Uncollected Stories 2003 by Stephen King Read Free Book Online

Wharton asked tightly
"The East Room is bad luck," Reynard said. "Some people might even
say it's cursed.”
"Now listen," Wharton said, his ill temper and unlaid grief building up
like steam in a teakettle, "I'm not going to be put off, Reynard. Every
word that comes out of your mouth makes me more determined to see
that room. Now are you going to agree to it or do I have to go down to
that village and ... ?"
"Please." Something in the quiet hopelessness of the word made
Wharton look up. Reynard looked directly into his eyes for the first time
and they were haunted, haggard eyes. "Please, Mr. Wharton. Take my
word that your sister died naturally and go away. I don't want to see you
die!" His voice rose to a wail. "I didn't want to see anybody die!"
Wharton felt a quiet chill steal over him. His gaze skipped from the
grinning fireplace gargoyle to the dusty, empty-eyed bust of Cicero in
the corner to the strange wainscoting carvings. And a voice came from
within him: Go away from here . A thousand living yet insentient eyes
seemed to stare at him from the darkness, and again the voice spoke...
"Go away from here."
Only this time it was Reynard.
"Go away from here," he repeated. "Your sister is beyond caring and
beyond revenge. I give you my word...”
"Damn your word!" Wharton said harshly. "I'm going down to the
sheriff, Reynard. And if the sheriff won't help me, I'll go to the county
commissioner. And if the county commissioner won't help me...”
"Very well." The words were like the faraway tolling of a churchyard
bell.
"Come."
Reynard led the way into the hall, down past the kitchen, the empty
dining room with the chandelier catching and reflecting the last light of
day, past the pantry, toward the blind plaster of the corridor's end.
This is it , he thought, and suddenly there was a strange crawling in the
pit of his stomach.
"I..." he began involuntarily.
"What?" Reynard asked, hope glittering in his eyes.
"Nothing."
They stopped at the end of the hall, stopped in the twilight gloom.
There seemed to be no electric light. On the floor Wharton could see the
still-damp plasterer’s trowel Reynard had used to wall up the doorway,
and a straggling remnant of Poe’s “Black Cat” clanged through his
mind: “I had walled the monster up within the tomb…”
Reynard handed the trowel to him blindly. "Do whatever you have to
do, Wharton. I won't be party to it. I wash my hands of it.”
Wharton watched him move off down the hall with misgivings, his
hand opening and closing on the handle of the trowel. The faces of the
Little-boy weathervane, the fire-dog gargoyle, the wizened housemaid
all seemed to mix and mingle before him, all grinning at something he
could not understand. Go away from here...
With a sudden bitter curse he attacked the wall, hacking into the soft,
new plaster until the trowel scraped across the door of the East Room.
He dug away plaster until he could reach the doorknob. He twisted, then
yanked on it until the veins stood out in his temples .
The plaster cracked, schismed, and finally split. The door swung
ponderously open, shedding plaster like a dead skin.
Wharton stared into the shimmering quicksilver pool.
It seemed to glow with a light of its own in the darkness, ethereal and
fairy-like. Wharton stepped in, half-expecting to sink into warm, pliant
fluid.
But the floor was solid.
His own reflection hung suspended below him, attached only by the
feet, seeming to stand on its head in thin air. It made him dizzy just to
look at it.
Slowly his gaze shifted around the room. The ladder was still there,
stretching up into the glimmering depths of the mirror. The room was
high, he saw. High enough for a fall to he winced – to kill.
It was ringed with empty bookcases, all seeming to lean over him on
the very threshold of imbalance. They added to the room's strange,
distorting effect.
He went over to the ladder and stared down at the feet. They were
rubbershod, as