Stephen King's N. by Stephen King, Marc Guggenheim, Alex Maleev Read Free Book Online Page A

keeps driving at that thin place—and all the thin places of the world, I imagine. Sometimes I think there’s a whole chain of ruined universes behind that force, stretching back untold eons in time like monstrous footprints…
    [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. I knew what I had to do.
    Forcing myself to go down to that ring of stones was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The sound of the hay brushing against the cuffs of my pants was like a voice—low, harsh, protesting. Warning me to keep away. The air began to taste diseased. Full of cancer and things that are maybe even worse, germs that don’t exist in our world. My skin began to thrum, and I had an idea—truth is, I still have this idea—that if I stepped between two of those stones and into the circle, my flesh would liquefy and go dripping off my bones. I could hear the wind that sometimes blows out of there, turning in its own private cyclone. And I knew it was coming. The thing with the helmet-head.
    [He gestures again to the scraps in the wastebasket.]
    It was coming, and if I saw it this close up, it would drive me mad. I’d end my life inside that circle, taking pictures that would show nothing but clouds of gray. But something drove me onward. And when I got