by Stephen King
“No, no,” Jacobs said. I suspected that, with the job done, he was anxious to be rid of her. “I can’t think of better medicine than sleeping in your own bed, and if you leave soon, you can be back not long after dark.”
Jenny made no further objection, just went back to plucking at her napkin. But before she bent her head, I saw a look of relief on her face. She wanted out as much as Astrid, although perhaps not for quite the same reasons.
Astrid’s returning color was only part of the remarkable change in her. She was sitting upright in her wheelchair; her eyes were clear and engaged. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you, Mr. Jacobs, and I certainly can’t repay you, but if there’s ever anything you need from me that’s mine to give, you only have to ask.”
“Actually, there are several things.” He ticked them off on the gnarled fingers of his right hand. “Eat. Sleep. Work hard to regain your strength. Can you do those things?”
“Yes. I will. And I’m never going to touch another cigarette.”
He waved this away. “You won’t want to. Will she, Jamie?”
“Probably not,” I said.
“Miss Knowlton?”
She jerked as if he’d pinched her bottom.
“Astrid must engage a physical therapist, or you must engage one on her behalf. The sooner she gets out of that damn wheelchair, the better. Am I right? Am I cooking with gas, as we used to say?”
“Yes, Pastor Danny.”
He frowned, but didn’t correct her. “There’s something else you fine ladies can do for me, and it’s extremely important: leave my name out of this. I have a great deal of work to do in the coming months, and the last thing I need is to have hordes of sick people coming up here in hopes of being cured. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Astrid said.
Jenny nodded without looking up.
“Astrid, when you see your doctor and he expresses amazement, as he certainly will, all you’ll tell him is that you prayed for a remission and your prayers were answered. His own belief—or lack of it—in the efficacy of prayer won’t matter; either way, he’ll be forced to accept the evidence of his MRI pictures. Not to mention your happy smiling face. Your happy and healthy smiling face.”
“Yes, that’s fine. Whatever you want.”
“Let me roll you back to the suite,” Jenny said. “If we’re going to leave, I better pack.” Subtext: Get me out of here. On that, she and Charlie Jacobs were thinking alike; they were cooking with gas.
“All right.” Astrid looked at me shyly. “Jamie, would you bring me a Coke? I’d like to speak to you.”
“Sure.”
Jacobs watched Jenny trundle Astrid across the empty restaurant and toward the far door. When they were gone, he turned to me. “So. We have a bargain?”
“Yes.”
“And you won’t DS on me?”
DS. Carny-speak for down south, meaning to pull stakes and disappear.
“No, Charlie. I won’t DS on you.”
“That’s fine, then.” He was looking at the doorway through which the women had gone. “Miss Knowlton doesn’t like me much now that I’ve left Team Jesus, does she?”
“Scared of you is what she is.”
He shrugged it off. Like his smile, the shrug was mostly one-sided. “Ten years ago, I couldn’t have cured our Miss Soderberg. Perhaps not even five. But things are moving fast, now. By this summer . . .”
“By this summer, what?”
“Who knows?” he said. “Who knows?”
You do, I thought. You do, Charlie.
• • •
“Watch this, Jamie,” Astrid said when I arrived with her soft drink.
She got out of the wheelchair and tottered three steps to the chair by her bedroom window. She held on to it for balance while she turned herself around, and collapsed into it with a sigh of relief and pleasure.
“Not much, I know—”
“Are you kidding? It’s amazing.” I handed her an ice-choked glass of Coca-Cola. I had even stuck a piece of lime on the rim for good luck. “And you’ll be able to do more each day.”
We had the room to ourselves. Jenny had excused herself to finish packing, although it looked to me as if the job was already done. Astrid’s coat was laid out on the bed.
“I think I owe you as much as I owe Mr. Jacobs.”
“That’s not true.”
“Don’t lie, Jamie, your nose will grow and the bees will sting your knees. He must get thousands of letters begging for cures, even now. I don’t think he picked mine out of the pile by accident. Were you the one in charge of reading them?”
“Nope, that was Al Stamper, your friend Jenny’s old fave. Charlie got in touch with me later.”
“And you came,” she said. “After all these years, you came. Why?”
“Because I had to. I can’t explain any better than that, except there was a time when you meant the world to me.”
“You didn’t promise him anything? There was no . . . what do they call it . . . quid pro quo?”
“Not a single one.” I said it without missing a beat. During my years as an addict, I’d become an accomplished liar, and the sad truth is that sort of skill sticks with you.
“Walk over here. Stand close to me.”
I did. With no hesitation or embarrassment, she put her hand on the front of my jeans. “You were gentle with this,” she said. “Many boys wouldn’t have been. You had no experience, but you knew how to be kind. You meant the world to me, too.” She dropped her hand and looked at me out of eyes no longer dull and preoccupied with her own pain. Now they were full of vitality. Also worry. “You did promise. I know you did. I won’t ask what, but if you ever loved me, be careful of him. I owe him my life, and I feel awful saying this, but I believe he’s dangerous. And I think you believe that, too.”
Not as accomplished at lying as I’d thought, then. Or perhaps it was just that she saw more now that she was cured.
“Astrid, you have nothing to worry about.”
“I wonder . . . could I have a kiss, Jamie? While we’re alone? I know I’m not much to look at, but . . .”
I dropped to one knee—again feeling like a swain in a romance—and kissed her. No, she wasn’t much to look at, but compared to how she’d looked that morning, she was a knockout. Still—it was only skin against skin, that kiss. There were no embers in the ashes. For me, at least. But we were tied together, just the same. Jacobs was the knot.
She stroked the back of my head. “Still such wonderful hair, going white or not. Life leaves us so little, but it’s left you that. Goodbye, Jamie. And thank you.”
• • •
On my way out, I stopped to talk briefly to Jenny. Mostly I wanted to know if she lived close enough to Astrid to monitor her progress.
She smiled. “Astrid and I are divorce buddies. Have been since I moved to Rockland and started working at the hospital there. Ten years ago, that was. When she got sick, I moved in with her.”
I gave her my cell number, and the number at Wolfjaw. “There may be aftereffects.”
She nodded. “Pastor Danny filled me in. Mr. Jacobs, I mean. It’s hard for me to get used to calling him that. He said she might be prone to sleepwalking until her brainwaves re-regulate themselves. Four to six months, he said. I’ve seen that behavior in people who overdo stuff like Ambien and Lunesta.”
“Yes, that’s the most likely.” Although there was also dirt-eating, compulsive walking, Tourette’s syndrome, kleptomania, and Hugh Yates’s prismatics. So far as I knew, Ambien didn’t cause any of those things. “But if there’s anything else . . . call.”
“How worried are you?” she asked. “Tell me what to expect.”
“I don’t really know, and she’ll probably be fine.” Most of them were, after all, at least according to Jacobs. And as little a
s I trusted him, I had to count on that, because it was too late to do anything else. The thing was done.
Jenny stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. “She’s better. That’s God’s grace, Jamie, no matter what Mr. Jacobs may think now that he’s fallen away. Without it—without him—she would have been dead in six weeks.”
• • •
Astrid rode down the handicapped ramp in her wheelchair, but got into Jenny’s Subaru on her own. Jacobs closed her door. She reached through the open window, grasped one of his hands in both of her own, and thanked him again.
“It was my pleasure,” he said. “Just remember your promise.” He pulled his hand free so he could put a finger to her lips. “Mum’s the word.”
I bent down and kissed her forehead. “Eat,” I said. “Rest. Do therapy. And enjoy your life.”
“Roger, Captain,” she said. She looked past me, saw Jacobs slowly climbing the steps to the porch, then met my eyes and repeated what she’d said earlier. “Be careful.”
“Don’t worry.”
“But I will.” Her eyes on mine, full of grave concern. She was getting old now, as I was, but with the disease banished from her body, I could see the girl who had stood in front of the stage with Hattie, Carol, and Suzanne, the four of them shaking their moneymakers while Chrome Roses played “Knock on Wood” or “Nutbush City Limits.” The girl I had kissed under the fire escape. “I will worry.”
I rejoined Charlie Jacobs on the porch, and we watched Jenny Knowlton’s trim little Outback roll down the road that led to the gate. It had been a fine melt-day, and the snow had pulled back, revealing grass that was already turning green. Poor man’s fertilizer, I thought. That’s what we used to call it.
“Will those women keep their mouths shut?” Jacobs asked.
“Yes.” Maybe not forever, but until his work was done, if he was as close to finished as he claimed. “They promised.”
“And you, Jamie? Will you keep your promise?”
“Yes.”
That seemed to satisfy him. “Stay the night, why don’t you?”
I shook my head. “I booked a room at Embassy Suites. I’ve got an early flight.”
And I can’t wait to get away from this place, just as I couldn’t wait to get away from The Latches.
I didn’t say this, but I’m sure he knew it.
“Fine. Just be ready when I call.”
“What do you need, Charlie? A written statement? I said I’ll come, and I will.”
“Good. We’ve been bouncing off each other like a couple of billiard balls for most of our lives, but that’s almost over. By the end of July—mid-August at the latest—we’ll be finished with each other.”
He was right about that. God help him, he was.
Always assuming He’s there, of course.
• • •
Even with a change of planes in Cincinnati, I was back in Denver the next day before 1 PM—when it comes to time travel, nothing beats flying west in a jet plane. I woke up my phone and saw I had two messages. The first was from Jenny. She said that she had locked the door of Astrid’s bedroom last night before turning in herself, but there hadn’t been a peep from the baby monitor, and when she got up at six-thirty, Astrid was still conked out.
“When she got up, she ate a soft-boiled egg and two pieces of toast. And the way she looks . . . I have to keep telling myself it’s not some kind of illusion.”
That was the good message. The bad one was from Brianna Donlin—now Brianna Donlin-Hughes. She’d left it only minutes before my United flight touched down. “Robert Rivard is dead, Jamie. I don’t know the details.” But by that evening, she’d gotten them.
A nurse had told Bree that most people who went into Gad’s Ridge never came out, and that was certainly true of the boy Pastor Danny had healed of his muscular dystrophy. They found him in his room, dangling from a noose he’d made from a pair of bluejeans. He left a note that said, I can’t stop seeing the damned. The line stretches forever.
XII
Forbidden Books. My Maine Vacation. The Sad Story of Mary Fay. The Coming of the Storm.
About six weeks later I got an email from my old research partner.
To: Jamie
From: Bree
Subject: FYI
After you were at Jacobs’s place in upstate New York, you said in an email that he mentioned a book called De Vermis Mysteriis. The name stuck in my head, probably because I took just enough Latin in high school to know that’s The Mysteries of the Worm in plain English. I guess research into All Things Jacobs is a hard habit to break, because I looked into it. Without telling my husband, I should add, as he believes I have put All Things Jacobs behind me.
Anyway, this is pretty heavy stuff. According to the Catholic Church, De Vermis Mysteriis is one of half a dozen so-called Forbidden Books. Taken as a group, they are known as “grimoires.” The other five are The Book of Apollonius (he was a doctor at the time of Christ), The Book of Albertus Magnus (spells, talismans, speaking to the dead), Lemegeton and Clavicula Salomonis (supposedly written by King Solomon), and The Grimoire of Picatrix. That last one, along with De Vermis Mysteriis, was supposedly the basis of H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire, called The Necronomicon.
Editions are available of all the Forbidden Books EXCEPT FOR De Vermis Mysteriis. According to Wikipedia, secret emissaries of the Catholic Church (paging Dan Brown) had burned all but six or seven copies of De Vermis by the turn of the 20th century. (BTW, the Pope’s army now refuses to acknowledge such a book ever existed.) The others have dropped out of sight, and are presumed to be destroyed or held by private collectors.
Jamie, all the Forbidden Books deal with POWER, and how to obtain it by means that combine alchemy (which we now call “science”), mathematics, and certain nasty occult rituals. All of it is probably bullshit, but it makes me uneasy—you told me Jacobs has spent his life studying electrical phenomena, and based on his healing successes, I have to think he may have gotten hold of a power that’s pretty awesome. Which makes me think of the old proverb: “He who takes a tiger by the tail dare not let go.”
A couple of other things for you to think about.
One: Up until the mid-seventeenth century, Catholics known to be studying potestas magnum universum (the force that powers the universe) were liable to excommunication.
Two: Wikipedia claims—although without verifying references, I must add—that the couplet most people remember from Lovecraft’s fictional Necronomicon was stolen from a copy of De Vermis which Lovecraft had access to (he certainly never owned one, he was too poor to purchase such a rarity). This is the couplet: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die.” That gave me nightmares. I’m not kidding.
Sometimes you called Charles Daniel Jacobs “my old fifth business.” I hope you are done with him at last, Jamie. Once upon a time I would have laughed at all this, but once upon a time I thought miracle cures at revival meetings were bullshit.
Give me a call someday, would you? Let me know All Things Jacobs are behind you.
Affectionately, as always,
Bree
I printed this out and read it over twice. Then I googled De Vermis Mysteriis and found everything Bree had told me in her email, along with one thing she hadn’t. In an antiquarian book-blog called Dark Tomes of Magick & Spells, someone called Ludvig Prinn’s suppressed grimoire “the most dangerous book ever written.”
• • •
I left my apartment, walked down the block, and bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time since a brief flirtation with tobacco in college. There was no smoking in my building, so I sat on my steps to light up. I coughed out the first drag, my head swimming, and I thought, These things would have killed Astrid, if not for Charlie’s intervention.
Yes. Charlie and his miracle cures. Charlie who ha
d a tiger by the tail and didn’t want to let go.
Something happened, Astrid had said in my dream, speaking through a grin from which all her former sweetness had departed. Something happened, and Mother will be here soon.
Then, later, after Jacobs had shot his secret electricity into her head: There’s a door in the wall. The door is covered with ivy. The ivy is dead. She waits. And when Jacobs asked who Astrid was talking about: Not the one you want.
I can break my promise, I thought, casting the cigarette away. It wouldn’t be the first one.
True, but not this one. Not this promise.
I went back inside, crushing the pack of cigarettes and tossing it into the trash can beside the mailboxes. Upstairs, I called Bree’s cell, prepared to leave a message, but she answered. I thanked her for her email and told her I had no intention of ever seeing Charles Jacobs again. I told this lie without guilt or hesitation. Bree’s husband was right; she needed to be finished with All Things Jacobs. And when the time came to go back to Maine and fulfill my promise, I would lie to Hugh Yates for the same reason.
Once upon a time, two teenagers had fallen for each other, and hard, as only teenagers can. A few years later they made love in a ruined cabin while the thunder rolled and the lightning flashed—all very Victoria Holt. In the course of time, Charles Jacobs had saved them both from paying the ultimate price for their addictions. I owed him double. I’m sure you see that, and I could leave it there, but to do so would be to omit a much larger truth: I was also curious. God help me, I wanted to watch him lift the lid on Pandora’s box and peer inside.
• • •
“This isn’t your lame-ass way of telling me you want to retire, is it?” Hugh tried to sound as if he was joking, but there was real apprehension in his eyes.
“Not at all. I just want a couple of months off. Maybe only six weeks, if I get bored. I need to reconnect with my family in Maine while I still can. I’m not getting any younger.”
