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Authors: Stephen King

Insomnia

BOOK: Insomnia
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By Stephen King and published by
Hodder & Stoughton
FICTION
:
Carrie
’Salem’s Lot
The Shining
Night Shift
The Stand
The Dead Zone
Firestarter
Cujo
Different Seasons
Cycle of the Werewolf
Christine
The Talisman
(with Peter Straub)
Pet Sematary
It
Skeleton Crew
The Eyes of the Dragon
Misery
The Tommyknockers
The Dark Half
Four Past Midnight
Needful Things
Gerald’s Game
Dolores Claiborne
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
Insomnia
Rose Madder
Desperation
Bag of Bones
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Hearts in Atlantis
Dreamcatcher
Everything’s Eventual
From a Buick 8
Cell
Lisey’s Story
The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
Duma key
Just After Sunset
Under the Dome
Stephen King Goes to the Movies
By Stephen King as Richard Bachman
Thinner
The Running Man
The Bachman Books
The Regulators
Blaze
NON-FICTION
:
Danse Macabre
On Writing (A Memoir of the Craft)
Insomnia
 
 
Stephen King
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the
following copyrighted material:
‘White Rabbit’ lyrics and music by Grace Slick. © 1967 Irving Music, Inc. (BMI).
All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
‘The Pursuit’ from
Cemetery Nights
by Stephen Dobyns. Copyright © Stephen Dobyns, 1987.
By permission of the author and Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
‘You Can’t Sit Down’ by Delecta Clark, Cornell Muldrow, and Kal Mann. © 1960 (renewed),
1968 Conrad Music, a division of Arc Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
The Lord of the Rings
by J. R. R. Tolkien, Copyright © 1965 by J. R. R. Tolkien © renewed 1993 by Christopher R. Tolkien, John F. R. Tolkien, and Priscilla M. A. R. Tolkien.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co. and HarperCollins Publishers Limited.
All rights reserved.
‘Your Baby,’ words and music by P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri. © Copyright 1965 by MCA Music Publishing, a Division of MCA Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
‘Lantern’ by Michael McDernott © 1993 EMI Blackwood Music, Inc., and Wanted Mann Music. All rights reserved for Wanted Man Music controlled and administered by EMI Blackwood Music, Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission
Copyright © 1994 by Stephen King
First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette Livre UK company
The right of Stephen King to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data King, Stephen
Insomnia
I. Title
813.54[F]
Epub ISBN 978 1 84894 072 7
Book ISBN 978 0 340 95279 5
Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette Livre UK company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
CONTENTS
For Tabby . . . and for Al Kooper,
who knows the playing-field.
No fault of mine.
PROLOGUE
WINDING THE
DEATHWATCH (I)
Old age is an island surrounded by death.
Juan Montalvo
‘On Beauty’
1
No one – least of all Dr Litchfield – came right out and told Ralph Roberts that his wife was going to die, but there came a time when Ralph understood without needing to be told. The months between March and June were a jangling, screaming time inside his head – a time of conferences with doctors, of evening runs to the hospital with Carolyn, of trips to other hospitals in other states for special tests (Ralph spent much of his travel time on these trips thanking God for Carolyn’s Blue Cross/Major Medical coverage), of personal research in the Derry Public Library, at first looking for answers the specialists might have overlooked, later on just looking for hope and grasping at straws.
Those four months were like being dragged drunk through some malign carnival where the people on the rides were really screaming, the people lost in the mirror maze were really lost, and the denizens of Freak Alley looked at you with false smiles on their lips and terror in their eyes. Ralph began to see these things by the middle of May, and as June set in, he began to understand that the pitchmen along the medical midway had only quack remedies to sell, and the cheery quickstep of the calliope could no longer quite hide the fact that the tune spilling out of the loudspeakers was ‘The Funeral March’. It was a carnival, all right; the carnival of lost souls.
Ralph continued to deny these terrible images – and the even more terrible idea lurking behind them – all through the early summer of 1992, but as June gave way to July, this finally became impossible. The worst midsummer heatwave since 1971 rolled over central Maine, and Derry simmered in a bath of hazy sun, humidity, and daily temperatures in the mid-nineties. The city – hardly a bustling metropolis at the best of times – fell into a complete stupor, and it was in this hot silence that Ralph Roberts first heard the ticking of the deathwatch and understood that in the passage from June’s cool damp greens to the baked stillness of July, Carolyn’s slim chances had become no chances at all. She was going to die. Not this summer, probably – the doctors claimed to have quite a few tricks up their sleeves yet, and Ralph was sure they did – but this fall or this winter. His longtime companion, the only woman he had ever loved, was going to die. He tried to deny the idea, scolding himself for being a morbid old fool, but in the gasping silences of those long hot days, Ralph heard that ticking everywhere – it even seemed to be in the walls.
Yet it was loudest from within Carolyn herself, and when she turned her calm white face toward him – perhaps to ask him to turn on the radio so she could listen while she shelled some beans for their supper, or to ask him if he would go across to the Red Apple and get her an ice-cream on a stick – he would see that she heard it, too. He would see it in her dark eyes, at first only when she was straight, but later even when her eyes were hazed by the pain medication she took. By then the ticking had grown very loud, and when Ralph lay in bed beside her on those hot summer nights when even a single sheet seemed to weigh ten pounds and he believed every dog in Derry was barking at the moon, he listened to it, to the deathwatch ticking inside Carolyn, and it seemed to him that his heart would break with sorrow and terror. How much would she be required to suffer before the end came? How much would
he
be required to suffer? And how could he possibly live without her?
It was during this strange, fraught period that Ralph began to go for increasingly long walks through the hot summer afternoons and slow, twilit evenings, returning on many occasions too exhausted to eat. He kept expecting Carolyn to scold him for these outings, to say,
Why don’t you stop it, you stupid old man? You’ll kill yourself if you keep walking in this heat!
But she never did, and he gradually realized she didn’t even know. That he went out, yes – she knew that. But not all the miles he went, or that when he came home he was often trembling with exhaustion and near sunstroke. Once upon a time it had seemed to Ralph she saw everything, even a change of half an inch in where he parted his hair. No more; the tumor in her brain had stolen her powers of observation, as it would soon steal her life.
So he walked, relishing the heat in spite of the way it sometimes made his head swim and his ears ring, relishing it mostly
because
of the way it made his ears ring; sometimes there were whole hours when they rang so loudly and his head pounded so fiercely that he couldn’t hear the tick of Carolyn’s deathwatch.
He walked over much of Derry that hot July, a narrow-shouldered old man with thinning white hair and big hands that still looked capable of hard work. He walked from Witcham Street to the Barrens, from Kansas Street to Neibolt Street, from Main Street to the Kissing Bridge, but his feet took him most frequently west along Harris Avenue, where the still beautiful and much beloved Carolyn Roberts was now spending her last year in a haze of headaches and morphine, to the Harris Avenue Extension and Derry County Airport. He would walk out the Extension – which was treeless and completely exposed to the pitiless sun – until he felt his legs threatening to cave in beneath him, and then double back.
BOOK: Insomnia
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