Stephen King: 11/22/63: A Novel

“Two more, then open em,” Al said. He sounded farther away than ever. At the other end of the diner instead of standing in the pantry door.

I went down with my left foot. Went down with my right foot again, and all at once there was a pop inside my head, exactly like the kind you hear when you’re in an airplane and the pressure changes suddenly. The dark field inside my eyelids turned red, and there was warmth on my skin. It was sunlight. No question about it. And that faint sulphurous smell had grown thicker, moving up the olfactory scale from barely there to actively unpleasant. There was no question about that, either.

I opened my eyes.

I was no longer in the pantry. I was no longer in Al’s Diner, either. Although there was no door from the pantry to the outside world, I was outside. I was in the courtyard. But it was no longer brick, and there were no outlet stores surrounding it. I was standing on crumbling, dirty cement. Several huge metal receptacles stood against the blank white wall where Your Maine Snuggery should have been. They were piled high with something and covered with sail-size sheets of rough brown burlap cloth.

I turned around to look at the big silver trailer which housed Al’s Diner, but the diner was gone.

Where it should have been was the vast Dickensian bulk of Worumbo Mills and Weaving, and it was in full operation. I could hear the thunder of the dyers and dryers, the shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH of the huge weaving flats that had once filled the second floor (I had seen pictures of these machines, tended by women who wore kerchiefs and coveralls, in the tiny Lisbon Historical Society building on upper Main Street). Whitish-gray smoke poured from three tall stacks that had come down during a big windstorm in the eighties.

I was standing beside a large, green-painted cube of a building-the drying shed, I assumed. It filled half the courtyard and rose to a height of about twenty feet. I had come down a flight of stairs, but now there were no stairs. No way back. I felt a surge of panic.

“Jake?” It was Al’s voice, but very faint. It seemed to arrive in my ears by a mere trick of acoustics, like a voice winding for miles down a long, narrow canyon. “You can come back the same way you got there. Feel for the steps.”

I lifted my left foot, put it down, and felt a step. My panic eased.

“Go on.” Faint. A voice seemingly powered by its own echoes. “Look around a little, then come back.”

I didn’t go anywhere at first, just stood still, wiping my mouth with the palm of my hand. My eyes felt like they were bugging out of their sockets. My scalp and a narrow strip of skin all the way down the middle of my back was crawling. I was scared-almost terrified-but balancing that off and keeping panic at bay (for the moment) was a powerful curiosity. I could see my shadow on the concrete, as clear as something cut from black cloth. I could see flakes of rust on the chain that closed the drying shed off from the rest of the courtyard. I could smell the powerful effluent pouring from the triple stacks, strong enough to make my eyes sting. An EPA inspector would have taken one sniff of that shit and shut the whole operation down in a New England minute. Except… I didn’t think there were any EPA inspectors in the vicinity. I wasn’t even sure the EPA had been invented yet. I knew where I was; Lisbon Falls, Maine, deep in the heart of Androscoggin County.

The real question was when I was.

A sign I couldn’t read hung from the chain-the message was facing the wrong way. I started toward it, then turned around. I closed my eyes and shuffled forward, reminding myself to take baby steps. When my left foot clunked against the bottom step that went back up to the pantry of Al’s Diner (or so I devoutly hoped), I felt in my back pocket and brought out a folded sheet of paper: my exalted department head’s “Have a nice summer and don’t forget the July in-service day” memo. I briefly wondered how he’d feel about Jake Epping teaching a six-week block called The Literature of Time Travel next year. Then I tore a strip from the top, crumpled it, and dropped it on the first step of the invisible stairway. It landed on the ground, of course, but either way it marked the spot. It was a warm, still afternoon and I didn’t think it would blow away, but I found a little chunk of concrete and used it as a paperweight, just to be sure. It landed on the step, but it also landed on the scrap of memo. Because there was no step. A snatch of some old pop song drifted through my head: First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

Look around a little, Al had said, and I decided that was what I’d do. I figured if I hadn’t lost my mind already, I was probably going to be okay for awhile longer. Unless I saw a parade of pink elephants or a UFO hovering over John Crafts Auto, that was. I tried to tell myself this wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening, but it wouldn’t wash. Philosophers and psychologists may argue over what’s real and what isn’t, but most of us living ordinary lives know and accept the texture of the world around us. This was happening. All else aside, it was too goddam stinky to be a hallucination.

I walked to the chain, which hung at thigh level, and ducked beneath it. Stenciled in black paint on the other side was NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED. I looked back again, saw no indication that repairs were in the immediate offing, walked around the corner of the drying shed, and almost stumbled over the man sunning himself there. Not that he could expect to get much of a tan. He was wearing an old black overcoat that puddled around him like an amorphous shadow. There were dried crackles of snot on both sleeves. The body inside the coat was scrawny to the point of emaciation. His iron-gray hair hung in snaggles around his beard-scruffy cheeks. He was a wino if ever a wino there was.

Cocked back on his head was a filthy fedora that looked straight out of a 1950s film noir, the kind where all the women have big bazonkas and all the men talk fast around the cigarettes stuck in the corners of their mouths. And yep, poking up from the fedora’s hatband, like an old-fashioned reporter’s press pass, was a yellow card. Once it had probably been a bright yellow, but much handling by grimy fingers had turned it bleary.

When my shadow fell across his lap, the Yellow Card Man turned and surveyed me with bleary eyes.

“Who the fuck’re you?” he asked, only it came out Hoo-a fuck-a you?

Al hadn’t given me detailed instructions on how to answer questions, so I said what seemed safest. “None of your fucking business.”

“Well fuck you, too.”

“Fine,” I said. “We are in accord.”

“Huh?”

“Have a nice day.” I started toward the gate, which stood open on a steel track. Beyond it, to the left, was a parking lot that had never been there before. It was full of cars, most of them battered and all of them old enough to belong in a car museum. There were Buicks with portholes and Fords with torpedo noses. Those belong to actual millworkers, I thought. Actual millworkers who are inside now, working for hourly wages.

“I got a yellow card from the greenfront,” the wino said. He sounded both truculent and troubled. “So gimme a buck because today’s double-money day.”

I held the fifty-cent piece out to him. Feeling like an actor who only has one line in the play, I said: “I can’t spare a buck, but here’s half a rock.”

Then you give it to him, Al had said, but I didn’t need to. The Yellow Card Man snatched it from me and held it close to his face. For a moment I thought he was actually going to bite into it, but he just closed his long-fingered hand around it in a fist, making it disappear. He peered at me again, his face almost comic with distrust.