Desperation

by Stephen King

Steve Ames pulled the Ryder van over to the side of the road which led south from Highway 50 to the town of Desperation.

Steve Ames pulled the Ryder van over to the side of the road which led south from Highway 50 to the town of Desperation. They had found it with no trouble at all. Now he sat behind the wheel and looked at Cynthia Smith, who had tickled him even in his unease by calling him her nice new friend. She wasn’t looking at her nice new friend now; she was looking down at the bottom of her funky Peter Tosh shirt and plucking at it nervously.

Your boss, your boss, your boss. I know that’s what you’re thinking about and practically all you’re thinking about, and that’s what’s got me worried. Because I have a bad feeling about this, Steve. A bad intuition.”

A gust of wind shook the Ryder truck. A cloud of tawny sand blew across the road, turning it into a momentary mirage.

The setting sun had touched the rising membrane of sand in the west now, and its bottom arc had gone as red as blood.

Then he reached into his pocket and brought out the keyring again. He selected the same one as before, David noticed—square, with a black mag-strip on it—so it was probably a master.

In his heart was a growing certainty: if the huge, bloody cop took his mother out of this room, they would never see her again.

“I’m sensitive—a real Bridges of Madison County kind of guy, only without the cameras.”

“Ah lah,” he said, and let go of Ellen’s arm long enough to spank his right hand across the back of his left hand in a quick gesture that reminded David of a flat stone skipping across the surface of a pond. “Him en tow.”

“Ah lah,” he said, and let go of Ellen’s arm long enough to spank his right hand across the back of his left hand in a quick gesture that reminded David of a flat stone skipping across the surface of a pond. “Him en tow.” The coyote sat down.

“You saw him—he’s got internal bleeding, he’s losing his teeth, one eye’s ruptured right out of his head. He can’t last much longer.”

It? The cop, Entragian, was that who the voice meant by it? And what way did he . . . or it . . . want him to think?

Stop it, David. His thought, Gene Martin’s voice. That’s just the way it wants you to think. It? The cop, Entragian, was that who the voice meant by it? And what way did he . . . or it . . . want him to think? For that matter, why would it care what way he thought at all?

“That cop?” David said. “Mr. Billingsley says he’s taller than he used to be. Three inches, at least.”

“What you are is blind if you can’t see that something very terrible and very out of the ordinary is going on here.”

“Sir, what’s your name?” Ralph asked the gray-haired man. “Marinville. Johnny Marinville. I’m a—” “What you are is blind if you can’t see that something very terrible and very out of the ordinary is going on here.” “I didn’t say it wasn’t terrible, and I certainly didn’t say it was ordinary,” the gray-haired man replied. He went on, but then the voice came again, the outside voice, and David lost track of their conversation.

The soap. David, the soap.

The soap. David, the soap. He looked at it—a green bar of Irish Spring sitting beside the spigot—and thought of Entragian saying I’ll be back for you. The soap. Suddenly he understood . . . or thought he did. Hoped he did. I better be right. I better be right, or—

Where were the cops?”

He started slowly down the corridor, thinking that he should call out something like Hey! Anybody home? and not quite daring to. The place felt simultaneously empty and somehow not empty, although how it could be both things at the same time was—

“Do not worry, little Nell,” he said in a very passable Dudley Do-Right imitation, “for I will protect you.”

The first door on the right was an office. Empty. There was a cork-board on the wall covered with Polaroid shots of an open-pit mine. That was the big wall of earth they’d seen looming behind the town, Steve assumed.

“Hey Steve,” Cynthia whispered in a strengthless little voice. “That’s a hand.”

He straightened up and saw Cynthia standing at the desk. The top of this one was much neater. There was a PowerBook on it, closed. Next to it was a telephone. Next to the phone was an answering machine with the red message-light blinking. Cynthia picked up the telephone, listened, then put it back. He was startled by the whiteness of her face. With that little blood in her head, she should be lying on the floor dead-fainted away, he thought. Instead of fainting, she reached a finger toward the PLAY MESSAGES button on the answering machine. “Don’t do that!” he hissed. God knew why, and it was too late, anyway. There was a beep. A click. Then a strange voice—it seemed to be neither male nor female, and it scared the hell out of Steve—began to speak. “Pneuma,” it said in a contemplative voice. “Soma. Sarx. Pneuma. Soma. Sarx. Pneuma. Soma. Sarx.” It went on slowly enunciating these words, seeming to grow louder as it spoke. Was that possible? He stared at the machine, fascinated, the words hitting into his brain (soma sarx pneuma) like tiny sharp carpet-tacks. He might have gone on staring at it for God knew how long if Cynthia hadn’t reached past him and banged the STOP button hard enough to make the machine jump on the desk. “Sorry, nope, too creepy.” She sounded both apologetic and defiant.

”Where are you taking me?” Ellen Carver asked for the third time. She leaned forward, hooking her fingers through the mesh between the cruiser’s front and back seats. “Please, can’t you tell me?”

The sun was a declining ball of dusty furnace-fire, and the landscape had a kind of clear daylight darkness about it that struck her as apocalyptic. It wasn’t so much a question of where she was, she realized, as who she was. She couldn’t believe she was the same Ellen Carver who was on the PTA and had been considering a run for school board this fall, the same Ellen Carver who sometimes went out to lunch with friends at China Happiness, where they would all get silly over mai-tais and talk about clothes and kids and marriages—whose was shaky and whose was not. Was she the Ellen Carver who picked her nicest clothes out of the Boston Proper catalogue and wore Red perfume when she was feeling amorous and had a funny rhinestone tee-shirt that said QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE? The Ellen Carver who had raised two lovely children and had kept her man when those all about her were losing theirs? The one who examined her breasts for lumps once every six weeks or so, the one who liked to curl up in the living room on weekend nights with a cup of hot tea and a few chocolates and paperbacks with titles like Misery in Paradise? Really? Oh really? Well, yes, probably; she was those Ellens and a thousand others: Ellen in silk and Ellen in denim and Ellen sitting on the commode and peeing with a recipe for Brown Betty in one hand; she was, she supposed, both her parts and more than her parts, when summed, could account for . . . but could that possibly mean she was also the Ellen Carver whose ...

“Uck,” he said, grimacing, and reached into his mouth like a man who’s got a hair on his tongue. Instead of a hair he pulled out the tongue itself. He looked at it for a moment, lying limply in his fist like a piece of liver, and then tossed it aside.

Down here, night had already fallen.

“The job of the new Christian is to meet God, to know God, to trust God, to love God. That’s not like taking a list to the supermarket, either, where you can dump stuff into your basket in any order you like. It’s a progression, like working your way up the math ladder from counting to calculus. You’ve met God, and rather spectacularly, too. Now you’ve got to get to know him.”

So he had read the Bible, starting in March and finishing Revelation (“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen”) just a week or so before they had left Ohio.

David had been amazed at how much of the Bible was politics.

sane men and women don’t believe in God. That was all, that was flat. You can’t say it from the pulpit, because the congregation’d run you out of town, but it’s the truth. God isn’t about reason; God is about faith and belief. God says, “Sure, take away the safety net. And when that’s gone, take away the tightrope, too.”

Out by the desk, the coyote got to its feet. Its growl rose to a snarl. Its yellow eyes were fixed intently on David Carver. Its muzzle wrinkled back in an unpleasantly toothy grin.

“My God hath sent his anger, and hath shut the lions’ mouths,” Daniel told him, “forasmuch as innocency was found in me.”

Find innocency in me, God. Find innocency in me and shut that fleabag’s mouth. Jesus’ name I pray, amen.

Johnny glanced over at the kid’s cell. What he saw made his muscles relax with fear—when the coyote yanked on the jacket this time, the animal came very close to pulling it free.

The kid was hung.

God help me, he thought. It didn’t seem like a prayer; it was maybe too scared and up against it to be a prayer. Please help me, don’t let me be stuck, please help me. Turn your head, the voice he sometimes heard now told him. As always, it spoke in an almost disinterested way, as if the things it was saying should have been self-evident, and as always David recognized it by the way it seemed to pass through him rather than to come from him. An image came to him then: hands pressing the front and back of a book, squeezing the pages together a little in spite of the boards and the binding. Could his head do that? David thought—or perhaps only hoped—that it could. But he would have to be in the right position. Turn your head, the voice had said. From somewhere behind him came a thick ripping sound, then Marinville’s voice, somehow amused, scared, and outraged all at the same time: “Do you know how much that thing cost?” David twisted around so he lay on his back instead of his side. Just having the pressure of the bar off his jaw was an incredible relief. Then he reached up and placed his palms against the bars. Is this right? No answer. So often there was no answer. Why was that? Because God is cruel, the Reverend Martin who kept school inside his head replied. God is cruel. I have popcorn, David, why don’t I make some? Maybe we can find one of those old horror movies on TV, something Universal, maybe even The Mummy. He pushed with his hands. At first nothing happened, but ...

David turned on his knees and pulled his clothes out through the bars. He squeezed his pants, feeling for the tube of the shotgun shell in the pocket. The shotgun shell was there. He got to his feet, and for a few seconds the world turned into a merry-go-round. He had to reach out for the bars of his erstwhile cell to keep from falling over. Billingsley put a hand over his. It was surprisingly warm. “Go, son,” he said. “Time’s almost up.”

David ducked out and yanked the door shut behind him. A split second later, the coyote hit it with a thud. A howl—terrible because it was so close—rose from the holding area. It was as if it knew it had been fooled, David thought; as if it also knew that, when the man who had summoned it here returned, he would not be pleased.

He opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and groped for the stair railing. Then, naked, holding his clothes against his chest with his free hand, David Carver started down into the shadows.

“Why?” she whispered. “Why?”

The large space at the end of the Quonset hut looked like a combination workroom, lab, and storage area. It was lit by hanging hi-intensity lamps with metal hoods, a little like the lights which hang over the tables in billiard emporiums. They cast a bright lemony glow. It looked to Steve as if two crews might have worked here at the same time, one doing assay work on the left side of the room, the other sorting and cataloguing on the right. There were Dandux laundry baskets lined up against the wall on the sorting side, each with chunks of rock in it. These had clearly been sorted; one basket was filled with rocks that were mostly black, another with smaller rocks, almost pebbles, that were shot through with glitters of quartz.

The hardhats were scattered on the floor, below the dangling feet of the people who had been hung from the hooks, hung like roasts in a butcher’s walk-in freezer.

Over the fuzz of her extravagantly colored hair he could see the other side of the room, and she was right—there was another body crumpled in the corner. Fourteen dead in all, at least three of them women. With their heads hanging and their chins on their chests, it was hard to tell for sure about some of the others. Nine were wearing lab coats—no, ten, counting the one in the corner—and two were in jeans and open-necked shirts. Two others were wearing suits, string ties, dress boots. One of these appeared to have no left hand, and Steve had a pretty good idea of where that hand might be, oh yes indeed he did. Most had been shot, and they must have been facing their killers, because Steve could see gaping exit wounds in the backs of most of the dropped heads. At least three, however, had been opened like fish. They hung with their white coats stained maroon and pools of blood beneath them and their guts dangling.

He picked through the keys quickly, praying to find what he needed . . . and did. A square one that almost didn’t look like a key at all. A black magnetic strip ran down its length. The key to the holding cells upstairs.

David put the keyring in his pocket, glanced curiously at Reed’s open pants again, then unsnapped the strap over the cop’s gun. He pulled it out, holding it in both hands, feeling its extraordinary weight and sense of inheld violence. A revolver, not an automatic with the bullets buried away in the handle. David turned the muzzle toward himself, careful to keep his fingers outside the trigger-guard, so he could look at the cylinder. There were bullet-heads in every hole he could see, so that was probably all right. The first chamber might be empty—in the movies cops sometimes did that to keep from shooting themselves by accident—but he reckoned that wouldn’t matter if he pulled the trigger at least twice, and fast.

“God, I never shot a gun in my life,” he said. “Please help me be able to shoot this one. Jesus’ sake, amen.” That taken care of, David started up the stairs.

Mary Jackson was sitting on her bunk, looking down at her folded hands and thinking arsenic thoughts about her sister-in-law. Deirdre Finney, with her pretty pale face and sweet, stoned smile and pre-Raphaelite curls. Deirdre who didn’t eat meat (“It’s like, cruel, you know?”) but smoked the smoke, oh yes, Deirdre had been going steady with that rascal Panama Red for years now. Deirdre with her Mr. Smiley-Smile stickers. Deirdre who had gotten her brother killed and her sister-in-law slammed into a hicksville jail cell that was really Death Row, and all because she was too fucking fried to remember that she’d left her extra pot under the spare tire.

For Johnny Marinville it was like being tumbled back into Vietnam again, where mortal things happened at a zany speed that always surprised you. He hadn’t held out much hope for the kid, thought he was apt to spray bullets wildly everywhere but into Bosco’s hide, but the kid was all they had. Like Mary, he had decided that if they weren’t out of here when the cop came back, they were through.

“David!” Ralph cried, and grabbed for his son’s shirt. Too late. The boy darted out into the howling dark, unmindful of anything that might be waiting. And now Johnny understood what had galvanized David: headlights. Turning headlights that swept across the street from right to left, as if mounted on a gimbal. Sand danced wildly in the moving beams. “Hey!” David screamed waving his arms. “Hey, you! You in the truck!”

To his heart, the town felt like a graveyard.

The truck, Johnny. Was there something about the truck? There was, wasn’t there? Terry’s voice.

Johnny barely heard that, either. The letters on the back of the truck receding into the windy dark could have spelled Ryder. It made sense, didn’t it? Steve Ames was looking for him. He had poked his head into Desperation, seen nothing, and was now driving out of town again to look somewhere else. Johnny leaped past the astonished Billingsley, down on one knee loading guns, and pelted upstairs toward the holding area, praying to David Carver’s God that his cellular telephone was still intact.

“Bikes in the street down there, see them? My old grammy used to say bikes in the street are one of those bigtime whammies, like breaking a mirror or leaving a hat on the bed. Time to boogie.”