Different Seasons - Stephen King [103]
'No, your hold over me will weaken even as mine over you grows stronger. No situation is static. And there will come a time-if I live long enough-when I will decide what you know no longer matters. Then I will destroy the document.'
'But so many things could happen to you in between! Accidents, sickness, disease -' Dussander shrugged.' "There will be water if God wills it, and we will find it if God wills it, and we will drink it if God wills it" What happens is not up to us.' Todd looked at the old man for a long time-for a very long time. There were flaws in Dussander's arguments-there had to be. A way out, an escape hatch either for both of them or for Todd alone. A way to cry it off times, guys, I hurt my foot, allee-allee-in-free. A black knowledge of the years ahead trembled somewhere behind his eyes;
he could feel it there, waiting to be born as conscious thought. Everywhere he went, everything he did
He thought of a cartoon character with an anvil suspended over its head. By the time he graduated from high school, Dussander would be eighty, and that would not be the end; by the time he collected his BA, Dussander would be eighty-four and he would still feel that he wasn't old enough; he would finish his master's thesis and graduate school the year Dussander turned eighty-six and Dussander still might not feel safe. 'No,' Todd said thickly. 'What you're saying I can't face that.'
'My boy,' Dussander said gently, and Todd heard for the first time and with dawning horror the slight accent the old man had put on the first word. 'My boy you must' Todd stared at him his tongue swelling and thickening in his mouth until it seemed it must fill his throat and choke him. Then he wheeled and blundered out of the house. Dussander watched all of this with no expression at all, and when the door had slammed shut and the boy's running footsteps stopped, meaning that he had mounted his bike, he lit a cigarette. There was, of course, no safe deposit box, no document But the boy believed those things existed; he had believed utterly. He was safe. It was ended.
But it was not ended.
That night they both dreamed of murder, and both of them awoke in mingled terror and exhilaration.
Todd awoke with the now familiar stickiness on his lower belly. Dussander, too old for such things, put on the Gestapo uniform and then lay down again, waiting for his racing heart to slow. The uniform was cheaply made and already beginning to fray.
In Dussander's dream he had finally reached the camp at the top of the hill. The wide gate slid open for him and then rumbled shut on its steel track once he was inside. Both the gate and the fence surrounding the camp were electrified. His scrawny, naked pursuers threw themselves against the fence -. wave after wave; Dussander had laughed at them and he had strutted back and forth, his chest thrown out, his cap cocked at exactly the right angle. The high, winey smell of burning flesh filled the black air, and he had awakened in southern California thinking of jack-o'-lanterns and the night when vampires seek the blue flame.
Two days before the Bowdens were scheduled to fly to Hawaii, Todd went back to the abandoned trainyard where folks had once boarded trains for San Francisco, Seattle, and Las Vegas; where other, older folks had once boarded the trolley for Los Angeles.
It was nearly dusk when he got there. On the curve of freeway nine hundred yards away, most of the cars were now mowing their parking lights. Although it was warm, Todd was wearing a light jacket. Tucked into his belt under it was a butcher-knife wrapped in an old hand-towel. He had purchased the knife in a discount department store, one of the big ones surrounded by acres of parking lot.
He looked under the platform where the wino had been the month before. His mind turned and turned, but it turned on re-thing; everything inside him at that moment was shades of