Stephen King - Crouch End

‘How could you remember such gibberish?’ Farnham asked her. Doris Freeman shook her head, slowly and tiredly. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s like a nightmare you want to forget as soon as you wake up, but it won’t fade away like most dreams do; it just stays and stays and stays.’ Norris Road seemed to stretch on into infinity, cobbled, split by tram tracks. And although she continued to walk – she wouldn’t have believed she could run, although later, she said, she did – she no longer called for Lonnie. She was in the grip of a terrible, bone-rattling fear, a fear so great she would not have believed a human being could endure it without going mad or dropping dead. It was impossible for her to articulate her fear except in one way, and even this, she said, only began to bridge the gulf which had opened within her mind and heart. She said it was as if she were no longer on earth but on a different planet, a place so alien that the human mind could not even begin to comprehend it. The angles seemed different, she said. The colors seemed different. The… but it was hopeless.

She could only walk under a gnarled-plum sky between the eldritch bulking buildings, and hope that it would end.

As it did.

She became aware of two figures standing on the sidewall ahead of her – the children she and Lonnie had seen earlier. The boy was using his claw-hand to stroke the little girl’s ratty braids. ‘It’s the American woman,’ the boy said.

‘She’s lost,’ said the girl.

‘Lost her husband.’

‘Lost her way.’

‘Found the darker way.’

‘The road that leads into the funnel.’

‘Lost her hope.’

‘Found the Whistler from the Stars…’

‘…Eater of Dimensions…’

‘…the Blind Piper…’

Faster and faster their words came, a breathless litany, a flashing loom. Her head spun with them. The buildings leaned. The stars were out, but they were not her stars, the ones she had wished on as a girl or courted under as a young woman, these were crazed stars in lunatic constellations, and her hands went to her ears and her hands did not shut out the sounds and finally she screamed at them:

‘Where’s my husband? Where’s Lonnie? What have you done to him?’

There was silence. And then the girl said: ‘He’s gone beneath.’

The boy: ‘Gone to the Goat with a Thousand Young.’

The girl smiled – a malicious smile full of evil innocence. ‘He couldn’t well not go, could he?

The mark was on him. You’ll go, too.’

‘Lonnie! What have you done with…’

The boy raised his hand and chanted in a high fluting language that she could not understand – but the sound of the words drove Doris Freeman nearly mad with fear.

‘The street began to move then,’ she told Vetter and Farnham. ‘The cobbles began to undulate like a carpet. They rose and fell, rose and fell. The tram tracks came loose and flew into the air. I remember that, I remember the starlight shining on them – and then the cobbles themselves began to come loose, one by one at first, and then in bunches. They just flew off into the darkness. There was a tearing sound when they came loose. A grinding, tearing sound… the way an earthquake must sound. And – something started to come through…’ ‘What?’ Vetter asked. He was hunched forward, his eyes boring into her. ‘What did you see? What was it?’

‘Tentacles,’ she said, slowly and haltingly. ‘I think it was tentacles. But they were as thick as old banyan trees, as if each of them was made up of a thousand smaller ones… and there were pink things like suckers… except sometimes they looked like faces… one of them looked like Lonnie’s face… and all of them were in agony. Below them, in the darkness under the street – in the darkness beneath – there was something else. Something like eyes…’

At that point she had broken down, unable to go on for some time, and as it turned out, there was really no more to tell. The next thing she remembered with any clarity was cowering in the doorway of a closed newsagent’s shop. She might be there yet, she had told them, except that she had seen cars passing back and forth just up ahead, and the reassuring glow of arc-sodium streetlights. Two people had passed in front of her, and Doris had cringed farther back into the shadows, afraid of the two evil children. But these were not children, she saw; they were a teenage boy and girl walking hand in hand. The boy was saying something about the new Martin Scorsese film.

She’d come out onto the sidewalk warily, ready to dart back into the convenient bolthole of the newsagent’s doorway at a moment’s notice, but there was no need. Fifty yards up was a moderately busy intersection, with cars and lorries standing at a stop-and-go light. Across the way was a jeweler’s shop with a large lighted clock in the show window. A steel accordion grille had been drawn across, but she could still make out the time. It was five minutes of ten. She had walked up to the intersection then, and despite the streetlights and the comforting rumble of traffic, she had kept shooting terrified glances back over her shoulder. She ached all over. She was limping on one broken heel. She had pulled muscles in her belly and both legs – her right leg was particularly bad, as if she had strained something in it. At the intersection she saw that somehow she had come around to Hillfield Avenue and Tottenham Road. Under a streetlamp a woman of about sixty with her graying hair escaping from the rag it was done up in was talking to a man of about the same age. They both looked at Doris as if she were some sort of dreadful apparition.

‘Police,’ Doris Freeman croaked. ‘Where’s the police station? I’m an American citizen… I’ve lost my husband… I need the police.’

‘What’s happened, then, lovey?’ the woman asked, not unkindly. ‘You look like you’ve been through the wringer, you do.’

‘Car accident?’ her companion asked.

‘No. Not… not… Please, is there a police station near here?’ ‘Right up Tottenham Road,’ the man said. He took a package of Players from his pocket. ‘Like a cig? You look like you c’d use one.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, and took the cigarette although she I had quit nearly four years ago. The elderly man had to follow the jittering tip of it with his lighted match to get it going for her. He glanced at the woman with her hair bound up in the rag. ‘I’ll just take a little stroll up with her, Evvie. Make sure she gets there all right.’

‘I’ll come along as well, then, won’t I?’ Evvie said, and put an arm around Doris’s shoulders.

‘Now what is it, lovey? Did someone try to mug you?’ ’No,’ Doris said. ‘It… I… I… the street… there was a cat with only one eye… the street opened up… I saw it… and they said something about a Blind Piper… I’ve got to find Lonnie!’

She was aware that she was speaking incoherencies, but she seemed helpless to be any clearer. And at any rate, she told Vetter and Farnham, she hadn’t been all that incoherent, because the man and woman had drawn away from her, as if, when Evvie asked what the matter was, Doris had told her it was bubonic plague.

The man said something then – ‘Happened again,’ Doris thought it was. The woman pointed. ‘Station’s right up there. Globes hanging in front. You’ll see it.’ Moving very quickly, the two of them began to walk away. The woman glanced back over her shoulder once; Doris Freeman saw her wide, gleaming eyes. Doris took two steps after them, for what reason she did not know. ‘Don’t ye come near!’ Evvie called shrilly, and forked the sign of the evil eye at her. She simultaneously cringed against the man, who put an arm about her. ‘Don’t you come near, if you’ve been to Crouch End Towen!’