by Стивен Кинг
I made myself look up from the melting whipped cream. “No,” I said.
He was silent for another moment or two. I thought he was getting ready to move on to another topic. That would have been fine with me. Instead, he came right out and asked me if I had been laid at all since Johanna died. He would have accepted a lie on that subject even if he didn’t entirely believe it—men lie about sex all the time. But I told the truth… and with a certain perverse pleasure.
“No.”
“Not a single time?”
“Not a single time.”
“What about a massage parlor? You know, to at least get a—”
He sat there tapping his spoon against the rim of the bowl with his dessert in it. He hadn’t taken a single bite. He was looking at me as though I were some new and oogy specimen of bug. I didn’t like it much, but I suppose I understood it.
I had been close to what is these days called “a relationship” on two occasions, neither of them on Key Largo, where I had observed roughly two thousand pretty women walking around dressed in only a stitch and a promise. Once it had been a red-haired waitress, Kelli, at a restaurant out on the Extension where I often had lunch. After awhile we got talking, joking around, and then there started to be some of that eye-contact, you know the kind I’m talking about, looks that go on just a little too long. I started to notice her legs, and the way her uniform pulled against her hip when she turned, and she noticed me noticing.
And there was a woman at Nu You, the place where I used to work out. A tall woman who favored pink jog-bras and black bike shorts. Quite yummy.
Also, I liked the stuff she brought to read while she pedalled one of the stationary bikes on those endless aerobic trips to nowhere—not Mademoiselle or Cosmo, but novels by people like John Irving and Ellen Gilchrist. I like people who read actual books, and not just because I once wrote them myself. Book-readers are just as willing as anyone else to start out with the weather, but as a general rule they can actually go on from there.
The name of the blonde in the pink tops and black shorts was Adria Bundy. We started talking about books as we pedalled side by side ever deeper into nowhere, and there came a point where I was spotting her one or two mornings a week in the weight room. There’s something oddly intimate about spotting. The prone position of the lifter is part of it, I suppose (especially when the lifter is a woman), but not all or even most of it. Mostly it’s the dependence factor. Although it hardly ever comes to that point, the lifter is trusting the spotter with his or her life. And, at some point in the winter of 1996, those looks started as she lay on the bench and I stood over her, looking into her upside-down face. The ones that go on just a little too long.
Kelli was around thirty, Adria perhaps a little younger. Kelli was divorced, Adria never married. In neither case would I have been robbing the cradle, and I think either would have been happy to go to bed with me on a provisional basis. Kind of a honey-bump test-drive. Yet what I did in Kelli’s case was to find a different restaurant to eat my lunch at, and when the YMCA sent me a free exercise-tryout offer, I took them up on it and just never went back to Nu You. I remember walking past Adria Bundy one day on the street six months or so after I made the change, and although I said hi, I made sure not to see her puzzled, slightly hurt gaze.
In a purely physical way I wanted them both (in fact, I seem to remember a dream in which I had them both, in the same bed and at the same time), and yet I wanted neither. Part of it was my inability to write—my life was quite fucked up enough, thank you, without adding any additional complications. Part of it was the work involved in making sure that the woman who is returning your glances is interested in you and not your rather extravagant bank account.
Most of it, I think, was that there was just too much Jo still in my head and heart. There was no room for anyone else, even after four years. It was sorrow like cholesterol, and if you think that’s funny or weird, be grateful.
“What about friends?” Frank asked, at last beginning to eat his strawberry shortcake. “You’ve got friends you see, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Plenty of friends.” Which was a lie, but I did have lots of crosswords to do, lots of books to read, and lots of movies to watch on my VCR at night; I could practically recite the FBI warning about unlawful copying by heart. When it came to real live people, the only ones I called when I got ready to leave Derry were my doctor and my dentist, and most of the mail I sent out that June consisted of change-of address cards to magazines like Harper’s and National Geographic. “Frank,” I said, “you sound like a Jewish mother.”
“Sometimes when I’m with you IJEL like a Jewish mother,” he said. “One who believes in the curative powers of baked potatoes instead of matzo balls. You look better than you have in a long time, finally put on some weight, I think—”
“Too much.”
“Bullshit, you looked like Ichabod Crane when you came for Christmas.
Also, you’ve got some sun on your face and arms.”
“I’ve been walking a lot.”
“So you look better… except for your eyes. Sometimes you get this look in your eyes, and I worry about you every time I see it. I think Jo would be glad someone’s worrying.”
“What look is that?” I asked.
“Your basic thousand-yard stare. Want the truth? You look like someone who’s caught on something and can’t get loose.”
I left Derry at three-thirty, stopped in Rumford for supper, then drove slowly on through the rising hills of western Maine as the sun lowered.
I had planned my times of departure and arrival carefully, if not quite consciously, and as I passed out of Motton and into the unincorporated township of TR-90, I became aware of the heavy way my heart was beating.
There was sweat on my face and arms in spite of the car’s air conditioning. Nothing on the radio sounded right, all the music like screaming, and I turned it off.
I was scared, and had good reason to be. Even setting aside the peculiar cross-pollination between the dreams and things in the real world (as I was able to do quite easily, dismissing the cut on my hand and the sunflowers growing through the boards of the back stoop as either coincidence or so much psychic fluff), I had reason to be scared.
Because they hadn’t been ordinary dreams, and my decision to go back to the lake after all this time hadn’t been an ordinary decision. I didn’t feel like a modern fin-de-millgnaire man on a spiritual quest to face his fears (I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s all have an emotional circle-jerk while William Acker-man plays softly in the background); I felt more like some crazy Old Testament prophet going out into the desert to live on locusts and alkali water because God had summoned him in a dream.
I was in trouble, my life was a moderate-going-on-severe mess, and not being able to write was only part of it. I wasn’t raping kids or running around Times Square preaching conspiracy theories through a bullhorn, but I was in trouble just the same. I had lost my place in things and couldn’t find it again. No surprise there; after all, life’s not a book.
What I was engaging in on that hot July evening was self-induced shock therapy, and give me at least this much credit—I knew it.
You come to Dark Score this way: 1-95 from Derry to Newport;
Route 2 from Newport to Bethel (with a stop in Rumford, which used to stink like hell’s front porch until the paper-driven economy pretty much ground to a halt during Reagan’s second term); Route 5 from Bethel to Waterford. Then you take Route 68, the old County Road, across Castle View, through Motton (where downtown consists of a converted barn which sells videos, beer, and second-hand rifles), and then past the sign which reads TR-90 and the one reading GAME WARDEN IS BEST ASSISTANCE IN EMERGENCY, DIAL 1-800-555-GAME OR *72 ON CELLULAR PHONE. To this, in spray paint, someone has added FUCK THE EAGLES.
Five miles past that sign, you come to a narrow lane on the right, marked only by a square of tin with the faded number 42 on it. Above this, like umlauts, are a cou
ple of. 22 holes.
I turned into this lane just about when I had expected to—it was 7:16 P.M… EDT, by the clock on the Chevrolet’s dashboard.
And the feeling was coming home.
I drove in two tenths of a mile by the odometer, listening to the grass which crowned the lane whickering against the undercarriage of my car, listening to the occasional branch which scraped across the roof or knocked on the passenger side like a fist. At last I parked and turned the engine off. I got out, walked to the rear of the car, lay down on my belly, and began pulling all of the grass which touched the Chevy’s hot exhaust system. It had been a dry summer, and it was best to take precautions. I had come at this exact hour in order to replicate my dreams, hoping for some further insight into them or for an idea of what to do next. What I had not come to do was start a forest fire.
Once this was done I stood up and looked around. The crickets sang, as they had in my dreams, and the trees huddled close on either side of the lane, as they always did in my dreams. Overhead, the sky was a fading strip of blue.
I set off, walking up the right hand wheelrut. Jo and I had had one neighbor at this end of the road, old Lars Washburn, but now Lars’s driveway was overgrown with juniper bushes and blocked by a rusty length of chain. Nailed to a tree on the left of the chain was NO Trespassing.
Nailed to one on the right was NEXT CENTURY REAL ESTATE, and a local number. The words were faded and hard to read in the growing gloom.
I walked on, once more conscious of my heavily beating heart and of the way the mosquitoes were buzzing around my face and arms. Their peak season was past, but I was sweating a lot, and that’s a smell they like.
It must remind them of blood.
Just how scared was I as I approached Sara Laughs? I don’t remember. I suspect that fright, like pain, is one of those things that slip our minds once they have passed. What I do remember is a feeling I’d had before when I was down here, especially when I was walking this road by myself. It was a sense that reality was thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves. But in places like Lane Forty-two, you find that all the smoke and mirrors have been removed. What’s left is the sound of crickets and the sight of green leaves darkening toward black; branches that make shapes like faces; the sound of your heart in your chest, the beat of the blood against the backs of your eyes, and the look of the sky as the day’s blue blood runs out of its cheek.
What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every turn of a step. It is here; you slip across it on a kind of breathless curve like a skater turning for home.
I stopped for a moment about half a mile south of where I’d left the car, and still half a mile north of the driveway. Here the road curves sharply, and on the right is an open field which slants steeply down toward the lake. Tidwell’s Meadow is what the locals call it, or sometimes the Old Camp. It was here that Sara Tidwell and her curious tribe built their cabins, at least according to Marie Hingerman (and once, when I asked Bill Dean, he agreed this was the place. . although he didn’t seem interested in continuing the conversation, which struck me at the time as a bit odd).
I stood there for a moment, looking down at the north end of Dark Score.
The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset, without a single ripple or a single small craft to be seen. The boat-people would all be down at the marina or at Warrington’s Sunset Bar by now, I guessed, eating lobster rolls and drinking big mixed drinks. Later a few of them, buzzed on speed and martinis, would go bolting up and down the lake by moonlight. I wondered if I would be around to hear them. I thought there was a fair chance that by then I’d be on my way back to Derry, either terrified by what I’d found or disillusioned because I had found nothing at all.
“You funny little man, said Strickland.”
I didn’t know I was going to speak until the words were out of my mouth, and why those words in particular I had no idea. I remembered my dream of Jo under the bed and shuddered. A mosquito whined in my ear. I slapped it and walked on.
In the end, my arrival at the head of the driveway was almost too perfectly timed, the sense of having re-entered my dream almost too complete. Even the balloons tied to the SARA LAUGHS sign (one white and one blue, both with WELCOME BACK MIKE, carefully printed on them in black ink) and floating against the ever-darkening backdrop of the trees seemed to intensify the deja vu I had quite deliberately induced, for no two dreams are exactly the same, are they? Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even when they try their best to be identical, because we’re never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.
I walked to the sign, feeling the mystery of this place at twilight. I squeezed down on the board, feeling its rough reality, and then I ran the ball of my thumb over the letters, daring the splinters and reading with my skin like a blind man reading braille: S and A and R and A; L and A and U and G and H and S.
The driveway had been cleared of fallen needles and blown-down branches, but Dark Score glimmered a fading rose just as it had in my dreams, and the sprawled hulk of the house was the same. Bill had thoughtfully left the light over the back stoop burning, and the sunflowers growing through the boards had long since been cut down, but everything else was the same.
I looked overhead, at the slot of sky over the lane. Nothing. . I waited… and nothing… waiting still… and then there it was, right where the center of my gaze had been trained. At one moment there was only the fading sky (with indigo just starting to rise up from the edges like an infusion of ink), and at the next Venus was glowing there, bright and steady. People talk about watching the stars come out, and I suppose some people do, but I think that was the only time in my life that I actually saw one appear. I wished on it, too, but this time it was real time, and I did not wish for Jo. “Help me,” I said, looking at the star. I would have said more, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what kind of help I needed.
That’s enough, a voice in my mind said uneasily. That’s enough, now. Go on back and get your car. Except that wasn’t the plan. The plan was to go down the driveway, just as I had in the final dream, the nightmare.
The plan was to prove to myself that there was no shroud-wrapped monster lurking in the shadows of the big old log house down there. The plan was pretty much based on that bit of New Age wisdom which says the word “fear” stands for Face Everything And Recover. But, as I stood there and looked down at that spark of porch light (it looked very small in the growing darkness), it occurred to me that there’s another bit of wisdom, one not quite so good-morning-starshine, which suggests fear is actually an acronym for Fuck Everything And Run. Standing there by myself in the woods as the light left the sky, that seemed like the smarter interpretation, no two ways about it. I looked down and was a little amused to see that I had taken one of the balloons—untied it without even noticing as I thought things over. It floated serenely up from my hand at the end of its string, the words printed on it now impossible to read in the growing dark. Maybe it’s all moot, anyway; maybe I won’t be able to move. Maybe that old devil writer’s walk has got hold of me again, and I’ll just stand here like a statue until someone comes along and hauls me away. But this was real time in the real world, and in the real world there was no such thing as writer’s walk. I opened my hand.
As the string I’d been holding floated free, I walked under the rising balloon and started down the driveway. Foot followed foot, pretty much as they had ever since I’d first learned this trick back in 1959. I went deeper and deeper into the clean but sour smell of pine, and once I caught myself taking an extra-big step, avoiding a fallen branch that had been in the dream but wasn’t here in reality. My heart was still thudd
ing hard, and sweat was still pouring out of me, oiling my skin and drawing mosquitoes. I raised a hand to brush the hair off my brow, then stopped, holding it splay-fingered out in front of my eyes. I put the other one next to it. Neither was marked; there wasn’t even a shadow of scar from the cut I’d given myself while crawling around my bedroom during the ice storm. “I’m all right,” I said. “I’m all right.” You funny little man, said Strickland, a voice answered. It wasn’t mine, wasn’t Jo’s; it was the UFO voice that had narrated my nightmare, the one which ’had driven me on even when I wanted to stop. The voice of some outsider. I started walking again. I was better than halfway down the driveway now. I had reached the point where, in the dream, I told the voice that I was afraid of Mrs. Danvers. “I’m afraid of Mrs. D…” I said, trying the words aloud in the growing dark. “What if the bad old housekeeper’s down there?” A loon cried on the lake, but the voice didn’t answer. I suppose it didn’t have to. There was no Mrs. Danvers, she was only a bag of bones in an old book, and the voice knew it. I began walking again. I passed the big pine that Jo had once banged into in our Jeep, trying to back up the driveway. How she had sworn! Like a sailor! I had managed to keep a straight face until she got to “Fuck a duck,” and then I’d lost it, leaning against the side of the Jeep with the heels of my hands pressed against my temples, howling until tears rolled down my cheeks, and Jo glaring hot blue sparks at me the whole time. I could see the mark about three feet up on the trunk of the tree, the white seeming to float above the dark bark in the gloom. It was just here that the unease which pervaded the other dreams had skewed into something far worse.
Even before the shrouded thing had come bursting out of the house, I had felt something was all wrong, all twisted up; I had felt that somehow the house itself had gone insane. It was at this point, passing the old scarred pine, that I had wanted to run like the gingerbread man.
I didn’t feel that now. I was afraid, yes, but not in terror. There was nothing behind me, for one thing, no sound of slobbering breath. The worst thing a man was likely to come upon in these woods was an irritated moose. Or, I supposed, if he was really unlucky, a pissed-off bear.
