Six Stories

SIX STORIES

Stephen King

Autopsy Room 4

Blind Willie

L.T.‘s Theory of Pets

Lunch at the Gotham Cafe

Luckey Quarter

The Man in the Black Suit

© 1997 Philtrum Press

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 IV.

AUTOPSY ROOM FOUR

Stephen King

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 habitueòf 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 twentyfive; 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 know about it, have not been above using it with certain female clients. Otherwise, it gets old in a hurry. And in these circumstances … God.

“Attending physician?’ the lady doc; asks. “Was it Kazalian?”

“NO,” Mike says, and for just a moment he looks down at me.

Older than Rusty by at least ten years. Black hair with flecks of gray in it. Spectacles. How come none of these ~ can see that I am not dead? “There was a doc in the foursome that found him, actually. That’s his signature on page one … see?”

Riffle: of paper, then: “Christ, Jennings. I know him. He gave Noah his physical after the ark grounded on Mount Ararat.”

Rusty doesn’t look as if he gets the joke, but he brays laughter into my face anyway. I can smell onions on his breath, a little leftover lunchstink, and if I can smell onions, I must be breathing. I must be, right? If only-Before I can finish this thought, Rusty leans even closer and I feel a blast of hope. He’s seen something! He’s seen something and means to give me mouth-to-mouth. God bless you, Rusty! God bless you and your onion breath!

But the stupid grin doesn’t change, and instead of putting his mouth on mine, his hand slips around my jaw.- Now he’s grasping one side with his thumb and the other side with his fingers.

“He’s alive! - Rusty cries. “He’s alive, and he’s gonna sing for the Room Four Michael Bolton Fan Club!”

His fingers pinch tighter-it hurts in a distant comingout-of-the-novocaine way-and begins to move my jaw up and down, clicking my teeth together. “If she’s ba-aaad, he can’t see it,” Rusty sings in a hideous, atonal voice that would probably make Percy Sledge’s head explode. “She can do no wrrr-ongggg… My teeth open and close at the rough urging of his hand; my tongue rises and falls like a dead dog riding the surface of an uneasy waterbed.

“Stop it!” the lady doc snaps at him. She sounds genuinely shocked. Rusty, perhaps sensing this, does not stop but goes gleefully on. His fingers are pinching into my cheeks now. My frozen eyes stare blindly upward.

“Turn his back on his best friend if she put him d-”

Then she’s there, a woman in a green gown with her cap tied around her throat and hanging down her back like the Cisco Kid’s sombrero, short brown hair swept back from her brow, good-looking but severe-more handsome than pretty. She grabs Rusty with one short-nailed hand and pulls him back from me.

“Hey” Rusty says, indignant. “Get your hands off me!”

“Then you keep your hands off him, ” she says, and there is no mistaking the anger in her voice. “I’m tired of your sophomore class wit, Rusty, and the next time you start in, I’m going to report you.”