Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [310]
'I'm talking to you,' he said steadily. 'Not to her but to you. I love you, Sarah.'
She looked at him again, and that look of terrible weariness was back. 'Yes,' she said. 'Maybe you do. And maybe you should learn not to.'
'I want you to do something for me, Sarah. I want you to turn your back to me. There's a train coming. I want you to watch that train and not look back at me until I tell you. Can you do that?'
Her upper lip lifted. That expression of hate and fear animated her haggard face again. 'No! Leave me alone! Go away!'
'Is that what you want?' he asked. 'Is it really? You told Dolph where I could find you, Sarah. Do you really want me to go?'
Her eyes closed again. Her mouth drew down in a trembling bow of anguish. When her eyes opened again, they were full of haunted terror and brimming with tears. 'Oh, Sam,. help me! Something is wrong and I don't know what it is or what to do!'
'I know what to do,' he told her. 'Trust in me, Sarah, and trust in what you said when we were on our way to the Library Monday night. Honesty and belief. Those things are the opposite of fear. Honesty and belief.'
'It's hard, though,' she whispered. 'Hard to trust. Hard to believe.'
He looked at her steadily.
Naomi's upper lip lifted suddenly, and her lower lip curled out, turning her mouth momentarily into a shape that was almost like a horn. 'Fuck yourself!' she said. 'Go on and fuck yourself, Sam Peebles!'
He looked at her steadily.
She raised her hands and pressed them against her temples. 'I didn't mean it. I don't know why I said it. I ... my head ... Sam, my poor head! It feels like it's splitting in two.'
The oncoming train whistled as it crossed the Proverbia River and rolled into Junction City. It was the midafternoon freight, the one that charged through without stopping on its way to the Omaha stockyards. Sam could see it now.
'There's not much time, Sarah. It has to be now. Turn around and look at the train. Watch it come.'
'Yes,' she said suddenly. 'All right. Do what you want to do, Sam. And if you see ... see it isn't going to work ... then push me. Push me in front of the train. Then you can tell the others that I jumped ... that it was suicide.' She looked at him pleadingly - deathly-tired eyes staring into his from her exhausted face. 'They know I haven't been feeling myself - the people in the Program. You can't keep how you feel from them. After awhile that's just not possible. They'll believe you if you say I jumped, and they'd be right, because I don't want to go on like this. But the thing is . Sam, the thing is, I think that before long I will want to go on. '
'Be quiet,' he said. 'We're not going to talk about suicide. Look at the train, Sarah, and remember I love you.'
She turned toward the train, less than a mile away now and coming fast. Her hands went to the nape of her neck and lifted her hair. Sam bent forward . . . and what he was looking for was there, crouched high on the clean white flesh of her neck. He knew that her brain-stem began less than half an inch below that place, and he felt his stomach twist with revulsion.
He bent forward toward the blistery growth. It was covered in a spiderweb skein of crisscrossing white threads, but he could see it beneath, a lump of pinkish jelly that throbbed and pulsed with the beat of her heart.
'Leave me alone!' Ardelia Lortz suddenly screamed from the mouth of the woman Sam had come to love. 'Leave me alone, you bastard!' But Sarah's hands were steady, holding her hair up, giving him access.
'Can you see the numbers on the engine, Sarah?' he murmured.
She moaned.
He drove his thumb into the soft glob of red licorice he held, making a well a little bigger than the parasite which lay on Sarah's neck. 'Read them to me, Sarah. Read me the numbers.'
'Two ... six ... oh Sam, oh my head hurts ... it feels like big hands pulling my brain into two pieces . . .'
'Read the numbers, Sarah,' he murmured, and brought the Bull's Eye licorice down toward that pulsing, obscene growth.
'Five ... nine . .