Cell: A Novel by Stephen King Read Free Book Online

the door. When Tom reached for the handle, the bald clerk held his hand up much as Clay had held his up to the bloodstained girl behind them. The clerk found a second key, used this one in another lock, and opened the door.
    “Come in,” he said. “Hurry.” Then he saw the girl, lingering at a little distance and watching. “Not her.”
    “Yes, her,” Clay said. “Come on, honey.” But she wouldn’t, and when Clay took a step toward her, she whirled and took off running, the skirt of her dress flying out behind her.
     
    8
    “She could die out there,” Clay said.
    “Not my problem,” the desk clerk said. “Are you coming in or not, Mr. Riddle?” He had a Boston accent, not the blue-collar-Southie kind Clay was most familiar with from Maine, where it seemed that every third person you met was a Massachusetts expat, but the fussy I-wish-I-were-British one.
    “It’s Riddell.” He was coming in all right, no way this guy was going to keep him out now that the door was open, but he lingered a moment longer on the sidewalk, looking after the girl.
    “Go on,” Tom said quietly. “Nothing to be done.”
    And he was right. Nothing to be done. That was the exact hell of it. He followed Tom in, and the desk clerk once more double-locked the doors of the Atlantic Avenue Inn behind them, as if that were all it would take to keep them from the chaos of the streets.
     
    9
    “That was Franklin,” said the desk clerk as he led the way around the uniformed man lying facedown on the floor.
    He looks too old to be a bellhop, Tom had said, peering in through the window, and Clay thought he certainly did. He was a small man, with a lot of luxuriant white hair. Unfortunately for him, the head on which it was probably still growing (hair and nails were slow in getting the word, or so he had read somewhere) was cocked at a terrible crooked angle, like the head of a hanged man. “He’d been with the Inn for thirty-five years, as I’m sure he told every guest he ever checked in. Most of them twice.”
    That tight little accent grated on Clay’s frayed nerves. He thought that if it had been a fart, it would have been the kind that comes out sounding like a party-horn blown by a kid with asthma.
    “A man came out of the elevator,” the desk clerk said, once more using the pass-through to get behind the desk. Back there was apparently where he felt at home. The overhead light struck his face and Clay saw he was very pale. “One of the crazy ones. Franklin had the bad luck to be standing right there in front of the doors—”
    “I don’t suppose it crossed your mind to at least take the damn picture off his ass,” Clay said. He bent down, picked up the Currier & Ives print, and put it on the couch. At the same time, he brushed the dead bellman’s foot off the cushion where it had come to rest. It fell with a sound Clay knew very well. He had rendered it in a great many comic books as CLUMP .
    “The man from the elevator only hit him with one punch,” the desk clerk said. “It knocked poor Franklin all the way against the wall. I think it broke his neck. In any case, that was what dislodged the picture, Franklin striking the wall.”
    In the desk clerk’s mind, this seemed to justify everything.
    “What about the man who hit him?” Tom asked. “The crazy guy? Where’d he go?”
    “Out,” the desk clerk said. “That was when I felt locking the door to be by far the wisest course. After he went out.” He looked at them with a combination of fear and prurient, gossipy greed that Clay found singularly distasteful. “What’s happening out there? How bad has it gotten?”
    “I think you must have a pretty good idea,” Clay said. “Isn’t that why you locked the door?”
    “Yes, but—”
    “What are they saying on TV?” Tom asked.
    “Nothing. The cable’s been out—” He glanced at his watch. “For almost half an hour now.”
    “What about the radio?”
    The desk clerk gave Tom a prissy