JК
Desperation :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 407 из 422Images danced crazily in his mind: Terry grab-bing his belt-loops and yanking him tight to her belly as he began to come, the best orgasm of his life and it had gone nowhere but into his pants, tell that one to Ernest Hemingway; coming out of the pool at the Bel-Air, laughing, hair plastered to his forehead, holding up the beer-bottle as the cameras flashed; Bill Harris telling him that going across country on his motorcycle might change his life and his whole career… if he was really up to it, that was. Last of all he saw the cop’s empty gray eyes staring at him in the rearview mirror, the cop saying he thought Johnny would shortly come to understand a great deal more about pneuma. soma, and sarx than he had previously.
About that he had been right.
“God, protect me long enough to get this done,” he said, and allowed himself to be drawn toward the mi. Could he stop even if he tried. Best not to know, maybe.
There were dead animals lying in a rotting ring around the hole in the floor-David Carver’s well of the worlds. Coyotes and buzzards, mostly, but he also saw spiders and a few scorpions. He had an idea that these last protec-tors had died when the eagle had died. Some withdrawing force had hammered the life out of them just as the life had been hammered from Audrey Wyler almost as soon as Steve had slapped the can tahs out of her hand.
Now smoke began to rise out of the mi… except it wasn’t smoke at all, not really. It was some sort of greasy brown-black muck, and as it began to curl toward him, Johnny saw it was. alive. It looked like clutching three—fingered hands on the ends of scrawny arms.
They were not ectoplasmic, those arms, but neither were they strictly physical. Like the carved shapes looming above and all around him, looking at them made Johnny’s head hurt, the way a kid’s head hurt when he staggered off some viciously swerving amusement park ride. It was the stuff that had crazed the miners, of course. The stuff that had changed Ripton. The glassless windows of the pirin moh leered at him, telling him…
what, exactly. He could almost hear—(cay de mun) Open your mouth.
And yes, his mouth was open, wide open, like when you go to the dentist. Please open wide, Mr. Marinville, open wide, you lousy contemptible excuse for a writer, you make me furious, you make me sick with rage, but go on, open wide, cay de mun, you fucking grayhaired pre-tentious motherfucker, we’ll fix you up, make you good as new, better than new, open wide open wide cay de mun OPEN WIDE—The smoke. Muck. Whatever it was. Those were no longer hands on the ends of the arms but tubes. No… not tubes…
Holes.
Yes, that was it. Holes like eyes. Three of them. Maybe more, but three he could see clearly.
About that he had been right.
“God, protect me long enough to get this done,” he said, and allowed himself to be drawn toward the mi. Could he stop even if he tried. Best not to know, maybe.
There were dead animals lying in a rotting ring around the hole in the floor-David Carver’s well of the worlds. Coyotes and buzzards, mostly, but he also saw spiders and a few scorpions. He had an idea that these last protec-tors had died when the eagle had died. Some withdrawing force had hammered the life out of them just as the life had been hammered from Audrey Wyler almost as soon as Steve had slapped the can tahs out of her hand.
Now smoke began to rise out of the mi… except it wasn’t smoke at all, not really. It was some sort of greasy brown-black muck, and as it began to curl toward him, Johnny saw it was. alive. It looked like clutching three—fingered hands on the ends of scrawny arms.
They were not ectoplasmic, those arms, but neither were they strictly physical. Like the carved shapes looming above and all around him, looking at them made Johnny’s head hurt, the way a kid’s head hurt when he staggered off some viciously swerving amusement park ride. It was the stuff that had crazed the miners, of course. The stuff that had changed Ripton. The glassless windows of the pirin moh leered at him, telling him…
what, exactly. He could almost hear—(cay de mun) Open your mouth.
And yes, his mouth was open, wide open, like when you go to the dentist. Please open wide, Mr. Marinville, open wide, you lousy contemptible excuse for a writer, you make me furious, you make me sick with rage, but go on, open wide, cay de mun, you fucking grayhaired pre-tentious motherfucker, we’ll fix you up, make you good as new, better than new, open wide open wide cay de mun OPEN WIDE—The smoke. Muck. Whatever it was. Those were no longer hands on the ends of the arms but tubes. No… not tubes…
Holes.
Yes, that was it. Holes like eyes. Three of them. Maybe more, but three he could see clearly.