Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  The sleeper was on the floor. Webs covered her head and her hands, as well as her lower body. There was a pair of slacks, knotted together with a pair of underwear, tossed off in a corner. She was small, around five feet. From the pictures on the wall and on the bureau, she appeared to be in her seventies, perhaps older.

  Terry figured that the man who had tried to rape her must have yanked her from the bed and onto the floor in the process of removing the slacks.

  The rapist was on the floor, too, a few feet away. Actually, he didn’t look like a full-grown man; there was a teenage leanness to him. His jeans bunched around his ankles, stopped by a pair of sneakers. CURT M, read a Magic Marker label on the side of one of the sneaker soles. His face was a red slick. Breath stirred the bloody spit around his mouth. Blood continued to stream from his crotch area, adding to the swamp that had already formed in the rug. A stain colored the far wall of the room and below, on the floor, was a wad of flesh that Terry assumed were Curt M’s cock and balls.

  Curt M had probably figured the woman would never notice. To a son of a bitch like this, Aurora must have arrived looking like the opportunity of a lifetime, Easter morning in rapist heaven. There were probably a lot of others like him and, boy, were they in for a nasty surprise.

  But how long before the word got out? If you tore the webs and tried to dip your wick, they fought back; they killed. Which seemed perfectly fair to Terry. But it was awfully easy, from there, to imagine some half-assed messiah like that batshit Kinsman What’s-His-Name who was always on the news pissing and moaning about his taxes, coming along with a brand new plan. He’d announce that it was in everyone’s best interest to go around shooting the cocooned women in their web-wrapped heads. They’re ticking bombs, he’d say. There were men out there who’d love that idea. Terry thought of all those guys who’d been having wet dreams for years about being able to use the ridiculous arsenals they’d amassed for “home defense,” but would never have had the guts to pull the trigger on a person who was awake, let alone armed and pointing a gun back at them. Terry didn’t believe there were millions of those guys, but he’d been a cop long enough to suspect there were thousands of them.

  What did that leave? Terry’s wife was asleep. Could he keep her safe? What was he going to do, put her on a shelf in a cabinet, store her like a jar of preserves?

  And he knew his daughter had never awakened that morning. It didn’t matter that the phone lines were scrambled. Diane was a college kid. She slept in whenever she could. Plus, she’d sent them her spring semester schedule, and Terry was pretty sure she didn’t have morning classes on Thursdays.

  Was it possible that Roger—stupid, stupid, stupid Roger—had made an astute choice when he took those webs off Jessica? Roger got it over with before having to see anyone he loved shot in her sleep.

  I should kill myself, Terry thought.

  He let the idea float around. When it didn’t sink, he grew alarmed and told himself not to rush into anything. He ought to get a drink, or a couple, really let himself work through it all. He thought better when he’d had a few, always had.

  On the floor, Curt McLeod—the third-best player on the Dooling High School varsity tennis team, behind Kent Daley and Eric Blass—was making hitching noises. Cheyne-Stokes respiration had begun.

  8

  Terry’s request that Lila drop him off at the Squeaky Wheel hardly jarred her. It made as much sense as anything at this point.

  “What did you see in there, Terry?”

  He was in the passenger seat, holding the cocooned baby between wide-open, flattened palms, like a hot casserole. “Some kid tried to—ah—get with a lady in there. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “That woke her up. She was asleep again when I entered the premises. He was—pretty much dead. Dead all the way now.”

  “Oh,” said Lila.

  They rolled through the dark town. The fire in the hills was red, the smoke cloud that rose from it a shade deeper than the night. A woman in a neon pink jogging suit was doing jumping jacks on a lawn. Crowds of people—predominantly women—were visible through the big windows of the Starbucks on Main Street, which was either open exceptionally late or (perhaps more likely) had been forced open by the crowd. It was 2:44 AM.

  The parking lot at the rear of the Squeak was more packed than Lila had ever seen it. There were trucks, sedans, motorcycles, compacts, vans. A new row of vehicles had begun on the grass embankment at the end of the lot.

  Lila cozied the cruiser up to the back door, which was ajar and sending out light, voices, and a jukebox blare. The current song was a clattering garage band tune she’d heard a million times but wouldn’t have known the name of even if she had been operating on a full night’s rest. The singer’s voice was iron dragged over asphalt:

  “You’re gonna wake up wonderin, find yourself all alone!” he wailed.

  A barmaid had fallen asleep sitting on a milk crate beside the door. Her cowboy boots were sprawled out in a V. Terry got out of the car, put Platinum on the seat, then leaned back in. Neon from a beer sign washed over the right side of his face and gave him the acid green visage of a movie corpse. He gestured at the cocooned bundle.

  “Maybe you should hide that baby somewhere, Lila.”

  “What?”

  “Think about it. They’ll start wiping the girls and women out soon. Because they’re dangerous. They wake up on the wrong side of the bed, so to speak.” He straightened. “I have to get a drink. Good luck.” Her deputy shut the door carefully, as if afraid he might rouse the infant.

  Lila watched Terry walk in through the back door of the bar. He didn’t spare a glance for the woman asleep on the milk crate, the heels of her boots planted in the gravel, toes pointed up.

  9

  Officers Lampley and Murphy had cleared off the crap on the long table in the janitor’s supply room so that Ree’s body could lie in peace. Taking her to the county morgue in the middle of the night was out of the question, and St. Theresa’s was still a madhouse. Tomorrow, if things settled down, one of the officers could transport her remains to Crowder’s Funeral Home on Kruger Street.

  Claudia Stephenson sat at the foot of the table in a folding chair, holding an ice pack to her throat. Jeanette came in and sat in another folding chair, at the head of the table.

  “I just wanted someone who’d talk to me,” Claudia said. Her voice was husky, hardly more than a whisper. “Ree was always a good listener.”

  “I know,” said Jeanette, thinking that was true even though Ree was dead.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Van said. She was in the open door, her muscular body looking slack with weariness and sorrow.

  “You should have used your Taser,” Jeanette said, but she couldn’t muster any real accusation. She was also weary.

  “There was no time,” Van said.

  “She was going to kill me, Jeanie.” Claudia said this in a tone of apology. “If you want to blame anyone, blame me. I was the one who tried to get the webs off her.” She repeated, “I only wanted someone to chat with.”

  At rest, Ree’s uncovered face was both slack and stunned, lids low, mouth open; it was the in-between expression—between laughs, between smiles—you wore in the photograph that you threw out or deleted from your phone. Someone had scrubbed the blood from her forehead, but the bullet hole was stark and obscene. The tattered webbing hung loose around her hair, lank and wilted instead of fluttering and silken, as dead as Ree herself. The stuff had stopped growing when Ree stopped living.

  When Jeanette tried to picture the living Ree, all she could find that was solid was a few moments from that morning. I say you can’t not be bothered by a square of light.

  Claudia sighed or moaned or sobbed, or maybe did all three simultaneously. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said in her choked wheeze. “I’m so sorry.”

  Jeanette closed Ree’s eyelids. That was better. She let her finger graze a small portion of the patch of scar tissue
on Ree’s forehead. Who did that to you, Ree? I hope whoever did that hates himself, and punishes himself. Or that he’s dead, and it almost certainly was a he. Ninety-nine percent. The girl’s eyelids were paler than the rest of her sandy skin.

  Jeanette bent low to Ree’s ear. “I’ve never told anyone what I told you. Not even Dr. Norcross. Thanks for listening. Now sleep well, honey. Please sleep well.”

  10

  The fragment of burning web rose into the air, twisting orange and black, blooming. It didn’t flare. Blooming was the only word for the way it opened, the fire becoming so much bigger than the fuel.

  Garth Flickinger, holding the lit match that he’d used to test the trimming of web, reared back against the coffee table. His medical implements skidded across it and a few clattered to the floor. Frank, watching from near the door, lowered himself to a crouch and moved quickly toward Nana, to shield her.

  The flame formed a swirling circle.

  Frank pressed his body over his daughter.

  In Flickinger’s hand, the burning match had reached his fingertips, but he continued to hold it. Frank smelled the burning skin. In the glare of the fiery circle that hovered in mid-air above the living room, the doctor’s elfin features appeared to separate, as if they wished—understandably—to flee.

  Because fire did not burn this way. Fire did not float. Fire did not make circles.

  The last experiment on the web was delivering a conclusive answer to the question of “Why?” and the answer was: because what was happening was not of this world, and could not be treated by the medicine of this world. This realization was on Flickinger’s face for anyone to read. Frank guessed it was in his own face, as well.

  The fire collapsed into a rippling brown mass that jittered into a hundred pieces. Moths spilled into the air.

  Moths rose to the light fixture; they fluttered to the lampshade, to the corners of the ceiling, through the entryway to the kitchen; moths went dancing to the print of Christ walking on water on the wall and settled on the edges of the frame; a moth tumbled through the air and landed on the ground close to where Frank was draped across Nana. Flickinger was scrambling in the opposite direction on his hands and knees, toward the front hall, yelling the whole way (screaming, actually), his poise shattered.

  Frank didn’t move. He kept his eyes on one single moth. It was the color of nothing you’d notice.

  The moth crept forward across the floor. Frank was afraid, terrified really, of the little creature that weighed roughly as much as a fingernail and was a living shade of mute. What would it do to him?

  Anything. It could do anything it wanted—as long as it didn’t hurt Nana.

  “Don’t touch her,” Frank whispered. Embracing his daughter like this, he could feel her pulse and her breath. The world had a way of spinning from Frank’s grasp, of making him wrong or foolish when all he wanted was to be right and good, but he wasn’t a coward. He was ready to die for his little girl. “If you have to have someone, you can have me.”

  Two spots of ink on the brown chevron of the moth’s body, its eyes, saw into Frank’s eyes, and from there into his head. He felt it flying around in his skull for God knew how long, touching down on his brain, dragging its pointed feet along the canals like a boy on a rock in the middle of a stream, drawing a stick through the water.

  And Frank huddled closer to his child. “Please take me instead.”

  The moth darted away.

  11

  Claudia, she of the Dynamite Body-a, left. Officer Lampley had offered to give Jeanette a moment alone. Now she had the actual Ree to talk to. Or what was left of her. She felt she should have told Ree these things while Ree was still alive.

  “What happened—I’m not sure if it was morning or afternoon or early evening, but we’d been on the nod for days. Didn’t go out. Ordered in. At one point, Damian burned me with a cigarette. I’m lying in bed and we’re both looking at my bare arm and I ask, ‘What are you doing?’ The pain was in another room from my mind. I didn’t even move my arm. Damian says, ‘Making sure that you’re real.’ I still have the scar, size of a penny from his pressing so hard. ‘Satisfied?’ I asked. ‘You believe I’m real?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, but I hate you more for being real. If you’d let me get my knee fixed, none of this would have happened. You are one vicious bitch. And I’m finally onto you!’ ”

  Ree said That’s pretty scary.

  “Yes. It was. Because Damian said all that with an expression like this is great news, and he’s delighted to get it and pass it on. It’s like he was the host of some late night radio talk show, playing to his crowd of insomniac nutbags. We’re in the bedroom and the curtains are drawn and nothing’s been washed in days. The power’s off because we didn’t pay the bill. Later, I don’t know how long, I find myself sitting on the floor in Bobby’s room. His bed’s still there, but the other furniture, the rocker and the bureau, they’re gone. Damian sold them to a guy for a little cash. Maybe I was finally coming down, maybe it was because of the cigarette burn, but I felt so sad, and so awful, and so—like I was turned around and in this foreign place and there’s no way home.”

  Ree said I know the feeling.

  “The screwdriver, now—the clutchhead screwdriver. The guy who bought the rocker must have used it to take the base off and then forgot to take it with him. That’s all I can figure. I know it wasn’t our screwdriver. We didn’t have any tools by then. Damian had sold them off long before the furniture. But this screwdriver is lying on the floor of Bobby’s room and I pick it up. I go to the living room and Damian’s sitting in the folding chair that’s the last seat in the house. He goes, ‘You here to finish the job? Well go ahead. But you better hurry up, because if you don’t get to killing me in the next few seconds here, I think I’ll choke you until your stupid fucking head pops off.’ Says it in that same late night host voice. And he holds up a little bottle with the last couple of pills we have, and then, he gives it a shake, like for a special punchline, ta-da! He goes, ‘Right here’s a good spot, plenty of meat,’ and he pulls my hand that’s holding the screwdriver over to his upper thigh, and puts the point against his jeans, and says, ‘Well? Now or never, Jeanie-baby, now or never.’ ”

  Ree said I guess he wanted it.

  “And he got it. I drove that bastard all the way down to the handle. Damian doesn’t shout, he just gives a big exhale, and goes, ‘Look what you did to me,’ and he’s bleeding all over the chair and the floor. But he doesn’t make a move to help himself. He says, ‘Fine. Watch me die. Enjoy it.’ ”

  Ree said Did you?

  “No. No! I huddled in the corner of the room. How long, I couldn’t tell. Police said it was twelve or fourteen hours. I saw the shadows change, but I didn’t know how long. Damian sat there, and he talked. And he talked. Was I happy now. Had this been the plan from the beginning. Oh, and how had I rigged the ground in the park so he’d hurt his knee in the first place. What a great trick, Jeanie-baby. Eventually, he stopped talking. But I can see him—real clear, I can see him, right this minute still. I used to dream about telling Damian I was sorry, about begging his forgiveness. In those dreams he’d just sit in that chair, looking at me and turning blue. Too-late dreams, Dr. Norcross says. Too late for sorry. Score one for the doc, right, Ree? Dead men don’t accept apologies. Not once in the history of the world.”

  Ree said Got that right.

  “But, oh, honey, oh, Ree. What I wouldn’t give to change everything now just this one time, because you were too good to end up like this. You didn’t ever kill anyone. It should have been me. Not you. Me.”

  To this Ree said nothing.

  CHAPTER 19

  1

  Clint found Hicks’s cell phone number in the address book in his desk and called it from the landline. The acting warden was disconcertingly relaxed. Maybe he’d popped a Valium or two.

  “A lot of the women seem to have reached a state of, I guess you’d call it acceptance, Doc.”

  “Ac
ceptance isn’t the same as giving up,” said Clint.

  “Put it how you want to put it, but the lights have gone out on more than half of them since you left.” Hicks said this with satisfaction, noting that the officer-to-inmate ratio was once again manageable. They would still be in good shape once they lost the female officers.

  This was how people in power thought of human life, wasn’t it? In terms of sum benefits and ratios and manageability. Clint had never wanted to be in power. As a ward of the foster system he had, mostly by grace, survived the dominion of countless domestic tyrants; he had chosen his field in clear reaction to that experience, in order to help the helpless, people like the boy he’d been, like Marcus and Jason and Shannon—and like his own mother, that pale, worried ghost of his faintest memory.

  Jared squeezed his father’s shoulder. He had been listening.

  “Be advised, the paperwork is going to be unprecedented,” Hicks continued. “The state does look down on shooting prison inmates.” Ree Dempster was cooling in the janitor’s closet and Hicks was already thinking of the paperwork. Clint decided he had to get off the phone before he used the slang term that referred to men who had sexual congress with the woman who’d given them birth.

  Clint said he’d be in soon, and that was it. Jared offered to make fried baloney sandwiches. “You must be hungry.”

  “Thank you,” said Clint. “Sounds like just the right thing.”

  The meat sizzled and popped in the pan and his nose found the smell. It was so good tears came to his eyes. Or maybe the tears were in his eyes already.

  “I need to get me one of those.” That was what Shannon had said to him that last time, looking at the picture of little Jared. And apparently she had.

  Sheila, Lila had said the girl’s name was, Sheila Norcross.

  It was flattering, really, maybe the most flattering thing that had ever happened to him, Shannon giving her girl his last name. It was a problem now, but still. It meant that she’d loved him. Well, he had loved Shannon, too. In a way. There were things between them that other people could never understand.