Insomnia

by Stephen King

No one—least of all Dr. Litchfield—came right out and told Ralph Roberts that his wife was going to die, but there came a time when Ralph understood without needing to be told. The months between March and June were a jangling, screaming time inside his head—a

he began to understand that the pitchmen along the medical midway had only quack remedies to sell, and the cheery quickstep of the calliope could no longer quite hide the fact that the tune spilling out of the loudspeakers was “The Funeral March.” It was a carnival, all right; the carnival of lost souls.

The worst midsummer heatwave since 1971 rolled over central Maine, and Derry simmered in a bath of hazy sun, humidity, and daily temperatures in the mid-nineties. The city—hardly a bustling metropolis at the best of times—fell into a complete stupor, and it was in this hot silence

Ralph heard that

ticking everywhere—it even seemed to be in the walls.

through the hot summer afternoons

So he walked, relishing the heat in spite of the way it sometimes made his head swim and his ears ring, relishing it mostly because of the way it made his ears ring; sometimes there were whole hours when they rang so loudly and his head pounded so fiercely that he couldn’t hear the tick of Carolyn’s deathwatch.

He walked from Witcham Street to the Barrens, from Kansas Street to Neibolt Street, from Main Street to the Kissing Bridge,

It was on one of these walks that he first became aware that something had gone very wrong with Ed Deepneau, his neighbor from up the street.

thunderheads had blotted out the sun and a cool, if sporadic, breeze had begun to blow.

when the four-forty-five United Airlines flight from Boston swooped low overhead, startling him

he had walked more than five miles without the slightest sense of time passing. Carolyn’s time, a voice deep inside his head muttered.

the bruise-purple thunderheads which were stacking up over the airport.

What if it doesn’t just rain? Last summer it hailed so hard that one time in August it broke windows all over the west side. “Let it hail, then,” he said. “I don’t bruise that easy.”

He could hear the first rumbles of thunder in the west, where the clouds were stacking up. The sun, although blotted out, was refusing to quit without a fight; it edged the thunderheads

with bands of brilliant gold and shone through occasional rifts in the clouds like the fragmented beam of some huge movie-projector.

One thing, at least, he thought. I’ll sleep tonight. I’ll sleep like a damn rock.

the tires sending up puffs of blue smoke that made

Ralph think of the 747 touching down,

The wind was still freshening from the west, where the thunderheads were, and it carried the screaming voice of the Datsun’s driver:

Ralph had an idea that Ed wouldn’t be able to tell someone to go to hell without suffering a sleepless night in consequence, but—

only later that Ralph came to consider Ed might have rammed the Ranger on purpose).

A moment later both vehicles were dead in the middle of the road, tangled together like some weird sculpture.

impugned, legal action threatened. Ralph supposed what the drivers were really trying to say without coming right out and saying it was Listen, fool, you scared the living hell out of me!

that the accident was maybe not over but still happening.

his slim shoulders squared against a background of deepening clouds.

And there was something around his neck: a long white something. A scarf? It looked like a scarf, but why would anyone be wearing a scarf on a day as hot as this one had been?

Thunder rumbled in the west, louder now. And closer.

seemed almost to home in, like a jet guided by radar—and

but the freshening breeze—cold now with the promise of rain—seemed to snatch the words away

it was very white in the rapidly darkening day—and

His voice rose to a shriek that was lost in the coming storm’s first really authoritative clap of thunder.

The heat beneath the thin tee-shirt was unnerving; it was like putting an arm around an oven,

He had never seen such utter, unreasoning fury in a pair of human eyes; had never even suspected such fury might exist.

except this wasn’t Ed, and Ralph knew it.

(so hot under the tee-shirt, so incredibly, throbbingly hot),

Ed yelled suddenly, and pointed over Ralph’s shoulder. Lightning flashed, and for a moment the pitted scars of Ed’s adolescent acne were thrown into sharp relief, like some strange organic treasure map. Thunder rolled.

More lightning flashed overhead, a purple-white snarl of electricity.

it was almost as if the man had somehow swallowed a bolt of the lightning now loose in the sky.

Ed’s tongue slipped out and dabbed delicately first at one corner of his mouth and then the other.

Ralph saw there were Chinese figures embroidered on it in red, just above the fringe.

In for a penny, in for a pound.” There was another flash of lightning, another heavy blast of thunder—one that seemed to go rolling all the way across the sky this time—and a cold spackle of rain struck the back of Ralph’s sweaty neck.

“I ain’t Ray Joubert or that guy Dahmer after all. How ’bout that!”

Another flash of lightning exploded above the airport. The thunder which followed was almost deafening.

Ralph suddenly found himself wondering how much he trusted that expression, and if he really had even the slightest idea of

Another cold spatter of rain fell, drumming on the blue tarpaulin like impatient fingers. “A

Ed was not his business this July; Carolyn was. Carolyn and the thing which had started ticking in the walls of their bedroom—and inside her—late at night.

(hey hey Susan Day) he would remember later on.