The Man in the Black Suit
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. I ve 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-
45
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
Castle Stream one afternoon in the summer of 1914.
The town of Motton was a different world in those days more dif-
ferent than I could ever tell you. That was a world without airplanes
droning overhead, a world almost without cars and trucks, a world
where the skies were not cut into lanes and slices by overhead power
lines.
There was not a single paved road in the whole town, and the busi-
ness district consisted of nothing but Corson s General Store, Thut s
Livery & Hardware, the Methodist Church at Christ s Corner, the
school, the town hall, and Harry s Restaurant half a mile down from
there, which my mother called, with unfailing disdain, the liquor
house.
Mostly, though, the difference was in how people lived how
apart they were. I m not sure people born after the middle of the twen-
tieth century could quite credit that, although they might say they
could, to be polite to old folks like me. There were no phones in west-
ern Maine back then, for one thing. The first one wouldn t be
installed for another five years, and by the time there was one in our
house, I was nineteen and going to college at the University of
Maine in Orono.
But that is only the roof of the thing. There was no doctor closer
than Casco, and no more than a dozen houses in what you would call
town. There were no neighborhoods (I m not even sure we knew the
46
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
word, although we had a verb neighboring that described church
functions and barn dances), and open fields were the exception rather
than the rule. Out of town the houses were farms that stood far apart
from each other, and from December until middle March we mostly
hunkered down in the little pockets of stovewarmth we called fami-
lies. We hunkered and listened to the wind in the chimney and
hoped no one would get sick or break a leg or get a headful of bad
ideas, like the farmer over in Castle Rock who had chopped up his wife
and kids three winters before and then said in court that the ghosts
made him do it. In those days before the Great War, most of Motton
was woods and bog, dark long places full of moose and mosquitoes,
snakes and secrets. In those days there were ghosts everywhere.
This thing I m telling about happened on a Saturday. My father gave
me a whole list of chores to do, including some that would have been
Dan s, if he d still been alive. He was my only brother, and he d died
of being stung by a bee. A year had gone by, and still my mother
wouldn t hear that. She said it was something else, had to have
been, that no one ever died of being stung by a bee. When Mama
Sweet, the oldest lady in the Methodist Ladies Aid, tried to tell her
at the church supper the previous winter, this was that the same
thing had happened to her favorite uncle back in 73, my mother
clapped her hands over her ears, got up, and walked out of the
church basement. She d never been back since, either, and nothing my
father could say to her would change her mind. She claimed she was
done with church, and that if she ever had to see Helen Robichaud
again (that was Mama Sweet s real name), she would slap her eyes out.
She wouldn t be able to help herself, she said.
That day, Dad wanted me to lug wood for the cookstove, weed the
beans and the cukes, pitch hay out of the loft, get two jugs of water
to put in the cold pantry, and scrape as much old paint off the cellar
bulkhead as I could. Then, he said, I could go fishing, if I didn t mind
going by myself he had to go over and see Bill Eversham about
some cows. I said I sure didn t mind going by myself, and my Dad
smiled like that didn t surprise him so very much. He d given me a
47
STEPHEN KING
bamboo pole the week before not because it was my birthday or
anything, but just because he liked to give me things, sometimes
and I was wild to try it in Castle Stream, which was by far the
troutiest brook I d ever fished.
But don t you go too far in the woods, he told me. Not beyond
where it splits.
No, sir.
Promise me.
Yessir, I promise.
Now promise your mother.
We were standing on the back stoop; I had been bound for the
springhouse with the waterjugs when my Dad stopped me. Now he
turned me around to face my mother, who was standing at the mar-
ble counter in a flood of strong morning sunshine falling through the
double windows over the sink. There was a curl of hair lying across
the side of her forehead and touching her eyebrow you see how well
I remember it all? The bright light turned that little curl to filaments
of gold and made me want to run to her and put my arms around
her. In that instant I saw her as a woman, saw her as my father must
have seen her. She was wearing a housedress with little red roses all
over it, I remember, and she was kneading bread. Candy Bill, our lit-
tle black Scottie dog, was standing alertly beside her feet, looking up,
waiting for anything that might drop. My mother was looking at me.
I promise, I said.
She smiled, but it was the worried kind of smile she always seemed
to make since my father brought Dan back from the west field in his
arms. My father had come sobbing and bare-chested. He had taken
off his shirt and draped it over Dan s face, which had swelled and
turned color. My boy! he had been crying. Oh, look at my boy! Jesus, look
at my boy! I remember that as if it had been yesterday. It was the only
time I ever heard my Dad take the Savior s name in vain.
What do you promise, Gary? she asked.
Promise not to go no further than where it forks, ma am.
Any further.
Any.
48
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
She gave me a patient look, saying nothing as her hands went on
working in the dough, which now had a smooth, silky look.
I promise not to go any further than where it forks, ma am.
Thank you, Gary, she said. And try to remember that gram-
mar is for the world as well as for school.
Yes, ma am.
Candy Bill followed me as I did my chores, and sat between my feet
as I bolted my lunch, looking up at me with the same attentiveness
he had shown my mother while she was kneading her bread, but when
I got my new bamboo pole and my old, splintery creel and started out
of the dooryard, he stopped and only stood in the dust by an old roll
of snowfence, watching. I called him but he wouldn t come. He
yapped a time or two, as if telling me to come back, but that was all.
Stay, then, I said, trying to sound as if I didn t care. I did,
though, at least a little. Candy Bill always went fishing with me.
My mother came to the door and looked out at me with her left
hand held up to shade her eyes. I can see her that way still, and it s like
looking at a photograph of someone who later became unhappy, or
died suddenly. You mind your Dad now, Gary!
Yes, ma am, I will.
She waved. I waved, too. Then I turned my back on her and
walked away.
The sun beat down on my neck, hard and hot, for the first quarter-mile
or so, but then I entered the woods, where double shadow fell over the
road and it was cool and fir-smelling and you could hear the wind hiss-
ing through the deep needled groves. I walked with my pole on my
shoulder like boys did back then, holding my creel in my other hand
like a valise or a salesman s sample-case. About two miles into the
woods along a road which was really nothing but a double rut with a
grassy strip growing up the center hump, I began to hear the hurried,
eager gossip of Castle Stream. I thought of trout with bright speckled
backs and pure white bellies, and my heart went up in my chest.
The stream flowed under a little wooden bridge, and the banks
49
STEPHEN KING
leading down to the water were steep and brushy. I worked my way
down carefully, holding on where I could and digging my heels in. I
went down out of summer and back into midspring, or so it felt. The
cool rose gently off the water, and a green smell like moss. When I got
to the edge of the water I only stood there for a little while, breath-
ing deep of that mossy smell and watching the dragonflies circle and
the skitterbugs skate. Then, farther down, I saw a trout leap at a but-
terfly a good big brookie, maybe fourteen inches long and remem-
bered I hadn t come here just to sightsee.
I walked along the bank, following the current, and wet my line for
the first time with the bridge still in sight upstream. Something jerked
the tip of my pole down a time or two and ate half my worm, but he
was too sly for my nine-year-old hands or maybe just not hungry
enough to be careless so I went on.
I stopped at two or three other places before I got to the place
where Castle Stream forks, going southwest into Castle Rock and
southeast into Kashwakamak Township, and at one of them I caught
the biggest trout I have ever caught in my life, a beauty that measured
nineteen inches from tip to tail on the little ruler I kept in my creel.
That was a monster of a brook trout, even for those days.
If I had accepted this as gift enough for one day and gone back, I
would not be writing now (and this is going to turn out longer than
I thought it would, I see that already), but I didn t. Instead I saw to
my catch right then and there as my father had shown me cleaning
it, placing it on dry grass at the bottom of the creel, then laying damp
grass on top of it and went on. I did not, at age nine, think that
catching a nineteen-inch brook trout was particularly remarkable,
although I do remember being amazed that my line had not broken
when I, netless as well as artless, had hauled it out and swung it
toward me in a clumsy tail-flapping arc.
Ten minutes later, I came to the place where the stream split in
those days (it is long gone now; there is a settlement of duplex
homes where Castle Stream once went its course, and a district
grammar school as well, and if there is a stream it goes in darkness),
dividing around a huge gray rock nearly the size of our outhouse.
50
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
There was a pleasant flat space here, grassy and soft, overlooking what
my Dad and I called South Branch. I squatted on my heels, dropped
my line into the water, and almost immediately snagged a fine rain-
bow trout. He wasn t the size of my brookie only a foot or so but
a good fish, just the same. I had it cleaned out before the gills had
stopped flexing, stored it in my creel, and dropped my line back into
the water.
This time there was no immediate bite so I leaned back, looking up
at the blue stripe of sky I could see along the stream s course. Clouds
floated by, west to east, and I tried to think what they looked like. I
saw a unicorn, then a rooster, then a dog that looked a little like Candy
Bill. I was looking for the next one when I drowsed off.
Or maybe slept. I don t know for sure. All I know is that a tug on my
line so strong it almost pulled the bamboo pole out of my hand was
what brought me back into the afternoon. I sat up, clutched the pole,
and suddenly became aware that something was sitting on the tip of
my nose. I crossed my eyes and saw a bee. My heart seemed to fall
dead in my chest, and for a horrible second I was sure I was going to
wet my pants.
The tug on my line came again, stronger this time, but although
I maintained my grip on the end of the pole so it wouldn t be pulled
into the stream and perhaps carried away (I think I even had the pres-
ence of mind to snub the line with my forefinger), I made no effort to
pull in my catch. All of my horrified attention was fixed on the fat
black-and-yellow thing that was using my nose as a rest-stop.
I slowly poked out my lower lip and blew upward. The bee ruffled
a little but kept its place. I blew again and it ruffled again . . . but this
time it also seemed to shift impatiently, and I didn t dare blow any-
more, for fear it would lose its temper completely and give me a shot.
It was too close for me to focus on what it was doing, but it was easy
to imagine it ramming its stinger into one of my nostrils and shoot-
ing its poison up toward my eyes. And my brain.
A terrible idea came to me: that this was the very bee which had
killed my brother. I knew it wasn t true, and not only because honey-
51
STEPHEN KING
bees probably didn t live longer than a single year (except maybe for
the queens; about them I was not so sure). It couldn t be true because
bees died when they stung, and even at nine I knew it. Their stingers
were barbed, and when they tried to fly away after doing the deed,
they tore themselves apart. Still, the idea stayed. This was a special
bee, a devil-bee, and it had come back to finish the other of Albion and
Loretta s two boys.
And here is something else: I had been stung by bees before, and
although the stings had swelled more than is perhaps usual (I can t
really say for sure), I had never died of them. That was only for my
brother, a terrible trap which had been laid for him in his very mak-
ing, a trap which I had somehow escaped. But as I crossed my eyes
until they hurt in an effort to focus on the bee, logic did not exist. It
was the bee that existed, only that, the bee that had killed my brother,
killed him so bad that my father had slipped down the straps of his
overalls so he could take off his shirt and cover Dan s swelled,
engorged face. Even in the depths of his grief he had done that,
because he didn t want his wife to see what had become of her first-
born. Now the bee had returned, and now it would kill me. It would
kill me and I would die in convulsions on the bank, flopping just as
a brookie flops after you take the hook out of its mouth.
As I sat there trembling on the edge of panic of simply bolting
to my feet and then bolting anywhere there came a report from
behind me. It was as sharp and peremptory as a pistol-shot, but I
knew it wasn t a pistol-shot; it was someone clapping his hands. One
single clap. At the moment it came, the bee tumbled off my nose and
fell into my lap. It lay there on my pants with its legs sticking up and
its stinger a threatless black thread against the old scuffed brown of
the corduroy. It was dead as a doornail, I saw that at once. At the same
moment, the pole gave another tug the hardest yet and I almost
lost it again.
I grabbed it with both hands and gave it a big stupid yank that
would have made my father clutch his head with both hands, if he had
been there to see it. A rainbow trout, a good bit larger than the one
I had already caught, rose out of the water in a wet, writhing flash,
52
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
spraying fine drops of water from its filament of tail it looked like
one of those romanticized fishing pictures they used to put on the cov-
ers of men s magazines like True and Man s Adventure back in the for-
ties and fifties. At that moment hauling in a big one was about the last
thing on my mind, however, and when the line snapped and the fish
fell back into the stream, I barely noticed. I looked over my shoulder
to see who had clapped. A man was standing above me, at the edge
of the trees. His face was very long and pale. His black hair was
combed tight against his skull and parted with rigorous care on the
left side of his narrow head. He was very tall. He was wearing a black
three-piece suit, and I knew right away that he was not a human
being, because his eyes were the orangey-red of flames in a woodstove.
I don t just mean the irises, because he had no irises, and no pupils, and
certainly no whites. His eyes were completely orange an orange that
shifted and flickered. And it s really too late not to say exactly what
I mean, isn t it? He was on fire inside, and his eyes were like the lit-
tle isinglass portholes you sometimes see in stove doors.
My bladder let go, and the scuffed brown the dead bee was lying
on went a darker brown. I was hardly aware of what had happened,
and I couldn t take my eyes off the man standing on top of the bank
and looking down at me, the man who had walked out of thirty miles
of trackless western Maine woods in a fine black suit and narrow shoes
of gleaming leather. I could see the watch-chain looped across his vest
glittering in the summer sunshine. There was not so much as a single
pine-needle on him. And he was smiling at me.
Why, it s a fisherboy! he cried in a mellow, pleasing voice.
Imagine that! Are we well-met, fisherboy?
Hello, sir, I said. The voice that came out of me did not tremble,
but it didn t sound like my voice, either. It sounded older. Like
Dan s voice, maybe. Or my father s, even. And all I could think was
that maybe he would let me go if I pretended not to see what he was.
If I pretended I didn t see there were flames glowing and dancing
where his eyes should have been.
I ve saved you a nasty sting, perhaps, he said, and then, to my
horror, he came down the bank to where I sat with a dead bee in my
53
STEPHEN KING
wet lap and a bamboo fishing pole in my nerveless hands. His slick-
soled city shoes should have slipped on the low, grassy weeds which
dressed the steep bank, but they didn t; nor did they leave tracks
behind, I saw. Where his feet had touched or seemed to touch
there was not a single broken twig, crushed leaf, or trampled shoe-
shape.
Even before he reached me, I recognized the aroma baking up from
the skin under the suit the smell of burned matches. The smell of
sulfur. The man in the black suit was the Devil. He had walked out
of the deep woods between Motton and Kashwakamak, and now he
was standing here beside me. From the corner of one eye I could see
a hand as pale as the hand of a store window dummy. The fingers were
hideously long.
He hunkered beside me on his hams, his knees popping just as
the knees of any normal man might, but when he moved his hands
so they dangled between his knees, I saw that each of those long fin-
gers ended in what was not a fingernail but a long yellow claw.
You didn t answer my question, fisherboy, he said in his mellow
voice. It was, now that I think of it, like the voice of one of those radio
announcers on the big-band shows years later, the ones that would sell
Geritol and Serutan and Ovaltine and Dr. Grabow pipes. Are we
well-met?
Please don t hurt me, I whispered, in a voice so low I could barely
hear it. I was more afraid than I could ever write down, more afraid
than I want to remember . . . but I do. I do. It never even crossed my
mind to hope I was having a dream, although I might have, I sup-
pose, if I had been older. But I wasn t older; I was nine, and I knew
the truth when it squatted down on its hunkers beside me. I knew a
hawk from a handsaw, as my father would have said. The man who
had come out of the woods on that Saturday afternoon in midsummer
was the Devil, and inside the empty holes of his eyes, his brains were
burning.
Oh, do I smell something? he asked, as if he hadn t heard me . . .
although I knew he had. Do I smell something . . . wet?
He leaned forward toward me with his nose stuck out, like some-
54
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
one who means to smell a flower. And I noticed an awful thing; as
the shadow of his head travelled over the bank, the grass beneath it
turned yellow and died. He lowered his head toward my pants and
sniffed. His glaring eyes half-closed, as if he had inhaled some sub-
lime aroma and wanted to concentrate on nothing but that.
Oh, bad! he cried. Lovely-bad! And then he chanted: Opal!
Diamond! Sapphire! Jade! I smell Gary s lemonade! Then he threw
himself on his back in the little flat place and laughed wildly. It was
the sound of a lunatic.
I thought about running, but my legs seemed two counties away
from my brain. I wasn t crying, though; I had wet my pants like a
baby, but I wasn t crying. I was too scared to cry. I suddenly knew that
I was going to die, and probably painfully, but the worst of it was that
that might not be the worst of it.
The worst of it might come later. After I was dead.
He sat up suddenly, the smell of burnt matches fluffing out from
his suit and making me feel all gaggy in my throat. He looked at me
solemnly from his narrow white face and burning eyes, but there was
a sense of laughter about him, too. There was always that sense of
laughter about him.
Sad news, fisherboy, he said. I ve come with sad news.
I could only look at him the black suit, the fine black shoes, the
long white fingers that ended not in nails but in talons.
Your mother is dead.
No! I cried. I thought of her making bread, of the curl lying
across her forehead and just touching her eyebrow, standing there in
the strong morning sunlight, and the terror swept over me again . . .
but not for myself this time. Then I thought of how she d looked
when I set off with my fishing pole, standing in the kitchen doorway
with her hand shading her eyes, and how she had looked to me in
that moment like a photograph of someone you expected to see
again but never did. No, you lie! I screamed.
He smiled the sadly patient smile of a man who has often been
accused falsely. I m afraid not, he said. It was the same thing that
happened to your brother, Gary. It was a bee.
55
STEPHEN KING
No, that s not true, I said, and now I did begin to cry. She s old,
she s thirty-five, if a bee-sting could kill her the way it did Danny she
would have died a long time ago and you re a lying bastard!
I had called the Devil a lying bastard. On some level I was aware
of this, but the entire front of my mind was taken up by the enormity
of what he d said. My mother dead? He might as well have told me
that there was a new ocean where the Rockies had been. But I
believed him. On some level I believed him completely, as we always
believe, on some level, the worst thing our hearts can imagine.
I understand your grief, little fisherboy, but that particular argu-
ment just doesn t hold water, I m afraid. He spoke in a tone of bogus
comfort that was horrible, maddening, without remorse or pity. A
man can go his whole life without seeing a mockingbird, you know,
but does that mean mockingbirds don t exist? Your mother
A fish jumped below us. The man in the black suit frowned, then
pointed a finger at it. The trout convulsed in the air, its body bend-
ing so strenuously that for a split-second it appeared to be snapping
at its own tail, and when it fell back into Castle Stream it was float-
ing lifelessly, dead. It struck the big gray rock where the waters
divided, spun around twice in the whirlpool eddy that formed there,
and then floated off in the direction of Castle Rock. Meanwhile, the
terrible stranger turned his burning eyes on me again, his thin lips
pulled back from tiny rows of sharp teeth in a cannibal smile.
Your mother simply went through her entire life without being
stung by a bee, he said. But then less than an hour ago, actually
one flew in through the kitchen window while she was taking the
bread out of the oven and putting it on the counter to cool.
No, I won t hear this, I won t hear this, I won t!
I raised my hands and clapped them over my ears. He pursed his
lips as if to whistle and blew at me gently. It was only a little breath,
but the stench was foul beyond belief clogged sewers, outhouses
that have never known a single sprinkle of lime, dead chickens after
a flood.
My hands fell away from the sides of my face.
Good, he said. You need to hear this, Gary; you need to hear
56
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
this, my little fisherboy. It was your mother who passed that fatal
weakness on to your brother Dan; you got some of it, but you also got
a protection from your father that poor Dan somehow missed. He
pursed his lips again, only this time, he made a cruelly comic little tsk-
tsk sound instead of blowing his nasty breath at me. So, although I
don t like to speak ill of the dead, it s almost a case of poetic justice,
isn t it? After all, she killed your brother Dan as surely as if she had put
a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
No, I whispered. No, it isn t true.
I assure you it is, he said. The bee flew in the window and lit on
her neck. She slapped at it before she even knew what she was
doing you were wiser than that, weren t you, Gary? and the bee
stung her. She felt her throat start to close up at once. That s what
happens, you know, to people who are allergic to bee-venom. Their
throats close and they drown in the open air. That s why Dan s face
was so swollen and purple. That s why your father covered it with his
shirt.
I stared at him, now incapable of speech. Tears streamed down my
cheeks. I didn t want to believe him, and knew from my church
schooling that the devil is the father of lies, but I did believe him, just
the same. I believed he had been standing there in our dooryard, look-
ing in the kitchen window, as my mother fell to her knees, clutching
at her swollen throat while Candy Bill danced around her, barking
shrilly.
She made the most wonderfully awful noises, the man in the
black suit said reflectively, and she scratched her face quite badly,
I m afraid. Her eyes bulged out like a frog s eyes. She wept. He
paused, then added: She wept as she died, isn t that sweet? And
here s the most beautiful thing of all. After she was dead . . . after she
had been lying on the floor for fifteen minutes or so with no sound
but the stove ticking and with that little stick of a bee-stinger still
poking out of the side of her neck so small, so small do you know
what Candy Bill did? That little rascal licked away her tears. First on
one side . . . and then on the other.
He looked out at the stream for a moment, his face sad and
57
STEPHEN KING
thoughtful. Then he turned back to me and his expression of bereave-
ment disappeared like a dream. His face was as slack and avid as the
face of a corpse that has died hungry. His eyes blazed. I could see his
sharp little teeth between his pale lips.
I m starving, he said abruptly. I m going to kill you and tear you
open and eat your guts, little fisherboy. What do you think about
that?
No, I tried to say, please, no, but no sound came out. He meant to
do it, I saw. He really meant to do it.
I m just so hungry, he said, both petulant and teasing. And you
won t want to live without your precious mommy, anyhow, take my
word for it. Because your father s the sort of man who ll have to have
some warm hole to stick it in, believe me, and if you re the only one
available, you re the one who ll have to serve. I ll save you all that dis-
comfort and unpleasantness. Also, you ll go to Heaven, think of
that. Murdered souls always go to Heaven. So we ll both be serving
God this afternoon, Gary. Isn t that nice?
He reached for me again with his long, pale hands, and without
thinking what I was doing, I flipped open the top of my creel,
pawed all the way down to the bottom, and brought out the mon-
ster brookie I d caught earlier the one I should have been satisfied
with. I held it out to him blindly, my fingers in the red slit of its belly
from which I had removed its insides as the man in the black suit
had threatened to remove mine. The fish s glazed eye stared dream-
ily at me, the gold ring around the black center reminding me of my
mother s wedding ring. And in that moment I saw her lying in her
coffin with the sun shining off the wedding band and knew it was
true she had been stung by a bee, she had drowned in the warm,
bread-smelling kitchen air, and Candy Bill had licked her dying
tears from her swollen cheeks.
Big fish! the man in the black suit cried in a guttural, greedy
voice. Oh, biiig fiiish!
He snatched it away from me and crammed it into a mouth that
opened wider than any human mouth ever could. Many years later,
when I was sixty-five (I know it was sixty-five because that was the
58
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
summer I retired from teaching), I went to the New England Aquar-
ium and finally saw a shark. The mouth of the man in the black suit
was like that shark s mouth when it opened, only his gullet was blaz-
ing red, the same color as his awful eyes, and I felt heat bake out of it
and into my face, the way you feel a sudden wave of heat come push-
ing out of a fireplace when a dry piece of wood catches alight. And I
didn t imagine that heat, either, I know I didn t, because just before
he slid the head of my nineteen-inch brook trout between his gaping
jaws, I saw the scales along the sides of the fish rise up and begin to
curl like bits of paper floating over an open incinerator.
He slid the fish in like a man in a travelling show swallowing a
sword. He didn t chew, and his blazing eyes bulged out, as if in effort.
The fish went in and went in, his throat bulged as it slid down his gul-
let, and now he began to cry tears of his own . . . except his tears were
blood, scarlet and thick.
I think it was the sight of those bloody tears that gave me my body
back. I don t know why that should have been, but I think it was. I
bolted to my feet like a jack released from its box, turned with my
bamboo pole still in one hand, and fled up the bank, bending over and
tearing tough bunches of weeds out with my free hand in an effort to
get up the slope more quickly.
He made a strangled, furious noise the sound of any man with
his mouth too full and I looked back just as I got to the top. He
was coming after me, the back of his suit-coat flapping and his thin
gold watch-chain flashing and winking in the sun. The tail of the fish
was still protruding from his mouth and I could smell the rest of it,
roasting in the oven of his throat.
He reached for me, groping with his talons, and I fled along the
top of the bank. After a hundred yards or so I found my voice and
went to screaming screaming in fear, of course, but also screaming
in grief for my beautiful dead mother.
He was coming along after me. I could hear snapping branches
and whipping bushes, but I didn t look back again. I lowered my
head, slitted my eyes against the bushes and low-hanging branches
along the stream s bank, and ran as fast as I could. And at every step
59
STEPHEN KING
I expected to feel his hands descending on my shoulders pulling me
back into a final hot hug.
That didn t happen. Some unknown length of time later it
couldn t have been longer than five or ten minutes, I suppose, but it
seemed like forever I saw the bridge through layerings of leaves and
firs. Still screaming, but breathlessly now, sounding like a teakettle
which has almost boiled dry, I reached this second, steeper bank and
charged up to it.
Halfway to the top I slipped to my knees, looked over my shoulder,
and saw the man in the black suit almost at my heels, his white face
pulled into a convulsion of fury and greed. His cheeks were splattered
with his bloody tears and his shark s mouth hung open like a hinge.
Fisherboy! he snarled, and started up the bank after me, grasping
at my foot with one long hand. I tore free, turned, and threw my fish-
ing pole at him. He batted it down easily, but it tangled his feet up
somehow and he went to his knees. I didn t wait to see anymore; I
turned and bolted to the top of the slope. I almost slipped at the very
top, but managed to grab one of the support struts running beneath
the bridge and save myself.
You can t get away, fisherboy! he cried from behind me. He
sounded furious, but he also sounded as if he were laughing. It
takes more than a mouthful of trout to fill me up!
Leave me alone! I screamed back at him. I grabbed the bridge s
railing and threw myself over it in a clumsy somersault, filling my
hands with splinters and bumping my head so hard on the boards
when I came down that I saw stars. I rolled over onto my belly and
began crawling. I lurched to my feet just before I got to the end of the
bridge, stumbled once, found my rhythm, and then began to run. I
ran as only nine-year-old boys can run, which is like the wind. It felt
as if my feet only touched the ground with every third or fourth stride,
and for all I know, that may be true. I ran straight up the righthand
wheelrut in the road, ran until my temples pounded and my eyes
pulsed in their sockets, ran until I had a hot stitch in my left side from
the bottom of my ribs to my armpit, ran until I could taste blood and
something like metal-shavings in the back of my throat. When I
60
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
couldn t run anymore I stumbled to a stop and looked back over my
shoulder, puffing and blowing like a windbroke horse. I was convinced
I would see him standing right there behind me in his natty black suit,
the watch-chain a glittering loop across his vest and not a hair out of
place.
But he was gone. The road stretching back toward Castle Stream
between the darkly massed pines and spruces was empty. And yet I
sensed him somewhere near in those woods, watching me with his
grassfire eyes, smelling of burnt matches and roasted fish.
I turned and began walking as fast as I could, limping a little I d
pulled muscles in both legs, and when I got out of bed the next morn-
ing I was so sore I could barely walk. I didn t notice those things then,
though. I just kept looking over my shoulder, needing again and again
to verify that the road behind me was still empty. It was, each time I
looked, but those backward glances seemed to increase my fear
rather than lessening it. The firs looked darker, massier, and I kept
imagining what lay behind the trees which marched beside the
road long, tangled corridors of forest, leg-breaking deadfalls,
ravines where anything might live. Until that Saturday in 1914, I had
thought that bears were the worst thing the forest could hold.
Now I knew better.
A mile or so further up the road, just beyond the place where it came
out of the woods and joined the Geegan Flat Road, I saw my father
walking toward me and whistling The Old Oaken Bucket. He was
carrying his own rod, the one with the fancy spinning reel from Mon-
key Ward. In his other hand he had his creel, the one with the ribbon
my mother had woven through the handle back when Dan was still
alive. DEDICATED TO JESUS, that ribbon said. I had been walking but
when I saw him I started to run again, screaming Dad! Dad! Dad! at
the top of my lungs and staggering from side to side on my tired,
sprung legs like a drunken sailor. The expression of surprise on his face
when he recognized me might have been comical under other cir-
cumstances, but not under these. He dropped his rod and creel into
the road without so much as a downward glance at them and ran to
61
STEPHEN KING
me. It was the fastest I ever saw my Dad run in his life; when we came
together it was a wonder the impact didn t knock us both senseless,
and I struck my face on his belt-buckle hard enough to start a little
nosebleed. I didn t notice that until later, though. Right then I only
reached out my arms and clutched him as hard as I could. I held on
and rubbed my hot face back and forth against his belly, covering his
old blue workshirt with blood and tears and snot.
Gary, what is it? What happened? Are you all right?
Ma s dead! I sobbed. I met a man in the woods and he told me!
Ma s dead! She got stung by a bee and it swelled her all up just like
what happened to Dan, and she s dead! She s on the kitchen floor and
Candy Bill . . . licked the t-t-tears . . . off her . . . off her . . .
Face was the last word I had to say, but by then my chest was hitch-
ing so bad I couldn t get it out. My tears were flowing again, and my
Dad s startled, frightened face had blurred into three overlapping
images. I began to howl not like a little kid who s skun his knee but
like a dog that s seen something bad by moonlight and my father
pressed my head against his hard flat stomach again. I slipped out
from under his hand, though, and looked back over my shoulder. I
wanted to make sure the man in the black suit wasn t coming.
There was no sign of him; the road winding back into the woods was
completely empty. I promised myself I would never go back down
that road again, not ever, no matter what, and I suppose now God s
greatest blessing to His creatures below is that they can t see the
future. It might have broken my mind if I had known I would be going
back down that road, and not two hours later. For that moment,
though, I was only relieved to see we were still alone. Then I thought
of my mother my beautiful dead mother and laid my face back
against my father s stomach and bawled some more.
Gary, listen to me, he said a moment or two later. I went on bawl-
ing. He gave me a little longer to do that, then reached down and
lifted my chin so he could look into my face and I could look into his.
Your Mom s fine, he said.
I could only look at him with tears streaming down my cheeks. I
didn t believe him.
62
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
I don t know who told you different, or what kind of dirty dog
would want to put a scare like that into a little boy, but I swear to
God your mother s fine.
But . . . but he said . . .
I don t care what he said. I got back from Eversham s earlier than
I expected he doesn t want to sell any cows, it s all just talk and
decided I had time to catch up with you. I got my pole and my creel
and your mother made us a couple of jelly fold-overs. Her new
bread. Still warm. So she was fine half an hour ago, Gary, and there s
nobody knows any different that s come from this direction, I guar-
antee you. Not in just half an hour s time. He looked over my
shoulder. Who was this man? And where was he? I m going to find
him and thrash him within an inch of his life.
I thought a thousand things in just two seconds that s what it
seemed like, anyway but the last thing I thought was the most
powerful: if my Dad met up with the man in the black suit, I didn t
think my Dad would be the one to do the thrashing. Or the walking
away.
I kept remembering those long white fingers, and the talons at
the ends of them.
Gary?
I don t know that I remember, I said.
Were you where the stream splits? The big rock?
I could never lie to my father when he asked a direct question
not to save his life or mine. Yes, but don t go down there. I seized
his arm with both hands and tugged it hard. Please don t. He was
a scary man. Inspiration struck like an illuminating lightning-bolt.
I think he had a gun.
He looked at me thoughtfully. Maybe there wasn t a man, he
said, lifting his voice a little on the last word and turning it into some-
thing that was almost but not quite a question. Maybe you fell asleep
while you were fishing, son, and had a bad dream. Like the ones you
had about Danny last winter.
I had had a lot of bad dreams about Dan last winter, dreams
where I would open the door to our closet or to the dark, fruity inte-
63
STEPHEN KING
rior of the cider shed and see him standing there and looking at me
out of his purple strangulated face; from many of these dreams I had
awakened screaming, and awakened my parents, as well. I had fallen
asleep on the bank of the stream for a little while, too dozed off, any-
way but I hadn t dreamed and I was sure I had awakened just before
the man in the black suit clapped the bee dead, sending it tumbling
off my nose and into my lap. I hadn t dreamed him the way I had
dreamed Dan, I was quite sure of that, although my meeting with him
had already attained a dreamlike quality in my mind, as I suppose
supernatural occurrences always must. But if my Dad thought that
the man had only existed in my own head, that might be better. Bet-
ter for him.
It might have been, I guess, I said.
Well, we ought to go back and find your rod and your creel.
He actually started in that direction, and I had to tug frantically
at his arm to stop him again, and turn him back toward me.
Later, I said. Please, Dad? I want to see Mother. I ve got to see
her with my own eyes.
He thought that over, then nodded. Yes, I suppose you do. We ll
go home first, and get your rod and creel later.
So we walked back to the farm together, my father with his fish-
pole propped on his shoulder just like one of my friends, me carrying
his creel, both of us eating folded-over slices of my mother s bread
smeared with blackcurrant jam.
Did you catch anything? he asked as we came in sight of the
barn.
Yes, sir, I said. A rainbow. Pretty good-sized. And a brookie that
was a lot bigger, I thought but didn t say. Biggest one I ever saw, to tell the
truth, but I don t have that one to show you, Dad. I gave that one to the man
in the black suit, so he wouldn t eat me. And it worked . . . but just barely.
That s all? Nothing else?
After I caught it I fell asleep. This was not really an answer, but
not really a lie, either.
Lucky you didn t lose your pole. You didn t, did you, Gary?
No, sir, I said, very reluctantly. Lying about that would do no
64
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
good even if I d been able to think up a whopper not if he was set
on going back to get my creel anyway, and I could see by his face that
he was.
Up ahead, Candy Bill came racing out of the back door, barking his
shrill bark and wagging his whole rear end back and forth the way
Scotties do when they re excited. I couldn t wait any longer; hope and
anxiety bubbled up in my throat like foam. I broke away from my
father and ran to the house, still lugging his creel and still convinced,
in my heart of hearts, that I was going to find my mother dead on the
kitchen floor with her face swelled and purple like Dan s had been
when my father carried him in from the west field, crying and calling
the name of Jesus.
But she was standing at the counter, just as well and fine as when
I had left her, humming a song as she shelled peas into a bowl. She
looked around at me, first in surprise and then in fright as she took in
my wide eyes and pale cheeks.
Gary, what is it? What s the matter?
I didn t answer, only ran to her and covered her with kisses. At
some point my father came in and said, Don t worry, Lo he s all
right. He just had one of his bad dreams, down there by the brook.
Pray God it s the last of them, she said, and hugged me tighter
while Candy Bill danced around our feet, barking his shrill bark.
You don t have to come with me if you don t want to, Gary, my
father said, although he had already made it clear that he thought I
should that I should go back, that I should face my fear, as I suppose
folks would say nowadays. That s very well for fearful things that are
make-believe, but two hours hadn t done much to change my con-
viction that the man in the black suit had been real. I wouldn t be able
to convince my father of that, though. I don t think there was a nine-
year-old that ever lived who would have been able to convince his
father he d seen the Devil come walking out of the woods in a black
suit.
I ll come, I said. I had walked out of the house to join him before
he left, mustering all my courage in order to get my feet moving, and
65
STEPHEN KING
now we were standing by the chopping-block in the side yard, not far
from the woodpile.
What you got behind your back? he asked.
I brought it out slowly. I would go with him, and I would hope the
man in the black suit with the arrow-straight part down the left side
of his head was gone . . . but if he wasn t, I wanted to be prepared. As
prepared as I could be, anyway. I had the family Bible in the hand I
had brought out from behind my back. I d set out just to bring my
New Testament, which I had won for memorizing the most psalms in
the Thursday night Youth Fellowship competition (I managed eight,
although most of them except the Twenty-third had floated out of my
mind in a week s time), but the little red Testament didn t seem like
enough when you were maybe going to face the Devil himself, not
even when the words of Jesus were marked out in red ink.
My father looked at the old Bible, swelled with family documents
and pictures, and I thought he d tell me to put it back, but he didn t.
A look of mixed grief and sympathy crossed his face, and he nodded.
All right, he said. Does your mother know you took that?
No, sir.
He nodded again. Then we ll hope she doesn t spot it gone
before we get back. Come on. And don t drop it.
Half an hour or so later, the two of us stood on the bank looking
down at the place where Castle Stream forked, and at the flat place
where I d had my encounter with the man with the red-orange eyes.
I had my bamboo rod in my hand I d picked it up below the
bridge and my creel lay down below, on the flat place. Its wicker
top was flipped back. We stood looking down, my father and I, for a
long time, and neither of us said anything.
Opal! Diamond! Sapphire! Jade! I smell Gary s lemonade! That had
been his unpleasant little poem, and once he had recited it, he had
thrown himself on his back, laughing like a child who has just dis-
covered he has enough courage to say bathroom words like shit or
piss. The flat place down there was as green and lush as any place in
Maine that the sun can get to in early July . . . except where the
66
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
stranger had lain. There the grass was dead and yellow in the shape
of a man.
I looked down and saw I was holding our lumpy old family Bible
straight out in front of me with both thumbs pressing so hard on the
cover that they were white. It was the way Mama Sweet s husband
Norville held a willow-fork when he was trying to dowse somebody
a well.
Stay here, my father said at last, and skidded sideways down the
bank, digging his shoes into the rich soft soil and holding his arms out
for balance. I stood where I was, holding the Bible stiffly out at the
ends of my arms like a willow-fork, my heart thumping wildly. I don t
know if I had a sense of being watched that time or not; I was too
scared to have a sense of anything, except for a sense of wanting to be
far away from that place and those woods.
My Dad bent down, sniffed at where the grass was dead, and gri-
maced. I knew what he was smelling: something like burnt matches.
Then he grabbed my creel and came on back up the bank, hurrying.
He snagged one fast look over his shoulder to make sure nothing was
coming along behind. Nothing was. When he handed me the creel,
the lid was still hanging back on its cunning little leather hinges. I
looked inside and saw nothing but two handfuls of grass.
Thought you said you caught a rainbow, my father said, but
maybe you dreamed that, too.
Something in his voice stung me. No, sir, I said. I caught one.
Well, it sure as hell didn t flop out, not if it was gutted and
cleaned. And you wouldn t put a catch into your fisherbox without
doing that, would you, Gary? I taught you better than that.
Yes, sir, you did, but
So if you didn t dream catching it and if it was dead in the box,
something must have come along and eaten it, my father said, and
then he grabbed another quick glance over his shoulder, eyes wide, as
if he had heard something move in the woods. I wasn t exactly sur-
prised to see drops of sweat standing out on his forehead like big clear
jewels. Come on, he said. Let s get the hell out of here.
I was for that, and we went back along the bank to the bridge,
67
STEPHEN KING
walking quick without speaking. When we got there, my Dad
dropped to one knee and examined the place where we d found my
rod. There was another patch of dead grass there, and the lady s
slipper was all brown and curled in on itself, as if a blast of heat had
charred it. While my father did this, I looked in my empty creel.
He must have gone back and eaten my other fish, too, I said.
My father looked up at me. Other fish!
Yes, sir. I didn t tell you, but I caught a brookie, too. A big one.
He was awful hungry, that fella. I wanted to say more, and the words
trembled just behind my lips, but in the end I didn t.
We climbed up to the bridge and helped one another over the rail-
ing. My father took my creel, looked into it, then went to the railing
and threw it over. I came up beside him in time to see it splash down
and float away like a boat, riding lower and lower in the stream as
the water poured in between the wicker weavings.
It smelled bad, my father said, but he didn t look at me when
he said it, and his voice sounded oddly defensive. It was the only
time I ever heard him speak just that way.
Yes, sir.
We ll tell your mother we couldn t find it. If she asks. If she
doesn t ask, we won t tell her anything.
No, sir, we won t.
And she didn t and we didn t and that s the way it was.
That day in the woods is eighty-one years gone, and for many of the
years in between I have never even thought of it . . . not awake, at
least. Like any other man or woman who ever lived, I can t say
about my dreams, not for sure. But now I m old, and I dream awake,
it seems. My infirmities have crept up like waves which will soon take
a child s abandoned sand castle, and my memories have also crept up,
making me think of some old rhyme that went, in part, Just leave
them alone/And they ll come home/Wagging their tails behind
them. I remember meals I ate, games I played, girls I kissed in the
school cloakroom when we played Post Office, boys I chummed
with, the first drink I ever took, the first cigarette I ever smoked (corn-
68
EVERYTHING S EVENTUAL
shuck behind Dicky Hammer s pig-shed, and I threw up). Yet of all
the memories, the one of the man in the black suit is the strongest,
and glows with its own spectral, haunted light. He was real, he was
the Devil, and that day I was either his errand or his luck. I feel more
and more strongly that escaping him was my luck just luck, and not
the intercession of the God I have worshipped and sung hymns to all
my life.
As I lie here in my nursing-home room, and in the ruined sand cas-
tle that is my body, I tell myself that I need not fear the Devil that
I have lived a good, kindly life, and I need not fear the Devil. Some-
times I remind myself that it was I, not my father, who finally
coaxed my mother back to church later on that summer. In the
dark, however, these thoughts have no power to ease or comfort. In
the dark comes a voice which whispers that the nine-year-old boy I
was had done nothing for which he might legitimately fear the devil
either . . . and yet the Devil came. And in the dark I sometimes hear
that voice drop even lower, into ranges which are inhuman. Big fish!
it whispers in tones of hushed greed, and all the truths of the moral
world fall to ruin before its hunger. Biiig fiiish!
The Devil came to me once, long ago; suppose he were to come
again now? I am too old to run now; I can t even get to the bath-
room and back without my walker. I have no fine large brook trout
with which to propitiate him, either, even for a moment or two; I am
old and my creel is empty. Suppose he were to come back and find
me so?
And suppose he is still hungry?
My favorite Nathaniel Hawthorne story is Young Goodman
Brown. I think it s one of the ten best stories ever written by an
American. The Man in the Black Suit is my hommage to it.
As for the particulars, I was talking with a friend of mine one day,
and he happened to mention that his Grandpa believed truly
believed that he had seen the Devil in the woods, back around
the turn of the twentieth century. Grandpa said the Devil came
69
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