“What could you write that would make you happy?”
said King in a statement.
I saw the empty streets, the haunted buildings, a gargoyle head lying overturned in the street.
Stephen King.Shane Leonard
I saw smashed statues (of what I didn’t know, but I eventually found out).
I saw a huge, sprawling palace with glass towers so high their tips pierced the clouds.
Those images released the story I wanted to tell."
Cover of Stephen King’s novel ‘Fairy Tale’.Simon and Schuster
But he carries a heavy load.
Charlie learned how to take care of himself and his dad.
Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.
Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar.
Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe.
I moved very slowly, with my back planted against the curving stone wall, facing the drop.
The stones were rough and damp.
I kept the flashlight trained on my feet.
I didn’t want to stumble.
A stumble might be the end of me.
On number ninety, not quite halfway, I heard rustling beneath me.
I debated shining my light toward the sound and almost decided not to.
That was good logic, but fear was stronger.
It took nine or ten minutes to reach the bottom, because I was moving very slowly.
It seemed even longer.
I was deep in the earth and going deeper.
I reached the bottom at the hundred and eighty-fifth step.
The pile of fallen blocks was streaked with black stuff that I guessed was roach shit.
The corridor was there.
I stepped over the blocks and into it.
Mr. Bowditch had been right it was so tall I didn’t even think about ducking my head.
Going toward the sound of them, I was more curious than anything.
Cheerful, I thought.
Cheerful I was not, but my fear was being replaced overshadowed, at least by excitement.
If Mr. Bowditch had been telling the truth, another world was waiting not far up ahead.
Having come this far, I wanted to see it.
Gold was the very least of it.
The dirt floor changed to stone.
To cobblestones, in fact, like in old movies on TCM about London in the nineteenth century.
Now the rustling was right over my head and I snapped off the light.
For all I knew, they might be vampire bats.
except I wasn’t really in Illinois anymore, was I?
I kept waiting to see daylight, always listening to the soft fluttering overhead.
Were the bats really as big as turkey buzzards?
I didn’t want to know.
At last I saw light a bright spark, just as Mr. Bowditch had said.
This was like that.
Then it passed, as Mr. Bowditch had said it did for him.
He said there was a border, and that had been it.
I had left Sentry’s Rest behind.
I was in the Other.
I ducked under some overhanging vines and stepped out onto a sloping hillside.
The sky was gray but the field was bright red.
Poppies spread in a gorgeous blanket stretching left and right as far as I could see.
A path led through the flowers toward a road.
The path was faint but the road wasn’t.
It was dirt but wide, not a track but a thoroughfare.
Where the path joined the road there was a tidy little cottage with smoke rising from the stone chimney.
There were clotheslines with things strung on them that weren’t clothes.
I couldn’t make out what they were.
I looked to the far horizon and saw the skyline of a great city.
Daylight reflected hazily from its highest towers, as if they were made of glass.
This excerpt was reprinted with permission from Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster.
