Stephen King's N. (6 page)

[I tell him I do, of course I do.]

I spent that whole day in Ackerman’s Field, watching and counting. Because the twenty-first was the summer solstice. The day of highest danger. Just as the winter solstice in December is the day when the danger is lowest. It was last year, it will be again this year, it has been every year since the beginning of time. And in the months ahead—until fall, at least—I’ve got my work cut out for me. The twenty-first…I can’t tell you how awful it was out there. The way that eighth stone kept shimmering out of existence. How hard it was to concentrate it back into the world. The way the darkness would gather and recede…gather and recede…like the tide. Once I dozed off and when I looked up there was an inhuman eye—a hideous three-lobed eye—looking back at me. I screamed, but I didn’t run. Because the world was depending on me. Depending on me and not even knowing it. Instead of running, I raised my camera and looked through the viewfinder. Eight stones. No eye. But after that I stayed awake.

Finally the circle steadied, and I knew I could go. At least for that day. By then the sun was setting again, as it had on the first evening; a ball of fire sitting on the horizon, turning the Androscoggin into a bleeding snake.

And Doc—whether it’s real or just a delusion, the work is just as hard. And the responsibility! I’m so tired. Talk about having the weight of the world on your shoulders…

[He’s back on the couch again. He is a big man, but now he looks small and shriveled. Then he smiles.]

At least I’ll get a break come winter. If I make it that far. And you know what? I think we’ve finished, you and I. As they used to say on the radio, “This concludes today’s program.” Although…who knows? You may see me again. Or at least hear from me.

[I tell him on the contrary, we have a lot more work to do. I tell him he is carrying a weight; an invisible eight-hundred-pound gorilla on his back, and that together we can persuade it to climb down. I say we can do it, but it will take time. I say all these things, and I write him two prescriptions, but in my heart I fear that he means it; he’s done. He takes the prescriptions, but he’s done. Perhaps only with me; perhaps with life itself.]

Thank you, Doc. For everything. For listening. And those?

[He points to the table beside the couch, with its careful arrangement.]

I wouldn’t move them, if I were you.

[I give him an appointment card, and he tucks it carefully away in his pocket. And when he pats the pocket with his hand to make sure it’s safe, I think perhaps I am wrong, and I will actually see him on July 5th. I have been wrong before. I have come to like N., and I don’t want him to step into that ring of stones for good. It only exists in his mind, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.]

[Final Session Ends]

4. Dr. Bonsaint’s Manuscript (Fragmentary)

July 5, 2007

I called his home phone number when I saw the obituary. Got C., the daughter who goes to school here in Maine. She was remarkably composed, saying that in her heart she was not surprised. She told me she was the first to arrive at N.’s Portland home (her summer job is in Camden, not that far distant), but I could hear others in the house. That’s good. The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together when a member dies, and that is particularly important when the death is violent and unexpected—murder or suicide.

She knew who I was. Talked freely. Yes, it was suicide. His car. The garage. Towels laid along the bottoms of the doors, and I am sure an even number of them. Ten or twenty; both good numbers, according to N. Thirty not so good, but do people—especially men living on their own—have as many as thirty towels in their homes? I’m pretty sure they don’t. I know I don’t.

There will be an inquest, she said. They will find drugs—the very ones I prescribed, I have no doubt—in his system, but probably not in lethal amounts. Not that it matters, I suppose; N. is just as dead, no matter what the cause.

She asked me if I would come to the funeral. I was touched. To the point of tears, in fact. I said I would, if the family would have me. Sounding surprised, she said of course they would…why not?

“Because in the end I couldn’t help him,” I said.

“You tried,” she said. “That’s the important thing.” And I felt the stinging in my eyes again. Her kindness.

Before hanging up, I asked her if he left a note. She said yes. Three words. Am so tired.

He should have added his name. That would have made four.

July 7, 2007

At both the church and cemetery, N.’s people—especially C.—took me in and made me welcome. The miracle of family, which can open its circle even at such critical times. Even to take in a stranger. There were close to a hundred people, many from the extended family of his professional life. I wept at the graveside. Am neither surprised nor ashamed: identification between analyst and patient can be a powerful thing. C. took my hand, hugged me, and thanked me for trying to help her father. I told her she was welcome, but I felt like an imposter, a failure.

Beautiful summer day. What mockery.

Tonight I have been playing the tapes of our sessions. I think I will transcribe them. There is surely at least an article in N.’s story—a small addition to the literature of obsessive-compulsive disorder—and perhaps something larger. A book. Yet I am hesitant. What holds me back is knowing I’d have to visit that field, and compare N.’s fantasy to the reality. His world to mine. That the field exists I am quite sure. And the stones? Yes, probably there are stones. With no meaning beyond those his compulsions lent them.

Beautiful red sunset this evening.

July 17, 2007

I took the day off and went out to Motton. It has been on my mind, and in the end I saw no reason not to go. I was “dither-dathering,” our mother would have said. If I intend to write up N.’s case, such dither-dathering must stop. No excuses. With markers from my childhood to guide me—the Bale Road Bridge (which Sheila and I used to call, for reasons I can no longer remember, the Fail Road Bridge), Boy Hill, and especially the Serenity Ridge Cemetery—I thought I would find N.’s road without too much trouble, and I did. There could be little question, because it was the only dirt track with a chain across it and a NO TRESPASSING sign.

I parked in the cemetery lot, as N. had done before me. Although it was a bright hot summer midday, I could hear only a few birds singing, and those very distant. No cars passed on Route 117, only one overloaded pulp-truck that went droning past at seventy miles an hour, blowing my hair back from my forehead in a blast of hot air and oily exhaust. After that it was just me. I thought of childhood walks taken to the Fail Road Bridge with my little Zebco fishing rod propped on my shoulder like a soldier’s carbine. I was never afraid then, and told myself I wasn’t afraid on this day.

But I was. Nor do I count that fear as completely irrational. Back-trailing a patient’s mental illness to its source is never comfortable.

I stood at the chain, asking myself if I really wanted to do this—if I wanted to trespass, not just on land that wasn’t mine, but on an obsessive-compulsive fantasy that had very likely killed its possessor. (Or—this is probably closer—its possessed.) The choice didn’t seem as clear as it had in the morning, when I put on my jeans and old red hiking boots. This morning it seemed simple: “Go out and compare the reality to N.’s fantasy, or give up the idea of the article (or book).” But what is reality? Who am I to insist that the world perceived by Dr. B.’s senses is more “real” than that which was perceived by those of the late Accountant N.?

The answer to that seemed clear enough: Dr. B. is a man who has not committed suicide, a man who does not count, touch, or place, a man who believes that numbers, whether odd or even, are just numbers. Dr. B. is a man who is able to cope with the world. Ultimately, Accountant N. was not. Therefore, Dr. B.’s perception of reality is more viable than Accountant N.’s.

But once I was there, and sensed the quiet power of the place (even at the foot of the road, while still outside the chain), it occurred to me that the choice was really much simpler: walk up that deserted road to Ackerman’s Field or turn around and walk back down the blacktop to my car. Drive away. Forget the possible book, forget the rather more probable article. Forget N. and get on with my own life.

Except. Except.

Driving away might (I only say might) mean that on some level, one deep in my subconscious, where all the old superstitions still live (going hand in hand with all the old red urges), I had accepted N.’s belief that Ackerman’s Field contains a thin place protected by magic ringstones, and that if I were to go there, I might re-activate some terrible process, some terrible struggle, which N. felt his suicide could halt (at least temporarily). It would mean I had accepted (in that same deep part of me where we are all nearly as similar as ants toiling in an underground nest) the idea that I was to be the next guardian. That I had been called. And if I gave in to such notions…

“My life would never be the same.” I said that aloud. “I could never look at the world in the same way.”

All at once the business seemed very serious. Sometimes we drift, do we not? Into places where the choices are no longer simple, and the consequences of picking the wrong option become grave. Perhaps life-or sanity-threatening.

Or…what if they aren’t choices at all? What if they only look like choices?

I pushed the idea aside and squeezed past one of the posts holding the chains. I have been called a witch-doctor both by patients and (jokingly, I assume) by my peers, but I had no wish to think of myself that way; to look at myself in the shaving-mirror and think, There is a man who was influenced at a critical moment not by his own thought-processes but by a dead patient’s delusion.

There were no trees across the road, but I saw several—birches and pines, mostly—lying in the ditch on the uphill side. They might have fallen this year and been dragged aside, or last year, or the year before. It was impossible for me to tell. I’m no woodsman.

I came to a rising hill and saw the woods pull away on either side, opening a vast stretch of hot summer sky. It was like walking into N.’s head. I stopped halfway up the hill, not because I was out of breath, but to ask myself one final time if this was what I wanted. Then I continued on.

I wish I hadn’t.

The field was there, and the view opening to the west was every bit as spectacular as N. had suggested—breathtaking, really. Even with the sun high and yellow instead of sitting red above the horizon. The stones were there, too, about forty yards down the slope. And yes, they do suggest circularity, although they are in no sense the sort of circle one sees at Stonehenge. I counted them. There were eight, just as N. said.

(Except when he said there were seven.)

The grass inside that rough grouping did look a bit patchy and yellow compared to the thigh-high greenery in the rest of the field (it stretches down to a wide acreage of mixed oaks, firs, and birches), but it was by no means dead. What caught my attention closer by was a little cluster of sumac bushes. Those weren’t dead, either—at least I don’t think so, but the leaves were black instead of green-streaked-with-red, and they had no shape. They were ill-formed things, somehow hard to look at. They offended the order the eye expected. I can’t put it any better than that.

About ten yards down from where I stood, I saw something white caught in one of those bushes. I walked toward it, saw it was an envelope, and knew N. had left it for me. If not on the day of his suicide, then not long before. I felt a terrible sinking in my stomach. A clear sense that in deciding to come here (if I did decide), I had made the wrong choice. That I had been certain to make the wrong choice, in fact, having been educated to trust my intellect over my instincts.

Rubbish. I know I shouldn’t be thinking this way.

Of course (here’s a point!), N. knew, too, and went on thinking that way just the same. No doubt counting the towels even as he prepared for his own…

To make sure it was an even number.

Shit. The mind gets up to funny tricks, doesn’t it? Shadows grow faces.

The envelope was wrapped in a clear plastic Baggie to keep it dry. The printing on the front was perfectly firm, perfectly clear: DR. JOHN BONSAINT.

I took it out of the Baggie, then looked down the slope at the stones again. Still eight. Of course there were. But not a bird sang, not a cricket creaked. The day held its breath. Every shadow was carved. I know now what N. meant about feeling cast back in time.

There was something in the envelope; I could feel it sliding back and forth, and my fingers knew it for what it was even before I tore off the end of the envelope and dumped it into the palm of my hand. A key.

Also a note. Just two words. Sorry, Doc. And his name, of course. First name only. That makes three words, in all. Not a good number. At least according to N.

I put the key in my pocket and stood beside a sumac bush that didn’t look like a sumac bush—black leaves, branches twisted until they almost looked like runes, or letters…

Not CTHUN!

…and decided, Time to leave. That’s enough. If something has mutated the bushes, some environmental condition that’s poisoned the ground, so be it. The bushes are not the important part of this landscape; the stones are the important part. There are eight. You have tested the world and found it as you hoped it would be, as you knew it would be, as it always was. If this field seems too quiet—fraught, somehow—that is undoubtedly the lingering effect of N.’s story on your own mind. Not to mention his suicide. Now go back to your life. Never mind the silence, or the sense—in your mind like a thundercloud—that something is lurking in that silence. Go back to your life, Dr. B.

Go back while you still can.

I returned to the end of the road. The high green hay whickering against my jeans like a low, gasping voice. The sun beating on my neck and shoulders.

I felt an urge to turn and look again. Strong urge. I fought it and lost.

When I turned around I saw seven stones. Not eight, but seven. I counted them twice to make sure. And it did seem darker inside the stones, as if a cloud had passed over the sun. One so small it made shade only in that place. Only it didn’t look like a shadow. It looked like a particular darkness, one that was moving over the yellow, matted grass, circling in on itself and then belling out again toward the gap where, I was sure (almost sure; that’s the hell of it) an eighth stone had been standing when I arrived.