Стивен Кинг - Later

Mom got us tickets to see the Mets play the Tigers on the last Sunday in August. The Mets lost big, but I didn’t care, because Mom bagged a pair of awesome seats from one of her publisher friends (contrary to popular belief, literary agents do have friends). They were on the third base side, just two rows up from the field. It was during the seventh inning stretch, while the Mets were still keeping it close, that I saw Therriault. I looked around for the hotdog man, and when I looked back, my pal Thumper was standing near the third base coach’s box. Same khaki pants. Same shirt with blood all down the left side and spattering the suicide note. Head blown open like somebody lit off a cherry bomb in there. Grinning. And yes, beckoning.

The Tigers infield was throwing the ball around, and just after I saw Therriault, a chuck from the shortstop to the third basemen went way wild. The crowd whooped and jeered the usual stuff— nice throw busher, my grandmother can do better than that— but I just sat there with my hands clamped so tight the nails were biting into my palms. The shortstop hadn’t seen Therriault (he would have run into the outfield screaming if he had), but he felt him. I know he did.

And here’s something else: the third base coach went to retrieve the ball, then backed off and let it roll into the dugout. Shagging it would have brought him right next to the thing only I could see. Did the guy feel a cold spot, like in a ghost movie? I don’t think so. I think he felt, just for a second or two, that the world was trembling around him. Vibrating like a guitar string. I have reasons to think that.

Mom said, “Okay, Jamie? You’re not getting sunstroke on me, are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said, and clenched hands or not, I mostly was. “Do you see the hotdog man?”

She craned around and waved to the nearest vendor. Which gave me a chance to give Kenneth Therriault the finger. His grin turned into a snarl that showed all his teeth. Then he walked into the visitors’ dugout, where the players who weren’t on the field no doubt shuffled around on the bench to give him room, without any idea why they were doing it.

I sat back with a smile. I wasn’t ready to think that I’d vanquished him—not with a cross or holy water but by flipping him the bird—but the idea did kind of tiptoe in.

People started to leave in the top of the ninth, after the Tigers scored seven and put the game out of reach. Mom asked me if I wanted to stay and watch the Mr. Met Dash and I shook my head. The Dash was strictly for little kids. I had done it once, back before Liz, back before that fucker James Mackenzie stole our money in his Ponzi scheme, even before the day Mona Burkett told me turkeys weren’t green. Back when I was a little kid and the world was my oyster.

That seemed so long ago.

You may be asking yourself a question I never asked myself back then: Why me? Why Jamie Conklin? I have asked myself since, and I don’t know. I can only guess. I think it was because I was different, and it—the it inside the shell of Therriault—hated me for it and wanted to hurt me, even destroy me if it could. I think, call me crazy if you want, I offended it somehow. And maybe there was something else. I think maybe—just maybe—the Ritual of Chüd had already begun.

I think that once it started fucking with me it couldn’t stop.

As I said, just guessing here. Its reasons might have been something else entirely, as unknowable as it was to me. And as monstrous. As I said, this is a horror story.

I was still scared of Therriault, but I no longer thought that I might chicken out if an opportunity came to put Professor Burkett’s ritual into practice. I only needed to be ready. For Therriault to get close, in other words, not just be across the street or standing near third base at Citi Field.

My chance came on a Saturday in October. I was going down to Grover Park to play touch football with a bunch of kids from my school. Mom left me a note that said she’d stayed up late reading Philippa Stephens’s latest opus and was going to sleep in. I was to get my breakfast quietly, and no more than half a cup of coffee. I was to have a good time with my friends and not come home with a concussion or a broken arm. I was to be back by two at the very latest. She left me lunch money, which I folded carefully into my pocket. There was a PS: Would it be a waste of time to ask you to eat something green, even a scrap of lettuce on a hamburger?

Probably, Mom, probably , I thought as I poured myself a bowl of Cheerios and ate them (quietly).

When I left the apartment, Therriault wasn’t on my mind. He spent less and less time there, and I used some of the newly available space to think about other things, mostly girls. I was dwelling on Valeria Gomez in particular as I walked down the hall to the elevator. Did Therriault decide to get close that day because he had a kind of window into my head, and knew he was far from my thoughts? Sort of a low-grade telepathy? I don’t know that either.

I pushed the call button, wondering if Valeria would come to the game. It was quite possible because her brother Pablo played. I was deep in a daydream of how I caught a pass, evaded all would-be touchers, and sped into the end zone with the ball held high, but I still stepped back when the elevator arrived—that had become second nature to me. It was empty. I pushed for the lobby. The elevator went down and the door opened. There was a short stub of hallway, and then a door, locked from the inside, which gave on a little foyer. The door to the outside wasn’t locked, so the mailman could come in and put the mail in the boxes. If Therriault had been out there, in the foyer, I couldn’t have done what I did. But he wasn’t in the foyer. He was inside, at the end of the hall, grinning away like doing so was going to be outlawed the day after tomorrow.

He started to say something, maybe one of his bullshit prophecies, and if I’d been thinking of him instead of Valeria, I probably would have either frozen in place or stumbled back into the elevator car, whamming on the DOOR CLOSE button for all I was worth. But I was being pissed at him for intruding on my fantasy and all I remember thinking was what Professor Burkett told me on the day I brought him the casserole.

“The tongue-biting in the Ritual of Chüd is only one ceremony before meeting an enemy,” he said. “There are many. The Maoris do a war-cry dance as they face their opponents. Kamikaze pilots toasted each other and photographs of their targets with what they believed was magical saké. In ancient Egypt, members of warring houses struck each other on the forehead before getting out the knives and spears and bows. Sumo wrestlers clap each other on the shoulders. All come down to the same thing: I meet you in combat, where one of us will best the other . In other words, Jamie, don’t bother sticking out your tongue. Just grab your demon and hold on for dear life.”

Instead of freezing or cringing, I bolted thoughtlessly forward with my arms out, like I was about to embrace a long absent friend. I screamed, but I think only in my head, because nobody looked out from one of the ground-floor apartments to see what was going on. Therriault’s grin—the one that always showed that lump of dead blood between his teeth and cheek—disappeared, and I saw an amazing, wonderful thing: he was afraid of me. He cringed back against the door to the foyer, but it opened the other way and he was pinned. I grabbed him.

I can’t describe how it went down. I don’t think a much more gifted writer than I am could, but I’ll do the best I can. Remember what I said about the world trembling, or vibrating like a guitar string? That was what it was like on the outside of Therriault, and all around him. I could feel it shaking my teeth and jittering my eyeballs. Only there was something else, on the inside of Therriault. It was something that was using him as a vessel and keeping him from moving on to wherever dead people go when their connection to our world rots away.