Стивен Кинг - Later

If you’re following this, you know that if bullshit was an event in the Olympics, the judges would have given Professor Burkett all 10s for that one, but I was only thirteen and in a bad place. Which is to say I swallowed it whole. If part of me had an idea of what Professor Burkett was up to—I can’t really remember—I shut it down. You have to remember how desperate I was. The idea of being followed around by Kenneth Therriault, aka Thumper, for the rest of my life— haunted by him, to use the professor’s word—was the most horrible thing I could imagine.

“How does it work?” I asked.

“Ah, you’ll like this. It’s like one of the uncensored fairy tales in the book I gave you. According to the stories, you and the demon bind yourselves together by biting into each other’s tongues.”

He said this with a certain relish, and I thought, Like it? Why would I like it?

“Once this union has been accomplished, you and the demon have a battle of wills. This would occur telepathically, I assume, since it would be hard to talk while engaged in a… mmm… mutual tongue-bite. The first to withdraw loses all power over the winner.”

I stared at him, my mouth open. I had been raised to be polite, especially around my mother’s clients and acquaintances, but I was too grossed out to consider the social niceties. “If you think I’m going to—what?—french-kiss that guy, you’re out of your mind! For one thing, he’s dead , did you not get that?”

“Yes, Jamie, I believe I did.”

“Besides, how would I even get him to do it? What would I say, come on over here, Ken honey, and slip me some tongue?”

“Are you finished?” Professor Burkett asked mildly, once again making me feel like the most clueless student in class. “I think the tongue-biting aspect is meant to be symbolic. The way chunks of Wonder Bread and little thimbles of wine are meant to be symbolic of Jesus’s last supper with his disciples.”

I didn’t get that, not being much of a churchgoer, so I kept my mouth shut.

“Listen to me, Jamie. Listen very carefully.”

I listened as if my life depended on it. Because I thought it did.

As I was preparing to leave (politeness had resurfaced and I didn’t neglect to tell him thank you), the professor asked me if his wife had said anything else. Besides about where the rings were, that was.

By the time you’re thirteen I think you’ve forgotten most of the things that have happened to you when you’re six—I mean, that’s more than half your life ago!—but I didn’t have any trouble remembering that day. I could have told him how Mrs. Burkett threw shade about my green turkey but figured that wouldn’t interest him. He wanted to know if she’d said anything about him , not what she’d said to me.

“You were hugging my mom and she said you were going to burn her hair with your cigarette. And you did. Guess you quit smoking, huh?”

“I allow myself three a day. I suppose I could have more, I’m not going to be cut down in my youth, but three is all I seem to want. Did she say anything else?”

“Um, that you’d be having lunch with some woman in a month or two. Her name might have been Debbie or Diana, something like that—”

“Dolores? Was it Dolores Magowan?” He was looking at me with new eyes, and all at once I wished we’d had this part of our conversation to start with. It would have gone a long way toward establishing my credibility.

“It might have been.”

He shook his head. “Mona always thought I had eyes for that woman, God knows why.”

“She said something about rubbing sheep-dip into her hands—”

“Lanolin,” he said. “For her swollen joints. I’ll be damned.”

“There was one other thing, too. About how you always missed the back loop on your pants. I think she said ‘Who’ll do that now?’ ”

“My God,” he said softly. “Oh my God. Jamie.”

“Oh, and she kissed you. On the cheek.”

It was just a little kiss, and years ago, but that sealed the deal. Because he also wanted to believe, I guess. If not in everything, in her. In that kiss. That she had been there.

I left while I was ahead.

I kept an eye out for Therriault on my way home—that was second nature to me by then—but didn’t see him. Which was great, but I’d given up hoping that he was gone for good. He was a bad penny, and he’d turn up. I only hoped I would be ready for him when he did.

That night I got an email from Professor Burkett. I did a little research with interesting results , it said. I thought you also might be interested . There were three attachments, all three reviews of Regis Thomas’s last book. The professor had highlighted the lines he had found interesting, leaving me to draw my own conclusions. Which I did.

From the Sunday Times Book Review : “Regis Thomas’s swan song is the usual farrago of sex and swamp-tromping adventure, but the prose is sharper than usual; here and there one finds glimmers of actual writing.”

From the Guardian : “Although the long-bruited Mystery of Roanoke won’t be much of a surprise to readers of the series (who surely saw it coming), Thomas’s narrative voice is livelier than one might expect from the previous volumes, where turgid exposition alternated with fervid and sometimes comical sexual encounters.”

From the Miami Herald : “The dialogue snaps, the pacing is crisp, and for once the lesbian liaison between Laura Goodhugh and Purity Betancourt feels real and touching, rather than like a prurient joke or a stroke fantasy. It’s a great wind-up.”

I couldn’t show those reviews to my mother—they would have raised too many questions—but I was pretty sure she must have seen them herself, and I guessed they had made her as happy as they made me. Not only had she gotten away with it, she had put a shine on Regis Thomas’s sadly tarnished reputation.

There were many nights in the weeks and months following my first encounter with Kenneth Therriault when I went to bed feeling unhappy and afraid. That night wasn’t one of them.

I’m not sure how many times I saw him the rest of that summer, which should tell you something. If it doesn’t, here it is in plain English: I was getting used to him. I never would have believed it on the day when I turned around and saw him standing by the trunk of Liz Dutton’s car, close enough to touch me. I never would have believed it on the day when the elevator opened and he was in there, telling me my mother had cancer and grinning like it was the happiest news ever. But familiarity breeds contempt, so they say, and in this case the saying was true.

It no doubt helped that he never did show up in my closet or under my bed (which would have been worse, because when I was little I was sure that was where the monster was waiting to grab a dangling foot or arm). That summer I read Dracula— okay, not the actual book, but a kick-ass graphic novel I bought at Forbidden Planet—and in it Van Helsing said that a vampire couldn’t come in unless you invited him. If it was true of vampires, it stood to reason (at least to thirteen-year-old me it did) that it was true of other supernatural beings. Like the one inside of Therriault, keeping him from disappearing after a few days like all the other dead people. I checked Wikipedia to see if Mr. Stoker just made that up, but he didn’t. It was in lots of the vampire legends. Now (later!) I can see it makes symbolic sense. If we have free will, then you have to invite evil in.

Here’s something else. He had mostly stopped crooking that finger at me. For most of that summer he just stood at a distance, staring. The only time I did see him beckoning was kind of funny. If, that is, you can say anything about that undead motherfucker was funny.