Desperation

by Stephen King

They stood in the darkness of China Pit, smelling the dank exhaled breath of the earth, listening to that faint roar, looking at David Carver, who had brought them here.

They stood in the darkness of China Pit, smelling the dank exhaled breath of the earth, listening to that faint roar, looking at David Carver, who had brought them here. “Whose father?” David asked them. “Our father,” Johnny said, stepping easily onto the road of the old prayer, as if he had never been away. “Who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come—” The others joined in, Cynthia, the minister’s daughter, first, Mary last. “—thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.” Through the amen, Cynthia continued on: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen.” She looked up with the little twinkle Johnny had come to like quite a lot. “That’s the way I learned it—kind of a Protestant dance-mix, y’know?” David was looking at Johnny now. “Help me do my best,” Johnny said. “If you’re there, God—and I now have reason to believe you are—help me to do my best and not weaken again. I want you to take that request very seriously, because I have a long history of weakening. David, what about you? Anything to say?” David shrugged and shook his head. “Said it already.” He let go of the hands holding his, and the circle broke.

“That’s right, he’s cruel. But you knew that. And you have no control over the nature of God anyway. None of us do. So why won’t you relax?”

“That’s right, he’s cruel. But you knew that. And you have no control over the nature of God anyway. None of us do. So why won’t you relax?” David made no reply. His head was bowed, but not in prayer this time. Johnny thought it was resignation. In some way, the boy knew what was coming, and that was the worst part. The cruelest part, if you liked. It’s not going to be that easy for him, he had told Steve in the powder magazine, but back there he hadn’t really understood how hard hard could be. First his sis, then his mother; now— “Right,” he said in a voice that sounded as dry as the ground they were standing on. “First David, then Ralph, then you, Steve. I’ll be behind you. Tonight—sorry, this morning—it’s a case of ladies last.” “If we have to go in, I want to go in with Steve,” Cynthia said. “Okay, fine,” Johnny said at once—it was as if he had been expecting this. “You and I can switch places.” “Who put you in charge, anyway?” Mary asked. Johnny turned on her like a snake, startling her into a precarious step backward. “Do you want to have a go?” he asked with a kind of dangerous good cheer. “Because if you do, lass, I’d be happy to turn it over to you. I asked for this no more than David did. So what do you think? Want to put-um on Big Chief’s headdress?”

How else could he go on, except with merciful incomprehension held before him like a shield? How could anyone?

There was a fluttering explosion in the dark.

There was a fluttering explosion in the dark. It was a sound Johnny associated with his Connecticut childhood, pheasant exploding out of the underbrush and into the air as twilight drew down toward dark. For a moment the smell of the mine was stronger, as unseen wings drove the ancient air against his face in pulses. Mary screamed. The flashlight beam jagged upward at an angle, and for just one moment it pinpointed a nightmarish midair apparition, something with wings and glaring golden eyes and outstretched talons. It was David the eyes were glaring at, David it wanted. “Look out!” Ralph yelled, and threw himself over David’s back, driving him down to the bone-littered floor of the shaft. The flashlight fell from the boy’s hand as he went down, kicking up just enough light to be confusing. Unclear shapes strove together in its reflected glow: David under his father, and the shadow of the eagle flexing and swelling above them both. “Shoot it!” Cynthia screamed. “Steve, shoot it, it’s gonna tear his head off!” Johnny grabbed the barrel of the .30-.06 as Steve brought it up. “No. A gunshot’ll bring the whole works down on top of us.” The eagle screeched, wings battering Carver’s head. Ralph tried to fend the bird off with his left hand. It seized one of his fingers in the hook of its beak and tore it off. And then its talons plunged into Ralph Carver’s face like strong fingers into dough. “DADDY, NO!” David shrieked. Steve shoved into the tangle of shadows, and when the side of his foot kicked the downed flashlight, Johnny was treated to a better view than he wanted of the bird with Ralph’s head in its grip. Its wings sent furious skirls of dust in motion from the floor and the old shaft walls. Ralph’s head wagged wildly from side to side, but his body covered David almost completely. Steve drew the rifle back, meaning to swing it, and the butt cracked against the wall. There wasn’t room. He jabbed it forward instead, like a lance. The eagle turned its gimlet gaze on him, talons shifting their grip on Ralph. Its wings were soft thunder in the closed space. Johnny saw Ralph’s finger jutting from the side of its beak. Steve jabbed forward again, this time catching the eagle squarely and knocking the finger out of the beak. Its head was driven back against the wall. Its talons flexed. One drove deeper into Ralph’s face. The other lifted, plunged into his neck, and ripped it open. The bird screamed, perhaps in rage, perhaps in triumph. Mary screamed with it. “GOD, NO!” David howled, his voice cracking. “OH GOD, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP HURTING MY DADDY!” This is hell, Johnny thought calmly, stepping forward and then kneeling. He seized the talon buried in Ralph’s throat. It was like grabbing some exotically ugly curio which had been upholstered in alligator-hide. He twisted it as hard as he could and heard a brittle tearing sound. Above him, Steve drove forward with the stock of the .30-.06 again, slamming the eagle’s head against the rock side of the shaft. There was a crunch. A wing battered down on Johnny’s head. It was like the buzzard in the parking lot all over again. Back to the future, he thought, let go of the talon in favor of the wing, and yanked. The bird came toward him, squalling its ugly, ear-splitting cry, and Ralph came with it, pulled by the talon still buried in his cheek, temple, and orbit of his left eye. Johnny thought Ralph was either unconscious or already dead. He hoped he was already dead. David crawled out from under, face dazed, his shirt soaked with his father’s blood. In a moment he would seize the flashlight and plunge deeper into the mine, if they weren’t quick. “Steve!” Johnny shouted, reaching blindly over his head and encircling the eagle’s back. It plunged and twisted in his hold like the spine of a bucking bronco. “Steve, finish it! Finish it!” Steve drove the stock of the rifle into the bird’s gullet, tilting its shadowy head toward the ceiling. At that moment Mary darted forward. She seized the eagle’s neck and wrung it with bitter efficiency. There was a muffled crack, and suddenly the talon buried in Ralph’s face relaxed. David’s father fell to the floor of the mine, his forehead striking a ribcage and powdering it to dust.

“Let go!” he screamed. “It’s my job! MINE!”

David turned, saw his father lying motionless and facedown. His eyes cleared. He even nodded, as if to say Pretty much what I expected, then bent to pick up the flashlight. It was only when Johnny grabbed him around the waist that his calm broke and he began to struggle. “Let go!” he screamed. “It’s my job! MINE!” “No, David,” Johnny said, holding on for dear life. “It’s not.” He tightened his grip across David’s chest with his left hand, wincing as the boy’s heels printed fresh pain on his shins, and let his right hand slide down to the boy’s hip. From there it moved with a good pickpocket’s unobtrusive speed. Johnny took from David what he had been instructed to take . . . and left something, too. “He can’t take them all and then not let me finish! He can’t do that! He can’t!” Johnny winced as one of David’s feet connected with his left kneecap. “Steve!”

“No, it’s my job! It’s mine! He can’t take them all and leave me! Do you hear? HE CAN’T TAKE THEM ALL AND—”

“Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?”

“Listen to me, David. I’m going to tell you something you didn’t learn from your minister or your Bible. For all I know it’s a message from God himself. Are you listening?” David only looked at him, saying nothing. “You said ‘God is cruel’ the way a person who’s lived his whole life on Tahiti might say ‘Snow is cold.’ You knew, but you didn’t understand.” He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy’s cold cheeks. “Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?”

“Sometimes he makes us live.”

He saw that the walls fairly jostled with Chinese characters, as if the survivors of the cave-in had succumbed to a sort of writing mania as death first approached and then overtook them.

He could feel the can tahs calling to him, pulling him as the moon pulls at salt water.

The can tahs spoke in tones of madness which he recognized from his own past life: sweetly reasonable voices proposing unspeakable acts.

The hole looked just big enough for him to squeeze through.

Johnny tossed the flashlight aside—he wouldn’t need it anymore—and squeezed through the gap. As he passed into the an tak, that murmuring elevator-sound they had heard at the entrance to the drift seemed to fill his head with whispering voices . . . enticing, cajoling, forbidding. All around him, turning the an tak chamber into a fantastic hollow column lit in dim scarlet tones, were carved stone faces: wolf and coyote, hawk and eagle, rat and scorpion. From the mouth of each protruded not another animal but an amorphous, reptilian shape Johnny could barely bring himself to look at . . . and could not really see, in any case. Was it Tak? The Tak at the bottom of the ini? Did it matter?

How had it gotten Ripton?

How had it gotten Ripton? If it was stuck down there, exactly how had it gotten Ripton?

Last of all he saw the cop’s empty gray eyes staring at him in the rearview mirror, the cop saying he thought Johnny would shortly come to understand a great deal more about pneuma, soma, and sarx than he had previously.

He had an idea that these last protectors had died when the eagle had died.

There were dead animals lying in a rotting ring around the hole in the floor—David Carver’s well of the worlds. Coyotes and buzzards, mostly, but he also saw spiders and a few scorpions. He had an idea that these last protectors had died when the eagle had died. Some withdrawing force had hammered the life out of them just as the life had been hammered from Audrey Wyler almost as soon as Steve had slapped the can tahs out of her hand.

Now smoke began to rise out of the ini . . .

He snapped his mouth shut and yanked the motorcycle helmet down over his head.

He snapped his mouth shut and yanked the motorcycle helmet down over his head. He was just in time. A moment later the brownish ribbons encountered the plexi face-shield and spread over it with an unpleasant wet smooching sound. For a moment he could see spreading suckers like kissing lips, and then they were gone, lost in filthy smears of brown particulate matter.

Do you know how to set this shit off without dyno or blasting caps? Steve had asked. You do, don’t you? Or you think you do.

He tried to take a step backward, maybe think this over, but tendrils of muck curled around his ankles like hands and jerked his feet out from under him.

He tried to take a step backward, maybe think this over, but tendrils of muck curled around his ankles like hands and jerked his feet out from under him. He went into the well in a graceless feet-first dive, hammering the back of his head against the edge as he fell. If not for the helmet, his skull would likely have been crushed in. He curled the bags of ANFO protectively against his chest, making breasts of them.

Then the pain came, first biting, then searing, then seeming to eat him alive.

Then the pain came, first biting, then searing, then seeming to eat him alive. The ini was funnel-shaped, but the descending, narrowing circle was lined with crystal outcrops of quartz and cracked hornfels. Johnny slid down this like a kid down a slide that has grown crooked glass thorns. His legs were protected to some degree by the leather chaps and his head was protected by the motorcycle helmet, but his back and buttocks were shredded in moments. He put down his forearms in an effort to brake his slide. Needles of stone tore through them. He saw his shirt-sleeves turn red; an instant later they were in ribbons.

“Let go,” he said. “My God commands it.”

“Let go,” he said. “My God commands it.” The brownish-black smoke fell back, curling around his thighs in filthy banners. “I can let you live,” a voice said. It was no wonder, Johnny thought, that Tak was caught on the other side of the funnel. The hole to which it narrowed was stringent, no more than an inch across. Red light pulsed in it like a wink. “I can heal you, make you well, let you live.” “Yeah, but can you win me a goddam Nobel Prize for Literature?”

“Can you bring David’s father back?”

“GOD FORGIVE ME, I HATE CRITICS!”

With sweat stinging his eyes, Johnny used the claw end of the hammer to tear open one of the ANFO bags. He tilted the slit over the tiny hole, spread the cloth, and poured through one cupped, bloody hand. The red light was obliterated at once, as if the thing down there feared it might inadvertently set off the charge itself. “You can’t!” it screamed, its voice muffled now—but Johnny heard it clearly enough in his head, just the same. “You can’t, damn you! An lah! An lah! Os dam! You bastard!” An lah yourself, Johnny thought. And a big fat can de lach in the bargain. The first bag was empty. Johnny could see dim whiteness in the hole where there had been only black and pulsing red before. The gullet leading back to Tak’s world . . . or plane . . . or dimension . . . wasn’t that long, then. Not in physical terms of measurement. And was the pain in his back and legs less? Maybe I’ve just gone numb, he thought. Not a new state for me, actually. He grabbed the second bag of ANFO and saw one entire side of it was sopped through with his blood. He felt a growing weakness to go along with the fog in his head. Had to be quick now. Had to go like the wind. He tore open the second bag with the hammer’s claw, trying to steel himself against the shrieks in his head; Tak had lapsed entirely into that other language now. He turned the bag over the hole and watched ANFO pellets pour out. The whiteness grew brighter as the gullet filled. By the time the bag was empty, the top layer of pellets was only three inches or so down. Just room enough, Johnny thought. He became aware that a stillness had fallen here in the well, and in the an tak above; there was only that faint whispering, which could have been the calling of ghosts that had been penned up in here ever since the twenty-first of September, 1859. If so, he intended to give them their parole. He fumbled in the pocket of his chaps for what seemed an age, fighting the fog that wanted to blur his thoughts, fighting his own growing weakness. At last his fingers touched something, slipped away, came back, touched it again, grasped it, brought it out. A fat green shotgun shell. Johnny slipped it into the eyehole at the bottom of the ini, and wasn’t surprised to find it was a perfect fit, its blunt circular top seated firmly against the ANFO pellets. “You’re primed, you bastard,” he croaked. No, a voice whispered in his head. No, you dare not. Johnny looked at the brass circlet plugging the hole at the bottom of the ini. He gripped the handle of the hammer, his strength flagging badly now, and thought of what the cop had told him just before he stuck him in the back of the cruiser. You’re a sorry excuse for a writer, the cop had said. You’re a sorry excuse for a man, too. Johnny shoved the helmet off with the heel of his free left hand. He was laughing again as he raised the hammer high above his head, and laughing as he brought it down squarely on the base of the shell. “GOD FORGIVE ME, I HATE CRITICS!”

Excused early, Johnny thought, and then that was gone, too.

He had one fraction of a moment to wonder if he had succeeded, and then the question was answered in a bloom of brilliant, soundless red. It was like swooning into a rose. Johnny Marinville let himself fall, and his last thoughts were of David—had David gotten out, had David gotten clear, was he all right now, would he be all right later. Excused early, Johnny thought, and then that was gone, too.

“And thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about,” David said. His voice was dead, expressionless. “And you shall say, ‘Take heed to yourselves that you go not up into the mount.’ ”

“ ‘Go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it: whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death: There shall not be a hand touch it, but he shall surely be stoned or shot through. Whether it be beast or man, it shall not live.’ ”

“What are we going to tell the police about all this? The real police, I mean.”

“There’s a slightly more important question,” Cynthia said. “What are we going to tell the police about all this? The real police, I mean.” No one said anything for a moment. Then David, still looking at the grille of the Acura, said: “The front part. Let them figure out the rest for themselves.” “I don’t get you,” Mary said. She actually thought she did, but wanted to keep him talking. Wanted him out here with the rest of them mentally as well as physically. “I’ll tell about how we had flat tires and the bad cop took us back to town. How he got us to go with him by saying there was a guy out in the desert with a rifle. Mary, you tell about how he stopped you and Peter. Steve, you tell about how you were looking for Johnny and Johnny phoned you. I’ll say how we escaped after he took my mother away. How we went to the theater. How we called you on the phone, Steve. Then you can tell how you came to the theater, too. And that’s where we were all night. In the theater.”

“There are people who believe a flying saucer crashed not too far from here, back in the forties. Did you know that?”

“In a sec. What are the authorities going to think about what they do find? All the dead people and dead animals? And what will they say? What will they give out?” Steve said: “There are people who believe a flying saucer crashed not too far from here, back in the forties. Did you know that?” She shook her head. “In Roswell, New Mexico. According to the story, there were even survivors. Astronauts from another world. I don’t know if any of it’s true, but it might be. The evidence suggests that something pretty outrageous happened in Roswell. The government covered it up, whatever it was. The same way they’ll cover this up.”

“As to what they’ll think . . . poison gas, maybe. Some weird shit that belched out of a pocket in the earth and made people crazy. And that’s not so far wrong, is it? Really?”

On the horizon, looking small at this distance, was the north face of the China Pit embankment. Above it was a gigantic cloud of dark gray dust. It hung in the sky, still connected to the pit by a hazy umbilicus of rising dust and powdered earth: the remains of a mountain rising into the sky like poisoned ground after a nuclear blast. It made the shape of a wolf, its tail pointing toward the newly risen sun, its grotesquely elongated snout pointed west, where the night was still draining sullenly from the sky.

There were holes in him that cried out in pain, and would go on crying out for so much of the future. One for his mother, one for his father, one for his sister. Holes like faces. Holes like eyes.

Something was gone; the shotgun shell. Something had been put in its place: a piece of stiff paper.

Something was gone; the shotgun shell. Something had been put in its place: a piece of stiff paper. “David?” Steve called from the open window of the truck. “Something wrong?” He shook his head, opening the car door with one hand and taking the folded paper from his pocket with the other. It was blue. And there was something familiar about it, although he couldn’t remember having a paper like this in his pocket yesterday. There was a ragged hole in it, as if it had been punched onto something. As if— Leave your pass. It was the last thing the voice had said on that day last fall when he had prayed for God to make Brian better. He hadn’t understood, but he had obeyed, had hung the blue pass on a nailhead. The next time he’d shown up at the Viet Cong Lookout—a week later? two?—it had been gone. Taken by some kid who wanted to write down a girl’s telephone number, maybe, or blown off by the wind. Except . . . here it was. All I want is lovin’, all I need is lovin’. Felix Cavaliere on vocal, most severely cool. No, he thought. This can’t be. “David?” Mary. Far away. “David, what is it?” Can’t be, he thought again, but when he unfolded it, the words printed at the top were completely familiar: WEST WENTWORTH MIDDLE SCHOOL 100 Viland Avenue Then, in big black tabloid type: EXCUSED EARLY And, last of all: Parent of excused student must sign this pass. Pass must be returned to attendance office.

Except now there was more. A brief scrawled message below the last line of printing.

Except now there was more. A brief scrawled message below the last line of printing. Something moved inside him. Some huge thing. His throat closed up, then opened to let out a long, wailing cry that was only grief at the top. He swayed, clutching at the Acura’s roof, lowered his forehead to his arm, and began to sob. From some great distance he heard the truck doors opening, heard Steve and Cynthia racing toward him. He wept. He thought of Pie, holding her doll and smiling up at him. He thought of his mother, dancing to the radio in the laundry room with the iron in one hand, laughing at her own foolishness. He thought of his father, sitting on the porch with his feet cocked up on the rail, a book in one hand and a beer in the other, waving to him as he came home from Brian’s, pushing his bike up the driveway toward the garage in the thick twilight. He thought of how much he had loved them, how much he would always love them. And Johnny. Johnny standing on the dark edge of the China Shaft, saying Sometimes he makes us live. David wept with his head down and the EXCUSED EARLY pass now crumpled in his closed fist, that huge thing still moving inside him, something like a landslide . . . but maybe not so bad. Maybe, in the end, not so bad.

“While you were fighting with him, a shotgun shell fell off the desk and rolled over to me. When I had a chance, I picked it up. Johnny must have stolen it out of my pocket when he was hanging onto me. In the mineshaft. After my dad was killed. Johnny used the shell to set off the ANFO. And when he took it out of my pocket, he put this in.”

‘God is love.’ ”

“Do you understand the reference, David?” David took the blue pass. “Of course. First John, chapter four, verse eight. ‘God is love.’ ” She looked at him for a long time. “Is he, David? Is he love?” “Oh, yes,” David said. He folded the pass along its crease. “I guess he’s sort of . . . everything.”

David put his head back against the seat, closed his eyes, and began to pray.

Cynthia waved. Mary waved back and gave her a thumbs-up. Steve pulled out and Mary followed him, the Acura’s wheels rolling reluctantly through the first ridge of sand and then picking up speed. David put his head back against the seat, closed his eyes, and began to pray. Bangor, Maine November 1, 1994–December 5, 1995