Different Seasons: Four Novellas

by Stephen King

“According to the books I read for my report, you’re the monster, Mr. Dussander. Not me. You sent them to the ovens, not me. Two thousand a day at Patin before you came, three thousand after, thirty-five hundred before the Russians came and made you stop. Himmler called you an efficiency expert and gave you a medal. So you call me a monster. Oh boy.”

“Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.”

Like when he wanted to feel around under Sharon Ackerman’s dress last year. Sharon said it was bad for him to want to do that, even though he could tell from her tone of voice that the idea sort of excited her. So he told her he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up and then she let him. That was politics.

The work must go on, if only so there is no evidence of what we did here, or so little that the world, which doesn’t want to believe it, won’t have to. I would think: The work must go on if we are to survive.”

Todd smiled enough for both of them.

An observer might have thought them grandfather and grandson, the latter perhaps attending some rite of passage, a handing down.

And as Richard liked to say, for a kid the whole world’s a laboratory. You have to let them poke around in it. And if the kid in question has a healthy home life and loving parents, he’ll be all the stronger for having knocked around a few strange corners.

Todd smiled at him. And incredibly—certainly not because he wanted to—Dussander found himself smiling back.

Whistling, his fatherly duty discharged, Dick Bowden unrolled a blueprint and bent over it.

tape. It spoke of impatience with such a womanly thing.

Dussander was a little touched in spite of himself.

He liked it when Dussander begged. The way they must have begged him once. The inmates at Patin.

Dussander had a dark dignity—at least in Todd’s eyes—that he had not possessed earlier.

As for Dussander, he felt disgust, discomfort . . . and a mild, sneaking sense of relief.

He snapped to attention, and for a moment Todd was scared—really scared.

The old man living in genteel poverty was gone. Dussander was here.

It suddenly struck him that he didn’t want Dussander to be enjoying any part of this, and that perhaps—just perhaps—he had wanted to make Dussander appear ludicrous even more than he had wanted to make him appear authentic.

You are under stress. Because of the boy. But be honest with yourself. It is too early in the morning to tell lies. You have not entirely regretted talking.

He was an old man, and although he was afraid of death, he was more afraid of being an old man who is alone.

Almost ten years of experience in the counselling business had convinced him that when an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent showed up for a conference, it usually meant trouble at home—the sort of trouble that invariably turned out to be the root of the problem.

“No, we give them gas. It’s very humane. They don’t feel a thing.” “No,” Mr. Denker said. “I am sure they don’t.”

We’re Todd’s right hand, that’s all. You and me and all the rest—the house, the ski-trips to Tahoe, the Thunderbird in the garage, his color TV. All his right hand. And he doesn’t want us to see what his left hand is up to.”

That was an adult thought for a boy of fourteen to have, but such thoughts no longer struck Todd as singular. He had many adult thoughts these days. Most of them were not so great.

No, the real villain was and is your absurd American self-confidence that never allowed you to consider the possible consequences of what you were doing . . . which does not allow it even now.”

“A nice girl,” Denker said, his words muffled by a mouthful of carrots and peas. “Oh yes— (you must sit down) “—Felice, you mean. She’s (and tell us all about it.) “very sweet.” (tell us everything, omit nothing.)

More and more it seemed to Ed that there was a vicious downside of American life, a greased skid of opportunism, cut corners, easy drugs, easy sex, a morality that grew cloudier each year.

And Todd is a good boy. Salutatorian of his class . . . he must be a good boy. Am I right?”

maybe there is something about what the Germans did that exercises a deadly fascination over us—something that opens the catacombs of the imagination. Maybe part of our dread and horror comes from a secret knowledge that under the right—or wrong—set of circumstances, we ourselves would be willing to build such places and staff them.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.

That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

Vern Tessio said: “You guys want to go see a dead body?”

In those days it was still possible to walk into the woods and lose your direction there and die there.

I guess that sounds pretty bitter. And I guess if you’d been there, you’d understand why I felt that way.

And if he didn’t want to talk about either one, I guess that was his privilege. It just bugged me that he’d given up talking about everything else, too. That was taking democracy too fucking far.

Love may be as divine as the poets say, he thinks, but sex is Bozo the Clown bouncing around on a spring.

there was a kind of dreadful exhilaration in seeing things that had troubled me for years come out in a new form, a form over which I had imposed control.

Maybe you think that’s funny, a twelve-year-old worrying that he might be an incipient alcoholic, but it wasn’t funny to Chris. Not at all. He’d thought about the possibility a lot. He’d had occasion to.

stalking among the gulls like thoughtful, introspective ministers, an occasional huge crow.

Joe Camber’s dog Cujo went rabid twenty years later—the

for just one moment we looked in each other’s eyes and saw some of the true things that made us friends. Then we looked away again and watched Teddy and Vern throwing water at each other, screaming and laughing and calling each other pussies.

“This is really a good time,” Vern said simply, and he didn’t just mean being off-limits inside the dump, or fudging our folks, or going on a hike up the railroad tracks into Harlow; he meant those things but it seems to me now that there was more, and that we all knew it. Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?

And now I sit here trying to look through an IBM keyboard and see that time, trying to recall the best and the worst of that green and brown summer, and I can almost feel the skinny, scabbed boy still buried in this advancing body and hear those sounds.

I ran until I was over the first hill, scared and laughing to myself, my heart beating out a triphammer pulse in my chest.

Nuttier’n a long-tailed cat in a room fulla rockin chairs.

Chris was good at it. He was tough enough to be good at it.

You’ve heard it said “His bowels turned to water”? I know what that phrase means—exactly what it means. It may be the most accurate cliché ever coined.

I went because of the shadows that are always somewhere behind our eyes, because of what Bruce Springsteen calls the darkness on the edge of town in one of his songs, and at one time or another I think everyone wants to dare that darkness in spite of the jalopy bodies that some joker of a God gave us human beings. No . . . not in spite of our jalopy bodies but because of them.

I remember that as a kid, September days always seemed to end much too soon, catching me by surprise—it was as if something inside my heart expected it to always be June, with daylight lingering in the sky until almost nine-thirty.

“They come outta you just like bubbles out of soda-pop,” he said after awhile. “What does?” But I thought I knew what he meant. “The stories. That really bugs me, man. It’s like you could tell a million stories and still only get the ones on top. You’ll be a great writer someday, Gordie.”