Stephen King – Nona
Nona
by Stephen King
Do you love?
I hear her voice saying this — sometimes I still hear it. In my dreams. Do you love?
Yes, I answer. Yes — and true love will never die. Then I wake up screaming.
I don’t know how to explain it, even now. I can’t tell you why I did those things. I couldn’t do it at the trial, either. And there are a lot of people here who ask me about it. There’s a psychiatrist who does. But I am silent. My lips are sealed. Except here in my cell. Here I am not silent. I wake up screaming.
In the dream I see her walking toward me. She is wearing a white gown, almost
transparent, and her expression is one of mingled desire and triumph. She comes to me across a dark room with a stone floor and I smell dry October roses. Her arms are held open and I go to her with mine out to enfold her.
I feel dread, revulsion, unutterable longing. Dread and revulsion because I know what this place is, longing because I love her. I will always love her. There are times when I wish there were still a death penalty in this state. A short walk down a dim corridor, a straight-backed chair fitted with a steel skullcap, clamps… then one quick jolt and I would be with her.
As we come together in the dream my fear grows, but it is impossible for me to draw back from her. My hands press against the smooth plane of her back, her skin near under silk.
She smiles with those deep, black eyes. Her head tilts up to mine and her lips part, ready to be kissed.
That’s when she changes, shrivels. Her hair grows coarse and matted, melting from black to an ugly brown that spills down over the creamy whiteness of her cheeks. The eyes shrink and go beady. The whites disappear and she is glaring at me with tiny eyes like two polished pieces of jet. The mouth becomes a maw through which crooked yellow teeth protrude.
I try to scream. I try to wake up.
I can’t. I’m caught again. I’ll always be caught.
I am in the grip of a huge, noisome graveyard rat. Lights sway in front of my eyes.
October roses. Somewhere a dead bell is chanting.
“Do you love?” this thing whispers. “Do you love?” The smell of roses is its breath as it swoops toward me, dead flowers in a charnel house.
“Yes,” I tell the rat-thing. “Yes — and true love will never die.” Then I do scream, and I am awake.
They think what we did together drove me crazy. But my mind is still working in some
way or other, and I’ve never stopped looking for the answers. I still want to know how it was, and what it was.
They’ve let me have paper and a pen with a felt tip. I’m going to write everything down.
Maybe I’ll answer some of their questions and maybe while I’m doing that I can answer some of my own. And when I’m done, there’s something else. Something they don’t know I have.
Something I took. It’s here under my mattress. A knife from the prison dining hall.
I’ll have to start by telling you about Augusta.
As I write this it is night, a fine August night poked through with blazing stars. I can see them through the mesh of my window, which overlooks the exercise yard and a slice of sky I can block out with two fingers. It’s hot, and I’m naked except for my shorts. I can hear the soft summer sound of frogs and crickets. But I can bring back winter just by closing my eyes. The bitter cold of that night, the bleakness, the hard, unfriendly lights of a city that was not my city. It was the fourteenth of February.
See, I remember everything.
And look at my arms — covered with sweat, they’ve pulled into gooseflesh.
Augusta…
When I got to Augusta I was more dead than alive, it was that cold. I had picked a fine day to say good-bye to the college scene and hitchhike west; it looked like I might freeze to death before I got out of the state.