Before the Play by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King [King, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Scene III: On the Night of the Grand Masquerade

Downstairs, upstairs, in corners and hallways, the party went on and on. The music was louder, the laughter was louder, the shrieks were louder and sounded less and less like cries of pleasure and amusement to Lewis Toner’s ears and more like cries of agony, the sound of death-throes. Perhaps they were. There was a monster in the hotel. As a matter of fact, a monster owned the hotel now. His name was Horace Derwent.

Lewis Toner, who had come to the ball as a dog (at Horace’s request, of course), reached the second floor and began to walk down the hall toward his room, his shoulders slumped inside the hot costume. The dog’s head, its muzzle set in a snarling rictus, was under arm.

He turned a corner and there was a couple entwined by one of the fire extinguisher hoses, one of the Derwent Enterprises secretaries - Patty? Sherry? Merry? - and one of Derwent’s bright young subalterns, a fellow named Norman something. At first he thought the girl was wearing a skin-tight ballerina’s leotard and then he realized it was skin - she was naked from the waist down. Norman was wearing some sort of Arabian nights thing, complete with slippers that came to upturned points. His little toothbrush moustache, grown in imitation of the boss, looked ridiculous in contrast.

Patty-Sherry-Merry giggled when she saw him and made no attempt to cover herself. She was openly caressing Norman. The thing was turning into an orgy.

“It’s Lewis,” she said. “Woof-woof, doggie.”

“Do a trick,” Norman said thickly, breathing scotch fumes into his face “Up, boy, up! Roll over! Shake hands.”

Lewis broke into a run, chased by their drunken laughter. You’ll find out, he thought. You’ll find out when he turns on you like he turned on me tonight.

At first he couldn’t get into his room because the door was locked and the key was in his pants pocket and his pants were under the dog costume and the costume’s zipper was in the back. He reached and clutched and got it started and finally managed to get it down, knowing that he must look to them grotesquely like a woman wriggling out of her evening dress, and at last the hot, wolly dog costume slipped off his shoulders and pooled around his feet. Behind him their laughter went on and on grinding and mechanical, reminding him of a date he had gone on with his first lover, a career sailor originally from San Diego. Ronnie his name had been, and he always had been called San Diego Dago. Just Dago. They had gone to a carnival, and there had been a funhouse, and to the left of the stage out front, under a huge canvas sign that said House of a Thousand Thrills, there had been a mechanical clown that laughed on and on the way they were laughing at him now as he fumbled his room key from his pocket, on and on

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