Cynthia caught his arm. He turned to her, feeling a bit impatient. Through the picture window he could see the other Poplar Street survivors clustering in the middle of the street. So far they were ignoring the hails from the cops, who didn’t seem to know if they should come up or hold their positions, and Johnny wanted to join his neighbors before they made up their minds one way or the other.
“Is it gone?” she asked. “Tak-that red thing-whatever it was-is it gone?”
He looked back into the kitchen. It hurt him almost physically to do this, but he managed. There was plenty of red in there-the walls were painted with it, the ceiling too, for that matter-but no sign of the glowing, embery thing that had tried to find a safe harbor for itself in Cammie Reed’s head after its primary host had been killed.
“Did it die when she did?” The girl was looking at him with pleading eyes. “Say it did, okay? Make me feel good and say it did.”
“It must have,” Johnny said. “If it hadn’t, I imagine it would be trying one of us on for size right now.”
She let out air in a gusty rush. “Yeah. That makes sense.”
So it did, but Johnny didn’t believe it. Not for a second. I know you all, it had said. I’ll find you all. I’ll hunt you down. Maybe it would. And maybe it would have a slightly more strenuous fight on its hands than it had bargained for, should it try. In any case, there was no sense in worrying about it now.
Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him en tow!
What is it?” Cynthia asked. What’s wrong?”
What do you mean?”
“You’re shivering.”
Johnny smiled. “I guess a goose just walked over my grave.” He took her hand off his arm and folded his fingers through hers. “Come on. Let’s go out and see how everyone’s doing.”
They were almost to the street and the others when Cynthia came to a stop. “Oh my God,” she said in a soft, strengthless voice. “Oh my God, look.”
Johnny turned. The storm had moved on, but there was one isolated thunderhead just west of them. It hung over downtown Columbus, connected to Ohio by a gauzy umbilicus of rain, and it made the shape of a gigantic cowboy galloping on a storm-colored stallion. The horse’s grotesquely elongated snout pointed east, toward the Great Lakes; its tail stretched out long toward the prairies and deserts. The cowboy appeared to have his hat in one hand, perhaps waving it in a hooraw, and as Johnny watched, open-mouthed and transfixed, the man’s head flickered with lightning.
“A ghost rider,” Brad said. “Holy shit, a goddam ghost rider in the sky. Do you see it, Bee?”
Cynthia moaned through the hand she’d pressed to her mouth. Looked up at the cloud-shape, eyes bulging, head shaking from side to side in a useless gesture of negation. The others were looking now, as well-not the firemen and not the cops, who would break out of their indecision soon and come on up here to join the block party, but the Poplar Street folk who had survived the regulators.
Steve took Cynthia by her thin arms and drew her gently away from Johnny. “Stop it,” he said. “It can’t hurt us. It’s just a cloud and it can’t hurt us. It’s going away already. See?”
It was true. The flank of the skyhorse was tearing open in some places, melting in others, letting the sun through in long, hazy rays. It was just a summer afternoon again, the very rooftree of summer, all watermelon and Kool-Aid and foul tips off the end of the bat.
Steve glanced down the street and saw a police car begin rolling, very slowly, up the hill toward them, running over the tangled firehoses as it came. He looked back at Johnny. “Yo.”
“Yo what?”
“Did he commit suicide, that kid?”
“I don’t know what else you’d call it,” Johnny said, but he supposed he knew why the hippie had asked; it hadn’t felt like suicide, somehow.
The police cruiser stopped. The man who got out was wearing a khaki uniform which came equipped with roughly one ton of gold braid. His eyes, a very sharp blue, were almost lost in a complex webwork of wrinkles. His gun, a big one, was in his hand. He looked like someone Johnny had seen before, and after a moment it came to him: the late Ben Johnson, who had played saintly ranchers (usually with beautiful daughters) and satanic outlaws with equal grace and ability.
“Someone want to tell me what in the name of Christ Jesus the Redeemer went on here?” he asked.
No one replied, and after a moment Johnny Marinville realized they were all looking at him. He stepped forward, read the little plaque pinned to the pocket of the man’s crisp uniform blouse, and said: “Outlaws, Captain Richardson.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Outlaws. Regulators. Renegades from the wastes.”
“My friend, if you see anything funny about this-”
“I don’t, sir. No indeed. And it’s going to get even further from funny when you look in there.” Johnny pointed toward the Wyler house, and as he did suddenly thought of his guitar. It was like thinking about a glass of iced tea when you were hot and thirsty and tired. He thought of how nice it would be to sit on his porch step and strum and sing “The Ballad of Jesse James” in the key of D. That was the one that went, “Oh, Jesse had a wife to mourn for his life, three children they were brave”. He supposed his old Gibson might have a hole in it, his house looked pretty well trashed (looked as if it was no longer sitting exactly right on its foundations, for that matter), but on the other hand, it might be perfectly fine. Some of them had come through okay, after all.
Johnny started in that direction, already hearing the song as it would come from under his hand and out of his mouth: “Oh, Robert Ford, Robert Ford, I wonder how you must feel? For you slept in Jesse’s bed, and you ate of Jesse’s bread, and you have laid Jesse James down in his grave.”
“Hey!” the cop who looked like Ben Johnson called truculently. “Just where in the hell do you think you’re going?”
“To sing a song about the good guys and the bad guys,” Johnny said. He put his head down and felt the hazy heat of the summer sun on his neck and kept walking.
Letter from Mrs Patricia Allen to Katherine Anne Goodlowe, of Montpelier, Vermont
June 19, 1986
Dear Kathi,
This is the most beautiful place in the whole world, I’m convinced of it. The honeymoon has been the sweetest nine days of my whole life, and the nights-! I was raised to believe that certain things you don’t talk about, so just let me say that my fears of discovering, too late to do anything about it, that “saving it for marriage” was the worst mistake of my life, have proved unfounded. I feel like a kid living in a candy factory!
“Enough of that, though; I didn’t write to tell you about the new Mrs Allen’s sex life (superb though it may be), or even about the beauty of the Catskills. I’m writing because Tom’s downstairs for the nonce, shooting pool, and I know how much you love a “spooky story”. Especially if there’s an old hotel in it; you’re the only person I know who’s read not just one copy of The Shining to tatters, but two! If that was all, though, I probably would have just waited until Tom and I got back and then told you my tale face-to-face. But I might actually have some souvenirs of this particular “tale from beyond”, and that has caused me to pickup my pen on this beautiful full-moon evening.
The Mountain House was opened in 1869, so it certainly qualifies as an old hotel, and although I don’t suppose it’s much like Stephen “King’s Overlook, it has its share of odd nooks and spooky corridors. It has its share of ghost stories, too, but the one I’m writing you about is something of an oddity-not a single turn-of-the-century lady or 1929 Stock Market-crash suicide in it. These two ghosts-that’s right, a pair, two for the price of one-have only been actively haunting for the last four years or so, as far as I have been able to find out, and I’ve been able to find out a fair amount. The staff is very helpful to visitors who want to do a little “ghost-hunting” on the side; adds to the ambience, I suppose!
Anyway, there are over a hundred little shelters spotted around the grounds, eccentric wooden huts which the guests sometimes call “follies” and the Mohonk brochures call “gazebos”, you find these overlooking the choicest views. There’s one located at the north end of an upland meadow about three miles from the Mountain House itself. On the map this meadow has no name (I actually checked the topographical plans in the office this morning), but the help have a name for it; they call it Mother and Son Meadow.