Four Past Midnight by Stephen King Page B

longer search out her bottles and break them, or slap her and tell her to get hold of herself, for God’s sake, Catherine Toomy began her life’s work in earnest. She alternately smothered her son with affection and froze him with rejection, depending on how much gin was currently perking through her bloodstream. Her behavior was often odd and sometimes bizarre. On the day Craig turned ten, she placed a wooden kitchen match between two of his toes, lit it, and sang “Happy Birthday to You” while it burned slowly down toward his flesh. She told him that if he tried to shake it out or kick it loose, she would take him to THE ORPHAN’S HOME at once. The threat of THE ORPHAN’S HOME was a frequent one when Catherine Toomy was loaded. “I ought to, anyway,” she told him as she lit the match which stuck up between her weeping son’s toes like a skinny birthday candle. “You’re just like your father. He didn’t know how to have fun, and neither do you. You’re a bore, Craiggy-weggy.” She finished the song and blew out the match before the skin of Craig’s second and third right toes was more than singed, but Craig never forgot the yellow flame, the curling, blackening stick of wood, and the growing heat as his mother warbled “Happy birthday, dear Craiggy-weggy, happy birthday to yoooou ” in her droning, off-key drunk’s voice.
    Pressure.
    Pressure in the trenches.
    Craig Toomy continued to get all A’s, and he continued to spend a lot of time in his room. The place which had been his Coventry had become his refuge. Mostly he studied there, but sometimes—when things were going badly, when he felt pressed to the wall—he would take one piece of notepaper after another and tear them into narrow strips. He would let them flutter around his feet in a growing drift while his eyes stared out blankly into space. But these blank periods were not frequent. Not then.
    He graduated valedictorian from high school. His mother didn’t come. She was drunk. He graduated ninth in his class from the UCLA Graduate School of Management. His mother didn’t come. She was dead. In the dark trench which existed in the center of his own heart, Craig was quite sure that the langoliers had finally come for her.
    Craig went to work for the Desert Sun Banking Corporation of California as part of the executive training program. He did very well, which was not surprising; Craig Toomy had been built, after all, to get all A’s, built to thrive under the pressures which exist in the deep fathoms. And sometimes, following some small reverse at work (and in those days, only five short years ago, all the reverses had been small ones), he would go back to his apartment in Westwood, less than half a mile from the condo Brian Engle would occupy following his divorce, and tear small strips of paper for hours at a time. The paper-tearing episodes were gradually becoming more frequent.
    During those five years, Craig ran the corporate fast track like a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit. Water-cooler gossips speculated that he might well become the youngest vice-president in Desert Sun’s glorious forty-year history. But some fish are built to rise just so far and no farther; they explode if they transgress their built-in limits.
    Eight months ago, Craig Toomy had been put in sole charge of his first big project—the corporate equivalent of a master’s thesis. This project was created by the bonds department. Bonds—foreign bonds and junk bonds (they were frequently the same)—were Craig’s specialty. This project proposed buying a limited number of questionable South American bonds—sometimes called Bad Debt Bonds—on a carefully set schedule. The theory behind these buys was sound enough, given the limited insurance on them that was available, and the much larger tax-breaks available on turn-overs resulting in a profit (Uncle Sam was