Стивен Кинг - Desperation

Uh-uh, Mary thought. No way. And, perhaps absurdly: That’s not how I was raised.

“You can’t come in this window. There’s a lot of broken glass. Something… an animal jumped through it Go a little farther along the back of the theater. You 11 come to the ladies’ room. That’s better. There are even some boxes to stand on. I’ll help you in.

Okay.”

“Yes. Thank you, Mary. Thank God I found you.” Ellen gave her a horrible, grimacing smile-gratitude, shoe licking humility, and what might have been terror all mixed together-and then shuffled on, head down, back bent. Twelve hours ago she had been Mrs. Suburban Wifemom, on her way to a nice middle-class vacation in Lake Tahoe, where she had probably planned to wear her new resort clothes from Talbot’s over her new under wear from Victoria’s Secret. Daytime sun with the kids nighttime sex with the comfy, known partner, postcards home to the friends-having a great time, the air is so clean, wish you were here. Now she looked and acted like a refugee, a no-age warhag fleeing some ugly desert bloodbath.

And Mary Jackson, that sweet little princess-votes Democratic, gives blood every two months, writes poetry-had actually considered leaving her out there to moan in the dark until she could consult with the men And what did that mean. That she had been in the same war, Mary supposed. This was how you thought, how you behaved, when it happened to you. Except she wouldn’t. Be damned if she would.

Mary crossed the hall, listening for any further shouts from the theater. There were none.

Then, just as she pushed open the ladies’-room door, three gunshots rang out. They were muffled by walls and distance, but there was no doubt about what they were. Shouts followed them. Mary froze in place, pulled in two different direc-tions with equal force.

What decided her was the soft sound of weeping from beyond the unlatched ladies—room window.

“Ellen. What is it. What’s wrong.”

“I’m stupid, that’s all, stupid! I bumped my bad arm putting up another crate to stand on!” The woman outside the window-she was just a blur of shadow on the frosted glass—began sobbing harder.

“Hold on, you’ll be inside in a jiffy,” Mary said, and hurried across the room. She set aside the beer-bottles Billingsley had put up on the windowledge and was lifting the hinged window, trying to think how best to help Ellen into the room without hurting her further, when she remembered what Billingsley had said about the cop: that he was taller. Dear God, David’s father had said, a look of thunderstruck understanding on his face. She ’s like Entragian. Like the cop.

Maybe she’s got a broken arm, Mary thought coldly, maybe she really does. On the other hand—On the other hand, hunching over like that was actually a very good way to disguise one’s true height, wasn’t it.

The lizard which usually kept its place on the back wall of her brain suddenly leaped forward, chirping in terror. Mary decided to pull back, take a moment or two and think things over… but before she could, her arm was seized by a strong hot hand. Another one banged open the window, and all of Mary’s strength ran out of her like water as she looked into the grinning face staring up at her. It was Ellen’s face, but the badge pinned below it (I see you’re an organ donor) belonged to Entragian.

It was Entragian. Collie Entragian somehow living in Ellen Carver’s body.

“No!” she screamed, yanking backward, heedless of the pain as Ellen’s fingernails punched into her arms and brought blood. “No, let go of me!”

“Not until I hear you sing ‘Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,’ you cunt,” the Ellen-thing said, and as it yanked Mary forward through the window it was still holding open, blood burst from both of Ellen’s nostrils in a gush. More blood trickled from Ellen’s left eye like gummy tears. “Oh the dawn is breakin’, it’s early morn…

Mary had a confused sensation of flying toward the board fence on the other side of the lane.

“The taxi-driver is blowin’ his horn…”

She managed to get one blocking arm up, but not enough; she took most of the impact with her forehead and went to her knees, head ringing. She could feel warmth spreading over her lips and chin. Join the nose-bleed club, babe, she thought, and staggered to her feet “Already I’m so lonesome! could cryyyyy…

Mary took two large, lunging strides, and then the cop (she couldn’t stop thinking of it as the cop, only now wearing a wig and falsies) grabbed her by the shoulder, almost tearing one arm off her shirt as it whirled Mary around.

“Let g-” Mary began, and then the Ellen-thing clipped her on the point of the chin, a crisp and elementary blo that put out the lights. It caught Mary under the arms on her way down and pulled her close. When it felt Mary s breath on Ellen’s skin, the faint anxiety which had been on Ellen’s face cleared.

“Gosh, I love that song,” it said, and slung Mary over her shoulder like a sack of grain.

“It turns me all gooshy inside. Tak!”

She disappeared around the corner with her burden Five minutes later, Collie Entragian’s dusty Caprice was once more on its way out to the China Pit, headlights cut ting through the swirls of sand driven by the dying wind As it drove past Harvey’s Small Engine Repair and the bodega beyond it, a thin blue-white sickle of moon appeared in the sky overhead.

Even in the boozy, druggy days, Johnny Mar-inville’s recall had been pretty relentless. In 1986, while riding in the back seat of Sean Hutter’s so-called Party—mobile (Sean had been doing the Friday-night East Hampton rounds with Johnny and three others in the big old ‘65 Caddy), he had been involved in a fatal accident. Sean, who had been too drunk to walk, let alone drive, had rolled the Partymobile over twice, trying to make the turn from Eggamoggin Lane onto Route B without slowing down. The girl sitting next to Hutter had been killed. Sean’s spine had been pulverized. The only Party—mobile he ran these days was a motorized Cadding wheel-chair, the kind you steered with your chin.

The others had suffered minor injuries; Johnny had considered himself lucky to get off with a bruised spleen and a broken foot. But the thing was, he was the only one who remembered what had happened. Johnny found this so curious that he had questioned the survivors carefully, even Sean, who kept crying and telling him to go away (Johnny hadn’t obliged until he’d gotten what he wanted; what the hell, he figured, Sean owed him). Patti Nickerson said she had a vague memory of Sean saying Hold on, we ’re going for a ride just before it happened, but that was it. With the others, recall simply stopped short of the accident and then picked up again at some point after it, as if their memories had been squirted with some amnesia-producing ink. Sean himself claimed to remember nothing after getting out of the shower that afternoon and wiping the steam off the mirror so he could see to shave. After that, he said, everything was black until he’d awakened in the hospital. He might have been lying about that, but Johnny didn’t think so. Yet he himself remembered everything. Sean hadn’t said Hold on, we’re going for a ride; he had said Hang on, we’re going wide. And laughing as he said it. He went on laughing even when the Partymobile had started to roll. Johnny remembered Patti screaming “My hair!

Oh shit, my hair!” and how she had landed on his crotch with a ball-numbing thud when the car went over. He remembered Bruno Gartner bellowing. And the sound of the Partymobile’s collapsing roof driv-ing Rachel Timorov’ s head down into her neck, splitting her skull open like a bone flower. A tight crunching sound it had been, the sound you hear in your head when you smash an icecube between your teeth. He remembered shit. He knew that was part of being a writer, but he didn’t know if it was nature or nurture, cause or effect. He sup-posed it didn’t matter. The thing was, he remembered shit even when it was as confusing as the final thirty seconds of a big fireworks display.