The man in the black suit (25)
“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 conviction 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 nineyear- 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
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.
Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual
