by Stephen King
Jake had nodded. It wasn’t necessary to talk to his father, because his father treated everyone-including his wife-the way he treated his underlings at the TV network where he was in charge of programming and an acknowledged master of The Kill. All you had to do was listen, nod in the right places, and after a while he let you go.
Good, his father said, lighting one of the eighty Camel cigarettes he smoked each and every day. We understand each other, then. You’re going to have to work your buttsky off, but you can cut it. They never would have sent us this if you couldn’t. He picked up the letter of acceptance from The Piper School and rattled it. There was a kind of savage triumph in the gesture, as if the letter was an animal he had killed in the jungle, an animal he would now skin and eat. So work hard. Make your grades. Make your mother and me proud of you. If you end the year with an A average in your courses. there’s a trip to Disney World in it for you. That’s something to shoot for, right, kiddo?
Jake had made his grades-A’s in everything (until the last three weeks, that was). He had, presumably, made his mother and father proud of him, although they were around so little that it was hard to tell. Usually there was nobody around when he came home from school except for Greta Shaw-the housekeeper-and so he ended up showing his A papers to her. After that, they migrated to a dark corner of his room. Sometimes Jake looked through them and wondered if they meant anything. He wanted them to, but he had serious doubts.
Jake didn’t think he would be going to Disney World this summer, A average or no A average.
He thought the nuthouse was a much better possibility.
As he walked in through the double doors of The Piper School at 8:45 on the morning of May 31st, a terrible vision came to him. He saw his father in his office at 70 Rockefeller Plaza, leaning over his desk with a Camel jutting from the corner of his mouth, talking to one of his underlings as blue smoke wreathed his head. All of New York was spread out behind and below his father, its thump and hustle silenced by two layers of Thermopane glass.
The fact is, money doesn’t get anyone into Sunnyvale Sanitarium, his father was telling the underling in a tone of grim satisfaction. He reached out and tapped the underling’s forehead. The only thing that gets you into a place like that is when something big-time goes wrong up here in the attic. That’s what happened to the kid. But he’s working his goddam buttsky off. Makes the best fucking baskets in the place, they tell me. And when they let him out-if they ever do-there’s a trip in it for him. A trip to-
“-the way station,” Jake muttered, then touched his forehead with a hand that wanted to tremble. The voices were coming back. The yelling, conflicting voices which were driving him mad.
You’re dead, Jake. You were run over by a car and you’re dead.
Don’t be stupid! Look-see that poster? REMEMBER THE CLASS ONE PICNIC, it says. Do you think they have Class Picnics in the afterlife?
I don’t know. But I know you were run over by a car.
No!
Yes. It happened on May 9th, at 8:25 AM You died less than a minute later.
No! No! No!
“John?”
He looked around, badly startled. Mr. Bissette, his French teacher, was standing there, looking a little concerned. Behind him, the rest of the student body was streaming into the Common Room for the morning assembly. There was very little skylarking, and no yelling at all. Presumably these other students, like Jake himself, had been told by their parents how lucky they were to be attending Piper, where money didn’t matter (although tuition was $22,000 a year), only your brains. Presumably many of them had been promised trips this summer if their grades were good enough. Presumably the parents of the lucky trip-winners would even go along in some cases. Presumably-
“John, are you okay?” Mr. Bissette asked.
“Sure,” Jake said. “Fine. I overslept a little this morning. Not awake yet, I guess.”
Mr. Bissette’s face relaxed and he smiled. “Happens to the best of us.”
Not to my dad. The master of The Kill never oversleeps.
“Are you ready for your French final?” Mr. Bissette asked. “Voulez-vous faire I’examen cet apres-midi?”
“I think so,” Jake said. In truth he didn’t know if he was ready for the exam or not. He couldn’t even remember if he had studied for the French final or not. These days nothing seemed to matter much except for the voices in his head.
“I want to tell you again how much I enjoyed having you this year, John. I wanted to tell your folks, too, but they missed Parents’ Night-”
“They’re pretty busy,” Jake said.
Mr. Bissette nodded. “Well, I have enjoyed you. I just wanted to say so… and that I’m looking forward to having you back for French II next year.”
“Thanks,” Jake said, and wondered what Mr. Bissette would say if he added, But I don’t think I’ll be taking French II next year, unless I can get a correspondence course delivered to my postal box at good old Sunnyvale.
Joanne Franks, the school secretary, appeared in the doorway of the Common Room with her small silver-plated bell in her hand. At The Piper School, all bells were rung by hand. Jake supposed that if you were a parent, that was one of its charms. Memories of the Little Red Schoolhouse and all that. He hated it himself. The sound of that bell seemed to go right through his head-
I can’t hold on much longer, he thought despairingly. I’m sorry, but I’m losing it. I’m really, really losing it.
Mr. Bissette had caught sight of Ms. Franks. He turned away, then turned back again. “Is everything all right, John? You’ve seemed preoccupied these last few weeks. Troubled. Is something on your mind?”
Jake was almost undone by the kindness in Mr. Bissette’s voice, but then he imagined how Mr. Bissette would look if he said: Yes. Something is on my mind. One hell of a nasty little factoid. I died, you see, and I went into another world. And then I died again. You’re going to say that stuff like that doesn’t happen, and of course you’re right, and part of my mind knows you’re right, but most of my mind knows that you’re wrong. It did happen. I did die.
If he said something like that, Mr. Bissette would be on the phone to Elmer Chambers at once, and Jake thought that Sunnyvale Sanitarium would probably look like a rest-cure after all the stuff his father would have to say on the subject of lads who started having crazy notions just before Finals Week. Kids who did things that couldn’t be discussed over lunch or cocktails. Kids Who Let Down The Side.
Jake forced himself to smile at Mr. Bissette. “I’m a little worried about exams, that’s all.”
Mr. Bissette winked. “You’ll do fine.”
Ms. Franks began to ring the Assembly Bell. Each peal stabbed into Jake’s ears and then seemed to flash across his brain like a small rocket.
“Come on,” Mr. Bissette said. “We’ll be late. Can’t be late on the first day of Finals Week, can we?”
They went in past Ms. Franks and her clashing bell. Mr. Bissette headed toward the row of seats called Faculty Choir. There were lots of cute names like that at Piper School; the auditorium was the Common Room, lunch-hour was Outs, seventh- and eighth-graders were Upper Boys and Girls, and, of course, the folding chairs over by the piano (which Ms. Franks would soon begin to pound as mercilessly as she rang her silver bell) was Faculty Choir. All part of the tradition, Jake supposed. If you were a parent who knew your kid had Outs in the Common Room at noon instead of just slopping up Tuna Surprise in the caff, you relaxed into the assurance that everything was A-OK in the education department.
He slipped into a seat at the rear of the room and let the morning’s announcements wash over him. The terror ran endlessly on in his mind, making him feel like a rat trapped on an exercise wheel. And when he tried to look ahead to some better, brighter time, he could see only darkness.
The ship was his sanity, and it was sinking.
Mr. Harley, the headmaster, approached the podium and imparted a brief exordium about the importance of Finals Week, a
nd how the grades they received would constitute another step upon The Great Road of Life. He told them that the school was depending on them, he was depending on them, and their parents were depending on them. Me did not tell them that the entire free world was depending on them, but he strongly implied that this might be so. He finished by telling them that bells would be suspended during Finals Week (the first and only piece of good news Jake had received that morning).
Ms. Franks, who had assumed her seat at the piano, struck an invocatory chord. The student body, seventy boys and fifty girls, each turned out in a neat and sober way that bespoke their parents’ taste and financial stability, rose as one and began to sing the school song. Jake mouthed the words and thought about the place where he had awakened after dying. At first he had believed himself to be in hell… and when the man in the black hooded robe came along, he had been sure of it.
Then, of course, the other man had come along. A man Jake had almost come to love.
But he let me fall. He killed me.
He could feel prickly sweat breaking out on the back of his neck and between his shoulderblades.
“So we hail the halls of Piper,
Hold its banner high;
Hail to thee, our alma mater,
Piper, do or die!”
God, what a shitty song, Jake thought, and it suddenly occurred to him that his father would love it.
2
PERIOD ONE WAS ENGLISH Comp, the only class where there was no final. Their assignment had been to write a Final Essay at home. This was to be a typed document between fifteen hundred and four thousand words long. The subject Ms. Avery had assigned was My Understanding of Truth. The Final Essay would count as twenty-five per cent of their final grade for the semester.
Jake came in and took his seat in the third row. There were only eleven pupils in all. Jake remembered Orientation Day last September, when Mr. Harley had told them that Piper had The Highest Teacher To Student Ratio Of Any Fine Private Middle School In The East. He had popped his fist repeatedly on the lectern at the front of the Common Room to emphasize this point. Jake hadn’t been terribly impressed, but he had passed the information along to his lather. He thought his father would be impressed, and he had not been wrong.
He unzipped his bookbag and carefully removed the blue folder which contained his Final Essay. He laid it on his desk, meaning to give it a final look-over, when his eye was caught by the door at the left side of the room. It led, he knew, to the cloakroom, and it was closed today because it was seventy degrees in New York and no one had a coat which needed storage. Nothing back there except a lot of brass coathooks in a line on the wall and a long rubber mat on the floor for boots. A few boxes of school supplies-chalk, blue-books and such-were stored in the far corner.
No big deal.
All the same, Jake rose from his seat, leaving the folder unopened on the desk, and walked across to the door. He could hear his classmates murmuring quietly together, and the riffle of pages as they checked their own Final Essays for that crucial misplaced modifier or fuzzy phrase, but these sounds seemed far away.
It was the door which held his attention.
In the last ten days or so, as the voices in his head grew louder and louder, Jake had become more and more fascinated with doors-all kinds of doors. He must have opened the one between his bedroom and the upstairs hallway five hundred times in just the last week, and the one between his bedroom and the bathroom a thousand. Each time he did it, he felt a tight ball of hope and anticipation in his chest, as if the answer to all of his problems lay somewhere behind this door or that one and he would surely find it… eventually. But each time it was only the hall, or the bathroom, or the front walk, or whatever.
Last Thursday he had come home from school, thrown himself on his bed, and had fallen asleep-sleep, it seemed, was the only refuge which remained to him. Except when he’d awakened forty-five minutes later, he had been standing in the bathroom doorway, peering dazedly in at nothing more exciting than the toilet and the basin. Luckily, no one had seen him.
Now, as he approached the cloakroom door, he felt that same dazzling burst of hope, a certainty that the door would not open on a shadowy closet containing only the persistent smells of winter-flannel, rubber, and wet wool-but on some other world where he could be whale again. Hot, dazzling light would fall across the classroom floor in a widening triangle, and he would see birds circling in a faded blue sky the color of
(his eyes)
old jeans. A desert wind would blow his hair back and dry the nervous sweat on his brow.
He would step through this door and be healed.
Jake turned the knob and opened the door. Inside was only darkness and a row of gleaming brass hooks. One long-forgotten mitten lay near the stacked piles of blue-books in the corner.
His heart sank, and suddenly Jake felt like simply creeping into that dark room with its bitter smells of winter and chalkdust. He could move the mitten and sit in the corner under the coathooks. He could sit on the rubber mat where you were supposed to put your boots in the wintertime. He could sit there, put his thumb in his mouth, pull his knees tight against his chest, close his eyes, and… and…
And just give up.
This idea-the relief of this idea-was incredibly attractive. It would be an end to the terror and confusion and dislocation. That last was somehow the worst; that persistent feeling that his whole life had turned into a funhouse mirror-maze.
Yet there was deep steel in Jake Chambers as surely as there was deep steel in Eddie and Susannah. Now it flashed out its dour blue lighthouse gleam in the darkness. There would be no giving up. Whatever was loose inside him might tear his sanity away from him in the end, but he would give it no quarter in the meantime. Be damned if he would.
Never! he thought fiercely. Never! Nev-
“When you’ve finished your inventory of the school-supplies in the cloakroom, John, perhaps you’d care to join us,” Ms. Avery said from behind him in her dry, cultured voice.
There was a small gust of giggles as Jake turned away from the cloakroom. Ms. Avery was standing behind her desk with her long fingers tented lightly on the blotter, looking at him out of her calm, intelligent face. She was wearing her blue suit today, and her hair was pulled back in its usual bun. Nathaniel Hawthorne looked over her shoulder, frowning at Jake from his place on the wall.
“Sorry,” Jake muttered, and closed the door. He was immediately seized by a strong impulse to open it again, to double-check, to see if this time that other world, with its hot sun and desert vistas, was there.
Instead he walked back to his seat. Petra Jesserling looked at him with merry, dancing eyes. “Take me in there with you next time,” she whispered. “Then you’ll have something to look at.”
Jake smiled in a distracted way and slipped into his seat.
“Thank you, John,” Ms. Avery said in her endlessly calm voice. “Now, before you pass in your Final Essays-which I am sure will all be very fine, very neat, very specific-I should like to pass out the English Department’s Short List of recommended summer reading. I will have a word to say about several of these excellent books-”
As she spoke she gave a small stack of mimeographed sheets to David Surrey. David began to hand them out, and Jake opened his folder to take a final look at what he had written on the topic My Understanding of Truth. He was genuinely interested in this, because he could no more remember writing his Final Essay, than he could remember studying for his French final.
He looked at the title page with puzzlement and growing unease. MY UNDERSTANDING OF TRUTH, By John Chambers, was neatly typed and centered on the sheet, and that was all right, but he had for some reason pasted two photographs below it. One was of a door-he thought it might be the one at Number 10, Downing Street, in London-and the other was of an Amtrak train. They were color shots, undoubtedly culled from some magazine.
Why did I do that? And when did I do it?
He turned the page and stare
d down at the first page of his Final Essay, unable to believe or understand what he was seeing. Then, as understanding began to trickle through his shock, he felt an escalating sense of horror. It had finally happened; he had finally lost enough of his mind so that other people would be able to tell.
3
MY UNDERSTANDING OF TRUTH
By John Chambers
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
-T. S. “BUTCH” ELIOT
“My first thought was, he lied in every word."
-ROBERT “SUNDANCE” BROWNING
The gunslinger is the truth.
Roland is the truth.
The Prisoner is the truth.
The Lady of Shadows is the truth.
The Prisoner and the Lady are married. That is the truth.
The way station is the truth.
The Speaking Demon is the truth.
We went under the mountains and that is the truth.
There were monsters under the mountain. That is the truth. One of them had an Amoco gas pump between his legs and was pretending it was his penis. That is the truth.
Roland let me die. That is the truth. I still love him. That is the truth.
“And it is so very important that you all read The Lord of the Flies,” Ms. Avery was saying in her clear but somehow pale voice. “And when you do, you must ask yourselves certain questions. A good novel is often like a series of riddles within riddles, and this is a very good novel-one of the best written in the second half of the twentieth century. So ask yourselves first what the symbolic significance of the conch shell might be. Second-”
