Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  “For this afternoon and tonight, I’ll just keep a car posted near the prison.” Frank paused. “Beyond that, I can’t promise, and even that depends on Norcross not trying anything funny.”

  “I hardly think—”

  “But I do.” Frank gravely tapped a finger against the hollow of his temple, as if to indicate thought processes hard at work. “Position I’m in right now, I have to. He thinks he’s smart, and guys like that can be a problem. To others, and to themselves. Looking at it that way, your trip to Coughlin is a mission of mercy. So drive carefully, Judge.”

  “At my age, I always do,” Judge Silver said. His entry into the Land Rover was slow and painful to watch. Frank was on the verge of going to help him when Silver finally made it behind the wheel and slammed the door. The engine roared to life, Silver gunning it thoughtlessly, and then the lights came on, cutting cones through the drizzle.

  Ex-FBI, and in Coughlin, Frank marveled. Wonders never ceased. Maybe he could call the Bureau and get an emergency federal order enjoining Norcross to let the woman go. Unlikely, with the government in an uproar, but not out of the question. If Norcross defied them then, no one could blame them for forcing the issue.

  He went back inside to give the remaining deputies their orders. He’d already decided to send Barrows and Rangle to relieve Peters and that Blass kid. He and Pete Ordway could start making a list of guys, responsible ones, who might form a posse, should a posse be needed. No need to go back to the station, where Terry might show up; they could do it right here at the diner.

  7

  Judge Oscar Silver rarely drove anymore, and when he did, he no longer exceeded forty miles an hour, no matter how many cars stacked up behind him. If they began to honk and tailgate, he found a place to pull over and let them go by, then resumed his stately pace. He was aware that both his reflexes and his vision had declined. In addition, he had suffered three heart attacks, and knew that the bypass operation performed on his failing pump at St. Theresa’s two years ago would only hold the final infarction at bay for so long. He was at peace with that, but he had no wish to die behind the wheel, where a final swerve might take one or more innocent people with him. At only forty (less, within the city limits), he thought he would have a fair chance to apply braking and shift into park before the lights went out for good.

  Today was different, however. Once he was beyond Ball’s Ferry and on the Old Coughlin Road, he increased his speed until the needle hovered at sixty-five, territory it hadn’t explored in five years or more. He had reached Rhinegold on his cell, and Rhinegold was willing to talk (although the judge, a crafty old soul, hadn’t wanted to discuss the subject of their confab on the phone—probably a needless precaution, but discretion had ever been his byword), and that was good news. The bad news: Silver suddenly found that he did not trust Frank Geary, who talked so easily about gathering a bunch of men and storming the prison. He had sounded reasonable enough back at the Olympia, but the situation was utterly unreasonable. The judge didn’t care for how practical Frank made such a move sound, when it ought to be an absolute last resort.

  The windshield wipers clicked back and forth, clearing the thin rain. He turned on the radio and tuned in the all-news station in Wheeling. “Most city services have been shut down until further notice,” the announcer said, “and I want to repeat that the nine o’clock curfew will be strictly enforced.”

  “Good luck with that,” the judge murmured.

  “Now, recapping our top story. So-called Blowtorch Brigades, goaded by Internet-fueled fake news that respiration exhaled through the growths—or cocoons—surrounding the sleeping women is spreading the Aurora plague, have been reported in Charleston, Atlanta, Savannah, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Tampa.” The announcer paused, and when he resumed, his flat twang had become more pronounced. Folksier. “Neighbors, I’m proud to say none of these ignorant mobs have been operating here in Wheeling. We all have womenfolks we love like mad, and killing them in their sleep, no matter how unnatural that sleep may be, would be a terrible thing to do.”

  He pronounced terrible as turrible.

  Judge Silver’s Land Rover was nearing the outer limits of Dooling’s neighbor, Maylock. Rhinegold’s house in Coughlin was on the other side, a drive of another twenty minutes or so.

  “The National Guard has been called out in all the cities where those Brigades have been at work, and they have orders to shoot to kill if those superstitious fools won’t cease and desist. I say amen to that. The CDC has repeated that there is no truth whatsoever to—”

  The windshield was fogging up. Judge Silver leaned to his right, never taking his eyes from the road, and flipped on the defroster. The fan whooshed. On its wind, clouds of small brown moths spewed from the vents, filling the cabin and circling the judge’s head. They lit in his hair and battered his cheeks. Worst of all, they spun before his eyes, and something one of his old aunts had told him long ago, when he was just an impressionable boy, recurred to him with the brilliance of a proven fact, like up is up and down is down.

  “Don’t ever rub your eyes after touching a moth, Oscar,” she had said. “The dust from their wings will get in there and you’ll go blind.”

  “Get away!” Judge Silver yelled. He took his hands off the wheel and beat at his face. Moths continued to pour from the vents—hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. The Land Rover’s cabin became a swirling brown mist. “Get away, get away, get aw—”

  A huge weight settled on the left side of his chest. Pain hammered down his left arm like electricity. He opened his mouth to cry out and moths flew in, crawling on his tongue and tickling the lining of his cheeks. With his last struggling breath he pulled them down his throat, where they clogged his windpipe. The Land Rover veered left; an approaching truck veered right just in time to avoid it, ending up in the ditch, canted but not quite toppling. There was no ditch to avoid on the other side of the road—just the guardrails separating the Dorr’s Hollow Bridge from the open air and the stream beneath. Silver’s vehicle snapped the guardrails and pitched over. The Land Rover went end-for-end into the water below. Judge Silver, by then already dead, was ejected through the windshield and into Dorr’s Hollow Stream, a tributary of Ball Creek. One of his loafers came off and floated downstream, shipping water and then sinking.

  The moths exited the overturned vehicle, now bubbling its way down into the water, and flew back toward Dooling in a flock.

  8

  “I hated to do that,” Eve said—speaking not to her guests, Clint felt, but to herself. She wiped a single tear from the corner of her left eye. “The more time I spend here, the more human I become. I had forgotten that.”

  “What are you talking about, Evie?” Clint asked. “What did you hate to do?”

  “Judge Silver was trying to bring in outside help,” she said. “It might not have made any difference, but I couldn’t take the chance.”

  “Did you kill him?” Angel asked, sounding interested. “Use your special powers an all?”

  “I had to. From this point forward, what happens in Dooling has to stay in Dooling.”

  “But . . .” Michaela rubbed a hand down her face. “What’s happening in Dooling is happening everywhere. It’s going to happen to me.”

  “Not for awhile,” Evie said. “And you won’t need any more stimulants, either.” She extended a loose fist through the prison bars, extended a finger, and beckoned. “Come to me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Rand said, as Garth overlapped him, saying, “Don’t be stupid, Mickey.” He grabbed her forearm.

  “What do you think, Clint?” Evie asked, smiling.

  Knowing he was giving in—not just to this, but to everything—Clint said, “Let her go.”

  Garth released his grip. As if hypnotized, Michaela took two steps forward. Evie put her face against the bars, her eyes on Michaela’s. Her lips parted.

  “Lesbo stuff!” Angel crowed. “Turn on the cameras, freaks, the muff-divin comes next!” />
  Michaela took no notice. She pressed her mouth to Evie’s. They kissed with the hard bars of the soft cell between them, and Clint heard a sigh as Eve Black breathed into Michaela’s mouth and lungs. At the same time he felt the hairs stand up on his arms and neck. His vision blurred with tears. Somewhere Jeanette was screaming, and Angel was cackling.

  At last Evie broke the kiss and stepped back. “Sweet mouth,” she said. “Sweet girl. How do you feel now?”

  “I’m awake,” Michaela said. Her eyes were round, her recently kissed lips trembling. “I’m really awake!”

  There was no question that she was. The purple pouches beneath her eyes had disappeared, but that was the least of it; her skin had tightened on her bones and her formerly pallid cheeks had taken on a rosy glow. She turned to Garth, who was staring at her with slack-jawed amazement.

  “I’m really, really awake!”

  “Holy shit,” Garth said. “I think you are.”

  Clint darted his spread fingers at Michaela’s face. She snapped her head away. “Your reflexes are back,” he said. “You couldn’t have done that five minutes ago.”

  “How long can I stay this way?” Michaela clasped her shoulders, hugging herself. “It’s wonderful!”

  “A few days,” Evie repeated. “After that, the weariness will return, and with interest. You’ll fall asleep no matter how much you struggle against it, and grow a cocoon like all the rest. Unless, that is . . .”

  “Unless you get what you want,” Clint said.

  “What I want is immaterial now,” Evie said. “I thought you understood that. It’s what the men of this town do with me that matters. And what the women on the other side of the Tree decide.”

  “What—” Garth began, but then Jeanette hit him like a left tackle intent on sacking the quarterback, driving him into the bars. She shouldered him aside and grasped the bars, staring at Evie. “Do me! Evie, do me! I don’t want to fight it no more, I don’t want to see the bud man anymore, so do me!”

  Evie took her hands and looked at her sadly. “I can’t, Jeanette. You should stop fighting it and go to sleep like all the others. They could use someone as brave and strong as you are over there. They call it Our Place. It can be your place, too.”

  “Please,” Jeanette whispered, but Evie let go of her hands. Jeanette staggered away, squashing spilled peas underfoot and crying soundlessly.

  “I don’t know,” Angel said thoughtfully. “Maybe I won’t kill you, Evie. I’m thinking maybe . . . I just don’t know. You’re spiritual. Plus, even crazier than me. Which is goin some.”

  Evie addressed Clint and the others again: “Armed men will be coming. They want me because they think I may have caused Aurora, and if I caused it, I can put a stop to it. That’s not exactly true—it’s more complicated than that—just because I turned something on by myself doesn’t mean I can turn it off by myself—but do you think angry, frightened men would believe that?”

  “Not in a million years,” Garth Flickinger said. Standing behind him, Billy Wettermore grunted agreement.

  Evie said, “They’ll kill anyone who gets in their way, and when I’m not able to awaken their sleeping beauties with a wave of my Fairy Godmother magic wand, they’ll kill me. Then they’ll set fire to the prison and every woman in it, just for spite.”

  Jeanette had wandered into the delousing area to resume her conversation with the bud man, but Angel was paying close attention. Clint could almost hear her mood lift, like a generator first thumping to life and then whirring into gear. “They ain’t gonna kill me. Not without a fight.”

  For the first time Evie looked piqued. Clint thought that whatever she’d done to awaken Mickey Coates might have drained her battery. “Angel, they’ll wash over you like a wave over a child’s sand castle.”

  “Maybe, but I’ll take a few with me.” Angel did a couple of rusty kung fu moves that made Clint feel an emotion he had never before associated with Angel Fitzroy: pity.

  “Did you bring us here?” Michaela asked. Her eyes were bright, fascinated. “Did you draw us here? Garth and me?”

  “No,” Evie said. “You don’t understand how powerless I am—little more than one of the drug-man’s rabbits hung on a line, waiting to be skinned or set free.” She turned her gaze fully on Clint. “Do you have a plan? I think you do.”

  “Nothing so grand,” Clint said, “but I might be able to buy some time. We’ve got a fortified position here, but we could use a few more men—”

  “What we could use,” Tig interrupted, “is a platoon of marines.”

  Clint shook his head. “Unless Terry Coombs and that guy Geary can get outside help, I think we can hold the prison with a dozen men, maybe as few as ten. Right now we number just four. Five, if we can get Scott Hughes onboard, but I don’t hold out much hope of that.”

  Clint went on, speaking mostly to Mickey and the doc she’d brought with her. He didn’t like the idea of sending Flickinger on a life-or-death mission—nothing about how he looked or smelled disagreed with Evie’s pronouncement that he was a big-time doper—but Flickinger and Janice Coates’s daughter were all he had to work with. “The real problem is weaponry, and the big question is who lays hands on it first. I know from my wife that they’ve got quite the armory at the sheriff’s station. Since 9/11 and all the domestic terrorism threats afterward, most towns Dooling’s size do. For handguns they’ve got Glock 17s and, I think Lila said, Sig . . . something or others.”

  “Sig Sauer,” Billy Wettermore said. “Good weapon.”

  “They’ve got M4 semi-autos with those big clips,” Clint went on, “and a couple of Remington Model 700s. Also, I believe Lila said they have a forty-millimeter grenade launcher.”

  “Guns.” Evie spoke to no one in particular. “The perfect solution to any problem. The more you have, the more perfectly they solve the problem.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Michaela cried. “A grenade launcher?”

  “Yes, but not for explosives. They use it with teargas.”

  “Don’t forget the bulletproof vests.” Rand sounded glum. “Except at super-close range, those things will stop a Mossberg slug. And the Mossies are the heaviest armament we’ve got.”

  “This sounds like a punting situation,” Tig remarked.

  Billy Wettermore said, “I sure don’t want to kill anybody if I don’t have to. Those are our friends, for God’s sake.”

  “Well, good luck,” Evie said. She went to her bunk and powered up Assistant Warden Hicks’s phone. “I’m going to play a few games of Boom Town, then take a nap.” She smiled at Michaela. “I won’t be taking any further questions from the press. You’re a wonderful kisser, Mickey Coates, but you’ve worn me out.”

  “Just watch that she don’t decide to sic her rats on you,” Angel said to the group at large. “They do whatever she wants. It’s how she got Hicksie’s cell phone.”

  “Rats,” Garth said. “This keeps getting better.”

  “I need you folks to come with me,” Clint said. “We need to talk, but it has to be quick. They’ll have this place locked down soon enough.”

  Billy Wettermore pointed to Jeanette, now seated cross-legged in the shower alcove of the delousing station and talking earnestly with someone only she could see. “What about Sorley?”

  “She’ll be fine,” Clint said. “Come on. Go to sleep, Jeanette. Let yourself rest.”

  Without looking at him, Jeanette said a single word. “No.”

  9

  To Clint, the warden’s office had an archaeological appearance, as if it had been abandoned for years instead of less than a week. Janice Coates lay on the couch, wrapped in her cerements of white. Michaela went to her and knelt down. She stroked the cocoon with one hand. It gave off crackling sounds. Garth started to approach her, but Clint took his arm. “Give her a minute, Dr. Flickinger.”

  It was actually more like three before Michaela got to her feet. “What can we do?” she asked.

  “Can you be persistent
and persuasive?” Clint asked.

  She fixed him with eyes that were no longer bloodshot. “I came to NewsAmerica as an unpaid intern at twenty-three. By twenty-six, I was a full-time correspondent and they were talking about giving me my own evening show.” She saw Billy giving a look to Tig and Rand, and smiled at them. “You know what they say around here, don’t you? It ain’t bragging if it’s the truth.” She returned her attention to Clint. “Those are my references. Are they good enough?”

  “I hope so,” Clint said. “Listen.”

  He talked for the next five minutes. There were questions, but not many. They were in a bad corner, and all of them knew it.

  CHAPTER 6

  1

  Alexander Peter Bayer, the first baby to be born on the other side of the Tree, son of a former Dooling inmate named Linda Bayer, breathed air for the first time a week after Lila and Tiffany returned from the wreck below Lion Head. It was another few days before Lila made his acquaintance at a small gathering in Elaine Nutting Geary’s repaired home. He was not a traditionally attractive infant; the stacking of his many jowls produced an association not with the Gerber Baby but with a bookie that Lila had once arrested who had been known as “Larry Large.” However, baby Alexander had an irresistibly comic way of rolling his eyes around, as if he were anxiously attempting to gain his bearings amid the flowering of female faces that loomed above him.

  A plate of slightly crispy (though still pretty tasty) scones was passed around. Between bouts of the strange vertigo that afflicted her, Nadine Coombs had baked them in an outdoor oven. The oven itself had recently been hauled from the ruins of the Lowe’s in Maylock, using sledges and Tiffany’s horses. It flabbergasted Lila sometimes, the rate of progress they were making, the speed and efficiency with which problems were solved and advancements made.

  At some point Lila ended up with the baby. “Are you the last man on earth, or the first?” she asked him.