Стивен Кинг - Desperation

“That’s enough chit-chat,” he said. He sounded like the world’s kindliest grandpa. “Hop into your room Mary-mine. Into your gilded cage, my little blue-eyed parakeet.”

“Or what. You’ll kill me.”

“I already told you I won’t,” he said in that same Kind Old Gramps voice, “but you don’t want to forget the world-renowned fate worse than death.” His voice hadn’t changed, but she was now looking up at him raptly, like a staked goat at an approaching boa constrictor. “I can hurt you, Mary,” he said. “I can hurt you so badly you’ll wish I had killed you. Now, you believe that, don’t you.”

She looked at him a moment longer, then tore her eyes away—and that was just what it felt like to David from his place twenty feet away, her pulling free, the way you’d pull a piece of tape off the flap of a letter or a package—and walked into the cell. Her face shivered as she went, then broke apart as the cop slammed the cell s barred door behind her. She threw herself onto one of the four bunks at the rear, put her face into her arms, and began to sob. The cop stood watching her for a moment head lowered. David had time to look down at the shotgun shell again and think about grabbing it. Then the big cop jerked and kind of shook himself, like someone waking from a doze, and turned away from the cell with the sob-bing woman in it. He walked across to where David was standing.

The white-haired man retreated rapidly from the bars as the cop came, until the backs of his knees struck the edge of the bunk and he folded down to a sitting position. Then he put his hands over his eyes again. Before, that had seemed like a gesture of despair to David, but now it seemed to echo the horror he himself had felt when the cop’s stare had fallen upon him—not despair but the instinctive hiding gesture of someone who will not look at a thing unless absolutely forced to look.

“How’s it going, Tom.” the cop asked the man on the bunk. “How they hanging, oldtimer.”

Mr. White Hair shrank away from the sound of the voice without taking his hands away from his eyes. The cop looked at him a moment longer, then turned his gray gaze on David again. David found he couldn’t look away—now it was his eyes that had been taped. And there was something else, wasn’t there. A sense of being called.

“Having fun, David.” the big blond cop asked. His eyes seemed to be expanding, turning into bright gray ponds filled with light. “Are you filling this interlude, measure for measure.”

“I—” It came out a dusty croak. He licked his lips and tried again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you. I wonder about that. Because I see He raised one hand to the corner of his mouth, touched it, then dropped it again. The expression on his face seemed to be one of genuine puzzlement. “I don’t know what I see. It’s a question, yes sir, it is. Who are you, boy.”

David glanced quickly at his mother and father and could not look for long at what he saw on their faces. They thought the cop was going to kill him, as he had killed Pie and Mary’s husband.

He turned his eyes back at the cop. “I’m David Carver,” he said. “I live at 248 Poplar Street, in Wentworth, Ohio.”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s true, but little Dave, who made thee. Canst thou say who made thee. Tak!”

He’s not reading my mind, David thought, hut I think maybe he could. If he wanted to.

An adult would likely have admonished himself for such a thought, told himself not to be silly, not to succumb to fear-driven paranoia. That’s just what he wants you to believe, that he’s a mind-reader, the adult would think. But David wasn’t a man, he was a boy of eleven. Not just any boy of eleven, either; not since last Novem-ber. There had been some big changes since then. He could only hope they would help him deal with what he was seeing and experiencing now.

The cop, meanwhile, was looking at him with nar-rowed, considering eyes.

“I guess my mother and father made me,” David said. ‘Isn’t that the way it works.”

“A boy who understands the birds and bees! Won-derful! And what about my other question, Trooper—are you having any fun.”

“You killed my sister, so don’t ask stupid questions.

“Son, don’t provoke him!” his father called in a high scared voice. It didn’t really sound like his father at all “Oh, I’m not stupid,” the cop said, bending that horrid gray gaze even more closely on David. The irises actually seemed to be in motion, turning and turning like pin wheels.

Looking at them made David feel nauseated close to vomiting, but he couldn’t look away. “1 may be a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. I know a lot Trooper. I do. I know a lot.”

“Leave him alone!” David’s mother screamed. David couldn’t see her; the cop’s bulk blocked her out entirely “Haven’t you done enough to our family. If you touch him, I’ll kill you!”

The cop paid no notice. He raised his index fingers to his lower lids and pulled them down, making the eyeballs themselves bulge out grotesquely. “I’ve got eagle eyes, David, and those are eyes that see the truth from afar. You just want to believe that. Eagle eyes, yes sir.” The cop continued to stare through the bars, and now it was almost as if eleven-year-old David Carver had hypnotized him.

“You’re quite a one, aren’t you.” the cop breathed. ‘You’re quite a one indeed. Yes, I think so.”

Think whatever you want, just don’t think about me thinking about the shotgun shell.

The cop’s eyes widened slightly, and for a hideous moment David thought that was exactly what the cop was thinking about, that be had tuned into David’s mind as if it were a radio signal. Then a coyote howled outside, a outside the door of the room Brian was in. David had shaken his head. He was still powerfully in the grip of the feeling which had more or less swallowed him since his pallid mother had given him the news about the accident: that feeling of being guided by someone more experi-enced than he was, someone who would be brave for him if his own courage faltered.

He had gone into the room. Mr. and Mrs. Ross were there, sitting in red vinyl chairs.

They had books in their hands that they weren’t reading. Brian was in the bed by the window, surrounded by equipment that beeped and sent green lines rolling across video screens. A light blanket was pulled up to his waist. Above it, a thin white hospital shirt lay open like cheesy school-play angel’s wings on either side of his chest. There were all sorts of rubber suckers on him down there, and more attached to his head, below a vast white cap of bandage. From beneath this cap, one long cut descended Brian’s left cheek to the corner of his mouth, where it curved up like a fishhook. The cut had been sutured with black thread. To David it had looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie, one of the old ones with Boris Karloff they showed on Saturday nights. Sometimes, when he slept over at Brian’s, the two of them stayed up and ate pop-corn and watched those movies. They loved the old black—and-white monsters. Once, during The Mummy, Brian had turned to David and said, “Oh shit, the mummy’s after us, let’s all walk a little faster.” Stupid, but at quarter to one in the morning, anything can strike eleven-year-olds funny, and the two of them had laughed like fiends.

Brian’s eyes had looked up at him from the hospital bed. And through him. They were open and as empty as school classrooms in August.

Feeling more than ever as if he were not moving but being moved, David had walked into the magic circle of the machines. He observed the suction cups on Brian’s chest and temples. He observed the wires coming out of the suction cups. He observed the oddly misshapen look of the helmet-sized bandage on the left side of Brian’s head, as if the shape beneath it had been radically changed. David supposed it had been. When you hit the side of a brick house, something had to give. There was a tube in Brian’s right arm and another coming out of his chest. The tubes went to bags of liquid hanging off poles There was a plastic doodad in Brian’s nose and a band on, his wrist.