'Goodbye. Once again, my sympathies.'
'And mine, too.'
Click.
Dale crossed the room and picked up the photograph of Squad D.
He looked at the smiling blonde boy, who was sitting cross-legged
in front of Kimberley and Gibson, sitting casually and comfortably
on the ground as if he had never had a haemorrhoid in his life, as if
he had never stood atop a stepladder in a shadowy garage and
slipped a noose around his neck.
Josh finally caught up with them.
He stood looking fixedly at the photograph for a long time before
realizing that the depth of silence In the room had deepened. The
clock had stopped.
THAT FEELING, YOU
CAN ONLY SAY WHAT
IT IS IN FRENCH
STEPHEN KING
From
The New Yorker, 1998
A second honeymoon in the Florida Keys. What could be more
relaxing?
FLOYD, what's that over there? Oh shit. The mans voice speaking
these words was vaguely familiar, but the words themselves were
just a disconnected snip of dialogue, the kind of thing you heard
when you were channel-surfing with the remote. There was no one
named Floyd in her life. Still, that was the start. Even before she
saw the little girl in the red pinafore, there were those disconnected
words.
But it was the little girl who brought it on strong. 'Oh-oh, I'm
getting that feeling,' Carol said.
The girl in the pinafore was in front of a country market called
Carson's 'Beer, Wine, Groc, Fresh Bait, Lottery' - crouched down
with her butt between her ankles and the bright-red apron-dress
tucked between her thighs, playing with a doll. The doll was
yellow-haired and dirty the kind that's round and stuffed and
boneless in the body.
'What feeling?' Bill asked.
'You know. The one you can only say what it is in French. Help
me here.'
'Deja vu,' he said.
'That's it,' she said, and turned to look at the little girl one more
time. She'll have the doll by one leg, Carol thought. Holding it
upside down by one leg with its grimy yellow hair hanging down.
But the little girl had abandoned the doll on the store's splintery
gray steps and had gone over to look at a dog caged up in the back
of a station wagon. Then Bill and Carol Shelton went around a
curve in the road and the store was out of sight.
'How much farther?' Carol asked.
Bill looked at her with one eyebrow raised and his mouth dimpled
at one corner - left eyebrow right dimple, always the same. The
