Стивен Кинг - Desperation

“We never saw anything,” Cynthia said.

“No. Not really.” He opened the Magna-Cube, took out the key inside, gave it to Mary.

“Why don’t you try the engine.”

“In a sec. What are the authorities going to think about what they do find. All the dead people and dead animals. And what will they say. What will they give out.”

Steve said: “There are people who believe a flying saucer crashed not too far from here, back in the forties. — Did you know that.”

She shook her head.

“In Roswell, New Mexico. According to the story, there were even survivors. Astronauts from another 2 world. I don’t know if any of it’s true, but it might be. The evidence suggests that something pretty outrageous hap-pened in Roswell. The government covered it up, what—L ever it was. The same way they’ll cover this up.”

Cynthia punched his arm. “Pretty paranoid, cookie.” He shrugged. “As to what they’ll think… poison gas, maybe. Some weird shit that belched out of a pocket in the earth and made people crazy. And that’s not so far wrong, is it. Really.”

“No,” Mary said. “I think the most important thing is that we all tell the same story, just the way that David out-lined it.”

Cynthia shrugged, and a ghost of her old pert who-gives-a-shit look came over her face.

“Like if we break down and tell them what really happened they’re going to believe us, right.”

“Maybe they wouldn’t,” Steve said, “but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not spend the next six weeks taking polygraph tests and looking at inkblots when I could spend them looking at your exotic and mysterious face.”

She punched his arm again. A little harder this time She caught David watching this byplay and nodded to him. “You think I got a mysterious and exotic face.”

David turned away, studied the mountains to the north. Mary went around to the driver’s door of the Acura and opebed it, reminding herself she’d have to pull the seat up before she could drive-Peter had been a foot taller than she. The glovebox was open from when she’d been pawing around in it for the registration, but surely a bulb as small as the one in there couldn’t draw more than a trickle of juice, could it. Well, it wasn’t exactly life and death in any—“Oh my Lord,”

Steve said in a soft, strengthless voice.

“Oh my dear Lord, look.”

She turned. On the horizon, looking small at this dis-tance, was the north face of the China Pit embankment. Above it was a gigantic cloud of dark gray dust. It hung in the sky, still connected to the pit by a hazy umbilicus of rising dust and powdered earth: the remains of a mountain rising into the sky like poisoned ground after a nuclear blast. It made the shape of a wolf, its tail pointing toward the newly risen sun, its grotesquely elongated snout pointed west, where the night was still draining sullenly from the sky.

The snout hung open. Protruding from it was a strange shape, amorphous but somehow reptilian. There was something of the scorpion in that shape, and of the lizard as well.

Can tak, can tah.

Mary screamed through raised hands. Looked up at the shape in the sky, eyes bulging over her dirty fingers, head shaking from side to side in a useless gesture of negation.

“Stop,” David said, and put his arm around her waist. “Stop, Mary. It can’t hurt us. And it’s going away already. See.”

It was true. The hide of the skywolf was tearing open in some places, appearing to melt in others, letting the sun shine through in long, golden rays that were both beau-tiful and somehow comical-the sort of shot you expected to see at the end of a Bible epic.

“I think we ought to go,” Steve said at last.

“I think we never should have come in the first place,” Mary said faintly, and got into the car. Already she could smell the aroma of her dead husband’s aftershave.

David stood watching as she pulled the seat forward and slipped the key into the ignition. He felt distant from himself, a creature floating in space somewhere between a dark star and a light one. He thought of sitting at the kitchen table back home, sitting there. and playing slap-jacks with Pie. He thought he would see Steve and Mary and Cynthia, nice as they were, dead and in hell for just one more game of Slap-jacks in the kitchen with her-Pie with a glass of Cranapple juice, him with a Pepsi, both of them giggling like mad. He would see him-self in hell, for that matter. How far could it be, after all, from Desperation.

Mary turned the key in the ignition. The engine cranked briskly and started almost at once. She grinned and clapped her hands.

“David. Ready to go.”

“Sure. I guess.”

“Hey.” Cynthia put a hand on the back of his neck. “You all right, my man.”

He nodded, not looking up.

Cynthia bent over and kissed his cheek. “You have to fight it,” she whispered in his ear.

“You have to fight it, you know.”

“I’ll try,” he said, but the days and weeks and months ahead looked impossible to him.

Go to your friend Brian, Johnny had said. Go to your friend and make him your brother.

And that might be a place to start, yes, but after that.

There were holes in him that cried out in pain, and would go on crying out for so much of the future. One for his mother, one for his father, one for his sister. Holes like faces.

Holes like eyes.

In the sky, the wolf had gone except for a paw and what might have been-perhaps-the tip of a tail. Of the rep-tilian thing in its mouth there was no sign.

“We beat you,” David whispered, starting around to the passenger side of the car. “We beat you, you son of a bitch, there’s that.”

Tak, whispered a smiling, patient voice far back in his mind. Tak ah lah. Tak ah wan.

He turned his mind and heart from it with an effort.

Go to your friend and make him your brother.

Maybe. But Austin first. With Mary and Steve and Cynthia. He intended to stay with them as long as pos-sible. They, at least, could understand… and in a way no one else would ever be able to. They had been in the pit together.

As he reached the passenger-side door, he closed the small metal box and slipped it absently into his pocket. He stopped suddenly, free band frozen in midair as it reached for the doorhandle.

Something was gone; the shotgun shell.

Something bad been put in its place: a piece of stiff paper.

“David.” Steve called from the open window of the truck. “Something wrong.”

He shook his head, opening the car door with one hand and taking the folded paper from his pocket with the other. It was blue. And there was something familiar about it, although he couldn’t remember having a paper like this in his pocket yesterday. There was a ragged hole in it, as if it had been punched onto something. As if—Leave your pass.

It was the last thing the voice had said on that day last fall when he had prayed for God to make Brian better. He hadn’t understood, but he had obeyed, had hung the blue pass on a nailhead. The next time he’d shown up at the Viet Cong Lookout-a week later. two.-it had been gone. Taken by some kid who wanted to write down a girl’s telephone number, maybe, or blown off by the wind. Except… here it was.

All I want is lovin’, all I need is lovin”.

Felix Cavaliere on vocal, most severely cool.

No, he thought. This can’t be.

“David.” Mary. Far away. “David, what is it.”

Can’t be, he thought again, but when he unfolded it, the words printed at the top were completely familiar:

WEST WENTWORTH MIDDLE SCHOOL 100 Viland Avenue Then, in big black tabloid type:

EXCUSED EARLY

And, last of all:

Parent of excused student must sign this pass.