Stephen King – Desperation

Billingsley led them around the corner. A rickety board fence ran along the backside of the movie theater, leaving a gap of about four feet. The old man walked slowly along this path with his hands held out. The others fol-lowed in single file; there was no room to double up. Mary was just starting to think Billingsley had gotten them down here on some sort of wild-goose chase when he stopped.

“Here we are.”

He bent, and Mary saw him pick something up-a crate, it looked like. He put it on top of another one, then stepped up onto the makeshift platform with a wince. He was standing in front of a dirty frosted-glass window. He put his hands on this, the fingers spread like starfish, and pushed. The window slid up.

“It’s the ladies’,” he said. “Watch out. There’s a little drop.”

He turned around and slid through, looking like a large, wrinkled boy entering the Over-The-Hill Gang’s club-house. David followed, then his father. Johnny Marinville went next, first almost falling off the crate platform as he turned around. He really was close to blind in the dark, she thought, and reminded herself never to ride in a car this man was driving. And a motorcycle? Had he really crossed the country on a motorcycle? If so, God must love him a lot more than she ever would.

She grabbed him by the back of the belt and steadied him. “Thanks,” he said, and this time he did sound humble. Then he was wriggling through the window, puffing and grunting, his long hair hanging in his face.

Mary took one quick look around, and for a moment she heard ghost-voices in the wind.

Didn’t you see it?

See what?

On that sign. That speed-limit sign.

What about it?

There was a dead cat on it.

Now, standing on the crate, she thought: The people who said those things really are ghosts, because they ‘re dead. Me as much as him-certainly the Mary Jackson who left on this trip is gone. The person back here behind this old movie house, she’s someone new.

She passed her gun and flashlight through the window to the hands held up to take them, then turned around and slid easily over the sill and into the ladies’.

Ralph caught her around the hips and eased her down. David was shining his flashlight around, holding one hand over the top of the lens in a kind of hood. The place had a smell that made her wrinkle her nose-damp, mildew, booze. There was a carton filled with empty liquor bottles in one corner. In one of the toilet-stalls there were two large plastic bins filled with beer-cans. These had been placed over a hole where, once upon a time, she supposed, there had been an actual toilet. Around the time James Dean died, from the look of the place, she thought. She realized she could use a toilet herself, and that no matter how the place smelled, she was hungry, as well. Why not? She hadn’t had anything to eat for almost eight hours. She felt guilty about being hungry when Peter would never eat again, but she supposed the feeling would pass. That was the hell of it, when you thought it over. That was the exact hell of it.

“Holy shit,” Marinville said, pulling his own flashlight out of his shirt and shining it into the beer-can repository. “You and your friends must party hearty, Thomas.”

“We clean the whole place out once a month,” Billingsley said, sounding defensive.

“Not like the kids that used to run wild upstairs until the old fire escape finally fell down last winter. We

don’t pee in the corners, and we don’t use drugs, either.”

Marinville considered the carton of liquor empties. “On top of all that J. W. Dant, a few drugs and you’d probably explode.”

“Where do you pee, if you don’t mind me asking?” Mary said. “Because I could use a little relief in that direction.”

“There’s a Port-A-Potty across the hail in the men’s. The kind they have in sickrooms.

We keep that clean, too.” He gave Marinville a complex look, equal parts truculence and timidity. Mary supposed that Marinville was preparing to tee off on Billingsley. She had an idea Billingsley felt it coming, too. And why? Because guys like Marinville needed to establish a pecking order, and the veterinarian was clearly the most peckable person in attendance.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Might I borrow your flashlight Johnny?”

She held out her hand. He looked at it dubiously, then handed it over. She thanked him and headed for the door

“Whoa-neat!” David said softly, and that stopped her The boy had focused his flashlight on one of the few sections of wall where the tiles were still mostly intact on it someone had drawn a gloriously rococo fish in various Magic Marker colors. It was the sort of flippy tailed, half-mythological beast that one sometimes found disporting atop the waveiets of very old sea-maps. Yet there was nothing fearsome or sea-monsterish about the fellow swimming on the wall above the broken Towl Master dispenser; with its blue Betty Boop eyes and red gills and yellow dorsal fin, there was something sweet and exuberant about it-here in the fetid, booze-smelling dark, the fish was almost miraculous.

Only one tile had fallen out of the drawing, eradicating the lower half of the tail.

“Mr. Billingsley. did you-”

“Yes, son, yes,” he said, sounding both defiant and embarrassed. “I drew it.” He looked at Marinville. “I was probably drunk at the time.”

Mary paused in the doorway, bracing for Marinville’s reply. He surprised her. “I’ve been known to draw a few drunkfish myself,” he said. “With words rather than coloring pens, but I imagine the principle is the same. Not bad, Billingsley. But why here? Of all places, why here?

“Because I like this place,” he said with considerable dignity. “Especially since the kids cleared out. Not that they ever bothered us much back here; they liked the balcony, mostly. I suppose that sounds crazy to you, but I don’t much care. It’s where I come to be with my friends since I retired and quit the Town Committee. I look for-ward to the nights I spend with them. It’s just an old movie theater, there’s rats and the seats are full of mildew, but so what? It’s our business, ain’t it? Our own business. Only now I suppose they’re all dead. Dick Onslo, Tom Kincaid, Cash Lancaster. My old pals.” He uttered a harsh, startling cry, like the caw of a raven. It made her jump.

“Mr. Billingsley?” It was David. The old man looked at him. “Do you think he killed everyone in town?”

“That’s crazy!” Marinville said.

Ralph yanked his arm as if it were the stop-cord on a bus. “Quiet.”

Billingsley was still looking at David and rubbing at the flesh beneath his eyes with his long, crooked fingers. “I think he may have,” he said, and glanced at Marinville again for a moment. “I think he may have at least tried.”

“How many people are we talking about?” Ralph asked. “In Desperation? Hundred and ninety, maybe two hundred. With the new mine people starting to trickle in, maybe fifty or sixty more. Although it’s hard to tell how many of em would’ve been here and how many up to the pit.”

“The pit?” Mary asked.

“ChinaPit. The one they’re reopening. For the copper.”

“Don’t tell me one man, even a moose like that, went around town and killed two hundred people,”

Marinville said, “because, excuse me very much, I don’t believe it. I mean, I believe in American enterprise as much as any-one, but that’s just nuts.”

“Well, he might have missed a few on the first pass,” Mary said. “Didn’t you say he ran over a guy when he was bringing you in? Ran him over and killed him?”

Marinville turned and favored her with a weighty frown. “I thought you had to take a leak.”

“I’ve got good kidneys. He did, didn’t he? He ran someone down in the st~’iet. You said so.”

“All right, yeah. Rancourt, he called him. Billy Rancourt.”

“Oh Jesus.” Billingsley closed his eyes.

“You knew him?” Ralph asked.

“Mister, in a town the size of this one, everybody knows everybody. Billy worked at the feed store, cut some hair in his spare time.”

“All right, yeah, Entragian ran this Rancourt down in the street-ran him down like a dog.”

Marinville sounded upset, querulous. “I’m willing to accept the idea that Entragian may have killed a lot of people. I know what he’s capable of.”

“Do you?” David asked softly, and they all looked at him. David looked away, at the colorful fish floating on the wall.

“For one guy to kill hundreds of people. . .“ Marinville said, and then quit for a moment, as if he’d temporarily lost his train of thought. “Even if he did it at night .. I mean, guys.. “Maybe it wasn’t just him,”