Gwendy’s Final Task

Gwendy jerks away from the screen, a loud sob lodging in her throat. For one panic-stricken moment, she fears she might actually choke to death on her grief. She sits back and once again focuses on her breathing. The suffocating sensation gradually loosens its grip. Eyes filled with tears, she turns back to her laptop. And gasps.

There’s a car stopped in the road beside Ryan’s lifeless body. It’s not quite as wide as the Cadillac, but it’s sleeker, built lower to the ground, and painted such a dazzling shade of cartoon green that it almost hurts to look at. It doesn’t look real, Gwendy thinks with morbid fascination. It looks like a child’s toy come to life.

She immediately recognizes the car as the same vehicle in which she’d seen Gareth Winston sitting beside the blond man when she touched Winston’s hand outside of the lavatory on Eagle Heavy. He was there, she thinks, squeezing her fists together so hard the color fades from her fingertips. Maybe not in Derry, and maybe not on the day they killed my husband, but the son-of-a-bitch was inside that car. And was he making some kind of a deal? Of course he was, because that’s what guys like Gareth do: they make deals.

“He’s one of them,” she says aloud to the empty sitting room.

As Gwendy watches, the doors of the car (an old green Chrysler, big as a boat, she suddenly remembers from her old friend Norris Ridgewick’s email) swing open and four men step out onto Carter Street.

“What the—” She never finishes the sentence.

The men are unnaturally tall and thin. And dressed identically—wearing long yellow dusters and bandanas over the lower halves of their faces—like a gang of Old West outlaws. They amble to the front of the car and stand shoulder to shoulder, surrounding the body. Looking down, one of the men places a dark-gloved hand on his chest and bends over, howling with a high, barking laughter that Gwendy is somehow able to hear over the whine of the wind. It’s an ugly animal sound, and she quickly lowers the volume on her laptop. The others soon join in, gesturing at the fallen body, hooting and guffawing. One of the men suddenly spins in a tight circle and begins hopping from one foot to the other, performing some kind of lunatic jig, slapping at his thighs with furious delight.

Gwendy abruptly stops the video—and hits REWIND. She doesn’t go back very far, maybe ten or twelve seconds. She isn’t sure if her eyes are playing tricks on her or if what she thinks she just saw is real.

She hits PLAY and watches as the man launches into his bizarre dance, and then it happens again. The man begins to fade in and out—not in and out of focus, but in and out of existence. One second, he’s whole and solid, the next he’s blurry and only partially there.

And then it’s all four of the men.

While everything else in the video remains crystal clear—if Gwendy leans close enough to the screen, she can almost make out the phone number printed at the bottom of the FOR SALE BY OWNER sign—the four men in the yellow dusters have suddenly begun to shimmer. Looking at them now is a little like staring at a heat mirage rising off the highway in the middle of a summer heat wave. This isn’t what they look like, Gwendy thinks with calm assurance. This isn’t what they look like at all. It’s as if they’re wearing costumes and masks to make them appear human, but the disguises are only temporary, and I’m sitting here watching as they fade in and out of reality. Even the goddamn car is wearing one. It’s lost its edges. Its shape no longer looks quite solid.