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FICTIONJanuary 28, 2019

The Quiet Boy

But there was no Goldilocks in his story. There were only the Wolfs, who lived together in a cave
above a town. Big Wolf, Middle Wolf, and Little Wolf. Big Wolf was a brute. Little Wolf was
timid. Middle Wolf was the peacemaker.

By Nick Antosca

Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku.

I t happened during her second month as a teacher. She was 23 and frustrated. She’d expectedto end up in a city, but Teach For America had sent her here, to this little town built around a
dead railroad station: Rexford, West Virginia. Another teacher had told her the unofficial town
motto was “Hills, Whores, and Liquor Stores.” She hadn’t seen any whores, as far as she knew,
but there were definitely hills and liquor stores.

“Okay, guys,” Julia told her fourth graders. “Settle down and start writing your stories.”

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She was lucky, she knew. She’d been born with a teacher’s voice. Confident but kind, pleasing to
the ear but full of authority. They listened when she spoke. If you couldn’t get them to listen,
you were dead.

You needed other things too. Patience. A good memory of who you had been at that age. But
most of all, you had to love the kids—suffer when they struggled or when something bad was
going on at home—be happy for them when they succeeded or when they laughed wildly at a
dumb joke. And she did. She loved her kids.

She just wasn’t sure she loved being a teacher. Especially not here, in this town.

She herself had had a few teachers, particularly one in high school, who told her she could be
something. What she wanted now was to be that kind of teacher: one who made a difference for
her students, or at least for a few of them. But most of the Rexford kids didn’t seem to want
anything different. They already looked forward to dropping out of high school at sixteen.

“Your story can be a , a , or a ,” she told the class. “But remember, what do
all stories have?”

fable tall tale fairy tale

“Miss Grey! I know!” said Travis, his arm shooting up. “A beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Travis was loud and bossy, the kind of kid they always joked would become a teacher. He lived in
Ballard Creek, a new-ish suburb outside of Rexford, filled with D.C. commuters who lived out
here because taxes were lower. Julia had gone there last month to drive a kid home after he’d
missed the bus. The lawns were neat. She’d talked briefly to the kid’s mom, who was a little
drunk. The mom had pointed up the street at all the saplings in their swollen beds of dirt.

“Tiny trees,” she’d said. “All planted at the same time. That’s why they’re all the same size.
There’s nothing I hate more than tiny trees.”

Julia had nodded politely. Your poor husband…

You could tell the Ballard Creek kids from the Rexford kids right away. They had cleaner clothes.
They weren’t smarter, but they had parents who actually made them do homework.

“That’s right,” she told Travis. “A beginning, a middle, and an end.”

. It felt like a glove that didn’t fit.Miss Grey

When the recess bell rang, they leapt from their seats to line up at the door.

Except Lucas Weaver. He stayed at his desk, feverishly writing.

All the Rexford kids were poor. But Lucas seemed poor. He had dark hair and scabby
hands. The pair of Wrangler jeans he wore every single day had been patched up so sloppily she
wondered if he’d done it himself.

really

“Okay, guys,” she said to the line of rowdy nine- and ten-year-olds, “quiet down. I said a line,
not a circus.”

They got quiet, and she let them go. Other teachers were already outside to watch them on the
playground.

She and Lucas were alone. Her desk was covered with unfinished lesson plans and papers she
needed to grade, and part of her wanted to tell him to go outside so she could get her work
done. But she sat beside him.

“Lucas, you don’t want to go to recess?”

He didn’t look up. “I’m writing my fairy tale.”

“Okay,” Julia said. She saw that he wasn’t just writing, he was . The illustrations were
detailed and swift. She didn’t want to interrupt— —so she watched. His
shoulders were frail, his bones birdlike and distinct. Did he have enough to eat? Did he get
breakfast in the morning?

illustrating
he was so engrossed!

She had asked around about him. He lived down in the Mudders, which was what they called a
row of homes out past the train tracks. The real name was Perlmutter Road. It was the poorest
part of town.

In her two months’ experience, Lucas had been the hardest to make a connection with. He had
no friends. If you got close to him, he seemed to subtly withdraw, like he was scared he smelled
bad. He actually have a faint odor, but it wasn’t anything revolting, exactly. He smelled like
damp leaves, like the outdoors, and like…pets. Damp animal fur.

did

“Do you have a dog or a cat at home?” she said.

Lucas stopped writing. The question seemed to trouble him. “No.”

“Oh,” she said. “Did you ever ask your mom and dad if you could have one?”

He still didn’t look at her. “I just live with my dad. And my little brother.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” she said. “What’s his name?”

“Todd.”

“How old is he? Does he go here?”

“He’s homeschooled,” Lucas said.

She saw that he’d almost finished another illustration. It was a large animal, burly and dark.
Suddenly he stood, as if embarrassed, and crumpled up the pages.

“What are you doing?” she said.

He ran to the trash can, tearing the pages up, and threw the scraps away. He looked at her with a
shy, ashamed expression that made her heart go out to him. But then he fled outside. She
observed through the window as he crouched at the edge of the playground, arms around knees,
watching the other kids.

She was in the teacher’s lounge when a third grade teacher named Bret Goucher approached
her.

“What’s that?”

“A story one of my kids drew,” Julia said. She was taping Lucas’s story back together like a jigsaw
puzzle. She thought Bret would go away after a moment—he was like an older version of the
guys in college who seemed to think that if they just hovered long enough, you might
spontaneously become their girlfriend—but instead, he sat down.

“What kid?”

“Lucas Weaver.”

Bret made a soft, sympathetic chuckle.

“Kind of a lost cause, isn’t he? Never had him in class, but I think he’s a little out there.”

“He’s smart,” Julia said. “I wonder if the dad has any idea.”

Bret said, “I was at the cleaners a few months ago—the laundromat, by Paul’s Pizza? And the
kid, Lucas, comes in with an armful of sheets, and he goes to a machine, puts the sheets in, puts
a quarter in…and then he strips down to his underpants and puts all his clothes in, too! So he’s
sitting there, buck naked except his Batman underpants, just watching the clothes go round and
around, like a dog.” He gave another chuckle.

“He doesn’t have any other clothes to wear,” Julia said quietly.

“You know,” Bret said, “I did Teach For America too when I was your age. They had me in
Baltimore. It was like . Those people name their kids the craziest shit. I had this pair of
twins in my class. The one was named Yahighness and the other one was Yamajesty—”

The Wire

“I gotta go,” Julia said, getting up. She had finished taping the story together.

Julia read Lucas’s story at home. She was renting a little cottage just outside of town. Her
cottage nestled behind a larger house—one of the nicest, most well-kept houses around Rexford
—where the landlady, a sixty-something divorced woman named Elaine Fielding, lived. The
cottage was quiet and cozy.

Lucas’s story was called “The Three Wolfs.”

Sometimes kids just rewrote stories they knew. They’d write about Iron Man or Jack Sparrow.
She thought at first that Lucas had just retold Goldilocks, with .wolfs

”
“Every day Middle Wolf went out and got fish for them all. But one day he came back and Big Wolf
and Little Wolf had rabeez. And all they wanted to do was go to town and eat people.

So Middle Wolf blocked up the entrance to the cave with rocks and trapped the other two inside,
where they growled all day and night. And every day, he caught fish for them, which he slipped
between the rocks to sate their hunger. And every night, he slept by the entrance to make sure
they never got out.

Lucas had drawn each of them. His illustrations were quick but thoughtlessly confident, like a
painter’s sketches. The most extraordinary thing was how realistic they were, except that
Middle Wolf had an oddly human face and Big Wolf had strange eyes. Little Wolf was just a pup.

It was a strange story for a kid to write. He’d said he lived with his dad and little brother, Todd.
So Big Wolf was the father, Little Wolf was Todd, and Middle Wolf—the one who took care of
everything, who kept the peace—was Lucas.

She guessed Lucas’s father was probably an alcoholic, maybe a bad one. And Lucas was probably
one of those kids who have to parent the parent—clean up, put his brother to bed on nights
when Dad stumbled in late or passed out early. And that thing about Little Wolf getting …
Was Lucas afraid because his brother, probably younger and more impressionable, looked up to
Dad? Might one day become him? Was she reading too much into it? She went to bed with the
story kicking around her mind. Shapes of wolves slouched through her dreams, surly, with
black, matted fur.

rabeez

Julia went by Rite Aid on her way to school and bought sweatshirts and socks.

Before class, she looked at Lucas’s front office records. His home address was listed as 18
Perlmutter Road. The only parent listed was his father, Frank. . She pictured a big man,
rough, with a nimbus of liquor breath.

Frank

“What’re you interested in the Weaver kid for?” the secretary, Carole, asked.

Julia closed the file. “Mrs. Parsons mentioned a Board of Ed thing once, an art program for
gifted students? County Arts Program, or—”

“Jefferson County Arts Mentorship Program,” Carole recited. “It’s Fed money. They pay special
teachers, bring ’em in a couple times a week after school. One-on-one work.”

Julia thought, That would be perfect for Lucas.

At lunch, Julia kept Lucas behind and gave him the clothes. Two cheap grey sweatshirts and six
pairs of white socks with red stripes. He seemed not to believe it at first. He didn’t want to let go
of them.

“These will fit me,” he said, tentative.

“Good,” Julia said. Then she said, “You like drawing, don’t you? You like art?”

“I like drawing stuff.”

“I found out about a special program for kids like you,” she said. “You’d get to stay after school
and work with a special art teacher for drawing. I talked to a man at the Board of Ed about it. Is
that something you want to do?”

She saw something in his eyes then. Enthusiasm or hope, one of those quiet, thrilling things.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Great!” Julia said. “I just need to get your dad to sign a permission slip. I’d like to talk to him
about it, too, and—”

Lucas’s face changed. A light went out.

“Actually, I don’t want to,” he said. He got up, hurried toward the door.

“Wait,” Julia said. “Lucas, you would get to—”

“I changed my mind,” he said, fleeing. She heard the sharp, echoing smacks of his sneakers in
the hallway.

She thought about it that night, making dinner in the cottage. She could hear Elaine’s dogs—a
mastiff and a Dalmatian—barking from the main house. . She
thought about how Lucas had reacted so viscerally to the idea that she might talk to his father.
Was he embarrassed by the idea of her meeting… ?

Must be a rabbit in the yard

Frank

No, not embarrassed. There had been fear. He thought Frank would punish him for being singled
out as gifted.

The next day at lunch, she tried to talk to Lucas again, but he resisted, saying only, “I changed
my mind! I don’t want to do it!”

Later, she called his home phone number—the one listed in his file—but got “
”

This number is not
in service…

It bothered her. She asked Mrs. Simms, the teacher who’d had Lucas last year, if she’d ever met
Frank. Mrs. Simms didn’t think so, and she was surprised that Julia thought Lucas was gifted.
Mrs. Simms had thought he was “challenged.”

None of the other teachers had ever seen Lucas’s father.

Julia thought
,

Well, this is what I’m here to do, isn’t it? . If nobody else at this school has gone out of
their way to help this kid, or reached out to Frank Weaver it might as well be me.

She didn’t tell Lucas. Perlmutter Road was the last stop on his bus route, so he would get
dropped off around 4. If she left school right away, she could get to his house by 3:40, which
would give her twenty minutes to talk to Frank Weaver.

It was Friday. She left right after the last bell. She drove through town, past forlorn houses and
big dogs chained to posts, past Judy’s Laundromat and Paul’s Pizza. Then down a pockmarked
road to the dead train station. She crossed the tracks and drove down a short road, flanked by
woods, that became another road. The sagging homes that lined it made her think of toothless
faces.

This was Perlmutter Road. The Mudders. Lucas’s house, number 18, was a two-story grey trap.
The porch was sunken. The driveway was so overgrown that there was no driveway.

Julia parked on the street. The house was even worse up close. The neighboring ones, at least,
showed signs of life. Toys on porches, curtains in windows. But Lucas’s front yard hadn’t been
mowed in years. And the windows were actually boarded up.

Had she made a mistake?

She looked around. It was quiet. She could hear insects. Birds in the woods. . There were no
dogs. Every other yard in Rexford, it seemed, had a dog. But not here. Not in the Mudders. She
remembered how Lucas smelled. . But he’d told her he didn’t have any.

Dogs

Like pets

Someone was looking at her.

She didn’t know how long he’d been there. A young man—a —on the next porch over. He had
the hollow eyes of an oxycontin addict. High school age.

kid

“What are you doing over there?” he said.

“I need to talk to Mr. Weaver,” Julia said. Her voice sounded too high. Weak. She tried again.
“Frank Weaver. Do you know if he’s here?”

He just kept staring. Maybe he wasn’t such a kid. Maybe he was in his mid-twenties, or older.
“You better get away from there,” he said.

“I’m from the school,” she said. “I’m Lucas’s teacher.”

“Well, I told you,” he said. He went into his house. She thought about knocking on his door,
asking if he knew them. But she was scared of him. She was scared of Frank Weaver, too. She
was scared that at any moment she’d lose her nerve.

She walked up on Lucas’s porch and rang the doorbell.

No sound from inside. She beat on the door with her open hand, hesitantly at first, then harder.

“Hello? Mr. Weaver?”

Nothing. And yet she had a discomfiting sense of someone just on the other side of the door,
and aware of her presence. She pounded on the door again.

“Hello? Is anyone here?”

Still no sound. She stepped back. She noticed something—the windows were boarded up
She approached the nearest one. The boarding-up had been done haphazardly, with

the boards misaligned and the nails driven in at crazy angles.

from
the outside.

It was, she thought, like a child had done it.

There were gaps between the boards. She leaned in, staring into the interior darkness, letting
her eyes adjust to the shadows inside.

One shadow was shaped like a man.

Her scalp went cold. He was standing fifteen feet away, looking in her direction.
No. The figure in the darkness shifted slightly. It

Or maybe it’s
just a coat hung on a door. Maybe it’s just…

didn’t come closer. It just shifted its weight. It was simply standing there—and hating her.
Radiating malevolence.

Then the paralysis was gone and she jolted back as if burned. She stood at the edge of the porch,
shaken. The sunlight on the back of her neck made her feel like a little girl, a fearful and wildly
imaginative child.

You’re just scared. You didn’t see…that.

The neighborhood was empty and silent. She edged back to the window and peered between the
boards. The… …was gone. There were still shadows in the same place, but they were
indistinguishable from other shadows.

figure

.Get your shit together

She’d come here to do something—to help a kid who needed help. Jumping at shadows was no
way to go about it.

Something wrong here, though. That living room hadn’t looked inhabited.

was

Julia went down the porch steps and looked up at the house again. And now she noticed
something—the upstairs windows were boarded. There was only dark glass.not

Walking cautiously around the house— —she peered into the backyard.
The grass was high. There was a slash of blue material in it, shiny like a windbreaker: A tent. A
sagging blue tent, as if for a camping trip.

should I be doing this?

The front flap was open. She approached it and knelt to look in. She saw candy wrappers, empty
peanut butter containers. Bed sheets with some comic book hero on them. . It was Thor. A
child’s sheets. And she saw pens and pencils and 9-by-12 paper, the kind they used in the
school printers. And library books—school library books. and .

Thor

Sounder Bridge to Terabithia

And in the corner, a small pile of familiar white socks with red stripes.

Lucas was in the tent.living

The poor kid. Where was Frank Weaver? Had Lucas’s father abandoned him here? Gone out
drinking one night and never come home?

She went back around the house, intending to leave—and then she heard the school bus.
Instinctively she stopped, half-hidden.

Lucas and two older boys got off. The older boys were roughhousing as they went off down the
street.

She watched Lucas walk toward the house alone. He went around the other side, into the back
yard. She crept back around to see him enter his tent. After a moment, he came out with the
Thor sheets bundled in his arms. He carried the bundle back around the other side of the house.
She watched him go up the street, his small figure getting smaller. Off to the laundromat.

He was on his own. She would have to talk to child services, get the county involved. Once he
was gone, she walked toward her car. But a prickly feeling on the back of her neck—like a silk
scarf brushing against it—made her turn and look back at the house. It was a shell, a
sarcophagus.

A shape moved in the upstairs window.

A child’s silhouette—smaller than Lucas. Maybe five years old. Then it was gone. It had been
sucking on its fingers.

. Todd The little brother.

She walked back to the porch. She rang the bell and called,

“Todd?”

No answer. But she’d seen him. He was in there.

She pounded on the door. Silence. She peered through the boarded-up windows again.
Darkness. Then, soft as a cat, a little figure dashed past.

“Todd!” she shouted. “I’m Lucas’s teacher, from school. Can you let me in?”

No reply. She tried the front door. Locked.

“Todd? I need to talk to you.”

She heard something, like a kitten mewling, from inside. Plaintive. As it got louder, it sounded
less like a kitten, more like a child. It grew into a sob. A sound of desolation and fear.

I have to get in there. I have to help that child.

She banged on the door. “Can you hear me? Open the door!”

The crying seem to be from deep in the house, maybe from the basement. It had a faraway,
panicky, almost hysterical quality.

Julia threw herself against the door. Something terrible was happening inside that house.
Something had happened to that child. A kind of madness was coming over her.

“I’m coming!”

The door didn’t give. She looked around wildly and saw something sharp in the grass: a long
piece of metal, rusted, something from a car. She brought it to the door, stabbed one end
between the door and the jamb, and pulled. With a retching crackle, the door swung inward, the
old lock ripping out of the dry, almost-rotted wood.

Immediately the crying stopped.

She looked into the foul, stale darkness and listened. Her heart was pounding; she felt it in her
throat and ears and under her left breast.

The fever that had come over her—the frantic desire to get inside the house, help the child—
subsided a little. Did I really hear it?

Yes. She had heard it. And she’d seen the silhouette. There was a child in this house and he’d
been terrified, maybe in pain.

So why now the silence?

She stepped inside. The air was… She held the neck of her shirt over her mouth. Things
had rotted in here. There were animals in the walls, or something, and one had expired.

heavy.

“Todd?”

Her voice died in the air. She was in a cramped front hallway. To the left was the kitchen…
ancient dishes in the sink…everything coated in a grime-skin. To the right, though, was the
living room. The room she’d seen the little figure dash through.

She entered it. The rug was grey-brown. Liquor bottles in the corner. Rat droppings all over the
floor. A Redskins calendar sideways on the wall, yellow. On a coffee table sat a bowl of black
moss that had been soup.

Beside the bowl sat three small figurines of red clay. The figurines had disproportionately large
heads. Animals of some kind, maybe goats.

“Todd?” she called again.

A symbol had been smeared on the table, long ago, in some dark substance. A five pointed star.
The star had other markings, drawings that looked like eyes with rectangular black pupils, like
goats’ eyes. One at each point of the star.

A feeling of dread was coming over her. Like she’d miscalculated in some disastrous way.

I shouldn’t have come here.

Then her skin tightened into bumps. She felt it again, the sense of someone close by. That
presence she’d imagined— —beyond the boarded-up window. Its
malevolence, its pure and shining hatred.

no, I didn’t imagine it

That presence was standing behind her. Giving off an overpowering desire to perform acts of
cruelty. To mutilate, to desecrate, to inhale the agony of others.

She looked behind her. . Nothing. She wanted to flee the house. But another, darker
room—the room into which the small figure had dashed—waited beyond the living room. She
took a step toward that doorway. It led into a dining room, where the light didn’t reach. She
didn’t enter, just looked in.

Nothing

Two corpses.

A man and a small child, curled on the floor.

They’d been dead a long time. They were dry as leaves, almost mummified, and there was
something wrong with their faces—

The sense of a presence behind her grew suddenly intolerable, as if it were just now leaning over
her shoulder, its big chin almost resting on her collarbone, its breath on her neck.

“ ”ONE MORE STEP.

A whisper—she jolted so hard it was more like a convulsion. In a mindless panic, she ran from
the house. On the lawn, she fumbled for her phone, gasping. No service.

she thought hysterically. The house is doing it, Whatever’s in the house. It’s that strong, it’s
jamming the signal.

She was halfway up the street before she got any bars.

The sheriff’s name was Drew Eastin. He was a skinny, thoughtful-looking forty-ish man with
deep crow’s feet and a calm half-smile. On another day, she might have found him attractive.

“Stay here,” Eastin told her. Two more squad cars were pulling up. That was probably half of
Rexford’s police force. “We’ll go in and see what’s what.”

She waited, numb, by the police cars. She kept hearing that voice in her ear, the raspy whisper.
A man’s voice, rough and insistent. The sheriff went into the house with a few deputies. One
came back out. His face was ashen and gleaming and he kept rubbing his mouth.

When Sheriff Eastin emerged, he wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked older.

“Like you said,” he told her. “Two bodies. State crime lab’ll tell us for sure, but I think it’s Frank
Weaver and his son Todd.”

“I don’t understand it. Why didn’t Lucas tell anyone?” Julia said.

“Probably scared the county would take him away. Probably seen it happen to other kids down
here.” He looked around. Some residents were outside, watching the police cars. “I’ll get Kenny
to go by the Laundromat, pick up the kid.”

“Okay,” Julia said. “I’d like to stay here until they find him, if that’s all right. Do you have any
idea what happened? How they died?”

Eastin sighed. “If I had to guess, I’d say Frank killed his boy, maybe fed him rat poison—there’s
a big box in there—and then killed himself. What happened after that, I don’t know. It looks like
nobody’s been in there for a year. Jesus.”

“What about the crying I heard? And the person I thought I saw moving around?”

saw You didn’t think. You it.

Eastin gave her a strange look. “There’s nobody else in there. We looked all over. Only place we
haven’t been yet is the basement.”

“Why not?” she said, uneasy.

“It’s locked. Heavy door. We’re looking for a key. We’ll get a locksmith to come if we can’t find
one.”

“Could someone be down there?”

“If so, they’re keeping quiet.”

He shook his head again, slowly exhaled. “What?” Julia asked.

“I’ve been a cop for 25 years. I’ve seen a few people who died younger than they should. But in
there… something’s not right.”

She nodded. She knew.

ONE MORE STEP

Eastin went reluctantly back to the house. A coroner’s van arrived. Two men in white uniforms
carried out the body bags.

They were loading the second body bag—the little one—when footsteps came up quickly behind
her, soft and crackling. She cried out as she turned—

It was Lucas. He had come out of the woods up the street; he must have taken a shortcut, and
the police had missed him. Clutching his bed sheets, he stared with horror as the bodies were
taken away.

“What are they doing?” he asked in a high, shaken voice.

“We found your father and Todd,” she said gently. “We know you’ve been on your own. It’s
going to be okay. We’re going to—”

“What are they ?”doing

“Lucas, how long have you been living like this, by yourself?” she said. “Can you tell me that?
When did it happen?”

He didn’t seem to hear. He took a few tentative steps, staring with what seemed like disbelief at
the small black body bag being loaded into the van.

“They took them out?” he said. “They’re taking them away?”

“Lucas,” she said, “they’re not going to take away. Someone’s going to—”you

“They can’t do that!”

The look on his face was heartbreaking. A look of despair. Of someone who has no choices left.

No kid should have to feel that way.

She stood in front of him to block his view. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked him
in the eyes.

“It’s going to be okay,” she told him. “I know this must have been hard—I can’t imagine how
hard—but I’m here for you. That’s a promise. Do you understand?”

His state of shock seemed to subside, and a flicker of comprehension came into his eyes. He
nodded.

“That’s a promise,” Julia said again.

Very quietly, he said, “I’m scared.”

She hugged him. She couldn’t help it.

Julia spoke quietly with Eastin, out of Lucas’s hearing. The sheriff had tried asking the kid a few
gentle questions, but barely got a response.

“What’s going to happen to him?” Julia asked.

“First thing, we need to figure out the relative situation. Maybe he goes to live with an aunt or
grandma.”

“What if he doesn’t have one?”

“Well,” Eastin said uncomfortably, “then we see what the other options are. There good
foster families out there.”

are

“What about this weekend?” Julia asked. “Where’s he going to sleep?”

It was clearly a question the sheriff had not considered yet. “Well,” he finally said, “I don’t know
that even if we drove him to Morgantown they’d have a place all set up for him tonight. I’ll…I’ll
see if I know someone who can—”

“I can,” Julia said. “He can stay with me. I rent the cottage behind Elaine Fielding’s house.
There’s room.”

“Well, good,” Eastin said. “I mean, you’re his teacher.”

She drove Lucas to her cottage. The whole ride, he stared out the window, scanning the trees
like he was looking for something. Very faintly, in the distance, there were sirens. Rexford was
in a valley, and sound carried.

“Do you want to listen to the radio?” Julia asked, because she didn’t know what else to say.
What you say to a kid who’d been through what he had? All you could do was try to make
him feel safe for the moment.

could

No matter what I do, he’s gonna need a lot of therapy.

Lucas didn’t seem to hear her. He just kept looking out the window. Now and then he twisted in
the seat to look over his shoulder, as if something might be following them down the road.

Elaine, her landlord, was retrieving the plastic refuse bins from the end of the driveway when
they got home. Elaine was tall, with short grey hair, a husky laugh, and a serene, absent-minded
smile. She was smiling now, wiping one hand on a faded t-shirt that said Vandals, which Julia

was pretty sure was an old band. She was also pretty sure Elaine smoked a lot of weed. Elaine
leaned down to the window to say hi.

“Hey, who’s this?” she said. “One of your students?”

“This is Lucas,” Julia said. “He’s hanging out this weekend. Right, Lucas?”

Lucas studied Elaine. “Yeah,” he said.

“Lucas, Elaine lives in the other house, that one.” Julia pointed it out.

Elaine looked a little puzzled but waved. “Okay then. Lucas, I want you to do one thing for me,
okay?”

“What?” he said even more quietly.

“Keep it real. Can you do that?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” Elaine said. “Then you don’t have to worry about anything.”

Julia drove up past the main house and parked by the cottage. It was getting dark. Once inside,
Lucas shut the front door and locked it. Then he went around and locked all the windows.

“You want to get pizza for dinner?” she asked. She was trying to keep him occupied, if not
entertained. She had just started playing on her laptop—she didn’t have a TV—
and they were on her couch watching it. He sat with his arms wrapped around his knees.

Despicable Me

“I don’t want to go out,” he said. “Do you have anything to eat here?”

“We don’t have to go out. We can order,” Julia said, searching for her phone. “What do you like?
Cheese? Sausage?”

She ordered two large pizzas from Paul’s, the local place, thinking she could put leftovers in the
fridge. When she sat back down with him, she noticed
again his frailness, his birdlike shoulders. Her desire to help him, to protect him, swelled up
stronger than ever. Now that she knew how he had been living, she wondered if he was suffering
from serious malnutrition.

What kid doesn’t like pizza for breakfast?

He should be checked out by a doctor. He should’ve been taken straight to a hospital.

She wasn’t going to make Lucas’s night even worse by rushing him off to War Memorial
Hospital right now—an hour away—just when the movie was getting good and they had pizza

coming. But she could make sure something was arranged for tomorrow. She went into the
kitchen with her phone. Sheriff Eastin had given her his number.

His phone rang many times before he answered.

“Yeah, who’s this?” He sounded almost out of breath and there was a siren, loud, in the
background. She had the impression that he was driving.

“It’s Julia Grey. I wanted to ask you—I think Lucas should see a doctor, get checked out. I think
he’s malnourished and, given how he’s been living—”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

“Is everything all right?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

“I’m headed over to Ballard Creek. It sounds like some people got hurt over there tonight—
maybe bad.” His voice sounded raw. Not the confident man who’d showed up in the Mudders a
few hours earlier. “Miss Grey, I have to go, but there’s something else I ought to tell you…. We
got into the basement. I’m gonna ask you to keep this to yourself. What we found down there
was, uh, a lot of animals. Dead ones.”

“What kind of animals?” she said quietly, so Lucas wouldn’t hear.

“Dogs mostly, dogs and cats. Some of them had collars and tags. They were, ah—I’ve never seen
anything quite like it. They were kind of…twisted around. Like with their necks and their…
bodies broken.”

“Broken?” she said.

“Like somebody wrung them like towels and broke everything inside them,” Eastin said. “And…
some of them hadn’t been down there that long. Some of them had only been there…maybe a
week. Or less.”

Julia looked back into the living room. Lucas was watching the movie.

“How big were they?” she said faintly. She heard what sounded like a police radio crackling.

“Small. Cats and small dogs.” He knew what she was thinking. He said, “Miss Grey, I don’t know
what happened to those animals in that basement. But if you don’t want that kid in your house
tonight, I get it—you bring him over to the station. You understand?”

“I’ll call you back,” she said quietly.

She hung up. She looked back into the living room. Lucas was not watching the movie anymore.
He was looking at her.

She remembered the way he always recoiled at school if anyone got near him, like he was scared
he smelled bad. But he didn’t smell …bad

He smelled like pets.

tried to wring them like towels

broke everything inside them

Julia looked at his skinny arms, his small white hands.

He couldn’t do that. Could he?

She walked slowly over to him. He kept watching her. She sat next to him. She looked him in the
eye.

“Lucas,” she said, “How long ago did your father and your little brother die?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he mumbled.

“You need to,” Julia said. “ did they die?”How

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he repeated almost inaudibly.

“Did you see it?”

He didn’t speak. She looked at him. That quality he had, which she had interpreted as
vulnerable shyness…could it be something else? Something colder, more reptilian? She
remembered that movie, Or was it Someone—one of her relatives—
had made a joke about it when she became a teacher.

The Bad Seed. The Good Son?

“Lucas,” Julia said, her voice catching in her throat, “they found some animals in your
basement. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

No answer.

“Do you know how they got there?”

No answer.

“Did you…put them there?”

He shook his head slowly. She took his arm. It was as thin as a bone.

“Lucas… if you don’t answer me, I can’t help you. Please, tell me the truth: Who killed the
animals in the basement?”

He just stared at her.

Thoughtlessly, as if in a dream, she stood up and started backing away. Dimly she was aware of
the dogs barking over at Elaine’s house, but then they both went silent. The movie, still

playing

on her laptop, chirped mockingly. Lucas watched her back into the kitchen. Then he turned to
look out the window, where darkness had fallen.

She called Sheriff Eastin back. She had to call three times before he answered, and when he did,
she could hear screaming in the background—the gender of the person was impossible to know,
but they were screams of fresh, shattering grief.

“Who that? What’s happening?” Julia said unsteadily, a panic rising.is

“Miss Grey, I gotta call you back,” the Sheriff said hoarsely. “Some people got… over here
in Ballard tonight.” The way he hesitated before he said made it sound like they hadn’t
just been killed. Like something more awful, more…specific had happened to them. “I think
maybe…some kind of animal’s gotten loose. And we don’t know where it is now.”

killed
killed

Rabeez

She had a flash image of a human body torn apart, broken— —
lying like a huge, shredded red rag on one of those neat green Ballard Creek lawns.

tried to wring them out like towels

“Sheriff, I want to talk to you about Lucas—”

“Not now,” he said distractedly. “Just lock your doors.”

She said, “They already are,” and then Eastin hung up on her.

and all they wanted to do was go to town and eat people

Except maybe he hadn’t hung up on her, because when she looked at the phone, she had no
service anymore. Just like earlier, at Lucas’s house. And just like earlier, she felt a chill of dread,
the fine hairs all over her body standing on end.

She looked at Lucas again. He was still looking out at the window into the night, but now he was
gripping the edge of the couch with white-knuckled hands. If he were a dog, the hair on his back
would’ve been standing straight up.

“Lucas,” she whispered, “what are you looking at?”

Then the screams started from outside.

They were coming from Elaine’s house. The sound was so raw, so unfamiliar, that at first Julia
didn’t realize it Elaine. She started for the door but Lucas cried in a high voice, “No—don’t
go out there!”

was

It was a good thing she hesitated, because then, in the window, she saw movement. Something
in the yard. Lucas saw it too and backed away from the window.

There was a child out there. Just a small dark shape, moving strangely on the grass. She knew
right away that it was the same silhouette she’d seen in the window at Lucas’s house, in the
shape of a small boy. But now she could see that something was growing out of its skull,
something like gnarled tree branches. Horns, or antlers. The boy-thing had its fingers in its
mouth. It was hopping, like a frog, in the dark grass. It was . Not the least bit bothered by
the long, ragged screams of agony coming from the other house.

playing

“Lucas,” Julia whispered, paralyzed, “who is that?”

“It’s Todd.”

She said, “Your brother Todd is dead.”

“I know.”

Elaine’s screams stopped. They had seemed to go on forever, but it was probably only fifteen or
twenty seconds.

The little boy-thing in the yard stopped hopping. It stood and turned toward the big house, and
when it did, she got a glimpse of its face in the moonlight—wax-white and strangely bulbous,
with large, crazily staring eyes, and a wet mouth that was sucking on itself as if in constant
search of a food source. Then shadows covered it again. The glimpse was so shocking, so
bizarre, that she wanted to believe she’d imagined it—that her mind had drawn it up from some
horror movie she’d seen as a girl.

The lights in Elaine’s house were dark. They’d been on earlier. Now the little boy— —was
staring at Elaine’s house as the back door swung open and something—a man-shaped darkness,
but larger than a man—emerged.

Todd

Julia recognized it, too. It was the thing she’d seen the first time she looked in the boarded-up
window of Lucas’s house. The figure that had radiated such malevolence. The one that had
whispered to her.

ONE MORE STEP

Now she could see that it, too, had great, gnarled, oak-like antlers. It walked to the little boy (if
was the right word, because its feet didn’t quite seem to touch the ground) and held out

its hand, and the little boy shape seemed to eat, or lap, something out of its hand.
walked

She didn’t have to ask Lucas who it was. She knew.

It was Frank Weaver.

Frank and Todd turned to look at the cottage. Their faces, indistinct in the darkness, were
grotesquely, almost clownishly evil.

“Lucas,” she whispered, “what do they want?”

He was so quiet she could barely hear him.

“They’re hungry. They’re always hungry.”

and all they wanted to do was go to town and eat people

They were still just standing out there in the yard, like hateful statues. She understood that they
didn’t eat in the normal sense. They didn’t feed on flesh, that wasn’t what he meant. They fed
on pain.

“What are they?” she whispered. “How did they get like this?”

“ did it,” Lucas said. “He made it so if they died, they would be like this…” His voice choked
off. “He didn’t know that if their bodies stayed in the house, they couldn’t get out.”
He

“You were feeding them, weren’t you?” she said. “You were keeping them trapped in the house
and feeding them.”

“I had to,” Lucas whispered.

“And I let them out,” Julia said.

Lucas didn’t answer. She wanted to ask him why he hadn’t warned her, told her they would be
coming. But she knew the answer—it wouldn’t have made any difference. She never would’ve
believed him.

She said, “Is there anything we can do?”

He stared out the window, his chin crumpling. “They don’t like the light,” he said. “But the
lights are going to go out soon.”

The two figures in the yard were no longer standing still.

The little boy started toward the cottage, still being playful. He took giant, exaggerated tiptoe
steps, like a cartoon character sneaking up on someone.

And the huge man strode— —after him.floated

A full-body panic seized her. Once, as a child, she had been dragged and rolled by a wave at the
beach. It seemed to go on forever, and as her brain screamed for oxygen and black dots swelled
in her vision, she’d felt the same panic: I’m going to die TOO SOON. As in, NOW.

They came toward the cottage with nightmarish slowness—grinning, enjoying themselves, like
an obscene parody of a father and son out for a walk—and she knew that when they reached it,
her life would end.

“I’ll go with them,” Lucas said faintly. “They came for me. If I go out there, they might not—”

“Shut up,” she hissed. She was trying to think. She knelt and
fumbled under the table by the front door—she kept a flashlight there.

The lights are going to go out.

A tiny voice in her head screamed at her. Send him out! For fuck’s sake, if he’s the one they want,
send him out there—and RUN.

Ignoring it, she turned the flashlight on—a heavy, powerful Maglite with a black metal handle
longer than her forearm—barely a second before the lights went out. Darkness surged in on
them. The Maglite’s beam swung wildly, bleaching the walls and ceiling. She saw their leering,
impossible faces, suddenly , pressed up against the glass, looking in.
Their eyes had rectangular black pupils, like goats’. The boy gibbered soundlessly, lips moving
and puckering.

right outside the window

They’d be on her already, she knew, if not for the Maglite—which had already begun to flicker—

“ ”GIVE HIM TO ME.

A whisper…but it felt like burning smoke against her eardrum, like steam enveloping her brain.
She cried out and recoiled—and then they weren’t at the window anymore but , the man-
shape in one corner of the room and the boy-shape in another, moving in, and the flashlight
died and Lucas was shrieking—

inside

—and Julia was about to scream in someone else’s voice, Take him! Leave me alone!—

Headlights flashed across the front windows. A car was pulling up outside. Frank and Todd
weren’t there anymore. A car door slammed. Footsteps came toward the front door.

Julia tried to warn the pizza delivery boy, but he barely had time to ring the doorbell. Then two
shapes past the front windows and he started screaming, too.lunged

For a moment she was frozen. Some part of her— had been about to do
it…about to give Lucas up A hot wave of shame washed over her.

was it, though? really?—
.

She heard bones breaking outside—all at once, like a sheet of bubble wrap being twisted—and
her paralysis broke. They only had a moment or two.

She pulled Lucas into the kitchen and grabbed a glass salad bowl, a steel pot, and the iron skillet
she used for cooking eggs. She arranged them on the linoleum floor in a triangle with herself
and Lucas at the center. She started tearing up newspaper and filling them with it. Then she
grabbed some matches and lit the newspaper on fire.

“Keep putting paper in,” she told Lucas. “Don’t let the fires die.” They had only three
newspapers—today’s, yesterday’s, and the one from the day before. How long would that last?

The delivery boy’s screams tapered off. The small fires began to rise, with Julia and Lucas
huddled in their flickering light, feeding them. She saw Todd’s dark shape capering in the living
room, like a dog.

Frank appeared in the kitchen doorway. Lucas gripped her arm. For a moment, Frank just looked
at her, the fire dancing between them. The light played on his swollen face.

“ ,” Frank whispered.GIVE HIM TO ME

A strange calm settled over her. Her brain seemed to enter that cloud again, that steam. She had
to be realistic. They had gotten Elaine and the delivery boy, and some people over in Ballard
Creek too. They had fed. Maybe they would let her go if she gave up the boy. She could quit
teaching, go back to school, do something else, live another life. . First she just had to live
through the night…and that meant giving up the boy.

Yes

“ ”PUSH HIM OUT OF THE LIGHT.

She didn’t move, but she looked down at Lucas. It wouldn’t be hard, and then they would be
gone. Frank’s obscene face seemed to swell and distort in the firelight.

“ ”GIVE HIM TO ME. HE’S MY SON.

She placed a hand on Lucas’s shoulder—felt the frailness of his bones, the heat of his flesh.
Lucas looked up at her. He was waiting for her to push him away.

She looked up at Frank. She dug her fingers into Lucas’s shoulder.

She shook her head.

Nobody noticed at first when she didn’t show up for school. The town of Rexford was in shock.
Six people killed during the night, including the two over in Ballard Creek, and others missing.

But when her coworker, Bret Goucher, who taught third grade, eventually dropped by her
cottage to check on her, he didn’t even go inside. The kid from Paul’s Pizza was lying on the
porch. Paul himself was there too, having come over to see what had happened to his missing
delivery boy. After what had been done to them, they looked more like disgracefully made
pizzas than people. Mr. Goucher got back in his car and fled.

It was Sheriff Eastin who finally found Julia. She was all over the kitchen floor. She was alone.

Nick Antosca
NIck Antosca is a novelist and screenwriter. He is co-writing and executive producing the
supernatural horror/thriller (based on this short story) for Fox Searchlight, with
Scott Cooper directing and Guillermo del Toro producing. He is also the creator and
showrunner of SYFY’s horror anthology series . He has written five books,
including and , which won a Shirley Jackson Award. He
is from New Orleans and lives in California.

Antlers

Channel Zero
The Girlfriend Game Midnight Picnic

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The Man in the Black Suit

I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me
when I was very young—only nine years old. It was 1914, the sum-
mer after my brother Dan died in the west field and three years before
America got into World War I. I’ve never told anyone about what
happened at the fork in the stream that day, and I never will . . . at
least not with my mouth. I’ve decided to write it down, though, in this
book which I will leave on the table beside my bed. I can’t write long,
because my hands shake so these days and I have next to no strength,
but I don’t think it will take long.

Later, someone may find what I have written. That seems likely to
me, as it is pretty much human nature to look in a book marked DIARY
after its owner has passed along. So yes—my words will probably be
read. A better question is whether or not anyone will believe them.
Almost certainly not, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not belief I’m inter-
ested in but freedom. Writing can give that, I’ve found. For twenty
years I wrote a column called “Long Ago and Far Away” for the Cas-
tle Rock Call, and I know that sometimes it works that way—what
you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs
left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white.

I pray for that sort of release.
A man in his nineties should be well past the terrors of childhood,

but as my infirmities slowly creep up on me, like waves licking
closer and closer to some indifferently built castle of sand, that terri-
ble face grows clearer and clearer in my mind’s eye. It glows like a
dark star in the constellations of my childhood. What I might have
done yesterday, who I might have seen here in my room at the nurs-

ing home, what I might have said to them or they to me . . . those
things are gone, but the face of the man in the black suit grows ever
clearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said. I don’t want
to think of him but I can’t help it, and sometimes at night my old
heart beats so hard and so fast I think it will tear itself right clear of
my chest. So I uncap my fountain pen and force my trembling old
hand to write this pointless anecdote in the diary one of my great-
grandchildren—I can’t remember her name for sure, at least not right
now, but I know it starts with an S—gave to me last Christmas, and
which I have never written in until now. Now I will write in it. I will
write the story of how I met the man in the black suit on the bank of
Castle Stream one afternoon in the summer of 1914.

The town of Motton was a different world in those days—more dif-
ferent than I could ever tell you. That was a world without airplanes
droning overhead, a world almost without cars and trucks, a world
where the skies were not cut into lanes and slices by overhead power
lines.

There was not a single paved road in the whole town, and the busi-
ness district consisted of nothing but Corson’s General Store, Thut’s
Livery & Hardware, the Methodist Church at Christ’s Corner, the
school, the town hall, and Harry’s Restaurant half a mile down from
there, which my mother called, with unfailing disdain, “the liquor
house.”

Mostly, though, the difference was in how people lived—how
apart they were. I’m not sure people born after the middle of the twen-
tieth century could quite credit that, although they might say they
could, to be polite to old folks like me. There were no phones in west-
ern Maine back then, for one thing. The first one wouldn’t be
installed for another five years, and by the time there was one in our
house, I was nineteen and going to college at the University of
Maine in Orono.

But that is only the roof of the thing. There was no doctor closer
than Casco, and no more than a dozen houses in what you would call
town. There were no neighborhoods (I’m not even sure we knew the

STEPHEN KING

word, although we had a verb—neighboring—that described church
functions and barn dances), and open fields were the exception rather
than the rule. Out of town the houses were farms that stood far apart
from each other, and from December until middle March we mostly
hunkered down in the little pockets of stovewarmth we called fami-
lies. We hunkered and listened to the wind in the chimney and
hoped no one would get sick or break a leg or get a headful of bad
ideas, like the farmer over in Castle Rock who had chopped up his wife
and kids three winters before and then said in court that the ghosts
made him do it. In those days before the Great War, most of Motton
was woods and bog, dark long places full of moose and mosquitoes,
snakes and secrets. In those days there were ghosts everywhere.

This thing I’m telling about happened on a Saturday. My father gave
me a whole list of chores to do, including some that would have been
Dan’s, if he’d still been alive. He was my only brother, and he’d died
of being stung by a bee. A year had gone by, and still my mother
wouldn’t hear that. She said it was something else, had to have
been, that no one ever died of being stung by a bee. When Mama
Sweet, the oldest lady in the Methodist Ladies’ Aid, tried to tell her—
at the church supper the previous winter, this was—that the same
thing had happened to her favorite uncle back in ’73, my mother
clapped her hands over her ears, got up, and walked out of the
church basement. She’d never been back since, either, and nothing my
father could say to her would change her mind. She claimed she was
done with church, and that if she ever had to see Helen Robichaud
again (that was Mama Sweet’s real name), she would slap her eyes out.
She wouldn’t be able to help herself, she said.

That day, Dad wanted me to lug wood for the cookstove, weed the
beans and the cukes, pitch hay out of the loft, get two jugs of water
to put in the cold pantry, and scrape as much old paint off the cellar
bulkhead as I could. Then, he said, I could go fishing, if I didn’t mind
going by myself—he had to go over and see Bill Eversham about
some cows. I said I sure didn’t mind going by myself, and my Dad
smiled like that didn’t surprise him so very much. He’d given me a

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

bamboo pole the week before—not because it was my birthday or
anything, but just because he liked to give me things, sometimes—
and I was wild to try it in Castle Stream, which was by far the
troutiest brook I’d ever fished.

“But don’t you go too far in the woods,” he told me. “Not beyond
where it splits.”

“No, sir.”
“Promise me.”
“Yessir, I promise.”
“Now promise your mother.”
We were standing on the back stoop; I had been bound for the

springhouse with the waterjugs when my Dad stopped me. Now he
turned me around to face my mother, who was standing at the mar-
ble counter in a flood of strong morning sunshine falling through the
double windows over the sink. There was a curl of hair lying across
the side of her forehead and touching her eyebrow—you see how well
I remember it all? The bright light turned that little curl to filaments
of gold and made me want to run to her and put my arms around
her. In that instant I saw her as a woman, saw her as my father must
have seen her. She was wearing a housedress with little red roses all
over it, I remember, and she was kneading bread. Candy Bill, our lit-
tle black Scottie dog, was standing alertly beside her feet, looking up,
waiting for anything that might drop. My mother was looking at me.

“I promise,” I said.
She smiled, but it was the worried kind of smile she always seemed

to make since my father brought Dan back from the west field in his
arms. My father had come sobbing and bare-chested. He had taken
off his shirt and draped it over Dan’s face, which had swelled and
turned color. My boy! he had been crying. Oh, look at my boy! Jesus, look
at my boy! I remember that as if it had been yesterday. It was the only
time I ever heard my Dad take the Savior’s name in vain.

“What do you promise, Gary?” she asked.
“Promise not to go no further than where it forks, ma’am.”
“Any further.”
“Any.”

STEPHEN KING

She gave me a patient look, saying nothing as her hands went on
working in the dough, which now had a smooth, silky look.

“I promise not to go any further than where it forks, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Gary,” she said. “And try to remember that gram-

mar is for the world as well as for school.”
“Yes, ma’am.”

Candy Bill followed me as I did my chores, and sat between my feet
as I bolted my lunch, looking up at me with the same attentiveness
he had shown my mother while she was kneading her bread, but when
I got my new bamboo pole and my old, splintery creel and started out
of the dooryard, he stopped and only stood in the dust by an old roll
of snowfence, watching. I called him but he wouldn’t come. He
yapped a time or two, as if telling me to come back, but that was all.

“Stay, then,” I said, trying to sound as if I didn’t care. I did,
though, at least a little. Candy Bill always went fishing with me.

My mother came to the door and looked out at me with her left
hand held up to shade her eyes. I can see her that way still, and it’s like
looking at a photograph of someone who later became unhappy, or
died suddenly. “You mind your Dad now, Gary!”

“Yes, ma’am, I will.”
She waved. I waved, too. Then I turned my back on her and

walked away.

The sun beat down on my neck, hard and hot, for the first quarter-mile
or so, but then I entered the woods, where double shadow fell over the
road and it was cool and fir-smelling and you could hear the wind hiss-
ing through the deep needled groves. I walked with my pole on my
shoulder like boys did back then, holding my creel in my other hand
like a valise or a salesman’s sample-case. About two miles into the
woods along a road which was really nothing but a double rut with a
grassy strip growing up the center hump, I began to hear the hurried,
eager gossip of Castle Stream. I thought of trout with bright speckled
backs and pure white bellies, and my heart went up in my chest.

The stream flowed under a little wooden bridge, and the banks

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

leading down to the water were steep and brushy. I worked my way
down carefully, holding on where I could and digging my heels in. I
went down out of summer and back into midspring, or so it felt. The
cool rose gently off the water, and a green smell like moss. When I got
to the edge of the water I only stood there for a little while, breath-
ing deep of that mossy smell and watching the dragonflies circle and
the skitterbugs skate. Then, farther down, I saw a trout leap at a but-
terfly—a good big brookie, maybe fourteen inches long—and remem-
bered I hadn’t come here just to sightsee.

I walked along the bank, following the current, and wet my line for
the first time with the bridge still in sight upstream. Something jerked
the tip of my pole down a time or two and ate half my worm, but he
was too sly for my nine-year-old hands—or maybe just not hungry
enough to be careless—so I went on.

I stopped at two or three other places before I got to the place
where Castle Stream forks, going southwest into Castle Rock and
southeast into Kashwakamak Township, and at one of them I caught
the biggest trout I have ever caught in my life, a beauty that measured
nineteen inches from tip to tail on the little ruler I kept in my creel.
That was a monster of a brook trout, even for those days.

If I had accepted this as gift enough for one day and gone back, I
would not be writing now (and this is going to turn out longer than
I thought it would, I see that already), but I didn’t. Instead I saw to
my catch right then and there as my father had shown me—cleaning
it, placing it on dry grass at the bottom of the creel, then laying damp
grass on top of it—and went on. I did not, at age nine, think that
catching a nineteen-inch brook trout was particularly remarkable,
although I do remember being amazed that my line had not broken
when I, netless as well as artless, had hauled it out and swung it
toward me in a clumsy tail-flapping arc.

Ten minutes later, I came to the place where the stream split in
those days (it is long gone now; there is a settlement of duplex
homes where Castle Stream once went its course, and a district
grammar school as well, and if there is a stream it goes in darkness),
dividing around a huge gray rock nearly the size of our outhouse.

STEPHEN KING

There was a pleasant flat space here, grassy and soft, overlooking what
my Dad and I called South Branch. I squatted on my heels, dropped
my line into the water, and almost immediately snagged a fine rain-
bow trout. He wasn’t the size of my brookie—only a foot or so—but
a good fish, just the same. I had it cleaned out before the gills had
stopped flexing, stored it in my creel, and dropped my line back into
the water.

This time there was no immediate bite so I leaned back, looking up
at the blue stripe of sky I could see along the stream’s course. Clouds
floated by, west to east, and I tried to think what they looked like. I
saw a unicorn, then a rooster, then a dog that looked a little like Candy
Bill. I was looking for the next one when I drowsed off.

Or maybe slept. I don’t know for sure. All I know is that a tug on my
line so strong it almost pulled the bamboo pole out of my hand was
what brought me back into the afternoon. I sat up, clutched the pole,
and suddenly became aware that something was sitting on the tip of
my nose. I crossed my eyes and saw a bee. My heart seemed to fall
dead in my chest, and for a horrible second I was sure I was going to
wet my pants.

The tug on my line came again, stronger this time, but although
I maintained my grip on the end of the pole so it wouldn’t be pulled
into the stream and perhaps carried away (I think I even had the pres-
ence of mind to snub the line with my forefinger), I made no effort to
pull in my catch. All of my horrified attention was fixed on the fat
black-and-yellow thing that was using my nose as a rest-stop.

I slowly poked out my lower lip and blew upward. The bee ruffled
a little but kept its place. I blew again and it ruffled again . . . but this
time it also seemed to shift impatiently, and I didn’t dare blow any-
more, for fear it would lose its temper completely and give me a shot.
It was too close for me to focus on what it was doing, but it was easy
to imagine it ramming its stinger into one of my nostrils and shoot-
ing its poison up toward my eyes. And my brain.

A terrible idea came to me: that this was the very bee which had
killed my brother. I knew it wasn’t true, and not only because honey-

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

bees probably didn’t live longer than a single year (except maybe for
the queens; about them I was not so sure). It couldn’t be true because
bees died when they stung, and even at nine I knew it. Their stingers
were barbed, and when they tried to fly away after doing the deed,
they tore themselves apart. Still, the idea stayed. This was a special
bee, a devil-bee, and it had come back to finish the other of Albion and
Loretta’s two boys.

And here is something else: I had been stung by bees before, and
although the stings had swelled more than is perhaps usual (I can’t
really say for sure), I had never died of them. That was only for my
brother, a terrible trap which had been laid for him in his very mak-
ing, a trap which I had somehow escaped. But as I crossed my eyes
until they hurt in an effort to focus on the bee, logic did not exist. It
was the bee that existed, only that, the bee that had killed my brother,
killed him so bad that my father had slipped down the straps of his
overalls so he could take off his shirt and cover Dan’s swelled,
engorged face. Even in the depths of his grief he had done that,
because he didn’t want his wife to see what had become of her first-
born. Now the bee had returned, and now it would kill me. It would
kill me and I would die in convulsions on the bank, flopping just as
a brookie flops after you take the hook out of its mouth.

As I sat there trembling on the edge of panic—of simply bolting
to my feet and then bolting anywhere—there came a report from
behind me. It was as sharp and peremptory as a pistol-shot, but I
knew it wasn’t a pistol-shot; it was someone clapping his hands. One
single clap. At the moment it came, the bee tumbled off my nose and
fell into my lap. It lay there on my pants with its legs sticking up and
its stinger a threatless black thread against the old scuffed brown of
the corduroy. It was dead as a doornail, I saw that at once. At the same
moment, the pole gave another tug—the hardest yet—and I almost
lost it again.

I grabbed it with both hands and gave it a big stupid yank that
would have made my father clutch his head with both hands, if he had
been there to see it. A rainbow trout, a good bit larger than the one
I had already caught, rose out of the water in a wet, writhing flash,

STEPHEN KING

spraying fine drops of water from its filament of tail—it looked like
one of those romanticized fishing pictures they used to put on the cov-
ers of men’s magazines like True and Man’s Adventure back in the for-
ties and fifties. At that moment hauling in a big one was about the last
thing on my mind, however, and when the line snapped and the fish
fell back into the stream, I barely noticed. I looked over my shoulder
to see who had clapped. A man was standing above me, at the edge
of the trees. His face was very long and pale. His black hair was
combed tight against his skull and parted with rigorous care on the
left side of his narrow head. He was very tall. He was wearing a black
three-piece suit, and I knew right away that he was not a human
being, because his eyes were the orangey-red of flames in a woodstove.
I don’t just mean the irises, because he had no irises, and no pupils, and
certainly no whites. His eyes were completely orange—an orange that
shifted and flickered. And it’s really too late not to say exactly what
I mean, isn’t it? He was on fire inside, and his eyes were like the lit-
tle isinglass portholes you sometimes see in stove doors.

My bladder let go, and the scuffed brown the dead bee was lying
on went a darker brown. I was hardly aware of what had happened,
and I couldn’t take my eyes off the man standing on top of the bank
and looking down at me, the man who had walked out of thirty miles
of trackless western Maine woods in a fine black suit and narrow shoes
of gleaming leather. I could see the watch-chain looped across his vest
glittering in the summer sunshine. There was not so much as a single
pine-needle on him. And he was smiling at me.

“Why, it’s a fisherboy!” he cried in a mellow, pleasing voice.
“Imagine that! Are we well-met, fisherboy?”

“Hello, sir,” I said. The voice that came out of me did not tremble,
but it didn’t sound like my voice, either. It sounded older. Like
Dan’s voice, maybe. Or my father’s, even. And all I could think was
that maybe he would let me go if I pretended not to see what he was.
If I pretended I didn’t see there were flames glowing and dancing
where his eyes should have been.

“I’ve saved you a nasty sting, perhaps,” he said, and then, to my
horror, he came down the bank to where I sat with a dead bee in my

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

wet lap and a bamboo fishing pole in my nerveless hands. His slick-
soled city shoes should have slipped on the low, grassy weeds which
dressed the steep bank, but they didn’t; nor did they leave tracks
behind, I saw. Where his feet had touched—or seemed to touch—
there was not a single broken twig, crushed leaf, or trampled shoe-
shape.

Even before he reached me, I recognized the aroma baking up from
the skin under the suit—the smell of burned matches. The smell of
sulfur. The man in the black suit was the Devil. He had walked out
of the deep woods between Motton and Kashwakamak, and now he
was standing here beside me. From the corner of one eye I could see
a hand as pale as the hand of a store window dummy. The fingers were
hideously long.

He hunkered beside me on his hams, his knees popping just as
the knees of any normal man might, but when he moved his hands
so they dangled between his knees, I saw that each of those long fin-
gers ended in what was not a fingernail but a long yellow claw.

“You didn’t answer my question, fisherboy,” he said in his mellow
voice. It was, now that I think of it, like the voice of one of those radio
announcers on the big-band shows years later, the ones that would sell
Geritol and Serutan and Ovaltine and Dr. Grabow pipes. “Are we
well-met?”

“Please don’t hurt me,” I whispered, in a voice so low I could barely
hear it. I was more afraid than I could ever write down, more afraid
than I want to remember . . . but I do. I do. It never even crossed my
mind to hope I was having a dream, although I might have, I sup-
pose, if I had been older. But I wasn’t older; I was nine, and I knew
the truth when it squatted down on its hunkers beside me. I knew a
hawk from a handsaw, as my father would have said. The man who
had come out of the woods on that Saturday afternoon in midsummer
was the Devil, and inside the empty holes of his eyes, his brains were
burning.

“Oh, do I smell something?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard me . . .
although I knew he had. “Do I smell something . . . wet?”

He leaned forward toward me with his nose stuck out, like some-

STEPHEN KING

one who means to smell a flower. And I noticed an awful thing; as
the shadow of his head travelled over the bank, the grass beneath it
turned yellow and died. He lowered his head toward my pants and
sniffed. His glaring eyes half-closed, as if he had inhaled some sub-
lime aroma and wanted to concentrate on nothing but that.

“Oh, bad!” he cried. “Lovely-bad!” And then he chanted: “Opal!
Diamond! Sapphire! Jade! I smell Gary’s lemonade!” Then he threw
himself on his back in the little flat place and laughed wildly. It was
the sound of a lunatic.

I thought about running, but my legs seemed two counties away
from my brain. I wasn’t crying, though; I had wet my pants like a
baby, but I wasn’t crying. I was too scared to cry. I suddenly knew that
I was going to die, and probably painfully, but the worst of it was that
that might not be the worst of it.

The worst of it might come later. After I was dead.
He sat up suddenly, the smell of burnt matches fluffing out from

his suit and making me feel all gaggy in my throat. He looked at me
solemnly from his narrow white face and burning eyes, but there was
a sense of laughter about him, too. There was always that sense of
laughter about him.

“Sad news, fisherboy,” he said. “I’ve come with sad news.”
I could only look at him—the black suit, the fine black shoes, the

long white fingers that ended not in nails but in talons.
“Your mother is dead.”
“No!” I cried. I thought of her making bread, of the curl lying

across her forehead and just touching her eyebrow, standing there in
the strong morning sunlight, and the terror swept over me again . . .
but not for myself this time. Then I thought of how she’d looked
when I set off with my fishing pole, standing in the kitchen doorway
with her hand shading her eyes, and how she had looked to me in
that moment like a photograph of someone you expected to see
again but never did. “No, you lie!” I screamed.

He smiled—the sadly patient smile of a man who has often been
accused falsely. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “It was the same thing that
happened to your brother, Gary. It was a bee.”

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

“No, that’s not true,” I said, and now I did begin to cry. “She’s old,
she’s thirty-five, if a bee-sting could kill her the way it did Danny she
would have died a long time ago and you’re a lying bastard!”

I had called the Devil a lying bastard. On some level I was aware
of this, but the entire front of my mind was taken up by the enormity
of what he’d said. My mother dead? He might as well have told me
that there was a new ocean where the Rockies had been. But I
believed him. On some level I believed him completely, as we always
believe, on some level, the worst thing our hearts can imagine.

“I understand your grief, little fisherboy, but that particular argu-
ment just doesn’t hold water, I’m afraid.” He spoke in a tone of bogus
comfort that was horrible, maddening, without remorse or pity. “A
man can go his whole life without seeing a mockingbird, you know,
but does that mean mockingbirds don’t exist? Your mother—”

A fish jumped below us. The man in the black suit frowned, then
pointed a finger at it. The trout convulsed in the air, its body bend-
ing so strenuously that for a split-second it appeared to be snapping
at its own tail, and when it fell back into Castle Stream it was float-
ing lifelessly, dead. It struck the big gray rock where the waters
divided, spun around twice in the whirlpool eddy that formed there,
and then floated off in the direction of Castle Rock. Meanwhile, the
terrible stranger turned his burning eyes on me again, his thin lips
pulled back from tiny rows of sharp teeth in a cannibal smile.

“Your mother simply went through her entire life without being
stung by a bee,” he said. “But then—less than an hour ago, actually—
one flew in through the kitchen window while she was taking the
bread out of the oven and putting it on the counter to cool.”

“No, I won’t hear this, I won’t hear this, I won’t!”
I raised my hands and clapped them over my ears. He pursed his

lips as if to whistle and blew at me gently. It was only a little breath,
but the stench was foul beyond belief—clogged sewers, outhouses
that have never known a single sprinkle of lime, dead chickens after
a flood.

My hands fell away from the sides of my face.
“Good,” he said. “You need to hear this, Gary; you need to hear

STEPHEN KING

this, my little fisherboy. It was your mother who passed that fatal
weakness on to your brother Dan; you got some of it, but you also got
a protection from your father that poor Dan somehow missed.” He
pursed his lips again, only this time, he made a cruelly comic little tsk-
tsk sound instead of blowing his nasty breath at me. “So, although I
don’t like to speak ill of the dead, it’s almost a case of poetic justice,
isn’t it? After all, she killed your brother Dan as surely as if she had put
a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”

“No,” I whispered. “No, it isn’t true.”
“I assure you it is,” he said. “The bee flew in the window and lit on

her neck. She slapped at it before she even knew what she was
doing—you were wiser than that, weren’t you, Gary?—and the bee
stung her. She felt her throat start to close up at once. That’s what
happens, you know, to people who are allergic to bee-venom. Their
throats close and they drown in the open air. That’s why Dan’s face
was so swollen and purple. That’s why your father covered it with his
shirt.”

I stared at him, now incapable of speech. Tears streamed down my
cheeks. I didn’t want to believe him, and knew from my church
schooling that the devil is the father of lies, but I did believe him, just
the same. I believed he had been standing there in our dooryard, look-
ing in the kitchen window, as my mother fell to her knees, clutching
at her swollen throat while Candy Bill danced around her, barking
shrilly.

“She made the most wonderfully awful noises,” the man in the
black suit said reflectively, “and she scratched her face quite badly,
I’m afraid. Her eyes bulged out like a frog’s eyes. She wept.” He
paused, then added: “She wept as she died, isn’t that sweet? And
here’s the most beautiful thing of all. After she was dead . . . after she
had been lying on the floor for fifteen minutes or so with no sound
but the stove ticking and with that little stick of a bee-stinger still
poking out of the side of her neck—so small, so small—do you know
what Candy Bill did? That little rascal licked away her tears. First on
one side . . . and then on the other.”

He looked out at the stream for a moment, his face sad and

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

thoughtful. Then he turned back to me and his expression of bereave-
ment disappeared like a dream. His face was as slack and avid as the
face of a corpse that has died hungry. His eyes blazed. I could see his
sharp little teeth between his pale lips.

“I’m starving,” he said abruptly. “I’m going to kill you and tear you
open and eat your guts, little fisherboy. What do you think about
that?”

No, I tried to say, please, no, but no sound came out. He meant to
do it, I saw. He really meant to do it.

“I’m just so hungry,” he said, both petulant and teasing. “And you
won’t want to live without your precious mommy, anyhow, take my
word for it. Because your father’s the sort of man who’ll have to have
some warm hole to stick it in, believe me, and if you’re the only one
available, you’re the one who’ll have to serve. I’ll save you all that dis-
comfort and unpleasantness. Also, you’ll go to Heaven, think of
that. Murdered souls always go to Heaven. So we’ll both be serving
God this afternoon, Gary. Isn’t that nice?”

He reached for me again with his long, pale hands, and without
thinking what I was doing, I flipped open the top of my creel,
pawed all the way down to the bottom, and brought out the mon-
ster brookie I’d caught earlier—the one I should have been satisfied
with. I held it out to him blindly, my fingers in the red slit of its belly
from which I had removed its insides as the man in the black suit
had threatened to remove mine. The fish’s glazed eye stared dream-
ily at me, the gold ring around the black center reminding me of my
mother’s wedding ring. And in that moment I saw her lying in her
coffin with the sun shining off the wedding band and knew it was
true—she had been stung by a bee, she had drowned in the warm,
bread-smelling kitchen air, and Candy Bill had licked her dying
tears from her swollen cheeks.

“Big fish!” the man in the black suit cried in a guttural, greedy
voice. “Oh, biiig fiiish!”

He snatched it away from me and crammed it into a mouth that
opened wider than any human mouth ever could. Many years later,
when I was sixty-five (I know it was sixty-five because that was the

STEPHEN KING

summer I retired from teaching), I went to the New England Aquar-
ium and finally saw a shark. The mouth of the man in the black suit
was like that shark’s mouth when it opened, only his gullet was blaz-
ing red, the same color as his awful eyes, and I felt heat bake out of it
and into my face, the way you feel a sudden wave of heat come push-
ing out of a fireplace when a dry piece of wood catches alight. And I
didn’t imagine that heat, either, I know I didn’t, because just before
he slid the head of my nineteen-inch brook trout between his gaping
jaws, I saw the scales along the sides of the fish rise up and begin to
curl like bits of paper floating over an open incinerator.

He slid the fish in like a man in a travelling show swallowing a
sword. He didn’t chew, and his blazing eyes bulged out, as if in effort.
The fish went in and went in, his throat bulged as it slid down his gul-
let, and now he began to cry tears of his own . . . except his tears were
blood, scarlet and thick.

I think it was the sight of those bloody tears that gave me my body
back. I don’t know why that should have been, but I think it was. I
bolted to my feet like a jack released from its box, turned with my
bamboo pole still in one hand, and fled up the bank, bending over and
tearing tough bunches of weeds out with my free hand in an effort to
get up the slope more quickly.

He made a strangled, furious noise—the sound of any man with
his mouth too full—and I looked back just as I got to the top. He
was coming after me, the back of his suit-coat flapping and his thin
gold watch-chain flashing and winking in the sun. The tail of the fish
was still protruding from his mouth and I could smell the rest of it,
roasting in the oven of his throat.

He reached for me, groping with his talons, and I fled along the
top of the bank. After a hundred yards or so I found my voice and
went to screaming—screaming in fear, of course, but also screaming
in grief for my beautiful dead mother.

He was coming along after me. I could hear snapping branches
and whipping bushes, but I didn’t look back again. I lowered my
head, slitted my eyes against the bushes and low-hanging branches
along the stream’s bank, and ran as fast as I could. And at every step

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

I expected to feel his hands descending on my shoulders pulling me
back into a final hot hug.

That didn’t happen. Some unknown length of time later—it
couldn’t have been longer than five or ten minutes, I suppose, but it
seemed like forever—I saw the bridge through layerings of leaves and
firs. Still screaming, but breathlessly now, sounding like a teakettle
which has almost boiled dry, I reached this second, steeper bank and
charged up to it.

Halfway to the top I slipped to my knees, looked over my shoulder,
and saw the man in the black suit almost at my heels, his white face
pulled into a convulsion of fury and greed. His cheeks were splattered
with his bloody tears and his shark’s mouth hung open like a hinge.

“Fisherboy!” he snarled, and started up the bank after me, grasping
at my foot with one long hand. I tore free, turned, and threw my fish-
ing pole at him. He batted it down easily, but it tangled his feet up
somehow and he went to his knees. I didn’t wait to see anymore; I
turned and bolted to the top of the slope. I almost slipped at the very
top, but managed to grab one of the support struts running beneath
the bridge and save myself.

“You can’t get away, fisherboy!” he cried from behind me. He
sounded furious, but he also sounded as if he were laughing. “It
takes more than a mouthful of trout to fill me up!”

“Leave me alone!” I screamed back at him. I grabbed the bridge’s
railing and threw myself over it in a clumsy somersault, filling my
hands with splinters and bumping my head so hard on the boards
when I came down that I saw stars. I rolled over onto my belly and
began crawling. I lurched to my feet just before I got to the end of the
bridge, stumbled once, found my rhythm, and then began to run. I
ran as only nine-year-old boys can run, which is like the wind. It felt
as if my feet only touched the ground with every third or fourth stride,
and for all I know, that may be true. I ran straight up the righthand
wheelrut in the road, ran until my temples pounded and my eyes
pulsed in their sockets, ran until I had a hot stitch in my left side from
the bottom of my ribs to my armpit, ran until I could taste blood and
something like metal-shavings in the back of my throat. When I

STEPHEN KING

couldn’t run anymore I stumbled to a stop and looked back over my
shoulder, puffing and blowing like a windbroke horse. I was convinced
I would see him standing right there behind me in his natty black suit,
the watch-chain a glittering loop across his vest and not a hair out of
place.

But he was gone. The road stretching back toward Castle Stream
between the darkly massed pines and spruces was empty. And yet I
sensed him somewhere near in those woods, watching me with his
grassfire eyes, smelling of burnt matches and roasted fish.

I turned and began walking as fast as I could, limping a little—I’d
pulled muscles in both legs, and when I got out of bed the next morn-
ing I was so sore I could barely walk. I didn’t notice those things then,
though. I just kept looking over my shoulder, needing again and again
to verify that the road behind me was still empty. It was, each time I
looked, but those backward glances seemed to increase my fear
rather than lessening it. The firs looked darker, massier, and I kept
imagining what lay behind the trees which marched beside the
road—long, tangled corridors of forest, leg-breaking deadfalls,
ravines where anything might live. Until that Saturday in 1914, I had
thought that bears were the worst thing the forest could hold.

Now I knew better.

A mile or so further up the road, just beyond the place where it came
out of the woods and joined the Geegan Flat Road, I saw my father
walking toward me and whistling “The Old Oaken Bucket.” He was
carrying his own rod, the one with the fancy spinning reel from Mon-
key Ward. In his other hand he had his creel, the one with the ribbon
my mother had woven through the handle back when Dan was still
alive. DEDICATED TO JESUS, that ribbon said. I had been walking but
when I saw him I started to run again, screaming Dad! Dad! Dad! at
the top of my lungs and staggering from side to side on my tired,
sprung legs like a drunken sailor. The expression of surprise on his face
when he recognized me might have been comical under other cir-
cumstances, but not under these. He dropped his rod and creel into
the road without so much as a downward glance at them and ran to

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

me. It was the fastest I ever saw my Dad run in his life; when we came
together it was a wonder the impact didn’t knock us both senseless,
and I struck my face on his belt-buckle hard enough to start a little
nosebleed. I didn’t notice that until later, though. Right then I only
reached out my arms and clutched him as hard as I could. I held on
and rubbed my hot face back and forth against his belly, covering his
old blue workshirt with blood and tears and snot.

“Gary, what is it? What happened? Are you all right?”
“Ma’s dead!” I sobbed. “I met a man in the woods and he told me!

Ma’s dead! She got stung by a bee and it swelled her all up just like
what happened to Dan, and she’s dead! She’s on the kitchen floor and
Candy Bill . . . licked the t-t-tears . . . off her . . . off her . . .”

Face was the last word I had to say, but by then my chest was hitch-
ing so bad I couldn’t get it out. My tears were flowing again, and my
Dad’s startled, frightened face had blurred into three overlapping
images. I began to howl—not like a little kid who’s skun his knee but
like a dog that’s seen something bad by moonlight—and my father
pressed my head against his hard flat stomach again. I slipped out
from under his hand, though, and looked back over my shoulder. I
wanted to make sure the man in the black suit wasn’t coming.
There was no sign of him; the road winding back into the woods was
completely empty. I promised myself I would never go back down
that road again, not ever, no matter what, and I suppose now God’s
greatest blessing to His creatures below is that they can’t see the
future. It might have broken my mind if I had known I would be going
back down that road, and not two hours later. For that moment,
though, I was only relieved to see we were still alone. Then I thought
of my mother—my beautiful dead mother—and laid my face back
against my father’s stomach and bawled some more.

“Gary, listen to me,” he said a moment or two later. I went on bawl-
ing. He gave me a little longer to do that, then reached down and
lifted my chin so he could look into my face and I could look into his.
“Your Mom’s fine,” he said.

I could only look at him with tears streaming down my cheeks. I
didn’t believe him.

STEPHEN KING

“I don’t know who told you different, or what kind of dirty dog
would want to put a scare like that into a little boy, but I swear to
God your mother’s fine.”

“But . . . but he said . . .”
“I don’t care what he said. I got back from Eversham’s earlier than

I expected—he doesn’t want to sell any cows, it’s all just talk—and
decided I had time to catch up with you. I got my pole and my creel
and your mother made us a couple of jelly fold-overs. Her new
bread. Still warm. So she was fine half an hour ago, Gary, and there’s
nobody knows any different that’s come from this direction, I guar-
antee you. Not in just half an hour’s time.” He looked over my
shoulder. “Who was this man? And where was he? I’m going to find
him and thrash him within an inch of his life.”

I thought a thousand things in just two seconds—that’s what it
seemed like, anyway—but the last thing I thought was the most
powerful: if my Dad met up with the man in the black suit, I didn’t
think my Dad would be the one to do the thrashing. Or the walking
away.

I kept remembering those long white fingers, and the talons at
the ends of them.

“Gary?”
“I don’t know that I remember,” I said.
“Were you where the stream splits? The big rock?”
I could never lie to my father when he asked a direct question—

not to save his life or mine. “Yes, but don’t go down there.” I seized
his arm with both hands and tugged it hard. “Please don’t. He was
a scary man.” Inspiration struck like an illuminating lightning-bolt.
“I think he had a gun.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “Maybe there wasn’t a man,” he
said, lifting his voice a little on the last word and turning it into some-
thing that was almost but not quite a question. “Maybe you fell asleep
while you were fishing, son, and had a bad dream. Like the ones you
had about Danny last winter.”

I had had a lot of bad dreams about Dan last winter, dreams
where I would open the door to our closet or to the dark, fruity inte-

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

rior of the cider shed and see him standing there and looking at me
out of his purple strangulated face; from many of these dreams I had
awakened screaming, and awakened my parents, as well. I had fallen
asleep on the bank of the stream for a little while, too—dozed off, any-
way—but I hadn’t dreamed and I was sure I had awakened just before
the man in the black suit clapped the bee dead, sending it tumbling
off my nose and into my lap. I hadn’t dreamed him the way I had
dreamed Dan, I was quite sure of that, although my meeting with him
had already attained a dreamlike quality in my mind, as I suppose
supernatural occurrences always must. But if my Dad thought that
the man had only existed in my own head, that might be better. Bet-
ter for him.

“It might have been, I guess,” I said.
“Well, we ought to go back and find your rod and your creel.”
He actually started in that direction, and I had to tug frantically

at his arm to stop him again, and turn him back toward me.
“Later,” I said. “Please, Dad? I want to see Mother. I’ve got to see

her with my own eyes.”
He thought that over, then nodded. “Yes, I suppose you do. We’ll

go home first, and get your rod and creel later.”
So we walked back to the farm together, my father with his fish-

pole propped on his shoulder just like one of my friends, me carrying
his creel, both of us eating folded-over slices of my mother’s bread
smeared with blackcurrant jam.

“Did you catch anything?” he asked as we came in sight of the
barn.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “A rainbow. Pretty good-sized.” And a brookie that
was a lot bigger, I thought but didn’t say. Biggest one I ever saw, to tell the
truth, but I don’t have that one to show you, Dad. I gave that one to the man
in the black suit, so he wouldn’t eat me. And it worked . . . but just barely.

“That’s all? Nothing else?”
“After I caught it I fell asleep.” This was not really an answer, but

not really a lie, either.
“Lucky you didn’t lose your pole. You didn’t, did you, Gary?”
“No, sir,” I said, very reluctantly. Lying about that would do no

STEPHEN KING

good even if I’d been able to think up a whopper—not if he was set
on going back to get my creel anyway, and I could see by his face that
he was.

Up ahead, Candy Bill came racing out of the back door, barking his
shrill bark and wagging his whole rear end back and forth the way
Scotties do when they’re excited. I couldn’t wait any longer; hope and
anxiety bubbled up in my throat like foam. I broke away from my
father and ran to the house, still lugging his creel and still convinced,
in my heart of hearts, that I was going to find my mother dead on the
kitchen floor with her face swelled and purple like Dan’s had been
when my father carried him in from the west field, crying and calling
the name of Jesus.

But she was standing at the counter, just as well and fine as when
I had left her, humming a song as she shelled peas into a bowl. She
looked around at me, first in surprise and then in fright as she took in
my wide eyes and pale cheeks.

“Gary, what is it? What’s the matter?”
I didn’t answer, only ran to her and covered her with kisses. At

some point my father came in and said, “Don’t worry, Lo—he’s all
right. He just had one of his bad dreams, down there by the brook.”

“Pray God it’s the last of them,” she said, and hugged me tighter
while Candy Bill danced around our feet, barking his shrill bark.

“You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to, Gary,” my
father said, although he had already made it clear that he thought I
should—that I should go back, that I should face my fear, as I suppose
folks would say nowadays. That’s very well for fearful things that are
make-believe, but two hours hadn’t done much to change my con-
viction that the man in the black suit had been real. I wouldn’t be able
to convince my father of that, though. I don’t think there was a nine-
year-old that ever lived who would have been able to convince his
father he’d seen the Devil come walking out of the woods in a black
suit.

“I’ll come,” I said. I had walked out of the house to join him before
he left, mustering all my courage in order to get my feet moving, and

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

now we were standing by the chopping-block in the side yard, not far
from the woodpile.

“What you got behind your back?” he asked.
I brought it out slowly. I would go with him, and I would hope the

man in the black suit with the arrow-straight part down the left side
of his head was gone . . . but if he wasn’t, I wanted to be prepared. As
prepared as I could be, anyway. I had the family Bible in the hand I
had brought out from behind my back. I’d set out just to bring my
New Testament, which I had won for memorizing the most psalms in
the Thursday night Youth Fellowship competition (I managed eight,
although most of them except the Twenty-third had floated out of my
mind in a week’s time), but the little red Testament didn’t seem like
enough when you were maybe going to face the Devil himself, not
even when the words of Jesus were marked out in red ink.

My father looked at the old Bible, swelled with family documents
and pictures, and I thought he’d tell me to put it back, but he didn’t.
A look of mixed grief and sympathy crossed his face, and he nodded.
“All right,” he said. “Does your mother know you took that?”

“No, sir.”
He nodded again. “Then we’ll hope she doesn’t spot it gone

before we get back. Come on. And don’t drop it.”

Half an hour or so later, the two of us stood on the bank looking
down at the place where Castle Stream forked, and at the flat place
where I’d had my encounter with the man with the red-orange eyes.
I had my bamboo rod in my hand—I’d picked it up below the
bridge—and my creel lay down below, on the flat place. Its wicker
top was flipped back. We stood looking down, my father and I, for a
long time, and neither of us said anything.

Opal! Diamond! Sapphire! Jade! I smell Gary’s lemonade! That had
been his unpleasant little poem, and once he had recited it, he had
thrown himself on his back, laughing like a child who has just dis-
covered he has enough courage to say bathroom words like shit or
piss. The flat place down there was as green and lush as any place in
Maine that the sun can get to in early July . . . except where the

STEPHEN KING

stranger had lain. There the grass was dead and yellow in the shape
of a man.

I looked down and saw I was holding our lumpy old family Bible
straight out in front of me with both thumbs pressing so hard on the
cover that they were white. It was the way Mama Sweet’s husband
Norville held a willow-fork when he was trying to dowse somebody
a well.

“Stay here,” my father said at last, and skidded sideways down the
bank, digging his shoes into the rich soft soil and holding his arms out
for balance. I stood where I was, holding the Bible stiffly out at the
ends of my arms like a willow-fork, my heart thumping wildly. I don’t
know if I had a sense of being watched that time or not; I was too
scared to have a sense of anything, except for a sense of wanting to be
far away from that place and those woods.

My Dad bent down, sniffed at where the grass was dead, and gri-
maced. I knew what he was smelling: something like burnt matches.
Then he grabbed my creel and came on back up the bank, hurrying.
He snagged one fast look over his shoulder to make sure nothing was
coming along behind. Nothing was. When he handed me the creel,
the lid was still hanging back on its cunning little leather hinges. I
looked inside and saw nothing but two handfuls of grass.

“Thought you said you caught a rainbow,” my father said, “but
maybe you dreamed that, too.”

Something in his voice stung me. “No, sir,” I said. “I caught one.”
“Well, it sure as hell didn’t flop out, not if it was gutted and

cleaned. And you wouldn’t put a catch into your fisherbox without
doing that, would you, Gary? I taught you better than that.”

“Yes, sir, you did, but—”
“So if you didn’t dream catching it and if it was dead in the box,

something must have come along and eaten it,” my father said, and
then he grabbed another quick glance over his shoulder, eyes wide, as
if he had heard something move in the woods. I wasn’t exactly sur-
prised to see drops of sweat standing out on his forehead like big clear
jewels. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I was for that, and we went back along the bank to the bridge,

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

walking quick without speaking. When we got there, my Dad
dropped to one knee and examined the place where we’d found my
rod. There was another patch of dead grass there, and the lady’s
slipper was all brown and curled in on itself, as if a blast of heat had
charred it. While my father did this, I looked in my empty creel.

“He must have gone back and eaten my other fish, too,” I said.
My father looked up at me. “Other fish!”
“Yes, sir. I didn’t tell you, but I caught a brookie, too. A big one.

He was awful hungry, that fella.” I wanted to say more, and the words
trembled just behind my lips, but in the end I didn’t.

We climbed up to the bridge and helped one another over the rail-
ing. My father took my creel, looked into it, then went to the railing
and threw it over. I came up beside him in time to see it splash down
and float away like a boat, riding lower and lower in the stream as
the water poured in between the wicker weavings.

“It smelled bad,” my father said, but he didn’t look at me when
he said it, and his voice sounded oddly defensive. It was the only
time I ever heard him speak just that way.

“Yes, sir.”
“We’ll tell your mother we couldn’t find it. If she asks. If she

doesn’t ask, we won’t tell her anything.”
“No, sir, we won’t.”
And she didn’t and we didn’t and that’s the way it was.

That day in the woods is eighty-one years gone, and for many of the
years in between I have never even thought of it . . . not awake, at
least. Like any other man or woman who ever lived, I can’t say
about my dreams, not for sure. But now I’m old, and I dream awake,
it seems. My infirmities have crept up like waves which will soon take
a child’s abandoned sand castle, and my memories have also crept up,
making me think of some old rhyme that went, in part, “Just leave
them alone/And they’ll come home/Wagging their tails behind
them.” I remember meals I ate, games I played, girls I kissed in the
school cloakroom when we played Post Office, boys I chummed
with, the first drink I ever took, the first cigarette I ever smoked (corn-

STEPHEN KING

shuck behind Dicky Hammer’s pig-shed, and I threw up). Yet of all
the memories, the one of the man in the black suit is the strongest,
and glows with its own spectral, haunted light. He was real, he was
the Devil, and that day I was either his errand or his luck. I feel more
and more strongly that escaping him was my luck—just luck, and not
the intercession of the God I have worshipped and sung hymns to all
my life.

As I lie here in my nursing-home room, and in the ruined sand cas-
tle that is my body, I tell myself that I need not fear the Devil—that
I have lived a good, kindly life, and I need not fear the Devil. Some-
times I remind myself that it was I, not my father, who finally
coaxed my mother back to church later on that summer. In the
dark, however, these thoughts have no power to ease or comfort. In
the dark comes a voice which whispers that the nine-year-old boy I
was had done nothing for which he might legitimately fear the devil
either . . . and yet the Devil came. And in the dark I sometimes hear
that voice drop even lower, into ranges which are inhuman. Big fish!
it whispers in tones of hushed greed, and all the truths of the moral
world fall to ruin before its hunger. Biiig fiiish!

The Devil came to me once, long ago; suppose he were to come
again now? I am too old to run now; I can’t even get to the bath-
room and back without my walker. I have no fine large brook trout
with which to propitiate him, either, even for a moment or two; I am
old and my creel is empty. Suppose he were to come back and find
me so?

And suppose he is still hungry?

My favorite Nathaniel Hawthorne story is “Young Goodman
Brown.” I think it’s one of the ten best stories ever written by an
American. “The Man in the Black Suit” is my hommage to it.
As for the particulars, I was talking with a friend of mine one day,
and he happened to mention that his Grandpa believed—truly
believed—that he had seen the Devil in the woods, back around
the turn of the twentieth century. Grandpa said the Devil came

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

Surname 1

Ariel Goodie

Professor Katherine

Intro to Literature

September 15, 2020

Symbolism in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery

Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery uses a third objective point of view, where the narrator is

depicted as an external observer of the events and activities surrounding the yearly event. The

narrator is not involved in the activities of the lottery, which makes the readers know very little

about the narrator’s views, perceptions, and attitudes regarding the lottery. However, the readers

can deduce the views of the narrator from the dialogue and the styles employed by the author.

Symbolism is the dominating style where the author uses objects that denote the civility and

outlook of the town’s people. Though Shirley Jackson’s short story, The Lottery describes the

annual lottery where the town selects a person who could be stoned to death by the townspeople,

in reality, it uses the lottery as a symbol of blind adherence to tradition and the black box to show

that the practice is no longer important to the small town.

The yearly lottery represents blind adherence to an old tradition. The people in the town,

whose number has now grown to three hundred, do not know when or why the practice started.

Even the oldest man in the town does not exceptionally provide insightful information about the

tradition. The narrator shows how the people were eager to take part in the practice. Their wives

or the eldest sons represented men who could not be available. They did not consider giving up

on the culture, explaining why they did not hesitate to stone to death any selected persons. The

old man, Warner, says, “There has always been a lottery” to show that the practice is ancient, and

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
Need a transition to shift, since you’re moving from this idea of tradition to their willingness to partake in it regardless

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
getting repetitive, as this is the exact phrasing from above

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
why is this detail needed here?

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
A focused thesis here – but again, see above notes re: how to lead us to this point (and I would suggest reviewing the Developing Essay #1 notes on intros overall)

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
short story titles in quotes, not italics

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
In what way? let’s bring in textual evidence to illustrate this

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
actually type your last name here

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
rephrase for clarity

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
Why open with this very specific discussion of perspective, when your focus is on symbolism in this story?

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
Clear and straightforward title

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
But WHY is this the case? How is this so clearly tied to their culture?

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
how does this tie into their eagerness?

Surname 2

no persons have been opposed to it. He celebrates taking part in the seventy-seventh time,

meaning he has seen seventy-seven people stoned to death. His celebration for taking part

indicates that he considers the tradition necessary. The lottery has always been there for the

people, and they do not want a culture in which it does not exist. They are committed to blindly

follow the tradition, despite knowing that some towns have done away with it.

The community does not revere the black box. The narrator shows the reader that the

town did not have a plan for storing the black box. It is stored in Mr. Summers’ officer, the

grocery store, and the post office. This denotes that the box did not have a designated place in

society. The townspeople did not need the box, and on a more symbolic level, they needed to get

rid of the box and the tradition. The townspeople note that the box is not the original one,

symbolically denoting the changes the town has undergone, which call for eradicating the

practice.

Shirley Jackson has authored a short story about a small town that continues with an old

tradition that entails selecting a person killed by the rest of the townspeople. The lottery

symbolizes the blind adherence to a tradition whose roots are not known even by the oldest man

in the small town. Also, the black box shows that the practice does not have a designated place in

the society, which is symbolized by the lack of reverence of the box. There is a lack of a

designated place for storing the box.

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
But then with these details in mind, how does that connect back to/work under your previous point?

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
Yes, but why need to include this? If it’s a key detail to your analysis, show us why it’s important

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
Getting repetitive here

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
Not 2 full pages

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
Very abrupt shift – work on that transition

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
Conclusion is very repetitive — see the Developing Essay #1 resources on Canvas to help with this section

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
And yet, they haven’t done the latter — why is that?

Katherine Marsh
39880000000001437
Okay yes – that specific quote indicating this sense of it always having been there and accepted (although on this note — that no one has objected to it — is not entirely true — consider the younger folks talking of other towns who’ve stopped doing it)

Surname 3

Works Cited

Jackson, Shirley. “The Lottery.” The Lottery and Other Stories. New York: Farrar, 1991.

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