" Un excellent cru, touchant et flippant à la fois." L'avenir
Grandir, c'est parfois affronter les démons qui vous hantent.
Jamie n'est pas un enfant comme les autres : il a le pouvoir de parler avec les morts. Mais si ce don extraordinaire n'a pas de prix, il peut lui coûter cher. C'est ce que Jamie va découvrir lorsqu'une inspectrice de la police de New York lui demande son aide pour traquer un tueur qui menace de frapper... depuis sa tombe.
Biographie de l'auteur:
Stephen King a écrit plus de 50 romans, autant de best-sellers, et plus de 200 nouvelles. Couronné de nombreux prix littéraires, il est devenu un mythe vivant de la littérature américaine (médaille de la National Book Foundation en 2003 pour sa contribution aux lettres américaines, Grand Master Award en 2007 pour l'ensemble de son oeuvre).
En février 2018, il a reçu un PEN award d'honneur pour service rendu à la littérature et pour son engagement pour la liberté d'expression.
2.
Danse macabre
Macabres, ces rats qui filent en couinant dans les sous-sols abandonnés d'une filature. Des milliers et des milliers de rats filant en lente procession. Comment s'en débarrasser ? Une machine infernale qui semble avoir une vie propre entreprend un macabre nettoyage ... et l'horreur commence. L'engin happe les humains, les plie dans ses crocs comme des draps... Aveugle, un Ver géant rampe dans une église maudite depuis des années, dans l'attente de la prophétie diabolique qui le libérera. Et si les objets prenaient un jour le pouvoir ? La face cachée du monde en 5 nouvelles diaboliques.
Biographie de l'auteur:
Né en 1947 à Portland (Maine), Stephen King a connu son premier succès en 1974 avec Carrie . En une quarantaine d’années, on lui doit plus de cinquante romans et autant de nouvelles, certains sous le pseudonyme de Richard Bachman. Il a reçu de nombreuses distinctions littéraires, dont le prestigieux Grand Master Award des Mystery Writers of America pour l’ensemble de sa carrière en 2007. Son œuvre est largement adaptée au cinéma et à la télévision.
3.
Chambre 1408
« Dans une maison abandonnée ou dans le donjon d'un vieux château, votre incrédulité peut vous servir de protection. Dans la chambre 1408, elle ne fera que vous rendre encore plus vulnérable. »
Mike est écrivain et chasseur de fantômes. Non pas qu'il y croie lui-même, bien au contraire. Jusque-ici, rien n'est encore parvenu à vaincre son scepticisme. Rien, jusqu'à cette enquête qui le mène à l'hôtel Dolphin de New York, réputé pour sa tristement célèbre chambre 1408. Une chambre supposée hantée...
Biographie de l'auteur:
Stephen King a écrit plus de 50 romans, autant de best-sellers, et plus de 200 nouvelles. Couronné de nombreux prix littéraires, il est devenu un mythe vivant de la littérature américaine (médaille de la National Book Foundation en 2003 pour sa contribution aux lettres américaines, Grand Master Award en 2007 pour l'ensemble de son oeuvre).
En février 2018, il a reçu un PEN award d'honneur pour service rendu à la littérature et pour son engagement pour la liberté d'expression.
4.
Si ça saigne
Les journalistes le savent : si ça saigne, l'info se vend. Et l'explosion d'une bombe au collège Albert Macready est du pain béni dans le monde des news en continu. Holly Gibney de l'agence de détectives Finders Keepers, travaille sur sa dernière enquête lorsqu'elle apprend l'effroyable nouvelle en allumant la télévision. Elle ne sait pas pourquoi, le journaliste qui couvre les événements attire son attention...
Revue de presse
Une plume inégalable. --Le Parisien Week-end
[...] le septuagénaire prouve qu'il tient une forme d'enfer. --Le Parisien Week-end
Biographie de l'auteur:
Stephen King a écrit plus de 50 romans, autant de best-sellers, et plus de 200 nouvelles. Couronné de nombreux prix littéraires, il est devenu un mythe vivant de la littérature américaine (médaille de la National Book Foundation en 2003 pour sa contribution aux lettres américaines, Grand Master Award en 2007 pour l'ensemble de son oeuvre).
En février 2018, il a reçu un PEN award d'honneur pour service rendu à la littérature et pour son engagement pour la liberté d'expression.
5.
The Mist
#1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King’s terrifying novella about a town engulfed in a dense, mysterious mist as humanity makes its last stand against unholy destruction—originally published in the acclaimed short story collection Skeleton Crew and made into a TV series, as well as a feature film starring Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden .
In the wake of a summer storm, terror descends...David Drayton, his son Billy, and their neighbor Brent Norton join dozens of others and head to the local grocery store to replenish supplies following a freak storm. Once there, they become trapped by a strange mist that has enveloped the town. As the confinement takes its toll on their nerves, a religious zealot, Mrs. Carmody, begins to play on their fears to convince them that this is God’s vengeance for their sins. She insists a sacrifice must be made and two groups—those for and those against—are aligned. Clearly, staying in the store may prove fatal, and the Draytons, along with store employee Ollie Weeks, Amanda Dumfries, Irene Reppler, and Dan Miller, attempt to make their escape. But what’s out there may be worse than what they left behind.
This exhilarating novella explores the horror in both the enemy you know—and the one you can only imagine.
Extrait
The Mist
I. The Coming of the Storm
This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke—the night of July 19—the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.
We lived on Long Lake, and we saw the first of the storms beating its way across the water toward us just before dark. For an hour before, the air had been utterly still. The American flag that my father put up on our boathouse in 1936 lay limp against its pole. Not even its hem fluttered. The heat was like a solid thing, and it seemed as deep as sullen quarry-water. That afternoon the three of us had gone swimming, but the water was no relief unless you went out deep. Neither Steffy nor I wanted to go deep because Billy couldn’t. Billy is five.
We ate a cold supper at five-thirty, picking listlessly at ham sandwiches and potato salad out on the deck that faces the lake. Nobody seemed to want anything but Pepsi, which was in a steel bucket of ice cubes.
After supper Billy went out back to play on his monkey bars for a while. Steff and I sat without talking much, smoking and looking across the sullen flat mirror of the lake to Harrison on the far side. A few powerboats droned back and forth. The evergreens over there looked dusty and beaten. In the west, great purple thunderheads were slowly building up, massing like an army. Lightning flashed inside them. Next door, Brent Norton’s radio, tuned to that classical-music station that broadcasts from the top of Mount Washington, sent out a loud bray of static each time the lightning flashed. Norton was a lawyer from New Jersey and his place on Long Lake was only a summer cottage with no furnace or insulation. Two years before, we had a boundary dispute that finally wound up in county court. I won. Norton claimed I won because he was an out-of-towner. There was no love lost between us.
Steff sighed and fanned the top of her breasts with the edge of her halter. I doubted if it cooled her off much but it improved the view a lot.
“I don’t want to scare you,” I said, “but there’s a bad storm on the way, I think.”
She looked at me doubtfully. “There were thunderheads last night and the night before, David. They just broke up.”
“They won’t do that tonight.”
“No?”
“If it gets bad enough, we’re going to go downstairs.”
“How bad do you think it can get?”
My dad was the first to build a year-round home on this side of the lake. When he was hardly more than a kid he and his brothers put up a summer place where the house now stood, and in 1938 a summer storm knocked it flat, stone walls and all. Only the boathouse escaped. A year later he started the big house. It’s the trees that do the damage in a bad blow. They get old, and the wind knocks them over. It’s mother nature’s way of cleaning house periodically.
“I don’t really know,” I said, truthfully enough. I had only heard stories about the great storm of thirty-eight. “But the wind can come off the lake like an express train.”
Billy came back a while later, complaining that the monkey bars were no fun because he was “all sweated up.” I ruffled his hair and gave him another Pepsi. More work for the dentist.
The thunderheads were getting closer, pushing away the blue. There was no doubt now that a storm was coming. Norton had turned off his radio. Billy sat between his mother and me, watching the sky, fascinated. Thunder boomed, rolling slowly across the lake and then echoing back again. The clouds twisted and rolled, now black, now purple, now veined, now black again. They gradually overspread the lake, and I could see a delicate caul of rain extending down from them. It was still a distance away. As we watched, it was probably raining on Bolster’s Mills, or maybe even Norway.
The air began to move, jerkily at first, lifting the flag and then dropping it again. It began to freshen and grew steady, first cooling the perspiration on our bodies and then seeming to freeze it.
That was when I saw the silver veil rolling across the lake. It blotted out Harrison in seconds and then came straight at us. The powerboats had vacated the scene.
Billy stood up from his chair, which was a miniature replica of our director’s chairs, complete with his name printed on the back. “Daddy! Look!”
“Let’s go in,” I said. I stood up and put my arm around his shoulders.
“But do you see it? Dad, what is it?”
“A water-cyclone. Let’s go in.”
Steff threw a quick, startled glance at my face and then said, “Come on, Billy. Do what your father says.”
We went in through the sliding glass doors that give on the living room. I slid the door shut on its track and paused for another look out. The silver veil was three-quarters of the way across the lake. It had resolved itself into a crazily spinning teacup between the lowering black sky and the surface of the water, which had gone the color of lead streaked with white chrome. The lake had begun to look eerily like the ocean, with high waves rolling in and sending spume up from the docks and breakwaters. Out in the middle, big whitecaps were tossing their heads back and forth.
Watching the water-cyclone was hypnotic. It was nearly on top of us when lightning flashed so brightly that it printed everything on my eyes in negative for thirty seconds afterward. The telephone gave out a startled ting! and I turned to see my wife and son standing directly in front of the big picture window that gives us a panoramic view of the lake to the northwest.
One of those terrible visions came to me—I think they are reserved exclusively for husbands and fathers—of the picture window blowing in with a low hard coughing sound and sending jagged arrows of glass into my wife’s bare stomach, into my boy’s face and neck. The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones.
I grabbed them both hard and jerked them away. “What the hell are you doing? Get away from there!”
Steff gave me a startled glance. Billy only looked at me as if he had been partially awakened from a deep dream. I led them into the kitchen and hit the light switch. The phone ting-a-linged again.
Then the wind came. It was as if the house had taken off like a 747. It was a high, breathless whistling, sometimes deepening to a bass roar before glissading up to a whooping scream.
“Go downstairs,” I told Steff, and now I had to shout to make myself heard. Directly over the house thunder whacked mammoth planks together and Billy shrank against my leg.
“You come too!” Steff yelled back.
I nodded and made shooing gestures. I had to pry Billy off my leg. “Go with your mother. I want to get some candles in case the lights go off.”
He went with her, and I started opening cabinets. Candles are funny things, you know. You lay them by every spring, knowing that a summer storm may knock out the power. And when the time comes, they hide.
I was pawing through the fourth cabinet, past the half-ounce of grass that Steff and I bought four years ago and had still not smoked much of, past Billy’s wind-up set of chattering teeth from the Auburn Novelty Shop, past the drifts of photos Steffy kept forgetting to glue in our album. I looked under a Sears catalogue and behind a Kewpie doll from Taiwan that I had won at the Fryeburg Fair knocking over wooden milk bottles with tennis balls.
I found the candles behind the Kewpie doll with its glazed dead man’s eyes. They were still wrapped in their cellophane. As my hand closed around them the lights went out and the only electricity was the stuff in the sky. The dining room was lit in a series of shutterflashes that were white and purple. Downstairs I heard Billy start to cry and the low murmur of Steff soothing him.
I had to have one more look at the storm.
The water-cyclone had either passed us or broken up when it reached the shoreline, but I still couldn’t see twenty yards out onto the lake. The water was in complete turmoil. I saw someone’s dock—the Jassers’, maybe—hurry by with its main supports alternately turned up to the sky and buried in the churning water.
I went downstairs. Billy ran to me and clung to my legs. I lifted him up and gave him a hug. Then I lit the candles. We sat in the guest room down the hall from my little studio and looked at each other’s faces in the flickering yellow glow and listened to the storm roar and bash at our house. About twenty minutes later we heard a ripping, rending crash as one of the big pines went down nearby. Then there was a lull.
“Is it over?” Steff asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe only for a while.”
We went upstairs, each of us carrying a candle, like monks going to vespers. Billy carried his proudly and carefully. Carrying a candle, carrying the fire, was a very big deal for him. It helped him forget about being afraid.
It was too dark to see what damage had been done around the house. It was past Billy’s bedtime, but neither of us suggested putting him in. We sat in the living room, listened to the wind, and looked at the lightning.
About an hour later it began to crank up again. 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.
The second squall wasn’t so hard, but we heard the crash of several trees weakened by the first onslaught. As the wind began to die down again, one thudded heavily on the roof, like a fist dropped on a coffin lid. Billy jumped and looked apprehensively upward.
“It’ll hold, champ,” I said.
Billy smiled nervously.
Around ten o’clock the last squall came. It was bad. The wind howled almost as loudly as it had the first time, and lightning seemed to be flashing all around us. More trees fell, and there was a splintering crash down by the water that made Steff utter a low cry. Billy had gone to sleep on her lap.
“David, what was that?”
“I think it was the boathouse.”
“Oh. Oh, Jesus.”
“Steffy, I want us to go downstairs again.” I took Billy in my arms and stood up with him. Steff’s eyes were big and frightened.
“David, are we going to be all right?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
We went downstairs. Ten minutes later, as the final squall peaked, there was a splintering crash from upstairs—the picture window. So maybe my vision earlier hadn’t been so crazy after all. Steff, who had been dozing, woke up with a little shriek, and Billy stirred uneasily in the guest bed.
“The rain will come in,” she said. “It’ll ruin the furniture.”
“If it does, it does. It’s insured.”
“That doesn’t make it any better,” she said in an upset, scolding voice. “Your mother’s dresser . . . our new sofa . . . the color TV . . .”
“Shhh,” I said. “Go to sleep.”
“I can’t,” she said, and five minutes later she had.
I stayed awake for another half hour with one lit candle for company, listening to the thunder walk and talk outside. I had a feeling that there were going to be a lot of people from the lakefront communities calling their insurance agents in the morning, a lot of chainsaws burring as cottage owners cut up the trees that had fallen on their roofs and battered through their windows, and a lot of orange CMP trucks on the road.
The storm was fading now, with no sign of a new squall coming in. I went back upstairs, leaving Steff and Billy on the bed, and looked into the living room. The sliding glass door had held. But where the picture window had been there was now a jagged hole stuffed with birch leaves. It was the top of the old tree that had stood by our outside basement access for as long as I could remember. Looking at its top, now visiting in our living room, I could understand what Steff had meant by saying insurance didn’t make it any better. I had loved that tree. It had been a hard campaigner of many winters, the one tree on the lakeside of the house that was exempt from my own chainsaw. Big chunks of glass on the rug reflected my candle-flame over and over. I reminded myself to warn Steff and Billy. They would want to wear their slippers in here. Both of them liked to slop around barefoot in the morning.
I went downstairs again. 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.
Biographie de l'auteur:
Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Fairy Tale, Billy Summers , If It Bleeds , The Institute , Elevation , The Outsider , Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch , Finders Keepers , and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower , It , Pet Sematary , and Doctor Sleep are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
6.
L'Outsider
Le corps martyrisé d’un garçon de onze ans est retrouvé dans le parc de Flint City. Témoins et empreintes digitales désignent aussitôt le coupable : Terry Maitland, l’un des habitants les plus respectés de la ville, entraîneur de l’équipe locale de baseball, professeur d’anglais, marié et père de deux fillettes. Et les résultats des analyses ADN ne laissent aucune place au doute. Pourtant, malgré l’évidence, Terry Maitland affirme qu’il est innocent. Et si c’était vrai ?
À travers cette enquête impossible, Stephen King explore le mal contemporain et universel.
Biographie de l'auteur:
Né en 1947 à Portland (Maine), Stephen King a connu son premier succès en 1974 avec Carrie . En une quarantaine d’années, on lui doit plus de cinquante romans et autant de nouvelles, certains sous le pseudonyme de Richard Bachman. Il a reçu de nombreuses distinctions littéraires, dont le prestigieux Grand Master Award des Mystery Writers of America pour l’ensemble de sa carrière en 2007. Son œuvre est largement adaptée au cinéma et à la télévision.
7.
Shining
Situé dans les montagnes Rocheuses, l’Overlook Palace passe pour être l’un des plus beaux lieux du monde. Confort, luxe, volupté…
L’hiver, l’hôtel est fermé.
Coupé du monde par le froid et la neige. Alors, seul l’habite un gardien.
Celui qui a été engagé cet hiver-là s’appelle Jack Torrance: c’est un alcoolique, un écrivain raté, qui tente d’échapper au désespoir. Avec lui vivent sa femme, Wendy, et leur enfant, Danny.
Danny qui possède le don de voir, de ressusciter les choses et les êtres que l’on croit disparus.
Ce qu’il sent, lui, dans les cent dix chambres vides de l’Overlook Palace, c’est la présence du démon. Cauchemar ou réalité, le corps de cette femme assassinée? ces bruits de fête qui dérivent dans les couloirs ? cette vie si étrange qui anime l’hôtel?
Un récit envoûtant immortalisé à l’écran par Stanley Kubrick.
Biographie de l'auteur:
Né en 1947 à Portland (Maine), Stephen King a connu son premier succès en 1974 avec Carrie . En une quarantaine d’années, on lui doit plus de cinquante romans et autant de nouvelles, certains sous le pseudonyme de Richard Bachman. Il a reçu de nombreuses distinctions littéraires, dont le prestigieux Grand Master Award des Mystery Writers of America pour l’ensemble de sa carrière en 2007. Son œuvre est largement adaptée au cinéma et à la télévision.
8.
Ça (Coffret 2 tomes)
Un coffret collector à l'occasion du retour du célèbre clown-tueur au cinéma !
Tout avait commencé juste avant les vacances d’été quand le petit Browers avait gravé ses initiales au couteau sur le ventre de son copain Ben Hascom. Tout s’était terminé deux mois plus tard dans les égouts par la poursuite infernale d’une créature étrange, incarnation même du mal. Mais aujourd’hui tout recommence.
Les enfants terrorisés sont devenus des adultes. Le présent retrouve le passé, le destin reprend ses droits, l’horreur ressurgit. Chacun retrouvera dans ce roman à la construction saisissante ses propres souvenirs, ses angoisses et ses terreurs d’enfant, la peur de grandir dans un monde de violence.
Biographie de l'auteur:
Né en 1947 à Portland (Maine), Stephen King a connu son premier succès en 1974 avec Carrie . En une quarantaine d’années, on lui doit plus de cinquante romans et autant de nouvelles, certains sous le pseudonyme de Richard Bachman. Il a reçu de nombreuses distinctions littéraires, dont le prestigieux Grand Master Award des Mystery Writers of America pour l’ensemble de sa carrière en 2007. Son œuvre est largement adaptée au cinéma et à la télévision.
9.
Salem
« Salem est l’un de mes meilleurs romans, l’un des plus effrayants aussi. Alors, éteignez la télévision, et parlons vampires dans la pénombre, je pense pouvoir vous faire croire en leur existence. » Stephen King, juin 2005.
Le Maine, 1970. Ben Mears revient à Salem et s’installe à Marsten House, inhabitée depuis la mort tragique de ses propriétaires, vingt-cinq ans auparavant. Mais, très vite, il doit se rendre à l’évidence : il se passe des choses étranges dans cette petite bourgade. Un chien est immolé, un enfant disparaît, et l’horreur s’infiltre, se répand, aussi inéluctable que la nuit qui descend sur Salem.
En bonus : Deux nouvelles inédites sur le village de Salem. De nombreuses scènes coupées que Stephen King souhaitait faire découvrir à son public.
Biographie de l'auteur:
Né en 1947 à Portland (Maine), Stephen King a connu son premier succès en 1974 avec Carrie . En une quarantaine d’années, on lui doit plus de cinquante romans et autant de nouvelles, certains sous le pseudonyme de Richard Bachman. Il a reçu de nombreuses distinctions littéraires, dont le prestigieux Grand Master Award des Mystery Writers of America pour l’ensemble de sa carrière en 2007. Son œuvre est largement adaptée au cinéma et à la télévision.
10.
The Sun Dog
#1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King’s novella The Sun Dog , published in his award-winning 1990 story collection Four Past Midnight, now available for the first time as a standalone publication.
The dog is loose again. It is not sleeping. It is not lazy. It’s coming for you.
Kevin Delavan wants only one thing for his fifteenth birthday: a Polaroid Sun 660. There’s something wrong with his gift, though. No matter where Kevin Delevan aims the camera, it produces a photograph of an enormous, vicious dog. In each successive picture, the menacing creature draws nearer to the flat surface of the Polaroid film as if it intends to break through. When old Pop Merrill, the town’s sharpest trader, gets wind of this phenomenon, he envisions a way to profit from it. But the Sun Dog, a beast that shouldn’t exist at all, turns out to be a very dangerous investment.
Extrait
The Sun Dog
CHAPTER ONE
September 15th was Kevin’s birthday, and he got exactly what he wanted: a Sun.
The Kevin in question was Kevin Delevan, the birthday was his fifteenth, and the Sun was a Sun 660, a Polaroid camera which does everything for the novice photographer except make bologna sandwiches.
There were other gifts, of course; his sister, Meg, gave him a pair of mittens she had knitted herself, there was ten dollars from his grandmother in Des Moines, and his Aunt Hilda sent—as she always did—a string tie with a horrible clasp. She had sent the first of these when Kevin was three, which meant he already had twelve unused string ties with horrible clasps in a drawer of his bureau, to which this would be added—lucky thirteen. He had never worn any of them but was not allowed to throw them away. Aunt Hilda lived in Portland. She had never come to one of Kevin’s or Meg’s birthday parties, but she might decide to do just that one of these years. God knew she could; Portland was only fifty miles south of Castle Rock. And suppose she did come . . . and asked to see Kevin in one of his other ties (or Meg in one of her other scarves, for that matter)? With some relatives, an excuse might do. Aunt Hilda, however, was different. Aunt Hilda presented a certain golden possibility at a point where two essential facts about her crossed: she was Rich, and she was Old.
Someday, Kevin’s Mom was convinced, she might DO SOMETHING for Kevin and Meg. It was understood that the SOMETHING would probably come after Aunt Hilda finally kicked it, in the form of a clause in her will. In the meantime, it was thought wise to keep the horrible string ties and the equally horrible scarves. So this thirteenth string tie (on the clasp of which was a bird Kevin thought was a woodpecker) would join the others, and Kevin would write Aunt Hilda a thank-you note, not because his mother would insist on it and not because he thought or even cared that Aunt Hilda might DO SOMETHING for him and his kid sister someday, but because he was a generally thoughtful boy with good habits and no real vices.
He thanked his family for all his gifts (his mother and father had, of course, supplied a number of lesser ones, although the Polaroid was clearly the centerpiece, and they were delighted with his delight), not forgetting to give Meg a kiss (she giggled and pretended to rub it off but her own delight was equally clear) and to tell her he was sure the mittens would come in handy on the ski team this winter—but most of his attention was reserved for the Polaroid box, and the extra film packs which had come with it.
He was a good sport about the birthday cake and the ice cream, although it was clear he was itching to get at the camera and try it out. And as soon as he decently could, he did.
That was when the trouble started.
He read the instruction booklet as thoroughly as his eagerness to begin would allow, then loaded the camera while the family watched with anticipation and unacknowledged dread (for some reason, the gifts which seem the most wanted are the ones which so often don’t work). There was a little collective sigh—more puff than gust—when the camera obediently spat out the cardboard square on top of the film packet, just as the instruction booklet had promised it would.
There were two small dots, one red and one green, separated by a zig-zag lightning-bolt on the housing of the camera. When Kevin loaded the camera, the red light came on. It stayed on for a couple of seconds. The family watched in silent fascination as the Sun 660 sniffed for light. Then the red light went out and the green light began to blink rapidly.
“It’s ready,” Kevin said, in the same straining-to-be-off-hand-but-not-quite-making-it tone with which Neil Armstrong had reported his first step upon the surface of Luna. “Why don’t all you guys stand together?”
“I hate having my picture taken!” Meg cried, covering her face with the theatrical anxiety and pleasure which only sub-teenage girls and really bad actresses can manage.
“Come on, Meg,” Mr. Delevan said.
“Don’t be a goose, Meg,” Mrs. Delevan said.
Meg dropped her hands (and her objections), and the three of them stood at the end of the table with the diminished birthday cake in the foreground.
Kevin looked through the viewfinder. “Squeeze a little closer to Meg, Mom,” he said, motioning with his left hand. “You too, Dad.” This time he motioned with his right.
“You’re squishing me!” Meg said to her parents.
Kevin put his finger on the button which would fire the camera, then remembered a briefly glimpsed note in the instructions about how easy it was to cut off your subjects’ heads in a photograph. Off with their heads, he thought, and it should have been funny, but for some reason he felt a little tingle at the base of his spine, gone and forgotten almost before it was noticed. He raised the camera a little. There. They were all in the frame. Good.
“Okay!” he sang. “Smile and say Intercourse!”
“Kevin!” his mother cried out.
His father burst out laughing, and Meg screeched the sort of mad laughter not even bad actresses often essay; girls between the ages of ten and twelve own sole title to that particular laugh.
Kevin pushed the button.
The flashbulb, powered by the battery in the film pack, washed the room in a moment of righteous white light.
It’s mine, Kevin thought, and it should have been the surpassing moment of his fifteenth birthday. Instead, the thought brought back that odd little tingle. It was more noticeable this time.
The camera made a noise, something between a squeal and a whirr, a sound just a little beyond description but familiar enough to most people, just the same: the sound of a Polaroid camera squirting out what may not be art but what is often serviceable and almost always provides instant gratification.
“Lemme see it!” Meg cried.
“Hold your horses, muffin,” Mr. Delevan said. “They take a little time to develop.”
Meg was staring at the stiff gray surface of what was not yet a photograph with the rapt attention of a woman gazing into a crystal ball.
The rest of the family gathered around, and there was that same feeling of anxiety which had attended the ceremony of Loading the Camera: still life of the American Family waiting to let out its breath.
Kevin felt a terrible tenseness stealing into his muscles, and this time there was no question of ignoring it. He could not explain it . . . but it was there. He could not seem to take his eyes from that solid gray square within the white frame which would form the borders of the photograph.
“I think I see me!” Meg cried brightly. Then, a moment later: “No. I guess I don’t. I think I see—”
They watched in utter silence as the gray cleared, as the mists are reputed to do in a seer’s crystal when the vibrations or feelings or whatever they are are right, and the picture became visible to them.
Mr. Delevan was the first to break the silence.
“What is this?” he asked no one in particular. “Some kind of joke?”
Kevin had absently put the camera down rather too close to the edge of the table in order to watch the picture develop. Meg saw what the picture was and took a single step away. The expression on her face was neither fright nor awe but just ordinary surprise. One of her hands came up as she turned toward her father. The rising hand struck the camera and knocked it off the table and onto the floor. Mrs. Delevan had been looking at the emerging picture in a kind of trance, the expression on her face either that of a woman who is deeply puzzled or who is feeling the onset of a migraine headache. The sound of the camera hitting the floor startled her. She uttered a little scream and recoiled. In doing this, she tripped over Meg’s foot and lost her balance. Mr. Delevan reached for her, propelling Meg, who was still between them, forward again, quite forcefully. Mr. Delevan not only caught his wife, but did so with some grace; for a moment they would have made a pretty picture indeed: Mom and Dad, showing they still know how to Cut A Rug, caught at the end of a spirited tango, she with one hand thrown up and her back deeply bowed, he bent over her in that ambiguous male posture which may be seen, when divorced from circumstance, as either solicitude or lust.
Meg was eleven, and less graceful. She went flying back toward the table and smacked into it with her stomach. The hit was hard enough to have injured her, but for the last year and a half she had been taking ballet lessons at the YWCA three afternoons a week. She did not dance with much grace, but she enjoyed ballet, and the dancing had fortunately toughened the muscles of her stomach enough for them to absorb the blow as efficiently as good shock absorbers absorb the pounding a road full of potholes can administer to a car. Still, there was a band of black and blue just above her hips the next day. These bruises took almost two weeks to first purple, then yellow, then fade . . . like a Polaroid picture in reverse.
At the moment this Rube Goldberg accident happened, she didn’t even feel it; she simply banged into the table and cried out. The table tipped. The birthday cake, which should have been in the foreground of Kevin’s first picture with his new camera, slid off the table. Mrs. Delevan didn’t even have time to start her Meg, are you all right? before the remaining half of the cake fell on top of the Sun 660 with a juicy splat! that sent frosting all over their shoes and the baseboard of the wall.
The viewfinder, heavily smeared with Dutch chocolate, peered out like a periscope. That was all.
Happy birthday, Kevin.
• • •
Kevin and Mr. Delevan were sitting on the couch in the living room that evening when Mrs. Delevan came in, waving two dog-eared sheets of paper which had been stapled together. Kevin and Mr. Delevan both had open books in their laps (The Best and the Brightest for the father; Shoot-Out at Laredo for the son), but what they were mostly doing was staring at the Sun camera, which sat in disgrace on the coffee table amid a litter of Polaroid pictures. All the pictures appeared to show exactly the same thing.
Meg was sitting on the floor in front of them, using the VCR to watch a rented movie. Kevin wasn’t sure which one it was, but there were a lot of people running around and screaming, so he guessed it was a horror picture. Megan had a passion for them. Both parents considered this a low taste (Mr. Delevan in particular was often outraged by what he called “that useless junk”), but tonight neither of them had said a word. Kevin guessed they were just grateful she had quit complaining about her bruised stomach and wondering aloud what the exact symptoms of a ruptured spleen might be.
“Here they are,” Mrs. Delevan said. “I found them at the bottom of my purse the second time through.” She handed the papers—a sales slip from J. C. Penney’s and a MasterCard receipt—to her husband. “I can never find anything like this the first time. I don’t think anyone can. It’s like a law of nature.”
She surveyed her husband and son, hands on her hips.
“You two look like someone just killed the family cat.”
“We don’t have a cat,” Kevin said.
“Well, you know what I mean. It’s a shame, of course, but we’ll get it sorted out in no time. Penney’s will be happy to exchange it—”
“I’m not so sure of that,” John Delevan said. He picked up the camera, looked at it with distaste (almost sneered at it, in fact), and then set it down again. “It got chipped when it hit the floor. See?”
Mrs. Delevan took only a cursory glance. “Well, if Penney’s won’t, I’m positive that the Polaroid company will. I mean, the fall obviously didn’t cause whatever is wrong with it. The first picture looked just like all these, and Kevin took that one before Meg knocked it off the table.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Meg said without turning around. On the screen, a pint-sized figure—a malevolent doll named Chucky, if Kevin had it right—was chasing a small boy. Chucky was dressed in blue overalls and waving a knife.
“I know, dear. How’s your stomach?”
“Hurts,” Meg said. “A little ice cream might help. Is there any left over?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Meg gifted her mother with her most winning smile. “Would you get some for me?”
“Not at all,” Mrs. Delevan said pleasantly. “Get it yourself. And what’s that horrible thing you’re watching?”
“Child’s Play,” Megan said. “There’s this doll named Chucky that comes to life. It’s neat.”
Mrs. Delevan wrinkled her nose.
“Dolls don’t come to life, Meg,” her father said. He spoke heavily, as if knowing this was a lost cause.
“Chucky did,” Meg said. “In movies, anything can happen.” She used the remote control to freeze the movie and went to get her ice cream.
“Why does she want to watch that crap?” Mr. Delevan asked his wife, almost plaintively.
“I don’t know, dear.”
Kevin had picked up the camera in one hand and several of the exposed Polaroids in the other—they had taken almost a dozen in all. “I’m not so sure I want a refund,” he said.
His father stared at him. “What? Jesus wept!”
“Well,” Kevin said, a little defensively, “I’m just saying that maybe we ought to think about it. I mean, it’s not exactly an ordinary defect, is it? I mean, if the pictures came out overexposed . . . or underexposed . . . or just plain blank . . . that would be one thing. But how do you get a thing like this? The same picture, over and over? I mean, look! And they’re outdoors, even though we took every one of these pictures inside!”
“It’s a practical joke,” his father said. “It must be. The thing to do is just exchange the damned thing and forget about it.”
“I don’t think it’s a practical joke,” Kevin said. “First, it’s too complicated to be a practical joke. How do you rig a camera to take the same picture over and over? Plus, the psychology is all wrong.”
“Psychology, yet,” Mr. Delevan said, rolling his eyes at his wife.
“Yes, psychology!” Kevin replied firmly. “When a guy loads your cigarette or hands you a stick of pepper gum, he hangs around to watch the fun, doesn’t he? But unless you or Mom have been pulling my leg—”
“Your father isn’t much of a leg-puller, dear,” Mrs. Delevan said, stating the obvious gently.
Mr. Delevan was looking at Kevin with his lips pressed together. It was the look he always got when he perceived his son drifting toward that area of the ballpark where Kevin seemed most at home: left field. Far left field. There was a hunchy, intuitive streak in Kevin that had always puzzled and confounded him. He didn’t know where it had come from, but he was sure it hadn’t been his side of the family.
He sighed and looked at the camera again. A piece of black plastic had been chipped from the left side of the housing, and there was a crack, surely no thicker than a human hair, down the center of the viewfinder lens. The crack was so thin it disappeared completely when you raised the camera to your eye to set the shot you would not get—what you would get was on the coffee table, and there were nearly a dozen other examples in the dining room.
What you got was something that looked like a refugee from the local animal shelter.
“All right, what in the devil are you going to do with it?” he asked. “I mean, let’s think this over reasonably, Kevin. What practical good is a camera that takes the same picture over and over?”
But it was not practical good Kevin was thinking about. In fact, he was not thinking at all. He was feeling . . . and remembering. In the instant when he had pushed the shutter release, one clear idea
(it’s mine)
had filled his mind as completely as the momentary white flash had filled his eyes. That idea, complete yet somehow inexplicable, had been accompanied by a powerful mixture of emotions which he could still not identify completely . . . but he thought fear and excitement had predominated.
And besides—his father always wanted to look at things reasonably. He would never be able to understand Kevin’s intuitions or Meg’s interest in killer dolls named Chucky.
Meg came back in with a huge dish of ice cream and started the movie again. Someone was now attempting to toast Chucky with a blowtorch, but he went right on waving his knife. “Are you two still arguing?”
“We’re having a discussion,” Mr. Delevan said. His lips were pressed more tightly together than ever.
“Yeah, right,” Meg said, sitting down on the floor again and crossing her legs. “You always say that.”
“Meg?” Kevin said kindly.
“What?”
“If you dump that much ice cream on top of a ruptured spleen, you’ll die horribly in the night. Of course, your spleen might not actually be ruptured, but—”
Meg stuck her tongue out at him and turned back to the movie.
Mr. Delevan was looking at his son with an expression of mingled affection and exasperation. “Look, Kev—it’s your camera. No argument about that. You can do whatever you want with it. But—”
“Dad, aren’t you even the least bit interested in why it’s doing what it’s doing?”
“Nope,” John Delevan said.
It was Kevin’s turn to roll his eyes. Meanwhile, Mrs. Delevan was looking from one to the other like someone who is enjoying a pretty good tennis match. Nor was this far from the truth. She had spent years watching her son and her husband sharpen themselves on each other, and she was not bored with it yet. She sometimes wondered if they would ever discover how much alike they really were.
“Well, I want to think it over.”
“Fine. I just want you to know that I can swing by Penney’s tomorrow and exchange the thing—if you want me to and they agree to swap a piece of chipped merchandise, that is. If you want to keep it, that’s fine, too. I wash my hands of it.” He dusted his palms briskly together to illustrate.
“I suppose you don’t want my opinion,” Meg said.
“Right,” Kevin said.
“Of course we do, Meg,” Mrs. Delevan said.
“I think it’s a supernatural camera,” Meg said. She licked ice cream from her spoon. “I think it’s a Manifestation.”
“That’s utterly ridiculous,” Mr. Delevan said at once.
“No, it’s not,” Meg said. “It happens to be the only explanation that fits. You just don’t think so because you don’t believe in stuff like that. If a ghost ever floated up to you, Dad, you wouldn’t even see it. What do you think, Kev?”
For a moment Kevin didn’t—couldn’t—answer. He felt as if another flashbulb had gone off, this one behind his eyes instead of in front of them.
“Kev? Earth to Kevin!”
“I think you might just have something there, squirt,” he said slowly.
“Oh my dear God,” John Delevan said, getting up. “It’s the revenge of Freddy and Jason—my kid thinks his birthday camera’s haunted. I’m going to bed, but before I do, I want to say just one more thing. A camera that takes photographs of the same thing over and over again—especially something as ordinary as what’s in these pictures—is a boring manifestation of the supernatural.”
“Still . . .” Kevin said. He held up the photos like a dubious poker hand.
“I think it’s time we all went to bed,” Mrs. Delevan said briskly. “Meg, if you absolutely need to finish that cinematic masterpiece, you can do it in the morning.”
“But it’s almost over!” Meg cried.
“I’ll come up with her, Mom,” Kevin said, and, fifteen minutes later, with the malevolent Chucky disposed of (at least until the sequel), he did. But sleep did not come easily for Kevin that night. He lay long awake in his bedroom, listening to a strong late-summer wind rustle the leaves outside into whispery conversation, thinking about what might make a camera take the same picture over and over and over again, and what such a thing might mean. He only began to slip toward sleep when he realized his decision had been made: he would keep the Polaroid Sun at least a little while longer.
It’s mine, he thought again. He rolled over on his side, closed his eyes, and was sleeping deeply forty seconds later.
Biographie de l'auteur:
Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Fairy Tale, Billy Summers , If It Bleeds , The Institute , Elevation , The Outsider , Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch , Finders Keepers , and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower , It , Pet Sematary , and Doctor Sleep are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
