You Like It Darker by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2024-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

ON SLIDE INN ROAD

Granpop’s dinosaur of a Buick creeps along the dirt road at twenty miles an hour. Frank Brown is driving with his eyes slitted and his mouth compressed to a fine white line. Corinne, his missus, is riding shotgun with her iPad open in her lap, and when Frank asks her if she’s sure this is right, she tells him everything is fine, steady as she goes, they’ll rejoin the main road in another six miles, eight at most, and from there it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to the turnpike. She doesn’t want to say that the blinking blue dot marking their location disappeared five minutes ago and the map is frozen in place. They’ve been married fourteen years and Corinne knows the mouth her husband is currently wearing. It means he’s close to blowing his stack.

In the spacious backseat, Billy Brown and Mary Brown sit flanking Granpop, who has his big old black shoes planted on either side of the driveshaft hump. Billy is eleven. Mary is nine. Granpop is seventy-five, a giant pain in the ass as far as his son is concerned, and too old to have such young grandchildren, but there it is.

When they set out from Falmouth to see Granpop’s dying sister up in Derry, Granpop talked nonstop, mostly about the zipper bag in the backseat. It contains Nan’s baseball souvenirs. Mad about baseball she was, he tells them. There are baseball cards that he says are worth a fortune (Frank Brown fucking doubts this), her college softball glove signed by Dom DiMaggio, and the prize of all prizes, a Louisville Slugger signed by Ted Williams. She won it in a Jimmy Fund charity raffle the year before the Splendid Splinter called it quits.

“Teddy Ballgame flew in Korea, you know,” Granpop tells the kids. “Bombed hell out of the gooks.”

“Not a word the children need to know,” Corinne said from the front seat—but without much thought of success. Her father-in-law grew up in a politically incorrect age, and he’s carried it with him. She also thought of asking him what a dying, semi-comatose octogenarian was supposed to do with a bat and glove, but kept still on that point, too. Donald Brown has never had much to say about his sister, good or bad, but he must feel something for her or he wouldn’t have insisted they make this trip. He insisted on his old Buick, too. Because it’s roomy, and because he said he knew a shortcut that might be a little rough. He’s right on both counts.

He also tucked a pile of his old comic books into the bag. “Reading material for the youngsters on the trip,” he said. Billy doesn’t give shit one for old comic books, he’s playing a game on his phone, but Mary got on her knees, unzipped Granpop’s bag, and grabbed a stack. Most are cruddy, but some are pretty good. In the one she’s reading now, Betty and Veronica are fighting over Archie, pulling each other’s hair and such.

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