Authors: Stephen King
through the edited script in a kind of daze. I felt such a feeling of regret . . . of
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loss . . .'' He looked directly at me and
said, ``Does any of this make any sense to you?''
`Ìt makes sense,'' I said. And it did. In a crazy sort of way.
``There were lots of pills left in the house,'' he said. ``Linda and I were like the
Demmicks in a lot of ways, Clyde--we
really did believe in living better chemically, and a couple of times I came very
close to taking a couple of double
handfuls. The way the thought always came to me wasn't in terms of suicide, but in
terms of wanting to catch up to
Linda and Danny. To catch up while there was still time.''
I nodded. It was what I'd thought about Ardis McGill when, three days after we'd said
toodle-oo to each other in
Blondie's, I'd found her in that stuffy attic room with a small blue hole in the
center of her forehead. Except it had been
Sam Landry who had really killed her, and who had accomplished the deed with a kind of
flexible bullet to the brain.
Of course it had been. In my world Sam Landry, this tired-looking man in the hobo's
pants, was responsible for
everything. The idea should have seemed crazy, and it did . . . but it was getting
saner all the time.
I found I had just energy enough to swivel my chair and look out my window. What I saw
somehow did not surprise me
in the least: Sunset Boulevard and all that surrounded it had frozen solid. Cars,
buses, pedestrians, all stopped dead in
their tracks. It was a Kodak snapshot world out there, and why not? Its creator could
not be bothered with animating
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much of it, at least for the time being; he was still caught in the whirlpool of his
own pain and grief. Hell, I was lucky
to still be breathing myself.
``So what happened?'' I asked. ``How did you get here, Sam? Can I call you that? Do
you mind?''
``No, I don't mind. I can't give you a very good answer, though, because I don't
exactly know. All I know for sure is
that every time I thought of the pills, I thought of you. What I thought specifically
was, `Clyde Umney would never do
this, and he'd sneer at anyone who did. He'd call it the coward's way out.' ''
I considered that, found it fair enough, and nodded. For someone staring some horrible
ailment in the face--Vernon's
cancer, or the misbegotten nightmare that had killed this man's son--I might make an
exception, but take the pipe just
because you were depressed? That was for pansies.
``Then I thought, `But that's Clyde Umney, and Clyde is make-believe . . . just a
figment of your imagination.' That
idea wouldn't live, though. It's the dumbbells of the world--politicians and lawyers,
for the most part--who sneer at
imagination, and think a thing isn't real unless they can smoke it or stroke it or
feel it or fuck it. They think that way
because they have no imagination themselves, and they have no idea of its power. I
knew better. Hell, I ought to--my
imagination has been buying my food and paying the mortgage for the last ten years or
so.
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`Àt the same time, I knew I couldn't go on living in what I used to think of as `the
real world,' by which I suppose we
all mean `the only world.' That's when I started to realize there was only one place
left where I could go and feel
welcome, and only one person I could be when I got there. The place was here--Los
Angeles, in 1930-something. And
the person was you.''
I heard that faint whirring sound coming from inside his gadget again, but I didn't
turn around.
Partly because I was afraid to.
And partly because I no longer knew if I could.
_______________________________________________________________________
VI. Umney's Last Case.
On the street seven stories below, a man was frozen with his head half-turned to look
at the woman on the corner, who
was climbing up the step of the eight-fifty bus headed downtown. She had exposed a
momentary length of beautiful
leg, and this was what the man was looking at. A little farther down the street a boy
was holding out his battered old
baseball glove to catch the ball frozen in mid-air just above his head. And, floating
six feet above the street like a ghost
called up by a third-rate swami at a carnival seance, was one of the newspapers from
Peoria Smith's overturned table.
Incredibly, I could see the two photographs on it from up here: Hitler above the fold,
the recently deceased Cuban
bandleader below it.
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Landry's voice seemed to come from a long way off.
`Àt first I thought that meant I'd be spending the rest of my life in some nut-ward,
thinking I was you, but that was all
right, because it would only be my physical self locked up in the funny-farm, do you
see? And then, gradually, I began
to realize that it could be a lot more than that . . . that maybe there might be a way
I could actually . . . well . . . slip all
the way in. And do you know what the key was?''
``Yes,'' I said, not looking around. That whir came again as something in his gadget
revolved, and suddenly the
newspaper frozen in mid-air flapped off down the frozen Boulevard. A moment or two
later an old DeSoto rolled
jerkily through the intersection of Sunset and Fernando. It struck the boy wearing the
baseball glove, and both he and
the DeSoto sedan disappeared. Not the ball, though. It fell into the street, rolled
halfway to the gutter, then froze solid
again.
``You do?'' He sounded surprised.
``Yeah. Peoria was the key.''
``That's right.'' He laughed, then cleared his throat--nervous sounds, both of them.
`Ì keep forgetting that you're me.''
It was a luxury I didn't have.
`Ì was fooling around with a new book, and not getting anywhere. I'd tried Chapter
One six different ways to Sunday
before realizing a really interesting thing: Peoria Smith didn't like you.''
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That made me swing around in a hurry. ``The hell you say!''
`Ì didn't think you'd believe it, but it's the truth, and I'd somehow known it all
along. I don't want to convene the lit
class again, Clyde, but I'll tell you one thing about my trade--writing stories in the
first person is a funny, tricky
business. It's as if everything the writer knows comes from his main character, like a
series of letters or dispatches from
some far-off battle zone. It's very rare for the writer to have a secret, but in this
case I did. It was as if your little part
of Sunset Boulevard were the Garden of Eden--''
`Ì never heard it called that before,'' I remarked.
``--and there was a snake in it, one I saw and you didn't. A snake named Peoria
Smith.''
Outside, the frozen world that he'd called my Garden of Eden continued to darken,
although the sky was cloudless. The
Red Door, a nightclub reputedly owned by Lucky Luciano, disappeared. For a moment
there was just a hole where it
had been, and then a new building filled it--a restaurant called Petit Déjeuner with a
window full of ferns. I glanced up
the street and saw that other changes were going on--new buildings were replacing old
ones with silent, spooky speed.
They meant I was running out of time; I knew this. Unfortunately, I knew something
else, as well--there was probably
not going to be any nick in this bundle of time. When God walks into your office and
tells you He's decided he likes
your life better than His own, what the hell are your options?
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`Ì junked all the various drafts of the novel I'd started two months after my wife's
death,'' Landry said. `Ìt was
easy--poor crippled things that they were. And then I started a new one. I called it .
. . can you guess, Clyde?''
``Sure,'' I said, and swung around. It took all my strength, but what I suppose this
geek would call my ``motivation''
was good. Sunset Strip isn't exactly the Champs Elysees or Hyde Park, but it's my
world. I didn't want to watch him
tear it apart and rebuild it the way he wanted it. `Ì suppose you called it Umney's
Last Case.''
He looked faintly surprised. ``You suppose right.''
I waved my hand. It was an effort, but I managed. `Ì didn't win the Shamus of the
Year Award in 1934 and '35 for
nothing, you know.''
He smiled at that. ``Yes. I always did like that line.''
Suddenly I hated him--hated him like poison. If I could have summoned the strength to
lunge across the desk and choke
the life out of him, I would have done it. He saw it, too. The smile faded.
``Forget it, Clyde--you wouldn't have a chance.''
``Why don't you get out of here?'' I grated at him. ``Just get out and let a working
stiff alone?''
``Because I can't. I couldn't even if I wanted to . . . and I don't.'' He looked at me
with an odd mixture of anger and
pleading. ``Try to look at it from my point of view, Clyde--''
``Do I have any choice? Have I ever?''
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He ignored that. ``Here's a world where I'll never get any older, a year where all the
clocks are stopped at just about
eighteen months before World War II, where the newspapers always cost three cents,
where I can eat all the eggs and
red meat I want and never have to worry about my cholesterol level.''
`Ì don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.''
He leaned forward earnestly. ``No, you don't! And that's exactly the point, Clyde!
This is a world where I can really do
the job I dreamed about doing when I was a little boy--I can be a private eye. I can
go racketing around in a fast car at
two in the morning, shoot it out with hoodlums--knowing they may die but I won't--and
wake up eight hours later
next to a beautiful chanteuse with the birds twittering in the trees and the sun
shining in my bedroom window. That
clear, beautiful California sun.''
``My bedroom window faces west,'' I said.
``Not anymore,'' he replied calmly, and I felt my hands curl into strengthless fists
on the arms of my chair. ``Do you see
how wonderful it is? How perfect? In this world, people don't go half-mad with itching
caused by a stupid, undignified
disease called shingles. In this world, people don't go gray, let alone bald.''
He looked at me levelly, and in his gaze I saw no hope for me. No hope at all.
`Ìn this world, beloved sons never die of AIDS and beloved wives never take overdoses
of sleeping pills. Besides, you
were always the outsider here, not me, no matter how it might have felt to you. This
is my world, born in my
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imagination and maintained by my effort and ambition. I loaned it to you for awhile,
that's all . . . and now I'm taking
it back.''
``Finish telling me how you got in, will you do that much? I really want to hear.''
`Ìt was easy. I tore it apart, starting with the Demmicks, who were never much more
than a lousy imitation of Nick and
Nora Charles, and rebuilt it in my own image. I took away all the beloved supporting
characters, and now I'm removing
all the old landmarks. I'm pulling the rug out from under you a strand at a time, in
other words, and I'm not proud of it,
but I am proud of the sustained effort of will it's taken to pull it off.''
`What's happened to you back in your own world?'' I was still keeping him talking, but
now it was nothing but habit,
like an old milk-horse finding his way back to the barn on a snowy morning.
He shrugged. ``Dead, maybe. Or maybe I really have left a physical self--a husk-sitting catatonic in some mental
institution. I don't think either of those things is really the case, though--all of
this feels too real. No, I think I made it
all the way, Clyde. I think that back home they're looking for a missing writer . . .
with no idea that he's disappeared
into the storage banks of his own word-processor. And the truth is I really don't
care.''
`Ànd me? What happens to me?''
``Clyde,'' he said, `Ì don't care about that, either.''
He bent over his gadget again.
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``Don't!'' I said sharply.
He looked up.
`Ì . . .'' I heard the quiver in my voice, tried to control it, and found I couldn't.
``Mister, I'm afraid. Please leave me
alone. I know it's not really my world out there anymore--hell, in here, either--but