by Stephen King
The young man shined a light into her eyes, took her vital signs, and asked her questions like, “Who is the President of the United States?” Then he disappeared through the sheet, and Song waited, thinking nothing.
She didn’t know how much time had passed before a woman came through the sheet.
“I’m Dr. Patel,” she said, extending her hand. “I want to ask you a few questions, starting with the scars I noticed on your head. I assume they’re from an old head injury?”
Song nodded and told her about the car accident.
Dr. Patel pulled a tablet out of her pocket and tapped at the keys. “Have you been experiencing any headaches lately? Bad ones where the pain is worse or lasts longer than an ordinary headache?”
Song had been having bad headaches lately, but she’d blamed the usual culprit—getting old. “I guess so.”
“And how’s your memory been? Any gaps in time that you can’t remember?”
Song thought about the crack in the wall and shook her head. She remembered that too well.
“What about any changes in your mood or personality? Any feelings of, say, not being quite yourself?”
Song didn’t think so, but then again, who was there to tell her otherwise? “Nothing I’ve noticed.”
Dr. Patel pulled out another, larger tablet. She placed a film on the lit screen and Song Ying’s brain appeared. “We took some images to help us figure out what happened, and for the most part, everything looks normal. Your vital signs are good and you seem alert and responsive—”
For the most part? “I feel fine.”
“—but we did notice a little shaded area right here.” Dr. Patel scooted closer and pointed out what she thought might be “a small lesion” at the back of Song Ying’s brain. “It could be changes occurring because of the old injury, or something that was missed the first time around. Of course we won’t know anything definite until we run more tests and compare them to your old records. But any time a person loses consciousness, especially with a medical history like yours, we want to look into it.”
Song nodded, but only for the doctor’s sake—no way in the world would her lousy health insurance cover tests like that!
Dr. Patel tucked her screen under her arm and stood up. “I’ve scheduled you for a series of follow-up appointments. We’d like to hold you here for a few more hours to make sure you’re good to go, and you can confirm those appointment times with the check-out nurse.”
Then she bustled out of the room. Every so often a nurse or assistant would come in and make her walk around or answer more questions or pee into a cup. Someone brought her a meal on a plastic tray, but Song wasn’t hungry. Finally, she was allowed to leave. When the check-out nurse scheduled her follow-up appointments, Song took the cards with the times and dates and threw them in the trash on her way out the front door.
Song then did something she’d never done in her life, because who would pay to ride in a car when there were perfectly good buses or subways, or even your own two feet? But tonight Song called a cab and even gave the driver a generous tip, something she also rarely did, because no one tipped her extra for doing the job she was paid to do.
It was almost midnight when she reached her apartment. She tried to watch a few of her favorite Chinese television dramas, but she couldn’t get interested, so she pulled the blinds, climbed into bed, and fell asleep.
And dreamed.
In her dream, Song was in her own kitchen. A peeling edge of wallpaper in the corner by the fridge drew her toward it. Even though she kept her apartment spotless, when Song pulled the wallpaper away, thousands of purple beetles poured out. On the back of every beetle rode another beetle with another beetle riding its back, and so on into infinity.
Song ran to the window, and even though her real-life apartment boasted no such view, she saw the Transamerica Pyramid, that forty-eight story icon of the San Francisco skyline with its needle hat puncturing the sky. As she stared at it, the Pyramid began to crack in half and thousands of purple beetles poured out. The longer she watched, the more certain she was that a face was forming among the teeming horde—the Grey Man’s face. His eyes and nose were full of beetles. He opened his mouth and thousands more poured out, streaming through the city like floodwater.
In the single voice of a thousand chittering insects, the Grey Man said, “Are you willing to make the sacrifice?”
What sacrifice? Song wanted to ask, but when she opened her mouth, purple beetles poured out.
Choking. She was choking. The whole city was choking, the whole world …
“Yes!” she finally cried, waking with a start and jumping out of bed. “Yes!”
The cheap linoleum floor was ice cold beneath her feet. It was early, just past three in the morning. Song ran to the kitchen and checked every edge and crack. There was no peeling wallpaper, no purple beetles, no view of the Pyramid out the window.
Just a dream—but what a dream! Song placed her hand on the back of her head and pressed gingerly. She’d heard about people with brain injuries who started acting crazy and seeing and believing in things that weren’t really there. Maybe that’s what was happening to her—maybe the black wave had caught up with her after all.
She shouldn’t have thrown those appointment cards away, but what good would they do? She had no one to help care for her, no one to help pay the bills. If she survived whatever was wrong with her, she’d be out on the streets to enjoy the rest of her life.
Song paced the small apartment. She should go back to bed; her shift at the Hotel Reo started in less than three hours. Instead, for the second time in less than 24 hours, Song did something she never normally did—she put on her coat and went out into the night. The streets were filled with criminals and crazy people at this hour, but she didn’t care.
She walked through her neighborhood toward Market Street, past the homeless people and runaways and drug addicts and forgotten people who took over the night until the city showed up for work the next morning. She looked for purple beetles, or twisted trees, or babies with ancient faces. But she saw only the city, the same as it always was.
She turned down a side alley toward home. If she hurried, she might manage to get some breakfast in her before she had to go to work.
And that’s when she saw it. Scrawled on the wall in thick black letters were the words, “Look at the dog.” Below them was written “Dog at the look” in softer, cursive letters.
Song Ying stopped. On the ground beneath the letters sat a huddled human figure swathed in a filthy blanket. For the third time, Song did something she never did. She approached the huddled human. She said, “Excuse me, can I ask you a question? What do those words mean?”
The human looked up—a woman, her hair hanging down in thick, matted grey braids. The woman said, “Anything you can spare, anything at all,” and held out a bony, grimy hand.
Song moved closer. She knelt down in front of the woman and pointed at the graffiti. “Can you tell me what those words mean?”
The woman’s eyes skittered from one side to the next. Her mouth was crusted with dried spittle, and she smelled like damp rot.
“Do you know what that graffiti means?” Song tried again. “Or who put it there?”
The woman’s eyes danced madly. Crazy in the head, as Song’s mother always said.
Song never gave money to homeless people, but it seemed to be a time for nevers. She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a five dollar bill. She held it out, and the woman reached for it. Only instead of taking the money, she gripped Song’s hand with surprisingly strong fingers.
“Let go!” Song yelled. But the woman wouldn’t let go, and when Song looked into her eyes, they were still and clear. They were also grey—grey like the rest of her, grey like the Grey Man.
“Are you still willing to make the sacrifice?” Grey Woman asked, her voice as clear and calm as her eyes.
Still? What sacrifice did Song supposedly say she’d make? Then Song rememb
ered the Grey Man and the beetles and the question. And her answer: Yes, not once, but twice—yes.
For a moment, Song felt a flush of pride—of course she would make the sacrifice! What kind of a person did these Grey People think she was, a useless old woman too selfish to save the human race?
But then she snorted, disgusted with herself for such nonsense. And yet what had she seen in room #211 that had followed her home and invaded her dreams?
“What sacrifice?” Song Ying asked. She could feel the black wave swirl around her ankles, luring her out to sea. “What do these words mean? What is happening to me?”
The woman let go of her hand. “A crack. A place, a moment where things line up just so. But something goes wrong, something gets out of line. And the crack opens up, and other worlds come in.”
“You mean the Hotel Reo? What other worlds?”
“Worlds other than the apparent world.” The woman flung her arms open, and Song jumped back. “Worlds that divide and multiply. Worlds upon worlds upon worlds, all different, yet the same. Into infinity. But sometimes, things get out of line, and a crack opens up.”
Song Ying saw the crack at the back of her brain open up, too. One tiny purple beetle crawled out before the crack sealed shut again. She closed her eyes, but the woman’s voice continued.
“Things come through the crack that shouldn’t come through.” Grey Woman shook her head and shivered. “All things multiple and divide. It’s the way of things, it’s infinity. But things that should not be multiply into more things that should not be.”
“What’s that have to do with me?” Song demanded. “I’m just an ordinary woman in an ordinary life. I know nothing about anything!”
Grey Woman smiled. “Not many do.”
“Then why are you telling me this?”
“Because you asked.”
Song didn’t have an answer for that. She also didn’t understand a word of what the woman was saying, but she still wanted to know one thing: “What does that graffiti mean? About the dog?”
But Grey Woman didn’t answer, at least not directly. “When a crack opens up, some people can come through the crack, too—can go back and forth between worlds.”
“Like travelers?”
Grey Woman nodded. “Like travelers. But it’s always difficult, and always imperfectly done. Things come through fragmented, in-complete. I only know certain things, and I’m not even sure if what I know can put things back into line. There’s always some missing part, some unforeseen, uncontrollable “X” factor …”
The woman trailed off, and Song considered that whoever was in charge of putting things back into line hadn’t been very smart in hiring these Grey People, but she kept it to herself. “Then what do you want with me?”
“Nothing. If you are the missing part, the unforeseen “X” factor, then nothing I do or say at this point matters. My job is finished. Now it’s up to you.”
“I don’t understand! Now what’s up to me?”
Grey Woman sat up straight, thinking. Then she said, “Since mathematics is everything and everything is mathematics, perhaps you should think of it like that. Like the computer code so important to your world. Picture millions and millions of lines of codes being written across the universe, infinitely. Sometimes, one tiny number goes wrong, and the whole thing falls apart. Our job is to find that tiny number and fix it. But like I said, it’s an imperfect process, and fixing the code is different every time. We fail as many times as we succeed, in part because every world has different rules.”
“About math?”
“No! Math is its own infinite rule. I mean different rules about things like time—time running backward, or in different directions at once. Water breathed as air, and air walked upon like the ground. Animals speaking in human tongues, and humans singing like birds. Waves that flow backward, toward the sea, and rain that falls upward, toward the sky.”
Song felt dizzy, unable to remain upright. She leaned her hand against the alleyway’s grimy wall to keep from falling. “And you say the broken code can be fixed? Can be rewritten?”
Grey Woman slumped back against the wall. “Or unwritten. But there’s always some kind of sacrifice—something that either can’t go back through the crack to its own world, or can’t stay here in this one once the code has been fixed. Every time a number changes, another changes as a result. Every time a number is added, another has to be taken away …”
But suddenly the clarity went out of Grey Woman’s eyes, and they once again skittered with incoherence. Grey Woman mumbled something, stopped as if trying to collect her thoughts, but then put her head down on her arms. Song saw a thin stream of liquid trickle from beneath where she was sitting. The liquid was a murky purple color.
Song turned and ran out of the alley. She ran until she ran out of breath, and then she walked. She didn’t know how far or how long, but when she stopped, she was by the water, at Pier 39, where the tourists gathered to shop and catch the ferry to Alcatraz.
Song turned to face a crowd of people gathered in the middle of the square. From somewhere in the crowd, a child’s voice called out, “Look at the dog!”
Song looked to where the child was pointing and saw a three-legged dog running into traffic. Suddenly, the sky turned an off-kilter, hazy purple, as if filtered through a crooked, dirty screen. It turned blue again and then back to purple, over and over again, endlessly, maddeningly. The Transamerica Pyramid trembled and cracked open at the top. One tiny purple beetle skittered down the needle-hat and disappeared. Then the waves ran backward. The sea rose up vertically and stopped, undulating with fish and crabs and sea algae suspended in an invisible mid-air fishbowl.
In the silent, windless air, Song Ying called out, “Dog at the look!”
The three-logged dog began running backward, back toward the crowd of people. The sky turned purple one last time and then gave way to blue for good. The Pyramid sealed itself back together, and the sea fell flat, peaceful once more. The waves came in and broke on the shore.
Song fell to her knees. She opened her mouth to speak, but could no longer recall the words of any language, or even the sound of human speech. She raised both arms to the sky and then lost consciousness, toppling to the ground like a ruin.
“Hey, are you okay? Song Ying—wake up!”
She opened her eyes to see Maria’s concerned face floating above her. She was gently shaking Song’s shoulders, but Song could neither move nor speak. A thousand hammers were thundering against her head, and every time she tried to sit up, they pounded even harder.
Maria ran to the bathroom and came back with a wet rag, pressing it against Song’s forehead. It helped, and Song Ying sat up.
She was in room #211, but there was no Grey Man. No strange words written on the wall, no crack.
“Song, you need to wake up or you’re gonna get fired for sure,” Maria was saying. “We all catch some missing sleep now and then, and I’m cool with that, okay? But come on, this room hasn’t been rented out for what, almost a month? And I’m supposed to say you’re in here cleaning? I love you, Song Ying, but I need this job.”
Song already knew that if she asked, she’d be told that no man with grey eyes and grey hair had ever rented this room. At least not in this world, or this version of it.
Song let Maria tell her to take the rest of the day off, already knowing the words. Only this time Maria added new ones: “You don’t look so good at all—in fact, you look kind of grey.”
Song Ying walked out of the Hotel Reo toward Market Street, and then kept going toward the pier. The city was the same as always, the world the same one she’d always known. And yet for Song, everything was different.
For one thing, the sky was an off-kilter, hazy purple, as if filtered through a crooked, dirty screen.
At Pier 39, Song passed the tourists and the t-shirt shops and the pizza stands and went down to the water. She walked the coastline until the crowds thinned and then disappeared. She took her sh
oes off and walked across the rocks and the hard, slick sand toward the sea. She walked into the water, fighting the freezing waves determined to force her back to shore. She was up to her waist when the waves began to run backward. She stood and waited, and soon the sea rose up vertically and then broke loose.
The Black Wave pulled her out to the underwater world, but this time Song Ying didn’t fight it.
This time she let it take her.
It didn’t feel like a sacrifice. It felt like being reborn.
EXECUTIVE
FUNCTIONS
LUCY A. SNYDER
Joseph Pendleton smiled at the underling across the table from him. He’d practiced his expression in the mirror a hundred times; he knew it would come across as warm, sincere, comforting.
“I can’t promise you anything quite yet, but I agree that your attendance and yearly reviews are the things we look for when promoting worthy employees.”
Grateful tears shone in her cow-brown eyes. “Oh, Mr. Pendleton, the senior accounting position would mean the world to me and my family.”
Her daughter—he’d forgotten the brat’s name—had some kind of cancer. It probably wouldn’t be terminal if the dowdy accountant could throw enough money at enough doctors. But it was a lingering illness either way; a drain on the company’s insurance fund. At the executive team’s weekly golf outing, their chief human resources officer had hinted strongly that it would be a gold star on his record if he found a reason to fire her. But she’d filled out FMLA paperwork the week her daughter was diagnosed, so her medical absences couldn’t be held against her. And despite his monitoring her every move on her computer and at her desk, she was an exemplary employee. She didn’t so much as check the weather on company time.
Authentic reasons to let her go were nonexistent, and she had certain qualities that made him reluctant to manufacture any. Her loyalty was dogged, and her heart as soft as butter. She might not earn him any bonuses, but she couldn’t hurt his status.
