Stephen King – The Waste Lands

unaware; no, not totally unaware, even then) that a boy from another part of the city was

following them.

He saw a hallway. Jake was down on his hands and knees, tugging frantically at a board.

Something was coming for him. Eddie could see it, but at the same time he could not—it

was as if part of his brain refused to see it, as if seeing would lead to comprehension and

comprehension to madness.

“Hurry up, Jake!” he screamed into the keyhole. “For Christ’s sake, move it!”

Above the speaking ring, thunder ripped the sky like cannon-fire and the rain turned to

hail.

32

FOR A MOMENT AFTER the key fell, Jake only stood where he was, staring down at the

narrow crack between the boards.

Incredibly, he felt sleepy.

That shouldn’t have happened, he thought. It’s one thing too much. I can’t go on with this,

not one minute, not one single second longer. I’m going to curl up against that door instead.

I’m going to go to sleep, right away, all at once, and when it grabs me and pulls me toward

its mouth, I’ll never wake up.

Then the thing coming out of the wall grunted, and when Jake looked up, his urge to give

in vanished in a single stroke of terror. Now it was all the way out of the wall, a giant

plaster head with one broken wooden eye and one reaching plaster hand. Chunks of lathing

stood out on its skull in random hackles, like a child’s drawing of hair. It saw Jake and

opened its mouth, revealing jagged wooden teeth. It grunted again. Plaster-dust drifted out

of its yawning mouth like cigar smoke.

Jake fell to his knees and peered into the crack. The key was a small brave shimmer of

silvery light down there in the dark, but the crack was far too narrow to admit his fingers.

He seized one of the boards and yanked with all his might. The nails which held it

groaned … but held.

There was a jangling crash. He looked down the hallway and saw the hand, which was

bigger than his whole body, seize the fallen chandelier and throw it aside. The rusty chain

which had once held it suspended rose like a bullwhip and then came down with a heavy

crump. A dead lamp on a rusty chain rattled above Jake, dirty glass chattering against ancient brass.

The doorkeeper’s head, attached only to its single hunched shoulder and reaching arm, slid

forward above the floor. Behind it, the remains of the wall collapsed in a cloud of dust. A

moment later the fragments humped up and became the creature’s twisted, bony back.

The doorkeeper saw Jake looking and seemed to grin. As it did, splinters of wood poked

out of its wrinkling cheeks. It dragged itself forward through the dust-hazed ballroom,

mouth opening and closing. Its great hand groped amid the ruins, feeling for purchase, and

ripped one of the French doors at the end of the hall from its track.

Jake screamed breathlessly and began to wrench at the board again. It wouldn’t come, but

the gunslinger’s voice did:

“The other one, Jake! Try the other one!”

He let go of the board he had been yanking at and grabbed the one on the other side of the

crack. As he did, another voice spoke. He heard this one not in his head but with his ears,

and understood it was coming from the other side of the door—the door he had been

looking for ever since the day he hadn’t been run over in the street.

“Hurry up, Jake! For Christ’s sake, hurry up!”

When he yanked this other board, it came free so easily that he almost tumbled over

backward.

33

Two WOMEN WERE STANDING in the doorway of the used appliance shop across the

street from The Mansion. The older was the proprietor; the younger had been her only

customer when the sounds of crashing walls and breaking beams began. Now, without

knowing they were doing it, they linked arms about each other’s waists and stood that way,

trembling like children who hear a noise in the dark.

Up the street, a trio of boys on their way to the Dutch Hill Little League field stood gaping

at the house, their Red Ball Flyer wagon filled with baseball equipment forgotten behind

them. A delivery driver nosed his van into the curb and got out to look. The patrons of

Henry’s Corner Market and the Dutch Hill Pub came straggling up the street, looking

around wildly.

Now the ground began to tremble, and a fan of fine cracks started to spread across

Rhinehold Street.

“Is it an earthquake?” the delivery van driver shouted at the women standing outside the appliance shop, hut instead of waiting for an answer he jumped hack behind the wheel of

his van and drove away rapidly, swerving to the wrong side of the street to keep away from

the ruined house which was the epicenter of this convulsion.

The entire house seemed to be bowing inward. Boards splintered, jumped off its face, and

rained down into the yard. Dirty gray-black waterfalls of slate shingles poured down from

the eaves. There was an earsplitting bang and a long, zigzagging crack shot down the center

of The Mansion. The door disappeared into it and then the whole house began to swallow

itself from the outside in.

The younger woman suddenly broke the older one’s grip. “I’m get- ting out of here,” she said, and began to run up the street without looking back.

34

A HOT, STRANGE WIND began to sigh down the hallway, blowing Jake’s sweaty hair

back from his brow as his fingers closed over the silver key. He now understood on some

instinctive level what this place was, and what was happening. The doorkeeper was not just

in the house, it was the house: every board, every shingle, every windowsill, every eave.

And now it was pushing forward, becoming some crazily jumbled representa- tion of its

true shape as it did. It meant to catch him before he could use the key. Beyond the giant

white head and the crooked, hulking shoul- der, he could see boards and shingles and wire

and bits of glass—even the front door and the broken banister—flying up the main hall and

into the ballroom, joining the form which bulked there, creating more and more of the

misshapen plaster-man that was even now groping toward him with its freakish hand.

Jake yanked his own hand out of the hole in the floor and saw it was covered with huge

trundling beetles. He slapped it against the wall to knock them off, and cried out as the wall

first opened and then tried to close around his wrist. He yanked his hand free just in time,

whirled, and jammed the silver key into the hole in the plate.

The plaster-man roared again, but its voice was momentarily drowned out by a harmonic

shout which Jake recognized: he had heard it in the vacant lot, but it had been quiet then,

perhaps dreaming. Now it was an unequivocal cry of triumph. That sense of

certainty—over- whelming, inarguable—filled him again, and this time he felt sure there

would be no disappointment. He heard all the affirmation he needed in that voice. It was

the voice of the rose.

The dim light in the hallway was blotted out as the plaster hand tore away the other French

door and squeezed into the corridor. The face socked itself into the opening above the hand, peering at Jake. The plas- terfingers crawled toward him like the legs of a huge spider.

Jake turned the key and felt a sudden surge of power rush up his arm. He heard a heavy,

muffled thump as the locked bolt inside with- drew. He seized the knob, turned it, and

yanked the door open. It swung wide. Jake cried out in confused horror as he saw what lay

behind.

The doorway was blocked with earth, from top to bottom and side to side. Roots poked out

like bunches of wire. Worms, seeming as con- fused as Jake was himself, crawled hither

and thither on the door-shaped pack of dirt. Some dived back into it; others only went on

crawling about, as if wondering where the earth which had been below them a moment ago

had gone. One dropped onto Jake’s sneaker.

The keyhole shape remained for a moment, shedding a spot of misty white light on Jake’s

shirt. Beyond it—so close, so out of reach—he could hear rain and a muffled boom of

thunder across an open sky. Then the keyhole shape was also blotted out, and gigantic

plaster fingers curled around Jake’s lower leg.

35

EDDIE DID NOT FEEL the sting of the hail as Roland dropped the hide, got to his feet,

and ran to where Susannah lay.

The gunslinger grabbed her beneath the arms and dragged her—as gently and carefully as