Annotation

Введите сюда краткую аннотацию

Stephen King

Stephen King

Finn

FINN HAD A HARD CO of it from the very beginning. He slipped through the hands of a midwife who had delivered hundreds of babies and gave his birthday cry when he hit the floor. When he was five, there was a house party next door. He was allowed out to listen to the music (Shane MacGowan blasting from pole-mounted portable speakers) on his side of the street. It was summer, he was barefoot, and a cherry bomb thrown by an exuberant partygoer flew up, arced down with the stub of its fuse fizzing, and blew off the baby toe on his left foot.

Wouldn’t have happened again in a thousand years, his grandma said. Also: God must have wanted that toe for an angel.

When he was seven, he and his sisters were playing in Pettingill Park while Grandma sat on a nearby bench, alternately knitting and doing one of her word search puzzles. Finn didn’t care for the swings, had no use for the seesaws, could not have cared less about the roundy-round. What he liked was the Twisty, an entrancing curlicue of blue plastic twenty feet high. There were steps, but Finn preferred to climb the slide itself on his hands and knees, up and around, up and around. At the top he would sit and glide to the packed dirt at the bottom. He never had an accident on the Twisty.

"Stop that awhile, why don’t ya,” Grandma said one day. “You’re always on that old Twisty. Try something new. Try the monkey bars. Show me a trick.”

His sisters, Colleen and Marie, were on them, climbing and swinging like ... well, like monkeys. So, to please Grandma, he went on the monkey bars and slipped while hanging upside down and fell and broke his arm.

His teacher that year, pretty Miss Monoghan, liked to end each day by saying, What have we learned today, kiddos? At the urgent care, while having his arm set (the lollipop he was given afterwards hardly seemed adequate compensation for the pain), Finn thought what he’d learned that day was Stick to the Twisty.

At fourteen, running home from his friend Patrick’s house in a driving thunderstorm, a stroke of lightning hit the street directly behind him, close enough to char a line down the back of his jacket. Finn fell forward, hit his head on the curb, suffered a concussion, and lay unconscious in his bed for two days before waking up and asking what had happened. It was Deirdre Hanlon from across the street (one of the partygoers on that long-ago Shane MacGowan day, although not the cherry bomb thrower) who saw him and fished the unconscious boy out of the gutter “I thought poor old Finn was dead for sure,” she said.

His late father said Finn was born under a bad sign. Grandma (who never apologized for the monkey-bars day) held a different view. She told Finn that for every stroke of bad luck God dealt out, he gave two strokes of good. Finn thought that over and said he’d had no good luck to speak of, unless it wasn’t being hit dead center by the lightning bolt.

You should be glad your luck’s out,” Grandma said. Maybe it will come in all at once and you’ll win the Lotto. Or a rich relative will die and leave you everything.”

“I don’t have any rich relatives.”

That you know of,” Grandma said. She was the kind of woman who always got the last word. “When things go wrong, just remind yourself, ‘God owes me.’ And God always pays His debts.”

Not soon enough to suit Finn, however. Worse luck awaited.

~

NOW NINETEEN, Finn came running home from his girlfriend s house, not because it was raining but because even with a case of blue balls, all that hugging and touching and smooching had left him exhilarated. He felt he had to run or explode. He was wearing a leather jacket, jeans, a Cabinteely cap, and a vintage T-shirt with the logo of an old band—Nazareth—on the front. He rounded the corner onto Peeke Street and ran into a young man running the other way. They both fell down. Finn picked himself up and started to apologize, but the young man was already legging it again, looking back over his shoulder. He was also wearing jeans, a bill cap, and a T-shirt, which didn’t strike Finn as particularly coincidental; in this city, it was the uniform of the young, men and women both.

Finn carried on running down Peeke, rubbing a scraped elbow as he went. A black tradesman’s van came toward him, lights off. Finn thought nothing of it until it pulled up beside him and some men—at least four—came rushing out of the back even before the van had rolled completely to a stop.

Two of them grabbed him by the arms. Finn managed, “Hey!”

A third man said “Hey yourself!” and pulled a bag over his head.

There was a sting in his upper arm just above his scraped elbow. He was aware of being hustled, feet not touching the pavement, and then the world flew away.

~

WHEN FINN CAME TO, he was lying on a cot in a small room with a high ceiling. In one corner was a table lamp with no table beneath it. In another was a commode. The commode was blue plastic, exactly the same shade as the Twisty in Pettingill Park. There was no other furniture. There was a skylight, but it had been painted black in slopping, careless strokes.

Finn sat up and winced. He didn’t have a headache, exactly, but his neck was terribly stiff and his arm hurt the way it had after he’d gotten his Covid shot. He looked at it and saw someone had put a sticking plaster above his scraped elbow. He peeled it back and saw a tiny hole with a red corona around it.

Finn tried the door and found it locked. He knocked, then pounded on it. As if in answer, AC/DC blasted at him: “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” at what sounded like two thousand decibels. Finn clapped his hands over his ears. It went on for twenty or thirty seconds, then stopped. He looked up and saw three speakers mounted high up. To him they looked like Bose models, which meant expensive. In the corner above the table lamp without a table, the lens of a camera stared down at him.

Unlike the time when he had almost been struck by lightning, Finn remembered what had happened before he temporarily lost the plot, and guessed what it meant. It was absurd but not amazing. Being kidnapped was just another example of Finn Murrie luck.

He went back to pounding on the door and yelling for someone to come. When no one did, he stepped back and looked up at the camera.

“Is someone there? Like, monitoring this? If you are, please come and let me out. I believe you’ve dropped a bollock. You want the other fella.”

There was no response for almost a full minute. Finn was walking back to the cot, having decided to lie down until someone came to rectify what was obviously a mistake, when the speakers blared again. Finn liked the Ramones, but not at such apocalyptic volume in a closed room. This time the sonic assault went on for about two minutes before cutting out just as abruptly.

He lay on the cot and had just begun to drift when Cheap Trick roared down. Twenty minutes later it was the dirty sax break from “Tequila, by the Champs.

It went on like that for quite some time. Probably hours. There was no way Finn could tell for sure. His captors had taken his watch.

~

HE WAS DOZING when the door opened. Two men came in. Finn wasn’t sure they were the ones who had grabbed him by the arms, but pretty sure. One of them had a droopy eye. He said, “Are you going to be troublesome, Bobby-O?”

“Not if you’re going to make this right,” Finn said. He took little notice of being called Bobby-O, thought it was just some kind of nickname, like Daddy-O, or how if his father had seen a drunk staggering up the street, he’d always say, “There goes Paddy O’Reilly headed home to thump up his wife.”

“That’s up to you,” the other said. He had a narrow face and black eyes, like a weasel.

They went out the door, Finn between the two men, who were both wearing chinos and white shirts. Neither of them had a gun, which was a bit of a comfort, although Finn had no doubt they could handle him easily if he decided to make trouble for them. They looked fit. Finn was tall but weedy.

The room they came out in was lined with shelves, all of them empty. To Finn it looked like a pantry, or maybe, given the size, what his grandma would have called a larder. As a young woman in County Down, she’d been “in service.”

From the pantry they entered the biggest kitchen Finn had ever seen. There were a couple of empty bowls on the counter with spoons in them. Judging by the scum inside, he guessed they had contained soup. His belly rumbled. He didn’t know how long it had been since he’d eaten. Ellie had made him some scrambled eggs before the necking started, but Finn reckoned that was long since digested. If digestion continued when you were unconscious, that was. He thought it must. A person’s body just went on about its business. As long as it could, anyway.

Next was a dining room with a shining mahogany table that looked long enough to play shuffleboard on. Heavy plum-colored drapes had been pulled all the way closed. Finn strained his ears for the sound of passing traffic and heard nothing.

They went down a hall and the droopy-eyed man opened a door on the right. The weasel gave Finn a light shove. There was a fancy desk in the room. The walls were lined with books and folders. More drapes, a deep dull red, had been drawn over the window behind the desk. A man with white hair combed back like the early Cliff Richard sat behind the desk. He was wearing a tweedy jacket with elbow patches. A rusty black tie was pulled down. His tanned face was scored with lines. He looked not much older than Finn’s father had been when he died.

“Sit down.”

Finn sat down across from the white-haired man. Mr. Droopy Eye stood in one corner. Mr. Weasel stood in the other corner. They clasped their hands in front of their belt buckles.

There was a folder in front of the white-haired man, thinner than the ones crammed in helter-skelter on the shelves. He opened it, lifted a sheet of paper, looked at it, and sighed.

“This can be easy or hard, Mr. Feeney. That’s entirely up to you.”

Finn leaned forward. “See, that’s not my name. You have the wrong person.”

The white-haired man looked interested. He put the sheet of paper back in the thin folder and closed it. “Not Bobby Feeney? Is that so?”

“My name is Finn Murrie. That’s Murrie with an ie at the end, not ay.” He felt that this detail alone should be enough to convince the white-haired man. It was so specific.

“Is it now?” the white-haired man said. “Wonders never cease, do they?”

“I’ll tell you what happened. What I think happened. When I came round the corner into Peeke Street I ran into a fella running the other way. We knocked each other down. He got up and ran on. I got up and ran on. These fellas”—he pointed at the men in the corners—“must have wanted that other fella, your Bobby Feeney. He was dressed the same as me.”

“Dressed the same, was he? Cabinteely cap? Nazareth T-shirt? Leather jacket?”

“Well, I don’t know what was on the shirt, and I can’t remember if he was wearing a cap, it all happened so fast, but it’s sure that’s who you wanted. This happens to me all the time.”

The white-haired man leaned forward, his hands (scarred, Finn saw, or maybe burned) clasped on his thin folder. He looked more interested than ever. “You are taken into custody all the time, are you?”

“No, bad luck. Bad luck happens to me all the time.” He told the white-haired man about being dropped at birth, and the cherry bomb that took his toe because an angel wanted one, the broken arm because he let his grandma coax him off the Twisty, the lightning strike. There were other things he could have added, but he thought the lightning strike and the resulting concussion made a good place to stop. Like the climax of a storybook story. “So you see, I’m not the one you’re looking for.”

“Huh.” The white-haired man sat back, pressed a hand to his belly as if it pained him, and sighed.

Inspiration struck Finn. “Just think about it, sir. If I was running away from these fellas of yours, I’d run away. But I didn’t, did I? I ran right into their outstretched arms, so to speak. It was the other fella, this Bobby Feeney, who ran away.”

“You’re not Bobby Feeney?”

“No sir.”

“You’re Finn Donovan.”

“Finn Murrie. With an ie.” This should have been settled by now. That it apparently was not gave Finn a bad feeling.

“Do you have any identification? Because if you had a wallet, it must be crammed up your arse. That’s the only place we didn’t look.”

Finn actually reached for his back pocket before remembering.

“I left it at my girlfriend’s house. We were sitting on the couch”—lying on it, actually, Ellie on top—“and it was digging into my butt, so I took it out and put it on this little table, with our cans of lager. I must have forgotten it.”

“Forgot it,” said Mr. Weasel, grinning.

“Must have,” said Mr. Droopy Eye. He was grinning, too.

“You see, we have a problem here already,” the white-haired man said.

Finn had another inspo. The unpleasant situation he was in—the unbelievable situation, really, although he had no choice but to believe it— seemed to be bringing inspirations on thick and fast. “I had my Odeon card in my pocket, I kept it separate in case Ellie wanted to go out to the Stillorgan ...”

He felt for the card. It wasn’t there.

The white-haired man opened his folder, riffled through the few papers inside, and brought out an orange card. “This card?”

“Yes, that’s it. See my name?” He reached for it. The white-haired man leaned back. Mr. Weasel and Mr. Droopy Eye unclasped their hands, ready to pounce should pouncing be called for.

The white-haired man held the card close to his face, as if he were nearsighted. “Finn Murray, it says here. With an ay.”

Finn felt heat rising in his cheeks, as if he had been caught in a lie. He hadn’t been, but that was how it felt. “People misspell names all the time, don’t they? My father’s name was Stephen and people were always spelling it with a v or even an f like Stefan.”

The white-haired man slipped the Odeon card back into his folder. “Did you enjoy the music we had piped into your room?”

“I know why you do that. I’ve seen it on telly. It’s a tactic, like. To keep people on edge.”

“Ah, is that why we do it? Pando, did you know that’s why we do it?”

“Hard to say,” Mr. Weasel replied with a shrug.

“I have heard it said that music soothes the savage beast, although I’m not sure that speaks to your question.”

“We can arrange some Nazareth, if you like,” said the white-haired man. “You being a fan and all.” And, with what sounded grotesquely like pride: “We have Spotify!”

“I want to go home.” Finn didn’t like the tremble he heard in his voice but couldn’t help it. “You made a mistake and I want to go home. I won’t say nothing.” He was sorry as soon as it came out. Kidnap victims were always saying it and it never worked. He’d seen that on telly, too.