Four Past Midnight (96 page)

He looked at her steadily.

She raised her hands and pressed them against her temples. “I didn't mean it. I don't know why I said it. I ... my head ... Sam, my poor
head
! It feels like it's splitting in two.”

The oncoming train whistled as it crossed the Proverbia River and rolled into Junction City. It was the mid-afternoon freight, the one that charged through without stopping on its way to the Omaha stockyards. Sam could see it now.

“There's not much time, Sarah. It has to be now. Turn around and look at the train. Watch it come.”

“Yes,” she said suddenly. “All right. Do what you want to do, Sam. And if you see ... see it isn't going to work ... then push me. Push me in front of the train. Then you can tell the others that I jumped ... that it was suicide.” She looked at him pleadingly—deathly-tired eyes staring into his from her exhausted face. “They know I haven't been feeling myself—the people in the Program. You can't keep how you feel from them. After awhile that's just not possible. They'll believe you if you say I jumped, and they'd be right, because I don't want to go on like this. But the thing is ... Sam, the thing is, I think that before long I
will
want to go on.”

“Be quiet,” he said. “We're not going to talk about suicide. Look at the train, Sarah, and remember I love you.”

She turned toward the train, less than a mile away now and coming fast. Her hands went to the nape of her neck and lifted her hair. Sam bent forward ... and what he was looking for was there, crouched high on the clean white flesh of her neck. He knew that her brain-stem began less than half an inch below that place, and he felt his stomach twist with revulsion.

He bent forward toward the blistery growth. It was covered in a spiderweb skein of crisscrossing white threads, but he could see it beneath, a lump of pinkish jelly that throbbed and pulsed with the beat of her heart.

“
Leave me alone!
” Ardelia Lortz suddenly screamed from the mouth of the woman Sam had come to love. “
Leave me alone
,
you bastard!
” But Sarah's hands were steady, holding her hair up, giving him access.

“Can you see the numbers on the engine, Sarah?” he murmured.

She moaned.

He drove his thumb into the soft glob of red licorice he held, making a well a little bigger than the parasite which lay on Sarah's neck. “Read them to me, Sarah. Read me the numbers.”

“Two ... six ... oh Sam, oh my head hurts ... it feels like big hands pulling my brain into two pieces ...”

“Read the numbers, Sarah,” he murmured, and brought the Bull's Eye licorice down toward that pulsing, obscene growth.

“Five ... nine ... five ...”

He closed the licorice gently over it. He could feel it suddenly, wriggling and squirming under the sugary blanket.
What if it breaks? What if it just breaks open before I can pull it off her? It's all Ardelia's concentrated poison ... what if it breaks before I get it off?

The oncoming train whistled again. The sound buried Sarah's shriek of pain.

“
Steady—
”

He simultaneously pulled the licorice back and folded it over. He had it; it was caught in the candy, pulsing and throbbing like a tiny sick heart. On the back of Sarah's neck were three tiny dark holes, no bigger than pinpricks.

“
It's gone!
” she cried. “
Sam
, it's
gone!
”

“Not yet,” Sam said grimly. The licorice lay on his palm again, and a bubble was pushing up its surface, straining to break through—

The train was roaring past the Junction City depot now, the depot where a man named Brian Kelly had once tossed Dave Duncan four bits and then told him to get in the wind. Less than three hundred yards away and coming fast.

Sam pushed past Sarah and knelt by the tracks.

“
Sam
,
what are you doing?”

“Here you go, Ardelia,” he murmured. “Try this.” He slapped the pulsing, stretching blob of red licorice down on one of the gleaming steel rails.

In his mind he heard a shriek of unutterable fury and terror. He stood back, watching the thing trapped inside the licorice struggle and push. The candy split open ... he saw a darker red inside trying to push itself out ... and then the 2:20 to Omaha rushed over it in an organized storm of pounding rods and grinding wheels.

The licorice disappeared, and inside of Sam Peebles's mind, that drilling shriek was cut off as if with a knife.

He stepped back and turned to Sarah. She was swaying on her feet, her eyes wide and full of dazed joy. He slipped his arms around her waist and held her as the boxcars and flatcars and tankers thundered past them, blowing their hair back.

They stood like that until the caboose passed, trailing its small red lights off into the west. Then she drew away from him a little ... but not out of the circle of his arms—and looked at him.

“Am I free, Sam? Am I really free of her? It feels like I am, but I can hardly believe it.”

“You're free,” Sam agreed. “Your fine is paid, too, Sarah. Forever and ever, your fine is paid.”

She brought her face to his and began to cover his lips and cheeks and eyes with small kisses. Her own eyes did not close as she did this; she looked at him gravely all the while.

He took her hands at last and said, “Why don't we go back inside, and finish paying our respects? Your friends will be wondering where you are.”

“They can be your friends, too, Sam ... if you want them to be.”

He nodded. “I do. I want that a lot.”

“Honesty and belief,” she said, and touched his cheek.

“Those are the words.” He kissed her again, then offered his arm. “Will you walk with me, lady?”

She linked her arm through his. “Anywhere you want, sir. Anywhere at all.”

They walked slowly back across the lawn to Angle Street together, arm in arm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

E
very now and then someone will ask me, “When are you going to get tired of this horror stuff, Steve, and write something serious?”

I used to believe the implied insult in this question was accidental, but as the years go by I have become more and more convinced that it is not. I watch the faces of the people who drop that particular dime, you see, and most of them look like bombardiers waiting to see if their last stick of bombs is going to fall wide or hit the targeted factory or munitions dump dead on.

The fact is, almost all of the stuff I have written—and that includes a lot of the funny stuff—was written in a serious frame of mind. I can remember very few occasions when I sat at the typewriter laughing uncontrollably over some wild and crazy bit of fluff I had just finished churning out. I'm never going to be Reynolds Price or Larry Woiwode—it isn't in me—but that doesn't mean I don't care as deeply about what I do. I have to do what I
can
do, however—as Nils Lofgren once put it, “I gotta be my dirty self ... I won't play no jive.”

If
real
—meaning !!SOMETHING THAT COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN!! —is your definition of serious, you are in the wrong place and you should by all means leave the building. But please remember as you go that I'm not the only one doing business at this particular site; Franz Kafka had an office here, and George Orwell, and Shirley Jackson, and Jorge Luis Borges, and Jonathan Swift, and Lewis Carroll. A glance at the directory in the lobby shows the present tenants include Thomas Berger, Ray Bradbury, Jonathan Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Disch, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Peter Straub, Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Katherine Dunn, and Mark Halpern.

I am doing what I do for the most serious reasons: love, money, and obsession. The tale of the irrational is the sanest way I know of expressing the world in which I live. These tales have served me as instruments of both metaphor and morality; they continue to offer the best window I know on the question of how we perceive things and the corollary question of how we do or do not behave on the basis of our perceptions. I have explored these questions as well as I can within the limits of my talent and intelligence. I am no one's National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize winner, but I'm serious, all right. If you don't believe anything else, believe this: when I take you by your hand and begin to talk, my friend, I believe every word I say.

A lot of the things I have to say—those Really Serious Things—have to do with the small-town world in which I was raised and where I still live. Stories and novels are scale models of what we laughingly call “real life,” and I believe that lives as they are lived in small towns are scale models of what we laughingly call “society.” This idea is certainly open to argument, and argument is perfectly fine (without it, a lot of literature teachers and critics would be looking for work); I'm just saying that a writer needs some sort of launching pad, and aside from the firm belief that a story may exist with honor for its own self, the idea of the small town as social and psychological microcosm is mine. I began experimenting with this sort of thing in Carrie, and continued on a more ambitious level with
‘Salem's
Lot. I never really hit my stride, however, until
The Dead Zone.

That was, I think, the first of my Castle Rock stories (and Castle Rock is really just the town of Jerusalem's Lot without the vampires). In the years since it was written, Castle Rock has increasingly become “my town,” in the sense that the mythical city of Isola is Ed McBain's town and the West Virginia village of Glory was Davis Grubb's town. I have been called back there time and time again to examine the lives of its residents and the geographies which seem to rule their lives—Castle Hill and Castle View, Castle Lake and the Town Roads which lie around it in a tangle at the western end of the town.

As the years passed, I became more and more interested in—almost entranced by—the secret life of this town, by the hidden relationships which seemed to come clearer and clearer to me. Much of this history remains either unwritten or unpublished: how the late Sheriff George Bannerman lost his virginity in the back seat of his dead father's car, how Ophelia Todd's husband was killed by a walking windmill, how Deputy Andy Clutterbuck lost the index finger on his left hand (it was cut off in a fan and the family dog ate it).

Following The Dead Zone, which is partly the story of the psychotic Frank Dodd, I wrote a novella called “The Body”;
Cujo
, the novel in which good old Sheriff Bannerman bit the dust; and a number of short stories and novelettes about the town (the best of them, at least in my mind, are “Mrs. Todd's Shortcut” and “Uncle Otto's Truck”). All of which is very well, but a state of entrancement with a fictional setting may not be the best thing in the world for a writer. It was for Faulkner and J. R. R. Tolkien, but sometimes a couple of exceptions just prove the rule, and besides, I don't play in that league.

So at some point I decided—first in my subconscious mind, I think, where all that Really Serious Work takes place—that the time had come to close the book on Castle Rock, Maine, where so many of my own favorite characters have lived and died. Enough, after all, is enough. Time to move on (maybe all the way next door to Harlow, ha-ha). But I didn't just want to walk away; I wanted to
finish
things, and do it with a bang.

Little by little I began to grasp how that could be done, and over the last four years or so I have been engaged in writing a Castle Rock Trilogy, if you please—the
last
Castle Rock stories. They were not written in order (I sometimes think “out of order” is the story of my life), but now they are written, and they are serious enough ... but I hope that doesn't mean that they are sober-sided or boring.

The first of these stories,
The Dark Half
, was published in 1989. While it is primarily the story of Thad Beaumont and is in large part set in a town called Ludlow (the town where the Creeds lived in Pet
Sematary
), the town of Castle Rock figures in the tale, and the book serves to introduce Sheriff Bannerman's replacement, a fellow named Alan Pangborn. Sheriff Pangborn is at the center of the last story in this sequence, a long novel called
Needful Things
, which is scheduled to be published next year and will conclude my doings with what local people call The Rock.

The connective tissue between these longer works is the story which follows. You will meet few if any of Castle Rock's larger figures in “The Sun Dog,” but it will serve to introduce you to Pop Merrill, whose nephew is town bad boy (and Gordie LaChance's
bête noire
in “The Body”) Ace Merrill. “The Sun Dog” also sets the stage for the final fireworks display ... and, I hope, exists as a satisfying story on its own, one that can be read with pleasure even if you don't give a hang about
The Dark Half or Needful Things
.