Стивен Кинг - Desperation

Do you know how to set this shit off without dyno or blasting caps. Steve had asked. You do, don’t you. Or you think you do.

“I hope I do,” Johnny said. His voice was flat and strange inside the helmet. “I hope I-”

“THEN COME ON!” a mad voice cried out from below him. Johnny recoiled in terror and surprise. It was the voice of the cop. Of Collie Entragian. “COME ON! TAK AH SM! PIRIN MOH! COME ON, YOU ROTTEN COCKSUCKER! LET’s SEE HOW BRAVE YOU ARE! TAK!”

He tried to take a step backward, maybe think this over, but tendrils of muck curled around his ankles like hands and jerked his feet out from under him. He went into the well in a graceless feet-first dive, hammering the back of his head against the edge as he fell. If not for the helmet, his skull would likely have been crushed in. He curled the bags of ANFO protectively against his chest, making breasts of them.

Then the pain came, first biting, then searing, then seeming to eat him alive. The Mi was funnel-shaped, but the descending, narrowing circle was lined with crystal outcrops of quartz and cracked hornfels. Johnny slid down this like a kid down a slide that has grown crooked glass thorns. His legs were protected to some degree by the leather chaps and his head was protected by the motorcycle helmet, but his back and buttocks were shredded in moments. He put down his forearms in an effort to brake his slide. Needles of stone tore through them. He saw his shirt-sleeves turn red; an instant later they were in ribbons.

“YOU UKE THAT.” the voice from the bottom of the mi gibed, and now it was Ellen Carver’s voice. “TAK AH LAH, YOU INTERFERING BASTARD! EN TOW! TEN AH LAK!” Raving.

Cursing him in two languages.

Insane in any dimension, Johnny thought, and laughed in his agony. He lurched forward, meaning to somersault or die trying. Time to tenderize the other side, he thought, and laughed harder than ever. He could feel blood pouring into his boots like warm water.

The brown-black vapor was all around him, whispering and smearing gaping sucker—mouths across the helmet’s faceplate. They appeared, disappeared, then appeared again, rubbing and making those low, suggestive smooch-ing sounds. He couldn’t get off his back the way he wanted to, couldn’t somersault. The angle of descent was too steep. He turned over on his side instead, clutching at the crystal outcrops that were tearing him open, slashing his hands and not caring, needing to stop himself before he was literally cut to ribbons.

Then, suddenly, it was over.

He lay folded at the bottom of the funnel, bleeding everywhere, it felt like, his slit nerves trying to drown out all rational thought with their mindless screaming. He looked up and saw a wide swath of blood marking his path down the inclined, curving wall. Strips of cloth and leather-his shirt, his Levi’s, his chaps-hung from some of the jutting crystals.

Smoke curling up between his legs, coming from the hole at the bottom of the funnel and trying to seize his crotch.

“Let go,” he said. “My God commands it.”

The brownish-black smoke fell back, curling around his thighs in filthy banners.

“I can let you live,” a voice said. It was no wonder, Johnny thought, that Tak was caught on the other side of the funnel. The hole to which it narrowed was stringent, no more than an inch across. Red light pulsed in it like a wink. “I can heal you, make you well, let you live.”

“Yeah, but can you win me a goddam Nobel Prize for Literature.”

Johnny slipped the bags of ANFO off his neck, then yanked the hammer from his belt.

He’d have to work fast. He was cut in what felt like a billion places, and already he could feel the grayness of blood-loss crowding in on his mind. It made him think of Connecticut again, and the way the fogs came in after dark during the last weeks of March and the first weeks of April. The oldtimers called it strawberry spring, God knew why.

“Yes! Yes, I can do that!” The voice from the narrow red throat sounded eager. It also sounded frightened. “Anything! Success… money… women… and I can heal you, don’t forget that! I can heal you!”

“Can you bring David’s father back.”

Silence from the mi. Now the brownish-black mist coming out of the hole found the long confusion of slashes along his back and legs, and suddenly he felt as if he had been attacked by moray eels… or piranhas. He screamed.

“I can make the pain stop!” Talc said from its tiny hole. “All you have to do is ask-and stop yourself, of course.”

With sweat stinging his eyes, Johnny used the claw end of the hammer to tear open one of the ANFO bags. He tilted the slit over the tiny hole, spread the cloth, and poured through one cupped, bloody hand. The red light was obliterated at once, as if the thing down there feared it might inadvertently set off the charge itself.

“You can’t!” it screamed, its voice muffled now-. but Johnny heard it clearly enough in his head, just the same. “You can’t, damn you! An lab! An lab! Os dam! You bastard!”

An lah yourself Johnny thought. And a big fat can de lach in the bargain.

The first bag was empty. Johnny could see dim white-ness in the hole where there had been only black and pulsing red before. The gullet leading back to Tak’s world or plane… or dimension… wasn’t that long, then. Not in physical terms of measurement.

And was the pain in his back and legs less.

Maybe I’ve just gone numb, he thought. Not a new state for me, actually.

He grabbed the second bag of ANFO and saw one entire side of it was sopped through with his blood. He felt a growing weakness to go along with the fog in his head. Had to be quick now. Had to go like the wind.

He tore open the second bag with the hammer’s claw, trying to steel himself against the shrieks in his head; Talc had lapsed entirely into that other language now.

He turned the bag over the hole and watched ANFO pellets pour out. The whiteness grew brighter as the gullet filled. By the time the bag was empty, the top layer of pel-lets was only three inches or so down.

Just room enough, Johnny thought.

He became aware that a stillness had fallen here in the well, and in the an tak above; there was only that faint whispering, which could have been the calling of ghosts that had been penned up in here ever since the twenty-first of September, 1859.

If so, he intended to give them their parole.

He fumbled in the pocket of his chaps for what seemed an age, fighting the fog that wanted to blur his thoughts, fighting his own growing weakness. At last his fingers touched something, slipped away, came back, touched it again, grasped it, brought it out.

Afat green shotgun shell.

Johnny slipped it into the eyehole at the bottom of the mi, and wasn’t surprised to find it was a perfect fit, its blunt circular top seated firmly against the ANFO pellets.

“You’re primed, you bastard,” he croaked.

No, a voice whispered in his head. No, you dare not.

Johnny looked at the brass circlet plugging the hole at the bottom of the mi. He gripped the handle of the hammer, his strength flagging badly now, and thought of what the cop had told him just before he stuck him in the back of the cruiser. You ’re a sorry excuse for a writer, the cop had said. You’re a sorry excuse for a man, too.

Johnny shoved the helmet off with the heel of his free left hand. He was laughing again as he raised the hammer high above his head, and laughing as he brought it down squarely on the base of the shell.

“GOD FORGIVE ME, I HATE CRITICS!”

He had one fraction of a moment to wonder if he had succeeded, and then the question was answered in a bloom of brilliant, soundless red. It was like swooning into a rose.

Johnny Marinville let himself fall, and his last thoughts were of David-had David gotten out, had David gotten clear, was he all right now, would he be all right later.