1922

by Stephen King

I wonder if Hell can be worse than the City of Omaha. Perhaps it is the City of Omaha, but with no good country surrounding it; only a smoking, brimstone-stinking emptiness full of lost souls like myself.

I believe that there is another man inside of every man, a stranger, a Conniving Man.

(for the Law, as we know, will befriend whomever pays it).

The rage in his eyes was of the raw, pure sort that only adolescents can feel. It is rage that doesn’t count the cost.

And is there Hell, or do we make our own on earth? When I consider the last eight years of my life, I plump for the latter.

Yet I moved forward with the plan. Because I was like one of those Russian nesting dolls? Perhaps. Perhaps every man is like that. Inside me was the Conniving Man, but inside the Conniving Man was a Hopeful Man. That fellow died sometime between 1922 and 1930. The Conniving Man, having done his damage, disappeared. Without his schemes and ambitions, life has been a hollow place.

They say that loving eyes can never see, but that’s a fool’s axiom. Sometimes they see too much.

But of course the new wears off. The new wears off everything, and it usually doesn’t take long. What’s beneath is gray and shabby, more often than not. Like a rat’s hide.

In the end we are all caught in devices of our own making. I believe that. In the end we are all caught.

It was a cold and forbidding hulk of a building, its thick stone and slit windows expressing perfectly how the papist hierarchy seems to feel in their hearts about women.