Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  A few yards away, upstairs in a B Wing cell, Nell Seeger—Dooling Correctional inmate #4609198-1, five-to-ten (Class B possession with intent to distribute)—sat up in her top bunk to thumb off the television.

  The small TV, a flatscreen about as thick as a closed laptop, rested on the ridge at the foot of the bunk. It had been showing the news. Nell’s cellie and off-again on-again lover, Celia Frode, not quite halfway through her one-to-two years (Class D possession, second offense), had been watching from her place at their unit’s single steel desk. She said, “Thank goodness. I can’t take any more of this madness. Now what are you going to do?”

  Nell lay back down and rolled over on her side, facing the painted square on the wall where the school pictures of her three kids were pasted in a row. “Nothing personal, darling, but I’m going to take a rest. I’m awful beat.”

  “Oh.” Celia understood right away. “Well. All right. Sweet dreams, Nell.”

  “I hope so,” said Nell. “Love you. You can have any of my stuff that you want.”

  “Love you, too, Nell.” Celia put her hand on Nell’s shoulder. Nell patted it once and then curled up. Celia sat down at their cell’s small desk to wait.

  When Nell was snoring softly, Celia stood up and peeked at her. Strands were curling around her cellie’s face, fluttering and falling and splitting into more strands, waving like seaweed in a gentle tide. Nell’s eyes were rolling under her eyelids. Was she dreaming about them, together, on the outside, sitting on a picnic blanket somewhere, maybe the beach? No, probably not. Probably Nell was dreaming about her kids. She wasn’t the most demonstrative partner that Celia had ever taken up with, sure wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but Nell had a good heart, and she loved her kids, was always writing to them.

  It would be awfully lonely without her.

  What the hell, thought Celia, and decided to take a liedown herself.

  3

  Thirty miles east of Dooling Correctional, and at about the same time Nell was drifting off, two brothers sat handcuffed to a bench in the Coughlin County Courthouse. Lowell Griner was thinking about his father and about suicide, which might be preferable to thirty years in State. Maynard Griner was dreaming about a slab of barbecued ribs that he’d eaten a few weeks earlier, right before the bust. Neither man had any idea what was going on in the wider world.

  The bailiff on guard duty was sick of waiting around. “What the fuck. I’m going to see if Judge Wainer plans to pee or get off the pot. I don’t get paid enough to babysit you murdering little peckerwoods all day.”

  4

  As Celia decided to join Nell in sleep; as the bailiff entered a conference room to consult with Judge Wainer; as Frank Geary sprinted across the lawn of the house he had once lived in, his only child in his arms and his estranged wife steps behind him; while these things were happening, thirty or so civilians attempted an impromptu assault on the White House.

  The vanguard, three men and one woman, all young, all to the naked eye unarmed, began to climb the White House fence. “Give us the antidote!” bellowed one of the men as he dropped to the ground inside the fence. He was scrawny, ponytailed, and wore a Cubs cap.

  A dozen Secret Service agents, pistols at the ready, quickly surrounded the trespassers, but at that point a second, much larger surge of people from the crowd that had massed on Pennsylvania Avenue pushed over the barricades and charged the fence. Police officers in riot gear swept in from behind, hauling them down from the fence. Two shots came in quick succession, and one of the cops stumbled and fell loose-bodied to the ground. After that the gunfire turned into a wall of sound. A teargas canister burst somewhere close by and a pall of ashy smoke began to unravel across the pavement, erasing most of the people running past.

  Michaela Morgan, nee Coates, viewed the scene on a monitor in the back of the NewsAmerica van parked across the street from the CDC, and rubbed her hands together. They had acquired a noticeable shake. Her eyes were itchy and watery from the three bumps she’d just snorted off the control deck with a ten-dollar bill.

  A woman in a dark blue dress appeared in the foreground of the White House shot. She was around Michaela’s mother’s age, her black shoulder-length hair fissured with streaks of gray, a string of pearls bouncing at her neck. Straight out in front of her, like a hot platter, she held a baby, its lolling head swaddled in white. The woman strode smoothly by, never turning her profile, and vanished beyond the edge of the shot.

  “I think I could use a little more. You mind?” Michaela asked her tech guy. He told her to knock herself out (perhaps a poor choice of words under the circumstances), and handed her the Baggie.

  5

  While the furious, terrified crowd was attacking 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Lila Norcross was driving toward Dooling. Her mind was on Jared, on her son, and on the girl, on Sheila, her son’s half-sister, her husband’s daughter, what an interesting new family tree they had! Wasn’t there something similar around their mouths, Sheila’s and Clint’s, that crafty little upturn at the corners? Was she a liar, too, like her father? Could be. And was the girl tired like Lila was tired, still feeling the effects of all that running and jumping she’d done the previous night? If she was, well then, that was something else they had in common, something besides just Clint and Jared.

  Lila wondered if she should just go to sleep, abdicate from the whole mess. It would certainly be easier. She wouldn’t have thought that a few days ago; a few days ago she would have seen herself as strong and decisive and in control. When had she ever challenged Clint? Not once, it seemed to her in the light of her new understanding. Not even when she’d found out about Sheila Norcross, the girl who bore his last name, and her last name, too.

  Pondering these things, Lila turned onto Main Street. She hardly registered the tan compact that swung left past her, and went blasting up the hill in the direction from which she’d just come.

  The compact’s driver, a middle-aged woman, was taking her mother to the hospital in Maylock. In the backseat of the automobile, the middle-aged woman’s elderly father—never the most cautious of men, a tosser of young children into swimming pools, a bettor of trifectas, a cavalier gobbler of pickled sausages in foggy jars on the counters of roadside general stores—was using the edge of an ice scraper to separate the webbing covering his wife’s face. “She’ll suffocate!” he yelled.

  “The radio said not to!” the middle-aged woman yelled back, but her father was his own man, right to the end, and continued to carve apart the growth on his wife’s face.

  6

  And Evie was almost everywhere. She was a fly in the 767, crawling down to the bottom of a highball glass and dabbing her legs in the residue of a whiskey and Coke moments before the plane’s nose connected with the ocean’s surface. The moth that fluttered around the fluorescent bar in the ceiling of Nell Seeger and Celia Frode’s prison cell was also Evie. She was visiting the Coughlin Courthouse, behind the grid of the air duct in the corner of the conference room, where she peered through the shiny black eyes of a mouse. On the White House lawn, as an ant, she moved through the still-warm blood of a dead teenage girl. In the woods where Jared ran from his pursuers, she was a worm beneath his shoes, nosing in the soil, blind and many-segmented.

  Evie got around.

  CHAPTER 8

  1

  Memories of freshman track came back to Jared as he fled through the trees. Coach Dreifort had said Jared was a “comer.”

  “I got plans for you, Norcross, and they involve winning a whole mess of shiny medals,” Coach Dreifort had said. At the end of that season Jared finished fifth out of fifteen in his group at regionals in the 8,000 meter—outstanding for a frosh—but then he’d ruined Coach D.’s plans, quitting to take a job on the Yearbook Committee.

  Jared had relished those late race moments when he found a fresh lung and regained the pace and felt a sense of ecstasy, loving his own strength. The reason he’d quit was that Mary was on the Yearbook Committee. She had been
elected sophomore sales and distribution chairwoman, and needed a vice-chair. Jared’s dedication to track was summarily abandoned. Sign me up, he told Mary.

  “Okay, but there’s two things,” she explained. “Number one, if I die, which I might because I ate one of those mystery meat hot pockets at the cafeteria today, then you have to take over as chair and fulfill my duties and make sure there’s a full page tribute to my memory in the yearbook senior year. And you have to make sure that the photo of me isn’t something stupid that my mother picked.”

  “Got it,” Jared had said, and thought, I really love you. He knew he was too young. He knew she was too young. How could he not, though? Mary was so beautiful, and she was so on the ball, but she made it seem completely natural, no stress, no strain. “What’s the second thing?”

  “The second thing—” She grabbed his head with both hands and shook it back and forth and up and down. “—is that I am the Boss!”

  As far as Jared was concerned, that was also no problem.

  Now his sneaker came down on a flat rock sitting high and loose, and that, as it happened, was a problem, actually a pretty big one, because he felt a wobble and a sharp sting in his right knee. Jared gasped and drove forward with his left foot, concentrating on his breathing like they taught you in track, keeping his elbows working.

  Eric was thundering behind him. “We just want to talk to you!”

  “Don’t be a fucking pussy!” That was Curt.

  Down into a gully, and Jared felt his hurt knee slide around and thought he heard a little ping somewhere under the thudding of his pulse and the crackle of dry leaves under his sneaker heels. Malloy Street, the one behind the high school, was up ahead, a yellow car flickering past in the gaps between the trees. His right leg buckled at the bottom of the gully, and the pain was unprecedented, hand-on-a-red-burner pain only on the inside, and he grabbed a thorny branch to yank himself staggering up the opposite bank.

  The air was momentarily disturbed behind him, as if a hand had swiped right past his scalp, and he heard Eric swearing and the tumult of bodies tangling. They’d lost it while sliding down the gully behind him. The road was twenty feet on; he could hear the burr of a car engine. He was going to make it!

  Jared lurched, closing the gap to the road, feeling a burst of that old track euphoria, the air in his lungs suddenly carrying him, thrusting him forward and holding off the agony of his distorted knee.

  The hand on his shoulder spun him off-balance at the edge of the road. He caught onto a birch tree to keep from falling.

  “Give me that phone, Norcross.” Kent’s face shone bright red, the acne field on his forehead purple. His eyes were wet. “We were kidding around, that’s all.”

  “No,” said Jared. He couldn’t even remember picking his phone up again, but there it was in his hand. His knee felt enormous.

  “Yes,” Kent said. “Give it.” The other two had gathered themselves and were running to catch up, only a few feet off.

  “You were going to pee in an old lady’s ear!” cried Jared.

  “Not me!” Kent blinked away sudden tears. “I couldn’t, anyway! I got a shy bladder!”

  You weren’t going to try to stop them, though, Jared might have replied, but instead felt his arm cock and his fist shoot out to connect with Kent’s dimpled chin. The impact produced a satisfying clack of teeth slamming together.

  As Kent tumbled down into the weeds, Jared shoved his phone in his pocket and got moving again. Three agonizing hops and he was at the yellow centerline, waving down a speeding tan compact with a Virginia plate. He didn’t register that the driver was turned around in her seat—and Jared certainly didn’t see what was happening in the rear of the car, where a bellowing old woman with tattered webbing hanging from her face was repeatedly gouging the edge of an ice scraper into the chest and throat of her husband who had cut said webbing from her face—but he did note the compact’s erratic progress, as it jerked right-left-right-left, almost out of control.

  Jared tried to twist away, wishing himself small, and was just congratulating himself on his evasion technique when the compact hit him and sent him flying.

  2

  “Hey! Get your hands off my Booth!” Ree had gotten Officer Lampley’s attention by knocking on the front window of the Booth, a major no-no. “What do you want, Ree?”

  “The warden, Officer,” said Ree, elaborately and unnecessarily mouthing the words, which Vanessa Lampley could hear perfectly fine via the vents situated under the panes of bulletproof glass. “I need to see the warden about something wrong. Her and no one else. I’m sorry, Officer. That’s the only way. How it’s got to be.”

  Van Lampley had worked hard to cultivate her reputation as a firm but fair officer. For seventeen years she’d patrolled the cellblocks of Dooling Correctional, and she’d been stabbed once, punched several times, kicked even more times, choked, had drippy shit flung at her, and been invited to go and fuck herself in any number of ways and with a variety of objects, many of them unrealistically large or dangerously sharp. Did Van sometimes draw on these memories during her arm-wrestling matches? She did indeed, although sparingly, usually only during significant league bouts. (Vanessa Lampley competed in the Ohio Valley Slammers League, Women’s A Division.) The memory of the time that a deranged crack addict dropped a chunk of brick from the second level of B Wing down onto Vanessa’s skull (resulting in a skull contusion and a concussion) had, in fact, helped her take it “over-the-top” in both of her championship victories. Anger was excellent fuel if you refined it correctly.

  In spite of these regrettable experiences, she was forever conscious of the responsibility that went with her authority. She understood that no one wanted to be in prison. Some people, however, needed to be. It was unpleasant, both for them and for her. If a respectful attitude was not maintained, it would be more unpleasant—for them, and for her.

  And although Ree was all right—poor kid had a big scar on her forehead that told you she hadn’t had the easiest ride through life—it was disrespectful to make unreasonable requests. The warden wasn’t available for on the spot one-on-ones, especially with a medical emergency happening.

  Van had serious worries of her own concerning what she’d read on the Internet about Aurora on her last break, and the directive from above that everyone needed to stay for a second shift. Now McDavid, looking on the monitor like she belonged not in a cell but in a sarcophagus, had been put under quarantine. Van’s husband, Tommy, when she called him at their house, insisted he would be fine on his own for as long as she needed to stay, but she didn’t believe it for a second. Tommy, on disability for his hips, couldn’t make a grilled cheese sandwich for himself; he’d be eating pickles out of a jar until she got home. If Van wasn’t allowed to lose her head about any of that, then neither was Ree Dempster or any other inmate.

  “No, Ree, you need to lower your sights. You can tell me, or you tell no one. If it’s important enough, I’ll take it to the warden. And why’d you touch my Booth? Dammit. You know you can’t do that. I should put you on Bad Report for that.”

  “Officer . . .” Ree, on the other side of the window, put her hands together in supplication. “Please. I’m not lying. Something wrong happened and it’s too wrong to let go, and you’re a lady, so please understand that.” Ree wrung her clasped hands in the air. “You’re a lady. Okay?”

  Van Lampley studied the inmate, who was on the raised concrete apron in front of the Booth and praying to her like they had anything in common besides their double X chromosomes. “Ree, you’re right up against the line here. I’m not kidding.”

  “And I’m not lyin for prizes! Please believe me. It’s about Peters, and it’s serious. Warden needs to know.”

  Peters.

  Van rubbed her immense right bicep, as was her habit when a matter called for consideration. The bicep was inked with a gravestone for YOUR PRIDE. Under the words on the stone was a picture of a flexed arm. It was a symbol of all the opponents s
he’d bent back: knuckles on the table, thank you for playing. A lot of men wouldn’t arm-wrestle her. They didn’t want to risk the embarrassment. They made excuses, shoulder tendinitis, bad elbow, etc. “Lying for prizes” was a funny way to put it, but somehow apt. Don Peters was the lying-for-prizes type.

  “If I hadn’t jacked my arm pitching high school ball, I hope you understand that I’d break you down right quick, Lampley,” the little asswipe had explained to her once when a group of them were having beers at the Squeaky Wheel.

  “I don’t doubt it, Donnie,” she’d replied.

  Ree’s big secret was probably bunk. And yet . . . Don Peters. There had been loads of complaints about him, the kind that maybe you did have to be a woman to truly relate to.

  Van raised the cup of coffee that she’d forgotten she had. It was cold. Okay, she supposed she could walk Ree Dempster down to see the warden. Not because Vanessa Lampley was going soft, but because she needed a fresh cup. After all, as of now her shift was open-ended.

  “All right, inmate. This once. I’m probably wrong to do it, but I will. I just hope you’ve thought this through.”

  “I have, Officer, I have. I’ve thought and thought and thought.”

  Lampley buzzed Tig Murphy to come down and spell her in the Booth. Said she needed to take ten.

  3

  Outside the soft cell, Peters was leaning against the wall and scrolling through his phone. His mouth curled into a perplexed frown.

  “I hate to bother you, Don—” Clint chinned toward the cell door. “—but I need to talk to this one.”

  “Oh, it’s no bother, Doc.” Peters clicked his phone off and summoned a pal-ole-pal-o’mine grin that they both knew was as real as the Tiffany lamps that got sold at the bi-weekly flea market in Maylock.