Steven King I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me when I was very young—only nine years old. It was 1914, the sum¬ mer after my brother Dan died in the west field and three years before
America got into World War I. five never told anyone about what happened at the fork in the stream that day, and I never will ... at least not with my mouth. I’ve decided to write it down, though, in this book which I will leave on the table beside my bed. I can’t write long, because my hands shake so these days and I have next to no strength, but I don’t think it will take long.
Later, someone may find what I have written. That seems likely to me, as it is pretty much human nature to look in a book marked diary after its owner has passed along. So yes—my words will probably be read. A better question is whether or not anyone will believe them.
Almost certainly not, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not belief I’m inter¬ ested in but freedom. Writing can give that, I’ve found. For twenty years I wrote a column called “Long Ago and Far Away” for the Cas¬ tle Rock Call, and I know that sometimes it works that way—what you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white.
I pray for that sort of release.
A man in his nineties should be well past the terrors of childhood, but as my infirmities slowly creep up on me, like waves licking closer and closer to some indifferently built castle of sand, that terri¬ ble face grows clearer and clearer in my mind’s eye. It glows like a dark star in the constellations of my childhood. What I might have done yesterday, who I might have seen here in my room at the nurs-
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STEPHEN KING ing home, what I might have said to them or they to me . . . those things are gone, but the face of the man in the black suit grows ever clearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said. I don’t want to think of him but I can’t help it, and sometimes at night my old heart beats so hard and so fast I think it will tear itself right clear of my chest. So I uncap my fountain pen and force my trembling old hand to write this pointless anecdote in the diary one of my great¬ grandchildren—I can’t remember her name for sure, at least not right now, but I know it starts with an S—gave to me last Christmas, and which I have never written in until now. Now I will write in it. I will write the story of how I met the man in the black suit on the bank of