You Like It Darker

by Stephen King

“What I want to know, Mr. Andersson, is who gave you your information?” “A cop.” Andersson pauses for a moment, then blurts, “At least he said he was a cop, and I believed him because he really had the inside track on the investigation. He said printing the guy’s name would put pressure on him to, you know, come clean.”

“Shhh! Go back.” Andersson flinches and does something with his mouse. “—Wilder High School. He lives in the Oak Grove Trailer Park in the town of Manitou. You should print that right away.” There’s a pause. “He is KBI’s prime suspect because he claims he had a dream of where the body was. The investigators don’t believe him. You might want to save that for a follow-up. Just a suggestion.” There’s another pause. Then the vocoder voice says, “Fifteen. Goodbye.”

“Are you okay, ma’am?” “Yes,” she says. She’s not. She’s sick to her stomach. “Play it again.” She takes out her phone and hits record.

In her car, she lowers her head and cries. There was a moment there, just a moment, when she really thought he might kill her.

“Danny, we got him.” “The kid?” His voice is a little stronger. “I think Edgar told the cops—” “Not the kid, him. The man who killed Yvonne Wicker. He… are you getting this? Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yes.” Does he feel relieved? Vindicated? He can’t tell. He’s not even sure how badly he’s hurt, or if he’ll ever be really well again. What if he has to spend the rest of his life shitting into a bag? “He’s confessed, Danny. Confessed to Wicker and two others. Cops in Illinois and Missouri are looking for the bodies.”

Do you remember the charm bracelet the Wicker girl was wearing?” Danny remembers. He saw it twice, once in his dream and once in real life. “Iverson had two of the charms in his kill-sack. As trophies. There was more stuff in there. From the other two.”

“All because of one dream,” he says bitterly. “It didn’t even help catch the guy.” “But think of the adventure you had.” Danny shows him a middle finger. “On that note,” Ball says, and takes his leave.

How many jigsaw puzzles can he do before facing the pointlessness of his life going forward and slides his service weapon deep into his mouth? Boom, gone. God knows he wouldn’t be the first. God knows he’s thought about it. Is thinking.

He’s still thinking about that when he drifts into the first good sleep he’s had since the night before he dreamed that inexplicable dream. That lasts until 1:20 AM, when the second dream begins.

At home, Jalbert dresses in jeans and his black suit coat, the one he always wore when he was on the job. He puts his badge on his belt, technically against the law now that he’s retired, but it will help him get in if any late shift person asks questions. To this he adds his service weapon.

There’s time to shoot him, but she doesn’t. Can’t. She can only watch as Jalbert continues to raise the gun, but he’s not pointing it at the nurse. He puts it to his own head.

“Frank, don’t. Please don’t.” “I did it all for poor Miss Yvonne.” Then he says “Three, two, one.” And pulls the trigger.

“He was a twin,” Mr. Ludlum breathed, and the smell of alcohol—maybe Scotch, maybe whiskey—drifted to Finn from across the desk. “A twin but also a single birth. How do you explain that paradox?” “I don’t know.” “Then I’ll tell you. The future King of Rock and Roll absorbed his twin brother in utero. Ate him in an act of fetal cannibalism!”

What if Bobby Feeney hadn’t just knocked him on his arse but on his noggin? What if Finn had hit said noggin on the exact same place where it had once been cracked on the memorable (not that he actually did remember) day when he had been brushed by lightning? Wouldn’t that just be Finn Murrie’s luck? What if he was lying in a hospital bed somewhere, deep in a coma, his damaged brain creating some crackpot alternate reality?

Should he tell her that once you were in, you couldn’t get out? That it was your basic deal with the devil? He should. But he wouldn’t.

“Then bring her. I’d love to see how much she’s grown.” “What about Jim’s allergies?” “Fuck his allergies,” she said, and hung up, laughing.

“Hello, boys,” I said. “Very nice to meet you.” Not being there, Jacob and Joseph made no reply. And not being there, the heat didn’t bother them and they would never have to worry about Covid or skin cancer.

It wasn’t rattlesnakes that killed our son. He died of dehydration in a hot car. I never blamed my wife for it; she almost died with him. I never even blamed the dog, a St. Bernard named Cujo, who circled and circled our dead Ford Pinto for three days under the hammering summer sun.

There’s a book by Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and that perfectly described what happened to my wife and son. The house where our car died—because of a plugged needle valve that would have taken a mechanic five minutes to fix—was far out in the country and deserted. The dog was rabid. If Tad had a guardian angel, he was on vacation that July.

The buzzards had gotten half of her nose and both of her eyes. Blood-rimmed sockets stared at me with terminal shock.

Then the foliage ended and the beach widened into a lopsided triangle deep in shells. Here and there I spotted shark’s teeth, some as big as my index finger. I picked a few up and put them in my pocket, thinking I’d give them to Donna. Then I remembered, oh snap, that my wife was dead.

We held hands and kicked through the leaves, listening to the crackle and smelling that sweet cinnamon odor they get before they go limp and start to decay.

There was no note. There was something worse. Yellow shorts on one seat, red shorts on the other. Not the same ones as yesterday. And shirts draped across the backs, also not the same. I didn’t want to touch those shirts and didn’t have to in order to read what was on them: TWEEDLEDUM and TWEEDLEDEE. Twin shirts for sure, but the twins who had worn these were long dead.

My mother had a saying, Only snooping is lower than gossip, but my father liked to tease her with another one: Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back.

It was like listening to one end of a phone conversation. “Yes. Okay. Good. Thank God you are. What?” She nodded. “I will.” She closed her eyes, still smiling. I left the room to shut the front door, where there was already a fantail of snow almost an inch deep. When I came back, my wife was dead. You may scoff at the idea that our son came to escort her out of this life, and you are welcome to. I, on the other hand, once heard my little boy’s voice coming from his closet while he was dying a dozen miles away. I never told anyone about that, not even Donna.

Still thinking of how Donna saw Tad grown to manhood as she passed out of the world. That her life ended in such a way should have had a calming effect on me, but it didn’t. The memory of her deathbed kept connecting to the vision I’d had of the boys falling into the snakepit and coming back to reality to discover my hand going back and forth between TWEEDLEDUM and TWEEDLEDEE. Feeling their leavings. Their remains.

The shadow on the wall. Gathering every last ounce of my courage, I stepped away from the wall and went through the door. The squeaking stopped. The abandoned stroller was standing in front of the glass shower stall. Now there were two pairs of black pants draped over the seats and two black coats draped over the backs. Those were burial suits, meant to be worn forever.

Now I looked at Greg’s fancy clawfoot tub, which was long and deep. It was filled to the brim with rattlesnakes. As I watched, one small, supplicating hand rose from the twisting mass, that bathtub rhumba, and stretched out to me. I fled.

The stroller was still there in the morning, this time with identical white shorts on the seats. Only when I got closer I saw they weren’t completely identical after all. There were red pinstripes running down the legs of one and blue down the other. The shirts bore identical crows, one named HECKLE and one named JEKYLL. I had no intention of rolling it back down to Allie Bell’s house. After a long career in the advertising business, I knew an exercise in futility when I encountered one. I put it in my garage instead.

I heard it then, faint but audible: Squeak and squeak and squeak. I told myself I didn’t. Told myself it was ridiculous. Told myself I wasn’t in a story called “The Tell-Tale Pram.”

I didn’t dare turn around, but there was something I could do. If I dared. My phone was in the pocket of my shorts. I took it out, opened the camera app, and reversed the image so I was looking at my own terrified face, corpse-pale in the moonlight. I raised the phone over my shoulder so I could look behind me without actually turning my head. I tried to steady my hand. Hadn’t realized it was shaking until then. Jacob and Joseph weren’t there and neither was the stroller… but their shadows were there. Two human shapes and the angular one of the double buggy their mother had pushed them around in. I can’t say those disembodied shadows were worse than actually seeing them would have been, but they were terrible enough. I pushed the button to take a photograph with my thumb, sure it wouldn’t work, but I heard the click.

See us. Roll us. Push us. I closed the photo app and opened the voice memo. See us, roll us, push us. I thought those shadows were too long to be the shadows of four-year-old children and thought again of Donna at the end of her life: You’re all grown up! Look how tall you are!

The stroller was in the guest bedroom. The real stroller might be still in the garage, but the ghostly one was also real, and so were the twins pushing it so maniacally back and forth.

Jacob and Joseph were in the guest bed. They were no longer children… yet they were. The bodies under the coverlet were long, the bodies of full-grown men, but the heads, although grotesquely swollen, were those of children. Rattlesnake poison had so bloated those heads that they had become pumpkins with Halloween faces. Their lips were black. Their foreheads, cheeks, and necks were stippled with snakebites. The eyes were sunken but hellishly alive and aware. They were grinning at me.

He said the autopsy had been completed. Alita Bell, wife to Henry, mother to Jacob and Joseph, had died of a heart attack. “The ME said it was amazing she lived as long as she did. She had ninety per cent blockages, but that wasn’t all. There was cardiac scarring, which means she’d suffered a number of previous heart attacks. Small ones, you know. He also said… well, never mind.”

But he wasn’t a kiddo, not anymore. Four decades had passed since Tad Trenton died in that hot car with the rabid St. Bernard patrolling the dooryard of a farmhouse as deserted as the north end of Rattlesnake Key. The dead could age. I had never considered the possibility, but knew it now.

But I’ve been told that men or even women—small women—are sometimes able to lift cars off their trapped children. And once upon a time, a woman named Donna Trenton had fought a 150-pound St. Bernard with nothing but a baseball bat… and won. If she could do that, surely I could do this.

She gave him a dreamy smile. “I can’t lift up a floor, silly.” “Maybe you won’t be able to but maybe you will. Things are possible in dreams that would otherwise not be.” “Like flying.” The dreamy smile got bigger. “Yes, like flying.” He sounded a little impatient with that idea, although to me the idea of flying in dreams seemed as logical as anything else about them. According to Jung, dreams of flying indicated the core psyche’s desire to break free of the expectations of others, or even more difficult, usually impossible, the expectations of the self.

“I want to see what’s there. I may fail, but what we saw today makes me believe that success is possible. The floor of her dream was too heavy for her. I have eleven more test subjects. One of them may be stronger.” I should have left then.

Then the snoring stopped and still sleeping Gaskill groped for the pen resting on the open pad of Blue Horse paper. He wrote something on it without opening his eyes. “Note that,” Elgin said, but I already had, not in Gregg but in plain: At 3:17 PM Gaskill writes for approx. 15 secs. Drops pen. Sleeping again now & snoring again.

Taking dictation like any steno would do. Which raised the question of who had been giving it. “Vietnamese? It is, isn’t it. It’s why you asked if he served.” “Yes.” Of course it was. Mat trang da day cua ma guy. “What does it say?” “It says the moon is full of demons.”

Without looking at me, Elgin said, “That message was meant for you.” Of course it was. “He knew you were in Vietnam. More. He knew you knew the language.”

The other hand rose up, hesitated, then moved swiftly. I wrote in plain 3:29 PM, Dev raises right hand & makes a fist & hits self in cheek. “He’s trying to wake himself up,” I said.

Devereaux began to shiver all over like a man suffering a fit of ague. His legs jittered and scissored. His back arched. His midsection rose from the couch and thumped down and rose again. His feet tapdanced and he began to make a sound, mump-mump-mump, as if his lips were spitstuck and he was trying to get them open to articulate. “We need to wake him up.”

The split black eyeballs began to retract toward Devereaux’s face like a film run in reverse. He said mump-mump-mump. The crotch of his pants darkened as his bladder let go. The split black eyeballs healed themselves, first there was a seam and then that was gone and they were smooth again, only bulging from his face in small knobs like those you sometimes see on an old tree. Then they pulled back in and his eyes closed and Devereaux gave a galvanic twist at the waist and fell on the floor. Elgin’s white shirt ripped as he tore free of my grasp.

Some of the black filaments saw me and rose from the black bag and crossed the room and plastered themselves on the glass. More came. And more. I watched as they squirmed around until they made my name: WILLIAM DAVIS.

I opened the door. The gas was a stench. I flicked the Zippo and got a flame and tossed it and ran for my car. I got there and had just decided nothing was going to happen when the kitchen exploded.

More curious than ever, Phil pulled over and got out of his jalopy. “Hello!” “Hello yourself,” the Answer Man responded, equably enough.

THE ANSWER MAN read the sign in the middle. $25 PER 5 MINUTES read the sign on the left. YOUR FIRST 2 ANSWERS FREE