Стивен Кинг - Later

Behind me, Liz stopped shrieking and began to laugh. I turned and saw her running down the stairs, just a dark shape laughing like the Joker in a Batman cartoon. She was going way too fast, and not looking where she was going. She weaved from side to side, bouncing off the railings, looking back over her shoulder at the mirror where the light was now fading away, like the filament in an old-fashioned light bulb when you turn it off.

“Liz, look out!”

I yelled that even though the only thing in the world I wanted was to get away from her. The warning was pure instinct, and it did no good. She overbalanced, fell forward, hit the stairs, tumbled, hit the stairs again, did another somersault, then slid all the way to the bottom. She went on laughing the first time she hit but stopped the second time. Like she was a radio and someone had turned her off. She lay face-up at the foot of the stairs with her head cocked, her nose bent sideways, one arm all the way up behind her to her neck, and her eyes staring off into the gloom.

“Liz?”

Nothing.

“Liz, are you okay?”

What a stupid question, and why did I care? That one I can answer. I wanted her to be alive because something was behind me. I didn’t hear it but I knew it was there.

I knelt next to her and held a hand to her bloody mouth. There was no breath on my palm. Her eyes did not blink. She was dead. I got up, turned, and saw exactly what I expected: Liz standing there in her unzipped duffle coat and bloodstained sweatshirt. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking over my shoulder. She raised one of her hands and pointed, reminding me even in that terrible moment of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing at Scrooge’s tombstone.

Kenneth Therriault—what remained of him, at least—was coming down the stairs.

He was like a burned log with fire still inside. I don’t know any other way to put it. He had turned black, but his skin was cracked in dozens of places and that brilliant deadlight shone through. It was coming out of his nose, his eyes, even his ears. When he opened his mouth, it came out of there, too.

He grinned and lifted his arms. “Let’s try the ritual again and see who wins this time. I think you owe me that, since I saved you from her.”

He hurried down the stairs toward me, ready for the big reunion scene. Instinct told me to turn tail and run, but something deeper told me to stand pat no matter how much I wanted to flee that oncoming horror. If I did, it would grab me from behind, wrap its charred arms around me, and that would be the end. It would win, and I would become its slave, bound to come when it called. It would possess me alive as it had possessed Therriault dead, which would be worse.

“Stop,” I said, and the blackened husk of Therriault stopped at the foot of the stairs. Those outstretched arms were less than a foot from me.

“Go away. I’m done with you. Forever.”

“You’ll never be done with me.” And then it said one more word, one that made my skin pebble with goosebumps and the hair stand up on the nape of my neck. “ Champ .”

“Wait and see,” I said. Brave words, but I couldn’t keep the tremble out of my voice.

Still the arms were outstretched, the blackened hands with their brilliant cracks inches from my neck. “If you really want to get rid of me for good, take hold. We’ll do the ritual again, and it will be fairer, because this time I’m ready for you.”

I was weirdly tempted, don’t ask me why, but a part of me that was far beyond ego and deeper than instinct prevailed. You may beat the devil once—through providence, bravery, dumbass luck, or a combination of all—but not twice. I don’t think anyone but saints beat the devil twice, and maybe not even them.

“Go.” It was my turn to point like Scrooge’s last ghost. I pointed at the door.

The thing raised Therriault’s charred and sooty lip in a sneer. “You can’t send me away, Jamie. Don’t you realize that by now? We’re bound to one another. You didn’t think of the consequences. But here we are.”

I repeated my one word. It was all I could squeeze out of a throat that suddenly felt like it was the width of a pin.

Therriault’s body seemed poised to close the distance between us, to leap at me and close me in its awful embrace, but it didn’t. Maybe it couldn’t.

Liz shrank away as it passed her by. I expected it to go right through the door—as I had passed through Marsden—but whatever that thing was, it was no ghost. Its hand grasped the knob and turned it, more skin splitting and more light shining through. The door swung open.

It turned back to me. “Oh whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad.”

Then it left.

My legs were going to give out and the stairs were close, but I wasn’t going to sit on them with Liz Dutton’s broken body sprawled at their foot. I staggered to the conversation pit and collapsed into one of the chairs near it. I lowered my head and sobbed. Those were tears of horror and hysteria, but I think they were also—although I can’t remember for sure—tears of joy. I was alive. I was in a dark house at the end of a private road with two corpses and two leftovers (Marsden was looking down at me from the balcony), but I was alive.

“Three,” I said. “Three corpses and three leftovers. Don’t forget Teddy.”

I started laughing, but then I thought of Liz laughing pretty much the same way just before she died and made myself stop. I tried to think what I should do. I decided the first thing was to shut that fucking front door. Having those two revenants (a word I learned, you guessed it, later) staring at me wasn’t pleasant, but I was used to dead people seeing me seeing them. What I really didn’t like was the thought of Therriault out there somewhere, with the deadlight shining through his decaying skin. I’d told him to go, and he went… but what if he came back?

I walked past Liz and shut the door. When I came back I asked her what I should do. I didn’t expect an answer, but I got one. “Call your mother.”

I thought of the landline in the panic room, but I wasn’t going back up those stairs and into that room. Not for a million bucks.

“Do you have your phone, Liz?”

“Yes.” Sounding disinterested, like most of them do. Not all, though; Mrs. Burkett had had enough life left in her to offer criticism about the artistic merits of my turkey. And Donnie Bigs had tried to hide his stash of torture porn.

“Where is it?”

“In my jacket pocket.”

I went to her body and reached into the righthand pocket of her duffle coat. I touched the butt of the gun she’d used to end Donald Marsden’s life and drew my hand back as if I’d touched something hot. I tried the other one and got her phone. I turned it on.

“What’s the passcode?”

“2665.”

I punched it in, touched the New York City area code and the first three digits of Mom’s number, then changed my mind and made a different call.

“911, what is your emergency?”

“I’m in a house with two dead people,” I said. “One was murdered and the other one fell down the stairs.”

“Is this a joke, son?”

“I wish it was. The woman who fell down the stairs kidnapped me and brought me here.”

“What is your location?” Now the woman on the other end sounded engaged.

“It’s at the end of a private road outside of Renfield, ma’am. I don’t know how many miles or if there’s a street number.” Then I thought of what I should have said right away. “It’s Donald Marsden’s house. He’s the man the woman murdered. She’s the one who fell down the stairs. Her name is Liz Dutton. Elizabeth.”