Stephen King - Revival

Once he’d said it, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it before. Why it had taken me so long. The secret electricity had never really left me, or any of the people Pastor Danny had cured. Sometimes it slept, like the disease that had hidden so long in Mary Fay’s brain. Sometimes it awoke and made you eat dirt, or pour salt in your eyes, or hang yourself with your pants. That small doorway needed two keys to unlock it. Mary Fay was one.

I was the other.

“Charlie, you have to stop this.”

“ Stop? Are you insane?”

No , I thought, that would be you . I’ve come to my senses .

I just hoped it wasn’t too late.

“There’s something waiting on the other side. Astrid called it Mother. I don’t think you want to see her, and I know I don’t.”

I bent to strip off the metal circlet that lay across Mary Fay’s brow. He grabbed me in a bearhug and pulled me away. His arms were scrawny, and I should have been able to break his grip, but I couldn’t, at least not at first. He held me with all the strength of his obsession.

As we struggled in that gloomy, shadow-haunted room, the wind suddenly dropped. The rain slackened. Through the window I could see the pole again, and small rivers of water running down the wrinkles in the bulging forehead of granite that was Skytop.

Thank God , I thought. The storm is passing by .

I stopped fighting him just as I was on the verge of breaking free, and so lost my chance to end that day’s abomination before it could begin. The storm wasn’t over; it had only been drawing in a breath before commencing its main assault. The wind rushed back, this time at hurricane velocity, and in the split-second interval before the lightning came, I felt what I had on the day I’d come here with Astrid: the stiffening of all the hair on my body, and the sense that the air in the room had turned to oil. Not a click this time but a SNAP , as loud as a small-caliber gunshot. Jenny screamed in terror.

A jagged branch of fire shot from the clouds and struck the iron pole on Skytop, turning it blue. My head was filled with a vast choir of shrieking voices and I understood it was everyone Charles Jacobs had ever cured, plus everyone he’d ever snapped with his Portraits in Lightning camera. Not just the ones who’d suffered aftereffects; all of them, in their thousands. If that shrieking had gone on for even ten seconds, it would have driven me insane. But as the electric fire coating the pole faded, leaving it to glow a dull cherry-red like a branding iron fresh from the fire, those agonized voices also faded away.

Thunder rolled and rain swooshed down in a rush, accompanied by a rattle of hail.

“ Oh my God! ” Jenny screamed. “ Oh my God, look at it! ”

The circlet around Mary Fay’s head was glowing a brilliant, pulsing green. I saw it with more than my eyes; it was deep in my brain, as well, because I was the connection. I was the conduit. The glow began to fade, and then a fresh bolt of lightning struck the pole. The choir shrieked again. This time the band passed from green into a coruscating white, too dazzling to look at. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears. In the darkness the afterimage of the circlet remained, now an ethereal blue.

The interior screams faded. I opened my eyes and saw the glow embedded in the circlet was fading, as well. Jacobs was staring at the corpse of Mary Fay with wide, fascinated eyes. Drool dripped from the frozen side of his mouth.

The hail gave a final furious rattle, then quit. The rain began to slacken. I saw lightning fork into the trees beyond Skytop, but the storm was already moving east.

Jenny abruptly bolted from the room, leaving the door open. I heard her crash into something as she crossed the living room, and the bang when the door to the outside—the one I’d had to struggle to close—flew open and hit the wall. She was gone.

Jacobs took no notice. He bent over the dead woman, who lay with her eyes shut and her sooty lashes brushing her cheeks. The circlet was only dead metal now. In the shadowy room, it didn’t even gleam. If it had burned her forehead, the mark was beneath the band. I didn’t think it had; I would have smelled charred flesh.

“Wake up,” Jacobs said. When there was no response, he shouted it. “Wake up!” He shook her arm—gently at first, then harder. “Wake up! Wake up, damn you, wake up !”

Her head wagged from side to side as he shook her, as if in negation.

“ WAKE UP, YOU BITCH, WAKE UP! ”

He was going to pull her out of bed and onto the floor if he didn’t stop, and I couldn’t have borne that further desecration. I grabbed his right shoulder and hauled him away. We staggered backward in an awkward dance and crashed into the bureau.

He turned on me, his face wild with fury and frustration. “ Let me go! Let me go! I saved your miserable useless life and I demand you— ”

Then something happened.

From the bed came a low hummingsound. I relaxed my grip on Jacobs. The corpse lay as it had lain, only now with its hands splayed out at its sides, thanks to Charlie’s shaking.

It was just the wind , I thought. I’m sure I could have convinced myself of it, given time, but before I could even get started, it came again: a faint humming from the woman on the bed.

“She’s returning,” Charlie said. His eyes were huge, bulging from their sockets like the eyes of a toad squeezed by a cruel child. “She’s reviving. She’s alive .”

“No,” I said.

If he heard, he paid no mind. All of his attention was fixed on the woman in the bed, the pale oval of her face deep in the swimming shadows that infested the room. He lurched toward her like Ahab on the deck of the Pequod , dragging his bad leg. His tongue lapped at his mouth on the side that wasn’t frozen. He was gasping for breath.

“Mary,” he said. “Mary Fay.”

The humming sound came again, low and tuneless. Her eyes remained shut, but I realized with a cold chill of horror that I could see them moving beneath the lids, as if in death, she dreamed.

“Do you hear me?” His voice, dry with an almost prurient eagerness. “If you hear me, give me a sign.”

The humming continued. Jacobs put the palm of his hand on her left breast, then turned to me. Incredibly, he was grinning. In the gloom he looked like a death’s head.

“No heartbeat,” he said. “Yet she lives. She lives! ”

No , I thought. She waits . But the wait is almost over .

Jacobs turned back to her and lowered his half-frozen face until it was only inches from her dead one—a Romeo with his Juliet. “ Mary! Mary Fay! Come back to us! Come back and tell us where you’ve been!”

It’s hard for me to think of what happened next, let alone write it down, but I must, if only as a warning for anyone else who contemplates some similar experiment in damnation, and may read these words, and turn back because of them.

She opened her eyes.

Mary Fay opened her eyes, but they were no longer human eyes. Lightning had smashed the lock on a door that was never supposed to be opened, and Mother came through.

They were blue eyes at first. Bright blue. There was nothing in them. They were utterly blank. They stared at the ceiling through Jacobs’s avid face, and through the ceiling, and through the cloudy sky beyond. Then they came back. They registered him, and some understanding—some comprehension—came into them. She made that humming sound again, but I hadn’t seen her draw a single breath. What need? She was a dead thing… except for those inhuman staring eyes.