Stephen King - Revival

And for fifty minutes every Tuesday and Thursday, between two o’clock and two fifty, I talk.

How I do talk.

On the morning after the storm,I woke up on one of the couches in the lobby of the Goat Mountain Resort. My face hurt and my bladder was bursting, but I had no desire to relieve myself in the men’s room across from the restaurant. There were mirrors in there, and I didn’t want to glimpse my reflection even by accident.

I went outside to piss and saw one of the resort’s golf carts crashed into the porch steps. There was blood on the seat and the rudimentary dashboard. I looked down at my shirt and saw more blood. When I wiped my swollen nose, a maroon crust flaked off on my finger. So I had driven the golf cart, and crashed it, and bumped my face, although I could remember doing none of that.

To say I didn’t want to go back to the cottage near Skytop would be the understatement of the century, but I had to. Getting into the golf cart was the easy part. Driving it back down the path through the woods was more difficult, and every time I had to stop and move fallen branches, it was harder to get going again. My nose was throbbing and my head was thumping with a tension headache.

The door was still standing open. I parked, got out of the cart, and at first could only stand there, rubbing at my poor swollen nose until it began to ooze blood again. The day was sunny and beautiful—the storm had washed away all the heat and humidity—but the room beyond that open door was a cave of shadows.

There’s nothing to worry about , I told myself. Nothing will happen. It’s over .

Only what if it wasn’t? What if the something was still happening?

What if she was waiting for me, and ready to reach with that claw made of faces?

I forced myself up the steps, one at a time, and when a crow cawed harshly from the woods behind me, I cringed and screamed and covered my head. The only thing that kept me from bolting was the knowledge that if I didn’t see what was in there, Mary Fay’s deathroom would haunt me for the rest of my life.

There was no pulsing abomination with a single black eye. Charlie’s Patient Omega lay as she had when I last saw her, with two bullet holes in her nightgown and two more in the sheet around her hips. Her mouth was open, and although there was no sign of that horrible black extrusion, I didn’t even try to tell myself I had imagined it all. I knew better.

The metal band, now dull and dark, still circled her forehead.

Jacobs’s position had changed. Instead of lying on his side next to the bed with his knees drawn up, he was propped in a sitting position on the other side of the room, against the bureau. My first thought was that he hadn’t been dead after all. The terror of what had happened in here had brought on another stroke, but not an immediately fatal one. He had come to, crawled as far as the bureau, and died there.

It could have been, except for the revolver in his hand.

I stared at it for a long time, frowning, trying to recall. I couldn’t then, and I have refused Ed Braithwaite’s offer to hypnotize me in an effort to recover my blocked memories. Partly this is because I’m afraid of what hypnosis might release from the darker regions of my mind. Mostly it’s because I know what must have happened.

I turned from Charlie’s body (that expression of horror was still stamped on his face) to look at Mary Fay. I had fired the revolver five times, I was sure of that, but only four bullets had gone into her. One had gone wild, not surprising when you consider my state of mind. But when I lifted my eyes to the wall, I saw two bullet holes there.

Had I gone back to the resort, then returned the previous evening? I supposed it was possible, but I didn’t think I could have brought myself to do that, even in a blackout. No, I had fixed this scene before I left. Then I went back, crashed the golf cart, staggered up the steps, and fell asleep in the lobby.

Charlie hadn’t dragged himself across the room; I was the one who did the dragging. I propped him against the bureau, put the gun in his right hand, and fired it into the wall. The cops who would eventually discover this bizarre scene might not test Charlie’s hand for gunshot residue, but if they did, they would find it.

I wanted to cover Mary Fay’s face, but everything had to be left exactly as it was, and what I wanted most of all was to escape that room of shadows. I took a moment longer, though. I knelt beside my old fifth business and touched one of his thin wrists.

“You should have stopped, Charlie,” I said. “You should have stopped a long time ago.”

But could he have done that? It would be easy to say yes, because that would allow me to lay blame. Only I’d have to blame myself as well, because I hadn’t stopped, either. Curiosity is a terrible thing, but it’s human.

So human.

“I hadn’t been there at all,”I told Dr. Braithwaite. “That’s what I decided, and there was only one person who could testify that I had been.”

“The nurse,” Ed said. “Jenny Knowlton.”

“I thought she’d have no choice but to help me. We had to help each other, and the way to do it would be to say we’d left Goat Mountain together, when Jacobs started raving about turning off Mary Fay’s life support. I was sure Jenny would go along with that, if only to make certain I kept quiet about her part in it. I didn’t have her cell number, but I knew Jacobs would. His address book was in the Cooper Suite, and sure enough, her number was in it. I called and got voicemail. I told her to call me back. Astrid’s number was also in his book, so I tried her next.”

“And also got voicemail.”

“Yes.” I put my hands over my face. Astrid’s days of answering her phone had been all over by then. “Yes, that’s right.”

Here’s what happened.Jenny drove her golf cart back to the resort; Jenny got into her Subaru; Jenny drove to Mount Desert Island without stopping. All she wanted was the comfort of home. That meant Astrid, and sure enough, Astrid was waiting for her. Their bodies were found just inside the front door. Astrid must have plunged the butcher knife into her partner’s throat as soon as Jenny walked in. Then she used it to cut her wrists. She did it crosswise, not the recommended technique… but she cut all the way to the bone. I imagine them lying there in pools of drying blood while first Jenny’s phone rang in her purse, then Astrid’s on the kitchen counter below the knife rack. I don’t want to imagine that, but I am helpless to stop it.

Not all of Jacobs’s cures killed themselves,but over the next two years, a great many did. Not all of them took loved ones with them, but over fifty did; this I know from my research, which I shared with Ed Braithwaite. He would like to write it off as coincidence. He can’t quite do it, although he is happy to dispute my own conclusion from this parade of madness, suicide, and murder: Mother demands sacrifices.

Patricia Farmingdale, the lady who poured salt in her eyes, recovered enough of her vision to smother her elderly father in his bed before blowing her brains out with her husband’s Ruger. Emil Klein, the dirt-eater, shot his wife and son, then went out to his garage, poured lawnmower gas over himself, and struck a match. Alice Adams—cured of cancer at a Cleveland revival—went into a convenience store with her boyfriend’s AR-15 and unloaded, killing three random people. When the clip was empty, she pulled a snub-nose .38 from her pocket and fired it into the roof of her mouth. Margaret Tremayne, one of Pastor Danny’s San Diego cures (Crohn’s disease), threw her infant son from the balcony of her ninth-story apartment, then followed him down. Witnesses said she uttered not a sound as she fell.