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There was no ring in his ear. Instead, a harsh voice simply began speaking. “This is nine! Nine! This is nine! Nine! This is ten! Ten! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead! This is six! Six!”
It was not a machine-generated voice, but it wasn’t a human voice, either. It was the voice of the room.
“Eighteen! This is now eighteen! Take cover when the siren sounds! This is four! Four!”
“Five! This is five! Ignore the siren! Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room! Eight! This is eight!”
“Six!” the phone screamed. “Six, this is six, this is goddam fucking SIX!”
Mike grabbed the cuff of Dearborn’s slacks. “Don’t go in there,” he said in a cracked, smoky voice. “You’ll never come out.”
“It’s haunted,” Mike said, and as if the words had been a talisman, the door of room 1408 slammed furiously shut, cutting off the light, cutting off the terrible buzz that was almost words.
The minicorder itself melted around the corners, but it still works, and the tape inside it was fine. It’s the things on it which are not fine.
Sometimes just looking at a pen (or a tape recorder) will make him think: The pictures were crooked. I tried to straighten the pictures. He doesn’t know what this means. He can’t remember the pictures or anything else from room 1408, and he is glad. That is a mercy.
He knows he isn’t the first person to escape 1408 without really escaping—Olin tried to tell him—but it isn’t all bad. At least he doesn’t remember.
The closest he has ever come to articulating what he does remember about his seventy-odd (very odd) minutes in 1408 was on one of those walks. “It was never human,” he told the incoming waves in a choked, halting voice. “Ghosts . . . at least ghosts were once human. The thing in the wall, though . . . that thing . . .”
In the meantime, though, he sleeps with the lights on in his bedroom, so he will know at once where he is when he wakes up from the bad dreams.
He has had all the phones taken out of the house; at some point just below the place where his conscious mind seems able to go, he is afraid of picking the phone up and hearing a buzzing, inhuman voice spit, “This is nine! Nine! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead!”
He can’t stand the light that comes at sunset. That yellow deepening to orange, like light in the Australian desert.
