The waste lands - Stephen King [117]
He saw a hallway. Jake was down on his hands and knees, tugging frantically at a board. Something was coming for him. Eddie could see it, but at the same time he could not—it was as if part of his brain refused to see it, as if seeing would lead to comprehension and comprehension to madness.
“Hurry up, Jake!” he screamed into the keyhole. “For Christ’s sake, move it!”
Above the speaking ring, thunder ripped the sky like cannon-fire and the rain turned to hail.
32
FOR A MOMENT AFTER the key fell, Jake only stood where he was, staring down at the narrow crack between the boards.
Incredibly, he felt sleepy.
That shouldn’t have happened, he thought. It’s one thing too much. I can’t go on with this, not one minute, not one single second longer. I’m going to curl up against that door instead. I’m going to go to sleep, right away, all at once, and when it grabs me and pulls me toward its mouth, I’ll never wake up.
Then the thing coming out of the wall grunted, and when Jake looked up, his urge to give in vanished in a single stroke of terror. Now it was all the way out of the wall, a giant plaster head with one broken wooden eye and one reaching plaster hand. Chunks of lathing stood out on its skull in random hackles, like a child’s drawing of hair. It saw Jake and opened its mouth, revealing jagged wooden teeth. It grunted again. Plaster-dust drifted out of its yawning mouth like cigar smoke.
Jake fell to his knees and peered into the crack. The key was a small brave shimmer of silvery light down there in the dark, but the crack was far too narrow to admit his fingers. He seized one of the boards and yanked with all his might. The nails which held it groaned . . . but held.
There was a jangling crash. He looked down the hallway and saw the hand, which was bigger than his whole body, seize the fallen chandelier and throw it aside. The rusty chain which had once held it suspended rose like a bullwhip and then came down with a heavy crump. A dead lamp on a rusty chain rattled above Jake, dirty glass chattering against ancient brass.
The doorkeeper’s head, attached only to its single hunched shoulder and reaching arm, slid forward above the floor. Behind it, the remains of the wall collapsed in a cloud of dust. A moment later the fragments humped up and became the creature’s twisted, bony back.
The doorkeeper saw Jake looking and seemed to grin. As it did, splinters of wood poked out of its wrinkling cheeks. It dragged itself forward through the dust-hazed ballroom, mouth opening and closing. Its great hand groped amid the ruins, feeling for purchase, and ripped one of the french doors at the end of the hall from its track.
Jake screamed breathlessly and began to wrench at the board again. It wouldn’t come, but the gunslinger’s voice did:
“The other one, Jake! Try the other one!”
He let go of the board he had been yanking at and grabbed the one on the other side of the crack. As he did, another voice spoke. He heard this one not in his head but with his ears, and understood it was coming from the other side of the door—the door he had been looking for ever since the day he hadn’t been run over in the street.
“Hurry up, Jake! For Christ’s sake, hurry up!”
When he yanked this other board, it came free so easily that he almost tumbled over backward.
33
TWO WOMEN WERE STANDING in the doorway of the used appliance shop across the street from The Mansion. The older was the proprietor; the younger had been her only customer when the sounds of crashing walls and breaking beams began. Now, without knowing they were doing it, they linked arms about each other’s waists and stood that way, trembling like children who hear a noise in the dark.
Up the street, a trio of boys on their way to the Dutch Hill Little League field stood gaping at the house, their Red