King, Stephen - Six Stories - Ltd. Ed. Collection Short Fiction

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SIX STORIES

STEPHEN KING

Published in a signed, limited edition of 1100 copies.

200 numbered in Roman numbers and 900 numbered in Arabic numbers.

This special limited edition is signed by author Stephen King.

This edition is limited to 1,100 copies.

This is copy IVIV

STEPHEN

KING

AUTOPSY ROOM FOUR

IT'S SO DARK THAT FOR A WHILE - JUST HOW LONG I

DON'T KNOW - I think I'm still unconscious. Then, slowly, it

comes to me that unconscious people don't have a sensation of

movement through the dark, accompanied by a faint, rhythmic

sound that can only be a squeaky wheel. And I can feel contact,

from the top of my head to the balls of my heels. I can smell

something that might be rubber or vinyl. This is not

unconsciousness, and there is something too ... too what? Too

rational about these sensations for it to be a dream.

Then what is it?

Who am I?

And what's happening to me?

The squeaky wheel quits its stupid rhythm and I stop moving.

There is a crackle around me from the rubbersmelling stuff.

A voice: "Which one did they say?"

A pause.

Second voice: "Four, I think. Yeah, four."

We start to move again, but more slowly. I can hear the faint scuff

of feet now, probably in soft-soled shoes, maybe sneakers. The

owners of the voices are the owners of the shoes. They stop me

again. There's a thump followed by a faint whoosh. It is, I think,

the sound of a door with a pneumatic hinge being opened.

What's going on here? I yell, but the yell is only in my head. My

lips don't move. I can feel them-and my tongue, lying on the floor

of my mouth like a stunned mole-but I can't move them.

The thing I'm on starts rolling again. A moving bed? Yes. A

gurney, in other words. I've had some experience with them, a long

time ago, in Lyndon Johnson's shitty little Asian adventure. It

comes to me that I'm in a hospital, that something bad has

happened to me, something like the explosion that almost neutered

me twenty-three years ago, and that I'm going to be operated on.

There are a lot of answers in that idea, sensible ones, for the most

part, but I don't hurt anywhere. Except for the minor matter of

being scared out of my wits, I feel fine. And if these are orderlies

wheeling me into an operating room, why can't I see? Why can't I

talk?

A third voice: "Over here, boys."

My rolling bed is pushed in a new direction, and the question

drumming in my head is What kind of a mess have I gotten myself

into?

Doesn't that depend on who you are? I ask myself, but that's one

thing, at least, I find I do know. I'm Howard Cottrell. I'm a stock

broker known to some of my colleagues as Howard the Conqueror.

Second voice (from just above my head): "You're looking very

pretty today, Doc."

Fourth voice (female, and cool): 'It's always nice to be validated by

you, Rusty. Could you hurry up a little? The baby-sitter expects me

back by seven. She's committed to dinner with her parents."

Back by seven, back by seven. It's still the afternoon, maybe, or

early evening, but black in here, black as your hat, black as a

woodchucks asshole, black as midnight in Persia, and what's going

on? Where have I been? What have I been doing? Why haven't I

been manning the phones?

Because it's Saturday, a voice from far down murmurs. You were

... were ...

A sound: WHOCK! A sound I love. A sound I more or less live

for. The sound of ... what? The head of a golf club, of course.

Hitting a ball off the tee. I stand, watching it fly off into the blue ...

I'm grabbed, shoulders and calves, and lifted. It startles me terribly,

and I try to scream. No sound comes out ... or perhaps one does, a

tiny squeak, much tinier than the one produced by the wheel below

me. Probably not even that. Probably it's just my imagination.

I'm swung through the air in an envelope of blacknessHey, don't

drop me, I've got a bad back! I try to say, and again there's no

movement of the lips or teeth; my tongue goes on lying on the

floor of my mouth, the mole maybe not just stunned but dead, and

now I have a terrible thought, one that spikes fright a degree closer

to panic: What if they put me down the wrong way and my tongue

slides backward and blocks my windpipe? I won't be able to

breathe! That's what people mean when they say someone

swallowed his tongue, isn't it?

Second voice (Rusty): "You'll like this one, Doc, he looks like

Michael Bolton."

Female doc: "Who's that?"

Third voice-sounds like a young man, not much more than a

teenager: "He's this white lounge singer who wants to be black. I

don't think this is him."

There's laughter at that, the female voice joining in (a little

doubtfully), and as I am set down on what feels like a padded

table, Rusty starts some new crack-he's got a whole standup

routine, it seems. I lose this bit of hilarity in a burst of sudden

horror. I won't be able to breathe if my tongue blocks my

windpipe, that's the thought that has just gone through my mind,

but what if I'm not breathing now?

What if I'm dead? What if this is what death is like?

It fits. It fits everything with a horrid prophylactic snugness. The

dark. The rubbery smell. Nowadays I am Howard the Conqueror,

stock broker extraordinaire, terror of Derry Municipal Country

Club, frequent habitue` of what is known at golf courses all over

the world as the Nineteenth Hole, but in '71 I was part of a medical

assistance team in the Mekong Delta, a scared kid who sometimes

woke up wet-eyed from dreams of the family dog, and all at once I

know this feel, this smell.

Dear God, I'm in a body bag.

First voice: "Want to sign this, Doc? Remember to bear down

hard-it's three copies."

Sound of a pen, scraping away on paper. I imagine the owner of

the first voice holding out a clipboard to the woman doctor.

Oh dear Jesus let me not be dead! I try to scream, and nothing

comes out.

I'm breathing, though ... aren't I? I mean, I can't feel myself doing

it, but my lungs seem okay, they're not throbbing or yelling for air

the way they do when you've swum too far underwater, so I must

be okay, right?

Except if you're dead, the deep voice murmurs, they wouldn't be

crying out for air, would they? No-because dead lungs don't need

to breathe. Dead lungs can just kind of... take it easy.

Rusty: "What are you doing next Saturday night, Doc?"

But if I'm dead, how can I feel? How can I smell the bag I'm in?

How can I hear these voices, the Doc now saying that next

Saturday night she's going to be shampooing her dog, which is

named Rusty, what a coincidence, and all of them laughing? If I'm

dead, why aren't I either gone or in the white light they're always -

talking about on Oprah?

There's a harsh ripping sound and all at once I am in white light; it

is blinding, like the sun breaking through a scrim of clouds on a

winter day. I try to squint my eyes shut against it, but nothing

happens. My eyelids are like blinds on broken rollers.

A face bends over me, blocking off part of the glare, which comes

not from some dazzling astral plane but from a bank of overhead

fluorescents. The face belongs to a young, conventionally

handsome man of about twenty-five; he looks like one of those

beach beefcakes on Baywatch or Melrose Place. Marginally

smarter, though. He's got a lot of black hair under a carelessly

worn surgical greens cap. He's wearing the tunic, too. His eyes are

cobalt blue, the sort of eyes girls reputedly die for. There are dusty

arcs of freckles high up on his cheekbones.

"Hey, gosh," he says. It's the third voice. "This guy does look like

Michael Bolton! A little long in the old tootharoo, maybe . . ." He

leans closer. One of the flat tie-ribbons at the neck of his green

tunic tickles against my forehead. "But yeah. I see it. Hey,

Michael, sing something."

Help me! is what I'm trying to sing, but I can only look up into his

dark blue eyes with my frozen dead man's stare; I can only wonder

if I am a dead man, if this is how it happens, if this is what

everyone goes through after the pump quits. If I'm still alive, how

come he hasn't seen my pupils contract when the light hit them?

But I know the answer to that ... or I think I do. They didn't

contract. That's why the glare from the fluorescents is so painful.

The tie, tickling across my forehead like a feather.

Help me! I scream up at the Baywatch beefcake, who is probably

an intern or maybe just a med school brat. Help me, please!

My lips don't even quiver.

The face moves back, the tie stops tickling, and all that white light

streams through my helpless-to-look-away eyes and into my brain.

It's a hellish feeling, a kind of rape. I'll go blind if I have to stare

into it for long, I think, and blindness will be a relief.

WHOCK! The sound of the driver hitting the ball, but a little flat

this time, and the feeling in the hands is bad. The ball's up ... but

veering ... veering off ... veering toward ...

Shit.

I'm in the rough.

Now another face bends into my field of vision. A white tunic

instead of a green one below it, a great untidy mop of orange hair

above it. Distress-sale IQ is my first impression. It can only be

Rusty. He's wearing a big dumb grin that I think of as a high-

school grin, the grin of a kid who should have a tattoo reading

"Born to Snap Bra Straps" on one wasted bicep.

"Michael!" Rusty exclaims. "Jeez, ya lookin' gooood! This'z an

honor! Sing for us, big boy! Sing your deadassoff!"

From somewhere behind me comes the doc's voice, cool, no longer

even pretending to be amused by these antics. "Quit it, Rusty."

Then, in a slightly new direction: "What's the story, Mike?'

Mike's voice is the first voice-Rusty's partner. He sounds slightly

embarrassed to be working with a guy who wants to be Bobcat

Goldthwait when he grows up. "Found him on the fourteenth hole

at Derry Muni. Off the course, actually, in the rough. If he hadn't

just played through the foursome behind him, and if they hadn't

seen one of his legs stickin' out of the puckerbrush, he'd be an ant

farm by now."

I hear that sound in my head again- WHOM-only this time it is

followed by another, far less pleasant sound: the rustle of

underbrush as I sweep it with the head of my driver. It would have

to be fourteen, where there is reputedly poison ivy. Poison ivy and

...

Rusty is still peering down at me, stupid and avid. It's not death

that interests him; it's my resemblance to Michael Bolton. Oh yes, I

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SIXSTORIESSTEPHENKING©1997PhiltrumPressPublishedinasigned,limitededitionof1100copies.200numberedinRomannumbersand900numberedinArabicnumbers.ThisspeciallimitededitionissignedbyauthorStephenKing.Thiseditionislimitedto1,100copies.ThisiscopyIVIVSTEPHENKINGAUTOPSYROOMFOURIT'SSODARKTHATFORAWHILE-JUSTHOWLO...

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King, Stephen - Six Stories - Ltd. Ed. Collection Short Fiction

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