Desperation (1996) by King Stephen

Author:King, Stephen [Stephen, King,]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-12-19T00:42:13.781000+00:00

PART III

THE AMERICAN WEST: LEGENDARY SHADOWS

Holy shit! Steve said. This is amazing.

Fucking weird is what it is, Cynthia replied, then looked around to see if she had offended the old man. Billingsley was nowhere in sight.

Young lady, Johnny said. Weird is the mosh pit, the only invention for which your generation can so far take - credit. This is not weird. This is rather nice, iii fact.

Weird, Cynthia repeated, but she was smiling. Johnny guessed that The American West had been built in the decade following World War II, when movie the-aters were no longer the overblown Xanadus they had been in the twenties and thirties, but long before mailing and multiplexing turned them into . Dolby-equipped shoe-boxes. Billingsley had turned on the pinspots above the - screen and those in what once would have been called the orchestra-pit, and Johnny had no trouble seeing the place. The auditorium was big but bland. There were vaguely art-deco electric wall-sconces, but no other grace-notes. -

Most of the seats were still in place, but the red plush was faded and threadbare and smelled powerfully of mildew. The screen was a huge white rectangle upon which Rock Hudson had once clinched with Doris Day, across which - Charlton Heston had once matched chariots with Stephen Boyd. It had to be at least forty feet long and twenty feet high; from where Johnny stood, it looked the size of a drive-in screen.

There was a stage area in front of the screen-a kind of architectural holdover, Johnny assumed, since vaudeville must have been dead by the time this place was built. Had u it ever been used? He supposed so; for political speeches, or high school graduations, maybe for the final round of the Cowshit County Spelling Bee. Whatever purposes it had served in the past, surely none of the people who had attended those quaint country ceremonies could have pre-dicted this stage's final function.

He glanced around, a little worried about Billingsley now, and saw the old man coming down the short, narrow corridor which led from the bathrooms to the backstage area, where the rest of them were clustered. Old fella 's got a bottle stashed, he went back for a quick snort, that's all, Johnny thought, but he couldn't smell fresh booze on the old guy when he brushed past, and that was a smell he never missed now that he had quit drinking himself.

They followed Billingsley out onto the stage, the group of people Johnny was coming to think of (and not entirely without affection) as The Collie Entragian Survival Society, their feet clumping and echoing, their shadows long and pallid in the orchestra sidelights.

Billingsley had turned these on from a box in the electrical closet by the stage-left entrance. Above the tatty red plush seats, the weak light petered out in a hurry and there was only dark-ness ascending to some unseen height. Above that-and on all sides as well the desert wind howled. It was a sound that cooled Johnny's blood.

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