Read Online Everything's Eventual by Stephen King - Free Book Online Page B

hanging back on its cunning little leather hinges. I looked inside and saw nothing but two handfuls of grass.
    Thought you said you caught a rainbow, my father said, but maybe you dreamed that, too.
    Something in his voice stung me. No, sir, I said. I caught one.
    Well, it sure as hell didn't flop out, not if it was gutted and cleaned. And you wouldn't put a catch into your fisherbox without doing that, would you, Gary? I taught you better than that.
    Yes, sir, you did, but
    So if you didn't dream catching it and if it was dead in the box, something must have come along and eaten it, my father said, and then he grabbed another quick glance over his shoulder, eyes wide, as if he had heard something move in the woods. I wasn't exactly surprised to see drops of sweat standing out on his forehead like big clear jewels. Come on, he said. Let's get the hell out of here.
    I was for that, and we went back along the bank to the bridge, walking quick without speaking. When we got there, my Dad dropped to one knee and examined the place where we'd found my rod. There was another patch of dead grass there, and the lady's slipper was all brown and curled in on itself, as if a blast of heat had charred it. While my father did this, I looked in my empty creel.
    He must have gone back and eaten my other fish, too, I said.
    My father looked up at me. Otherfish!
    Yes, sir. I didn't tell you, but I caught a brookie, too. A big one. He was awful hungry, that fella. I wanted to say more, and the words trembled just behind my lips, but in the end I didn't.
    We climbed up to the bridge and helped one another over the railing. My father took my creel, looked into it, then went to the railing and threw it over. I came up beside him in time to see it splash down and float away like a boat, riding lower and lower in the stream as the water poured in between the wicker weavings.
    It smelled bad, my father said, but he didn't look at me when he said it, and his voice sounded oddly defensive. It was the only time I ever heard him speak just that way.
    Yes, sir.
    We'll tell your mother we couldn't find it. If she asks. If she doesn't ask, we won't tell her anything.
    No, sir, we won't.
    And she didn't and we didn't and that's the way it was.
    a
    That day in the woods is eighty-one years gone, and for many of the years in between I have never even thought of it not awake, at least. Like any other man or woman who ever lived, I can't say about my dreams, not for sure. But now I'm old, and I dream awake, it seems. My infirmities have crept up like waves which will soon take a child's abandoned sand castle, and my memories have also crept up, making me think of some old rhyme that went, in part, Just leave them alone/And they'll come home/Wagging their tails behind them. I remember meals I ate, games I played, girls I kissed in the school cloakroom when we played Post Office, boys I chummed with, the first drink I ever took, the first cigarette I ever smoked (corn-shuck behind Dicky Hammer's pig-shed, and I threw up). Yet of all the memories, the one of the man in the black suit is the strongest, and glows with its own spectral, haunted light. He was real, he was the Devil, and that day I was either his errand or his luck. I feel more and more strongly that escaping him was my luck justluck, and not the intercession of the God I have worshipped and sung hymns to all my life.
    As I lie here in my nursing-home room, and in the ruined sand castle that is my body, I tell myself that I need not fear the Devil that I have lived a good, kindly life, and I need not fear the Devil. Sometimes I remind myself that it was I, not my father, who finally coaxed my mother back to church later on that summer. In the dark, however, these thoughts have no power to ease or comfort. In the dark comes a voice which whispers that the nine-year-old boy I was had done nothing for which he might legitimately fear the devil either and yet the Devil came. And in the dark I sometimes hear