Page 62 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

Meeting the boy today had been a good thing, or so he hoped.

He’d never been a gregarious man, but these days he talked to anyone he saw.

Had to; he didn’t expect to live through the coming winter.

The Jenny Haniver he carried was one of many his father had left behind, mostly his own handiwork, but a few he’d collected in various strange ports through the years.

Yes, old Daddy Mole had definitely found some strange ports.

He snickered a little. A burbling sound came from the aquarium, rather like a pigeon’s coo, but more liquid.

“Yeah, yeah, keep your hair on. Not that you’ve got any.”

He snickered again, walked across the single big room, and gazed into the tank.

She appeared wide-awake, her four huge eyes glowing faintly.

A rippling movement thrust her body up at him.

Mole slipped his hand into the aquarium’s warm water.

She rose against him, and he used two fingers to gently part the slippery petals that comprised most of her body.

He probed deeper, slipped his fingers into the inner opening.

At its upper reaches was a small firm node that trembled against his touch, and it was this he used to satisfy her, stroking and rubbing it until her body blossomed like a time-lapse film of a flower.

He sighed. He had once found this exciting, but she wanted it every day and night, languished and appeared to be dying if she didn’t get it. She did not eat, did not appear to excrete; this was what she lived on.

He extinguished the lamp, got into the hammock where he slept, and lay gazing across at the aquarium. The moonlight streaming in through a high window was bright enough that he could still see her, a ruffled midnight-blue shape with gold spangles that seemed lit from within.

After his mother died, Seth had left their little rental house near the Oak Bluffs lagoon pond and set up housekeeping in what Vineyarders called the Campground, a circle of Victorian cottages at the heart of the town.

He had always wanted to live in one of these, and while the superflu had a lot of downsides, it had vastly improved the cost of living in his hometown.

The houses were built around a shady little park, their eaves dripping with gingerbread trim, variously painted peppermint pink and buttery yellow and seafoam green.

Seth had chosen a pale lavender one with raspberry-colored trim and a swing on its cozy porch.

Crucially, it was uninhabited when the superflu hit, as was the one to its right.

Seth had done the necessary maintenance to the house on the left: found the bodies (just two), bundled them up in their bedclothes, and hauled them down to the mass grave in Ocean Park.

There were bodies in some of the other cottages, but no one else was close enough for Seth to smell when he was at home.

He supposed he had gone a little nose-blind. Probably everyone who survived had.

A few days after meeting the old man, Seth woke up in a rank sweat, his sheets soaked.

Half-remembered dreams clouded his mind, and he realized that his throat was sore.

He lay in bed for twenty minutes, afraid to get up and check the mirror for the purplish-black smudges under the chin that were one of the earliest symptoms of the flu.

Finally, he dragged himself into the bathroom and looked.

The marks weren’t there, but the glands in his throat felt lumpy and swollen.

There were several bottles of AZT in the vanity drawer.

He took one out, considered it, then shook several of the blue-and-white capsules into his hand.

His stomach did a slow roll at the sight of them, and he had to stifle his gag reflex.

He knew exactly how they would make him feel, the headaches and drizzling shits, the somehow greasy waves of nausea.

Mermaid can keep you from getting sick , he heard Mole say, and smiled a little as he put the pills back in the drawer.

The previous owners of his cottage had a pretty good library, lots of fiction, lots of travel writing.

Seth had always enjoyed travel narratives, but found that he no longer did: it was too bleak picturing all those exotic destinations emptied by flu, or full of rotting bodies.

Fiction was still good, though. Sometimes he stopped by Bunch of Grapes, always reflecting that his employee discount was now one hundred percent.

These two sources provided him with plenty of reading, the only thing that made the nights bearable.

But the conversation with Mole had gotten him thinking about a book of his mother’s, an oversized collection of Japanese folk legends and supernatural creatures.

Some of the colorful illustrations had frightened and fascinated him as a child.

He would dare himself to look at them, knowing they guaranteed a sleepless night, but unable to resist their siren call.

He particularly remembered the chōchin’obake , a thing like a torn-open paper lantern with mournful, red-rimmed eyes and a long hanging tongue.

Hadn’t there been some sort of mermaid, too?

He didn’t want to go to his parents’ house.

He was forbidden to go to his parents’ house, not by any authority but by his own fear.

He could handle coming across strangers’ bodies.

His mother’s body was a different matter.

His father had died in the island’s one hospital, but it had been overwhelmed by the time his mother got sick, and she had died at home.

When he left her there, tucked into her own bed, she had still been fresh. She wouldn’t be now.

Seth tried to quit thinking about the book.

It wasn’t as if he had nothing to do; he ought to go over to Katama and check on the few people still there.

They weren’t as old as the man from the beach, but they weren’t young, and he worried about them getting hurt or running out of food.

One man was still hauling lobster traps, making grilled lobster and lobster stew for the group.

It sounded like a luxurious diet, but Seth knew you could get tired of eating lobster, if lobster was all you had.

Instead of doing that, he drove to Vineyard Haven and spent the morning trolling aimlessly through the little shops on Main Street, picking things up—scented candles, glass figurines, shark T-shirts—and putting them down again. There was nothing he needed here.

He got back in the car and drove without a destination in mind.

The motion calmed him, as did the land itself, woodland drawing in close on the roadsides, then opening up to long green vistas.

The island was at its seductive best, the meadows sweet with Queen Anne’s lace, blazing yellow coreopsis, purple spikes of lupine.

He saw a family of wild turkeys crossing the road near the airport.

It still amazed him that such natural beauty could exist alongside the horrors of the past few months.

How could anyone stand to leave this world?

Well, all right , he thought as he pulled up in front of his parents’ house. He supposed some underneath-part of him had known he was coming here all along.

Approaching the house, he saw that he had left all the curtains drawn. Had he locked the front door, too? Yes, out of habit, but the key was still on his ring. He let the door swing open, but did not immediately step inside; he simply stood there, sampling the air, all his senses on alert.

Was there the faintest thread of decay, or was it his imagination?

He stepped into the small foyer and shut the door behind him. It felt like stepping into some parallel dimension, one he had never expected to visit again. The house was hot and silent.

The living room was straight ahead, furnished simply but comfortably, the tall built-in bookshelves the focus of the room.

Beyond that, the kitchen lay in shadow. On his left, a hallway led to a bathroom, his old room, and his parents’ bedroom.

The door of this last room was closed. If he were to walk to the end of the hall—not even twenty steps!

—and open that door, he would see his mother.

Seth was suddenly afraid that his legs would take him there of their own accord, that he would be unable to stop his hand from turning the doorknob and—

Yes, there was a smell, one that pressed against the back of the throat and curled slyly into the nostrils.

It was sour on top, but shot through with veins of sickly sweetness.

It was not his imagination, not food going bad in the kitchen, not any damn thing but his mother lying in bed rotting.

He swallowed hard and tried to slow his breathing. Why had he come here?

The book. He had to get the book and go. He shouldn’t be here; no one should be here. This was a house of the dead.

He went to one of the big bookshelves. After a minute of scanning spines, he saw the volume he wanted, a big hardcover with a red dust jacket.

The Old Legends of Japan: A Compendium of Spirits, Monsters, and Yūrei .

He remembered yūrei , ghosts that weren’t exactly evil, but could be dangerous.

For instance, if you left someone you loved to rot in bed because you were too much of a coward to bury them, they could return to the world as a yūrei and haunt you.

He took the book down and flipped through it.

A muffled thump came from the back of the house.