Elevation

by Stephen King

“I’ll be dipped in pitch,”

Pumpkins came out on stoops, black cats and skeletons danced in the windows of houses,

The high schoolers went in costume to the annual Halloween dance in the gym, for which a local garage band, Big Top, renamed themselves Pennywise and the Clowns.

He got his first costumed customers around four o’clock, and the last ones just past sunset. There were ghosts and goblins, superheroes and stormtroopers.

The town motto seems to be if you can’t keep it on the down-low, then out you must go.

Not a wind, not even a high, exactly, but an elevation. A sense that you had gone beyond yourself and could go farther still.

Everything leads to this, he thought. To this elevation. If it’s how dying feels, everyone should be glad to go.

SHE GOT BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM A FRIEND, the caption read, and below that: Fellow Castle Rocker Scott Carey helps Deirdre McComb to her feet after she took a spill on the wet road just short of the finish line.

summer people come back, she’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

There was applause when Deirdre mounted the podium, and a roar of approval when she proclaimed the thirty-foot spruce as “the best Christmas tree in the best town in New England.”

The lights came on, the neon angel at the top twirled and curtseyed, and the crowd sang along with the high schoolers: Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, how lovely are your branches.

“Because I believe every bookstore should have a resident cat, which you are currently lacking.”

PS: When we go to the bookstore, we’ll always pet Bill.

Gravity is the anchor that pulls us down into our graves. There would be no grave for this man, and no more gravity, either. He had been given a special dispensation.

Everyone should have this, he thought, and perhaps, at the end, everyone does. Perhaps in their time of dying, everyone rises.