by Stephen King
I’m sure I didn’t find all the cases, scattered across the country as they were, and buried in the outbreaks of senseless violence that seem more and more to be a part of daily life in America. Bree could have found others, but she wouldn’t have helped me even if she had still been single and living in Colorado. Bree Donlin-Hughes wants nothing to do with me these days, and I totally get that.
Shortly before Christmas last year, Hugh phoned Bree’s mother and asked her to come up to his office at the big house. He said he had a surprise for her, and he certainly did. He strangled his old lover with a lamp cord, carried her body into the garage, and slipped her into the passenger seat of his vintage Lincoln Continental. Then he got behind the wheel, started the engine, got some rock on the radio, and sucked exhaust.
Bree knows I promised to steer clear of Jacobs . . . and Bree knows I lied.
• • •
“Let us suppose it’s all true,” Ed Braithwaite said during one of our recent sessions.
“How daring of you,” I said.
He smiled, but stayed on point. “It still wouldn’t follow that the vision you saw of that hellish afterlife was a true vision. I know it still haunts you, Jamie, but consider all the people—not excluding John of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelation—who’ve had visions of heaven and hell. Old men . . . old women . . . even children claim to have peeked beyond the veil. Heaven Is for Real is basically the afterlife vision of a kid who almost died when he was four—”
“Colton Burpo,” I said. “I read it. He talks about a horsie only Jesus can ride.”
“Make fun all you want,” Braithwaite said, shrugging. “Lord knows it’s an easy account to make fun of . . . but Burpo also met a miscarried sister whom he knew nothing about. That’s verifiable information. Like all those murder-suicides.”
“Many murder-suicides, but Colton only met one sister,” I said. “The difference is one of quantity. I never took a course in statistics, but I know that.”
“I’m happy to assume the kid’s vision of the afterlife was false, because it supports my thesis that your vision of it—the sterile city, the ant-things, the black-paper sky—was equally false. You see what I’m driving at, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I’d love to buy into it.”
Of course I would. Anyone would. Because every man and woman owes a death, and the thought of going to the place I saw has done more than cast a shadow over my life; it has made that life seem thin and unimportant. No—not just my life, every life. So I hang on to one thought. It’s my mantra, the first thing I tell myself in the morning and the last thing I tell myself at night.
Mother lied.
Mother lied.
Mother lied.
Sometimes I almost believe it . . . but there are reasons I can’t quite manage to do so.
There are signs.
• • •
Before going back to Nederland—where I would discover that Hugh had killed himself after murdering Bree’s mother—I drove to the home place in Harlow. There were two reasons for this. After Jacobs’s body was discovered, the police might get in touch with me and ask for an accounting of my time in Maine. That seemed important (although in the end, they never did), but something else was more important: I needed the comfort of a familiar place, and people who loved me.
I didn’t get it.
You remember Cara Lynne, don’t you? My great-niece? The one I carried around at the Labor Day party in 2013 until she fell asleep on my shoulder? The one who held out her arms to me every time I came near? When I walked into the house where I’d grown up, Cara Lynne was between her mother and dad, sitting in an old-fashioned high chair that I might have sat in once myself. When the little girl saw me, she began to scream and throw herself from side to side so violently that she would have tumbled to the floor if her dad hadn’t caught her. She buried her face against his chest, still screeching at the top of her lungs. She only stopped when her grandfather Terry led me out onto the porch.
“What the hell’s that about?” he asked, half-humorously. “Last time you were here, she couldn’t get enough of you.”
“Don’t know,” I said, but of course I did. I had hoped to stay a night, perhaps two, sucking up normality the way a vampire sucks blood, but that wasn’t going to work. I didn’t know exactly what Cara Lynne sensed in me, but I never wanted to see her small, terrified face again.
I told Terry I’d just stopped by to say hello, couldn’t even stay for supper, had a plane to catch in Portland. I’d been in Lewiston, I said, slop-recording a band Norm Irving had told me about. He said he thought they had national potential.
“And do they?” he asked.
“Nah. Strictly lo-fi.” I made a business of looking at my watch.
“Never mind the plane,” Terry said. “You can catch another one. Come on in and have dinner with the family, little brother. Cara will settle down.”
I didn’t think so.
I told Terry I had recording gigs at Wolfjaw that I absolutely could not miss. I told him another time. And when he held out his arms to me, I hugged him hard, knowing chances were good I’d never see him again. I didn’t know about the murders and suicides then, but I knew I was carrying something poisonous, and would probably carry it for the rest of my life. The last thing I wanted was to infect the people I loved.
On the way back to my rental car, I stopped and looked at the dirt strip between the lawn and Methodist Road. The road had been paved for years, but the strip of dirt looked just as it had when I used to play there with the toy soldiers my sister gave me for my sixth birthday. I had been kneeling there and playing with them one day in the fall of 1962, when a shadow fell over me.
That shadow is still there.
• • •
“Have you murdered anyone?”
Ed Braithwaite has asked me this question on several occasions. It is, I believe, what’s called incremental repetition. I always smile and tell him no. It’s true that I put four bullets into poor Mary Fay, but the woman was already dead at the time, and Charles Jacobs died of a final cataclysmic stroke. If it hadn’t happened that day, it would have happened on another, and probably before the year was out.
“And you obviously haven’t committed suicide,” Ed continues, smiling himself. “Unless I’m hallucinating you, that is.”
“You’re not.”
“The impulse isn’t there?”
“No.”
“Not even as a theoretical possibility? One that comes to you in the dead of night, perhaps, when you can’t sleep?”
“No.”
My life these days is far from happy, but the antidepressants have put a floor under me. Suicide isn’t on my radar. And given what may come after death, I want to live as long as possible. There’s something else, too. I feel—rightly or wrongly—that I have a lot to atone for. Because of that, I’m still trying to be a do-right daddy. I cook at the Harbor House soup kitchen on Aupupu Street. I volunteer two days a week at the Goodwill on Keolu Drive, next to the Nene Goose Bakery. If you’re dead, you can’t atone for anything.
“Tell me, Jamie—why are you the special lemming who feels no urge to jump off the cliff? Why are you immune?”
I just smile and shrug. I could tell him, but he wouldn’t believe me. Mary Fay was Mother’s door into our world, but I was the key. Shooting a corpse kills nothing—not that an immortal being such as Mother can be killed—but when I fired that pistol, I locked the door. I said no with more than my mouth. If I told my shrink that some otherworldly being, one of the Great Ones, was saving me for some final and apocalyptic act of revenge because of that no, said shrink might begin thinking about involuntary committal. I don’t want that, because I have another duty, one I consider far more important than helping out at Harbor House or sorting clothes at the Goodwill.
• • •
At the end of each session with Ed, I pay his receptionist by check. I can afford to do this because the itinerant rock guitarist turned recording engineer is now a wealthy man. Ironic, isn’t it? Hugh Yates died without issue, and left a substantial fortune (handed down from his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather) behind. There were many small bequests, including gifts of cash to Malcolm “Mookie” McDonald and Hillary Katz (aka Pagan Starshine), but a large part of the estate was to be divided between me and Georgia Donlin.
Given Georgia’s death at Hugh’s hands, that particular bequest could have provided probate attorneys with twenty years’ worth of legal munching and tasty fees, but since there was no one to kick up dickens (I certainly wasn’t going to), there was no wrangle. Hugh’s lawyers got in touch with Bree and told her that, as the deceased was her mother, she arguably had a valid claim on the loot.
Only Bree wouldn’t argue. The lawyer who handled my end of the business told me Bree claimed Hugh’s money was “tainted.” Perhaps so, but I had no compunctions about taking my share of it. Partly because I played no part in Hugh’s cure, mostly because I consider myself tainted already, and feel it’s better to be tainted in comfort than in poverty. I have no idea what happened to the several million that would have gone to Georgia, and have no desire to find out. Too much knowledge isn’t good for a person. I know that now.
• • •
When my twice-weekly session is finished and my bill is paid, I leave Ed Braithwaite’s outer office. Beyond is a wide carpeted hall lined with other offices. A right turn would take me back to the lobby, and from the lobby to Kuulei Road. But I don’t turn right. I turn left. Finding Ed was just happenstance, you see; I originally came to the Brandon L. Martin Psychiatric Center on other business.
I walk down the hallway, then cross the fragrant, beautifully maintained garden that is the green heart of this large facility. Here patients sit taking the reliable Hawaiian sun. Many are fully dressed, some are in pajamas or nightgowns, a few (recent arrivals, I believe) wear hospital johnnies. Some engage in conversations, either with fellow patients or with unseen companions. Others merely sit, looking at the trees and flowers with vacant, drugged-to-the-gills stares. Two or three are accompanied by attendants, lest they hurt themselves or others. The attendants usually greet me by name as I pass. They know me well by now.
On the other side of this open-air atrium is Cosgrove Hall, one of three Martin Center in-patient residences. The other two are for short-termers, mainly people with substance-abuse problems. The usual stay in those is twenty-eight days. Cosgrove is for people with issues that take longer to resolve. If they ever do.
Like the corridor in the main building, the one in Cosgrove is wide and carpeted. Like the corridor in the main building, the air is chilled to perfection. But there are no pictures on the walls, and no Muzak, either, because in it some of the patients hear voices murmuring obscenities or issuing sinister directives. In the main building’s corridor, some of the doors are open. Here, all are shut. My brother Conrad has been residing in Cosgrove Hall for almost two years now. The Martin Center administrators and the psychiatrist in charge of his case want to move him to a more permanent facility—Aloha Village on Maui has been mentioned—but so far I have resisted. Here in Kailua I can visit him after my appointments with Ed, and thanks to Hugh’s generosity, I can afford his upkeep.
Although I must admit my walks down the Cosgrove hallway are a trial.
I try to make them with my eyes fixed on my feet. I can do that, because I know it’s exactly one hundred and forty-two steps from the atrium doorway to Con’s small suite. I don’t always succeed—sometimes I hear a voice whispering my name—but mostly I do.
You remember Con’s partner, don’t you? The hunk from the University of Hawaii Botany Department? I didn’t name him then and don’t intend to now, although I might have done if he ever visited Connie. He doesn’t, though. If you asked him, I’m sure he’d say Why in God’s name would I want to visit the man who tried to kill me?
I can think of two reasons.
One, Con wasn’t in his right mind . . . or in any mind at all, for that matter. After hitting the hunk over the head with a lamp, my brother ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and swallowed a handful of Valium tablets—a small handful. When Botany Boy came around (with a bloody scalp that needed stitches, but otherwise not much the worse for wear), he called 911. The police came and broke down the bathroom door. Con was passed out and snoring in the tub. The EMTs examined him and didn’t even bother to pump his stomach.
Con didn’t try very hard to kill either Botany Boy or himself—that’s the other reason. But of course, he was one of Jacobs’s first cures. Probably the first. On the day he left Harlow, Charlie told me that Con had almost certainly cured himself; the rest had been a trick, pure huggermugger. It’s a skill they try to teach in divinity school, he’d said. I was always good at it.
Only he lied. The cure was as real as Con’s current state of semi-catatonia. I know that now. I was the one Charlie conned, not just once but again and again and again. Still—count your blessings, right? Conrad Morton had a lot of good stargazing years before I woke Mother. And there’s hope for him. He plays tennis, after all (although he never speaks), and as I said, he’s a volleyball monster. His doctor says he’s begun to show increased outward response (whatever that is when it’s at home), and the nurses and orderlies are less likely to come in and see him standing in the corner and striking his head lightly against the wall. Ed Braithwaite says that in time Conrad may come all the way back; that he may revive. I choose to believe he will. People say that where there’s life, there’s hope, and I have no quarrel with that, but I also believe the reverse.
There is hope, therefore I live.
Twice a week, after my talks with Ed, I sit in the living room of my brother’s suite and talk some more. Some of what I tell him is real—a kerfuffle at Harbor House that brought the police, a particularly large haul of almost-new clothes at the Goodwill, how I’ve finally gotten around to watching all five seasons of The Wire—and some of it is made up, like the woman I’m supposedly seeing who works as a waitress at the Nene Goose Bakery, and the long Skype conversations I have with Terry. Our visits are monologues rather than conversations, and that makes fiction necessary. My real life just won’t do, because these days it’s as sparsely furnished as a cheap hotel room.
I always finish by telling him he’s too thin, he has to eat more, and by telling him that I love him.
“Do you love me, Con?” I ask.
So far he hasn’t answered, but sometimes he smiles a little. That’s an answer of a kind, wouldn’t you agree?
• • •
When four o’clock comes and our visit is over, I reverse course and walk back down to the atrium, where the shadows—of the palms, the avocados, and the big, twisted banyan at the center of it all—have begun to grow long.
I count my steps, and I take little glances at the door ahead of me, but otherwise keep my gaze firmly fixed on the carpet. Unless I hear that voice whispering my name.
Sometimes when that happens, I’m able to ignore it.
Sometimes I cannot.
Sometimes I look up in spite of myself and see that the hospital wall, painted soothing pastel yellow, has been replaced with gray stones held together by ancient mortar and covered with ivy. The ivy is dead, and the branches look like grasping skeletal hands. The small door in the wall is hidden, Astrid was right about that, but it’s there. The voice comes from behind it, drifting through an ancient rusty keyhole.
I walk on resolutely. Of course I do. Horrors beyond comprehension wait on the other side of that door. Not just the land of death, but the land beyond death, a place full of insane colors, mad geometry, and bottomless chasms where the Great Ones live their endless, alien lives and think their endless, malevolent thoughts.
It’s the Null beyond that d
oor.
I walk on, and think of the couplet in Bree’s last email: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die.
Jamie, an old woman’s voice whispers from the keyhole of a door only I can see. Come. Come to me and live forever.
No, I tell her, just as I told her in my vision. No.
And . . . so far, so good. But eventually something will happen. Something always does. And when it does . . .
I will come to Mother.
April 6, 2013–December 27, 2013
Author’s Note
CHUCK VERRILL is my agent. He sold the book, and provided aid and comfort along the way.
NAN GRAHAM edited the book with a sharp eye and an even sharper blue pencil.
RUSS DORR, my tireless researcher, provided information when information was needed. If I screwed something up, it was because I failed to understand. In such cases blame me, not him.
SUSAN MOLDOW took all my calls, even when I was being a pain in the ass, and urged me ever onward.
MARSHA DeFILIPPO and JULIE EUGLEY mind my real-world affairs so I can live in my imagination.
TABITHA KING, my wife and best critic, pointed out the soft places and urged me to fix them. Which I did, to the best of my ability. I love her a bunch.
Thanks to all of you, and special thanks to THE ROCK BOTTOM REMAINDERS, who taught me you’re never too old to rock and roll and have kept me high-stepping to “In the Midnight Hour” since 1992. Key of E. All that shit starts in E.
—Bangor, Maine
About the Author
Photograph © Shane Leonard
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Mr. Mercedes, Doctor Sleep, and Under the Dome, now a major TV miniseries on CBS. His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller as well as the Best Hardcover Book Award from the International Thriller Writers Association. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
