Стивен Кинг - Desperation

Alot. He just hoped that Martin, who drank more than he should and maybe couldn’t be entirely trusted, had been telling the truth instead of just mouthing what David’s dad called “the company line.” He hoped that with all his mind and heart.

Because there were other gods in Desperation.

He was sure of it.

He began his prayer as he always did, not aloud but in his mind, sending words out in clear, even pulses of thought: See in me, God. Be in me. And speak in me, if you mean to, if it’s your will.

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God, the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer. The problem was simple enough. Even now, after all his reading and praying and instruction, even after what had happened to his friend, he doubted God’s existence. Had God used him, David Carver, to save Brian Ross’s life.

Why would God do a wild and crazy thing like that. Wasn’t it more likely that what Dr. Waslewski had called a clinical miracle and what David himself had thought of as an answered prayer had actually been nothing more than a clinical coinci-dence.

People could make shadows that looked like ani-mals, but they were still only shadows, minor tricks of light and projection. Wasn’t it likely that God was the same kind of thing.

Just another legendary shadow.

David closed his eyes tighter, concentrating on the mantra and trying to clear his mind.

See in me. Be in me. Speak in me if it’s your will.

And a kind of darkness came down. It was like nothing he had ever known or experienced before. He sagged side-ways against the wall between two of the projection—cutouts, eyes rolling up to whites, hands falling into his lap. A low, guttural sound came from his throat. It was followed by sleeptalk which perhaps only David’s mother could have understood.

“Shit,” he muttered. “The mummy’s after us.

Then he fell silent, leaning against the wall, a silver runner of drool almost as fine as a spider’s thread slipping from one corner of what was, essentially, still a child’s mouth.

Outside the door which he had shut in order to be alone with his God (there had once been a bolt on it, but that was long gone), approaching footsteps could now be heard.

They stopped outside the door. There was a long, listening pause, and then the knob turned. The door opened. Audrey Wyler stood there. Her eyes widened when they happened on the unconscious boy.

She came into the fuggy little room, closed the door behind her, and looked for something, anything, to tilt and prop under the knob. A board, a chair. It wouldn’t hold them off for long if they came up here, but even a thin margin might mean the difference between success and failure at this stage. But there was nothing.

“Fuck,” she whispered. She looked at the boy, realizing without much surprise that she was afraid of him. Afraid even to go near him.

Tak ah wan! The voice in her head.

“Tak ah wan!” This time out of her mouth. Assent. Both helpless and heartfelt.

She went down the two steps into the projection-booth proper and crossed, wincing at each gritting step, to where David leaned on his knees against the wall with the cut—outs in it. She kept expecting his eyes to fly open-eyes that would be filled with an electric-blue power. The right hand in her pocket squeezed the can tahs together once more, drawing strength, then-reluctantly-left them.

She dropped to her own knees in front of David, her cold and shaking fingers clasped before her. How ugly he was! And the smell coming from him was even more offensive to her. Of course she had stayed away from him; he looked like a gorgon and stank like a stew of spoiled meat and sour milk.

“Prayboy,” she said. “Ugly little prayboy.” Her voice had changed into something that was neither male nor female. Black shapes had begun to move vaguely beneath the skin of her cheeks and forehead, like the beating membranous wings of small insects. “Here’s what I should have done the first time I saw your toad’s face.”

Audrey’s hands-strong and tanned, chipped here and there with scabs from her work—settled around David Carver’s throat. His eyelids fluttered when those hands shut off his windpipe and stopped his breath, but just once.

Just once.

“Why’d you stop.” Steve asked.

He stood in the center of the improbable onstage living room, beside the elegant old wetbar from the Circle Ranch. His strongest wish at that moment was for a fresh shirt.

All day he had been baking (to call the Ryder van s air conditioning substandard was actually to be chari table), but now he was freezing. The water Cynthia was dabbing onto the punctures in his shoulders ran down his back in chill streams. At least he’d been able to talk her out of using Billingsley’s whiskey to clean his wounds like a dancehall girl fixing up a cowpoke in an old movie “I thought I saw something.” Cynthia spoke in a low voice.

“Waddit a puddy-tat.”

“Very funny.” She raised her voice to a shout. “David. Dayyyy-vid!”

They were alone onstage. Steve had wanted to help Marinville and Carver look for the kid, but Cynthia had insisted on washing out what she called “the holes in your hide”

first. The two men had disappeared into the lobby. Marinville had a new spring in his step, and the way he carried his gun made Steve think of another kind of old movie-the kind where the grizzled but heroic white hunter slogs through a thousand jungle perils and finally succeeds in plucking an emerald as big as a doorknob from the forehead of an idol watching over a lost city.

“What. What did you see.”

“I don’t really know. It was weird. Up on the balcony. For a minute I thought it was—you’ll laugh-a floating body.”

Suddenly something in him changed. It wasn’t like a light going on; it was more as if one had been turned out. He forgot about the stinging of the wounds in his shoul-ders, but all at once his back was colder than ever. Almost cold enough to start him shivering. For the second time that day he remembered being a teenager in Lubbock, and how the whole world seemed to go still and deadly before the benders arrived from the plains, dragging their some-times deadly skirts of hail and wind. “I’m not laughing,” he said. “Let’s go on up there.”

“It was probably just a shadow.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Steve. You okay.”

“No. I feel like I did when we came into town.”

She looked at him, alarmed. “Okay. But we don’t have a gun—“Fuck that.” He grabbed her arm. His eyes were wide, his mouth pinched. “Now. Christ, something is really wrong. Can’t you feel it.”

“I… might feel something. Should I get Mary. She’s back with Billingsley-”

“No time. Come or stay here. Suit yourself.”

He shrugged up the sides of the coverall, jumped off the stage, stumbled, grabbed a seat in the front row to steady himself, then ran up the center aisle. When he got to its head, Cynthia was right behind him, once again not even out of breath. The chick could motor, you had to give her that.

The boss was just coming out of the box office, Ralph Carver behind him. “We’ve been looking out at the street,” Johnny said. “The storm is definitely… Steve. What’s wrong.”

Without answering, Steve looked around, spotted the stairs, and pelted up them. Part of him was still amazed at the speed with which this feeling of urgency had grabbed hold.

Most of him was just scared.

“David! David, answer if you hear me!”

Nothing. A grim, trash-lined hallway leading past what were probably the old balcony and a snackbar alcove Narrow stairs going farther up at the far end. No one here Yet he had a clear sense that there had been, and only a short time ago.