“Hang Fire.”
Hold a mirror in front of my nose! I scream at them. Watch it fog up!
Can’t you at least do that?
Snick, snick, snickety-snick.
Pete turns the scissors at an angle so the light runs down the blade, and for the first time I’m certain, really certain, that this mad charade is going to go all the way through to the end. The director isn’t going to freeze the frame. The ref isn’t going to stop the fight in the tenth round. We’re not going to pause for a word from our sponsors.
38
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
Petie-Boy’s going to slide those scissors into my gut while I lie here helpless, and then he’s going to open me up like a mail-order package from the Horchow Collection.
He looks hesitantly at Dr. Arlen.
No! I howl, my voice reverberating off the dark walls of my skull but emerging from my mouth not at all. No, please no!
She nods. “Go ahead. You’ll be fine.”
“Uh . . . you want to turn off the music?”
Yes! Yes, turn it off!
“Is it bothering you?”
Yes! It’s bothering him! It’s fucked him up so completely he thinks his patient is dead!
“Well . . .”
“Sure,” she says, and disappears from my field of vision. A moment later Mick and Keith are finally gone. I try to make the humming noise and discover a horrible thing: now I can’t even do that. I’m too scared. Fright has locked down my vocal cords. I can only stare up as she rejoins him, the two of them gazing down at me like pallbearers looking into an open grave.
“Thanks,” he says. Then he takes a deep breath and lifts the scissors. “Commencing pericardial cut.”
He slowly brings them down. I see them . . . see them . . . then they’re gone from my field of vision. A long moment later, I feel cold steel nestle against my naked upper belly.
He looks doubtfully at the doctor.
“Are you sure you don’t—”
“Do you want to make this your field or not, Peter?” she asks him with some asperity.
“You know I do, but—”
“Then cut.”
He nods, lips firming. I would close my eyes if I could, but of course I cannot even do that; I can only steel myself against the pain that’s only a second or two away now—steel myself for the steel.
“Cutting,” he says, bending forward.
“Wait a sec!” she cries.
39
STEPHEN KING
The dimple of pressure just below my solar plexus eases a little. He looks around at her, surprised, upset, maybe relieved that the crucial moment has been put off—
I feel her rubber-gloved hand slide around my penis as if she meant to give me some bizarre handjob, Safe Sex with the Dead, and then she says, “You missed this one, Pete.”
He leans over, looking at what she’s found—the scar in my groin, at the very top of my right thigh, a glassy, no-pore bowl in the flesh.
Her hand is still holding my cock, holding it out of the way, that’s all she’s doing; as far as she’s concerned she might as well be holding up a sofa cushion so someone else can see the treasure she’s found beneath it—coins, a lost wallet, maybe the catnip mouse you haven’t been able to find—but something is happening.
Dear wheelchair Jesus on a chariot-driven crutch, something is happening.
“And look,” she says. Her finger strokes a light, tickly line down the side of my right testicle. “Look at these hairline scars. His testes must have swollen up to damned near the size of grapefruits.”
“Lucky he didn’t lose one or both.”
“You bet your . . . you bet your you-knows,” she says, and laughs that mildly suggestive laugh again. Her gloved hand loosens, moves, then pushes down firmly, trying to clear the viewing area. She is doing by accident what you might pay twenty-five or thirty bucks to have done on purpose . . . under other circumstances, of course. “This is a war-wound, I think. Hand me that magnifier, Pete.”
“But shouldn’t I—”
“In a few seconds,” she says. “He’s not going anywhere.” She’s totally absorbed by what she’s found. Her hand is still on me, still pressing down, and what was happening feels like it’s still happening, but maybe I’m wrong. I must be wrong, or he would see it, she would feel it—
She bends down and now I can see only her green-clad back, with the ties from her cap trailing down it like odd pigtails. Now, oh my, I can feel her breath on me down there.
“Notice the outward radiation,” she says. “It was a blast-wound 40
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
of some sort, probably ten years ago at least, we could check his mil-itary rec—”
The door bursts open. Pete cries out in surprise. Dr. Arlen doesn’t, but her hand tightens involuntarily, she’s gripping me again and it’s all at once like a hellish variation of the old Naughty Nurse fantasy.
“Don’t cut im up!” someone screams, and his voice is so high and wavery with fright that I barely recognize Rusty. “Don’t cut im up, there was a snake in his golf-bag and it bit Mike!”
They turn to him, eyes wide, jaws dropped; her hand is still gripping me, but she’s no more aware of that, at least for the time being, than Petie-Boy is aware that he’s got one hand clutching the left breast of his scrub-gown. He looks like he’s the one with the clapped-out fuel pump.
“What . . . what are you . . .” Pete begins.
“Knocked him flat!” Rusty was saying—babbling. “He’s gonna be okay, I guess, but he can hardly talk! Little brown snake, I never saw one like it in my life, it went under the loadin bay, it’s under there right now, but that’s not the important part! I think it already bit that guy we brought in. I think . . . holy shit, doc, whatja tryin to do?
Stroke im back to life?”
She looks around, dazed, at first not sure of what he’s talking about
. . . until she realizes that she’s now holding a mostly erect penis. And as she screams—screams and snatches the shears out of Pete’s limp gloved hand—I find myself thinking again of that old Alfred Hitchcock TV show.
Poor old Joseph Cotten, I think.
He only got to cry.
AFTERNOTE
It’s been a year since my experience in Autopsy Room Four, and I have made a complete recovery, although the paralysis was both stubborn and scary; it was a full month before I began to get back the finer motions of my fingers and toes. I still can’t play the piano, but then, 41
STEPHEN KING
of course, I never could. That is a joke, and I make no apologies for it.
I think that in the first three months after my misadventure, my ability to joke provided a slim but vital margin between sanity and some sort of nervous breakdown. Unless you’ve actually felt the tip of a pair of postmortem shears poking into your stomach, you don’t know what I mean.
Two weeks or so after my close call, a woman on Dupont Street called the Derry Police to complain of a “foul stink” coming from the house next door. That house belonged to a bachelor bank clerk named Walter Kerr. Police found the house empty . . . of human life, that is. In the basement they found over sixty snakes of different vari-eties. About half of them were dead—starvation and dehydration—
but many were extremely lively . . . and extremely dangerous. Several were very rare, and one was of a species believed to have been extinct since midcentury, according to consulting herpetologists.
Kerr failed to show up for work at Derry Community Bank on August 22nd, two days after I was bitten, one day after the story (PARALYZED MAN ESCAPES DEADLY AUTOPSY, the headline read; at one point I was quoted as saying I had been “scared stiff ”) broke in the press.
There was a snake for every cage in Kerr’s basement menagerie, except for one. The empty cage was unmarked, and the snake that popped out of my golf-bag (the ambulance orderlies had packed it in with my “corpse” and had been practicing chip-shots out in the ambulance parking area) was never found. The toxin in my bloodstream—the same toxin found to a far lesser degree in orderly Mike Hopper’s bloodstream—was documented but never identified. I have looked at a great many pictures of snakes in the last year, and have found at least one which has reportedly caused cases of full-body paralysis in humans. This is the Peruvian boomslang, a nasty viper which has supposedly been extinct since the 1920s. Dupont Street is less than half a mile from the Derry Municipal Golf Course.
Most of the intervening land consists of scrub woods and vacant lots.