Sam pushed past Sarah and knelt by the tracks.
‘Sam, what are you doing?’
‘Here you go, Ardelia,’ he murmured. ‘Try this.’ He slapped the pulsing, stretching blob of red licorice down on one of the gleaming steel rails.
In his mind he heard a shriek of unutterable fury and terror. He stood back, watching the thing trapped inside the licorice struggle and push. The candy split open … he saw a darker red inside trying to push itself
out … and then the 2:20 to Omaha rushed over it in an organized storm of pounding rods and grinding wheels.
The licorice disappeared, and inside of Sam Peebles’s mind, that drilling shriek was cut off as if with a knife.
He stepped back and turned to Sarah. She was swaying on her feet, her eyes wide and full of dazed joy. He slipped his arms around her waist and held her as the boxcars and flatcars and tankers thundered past them, blowing their hair back.
They stood like that until the caboose passed, trailing its small red lights off into the west. Then she drew away from him a little – but not out of the circle of his arms – and looked at him.
‘Am I free, Sam? Am I really free of her? It feels like I am, but I can hardly believe it.’
‘You’re free,’ Sam agreed. ‘Your fine is paid, too, Sarah. Forever and ever, your fine is paid.’
She brought her face to his and began to cover his lips and cheeks and eyes with small kisses. Her own eyes did not close as she did this; she looked at him gravely all the while.
He took her hands at last and said, ‘Why don’t we go back inside, and finish paying our respects? Your friends will be wondering where you are.’
‘They can be your friends, too, Sam … if you want them to be.’
He nodded. ‘I do. I want that a lot.’
‘Honesty and belief,’ she said, and touched his cheek.
‘Those are the words.’ He kissed her again, then offered his arm. ‘Will you walk with me, lady?’
She linked her arm through his. ‘Anywhere you want, sir. Anywhere at all.’
They walked slowly back across the lawn to Angle Street together, arm in arm.
A Note on ‘The Sun Dog’
Every now and then someone will ask me, ‘When are you going to get tired of this horror stuff, Steve, and write something serious?’
I used to believe the implied insult in this question was accidental, but as the years go by I have become more and more convinced that it is not. I watch the faces of the people who drop that particular dime, you see, and most of them look like bombardiers waiting to see if their last stick of bombs is going to fall wide or hit the targeted factory or munitions dump dead on.
The fact is, almost all of the stuff I have written – and that includes a lot of the funny stuff – was written in a serious frame of mind. I can remember very few occasions when I sat at the typewriter laughing uncontrollably over some wild and crazy bit of fluff I had just finished churning out. I’m never going to be Reynolds Price or Larry Woiwode – it isn’t in me – but that doesn’t mean I don’t care as deeply about what I do. I have to do what I can do, however – as Nils Lofgren once put it, ‘I gotta be my dirty self … I won’t play no jive.’
If real – meaning !!SOMETHING THAT COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN!! – is your definition of serious, you are in the wrong place and you should by all means leave the building. But please remember as you go that I’m not the only one doing business at this particular site; Franz Kafka had an office here, and George Orwell, and Shirley Jackson, and Jorge Luis Borges, and Jonathan Swift, and Lewis Carroll. A glance at the directory in the lobby shows the present tenants include Thomas Berger, Ray Bradbury, Jonathan Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Disch, Kurt Vonnegut, jr, Peter Straub, Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Katherine Dunn, and Mark Halpern.
I am doing what I do for the most serious reasons: love, money, and obsession. The tale of the irrational is the sanest way I know of expressing the world in which I live. These tales have served me as instruments of both metaphor and morality; they continue to offer the best window I know on the question of how we perceive things and the corollary question of how we do or do not behave on the basis of our perceptions. I have explored these questions as well as I can within the limits of my talent and intelligence. I am no one’s National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize winner, but I’m serious, all right. If you don’t believe anything else, believe this: when I take you by your hand and begin to talk, my friend, I believe every word I say.
A lot of the things I have to say – those Really Serious Things – have to do with the small-town world in which I was raised and where I still live. Stories and novels are scale models of what we laughingly call
‘real life,’ and I believe that lives as they are lived in small towns are scale models of what we laughingly call ‘society.’ This idea is certainly open to argument, and argument is perfectly fine (without it, a lot of literature teachers and critics would be looking for work); I’m just saying that a writer needs some sort of launching pad, and aside from the firm belief that a story may exist with honor for its own self, the idea of the small town as social and psychological microcosm is mine. I began experimenting with this sort of thing in Came, and continued on a more ambitious level with ‘Salem’s Lot. I never really hit my stride, however, until The Dead Zone.
That was, I think, the first of my Castle Rock stories (and Castle Rock is really just the town of Jerusalem’s Lot without the vampires). In the years since it was written, Castle Rock has increasingly become ‘my town,’ in the sense that the mythical city of Isola is Ed McBain’s town and the West Virginia village of Glory was Davis Grubb’s town. I have been called back there time and time again to examine the lives of its residents and the geographies which seem to rule their lives – Castle Hill and Castle View, Castle Lake and the Town Roads which lie around it in a tangle at the western end of the town.
As the years passed, I became more and more interested in – almost entranced by – the secret life of this town, by the hidden relationships which seemed to come clearer and clearer to me. Much of this history remains either unwritten or unpublished:- how the late Sheriff George Bannerman lost his virginity in the back seat of his dead father’s car, how Ophelia Todd’s husband was killed by a walking windmill, how
Deputy Andy Clutterbuck lost the index finger on his left hand (it was cut off in a fan and the family dog ate it).
Following The Dead Zone, which is partly the story of the psychotic Frank Dodd, I wrote a novella called
‘The Body’; Cujo, the novel in which good old Sheriff Bannerman bit the dust; and a number of short stories and novelettes about the town (the best of them, at least in my mind, are ‘Mrs Todd’s Shortcut’ and
‘Uncle Otto’s Truck’). All of which is very well, but a state of entrancement with a fictional setting may not be the best thing in the world for a writer. It was for Faulkner and J. R. R. Tolkien, but sometimes a couple of exceptions just prove the rule, and besides, I don’t play in that league.
So at some point I decided – first in my subconscious mind, I think, where all that Really Serious Work takes place – that the time had come to close the book on Castle Rock, Maine, where so many of my own favorite characters have lived and died. Enough, after all, is enough. Time to move on (maybe all the way next door to Harlow, ha-ha). But I didn’t just want to walk away; I wanted to finish things, and do it with a bang.
Little by little I began to grasp how that could be done, and over the last four years or so I have been engaged in writing a Castle Rock Trilogy, if you please -the last Castle Rock stories. They were not written in order (I sometimes think ‘out of order’ is the story of my life), but now they are written, and they are serious enough … but I hope that doesn’t mean that they are sober-sided or boring.