Стивен Кинг - Desperation

And everywhere, everywhere scattered among the remains, were can tahs: coyotes with spider-tongues, spt ders with weird albino ratlings poking from their mouths spread—winged bats with obscene baby-tongues (the babies were leering, gnomish). Some depicted night-marish creatures that had never existed on earth, halfling freaks that made Johnny’s eyes hurt. He could feel the can tahs calling to him, pulling him as the moon pulls at salt water. He had sometimes been pulled in that same way by a sudden craving to take a drink or to gobble a sweet dessert or to lick along the smooth velvet lining of a woman’s mouth with his tongue. The can tahs spoke in tones of madness which he recognized from his own past life: sweetly reasonable voices proposing unspeakable acts. But the can tahs would have no power over him unless he stopped and bent and touched them. If he could avoid that-avoid despair that would come disguised as curiosity-he reckoned he would be all right.

Had Steve gotten them out yet. He’d have to hope so, and hope that Steve could manage to get them a good dis-tance away in his trusty truck before the end came. A hell of a bang was coming. He only had the two bags of ANFO hung around his neck on the knotted drawstrings, but that would be plenty, all they had ever needed. It had seemed wiser not to tell the others that, though. Safer.

Now he could hear the soft groaning sound of which David had spoken: the squall and shift of hornfels, as if the very earth were speaking. Protesting his intrusion. And now he could see a dim zigzag of red light up ahead. Hard to tell how far away in the dark. The smell was stronger, too, and clearer: cold ashes. To his left, a skeleton-probably not Chin—ese, judging by its size—knelt against the wall as if it had died praying. Abruptly it turned its head and favored Johnny Marinville with its dead, toothy grin.

— Get out while there’s still time. Tak ah wan. Tak ah lah.

Johnny punted the skull as if it were a football. It disin-tegrated (almost vaporized) into bone-fragments and he hurried on toward the red light, which was coming through a rift in the wall. The hole looked just big enough for him to squeeze through.

He stood outside it, looking into the light, not able to see much from the drift side, hearing David’s voice in his head almost as a trance-subject must hear the voice of the hypnotist who has put him under: At ten minutes past one on the afternoon of September twenty-first, the guys at the face broke through into what they at first thought was a cave…

Johnny tossed the flashlight aside-he wouldn’t need it anymore-and squeezed through the gap. As he passed into the an talc, that murmuring elevator-sound they had heard at the entrance to the drift seemed to fill his head with whispering voices… enticing, cajoling, forbidding. All around him, turning the an tak chamber into a fan-tastic hollow column lit in dim scarlet tones, were carved stone faces: wolf and coyote, hawk and eagle, rat and scorpion. From the mouth of each protruded not another animal but an amorphous,

reptilian shape Johnny could barely bring himself to look at… and could not really see, in any case. Was it Tak. The Tak at the bottom of the mi. Did it matter.

How had it gotten Ripton.

If it was stuck dOwn there, exactly how had it gotten Ripton.

He suddenly realized he was crossing the an tak, walking toward the mi. He tried to stop his legs and dis-covered he couldn’t. He tried to imagine Cary Ripton making the same discovery and found it was easy.

Easy.

The long bags of ANFO swung back and forth against his chest. Images danced crazily in his mind: Terry grab-bing his belt-loops and yanking him tight to her belly as he began to come, the best orgasm of his life and it had gone nowhere but into his pants, tell that one to Ernest Hemingway; coming out of the pool at the Bel-Air, laughing, hair plastered to his forehead, holding up the beer-bottle as the cameras flashed; Bill Harris telling him that going across country on his motorcycle might change his life and his whole career… if he was really up to it, that was. Last of all he saw the cop’s empty gray eyes staring at him in the rearview mirror, the cop saying he thought Johnny would shortly come to understand a great deal more about pneuma. soma, and sarx than he had previously.

About that he had been right.

“God, protect me long enough to get this done,” he said, and allowed himself to be drawn toward the mi. Could he stop even if he tried. Best not to know, maybe.

There were dead animals lying in a rotting ring around the hole in the floor-David Carver’s well of the worlds. Coyotes and buzzards, mostly, but he also saw spiders and a few scorpions. He had an idea that these last protec-tors had died when the eagle had died. Some withdrawing force had hammered the life out of them just as the life had been hammered from Audrey Wyler almost as soon as Steve had slapped the can tahs out of her hand.

Now smoke began to rise out of the mi… except it wasn’t smoke at all, not really. It was some sort of greasy brown-black muck, and as it began to curl toward him, Johnny saw it was. alive. It looked like clutching three—fingered hands on the ends of scrawny arms.

They were not ectoplasmic, those arms, but neither were they strictly physical. Like the carved shapes looming above and all around him, looking at them made Johnny’s head hurt, the way a kid’s head hurt when he staggered off some viciously swerving amusement park ride. It was the stuff that had crazed the miners, of course. The stuff that had changed Ripton. The glassless windows of the pirin moh leered at him, telling him…

what, exactly. He could almost hear—(cay de mun) Open your mouth.

And yes, his mouth was open, wide open, like when you go to the dentist. Please open wide, Mr. Marinville, open wide, you lousy contemptible excuse for a writer, you make me furious, you make me sick with rage, but go on, open wide, cay de mun, you fucking grayhaired pre-tentious motherfucker, we’ll fix you up, make you good as new, better than new, open wide open wide cay de mun OPEN WIDE—The smoke. Muck. Whatever it was. Those were no longer hands on the ends of the arms but tubes. No… not tubes…

Holes.

Yes, that was it. Holes like eyes. Three of them. Maybe more, but three he could see clearly. A triangle of holes, two on top and one underneath, holes like whispering eyes,

like blast-holes—That’s right, David said. That’s right, Johnny. To blast Talc right into you, the way it blasted itself into Cary Ripton, the only way it has to get out of the hole it’s in down there, the hole that’s too small for anything but this stuff this jizz, two for your nose and one for your mouth.

The brownish-black muck twisted toward him, both horrible and enticing, holes that were mouths, mouths that were eyes. Eyes that whispered. Promised. He realized he had an erection. Not exactly a great time for one, but when had that ever stopped him.

Now… sucking… he could feel them sucking the air out of his mouth… his t—oat…

He snapped his mouth shut and yanked the motorcycle helmet down over his head. He was just in time. A moment later the brownish ribbons encountered the plexi face-shield and spread over it with an unpleasant wet smooching sound. For a moment he could see spreading suckers like kissing lips, and then they were gone, lost in filthy smears of brown particulate matter.

Johnny reached out, seized the brown stuff floating before him, and twisted it in opposite directions, as if he were wringing out a facecloth. There was a needling sen-sation in his palms and fingers, and the flesh went numb but the brown stuff tore away, some of it drawing back toward the mi, some dripping to the chamber’s floor.

He reached the edge of the hole, standing between a heap of feathers that had been a buzzard and a coyote lying dead on its side. He looked down, reaching up to touch the hanging bags of ANFO as he did, caressing them with tingling, half-numb hands.