Stephen King - Skeleton Crew (1985)

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The Mist

by Stephen King

I. The Coming of the Storm.

This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New

England history finally broke-the night of July 19-the entire western Maine region was

lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.

We lived on Long Lake, and we saw the first of the storms beating its way across

the water toward us just before dark. For an hour before, the air had been utterly still. The

American flag that my father put up on our boathouse in 1936 lay limp against its pole.

Not even its hem fluttered. The heat was like a solid thing, and it seemed as deep as

sullen quarry-water. That afternoon the three of us had gone swimming, but the water

was no relief unless you went out deep. Neither Steffy nor I wanted to go deep because

Billy couldn't. Billy is five.

We ate a cold supper at five-thirty, picking listlessly at ham sandwiches and

potato salad out on the deck that faces the lake. Nobody seemed to want anything but

Pepsi, which was in a steel bucket of ice cubes.

After supper Billy went out back to play on his monkey bars for a while. Steff and

I sat without talking much, smoking and looking across the sullen flat mirror of the lake

to Harrison on the far side. A few powerboats droned back and forth. The evergreens

over there looked dusty and beaten. In the west, great purple thunderheads were slowly

building up, massing like an army. Lightning flashed inside them. Next door, Brent

Norton's radio, tuned to that classical-music station that broadcasts from the top of Mount

Washington, sent out a loud bray of static each time the lightning flashed. Norton was a

lawyer from

New Jersey and his place on Long Lake was only a summer cottage with no

furnace or insulation. Two years before, we had a boundary dispute that finally wound up

in county court. I won. Norton claimed I won because he was an out-of-towner. There

was no love lost between us.

Steff sighed and fanned the top of her breasts with the edge of her -halter. I

doubted if it cooled her off much but it improved the view a lot.

" I don't want to scare you," I said, "but there's a bad storm on the way, I think."

She looked at me doubtfully. "There were thunderheads last night and the night

before, David. They just broke up."

"They won't do that tonight."

"No?"

"If it gets bad enough, we're going to go downstairs."

"How bad do you think it can get?"

My dad was the first to build a year-round home on this side of the lake. When he

was hardly more than a kid he and his brothers put up a summer place where the house

now stood, and in 1938 a summer storm knocked it flat, stone walls and all. Only the

boathouse escaped. A year later he started the big house. it's the trees that do the damage

in a bad blow. They get old, and the wind knocks them over. It's mother nature's way of

cleaning house periodically.

"I don't really know," I said, truthfully enough. I had only heard stories about the

great storm of thirty-eight. "But the wind can come off the lake like an express train."

Billy came back a while later, complaining that the monkey bars were no fun

because he was "all sweated up." I ruffled his hair and gave him another Pepsi. More

work for the dentist.

The thunderheads were getting closer, pushing away the blue. There was no doubt

now that a storm was coming. Norton had turned off his radio. Billy sat between his

mother and me, watching the sky, fascinated. Thunder boomed, rolling slowly across the

lake and then echoing back again. The clouds twisted and rolled, now black, now purple,

now veined, now black again. They gradually overspread the lake, and I could see a

delicate caul of rain extending down from them. It was still a distance away. As we

watched, it was probably raining on Bolster's Mills, or maybe even Norway.

The air began to move, jerkily at first, lifting the flag and then dropping it again. it

began to freshen and grew steady, first cooling the perspiration on our bodies and then

seeming to freeze it.

That was when I saw the silver veil rolling across the lake. it blotted out Harrison

in seconds and then came straight at us. The powerboats had vacated the scene.

Billy stood up from his chair, which was a miniature replica of our director's

chairs, complete with his name printed on the back. "Daddy! Look!"

"Let's go in," I said. I stood up and put my arm around his shoulders.

"But do you see it? Dad, what is it?"

"A water-cyclone. Let's go in."

Steff threw a quick, startled glance at my face and then said, "Come on, Billy. Do

what your father says."

We went in through the sliding glass doors that give on the living room. I slid the

door shut on its track and paused for another look out. The silver veil was three-quarters

of the way across the lake. It had resolved itself into a crazily spinning teacup between

the lowering black sky and the surface of the water, which had gone the color of lead

streaked with white chrome. The lake had begun to look eerily like the ocean, with high

waves rolling in and sending spume up from the docks and breakwaters. Out in the

middle, big whitecaps were tossing their heads back and forth.

Watching the water-cyclone was hypnotic. It was nearly on top of us when

lightning flashed so brightly that it printed everything on my eyes in negative for thirty

seconds afterward. The telephone gave out a startled ting! and I turned to see my wife

and son standing directly in front of the big-picture window that gives us a panoramic

view of the lake to the northwest.

One of those terrible visions came to me-I think they are reserved exclusively for

husbands and fathers-of the picture window blowing in with a low hard coughing sound

and sending jagged arrows of glass into my wife's bare stomach, into my boy's face and

neck. The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can

imagine for your loved ones.

I grabbed them both hard and jerked them away. "What the hell are you doing?

Get away from there!"

Steff gave me a startled glance. Billy only looked at me as if he had been partially

awakened from a deep dream. I led them into the kitchen and hit the light switch. The

phone ting-a-linged again.

Then the wind came. It was as if the house had taken off like a 747. It was a high,

breathless whistling, sometimes deepening to a bass roar before glissading up to a

whooping scream.

"Go downstairs," I told Steff, and now I had to shout to make myself heard.

Directly over the house thunder whacked mammoth planks together and Billy shrank

against my leg.

"You come too!" Steff yelled back.

I nodded and made shooing gestures. I had to pry Billy off my leg. "Go with your

mother. I want to get some candles in case the lights go off."

He went with her, and I started opening cabinets. Candles are funny things, you

know. You lay them by every spring, knowing that a summer storm may knock out the

power. And when the time tomes, they hide.

I was pawing through the fourth cabinet, past the half-ounce of grass that Steff

and I bought four years ago and had still not smoked much of, past Billy's wind-up set of

chattering teeth from the Auburn Novelty Shop, past the drifts of photos Steffy kept

forgetting to glue in our album. I looked under a Sears catalogue and behind a Kewpie

doll from Taiwan that I had won at the Fryeburg Fair knocking over wooden milk bottles

with tennis balls.

I found the candles behind the Kewpie doll with its glazed dead man's eyes. They

were still wrapped in their cellophane. As my hand closed around them the lights went

out and the only electricity was the stuff in the sky. The dining room was lit in a series of

shutter-flashes that were white and purple. Downstairs I heard Billy start to cry and the

low murmur of Steff soothing him.

I had to have one more look at the storm.

The water-cyclone had either passed us or broken up when it reached the

shoreline, but I still couldn't see twenty yards out onto the lake. The water was in

complete turmoil. I saw someone's dock-the Jassers', maybe-hurry by with its main

supports alternately turned up to the sky and buried in the churning water.

I went downstairs. Billy ran to me and clung to my legs. I lifted him up and gave

him a hug. Then I lit the candies. We sat in the guest room down the hall from my little

studio and looked at each other's faces in the flickering yellow glow and listened to the

storm roar and bash at our house. About twenty minutes later we heard a ripping, rending

crash as one of the big pines went down nearby. Then there was a lull.

"Is it over?" Steff asked.

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe only for a while.

We went upstairs, each of us carrying a candle, like monks going to vespers. Billy

carried his proudly and carefully. Carrying a candle, carrying the fire, was a very big deal

for him. it helped him forget about being afraid.

It was too dark to see what damage had been done around the house. It was past

Billy's bedtime, but neither of us suggested putting him in. We sat in the living room,

listened to the wind, and looked at the lightning.

About an hour later it began to crank up again. For three weeks the temperature

had been over ninety, and on six of those twenty-one days the National Weather Service

station at the Portland Jetport had reported temperatures of over one hundred degrees.

Queer weather. Coupled with the grueling winter we had come through and the late

spring, some people had dragged out that old chestnut about the long-range results of the

fifties A-bomb tests again. That, and of course, the end of the world. The oldest chestnut

of them all.

The second squall wasn't so hard, but we heard the crash of several trees

weakened by the first onslaught. As the wind began to die down again, one thudded

heavily on the roof, like a fist dropped on a coffin lid. Billy jumped and looked

apprehensively upward.

"It'll hold, champ," I said.

Billy smiled nervously.

Around ten o'clock the last squall came. It was bad. The wind howled almost as

loudly as it had the first time, and lightning seemed to be flashing all around us. More

trees fell, and there was a splintering crash down by the water that made Steff utter a low

cry. Billy had gone to sleep on her lap.

"David, what was that?"

"I think it was the boathouse."

"Oh. Oh, Jesus."

"Steffy, I want us to go downstairs again." I took Billy in my arms and stood up

with him. Steffs eyes were big and frightened.

"David, are we going to be all right

"Yes."

"Really?"

"Yes."

We went downstairs. Ten minutes later, as the final squall peaked, there was a

splintering crash from upstairs-the picture window. So maybe my vision earlier hadn't

been so crazy after all. Steff, who had been dozing, woke up with a little shriek, and Billy

stirred uneasily in the guest bed.

"The rain will come in," she said. "It'll ruin the furniture."

"If it does, it does. It's insured."

"That doesn't make it any better," she said in an upset, scolding voice. "Your

mother's dresser... our new sofa.... the color TV..."

"Shhh," I said. "Go to sleep."

"I can't," she said, and five minutes later she had.

I stayed awake for another half hour with one lit candle for company, listening to

the thunder walk and talk outside. I had a feeling that there were going to be a lot of

people from the lakefront communities calling their insurance agents in the morning, a lot

of chainsaws burring as cottage owners cut up the trees that had fallen on their roofs and

battered through their windows, and a lot of orange CMP trucks on the road.

The storm was fading now, with no sign of a new squall coming in. I went back

upstairs, leaving Steff and Billy on the bed, and looked into the living room. The sliding

glass door had held. But where the picture window had been there was now a jagged hole

stuffed with birch leaves. It was the top of the old tree that had stood by our outside

basement access for as long as I could remember. Looking at its top, now visiting in our

living room, I could understand what Steff had meant by saying insurance didn't make it

any better. I had loved that tree. It had been a hard campaigner of many winters, the one

tree on the lakeside of the house that was exempt from my own chainsaw. Big chunks of

glass on the rug reflected my candle-flame over and over. I reminded myself to warn

Steff and Billy. They would want to wear their slippers in here. Both of them liked to

slop around barefoot in the morning.

I went downstairs again. All three of us slept together in the guest bed, Billy

between Steff and me. I had a dream that I saw God walking across Harrison on the far

side of the lake, a God so gigantic that above his waist He was lost in a clear blue sky. In

the dream I could hear the rending crack and splinter of breaking trees as God stamped

the woods into the shape of His footsteps. He was circling the lake, coming toward the

Bridgton side, toward us, and all the houses and cottages and summer places were

bursting into purple-white flame like lightning, and soon the smoke covered everything.

The smoke covered everything like a Mist.

II. After the Storm. Norton.

A Trip to Town.

"Jeee-pers," Billy said.

He was standing by the fence that separates our property from Norton's and

looking down our driveway. The driveway runs a quarter of a mile to a camp road which,

in its turn, runs about three-quarters of mile to a stretch of two-lane blacktop, called

Kansas Road. From Kansas Road you can go anywhere you want, as long as it's

Bridgton.

I saw what Billy was looking at and my heart went cold.

"Don't go any closer, champ. Right there is close enough."

Billy didn't argue.

The morning was bright and as clear as a bell. The sky, which had been a mushy,

hazy color during the heat wave, had regained a deep, crisp blue that was nearly

autumnal. There was a light breeze, making cheerful sun-dapples move back and forth in

the driveway. Not far from where Billy was standing there was a steady hissing noise,

and in the grass there was what you might at first have taken for a writhing bundle of

snakes. The power lines leading to our house had fallen in an untidy tangle about twenty

feet away and lay in a burned patch of grass. They were twisting lazily and spitting. if the

trees and grass hadn't been so completely damped down by the torrential rains, the house

might have gone up. As it was, there was only that black patch where the wires had

touched directly.

"Could that lectercute a person, Daddy?"

"Yeah. it could."

"What are we going to do about it?"

"Nothing. Wait for the CMP."

"When will they come?"

"I don't know." Five-year-olds have as many questions as Hallmark has cards. "I

imagine they're pretty busy this morning. Want to take a walk up to the end of the

driveway with me?"

He started to come and then stopped, eyeing the wires nervously. One of them

humped up and turned over lazily, as if beckoning.

"Daddy, can lectricity shoot through the ground?"

A fair question. "Yes, but don't worry. Electricity wants the ground, not you,

Billy. You'll be all right if you stay away from the wires."

"Wants the ground," he muttered, and then came to me. We walked up the

driveway holding hands.

It was worse than I had imagined. Trees had fallen across the drive in four

different places, one of them small, two of them middling, and one old baby that must

have been five feet through the middle. Moss was crusted onto it like a moldy corset.

Branches, some half-stripped of their leaves, lay everywhere in jackstraw

profusion. Billy and I walked up to the camp road, tossing the smaller branches off into

the woods on either side. it reminded me of a summer's day that had been maybe twenty-

five years before; I couldn't have been much older than Billy was now. All my uncles had

been here, and they had spent the day in the woods with axes and hatchets and Darcy

poles, cutting brush. Later that afternoon they had all sat down to the trestle picnic table

my dad and mom used to have and there had been a monster meal of hot dogs and

hamburgers and potato salad. The 'Gansett beer had flowed like water and my uncle

Reuben took a dive into the lake with all his clothes on, even his deck-shoes. In those

days there were still deer in these woods.

"Daddy, can I go down to the lake?"

He was tired of throwing branches, and the thing to do with a little boy when he's

tired is to let him go do something else. "Sure."

We walked back to the house together and then Billy cut right, going around the

house and giving the downed wires a large berth. I went left, into the garage, to get my

McCullough. As I had suspected, I could already hear the unpleasant song of the

chainsaw up and down the lake.

I topped up the tank, took off my shirt, and was starting back up the driveway

when Steff came out. She eyed the downed trees lying across the driveway nervously.

"How bad is it?"

"I can cut it up. How bad is it in there?"

"Well, I got the glass cleaned up, but you're going to have to do something about

that tree, David. We can't have a tree in the living room."

“No," I said. "I guess we can't."

We looked at each other in the morning sunlight and got giggling. I set the

McCullough down on the cement areaway, and kissed her, holding her buttocks firmly.

"Don't," she murmured. "Billy's --”

He came tearing around the corner of the house just then. "Dad! Daddy! Y'oughta

see the "

Steffy saw the live wires and screamed for him to watch out. Billy, who was a

good distance away from them, pulled up short and stared at his mother as if she had

gone mad.

"I'm okay, Mom," he said in the careful tone of voice you use to placate the very

old and senile. He walked towards us, showing us how all right he was, and Steff began

to tremble in my arms.

"It's all right," I said in her ear. "He knows about them."

"Yes, but people get killed," she said. "They have ads all the time on television

about live wires, people get-Billy, I want you to come in the house right now!"

"Aw, come on, Mom! I wanna show Dad the boathouse!" He was almost bug-

eyed with excitement and disappointment. He had gotten a taste of post-storm apocalypse

and wanted to share it.

"You go in right now! Those wires are dangerous and --”

"Dad said they want the ground, not me --”

"Billy, don't you argue with me!"

"I'll come down and look, champ. Go on down yourself." I could feel Steff

tensing against me. "Go around the other side, kiddo."

"Yeah! Okay!"

He tore past us, taking the stone steps that led around the west end of the house

two by two. He disappeared with his shirttail flying, trailing back one word -- "Wow!" --

as he spotted some other piece of destruction.

"He knows about the wires, Steffy." I took her gently by the shoulders. "He's

scared of them. That's good. it makes him safe."

One tear tracked down her cheek. "David, I'm scared."

"Come on! It's over."

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摘要：

TheMistbyStephenKingI.TheComingoftheStorm.Thisiswhathappened.OnthenightthattheworstheatwaveinnorthernNewEnglandhistoryfinallybroke-thenightofJuly19-theentirewesternMaineregionwaslashedwiththemostviciousthunderstormsIhaveeverseen.WelivedonLongLake,andwesawthefirstofthestormsbeatingitswayacrossthewate...

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Stephen King - Skeleton Crew (1985)

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