believed you got, you know, after, and he had said you probably
got what you'd always thought you would get, that if Jerry Lee
Lewis thought he was going to Hell for playing boogie-woogie,
that's exactly where he'd go. Heaven, Hell, or Grand Rapids, it was
your choice or the choice of those who had taught you what to
believe. It was the human mind's final great service: the perception
of eternity in the place where you'd always expected to spend it.
'Carol? You O.K., babe?' In one hand was the magazine he'd been
reading, a Newsweek with Mother Teresa on the cover.
'SAINTHOOD NOW?' it said in white.
Looking around wildly at the cabin, she was thinking, it happens at
sixteen thousand feet I have to tell them, I have to warn them.
But it was fading, all of it, the way those feelings always did. They
went like dreams, or cotton candy turning into a sweet mist just
above your tongue.
'Landing? Already.' She felt wide awake, but her voice sounded
thick and muzzy.
'It's fast, huh?' he said, sounding pleased, as if he'd flown it
himself instead of paying for it. 'Floyd says we'll be on the ground
in-'
'Who?' she asked. The cabin of the little plane was warm but her
fingers were cold. 'Who?'
'Floyd. You know, the pilot' He pointed his thumb toward the
cockpit's left-hand seat. They were descending into a scrim of
clouds. The plane began to shake. 'He says we'll be on the ground
in Fort Myers in twenty minutes. You took a hell of a jump, girl.
And before that you were moaning.'
Carol opened her mouth to say it was that feeling, the one you
could only say what it was in French, something vu or rous, but it
was fading and all she said was 'I had a nightmare.'
There was a beep as Floyd the pilot switched the seat-belt light on.
Carol turned her head. Somewhere below, waiting for them now
and forever, was a white car from Hertz, a gangster car, the kind
the characters in a Martin Scorsese movie would probably call a
Crown Vic. She looked at the cover of the news magazine, at the
face of Mother Teresa, and all at once she remembered skipping
rope behind Our Lady of Angels, skipping to one of the forbidden
rhymes, skipping to the one that went Hey there, Mary, what's the
story, save my ass from Purgatory
All the hard days are coming, her Gram had said. She had pressed
the medal into Carol's palm, wrapped the chain around her fingers.
The hard days are coming.
THE GLASS
FLOOR
STEPHEN KING
Appeared in:
'Weird Tales' Fall, 1990
Starlight Mystery Stories, 1967
INTRODUCTION
In the novel Deliverance, by James Dickey, there is a scene where
