Stephen King - End of Watch

‘Right now? The SAT.’

Ah-ha, he thinks, the infamous Scholastic Assessment Test, where the Department of Academic Husbandry separates the sheep from the goats.

‘I’m so bad at math,’ she says. ‘I reek.’

‘Bad at the numbers,’ he says, nodding sympathetically.

‘If I don’t score at least six-fifty, I won’t get into a good school.’

‘And you’ll be lucky to score four hundred,’ he says. ‘Isn’t that the truth, Ellen?’

‘Yes.’ Tears well in her eyes and begin to roll down her cheeks.

‘And then you’ll do badly on the English, too,’ Brady says. He’s opening her up, and this is the best part. It’s like reaching into an animal that’s stunned but still alive, and digging its guts out. ‘You’ll freeze up.’

‘I’ll probably freeze up,’ Ellen says. She’s sobbing audibly now. Brady checks her short-term memory and finds that her parents have gone to work and her little brother is at school. So crying is all right. Let the bitch make all the noise she wants.

‘Not probably. You will freeze up, Ellen. Because you can’t handle the pressure.’

She sobs.

‘Say it, Ellen.’

‘I can’t handle the pressure. I’ll freeze, and if I don’t get into a good school, my dad will be disappointed and my mother will be mad.’

‘What if you can’t get into any school? What if the only job you can get is cleaning houses or folding clothes in a laundromat?’

‘My mother will hate me!’

‘She hates you already, doesn’t she, Ellen?’

‘I don’t… I don’t think…’

‘Yes she does, she hates you. Say it, Ellen. Say “My mother hates me.”’

‘My mother hates me. Oh God, I’m so scared and my life is so awful!’

This is the great gift bestowed by a combination of Zappit-induced hypnosis and Brady’s own ability to invade minds once they are in that open and suggestible state. Ordinary fears, the ones kids like this live with as a kind of unpleasant background noise, can be turned into ravening monsters. Small balloons of paranoia can be inflated until they are as big as floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

‘You could stop being scared,’ Brady says. ‘And you could make your mother very, very sorry.’

Ellen smiles through her tears.

‘You could leave all this behind.’

‘I could. I could leave it behind.’

‘You could be at peace.’

‘Peace,’ she says, and sighs.

How wonderful this is. It took weeks with Martine Stover’s mother, who was always leaving the demo screen to play her goddam solitaire, and days with Barbara Robinson. With Ruth Scapelli and this pimple-faced crybaby in her poofy-pink girl’s bedroom? Mere minutes. But then, Brady thinks, I always had a steep learning curve.

‘Do you have your phone, Ellen?’

‘Here.’ She reaches under a decorative throw pillow. Her phone is also poofy-pink.

‘You should post on Facebook and Twitter. So all your friends can read it.’

‘What should I post?’

‘Say “I am at peace now. You can be, too. Go to zeetheend.com.”’

She does it, but at an oozingly slow speed. When they’re in this state, it’s like they’re underwater. Brady reminds himself of how well this is going and tries not to become impatient. When she’s done and the messages are sent – more matches flicked into dry tinder – he suggests that she go to the window. ‘I think you could use some fresh air. It might clear your head.’

‘I could use some fresh air,’ she says, throwing back the duvet and swinging her bare feet out of bed.

‘Don’t forget your Zappit,’ he says.

She takes it and walks to the window.

‘Before you open the window, go to the main screen, where the icons are. Can you do that, Ellen?’

‘Yes…’ A long pause. The bitch is slower than cold molasses. ‘Okay, I see the icons.’

‘Great. Now go to Wipe Words. It’s the blackboard-and-eraser icon.’

‘I see it.’

‘Tap it twice, Ellen.’

She does so, and the Zappit gives an acknowledging blue flash. If anyone tries to use this particular game console again, it will give a final blue flash and drop dead.

‘ Now you can open the window.’

Cold air rushes in, blowing her hair back. She wavers, seems on the edge of waking, and for a moment Brady feels her slipping away. Control is still hard to maintain at a distance, even when they’re in a hypnotic state, but he’s sure he’ll hone his technique to a nice sharp point. Practice makes perfect.

‘Jump,’ Brady whispers. ‘Jump, and you won’t have to take the SAT. Your mother won’t hate you. She’ll be sorry. Jump and all the numbers will come right. You’ll get the best prize. The prize is sleep.’

‘The prize is sleep,’ Ellen agrees.

‘Do it now,’ Brady murmurs as he sits behind the wheel of Al Brooks’s old car with his eyes closed.

Forty miles south, Ellen jumps from her bedroom window. It’s not a long drop, and there’s banked snow against the house. It’s old and crusty, but it still cushions her fall to a degree, so instead of dying, she only breaks a collarbone and three ribs. She begins to scream in pain, and Brady is blown out of her head like a pilot strapped to an F-111 ejection seat.

‘Shit!’ he screams, and pounds the steering wheel. Babineau’s arthritis flares all the way up his arm, and that makes him angrier still. ‘Shit, shit, shit !’

In the pleasantly upscale neighborhood of Branson Park, Ellen Murphy struggles to her feet. The last thing she remembers is telling her mother she was too sick to go to school – a lie so she could tap pink fish and hunt for prizes on the pleasantly addictive Fishin’ Hole demo. Her Zappit is lying nearby, the screen cracked. It no longer interests her. She leaves it and begins staggering toward the front door on bare feet. Each breath she takes is a stab in the side.

But I’m alive, she thinks. At least I’m alive. What was I thinking? What in God’s name was I thinking?

Brady’s voice is still with her: the slimy taste of something awful that she swallowed while it was still alive.

‘Jerome?’ Holly asks. ‘Can you still hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want you to turn off the Zappit and put it on Bill’s desk.’ And then, because she’s always been a belt-and-suspenders kind of girl, she adds: ‘Facedown.’

A frown creases his broad brow. ‘Do I have to?’

‘Yes. Right now. And without looking at the damn thing.’

Before Jerome can follow this order, Hodges catches one final glimpse of the fish swimming, and one more bright blue flash. A momentary dizziness – perhaps caused by his pain pills, perhaps not – sweeps through him. Then Jerome pushes the button on top of the console, and the fish disappear.

What Hodges feels isn’t relief but disappointment. Maybe that’s crazy, but given his current medical problem, maybe it’s not. He’s seen hypnosis used from time to time to help witnesses achieve better recall, but has never grasped its full power until now. He has an idea, probably blasphemous in this situation, that the Zappit fish might be better medicine for pain than the stuff Dr Stamos prescribed.

Holly says, ‘I’m going to count down from ten to one, Jerome. Each time you hear a number, you’ll be a little more awake. Okay?’

For several seconds Jerome says nothing. He sits calmly, peacefully, touring some other reality and perhaps trying to decide if he would like to live there permanently. Holly, on the other hand, is vibrating like a tuning fork, and Hodges can feel his fingernails biting into his palms as he clenches his fists.

At last Jerome says, ‘Okay, I guess. Since it’s you, Hollyberry.’