He doesn’t like Mike’s voice on the tape, he doesn’t like the stuff that voice is saying ( My brother was actually eaten by wolves one winter on the Connecticut Turnpike . . . what in God’s name is that supposed to mean?), and most of all he doesn’t like the background sounds on the tape, a kind of liquid smooshing that sometimes sounds like clothes churning around in an oversudsed washer, sometimes like one of those old electric hair-clippers . . . and sometimes weirdly like a voice.
While Mike was still in the hospital, a man named Olin—the manager of the goddamned hotel, if you please—came and asked Sam Farrell if he could listen to that tape. Farrell said no, he couldn’t; what Olin could do was take himself on out of the agent’s office at a rapid hike and thank God all the way back to the fleabag where he worked that Mike Enslin had decided not to sue either the hotel or Olin for negligence.
“I tried to persuade him not to go in,” Olin said quietly. A man who spent most of his working days listening to tired travellers and petulant guests bitch about everything from their rooms to the magazine selection in the newsstand, he wasn’t much perturbed by Farrell’s ran-cor. “I tried everything in my power. If anyone was negligent that night, Mr. Farrell, it was your client. He believed too much in nothing. Very unwise behavior. Very unsafe behavior. I would guess he has changed somewhat in that regard.”
In spite of Farrell’s distaste for the tape, he would like Mike to listen to it, acknowledge it, perhaps use it as a pad from which to launch 401
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a new book. There is a book in what happened to Mike, Farrell knows it—not just a chapter, a forty-page case history, but an entire book.
One that might outsell all three of the Ten Nights books combined.
And of course he doesn’t believe Mike’s assertion that he has finished not only with ghost-tales but with all writing. Writers say that from time to time, that’s all. The occasional prima donna outburst is part of what makes writers in the first place.
As for Mike Enslin himself, he got off lucky, all things considered.
And he knows it. He could have been burned much more badly than he actually was; if not for Mr. Dearborn and his bucket of ice, he might have had twenty or even thirty different skin-graft procedures to suffer through instead of only four. His neck is scarred on the left side in spite of the grafts, but the doctors at the Boston Burn Institute tell him the scars will fade on their own. He also knows that the burns, painful as they were in the weeks and months after that night, were necessary. If not for the matches with CLOSE COVER BEFORE STRIKING
written on the front, he would have died in 1408, and his end would have been unspeakable. To a coroner it might have looked like a stroke or a heart attack, but the actual cause of death would have been much nastier.
Much nastier.
He was also lucky in having produced three popular books on ghosts and hauntings before actually running afoul of a place that is haunted—this he also knows. Sam Farrell may not believe Mike’s life as a writer is over, but Sam doesn’t need to; Mike knows it for both of them. He cannot so much as write a postcard without feeling cold all over his skin and being nauseated deep in the pit of his belly. Sometimes just looking at a pen (or a tape recorder) will make him think: The pictures were crooked. I tried to straighten the pictures. He doesn’t know what this means. He can’t remember the pictures or anything else from room 1408, and he is glad. That is a mercy. His blood-pressure isn’t so good these days (his doctor told him that burn victims often develop problems with their blood-pressure and put him on medication), his eyes trouble him (his ophthalmologist told him to start taking Ocuvites), he has consistent back problems, his prostate has 402
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gotten too large . . . but he can deal with these things. He knows he isn’t the first person to escape 1408 without really escaping—Olin tried to tell him—but it isn’t all bad. At least he doesn’t remember.
Sometimes he has nightmares, quite often, in fact (almost every goddam night, in fact), but he rarely remembers them when he wakes up. A sense that things are rounding off at the corners, mostly—melting the way the corners of his minicorder melted. He lives on Long Island these days, and when the weather is good he takes long walks on the beach. The closest he has ever come to articulating what he does remember about his seventy-odd ( very odd) minutes in 1408 was on one of those walks. “It was never human,” he told the incoming waves in a choked, halting voice. “Ghosts . . . at least ghosts were once human. The thing in the wall, though . . . that thing . . .”
Time may improve it, he can and does hope for that. Time may fade it, as it will fade the scars on his neck. In the meantime, though, he sleeps with the lights on in his bedroom, so he will know at once where he is when he wakes up from the bad dreams. He has had all the phones taken out of the house; at some point just below the place where his conscious mind seems able to go, he is afraid of picking the phone up and hearing a buzzing, inhuman voice spit, “This is nine!
Nine! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead!”
And when the sun goes down on clear evenings, he pulls every shade and blind and drape in the house. He sits like a man in a dark-room until his watch tells him the light—even the last fading glow along the horizon—must be gone.
He can’t stand the light that comes at sunset.
That yellow deepening to orange, like light in the Australian desert.
403
Riding the Bullet
I think I’ve said almost everything that needs to be said about this story in the Introduction. It’s essentially my telling of a tale you can hear in almost any small town. And, like an earlier story of mine (“The Woman in the Room,” in Night Shift ), it’s an attempt to talk about how my own mother’s approaching death made me feel.
There comes a time in most lives when we must face the deaths of our loved ones as an actual reality . . . and, by proxy, the fact of our own approaching death. This is probably the single great subject of horror fiction: our need to cope with a mystery that can be understood only with the aid of a hopeful imagination.
I’ve never told anyone this story, and never thought I would—not because I was afraid of being disbelieved, exactly, but because I was ashamed . . . and because it was mine. I’ve always felt that telling it would cheapen both me and the story itself, make it smaller and more mundane, no more than a camp counselor’s ghost story told before lights-out. I think I was also afraid that if I told it, heard it with my own ears, I might start to disbelieve it myself. But since my mother died I haven’t been able to sleep very well. I doze off and then snap back again, wide-awake and shivering. Leaving the bedside lamp on helps, but not as much as you might think. There are so many more shadows at night, have you ever noticed that? Even with a light on there are so many shadows. The long ones could be the shadows of anything, you think.
Anything at all.
405
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*
*
*
I was a junior at the University of Maine when Mrs. McCurdy called about Ma. My father died when I was too young to remember him and I was an only child, so it was just Alan and Jean Parker against the world. Mrs. McCurdy, who lived just up the road, called at the apartment I shared with three other guys. She had gotten the number off the magnetic minder-board Ma kept on her fridge.
“’Twas a stroke,” she said in that long and drawling Yankee accent of hers. “Happened at the restaurant. But don’t you go flyin off all half-cocked. Doctor says it wa’ant too bad. She’s awake and she’s talkin.”
“Yeah, but is she making sense?” I asked. I was trying to sound calm, even amused, but my heart was beating fast and the living room suddenly felt too warm. I had the apartment all to myself; it was Wednesday, and both my roomies had classes all day.
“Oh, ayuh. First thing she said was for me to call you but not to scare you. That’s pretty sensible, wouldn’t you say?”