Stephen King: The Mouse on the Mile

And there was a smell. Not bad in itself, but unpleasant in its associations. I’ve never been able to go down in the cellar at my granddaughter’s house when they bring me there, although that’s where their little boy has his Lionel set-up, which he would dearly love to share with his great-grampa. I don’t mind the trains, as I’m sure you can guess—it’s the transformer I can’t abide. The way it hums. And the way, when it gets hot, it smells . Even after all these years, that smell reminds me of Cold Mountain.

Van Hay gave him thirty seconds, then turned the juice off. The doctor stepped forward from his place and listened with his stethoscope. There was no talk from the witnesses now. The doctor straightened up and looked through the mesh. “Disorganized,” he said, and made a twirling, cranking gesture with one finger. He had heard a few random heartbeats from Bitterbuck’s chest, probably as meaningless as the final jitters of a decapitated chicken, but it was better not to take chances. You didn’t want him suddenly sitting up on the gurney when you had him halfway through the tunnel, bawling that he felt like he was on fire.

Van Hay rolled on three and The Chief surged forward again, twisting a little from side to side in the grip of the current. When doc listened this time, he nodded. It was over. We had once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create. Some of the folks in the audience had begun talking in those low voices again; most sat with their heads down, looking at the floor, as if stunned. Or ashamed.

Harry and Dean came up with the stretcher. It was actually Percy’s job to take one end, but he didn’t know and no one had bothered to tell him. The Chief, still wearing the black silk hood, was loaded onto it by Brutal and me, and we whisked him through the door which led to the tunnel as fast as we could manage it without actually running. Smoke—too much of it—was rising from the hole in the top of the mask, and there was a horrible stench.

“Aw, man!” Percy cried, his voice wavering. “What’s that smell?”

“Just get out of my way and stay out of it,” Brutal said, shoving past him to get to the wall where there was a mounted fire extinguisher. It was one of the old chemical kind that you had to pump. Dean, meanwhile, had stripped off the hood. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been; Bitterbuck’s left braid was smouldering like a pile of wet leaves.

“Never mind that thing,” I told Brutal. I didn’t want to have to clean a load of chemical slime off the dead man’s face before putting him in the back of the meatwagon. I slapped at The Chief’s head (Percy staring at me, wide-eyed, the whole time) until the smoke quit rising. Then we carried the body down the twelve wooden steps to the tunnel. Here it was as chilly and dank as a dungeon, with the hollow plinkplink sound of dripping water. Hanging lights with crude tin shades—they were made in the prison machine-shop—showed a brick tube that ran thirty feet under the highway. The top was curved and wet. It made me feel like a character in an Edgar Allan Poe story every time I used it.

There was a gurney waiting. We loaded Bitterbuck’s body onto it, and I made a final check to make sure his hair was out. That one braid was pretty well charred, and I was sorry to see that the cunning little bow on that side of his head was now nothing but a blackened lump.

Percy slapped the dead man’s cheek. The flat smacking sound of his hand made us all jump. Percy looked around at us with a cocky smile on his mouth, eyes glittering. Then he looked back at Bitterbuck again. “Adiós, Chief,” he said. “Hope hell’s hot enough for you.”

“Don’t do that,” Brutal said, his voice hollow and declamatory in the dripping tunnel. “He’s paid what he owed. He’s square with the house again. You keep your hands off him.”

“Aw, blow it out,” Percy said, but he stepped back uneasily when Brutal moved toward him, shadow rising behind him like the shadow of that ape in the story about the Rue Morgue. But instead of grabbing at Percy, Brutal grabbed hold of the gurney and began pushing Arlen Bitterbuck slowly toward the far end of the tunnel, where his last ride was waiting, parked on the soft shoulder of the highway. The gurney’s hard rubber wheels moaned on the boards; its shadow rode the bulging brick wall, waxing and waning; Dean and Harry grasped the sheet at the foot and pulled it up over The Chief’s face, which had already begun to take on the waxy, characterless cast of all dead faces, the innocent as well as the guilty.

WHEN I WAS EIGHTEEN, my Uncle Paul—the man I was named for—died of a heart attack. My mother and dad took me to Chicago with them to attend his funeral and visit relatives from my father’s side of the family, many of whom I had never met. We were gone almost a month. In some ways that was a good trip, a necessary and exciting trip, but in another way it was horrible. I was deeply in love, you see, with the young woman who was to become my wife two weeks after my nineteenth birthday. One night when my longing for her was like a fire burning out of control in my heart and my head (oh yes, all right, and in my balls, as well), I wrote her a letter that just seemed to go on and on—I poured out my whole heart in it, never looking back to see what I’d said because I was afraid cowardice would make me stop. I didn’t stop, and when a voice in my head clamored that it would be madness to mail such a letter, that I would be giving her my naked heart to hold in her hand, I ignored it with a child’s breathless disregard of the consequences. I often wondered if Janice kept that letter, but never quite got up enough courage to ask. All I know for sure is that I did not find it when I went through her things after the funeral, and of course that by itself means nothing. I suppose I never asked because I was afraid of discovering that burning epistle meant less to her than it did to me.

It was four pages long. I thought I would never write anything longer in my life, and now look at this. All this, and the end still not in sight. If I’d known the story was going to go on this long, I might never have started. What I didn’t realize was how many doors the act of writing unlocks, as if my Dad’s old fountain pen wasn’t really a pen at all, but some strange variety of skeleton key. The mouse is probably the best example of what I’m talking about—Steamboat Willy, Mr. Jingles, the mouse on the Mile. Until I started to write, I never realized how important he (yes, he ) was. The way he seemed to be looking for Delacroix before Delacroix arrived, for instance—I don’t think that ever occurred to me, not to my conscious mind, anyway, until I began to write and remember.

I guess what I’m saying is that I didn’t realize how far back I’d have to go in order to tell you about John Coffey, or how long I’d have to leave him there in his cell, a man so huge his feet didn’t just stick off the end of his bunk but hung down all the way to the floor. I don’t want you to forget him, all right? I want you to see him there, looking up at the ceiling of his cell, weeping his silent tears, or putting his arms over his face. I want you to hear him, his sighs that trembled like sobs, his occasional watery groan. These weren’t the sounds of agony and regret we sometimes heard on E Block, sharp cries with splinters of remorse in them; like his wet eyes, they were somehow removed from the pain we were used to dealing with. In a way—I know how crazy this will sound, of course I do, but there is no sense in writing something as long as this if you can’t say what feels true to your heart—in a way it was as if it was sorrow for the whole world he felt, something too big ever to be completely eased. Sometimes I sat and talked to him, as I did with all of them—talking was our biggest, most important job, as I believe I have said—and I tried to comfort him. I don’t feel that I ever did, and part of my heart was glad he was suffering, you know. Felt he deserved to suffer. I even thought sometimes of calling the governor (or getting Percy to do it—hell, he was Percy’s damn uncle, not mine) and asking for a stay of execution. We shouldn’t burn him yet, I’d say. It’s still hurting him too much, biting into him too much, twisting in his guts like a nice sharp stick. Give him another ninety days, your honor, sir. Let him go on doing to himself what we can’t do to him.