On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester’s Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field.
Авторы: King Stephen Edwin
his flashlight. ‘Get on the couch. And spread em.’
‘Don’t you want to read her her rights, first?’ Mel asked, and laughed: Nyuck-nyuck-nyuck. Sammy thought if she had to hear that laugh one more time, her head would split wide open. But she started for the couch, head down, shoulders slumped.
Carter grabbed her on the way by, turned her, and sprayed the beam of his flashlight up his own face, turning it into a goblin-mask. ‘Are you going to talk about this, Sammy?’
‘N-N-No.’
The goblin-mask nodded. ‘You hold that thought. Because no one would believe you, anyway. Except for us, of course, and then we’d have to come back and really fuck you up.’
Frankie pushed her onto the couch.
‘Do her,’ Georgia said excitedly, training her light on Sammy. ‘Do that bitch!’
All three of the young men did her. Frankie went first, whispering ‘You gotta learn to keep your mouth shut except for when you’re on your knees’ as he pushed into her.
Carter was next. While he was riding her, Little Walter awoke and began to cry.
‘Shut up, kid, or I’ll hafta readja your rights!’ Mel Searles hollered, and then laughed.
Nyuck- nyuck- nyuck.
11
It was almost midnight.
Linda Everett lay fast asleep in her half of the bed; she’d had an exhausting day, she had an early call tomorrow (eee-racfe-u-ation detail), and not even her worries about Janelle could keep her awake.
She didn’t snore, exactly, but a soft queep-queep-queep sound came from her half of the bed.
Rusty had had an equally exhausting day, but he couldn’t sleep, and it wasn’t Jan he was worried about. He thought she was going to be all right, at least for a while. He could keep her seizures at bay if they didn’t get any worse. If he ran out of Zarontin at the hospital dispensary, he could get more from Sanders Drug.
It was Dr Haskell he kept thinking about. And Rory Dinsmore, of course. Rusty kept seeing the torn and bloody socket where the boy’s eye had been. Kept hearing Ron Haskell telling Ginny, I’m not death. Deaf I mean.
Except he had been death.
He rolled over in bed, trying to leave these memories behind, and what came in their place was Rory muttering It’s Halloween. Overlapping that, his own daughter’s voice: It’s the Great Pumpkin’s fault! You have to stop the Great Pumpkin!
His daughter had been having a seizure. The Dinsmore kid had taken a ricochet to the eye and a bullet fragment to the brain. What did that tell him?
It tells me nothing. What did the Scottish guy say on Lost? ‘Don’t mistake coincidence for fate?’
Maybe that had been it. Maybe it had. But Lost had been a long time ago. The Scottish guy could have said Don’t mistake fate for coincidence.
He rolled over the other way and this time saw the black headline of that night’s Democrat one- sheet EXPLOSIVES TO BE FIRED AT BARRIER!
It was hopeless. Sleep was out of the question for now, and the worst thing you could do in a situation like that was try to flog your way into dreamland.
There was half a loaf of Linda’s famous cranberry-orange bread downstairs; he’d seen it on the counter when he came in. Rusty decided he’d have a piece of it at the kitchen table and thumb through the latest issue of American Family Physician. If an article on whooping cough wouldn’t put him to sleep, nothing would.
He got up, a big man dressed in the blue scrubs that were his usual nightwear, and left quietly, so as not to wake Linda.
Halfway to the stairs, he paused and cocked his head.
Audrey was whining, very soft and low. From the girls’ room. Rusty went down there and eased the door open.The golden retriever, just a dim shape between the girls’ beds, turned to look at him and voiced another of those low whines.
Judy was lying on her side with one hand tucked under her cheek, breathing long and slow. Jannie was a different story. She rolled restlessly from one side to the other, kicking at the bedclothes and muttering. Rusty stepped over the dog and sat down on her bed, under Jannie’s latest boy-band poster.
She was dreaming. Not a good dream, by her troubled expression. And that muttering sounded like protests. Rusty tried to make out the words, but before he could, she ceased.
Audrey whined again.
Jan’s nightdress was all twisted. Rusty straightened it, pulled up the covers, and brushed Jannie’s hair off her forehead. Her eyes were moving rapidly back and forth beneath her closed lids, but he observed no trembling of the limbs, no fluttering fingers, no characteristic smacking of the lips. REM sleep rather than seizure, almost certainly. Which raised an interesting question: could dogs also smell bad dreams?
He bent and kissed
