She was bending down to turn on the TV when Jesus said, “ ’Becka, Joe is putting it to that Hussy down at the pee-oh just about every lunch-hour and sometimes after quitting time, too. Once he was so randy he put it to her while he was supposed to be helping her sort the mail. And do you know what? She never even said ‘At least wait until I get the first-class took care of.’
“And that’s not all,” Jesus said. He walked halfway across the picture, His robe fluttering around His ankles, and sat down on a rock that jutted from the ground. He held His staff between his knees and looked at her grimly. “There’s a lot going on in Haven. You won’t believe the half of it.”
‘Becka screamed again and fell on her knees. “My Lord!” she shrieked. One of her knees landed squarely on her piece of coffee cake (which was roughly the size and thickness of the family Bible), squirting raspberry filling into the face of Ozzie, the cat, who had crept out from under the stove to see what was going on. “My Lord! My Lord!” ’Becka continued to shriek. Ozzie ran, hissing, for the kitchen, where he crawled under the stove again with red goo dripping from his whiskers. He stayed there the rest of the day.
“Well, none of the Paulsons was ever good for much,” Jesus said. A sheep wandered toward Him and He whacked it away, using His staff with an absentminded impatience that reminded ‘Becka, even in her current frozen state, of her late father. The sheep went, rippling slightly because of the 3-D effect. It disappeared, actually seeming to curve as it went off the edge of the picture ... but that was just an optical illusion, she felt sure. “Nossir!” Jesus declared. “Joe’s great-uncle was a murderer, as you well know, ’Becka. Murdered his son, his wife, and then himself. And when he came up here, do you know what We said? ‘No room!’ that’s what We said.” Jesus leaned forward, propped on His staff. “ ‘Go see Mr. Splitfoot down below,’ We said. ‘You’ll find your Haven-home, all right. But you may find your new landlord asks a hell of a high rent and never turns down the heat,’ We said.” Incredibly, Jesus winked at her ... and that was when ’Becka fled, shrieking, from the house.
2
She stopped in the back yard, panting, her mousy blond hair hanging in her face, her heart beating so fast that it frightened her. No one had heard her shriekings and carryings-on, thank the Lord; she and Joe lived far out on the Nista Road, and their nearest neighbors were the Brodskys, who lived in that slutty trailer. The Brodskys were half a mile away. That was good. Anyone who had heard her would have thought there was a crazywoman down at the Paulsons’.
Well there is, isn’t there? If you think that picture started to talk, why, you must be crazy. Daddy’d beat you three shades of blue for saying such a thing—one for lying, another for believing it, and a third for raising your voice. ’Becka, pictures don’t talk.
No ... nor did it, another voice spoke up suddenly. That voice came out of your own head, ’Becka. I don’t know how it could be ... how you could know such things ... but that’s what happened. You made that picture of Jesus talk your own self, like Edgar Bergen used to make Charlie McCarthy talk on the Ed Sullivan show.
But somehow that idea seemed more frightening, more downright crazy, than the idea that the picture itself had spoken, and she refused to allow it mental house-room. After all, miracles happened every day. There was that Mexican fellow who had found a picture of the Virgin Mary baked into an enchilada, or something. There were those miracles at Lourdes. Not to mention those children that had made the headlines of one of the tabloids—they had cried rocks. These were bona fide miracles (the children who wept rocks was, admittedly, a rather gritty one), as uplifting as a Pat Robertson sermon. Hearing voices was just nuts.
But that’s what happened. And you’ve been hearing voices for quite a while now, haven’t you? You’ve been hearing his voice. Joe’s. And that’s where it came from. Not from Jesus but from Joe—
“No,” ’Becka whimpered. “I ain’t heard any voices in my head.”
She stood by her clothesline in the back yard, looking blankly off toward the woods on the other side of the Nista Road. They were hazy in the heat. Less than half a mile into those woods, as the crow flew, Bobbi Anderson and Jim Gardener were steadily unearthing more and more of a titanic fossil in the earth.
Crazy, her dead father’s implacable voice tolled in her head. Crazy with the heat. You come on over here, ’Becka Bouchard, I’m gonna beat you three shades of blister-blue for that crazy talk.
“I ain’t heard no voices in my head,” ’Becka moaned. “That picture really did talk, I swear, I can’t do ventriloquism!”
Better the picture. If it was the picture, it was a miracle, and miracles came from God. A miracle could drive you nuts—and dear God knew she felt like she was going nuts right now—but it didn’t mean you were crazy to start with. Hearing voices in your head, however, or believing that you could hear other people’s thoughts ...
’Becka looked down, and saw blood gushing from her left knee. She shrieked again and ran back into the house to call the doctor, Medix, somebody, anybody. She was in the living room again, pawing at the dial with the phone to her ear, when Jesus said:
“That’s just raspberry filling from your coffee cake, ’Becka, Why don’t you just cool it before you have a heart attack?”
She looked at the Sony, the telephone receiver falling to the table with a clunk. Jesus was still sitting on the rock outcropping. It looked as though He had crossed His legs. It was really surprising how much He looked like her father ... only He didn’t seem forbidding, ready to be angry at a moment’s notice. He was looking at her with a kind of exasperated patience.
“Try it and see if I’m not right,” Jesus said.
She touched her knee gently, wincing, anticipating pain. There was none. She saw the seeds in the red stuff and relaxed. She licked the raspberry filling off her fingers.
“Also,” Jesus said, “you have got to get these ideas about hearing voices and going crazy out of your head. It’s just Me, and I can talk to anyone I want to, any way I want to.”
“Because you’re the Savior,” ’Becka whispered.
“Right,” Jesus said. He looked down. Below Him, on the screen, a couple of animated salad bowls were dancing in appreciation of the Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing which they were about to receive. “And I’d like you to please turn that crap off, if you don’t mind. We can’t talk with that thing running. Also, it makes My feet tingle.”
’Becka approached the Sony and turned it off.
“My Lord,” she whispered.
3
The following Sunday afternoon, Joe Paulson was lying fast asleep in the back yard hammock with Ozzie the cat zonked out on Joe’s ample stomach. ’Becka stood in the living room, holding the curtain back and looking at Joe. Sleeping in the hammock. Dreaming of his Hussy, no doubt—dreaming of throwing her down in a great big pile of catalogues and Woolco circulars and then—how would Joe and his piggy poker buddies put it?—“putting the shoes to her.”
She was holding the curtain with her left hand because she had a handful of square nine-volt batteries in her right. She took the batteries into the kitchen, where she was assembling something on the kitchen table. Jesus had told her to make it. She told Jesus she couldn’t make things. She was clumsy. Her daddy had always told her so. She thought of adding how he sometimes told her he was surprised she could wipe her own butt without an instruction manual, and then decided that wasn’t the sort of thing you told the Savior.
Jesus told her not to be a fool; if she could follow a recipe, she could build this little thing. She was delighted to find that He was absolutely right. It was not only easy, it was fun! More fun than cooking, certainly; she had never really had the knack for that, either. Her cakes fell and her breads never rose. She had begun this little thing yesterday, working with the toaster, the motor from her old Hamilton Beach blender, and a funny board full of electronics things which had come from the back of an old radio in the shed. She thought she would be done long before J
oe woke up and came in to watch the Red Sox game on TV at two o’clock.
She picked up his little blowtorch and lit it deftly with a kitchen match. She would have laughed a week ago if you’d told her she would be working with a propane torch now. But it was easy. Jesus told her exactly how and where to solder the wires to the electronics board from the old radio.
That wasn’t all Jesus had told her during the last three days. He had told her things that murdered her sleep, that made her afraid to go into the village and do her shopping, lest her guilty knowledge show on her face (I’ll always know when you done something wrong, ‘Becka, her father had told her, because you ain’t got the kind of face can keep a secret); that had, for the first time in her life, made her lose her appetite. Joe, totally bound up in his work, the Red Sox, and his Hussy, noticed hardly anything amiss ... although he had seen ’Becka gnawing her fingernails the other night as they watched Hill Street Blues, and nail-biting was something she had never done before—was, in fact, one of the things she nagged him about. Joe Paulson considered this for all of twelve seconds before looking back at the Sony TV and losing himself in dreams of Nancy Voss’s heaving white breasts.
Among others, these were a few of the things Jesus told her, causing ’Becka to sleep poorly and to begin biting her fingernails at the advanced age of forty-five:
In 1973, Moss Harlingen, one of Joe’s poker buddies, had murdered his father. They had been hunting deer up in Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no accident. Moss simply laid up behind a fallen tree with his rifle and waited until his father splashed across a small stream about fifty yards down the hill from where Moss was. Moss potted his father as easily as a clay duck in a shooting gallery. He thought he had killed his father for money. Moss’s business, Big Ditch Construction, had two notes falling due with two different banks within six weeks’ time, and neither would extend because of the other. Moss went to Abel, but his dad refused to help, although he could afford to. So Moss shot his father and inherited a pot of money after the county coroner handed down a verdict of death by misadventure. The notes were paid and Moss Harlingen really believed (except perhaps in his deepest dreams) that he had committed murder for gain. The real motive had been something else. Far in the past, when Moss was ten and his brother Emory seven, Abel’s wife went south to Rhode Island for one whole winter. Her brother had died suddenly, and his wife needed help getting on her feet. While their mother was gone, there were several incidents of buggery at the Harlingen place. The buggery stopped when the boys’ mother came back, and the incidents were never repeated. Moss had forgotten all about them. He never remembered lying awake in the dark anymore, lying awake in mortal terror and watching the doorway for the shadow of his father. He had absolutely no recollection of lying with his mouth pressed against his forearm, salty tears of shame and rage squeezing out of his hot eyes and coursing down his cold face to his mouth as Abel Harlingen slathered lard onto his cock and slid it up his son’s back door with a grunt and a sigh. It had all made so little impression on Moss that he could not remember biting his arm until it bled to keep from crying out, and he certainly could not remember Emory’s breathless bird-cries from the next bed—“Please, Daddy, no, Daddy, please not me tonight, please, Daddy.” Children, of course, forget very easily. But some memory might have lingered, because when Moss Harlingen actually pulled the trigger on the buggering son of a whore, as the echoes first rolled away and then rolled back, finally disappearing into the great forested silence of the up-Maine wilderness, Moss whispered: “Not you, Em, not tonight.”
Alice Kimball, who taught at the Haven Grammar School, was a lesbian. Jesus told ’Becka this on Friday, not long after the lady herself, looking large and solid and respectable in a green pantsuit, had stopped by, collecting for the American Cancer Society.
Darla Gaines, the pretty seventeen-year-old girl who brought the Sunday paper, had half an ounce of “bitchin reefer” between the mattress and box spring of her bed. Jesus told ‘Becka this right after Darla had come on Saturday to collect for the last five weeks (three dollars plus a fifty-cent tip ’Becka now wished she had withheld), and that she and her boyfriend smoked the reefer in Darla’s bed before having intercourse, only they called having intercourse “doing the horizontal bop.” They smoked reefer and “did the horizontal bop” almost every weekday afternoon from two-thirty until three or so. Darla’s parents both worked at Splendid Shoe in Derry and they didn’t get home until well past four.
Hank Buck, another of Joe’s poker cronies, worked at a large supermarket in Bangor and hated his boss so much that a year ago he had put half a box of Ex-Lax in the man’s chocolate shake when the boss had sent Hank out to get his lunch at McDonald’s one day. The boss had had something rather more spectacular than a bowel movement; at three-fifteen that day he had done something in his pants that was the equivalent of a shit A-bomb. The A-bomb—or S-bomb, if you preferred—had gone off as he was slicing lunchmeat in the deli of Paul’s Down-East SuperMart. Hank managed to keep a straight face until quitting time, but by the time he got into his car to go home, he was laughing so hard he almost shit his own pants. Twice he had to pull off the road, he got laughing so hard.
“Laughed,” Jesus told ’Becka. “What do you think of that?”
‘Becka thought it was a low-down mean trick. And such things were only the beginning, it seemed. Jesus knew something unpleasant or upsetting about everyone ’Becka came in contact with, it seemed.
She couldn’t live with such an awful outpouring.
She couldn’t live without it, either.
One thing was certain: she had to do something about it.
“You are,” Jesus said. He spoke from behind her, from the picture on top of the Sony. Of course He did. The idea that His voice was coming from inside her own head—that she was somehow ... well ... somehow reading people’s thoughts ... that was only a dreadful passing illusion. It must be. That alternative was horrifying.
Satan. Witchcraft.
“In fact,” Jesus said, confirming His existence with that dry, no-nonsense voice so like her father‘s, “you’re almost done with this part. Just solder that red wire to that point to the left of the long doohickey ... no, not there ... there. Good girl! Not too much solder, mind! It’s like Brylcreem, ’Becka. A little dab’ll do ya.”
Strange, hearing Jesus Christ talk about Brylcreem.
4
Joe woke up at a quarter to two, tossed Ozzie off his lap, strolled to the back of his lawn, brushing cat hairs off his T-shirt, and had a comfortable whiz into the poison ivy back there. Then he headed into the house. Yankees and Red Sox. Great. He opened the fridge, glancing briefly at the snippets of wire on the counter and wondering just what in the hell that dimbulb ‘Becka had been up to. But mostly he dismissed it. He was thinking of Nancy Voss. He was wondering what it would feel like to squirt off between Nancy’s tits. He thought maybe Monday he’d find out. He squabbled with her; Christ, sometimes they squabbled like a couple of dogs in August. Seemed like it wasn’t just them; everyone seemed short-fused lately. But when it came to fucking ... son of a bitch! He hadn’t been so randy since he was eighteen, and she was the same way. Seemed like neither of them could get enough. He’d even squirted in the night a couple of times. It was like he was sixteen again. He grabbed a quart of Bud and headed toward the living room. Boston was almost certainly going to win today. He had the odds figured at 8-5. Lately he seemed to have an amazing head for odds. There was a guy down in Augusta who’d take bets, and Joe had made almost five hundred bucks in the last three weeks ... not that ’Becka knew. He’d ratholed it. It was funny; he’d know exactly who was going to win and why, and then he’d get down to Augusta and forget the why and only remember the who. But that was the important thing, wasn’t it? Last time the guy in Augusta had grumbled, paying off at three to one on a twenty-dollar bet. Mets against the Pirates, Gooden on the mound, looked l
ike a cinch for the Mets, but Joe had taken the Pirates and they’d won, 5-2. Joe didn’t know how much longer the guy in Augusta would take his bets, but if he stopped, so what? There was always Portland. There were two or three books there. It seemed like lately he got a headache whenever he left Haven—needed glasses, maybe—but when you were rolling hot, a headache was a small price to pay. Enough money and the two of them could go away. Leave ‘Becka with Jesus. That was who ’Becka wanted to be married to anyway.
Cold as ice, she was. But that Nancy? One hot ticket! And smart! Why, just today she’d taken him out back at the P.O. to show him something. “Look! Look what I thought of! I think I ought to patent it, Joe! I really do!”
“What idear?” Joe asked. The truth was, he felt a little mad with her. The truth was, he was more interested in her tits than her idears, and mad or not, he was already getting a blue-steeler. It really was like being a kid again. But what she showed him was enough to make him forget all about his blue-steeler. For at least four minutes, anyway.
Nancy Voss had taken a kid’s Lionel train transformer and hooked it somehow to a bunch of D-cell batteries. This gadget was wired to seven flour sifters with their screens knocked out. The sifters were lying on their sides. When Nancy turned on the transformer, a number of filament-thin wires hooked to something that looked like a blender began to scoop first-class mail from a pile on the floor into the sifters, seemingly at random.
“What’s it doing?” Joe asked.
“Sorting the first-class,” she said. She pointed at one sifter after another. “That one’s Haven Village ... that’s RFD 1, Derry Road, you know ... that one’s Ridge Road ... that one’s Nista Road ... that one’s ...”
He didn’t believe it at first. He thought it was a joke, and he wondered how she’d like a slap upside the head. Why’d you do that? she’d whine. Some men can take a joke, he’d answer like Sylvester Stallone in that movie Cobra, but I ain’t one of em. Except then he saw it was really working. It was quite a gadget, all right, but the sound of the wires scraping across the floor was a little creepy. Harsh and whispery, like big old spiders’ legs. It was working, all right; damned if he knew how, but it was. He saw one of the wires snag a letter for Roscoe Thibault and push it into the correct sifter—RFD 2, which was the Hammer Cut Road—even though it had been misaddressed to Haven Village.
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