Book of the Dead (8 page)

“Depends,” Bright growled, blaming the voice for the injury to his thumb.

“And if you’ve just said no, don’t you see that proves you don’t know the truth?”

“Ho ho, very clever,” Bright scoffed. The absence of the pain was unexpectedly comforting: it felt like a calm in which he need do nothing except let the voice reach him. “Get on with it,” he muttered.

“Christ was the truth. He was the word that couldn’t deny itself although they made him suffer all the torments of the damned. Why would they have treated him like that if they hadn’t been afraid of the truth? He was the truth made flesh, born without the preamble of lust and never indulging in it himself, and we have only to become vessels of the truth to welcome him back before it’s too late.”

Not too late to recall where he’d seen the priest’s face, Bright thought, if he didn’t nod off first, he felt so numbed. “Look around you,” the voice was saying, “and see how late it is. Look and see the world ending in corruption and lust and man’s indifference.”

The suggestion seemed knowing. If you looked out at the suburb, you would see the littered walkways where nobody walked at night except addicts and muggers and drunks. There was better elsewhere, Bright told himself, and managed to turn his head on its stiff neck toward the portrait photograph. “Can you want the world to end this way?” the priest demanded. “Isn’t it true that you wish you could change it but feel helpless? Believe me, you can. Christ says you can. He had to suffer agonies for the truth, but we offer you the end of pain and the beginning of eternal life. The resurrection of the body has begun.”

Not this body, Bright thought feebly. His injured hand alone felt as heavy as himself. Even when he realized that he’d left the iron switched on, it seemed insufficient reason for him to move. “Neither men nor women shall we be in the world to come,” the voice was intoning. “The flesh shall be freed of the lusts that have blinded us to the truth.”

He blamed sex for everything, Bright mused, and instantly he remembered.
EVANGELIST IS VOODOO WIDOWER
, the headline inside a tabloid had said, months ago. The priest had gone to Haiti to save his wife’s people, only for her to return to her old faith and refuse to go home with him. Hadn’t he been quoted in the paper as vowing to use his enemies’ methods to defeat them? Certainly he’d announced that he was renaming himself Lazarus. His voice seemed to be growing louder, so loud that the speaker ought to be vibrating. “The Word of God will fill your emptiness. You will go forth to save your fellow man and be rewarded on the day of judgment. Man was made to praise God, and so he did until woman tempted him in the garden. When the sound of our praise is so great that it reaches heaven, our savior shall return.”

Bright did feel emptied, hardly there at all. If giving in to the voice gave him back his strength, wouldn’t that prove it was telling the truth? But he felt as if it wanted to take the place of his entire life. He gazed at the photograph, remembering the good-byes at the bus station, the last kiss and the pressure of her hands on his, the glow of the bus turning the buds on a tree into green fairy lights as the vehicle vanished over the crest of a hill, and then he realized that the priest’s voice had stopped.

He felt as if he’d outwitted the tape until a choir began the hymn he had been hearing all day. The emptiness within him was urging him to join in, but he wouldn’t while he had any strength. He managed to suck his bottom lip between his teeth and gnaw it, though he wasn’t sure if he could feel even a distant ache. Voodoo widower, he chanted to himself to break up the oppressive repetition of the hymn, voodoo widower. He was fending off the hymn, though it seemed impossibly loud in his head, when he heard another sound. The outer door was opening.

He couldn’t move, he couldn’t even call out. The numbness that had spread from his thumb through his body had sculpted him to the chair. He heard the outer door slam as bodies blundered voicelessly about the vestibule. The door to the room inched open, then jerked wide, and the two overalled figures struggled into the room.

He’d known who they were as soon as he’d heard the outer door. The hymn on the tape must have been a signal that he was finished—that he was like them. They’d tampered with the latch on their way out, he realized dully. He seemed incapable of feeling or reacting, even when the larger of the figures leaned down to gaze into his eyes, presumably to check that they were blank, and Bright saw how the gray, stretched lips were fraying at the corners. For a moment Bright thought the man’s eyes were going to pop out of their seedy sockets at him, yet he felt no inclination to flinch. Perhaps he was recognizing himself as he would be—yet didn’t that mean he wasn’t finished after all?

The man stood back from scrutinizing him and turned up the volume of the hymn. Bright thought the words were meant to fill his head, but he could still choose what to think. He wasn’t that empty, he’d done his bit of good for the world, he’d stood aside to give someone else a chance. Whatever the priest had brought back from Haiti might have deadened Bright’s body, but it hadn’t quite deadened his mind. He fixed his gaze on the photograph and thought of the day he’d walked on a mountain with her. He was beginning to fight back toward his feelings when the other man came out of the kitchen, bearing the sharpest knife in the place.

They weren’t supposed to make Bright suffer, the tape had said so. He could see no injuries on them. Suppose there were mutilations that weren’t visible? “Neither men nor women shall we be in the world to come.” At last Bright understood why his visitors seemed sexless. He tried to shrink back as the man who had turned up the hymn took hold of the electric iron.

The man grasped it by the point before he found the handle. Bright saw the gray skin of his fingers curl up like charred paper, but the man didn’t react at all. He closed his free hand around the handle and waited while his companion plodded toward Bright, the edge of the knife blade glinting like a razor. “It helps if you sing,” said the man with the knife. Though Bright had never been particularly religious, nobody could have prayed harder than he started to pray then. He was praying that by the time the first of them reached him, he would feel as little as they did.

BY STEPHEN KING

Considering that it was probably the end of the world, Maddie Pace thought she was doing a good job.
Hell
of a good job. She thought that she just might be coping with the End of Everything better than anyone else on earth. And she was
positive
she was coping better than any other
pregnant
woman on earth.

Coping
.

Maddie Pace, of all people.

Maddie Pace, who sometimes couldn’t sleep if, after a visit from Reverend Peebles, she spied a dust-bunny under the dining room table—just the thought that Reverend Peebles
might
have seen that dust-bunny could be enough to keep her awake until two in the morning.

Maddie Pace, who, as Maddie Sullivan, used to drive her fiancé Jack crazy when she froze over a menu, debating entrées sometimes for as long as half an hour.

“Maddie, why don’t you just flip a coin?” he’d asked her once after she had managed to narrow it down to a choice between the braised veal and the lamb chops… and then could get no further. “I’ve had five bottles of this goddam German beer already, and if you don’t make up y’mind pretty damn quick, there’s gonna be a drunk lobsterman under the table before we ever get any food
on
it!”

So she had smiled nervously, ordered the braised veal… and then lay awake until well past midnight, wondering if the chops might not have been better.

She’d had no trouble coping with Jack’s proposal, however; she accepted it and him quickly, and with tremendous relief. Following the death of her father, Maddie and her mother had lived an aimless, cloudy sort of life on Deer Isle, off the coast of Maine. “If I wasn’t around to tell them women where to squat and lean against the wheel,” George Sullivan had been fond of saying while in his cups and among his friends at Buster’s Tavern or in the back room of Daggett’s Barber Shop, “I don’t know what the hell they’d do.”

When he died of a massive coronary, Maddie was nineteen and minding the town library weekday evenings at a salary of $41.50 a week. Her mother was minding the house—or had been, that was, when George reminded her (sometimes with a good, hard shot to the ear) that she had a house that needed minding.

He was right.

They didn’t speak of it because it embarrassed them, but he was right and both of them knew it. Without George around to tell them where to squat and lean to the wheel, they didn’t know what the hell to do. Money wasn’t the problem; George had believed passionately in insurance, and when he dropped down dead during the tiebreaker frame of the League Bowl-Offs at Big Duke’s Big Ten in Yarmouth, his wife had come into better than a hundred thousand dollars. And island life was cheap, if you owned your own home and kept your garden weeded and knew how to put up your own vegetables come fall. The
problem
was having nothing to focus on. The
problem
was how the center seemed to have dropped out of their lives when George went facedown in his Island Amoco bowling shirt just over the foul line of lane nineteen in Big Duke’s (and goddam if he hadn’t picked up the spare they needed to win, too). With George gone their lives had become an eerie sort of blur.

It’s like being lost in a heavy fog, Maddie thought sometimes. Only instead of looking for the road, or a house, or the village, or just some landmark like that lightning-struck pine in the Altons’ woodlot, I am looking for the wheel. If I can ever find the wheel, maybe I can tell
myself
to squat and lean my shoulder to it.

At last she found her wheel; it turned out to be Jack Pace. Women marry their fathers and men their mothers, some say, and while such a broad statement can hardly be true all of the time, it was true in Maddie’s case. Her father had been looked upon by his peers with fear and admiration—“Don’t fool with George Sullivan, chummy,” they’d say. “He’s one hefty son of a bitch and he’d just as soon knock the nose off your face as fart downwind.”

It was true at home, too. He’d been domineering and sometimes physically abusive… but he’d also known things to want and work for, like the Ford pickup, the chain saw, or those two acres that bounded their place on the left. Pop Cook’s land. George Sullivan had been known to refer to Pop Cook (out of his cups as well as in them) as one stinky old bastid, but there was some good hardwood left on those two acres. Pop didn’t know it because he had gone to living on the mainland when his arthritis really got going and crippled him up bad, and George let it be known on the island that what that bastid Pop Cook didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him none, and furthermore, he would kill the man or woman that let light into the darkness of Pop’s ignorance. No one did, and eventually the Sullivans got the land. And the wood, of course. The hardwood was logged off for the two wood stoves that heated the house in three years, but the land would remain. That was what George said and they believed him, believed
in
him, and they worked, all three of them. He said you got to put your shoulder to this wheel and
push
the bitch, you got to push ha’ad because she don’t move easy. So that was what they did.

In those days Maddy’s mother had kept a roadside stand, and there were always plenty of tourists who bought the vegetables she grew—the ones George
told
her to grow, of course, and even though they were never exactly what her mother called “the Gotrocks family,” they made out. Even in years when lobstering was bad, they made out.

Jack Pace could be domineering when Maddie’s indecision finally forced him to be, and she suspected that, loving as he was in their courtship, he might get around to the physical part—the twisted arm when supper was cold, the occasional slap or downright paddling—in time; when the bloom was off the rose, so as to speak. She saw the similarities… but she loved him. And needed him.

“I’m not going to be a lobsterman all my life, Maddie,” he told her the week before they married, and she believed him. A year before, when he had asked her out for the first time (she’d had no trouble coping then, either—had said yes almost before all the words could get out of his mouth, and she had blushed to the roots of her hair at the sound of her own naked eagerness), he would have said, “I
ain’t
going to be a lobsterman all my life.” A small change… but all the difference in the world. He had been going to night school three evenings a week, taking the ferry over and back. He would be dog tired after a day of pulling pots, but he’d go just the same, pausing only long enough to shower off the powerful smells of lobster and brine and to gulp two No Doz with hot coffee. After a while, when she saw he really meant to stick to it, Maddie began putting up hot soup for him to drink on the ferry ride over. Otherwise, he would have had no supper at all.

She remembered agonizing over the canned soups in the store—there were so
many
! Would he want tomato? Some people didn’t like tomato soup. In fact, some people
hated
tomato soup, even if you made it with milk instead of water. Vegetable soup? Turkey? Cream of chicken? Her helpless eyes roved the shelf display for nearly ten minutes before Charlene Nedeau asked if she could help her with something—only Charlene said it in a sarcastic way, and Maddie guessed she would tell all her friends at high school tomorrow and they would giggle about it—about
her
—in the Girls’ Room, because Charlene knew what was wrong; the same thing that was always wrong. It was just Maddie Sullivan, unable to make up her mind over so simple a thing as a can of
soup
. How she had ever been able to decide to accept Jack Pace’s proposal was a wonder and a marvel to all of them… but of course they didn’t know how, once you found the wheel, you had to have someone to tell you when to stoop and where exactly to lean against it.