Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Kirby McCauley

  “It’s some kind of instruction, isn’t it?” hissed Miss Dinwittie. “It’s put there to guide the others!”

  Lester stood, unobtrusively. It had suddenly occurred to him that the old woman could have crowned him easily with a pan as he’d hunkered down at her feet. She glared at the weird little marks and snarled faintly.

  “They’re all over the house,” she said. “In the closets, on the stairs, inside cabinets—everywhere!”

  Suddenly her mood changed and, giving a small, vindictive laugh, she once again poked Lester in the chest.

  “Gives them clean away, doesn’t it?” she asked. “And there’s something else! I’ll go up and bring it down and you take it over to those silly fools who hired you, so they’ll see what they’re dealing with and give me some service for my money!”

  Putting a thin finger to her lips, she backed out of the room. Smiling, she closed the door.

  Lester stared after her and then a sudden hissing behind him made him wheel to see coffee boiling from its pot onto the stove. He turned off the burner, frightened at the way his heart was thumping in his chest. He wished to God he could have a cigarette, but he knew Miss Dinwittie didn’t hold with smoking or anything else along those lines.

  He could hear the rats. He decided he had never seen such a house for rats in all his life. One of them was making scuttling noises in the wall before him so he thumped the wall, but the rat just scuttled right along, behind the dead flowers printed on the paper, paying him no mind. Lester sighed and sat down in one of the inhospitable chairs.

  Another rat started scratching over at the wall where those funny marks were, and then another in some other part, and then a third and then a fourth. Lester began to estimate how many rats there might be in the old house and then decided maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, his being alone in this gloomy kitchen and all.

  He wiped the back of his hand against his lips and wished again for a cigarette. He stood and went to the hall door and opened it, looking up at the narrow staircase leading to the second floor. The carpeting on the stairs and floor was a smudgy brown.

  He went back into the kitchen and took out his cigarettes and lit one. To hell with Miss Dinwittie, anyways. Besides, he’d hear her coming and snuff it out. He bet those steps creaked something awful.

  If you could hear them over the sound of the rats, that is. They’d gotten louder, he could swear to it. He let the smoke drift out of his mouth and listened carefully. They said you could hear better if your mouth was open. He pressed his ear to the ugly floral paper and then drew back in fright when the sound of them instantly spread away from where he’d touched the wall. He ground the cigarette out on the sole of his shoe and dropped it in a box of garbage by the sink. He went to the hall again and called out, “Miss Dinwittie?”

  He gaped up into the darkness of the second floor. Had something moved up there?

  “Miss Dinwittie? You all right?”

  He shuffled his feet on the dusty carpet. It looked a little like rat skin itself, come to think of it. Was something rustling up there? “Miss Dinwittie? I’m coming up!”

  That would get a rise out of the old bitch if anything would. She wouldn’t tolerate folks like him coming where they hadn’t been asked.

  But there was no objection of any kind, so he rubbed his nose and began, slowly, to climb the stairs. The banister was repulsively smooth and slick. Like a rat’s tail, he thought.

  “Miss Dinwittie?”

  It was dark as hell up here. He took the flashlight from his belt and turned it this way and that, continuing to call as he peered through old doorways. When he came to her bedroom he was careful to call her name three times before he went in.

  On the dresser, between a silver comb and brush, lying right in the center of a dainty antimacassar doily, was the desiccated body of a rat in the convulsions of a violent rigor mortis. Its dried fingers clawed the air and its withered lips pulled back from dully gleaming teeth. It looked furious.

  “Shit!” said Lester.

  The top of its head had been flattened, perhaps by the heel of one of Miss Dinwittie’s shoes. Around its waist was tied a bit of grey string, and fixed to one side of this crude belt, by means of a tiny loop, was a small sliver of glass tapered on one end to a vicious point and wrapped about the other with a fragment of electrician’s tape so as to form a kind of handle. It was an efficient-looking miniature sword.

  Why that goddamn old bitch’s gone right out of her goddamn head, thought Lester; she’s dressed that goddamn dead rat up just like a little girl dresses up a doll!

  He heard a faint noise in the hall and turned, sweating in the clammy chill of the room. Was she out there waiting for him with a sword of her own? You read all the time in the papers about the awful things crazy people do!

  He tiptoed out of the room and peered down the hall and his breath stopped. The beam of his flashlight pointed at the bottom of the door leading to the attic and revealed Miss Dinwittie’s high-button shoes with their toes up in the air. Even as he gaped at them they edged out of sight in uneven little starts to the sounds of a faint bumping and an even fainter scrabbling.

  Oh my God, thought Lester, oh my Jesus God, oh please don’t let none of this happen to me, please, God!

  Still on tiptoe, even more on tiptoe, he worked his way to the stairs. He wanted to sob but he told himself he mustn’t do it because he’d never be able to hear the rats if he was sobbing. He started down the stairs and was halfway when a dim instinct made him look back up to the top.

  There, peering down at him, was a lone rat holding a discarded plastic knitting needle proudly upright. Fixed to the needle’s top was a tiny rectangle of foul, tattered cloth. It took Lester several seconds to realize he was looking at the flag of the rats.

  “I didn’t mean nothing!” he whispered, groping his way backwards down the stairs. He plucked the cap with ROSE BROTHERS EXTERMINATORS from his head and flung it from him, crying: “It was just a goddam way to make a living!”

  But the time for all that was long since past and the rat army, in perfect ranks and files on the floor below, watched its enemy approaching, step by step, and eagerly awaited the general’s command.

  The Mist

  Stephen King

  I.

  The Coming of the Storm.

  This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke—the night of July 19—the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.

  We lived on Long Lake, and we saw the first of the storms beating its way across the water toward us just before dark. For an hour before, the air had been utterly still. The American flag that my father put up on our boathouse in 1936 lay limp against its pole. Not even its hem fluttered. The heat was like a solid thing, and it seemed as deep as sullen quarry-water. That afternoon the three of us had gone swimming, but the water was no relief unless you went out deep. Neither Steffy or I wanted to go deep because Billy couldn’t. Billy is five.

  We ate a cold supper at five-thirty, picking listlessly at ham sandwiches and potato salad out on the deck that faces the lake. Nobody seemed to want anything but the Pepsi, which was in a steel bucket of ice cubes.

  After supper Billy went out back to play on his monkey bars for a while. Steff and I sat without talking much, smoking and looking across the sullen flat mirror of the lake to Harrison on the far side. A few power boats droned back and forth. The evergreens over there looked dusty and beaten. In the west, great purple thunderheads were slowly building up, massing like an army. Lightning flashed inside them. Next door, Brent Norton’s radio, tuned to that classical-music station that broadcasts from the top of Mount Washington, sent out a loud bray of static each time the lightning flashed. Norton was a lawyer from New Jersey and his place on Long Lake was only a summer cottage with no furnace or insulation. Two years before we had a boundary dispute that finally wound up in county court. I won. Norton cla
imed I won because he was an out-of-towner. There was no love lost between us.

  Steff sighed and fanned the tops of her breasts with the edge of her halter. I doubted if it cooled her off much but it improved the view a lot.

  “I don’t want to scare you,” I said, “but there’s a bad storm on the way, I think.”

  She looked at me doubtfully. “There were thunderheads last night and the night before, David. They just broke up.”

  “They won’t do that tonight.”

  “No?”

  “If it gets bad enough, we’re going to go downstairs.”

  “How bad do you think it can get?”

  My dad was the first to build a year-round home on this side of the lake. When he was hardly more than a kid he and his brothers put up a summer place where the house now stood, and in 1938 a summer storm knocked it flat, stone walls and all. Only the boathouse escaped. A year later he started the big house. It’s the trees that do the damage in a bad blow. They get old, and the wind knocks them over. It’s mother nature’s way of cleaning house periodically.

  “I don’t really know,” I said, truthfully enough. I had only heard stories about the great storm of thirty-eight. “But the wind can come off the lake like an express train.”

  Billy came back a while later, complaining that the monkey bars were no fun because he was “all sweated up.” I ruffled his hair and gave him another Pepsi. More work for the dentist.

  The thunderheads were getting closer, pushing away the blue. There was no doubt now that a storm was coming. Norton had turned off his radio. Billy sat between his mother and me, watching the sky, fascinated. Thunder boomed, rolling slowly across the lake and then echoing back again. The clouds twisted and roiled, now black, now purple, now veined, now black again. They gradually overspread the lake, and I could see a delicate caul of rain extending down from them. It was still a distance away. As we watched, it was probably raining on Bolster’s Mills, or maybe Norway.

  The air began to move, jerkily at first, lifting the flag and then dropping it again. It began to freshen and grew steady, first cooling the perspiration on our bodies and then seeming to freeze it.

  That was when I saw the silver veil rolling across the lake. It blotted out Harrison in seconds and then came straight at us. The power boats had vacated the scene.

  Billy stood up from his chair, which was a miniature replica of our director’s chairs, complete with his name printed on the back. “Daddy! Look!”

  “Let’s go in,” I said. I stood up and put my arm around his shoulders.

  “But do you see it? Dad, what is it?”

  “A water-cyclone. Let’s go in.”

  Steff threw a quick, startled glance at my face and then said, “Come on, Billy. Do what your father says.”

  We went in through the sliding glass doors that give on the living room. I slid the door shut on its track and paused for another look out. The silver veil was three-quarters of the way across the lake. It had resolved itself into a crazily-spinning teacup between the lowering black sky and the surface of the water, which had gone the color of lead streaked with white chrome. The lake had begun to look eerily like the ocean, with high waves rolling in and sending spume up from the docks and breakwaters. Out in the middle, big whitecaps were tossing their heads back and forth.

  Watching the water-cyclone was hypnotic. It was nearly on top of us when lightning flashed so brightly that it printed everything on my eyes in negative for thirty seconds afterward. The telephone gave out a startled ting! and I turned to see my wife and son standing directly in front of the big picture window that gives us a panoramic view of the lake to the northwest.

  One of those terrible visions came to me—I think they are reserved exclusively for husbands and fathers—of the picture window blowing in with a low hard coughing sound and sending jagged arrows of glass into my wife’s bare stomach, into my boy’s face and neck. The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones.

  I grabbed them both hard and jerked them away. “What the hell are you doing? Get away from there!”

  Steff gave me a startled glance. Billy only looked at me as if he had been partially awakened from a deep dream. I led them into the kitchen and hit the light switch. The phone ting-a-linged again.

  Then the wind came. It was as if the house had taken off like a 747. It was a high, breathless whistling, sometimes deepening to a bass roar before glissandoing up to a whooping scream.

  “Go downstairs,” I told Steff, and now I had to shout to make myself heard. Directly over the house thunder whacked mammoth planks together and Billy shrank against my leg.

  “You come too!” Steff yelled back.

  I nodded and made shooing gestures. I had to pry Billy off my leg. “Go with your mother. I want to get some candles in case the lights go off.”

  He went with her, and I started opening cabinets. Candles are funny things, you know. You lay them by every spring, knowing that a summer storm may knock out the power. And when the time comes, they hide.

  I was pawing through the fourth cabinet, past the half-ounce of grass that Steff and I bought four years ago and had still not smoked much of, past Billy’s wind-up set of chattering teeth from the Auburn Novelty Shop, past the drifts of photos Steffy kept forgetting to glue in our album. I looked under a Sears catalogue and behind a Kewpie doll from Taiwan that I had won at the Fryeburg fair knocking over wooden milk bottles with tennis balls.

  I found the candles behind the Kewpie doll with its glazed dead man’s eyes. They were still wrapped in their cellophane. As my hand closed around them the lights went out and the only electricity was the stuff in the sky. The dining room was lit in a series of shutter-flashes that were white and purple. Downstairs I heard Billy start to cry and the low murmur of Steff soothing him.

  I had to have one more look at the storm.

  The water-cyclone had either passed us or broken up when it reached the shoreline, but I still couldn’t see twenty yards out onto the lake. The water was in complete turmoil. I saw someone’s dock—the Jassers’, maybe—hurry by with its main supports alternately turned up to the sky and buried in the churning water.

  I went downstairs. Billy ran to me and clung to my legs. I lifted him up and gave him a hug. Then I lit the candles. We sat in the guest room down the hall from my little studio and looked at each other’s faces in the flickering yellow glow and listened to the storm roar and bash at our house. About twenty minutes later we heard a ripping, rending crash as one of the big pines went down nearby. Then there was a lull.

  “Is it over?” Steff asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe only for a while.”

  We went upstairs, each of us carrying a candle, like monks going to vespers. Billy carried his proudly and carefully. Carrying a candle, carrying the fire, was a very big deal for him. It helped him forget about being afraid.

  It was too dark to see what damage had been done around the house. It was past Billy’s bedtime, but neither of us suggested putting him in. We sat in the living room, listened to the wind, and looked at the lightning.

  About an hour later it began to crank up again. For three weeks the temperature had been over ninety, and on six of those twenty-one days the National Weather Service station at the Portland Jetport had reported temperatures of over one hundred degrees. Queer weather. Coupled with the grueling winter we had come through and the late spring, some people had dragged out that old chestnut about the long-range results of the fifties A-bomb tests again. That, and of course, the end of the world. The oldest chestnut of them all.

  The second squall wasn’t so hard, but we heard the crash of several trees weakened by the first onslaught. As the wind began to die down again, one thudded heavily on the roof, like a fist dropped on a coffin lid. Billy jumped and looked apprehensively upward.

  “It’ll hold, champ,” I said.

  Billy smiled nervously.

  Around ten o’clock t
he last squall came. It was bad. The wind howled almost as loudly as it had the first time, and lightning seemed to be flashing all around us. More trees fell, and there was a splintering crash down by the water that made Steff utter a low cry. Billy had gone to sleep on her lap.

  “David, what was that?”

  “I think it was the boathouse.”

  “Oh. Oh, Jesus.”

  “Steffy, I want us to go downstairs again.” I took Billy in my arms and stood up with him. Steff’s eyes were big and frightened.

  “David, are we going to be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  We went downstairs. Ten minutes later, as the final squall peaked, there was a splintering crash from upstairs—the picture window. So maybe my vision earlier hadn’t been so crazy after all. Steff, who had been dozing, woke up with a little shriek, and Billy stirred uneasily in the guest bed.

  “The rain will come in,” she said. “It’ll ruin the furniture.”

  “If it does, it does. It’s insured.”

  “That doesn’t make it any better,” she said in an upset, scolding voice. “Your mother’s dresser… our new sofa… the color TV…”

  “Shhh,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

  “I can’t,” she said, and five minutes later she had.

  I stayed awake for another half hour with one lit candle for company, listening to the thunder walk and talk outside. I had a feeling that there were going to be a lot of people from the lakefront communities calling their insurance agents in the morning. A lot of chainsaws burring as cottage owners cut up the trees that had fallen on their roofs and battered through their windows, and a lot of orange CMP trucks on the road.

  The storm was fading now, with no sign of a new squall coming in. I went back upstairs, leaving Steff and Billy on the bed, and looked into the living room. The sliding-glass door had held. But where the picture window had been there was now a jagged hole stuffed with birch leaves. It was the top of the old tree that had stood by our outside basement access for as long as I could remember. Looking at its top, now visiting in our living room, I could understand what Steffy had meant by saying insurance didn’t make it any better. I had loved that tree. It had been a hard campaigner of many winters, the one tree on the lakeside of the house that was exempt from my own chainsaw. Big chunks of glass on the rug reflected my candle-flame over and over. I reminded myself to warn Steff and Billy. They would want to wear their slippers in here. Both of them liked to slop around barefoot in the morning.