The waste lands - Stephen King [89]
And suddenly he thought of something else Deepneau had said: That’s only half the answer. Samson’s riddle is a double, my friend.
Jake glanced at his bedside clock and saw it was twenty past six. It was time to get moving if he wanted to be out of here before his parents woke up. There would be no school for him today; Jake thought that maybe, as far as he was concerned, school had been cancelled forever.
He threw back the bedclothes, swung his feet out onto the floor, and saw that there were scrapes on both knees. Fresh scrapes. He had bruised his left side yesterday when he slipped on the bricks and fell, and he had banged his head when he fainted near the rose, but nothing had happened to his knees.
“That happened in the dream,” Jake whispered, and found he wasn’t surprised at all. He began to dress swiftly.
5
IN THE BACK OF his closet, under a jumble of old laceless sneakers and a heap of Spiderman comic books, he found the packsack he had worn to grammar school. No one would be caught dead with a packsack at Piper—how too, too common, my deah—and as Jake grabbed it, he felt a wave of powerful nostalgia for those old days when life had seemed so simple.
He stuffed a clean shirt, a clean pair of jeans, some underwear and socks into it, then added Riddle-De-Dum! and Charlie the Choo-Choo. He had put the key on his desk before foraging in the closet for his old pack, and the voices came back at once, but they were distant and muted. Besides, he felt sure he could make them go away completely by holding the key again, and that eased his mind.
Okay, he thought, looking into the pack. Even with the books added, there was plenty of room left. What else?
For a moment he thought there was nothing else . . . and then he knew.
6
HIS FATHER’S STUDY SMELLED of cigarettes and ambition.
It was dominated by a huge teakwood desk. Across the room, set into a wall otherwise lined with books, were three Mitsubishi television monitors. Each was tuned to one of the rival networks, and at night, when his father was in here, each played out its progression of prime-time images with the sound off.
The curtains were drawn, and Jake had to turn on the desk lamp in order to see. He felt nervous just being in here, even wearing sneakers. If his father should wake up and come in (and it was possible; no matter how late he went to bed or how much he drank, Elmer Chambers was a light sleeper and an early riser), he would be angry. At the very least it would make a clean getaway much tougher. The sooner he was out of here, the better Jake would feel.
The desk was locked, but his father had never made any secret of where he kept the key. Jake slid his fingers under the blotter and hooked it out. He opened the third drawer, reached past the hanging files, and touched cold metal.
A board creaked in the hall and he froze. Several seconds passed. When the creak didn’t come again, Jake pulled out the weapon his father kept for “home defense”—a .44 Ruger automatic. His father had shown this weapon to Jake with great pride on the day he had bought it—two years ago, that had been. He had been totally deaf to his wife’s nervous demands that he put it away before someone got hurt.
Jake found the button on the side that released the clip. It fell out into his hand with a metallic snak! sound that seemed very loud in the quiet apartment. He glanced nervously toward the door again, then turned his attention to the clip. It was fully loaded. He started to slide it back into the gun, and then took it out again. Keeping a loaded gun in a locked desk drawer was one thing; carrying one around New York City was quite another.
He stuffed the automatic down to the bottom of his pack, then felt behind the hanging files again. This time he brought out a box of shells, about half-full. He remembered his father had done some target shooting at the police range on First Avenue before losing interest.
The board creaked again. Jake wanted to get out of here.
He removed one of