A crazy pulp truck driver named Richie Messina from over Freeport way was in Tookey's that night, pretty well liquored up. 'Jesus Christ,' this stampeder roars, standing up about nine feet tall in his wool pants and his plaid shirt and his leathertopped boots. 'Are you all so damn afraid to say it out? Vampires! That's what you're all thinking, ain't it? JesusjumpedupChrist in a chariotdriven sidecar! Just like a bunch of kids scared of the movies! You know what there is down there in 'Salem's Lot? Want me to tell you? Want me to tell you?' 'Do tell, Richie,' Tookey says. It had got real quiet in the bar. You could hear the fire popping, and outside the soft drift of November rain coming down in the dark. 'You got the floor.' 'what you got over there is your basic wild dog pack,' Richie Messina tells us. 'That's what y9u got. That and a lot of old women who love a good spo6k story. why, for eighty bucks I'd go up there and spend the night in what's left of that haunted house you're all so worried about. Well, what about it? Anyone want to put it up?' But nobody would. Richie was a loudmouth and a mean drunk and no one was going to shed any tears at his wake, but none of us were willing to see him go into 'Salem's Lot after dark. 'Be screwed to the bunch of you,' Richie says. 'I got my fourten in the trunk of my Chevy, and that'll stop anything in Falmouth, Cumberland, or Jerusalem's Lot. And that's where I'm goin He slammed out of the bar and no one said a word for a while. Then Lamont Henry says, real quiet, 'That's the last time anyone's gonna see Richie Messina. Holy God.' And Lamont, raised to be a Methodist from his mother's knee, crossed himself. 'He'll sober off and change his mind,' Tookey said, but he sounded uneasy. 'He'll be back by closin' time, makin' out it was all a joke.' But Lamont had the right of that one, because no one ever saw Richie again. His wife told the state cops she thought he'd gone to Florida to beat a collection agency, but you could see the truth of the thing in her eyes  sick, scared eyes. Not long after, she moved away to Rhode Island. Maybe she thought Richie was going to come after her some dark night. And I'm not the man to say he might not have done.  Now Tookey was looking at me and I was looking at Tookey as I stuffed my crucifix back into my shirt. I never felt so old or so scared in my life. Tookey said again, 'We can't just leave them out there, Booth.' 'Yeah. I know.' We looked at each other for a moment longer, and then he reached out and gripped my shoulder. 'You're a good man, Booth.' That was enough to buck me up some. It seems like when you pass seventy, people start forgetting that you are a man, or that you ever were. Tookey walked over to Lumley and said, 'I've got a fourwheeldrive Scout. I'll get it out.' 'For God's sake, man, why didn't you say so before?' He had whirled around from the window and was staring angrily at Tookey. 'Why'd you have to spend ten minutes beating around the bush?' Tookey said, very softly, 'Mister, you shut your jaw. And if you get urge to open it, you remember who made that turn on to an unploughed road in the middle of a goddamned blizzard.' He started to say something, and then shut his mouth. Thick colour had risen up in his cheeks. Tookey went out to get his Scout out of the garage. I felt around under the bar for his chrome flask and filled it full of brandy. Figured we might need it before this night was over. Maine blizzard  ever been out in one? The snow comes flying so thick and fine that it looks like sand and sounds like that, beating on the sides of your car or pickup. You don't want to use your high beams because they reflect off the snow and you can't see ten feet in front of you. With the low beams on, you can see maybe fifteen feet. But I can live with the snow. It's the wind I don't like, when it picks up and begins to howl, driving the snow into a hundred weird flying shapes and sounding like all the hate and pain and fear in the world. There's death in the throat of a snowstorm wind, white death  and maybe something beyond death. That's no sound to hear when you're tucked up all cosy in your own bed with the shutters bolted and the doors locked. It's that much worse if you're driving. And we were driving smack into 'Salem's Lot. 'Hurry up a little, can't you?' Lumley asked. I said, 'For a man who came in half frozen, you're in one hell of a hurry to end up walking again.' He gave me a resentful, baffled look and didn't say anything else. We were moving up the highway at a steady twentyfive miles an hour. It was hard to believe that Billy Larribee had just ploughed this stretch an hour ago; another two inches had covered it, and it was drifting in. The strongest gusts of wind rocked the scout on her springs. The headlights showed a swirling white nothing up ahead of us. We hadn't met a single car. About ten minutes later Lumley gasps 'Hey! what's that?' He was pointing out my side of the car; I'd been looking dead ahead. I turned, but was a shade too late. I thought I could see some sort of slumped form fading back from the car, back into the snow, but that could have been imagination. 'what was it? A deer?' I asked. 'I guess so,' he says, sounding shaky. 'But its eyes  they looked red.' He looked at me. 'Is that how a deer's eyes look at night?' He sounded almost as if he were pleading. 'They can look like anything,' I says, thinking that might be true, but I've seen a lot of deer at night from a lot of cars, and never saw any set of eyes reflect back red. Tookey didn't say anything. About fifteen minutes later, we came to a place where the snowbank on the right of the road wasn't so high because the ploughs are supposed to raise their blades a little when they go through an intersection. 'This looks like where we turned,' Lumley said, not sounding too sure about it. 'I don't see the sign' 'This is it,' Tookey answered. He didn't sound like himself at all. 'You can just see the top of the signpost.' 'Oh. Sure.' Lumley sounded relieved. 'Listen, Mr Tooklander, I'm sorry about being so short back there. I was cold and worried and calling myself two hundred kinds of fool. And I want to thank you both ' 'Don't thank Booth and me until we've got them in this car,' Tookey said. He put the Scout in fourwheel drive and slammed his way through the snowbank and on to Jointner Avenue, which goes through the Lot and out to 295. Snow flew up from the mudguards. The rear end tried to break a little bit, but Tookey's been driving through snow since Hector was a pup. He jockeyed it a bit, talked to it, and on we went. The headlights picked out the bare indication of other tyre tracks from time to time, the ones made by Lumley's car, and then they would disappear again. Lumley was leaning forward, looking for his car. And all at once Tookey said, 'Mr Lumley.' 'What?' He looked around at Tookey. 'People around these parts are kind of superstitious about 'Salem's Lot,' Tookey says, sounding easy enough but I could see the deep lines of strain around his mouth, and the way his eyes kept moving from side to side. 'If your people are in the car, why, that's fine. We'll pack them up, go back to my place, and tomorrow, when the storm's over, Billy will be glad to yank your car out of the snowbank. But if they're not in the car 'Not in the car?' Lumley broke in sharply. 'Why wouldn't they be in the car?' 'If they're not in the car,' Tookey goes on, not answering, 'we're going to turn around and drive back to Falmouth Center and whistle for the sheriff. Makes no sense to go wallowing around at night in a snowstorm anyway, does it?' 'They'll be in the car. Where else would they be?' I said, 'One other thing, Mr Lumley. If we should see anybody, we're not going to talk to them. Not even if they talk to us. You understand that?' Very slow, Lumley says, 'Just what are these superstitions?' Before I could say anything  God alone knows what I would have said  Tookey broke in. 'We're there.' We were coming up on the back end of a big Mercedes. The whole hood of the thing was buried in a snowdrift, and another drift had socked in the whole left side of the car. But the taillights were on and we could see exhaust drifting out of the tailpipe. 'They didn't run out of gas, anyway,' Lumley said. Tookey pulled up and pulled on the Scout's emergency brake. 'You remember what Booth told you, Lumley.' 'Sure, sure.' But he wasn't thinking of anything but his wife and daughter. I don't see how anybody could blame him, either. 'Ready, Booth?' Tookey asked me. His eyes held on mine, grim and grey in the dashboard lights. 'I guess lam,' I said. We all got out and the wind grabbed us, throwing snow in our faces. Lumley was first, bending into the wind, his fancy topcoat billowing out behind him like a sail. He cast two shadows, one from Tookey's headlights, the other from his own taillights. I was behind him, and Tookey was a step behind me. When I got to the trunk of the Mercedes, Tookey grabbed me. 'Let him go,' he said. 'Janey! Francie!' Lumley yelled. 'Everything okay?' He pulled open the driver'sside door and leaned in. 'Everything ' He froze to a dead stop. The wind ripped the heavy door right out of his hand pushed it all the way open. 'Holy God, Booth,' Tookey said, just below the scream of the wind. 'I think it's happened again.' Lumley turned back towards us. His face was scared and bewildered, his eyes wide. All of a sudden he lunged towards us through the snow, slipping and almost falling. He brushed me away like I was nothing and grabbed Tookey. 'How did you know?' he roared. 'where are they? what the hell is going on here?' Tookey broke his grip and shoved past him. He and I looked into the Mercedes together. Warm as toast it was, but it wasn't going to be for much longer. The little amber lowfuel light was glowing. The big car was empty. There was a child's Barbie doll on the passenger's floor mat. And a child's ski parka was crumpled over the seat back. Tookey put his hands over his face and then he was gone. Lumley had grabbed him and shoved him right back into the snowbank. His face was pale and wild. His mouth was working as if he had chewed down on some bitter stuff he couldn't yet unpucker enough to spit out. He reached in and grabbed the parka. 'Francie's coat?' he kind of whispered. And then loud, bellowing 'Francie's coat!' He turned around, holding it in front of him by the little furtrimmed hood. He looked at me, blank and unbelieving. 'She can't be out without her coat on, Mr Booth. why why she'll freeze to death.' 'Mr Lumley ' He blundered past me, still holding the parka, shouting 'Francie! Janey! Where are you? Where are youuu?' I gave Tookey my hand and pulled him to his feet. 'Are you all ' 'Never mind me,' he says. 'We've got to get hold of him, Booth.' We went after him as fast as we could, which wasn't very fast with the snow hipdeep in some places. But then he stopped and we caught up to him. 'Mr Lumley ' Tookey started, laying a hand on his shoulder. 'This way,' Lumley said. 'This is the way they went. Look!' We looked down. We were in a kind of dip here, and most of the wind went right over our heads. And you could see two sets of tracks, one large and one small, just filling up with snow. If we had been five minutes later, they would have been gone. He started to walk away, his head down, and Tookey grabbed him back. 'No! No, Lumley!' Lumley turned his wild face up to Tookey's and made a fist. He drew it back.. but something in Tookey's face made him falter. He looked from Tookey to me and then back again. 'She'll freeze,' he said, as if we were a couple of stupid kids. 'Don't you get it? She doesn't have her jacket on and she's only seven years old ' 'They could be anywhere,' Tookey said. 'You can't follow those tracks. They'll be gone in the next drift.' 'What do you suggest?' Lumley yells, his voice high and hysterical. 'If we go back to get the police, she'll freeze to death! Francie and my wife!' 'They may be frozen already,' Tookey said. His eyes caught Lumley's. 'Frozen, or something worse.' 'What do you mean?' Lumley whispered. 'Get it straight, goddamn it! Tell me!' 'Mr Lumley,' Tookey says, 'there's something in the Lot ' But I was the one who came out with it finally, said the word I never expected to say. 'Vampires, Mr Lumley. Jerusalem's Lot is full of vampires. I expect that's hard for you to swallow He was staring at me as if I'd gone green. 'Loonies,' he whispers. 'You're a couple of loonies.' Then he turned away, cupped his hands around his mouth, and bellowed, 'FRANCIE! JANEY!' He started floundering off again. The snow was up to the hem of his fancy coat. I looked at Tookey. 'What do we do now?' 'Follow him,' Tookey says. His hair was plastered with snow, and he did look a little bit loony. 'I can't just leave him out here, Booth. Can you?' 'No,' I says. 'Guess not.' So we started to wade through the snow after Lumley as best we could. But he kept getting further and further ahead. He had his youth to spend, you see. He was breaking the trail, going through that snow like a bull. My arthritis began to bother me something terrible, and I started to look down at my legs, telling myself A little further, just a little further, keep goin' damn it, keep goin' I piled right into Tookey, who was standing spreadlegged in a drift. His head was hanging and both of his hands were pressed to his chest. 'Tookey,' I says, 'you okay?' 'I'm all right,' he said, taking his hands away. 'We'll stick with him, Booth, and when he fags out he'll see reason.' We topped a rise and there was Lumley at the bottom, looking desperately for more tracks. Poor man, there wasn't a chance he was going to find them. The wind blew straight across down there where he was, and any tracks would have been rubbed out three minutes after they was made, let alone a couple of hours. He raised his head and screamed into the night 'FRANCJE!JANEY! FOR GOD'S SAKE!' And you could hear the desperation in his voice, the terror, and pity him for it. The only answer he got was the freighttrain wail of the wind. It almost seemed to be laughin' at him, saying I took them Mister New Jersey with your fancy car and camel'shair topcoat. I took them and I rubbed out their tracks and by morning I'll have them just as neat and frozen as two strawberries in a deepfreeze. 'Lumley!' Tookey bawled over the wind. 'Listen, you never mind vampires or boogies or nothing like that, but you mind this! You're just making it worse for them! We got to get the ' And then there was an answer, a voice coming out of the dark like little tinkling silver bells, and my heart turned cold as ice in a cistern. 'Jerry Jerry, is that you?' Lumley wheeled at the sound. And then she came, drifting out of the dark shadows of a little copse of trees like a ghost. She was a city woman, all right, and right then she seemed like the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I felt like I wanted to go to her and tell her how glad I was she was safe after all. She was wearing a heavy green pullover sort of thing, a poncho, I believe they're called. It floated all around her, and her dark hair streamed out in the wild wind like water in a December creek, just before the winter freeze stills it and locks it in. Maybe I did take a step towards her, because I felt Tookey's hand on my shoulder, rough and warm. And still  how can I say it?  I yearned after her, so dark and beautiful with that green poncho floating around her neck and shoulders, as exotic and strange as to make you think of some beautiful woman from a Walter de la Mare poem. 'Janey!' Lumley cried. 'Janey!' He began to struggle through the snow towards her, his arms outstretched. 'No!' Tookey cried. 'No, Lumley!' He never even looked but she did. She looked up at us and grinned. And when she did, I felt my longing, my yearning turn to horror as cold as the grave, as white and silent as bones in a shroud. Even from the rise we could see the sullen red glare in those eyes. They were less human than a wolf's eyes. And when she grinned you could see how long her teeth had become. She wasn't human any more. She was a dead thing somehow come back to life in this black howling storm. Tookey make the sign of the cross at her. She flinched back and then grinned at us again. We were too far away, and maybe too scared. 'Stop it!' I whispered. 'Can't we stop it?' 'Too late, Booth!' Tookey says grimly. Lumley had reached her. He looked like a ghost himself, coated in snow like he was. He reached for her and then he began to scream. I'll hear that sound in my dreams, that man screaming like a child in a nightmare. He tried to back away from her, but her arms, long and bare and as white as the snow, snaked out and pulled him to her. I could see her cock her head and then thrust it forward 'Booth!' Tookey said hoarsely. 'We've got to get out of here!' And so we ran. Ran like rats, I suppose some would say, but those who would weren't there that night. We fled back down along our own backtrail, falling down, getting up again, slipping and sliding. I kept looking back over my shoulder to see if that woman was coming after us, grinning that grin and watching us with those red eyes. We got back to the Scout and Tookey doubled over, holding his chest. 'Tookey!' I said, badly scared. 'What ' 'Ticker,' he said. 'Been bad for five years or more. Get me around in the shotgun seat, Booth, and then get us the hell out of here.' I hooked an arm under his coat and dragged him around and somehow boosted him up and in. He leaned his head back and shut his eyes. His skin was waxylooking and yellow. I went back around the hood of the truck at a trot, and I damned near ran into the little girl. She was just standing there beside the driver'sside door, her hair in pigtails, wearing nothing but a little bit of a yellow dress. 'Mister,' she said in a high, clear voice, as sweet as morning mist, 'won't you help me find my mother? She's gone and I'm so cold ' 'Honey,' I said, 'honey, you better get in the truck. Your mother's ' I broke off, and if there was ever a time in my life I was close to swooning, that was the moment. She was standing there, you see, but she was standing on top of the snow and there were no tracks, not in any direction. She looked up at me then, Lumley's daughter Francie. She was no more than seven years old, and she was going to be seven for an eternity of nights. Her little face was a ghastly corpse white, her eyes a red and silver that you could fall into. And below her jaw I could see two small punctures like pinpricks, their edges horribly mangled. She held out her arms at me and smiled. 'Pick me up, mister,' she said softly. 'I want to give you a kiss. Then you can take me to my mommy.' I didn't want to, but there was nothing I could do. I was leaning forward, my arms outstretched. I could see her mouth opening, I could see the little fangs inside the pink ring of her lips. Something slipped down her chin, bright and silvery, and with a dim, distant, faraway horror, I realized she was drooling. Her small hands clasped themselves around my neck and I was thinking Well, maybe it won't be so bad, not so bad, maybe it won't be so awful after a while  when something black flew out of the Scout and struck her on the chest. There was a puff of strangesmelling smoke, a flashing glow that was gone an instant later, and then she was backing away, hissing. Her face was twisted into a vulpine mask of rage, hate, and pain. She turned sideways and then and then she was gone. One moment she was there, and the next there was a twisting knot of snow that looked a little bit like a human shape. Then the wind tattered it away across the fields. 'Booth!' Tookey whispered. 'Be quick, now!' And I was. But not so quick that I didn't have time to pick up what he had thrown at that little girl from hell. His mother's Douay Bible. That was some time ago. I'm a sight older now, and I was no chicken then. Herb Tooklander passed on two years ago. He went peaceful, in the night. The bar is still there, some man and his wife from Waterville bought it, nice people, and they've kept it pretty much the same. But I don't go by much. It's different somehow with Tookey gone. Things in the Lot go on pretty much as they always have. The sheriff found that fellow Lumley's car the next day, out of gas, the battery dead. Neither Tookey nor I said anything about it. What would have been the point? And every now and then a hitchhiker or a camper will disappear around there someplace, up on Schoolyard Hill or out near the Harmony Hill cemetery. They'll turn up the fellow's packsack or a paperback book all swollen and bleached out by the rain or snow, or some such. But never the people. I still have bad dreams about that stormy night we went out there. Not about the woman so much as the little girl, and the way she smiled when she held her arms up sol could pick her up. So she could give me a kiss. But I'm an old man and the time comes soon when dreams are done. You may have an occasion to be travelling in southern Maine yourself one of these days. Pretty part of the countryside. You may even stop by Tookey's Bar for a drink. Nice place. They kept the name just the same. So have your drink, and then my advice to you is to keep right on moving north. whatever you do, don't go up that road to Jerusalem's Lot. Especially not after dark. There's a little girl somewhere out there. And I think she's still waiting for her goodnight kiss. THE WOMAN IN THE ROOM The question is Can he do it? He doesn't know. He knows that she chews them sometimes, her face wrinkling at the awful orange taste, and a sound comes from her mouth like splintering popsicle sticks. But these are different pills gelatine capsules. The box says DARVON COMPLEX on the outside. He found them in her medicine cabinet and turned them over in his hands, thinking. Something the doctor gave her before she had to go back to the hospital. Something for the ticking nights. The medicine cabinet is full of remedies, neatly lined up like a voodoo doctor's cures. Grisgris of the Western world. FLEET SUPPOSITOUES. He has never used a suppository in his life and the thought of putting a waxy something in his rectum to soften by body heat makes him feel ill. There is no dignity in putting things up your ass. PHILLIPS MILK OF MAGNESIA. ANACIN ARTHRITIS PAIN FORMULA. PEPTOBISMOL. More. He can trace the course of her illness through the medicines. But these pills are different. They are like regular Darvon only in that they are grey gelatine capsules. But they are bigger, what his dead father used to call hosscock pills. The box says Asp. 350 gr, Darvon 100 gr, and could she chew them even if he was to give them to her? Would she? The house is still running; the refrigerator runs and shuts off, the furnace kicks in and out, every now and then the Cuckoo bird pokes grumpily out of the clock to announce an hour or a half. He supposes that after she dies it will fall to Kevin and him to break up housekeeping. She's gone, all right. The whole house says so. She is in the Central Maine Hospital, in Lewiston. Room 312. She went when the pain got so bad she could no longer go out to the kitchen to make her own coffee. At times, when he visited, she cried without knowing it. The elevator creaks going up, and he finds himself examining the blue elevator certificate. The certificate makes it clear that the elevator is safe, creaks or no creaks. She has been here for nearly three weeks now and today they gave her an operation called a 'cortotomy'. He is not sure if that is how it's spelled, but that is how it sounds. The doctor has told her that the 'cortotomy' involves sticking a needle into her neck and then into her brain. The doctor has told her that this is like sticking a pin into an orange and spearing a seed. When the needle has poked into her pain centre, a radio signal will be sent down to the tip of the needle and the pain centre will be blown out. Like unplugging a TV. Then the cancer in her belly will stop being such a nuisance. The thought of this operation makes him even more uneasy than the thought of suppositories melting warmly in his anus. It makes him think of a book by Michael Crichton called The Terminal Man, which deals with putting wires in people's heads. According to Crichton, this can be a very bad scene. You better believe it. The elevator door opens on the third floor and he steps out. This is the old wing of the hospital, and it smells like the sweetsmelling sawdust they sprinkle over puke at a county fair. He has left the pills in the glove compartment of his car. He has not had anything to drink before this visit. The walls up here are twotone brown on the bottom and white on top. He thinks that the only twotone combination in the whole world that might be more depressing than brown and white would be pink and black. Hospital corridors like giant Good 'n' Plentys. The thought makes him smile and feel nauseated at the same time. Two corridors meet in a T in front of the elevator, and there is a drinking fountain where he always stops to put things off a little. There are pieces of hospital equipment here and there, like strange playground toys. A litter with chrome sides and rubber wheels, the sort of thing they use to wheel you up to the 'OR' when they are ready to give you your 'cortotomy'. There is a large circular object whose function is unknown to him. It looks like the wheels you sometimes see in squirrel cages. There is a rolling IV tray with two bottles hung from it, like a Salvador Dali dream of tits. Down one of the two corridors is the nurses' station, and laughter fuelled by coffee drifts out to him. He gets his drink and then saunters down towards her room. He is scared of what he may find and hopes she will be sleeping. If she is, he will not wake her up. Above the door of every room there is a small square light. When a patient pushes his call button this light goes on, glowing red. Up and down the hall patients are walking slowly, wearing cheap hospital robes over their hospital underwear. The robes have blue and white pinstripes and round collars. The hospital underwear is called a 'johnny'. The 'johnnies' look all right on the women but decidedly strange on the men because they are like kneelength dresses or slips. The men always seem to wear brown imitationleather slippers on their feet. The women favour knitted slippers with balls of yarn on them. His mother has a pair of these and calls them 'mules'. The patients remind him of a horror movie called The Night of the Living Dead. They all walk slowly, as if someone had unscrewed the tops of their organs like mayonnaise jars and liquids were sloshing around inside. Some of them use canes. Their slow gait as they promenade up and down the halls is frightening but also dignified. It is the walk of people who are going nowhere slowly, the walk of college students in caps and gowns filing into a convocation hall. Ectoplasmic music drifts everywhere from transistor radios. Voices babble. He can hear Black Oak Arkansas singing 'Jim Dandy' ('Go Jim Dandy, go Jim Dandy' a falsetto voice screams merrily at the slow hall walkers). He can hear a talkshow host discussing Nixon in tones that have been dipped in acid like smoking quills. He can hear a polka with French lyrics  Lewiston is still a Frenchspeaking town and they love their jigs and reels almost as much as they love to cut each other in the bars on lower Lisbon Street. He pauses outside his mother's room and for a while there he was freaked enough to come drunk. It made him ashamed to be drunk in front of his mother even though she was too doped and full of Elavil to know. Elavil is a tranquilizer they give to cancer patients so it won't bother them so much that they're dying. The way he worked it was to buy two sixpacks of Black Label beer at Sonny's Market in the afternoon. He would sit with the kids and watch their afternoon programmes on TV. Three beers with 'Sesame Street', two beers during 'Mister Rogers', one beer during 'Electric Company'. Then one with supper. He took the other five beers in the car. It was a twentytwomile drive from Raymond to Lewiston, via Routes 302 and 202, and it was possible to be pretty well in the bag by the time he got to the hospital, with one or two beers left over. He would bring things for his mother and leave them in the car so there would be an excuse to go back and get them and also drink another half beer and keep the high going. It also gave him an excuse to piss outdoors, and somehow that was the best of the whole miserable business. He always parked in the side lot, which was rutted, frozen November dirt, and the cold night air assured full bladder contraction. Pissing in one of the hospital bathrooms was too much like an apotheosis of the whole hospital experience the nurse's call button beside the hopper, the chrome handle bolted at a 45degree angle, the bottle of pink disinfectant over the sink. Bad news. You better believe it. The urge to drink going home was nil. So leftover beers collected in the icebox at home and when there were six of them, he would never have come if he had known it was going to be this bad. The first thought that crosses his mind is She's no orange and the second thought is She's really dying quick now, as if she had a train to catch out there in nullity. She is straining in the bed, not moving except for her eyes, but straining inside her body, something is moving in there. Her neck has been smeared orange with stuff that looks like Mercurochrome, and there is a bandage below her left ear where some humming doctor put the radio needle in and blew out 60 per cent of her motor controls along with the pain centre. Her eyes follow him like the eyes of a paintbythenumbers Jesus.  I don't think you better see me tonight, Johnny. I'm not so good. Maybe I'll be better tomorrow.  What is it?  It itches. I itch all over. Are my legs together? He can't see if her legs are together. They are just a raised V under the ribbed hospital sheet. It's very hot in the room. No one is in the other bed right now. He thinks Roommates come and roommates go, but my mom stays on for ever. Christ!  They're together, Mom.  Move them down, can you, Johnny? Then you better go. I've never been in a fix like this before. I can't move anything. My nose itches. Isn't that a pitiful way to be, with your nose itching and not able to scratch it? He scratches her nose and then takes hold of her calves through the sheet and pulls them down. He can put one hand around both calves with no trouble at all, although his hands are not particularly large. She groans. Tears are running down her cheeks to her ears.  Momma?  Can you move my legs down? I just did.  Oh. That's all right, then. I think I'm crying. I don't mean to cry in front of you. I wish I was out of this. I'd do anything to be out of this  Would you like a smoke?  Could you get me a drink of water first, Johnny? I'm as dry as an old chip.  Sure. He takes her glass with a flexible straw in it out and around the corner to the drinking fountain. A fat man with an elastic bandage on one leg is sailing slowly down the corridor. He isn't wearing one of the pinstriped robes and is holding his 'johnny' closed behind him. He fills the glass from the fountain and goes back to Room 312 with it. She has stopped crying. Her lips grip the straw in a way that reminds him of camels he has seen in travelogues. Her face is scrawny. His most vivid memory of her in the life he lived as her son is of a time when he was twelve. He and his brother Kevin and this woman had moved to Maine so that she could take care of her parents. Her mother was old and bedridden. High blood pressure had made his grandmother senile, and, to add insult to injury, had struck her blind. Happy eightysixth birthday.


Here's one to grow on. And she lay in a bed all day long, blind and senile, wearing large diapers and rubber pants, unable to remember what breakfast had been but able to recite all the Presidents right up to Ike. And so the three generations of them had lived together in that house where he had so recently found the pills (although both grandparents are now long since dead) and at twelve he had been lipping off about something at the breakfast table, he doesn't remember what, but something, and his mother had been washing out her mother's pissy diapers and then running them through the wringer of her ancient washing machine, and she had turned around and laid into him with one of them, and the first snap of the wet, heavy diaper had upset his bowl of Special K and sent it spinning wildly across the table like a large blue tiddlywink, and the second blow had stropped his back, not hurting but stunning the smart talk out of his mouth and the woman now lying shrunken in this bed in this room had whopped him again and again, saying You keep your big mouth shut, there's nothing big about you right now but your mouth and so you keep it shut until the rest of you grows the same size, and each italicized word was accompanied by a strop of his grandmother's wet diaper!  WHACKO! and any other smart things he might have had to say just evaporated. There was not a chance in the world for smart talk. He had discovered on that day and for all time that there is nothing in the world so perfect to set a twelveyearold's impression of his place in the scheme of things into proper perspective as being beaten across the back with a wet grandmotherdiaper. It had taken four years after that day to relearn the art of smarting off. She chokes on the water a little and it frightens him even though he has been thinking about giving her pills. He asks her again if she would like a cigarette and she says  If it's not any trouble. Then you better go. Maybe I'll be better tomorrow. He shakes a Kool out of one of the packages scattered on the table by her bed and lights it. He holds it between the first and second fingers of his right hand, and she puffs it, her lips stretching to grasp the filter. Her inhale is weak. The smoke drifts from her lips.  I had to live sixty years so my son could hold my cigarettes for me.  I don't mind. She puffs again and holds the filter against her lips so long that he glances away from it to her eyes and sees they are closed.  Mom? The eyes open a little, vaguely.  Johnny? Right.  How long have you been here?  Not long. I think I better go. Let you sleep.  Hnnnnn. He snuffs the cigarette in her ashtray and slinks from the room, thinking I want to talk to that doctor. Goddamn it, I want to talk to the doctor who did that. Getting into the elevator he thinks that the word 'doctor' becomes a synonym for 'man' after a certain degree of proficiency in the trade has been reached, as if it was an expected, provisioned thing that doctors must be cruel and thus attain a special degree of humanity. But 'I don't think she can really go on much longer,' he tells his brother later that night. His brother lives in Andover, seventy miles west. He only gets to the hospital once or twice a week. 'But is her pain better?' Kev asks. 'She says she itches.' He has the pills in his sweater pocket. His wife is safely asleep. He takes them out, stolen loot from his mother's empty house, where they all once lived with the grandparents. He turns the box over and over in his hand as he talked, like a rabbit's foot. 'Well then, she's better.' For Kev everything is always better, as if life moved towards some sublime vertex. It is a view the younger brother does not share. 'She's paralyzed.' 'Does it matter at this point?' 'Of course it matters!' he bursts out, thinking of her legs under the white ribbed sheet. 'John, she's dying.' 'She's not dead yet.' This in fact is what horrifies him. The conversation will go around in circles from here, the profits accruing to the telephone company, but this is the nub. Not dead yet. Just lying in that room with a hospital tag on her wrist, listening to phantom radios up and down the hail. And she's going to have to come to grips with time, the doctor says. He is a big man with a red, sandy beard. He stands maybe six foot four, and his shoulders are heroic. The doctor led him tactfully out into the hall when she began to nod off. The doctor continues  You see, some motor impairment is almost unavoidable in an operation like the 'cortotomy'. Your mother has some movement in the left hand now. She may reasonably expect to recover her right hand in two to four weeks.  Will she walk? The doctor looks at the drilledcork ceiling of the corridor judiciously. His beard crawls all the way down to the collar of his plaid shirt, and for some ridiculous reason Johnny thinks of Algernon Swinburne; why, he could not say. This man is the opposite of poor Swinburne in every way.  I should say not. She's lost too much ground.  She's going to be bedridden for the rest of her life?  I think that's a fair assumption, yes. He begins to feel some admiration for this man who he hoped would be safely hateful. Disgust follows the feeling; must he accord admiration for the simple truth?  How long can she live like that?  It's hard to say. (That's more like it.) The tumour is blocking one of her kidneys now. The other one is operating fine. When the tumour blocks it, she'll go to sleep.  A uremic coma?  Yes, the doctor says, but a little more cautiously. 'Uremia' is a technopathological term usually the property of doctors and medical examiners alone. But Johnny knows it because his grandmother died of the same thing, although there was no cancer involved. Her kidneys simply packed it in and she died floating in internal piss up to her ribcage. She died in bed, at home, at dinnertime. Johnny was the one who first suspected she was truly dead this time and not just sleeping in the comatose, openmouthed way that old people have. Two small tears had squeezed out of her eyes. Her old toothless mouth was drawn in, reminding him of a tomato that has been hollowed out, perhaps to hold egg salad, and then left forgotten on the kitchen shelf for a stretch of days. He held a round cosmetic mirror to her mouth for a minute, and when the glass did not fog and hide the image of her tomato mouth, he called for his mother. All of that had seemed as right as this did wrong.  She says she still had pain. And that she itches. The doctor taps his head solemnly, like Victor DeGroot in the old psychiatrist cartoons.  She imagines the pain. But it is nonetheless real. Real to her. That is why time is so important Your mother can no longer count time in terms of seconds and minutes and hours. She must restructure those units into days and weeks and months. He realizes what this burly man with the beard is saying, and it boggles him. A bell dings softly. He cannot talk mort to this man. He is a technical man. He talks smoothly of time, as though he has gripped the concept as easily as a fishing rod. Perhaps he has.  Can you do anything more for her?  Very little. But his manner is serene, as if this were right. He is, after all, 'not offering false hope'.  Can it be worse than a coma?  Of course it can. We can't chart these things with any real degree of accuracy. It's like having a shark loose in your body. She may bloat.  Bloat?  Her abdomen may swell and then go down and then swell again. But why dwell on such things now? I believe we can safely say that they would do the job, but suppose they don't? Or suppose they catch me? I don't want to go to court on a mercykilling charge. Not even if I can beat it. I have no causes to grind. He thinks of newspaper headlines screaming MATUCIDE and grimaces. Sitting in the parking lot, he turns the box over and over in his hands. DARVON COMPLEX. The question still is Can he do it? Should he? She has said I wish I were out of this. I'd do anything to be out of this. Kevin is talking of fixing her a room at his house so she won't die in the hospital. The hospital wants her out. They gave her some new pills and she went on a raving bummer. That was four days after the 'cortotomy'. They'd like her someplace else because no one has perfected a really foolproof 'cancerectomy' yet. And at this point if they got it all out of her she'd be left with nothing but her legs and her head. He has been thinking of how time must be for her, like something that has got out of control, like a sewing basket full of threaded spools spilled all over the floor for a big mean tomcat to play with. The days in Room 312. The night in Room 312. They have run a string from the call button and tied it to her left index finger because she can no longer move her hand far enough to press the button if she thinks she needs the bedpan. It doesn't matter too much anyway because she can't feel the pressure down there; her midsection might as well be a sawdust pile. She moves her bowels in the bed and pees in the bed and only knows when she smells it. She is down to ninetyfive pounds from onefifty and her body's muscles are so unstrung that it's only a loose bag tied to her brain like a child's sack puppet. Would it be any different at Kev's? Can he do murder? He knows it is murder. The worst kind, matricide, as if he were a sentient foetus in an early Ray Bradbury horror story, determined to turn the tables and abort the animal that has given it life. Perhaps it is his fault anyway. He is the only child to have been nurtured inside her, a changeofAife baby. His brother was adopted when another smiling doctor told her she would never have any children of her own. And of course, the cancer now in her began in the womb like a second child, his own darker twin. His life and her death began in the same place Should he not do what the other is doing already, so slowly and clumsily? He has been giving her aspirin on the sly for the pain she imagines she has. She has them in a Sucrets box in her hospitaltable drawer, along with her getwell cards and her reading glasses that no longer work. They have taken away her dentures because they are afraid she might pull them down her throat and choke on them, so now she simply sucks the aspirin until her tongue is slightly white. Surely he could give her the pills; three or four would be enough. Fourteen hundred grains of aspirin and four hundred grains of Darvon administered to a woman whose body weight has dropped 33 per cent over five months. No one knows he has the pills, not Kevin, not his wife. He thinks that maybe they've put someone else in Room 312's other bed and he won't have to worry about it. He can cop out safely. He wonders if that wouldn't be best, really. If there is another woman in the room, his options will be gone and he can regard the fact as a nod from Providence. He thinks  You're looking better tonight.  Am I?  Sure. How do you feel?  Oh, not so good. Not so good tonight.  Let's see you move your right hand. She raises if off the counterpane. It floats splayfingered in front of her eyes for a moment, then drops. Thump. He smiles and she smiles back. He asks her,  Did you see the doctor today?  Yes, he came in. He's good to come every day. Will you give me a little water, John? He gives her some water from the flexible straw.  You're good to come as often as you do, John. You're a good son. She's crying again. The other bed is empty, accusingly so. Every now and then one of the blue and white pinstriped bathrobes sails by them up the hall. The door stands open halfway. He takes the water gently away from her, thinking idiotically Is this glass half empty or half full?  How's your left hand?  Oh, pretty good.  Let's see. She raises it. It has always been her smart hand, and perhaps that is why it has recovered as well as it has from the devastating effects of the 'cortotomy'. She clenches it. Flexes it. Snaps the fingers weakly. Then it falls back to the counterpane. Thump. She complains,  But there's no feeling in it.  Let me see something. He goes to the wardrobe, opens it, and reaches behind the coat she came to the hospital in to get at her purse. She keeps it in here because she is paranoid about robbers; she has heard that some of the orderlies are ripoff artists who will lift anything they can get their hands on. She has heard from one of her roommates who has since gone home that a woman in the new wing lost five hundred dollars which she kept in her shoe. His mother is paranoid about a great many things lately, and has once told him a man sometimes hides under her bed in the lateatnight. Part of it is the combination of drugs they are trying on her. They make the bennies he occasionally dropped in college look like Excedrin. You can have your pick from the locked drug cabinet at the end of the corridor just past the nurses' station ups and downs, highs and bummers. Death, maybe, merciful death like a sweet black blanket. The wonders of modern science. He takes the purse back to her bed and opens it.  Can you take something out of here?  Oh, Johnny, I don't know. He says persuasively  Try it. For me. The left hand rises from the counterpane like a crippled helicopter. It cruises. Dives. Comes out of the purse with a single wrinkled Kleenex. He applauds  Good! Good! But she turns her face away.  Last year I was able to pull two full dish trucks with these hands. If there's to be a time, it's now. It is very hot in the room but the sweat on his forehead is cold. He thinks If she doesn't ask for aspirin, I won't. Not tonight. And he knows if it isn't tonight it's never. Okay. Her eyes flick to the halfopen door slyly.  Can you sneak me a couple of my pills, Johnny? It is how she always asks. She is not supposed to have any pills outside of her regular medication because she has lost so much body weight and she has built up what his druggie friends of his college days would have called 'a heavy thing'. The body's immunity stretches to within a fingernail's breadth of lethal dosage. One more pill and you're over the edge. They say it is what happened to Marilyn Monroe.  I brought some pills from home.  Did you?  They're good for pain. He holds the box out to her. She can only read very close. She frowns over the large print and then says,  I had some of that Darvon stuff before. It didn't help me.  This is stronger. Her eyes rise from the box to his own. Idly she says,  Is it? He can only smile foolishly. He cannot speak. It is like the first time he got laid, it happened in the back of some friend's car and when he came home his mother asked him if he had a good time and he could only smile this same foolish smile.  Can I chew them?  I don't know. You could try one.  All right. Don't let them see. He opens the box and prises the plastic lid off the bottle. He pulls the cotton out of the neck. Could she do all that with the crippled helicopter of her left hand? Would they believe it? He doesn't know. Maybe they don't either. Maybe they wouldn't even care. He shakes six of the pills into his hand. He watches her watching him. It is many too many, even she must know that. If she says nothing about it, he will put them all back and offer her a single Arthritis Pain Formula. A nurse glides by outside and his hand twitches, clicking the grey capsules together, but the nurse doesn't look in to see how the 'cortotomy kid' is doing. His mother doesn't say anything, only looks at the pills like they were perfectly ordinary pills (if there is such a thing). But on the other hand, she has never liked ceremony; she would not crack a bottle of champagne on her own boat.  Here you go, he says in a perfectly natural voice, and pops the first one into her mouth. She gums it reflectively until the gelatine dissolves, and then she winces.  Taste bad? I won't.  No, not too bad. He gives her another. And another. She chews them with that same reflective look. He gives her a fourth. She smiles at him and he sees with horror that her tongue is yellow. Maybe if he hits her in the belly she will bring them up. But he can't. He could never hit his mother.  Will you see if my legs are together?  Just take these first. He gives her a fifth. And a sixth. Then he sees if her legs are together. They are. She says,  I think I'll sleep a little now.  All right. I'm going to get a drink.  You've always been a good son, Johnny. He puts the bottle in the box and tucks the box into her purse, leaving the plastic top on the sheet beside her. He leaves the open purse beside her and thinks She asked for her purse. I brought it to her and opened it just before I left. She said she could get what she wanted out of it. She said she'd get the nurse to put it back in the wardrobe. He goes out and gets his drink. There is a mirror over the fountain, and he runs out his tongue and looks at it. When he goes back into the room, she is sleeping with her hands pressed together. The veins in them are big, rambling. He gives her a kiss and her eyes roll behind their lids, but do not open. Yes. He feels no different, either good or bad. He starts out of the room and thinks of something else. He goes back to her side, takes the bottle out of the box, and rubs it all over his shirt. Then he presses the limp fingertips of her sleeping left hand on the bottle. Then he puts it back and goes out of the room quickly, without looking back. He goes home and waits for the phone to ring and wishes he had given her another kiss. While he waits, he watches TV and drinks a lot of water.


Contents Title Page Dedication HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption SUMMER OF CORRUPTION Apt Pupil FALL FROM INNOCENCE The Body A WINTERS TALE The Breathing Method Afterword Copyright Page From the Magical Penof Stephen King, Four Mesmerizing Novellas ... DIFFERENT SEASONS Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption An unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge ... the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award nominee The Shawshank Redemption. Apt Pupil Todd Bowden is one of the top students in his high school class and a typical American sixteenyearolduntil he becomes obsessed with the dark and deadly past of an older man in town. The inspiration for the film Apt Pupil from Phoenix Pictures. The Body Four rambunctious young boys plunge through the facade of a small town and come facetoface with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. The film Stand By Me is based on this novella. The Breathing Method A disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death. To find the secret of his success, you have to compare King to Twain and PoeKings stories tap the roots of myth buried in all our minds. Los Angeles Times AMERICA LOVES THE BACHMAN BOOKS Fascinating. Philadelphia Inquirer CARRIE Horrifying. Chicago Tribune CHRISTINE Riveting. Playboy CUJO Gutwrenching. Newport News Daily Press THE DARK HALF Scary. Kirkus Reviews THE DARK TOWER THE GUNSLINGER Brilliant. Booklist THE DARK TOWER II THE DRAWING OF THE THREE Superb. Chicago HeraldWheaton THE DARK TOWER III THE WASTE LANDS Gripping. Chicago SunTimes THE DEAD ZONE Frightening. Cosmopolitan DIFFERENT SEASONS Hypnotic. New York Times Book Review DOLORES CLAIBORNE Unforgettable. San Francisco Chronicle THE EYES OF THE DRAGON Masterful. Cincinnati Post FIRESTARTER Terrifying. Miami Herald STEPHEN KING FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT Chilling. Milwaukee Journal GERALDS GAME Terrific. USA Today IT Mesmerizing. Washington Post Book World MISERY Wonderful. Houston Chronicle NEEDFUL THINGS Demonic. Kirkus Reviews NIGHT SHIFT Macabre. Dallas TimesHerald PET SEMATARY Unrelenting. Pittsburgh Press SALEMS LOT Tremendous. Kirkus Reviews THE SHINING Spellbinding. Pittsburgh Press SKELETON CREW Diabolical. Associated Press THE STAND Great. New York Times Book Review THINNER Extraordinary. Booklist THE TOMMYKNOCKERS Marvelous. Boston Globe WORKS BY STEPHEN KING NOVELS Carrie Salems Lot The Shining The Stand The Dead Zone Firestarter Cujo THE DARK TOWER I The Gunslinger Christine Pet Sematary Cycle of the Werewolf The Talisman (with Peter Straub) It The Eyes of the Dragon Misery The Tommyknockers THE DARK TOWER II The Drawing of the Three THE DARK TOWER III The Waste Lands The Dark Half Needful Things Geralds Game Dolores Claiborne Insomnia Rose Madder Desperation The Green Mile THE DARK TOWER IV Wizard and Glass Bag of Bones The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Dreamcatcher Black House (with Peter Straub) From a Buick 8 AS RICHARD BACHMAN Rage The Long Walk Roadwork The Running Man Thinner The Regulators COLLECTIONS Night Shift Different Seasons Skeleton Crew Four Past Midnight Nightmares and Dreamscapes Hearts in Atlantis Everythings Eventual NONFICTION Danse Macabre On Writing SCREENPLAYS Creepshow Cats Eye Silver Bullet Maximum Overdrive Pet Sematary Golden Years Sleepwalkers The Stand The Shining Rose Red Storm of the Century SIGNET Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi  110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Albany, Auckland 1311, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Viking edition. First Signet Printing, August 1983 70 Copyright  Stephen King, 1982 All rights reserved eISBN  9781101138083 Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material. Beechwood Music Corporation and Castle Music Pty. Limited Portions of lyrics from Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport, by Rolf Harris. Copyright  Castle Music Pty. Limited, 1960. Assigned to and copyrighted  Beechwood Music Corp., 1961 for the United States and Canada. Copyright  Castle Music Pty. Limited for other territories. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Big Seven Music Corporation Portions of lyrics from Party Doll, by Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen. Copyright  Big Seven Music Corp., 1956. Portions of lyrics from Sorry (I Ran All the Way Home) by ZwirnGiosasi. Copyright  Big Seven Music Corp., 1959. All rights reserved. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers; Jonathan Cape Ltd.; and the Estate of Robert Frost Two lines from Mending Wall from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1930, 1939, 1969. Copyright  Robert Frost, 1958. Copyright  Lesley Frost Ballantine, 1967. REGISTERED TRADEMARKMARCA REGISTRADA Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. PUBLISHERS NOTE These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or thirdparty Web sites or their content. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. httpus.penguingroup.com It is the tale, not he who tells it. Dirty deeds done dirt cheap. ACDC I heard it through the grapevine. Norman Whitfield Tout sen va, tout passe, leau coule, et le coeur oublie. Flaubert HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL For Russ and Florence Dorr Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption Theres a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guessIm the guy who can get it for you. Tailormade cigarettes, a bag of reefer if youre partial to that, a bottle of brandy to celebrate your son or daughters high school graduation, or almost anything else ... within reason, that is. It wasnt always that way. I came to Shawshank when I was just twenty, and I am one of the few people in our happy little family willing to own up to what they did. I committed murder. I put a large insurance policy on my wife, who was three years older than I was, and then I fixed the brakes of the Chevrolet coupe her father had given us as a wedding present. It worked out exactly as I had planned, except I hadnt planned on her stopping to pick up the neighbor woman and the neighbor womans infant son on their way down Castle Hill and into town. The brakes let go and the car crashed through the bushes at the edge of the town common, gathering speed. Bystanders said it must have been doing fifty or better when it hit the base of the Civil War statue and burst into flames. I also hadnt planned on getting caught, but caught I was. I got a seasons pass into this place. Maine has no deathpenalty, but the District Attorney saw to it that I was tried for all three deaths and given three life sentences, to run one after the other. That fixed up any chance of parole I might have for a long, long time. The judge called what I had done a hideous, heinous crime, and it was, but it is also in the past now. You can look it up in the yellowing files of the Castle Rock Call, where the big headlines announcing my conviction look sort of funny and antique next to the news of Hitler and Mussolini and FDRs alphabet soup agencies. Have I rehabilitated myself, you ask? I dont even know what that word means, at least as far as prisons and corrections go. I think its a politicians word. It may have some other meaning, and it may be that I will have a chance to find out, but that is the future ... something cons teach themselves not to think about. I was young, goodlooking, and from the poor side of town. I knocked up a pretty, sulky, headstrong girl who lived in one of the fine old houses on Carbine Street. Her father was agreeable to the marriage if I would take a job in the optical company he owned and work my way up. I found out that what he really had in mind was keeping me in his house and under his thumb, like a disagreeable pet that has not quite been housebroken and which may bite. Enough hate eventually piled up to cause me to do what I did. Given a second chance I would not do it again, but Im not sure that means I am rehabilitated. Anyway, its not me I want to tell you about; I want to tell you about a guy named Andy Dufresne. But before I can tell you about Andy, I have to explain a few other things about myself. It wont take long. As I said, Ive been the guy who can get it for you here at Shawshank for damn near forty years. And that doesnt just mean contraband items like extra cigarettes or booze, although those items always top the list. But Ive gotten thousands of other items for men doing time here, some of them perfectly legal yet hard to come by in a place where youve supposedly been brought to be punished. There was one fellow who was in for raping a little girl and exposing himself to dozens of others; I got him three pieces of pink Vermont marble and he did three lovely sculptures out of thema baby, a boy of about twelve, and a bearded young man. He called them The Three Ages of Jesus, and those pieces of sculpture are now in the parlor of a man who used to be governor of this state. Or heres a name you may remember if you grew up north of MassachusettsRobert Alan Cote. In 1951 he tried to rob the First Mercantile Bank of Mechanic Falls, and the holdup turned into a bloodbathsix dead in the end, two of them members of the gang, three of them hostages, one of them a young state cop who put his head up at the wrong time and got a bullet in the eye. Cote had a penny collection. Naturally they werent going to let him have it in here, but with a little help from his mother and a middleman who used to drive a laundry truck, I was able to get it for him. I told him, Bobby, you must be crazy, wanting to have a coin collection in a stone hotel full of thieves. He looked at me and smiled and said, I know where to keep them. Theyll be safe enough. Dont you worry. And he was right. Bobby Cote died of a brain tumor in 1967, but that coin collection has never turned up. Ive gotten men chocolates on Valentines Day; I got three of those green milkshakes they serve at McDonalds around St. Paddys Day for a crazy Irishman named OMalley; I even arranged for a midnight showing of Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones for a party of twenty men who had pooled their resources to rent the films ... although I ended up doing a week in solitary for that little escapade. Its the risk you run when youre the guy who can get it. Ive gotten reference books and fuckbooks, joke novelties like handbuzzers and itching powder, and on more than one occasion Ive seen that a longtimer has gotten a pair of panties from his wife or his girlfriend... and I guess youll know what guys in here do with such items during the long nights when time draws out like a blade. I dont get all those things gratis, and for some items the price comes high. But I dont do it just for the money; what good is money to me? Im never going to own a Cadillac car or fly off to Jamaica for two weeks in February. I do it for the same reason that a good butcher will only sell you fresh meat I got a reputation and I want to keep it. The only two things I refuse to handle are guns and heavy drugs. I wont help anyone kill himself or anyone else. I have enough killing on my mind to last me a lifetime. Yeah, Im a regular NeimanMarcus. And so when Andy Dufresne came to me in 1949 and asked if I could smuggle Rita Hayworth into the prison for him, I said it would be no problem at all. And it wasnt. When Andy came to Shawshank in 1948, he was thirty years old. He was a short, neat little man with sandy hair and small, clever hands. He wore goldrimmed spectacles. His fingernails were always clipped, and they were always clean. Thats a funny thing to remember about a man, I suppose, but it seems to sum Andy up for me. He always looked as if he should have been wearing a tie. On the outside he had been a vicepresident in the trust department of a large Portland bank. Good work for a man as young as he was especially when you consider how conservative most banks are ... and you have to multiply that conservatism by ten when you get up into New England, where folks dont like to trust a man with their money unless hes bald, limping, and constantly plucking at his pants to get his truss around straight. Andy was in for murdering his wife and her lover. As I believe I have said, everyone in prison is an innocent man. Oh, they read that scripture the way those holy rollers on TV read the Book of Revelation. They were the victims of judges with hearts of stone and balls to match, or incompetent lawyers, or police frameups, or bad luck. They read the scripture, but you can see a different scripture in their faces. Most cons are a low sort, no good to themselves or anyone else, and their worst luck was that their mothers carried them to term. In all my years at Shawshank, there have been less than ten men whom I believed when they told me they were innocent. Andy Dufresne was one of them, although I only became convinced of his innocence over a period of years. If I had been on that jury that heard his case in Portland Superior Court over six stormy weeks in 194748, I would have voted to convict, too. It was one hell of a case, all right; one of those juicy ones with all the right elements. There was a beautiful girl with society connections (dead), a local sports figure (also dead), and a prominent young businessman in the dock. There was this, plus all the scandal the newspapers could hint at. The prosecution had an openandshut case. The trial only lasted as long as it did because the DA was planning to run for the U.S. House of Representatives and he wanted John Q. Public to get a good long look at his phiz. It was a crackerjack legal circus, with spectators getting in line at four in the morning, despite the subzero temperatures, to assure themselves of a seat. The facts of the prosecutions case that Andy never contested were these that he had a wife, Linda Collins Dufresne; that in June of 1947 she had expressed an interest in learning the game of golf at the Falmouth Hills Country Club; that she did indeed take lessons for four months; that her instructor was the Falmouth Hills golf pro, Glenn Quentin; that in late August of 1947 Andy learned that Quentin and his wife had become lovers; that Andy and Linda Dufresne argued bitterly on the afternoon of September 10th, 1947; that the subject of their argument was her infidelity. He testified that Linda professed to be glad he knew; the sneaking around, she said, was distressing. She told Andy that she planned to obtain a Reno divorce. Andy told her he would see her in hell before he would see her in Reno. She went off to spend the night with Quentin in Quentins rented bungalow not far from the golf course. The next morning his cleaning woman found both of them dead in bed. Each had been shot four times. It was that last fact that militated more against Andy than any of the others. The DA with the political aspirations made a great deal of it in his opening statement and his closing summation. Andrew Dufresne, he said, was not a wronged husband seeking a hotblooded revenge against his cheating wife; that, the DA said, could be understood, if not condoned. But this revenge had been of a much colder type. Consider! the DA thundered at the jury. Four and four! Not six shots, but eight! He had fired the gun empty ... and then stopped to reload so he could shoot each of them again! FOUR FOR HIM AND FOUR FOR HER, the Portland Sun blared. The Boston Register dubbed him The EvenSteven Killer. A clerk from the Wise Pawnshop in Lewiston testified that he had sold a sixshot .38 Police Special to Andrew Dufresne just two days before the double murder. A bartender from the country club bar testified that Andy had come in around seven oclock on the evening of September 10th, had tossed off three straight whiskeys in a twentyminute periodwhen he got up from the barstool he told the bartender that he was going up to Glenn Quentins house and he, the bartender, could read about the rest of it in the papers. Another clerk, this one from the HandyPik store a mile or so from Quentins house, told the court that Dufresne had come in around quarter to nine on that same night. He purchased cigarettes, three quarts of beer, and some dishtowels. The county medical examiner testified that Quentin and the Dufresne woman had been killed between 1100 P.M. and 200 A.M. on the night of September 10th11th. The detective from the Attorney Generals office who had been in charge of the case testified that there was a turnout less than seventy yards from the bungalow, and that on the afternoon of September 11th, three pieces of evidence had been removed from that turnout first item, two empty quart bottles of Narragansett Beer (with the defendants fingerprints on them); second item, twelve cigarette ends (all Kools, the defendants brand); third item, a plaster moulage of a set of tire tracks (exactly matching the treadandwear pattern of the tires on the defendants 1947 Plymouth). In the living room of Quentins bungalow, four dishtowels had been found lying on the sofa. There were bulletholes through them and powderburns on them. The detective theorized (over the agonized objections of Andys lawyer) that the murderer had wrapped the towels around the muzzle of the murderweapon to muffle the sound of the gunshots. Andy Dufresne took the stand in his own defense and told his story calmly, coolly, and dispassionately. He said he had begun to hear distressing rumors about his wife and Glenn Quentin as early as the last week in July. In late August he had become distressed enough to investigate a bit. On an evening when Linda was supposed to have gone shopping in Portland after her golf lesson, Andy had followed her and Quentin to Quentins onestory rented house (inevitably dubbed the lovenest by the papers). He had parked in the turnout until Quentin drove her back to the country club where her car was parked, about three hours later. Do you mean to tell this court that you followed your wife in your brandnew Plymouth sedan? the DA asked him on crossexamination. I swapped cars for the evening with a friend, Andy said, and this cool admission of how wellplanned his investigation had been did him no good at all in the eyes of the jury. After returning the friends car and picking up his own, he had gone home. Linda had been in bed, reading a book. He asked her how her trip to Portland had been. She replied that it had been fun, but she hadnt seen anything she liked well enough to buy. Thats when I knew for sure, Andy told the breathless spectators. He spoke in the same calm, remote voice in which he delivered almost all of his testimony. What was your frame of mind in the seventeen days between then and the night your wife was murdered? Andys lawyer asked him. I was in great distress, Andy said calmly, coldly. Like a man reciting a shopping list he said that he had considered suicide, and had even gone so far as to purchase a gun in Lewiston on September 8th. His lawyer then invited him to tell the jury what had happened after his wife left to meet Glenn Quentin on the night of the murders. Andy told them ... and the impression he made was the worst possible. I knew him for close to thirty years, and I can tell you he was the most selfpossessed man Ive ever known. What was right with him hed only give you a little at a time. What was wrong with him he kept bottled up inside. If he ever had a dark night of the soul, as some writer or other has called it, you would never know. He was the type of man who, if he had decided to commit suicide, would do it without leaving a note but not until his affairs had been put neatly in order. If he had cried on the witness stand, or if his voice had thickened and grown hesitant, even if he had started yelling at that Washingtonbound District Attorney, I dont believe he would have gotten the life sentence he wound up with. Even if he hadve, he would have been out on parole by 1954. But he told his story like a recording machine, seeming to say to the jury This is it. Take it or leave it. They left it. He said he was drunk that night, that hed been more or less drunk since August 24th, and that he was a man who didnt handle his liquor very well. Of course that by itself would have been hard for any jury to swallow. They just couldnt see this coldly selfpossessed young man in the neat doublebreasted threepiece woollen suit ever getting fallingdown drunk over his wifes sleazy little affair with some smalltown golf pro. I believed it because I had a chance to watch Andy that those six men and six women didnt have. Andy Dufresne took just four drinks a year all the time I knew him. He would meet me in the exercise yard every year about a week before his birthday and then again about two weeks before Christmas. On each occasion he would arrange for a bottle of Jack Daniels. He bought it the way most cons arrange to buy their stuffthe slaves wages they pay in here, plus a little of his own. Up until 1965 what you got for your time was a dime an hour. In 65 they raised it all the way up to a quarter. My commission on liquor was and is ten per cent, and when you add on that surcharge to the price of a fine sippin whiskey like the Black Jack, you get an idea of how many hours of Andy Dufresnes sweat in the prison laundry was going to buy his four drinks a year. On the morning of his birthday, September 20th, he would have himself a big knock, and then hed have another that night after lightsout. The following day hed give the rest of the bottle back to me, and I would share it around. As for the other bottle, he dealt himself one drink Christmas night and another on New Years Eve. Then that bottle would also come to me with instructions to pass it on. Four drinks a yearand that is the behavior of a man who has been bitten hard by the bottle. Hard enough to draw blood. He told the jury that on the night of the tenth he had been so drunk he could only remember what had happened in little isolated snatches. He had gotten drunk that afternoonI took on a double helping of Dutch courage is how he put itbefore taking on Linda. After she left to meet Quentin, he remembered deciding to confront them. On the way to Quentins bungalow, he swung into the country club for a couple of quick ones. He could not, he said, remember telling the bartender he could read about the rest of it in the papers, or saying anything to him at all. He remembered buying beer in the HandyPik, but not the dishtowels. Why would I want dishtowels? he asked, and one of the papers reported that three of the lady jurors shuddered. Later, much later, he speculated to me about the clerk who had testified on the subject of those dishtowels, and I think its worth jotting down what he said. Suppose that, during their canvass for witnesses, Andy said one day in the exercise yard, they stumble on this fellow who sold me the beer that night. By then three days have gone by. The facts of the case have been broadsided in all the papers. Maybe they ganged up on the guy, five or six cops, plus the dick from the Attorney Generals office, plus the DAs assistant. Memory is a pretty subjective thing, Red. They could have started out with Isnt it possible that he purchased four or five dishtowels? and worked their way up from there. If enough people want you to remember something, that can be a pretty powerful persuader. I agreed that it could. But theres one even more powerful, Andy went on in that musing way of his. I think its at least possible that he convinced himself. It was the limelight. Reporters asking him questions, his picture in the papers ... all topped, of course, by his star turn in court. Im not saying that he deliberately falsified his story, or perjured himself. I think its possible that he could have passed a lie detector test with flying colors, or sworn on his mothers sacred name that I bought those dishtowels. But still ... memory is such a goddam subjective thing. I know this much even though my own lawyer thought I had to be lying about half my story, he never bought that business about the dishtowels. Its crazy on the face of it. I was pigdrunk, too drunk to have been thinking about muffling the gunshots. If Id done it, I just would have let them rip. He went up to the turnout and parked there. He drank beer and smoked cigarettes. He watched the lights downstairs in Quentins place go out. He watched a single light go on upstairs ... and fifteen minutes later he watched that one go out. He said he could guess the rest. Mr. Dufresne, did you then go up to Glenn Quentins house and kill the two of them? his lawyer thundered. No, I did not, Andy answered. By midnight, he said, he was sobering up. He was also feeling the first signs of a bad hangover. He decided to go home and sleep it off and think about the whole thing in a more adult fashion the next day. At that time, as I drove home, I was beginning to think that the wisest course would be to simply let her go to Reno and get her divorce. Thank you, Mr. Dufresne. The DA popped up. You divorced her in the quickest way you could think of, didnt you? You divorced her with a .38 revolver wrapped in dishtowels, didnt you? No, sir, I did not, Andy said calmly. And then you shot her lover. No, sir. You mean you shot Quentin first? I mean I didnt shoot either one of them. I drank two quarts of beer and smoked however many cigarettes the police found at the turnout. Then I drove home and went to bed. You told the jury that between August twentyfourth and September tenth you were feeling suicidal. Yes, sir. Suicidal enough to buy a revolver. Yes. Would it bother you overmuch, Mr. Dufresne, if I told you that you do not seem to me to be the suicidal type? No, Andy said, but you dont impress me as being terribly sensitive, and I doubt very much that, if I were feeling suicidal, I would take my problem to you. There was a slight tense titter in the courtroom at this, but it won him no points with the jury. Did you take your thirtyeight with you on the night of September tenth? No; as Ive already testified Oh, yes! The DA smiled sarcastically. You threw it into the river, didnt you? The Royal River. On the afternoon of September ninth. Yes, sir. One day before the murders. Yes, sir. Thats convenient, isnt it? Its neither convenient nor inconvenient. Only the truth. I believe you heard Lieutenant Minchers testimony? Mincher had been in charge of the party which had dragged the stretch of the Royal near Pond Road Bridge, from which Andy had testified he had thrown the gun. The police had not found it. Yes, sir. You know I heard it. Then you heard him tell the court that they found no gun, although they dragged for three days. That was rather convenient, too, wasnt it? Convenience aside, its a fact that they didnt find the gun, Andy responded calmly. But I should like to point out to both you and the jury that the Pond Road Bridge is very close to where the Royal River empties into the Bay of Yarmouth. The current is strong. The gun may have been carried out into the bay itself. And so no comparison can be made between the riflings on the bullets taken from the bloodstained corpses of your wife and Mr. Glenn Quentin and the riflings on the barrel of your gun. Thats correct, isnt it, Mr. Dufresne? Yes. Thats also rather convenient, isnt it? At that, according to the papers, Andy displayed one of the few slight emotional reactions he allowed himself during the entire sixweek period of the trial. A slight, bitter smile crossed his face. Since I am innocent of this crime, sir, and since I am telling the truth about throwing my gun into the river the day before the crime took place, then it seems to me decidedly inconvenient that the gun was never found. The DA hammered at him for two days. He reread the HandyPik clerks testimony about the dishtowels to Andy. Andy repeated that he could not recall buying them, but admitted that he also couldnt remember not buying them. Was it true that Andy and Linda Dufresne had taken out a joint insurance policy in early 1947? Yes, that was true. And if acquitted, wasnt it true that Andy stood to gain fifty thousand dollars in benefits? True. And wasnt it true that he had gone up to Glenn Quentins house with murder in his heart, and wasnt it also true that he had indeed committed murder twice over? No, it was not true. Then what did he think had happened, since there had been no signs of robbery? I have no way of knowing that, sir, Andy said quietly. The case went to the jury at 100 P.M. on a snowy Wednesday afternoon. The twelve jurymen and women came back in at 330. The bailiff said they would have been back earlier, but they had held off in order to enjoy a nice chicken dinner from Bentleys Restaurant at the countys expense. They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the deathpenalty, he would have done the airdance before that springs crocuses poked their heads out of the snow. The DA had asked him what he thought had happened, and Andy slipped the questionbut he did have an idea, and I got it out of him late one evening in 1955. It had taken those seven years for us to progress from nodding acquaintances to fairly close friendsbut I never felt really close to Andy until 1960 or so, and I believe I was the only one who ever did get really close to him. Both being longtimers, we were in the same cellblock from beginning to end, although I was halfway down the corridor from him. What do I think? He laughedbut there was no humor in the sound. I think there was a lot of bad luck floating around that night. More than could ever get together in the same short span of time again. I think it must have been some stranger, just passing through. Maybe someone who had a flat tire on that road after I went home. Maybe a burglar. Maybe a psychopath. He killed them, thats all. And Im here. As simple as that. And he was condemned to spend the rest of his life in Shawshankor the part of it that mattered. Five years later he began to have parole hearings, and he was turned down just as regular as clockwork in spite of being a model prisoner. Getting a pass out of Shawshank when youve got murder stamped on your admittanceslip is slow work, as slow as a river eroding a rock.