Стивен Кинг - Desperation

“Hook” was what she was trying to say, but the stutter turned into miserable little cries and she began to weep. Steve took her in his arms and held her, feeling her hot, wet face throb against his chest. Low on his chest. She was so goddam small.

Over the fuzz of her extravagantly colored hair he could see the other side of the room, and she was right—there was another body crumpled in the corner. Fourteen dead in all, at least three of them women. With their heads hanging and their chins on their chests, it was hard to tell for sure about some of the others. Nine were wearing lab coats-no, ten, counting the one in the corner-and two were in jeans and open-necked shirts. Two others were wearing suits, string ties, dress boots. One of these appeared to have no left hand, and Steve had a pretty good idea of where that hand might be, oh yes indeed he did. Most had been shot, and they must have been facing their killers, because Steve could see gaping exit wounds in the backs of most of the dropped heads. At least three, however, had been opened like fish. They hung with their white coats stained maroon and pools of blood beneath them and their guts dangling.

“Now here’s Mary Chapin Carpenter to tell us why she feels lucky today,” the radio announcer said, emerging gamely from another blast of static. “Maybe she’s been to Whalen’s in Austin. Let’s find out.”

Mary Chapin Carpenter began to tell the hanging dead men and women in the lab of the Desperation Mining Corporation about her lucky day, how she’d won the lot-tery and all, and Steve let go of Cynthia. He took a step into the lab and sniffed the air. No gunsmoke that he could smell, and maybe that didn’t mean much-the air conditioners probably turned over the air in here pretty fast-but the blood was dry on the corpses which had been eviscerated, and that probably meant whoever had done this was long gone.

“Let’s go!” Cynthia hissed, tugging his arm.

“Okay,” he said. “Just-”

He broke off as something caught his eye. It was sitting on the end of the computer table, to the right of the screen with the Goofy-flasher on it. Not a rock, or not just a rock, anyway. Some kind of stone artifact. He walked over and looked down at it.

The girl scurried after him and yanked his arm again. “What’s the matter with you. This isn’t a guided tour! What if-” Then she saw what he was looking at-really saw it-and broke off. She reached out a tentative finger and touched it. She gasped and drew her finger back. At the same moment her hips jerked forward as if she’d gotten an electric shock and her pelvis banged into the edge of the table. “Holy shit,” she breathed. “I think I just-” And there she stopped.

“Just what.”

“Nothing.” But she looked as if she was blushing, so Steve guessed maybe it was something, at that. “There ought to be a picture of that thing next to ugly in the dictionary.”

It was a rendering of what might have been a wolf or a coyote, and although it was crude, it had enough power to make them both forget, at least for a few seconds, that they were standing sixty feet from the leftovers of a mass murder. The beast’s head was twisted at a strange angle (a somehow hungry angle), and its eyeballs appeared to be starting out of their sockets in utter fury. Its snout was wildly out of proportion to its body-almost the snout of an alligator-and it was split open to show a jagged array of teeth. The statue, if that was what it was, had been broken off just below the chest. There were stumps of forelegs, but that was all. The stone was pitted and eroded with age. It was glittery in places, too, like the rocks col-lected in one of the Dandux baskets. Beside it, anchored by a plastic box of pushpins, was a note: Jim-What the hell is this. Any idea. Barbie.

“Look at its tongue,” Cynthia said in a strange, dreaming voice.

“What about it.”

“It’s a snake.”

Yes, he saw, it was. A rattler, maybe. Something with fangs, anyway.

Cynthia’s head snapped up. Her eyes were wide and alarmed. She grabbed his shirt again and pulled it. “What are we doing.” she asked, “This isn’t art-appreciation class, for Christ’s sake-we’ve got to get out of here!”

Yeah, we do, Steve thought. The question is, where do we go.

They’d worry about it when they got to the truck. Not in here. He had an idea it would be impossible to do any productive thinking in here.

“Hey, what happened to the radio.” she asked.

“Huh.” He listened, but the music was gone. “I don’t know.”

With a strange, set expression on her face, Cynthia reached out to the crumbling fragment on the table again. This time she touched it between the ears. She gasped. The hanging lights flickered-Steve saw them flicker—and the radio came back on. “Hey Dwight, hey Lyle, boys, you don ‘t need to fight,” Mary Chapin Carpenter sang through the static, “hot dog, I feel lucky tonight!”

“Christ,” Steve said. “Why’d you do that.”

Cynthia looked at Steve. Her eyes looked oddly hazy. She shrugged, touched her tongue to the middle of her upper lip. “I don’t know.” Suddenly she put her hand to her forehead and squeezed her temples, hard. When she took it away, her eyes were clear again, but frightened. “What the hell.” she said, more to herself than to him.

Steve reached out to touch the thing himself. She grabbed his wrist before he could.

“Don’t. It feels nasty.”

He shook her off and put his finger on the wolf’s back (all at once he was sure that was what it was, not a coyote but a wolf). The radio went dead again. At the same time there was a cough of broken glass from somewhere be-hind them. Cynthia yelped.

Steve had already taken his finger off the rock; he would have done that even if nothing at all had happened, because she was right: it felt nasty. But for a moment, something did happen. It felt as if one of the more vital circuits in his head had shorted out, for one thing. Except… hadn’t he been thinking about the girl. Doing some-thing to the girl, with the girl. The kind of thing both of you might like to try but would never talk about to your friends. A kind of experiment.

Even as he was mulling this over, trying to remember what the experiment might have been, he was reaching out for the stone again with his finger. He didn’t make a conscious decision to do this, but now that he was, it seemed like a good idea. Just let that old finger go where it wants, he thought, bemused. Let it touch whatever it—She grabbed his hand and twisted it away from the piece of stone Just as he was about to put his finger on the wolf’s back. “Hey, sport, read my lips: I want to get out of here! Right now!”

He took a deep breath, let it out. Repeated the process. His head began to feel like familiar territory again, but he was suddenly more frightened than ever. Of exactly what he didn’t know. Wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Holding her hand, he led her back into the hallway. He glanced over his shoulder once, at the crumbled gray bit of carving. Twisted, predatory head. Bulging eyes. Too—long snout. Snake tongue. And beyond it, something else. Both the helix and the exhibitionist Goofy were gone. Those screens were dark, as if some power-surge had shorted them out.

Water was pouring through the open door of the office with the aquarium in it. There was a molly stranded on the edge of the hallway carpet, flopping its last. Well, Steve thought, now we know what broke, no need to wonder about that.

“Don’t look when we go by,” he said. “Just-”

“Did you hear something just then.” she asked. “Bangs or booms or something like that.”

He listened, heard only the wind… then thought he heard a stealthy shuffling from behind him.