by Stephen King
“Yes, arrived around noon. Her friend Jenny Knowlton brought her. They had hoped to get here yesterday, but the storm was much worse Downeast. And before you ask your follow-up question, no, I haven’t treated her. The poor woman is exhausted. Tomorrow will be time enough for that, and time enough for her to see you. Although you may see her today, if you like, when she eats what little dinner she can manage. The restaurant is equipped with closed-circuit television cameras.”
I started to tell him what I thought of that, but he held up a hand.
“Peace, my friend. I didn’t put them in; they were here when I bought the place. I believe the management must have used them to make sure the service staff was performing up to expectations.” His one-sided smile looked sneerier than ever. Maybe that was just me, but I didn’t think so.
“Are you gloating?” I asked. “Is that what you’re doing, now that you’ve got me here?”
“Of course not.” He half turned to regard the melting snowbanks rolling past us on either side. Then he turned back to me. “Well. Perhaps. Just a little. You were so high and mighty the last time we met. So haughty.”
I didn’t feel high and mighty now, and I certainly didn’t feel haughty. I felt caught in a trap. I was here, after all, because of a girl I hadn’t seen in over forty years. One who had bought her own doom, pack by pack, at the nearest convenience store. Or at the pharmacy in Castle Rock, where you could buy cigarettes at the counter right up front. If you needed actual medicine, you had to walk all the way to the back. One of life’s ironies. I imagined dropping Jacobs off at the lodge and just driving away. The idea had a nasty attraction.
“Would you really let her die?”
“Yes.” He was still warming his hands in front of the vent. Now what I imagined was grabbing one of them and snapping those gnarled fingers like breadsticks.
“Why? Why am I so goddamned important to you?”
“Because you’re my destiny. I think I knew it the first time I saw you, down on your knees in your dooryard and grubbing in the dirt.” He spoke with the patience of a true believer. Or a lunatic. Maybe there’s really no difference. “I knew for sure when you showed up in Tulsa.”
“What are you doing, Charlie? What is it you want me for this summer?” It wasn’t the first time I’d asked him, but there were other questions I didn’t dare ask. How dangerous is it? Do you know? Do you care?
He seemed to be thinking about whether or not to tell me . . . but I never knew what he was thinking, not really. Then Goat Mountain Resort hove into view—even bigger than The Latches, but ugly and full of modern angles; Frank Lloyd Wright gone bad. Probably it had looked modern, even futuristic, to the wealthy people who had come here to play in the sixties. Now it looked like a cubist dinosaur with glass eyes.
“Ah!” he said. “Here we are. You’ll want to freshen up and rest a bit. I know I want to rest a bit. It’s very exciting having you here, Jamie, but also tiring. I’ve put you in the Snowe Suite on the third floor. Rudy will show you the way.”
• • •
Rudy Kelly was a mountain of a man in faded jeans, a loose gray smock top, and white crepe-soled nurse’s shoes. He was a nurse, he said, as well as Mr. Jacobs’s personal assistant. Judging by his size, I thought he might also be Jacobs’s bodyguard. His handshake was certainly no limp-fish musician’s howdy.
I had been in the resort’s lobby as a kid, had once even eaten lunch here with Con and the family of one of Con’s friends (terrified the whole time of using the wrong fork or dribbling down my shirt), but I had never been on any of the upper floors. The elevator was a clanky bucket, the kind of antique conveyance that in scary novels always stalls between floors, and I resolved to take the stairs for however long I had to be here.
The place was well heated (by virtue of Charlie Jacobs’s secret electricity, I had no doubt), and I could see some repairs had been made, but they felt haphazard. All the lights worked and the floorboards didn’t creak, but the air of desertion was hard to miss. The Snowe Suite was at the end of the corridor, and the view from the spacious living room was almost as good as that from Skytop, but the wallpaper was waterstained in places, and in here a vague aroma of mold had replaced the lobby’s smell of floor wax and fresh paint.
“Mr. Jacobs would like you to join him for dinner in his apartment at six,” Rudy said. His voice was soft and deferential, but he looked like an inmate in a prison flick—not the guy who plans the breakout, but the death-row enforcer who kills any guards who try to stop the escapees. “Will that work for you?”
“It’s fine,” I said, and when he left, I locked the door.
• • •
I took a shower—the hot water was abundant, and came at once—then laid out fresh clothes. With that done and time to kill, I lay down on the coverlet of the queen-size bed. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and I can never sleep on planes, so a nap would have been good, but I couldn’t drift off. I kept thinking about Astrid—both as she’d been then, and as she must be now. Astrid, who was in this same building with me, three floors down.
When Rudy knocked softly on the door at two minutes to six, I was up and dressed. At my suggestion that we take the stairs, he flashed a smile that said he knew a wimp when he saw one. “The elevator is totally safe, sir. Mr. Jacobs oversaw certain repairs himself, and that old slidebox was high on the list.”
I didn’t protest. I was thinking about how my old fifth business was no longer a reverend, no longer a rev, no longer a pastor. At this end of his life, he was back to plain old mister, and getting his blood pressure taken by a guy who looked like Vin Diesel after a face-lift gone bad.
Jacobs’s apartment was on the first floor in the west wing. He had changed into a dark suit and white shirt open at the collar. He rose to greet me, smiling that one-sided smile. “Thank you, Rudy. Will you tell Norma that we’ll be ready to eat in fifteen minutes?”
Rudy nodded and left. Jacobs turned to me, still smiling and once more producing that unpleasant papery sound as he rubbed his hands together. Outside the window, a ski slope with no lights to illuminate it and no skiers to groove the spring snow descended into darkness, a highway to nowhere. “It will only be soup and salad, I’m afraid. I gave up meat two years ago. It creates fatty deposits in the brain.”
“Soup and salad is fine.”
“There’s also bread, Norma’s sourdough. It’s excellent.”
“Sounds delicious. I’d like to see Astrid, Charlie.”
“Norma will serve her and her friend Jenny Knowlton around seven. Once they’ve eaten, Miss Knowlton will give Astrid her pain medication, and help her make her evening toilet. I told Miss Knowlton that Rudy could assist with these tasks, but she won’t hear of it. Alas, Jenny Knowlton no longer seems to trust me.”
I thought back to Astrid’s letter. “Even though you cured her of her arthritis?”
“Ah, but then I was Pastor Danny. Now that I’ve eschewed all those religious trappings—I told them so, felt I had to—Miss Knowlton is suspicious. That’s what the truth does, Jamie. It makes people suspicious.”
“Is Jenny Knowlton suffering aftereffects?”
“Not at all. She’s just uncomfortable without all her miracle mumbo-jumbo to fall back on. But since you brought up the subject of aftereffects, step into my study. I want to show you something, and there’s just time before our evening repast appears.”
The study was an alcove off the suite’s parlor. His computer was on, the extra-large screen showing those endlessly galloping horses. He sat down, grimacing with discomfort, and tapped a key. The horses gave way to a plain blue desktop with only two folders on it. They were labeled A and B.
He clicked A, revealing a list of names and addresses in alphabetical order. He pressed a button, and the list began to scroll at medium speed. “Do you know what these are?”
“Cures, I’d assume.�
�
“Verified cures, all affected by administration of electrical current to the brain—although not the sort of current any electrician would recognize. Over thirty-one hundred in all. Take my word for it?”
“Yes.”
He turned to look at me, although the movement clearly pained him. “You mean it?”
“Yes.”
Looking gratified, he closed file A and opened B. More names and addresses, also in alphabetical order, and this time the scroll was slow enough to pick out several names I recognized. Stefan Drew, the compulsive walker; Emil Klein, the dirt eater; Patricia Farmingdale, who had poured salt in her eyes. This list was much shorter than the first one. Before it ended, I saw Robert Rivard go sliding by.
“These are the ones who have suffered significant post-cure aftereffects. Eighty-seven in all. As I believe I told you the last time we met, it amounts to less than three percent of the total. Once there were over a hundred and seventy names in File B, but many have stopped having problems—in medical parlance, they have resolved. As you have. I stopped following my cures eight months ago, but if I’d kept on, I’m sure this list would be even shorter. The ability of the human body to recover from trauma is extraordinary. With the proper application of this new electricity to the cortex and the nerve tree, that ability is effectively unlimited.”
“Who are you trying to convince? Me or you?”
He blew his breath out in a disgusted pah sound. “What I’m trying to do is set your mind at rest. I’d rather have a willing assistant than a reluctant one.”
“I’m here. I’ll do what I promised . . . if you can cure Astrid. Let that be enough.”
There was a soft knock at the door.
“Come,” Jacobs said.
The woman who entered had the plump, matronly figure of the Good Gramma in a children’s story and the beady eyes of a dick in a department store. She set a tray down on the table in the parlor, then stood with her hands clasped primly in front of her plain black dress. Jacobs rose with another grimace, then tottered. In my first act as his assistant—in this new stage of our lives, at least—I caught his elbow and steadied him. He thanked me and led me out of the study.
“Norma, I’d like you to meet Jamie Morton. He’ll be with us at least through breakfast tomorrow, and back for a longer stay this summer.”
“Pleased,” she said, and held out her hand. I shook it.
“You don’t know what a victory that handshake represents for Norma,” Jacobs said. “Since childhood, she’s had a deep aversion to touching people. Haven’t you, dear? Not a physical problem, you’ll notice, but a psychological one. Nevertheless, she’s been cured. I think that’s interesting, don’t you?”
I told Norma it was nice to meet her, holding her hand a moment longer than necessary. I saw her mounting unease, and let loose. Cured, but perhaps not completely cured. That was interesting, too.
“Miss Knowlton says she’ll bring your patient to dinner a bit early tonight, Mr. Jacobs.”
“All right, Norma. Thank you.”
She left. We ate. It was light fare, but sat heavily in my stomach, just the same. My nerves felt all on the outside, sizzling my skin. Jacobs ate slowly—as if to taunt me—but at last he set aside his empty soup bowl. He seemed about to reach for another slice of bread, then looked at his watch and pushed back from the table instead.
“Come with me,” he said. “I think it’s time you saw your old friend.”
• • •
The door across the hall was marked RESORT PERSONNEL ONLY. Jacobs led me through a large outer office furnished with bare desks and empty shelves. The door to the inner office was locked.
He said, “Other than the security company that supplies twenty-four-seven gate guards, my staff consists of just Rudy and Norma. And while I trust them both, I see no need to put temptation in their way. And the temptation to peek at the unsuspecting is a strong one, wouldn’t you say?”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I could have. My mouth was as dry as old carpet. There were a dozen monitors in all, stacked in three rows of four. Jacobs pushed the power button on RESTAURANT CAMERA 3. “I believe this is the one we want.” Cheerful. Like a cross between Pastor Danny and a game show host.
It seemed to take forever before a black-and-white picture swam into view. The restaurant was large, with at least fifty tables, but only one was occupied. Two women were sitting there, but at first I could only see Jenny Knowlton, because Norma blocked the other one out as she bent to serve them their bowls of soup. Jenny was pretty, dark-haired, mid-fifties. I saw her mouth move in a silent thank you. Norma nodded, straightened up, stepped away from the table, and I saw what remained of the first girl I ever loved.
If this were a romance, I might say something like, “Although necessarily changed by the passage of years and somewhat wasted by the depredations of disease, her essential beauty remained.” I wish I could, but if I begin lying now, everything I have told so far becomes worthless.
Astrid was a crone in a wheelchair, her face a pallid pouch of flesh from which dark eyes stared listlessly down at food she obviously had no interest in. Her companion had put a large knitted cap—a kind of tam-o’-shanter—on her head, but it had slipped to one side, revealing a bald skull fuzzed with white stubble.
She picked up her spoon with a scrawny hand that was all tendons, then put it down again. The dark-haired woman exhorted her. The pallid creature nodded. Her tam fell off when she did, but Astrid appeared not to notice. She dipped into her soup and raised the spoon slowly to her mouth. Most of its cargo fell off during the trip. She sipped what was left, pooching her lips out in a way that reminded me of how the late Bartleby would take a slice of apple from my hand.
My knees unhinged. If there hadn’t been a chair in front of the bank of monitors, I would have gone straight to the floor. Jacobs stood beside me, gnarled hands clasped behind his back, rocking to and fro with a slight smile on his face.
And since this is to be a true account rather than a romance, I must add that I felt a sneaking relief. I would never have to keep my half of our devil’s bargain, because there was no way the woman in the wheelchair was coming back. Cancer is the pitbull of diseases, and it had her in its jaws, biting and rending. It would not stop until it had torn her to pieces.
“Turn it off,” I whispered.
Jacobs leaned toward me. “I beg your pardon? My ears aren’t as good as they used to be these da—”
“You heard me perfectly well, Charlie. Turn it off.”
He did.
• • •
We were kissing beneath the fire escape of Eureka Grange No. 7 as the snow swirled down. Astrid was blowing cigarette smoke into my mouth while the tip of her tongue slipped back and forth, first along my upper lip and then inside it, lightly caressing the line of my gum. My hand was squeezing her breast, although there wasn’t much to feel because of the heavy parka she was wearing.
Kiss me forever, I thought. Kiss me forever so I don’t have to see where the years have taken us and what you’ve become.
But no kiss goes on forever. She pulled back and I saw the ashen face inside the fur of her hood, the dusty eyes, the slack mouth. The tongue that had been inside my mouth was black and peeling. I had been kissing a corpse.
Or maybe not, because the lips rose in a grin.
“Something happened,” Astrid said. “Didn’t it, Jamie? Something happened, and Mother will be here soon.”
• • •
I jerked awake with a gasp. I had gone to bed in my skivvies, but now I was naked and standing in the corner. I had the pen from the bedside table curled in my right hand and was using it to jab at my left forearm, where there was a small but growing constellation of blue dots. I dropped it on the floor and staggered backward.
Stress, I thought. It was stress that brought on Hugh’s prismatics a
t the Norris County revival, and it was stress tonight. Besides, it’s not like you poured salt in your eyes. Or came around to find yourself outside gobbling dirt.
It was quarter past four, that deadly time of morning when it’s too late to go back to sleep and still too early to rise and shine. I pulled a book from the smaller of my two bags, sat down by the window, and opened it. My eyes took in the words just as my mouth had taken in Norma’s soup and salad: without tasting. Eventually I stopped trying and just looked out into the darkness, waiting for dawn.
It was a long time coming.
• • •
I took breakfast in Jacobs’s suite . . . if you can call a single piece of toast and half a cup of tea breakfast. Charlie, on the other hand, worked his way through a fruit cup, scrambled eggs, and a goodly heap of homefries. Skinny as he was, it was hard to tell where he put it. On the table by the door was a mahogany box. In it, he told me, were his healing instruments.
“I no longer use rings. No need of them, now that my performing career is over.”
“When are you going to start? I want to get it over with and get out of here.”
“Very soon. Your old friend dozes through her days, but doesn’t sleep much at night. Last night will have been a particularly difficult one for her, because I told Miss Knowlton to withhold her midnight pain meds—they depress the brainwaves. We’ll do our business in the East Room. It’s my favorite at this time of day. If you and I didn’t know God is a profitable and self-sustaining construct of the worlds’ churches, the morning light would be almost enough to make us believers again.”
He leaned forward, looking at me earnestly.
“There’s no need for you to be a part of this, you know. I saw how upset you were last night. I’ll need your help this summer, but this morning either Rudy or Miss Knowlton can assist me. Why don’t you come back tomorrow? Pop over to Harlow. Visit your brother and his family. I think that, were you to do that, you’d see an entirely different Astrid Soderberg on your return.”
