1408- Mike After Escaping

Sometimes just looking at a pen (or a tape recorder) will make him think:
The pictures were crooked. I tried to straighten the pictures. He doesn’t know
what this means. He can’t remember the pictures or anything else
from room 1408, and he is glad. That is a mercy. His blood-pressure
isn’t so good these days (his doctor told him that burn victims often
develop problems with their blood-pressure and put him on med-
ication), his eyes trouble him (his ophthalmologist told him to start
taking Ocuvites), he has consistent back problems, his prostate has
gotten too large . . . but he can deal with these things. He knows he
isn’t the first person to escape 1408 without really escaping—Olin
tried to tell him—but it isn’t all bad. At least he doesn’t remember.

Sometimes he has nightmares, quite often, in fact (almost every
goddam night, in fact), but he rarely remembers them when he
wakes up. A sense that things are rounding off at the corners,
mostly—melting the way the corners of his minicorder melted. He
lives on Long Island these days, and when the weather is good he takes
long walks on the beach. The closest he has ever come to articulating
what he does remember about his seventy-odd (very odd) minutes in
1408 was on one of those walks. “It was never human,” he told the
incoming waves in a choked, halting voice. “Ghosts . . . at least ghosts
were once human. The thing in the wall, though . . . that thing . . .”

Time may improve it, he can and does hope for that. Time may
fade it, as it will fade the scars on his neck. In the meantime, though,
he sleeps with the lights on in his bedroom, so he will know at once
where he is when he wakes up from the bad dreams. He has had all
the phones taken out of the house; at some point just below the place
where his conscious mind seems able to go, he is afraid of picking the
phone up and hearing a buzzing, inhuman voice spit, “This is nine!
Nine! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead!”

And when the sun goes down on clear evenings, he pulls every
shade and blind and drape in the house. He sits like a man in a dark
room until his watch tells him the light—even the last fading glow
along the horizon—must be gone.

He can’t stand the light that comes at sunset.

That yellow deepening to orange, like light in the Australian
desert.

- 1408, chapter IV