Стивен Кинг - Desperation

“No,” Billingsley agreed, blinking at her with his watery eyes. “When it was gold they were taking out of China Pit and Desatoya Pit-back in the fifties-it was cyanide in the pools. Just as nasty. No greenie-treehuggers back then, though. Must have been nice for the company, eh, Miss Wyler.” He got up, went to the bar, poured himself a finger of whiskey, and swallowed it like medicine.

“Could I have one about the same.” Ralph asked.

“Yessir, I b’Iieve you could,” Billingstey said. He handed Ralph his drink, then set out more glasses. He offered warm soft drinks, but the others opted for spring—water, which he poured out of a plastic jug.

“We pulled the rainbirds and replaced them with distribution heads and emitters,”

Audrey said. “It’s a drip-system, more expensive than rainbirds-a lot-but the birds don’t get into the chemicals.”

“No,” Billingsley agreed. He poured himself another tot. This he drank more slowly, looking at Audrey’s legs again over the rim of his glass.

A problem.

Maybe not yet… but there could be, if steps weren’t taken.

The thing that looked like Ellen Carver sat behind the desk in the now-empty holding area, head up, eyes gleaming lustrously. Outside, the wind rose and fell, rose and fell.

From closer by came the pad-click of paws ascending the stairs. They stopped outside the door. There came a coughing growl. Then the door swung open, pushed by the snout of a cougar. She was big for a female-perhaps six feet from snout to haunches, with a thick, switching tail that added another three feet to her overall length.

As the cougar came through the door and into the holding area, slinking low to the board floor, her ears laid back against her wedgeshaped skull, the thing cored into her head a little further, wanting to experience a bit of what the cougar was feeling as well as to draw her. The animal was frightened, sorting through the smells of the place and finding no comfort in any of them. It was a human den-place; but that was only part of her problem.

The cougar smelled a lot of trouble here. Gunpowder, for one thing; to the cougar, the smell of the fired guns was still sharp and acrid. Then there was the smell of fear, like a mixture of sweat and burned grass. There was the smell of blood, too-coyote blood and human blood, mixed together. And there was the thing in the chair, looking down at her as she slunk toward it, not wanting to go but not able to stop. It looked like a human being but didn’t smell like one. It didn’t smell like anything the cougar had ever scented before. She crouched by its feet and voiced a low whining, mewing sound.

The thing in the coverall got out of the chair, dropped to Ellen Carver’s knees, lifted the cougar’s snout, and looked into the cougar’s eyes. It began to speak rapidly in that other language, the tongue of the unformed, telling the cougar where she must go, how she must wait, and what she must do when the time came. They were armed and would likely kill the animal, but she would do her job first.

As it spoke, Ellen’s nose began to trickle blood. It felt the blood, wiped it away. Blisters had begun to rise on Ellen’s cheeks and neck. Fucking yeast infection! Noth-ing more than that, at least to start with! Why was it some women simply could not take care of themselves.

“All right,” it told the cougar. “Go on, now. Wait until it’s time. I’ll listen with you.”

The cougar made its whining, mewing sound again, licked with its rough tongue at the hand of the thing wearing Ellen Carver’s body, then turned and padded out of the room.

It resumed the chair and leaned back in it. It closed Ellen’s eyes and listened to the ceaseless rattle of sand against the windows, and let part of itself go with the animal.

“You had some downtime coming, you saddled up, and you went camping,” Steve said. “What then.”

“I spent four days in the Coppers. Fishing, taking plc-tures-photography’s what I do for fun. Great days. Then, — three nights ago, I came back. Went right to my house, which is north of town.”

“What brought you back.” Steve asked. “It wasn’t bad weather on the way, was it.”

“No. I had my little radio with me, and all I heard was fair and hot.”

“All I heard, too,” Steve said. “This shit’s a total mystery.”

“I had a meeting scheduled with Allen Symes the company comptroller, to summarize the switchover from rainbirds to heads and emitters. He was flying in from Arizona. I was supposed to meet him at Hernando’s Hide away at nine o’clock, the morning before last.

That’s what we’d taken to calling the lab and the offices out there on r the edge of town.

Anyway, that’s why I’m wearing this damned dress, because of the meeting and because Frank Geller told me that Symes doesn’t-didn’t-like women — . in jeans. I know everything was okay when I got back from my camping trip, because that’s when Frank called _ me and told me to wear a dress to the meeting. That night, around seven.”

“Who’s Frank Geller.” Steve asked.

“Chief mining engineer,” Billingsley said. “In charge of reopening the China Pit. At least he was.” He gave—Audrey a questioning look.

She nodded. “Yes. He’s dead.”

“Three nights ago,” Marinville mused. “Everything in Desperation was peachy three nights ago, at least as far as you know.”

“That’s right. But the next time I saw Frank, he was hung up on a hook. And one of his hands was gone.

“We saw him,” Cynthia said, and shivered. “We saw his hand, too. At the bottom of an aquarium.”

“Before all that, during the night, I woke up at least twice. The first time I thought it was thunder, but the second time it sounded like gunshots. I decided I’d been dreaming and went back to sleep, but that must be around the time he… got started. Then, when I got to the mining office…

At first, she said, she hadn’t sensed anything wrong—certainly not from the fact that Brad Josephson wasn’t at his desk. Brad never was, if he could help it. So she had gone out back to Hernando’s Hideaway, and there she had seen what Steve and Cynthia would come along and see themselves not long after-bodies on hooks. Appar-ently everyone who had come in that morning. One of them, dressed in a string tie and dress boots that would have tickled a country-and-western singer, had been Allen Symes. He had come all the way from Phoenix to die in Desperation.

“If what you say is right,” she said to Steve, “Entragian must’ve gotten more of the mining people later on. I didn’t count-I was too scared to even think of counting them-but there couldn’t have been more than seven when I was there. I froze. I might even have blacked out for a little while, I can’t say for sure. Then I heard gun-shots. No question what they were that time. And someone screaming. Then there were more gunshots and the screaming stopped.”

She went back to her car, not running-she said she was afraid that panic would take her over if she started running-and then drove into town. She intended to report what she’d found to Jim Reed. Or, if Jim was out on county business, as he often was, to one of his deputies, Entragian or Pearson.

“I didn’t run to the car and I didn’t go speeding into town, but I was in shock, just the same. I remember feeling around in the glove compartment for my ciga-rettes, even though I haven’t smoked in five years. Then I saw two people go running through the intersection. You know, under the blinker-light.”

They nodded.

“The town’s new police-car came roaring through right after them. Entragian was driving it, but I didn’t know that then. There were three or four gunshots, and the people he was chasing were thrown onto the sidewalk one right by the grocery store, the other just past it. There was blood. A lot. He never slowed, just went on through the intersection, heading west, and pretty soon I heaid more shots. I’m pretty sure I heard him yelling ‘Yee haw,’ too.