Lisey's Story by Stephen King

  "There are people in mental institutions, often people who've suffered catastrophic frontal-lobe traumas, who regress to animal states. I've read about it. But it's a process that usually occurs over a course of years. This happened to my brother all at once. And once it had, once he'd crossed that line . . ."

  Scott swallows. The click in his throat is as loud as a turning light-switch.

  "When I came down the cellar stairs with his food--meat and vegetables on a pie-plate, the way you'd bring food to a big dog like a Great Dane or a German Shepherd--he'd rush to the end of the chains that held him to the post, one around his neck and one around his waist, with drool flying from the corners of his mouth and then the whole works would snub up and he'd go flying, still howling and barking like a bool-devil, only sort of strangled until he got his breath back, you know?"

  "Yes," she says faintly.

  "You had to put the plate on the floor--I still remember the smell of that sour dirt when I bent over, I'll never forget it--and then push it to where he could get it. We had a bust' rake handle for that. It didn't do to get too close. He'd claw you, maybe pull you in. I didn't need Daddy to tell me that if he caught me, he'd eat as much of me as he could, alive and screaming. And this was the brother who made the bools. The one who loved me. Without him I never would have made it. Without him Daddy would have killed me before I made five, not because he meant to but because he was in his own badgunky. Me and Paul made it together. Buddy system. You know?"

  Lisey nods. She knows.

  "Only that January my buddy was cross-chained in the cellar--to the post and to the table with the printing-press on it--and you could measure the boundary of his world by this arc . . . this arc of turds . . . where he went to the end of his chains . . . and squatted . . . and shat."

  For a moment he puts the heels of his hands to his eyes. The cords stand out on his neck. He breathes through his mouth--long harsh shaking breaths. She doesn't think she has to ask him where he learned the trick of keeping his grief silent; that she now knows. When he's still again, she asks: "How did your father get the chains on him in the first place? Do you remember?"

  "I remember everything, Lisey, but that doesn't mean I know everything. Half a dozen times he put stuff in Paul's food, of that I'm positive. I think it was some kind of animal tranquilizer, but how he got it I have no idea. Paul gobbled down everything we gave him except for greens, and usually food energized him. He'd yowl and bark and leap around; he'd run to the end of his chains--trying to break them, I guess--or jump up and pound his fists on the ceiling until his knuckles bled. Maybe he was trying to break through, or maybe it was just for the joy of it. Sometimes he'd lie down in the dirt and masturbate.

  "But once in awhile he'd only be active for ten or fifteen minutes and then stop. Those were the times Daddy must have give him the stuff. He'd squat down, muttering, then fall over on his side and put his hands between his legs and go to sleep. The first time he did that, Daddy put on these two leather belts he made, except I guess you'd call the one that went around Paul's neck a choker, right? They had big metal claps at the back. He loop the chains through em, the tractor-chain through the waist-belt clap, the lighter chain through the choker-belt clap at the nape of his neck. Then he used a little hand-torch to weld them claps shut. And that was how Paul was trussed. When he woke up he was wild to find himself that way. Like to shook the house down." The flattened, nasal accents of rural Pennsylvania have crept so far into his voice that house becomes almost Germanic, almost haus. "We stood at the top of the stairs watchin 'im, and I beg Daddy to let 'im out before he broke 'is neck or choke 'imself, but Daddy, he said he wun't choke and Daddy was right. What happen after three weeks was he started to pull table and even center-pos'--the steel center-pos' that held up the kitchen floor--but he never broke his neck and he never choke 'imself.

  "The other times Daddy knock him out was to see if I could take him to Boo'ya Moon--did I tell you that's what me n Paul called it, the other place?"

  "Yes, Scott." Crying herself now. Letting the tears flow, not wanting him to see her wiping her eyes, not wanting to let him see her pitying that boy in that farmhouse.

  "Daddy want to see if I could take him and make him better like the times when Daddy cut him, or like that one time Daddy poke his eye with the pliers and make it come a little way out and Paul crite and crite because he couldn't hardly see good, or once Daddy yell at me and say 'Scoot, you little whoredog, you mother-killing mother!' for trackin in the spring muddy and push me down and crack my tailbone so I couldn't walk so well. Only after I went and had a bool . . . you know, a prize . . . my tailbone was okay again." He nods against her. "And Daddy, he see and give me a kiss and say, 'Scott, you're one in a million. I love you, you little motherfucker.' And I kiss him and say 'Daddy, you one in a million. I love you, you big motherfucker.' And he laughed." Scott pulls back from her and even in the gloom she can see that his face has almost become a child's face. And she can see the goonybird wonder there. "He laughed so hard he almos' fell out of his chair--I made my father laugh!"

  She has a thousand questions and doesn't dare ask a single one. Isn't sure she could ask a single one.

  Scott puts a hand to his face, rubs it, looks at her again. And he's back. Just like that. "Christ, Lisey," he says. "I've never talked about this stuff, never, not to anyone. Are you okay with this?"

  "Yes, Scott."

  "You're one hell of a brave woman, then. Have you started telling yourself it's all bullshit yet?" He's even grinning a little. It's an uncertain grin, but it's genuine enough, and she finds it dear enough to kiss: first one corner, then the other, just for balance.

  "Oh, I tried," she says. "It didn't work."

  "Because of how we boomed out from under the yum-yum tree?"

  "Is that what you call it?"

  "That was Paul's name for a quick trip. Just a quick trip that got you from here to there. That was a boom."

  "Like a bool, only with an m."

  "That's right," he says. "Or like a book. A book's a bool, only with a k."

  17

  I guess it depends on you, Scoot.

  These are his father's words. They linger and do not leave.

  I guess it depends on you.

  But he is only ten years old and the responsibility of saving his brother's life and sanity--maybe even his soul--weighs on him and steals his sleep as Christmas and New Year's pass and cold snowy January begins.

  You've made him better a lot of times, you've made him better of a lot of things.

  It's true, but there's never been anything like this and Scott finds he can no longer eat unless Daddy stands beside him, hectoring him into each bite. The lowest, snuffling cry from the thing in the cellar unzips his thin sleep, but most generally that's okay, because most generally what he's leaving behind are lurid, red-painted nightmares. In many of these he finds himself alone in Boo'ya Moon after dark, sometimes in a certain graveyard near a certain pool, a wilderness of stone markers and wooden crosses, listening as the laughers cackle and smelling as the formerly sweet breeze begins to smell dirty down low, where it combs through the tangles of brush. You can come to Boo'ya Moon after dark, but it's not a good idea, and if you find yourself there once the moon has fully risen, you want to be quiet. Just as quiet as a sweetmother. But in his nightmares, Scott always forgets and is appalled to find himself singing "Jambalaya" at the top of his voice.

  Maybe you can make him better of this.

  But the first time Scott tries he knows it's probably impossible. He knows as soon as he puts a tentative arm around the snoring, stinking, beshitted thing curled at the foot of the steel support post. He might as well try to strap a grand piano on his back and then do the cha-cha with it. Before, he and Paul have gone easily to that other world (which is really only this world turned inside-out like a pocket, he will later tell Lisey). But the snoring thing in the cellar is an anvil, a bank-safe . . . a grand piano strapped to a ten-year-old's back.


  He retreats to Daddy, sure he'll be paddled and not sorry. He feels that he deserves to be paddled. Or worse. But Daddy, who sat at the foot of the stairs with a stovelength in one hand watching the whole thing, doesn't paddle or strike with his fist. What he does is brush Scott's dirty, clumpy hair away from the nape of his neck and plant a kiss there with a tenderness that makes the boy quake.

  --Aint really surprised, Scott. Badgunky likes it right where it is.

  --Daddy, is Paul in there at all anymore?

  --Dunno. Now he's got Scott between his open spread legs so that there are green Dickies on either side of the boy. Daddy's hands are locked loosely around Scott's chest and his chin is on Scott's shoulder. Together they look at the sleeping thing curled at the foot of the post. They look at the chains. They look at the arc of turds that mark the border of its basement world.--What do you think, Scott? What do you feel?

  He considers lying to Daddy, but only for a moment. He won't do that when the man's arms are around him, not when he feels Daddy's love coming through in the clear, like WWVA at night. Daddy's love is every bit as true as his anger and madness, if less frequently seen and even less frequently demonstrated. Scott feels nothing, and reluctantly says so.

  --Little buddy, we can't go on this way.

  --Why not? He's eatin, at least . . .

  --Sooner or later someone'll come and hear him down here. A smucking door-to-door salesman, one lousy Fuller Brush man, that's all it'd take.

  --He'll be quiet. Badgunky'll make him be quiet.

  --Maybe, maybe not. There's no telling what badgunky'll do, not really. And there's the smell. I can sprinkle lime until I'm blue in the face and that shit-stink is still gonna come up through the kitchen floor. But most of all . . . Scooter, can't you see what he's doin to that motherless table with the printin-press on it? And the post? The sweetmother post?

  Scott looks. At first he can barely credit what he's seeing, and of course he doesn't want to credit what he's seeing. That big table, even with five hundred pounds of ancient hand-crank Stratton printing-press on it, has been pulled at least three feet from its original position. He can see the square marks in the hardpacked earth where it used to be. Worse still is the steel post, which butts against a flat metal flange at its top end. The white-painted flange presses in turn against the beam running directly beneath their kitchen table. Scott can see a dark right-angle tattooed on that white piece of metal and knows it's where the support post used to rest. Scott measures the post itself with his eye, trying to pick up a lean. He can't, not yet. But if the thing continues to yank on it with all its inhuman strength . . . day in and day out . . .

  --Daddy, can I try again?

  Daddy sighs. Scott cranes around to look into his hated, feared, loved face.

  --Daddy?

  --Have on 'til your cheeks crack, Daddy says. Have on and good luck to you.

  18

  Silence in the study over the barn, where it was hot and she was hurt and her husband was dead.

  Silence in the guest room, where it's cold and her husband is gone.

  Silence in the bedroom at The Antlers, where they lie together, Scott and Lisey, Now we are two.

  Then the living Scott speaks for the one that's dead in 2006 and gone in 1996, and the arguments against insanity do more than fall through; for Lisey Landon, they finally collapse completely: everything the same.

  19

  Outside their bedroom at The Antlers, the wind is blowing and the clouds are thinning. Inside, Scott pauses long enough to get a drink from the glass of water he always keeps by the side of the bed. The interruption breaks the hypnotic regression that has once more begun to grip him. When he resumes, he seems to be telling instead of living, and she finds this an enormous relief.

  "I tried twice more," he says. Tried, not trite. "I used to think trying that last time was how I got him killed. Right up until tonight I thought that, but talking about it--hearing myself talk about it--has helped more than I ever would have believed. I guess psychoanalysts have got something with that old talking-cure stuff after all, huh?"

  "I don't know." Nor does she care. "Did your father blame you?" Thinking, Of course he did.

  But once more she seems to have underestimated the complexity of the little triangle that existed for awhile on an isolated farmyard hill in Martensburg, Pennsylvania. Because, after hesitating a moment, Scott shakes his head.

  "No. It might have helped if he'd taken me in his arms--like he did after the first time I tried--and told me it wasn't my fault, wasn't anybody's fault, that it was just the badgunky, like cancer or cerebral palsy or something, but he never did that, either. He just hauled me away with one arm . . . I hung there like a puppet whose strings had been cut . . . and afterward we just . . ." In the brightening dimness, Scott explains all his silence about his past with one terrible gesture. He puts a finger to his lips for a second--it is a pallid exclamation point below his wide eyes--and holds it there: Shhhhh.

  Lisey thinks of how it was after Jodi got pregnant and went away, and nods her understanding. Scott gives her a grateful look.

  "Three tries in all," he resumes. "The second was only three or four days after my first go. I tried as hard as I could, but it was just like the first time. Only by then you could see a lean in the post he was chained to, and there was a second arc of turds, farther out, because he'd moved the table a little more and gotten a little extra slack in that chain. Daddy was starting to be afraid he might snap one of the table-legs, even though they were metal, too.

  "After my second try, I told Daddy I was pretty sure I knew what was wrong. I couldn't do it--couldn't take him--because he was always knocked out when I got close to him. And Daddy said, 'Well what's your plan, Scooter, you want to grab him when he's awake and raving? He'd rip your smockin head off.' I said I knew it. I knew more than that, Lisey--I knew that if he didn't rip my head off in the cellar, he'd rip it off on the other side, in Boo'ya Moon. So then I ast Daddy if he couldn't knock him out just a little--you know, make him woozy. Enough so I could get in close and hold him the way I was holding you, today, under the yum-yum tree."

  "Oh, Scott," she says. She is afraid for the ten-year-old boy even though she knows it must have come out all right; knows he lived to father the young man lying beside her.

  "Daddy said it was dangerous. 'Playin with fire there, Scoot,' he said. I knew I was, but there wasn't any other way. We couldn't keep him in the cellar much longer; even I could see that. And then Daddy--he kind of ruffled my hair and said, 'What happen to the little pissant ascairt to jump off the hall bench?' I was surprised he even remembered that, because he was so far in the badgunky, and I was proud."

  Lisey thinks what a dismal life it must have been, where pleasing such a man could make a child proud, and reminds herself he was only ten. Ten, and alone with a monster in the cellar much of the time. The father was also a monster, but at least a rational one some of the time. A monster capable of doling out the occasional kiss.

  "Then . . ." Scott looks up into the dim. For a moment the moon comes out. It dashes a pale and playful paw across his face before retreating into the clouds once more. When he resumes, she hears the child beginning to take over once more. "Daddy--see, Daddy never ast what I saw or where I went or what I did when I went there and I don't think he ever ast Paul--I dunno if Paul even remembered too much--but he come close then. He said, 'And if you take him like that, Scoot. What happens if he wakes up? Is he just gonna be suddenly all better? Because if he ain't, I won't be there to help you.'

  "But I thought about that, see? Thought about it and thought about it until it seem like my brains'd bust wide open." Scott gets up on one elbow and looks at her. "I knew it had to end as well as Daddy, maybe even better. Because of the pos'. And the table. But also because of how he was losin weight, and gettin sores on his face from not eatin the right food--we give him veg'ables, but everything except the taters and onyums he slang away from him and one of his eyes--the one Daddy
hurt before--had come over all milky-white on top of the red. Also more of his teeth was fallin out and one of his elbows, it come over all crookit. He was fallin apart from being down 'ere, Lisey, and what wasn't fallin apart from no sunlight and wrong food he was beatin to death. Do you see?"

  She nods.

  "So I had this little idea I tole Daddy. He said, 'You think you're pretty motherfucking smart for ten, don't you?' And I said no, I wasn't smart about hardly anything, and if he thought there was some other way that was safer and better, then okay. Only he didn't. He said, 'I think you're pretty motherfucking smart for ten, tell you that. And you turned out to have some guts in you after all. Unless you back out.'

  " 'I won't back out,' I said.

  "And he said, 'You won't need to, Scooter, because I'll be standing right at the foot of the stairs with my sweetmother deer-gun

  20

  Daddy stands at the foot of the stairs with his deer-gun, his .30-06, in his hands. Scott stands beside him, looking at the thing chained to the metal post and the printing-press table, trying not to tremble. In his righthand pocket is the slim instrument Daddy has given him, a hypodermic with a plastic cap on the needle-tip. Scott doesn't need his Daddy to tell him it's a fragile mechanism. If there's a struggle, it may break. Daddy offered to put it in a little white cardboard box that once held a fountain pen, but getting the hypo out of the box would take an extra couple of seconds--at least--and that might mean the difference between life and death if he succeeds in getting the thing chained to the post over to Boo'ya Moon. In Boo'ya Moon there will be no Daddy with a .30-06 deer-gun. In Boo'ya Moon there will just be him and the thing that slipped into Paul like a hand into a stolen glove. Just the two of them on top of Sweetheart Hill.

  The thing that used to be his brother lies sprawled with its back against the center-post and its legs splayed. It's naked except for Paul's undershirt. Its legs and feet are dirty. Its flanks are caked with shit. The pie-plate, licked clean even of grease, lies by one grimy hand. The extra-large hamburger that was on it disappeared down the Paul-thing's gullet in a matter of seconds, but Andrew Landon agonized over the patty's creation for almost half an hour, chucking his first effort out into the night after deciding he loaded too much of "the stuff" into it. "The stuff" is white pills that look almost exactly like the Tums and Rolaids Daddy sometimes takes. The one time Scott asked Daddy where they came from, Daddy said--Why don't you shut your goddam mouth, Curious George, before I shut it for you and when Daddy says something like that you take the hint if you've got any sense. Daddy ground the pills up with the bottom of a waterglass. He talked as he worked, maybe to himself, maybe to Scott, while below them the thing chained to the printing-press roared monotonously for its supper.--Easy enough to figure when you want to knock him out, Daddy said, looking from the pile of white powder to the ground meat.--Be easier still if I wanted to kill the troublesome motherfucker, ay? But no, I don't want to do that, I just want to give him a chance to kill the one that's still all right, more fool am I. Well smog it and smuck it, God hates a coward. He used the side of his pinky with surprising delicacy to separate a little line of white powder from the pile. He pinched some up, sprinkled it onto the meat like salt, kneaded it in, then pinched up a tiny bit more and kneaded that in, too. He didn't bother much with what he called hot coozine when it came to the thing downstairs, said it would be happy to eat its dinner raw--still warm and shaking on the bone, for that matter.