Stephen King - Sleeping Beauties

The snake glided down the Tree and drooped into the blackness, lolling before Evie. “I saw what you did,” she said to it. “I saw how you distracted Jeanette. And I hate you for it.”

The snake said nothing in return. Snakes do not need to justify their behavior.

Elaine Nutting stood beside her daughter, but she wasn’t present, not really. In her mind, she was still seeing the dead woman’s wet eyes. They were almost gold, those eyes, and very deep. The look in them wasn’t angry, just insistent. Elaine couldn’t deny those eyes. A son, the woman had said, I have a son.

“Elaine?” someone asked. It was time for her to make a decision.

“I have things I need to do,” Elaine said. She put her arm around Nana. “And my daughter loves her father.”

Nana hugged her back.

“Lila?” asked Janice. “What about you?”

They all turned to her, and Lila understood she could talk them out of it, if she wanted to. She could ensure the safety of this new world and destroy the old one. It would only take a few words. She could say, I love you all, and I love what we made here. Let’s not lose it . She could say, I’m going to lose my husband, no matter how heroic he may have tried to be, and I don’t want to lose this . She could say, You women will never be what you were, and what they expect, because part of you will always be here, where you were truly free. You’ll carry Our Place with you from now on, and because of that, you will always mystify them .

Except, really, when had men not been mystified by women? They were the magic that men dreamed of, and sometimes their dreams were nightmares.

The mighty blue sky had faded. The last streaks of light were magnesium smears above the hills. Evie was watching Lila, knowing it all came down to her.

“Yeah,” she told them. “Yeah. Let’s go back and get those guys in shape.”

They cheered.

Evie cried.

By twos, they departed, as if from the ark beached on Ararat. Blanche and baby Andy, Claudia and Celia, Elaine and Nana, Mrs. Ransom and Platinum Elway. They went hand-in-hand, carefully stepping over the giant riser of a gnarled root, and then into the deep night inside the Tree. In the space between, there was a glimmer, but it was diffuse, as if the light source came from around a corner—but the corner of what? It deepened the shadows without revealing much of anything. What each traveler did recall was noise and a feeling of warmth. Inside that faintly lit passage there was a crackling reverberation, a tickling sensation over the skin, like moths’ wings brushing—and then they awakened on the other side of the Tree, in the world of men, their cocoons melting away… but there were no moths. Not this time.

Magda Dubcek sat up in the hospital room where the police had conveyed her body after they discovered her asleep in the room with the body of her dead son. She wiped the webbing from her eyes, astonished to see a whole ward of women, rising up from their hospital beds, tearing at the shreds of their cocoons in an orgy of resurrection.

Lila watched the Tree shed its glossy leaves, as if it were weeping. They sifted to the ground and formed shiny mounds. Strings of moss slid down, whooshing from the branches. She watched a parrot, its marvelous green wings banded with silver marks, arise from the Tree and pierce the sky—watched it flap right into the dark and cease to be. Whorls of speckles, not unlike the Dutch Elm that Anton had warned her about, rapidly spread along the Tree’s roots. There was a sick smell in the air, like rot. She knew that the Tree had become infested, that something was devouring it from the inside while it died on the outside.

“See you back there, Ms. Norcross,” said Mary Pak, waving one hand, holding Molly’s hand with the other.

“You can call me Lila,” said Lila, but Mary had already gone through.

The fox trotted after them.

In the end, it was Janice, Michaela, Lila, and Jeanette’s body. Janice brought a shovel from one of the golf carts. The grave they made was only three feet deep, but Lila didn’t think it mattered. This world wouldn’t exist after they left it; there would be no animals to get at the body. They’d wrapped Jeanette in some coats, and covered her face with an extra baby blanket.

“It was an accident,” Janice said.

Lila bent down, scooped a handful of dirt, and tossed it on the shrouded figure in the hole. “The cops always say that after they shoot some poor black man or woman or child.”

“She had a gun.”

“She didn’t mean to use it. She came to save the Tree.”

“I know,” said Janice. She patted Lila’s shoulder. “But you didn’t. Remember that.”

A thick branch of the Tree moaned and cracked, smashing to the ground with an explosion of leaves.

“I’d give anything to take it back,” Lila said. She wasn’t crying. For now, tears were beyond her. “I’d give my soul.”

“I think it’s time to go,” said Michaela. “While we still can.” She took her mother’s hand and drew her into the Tree.

For a handful of minutes, Lila was the last woman in Our Place. She did not ponder this wonder, however. She had decided to be practical, starting right now. Her focus was on the dirt, on the shovel, and on filling the grave. Only when the work was done did she enter the dark of the Tree and cross over. She went without looking back. Doing that, she felt, would break her fragile heart.

To most people in the weeks after the women awoke, the world seemed a bit like some dismal thrift store boardgame: there were pieces missing, not necessarily the important pieces, but definitely some you’d like to have had. You sensed, at the very least, certain cards that might have helped you to victory were absent.

Grief was everywhere, like a disfigurement. But what did you do when you lost a wife, or a daughter, or your husband? Unless you were like Terry Coombs—and some were—you lived with the loss and went on playing the game.

Pudge Marone, bartender and owner of the Squeak, had lost a piece of himself and learned to live with it. His right thumb now ended below the knuckle. It took him awhile to lose the habit of reaching for beer taps with that hand, but he made do. Then, he received an offer for the building from a guy who wanted to open a TGI Fridays franchise. Pudge told himself the Squeaky Wheel would never have recovered from Aurora anyway, and the payday was not bad.

Certain people—Don Peters, for instance—were not missed much at all. They were so completely forgotten it was like they never existed. The wreck of the Peters property was sold at auction.

Johnny Lee Kronsky’s few possessions were bagged up with the trash, but his grim apartment remains unoccupied to this day.

Van had left the door open when she left Fritz Meshaum’s house that last day of Aurora, and after he had been dead a day or two, the turkey vultures came in and helped themselves to the free buffet. Smaller birds came inside to harvest Fritz’s wiry red beard for nesting materials. Eventually, an enterprising bear dragged the carcass outside. In time, insects polished his skeleton clean, and the sun bleached his overalls white. Nature made use of him and, as was her way, managed to make something beautiful: a bone sculpture.

When Magda Dubcek learned what had happened to Anton—the blood on her bedroom carpet told most of the story—she bitterly regretted her vote to come back. “What a mistake I have made,” she said to herself too many times to count, over too many rum and cokes to count. To Magda, her Anton wasn’t a piece, or two pieces, or three pieces; to her, he was the whole game. Blanche McIntyre tried to get Magda involved in volunteering—there were so many children who had lost a parent and needed help—and she invited her to join the book club, but Magda wasn’t interested. “There is no happy ending for me here,” she said. On long, sleepless nights, she drank and watched Boardwalk Empire . When she finished that one, she moved on to The Sopranos . She filled the empty hours with stories of mean men doing mean things.