Stephen King – The Waste Lands

I’m in a place I don’t know, he thought. I mean, I will know it—or would have known it if

the Cadillac had hit me. It’s the way station—but the part of me that’s there doesn’t know

that yet. That part only knows it’s in the desert someplace, and there are no people. I’ve

been crying, because I’m scared. I’m scared that this might be hell.

By three o’clock, when he arrived at Mid-Town Lanes, he knew he had found the pump in

the stables and had gotten a drink of water. The water was very cold and tasted strongly of

minerals. Soon he would go inside and find a small supply of dried beef in a room which

had once been a kitchen. He knew this as clearly and surely as he’d known the pretzel

vendor would select a bottle of Yoo-Hoo, and that the doll peek- ing out of the

Bloomingdale’s bag had blue eyes.

It was like being able to remember forward in time.

He bowled only two strings—the first a 96, the second an 87. Timmy looked at his sheet

when he turned it in at the counter and shook his head. “You’re having an off-day today,

champ,” he said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Jake said.

Timmy took a closer look. “You okay? You look really pale.”

“I think I might be coming down with a bug.” This didn’t feel like a lie, either. He was sure as hell coming down with something.

“Go home and go to bed,” Timmy advised. “Drink lots of clear liquids—gin, vodka, stuff like that.”

Jake smiled dutifully. “Maybe I will.”

He walked slowly home. All of New York was spread out around him, New York at its

most seductive—a late-afternoon street serenade with a musician on every corner, all the

trees in bloom, and everyone apparently in a good mood. Jake saw all this, but he also saw

behind it: saw himself cowering in the shadows of the kitchen as the man in black drank

like a grinning dog from the stable pump, saw himself sobbing with relief as he—or

it—moved on without discovering him, saw himself falling deeply asleep as the sun went

down and the stars began to come out like chips of ice in the harsh purple desert sky.

He let himself into the duplex apartment with his key and walked into the kitchen to get

something to eat. He wasn’t hungry, but it was, habit. He was headed for the refrigerator

when his eye happened on the pantry door and he stopped. He realized suddenly that the

way station— and all the rest of that strange other world where he now belonged— was

behind that door. All he had to do was push through it and rejoin the Jake that already

existed there. The queer doubling in his mind would end; the voices, endlessly arguing the

question of whether or not he had been dead since 8:25 that morning, would fall silent.

Jake pushed open the pantry door with both hands, his face already breaking into a sunny,

relieved smile . . . and then froze as Mrs. Shaw, who was standing on a step-stool at the

back of the pantry, screamed. The can of tomato paste she had been holding dropped out of

her hand and fell to the floor. She tottered on the stool and Jake rushed forward to steady

her before she could join the tomato paste.

“Moses in the bullrushes!” she gasped, fluttering a hand rapidly against the front of her housedress. “You scared the bejabbers out of me, Johnny!”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He really was, but he was also bitterly disap- pointed. It had only been

the pantry, after all. He had been so sure—

“What are you doing, creeping around here, anyway? This is your bowling day! I didn’t

expect you for at least another hour! I haven’t even made your snack yet, so don’t be

expecting it.”

“That’s okay. I’m not very hungry, anyway.” He bent down and picked up the can she had dropped.

“Wouldn’t know it from the way you came bustin in here,” she grumbled.

“I thought I heard a mouse or something. I guess it was just you.”

“I guess it was.” She descended the step-stool and took the can from him. “You look like you’re comin down with the flu or something, Johnny.” She pressed her hand against his

forehead. “You don’t feel hot, but that doesn’t always mean much.”

“I think I’m just tired,” Jake said, and thought: If only that was all it was. “Maybe I’ll just have a soda and watch TV for a while.”

She grunted. “You got any papers you want to show me? If you do, make it fast. I’m behind

on supper.”

“Nothing today,” he said. He left the pantry, got a soda, then went into the living room. He turned on Hollywood Squares and watched vacantly as the voices argued and the new

memories of that dusty other world continued to surface.

7

His MOTHER AND FATHER didn’t notice anything was wrong with him— his father

didn’t even get in until 9:30—and that was fine by Jake. He went to bed at ten and lay

awake in the darkness, listening to the city outside his window: brakes, horns, wailing

sirens.

You died.

I didn’t, though. I’m right here, safe in my own bed.

That doesn’t matter. You died, and you know it.

The hell of it was, he knew both things.

I don’t know which voice is true, but I know I can’t go on like this. So just quit it, both of

you. Stop arguing and leave me alone. Okay? Please?

But they wouldn’t. Couldn’t, apparently. And it came to Jake that he ought to get up—right

now—and open the door to the bathroom. The other world would be there. The way station

would be there and the rest of him would be there, too, huddled under an ancient blanket in

the stable, trying to sleep and wondering what in hell had happened.

I can tell him, Jake thought excitedly. He threw back the covers, suddenly knowing that

the door beside his bookcase no longer led into the bathroom but to a world that smelled of

heat and purple sage and fear in a handful of dust, a world that now lay under the

shadowing wing of night. I can tell him, but I won’t have to . . . because I’ll be IN him . . . I’ll BE him!

He raced across his darkened room, almost laughing with relief, and shoved open the door.

And—

And it was his bathroom. Just his bathroom, with the framed Marvin Gaye poster on the

wall and the shapes of the Venetian blinds lying on the tiled floor in bars of light and

shadow.

He stood there for a long time, trying to swallow his disappointment. It wouldn’t go. And it

was bitter.

Bitter.

8

THE THREE WEEKS BETWEEN then and now stretched like a grim, blighted terrain in

Jake’s memory—a nightmare wasteland where there had been no peace, no rest, no respite

from pain. He had watched, like a helpless prisoner watching the sack of a city he had once

ruled, as his mind buckled under the steadily increasing pressure of the phantom voices and

memories. He had hoped the memories would stop when he reached the point in them

where the man named Roland had allowed him to drop into the chasm under the mountains,

but they didn’t. Instead they simply recycled and began to play themselves over again, like

a tape set to repeat and repeat until it either breaks or someone comes along, and shuts it

off.

His perceptions of his more-or-less real life as a boy in New York City grew increasingly spotty as this terrible schism grew deeper. He could remember going to school, and to the

movies on the weekend, and out to Sunday brunch with his parents a week ago (or had it

been two?), but he remembered these things the way a man who has suffered malaria may

remember the deepest, darkest phase of his illness: people became shadows, voices seemed

to echo and overlap each other, and even such a simple act as eating a sandwich or

obtaining a Coke from the machine in the gymnasium became a struggle. Jake had pushed

through those days in a fugue of yelling voices and doubled memories. His obsession with

doors—all kinds of doors—deepened; his hope that the gunslinger•s world might lie

behind one of them never quite died. Nor was that so strange, since it was the only hope he

had.

But as of today the game was over. He’d never had a chance of winning anyway, not really.

He had given up. He had gone truant. Jake walked blindly east along the gridwork of streets,

head down, with no idea of where he was going or what he would do when he got there.

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