Nona.pdf

Nona

by Stephen King

Do you love?

I hear her voice saying this -- sometimes I still hear it. In my dreams. Do you love?

Yes, I answer. Yes -- and true love will never die. Then I wake up screaming.

I don't know how to explain it, even now. I can't tell you why I did those things. I couldn't

do it at the trial, either. And there are a lot of people here who ask me about it. There's a

psychiatrist who does. But I am silent. My lips are sealed. Except here in my cell. Here I am not

silent. I wake up screaming.

In the dream I see her walking toward me. She is wearing a white gown, almost

transparent, and her expression is one of mingled desire and triumph. She comes to me across a

dark room with a stone floor and I smell dry October roses. Her arms are held open and I go to

her with mine out to enfold her.

I feel dread, revulsion, unutterable longing. Dread and revulsion because I know what

this place is, longing because I love her. I will always love her. There are times when I wish

there were still a death penalty in this state. A short walk down a dim corridor, a straight-backed

chair fitted with a steel skullcap, clamps... then one quick jolt and I would be with her.

As we come together in the dream my fear grows, but it is impossible for me to draw

back from her. My hands press against the smooth plane of her back, her skin near under silk.

She smiles with those deep, black eyes. Her head tilts up to mine and her lips part, ready to be

kissed.

That's when she changes, shrivels. Her hair grows coarse and matted, melting from black

to an ugly brown that spills down over the creamy whiteness of her cheeks. The eyes shrink and

go beady. The whites disappear and she is glaring at me with tiny eyes like two polished pieces

of jet. The mouth becomes a maw through which crooked yellow teeth protrude.

I try to scream. I try to wake up.

I can't. I'm caught again. I'll always be caught.

I am in the grip of a huge, noisome graveyard rat. Lights sway in front of my eyes.

October roses. Somewhere a dead bell is chanting.

"Do you love?" this thing whispers. "Do you love?" The smell of roses is its breath as it

swoops toward me, dead flowers in a charnel house.

"Yes," I tell the rat-thing. "Yes -- and true love will never die." Then I do scream, and I

am awake.

They think what we did together drove me crazy. But my mind is still working in some

way or other, and I've never stopped looking for the answers. I still want to know how it was,

and what it was.

They've let me have paper and a pen with a felt tip. I'm going to write everything down.

Maybe I'll answer some of their questions and maybe while I'm doing that I can answer some of

my own. And when I'm done, there's something else. Something they don't know I have.

Something I took. It's here under my mattress. A knife from the prison dining hall.

I'll have to start by telling you about Augusta.

As I write this it is night, a fine August night poked through with blazing stars. I can see

them through the mesh of my window, which overlooks the exercise yard and a slice of sky I can

block out with two fingers. It's hot, and I'm naked except for my shorts. I can hear the soft

summer sound of frogs and crickets. But I can bring back winter just by closing my eyes. The

bitter cold of that night, the bleakness, the hard, unfriendly lights of a city that was not my city. It

was the fourteenth of February.

See, I remember everything.

And look at my arms -- covered with sweat, they've pulled into gooseflesh.

Augusta...

When I got to Augusta I was more dead than alive, it was that cold. I had picked a fine

day to say good-bye to the college scene and hitchhike west; it looked like I might freeze to

death before I got out of the state.

A cop had kicked me off the interstate ramp and threatened to bust me if he caught me

thumbing there again. I was almost tempted to wise mouth him and let him do it. The flat, four-

lane stretch of highway had been like an airport landing strip, the wind whooping and pushing

membranes of powdery snow skirling along the concrete. And to the anonymous Them behind

their Saf-T-Glas windshields, everyone standing in the breakdown lane on a dark night is either a

rapist or a murderer, and if he's got long hair you can throw in child molester and faggot on top.

I tried it awhile on the access road, but it was no good. And along about a quarter of eight

I realized that if I didn't get someplace warm quick, I was going to pass out.

I walked a mile and a half before I found a combination diner and diesel stop on 202 just

inside the city limits. JOE'S GOOD EATS , the neon said. There were three big rigs parked in the

crushed-stone parking lot, and one new sedan. There was a wilted Christmas wreath on the door

that nobody had bothered to take down, and next to it a thermometer showing just five degrees of

mercury above big zero. I had nothing to cover my ears but my hair, and my rawhide gloves

were falling apart. The tips of my fingers felt like pieces of furniture.

I opened the door and went in.

The heat was the first thing that struck me, warm and good. Next a hillbilly song on the

juke, the unmistakable voice of Merle Haggard: "We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy,

like the hippies out in San Francisco do."

The third thing that struck me was The Eye. You know about The Eye once you let your

hair get down below the lobes of your ears. Right then people know you don't belong to the

Lions, Elks, or the VFW. You know about The Eye, but you never get used to it.

Right now the people giving me The Eye were four truckers in one booth, two more at

the counter, a pair of old ladies wearing cheap fur coats and blue rinses, the short-order cook, and

a gawky kid with soapsuds on his hands. There was a girl sitting at the far end of the counter, but

all she was looking at was the bottom of her coffee cup.

She was the fourth thing that struck me.

I'm old enough to know there's no such thing as love at first sight. It's just something

Rodgers and Hammerstein thought up one day to rhyme with moon and June. It's for kids

holding hands at the Prom, right?

But looking at her made me feel something. You can laugh, but you wouldn't have if

you'd seen her. She was almost unbearably beautiful. I knew without a doubt that everybody else

in Joe's knew that the same as me. Just like I knew she had been getting The Eye before I came

in. She had coal-colored hair, so black that it seemed nearly blue under the fluorescents. It fell

freely over the shoulders of her scuffed tan coat. Her skin was cream-white, with just the faintest

blooded touch lingering beneath the skin -- the cold she had brought in with her. Dark, sooty

lashes. Solemn eyes that slanted up the tiniest bit at the corners. A full and mobile mouth below a

straight, patrician nose. I couldn't tell what her body looked like. I didn't care. You wouldn't,

either. All she needed was that face, that hair, that look. She was exquisite. That's the only word

we have for her in English.

Nona.

I sat two stools down from her, and the short-order cook came over and looked at me.

"What?"

"Black coffee, please."

He went to get it. From behind me someone said: "Well I guess Christ came back, just

like my mamma always said He would."

The gawky dishwasher laughed, a quick yuk-yuk sound. The truckers at the counter

joined in.

The short-order cook brought me my coffee back, jarred it down on the counter and

spilled some on the thawing meat of my hand. I jerked it back.

"Sorry," he said indifferently.

"He's gonna heal it hisself," one of the truckers in the booth called over.

The blue-rinse twins paid their checks and hurried out. One of the knights of the road

sauntered over to the juke and put another dime in. Johnny Cash began to sing "A Boy Named

Sue." I blew on my coffee.

Someone tugged at my sleeve. I turned my head and there she was -- she'd moved over to

the empty stool. Looking at that face close up was almost blinding. I spilled some more of my

coffee.

"I'm sorry." Her voice was low, almost atonal.

"My fault. I can't feel what I'm doing yet."

“I -- "

She stopped, seemingly at a loss. I suddenly realized that she was scared. I felt my first

reaction to her swim over me again -- to protect her and take care of her, make her not afraid. "I

need a ride," she finished in a rush. "I didn't dare ask any of them." She made a barely

perceptible gesture toward the truckers in the booth.

How can I make you understand that I would have given anything -- anything -- to be

able to tell her, Sure, finish your coffee, I'm parked right outside. It sounds crazy to say I felt that

way after half a dozen words out of her mouth, and the same number out of mine, but I did.

Looking at her was like looking at the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo come to breathing life.

And there was another feeling. It was as if a sudden, powerful light had been turned on in the

confused darkness of my mind. It would make it easier if I could say she was a pickup and I was

a fast man with the ladies, quick with a funny line and lots of patter, but she wasn't and I wasn't.

All I knew was I didn't have what she needed and it tore me up.

"I'm thumbing," I told her. "A cop kicked me off the interstate and I only came here to

get out of the cold. I'm sorry."

"Are you from the university?"

"I was. I quit before they could fire me."

"Are you going home?"

"No home to go to. I was a state ward. I got to school on a scholarship. I blew it. Now I

don't know where I'm going." My life story in five sentences. I guess it made me feel depressed.

She laughed -- the sound made me run hot and cold. "We're cats out of the same bag, I

guess."

I thought she said cats. I thought so. Then. But I've had time to think, in here, and more

and more it seems to me that she might have said rats. Rats out of the same bag. Yes. And they

are not the same, are they?

I was about to make my best conversational shot -- something witty like "Is that so?" --

when a hand came down on my shoulder.

I turned around. It was one of the truckers from the booth. He had blond stubble on his

chin and there was a wooden kitchen match poking out of his mouth. He smelled of engine oil

and looked like something out of a Steve Ditko drawing.

"I think you're done with that coffee," he said. His lips parted around the match in a grin.

He had a lot of very white teeth.

"What?"

"You stinking the place up, fella. You are a fella, aren't you? Kind of hard to tell."

"You aren't any rose yourself," I said. "What's that after-shave, handsome? Eau de

Crankcase?"

He gave me a hard shot across the side of the face with his open hand. I saw little black

dots.

"Don't fight in here," the short-order cook said. "If you're going to scramble him, do it

outside."

"Come on, you goddammed commie," the trucker said.

This is the spot where the girl is supposed to say something like "Unhand him" or "You

brute." She wasn't saying anything. She was watching both of us with feverish intensity. It was

scary. I think it was the first time I'd noticed how huge her eyes really were.

"Do I have to sock you again?"

"No. Come on, shitheels."

I don't know how that jumped out of me. I don't like to fight. I'm not a good fighter. I'm

an even worse name-caller. But I was angry, just then. It came up on me all at once that I wanted

to kill him.

Maybe he got a mental whiff of it. For just a second a shade of uncertainty flicked over

his face, an unconscious wondering if maybe he hadn't picked the wrong hippie. Then it was

gone. He wasn't going to back off from some long-haired elitist effeminate snob who used the

flag to wipe his ass with -- at least not in front of his buddies. Not a big ole truck-driving son-of-

a-gun like him.

The anger pounded over me again. Faggot? Faggot? I felt out of control, and it was good

to feel that way. My tongue was thick in my mouth. My stomach was a slab.

We walked across to the door, and my buddy's buddies almost broke their backs getting

up to watch the fun.

Nona? I thought of her, but only in an absent, back-of-my-mind way. I knew Nona would

be there. Nona would take care of me. I knew it the same way I knew it would be cold outside. It

was strange to know that about a girl I had only met five minutes before. Strange, but I didn't

think about that until later. My mind was taken up -- no, almost blotted out -- by the heavy cloud

of rage. I felt homicidal.

The cold was so clear and so clean that it felt as if we were cutting it with our bodies like

knives. The frosted gravel of the parking lot gritted harshly under his heavy boots and under my

shoes. The moon, full and bloated, looked down on us with a vapid eye. It was faintly ringed,

suggesting bad weather on the way. The sky was as black as a night in hell. We left tiny dwarfed

shadows behind our feet in the monochrome glare of a single sodium light set high on a pole

beyond the parked rigs. Our breath plumed the air in short bursts. The trucker turned to me, his

gloved fists balled.

"Okay, you son-of-a-bitch," he said.

I seemed to be swelling -- my whole body seemed to be swelling. Somehow, numbly, I

knew that my intellect was about to be eclipsed by an invisible something that I had never

suspected might be in me. It was terrifying -- but at the same time I welcomed it, desired it,

lusted for it. In that last instant of coherent thought it seemed that my body had become a stone

pyramid or a cyclone that could sweep everything in front of it like colored pick-up sticks. The

trucker seemed small, puny, insignificant. I laughed at him. I laughed, and the sound was as

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