Free Insomnia by Stephen King Page B

Island. He pretended to be examining the spider-plant which hung from the hook under the porch eave until she had reached what he deemed a safe distance, then crossed Harris Avenue to the Red Apple. Which was where the day’s real troubles began.
    6
    He entered the convenience store once again mulling over the spectacular failure of the delayed-sleep experiment and wondering if the advice in the library texts was no more than an uptown version of the folk remedies his acquaintances seemed so eager to press upon him. It was an unpleasant idea, but he thought his mind (or the force below his mind which was actually in charge of this slow torture) had sent him a message which was even more unpleasant: You have a sleep-window, Ralph. It’s not as big as it once was, and it seems to be getting smaller with every passing week, but you better be grateful for what you’ve got, because a small window is better than no window at all. You see that now, don’t you?
    ‘Yes,’ Ralph mumbled as he walked down the center aisle to the bright red Cup-A-Soup boxes. ‘I see that very well.’
    Sue, the afternoon counter-girl, laughed cheerfully. ‘You must have money in the bank, Ralph,’ she said.
    ‘Beg pardon?’ Ralph didn’t turn; he was inventorying the red boxes. Here was onion . . . split pea . . . the beef-and-noodles combo . . . but where the hell was the Chicken and Rice?
    ‘My mom always said people who talk to themselves have Oh my God! ’
    For a moment Ralph thought she had simply made a statement a little too complex for his tired mind to immediately grasp, something about how people who talked to themselves had found God, and then she screamed. He had hunkered down to check the boxes on the bottom shelf, and the scream shot him to his feet so hard and fast that his knees popped. He wheeled toward the front of the store, bumping the top shelf of the soup display with his elbow and knocking half a dozen red boxes into the aisle.
    ‘Sue? What’s wrong?’
    Sue paid no attention. She was looking out through the door with her fisted hands pressed against her lips and her brown eyes huge above them. ‘God, look at the blood!’ she cried in a choked voice.
    Ralph turned further, knocking a few more Lipton boxes into the aisle, and looked through the Red Apple’s dirty show window. What he saw drew a gasp from him, and it took him a space of seconds – five, maybe – to realize that the bloody, beaten woman staggering toward the Red Apple was Helen Deepneau. Ralph had always thought Helen the prettiest woman on the west side of town, but there was nothing pretty about her today. One of her eyes was puffed shut; there was a gash at her left temple that was soon going to be lost in the gaudy swelling of a fresh bruise; her puffy lips and her cheeks were covered with blood. The blood had come from her nose, which was still leaking. She wove through the Red Apple’s little parking lot toward the door like a drunk, her one good eye seeming to see nothing; it simply stared.
    More frightening than the way she looked was the way she was handling Natalie. She had the squalling, frightened baby slung casually on one hip, carrying her as she might have carried her books to high school ten or twelve years before.
    ‘ Oh Jesus, she’s gonna drop the kid! ’ Sue screamed, but although she was ten steps closer to the door than he was, she made no move – simply stood where she was with her hands pressed to her mouth and her eyes gobbling up her face.
    Ralph didn’t feel tired anymore. He sprinted up the aisle, tore open the door, and ran outside. He was just in time to catch Helen by the shoulders as she banged a hip against the ice cabinet – mercifully not the hip with Natalie on it – and went veering off in a new direction.
    ‘Helen!’ he yelled. ‘Jesus, Helen, what happened?’
    ‘Hun?’ she asked, her voice dully curious, totally unlike the voice of the lively young woman who sometimes accompanied him to