Night Journey

6

I HAD KNOWN the little door between the office and the steps down to the storage room hadn’t been built with the likes of Coffey in mind, but I hadn’t realized how great the disparity was until he stood before it, looking at it thoughtfully.

Harry laughed, but John himself seemed to see no humor in the big man standing in front of the little door. He wouldn’t have, of course; even if he’d been quite a few degrees brighter than he was, he wouldn’t have. He’d been that big man for most of his life, and this door was just a scrap littler than most.

He sat down, scooted through it that way, stood up again, and went down the stairs to where Brutal was waiting for him. There he stopped, looking across the empty room at the platform where Old Sparky waited, as silent—and as eerie—as the throne in the castle of a dead king. The cap hung with hollow jauntiness from one of the back-posts, looking less like a king’s crown than a jester’s cap, however, something a fool would wear, or shake to make his high-born audience laugh harder at his jokes. The chair’s shadow, elongated and spidery, climbed one wall like a threat. And yes, I thought I could still smell burned flesh in the air. It was faint, but I thought it was more than just my imagination.

Harry ducked through the door, then me. I didn’t like the frozen, wide-eyed way John was looking at Old Sparky. Even less did I like what I saw on his arms when I got close to him: goosebumps.

“Come on, big boy,” I said. I took his wrist and attempted to pull him in the direction of the door leading down to the tunnel. At first he wouldn’t go, and I might as well have been trying to pull a boulder out of the ground with my bare hands.

“Come on, John, we gotta go, ’less you want the coach-and-four to turn back into a pumpkin,” Harry said, giving his nervous laugh again. He took John’s other arm and tugged, but John still wouldn’t come. And then he said something in a low and dreaming voice. It wasn’t me he was speaking to, it wasn’t any of us, but I have still never forgotten it.

“They’re still in there. Pieces of them, still in there. I hear them screaming.”

Harry’s nervous chuckles ceased, leaving him with a smile that hung on his mouth like a crooked shutter hangs on an empty house. Brutal gave me a look that was almost terrified, and stepped away from John Coffey. For the second time in less than five minutes, I sensed the whole enterprise on the verge of collapse. This time I was the one who stepped in; when disaster threatened a third time, a little later on, it would be Harry. We all got our chance that night, believe me.

I slid in between John and his view of the chair, standing on my tiptoes to make sure I was completely blocking his sight-line. Then I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes, twice, sharply.

“Come on!” I said. “Walk! You said you didn’t need to be chained, now prove it! Walk, big boy! Walk, John Coffey! Over there! That door!”

His eyes cleared. “Yes, boss.” And praise God, he began to walk.

“Look at the door, John Coffey, just at the door and nowhere else.”

“Yes, boss.” John fixed his eyes obediently on the door.

“Brutal,” I said, and pointed.

He hurried in advance, shaking out his keyring, finding the right one. John kept his gaze fixed on the door to the tunnel and I kept my gaze fixed on John, but from the corner of one eye I could see Harry throwing nervous glances at the chair, as if he had never seen it before in his life.

There are pieces of them still in there… I hear them screaming.

If that was true, then Eduard Delacroix had to be screaming longest and loudest of all, and I was glad I couldn’t hear what John Coffey did.

Brutal opened the door. We went down the stairs with Coffey in the lead. At the bottom, he looked glumly down the tunnel, with its low brick ceiling. He was going to have a crick in his back by the time we got to the other end, unless—

I pulled the gurney over. The sheet upon which we’d laid Del had been stripped (and probably incinerated), so the gurney’s black leather pads were visible. “Get on,” I told John. He looked at me doubtfully, and I nodded encouragement. “It’ll be easier for you and no harder for us.”

“Okay, Boss Edgecombe.” He sat down, then lay back, looking up at us with worried brown eyes. His feet, clad in cheap prison slippers, dangled almost all the way to the floor. Brutal got in between them and pushed John Coffey along the dank corridor as he had pushed so many others. The only difference was that the current rider was still breathing. About halfway along—under the highway, we would have been, and able to hear the muffled drone of passing cars, had there been any at that hour—John began to smile. “Say,” he said, “this is fun.” He wouldn’t think so the next time he rode the gurney; that was the thought which crossed my mind. In fact, the next time he rode the gurney, he wouldn’t think or feel anything. Or would he? There are pieces of them still in there, he had said; he could hear them screaming.

Walking behind the others and unseen by them, I shivered.

“I hope you remembered Aladdin, Boss Edgecombe,” Brutal said as we reached the far end of the tunnel.

“Don’t worry,” I said. Aladdin looked no different from the other keys I carried in those days—and I had a bunch that must have weighed four pounds—but it was the master key of master keys, the one that opened everything. There was one Aladdin key for each of the five cellblocks in those days, each the property of the block super. Other guards could borrow it, but only the bull-goose screw didn’t have to sign it out.

There was a steel-barred gate at the far end of the tunnel. It always reminded me of pictures I’d seen of old castles; you know, in days of old when knights were bold and chivalry was in flower. Only Cold Mountain was a long way from Camelot. Beyond the gate, a flight of stairs led up to an unobtrusive bulkhead-style door with signs reading NO TRESPASSING and STATE PROPERTY and ELECTRIFIED WIRE on the outside.

I opened the gate and Harry swung it back. We went up, John Coffey once more in the lead, shoulders slumped and head bent. At the top, Harry got around him (not without some difficulty, either, although he was the smallest of the three of us) and unlocked the bulkhead. It was heavy. He could move it, but wasn’t able to flip it up.

“Here, boss,” John said. He pushed to the front again—bumping Harry into the wall with one hip as he did so—and raised the bulkhead with one hand. You would have thought it was painted cardboard instead of sheet steel.

Cold night air, moving with the ridge-running wind we would now get most of the time until March or April, blew down into our faces. A swirl of dead leaves came with it, and John Coffey caught one of them with his free hand. I will never forget the way he looked at it, or how he crumpled it beneath his broad, handsome nose so it would release its smell.

“Come on,” Brutal said. “Let’s go, forward harch.”

We climbed out. John lowered the bulkhead and Brutal locked it—no need for the Aladdin key on this door, but it was needed to unlock the gate in the pole-and-wire cage which surrounded the bulkhead.

“Hands to your sides while you go through, big fella,” Harry murmured. “Don’t touch the wire, if you don’t want a nasty burn.”

Then we were clear, standing on the shoulder of the road in a little cluster (three foothills around a mountain is what I imagine we looked like), staring across at the walls and lights and guard-towers of Cold Mountain Penitentiary. I could actually see the vague shape of a guard inside one of those towers, blowing on his hands, but only for a moment; the road-facing windows in the towers were small and unimportant. Still, we would have to be very, very quiet. And if a car did come along now, we could be in deep trouble.

“Come on,” I whispered. “Lead the way, Harry.”

We slunk north along the highway in a little conga-line, Harry first, then John Coffey, then Brutal, then me. We breasted the first rise and walked down the other side, where all we could see of the prison was the bright glow of the lights in the tops of the trees. And still Harry led us onward.

“Where’d you park it?” Brutal stage-whispered, vapor puffing from his mouth in a white cloud. “Baltimore?”

“It’s right up ahead,” Harry replied, sounding nervous and irritable. “Hold your damn water, Brutus.”

But Coffey, from what I’d seen of him, would have been happy to walk until the sun came up, maybe until it went down again. He looked everywhere, starting—not in fear but in delight, I am quite sure—when an owl hoo’d. It came to me that, while he might be afraid of the dark inside, he wasn’t afraid of it out here, not at all. He was caressing the night, rubbing his senses across it the way a man might rub his face across the swells and concavities of a woman’s breasts.

“We turn here,” Harry muttered.

A little finger of road—narrow, unpaved, weeds running up the center crown—angled off to the right. We turned up this and walked another quarter of a mile. Brutal was beginning to grumble again when Harry stopped, went to the left side of the track, and began to remove sprays of broken-off pine boughs. John and Brutal pitched in, and before I could join them, they had uncovered the dented snout of an old Farmall truck, its wired-on headlights staring at us like buggy eyes.

“I wanted to be as careful as I could, you know,” Harry said to Brutal in a thin, scolding voice. “This may be a big joke to you, Brutus Howell, but I come from a very religious family, I got cousins back in the hollers so damn holy they make the Christians look like lions, and if I get caught playing at something like this—!”

“It’s okay,” Brutal said. “I’m just jumpy, that’s all.”

“Me too,” Harry said stiffly. “Now if this cussed old thing will just start—”

He walked around the hood of the truck, still muttering, and Brutal tipped me a wink. As far as Coffey was concerned, we had ceased to exist. His head was tilted back and he was drinking in the sight of the stars sprawling across the sky.

“I’ll ride in back with him, if you want,” Brutal offered. Behind us, the Farmall’s starter whined briefly, sounding like an old dog trying to find its feet on a cold winter morning; then the engine exploded into life. Harry raced it once and let it settle into a ragged idle. “No need for both of us to do it.”

“Get up front,” I said. “You can ride with him on the return trip. If we don’t end up making that one locked into the back of our own stagecoach, that is.”

“Don’t talk that way,” he said, looking genuinely upset. It was as if he had realized for the first time how serious this would be for us if we were caught. “Christ, Paul!”

“Go on,” I said. “In the cab.”

He did as he was told. I yanked on John Coffey’s arm until I could get his attention back to the earth for a bit, then led him around to the rear of the truck, which was stake-sided. Harry had draped canvas over the posts, and that would be of some help if we passed cars or trucks going the other way. He hadn’t been able to do anything about the open back, though.

“Upsy-daisy, big boy,” I said.

“Goin for the ride now?”

“That’s right.”

“Good.” He smiled. It was sweet and lovely, that smile, perhaps the more so because it wasn’t complicated by much in the way of thought. He got up in back. I followed him, went to the front of the truckbed, and banged on top of the cab. Harry ground the transmission into first and the truck pulled out of the little bower he had hidden it in, shaking and juddering.

John Coffey stood spread-legged in the middle of the truckbed, head cocked up at the stars again, smiling broadly, unmindful of the boughs that whipped at him as Harry turned his truck toward the highway. “Look, boss!” he cried in a low, rapturous voice, pointing up into the black night. “It’s Cassie, the lady in the rockin chair!”

He was right; I could see her in the lane of stars between the dark bulk of the passing trees. But it wasn’t Cassiopeia I thought of when he spoke of the lady in the rocking chair; it was Melinda Moores.

“I see her, John,” I said, and tugged on his arm. “But you have to sit down now, all right?”

He sat with his back against the cab, never taking his eyes off the night sky. On his face was a look of sublime unthinking happiness. The Green Mile fell farther behind us with each revolution of the Farmall’s bald tires, and for the time being, at least, the seemingly endless flow of John Coffey’s tears had stopped.