Harry laughed, but John himself seemed to see no humor in the big man standing in front of the little door. He wouldn’t have, of course; even if he’d been quite a few degrees brighter than he was, he wouldn’t have. He’d been that big man for most of his life, and this door was just a scrap littler than most.
He sat down, scooted through it that way, stood up again, and went down the stairs to where Brutal was waiting for him. There he stopped, looking across the empty room at the platform where Old Sparky waited, as silent – and as eerie – as the throne m the castle of a dead king. The cap hung with hollow jauntiness from one of the back-posts, looking less like a king’s crown than a jester’s cap, however, something a fool would wear, or shake to make his high-born audience laugh harder at his jokes. The chair’s shadow, elongated and spidery, climbed one wall like a threat. And yes, I thought I could still smell burned flesh in the air. It was faint, but I thought it was more than just my imagination.
Harry ducked through the door, then me. I didn’t like the frozen, wide-eyed way John was looking at Old Sparky. Even less did I like what I saw on his arms when I got close to him: goosebumps.
“Come on, big boy,” I said. I took his wrist and attempted to pull him in the direction of the door leading down to the tunnel. At first he wouldn’t go, and I might as well have been trying to pull a boulder out of the ground with my bare hands.
“Come on, John, we gotta go, ‘less you want the coach-and-four to turn back into a pumpkin,” Harry said, giving his nervous laugh again. He took John’s other arm and tugged, but John still wouldn’t come. And then he said something in a low and dreaming voice. It wasn’t me he was speaking to, it wasn’t any of us, but I have still never forgotten it.
“They’re still in there. Pieces of them, still in there. I hear them screaming.”
Harry’s nervous chuckles ceased, leaving him with a smile that hung on his mouth like a crooked shutter hangs on an empty house. Brutal gave me a look that was almost terrified, and stepped away from John Coffey. For the second time in less than five minutes, I sensed the whole enterprise on the verge of collapse. This time I was the one who stepped in; when disaster threatened a third time, a little later on, it would be Harry. We all got our chance that night, believe me.
I slid in between John and his view of the chair, standing on my tiptoes to make sure I was completely blocking his sight-line. Then I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes, twice, sharply.
“Come on!” I said. “Walk! You said you didn’t need to be chained, now prove it! Walk, big boy! Walk, John Coffey! Over there! That door!”
His eyes cleared. “Yes, boss.” And praise God, he began to walk.
“Look at the door, John Coffey, just at the door and nowhere else.”
“Yes, boss.” John fixed his eyes obediently on the door.
“Brutal,” I said, and pointed.
He hurried in advance, shaking out his keyring, finding the right one. John kept his gaze fixed on the door to the tunnel and I kept my gaze fixed on John, but from the comer of one eye I could see Harry throwing nervous glances at the chair, as if he had never seen it before in his life.
There are pieces of them still in there … I hear them screaming.
If that was true, then Eduard Delacroix had to be screaming longest and loudest of all, and I was glad I couldn’t hear what John Coffey did.
Brutal opened the door. We went down the stairs with Coffey in the lead. At the bottom, he looked glumly down the tunnel, with its low brick ceiling. He was going to have a crick in his back by the time we got to the other end, unless – I pulled the gurney over. The sheet upon which we’d laid Del had been stripped (and probably incinerated), so the gurney’s black leather pads were visible. “Get on,” I told John.