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A man in his nineties should be well past the terrors of childhood, but as my infirmities slowly creep up on me, like waves licking closer and closer to some indifferently built castle of sand, that terrible face grows clearer and clearer in my mind’s eye. It glows like a dark star in the constellations of my childhood.
We hunkered and listened to the wind in the chimney and hoped no one would get sick or break a leg or get a headful of bad ideas, like the farmer over in Castle Rock who had chopped up his wife and kids three winters before and then said in court that the ghosts made him do it.
I sat up, clutched the pole, and suddenly became aware that something was sitting on the tip of my nose. I crossed my eyes and saw a bee. My heart seemed to fall dead in my chest, and for a horrible second I was sure I was going to wet my pants.
It was too close for me to focus on what it was doing, but it was easy to imagine it ramming its stinger into one of my nostrils and shooting its poison up toward my eyes. And my brain.
A terrible idea came to me: that this was the very bee which had killed my brother.
Still, the idea stayed. This was a special bee, a devil-bee, and it had come back to finish the other of Albion and Loretta’s two boys.
He was wearing a black three-piece suit, and I knew right away that he was not a human being, because his eyes were the orangey-red of flames in a woodstove. I don’t just mean the irises, because he had no irises, and no pupils, and certainly no whites. His eyes were completely orange—an orange that shifted and flickered.
Where his feet had touched—or seemed to touch—there was not a single broken twig, crushed leaf, or trampled shoe-shape.
From the corner of one eye I could see a hand as pale as the hand of a store window dummy. The fingers were hideously long.
The man who had come out of the woods on that Saturday afternoon in midsummer was the Devil, and inside the empty holes of his eyes, his brains were burning.
And I noticed an awful thing; as the shadow of his head travelled over the bank, the grass beneath it turned yellow and died.
Then he threw himself on his back in the little flat place and laughed wildly. It was the sound of a lunatic.
I had called the Devil a lying bastard.
He spoke in a tone of bogus comfort that was horrible, maddening, without remorse or pity.
His face was as slack and avid as the face of a corpse that has died hungry. His eyes blazed. I could see his sharp little teeth between his pale lips.
The fish went in and went in, his throat bulged as it slid down his gullet, and now he began to cry tears of his own . . . except his tears were blood, scarlet and thick.
His cheeks were splattered with his bloody tears and his shark’s mouth hung open like a hinge.
But hotel rooms are just naturally creepy places, don’t you think? I mean, how many people have slept in that bed before you? How many of them were sick? How many were losing their minds? How many were perhaps thinking about reading a few final verses from the Bible in the drawer of the nightstand beside them and then hanging themselves in the closet beside the TV? Brrrr. In any case, let’s check in, shall we? Here’s your key . . . and you might take time to notice what those four innocent numbers add up to.
How he had smoked for almost twenty years—thirty butts a day, sometimes forty—was now beyond him. Why he had done it was an even better question.
And 1408 is vacant. 1408 is always vacant these days.”
Because there are no ghosts in room 1408 and never have been. There’s something in there—I’ve felt it myself—but it’s not a spirit presence.
In an abandoned house or an old castle keep, your unbelief may serve you as protection. In room 1408, it will only render you more vulnerable.
“The Dolphin went to a MagCard system in 1979, Mr. Enslin, the year I took the job as manager. 1408 is the only room in the house that still opens with a key. There was no need to put a MagCard lock on its door, because there’s never anyone inside; the room was last occupied by a paying guest in 1978.”
“It is just as well that 1408 has never needed a MagCard lock on its door, because I am completely positive the device wouldn’t work. Digital wristwatches don’t work in room 1408. Sometimes they run backward, sometimes they simply go out, but you can’t tell time with one. Not in room 1408, you can’t. The same is true of pocket calculators and cell-phones. If you’re wearing a beeper, Mr. Enslin, I advise you to turn it off, because once you’re in room 1408, it will start beeping at will.” He paused. “And turning it off isn’t guaranteed to work, either; it may turn itself back on. The only sure
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Veronique and Celeste were twins, and the bond between them seemed to make them . . . how shall I put it? Not immune to 1408, but its equal . . . at least for the short periods of time needed to give a room a light turn.”
“Hoping for that bond, yes. And you can make fun of the room 1408 bogies as much as you want, Mr. Enslin, but you’ll feel them almost at once, of that I’m confident. Whatever there is in that room, it’s not shy.
There were several who had weeping fits, one who had a laughing fit—I don’t know why someone laughing out of control should be more frightening than someone sobbing, but it is—and a number who fainted.
He paused again, then added in a queer, flat tone: “One of them went blind.”
“She went blind. Rommie Van Gelder, that was. She was dusting the top of the television, and all at once she began to scream. I asked her what was wrong. She dropped her dustrag and put her hands over her eyes and screamed that she was blind . . . but that she could see the most awful colors. They went away almost as soon as I got her out through the door, and by the time I got her down the hallway to the elevator, her sight had begun to come back.”
The point is, Mr. Enslin, that if you can’t be swayed from your intention by a record of twelve suicides in sixty-eight years, I doubt if the gasps and fibrillations of a few chambermaids will stop you.”
“It’s also possible that some people react more quickly and more violently to whatever lives in that room, just as some people who go scuba-diving are more prone to the bends than others.
“How many have there been?” The idea of so-called natural deaths in 1408 had never occurred to him. “Thirty,” Olin replied. “Thirty, at least. Thirty that I know of.”
If I couldn’t persuade you to stay out of 1408, I doubt that I would have had much more luck in convincing the Stanley Corporation’s board of directors that I took a perfectly good room off the market because I was afraid that spooks cause the occasional travelling salesman to jump out the window and splatter himself all over Sixty-first Street.”
“There’s a telephone in the room, of course,” Olin said. “You could try it, if you find yourself in trouble . . . but I doubt that it will work. Not if the room doesn’t want it to.”
Olin brought one hand out from behind his back, and Mike saw it was trembling. “Mr. Enslin,” he said. “Mike. Don’t do this. For God’s sake—”
His problems with 1408 started even before he got into the room. The door was crooked.
Mere words on a page cannot adequately convey a listener’s growing conviction that he is hearing a man lose, if not his mind, then his hold on conventional reality, but even the flat words themselves suggest that something was happening.
The dust had a greasy, slippery feel. Like silk just before it rots was what came into his mind, but he was damned if he was going to put that on tape, either. How was he supposed to know what silk felt like just before it rotted? It was a drunk’s thought.
And they’ve been here a long time, no doubt about that, Mike thought. If I lifted them away from the walls, I’d see lighter patches on the wallpaper. Or bugs squirming out, the way they do when you turn over a rock.
“My brother was actually eaten by wolves one winter on the Connecticut Turnpike,” he said, then laughed and pushed STOP. There is more on the tape—a little more—but that is the final statement of any coherence . . . the final statement, that is, to which a clear meaning can be ascribed.
He pushed RECORD and spoke two words—fuming oranges—into the minicorder.
Mike pushed RECORD, the little red eye came on, he said “Orpheus on the Orpheum Circuit!” into the mike, then pushed STOP again.
Nevertheless, he picked the menu up. It was in French, and although it had been years since he had taken the language, one of the breakfast items appeared to be birds roasted in shit.
He closed his eyes and opened them. The menu was in Russian. He closed his eyes and opened them. The menu was in Italian. Closed his eyes, opened them. There was no menu. There was a picture of a screaming little woodcut boy looking back over his shoulder at the woodcut wolf which had swallowed his left leg up to the knee. The wolf’s ears were laid back and he looked like a terrier with its favorite toy.
1408 was wrong, yes indeed, 1408 was very wrong.
Tango-light, he thought. The kind of light that makes the dead get up out of their graves and tango. The kind of light—
He became aware that his shoes had begun to make odd smooching sounds, as if the floor beneath them were growing soft.
His face was shocked and vacant. Mike knew his name: Kevin O’Malley, this room’s first occupant, a sewing machine salesman who had jumped from this room in October of 1910. To O’Malley’s left were the others who had died here, all with that same vacant, shocked expression. It made them look related, all members of the same inbred and cataclysmically retarded family.
Mike blundered toward the door, his feet smooching and now actually seeming to stick a little at each step. The door wouldn’t open, of course. The chain hung unengaged, the thumbbolt stood straight up like clock hands pointing to six o’clock, but the door wouldn’t open.
His minicorder, faithful companion of many “case expeditions,” was no longer in his hand. He had left it somewhere. In the bedroom? If it was in the bedroom, it was probably gone by now, swallowed by the room; when it was digested, it would be excreted into one of the pictures.
