Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  She pulled her shoulder mic, thumbed the button, and tried to raise Linny in dispatch. She got nothing but a steady wash of static and somehow wasn’t surprised. Nor was she when a red snake—thicker than one of Van Lampley’s pumped-up biceps and at least three yards long—slithered from a vertical split in the amazing tree’s gray trunk. The split was as big as a doorway.

  The snake lifted its spade-shaped head in her direction. Black eyes surveyed her with cold interest. Its tongue tested the air, then withdrew. The snake slid rapidly up a crevasse in the trunk and coiled over a branch in a series of neat loops. Its head pendulumed. The impenetrable eyes still regarded Lila, now viewing her upside down.

  There was a low, rippling growl from behind the tree, and a white tiger emerged from the shadows, its eyes bright and green. A peacock strutted into view, head bobbing, fanning its glorious tail, making a noise that sounded like a single hilarious question, repeated over and over: Heehh? Heehh? Heehh? Heehh? Moths swirled around it. Lila’s family had owned an illustrated New Testament, and those swirling insects made her think of the diadem Jesus always seemed to have, even as a baby lying in a manger.

  The red snake slithered down from its branch, dropped the last ten feet, and landed between the peacock and the tiger. The three of them came toward Lila at the edge of the clearing, the tiger padding, the snake slithering, the peacock prancing and cackling.

  Lila felt a deep and profound sense of relief: Yes. Yes. It was a dream—it definitely was. It had to be. Not just this moment, and not just Aurora, but the rest of it, everything since the spring meeting of the Tri-Counties Curriculum Committee, in the Coughlin High School auditorium.

  She closed her eyes.

  3

  Joining the Curriculum Committee had been Clint’s doing (which was ironic; he had, in the end, been hoisted by his own petard). This was back in 2007. There had been an article in the Tri-Counties Herald about the parent of a junior high student in Coughlin who was determined to see Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret banned from the school library. The parent was quoted saying that it was “a dammed atheist tract.” Lila couldn’t believe it. She had adored the Judy Blume novel as a thirteen-year-old and related intensely to its portrait of what it was like to be an adolescent girl, how adulthood suddenly loomed up in front of you like some strange and terrifying new city and demanded you go through the gates whether you wanted to or not.

  “I loved that book!” Lila said, extending the paper to Clint.

  She had roused him from his usual daydream, sitting at the counter and staring through the glass doors at the yard, lightly rubbing the fingers of his left hand over the knuckles on his right. Clint looked at the article. “Sorry, hon, it’s too bad, but the book’s gotta burn. Orders direct from General Jesus.” He handed the paper back to her.

  “It’s not a joke, Clint. The reason that guy wants to censor that book is exactly the reason girls need to read it.”

  “I agree. And I know it’s not a joke. So why don’t you do something about it?”

  Lila had loved him for that, for challenging her. “All right. I will.”

  The paper mentioned a hastily formed group of parents and concerned citizens called the Curriculum Committee. Lila enlisted. And to bolster her cause, she did what a good police officer knows to do: she went to her community for assistance. Lila rallied every like-minded local she could think of to come out and support the book. She was unusually well-positioned to raise such a group. Years of settling noise complaints, cooling down property disputes, letting speeders go with warnings, and generally showing herself to be a conscientious and reasonable representative of the law, had created a lot of good will.

  “Who are all these damn women?” the father who had started it all exclaimed at the outset of the Curriculum Committee’s next gathering, because, one-and-all, they were women, and there were far more of them than of him. Margaret was saved. Judy Blume sent a thank-you note.

  Lila stayed on the Curriculum Committee, but there had never been another Margaret-sized controversy. The members read new books that were being added to the syllabi and the libraries at high schools and middle schools around the Tri-Counties, and listened to lectures by local English teachers and librarians. It was more like a book club than a political assembly. Lila enjoyed it. And, like most book clubs, though a man or two occasionally showed up, it remained primarily an XX affair.

  There had been a meeting on the previous Monday night. Afterward, on the way to her car in the high school parking lot, Lila fell into step with an elderly woman named Dorothy Harper, a member of something called the First Thursday Book Club, and one of the townsfolk Lila had originally drafted to help defend Margaret.

  “You must be so proud of your niece Sheila!” Dorothy remarked, leaning on a cane, a flowered purse large enough to contain a baby looped over her shoulder. “People are saying she might go to a Division I school on a basketball scholarship. Isn’t that wonderful for her?” Then Dorothy added, “Of course, I suppose you don’t want to get too excited yet—I know she’s only a sophomore. But very few girls make headlines at fifteen.”

  It was on the tip of Lila’s tongue to say that Dotty had made a mistake: Clint didn’t have a brother and Lila didn’t have a niece. But Dorothy Harper was at the age where names often got mixed up. She wished the old lady a nice day and drove home.

  Lila was a police officer, though, and paid to be curious. During an idle moment at her desk at the sheriff’s station the next morning, she thought of Dorothy’s comment, and typed Sheila Norcross into Firefox. A sports article with the headline, COUGHLIN PHENOM LEADS TIGERS TO TOURNEY FINALS, was the top result, fifteen-year-old Sheila Norcross being said phenom. So Dorothy Harper had been right about the name, after all. There were other Norcrosses in the Tri-Counties—who knew? She certainly hadn’t. Down toward the bottom of the article there was a mention of Sheila’s proud mother, who bore a different surname, Parks. Shannon Parks.

  That creaked a board in Lila’s memory. A couple of years earlier, when Jared had gone out for track, Clint had mentioned the name in passing—had said that a friend named Shannon Parks was the person who convinced him to go out for track at the same age. Given the context, Lila had assumed that Shannon Parks was a male saddled with a rather preppy name. She remembered because her husband hardly ever talked about his childhood and teenage years, and the rare occasions when he did made an impression on Lila.

  He had grown up in foster care. Lila didn’t know many details . . . and hey, who was she kidding? She didn’t know any details. What she knew was that it had been difficult. You could feel Clint’s temperature spike when the subject arose. If Lila ever brought up a case that involved a child being removed from its parents’ custody and put into care, Clint went quiet. He claimed it didn’t make him uncomfortable. “Just ruminative.” Lila, acutely conscious of the necessity of not being a cop in her marriage, let it go.

  Not that it had been easy, or that she had never felt tempted. Her resources as a police officer could have gained her access to all manner of court records. She resisted, though. If you loved a person, didn’t you have to allow them their quiet places? The rooms they didn’t want to visit? Also, she believed that Clint would tell her someday, all of it.

  But.

  Sheila Norcross.

  In the room he did not want to visit and where Lila had blithely assumed that he would someday invite her, was a woman—not a man but a woman—named Shannon, and a photograph of a teenage girl whose smile, sly and curled at the right corner, resembled not just one person that Lila knew well, but two—her husband and her son.

  4

  The rest was a simple two-part investigation.

  In part one, Lila broke the law for the first time not only in her career but in her entire life. She contacted the principal of Coughlin High School and, sans warrant, requested a copy of Sheila Norcross’s records. The Coughlin principal had long been grateful for her help in putting a pin in the brief Margaret
hullabaloo, and Lila reassured him that it was actually nothing about Sheila Norcross, and had to do rather with an identity theft ring. The principal faxed her the records without hesitation, his trust in Lila such that he was happy to break the law, too.

  According to the records, Sheila Norcross was smart, strong in English, even stronger in math and science. She carried a 3.8 grade average. Her teachers described her as a little arrogant, but appealing, a natural leader. Shannon Parks, her mother, was listed as her sole guardian. Clinton Norcross was listed as her father. She had been born in 2002, making her a little over a year younger than Jared.

  Until the AAU game on Wednesday night, Lila told herself she wasn’t sure. Uncertainty made no sense, of course, the truth was right there on the enrollment papers, and plain as the Norcross nose on the girl’s face, but she had to get through the days somehow. She told herself that she had to see the girl, see Sheila Norcross, standout point guard, slightly arrogant but likable 3.8 student, to be sure.

  Lila pretended that she was undercover, that it was her job to convince Clint that she was still the woman he was married to.

  “You seem preoccupied,” Clint said to her on Tuesday night.

  “I’m sorry. It’s probably because I’m having an affair with someone at work,” she said, which was just the sort of thing that Lila would have said, if she was still the Lila he was married to. “It’s very distracting.”

  “Ah. I understand,” Clint said, “It’s Linny, isn’t it?” and he pulled her close for a kiss, and she even kissed him back.

  5

  Then, the second step of the investigation: the stakeout.

  Lila found a seat high up in the bleachers of the gymnasium and watched the Tri-Counties AAU team go through their warm-ups. Sheila Norcross was immediately identifiable, number 34, darting in to flick a lay-up off the corner of the backboard, then reversing on her heels, laughing. Lila studied the girl with a detective’s eye. Maybe 34 didn’t have Clint’s jaw, and maybe the way she held herself was different, too, but so what? Kids had two parents.

  In the second row near the home team’s bench, several adults were standing, clapping along with the pre-game music. The players’ parents. Was the slim one in the cableknit sweater Shannon? Or was the girl’s mother the dyed blonde in the hip newsboy cap? Or some other woman? Lila couldn’t tell. How could she? She was the stranger at the party, after all, the uninvited. People talked about how their marriages fell apart, and they said, “It didn’t feel real.” Lila thought the game felt real enough, though—the crowd sounds, the gymnasium smells. No, it was her. She was what felt unreal.

  The horn sounded. It was game time.

  Sheila Norcross trotted to the huddle, and then did something that erased all doubt, all self-denial. It was awful and simple and convincing, so much more conclusive than any physical resemblance or any school record. Lila witnessed it from her place on the bleachers and understood that she and Clint were ruined.

  6

  As soon as Lila closed her eyes on the approaching animals, she felt the onset of true sleep—not padding, slithering, or bobbing, but rushing at her like a driverless sixteen-wheeler. Bright panic sparked her nerves, and she slapped herself. Hard. Her eyes flew open. There was no snake, no white tiger, no gabbling peacock. There was no gigantic banyan-esque tree. Where it had loomed in the center of the clearing was an oak, a fine old eighty-footer, magnificent in its own way but normal. A squirrel crouched on one of its lower limbs, chittering at her crossly.

  “Hallucinating,” she said. “This is bad.”

  She buttoned her shoulder mic. “Linny? Are you there? Come back.”

  “Right here, Sheriff.” The voice was tinny, a little broken up, but there was no static. “What . . . do for you?”

  The sound of the power lines—bzzz—was discernible again. Lila hadn’t realized it had disappeared. Had it disappeared? Boy, she was messed up.

  “Never mind, Lins, I’ll get back to you when I’m in the clear.”

  “You . . . right, Lila?”

  “Fine. Talk soon.”

  She took another look over her shoulder. Just an oak. A big one, but still just an oak. She started to turn away, and then another brilliant green bird exploded upward from the tree, heading west into the lowering sun. In the direction the other birds had gone.

  Lila closed her eyes tight, then fought them open again. No bird. Of course not. She had imagined the whole thing.

  But the tracks? They led me here.

  Lila decided she would not let herself care about the tracks, or the tree, or the strange woman, or anything else. What she needed to do right now was get back to town without falling asleep. It might be time to visit one of Dooling’s fine pharmacies. And if all else failed, there was the evidence locker. And yet . . .

  And yet what? She’d had a thought, but exhaustion had melted it away. Or almost. She caught it just before it could go completely. King Canute, that was the thought. King Canute commanding the tide to run backward.

  Some things just couldn’t be done.

  7

  Lila’s son was also awake. He was lying in a muddy ditch on the far side of the road. He was wet, he was in pain, and something was digging into his back. It felt like a beer can. All that was bad enough, but he also had company.

  “Norcross.”

  That was Eric.

  Eric fucking Blass.

  Jared kept his eyes closed. If they thought he was unconscious—maybe even dead—they would run away like the chickenshit cowardly assholes they were.

  Maybe.

  “Norcross!” This time his name was followed by a boot prodding him in the side.

  “Eric, let’s get out of here.” Another country heard from. Kent Daley, sounding whiney and on the edge of panic. “I think he’s out cold.”

  “Or in a coma.” Curt’s tone seemed to indicate that this wouldn’t be such a tragic outcome.

  “He’s not in a coma. He’s faking.” But Eric sounded nervous himself. He bent down. Jared’s eyes were closed, but he could smell Eric’s Axe cologne getting stronger. Jesus, did the guy bathe in the stuff? “Norcross!”

  Jared lay still. God, if only a cop car would come by, even one driven by his mother, embarrassing as the explanations that followed might be. But the cavalry arrived only in the movies.

  “Norcross, I’m going to kick you in the balls if you don’t open your eyes, and I mean really fucking hard.”

  Jared opened his eyes.

  “Okay,” Eric said, smiling. “No harm and no foul.”

  Jared, who felt he had been badly fouled—both by the car that had creased him and by these guys—said nothing. It seemed the wisest course.

  “We didn’t hurt the skeevy old lady, and you don’t look too bad, either. No legbones sticking out through your pants, at least. So we’re going to call it even. After you give me your phone, that is.”

  Jared shook his head.

  “You are such an asshole.” Eric spoke with kindly indulgence, as if to a puppy that had just piddled on the rug. “Curt? Kent? Hold him.”

  “Jesus, Eric, I don’t know,” Kent said.

  “I do. Hold him.”

  Curt said, “What if he’s got, like, internal injuries?”

  “He doesn’t. Car barely skinned him. Now hold him.”

  Jared tried to squirm away, but Curt pinned one of his shoulders and Kent pinned the other. He hurt all over, his knee was only the worst of it, and there was really no point in fighting these guys. He felt strangely listless. He supposed that might be shock setting in.

  “Phone.” Eric snapped his fingers. “Hand it over.” This was the guy Mary was going to a concert with. This guy right here.

  “I lost it in the woods.”

  Jared looked up at him, trying not to cry. Crying would be the worst.

  Eric sighed, dropped to his knees, and squeezed Jared’s pockets. He felt the rectangle of the iPhone in the right front and pulled it out. “Why do you have to be such
a dick, Norcross?” Now he sounded petulant and put-upon, like why are you ruining my day?

  “There’s a dick here, but it’s not me,” Jared said. He blinked hard to keep the tears from falling. “You were going to pee in her ear.”

  “No, he wasn’t. You’re disgusting to even think that, Norcross. It was a joke,” Curt said. “Guy talk.”

  Kent piped up eagerly, as if they were actually having a reasonable discussion, and not sitting on him and holding him down. “Yeah, it was just guy talk! We were just playing around. You know, like in the locker room. Don’t be ridiculous, Jared.”

  “I’m going to let this go,” Eric declared. As he spoke, he tapped away at the screen of Jared’s phone. “Because of Mary. I know that she’s your friend, and she’s going to be a lot more than my friend. So it’s a draw. We all walk away.” He finished tapping. “There: erased the video from your cloud, then emptied it out. All gone.”

  A gray rock stuck out of the ditch, looking to Jared like a gray tongue going nyah-nyah-nyah. Eric hammered Jared’s iPhone on it half a dozen times, shattering the screen and sending pieces of black plastic flying. He tossed what was left onto Jared’s chest. It slid off into the muddy ditchwater.

  “Since the video is gone, I didn’t have to do that, but Mary aside, I need you to understand that there are consequences for being a sneaky bitch.” Eric stood up. “Got me?”

  Jared said nothing, but Eric nodded as if he had.

  “Right. Let him go.”

  Kent and Curt stood and backed away. They looked wary, as if they expected Jared to spring up and start swinging like Rocky Balboa.

  “This is over for us,” Eric said. “We don’t want anything more to do with that moldy old cunt back there, okay? It better be over for you, too. Come on, you guys.”

  They left him there in the ditch. Jared held on until they were gone. Then he put an arm over his eyes and wept. When that part was over, he sat up, slid the remains of his phone in his pocket. (Several more pieces fell off as he did so.)