The Mist by Stephen King.
Title: The Mist.
Author: Stephen King.
Genre: Fiction, novella, horror.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1980.
Summary: In the wake of a destructive Maine summer thunderstorm, an impenetrable mist descends from the direction of a local military facility and infiltrates the small town of Bridgton, Maine. David Drayton and his son Billy are swept into a living nightmare as unnatural and violent forces concealed by the mist begin to emerge, wreaking havoc in their wave. Now trapped in the local supermarket with a ragtag group of survivors, David unexpectedly faces a growing threat from within, one that promises to challenge the boundaries of sanity itself as humanity makes its last stand against unholy destruction. In this horrifying mist, hearing is seeing-and believing. And what you're about to hear, you'll never forget.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ For three weeks the temperature had been over ninety, and on six of those twenty-one days the National Weather Service station at the Portland Jetport had reported temperatures of over one hundred degrees. Queer weather. Coupled with the grueling winter we had come through and the late spring, some people had dragged out that old chestnut about the long-range results of the fifties A-bomb tests again. That, and of course, the end of the world. The oldest chestnut of them all.
♥ All three of us slept together in the guest bed, Billy between Steff and me. I had a dream that I saw God walking across Harrison on the far side of the lake, a God so gigantic that above the waist He was lost in a clear blue sky. In the dream I could hear the rending crack and splinter of breaking trees as God stamped the woods into the shape of His footsteps. He was circling the lake, coming toward the Bridgton side, toward us, and all the houses and cottages and summer places were bursting into purple-white flame like lightning, and soon the smoke covered everything. The smoke covered everything like a mist.
..The Harrison side of the lake was gone. It had been buried under a line of bright-white mist, like a fair-weather cloud fallen to earth.
My dream of the night before recurred, and when Steff asked me what it was, the word that nearly jumped first from my mouth was God.
♥ "Also... well, I'll have to make you a list."
Give a woman a disaster and she turns squirrel.
♥ To the right of the breakwater was a small sandy beach. In 1941, before Pearl Harbor paid off the Great Depression in blood, my dad hired a man to truck in that fine beach sand...
♥ "Well, you tell Vic he's full of what makes the grass grow green."
"Horseshit, right?" Billy is a bright boy, but oddly humorless. To the champ, everything is serious business. I'm hoping that he'll live long enough to learn that in this world that is a very dangerous attitude.
♥ "Can I go over to the Bibbers' and see what happened there?"
"Just for a couple of minutes. They'll be cleaning up, too, and sometimes that makes people feel a little ugly."
♥ I wiped sweat off my face with my arm and wished for another beer; one really only sets your mouth.
♥ Dick Muehler, our insurance agent, said the Arrowhead Project was an agricultural station the government was running, no more or less. "Bigger tomatoes with a longer growing season," Dick said sagely, and then went back to showing me how I could help my family most efficiently by dying young.
♥ "Tell her everything's okay."
He smiled again, maybe telling himself first. "Okay."
He ran back and I watched him go, legs pumping, soles of his zori showing. I love him. It's his face and sometimes the way his eyes turn up to mine that make me feel as if things are really okay. It's a lie, of course-things are not okay and never have been-but my kid makes me believe the lie.
♥ I didn't like it. I felt very strongly that I had never seen a mist exactly like this one. Part of it was the unnerving straight edge of its leading front. Nothing in nature is that even; man is the inventor of straight edges.
♥ Steff was standing on the cement path which leads to the vegetable patch at the extreme west end of our property. She had a pair of clippers in one gloved hand and the weeding claw in the other. She had put on her old floppy sunhat, and it cast a band of shadow over her face. I tapped the horn twice, lightly, and she raised the hand holding the clippers in answer. We pulled out. I haven't seen my wife since then.
♥ Old trees have always reminded me of the Ents in Tolkien's wonderful Rings saga, only Ents that have gone bad. Old trees want to hurt you. It doesn't matter if you're snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, or just taking a walk in the woods. Old trees want to hurt you, and I think they'd kill you if they could.
♥ Like most modern markets, the Federal was constructed like a Skinner box-modern marketing techniques turn all customers into white rats. The stuff you really needed, staples, like bread, milk, meat, beer, and frozen dinners, was all on the far side of the store. To get there you had to walk past all the impulse items known to modern man-everything from Cricket lighters to rubber dog bones.
♥ "Are you worried about her?"
"No," I said, lying. I was worried, all right, but had no idea why I should be. "No, of course I'm not. Are you?"
"No-ooo..." But he was. His face had a pinched look. We should have gone back then. But even then it might have been too late,
♥ "Don't go out there!" Mrs. Carmody yelled. "It's death! I feel that it's death out there!"
Bud and Ollie Weeks, who both knew her, just looked impatient and irritated, but any summer people around her stepped smartly away, never minding their places in line. The bag-ladies in big cities seem to have the same effect on people, as if they were carriers of some contagious disease. Who knows? Maybe they are.
♥ It came with lazy speed. Watching it reminded me somehow of last evening's waterspout. There are big forces in nature that you hardly ever see-earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes-I haven't seen them all but I've seen enough to guess that they all move with that lazy, hypnotizing speed. They hold you spellbound, the way Billy and Steffy had been in front of the picture window last night.
♥ Some were laughing and excited, but they were a minority. They poured out into the fog, and none of us who stayed ever saw them again. There was a faint, acrid smell drifting in through the open door.
♥ "Mommy," he whispered.
"She's okay," I told him. It was something to say.
♥ "Isn't anyone going to help me?" she screamed. Her lips began to tremble. "Wont... won't anybody here see a lady home?"
No one replied. People shuffled their feet. She looked from face to face with her own broken face. The fat local man took a hesitant half-step forward and his wife jerked him back with one quick tug, her hand clapped over his wrist like a manacle.
.."You?" she said to me, and I picked Billy up again and held him in my arms like a shield to ward off her terrible broken face.
"I hope you all rot in hell," she said. She didn't scream it. Her voice was dead tired. She went to the OUT door and pulled it open, using both hands. I wanted to say something to her, but my mouth was too dry.
"Aw, lady, listen-" the teenage kid who had shouted at Mrs. Carmody began. He held her arm. She looked down at his hand and he let her go, shamefaced. She slipped out into the fog. We watched her go and no one said anything. We watched the fog overlay her and make her unsubstantial, not a human being anymore but a pencil-ink sketch of a human being done on the world's whitest paper, and no one said anything. For a moment it was like the letters of the KEEP RIGHT sign that had seemed to float on nothingness; her arms and legs and pallid blond hair were all gone and only the misty remnants of her red summer dress remained, seeming to dance in white limbo. Then her dress was gone, too, and no one said anything.
♥ I sat down on the floor and took Billy on my lap and held his face against my chest and rocked him and talked to him. I told him all the lies parents keep in reserve for bad situations, the ones that sound so damn plausible to a child, and I told them in a tone of perfect conviction.
"That's not regular fog," Billy said. He looked up at me, his eyes dark-circled and tear-streaked. "It isn't, is it, Daddy?"
"No, I don't think so." I didn't want to lie about that.
Kids don't fight shock the way adults do; they go with it, maybe because kids are in a semipermanent state of shock until they're thirteen or so. Billy started to doze off. I held him, thinking he might snap awake again, but his doze deepened into a real sleep. Maybe he had been awake part of the night before, when we had slept three-in-a-bed for the first time since Billy was an infant. And maybe-I felt a cold eddy slip through me at the thought-maybe he had sensed something coming.
♥ A tentacle came over the far lip of the concrete loading platform and grabbed Norm around the calf. My mouth dropped wide open. Ollie made a very short glottal sound of surprise-uk! The tentacle tapered from a thickness of a foot-the size of a grass snake-at the point where it had wrapped itself around Norm's lower leg to a thickness of maybe four or five feet where it disappeared into the mist. It was slate gray on top, shading to a fleshy pink underneath. And there were rows of suckers in the underside. They were moving and writhing like hundreds of small, puckering mouths.
..The other two tentacles slithered aimlessly back and forth on the loading platform for a moment, making those low scraping sounds I had heard earlier. Then one of them slapped against Norm's left hip and slipped around it. I felt it touch my arm. It was warm and pulsing and smooth. I think now that if it had gripped me with those suckers, I would have gone out into the mist too. But it didn't. It grabbed Norm. And the third tentacle ringleted his other ankle.
Now he was being pulled away from me. "Help me!" I shouted. "Ollie! Someone! Give me a hand here!"
But they didn't come. I don't know what they were dong, but they didn't come.
I looked down and saw the tentacle around Norm's waist working into his skin. The suckers were eating him where his shirt had pulled out of his pants. Blood, as red as his missing apron, began to seep out of the trench the pulsing tentacle had made for itself.
♥ All the faces turned toward us, and the hum of conversation died. Norton's face was like old cheese. Mrs. Carmody's black eyes glinted. Ollie was drinking beer; his face was still running with trickles of perspiration, although it had gotten rather chilly in the market. The two girls with CAMP WOODLANDS on their shirts were huddled together like young horses before a thunderstorm. Eyes. So many eyes. I could paint them, I thought with a chill. No faces, only eyes in the gloom. I could paint them but no one would believe they were real.
♥ "There's only one chance," Mrs. Carmody said.
"What's that, ma'am?" Mike Harlen asked politely.
"A sacrifice," Mrs. Carmody said-she seemed to grin in the gloom. "A blood sacrifice."
Blood sacrifice-the words hung there, slowly turning. Even now, when I know better, I tell myself that then what she meant was someone's pet dog-there were a couple of them trotting around the market in spite of the regulations against them. Even now I tell myself that. She looked like some crazed remnant of New England Puritanism in the gloom... but I suspect that something deeper and darker than mere Puritanism motivated her. Puritanism had its own dark grandfather, old Adam with bloody hands.
♥ "This gun... my husband's idea. He thought I should have it for protection. I've carried it unloaded for two years."
"Is your husband here, ma'am?"
"No, he's in New York. On business. He's gone on business a lot. That's why he wanted me to carry the gun. ..Don't mention it," she said, and I thought fleetingly that if I were her husband and proprietor of those green eyes and that full figure, I might not travel so much. Giving your wife a gun could be seen as a ludicrously symbolic act.
♥ "Do you think Mom's okay?"
"Billy, I just don't know," I said, and put an arm around him.
"I want her awful bad," Billy said, struggling with tears. "I'm sorry about the times I was bad to her."
..Billy was crying.
"Shh, Billy, shh," I said, rocking his head against me, but he went on crying. It was the sort of crying that only mothers know how to fix right.
♥ One of his followers murmured agreement, but another quietly slipped away. Now there was Norton and four others. Maybe that wasn't so bad. Christ Himself could only find twelve.
♥ Norton ran his hands through his hair, a gesture as calculated as any ever made by a Broadway actor. I had liked him better pulling the cord of his chainsaw fruitlessly, cussing and thinking himself unobserved. I could not tell then and do not know any better now if he believed in what he was doing or not. I think, down deep, that he knew what was going to happen. I think that the logic he had paid lip service to all his life turned on him at the end like a tiger that has gone bad and mean.
♥ Mr. McVey went on cooking chicken, apparently not minding that only a few people were eating it, happy in the act of cooking. As I think I have said, there are all ways of handling a thing like this. You wouldn't think it would be so, but it is. The mind is a monkey.
♥ The thing spread its wings and flapped them once-apparently not to fly away but to secure a better hold on its prey-and then its leathery-white, membranous wings enfolded poor Smalley's entire upper body. Then the sounds came-mortal tearing sounds that I cannot bear to describe in any detail.
All of this happened in bare seconds. Then I thrust my torch at the thing. There was the sensation of striking something with no more real substance than a box kite. The next moment the entire creature was blazing. It made a screeching sound and its wings spread; its head jerked and its reddish eyes rolled with what I most sincerely hope was great agony. It took off with a sound like linen bedsheets flapping on a clothesline in a stiff spring breeze. It uttered that rusty shrieking sound again.
Heads turned up to follow its flaming, dying course. I think that nothing in the entire business stands in my memory so strongly as that bird-thing blazing a zigzagging course above the aisles of the Federal Supermarket, dropping charred and smoking bits of itself here and there. It finally crashed into the spaghetti sauces, splattering Ragú and Prince and Prima Salsa everywhere like gouts of blood. It was little more than ash and bone.
..You could hear people crying now. And moaning. The odd lady who had been trampled was moaning. And you could hear laughter. The laughter of the damned.
♥ Oh yes-there were also six or seven people who had gone crazy.
Crazy isn't the best word; perhaps I just can't think of the proper one. But there were these people who had lapsed into a complete stupor without benefit of beer, wine, or pills. They stared at you with blank and shiny doorknob eyes. The hard cement of reality had come apart in some unimaginable earthquake, and these poor devils had fallen through. In time, some of them might come back. If there was time.
The rest of us had made our own mental compromises, and in some cases I suppose they were fairly odd. Mrs. Reppler, for instance, was convinced the whole thing was a dream-or so she said. And she spoke with some conviction.
♥ It could have been a good picture. It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough.
You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think-I did-that God put you on earth to blow your father away.
..I could have used the money-that was the year we put the addition on the house and bought the four-wheel-drive-but I just couldn't sell it. I couldn't sell it because I felt it was the best painting I had ever done and I wanted it to look at after someone would ask me, with totally unconscious cruelty, when I was going to do something serious.
Then I happened to show it to Ollie Weeks one day last fall. He asked me if he could photograph it and run it as an ad one week, and that was the end of my own false perspective. Ollie had recognized my painting for what it was, and by doing so, he forced me to recognize it, too. A perfectly good piece of slick commercial art. No more. And, thank God, no less.
I let him do it, and then I called the exec at his home in San Luis Obispo and told him he could have the painting for twenty-five hundred if he will wanted it. He did, and I shipped it UPS to the coast. And since then that voice of disappointed expectation-that cheated child's voice that can never be satisfied with such a mild superlative as good-has fallen pretty much silent. And except for a few tumbles-like the sounds of those unseen creatures somewhere out in the foggy night-it has been pretty much silent ever since. Maybe you can tell me-why should the silencing of that childish, demanding voice seem so much like dying?
♥ At first I had an idea that someone had hung a couple of mannequins from one of the heating pipes below the ceiling. That they had hung them on piano wire or something, a kid's Halloween trick.
Then I noticed the feet, dangling about seven inches off the cement floor. There were two piles of kicked-over cartons. I looked up at the faces and a scream began to rise in my throat because they were not the faces of department-store dummies. Both heads were coked to the side, as if appreciating some horribly funny joke, a joke that had made them laugh until they turned purple.
Their shadows. Their shadows thrown long on the wall behind them. Their tongues. Their protruding tongues.
They were both wearing uniforms. They were the kids I had noticed earlier and had lost track of along the way. The army brats from-
.."It couldn't be done," I said through a dry mouth. But their hands were tied behind them, all right. I couldn't seem to take my eyes away from that.
"It could. If they wanted to bad enough, David, they could."
"But why?"
"I think you know why. Not any of the tourists, the summer people-like that guy Miller-but there are people from around here who could make a pretty decent guess."
"The Arrowhead Project?"
Ollie said, "I stand by one of those registers all day long and I hear a lot. All this spring I've been hearing things about that damned Arrowhead thing, none of it good. ..I've heard stuff from maybe two dozen people," Ollie said. "Justine Robards. Nick Tochai. Ben Michaelson. You can't keep secrets in small towns. Things get out. Sometimes it's like a spring-it just bubbles up out of the earth and no one has an idea where it came from. You overhear something at the library and pass it on, or at the marina in Harrison, Christ knows where else, or why. But all spring and summer I've been hearing Arrowhead Project, Arrowhead Project."
"But these two," I said. "Christ, Ollie, they're just kids."
"There were kids in Nam who used to take ears. I was there. I saw it."
"But... what would drive them to do this?"
"I don't know. Maybe they knew something. Maybe they only suspected. They must have known people in here would start asking them questions eventually. If there is an eventually."
..I muttered, "It's like the Nazi war criminals killing themselves in their cells after the war was lost."
♥ I realized with fresh horror that new doors of perception were opening up inside. New? Not so. Old doors of perception. The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe. Children see everything their eyes happen upon, hear everything in their ears' range. But if life is the rise of consciousness (as a crewel-work sampler my wife made in high school proclaims), then it is also the reduction of input.
Terror is the widening of perspective and perception. The horror was in knowing I was swimming down to a place most of us leave when we get out of diapers and into training pants. I could see it on Ollie's face, too. When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.
♥ "I saw the way you looked at me," she said. "If we need to talk about it, it's no good. The Turman woman is with your son."
"Yes." It came to me that this was a way-maybe not the best one, but a way, nevertheless-to take the curse off what Ollie and I had just done. Not the best way, just the only way.
We went up the narrow flight of stairs and into the office. It was empty, as she had said. And there was a lock on the door. I turned it. In the darkness she was nothing but a shape. I put my arms out, touched her, and pulled her to me. She was trembling. We went down on the floor, first kneeling, kissing, and I cupped one firm breast and could feel the quick thudding of her heart through her sweatshirt. I thought of Steffy telling Billy not to touch the live wires. I thought of the bruise that had been on her hip when she took off the brown dress on our wedding night. I thought of the first time I had seen her, biking across the mall of the University of Maine at Orono, me bound for one of Vincent Hartgen's classes with my portfolio under my arm. And my erection was enormous.
We lay down then, and she said, "Love me, David. Make me warm." When she came, she dug into my back with her nails and called me by a name that wasn't mine. I didn't mind. It made us about even.
♥ Of course he was right. Perhaps the mist was protecting us in a way. Hiding us. But maybe it wouldn't hide us for long, and there was more to it than that. We had been in the Federal for eighteen hours, more or less, and I could feel a kind of lethargy spreading over me, not much different from the lethargy I've felt on one or two occasions when I've tried to swim too far. There was an urge to play it safe, to just stay put, to take care of Billy (and maybe to bang Amanda Dumfries in the middle of the night, a voice murmured), to see if the mist wouldn't just lift, leaving everything as it had been.
I could see it on the other faces as well, and it suddenly occurred to me that there were people now in the Federal who probably wouldn't leave under any circumstance. The very thought of going out the door after all that had happened would freeze them.
♥ Even that gave me the feeling of walking out over an impossible drop on a narrow beam. I wasn't going to help Billy by killing myself. On the other hand, I wasn't going to help him by just sitting on my ass, either.
♥ He seemed better this morning; he had eaten two donuts and a bowl of Special K for breakfast. Afterward I raced him up and down two of the aisles and even got him giggling a little. Kids are so adaptable that they can scare the living shit right out of you. He was too pale, the flesh under his eyes was still puffed from the tears he had cried in the night, and his face had a horribly used look. In a way it had become like an old man's face, as if too much emotional voltage had been running behind it for too long. But he was still alive and still able to laugh... at least until he remembered where he was and what was happening.
♥ "..There's a poisonous feel to that woman. And if people are frightened badly enough for long enough, they'll turn to anyone that promises a solution."
♥ A man in a maroon T-shirt lay facedown in the doorway. Or at least I thought his T-shirt was maroon; then I saw a few white patches at the bottom and understood that once it had been all white. The maroon was dried blood. And there was something else wrong with him. I puzzled it over in my mind. Even when Buddy Eagleton turned around and was noisily sick, it didn't come immediately. I guess when something that... that final happens to someone, your mind rejects it at first... unless maybe you're in a war.
His head was gone, that's what it was. His legs were splayed out inside the pharmacy doors, and his head should have been hanging over the low step. But his head just wasn't.
♥ I remembered talking with a writer friend who lived in Otisfield and supported his wife and two kids by raising chiciens and turning out one paperback original a year-spy stories. We had gotten talking about the bugle in popularity of books concerning themselves with the supernatural. Gault pointed out that in the forties Weird Tales had only been able to pay a pittance, and that in the fifties it went broke. When the machines fail, he had said (while his wife candled eggs and roosters crowed querulously outside), when the technologies fail, when the conventional religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night an seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layers dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant.
♥ "It doesn't matter to me," Hattie said. Her face was white and in spite of the sleep she'd gotten there were large discolored patched under her eyes. "I would do anything-take any chances-just to see the sun again."
Just to see the sun again. A little shiver coursed through me. She had put her finger on a spot that was very close to the center of my own fears, on the sense of almost foregone doom that had gripped me since I had seen Norm dragged out through the loading door. You could only see the sun through the mist as a little silver coin. It was like being on Venus.
It wasn't so much the monstrous creatures that lurked in the mist; my shot with the pinchbar had shown me they were no Lovecraftian horrors with immortal life but only organic creatures with their own vulnerabilities. It was the mist itself that sapped the strength and robbed the will. Just to see the sun again. She was right. That alone would be worth going through a lot of hell.
♥ "Let me hear you say it like you mean it!" Mrs. Carmody shouted. The veins stood out on her neck in bulging cords. Her voice was cracking and hoarse now, but still full of power. Ad it occurred to me that it was the mist that had given her that power-the power to cloud men's minds, to make a particularly apt pun-just as it had taken away the sun's power from the rest of us. Before, she had been nothing but a mildly eccentric old woman with an antiques store in a town that was lousy with antiques stores. Nothing but an old woman with a few stuffed animals in the back room and a reputation for
(that witch... that cunt)
folk medicine. It was said she could find water with an apple-wood stick, that she could charm warts, and sell you a cream that would fade freckles to shadows of their former selves. I had even heard-was it from old Bill Giosti?-that Mrs. Carmody could be seen (in total confidence) about your love life; that if you were having the bedroom miseries, she could give you a drink that would put the ram back in your rod.
"EXPIATION!" they all cried together.
"Expiation, that's right!" she shouted deliriously. "It's expiation gonna clear away this fog! Expiation gonna clear off these monsters and abominations! Expiation gonna drop the scales of mist from our eyes and let us see!" Her voice dropped a notch. "And what does the Bible say expiation is? What is the only cleanser for sin in the Eye and Mind of God?"
"Blood."
♥ A shadow loomed out of the mist, staining it dark. It was as tall as a cliff and coming right at us. I jammed on the brakes. Amanda, who had been catnapping, was thrown forward.
Something came; again, that is all I can say for sure. It may have been the fact that the mist only allowed us to glimpse things briefly, but I think it just as likely that there are certain things that your brain simply disallows. There are things of such darkness and horror-just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty-that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.
It was six-legged, I know that; its skin was slaty gray that mottled to dark brown in places. Those brown patches reminded me absurdly of the liver spots on Mrs. Carmody's hands. Its skin was deeply wrinkled and grooved, and clinging to it were scores, hundreds, of those pinkish "bugs" with the stalk-eyes. I don't know how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us. One of its gray, wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my window, and Mrs. Reppler said later she could not see the underside of its body, although she craned her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight.
For the moment it was over the Scout I had an impression of something so big that it might have made a blue whale look the size of a trout-in other words, something so big that it defied the imagination. Then it was gone, sending a seismological series of thuds back. It left tracks in the cement of the Interstate, tracks so deep I could not see the bottoms. Each single track was nearly big enough to drop the Scout into.
♥ One word.
If I only really heard it. If only.
I'm going to bed now. But first I'm going to kiss my son and whisper two words in his ear. Against the dreams that may come, you know.
Two words that sound a bit alike.
One of them is Hartford.
The other is hope.