Stephen King – The Waste Lands

anything at all. Another false alarm, blind alley, dry well. Now the voices will start up

again, and when they do, I think I’m going to start screaming. And that’s okay. Because I’m

tired of tough- ing this thing out. I’m tired of going crazy. If this is what going crazy is like, then I just want to hurry up and get there so somebody will take me to the hospital and give

me something that’ll knock me out. I give up. This is the end of the line—I’m through.

But the voices did not come back—at least, not yet. And as he began to think about what

he was seeing, he realized that the lot wasn’t com- pletely empty, after all. Standing in the

middle of the trash-littered, weedy waste ground was a sign.

MILLS CONSTRUCTION AND SOMBRA REAL ESTATE

ASSOCIATES ARE CONTINUING TO REMAKE THE FACE OF

MANHATTAN!

COMING SOON TO THIS LOCATION:

TURTLE BAY LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS!

CALL 555-6712 FOR INFORMATION!

YOU WILL BE SO GLAD YOU DID!

Coming soon? Maybe . . . but Jake had his doubts. The letters on the sign were faded and it

was sagging a little. At least one graffiti artist, BANCO SKANK by name, had left his

mark across the artist’s drawing of the Turtle Bay Luxury Condominiums in bright blue

spray-paint. Jake wondered if the project had been postponed or if it had maybe just gone

belly-up. He remembered hearing his father talking on the telephone to his business

advisor not two weeks ago, yelling at the man to stay away from any more condo

investments. “I don’t care how good the tax-picture looks!” he’d nearly screamed (this was, so far as Jake could tell, his father’s normal tone of voice when dis- cussing business

matters—the coke in the desk drawer might have had something to do with that). “When

they’re offering a goddamn TV set just so you•ll come down and look at a blueprint,

something’s wrong!”

The board fence surrounding the lot was chin-high to Jake. It had been plastered with

handbills—Olivia Newton-John at Radio City, a group called G. Gordon Liddy and the

Grots at a club in the East Village, a film called War of the Zombies which had come and

gone earlier that spring. NO TRESPASSING signs had also been nailed up at intervals

along the fence, but most of them had been papered over by ambitious bill-posters. A little

way farther along, another graffito had been spray-painted on the fence—this one in what

had once undoubtedly been a bright red but which had now faded to the dusky pink of

late-summer roses. Jake whispered the words aloud, his eyes wide and fascinated:

“See the TURTLE of enormous girth!

On his shell he holds the earth

If you want to run and play,

Come along the BEAM today.”

Jake supposed the source of this strange little poem (if not its meaning) was clear enough.

This part of Manhattan’s East Side was known, after all, as Turtle Bay. But that didn’t

explain the gooseflesh which was now running up the center of his back in a rough stripe,

or his clear sense that he had found another road-sign along some fabulous hidden

highway.

Jake unbuttoned his shirt and stuck his two newly purchased books inside. Then he looked

around, saw no one paying attention to him, and grabbed the top of the fence. He boosted

himself up, swung a leg over, and dropped down on the other side. His left foot landed on a

loose pile of bricks that promptly slid out from under him. His ankle buckled under his

weight and bright pain lanced up his leg. He fell with a thud and cried out in mingled hurt

and surprise as more bricks dug into his ribcage like thick, rude fists.

He simply lay where he was for a moment, waiting to get his breath back. He didn’t think

he was badly hurt, but he’d twisted his ankle and it would probably swell. He’d be walking

with a limp by the time he got home. He’d just have to grin and bear it, though; he sure

didn’t have cab-fare.

You don’t really plan to go home, do you? They’ll eat you alive.

Well, maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t. So far as he could see, he didn’t have

much choice in the matter. And that was for later. Right now he was going to explore this

lot which had drawn him as surely as a magnet draws steel shavings. That feeling of power

was still all around him, he realized, and stronger than ever. He didn’t think this was just a

vacant lot. Something was going on here, some-tiling big. He could feel it thrumming in

the air, like loose volts escaping from the biggest power-plant in the world.

As he got up, Jake saw that he had actually fallen lucky. Close by was a nasty jumble of

broken glass. If he’d fallen into that, he might have cut himself very badly.

That used to be the show window, Jake thought. When the deli was still here, you could

stand on the sidewalk and look in at all the meats and cheeses. They used to hang them on

strings. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did-knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

He looked around thoughtfully and then walked a little farther into the lot. Near the middle,

lying on the ground and half-buried in a lush growth of spring weeds, was another sign.

Jake knelt beside it, pulled it upright, and brushed the dirt away. The letters were faded, but

he could still make them out:

TOM AND GERRY’S ARTISTIC DELI

PARTY PLATTERS OUR SPECIALTY!

And below it, spray-painted in that same red-fading-to-pink, was this puzzling sentence:

HE HOLDS US ALL WITHIN HIS MIND.

This is the place, Jake thought. Oh yes.

He let the sign fall back, stood up, and walked deeper into the lot, moving slowly, looking

at everything. As he moved, that sensation of power grew. Everything he saw—the weeds,

the broken glass, the clumps of bricks—seemed to stand forth with a kind of exclamatory

force. Even the potato chip bags seemed beautiful, and the sun had turned a discarded

beer-bottle into a cylinder of brown fire.

Jake was very aware of his own breathing, and of the sunlight falling upon everything like

a weight of gold. He suddenly understood that he was standing on the edge of a great

mystery, and he felt a shudder—half terror and half wonder—work through him.

It’s all here. Everything. Everything is still here.

The weeds brushed at his pants; burdocks stuck to his socks. The breeze blew a Ring-Ding

wrapper in front of him; the sun reflected off it and for a moment the wrapper was filled

with a beautiful, terrible inner glow.

“Everything is still here,” he repeated to himself, unaware that his face was filling with its own inner glow. “Everything.”

He was hearing a sound—had been hearing it ever since he entered the lot, in fact. It was a

wonderful high humming, inexpressibly lonely and inexpressibly lovely. It might have

been the sound of a high wind on a deserted plain, except it was alive. It was, he thought,

the sound of a thousand voices singing some great open chord. He looked down and

realized there were faces in the tangled weeds and low bushes and heaps of bricks. Faces.

“What are you?” Jake whispered. “Who are you?” There was no answer, but he seemed to hear, beneath the choir, the sound of hoof-beats on the dusty earth, and gunfire, and angels

calling hosannahs from the shadows. The faces in the wreckage seemed to turn as he

passed. They seemed to follow his progress, but no evil intent did they bear. He could see

Forty-sixth Street, and the edge of the U.N. Building on the other side of First Avenue, but

the buildings did not matter—New York did not matter. It had become as pale as

window-glass.

The humming grew. Now it was not a thousand voices but a million, an open funnel of

voices rising from the deepest well of the universe. He caught names in that group voice,

but could not have said what they were. One might have been Marten. One might have

been Cuthbert. Another might have been Roland—Roland of Gilead.

There were names; there was a babble of conversation that might have been ten thousand

entwined stories; but above all was that gor- geous, swelling hum, a vibration that wanted to

fill his head with bright white light. It was, Jake realized with a joy so overwhelming that it

threatened to burst him to pieces, the voice of Yes; the voice of White; the voice of Always.

It was a great chorus of affirmation, and it sang in the empty lot. It sang for him.

Then, lying in a cluster of scrubby burdock plants, Jake saw the key . . . and beyond that,