Stephen King's N. by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King [King, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BluA
Amazon: B00AWR04BG
Publisher: Marvel
Published: 2012-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

[He says something under his breath that I don’t catch. I ask him to repeat, but he shakes his head.]

Hand me your pad, Doc. I’ll write it. If what I’m telling you is true and not just in my fucked-up head, it’s not safe to say the name aloud.

[He prints CTHUN in large capital letters. He shows it to me, and when I nod, he tears the sheet to shreds, counts the shreds—to make sure the number is even, I suppose—and then deposits them in the wastebasket near the couch.]

The key, the one I got in the mail, was in my home safe. I got it out and drove back to Motton—over the bridge, past the cemetery, up that damned dirt track. I didn’t think about it, because it wasn’t the sort of decision you have to consider. It would be like sitting down to consider whether or not you should put out the drapes in your living room if you came in and saw them on fire. No—I just went.

But I took my camera. You better believe that.

My nightmare woke me at five or so, and it was still early morning when I got to Ackerman’s Field. The Androscoggin was beautiful—it looked like a long silver mirror instead of a snake, with fine tendrils of mist rising from its surface and then spreading above it in a, I don’t know, temperature inversion, or something. That spreading cloud exactly mimicked the river’s bends and turns, so it looked like a ghost-river in the sky.

The hay was growing up in the field again, and most of the sumac bushes were turning green, but I saw a scary thing. And no matter how much of this other stuff is in my head (and I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge it might be), this was real. I’ve got pictures that show it. They’re foggy, but in a couple you can see the mutations in the sumac bushes closest to the stones. The leaves are black instead of green, and the branches are twisted they seem to make letters, and the letters seem to spell you know its name.

[He gestures to the wastebasket where the shreds of paper lie.]

The darkness was back inside the stones—there were only seven, of course, that’s why I’d been drawn out there—but I saw no eyes. Thank God, I was still in time. There was just the darkness, turning and turning, seeming to mock the beauty of that silent spring morning, seeming to exult in the fragility of our world. I could see the Androscoggin through it, but the darkness—it was almost Biblical, a pillar of smoke—turned the river to a filthy gray smear.

I raised my camera—I had the strap around my neck, so even if I dropped it, it wouldn’t fall into the clutch of the hay—and looked through the viewfinder. Eight stones. I lowered it and there were seven again. Looked through the viewfinder and saw eight. The second time I lowered the camera, it stayed eight. But that wasn’t enough, and I knew it.

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