Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  “Do you want to see Bobby again?”

  “Of course I want to see him,” Jeanette said, ignoring Damian. It was getting easier to do that. “Of course I want to see my boy.”

  “All right, then. Listen carefully. There are secret ways between the two worlds—tunnels. Each woman who goes to sleep passes through one of them, but there’s another—a very special one—that begins at a very special tree. That’s the only one that goes both ways. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “You will,” Evie said. “There’s a woman on the other side of that tunnel, and she’s going to close it unless someone stops her. I respect her position, I think it’s perfectly valid, the male species has performed abysmally on this side of the Tree, no amount of grade inflation can alter that conclusion, but everyone deserves a say. One woman, one vote. Elaine Nutting can’t be allowed to make the decision for everyone.”

  Evie’s face was at the bars of her cell. Verdant tendrils had grown up around her temples. Her eyes were auburn-colored tiger eyes. Moths had gathered in her hair, collecting themselves into a fluttering band. She was a monster, Jeanette thought, and beautiful.

  “What does that have to do with Bobby?”

  “If the Tree burns, the tunnel closes. No one can ever come back. Not you, not any other woman, Jeanette. The end will become inevitable.”

  “Nope, nope, nope. It’s already inevitable,” Damian said. “Go to sleep, Jeanie.”

  “Can you just shut up! You’re dead!” Jeanette screamed at him. “I’m sorry I killed you, and I would do anything to take it back, but you were cruel to me, and it’s done, so will you just shut your fucking mouth!”

  The declaration echoed around the narrow confines of A Wing. Damian was not there.

  “Well put,” Evie said. “Courageous! Now listen to me, Jeanette: I want you to close your eyes. You’ll go through the tunnel—your tunnel—but you won’t remember.”

  This part Jeanette thought she understood. “Because I’ll be sleeping?”

  “Exactly! Once you’re on the other side, you’re going to feel better than you have in quite a long time. I want you to follow the fox. He’ll take you where you need to go. Remember: Bobby and Tree. The one depends on the other.”

  Jeanette let her eyes shut. Bobby, she reminded herself. Bobby and the Tree and the tunnel that went both ways. The one some woman named Elaine wanted to close by an act of burning. Follow the fox. She counted one-two-three-four-five and everything was the same. Except for Evie, that was, who had turned into a Green Lady. As if she were a tree herself.

  Then she felt a tickle along her check, a swab of the lightest lace.

  10

  After the shot, they heard Bert Miller bellow and wail and keep wailing as his companion dragged him away. Clint borrowed Willy Burke’s riflescope to take a look. The yellow-clad figure on the ground was clutching his thigh and the other guy was hauling him underneath his armpits.

  “Good. Thanks.” Clint returned the rifle to Wettermore. Willy Burke was eyeing both of them with careful consideration: part admiration and part caution.

  Clint went back inside. The rear door that let into the small gymnasium was propped open with a brick.

  To lower visibility from the outside, they had trimmed the lights to just the red-tinted emergency bulbs. These cast small scarlet spots around the edges of the hardwood floor where inmates played half-court basketball. Clint stopped under the hoop and steadied himself against the padded wall. His heart was pumping. He wasn’t scared, he wasn’t happy, but he was here.

  Clint warned himself about the euphoria he was feeling, but it didn’t temper the pleasant thrumming in his limbs. He was either becoming walled off from himself or returning to himself. He didn’t know which. What he knew was that he had the milkshake, and Geary wasn’t going to take it away from him. That Geary was wrong almost didn’t matter.

  Aurora wasn’t a virus, it was an enchantment, and Evie Black was like no woman—no human—who had ever existed. You couldn’t fix something that was beyond human understanding with a hammer, which was what Frank Geary and Terry Coombs and the other men outside the prison presumed they could do. This required a different approach. It was obvious to Clint and should have been to them, because they weren’t all stupid men, but for some reason it wasn’t, and that meant he was going to have to use his own hammer to block theirs.

  They started it! How childish! And how true!

  The cycle of this logic went around on rusty, squalling wheels. Clint punched the padded wall several times and wished it were a man under his knuckles. He thought of pyrotherapy: the fever cure. For awhile, it had been cutting edge treatment, except giving malaria to your patients was awfully heavy medicine. Sometimes it saved them, and sometimes it finished them. Was Evie a pyrotherapist or the pyrotherapy? Was she possibly doctor and treatment both?

  Or, by ordering Billy Wettermore to fire that shot to the leg of Selectman Bert Miller, had he himself administered the first dose?

  11

  Footsteps clicked across the floor from the direction of the gymnasium. Angel was just leaving the abandoned Booth with a set of cell keys. She gripped them in her right hand, the longest key protruding between the knuckles of her index finger and her middle finger. She had once stabbed a sloppy old cowboy in an Ohio parking lot in the ear with a sharpened key. It had not killed the cowboy, but he hadn’t enjoyed it much. Angel, feeling kind, had merely taken from the man his wallet, his dimestore wedding ring, his scratch tickets, and silver belt buckle; she had allowed him to keep his life.

  Dr. Norcross walked by the glassed wall of the Booth without stopping. Angel weighed coming up behind him and plunging the key in the untrustworthy quack’s jugular. She loved the idea. Unfortunately, she had made a promise to Evie not to kill anyone until daylight, and Angel was profoundly wary of crossing the witch.

  She allowed the doctor to pass.

  Angel headed for C Wing and the cell that was home to Maura and Kayleigh. The shape that was clearly Maura, short and stout, lay on the outside of the bottom bunk, where someone had placed her after she had gone night-night in A Wing. Kayleigh was on the inside of the bunk. Angel had no clue what Evie had meant when she said that “their souls were dead,” but it encouraged caution.

  She used the tip of a key to slice through the webbing that covered Maura’s face. The material separated with a purr, and Maura’s pudgy, red-cheeked features emerged. They could have served as the model for an illustration on the box of some “down home” brand sold in little backwater stores—“Mama Maura’s Cornbread” or “Dunbarton Soothing Syrup.” Angel jumped away into the hall, ready to flee if Maura went for her.

  The woman on the bed sat up slowly.

  “Maura?”

  Maura Dunbarton blinked. She stared at Angel. Her eyes were entirely pupil. She pulled her right arm free of its cocoon, then her left arm, and then placed her hands together in her crinkly lap.

  After Maura had sat like that for a couple of minutes, Angel eased into the cell again. “I won’t just harm you if you move on me, Mo-Mo. I’ll kill you.”

  The woman sat quietly, black eyes fixed on the wall.

  Angel used the key to slice the webbing that covered Kayleigh’s face. As quickly as before, she darted back out of the cell and into the hall.

  The same process repeated itself: Kayleigh slipping down the top half of her cocoon as though it were a dress, looking with eyes that were all black. Shoulder to shoulder, the two women sat, torn webs hanging over their hair, their chins, their necks. They looked like ghosts in some cheap traveling carny’s haunted house.

  “You gals all right?” Angel asked.

  They made no reply. They did not appear to be breathing.

  “You know what-all you’re supposed to do?” Angel asked, less nervous now, but curious.

  They said nothing. No reflection of any kind stirred in their black eyes. A faint scent of turned, damp earth emanated from the two women. Angel
thought (she wished she hadn’t), This is how the dead sweat.

  “Okay. Good.” Either they would do something or they wouldn’t. “I’ll leave you gals to it.” She thought of adding something of an encouraging nature, like go get em, and decided not to.

  Angel went to the woodshop and used the keys to unlock the tools. She tucked a small hand drill into her waistband, a chisel into one sock, and a screwdriver into the other.

  Then, she lay down on her back beneath a table, and watched a dark window for the first sign of light. She didn’t feel a bit sleepy.

  12

  Filaments spun and whirled around Jeanette’s face, splitting and falling and rising, burying her features. Clint knelt beside her, wanting to hold her hand, but not daring. “You were a good person,” he told her. “Your son loved you.”

  “She is a good person. Her son does love her. She is not dead, she only sleeps.”

  Clint went to the bars of Evie’s cell. “So you say, Evie.”

  She sat on her cot. “You look like you’re getting your second wind, Clint.”

  Her bearing—the downward tilt of her head, glossy black hair falling across the side of her face—was melancholy. “You can still hand me over. But not for much longer.”

  “No,” he said.

  “What a voice on that man you had Wettermore shoot! I could hear him all the way over here.”

  Her tone wasn’t goading. It was reflective.

  “People don’t like to be shot. It hurts. Maybe you didn’t know that.”

  “The Municipal Building was destroyed tonight. The ones who did it blamed it on you. Sheriff Coombs took a walk. Frank Geary will bring his people in the morning. Does any of that surprise you, Clint?”

  It didn’t. “You’re very good at getting what you want, Evie. I’m not going to congratulate you, though.”

  “Now think of Lila and the others in the world beyond the Tree. Please believe me: they’re doing well there. They’re building something new, something fine. And there will be men. Better men, raised from infancy by women in a community of women, men who will be taught to know themselves and to know their world.”

  Clint said, “Their essential nature will assert itself in time. Their maleness. One will raise a fist against another. Believe me, Evie. You’re looking at a man who knows.”

  “Indeed so,” Evie agreed. “But such aggression isn’t sexual nature, it’s human nature. If you ever doubt the aggressive capacity of women, ask your own Officer Lampley.”

  “She’ll be asleep somewhere by now,” Clint said.

  Evie smiled, as if she knew better. “I am not so foolish as to promise you the women on the far side of the Tree have utopia. What they will have is a better start, and a good chance of a better finish. You are standing in the way of that chance. You and only you, of all the men on earth. I need you to know that. If you let me die, those women will be set free to live lives of their own choosing.”

  “Lives of your choosing, Evie.” His voice sounded parched to his own ears.

  The being on the other side of the cell door tapped a rhythm on the frame of the cot with her fingertips. “Linny Mars was in the sheriff’s station when it was destroyed. She’s gone forever. She didn’t get a choice.”

  “You took it from her,” Clint said.

  “We could go on like this forever. He said, she said. The oldest story in the universe. Go fight your war, Clint. That’s one thing men know how to do. Make me see another sunset if you can.”

  CHAPTER 13

  1

  As the rim of the sun appeared over the woods behind Dooling Correctional, a line of bulldozers clanked up West Lavin, end-to-end. All three were Caterpillars, two D9s and a big D11. The assault team was eighteen men in total. Fifteen of them were with the bulldozers, headed for the front gate; three of them were advancing around the backside of the prison fence. (They’d left Selectman Miller at the roadblock with a bottle of Vicodin and his bandaged leg propped on a camp chair.)

  Frank had organized twelve in the forward group—his dirty dozen—into three quartets. Each quartet, in vests and masks, hunkered behind a bulldozer, using it for cover. The windows and grills of the dozers had been jury-rigged with scrap steel. Retired Deputy Jack Albertson drove the first in line, Coach JT Wittstock drove the second, and the former Golden Gloves boxer, Carson Struthers, drove the third. Frank was with Albertson’s bulldozer.

  The men in the woods were Deputy Elmore Pearl, the deer hunter Drew T. Barry (his office now in ruins), and Don Peters.

  2

  Clint spotted the bulldozers from the high window on B Wing and bolted for the stairs, pulling on his bulletproof vest as he went. “Have fun gettin fucked, Doc,” Scott Hughes called cheerfully as he ran past.

  “Like they’ll give you a pass if they get in,” Clint said. This wiped the smile from Scott’s face.

  Clint hurried down Broadway, stopping to put his head in the visitors’ room. “Rand, they’re coming. Lay down the teargas.”

  “Okay,” said Rand from the family alcove at the end of the room, and calmly donned the gas mask he had at the ready.

  Clint continued to the security station at the main door.

  The station was your basic bulletproof tollbooth where visitors were required to check in. The little room had a long facing window and a drawer for passing IDs and valuables through to the officer on duty. There was a communications board like the ones in the Booth and the gatehouse, with monitors that could flip through views of the various inner and outer areas of the prison. Tig was at the board.

  Clint rapped on the door and Tig opened it.

  “What have you got on the monitors?”

  “Sunrise is flaring the lenses. If there’s men behind the bulldozers, I can’t see them yet.”

  They had eight or nine gas grenades to go with the launcher. On the central monitor, below the spirals of glare, Clint saw several of these strike the parking lot and spew white fumes to mix with the tarry smoke still leaking from the tires. He told Tig to keep watching and ran on.

  His next destination was the break room. Jared and Michaela were at a table with a deck of cards and cups of coffee.

  “Make yourselves scarce. It’s starting.”

  Michaela toasted him with her cup. “Sorry, Doc. I’m legal to vote and everything. I think I’ll stick around. Who knows, there might be a Pulitzer in my future.”

  Jared’s color was chalky. He looked from Michaela to his father.

  “Fine,” Clint said. “Far be it for me to abridge the freedom of the press. Jared, hide, and don’t tell me where.”

  He jogged on before his son could respond. His breath was short by the time he reached the rear door that opened near the shed and the fields. The reason that, until the morning of Aurora, he’d never before suggested to Lila that they should go running was because he hadn’t wanted her to have to limit her pace for him; it would have been embarrassing. What was the root here, vanity or laziness? Clint promised himself to give the question real consideration when he had a free second and, if he should be so lucky as to live through the morning, and ever get to speak to his wife again, possibly to repeat his proposal that they take up jogging together.

  “Three bulldozers on the road,” Clint announced as he emerged outside.

  “We know,” Willy Burke said. He walked over to Clint from his spot behind the shed. There was a weird contrast between his bulletproof vest and his festive red suspenders, now lolling in loops at his hips. “Tig radioed. Billy’s going to hold tight here, watch the north fence. I’m gonna sidle on up along this wall to the corner and see if I can get a few clean shots. You’re welcome to join me, but you’ll need one of these.” He handed Clint a gas mask and put on his own.

  3

  At the ninety-degree turn from the road to the gate, Frank pounded the metal plate over the door, a signal to Albertson to hang a right. Jack did so—slowly and carefully. The men slipped back further, keeping the mass of metal in front of them at
all times as it swung around. Frank was wearing a vest, and he had a Glock in his right hand. He could see licks of smoke spilling down the road. This was expected: he’d heard the pops of the gas grenades being fired. They couldn’t have too many. There had been a lot more masks than grenades in the armaments room of the sheriff’s station.

  The first bulldozer completed its adjustment and the four men climbed on the back, pressed together shoulder to shoulder.

  In the bulldozer cockpit Jack Albertson was safe behind the steel blade, which was raised to the upper position, therefore blocking the window. He gave it plenty of gas as it headed for the gate.

  Frank used his walkie, although not everyone in his attack force had them; all of this had been done on the fly. “Get ready, everyone. This is going to happen.” And please, he thought, with as little bloodshed as possible. He was already two men down, and the attack hadn’t even started.

  4

  “What do you think?” Clint asked Willy.

  On the other side of the double fences, the first bulldozer, blade high, was crunching forward. For a half-second there’d been a glimpse of movement slipping around to the back of the machine.

  Willy didn’t respond. The old moonshiner was revisiting an unnamed square meter of hell in Southeast Asia in ’68. Everything had been still, swamp water up to his Adam’s apple, a layer of smoke closing out the sky, him sandwiched in the middle; everything had been so still, and a bird, red and blue and yellow and massive, eagle-sized, had floated up beside him, dead, its eye clouded. The creature was so vivid and so incongruous in the strange light. Its glorious feathers had grazed Willy’s shoulder, and the faint current had drawn it away, and it had vanished back into the smoke.

  (Once, he had told his sister about that. “Never saw a bird like that before. Not the whole time I was there. Never saw one since, either, of course. I wonder sometimes if it was the last of its kind.” The Alzheimer’s had taken most of what made her herself by then, but there had been a small piece left, and she had said, “Maybe it was just—hurt, Willy,” and Willy had said to her, “I sure love you, you know.” His sister had blushed.)