by Steven King
“I think Coach Puffer did,” I said. “Once.”
He laughed. “You ready for that push, Dennis? You’ve been down here long enough. Let it go.”
“Easier said than done.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“Will you tell me one thing?” I asked. “I have to know.”
“I will if I can.”
“What did—” I had to stop and clear my throat. “What did you do with the … the pieces?”
“Why, I saw to that myself,” Mercer said. His voice was light, almost joking, but his face was very, very serious. “I had two fellows from the local police run all those pieces through the crusher out back of Darnell’s Garage. Made a little cube about so big.” He held his hands about two feet apart. “One of those guys got a hell of a bad cut. Took stitches.”
Mercer suddenly smiled—it was the bitterest, coldest smile I’ve ever seen.
“He said it bit him.”
Then he pushed me up the aisle to where my family and my girl stood waiting for me.
• • •
So that’s my story. Except for the dreams.
I’m four years older, and Arnie’s face has grown hazy to me, a browning photograph from an old yearbook. I never would have believed that could happen, but it has. I made it through, made the transition from adolescence to manhood—whatever that is—somehow; I’ve got a college degree on which the ink is almost dry, and I’ve been teaching junior high history. I started last year, and two of my original students—Buddy Repperton types, both of them—were older than I was. I’m single, but there are a few interesting ladies in my life, and I hardly think of Arnie at all.
Except in the dreams.
The dreams aren’t the only reason I’ve set all this down—there’s another, which I’ll tell you in a moment—but I would be lying if I said the dreams weren’t a big part of the reason. Maybe it’s an effort to lance the wound and clean it out. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not rich enough to afford a shrink.
In one of the dreams I am back where the funeral service was held. The three coffins are on their triple bier, but the church is empty except for me. In the dream I am on crutches again, standing at the foot of the central aisle, back by the door. I don’t want to go down there, but my crutches are pulling me along, moving by themselves. I touch the middle coffin. It springs open at my touch, and lying inside in the satin interior is not Arnie but Roland D. LeBay, a putrescent corpse in an Army uniform. As the bloated smell of gassy decay rushes out at me, the corpse opens its eyes; its rotting hands, black and slimy with some fungoid growth, grope upward and find my shirt before I can back away, and it pulls itself up until its glaring, reeking face is only inches from mine. And it begins to croak over and over again, Can’t beat that smell, can you? Nothing smells this good … except for pussy … except for pussy … except for pussy… . I try to scream but I can’t scream, because LeBay’s hands have settled in a noxious, tightening ring around my throat.
In the other dream—and this one is somehow worse—I’ve finished with a class or proctoring a study hall at Norton Junior High, where I teach. I pack my books back into my briefcase, stuff in my papers, and leave the room for my next class. And there in the hall, packed in between the industrial-gray lockers lining it, is Christine—brand new and sparkling, sitting on four new whitewall tires, a chrome Winged Victory hood ornament tilting toward me. She is empty, but her engine guns and falls off … guns and falls off … guns and falls off. In some of the dreams the voice from the radio is the voice of Richie Valens, killed long ago in a plane crash with Buddy Holly and J. P. Richardson, The Big Bopper. Richie is screaming “La Bamba” to a Latin beat, and as Christine suddenly lunges toward me, laying rubber on the hall floor and tearing open locker doors on either side with her doorhandles, I see that there is a vanity plate on the front—a grinning white skull on a dead black field. Imprinted over the skull are the words ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE.
Then I wake up—sometimes screaming, always clutching my leg.
• • •
But the dreams are fewer now. Something I read in one of my psych classes—I took a lot of them, maybe hoping to understand things that can’t be understood—is that people dream less as they grow older. I think I am going to be all right now. Last Christmas season, when I sent Leigh her annual card, I added a line to my usual note on the back. Below my signature, on impulse, I scribbled: How are you dealing with it? Then I sealed the card up and mailed it before I could change my mind. I got a postcard back a month later. It showed the new Taos Center for the Performing Arts on the front. On the back was my address and a single flat line: Dealing with what? L.
One way or another I guess we find out things we have to know.
Around the same time—it seems as though it’s around Christmas that my thoughts turn to it the most often—I dropped Rick Mercer a note, because the question had been on my mind more and more, gnawing at me. I wrote and asked him what had become of the block of scrap metal that had once been Christine.
I got no answer.
But time is teaching me how to deal with that too. I think about it less. I really do.
• • •
So here I am, at the tag end of everything, old memories and old nightmares all bundled into a neat sheaf of pages. Soon I will put them in a folder and put the folder in my file cabinet and lock that drawer and that will be the end.
But I told you there was something else, didn’t I? Some other reason for writing it all down.
His single-minded purpose. His unending fury.
I read it in the paper a few weeks ago—just an item that got put on the AP wire because it was bizarre, I suppose. Be honest, Guilder, I can hear Arnie saying, so I will. It was that item that got me going, more than all the dreams and old memories.
The news item was about a guy named Sander Galton, whose nickname, one would logically assume, must have been Sandy.
This Sander Galton was killed out in California, where he was working at a drive-in movie theater in L.A. He was apparently alone, closing up shop for the night after the movie had ended. He was in the snack-bar. A car ripped right through one of the walls, plowed through the counter, smashed the popcorn machine, and got him as he was trying to unlock the door to the projection booth. The cops knew that was what he was doing when the car ran him down because they found the key in his hand. I read that item, headed BIZARRE MURDER BY CAR IN LOS ANGELES—and I thought of what Mercer had told me, that last thing: He said it bit him.
Of course it’s impossible, but it was all impossible to start with.
I keep thinking of George LeBay in Ohio.
His sister in Colorado.
Leigh in New Mexico.
What if it’s started again?
What if it’s working its way east, finishing the job?
Saving me for last?
• • •
His single-minded purpose.
His unending fury.
About the Author
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Mr. Mercedes, winner of the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Novel; Doctor Sleep; and Under the Dome, a major TV miniseries on CBS. His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best Mystery/Thriller. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and a 2014 National Medal of Arts. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
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Also by Stephen King
FICTION
Carrie
’Salem’s Lot
The Shining
Night Shift
The Stand
The Dead Zone
Firestarter
Cujo
Creepshow
Different Seasons
Cycle of the Werewolf
Pet Sematary
IT
Skeleton Crew
The Eyes of the Dragon
Misery
The Tommyknockers
The Dark Half
Four Past Midnight
Needful Things
Gerald’s Game
Dolores Claiborne
Nightmares & Dreamscapes
Insomnia
Rose Madder
The Green Mile
Desperation
Bag of Bones
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Hearts in Atlantis
Dreamcatcher
Everything’s Eventual
From a Buick 8
The Colorado Kid
Cell
Lisey’s Story
Duma Key
Just After Sunset
Stephen King Goes to the Movies
Under the Dome
Full Dark, No Stars
11/22/63
Doctor Sleep
Mr. Mercedes
Revival
Finders Keepers
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
End of Watch (forthcoming June 2016)
NOVELS IN THE DARK TOWER SERIES
The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel
BY STEPHEN KING AS RICHARD BACHMAN
Thinner
The Running Man
The Long Walk
Roadwork
The Regulators
Blaze
WITH PETER STRAUB
The Talisman
Black House
NONFICTION
Danse Macabre
On Writing (A Memoir of the Craft)
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983 by Stephen King
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