Collections\Different Seasons\Apt Pupil:19

Collections\Different Seasons\Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption:He had to carry the possibility of discovery for another eight years-the probability of it, you might say, because no matter how carefully he stacked the cards in his favor, as an inmate of a state prison, he just didn't have that many to stack . . . and the gods had been kind to him for a very long time; some NINETEEN years.

Collections\Different Seasons\Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption:I have this manuscript. I have a small piece of luggage about the size of a doctor's bag that holds everything I own. I have NINETEEN fifties, four tens, a five, three ones, and assorted change. I broke one of the fifties to buy this tablet of paper and a deck of smokes.

Collections\Different Seasons\Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption:In the end, I trusted my judgment. Early the next morning, twenty minutes before the wake-up horn went off, I slipped the rock-hammer and a package of Camels to Ernie, the old trusty who swept the Cellblock 5 corridors until he was let free in 1956. He slipped it into his tunic without a word, and I didn't see the rock-hammer again for NINETEEN years, and by then it was damned near worn away to nothing.

Collections\Different Seasons\Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption:Time continued to pass-the oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only one that really is magic. But Andy Dufresne had changed. He had grown harder. That's the only way I can think of to put it. He went on doing Warden Norton's dirty work and he held onto the library, so outwardly things were about the same. He continued to have his birthday drinks and his year-end holiday drinks; he continued to share out the rest of each bottle. I got him fresh rock-polishing cloths from time to time, and in 1967 I got him a new rock-hammer-the one I'd gotten him NINETEEN years ago had, as I told you, plumb worn out. NINETEEN years! When you say it sudden like that, those three syllables sound like the thud and double-locking of a tomb door. The rock-hammer, which had been a ten-dollar item back then, went for twenty-two by '67. He and I had a sad little grin over that.

Collections\Different Seasons\The Body:19

Collections\Everything's Eventual\Everything's Eventual:But never mind that. Let's go back to my house here in Columbia City. How many NINETEEN-year-old high-school dropouts do you know who have their own houses? Plus a new car? Only a Honda, true, but the first three numbers on the odometer are still zeroes, and that's the important part. It has a CD/tape-player, and I don't slide in behind the wheel wondering if the goddam thing'll start, like I always did with the Ford, which Skipper used to make fun of. The Assholemobile, he called it. Why are there so many Skippers in the world? That's what I really wonder about.

Collections\Everything's Eventual\Everything's Eventual:I've got a good job now, and no reason to feel glum. No more hanging out with the gumbyheads at the Supr Savr, policing up the Kart Korral and getting bothered by assholes like Skipper. Skipper's munching the old dirt sandwich these days, but one thing I have learned in my NINETEEN years on this Planet Earth is don't relax, there are Skippers everywhere.

Collections\Everything's Eventual\Riding the Bullet:I looked both ways along the road. Nothing coming, not so much as a glow on the horizon. Putting my pack down in the wheelrut where I'd been dangling my feet, I got up and walked into the cemetery. A lock of hair had fallen onto my brow; the wind blew it off. The mist roiled lazily around my shoes. The stones at the back were old; more than a few had fallen over. The ones at the front were much newer. I bent, hands planted on knees, to look at one which was surrounded by almost-fresh flowers. By moonlight the name was easy to read: GEORGE STAUB. Below it were the dates marking the brief span of George Staub's life: January 19, 1977, at one end, October 12, 1998, at the other. That explained the flowers which had only begun to wilt; October 12th was two days ago and 1998 was just two years ago. George's friends and relatives had stopped by to pay their respects. Below the name and dates was something else, a brief inscription. I leaned down further to read it-

Collections\Everything's Eventual\Riding the Bullet:JANUARY 19, 1977-OCTOBER 12, 1998

Collections\Everything's Eventual\The Man in the Black Suit:He snatched it away from me and crammed it into a mouth that opened wider than any human mouth ever could. Many years later, when I was sixty-five (I know it was sixty-five because that was the summer I retired from teaching), I went to the New England Aquarium and finally saw a shark. The mouth of the man in the black suit was like that shark's mouth when it opened, only his gullet was blazing red, the same color as his awful eyes, and I felt heat bake out of it and into my face, the way you feel a sudden wave of heat come pushing out of a fireplace when a dry piece of wood catches alight. And I didn't imagine that heat, either, I know I didn't, because just before he slid the head of my NINETEEN-inch brook trout between his gaping jaws, I saw the scales along the sides of the fish rise up and begin to curl like bits of paper floating over an open incinerator.

Collections\Everything's Eventual\The Man in the Black Suit:I stopped at two or three other places before I got to the place where Castle Stream forks, going southwest into Castle Rock and southeast into Kashwakamak Township, and at one of them I caught the biggest trout I have ever caught in my life, a beauty that measured NINETEEN inches from tip to tail on the little ruler I kept in my creel. That was a monster of a brook trout, even for those days.

Collections\Everything's Eventual\The Man in the Black Suit:If I had accepted this as gift enough for one day and gone back, I would not be writing now (and this is going to turn out longer than I thought it would, I see that already), but I didn't. Instead I saw to my catch right then and there as my father had shown me-cleaning it, placing it on dry grass at the bottom of the creel, then laying damp grass on top of it-and went on. I did not, at age nine, think that catching a NINETEEN-inch brook trout was particularly remarkable, although I do remember being amazed that my line had not broken when I, netless as well as artless, had hauled it out and swung it toward me in a clumsy tail-flapping arc.

Collections\Everything's Eventual\The Man in the Black Suit:Mostly, though, the difference was in how people lived-how apart they were. I'm not sure people born after the middle of the twentieth century could quite credit that, although they might say they could, to be polite to old folks like me. There were no phones in western Maine back then, for one thing. The first one wouldn't be installed for another five years, and by the time there was one in our house, I was NINETEEN and going to college at the University of Maine in Orono.

Collections\Four Past Midnight\Secret Window, Secret Garden:"Then we found a large chunk of bottle in the wreckage of the office. It had contained wine-champagne, to be exact-but there wasn't any doubt that the last thing it had contained was gasoline. Part of the label was intact, and we sent a Fax copy to New York. It was identified as Moët et Chandon, NINETEEN-eighty-something. That wasn't proof indisputable that the bottle used for the Molotov cocktail came from your own wine room, Mrs. Milner, but it was very persuasive, since you listed better than a dozen bottles of Moët et Chandon, some from 1983 and some from 1984.

Collections\Four Past Midnight\Secret Window, Secret Garden:19

Collections\Four Past Midnight\The Langoliers:19

Collections\Four Past Midnight\The Sun Dog:So he went quickly to the worktable, bent, and extracted the Polaroid 660 with the broken lens from the shadows underneath. He put it on the table, fished a key-ring from his pocket (with one quick glance over his shoulder to be sure neither of them had decided to come down after all), and selected the small key which opened the locked drawer that formed the entire left side of the table. In this deep drawer were a number of gold Krugerrands; a stamp album in which the least valuable stamp was worth six hundred dollars in the latest Scott Stamp Catalogue; a coin collection worth approximately NINETEEN thousand dollars; two dozen glossy photographs of a bleary-eyed woman having sexual congress with a Shetland pony; and an amount of cash totalling just over two thousand dollars.

Collections\Full Dark, No Stars\1922:"You and I are going to split the payback," I said. "It's apt to come to no more than 38 dollars if we retire the loan by Christmas. That's 19 apiece. I'll take yours out of your choring money."

Collections\Full Dark, No Stars\A Good Marriage:- 19 -

Collections\Full Dark, No Stars\A Good Marriage:Her husband had coached Little League (also with Vinnie Eschler, that master of Polish jokes and big enveloping manhugs) during the years when Donnie had played shortstop for the Cavendish Hardware team, and Darcy still remembered what Bob said to the boys-many of them weeping-after they'd lost the final game of the District 19 tourney. Back in 1997 that would have been, probably only a month or so before Bob had murdered Stacey Moore and stuffed her into her cornbin. The talk he'd given to that bunch of drooping, sniffling boys had been short, wise, and (she'd thought so then and still did thirteen years later) incredibly kind.

Collections\Full Dark, No Stars\Big Driver:"The address I have is 19 Primrose Lane, in Stoke Village. Is that correct?"

Collections\Full Dark, No Stars\Big Driver:- 19 -

Collections\Hearts in Atlantis\Hearts in Atlantis:19

Collections\Hearts in Atlantis\Hearts in Atlantis:But before I learned any of those things, I learned about the pleasures and dangers of Hearts. There were sixteen rooms holding thirty-two boys on the third floor of Chamberlain Hall in the fall of 1966; by January of 1967, NINETEEN of those boys had either moved or flunked out, victims of Hearts. It swept through us that fall like a virulent strain of influenza. Only three of the young men on Three were completely immune, I think. One was my roommate, Nathan Hoppenstand. One was David "Dearie" Dearborn, the floor-proctor. The third was Stokely Jones III, soon to be known to the citizenry of Chamberlain Hall as Rip-Rip. Sometimes I think it's Rip-Rip I want to tell you about; sometimes I think it's Skip Kirk (later known as Captain Kirk, of course), who was my best friend during those years; sometimes I think it's Carol. Often I believe it's the sixties themselves I want to talk about, impossible as that has always seemed to me. But before I talk about any of those things, I better tell you about Hearts.

Collections\Hearts in Atlantis\Hearts in Atlantis:I told you that of the thirty-two students who began the fall semester on our floor of Chamberlain (thirty-three, if you also count Dearie . . . but he was immune to the charms of Hearts), only fifteen remained to start the spring semester. That doesn't mean the NINETEEN who left were all dopes, though; not by any means. In fact, the smartest fellows on Chamberlain Three in the fall of 1966 were probably the ones who transferred before flunking out became a real possibility. Steve Ogg and Jack Frady, who had the room just up the hall from Nate and me, went to Chadbourne the first week in November, citing "distractions" on their joint application. When the Housing Officer asked what sort of distractions, they said it was the usual-all-night bull sessions, toothpaste ambushes in the head, abrasive relations with a couple of the guys. As an afterthought, both added they were probably playing cards in the lounge a little too much. They'd heard Chad was a quieter environment, one of the campus's two or three "brain dorms."

Collections\Hearts in Atlantis\Hearts in Atlantis:There was a kind of rough concern in his voice. Nate's lower lip trembled and then firmed at the sound of it. He leaned over the neat surface of his desk (my own was already covered in about NINETEEN layers of junk) and snagged a Kleenex from the box he kept by his record-player. He blew his nose long and hard. When he was finished he was under control again, but I could see the baffled unhappiness in his eyes. Part of me-a mean part-was glad to see it. Glad to know that you didn't have to turn into a Hearts junkie to have problems. Human nature can be so shitty sometimes.

Collections\Hearts in Atlantis\Hearts in Atlantis:We-my mom and me, that is-thought he had twenty per cent of his eyesight left, maybe a bit more. It was hard to tell, because he so rarely talked. It was a bagging-room accident that did for him, a terrible two-story fall. He had scars on the left side of his face and his neck; there was a dented-in patch of skull where the hair never grew back. The accident pretty much blacked out his vision, and it did something to his mind, as well. But he was not a "total ijit," as I once heard some asshole down at Gendron's Barber Shop say, nor was he mute, as some people seemed to think. He was in a coma for NINETEEN days. After he woke up he became mostly silent, that much is true, and he was often terribly confused in his mind, but sometimes he was still there, all present and accounted for. He was there enough when I came home to give me a kiss and that strong one-armed hug, his way of hugging for as long as I could remember. I loved my old man a lot . . . and after a semester of playing cards with Ronnie Malenfant, I had learned that talking is a wildly overrated skill.

Collections\Just After Sunset\A Very Tight Place:19 GULF BOULEVARD

Collections\Just After Sunset\Mute:"She worked for MSAD 19," Monette said. "MSAD stands for Maine School Administrative District. It's one of the big ones, just south of Portland. Based in Dowrie, as a matter of fact, home of both Range Riders-the line-dancing joint-and the historic Grove Motel, just down the road from there. Convenient. Get your dancing and your fuh . . . your lovemaking all in the same area. Why, you wouldn't even have to drive your car if you happened to have a snootful. Which on most evenings they did have. Tequila shooters for her, whiskey for him. Jack, naturally. She told me. She told me everything."

Collections\Just After Sunset\N:"Call them events. That's what I call them. There are six hundred and four counting events, eight hundred and seventy-eight touching events, and twenty-two hundred and forty-six placing events. All even numbers, you'll notice. They add up to thirty-seven hundred and twenty-eight, also an even number. If you add the individual numbers in that total-3728-you come out with twenty, also even. A good number." He nods, as if confirming this to himself. "Divide 3728 by two and you come out with eighteen-hundred and sixty-four. 1864 adds up to NINETEEN, a powerful odd number. Powerful and bad." He actually shivers a little.

Collections\Just After Sunset\N:August 19

Collections\Just After Sunset\The Gingerbread Girl:The window in here was also big. And unlike the windows in the study and the guest room, it wasn't shuttered. Before Em could look out and see what lay beyond, her attention was drawn to a photograph on the wall by the bed. Not hung and certainly not framed, only tacked there with a pushpin. There were other tiny holes on the wall around it, as if other pictures had been pinned there over the years. This one was a color shot with 4-19-07 printed digitally in the right corner. Taken by an old-fashioned camera rather than a digital one, by the look of the paper, and not by anyone with much flair for photography. On the other hand, perhaps the photographer had been excited. The way hyenas might get excited, she supposed, when sundown comes and there's fresh prey in the offing. It was blurry, as if taken with a telephoto lens, and the subject wasn't centered. The subject was a long-legged young woman wearing denim shorts and a cropped top that said BEER O'CLOCK BAR. She had a tray balanced on the fingers of her left hand, like a waitress in a jolly old Norman Rockwell painting. She was laughing. Her hair was blond. Em couldn't be sure it was Nicole, not from this blurred photo and those few shocked instants when she had been looking down at the dead girl in the trunk of the Mercedes . . . but she was sure. Her heart was sure.

Collections\Night Shift\Children of the Corn: Isaac Renfrew (William), b. Sept. 19, 1945 Sept. 19, 1964

Collections\Night Shift\Children of the Corn:"So now is the Age of Favor lowered from NINETEEN plantings and harvestings to eighteen," Isaac went on relentlessly. "Yet be fruitful and multiply as the corn multiplies, that my favor may be shewn you, and be upon you."

Collections\Night Shift\Children of the Corn:And somehow, Vicky, I'm quite sure of this, somehow they decided that NINETEEN was as old as any of them could live. Richard "Amos" Deigan, the hero of our little story, had his nineteenth birthday on September 4, 1964-the date in the book. I think maybe they killed him. Sacrificed him in the corn. Isn't that a silly story?

Collections\Night Shift\Children of the Corn:But let's look at Rachel Stigman, who was Donna Stigman until 1964. She turned NINETEEN on June 21, just about a month ago. Moses Richardson was born on July 29-just three days from today he'll be NINETEEN. Any idea what's going to happen to ole Mose on the twenty-ninth?

Collections\Night Shift\Children of the Corn:They all turned to look at Isaac with dread and wonder, even Malachi. Isaac was only nine, but he had been the Seer since the corn had taken David a year ago. David had been NINETEEN and he had walked into the corn on his birthday, just as dusk had come drifting down the summer rows.

Collections\Night Shift\Jerusalem's Lot:Oct. 19, 1850.

Collections\Night Shift\Jerusalem's Lot:We exited together, Cal and I, leaving the place to its own darkness, and neither of us dared look back until we had crossed the rude planks spanning the stream. I will not say we defiled the NINETEEN hundred years man has spent climbing upward from a hunkering and superstitious savage by actually running; but I would be a liar to say that we strolled.

Collections\Night Shift\The Ledge:I looked at the clock. I couldn't help it. It was 8:19.

Collections\Night Shift\Trucks:I looked around. It was the two kids from the Fury. The boy looked about NINETEEN. He had long hair and a beard that was just starting to take hold. His girl looked younger.

Collections\Nightmares & Dreamscapes\Chattery Teeth:The reason was that in 1982 he had been on board a Western Pride commuter flight which had crashed in the high country seventeen miles north of Reno. Six of the NINETEEN passengers on board and both crew-members had been killed. Hogan had suffered a broken back. He had spent four months in bed and another ten in a heavy brace his wife Lita called the Iron Maiden. They (whoever they were) said that if you got thrown from a horse, you should get right back on. William I. Hogan said that was bullshit, and with the exception of a white-knuckle, two-Valium flight to attend his father's funeral in New York, he had never been on a plane since.

Collections\Nightmares & Dreamscapes\Dedication:"But it didn't make any difference. I went on until I was done-or until some part of me was satisfied-and then I just stood there a minute, looking down at the sheet. I couldn't hear nothing at all from the other room, and it came to me that he was right behind me, standing in the doorway. I knew just what the expression on his face'd be. Used to be a travelling show that came to Babylon every August when I was a girl, and they had a man with it-I guess he was a man-that geeked out behind the tent-show. He'd be down a hole and some fella would give a spiel about how he was the missing link and then throw a live chicken down. The geek'd bite the head off it. Once my oldest brother-Bradford, who died in a car accident in Biloxi-said he wanted to go and see the geek. My dad said he was sorry to hear it, but he didn't outright forbid Brad, because Brad was NINETEEN and almost a man. He went, and me and Kissy meant to ask him what it was like when he came back, but when we saw the expression on his face we never did. That's the expression I thought I'd see on Jefferies's face when I turned around and saw him in the doorway. Do you see what I'm sayin?"

Collections\Nightmares & Dreamscapes\Home Delivery:Money wasn't the problem; George had believed passionately in insurance, and when he dropped down dead during the tiebreaker frame of the League Bowl-Offs at Big Duke's Big Ten in Machias, his wife had come into better than a hundred thousand dollars. And island life was cheap, if you owned your place and kept your garden tended and knew how to put by your own vegetables come fall. The problem was having nothing to focus on. The problem was how the center seemed to have dropped out of their lives when George went facedown in his Island Amoco bowling shirt just over the foul line of lane NINETEEN (and goddam if he hadn't picked up the spare his team had needed to win, too). With George gone their lives had become an eerie sort of blur.

Collections\Nightmares & Dreamscapes\Home Delivery:The final sixty-one seconds of received transmission from the Xiaoping/Truman were considered too horrible for release by all three governments involved, and so no formal communiqué was ever issued. It didn't matter, of course; nearly twenty thousand ham operators had been monitoring the craft, and it seemed that at least NINETEEN thousand of them had been rolling tape when the craft had been-well, was there really any other word for it?-invaded.

Collections\Nightmares & Dreamscapes\Home Delivery:When her father died of a massive coronary, Maddie was NINETEEN and minding the town library weekday evenings at a salary of $41.50 a week. Her mother minded the house-or did, that was, when George reminded her (sometimes with a good hard shot to the ear) that she had a house which needed minding.

Collections\Nightmares & Dreamscapes\It Grows on You:"They ain't had a buyer on that place since NINETEEN n eighty-one," Old Clut says. When Old Clut says they, he means both Southern Maine Weaving and The Bank of Southern Maine, but he means more: he means The Massachusetts Wops. Southern Maine Weaving came into ownership of Joe's three mills-and Joe's house on the ridge-about a year after Joe took his own life, but as far as the men gathered around the stove in Brownie's are concerned, that name's just a smokescreen. . . or what they sometimes call The Legal, as in She swore out a pertection order on him n now he can't even see his own kids because of The Legal. These men hate The Legal as it impinges upon their lives and the lives of their friends, but it fascinates them endlessly when they consider how some people put it to work in order to further their own nefarious money-making schemes.

Collections\Nightmares & Dreamscapes\The House on Maple Street:00:19:06.

Collections\Skeleton Crew\Gramma:The Dodge backed out of the driveway and paused while his mother looked both ways, although nothing would be coming; nothing ever was. His mother would have a two-mile ride over washboards and ruts before she even got to tar, and it was NINETEEN miles to Lewiston after that.

Collections\Skeleton Crew\Mrs. Todd's Shortcut:"‘Oh. Well, the fourth-and there aren't too many who know about it, although they are all good roads-paved, anyway-is across Speckled Bird Mountain on 219 to 202 beyond Lewiston. Then, if you take Route 19, you can get around Augusta. Then you take the Old Derry Road. That way is just 129.2.'

Collections\Skeleton Crew\The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands:"Very well, then. I'm eighty-five and what I'm going to tell you occurred when I was twenty or thereabouts. It was 1919, at any rate, and I was just back from the Great War. My fiancée had died five months earlier, of influenza. She was only NINETEEN, and I fear I drank and played cards a great deal more than I should. She had been waiting for two years, you understand, and during that period I received a letter faithfully each week. Perhaps you may understand why I indulged myself so heavily. I had no religious beliefs, finding the general tenets and theories of Christianity rather comic in the trenches, and I had no family to support me. And so I can say with truth that the good friends who saw me through my time of trial rarely left me. There were fifty-three of them (more than most people have!): fifty-two cards and a bottle of Cutty Sark whiskey. I had taken up residence in the very rooms I inhabit now, on Brennan Street. But they were much cheaper then, and there were considerably fewer medicine bottles and pills and nostrums cluttering the shelves. Yet I spent most of my time here, at 249B, for there was almost always a poker game to be found."

Collections\Skeleton Crew\The Mist:This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke-the night of July 19-the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.

Collections\Skeleton Crew\The Monkey:But the next morning he forgot all about putting the monkey back because his mother didn't go to work. Beulah was dead. Their mother wouldn't tell them exactly what happened. "It was an accident, just a terrible accident," was all she would say. But that afternoon Bill bought a newspaper on his way home from school and smuggled page four up to their room under his shirt. Bill read the article haltingly to Hal while their mother cooked supper in the kitchen, but Hal could read the headline for himself-TWO KILLED IN APARTMENT SHOOT-OUT. Beulah McCaffery, 19, and Sally Tremont, 20, had been shot by Miss McCaffery's boyfriend, Leonard White, 25, following an argument over who was to go out and pick up an order of Chinese food. Miss Tremont had expired at Hartford Receiving. Beulah McCaffery had been pronounced dead at the scene.

Collections\Skeleton Crew\The Raft:Deke's football ring-All-Conference, 1981-slid slowly up the third finger of his right hand. The starlight rimmed the gold and played in the minute gutters between the engraved numbers, 19 on one side of the reddish stone, 81 on the other. The ring slid off his finger. The ring was a little too big to fit down through the crack, and of course it wouldn't squeeze.

Collections\Skeleton Crew\The Raft:Rachel said that summers had seemed to last forever when she was a girl, but now that she was an adult ("a doddering senile NINETEEN," Deke joked, and she kicked his ankle), they got shorter every year. "It seemed like I spent my life out at Cascade Lake," she said, crossing the decayed kitchen linoleum to the icebox. She peered in, found an Iron City Light hiding behind a stack of blue Tupperware storage boxes (the one in the middle contained some nearly prehistoric chili which was now thickly festooned with mold-Randy was a good student and Deke was a good football player, but neither of them was worth a fart in a noisemaker when it came to housekeeping), and appropriated it. "I can still remember the first time I managed to swim all the way out to the raft. I stayed there for damn near two hours, scared to swim back."

Collections\Skeleton Crew\The Reach:On November 19, when the first flurries came swirling down out of a sky the color of white chrome, Stella celebrated her birthday. Most of the village turned out. Hattie Stoddard came, whose mother had died of pleurisy in 1954 and whose father had been lost with the Dancer in 1941. Richard and Mary Dodge came, Richard moving slowly up the path on his cane, his arthritis riding him like an invisible passenger. Sarah Havelock came, of course; Sarah's mother Annabelle had been Stella's best friend. They had gone to the island school together, grades one to eight, and Annabelle had married Tommy Frane, who had pulled her hair in the fifth grade and made her cry, just as Stella had married Bill Flanders, who had once knocked all of her schoolbooks out of her arms and into the mud (but she had managed not to cry). Now both Annabelle and Tommy were gone and Sarah was the only one of their seven children still on the island. Her husband, George Havelock, who had been known to everyone as Big George, had died a nasty death over on the mainland in 1967, the year there was no fishing. An ax had slipped in Big George's hand, there had been blood-too much of it!-and an island funeral three days later. And when Sarah came in to Stella's party and cried, "Happy birthday, Gram!" Stella hugged her tight and closed her eyes

Collections\Skeleton Crew\The Wedding Gig:"You can-" she began, but just then a ruff-tuff-creampuff of about NINETEEN strolled over. A cigarette was dangling from the corner of his mouth, but so far as I could see it wasn't doing a thing for his image except making his left eye water.

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Afterlife:"In NINETEEN eleven?"

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Afterlife:"Use that one-as you have on every other occasion-and you begin all over again, as a seven-pound baby boy sliding from your mother's womb into the doctor's hands. You'll be wrapped in bunting and taken home to a farm in central Nebraska. When your father sells the farm in NINETEEN sixty-four, you'll move to New Jersey. There you will cut off the tip of your brother's little finger while playing flashlight tag. You'll go to the same high school, take the same courses, and make the same grades. You'll go to Boston College, and you'll commit the same act of semirape in the same fraternity house basement. You'll watch as the same two fraternity brothers then have sex with Annmarie Winkler, and although you'll think you should call a halt to what's going on, you'll never quite muster up the moral fortitude to do so. Three years later you'll meet Lynn DeSalvo, and two years after that you'll be married. You'll follow the same career path, you'll have the same friends, you'll have the same deep disquiet about some of your firm's business practices . . . and you'll keep the same silence. The same doctor will urge you to get a colonoscopy when you turn fifty, and you will promise-as you always do-that you'll take care of that little matter. You won't, and as a result you will die of the same cancer."

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Batman and Robin Have an Altercation:"Halloween, you dummy. You were eight, so it was NINETEEN fifty-nine. You were born in 'fifty-one."

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Blockade Billy:He waved me away, then went back to talking on the phone. I started across the locker room to the coaches' office, which was really the equipment room. Halfway there I stopped. The big pitcher-catcher conference had broken up, and the kid was pulling on his uniform shirt, the one with the big blue 19. And I saw the Band-Aid was back on the second finger of his right hand.

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Blockade Billy:I hesitated over giving him 19, because it was poor old Faraday's number, but the uniform fit him without looking like pajamas, so I did. While he was dressing, I said: "Ain't you tired? You must have driven almost nonstop. Didn't they send you some cash to take a plane?"

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Blockade Billy:I said we could, and led him down the runway and up through the dugout. He walked down to home plate outside the foul line in Faraday's uniform, the blue 19 gleaming in the morning sun (it wasn't but eight o'clock, the groundskeepers just starting what would be a long day's work).

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Blockade Billy:We went to Chicago for three, and the kid hit in those games, too, making it NINETEEN straight. But damn if we didn't lose all three. Jersey Joe looked at me after the last of those games and said, "I don't buy that lucky charm stuff. I think Blakely sucks luck."

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Drunken Fireworks:There was no pause, like with our Ghost of Fury. Fucker took off like Apollo 19, trailin a streak of blue fire that turned purple, then red. A second later the stars was blotted out by a giant flamin bird that covered the lake almost from one side to the other. It blazed up there, then exploded. And I'll be damned if little birds didn't come out of the explosion, shootin off in every direction.

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Herman Wouk Is Still Alive:Continued on page 19

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Herman Wouk Is Still Alive:From the Portland (Maine) Press-Herald, September 19, 2010:

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Mister Yummy:"Cleaned several times, but repaired only once," Ollie said, resuming his slow ambulation. "In NINETEEN twenty-three, according to Grampy, after my father dropped it down the well on the old farm in Hemingford Home. Can you imagine that? Over a hundred and twenty years old, and only repaired once. How many human beings on earth can claim that? A dozen? Maybe only six? You have two sons and a daughter, am I right?"

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Mister Yummy:"I was born in NINETEEN thirty. When AIDS was first observed and clinically described in the United States, I was fifty-two. I was living in New York, and working freelance for several advertising firms. My friends and I still used to go around to the clubs in the Village once in awhile. Not the Stonewall-a hellhole run by the Mafia-but some of the others. One night I was standing outside Peter Pepper's on Christopher Street, sharing a jay with a friend, and a bunch of young men went in. Good-looking guys in tight bellbottom pants and the shirts they all seemed to wear back then, the kind with the wide shoulders and narrow waists. Suede boots with stacked heels."

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Mister Yummy:"Some of the conservative columnists called AIDS the gay plague, and with ill-concealed satisfaction. It was a plague, but by NINETEEN eighty-six or so, the gay community had a pretty good fix on it. We understood the two most basic preventive measures-no unprotected sex and no sharing of needles. But young men think they're immortal, and as my grandma used to say when she was in her cups, a stiff dick has no conscience. It's especially true when the owner of that dick is drunk, high, and in the throes of sexual attraction."

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Morality:"I wandered a few years in the hinterlands before coming back to Brooklyn and Second Presbo. After five years as an associate, I became the senior pastor. I served as such, without blemish, until two thousand six. My life has been one-I say it with neither pride nor shame-of unremarkable service. I have led my church in helping the poor, both in countries far from here and in this community. The local AA drop-in center was my idea, and it's helped hundreds of suffering addicts and alcoholics. I've comforted the sick and buried the dead. More cheerfully, I've presided over more than a thousand weddings, and inaugurated a scholarship fund that has sent many boys and girls to colleges they could not otherwise have afforded. One of our scholarship girls won a National Book Award in NINETEEN ninety-nine.

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Summer Thunder:About such wildlife there could be no argument. Robinson had seen almost a dozen dead deer beside the lake road and more beside Route 19, on that one trip he and Gandalf had made to the Carson Corners General Store, where the sign out front-BUY YOUR VERMONT CHEESE & SYRUP HERE!-now lay facedown next to the dry gas pumps. But the greatest part of the animal holocaust was in the woods. When the wind was from the east, toward the lake rather than off it, the reek was tremendous. The warm days didn't help, and Robinson wanted to know what had happened to nuclear winter.

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Summer Thunder:With another living being to take care of, things were better. Robinson drove to the country store five miles up Route 19 (Gandalf sitting in the pickup's passenger seat, ears cocked, eyes bright) and got dog food. The store was abandoned, and of course it had been looted, but no one had taken the Eukanuba. After June Sixth, pets had been the last thing on people's minds. So Robinson deduced.

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\The Dune:"It was NINETEEN fifty-nine. I was still on the Point. I've always lived here except for the years in Tallahassee, and it's better not to speak of them . . . although I now think part of the hate I felt for that provincial backwater of a town, perhaps even most of it, was simply a masked longing for the island, and the dune. I kept wondering what I was missing, you see. Who I was missing. Being able to read obituaries in advance gives a man an extraordinary sense of power. Perhaps you find that unlovely, but there it is.

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\The Dune:"Over the years, many names have appeared on that dune, and the people the names belong to always die. Sometimes it's within the week, sometimes it's two, but it's never more than a month. Some have been people I knew, and if it's by a nickname I knew them, it's the nickname I see. One day in NINETEEN forty I paddled out there and saw GRAMPY BEECHER drawn into the sand. He died in Key West three days later. It was a heart attack."

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\The Dune:Judge Beecher gives the young man a wintry smile. "You needn't worry about that, son," he says. He looks toward the window, and the Gulf beyond. His face is long and thoughtful. "Those names . . . I can see them yet, jostling each other for place on that bloodred dune. Two days later, a TWA plane on its way to Miami crashed in the 'Glades. All one hundred and NINETEEN souls on board were killed. The passenger list was in the paper. I recognized some of the names. I recognized many of them."

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Ur:Don filled in the fields for NOVEMBER 19, 1962. The Kindle told him to enjoy his selection, but he didn't. None of them did. The headlines were stark and huge:

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Ur:He examined the dates again and saw that the death date was wrong. Hemingway had died on July 2, 1961, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to the screen, he had gone to that great library in the sky on August 19, 1964.

Collections\The Bazaar of Bad Dreams\Ur:Only it was quite the opposite. When Wesley selected the Ur and added a date-January 20, 1973-not quite at random, what came up instead of ENJOY YOUR SELECTION was this: NO TIMES THIS UR AFTER NOVEMBER 19, 1962.

Novellas\Elevation:"Oh, you bet," Mike said. "And she's got her old number. 19. We saved it for her special."

Novellas\Elevation:Everyone was milling in groups, talking and laughing, drinking hot coffee or cocoa. Everyone, that was, except for Deirdre McComb, looking impossibly tall and beautiful in her blue shorts and a pair of snow-white Adidas sneaks. She had placed her number-19-off-center, high on the left side of her bright red tee-shirt, in order to leave most of the shirt's front visible. On it was an empanada and HOLY FRIJOLE 142 MAIN STREET.

Novellas\Elevation:In the center of the sheet was a photo of Deirdre McComb. There were other runners, most of them behind her. A big number 19 was pinned to the waistband of her tiny blue shorts. Above them was a tee-shirt with NEW YORK CITY MARATHON 2011 on the front. On her face was an expression Scott would not have associated with her: blissful happiness.

Novels\'Salem's Lot:"Everyone disappeared," he told Herbert-or-Harold, who was listening with polite but not very well masked boredom. "Just a small town in the upcountry of northern Vermont, accessible by Interstate Route 2 and Vermont Route 19. Population of 312 in the census of 1920. In August of 1923 a woman in New York got worried because her sister hadn't written her for two months. She and her husband took a ride out there, and they were the first to break the story to the newspapers, although I don't doubt that the locals in the surrounding area had known about the disappearance for some time. The sister and her husband were gone, all right, and so was everyone else in Momson. The houses and the barns were all standing, and in one place supper had been put on the table. The case was rather sensational at the time. I don't believe that I would care to stay there overnight. The author of this book claims the people in the neighboring townships tell some odd stories...ha'ants and goblins and all that. Several of the outlying barns have hex signs and large crosses painted on them, even to this day. Look, here's a photograph of the general store and ethyl station and feed-and-grain store-what served in Momson as downtown. What do you suppose ever happened there?"

Novels\'Salem's Lot:November 19, 1975 (p. 27):

Novels\11_22_63:"Little cottage on Vining Street. Number NINETEEN. Look for the lawn gnome beside the porch. You can't miss it. He's waving a flag."

Novels\11_22_63:11/19/63 (Tuesday)

Novels\11_22_63:19

Novels\11_22_63:At the Chevron (where regular was selling for 19.9 cents a gallon and "super" was a penny more), a man in blue coveralls and a strenuous crewcut was working on a truck-the Anicettis', I presumed-that was up on the lift.

Novels\11_22_63:CHAPTER 19

Novels\11_22_63:He took me out to the back porch; I don't think the missus wanted me in the house with her and the baby. The rules were simple. Pegs were points, and a game was two laps around the board. I learned about the right jack, double runs, being stuck in the mudhole, and what Andy called "mystic NINETEEN"-the so-called impossible hand. Then we played. I kept track of the score to begin with, but quit once Cullum pulled four hundred points ahead. Every now and then some hunter would bang off a distant round, and Cullum would look toward the woods beyond his small backyard.

Novels\11_22_63:I did as she asked. She smoked three cigarettes during the telling. Toward the end, she cried hard, probably not from remembered pain so much as simple embarrassment. For most of us, I think it's easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid. Not that she had been. There's a world of difference between stupidity and naïveté, and like most good middle-class girls who came to maturity in the NINETEEN-forties and-fifties, Sadie knew almost nothing about sex. She said she had never actually looked at a penis until she had looked at mine. She'd had glimpses of Johnny's, but she said if he caught her looking, he would take hold of her face and turn it away with a grip that stopped just short of painful.

Novels\11_22_63:So I did, and the applause swelled again. Mike grabbed me, hugged me, lifted me off my feet, then set me down and gave me a hearty smack on the cheek. Everyone laughed, including me. We all grabbed hands, lifted them to the audience, and bowed. As I listened to the applause, a thought occurred to me, one that darkened my heart. In Minsk, there were newlyweds. Lee and Marina had been man and wife for exactly NINETEEN days.

Novels\11_22_63:So after a mostly sleepless July night when the sonar pings of hunch had been particularly strong, I packed my worldly goods (the lockbox containing my memoir and my cash I hid beneath the Sunliner's spare tire), left a note and a final rent check for my landlord, and headed north on US 19. I spent my first night on the road in a decaying DeFuniak Springs motor court. The screens had holes in them, and until I turned out my room's one light (an unshaded bulb dangling on a length of electrical cord), I was beset by mosquitoes the size of fighter planes.

Novels\11_22_63:The New Year's Eve dance at Bountiful Grange No. 7 was a little better. There was a band from Austin called The Jokers, and they were really laying it down. Sadie and I danced beneath sagging nets filled with balloons until our feet were sore. At midnight The Jokers swung into a Ventures-style version of "Auld Lang Syne," and the band's lead man shouted "May all your dreams come true in NINETEEN hundred and sixty-two!"

Novels\11_22_63:The bus came growling up to the stop. Secret Agent X-19-also known as Lee Harvey Oswald, the renowned Marxist and wife-beater-got on. When the bus was out of sight, I went back to the alley and walked its length. At the end, it widened out into a big unfenced backyard. There was a '57 or '58 Chevy Biscayne parked beside a natural gas pumping station. There was a barbecue pot standing on a tripod. Beyond the barbie was the backside of a big dark brown house. The general's house.

Novels\11_22_63:The next item was George T. Amberson's Maine driver's license, which stated I was six feet five, blue eyes, brown hair, weight one-ninety. I had been born on April 22, 1923, and lived at 19 Bluebird Lane in Sabattus, which happened to be my 2011 address.

Novels\11_22_63:Well of course it's not really cat, people would say, or probably not cat, but it can't be beef, not at a dollar-NINETEEN.

Novels\11_22_63:What have I done here, you ask, now that I have laid my good-angel wings aside? I have written. I have a fountain pen-one given to me by Mike and Bobbi Jill, you remember them-and I walked up the road to a market, where I bought ten refills. The ink is black, which suits my mood. I also bought two dozen thick legal pads, and I have filled all but the last one. Near the market is a Western Auto store, where I bought a spade and a steel footlocker, the kind with a combination. The total cost of my purchases was seventeen dollars and NINETEEN cents. Are these items enough to turn the world dark and filthy? What will happen to the clerk, whose ordained course has been changed-just by our brief transaction-from what it would have been otherwise?

Novels\Bachman\Blaze:"Now, just so's you know," Bluenote went on. His strange pale eyes glittered. "I get twenty-six cents the quart. You get seven cents. Makes it sound like I'm makin NINETEEN cents a quart on the sweat of your brow, but it ain't so. After all expenses, I make ten cents the quart. Three more'n you. That three cents is called capitalism. My field, my profit, you take a share." He repeated: "Just so's you know. Any objections?"

Novels\Bachman\Blaze:CHAPTER 19

Novels\Bachman\Blaze:He was done with Arithmetic. During October and most of November, instead of going to Room 7, he went to Room 19 study hall. That was fine by Blaze. It was two weeks before he could lie on his back comfortably, and then that was fine, too.

Novels\Bachman\Long Walk, The:It was only NINETEEN miles to Caribou, but dark would come before that. No rest for the wicked, Garraty thought and that struck him funny. He laughed.

Novels\Bachman\Rage:Chapter 19

Novels\Bachman\Regulators, The:June 19, 1995

Novels\Bachman\Regulators, The:Not just summer, either, not this year, but the apotheosis of summer, the avatar of summer, high green perfect central Ohio summer dead-smash in the middle of July, white sun glaring out of that fabled faded Levi's sky, the sound of kids hollering back and forth through the Bear Street Woods at the top of the hill, the tink! of Little League bats from the ballfield on the other side of the woods, the sound of power-mowers, the sound of muscle-cars out on Highway 19, the sound of Rollerblades on the cement sidewalks and smooth macadam of Poplar Street, the sound of radios-Cleveland Indians baseball (the rare day game) competing with Tina Turner belting out "Nutbush City Limits," the one that goes "Twenty-five is the speed limit, motorcycles not allowed in it"-and surrounding everything like an auditory edging of lace, the soothing, silky hiss of lawn sprinklers.

Novels\Bachman\Regulators, The:October 19, 1995

Novels\Bachman\Roadwork:"I'm fine," he said. "I lost my wife and my job because either the world has gone crazy or I have. Then I pick up a hitchhiker-a NINETEEN-year-old kid for Chrissake, the kind that's supposed to take it for granted that the world's gone crazy-and she tells me it's me, the world is doing just fine. Not much oil, but other than that, just fine."

Novels\Bachman\Roadwork:December 18-19, 1973

Novels\Bachman\Roadwork:December 19, 1973

Novels\Bachman\Roadwork:He and Mary had gone to see him at Younger's request on a warm June afternoon NINETEEN days after Charlie had been admitted to Doctors Hospital. He was a good-looking man, maybe halfway through his forties, physically fit from a lot of golf played with no electric golf cart. He was tanned a deep cordovan shade. And the doctor's hands fascinated him. They were huge hands, clumsy-looking, but they moved about his desk-now picking up a pen, now riffling through his appointment book, now playing idly across the surface of a silver-inlaid paperweight-with a lissome grace that was very nearly repulsive.

Novels\Bachman\Roadwork:January 19, 1974

Novels\Bachman\Roadwork:We must also point out again that according to the State Statute of Eminent Domain (S.L. 19452-36), you would be in violation of the law to remain in your present location past midnight of January 19, 1974. We are sure you understand this, but we are pointing it out once more so that the record will be clear.

Novels\Bachman\Running Man, The:"Five hundred dollars," Thompson was saying, and infinite hate and contempt filled his voice. Richards's face on the screen again, cold, hard, devoid of all emotion save an expression of bloodlust that seemed chiefly to be in the eyes. "Five police, five wives, NINETEEN children. It comes to just about seventeen dollars and twenty-five cents for each of the dead, the bereaved, the heartbroken. Oh yes, you work cheap, Ben Richards. Even Judas got thirty pieces of silver, but you don't even demand that. Somewhere, even now, a mother is telling her little boy that daddy won't be home ever again because a desperate, greedy man with a gun-"

Novels\Bachman\Running Man, The:"It don't matter!" she repeated. "It's the darkies." She turned to Richards and her eyes were hooded and furious and bewildered. "I'm sixty-five, but I was only a fresh young girl of NINETEEN when it began to happen. It was NINETEEN seventy-nine and the darkies were everywhere! Everywhere! Yes they were!" she nearly screamed, as if Richards had taken issue with her. "Everywhere! They sent those darkies to school with the whites. They set em high in the government. Radicals, rabble-rousing, and rebellion. I ain't so-"

Novels\Bachman\Thinner:"Okay," Billy said, and gave the toll-taker a dollar. He got his change and drove on. Almost to Connecticut; NINETEEN exits to go to Heidi. Then off to Mohonk. Duganfield wasn't working as a diversion, so try Mohonk. Just let's forget the old Gypsy woman and the old Gypsy man for a while, what say?

Novels\Bachman\Thinner:"Yeah!" Ginelli kindled. The light in his eyes whirled. "Drift trade, right, good! The man I was looking for is high-class drift trade. These guys in resort towns float around like whores looking for steady customers. They rarely fall for big stuff, they move on all the time, and they are fairly smart . . . except for their shoes. They got J. Press shirts and Paul Stuart sport coats and designer jeans . . . but then you look at their feet and their fucking loafers say ‘Caldor's, NINETEEN-ninety-five.' Their loafers say ‘I can be had, I'll do a job for you.' With whores it's the blouses. Always rayon blouses. You have to train them out of it.

Novels\Bachman\Thinner:Billy discovered all of this on the twenty-fifth; the Gypsies had left Bucksport late on the afternoon of June 19.

Novels\Bachman\Thinner:CHAPTER 19

Novels\Bachman\Thinner:Halleck opened the door . . . and was greeted for the first time with the unpleasant realization of how circus freaks must feel. The waiter was a boy of no more than NINETEEN, scruffy-haired and hollow-cheeked, as if in imitation of the British punk rockers. No prize himself. He glanced at Billy with the vacant disinterest of a fellow who sees hundreds of men in hotel robes each shift; the disinterest would clear a little when he looked down at the bill to see how much the tip was, but that was all. Then the waiter's eyes widened in a look of startlement which was almost horror. It was only for a moment; then the look of disinterest was back again. But Billy had seen it.

Novels\Bachman\Thinner:Ritual, his deeper mind whispered inarguably back. He was an agnostic and he hadn't been through the doors of any church since age NINETEEN, but he recognized a ritual when he saw it, and this weigh-in procedure was almost a genuflection. See, God, I do it the same every time, so keep this here white, upwardly mobile lawyer safe from the heart attack or stroke that every actuarial table in the world says I can expect right around the age of forty-seven. In the name of cholesterol and saturated fats we pray. Amen.

Novels\Bag of Bones:"Come on," I said. "Don't be shy. Let's go NINETEEN or ninety-two down. Barring that, let's talk."

Novels\Bag of Bones:"Go down 19n," I said, reaching out and touching the letters. A compass heading? Or maybe it meant Go 19 Down. That suggested crosswords again. Sometimes in a puzzle you get a clue which reads simply See 19 Across or See 19 Down. If that was the meaning here, what puzzle was I supposed to check?

Novels\Bag of Bones:"He just wasn't much of a writer. Not much of a photographer, either-those little black-and-white snaps of his make my eyes hurt. Still, he tells some good stories. The Micmac Drive, General Wing's trick horse, the twister in the eighteen-eighties, the fires in the NINETEEN-thirties . . ."

Novels\Bag of Bones:"I could use a little help here," I said, but there was no answer-not from the astral plane, not from inside my own head. I finally got the can of beer I'd been promising myself and took it back to the sofa. I picked up my Tough Stuff crossword book and looked at the puzzle I was currently working. "Liquor Is Quicker," it was called, and it was filled with the stupid puns which only crossword addicts find amusing. Tipsy actor? Marlon Brandy. Tipsy southern novel? Tequila Mockingbird. Drives the D.A. to drink? Bourbon of proof. And the definition of 19 Down was Oriental nurse, which every cruciverbalist in the universe knows is amah. Nothing in "Liquor Is Quicker" connected to what was going on in my life, at least that I could see.

Novels\Bag of Bones:19

Novels\Bag of Bones:FRIEND, by Noonan/Pg. 19

Novels\Bag of Bones:Go down NINETEEN. I turned to page NINETEEN of the telephone book, where the letter F was prominently showcased. I began to slip my finger down the first column and as it went, my excitement faded. The nineteenth name on page NINETEEN was Harold Failles. It meant nothing to me. There were also Feltons and Fenners, a Filkersham and several Finneys, half a dozen Flahertys and more Fosses than you could shake a stick at. The last name on page NINETEEN was Framingham. It also meant nothing to me, but-

Novels\Bag of Bones:I crossed to it, vaguely aware that the water had stopped running into the tub in the north-wing bathroom. When the generator died, the pump had quit. That was all right, it would be plenty deep enough already. And warm. I would give Kyra her bath, but first there was something I had to do. I had to go down NINETEEN, and after that I just might have to go down ninety-two. And I could. I had completed just over a hundred and twenty pages of manuscript, so I could. I grabbed the battery-powered lantern from the top of the cabinet where I still kept several hundred actual vinyl records, clicked it on, and set it on the table. It cast a white circle of radiance on the manuscript-in the gloom of that afternoon it was as bright as a spotlight.

Novels\Bag of Bones:I hurried into the living room, not quite running, wiping the shaving cream off my face with a towel as I went. I glanced briefly at the Tough Stuff crossword collection lying on top of my manuscript. That had been where I'd gone first in an effort to decipher "go down NINETEEN" and "go down ninety-two." Not an unreasonable starting-point, but what did Tough Stuff have to do with TR-90? I had purchased the book at Mr. Paperback in Derry, and of the thirty or so puzzles I'd completed, I'd done all but half a dozen in Derry. TR ghosts could hardly be expected to show an interest in my Derry crossword collection. The telephone book, on the other hand-

Novels\Bag of Bones:I looked at the paper with Kia written on it. Below the fat l-shapes I wrote Kyra, and remembered how, the first time I'd heard Ki say her name, I'd thought it was "Kia" she was saying. Below Kyra I wrote Kito, hesitated, then wrote Carla. I put these names in a box. Beside them I jotted Johanna, Bridget, and Jared. The fridgeafator people. Folks who wanted me to go down NINETEEN and go down ninety-two.

Novels\Bag of Bones:I shuffled through them quickly, looking for anything about the circumstances under which "our Southern blackbirds" had left. I found nothing. What I found instead was a clipping from the Call marked July 19th (go down NINETEEN, I thought), 1933. The headline read VETERAN GUIDE, CARETAKER, CANNOT SAVE DAUGHTER. According to the story, Fred Dean had been fighting the wildfires in the eastern part of the TR with two hundred other men when the wind had suddenly changed, menacing the north end of the lake, which had previously been considered safe. At that time a great many local people had kept fishing and hunting camps up there (this much I knew myself). The community had had a general store and an actual name, Halo Bay. Fred's wife, Hilda, was there with the Dean twins, William and Carla, age three, while her husband was off eating smoke. A good many other wives and kids were in Halo Bay, as well.

Novels\Bag of Bones:I started toward him and he moved to the center of the path to block me. I could feel the cold baking off him. I am saying exactly what I mean, expressing what I remember as clearly as I can: I could feel the cold baking off him. And yes, it was Max Devore all right, but got up like a logger at a costume party and looking the way he must have around the time his son Lance was born. Old but hale. The sort of man younger men might well look up to. And now, as if the thought had called them, I could see the rest shimmer into faint being behind him, standing in a line across the path. These were the ones who had been with Jared at the Fryeburg Fair, and now I knew who some of them were. Fred Dean, of course, only NINETEEN years old in '01, the drowning of his daughter still over thirty years away. And the one who had reminded me of myself was Harry Auster, the firstborn of my great-grandfather's sister. He would have been sixteen, barely old enough to raise a fuzz but old enough to work in the woods with Jared. Old enough to shit in the same pit as Jared. To mistake Jared's poison for wisdom. One of the others twisted his head and squinted at the same time-I'd seen that tic before. Where? Then it came to me: in the Lakeview General. This young man was the late Royce Merrill's father. The others I didn't know. Nor did I care to.

Novels\Bag of Bones:I thought about a similarity of names which was surely, had to be, a coincidence. I thought about a young, pretty girl who had become a mother at sixteen or seventeen and a widow at NINETEEN or twenty. I thought about inadvertently touching her breast, and how the world judged men in their forties who suddenly discovered the fascinating world of young women and their accessories. Most of all I thought of the queer thing that had happened to me when Mattie had told me the kid's name-that sense that my mouth and throat were suddenly flooded with cold, mineral-tangy water. That rush.

Novels\Bag of Bones:I thumbed through some of the other puzzles in the book, looking at 19 Downs. Marble worker's tool (chisel). CNN's favorite howler, 2 wds (wolfblitzer). Ethanol and dimethyl ether, e.g. (isomers). I tossed the book aside in disgust. Who said it had to be this particular crossword collection, anyway? There were probably fifty others in the house, four or five in the drawer of the very end-table on which my beer can stood. I leaned back on the sofa and closed my eyes.

Novels\Bag of Bones:On page NINETEEN of My Childhood Friend, Tiffi Taylor-the call-girl who had re-invented herself as Regina Whiting-was sitting in her studio with Andy Drake, reliving the day that John Sanborn (the alias under which John Shackleford had been getting by) saved her three-year-old daughter, Karen. This is the passage I read as the thunder boomed and the rain slashed against the sliding door giving on the deck:

Novels\Bag of Bones:Sara Laughs seemed very empty after having Mattie in my arms-a sleeping head without dreams. I checked the letters on the fridge, saw nothing there but the normal scatter, and got a beer. I went out on the deck to drink it while I watched the last of the sunset. I tried to think about the refrigerator people and crosspatches that had appeared on both refrigerators: "go down NINETEEN" on Lane Forty-two and "go down ninety-two" on Wasp Hill Road. Different vectors from the land to the lake? Different spots on The Street? Shit, who knew?

Novels\Bag of Bones:There was more but no need to read it. The message, owls under studio, ran down the margin just as it had on page NINETEEN. As it probably did on any number of other pages as well. I remembered how deliriously happy I had been to discover that the block had been dissolved and I could write again. It had been dissolved all right, but not because I'd finally beaten it or found a way around it. Jo had dissolved it. Jo had beaten it, and my continued career as a writer of second-rate thrillers had been the least of her concerns when she did it. As I stood there in the flicker-flash of lightning, feeling my unseen guests swirl around me in the unsteady air, I remembered Mrs. Moran, my first-grade teacher. When your efforts to replicate the smooth curves of the Palmer Method alphabet on the blackboard began to flag and waver, she would put her large competent hand over yours and help you.

Novels\Black House:19

Novels\Carrie:Carrie was seventeen, Chris Hargensen was seventeen, I was seventeen, Tommy Ross was eighteen, Billy Nolan (who spent a year repeating the ninth grade, presumably before he learned how to shoot his cuffs during examinations) was NINETEEN. . . .

Novels\Carrie:In a long and rather hysterical letter to her mother dated August 19, 1962, Margaret said that she and Ralph were living sinlessly, without "the Curse of Intercourse." She urged Harold and Judith Allison to close their "abode of wickedness" and do likewise. "It is," Margaret declares near the end of her letter, "the oney [sic] way you & That Man can avoid the Rain of Blood yet to come. Ralph & I, like Mary & Joseph, will neither know or polute [sic] each other's flesh. If there is issue, let it be Divine."

Novels\Carrie:News item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966:

Novels\Cell:19

Novels\Cell:Any sense of being alone ended along with the Dostie Stream Road, at a signpost reading NH ROUTE 38 and MANCHESTER 19 MI. There were still only a few travelers on 38, but when they switched to 128-a wide, wreck-littered road that headed almost due north-half an hour later, that trickle became part of a steady stream of refugees. They traveled mostly in little groups of three and four, and with what struck Clay as a rather shabby lack of interest in anyone other than themselves.

Novels\Cell:He awoke in the late afternoon, huddled in a ball and clutching a flat motel pillow. He went outside and saw Alice and Jordan sitting on the curb between the parking lot and the units. Alice had her arm around Jordan. His head was on her shoulder and his arm was around her waist. His hair was sticking up in back. Clay sat down with them. Beyond them, the highway leading to Route 19 and Maine was deserted except for a Federal Express truck sitting dead on the white line with its back doors standing open, and a crashed motorcycle.

Novels\Cell:He was the fourth sprinter of their first night on Highway 19, spotting them standing at the side of the road in the flare of his headlights. Spotting Alice. He leaned out, dark hair streaming back from his face, and yelled "Suck my rod, you teenybop bitch!" as he slammed by in a black Cadillac Escalade. His passengers cheered and waved. Someone shouted "Tell huh!" To Clay it sounded like absolute ecstasy expressed in a South Boston accent.

Novels\Cell:Route 19 was totally clear on both sides for short stretches, sometimes up to a quarter of a mile, and that encouraged sprinters. This was the term Jordan coined for the semi-suicidal dragsters who would go roaring past at high speeds, usually in the middle of the road, always with their high beams glaring.

Novels\Cell:They pushed on to the village of Hayes Station and stayed the night at a tumbledown motel called Whispering Pines. It was within sight of a sign reading ROUTE 19, 7 MI SANFORD THE BERWICKS KENT POND. They didn't leave their shoes outside the doors of the units they chose.

Novels\Cell:They were edging slowly east toward Route 19, a highway that would take them across the state line and into Maine, but they didn't make it that night. All the roads in this part of New Hampshire seemed to pass through the small city of Rochester, and Rochester had burned to the ground. The fire's core was still alive, putting out an almost radioactive glow. Alice took over, leading them around the worst of the fiery ruins in a half-circle to the west. Several times they saw KASHWAK=NO-FO scrawled on the sidewalks; once spray-painted on the side of a U.S. mailbox.

Novels\Christine:19

Novels\Christine:Vandenberg, a tall, thin guy who was either NINETEEN or twenty at that time, began to scream and dance around holding his butt. He forgot all about helping his Buddy; he ceased to be a factor in things. To me it's amazing that I didn't paralyze him. I never kicked anyone or anything harder; and my friend, it sho did feel fine.

Novels\Colorado Kid, The:"Well, that's because you see Johnny Gravlin the soccer player, miler, Friday night practical joker and Saturday lover as Mayor John Gravlin, who happens to be the only political hop-toad in a small island pond. He goes up and down Bay Street shaking hands and grinning with that gold tooth flashing off to one side in his mouth, got a good word for everyone he meets, never forgets a name or which man drives a Ford pickup and which one is still getting along with his Dad's old International Harvester. He's a caricature right out of an old NINETEEN-forties movie about small-town hoop-de-doo politics and he's such a hick he don't even know it. He's got one jump left in him-hop, toad, hop-and once he gets to that Augusta lilypad he'll either be wise enough to stop or he'll try another hop and end up getting squashed."

Novels\Colorado Kid, The:"You were the one who told him about the Pretty Lisa," Dave said to Vince when he had gotten hold of himself again. The Pretty Lisa Cabot was a fishing boat that had washed up on the shore of neighboring Smack Island in the NINETEEN-twenties with one dead crewman sprawled over the forward hold and the other five men gone. "How many times do you think Hanratty heard that one, up n down this part of the coast?"

Novels\Cujo:"And what a woman does-what I did-was to run from becoming. I got scared of the way the house sounded when Tad was gone. Once, do you know-this is crazy-I was in his room, changing the sheets, and I got thinking about these girlfriends I had in high school. Wondering what happened to them, where they went. I was almost in a daze. And Tad's closet door swung open and . . . I screamed and ran out of the room. I don't know why . . . except I guess I do. I thought for just a second there that Joan Brady would come out of Tad's closet, and her head would be gone and there would be blood all over her clothes and she would say, ‘I died in a car crash when I was NINETEEN coming back from Sammy's Pizza and I don't give a damn.' "

Novels\Cujo:George Meara, the mailman, lifted one leg clad in blue-gray Post Office issue and farted. Just lately he farted a great deal. He was mildly worried about it. It didn't seem to matter what he had been eating. Last night he and his wife had had creamed cod on toast and he had farted. This morning, Kellogg's Product 19 with a banana cut up in it-and he had farted. This noon, down at the Mellow Tiger in town, two cheeseburgers with mayonnaise . . . ditto farts.

Novels\Cujo:Suddenly Vic felt it trembling right behind his lips: the whole shitty black mess that Donna had managed to get herself into because of her need to keep pretending that she was still NINETEEN-going-on-twenty. He felt a certain dull anger at Roger, Roger who had been happily and unquestioningly married for fifteen years. Roger who had pretty, unassuming Althea to warm his bed (if Althea Breakstone had so much as contemplated infidelity, Vic would have been surprised), Roger who had absolutely no idea of how many things could go wrong at once.

Novels\Dark Half, The:"It was for Tom Carroll," Thad said. "Tom has been in the University English Department for NINETEEN years, and he's been chairman for the last five. He retired on May twenty-seventh, when the academic year officially ended. He's always been a great favorite in the Department, known to most of us old war-horses as Gonzo Tom because of his great liking for Hunter Thompson's essays. So we decided to throw a retirement party for him and his wife."

Novels\Dark Half, The:"The reason he gets noticed isn't his height but his breadth. He's not fat, but he's extremely wide. Neck size maybe eighteen-and-a-half, maybe NINETEEN. He's my age, Alan, but he's not fading the way I'm starting to or running to fat. He's strong. Like Schwarzenegger looks now that Schwarzenegger has started to build down a little. He works out with weights. He can pump a bicep hard enough to pop a sleeve-seam on his shirt, but he's not muscle-bound.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower I The Gunslinger:"Kill me, Roland, kill me! I said the word, NINETEEN, I said, and he told me . . . I can't bear it-"

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower I The Gunslinger:The gunslinger ate another piece of the meat, chewing the salt out of it before swallowing. The boy had become part of it, and the gunslinger was convinced he told the truth-he had not asked for it. It was too bad. He himself . . . he had asked for it. But he had not asked for the game to become this dirty. He had not asked to turn his guns on the townsfolk of Tull; had not asked to shoot Allie, with her sadly pretty face at the end marked by the secret she had finally asked to be let in on, using that word, that NINETEEN, like a key in a lock; had not asked to be faced with a choice between duty and flat-out murder. It was not fair to ring in innocent bystanders and make them speak lines they didn't understand on a strange stage. Allie, he thought, Allie was at least part of this world, in her own self-illusory way. But this boy . . . this God-damned boy . . .

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower II The Drawing of the Three:"Code 19," she said over and over again. Robbery in progress, shots fired. "Code 19, Code 19. Location is 395 West 49th, Katz's Drugs, perpetrator tall, sandy-haired, blue suit-"

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower II The Drawing of the Three:19

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower II The Drawing of the Three:Slowly, slowly, he reassembled his revolvers and loaded them with the shells he presumed to be dry. When the job was done, he held the one made for his left hand, cocked it . . . and then slowly lowered the hammer again. He wanted to know, yes. Wanted to know if there would be a satisfying report when he squeezed the trigger or only another of those useless clicks. But a click would mean nothing, and a report would only reduce twenty to NINETEEN . . . or nine . . . or three . . . or none.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower III The Waste Lands:19

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass:"I can spare ye that, Will. There are NINETEEN."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass:19

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass:He nodded. "I'm in your debt. But we'll also need to make out-if we can-how much oil those NINETEEN pumps are bringing up."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass:They were passing Citgo now, and she was glad for Will Dearborn's presence, even if his silence was a little irritating. She had always found the oilpatch, with its skeletal forest of gantries, a little spooky. Most of those steel towers had stopped pumping long since, and there was neither the parts, the need, nor the understanding to repair them. And those which did still labor along-NINETEEN out of about two hundred-could not be stopped. They just pumped and pumped, the supplies of oil beneath them seemingly inexhaustible. A little was still used, but a very little-most simply ran back down into the wells beneath the dead pumping stations. The world had moved on, and this place reminded her of a strange mechanical graveyard where some of the corpses hadn't quite-

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"NINETEEN," Eddie said. "This whole deal has gone NINETEEN."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"At 4:19, a young man in a striped shirt and tie that looked just oh so Hugo Boss came out and got us. We were whisked down a corridor past some very upscale offices-with an upscale executive beavering away in every one, so far as I could see-and to double doors at the end of the hall. This was marked CONFERENCE ROOM. Our escort opened the doors. He said, ‘God luck, gentlemen.' I remember that very clearly. Not good luck, but god luck. That was when my perimeter alarms started to go off, and by then it was far too late. It happened fast, you see. They didn't . . . "

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"DNF-44821-V-63 IS SHUTTING DOWN! ALL SUBNUCLEAR CELLS AND MEMORY CIRCUITS ARE IN SHUTDOWN PHASE! SHUTDOWN IS 13 PER CENT COMPLETE! I AM ANDY, MESSENGER ROBOT, MANY OTHER FUNCTIONS! PLEASE REPORT MY LOCATION TO LAMERK INDUSTRIES OR NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD! CALL 1-900-54! REWARD IS OFFERED! REPEAT, REWARD IS OFFERED!" There was a click as the message recycled. "DNF-44821-V-63 IS SHUTTING DOWN! ALL SUBNUCLEAR CELLS AND MEMORY CIRCUITS ARE IN SHUTDOWN PHASE! SHUTDOWN IS 19 PER CENT COMPLETE! I AM ANDY-"

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"Five, seven, and seven," Susannah said. "Add them, you get NINETEEN."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"I look in the sky-up there where the clouds are breaking right this minute-and I see the number NINETEEN written in blue."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"I look in the trees and see NINETEEN. Into the fire, see NINETEEN. Names make NINETEEN, like Overholser's and Callahan's. But that's just what I can say, what I can see, what I can get hold of." Eddie was speaking with desperate speed, looking directly into Roland's eyes. "Here's another thing. It has to do with todash. I know you guys sometimes think everything reminds me of getting high, and maybe that's right, but Roland, going todash is like being stoned."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"I'll return it someday," Callahan said. He meant it. "The important thing is I got lucky on my second try. Check page one-NINETEEN."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"It also looks like the East Stoneham Methodist Meeting Hall, built in 1819," Callahan said, "so I guess this time we've got a case of triplets." But his voice sounded faraway to his own ears, as hollow as the false voices which floated up from the bottom of the cave. All at once he felt false to himself, not real. He felt NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"It wasn't NINETEEN last night."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"It's NINETEEN o'clock and all the birds are singing," Eddie said. He wasn't smiling.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"It's all NINETEEN, isn't it?"

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"It's sure not Spanish," Jake said. "But the NINETEEN thing-"

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"Look at page one hundred and NINETEEN," Roland said. "I could make out a little of it, but not all. Not nearly enough."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"Piss on NINETEEN," Roland said rudely. "This isn't the time for number games. He'll be back here with his friends in short order, and I would speak to you an-tet of another matter before he does."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"Sorry for your loss," Susannah said, happy to see that Eddie was moving away. Probably to tell Jake she'd been right about the middle name: Wayne Dale Overholser. Equals NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"The eyes," Eddie agreed. "And the password. If it's not NINETEEN, it'll be ninety-nine."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"The people are real. You . . . Susannah . . . Jake . . . that guy Gasher who snatched Jake . . . Overholser and the Slightmans. But the way stuff from my world keeps showing up over here, that's not real. It's not sensible or logical, either, but that's not what I mean. It's just not real. Why do people over here sing ‘Hey Jude'? I don't know. That cyborg bear, Shardik-where do I know that name from? Why did it remind me of rabbits? All that shit about the Wizard of Oz, Roland-all that happened to us, I have no doubt of it, but at the same time it doesn't seem real to me. It seems like todash. Like NINETEEN. And what happens after the Green Palace? Why, we walk into the woods, just like Hansel and Gretel. There's a road for us to walk on. Muffin-balls for us to pick. Civilization has ended. Everything is coming unraveled. You told us so. We saw it in Lud. Except guess what? It's not! Booya, assholes, gotcha again!"

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"This were all long ago, ye must ken," Gran-pere said once Zalia Jaffords had him settled in his rocker with a pillow at the small of his back and his pipe drawing comfortably. "I canna say for a certain if the Wolves have come twice since or three times, for although I were NINETEEN reaps on earth then, I've lost count of the years between."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"Two-nine-eight adds up to NINETEEN," Susannah said. "I wish I could decide if that means something or if it's just Blue Car Syndrome."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"Welcome to Room 19 of the Todash Hospital," Eddie said.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"Who knows?" Jake asked. They were all speaking in low tones, heads together over the writing in the dirt. "It's like NINETEEN."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"Yeah," Jake said. "NINETEEN, ninety-nine, and NINETEEN-ninety-nine."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:"Yes. He said the doctors believed it was a blood disease spread by homosexual activity, or maybe by sharing needles. And what he wanted us to know, what he kept saying over and over again, was that he was clean, all the drug tests came back negative. ‘Not since NINETEEN-seventy,' he kept saying. ‘Not one toke off one joint. I swear to God.' We said we knew he was clean. We sat on either side of his bed and he took our hands."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:. . . identified as Lot #298 and Block #19, located in Manhattan, New York City, on 46th Street and 2nd Avenue, and Sombra Corporation, a corporation doing business within the State of New York.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:And really, what could be so special about the number NINETEEN? Mystery Number, indeed. After some thought, Susannah had pointed out it was prime, at least, like the numbers that had opened the gate between them and Blaine the Mono. Eddie had added that it was the only one that came between eighteen and twenty every time you counted. Jake had laughed at that and told him to stop being a jerk. Eddie, who had been sitting close to the campfire and carving a rabbit (when it was done, it would join the cat and dog already in his pack), told Jake to quit making fun of his only real talent.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:As they headed back, he counted the sticks he'd picked up, then the ones in Susannah's lap. The total came to NINETEEN in each case.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:But it could wake up, Roland thought. Wake up and send them all to the NINETEEN points of nowhere in the blink of an eye. This was an especially terrible thought, and he turned his mind from it. Certainly the idea of using it to secure protection for the rose seemed more and more like a bitter joke. He had faced both men and monsters in his time, but had never been close to anything like this. The sense of its evil was terrible, almost unmanning. The sense of its malevolent emptiness was far, far worse.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:But this darkness, more felt than seen, had nothing to do with NINETEEN. You had to subtract six in order to understand what was going on here. And for the first time, Roland really believed Callahan was right.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Eddie did. The photograph showed a stark white church sitting on a hill above a dirt road. East Stoneham Methodist Meeting Hall, the caption said. Built 1819. Eddie thought: Add em, come out with NINETEEN. Of course.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Eddie grasped a handful of duff, scooping up fragrant needles and leaving five black marks in the shape of a hand on the forest floor. "Real," he said. "I can feel it and smell it." He put the handful of needles to his mouth and ran out his tongue to touch them. "I can taste it. And at the same time, it's as unreal as a NINETEEN you might see in the fire, or that cloud in the sky that looks like a turtle. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Eddie thought, If you want to try a real number of power, Roland old buddy, try NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Eddie thought: That's when you went NINETEEN, pal. Or maybe it's ninety-nine. Or maybe it's both, somehow.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Eddie, Susannah, and Jake shared a look. The thought that went with it flowed effortlessly among them: Donald Frank Callahan. Equals NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Gran-pere whispered NINETEEN words as the last light died out of the day and night came to the Calla.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:He looked down at the sidewalk, suddenly sure he wouldn't have a shadow. They'd lost their shadows like the kids in one of the stories . . . one of the NINETEEN fairy tales . . . or was it maybe something newer, like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Peter Pan? One of what might be called the Modern NINETEEN?

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:He pushed Tower's pudgy hand away when it tried to take the book back. Then Eddie used his own finger to count the letters in the author's name. There were, of course, NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Maybe, but good old Jake Seventy-seven was about to make a purchase from that table which had gone on to change-and very likely to save-their lives. He'd worry about the number NINETEEN later. Or not at all, if he could manage it.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Not NINETEEN; not ninety-nine. What else was there? What in the name of Christ turned the bastard off?

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Of course it's not. Like the black guy bopping to that same beat. It's all the Beam, and it's all NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Roland began counting to twenty, but when he got to NINETEEN decided he'd counted enough. He gathered his legs beneath him-there was no dry twist now, not so much as a twinge-and then pistoned upward with his father's gun held high in his hand.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Roland considered for a moment, then let it pass. If the number NINETEEN was somehow part of this, its meaning would declare itself in time. For now there were other matters.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Roland realized he could. For one thing, the darkness on Second Avenue really wasn't dark at all. The gunslinger still couldn't comprehend the prodigal way in which these people of New York squandered the things those of Gilead had held most rare and precious. Paper; water; refined oil; artificial light. This last was everywhere. There was the glow from the store windows (although most were closed, the displays were still lit), the even harsher glow from a popkin-selling place called Blimpie's, and over all this, peculiar orange electric lamps that seemed to drench the very air with light. Yet Susannah was right. There was a black feel to the air in spite of the orange lamps. It seemed to surround the people who walked this street. It made him think about what Eddie had said earlier: This whole deal has gone NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Roland said, "You need to think of New York. Of Second Avenue in particular, I think. And of the time. The year of NINETEEN and seven-seven."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:The way we don't know for sure about NINETEEN, Susannah thought, and gave the bumbler a pat on the head. Oy responded with a companionable wink.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:Then there was the morning Roland had stopped them at the edge of the wood through which they were now traveling. He had pointed at the sky, where one particularly ancient tree had reared its hoary branches. The shape those branches made against the sky was the number NINETEEN. Clearly NINETEEN. They had all seen it, but Roland had seen it first.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:There is Route 19 through West Virginia, and a little road-dusty carnival that's looking for a man who can fix the rides and feed the animals. "Or the other way around," says Greg Chumm, the carny's greasy-haired owner. "You know, feed the rides and fix the animals. Whatever floats ya boat." And for awhile, when a strep infection leaves the carny shorthanded (they are swinging down south by now, trying to stay ahead of winter), he finds himself also playing Menso the ESP Wonder, and with surprising success. It is also as Menso that he first sees them, not vampires and not bewildered dead people but tall men with pale, watchful faces that are usually hidden under old-fashioned hats with brims or new-fashioned baseball hats with extra-long bills. In the shadows thrown by these hats, their eyes flare a dusky red, like the eyes of coons or polecats when you catch them in the beam of a flashlight, lurking around your trash barrels. Do they see him? The vampires (the Type Threes, at least) do not. The dead people do. And these men, with their hands stuffed into the pockets of their long yellow coats and their hardcase faces peering out from beneath their hats? Do they see? Callahan doesn't know for sure but decides to take no chances. Three days later, in the town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, he hangs up his black Menso tophat, leaves his greasy coverall on the floor of a pickup truck's camper cap, and blows Chumm's Traveling Wonder Show, not bothering with the formality of his final paycheck. On his way out of town, he sees a number of those pet posters nailed to telephone poles. A typical one reads:

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:There was a mechanical click in response to this, very loud. Jake had heard Blaine make a similar sound when he-or it-had felt the absurd closing in, threatening to fry his logic circuits. Then Andy said: "No answer, NINETEEN. Connect and report, sai Slightman. Let's have done with this."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:They looked at each other and laughed, because "NINETEEN" had become a kind of jokey catchword among them, replacing "bumhug," which Jake and Eddie had pretty much worn out. Yet the laughter had a tinge of uneasiness about it, because this business about NINETEEN had gotten a trifle weird. Eddie had found himself carving it on the side of his most recent wooden animal, like a brand: Hey there, Pard, welcome to our spread! We call it the Bar-NINETEEN. Both Susannah and Jake had confessed to bringing wood for the evening fire in armloads of NINETEEN pieces. Neither of them could say why; it just felt right to do it that way, somehow.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:They went in and they weren't seen and Eddie was relieved to count twenty-one books on the display table that had attracted the boy's notice. Except, of course, when Jake picked up the two he wanted-Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book-that left NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:This document constitutes a Pact of Agreement between Mr. Calvin Tower, a New York State resident, owning real property which is principally a vacant lot, identified as Lot # 298 and Block # 19, located . . .

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:What Pokey Slidell says under a burning autumn sky with the sound of the season's last crickets rising from the high white grass on either side of them is "It's been good to know ya, Jamie Jaffords, say true." He's got a smile on his face like none Jamie has ever seen before, but being only NINETEEN and living way out here on what some call the Rim and others call the Crescent, there's plenty he's never seen before. Or will ever see, way it looks now. It's a sick smile, but there's no cowardice in it. Jamie guesses he's wearing one just like it. Here they are under the sun of their fathers, and the darkness will soon have them. They've come to their dying hour.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:While Jake reloaded the Ruger, Roland and Eddie, standing side by side, went to work. They almost certainly could have taken the remaining eight between them (it didn't much surprise Eddie that there had been NINETEEN in this last cluster), but they left the last two for Jake. As they approached, swinging their light-swords over their heads in a way that would have been undoubtedly terrifying to a bunch of farmers, the boy shot the thinking-cap off the one on the left. Then he stood aside, dodging as the last surviving Wolf took a halfhearted swing at him.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:had finally stopped their squabbling. Back by the board fence that had been, where the two businessmen had been playing tic-tac-toe with a Mark Cross pen. And, of course, there had been the relief of being away from the Piper School and the insanity of his Final Essay for Ms. Avery's English class. The Final Essay counted a full twenty-five per cent toward each student's final grade, Ms. Avery had made that perfectly clear, and Jake's had been gibberish. The fact that his teacher had later given him an A+ on it didn't change that, only made it clear that it wasn't just him; the whole world was losing its shit, going NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla:it said. Numbers which added up to NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:But that was when Trudy's life changed. At 1:19 P.M., EDT, to be exact. She had just reached the curb on the downtown side of the street. Was, in fact, stepping up. And all at once a woman appeared on the sidewalk in front of her. A wide-eyed African-American woman. There was no shortage of black women in New York City, and God knew there had to be a fair percentage of them with wide eyes, but Trudy had never seen one emerge directly from thin air before, which was what this one did. And there was something else, something even more unbelievable. Ten seconds before, Trudy Damascus would have laughed and said nothing could be more unbelievable than a woman flicking into existence in front of her on a Midtown sidewalk, but there was. There definitely was.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:Cullum turned in at the next drive. Eddie followed, the tires of the sedan now whispering on a thick bed of fallen pine needles. Winks of blue once more began to appear between the trees, but when they finally reached Cabin 19 and a view of the water, Eddie saw that this, unlike Keywadin, was a true pond. Probably not much wider than a football field. The cabin itself looked like a two-room job. There was a screened-in porch facing the water with a couple of tatty but comfortable-looking rockers on it. A tin stovestack poked up from the roof. There was no garage and no car parked in front of the cabin, although Eddie thought he could see where one had been. With the cover of duff, it was hard to tell for sure.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:Discordia also sounds like something out of the DT stories, but it's not anything I have invented. As for 6/19/99, that's a date, right? Meaning what? June 19th of this year. Tabby and I should be back at the Turtleback Lane house by then, but so far as I can remember it's not anybody's birthday.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:Eddie could feel his heart beating hard in his chest. "What does the number NINETEEN mean to you?"

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:Eddie felt as if a huge invisible stone had suddenly rolled off his chest and out of his life. Claudia Inez Bachman only had eighteen letters. So something had added the y, and why? To make NINETEEN, of course. Claudia Bachman was just a name. Claudia y Inez Bachman, though . . . she was ka-tet.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:Eddie thought so, too. "Anyway, they can draw up legal papers that take care of the rose-the rose always stays, no matter what. And I've got a feeling that it will. 2007, 2057, 2525, 3700 . . . hell, the year 19,000 . . . I think it'll always be there. Because it may be fragile, but I think it's also immortal. We have to do it right while we have the chance, though. Because this is the key world. In this one you never get a chance to whittle a little more if the key doesn't turn. In this world I don't think there are any do-overs."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:Eddie thought they'd just gotten one of the things they'd come here for. Yes, Stephen King had created them. At least he'd created Roland, Jake, and Father Callahan. The rest he hadn't gotten to yet. And he had moved Roland like a piece on a chessboard: go to Tull, Roland, sleep with Allie, Roland, chase Walter across the desert, Roland. But even as he moved his main character along the board, so had King himself been moved. That one letter added to the name of his pseudonym's wife insisted upon it. Something had wanted to make Claudia Bachman NINETEEN. So-

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:He bent down, picked up one of the butts, and held it in his palm for a moment or two. Then he nodded, smiled cheerlessly, and readjusted the strap on his shoulder. The Orizas clanked faintly inside the rush bag. Jake had counted them in the back of the cab and hadn't been surprised to find there were exactly NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:June 19, 1999

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:Officer Antassi was extremely sympathetic on the phone, and Trudy found herself imagining an Italian George Clooney. Not a big stretch, considering Antassi's name and Clooney's dark hair and eyes. Antassi didn't look a bit like Clooney in person, but hey, who expected miracles and movie stars, it was a real world they were living in. Although . . . considering what had happened to her on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth at 1:19 P.M., EDT . . .

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:Owen and I are at the Hyatt Harborside tonight, and head off to Florida tomorrow. (Tabby and I are talking about buying a place there but haven't told the kids. I mean, they're only 27, 25 and 21-maybe when they're old enough to understand such things, ha-ha.) Earlier we met Joe and saw a film called Hurlyburly, from the play by David Rabe. Very odd. Speaking of odd, I had some sort of New Year's Night nightmare before leaving Maine. Can't remember exactly what it was, but when I woke up this morning I'd written two things in my dream-book. One was Baby Mordred, like something out of a Chas Addams cartoon. That I sort of understand; it must refer to Susannah's baby in the Dark Tower stories. It's the other thing that puzzles me. It says 6/19/99, O Discordia.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:She saw the slot and slid the card into it, being careful to push in the direction of the arrows. This time when she pushed 19, the number lit up. A moment later she was shoved rudely aside as Mia came forward.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:The coffee he made was better by far than any they'd had in Calla Bryn Sturgis, better than any Roland had had since his days in Mejis, Drop-riding out on the Rim. There were also strawberries. Cultivated and store-bought, Deepneau said, but Eddie was transported by their sweetness. The three of them sat in the kitchen of Jaffords Rentals' Cabin #19, drinking coffee and dipping the big strawberries in the sugarbowl. By the end of their palaver, all three men looked like assassins who'd dabbled the tips of their fingers in the spilled blood of their latest victim. Deepneau's unloaded gun lay forgotten on the windowsill.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:The door of the middle car opened. Susannah-Mia stepped in and pushed 19. The door slid shut but the car went nowhere.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:The man's bristly gray eyebrows went up. "You serious?" And when Eddie nodded: "Ninth of July. Year of our Lord NINETEEN-seventy-seven."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah:Until June first of 1999, Trudy Damascus was the sort of hard-headed woman who'd tell you that most UFOs were weather balloons (and those that weren't were probably the fabrications of people who wanted to get on TV), the Shroud of Turin was some fourteenth-century con man's trick, and that ghosts-Jacob Marley's included-were either the perceptions of the mentally ill or caused by indigestion. She was hard-headed, she prided herself on being hard-headed, and had nothing even slightly spiritual on her mind as she walked down Second Avenue toward her business (an accounting firm called Guttenberg, Furth, and Patel) with her canvas carry-bag and her purse slung over her shoulder. One of GF&P's clients was a chain of toy stores called KidzPlay, and KidzPlay owed GF&P a goodly sum of money. The fact that they were also tottering on the edge of Chapter Eleven meant el zippo to Trudy. She wanted that $69,211.19, and had spent most of her lunch-hour (in a back booth of Dennis's Waffles and Pancakes, which had been Chew Chew Mama's until 1994) mulling over ways to get it. During the last two years she had taken several steps toward changing Guttenberg, Furth, and Patel to Guttenberg, Furth, Patel and Damascus; forcing KidzPlay to cough up would be yet another step-a long one-in that direction.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:"It's NINETEEN," the man said. They were currently passing the one marked 27. From this end of Turtleback Lane, the numbers would go down rather than up.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:"Once you get down b'low the snowline it must be another ten or twelve days a-walkin, but ain't no need in the world to walk unless you fancy it. There's another one of those Positronics huts down there with any number a' wheelie vehicles parked inside. Like golf-carts, they are. The bat'tries are all dead, natcherly-flat as yer hat-but there's a gennie there, too, Honda just like mine, and it was a-workin the last time I was down there, for Bill keeps things in trim as much as he can. If you could charge up one of those wheelies, why that'd cut your time down to four days at most. So here's what I think: if you had to hoof it the whole way, it might take you as long as NINETEEN days. If you can go the last leg in one o' them hummers-that's what I call em, hummers, for that's the sound they make when they're runnin-I should say ten days. Maybe eleven."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:"Speak it!" the old man cried, then uttered that cheery go-to-hell laugh once again. "But I'm f'gettin my manners in my awe, gunslinger. This handsome stretch of woman standing beside me, it'd be natural for you to call her my granddaughter, 'cause I was sem'ty in the year she was born, which was NINETEEN-and-sixty-nine. But the truth is"-But'na troof is was what reached Roland's ear-"that sometimes the best things in life are started late, and having children"-Chirrun-"is one of'm, in my opinion. Which is a long-winded way of saying this is my daughter, Marian Odetta Carver, President of the Tet Corporation since I stepped down in '97, at the age of ninety-eight. And do you think it would frost some country-club balls, Roland, to know that this business, now worth just about ten billion dollars, is run by a Negro?" His accent, growing deeper as his excitement and joy grew, turned the last into Dis bid'ness, now wuth jus 'bout tin binnion dolla, is run bah NEE-grow?

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:"We have one exceptional good-mind fellow in New Mexico," Marian said. "His name is Fred Towne. He sees a great deal and is rarely if ever mistaken. This watch is a Patek Philippe, Roland. It cost NINETEEN thousand dollars, and the makers guarantee a full refund of the price if it's ever fast or slow. It needs no winding, for it runs on a battery-not made by North Central Positronics or any subsidiary thereof, I can assure you-that will last a hundred years. According to Fred, when you near the Dark Tower, the watch may nevertheless stop."

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:"You bet your purity," Eddie said. He tossed Roland a dark, dismayed glance. "And since NINETEEN's the part we keep running into-Ted Stevens Brautigan, go on, count the letters!-I bet it has to do with more than just the year. NINETEEN-"

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:"You leave it alone!" he tells them again, and hops back behind the wheel. He slams the door, takes a brief glance in the rearview mirror, sees two old ladies back there (he didn't notice them before because he wasn't exactly looking at the road when he passed them), gives them a wave they never see through the Caravan's filthy rear window, and then pulls back onto Route 7. Now the radio is playing "Gangsta Dream 19," by Owt-Ray-Juss, and Bryan turns it up (once more swerving across the white line and into the northbound lane as he does so-this is the sort of person who simply cannot fix the radio without looking at it). Rap rules! And metal rules, too! All he needs now to make his day complete is a tune by Ozzy-"Crazy Train" would be good.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:A brief pause. "I should say five hundred and ninety-five are currently operational." She immediately noticed that five-ninety-five added up to NINETEEN. Added up to chassit.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Another NINETEEN steps took him to the second landing and the second room. Here bits of cloth were scattered across the circular floor. Roland had no question that they had once been an infant's clout, torn to shreds by a certain petulant interloper, who had then gone out onto the balcony for a look back at the field of roses and found himself betaken. He was a creature of monumental slyness, full of evil wisdom . . . but in the end he had slipped, and now he would pay forever and ever.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Chassit is NINETEEN, he thought. Of course, it's all NINETEEN. Then he and Eddie were in light again, a fever-sick orange light, and there were Jake and Callahan. He even saw Oy standing at Jake's left heel, his fur bushed out and his muzzle wrinkled back to show his teeth.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Chussit, chissit, chassit, Roland thought as he looked at his son, a boy so small and terribly outnumbered in the dining room of the Dixie Pig. Chassit is NINETEEN. Enough to fill my basket. But what basket? What does it mean?

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Eddie nodded. There was a great deal about this Tower-chasing business he didn't understand, but there were also things he knew without asking. One was that the core of the walk-in activity in this part of the world was the house on Turtleback Lane John Cullum had identified as Cara Laughs. And when they got there, they'd find the identifying number at the head of the driveway was 19.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Enough to fill my basket, he thought as he was flung, weightless, through darkness and the terrible sound of the todash chimes. The words weren't quite nonsense but old numbers, she'd told him once when he had asked. Chussit, chissit, chassit: seventeen, eighteen, NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:FEDERAL OUTPOST 19

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:He thought about going into the tavern, maybe to draw himself a beer (surely if he was old enough to smoke and to kill people from ambush he was old enough to drink a beer), maybe just to see if the jukebox would play without change. He bet that Algul Siento had been what his Dad had claimed America would become in time, a cashless society, and that old Seeberg was rigged so you only had to push the buttons in order to start the music. And he bet that if he looked at the song-strip next to 19, he'd see "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," by Elton John.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:High school teachers faced with a large group of students in study hall or a school assembly will tell you that teenagers, even when freshly showered and groomed, reek of the hormones which their bodies are so busy manufacturing. Any group of people under stress emits a similar stink, and Jake, with his senses tuned to the most exquisite pitch, smelled it here. When they passed the maître d's stand (Blackmail Central, his Dad liked to call such stations), the smell of the Dixie Pig's diners had been faint, the smell of people coming back to normal after some sort of dust-up. But when the bird-creature in the far corner shouted, Jake had smelled the patrons more strongly. It was a metallic aroma, enough like blood to incite his temper and his emotions. Yes, he saw Tweety Bird knock aside the napkin on his table; yes, he saw the weapon beneath; yes, he understood that Callahan, standing on the table, was an easy shot. That was of far less concern to Jake than the mobilizing weapon that was Tweety Bird's mouth. Jake was drawing back his right arm, meaning to fling the first of his NINETEEN plates and amputate the head in which that mouth resided, when Callahan raised the turtle.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Indeed they were. Floor by floor and tale by tale (not to mention death by death), the rising rooms of the Dark Tower recounted Roland Deschain's life and quest. Each held its memento; each its signature aroma. Many times there was more than a single floor devoted to a single year, but there was always at least one. And after the thirty-eighth room (which is NINETEEN doubled, do ya not see it), he wished to look no more. This one contained the charred stake to which Susan Delgado had been bound. He did not enter, but looked at the face upon the wall. That much he owed her. Roland, I love thee! Susan Delgado had screamed, and he knew it was the truth, for it was only her love that rendered her recognizable. And, love or no love, in the end she had still burned.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Jake opened his mouth to ask how they could be sure they had been looking into Keystone World, the one where Stephen King had less than a day to live, and then shut it again. The answer was in the time, stupid, as the answer always was: the numbers comprising 9:19 also added up to NINETEEN.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:June 19, 1970-April 7, 2004:

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Nigel said he was dreadfully sorry, but that information was restricted and could be accessed only with the proper password. Susannah tried chassit, but it was no good. Neither was NINETEEN or, her final try, ninety-nine. She supposed she'd have to be content with just knowing most of them were gone.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Oy leaped at him and seized Joe's left leg just above the knee. "Twenny-five, sissy-four, NINETEEN, hike!" Joe cried merrily, and kicked out, now as agile as Fred Astaire. Oy flew through the air and hit the wall hard enough to knock a plaque reading GOD BLESS OUR HOME to the floor. Joe turned back to Roland.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Patrick nodded at once, but Roland had now traveled with him long enough to know that such a nod meant little or nothing. Eager to please, that's what he was. If you asked him if nine and nine made NINETEEN, he would nod with the same instant enthusiasm.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Roland recognized the steeply descending driveway at once, even though he'd last seen it under black, thundery skies, and much of his attention had been taken by the brilliant flying taheen. There was no sign of taheen or other exotic wildlife today. The roof of the house below had been dressed with copper instead of shingles at some point during the intervening years, and the wooded area beyond it had become a lawn, but the driveway was the same, with a sign reading CARA LAUGHS on the lefthand side and one bearing the number 19 in large numerals on the right. Beyond was the lake, sparkling blue in the strong afternoon light.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Roland shook his head. "Never mind, just drive." He looked at the clock on the dashboard, but it didn't work, had stopped in the long-ago with the hands pointed at (of course) 9:19. "It may not be too late yet," he said, while ahead of them, unheeded, the blue van began to pull away. It strayed across the white line of Route 7 into the southbound lane and Mrs. Tassenbaum almost committed a bon mot-something about people who started drinking before five-but then the blue van pulled back into the northbound lane, breasted the next hill, and was gone toward the town of Lovell.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:She supposed Federal Outpost 19 was still technically in the White Lands of Empathica, but the air had warmed considerably as Tower Road descended, and the snow on the ground was little more than a scrim. Groves of trees dotted the ground ahead, but Susannah thought the land would soon be almost entirely open, like the prairies of the American Midwest. There were bushes that probably supported berries in warm weather-perhaps even pokeberries-but now they were bare and clattering in the nearly constant wind. Mostly what they saw on either side of Tower Road-which had once been paved but had now been reduced to little more than a pair of broken ruts-were tall grasses poking out of the thin snow-cover. They whispered in the wind and Susannah knew their song: Commala-come-come, journey's almost done.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:The taillight of Cullum's truck flashed bright, but Eddie was so busy goggling that he would have rear-ended the man had Roland not spoken to him sharply. Eddie threw the Galaxie into Park without bothering to either set the emergency brake or turn off the engine. Then he got out and walked toward the blacktop driveway that descended the steep wooded slope. His eyes were huge in the delicate light, his mouth hung open. Cullum joined him and stood looking down. The driveway was flanked by two signs: CARA LAUGHS on the left and 19 on the right.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:The word, it turned out, was facilitator. And he later became sure that certain folks-certain talent scouts-were watching him even then, sizing him up, knowing he was different even in the subset of telepaths but not how different. For one thing, telepaths who did not come from the Keystone Earth (it was their phrase) were rare. For another, Ted had come to realize by the mid-NINETEEN-thirties that what he had was actually catching: if he touched a person while in a state of high emotion, that person for a short time became a telepath. What he hadn't known then was that people who were already telepaths became stronger.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:There was a grove of cottonwood trees on the bank-at least the gunslinger thought they were cottonwoods-but they had died when the stream from which their roots drank had disappeared. Now their branches were only bony, leafless snarls against the sky. In their silhouettes he could make out the number NINETEEN over and over again, in both the figures of Susannah's world and those of his own. In one place the branches seemed to clearly spell the word CHASSIT against the deepening sky.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:Very faintly he heard someone-he thought it was the girl who had kissed him-call Good luck, and then it was gone. Thunderclap was gone, and the Devar-Toi, and the darkness. They were America-side, in the parking lot of the place to which Roland's memory and Sheemie's power-boosted by the other four Breakers-had taken them. It was the East Stoneham General Store, where Roland and Eddie had been ambushed by Jack Andolini. Only unless there had been some horrible error, that had been twenty-two years earlier. This was June 19th of 1999, and the clock in the window (IT'S ALWAYS TIME FOR BOAR'S HEAD MEATS! was written in a circle around the face) said it was NINETEEN minutes of four in the afternoon.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower:With the help of the rest, Sheemie could have held the hole open a good while longer (the others had been staring into the brilliance of that bustling New York night with a kind of hungry amazement, not Breaking now but Opening, Seeing), only there turned out to be no need for that. Following the baseball score, the date and time had gone speeding past them in brilliant yellow-green letters a story high: JUNE 18, 1999 9:19 PM.

Novels\Dark Tower\The Wind Through The Keyhole:He had reached NINETEEN in this reverse count when he saw an orange-red flicker ahead and to his left. It was a campfire, and Tim was in no doubt of who had built it.

Novels\Dead Zone, The:"The whole wad on 19," Johnny said. Sarah wanted to moan and bit it back. The crowd murmured.

Novels\Dead Zone, The:Although he relived that day over and over in the months afterward, Johnny could never remember exactly how or why it was that he ended up in Trimbull after all. He had set out in another direction, planning to go down to Boston and take in the Red Sox at Fenway Park, then maybe go over to Cambridge and nose through the bookshops. If there was enough cash left over (he had sent four hundred dollars of Chatsworth's bonus to his father, who in turn sent it on to Eastern Maine Medical-a gesture tantamount to a spit in the ocean) he planned to go to the Orson Welles Cinema and see that reggae movie, The Harder They Come. A good day's program, and a fine day to implement it; that August 19 had dawned hot and clear and sweet, the distillation of the perfect New England summer's day.

Novels\Dead Zone, The:At last it slowed enough for her to be able to read the numbers and she saw 19, the 1 and 9 painted bright red on a black background. Up and down, up and down. The Wheel's smooth whirr broke into a steady ticka-ticka-ticka that was very loud in the stillness.

Novels\Dead Zone, The:Bannerman looked as though he didn't know whether to laugh at Johnny or deal him a good swift kick. "That's the craziest goddam thing I've ever heard," he said finally. "Frank Dodd's a fine officer and a fine man. He's crossing over next November to run for municipal chief of police, and he'll do it with my blessing." Now his expression was one of amusement mixed with tired contempt. "Frank's twenty-five. That means he would have had to have started this crazy shit when he was just NINETEEN. He lives at home very quietly with his mother, who isn't very well-hypertension, thyroid, and a semidiabetic condition. Johnny, you put your foot in the bucket. Frank Dodd is no murderer. I'd stake my life on that."

Novels\Dead Zone, The:Chapter 19

Novels\Dead Zone, The:From the New York Times, December 19, 1975:

Novels\Dead Zone, The:In the other bed Johnny Smith said softly, "The whole wad on NINETEEN. One way or the other. My girl's sick."

Novels\Dead Zone, The:The Wheel clicked into the second trip, passed 15 and 16, clicked over 17 and, after an instant's hesitation, 18 as well. With a final tick! the pointer dropped into the 19 slot. The crowd held its breath. The Wheel revolved slowly, bringing the pointer up against the small pin between 19 and 20. For a quarter of a second it seemed that the pin could not hold the pointer in the 19 slot; that the last of its dying velocity would carry it over to 20. Then the Wheel rebounded, its force spent, and came to rest.

Novels\Dead Zone, The:The ranchers were interested. Even at NINETEEN Stillson had been something of a comic spellbinder. And he had made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Because he was a born-again Christian and because he knew that the love of money was the root of all evil, he would make it rain and afterward they could pay him whatever they thought the job had been worth.

Novels\Doctor Sleep:"Sure." This was John Dalton's chief sermon to new parents. How are you going to handle night feedings? Draw up a schedule so someone's always on call and no one gets too ragged. How are you going to handle bathing and feeding and dressing and playtime so the kid has a regular-and hence comforting-routine? Draw up a schedule. Make a plan. Do you know how to handle an emergency? Anything from a collapsed crib to a choking incident? If you make a plan, you will, and NINETEEN times out of twenty, things will turn out fine.

Novels\Doctor Sleep:"Yeah? You like it? Good. I got it at the Western Auto. Pure American steel. The one White Gramma Rose gave me had a padlock, with a little key I wore around my neck, but that was long ago. This is the NINETEEN eighties, the modern age. See the number pad? What you do is put in five numbers you're sure you won't forget, then push the little button that says SET. Then, anytime you want to open the box, you punch your code."

Novels\Doctor Sleep:19

Novels\Doctor Sleep:Cause of death had been a heart attack. He scrolled back up and checked the date: January 19, 1999. The man who had saved Dan's life and the life of his mother had been dead almost fifteen years. There would be no help from that quarter.

Novels\Doctor Sleep:Momo had nodded. "You can't blame human nature, it is what it is, but don't give it to them. Period. End of discussion. You can rethink things when you're NINETEEN, if you want."

Novels\Doctor Sleep:She'd never thought of it just that way, but it was true. Also, he'd been NINETEEN, according to his driver's license. Well past whatever stunted prime he might have had around puberty. In another ten years he'd have been just another rube. Maybe even five. He hadn't been much of a meal, point taken. But you couldn't always have steak. Sometimes you had to settle for bean sprouts and tofu. At least they kept body and soul together until you could butcher the next cow.

Novels\Doctor Sleep:The woman on the floor who had once crawled after the chickens in southern Italy spoke clearly and coherently in spite of the pain. "My name is Concetta Reynolds, and I live on the third floor of a condominium at Two NINETEEN Marlborough Street. I seem to have broken my hip. Can you send an ambulance?"

Novels\Dolores Claiborne:I been thinkin about Joe a lot today, Andy-more about him than about Vera, truth to tell. I kep tryin to remember just why I married him in the first place, for one thing, and at first I couldn't do it. After awhile I got into a kind of panic about it, like Vera when she'd get the idear there was a snake inside her pillowslip. Then I realized what the trouble was-I was lookin for the love part, like I was one of those foolish little girls Vera used to hire in June and then fire before the summer was halfway done because they couldn't keep to her rules. I was lookin for the love part, and there was precious little of that even back in 1945, when I was eighteen and he was NINETEEN and the world was new.

Novels\Dreamcatcher:"But fellows, I'm here to tell you that the grayboys have been messing with us since the late NINETEEN-for-ties, and I have been messing with them since the late NINETEEN-seventies, and I can tell you that just because a fellow comes walking toward you with his hands raised saying I surrender, that doesn't mean, praise Jesus, that he doesn't have a pint of nitroglycerine shoved up his ass. Now the big old smart goldfish who go swimming around in the think-tanks, most of those guys say the grayboys came when we started lighting off atomic and hydrogen bombs, that they came to that the way bugs come to a buglight. I don't know about that, I am not a thinker, I leave the thinking to others, leave it to the cabbage, cabbage got the head on him, as the saying goes, but there's nothing wrong with my eyes, fellows, and I tell you those grayboy sons of bitches are as harmless as a wolf in a henhouse. We have taken a good many of them over the years, but not one has lived. When they die, their corpses decompose rapidly and turn into exactly the sort of stuff you see down there, what you lads call Ripley fungus. Sometimes they explode. Got that? They explode. The fungus they carry-or maybe it's the fungus that's in charge, some of the think-tank goldfish believe that might be the case-dies easily enough unless it gets on a living host, I say again living host, and the host it seems to like the best, fellows, praise Jesus, is good old homo sap. Once you've got it so much as under the nail of your little finger, it's Katie bar the door and Homer run for home."

Novels\Dreamcatcher:"It's a beautiful tale, Owen. Like the best lies, it incorporates large swatches of the truth. The President will tell a fascinated world, a world hanging on every word with its breath caught in its throat, praise Jesus, that a ship crewed by beings from another world crashed in northern Maine on either November sixth or November seventh of this year. That's true. He will say that we were not completely surprised, as we and the heads of the other countries which constitute the UN Security Council have known for at least ten years that ET has been scoping us out. Also true, only some of us here in America have known about our pals from the void since the late NINETEEN-forties. We also know that Russian fighters destroyed a grayboy ship over Siberia in 1974 . . . although to this day the Russkies don't know we know. That one was probably a drone, a test-shot. There have been a lot of those. The grays have handled their early contacts with a care which strongly suggests that we scare them quite a lot."

Novels\Dreamcatcher:"Talk to me, Jonesy-we'll play the game, we'll pass the time. Who was Richie, besides Number 19? Why were you angry with him? Because he was a Tiger? A Derry Tiger? What were they? Who's Duddits?"

Novels\Dreamcatcher:"Yeah," the kid says, wiping his eyes madly with a large swatch of tissues. At least he hasn't gone through all that small-time cheapshit stuff about how Jonesy can't prove it, can't prove a thing, he'd take it to the Student Affairs Council, he'd call a protest, blah-blah-blah-de-blah. He's crying instead, which is uncomfortable to witness but probably a good sign-NINETEEN is young, but too many of them have lost most of their consciences by the time they get there. Defuniak has pretty much owned up, which suggests there might still be a man in there, waiting to come out. "Yeah, that'd be great."

Novels\Dreamcatcher:19

Novels\Dreamcatcher:And there it was, loud and clear, a voice none of Kurtz's laddie-bucks would recognize. They knew Eddie Vedder; Walter Cronkite was a different deal. "-here. Il n'y a pas d'infection ici." Two seconds, and then a voice that might have belonged to Barbra Streisand: "One hundred and thirteen. One hundred and NINETEEN."

Novels\Dreamcatcher:Defuniak goes to the door, then turns. He is anxious to be gone before Mr. Jones changes his mind, but he is also NINETEEN. And curious. "How did you know? You weren't even there that day. Some grad student proctored the test."

Novels\Dreamcatcher:Except when he picks it up, they see that it isn't. New, yes-a brand-new Derry Tigers shirt, with 19 on the back. Pete doesn't give a shit for football, but the rest of them recognize it as Richie Grenadeau's number. Good, no-not anymore. It's ripped deeply at the back collar, as if the person wearing it had tried to run away, then been grabbed and hauled back.

Novels\Dreamcatcher:More out of curiosity than anything else (his curiosity also borrowed from Jonesy's store of emotions), Mr. Gray opened it. Inside was a bright yellow container made of plastic. Outlandish figures capered upon it, figures Jonesy's files identified as both cartoons and the Scooby-Doos. On one end was a sticker reading I BELONG TO DUDDITS CAVELL, 19 MAPLE LANE, DERRY, MAINE. IF THE BOY I BELONG TO IS LOST, CALL

Novels\Dreamcatcher:Owen, who had been full-time military since the age of NINETEEN and one of Kurtz's eraserheads for the last eight years, sent two hard words along the mental conduit the two of them had established: Acceptable losses.

Novels\Dreamcatcher:So he had . . . and Duddits had seen him. Only last night, or had Duddits seen him on that day, NINETEEN years ago? Did Duddits's gift also involve a kind of time travel?

Novels\Dreamcatcher:So she leads them back to the house where they'll spend so much of their time in the following years-the house at 19 Maple Lane-only it is really Duddits who leads the way, prancing, skipping, sometimes lifting his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox over his head, but always, Beaver notices, keeping at almost exactly the same place on the sidewalk, about a foot from the grass margin between the walk and the street. Years later, after the thing with the Rinkenhauer girl, he will consider what Mrs. Cavell said. They all will. He sees the line.

Novels\Dreamcatcher:The Cavells barely look at the boys, because the boys are such frequent visitors here at 19 Maple Lane, and the Rinkenhauers are too deep in their terror to even notice them. They have not touched the coffee Roberta has served. He's in his room, guys, Alfie Cavell says, giving them a wan smile. And Duddits, looking up at them from his GI Joe figures-he has all of them-gets up as soon as he sees them in the doorway. Duddits never wears his shoes in his room, always his bunny slippers that Henry gave him for his last birthday-he loves the bunny slippers, will wear them until they are nothing but pink rags held together with strapping tape-but his shoes are on now. He has been waiting for them, and although his smile is as sunny as ever, his eyes are serious. Eh ee own? Duddits asks-Where we goin? And-

Novels\Dreamcatcher:The sticker on the side reads: I BELONG TO DOUGLAS CAVELL, 19 MAPLE LANE, DERRY, MAINE. IF THE BOY I BELONG TO IS LOST, CALL 949-1864. THANKS!

Novels\Dreamcatcher:There's a box of Kleenex on the corner of Jonesy's desk, and he tosses it to the boy, who catches it easily even in his distress. Good reflexes. When you're NINETEEN, all your wiring is still nice and tight, all your connections nice and solid.

Novels\Dreamcatcher:Why do you keep seeing a brick wall? What is 19, besides a prime number? Who said "Fuck the Tigers"? What does that mean? What is the brick wall? When is the brick wall? What does it mean, why do you keep seeing it?

Novels\Duma Key:"Eleven-NINETEEN," he said. "There was never really a chance."

Novels\Duma Key:"Oh man, awful. They always scare her, but this one . . . she was in terror. Screaming about her sisters. Tessie and Lo-Lo, the ones who drowned back in the NINETEEN-twenties. She even had me going for awhile there . . . but it's over now. Are you okay? Was it hard?"

Novels\Duma Key:"Oh, we'll think of a few things," she said, and damned if she didn't tip me a wink from behind her NINETEEN-fifties-style cat's-eye glasses as she handed her champagne flute back to one of the circulating waiters. "Day after tomorrow. À bientôt, monsieur."

Novels\Duma Key:"Uh-huh. In any case, I tell no lie about Dalí. He stayed in your house for three weeks in NINETEEN eighty-one." Then, with hardly a pause: "I know what you're going through."

Novels\Duma Key:10:19 AM

Novels\Duma Key:2:19 PM

Novels\Duma Key:19-April of '27

Novels\Duma Key:August 19, '26

Novels\Duma Key:But Illy: Say yes. For me. She knew I would, not because she was my favorite (Lin was the one who knew that, I think), but because she had always been satisfied with so little and so seldom asked for anything. And because when I listened to her message, I remembered how she'd started to cry that day she and Melinda had come out to Lake Phalen, leaning against me and asking why it couldn't be the way it was. Because things never are, I think I replied, but maybe for a couple of days they could be . . . or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Ilse was NINETEEN, probably too old for one last childhood Christmas, but surely not too old to deserve one more with the family she'd grown up with. And that went for Lin, too. Her survival skills were better, but she was flying home from France yet again, and that told me something.

Novels\Duma Key:From the pocket of his plain black suit, Rosenblatt took a curl of paper that had to have come from an adding machine. "The paintings fetched four hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars, the sketches an additional NINETEEN. The total comes to a little over half a million dollars. It's the greatest sum the Scoto has ever taken in during the exhibition of a single artist's work. An amazing coup. Congratulations."

Novels\Duma Key:He rolled his eyes and sat back in his chair. "Don't try my patience, vato. You might be mistaken about a few things, but you ain't nuts. I got a lady up there . . . sweetest lady in the world and I love her, but sometimes she thinks I'm her Dad and it's Miami circa NINETEEN thirty-four. Sometimes she pops one of her china people into a Sweet Owen cookie-tin and tosses it into the koi pond behind the tennis court. I have to get em out when she naps, otherwise she pitches a bitch. No idea why. I think by this summer she may be wearing an adult didey full-time."

Novels\Duma Key:He smiled. "Honey, live like you got to live. Chuck Berry, NINETEEN sixty-nine."

Novels\Duma Key:It was ammo for the spear-pistol. I lifted one of the stubby harpoons out. It was about fifteen inches long, and quite heavy. The shaft was steel, not aluminum-I wasn't sure aluminum had even been used in the NINETEEN-twenties. The business-end was triple-bladed, and although the blades were tarnished, they looked sharp. I touched the ball of my finger to one, and a tiny bead of blood appeared on the skin instantly.

Novels\Duma Key:Jack drove slowly up to the back door . . . only with its face hanging over the Gulf of Mexico, that was the only door. "I'm surprised they were ever allowed to build this far out," he said. "I suppose they did things different in the old days." To him the old days probably meant the NINETEEN-eighties. "There's your car. Hope it's okay."

Novels\Duma Key:Probably it had been just another bit of gibberish, but I had nothing better to do, so I walked down the hall that would have been a dogtrot in a humbler house-the rain tapping the glass ceiling-and then climbed the wide staircase. I stopped five risers from the top, staring, then slowly climbed the rest of the way. There was something, after all: an enormous black-and-white photograph in a frame of narrow banded gold. I asked Wireman later how a black-and-white from the NINETEEN-twenties could have been blown up to such a size-it had to have been at least five feet tall by four wide-with so little blurring. He said it had probably been taken with a Hasselblad, the finest non-digital camera ever made.

Novels\Duma Key:That word-TEEF!-was still ringing in my head when I sat up with a cold puddle of October moonlight in my lap. I was trying to scream and producing only a series of silent gasps. My heart was thundering. I reached for the bedside lamp and mercifully avoided knocking it on the floor, although once it was on, I saw that I'd pushed the base halfway out over the drop. The clock-radio claimed it was 3:19 AM.

Novels\Duma Key:There was a moment of silence, then once more the hum of an open line. I considered throwing the whole works across the room and against the wall, but the Edgar floating over my head said no. The Edgar floating over my head said that would perhaps give Perse too much pleasure. So I hung it up gently instead, and then for a minute I just stood there swaying on my feet, alive while my NINETEEN-year-old daughter was dead, not shot after all but drowned in her own bathtub by a mad art critic.

Novels\Duma Key:When I got back with my book of prints-it cost a staggering one hundred and NINETEEN dollars, even with my Barnes & Noble discount card, good thing I'd saved a few million out of the divorce for myself-the MESSAGE WAITING lamp of my answering machine was flashing. It was Ilse, and the message was cryptic only at first listen.

Novels\Duma Key:Wireman was relentless. If I'd been on the witness stand, I think I'd have been a little puddle of grease and tears by then; the judge would have called a recess to allow the bailiff time to either mop me up or buff me to a shine. "Pam says if you subtracted The Freemantle Company buildings from the St. Paul skyline, it would look like Des Moines in NINETEEN seventy-two."

Novels\End of Watch:"Keith Frias and Krista Countryman," Pete says. "Both were also at City Center on the morning of April tenth, when Hartsfield did his thing. Frias, age NINETEEN, lost most of his arm, plus four broken ribs and internal injuries. He also lost seventy percent of the vision in his right eye. Countryman, age twenty-one, suffered broken ribs, a broken arm, and spinal injuries that resolved after all sorts of painful therapy I don't even want to think about."

Novels\End of Watch:19

Novels\End of Watch:Brady watched her wide eyes moving from side to side as she studied the screen, and knew he'd found what he was looking for. The pink fish, he thought. They're the ones that move the fastest, and besides, red is an angry color. Pink is . . . what? What was the word? It came, and he smiled. It was the radiant one that made him look NINETEEN again.

Novels\End of Watch:In his mind, he boomed it out like Moses on Mount Sinai. In his hospital bed, it was a whispered croak. But it did the job, because his row of laptop computers came to life. On each screen was the number 20 . . . then 19 . . . then 18 . . .

Novels\Eyes of the Dragon, The:19

Novels\Finders Keepers:"FBI Ten Most Wanted, that tasty enough? He's currently checking in at Delta, scheduled to leave for LA on Flight One-NINETEEN at one forty-five PM. Going under James Mallon, but his real name is Oliver Madden. He stole a bunch of money from the Feds five years ago as Oliver Mason, and you know how Uncle Sam feels about getting his pocket picked." He adds a few of the more colorful details on Madden's resume.

Novels\Finders Keepers:19

Novels\Finders Keepers:February 19, 1953

Novels\Finders Keepers:He was no longer NINETEEN and living in a two-room New Jersey apartment, he was six months shy of his eightieth birthday and living on a farm in New Hampshire, where his will specified he should be buried. There were men in his bedroom. They were wearing ski masks, one red, one blue, and one canary-yellow. He saw this and tried to believe it was just another dream-the sweet one had slid into a nightmare, as they sometimes did-but then the hand let go of his arm, grabbed his shoulder, and tumbled him onto the floor. He struck his head and cried out.

Novels\Finders Keepers:Rothstein didn't want to wake up. The dream was too good. It featured his first wife months before she became his first wife, seventeen and perfect from head to toe. Naked and shimmering. Both of them naked. He was NINETEEN, with grease under his fingernails, but she hadn't minded that, at least not then, because his head was full of dreams and that was what she cared about. She believed in the dreams even more than he did, and she was right to believe. In this dream she was laughing and reaching for the part of him that was easiest to grab. He tried to go deeper, but then a hand began shaking his shoulder, and the dream popped like a soap bubble.

Novels\Finders Keepers:They went down in an elevator big enough to hold a small herd of cattle, then along another corridor, and then-God knew why, they were wearing sandals and the jumpsuits had no pockets-through a metal detector. Beyond that was a visitor's room with eight walled booths like library carrels. The guard with the clipboard directed Morris to number 3. Morris sat down and faced his court-appointed through Plexiglas that had been smeared often and wiped seldom. The guy on the freedom side was a nerd with a bad haircut and a dandruff problem. He had a coldsore below one nostril and a scuffed briefcase sitting on his lap. He looked like he might be all of NINETEEN.

Novels\Firestarter:"I want a meeting with all six subdirectors at NINETEEN hundred hours. Also A-one-A. And I want to talk to the chief of state police up there in New York." They had been part of the search sweep, and Cap wanted to point that out to them. If mud was going to be thrown, he would be sure to save back a good, big bucket of it for them. But he also wanted to point out that behind a united front, they might still all be able to come out of this looking fairly decent.

Novels\Firestarter:"When complexes go, they go like dams bursting after torrential rains," Wanless said softly. "We have a promiscuous girl who is NINETEEN years old. Already she has had three hundred lovers. Her body is as hot with sexual infection as that of a forty-year-old prostitute. But until she was seventeen she was a virgin. Her father was a minister who told her again and again as a little girl that sex inside marriage was a necessary evil, that sex outside marriage was hell and damnation, that sex was the apple of original sin. When a complex like that goes, it goes like a breaking dam. First there is a crack or two, little trickling rills of water so small as to escape notice. And according to your computer's information, that is where we are now with this little girl. Suggestions that she has used her ability to help her father, at her father's urging. And then it all goes at once, spewing out millions of gallons of water, destroying everything in its path, drowning everyone caught in its way, changing the landscape forever!"

Novels\Firestarter:19

Novels\Firestarter:Andy left the lecture hall, started across the lobby toward the big double doors (outside, the quad was green with approaching summer, students passing desultorily back and forth), and then remembered his pen. He almost let it go; it was only a NINETEEN-cent Bic, and he still had his final round of prelims to study for. But the girl had been pretty, maybe worth chatting up, as the British said. He had no illusions about his looks or his line, which were both pretty nondescript, or about the girl's probable status (pinned or engaged), but it was a nice day and he was feeling good. He decided to wait. At the very least, he would get another look at those legs.

Novels\Firestarter:That was Andy McGee's mental state as he sat watching TV that August 19 while the storm walked the hills outside. The PTL host made a donations pitch and then introduced a gospel trio. The trio began to sing, and suddenly the lights went out.

Novels\Firestarter:The storm came on August 19, almost five months after Andy and Charlie were taken at Granther's camp in Vermont. For ten days the weather had been sticky and still. That August day, the thunderheads began to pile up shortly after noon, but nobody who worked on the grounds of the two handsome antebellum homes which faced each other across the rolling expanse of green lawn and manicured flowerbeds believed that the thunderheads were telling the truth-not the groundsmen astride their Lawnboys, not the woman who was in charge of computer subsections A-E (as well as the computer-room coffeemaker), who took one of the horses and cantered it lovingly along the well-kept bridle paths during her lunch hour, certainly not Cap, who ate a hero sandwich in his air-conditioned office and went right on working on next year's budget, oblivious of the heat and humidity outside.

Novels\Firestarter:The two graceful homes facing each other across the rolling lawns-and all of the Shop complex underneath-were served by the Eastern Virginia Power Authority, but there were two backup systems powered by diesel generators. One system served the "vital functions"-the electrical fence, the computer terminals (a power failure can cost unbelievable amounts of money in terms of computer time), and the small infirmary. A second system served the lesser functions of the complex-lights, air conditioning, elevators, and all of that. The secondary system was built to "cross"-that is, to come in if the primary system showed signs of overloading-but the primary system would not cross if the secondary system began to overload. On August 19, both systems overloaded. The secondary system crossed when the primary system began to overload, just as the power-system architects had planned (although in truth, they had never planned for the primary system to overload in the first place), and as a result, the primary system operated for a full seventy seconds longer than the secondary system. Then the generators for both systems blew, one after the other, like a series of firecrackers. Only these firecrackers had cost about eighty thousand dollars each.

Novels\From a Buick 8:The tow-truck parked in front of Shed B. There was a hydraulic whine and the Buick came out of its snout-up, tail-down posture, settling back on its whitewalls. The tow driver, old Johnny Parker, came around to unhook it, wheezing around the Pall Mall stuck in his gob. Ennis and Curt sat in Cruiser D-19 meanwhile, looking at each other.

Novels\Gerald�s Game:19

Novels\Gerald�s Game:He was sent to Gage Point-a sort of combination detox, halfway house, and mental institution for adolescents in Hancock County-on a charge of gross sexual abuse, and released as cured four years later, at the age of NINETEEN. This was in 1973. He spent the second half of 1975 and most of 1976 at AMHI, in Augusta. This was as a result of Joubert's Fun with Animals Period. I know I probably shouldn't be joking about these things, Ruth-you'll think I'm horrible-but in truth, I don't know what else to do. I sometimes feel that if I don't joke, I'll start to cry, and that if I start to cry I won't be able to stop. He was sticking cats in trash barrels and then blowing them to pieces with the big firecrackers they call "can-crushers," that's what he was doing . . . and every now and then, presumably when he needed a break in the old routine, he would nail a small dog to a tree.

Novels\Gerald�s Game:If he's dead, it's his own damned fault, the no-bullshit voice said. It tried to add a few other home truths as well, but Jessie gagged it. In her still-not-quite-conscious state she had a clearer sightline into the deeper archives of her memory banks, and she suddenly realized whose voice-slightly nasal, clipped, always on the verge of a sarcasm-tinged laugh-that was. It belonged to her college roommate, Ruth Neary. Now that Jessie knew, she found she wasn't a bit surprised. Ruth had always been extremely generous with pieces of her mind, and her advice had often scandalized her NINETEEN-year-old wet-behind-the-ears roommate from Falmouth Foreside . . . which had undoubtedly been the idea, or part of it; Ruth's heart had always been in the right place, and Jessie had never doubted that Ruth actually believed sixty per cent of the things she said and had actually done forty per cent of the things she claimed to have done. When it came to things sexual, the percentage was probably even higher. Ruth Neary, the first woman Jessie had ever known who absolutely refused to shave her legs and her armpits; Ruth, who had once filled an unpleasant floor-counsellor's pillowcase with strawberry-scented foam douche; Ruth, who on general principles went to every student rally and attended every experimental student play. If all else fails, tootsie, some good-looking guy will probably take his clothes off, she had told an amazed but fascinated Jessie after coming back from a student effort entitled "The Son of Noah's Parrot." I mean, it doesn't always happen, but it usually does-I think that's really what student-written and -produced plays are for-so guys and girls can take off their clothes and make out in public.

Novels\Green Mile, The:"Obeyin Regulation 19," Brutal said, finding the current page. He took the pencil and licked the tip-a disagreeable habit of which he could not be broken-and prepared to write. Regulation 19 stated simply: "Each visitor to E Block shall show a yellow Administration pass and shall be recorded without fail."

Novels\Green Mile, The:"Only we called it the Green Mile. Because of the linoleum on the floor. In the fall of '32, we got this fellow-we got this wildman-named William Wharton. Liked to think of himself as Billy the Kid, even had it tattooed on his arm. Just a kid, but dangerous. I can still remember what Curtis Anderson-he was the assistant warden back in those days-wrote about him. ‘Crazy-wild and proud of it. Wharton is NINETEEN years old, and he just doesn't care.' He'd underlined that part."

Novels\Green Mile, The:I felt one or the other pouring through me as we sat together on his bunk-November the eighteenth, NINETEEN and thirty-two. Pouring out of him and into me, whatever strange force he had in him coming through our joined hands in a way our love and hope and good intentions somehow never can, a feeling that began as a tingle and then turned into something tidal and enormous, a force beyond anything I had ever experienced before or have ever experienced since. Since that day I have never had pneumonia, or the flu, or even a strep throat. I have never had another urinary infection, or so much as an infected cut. I have had colds, but they have been infrequent-six or seven years apart, and although people who don't have colds often are supposed to suffer more serious ones, that has never been the case with me. Once, earlier on in that awful year of 1956, I passed a gallstone. And although I suppose it will sound strange to some reading this in spite of all I have said, part of me relished the pain that came when that gallstone went. It was the only serious pain I'd had since that problem with my waterworks, twenty-four years before. The ills that have taken my friends and same-generation loved ones until there are none of them left-the strokes, the cancers, the heart attacks, the liver diseases, the blood diseases-have all left me untouched, have swerved to avoid me the way a man driving a car swerves to avoid a deer or a raccoon in the road. The one serious accident I was in left me untouched save for a scratch on the hand. In 1932, John Coffey inoculated me with life. Electrocuted me with life, you might say. I will pass on eventually-of course I will, any illusions of immortality I might have had died with Mr. Jingles-but I will have wished for death long before death finds me. Truth to tell, I wish for it already and have ever since Elaine Connelly died. Need I tell you?

Novels\Green Mile, The:I made a note at the bottom of Brutal's report to talk to John Coffey-to try, at least-and then passed on to a note from Curtis Anderson, the warden's chief assistant. It said that he, Anderson, expected a DOE order for Edward Delacrois (Anderson's misspelling; the man's name was actually Eduard Delacroix) very soon. DOE stood for date of execution, and according to the note, Curtis had been told on good authority that the little Frenchman would take the walk shortly before Halloween-October 27th was his best guess, and Curtis Anderson's guesses were very informed. But before then we could expect a new resident, name of William Wharton. "He's what you like to call ‘a problem child,' " Curtis had written in his back-slanting and somehow prissy script. "Crazy-wild and proud of it. Has rambled all over the state for the last year or so, and has hit the big time at last. Killed three people in a holdup, one a pregnant woman, killed a fourth in the getaway. State Patrolman. All he missed was a nun and a blind man." I smiled a little at that. "Wharton is 19 years old, has Billy the Kid tattooed on upper l. forearm. You will have to slap his nose a time or two, I guarantee you that, but be careful when you do it. This man just doesn't care." He had underlined this last sentiment twice, then finished: "Also, he may be a hang-arounder. He's working appeals, and there's the fact that he is a minor."

Novels\Green Mile, The:KING COTTON had been deposed in the South seventy years before all these things happened and would never be king again, but in those years of the thirties it had a little revival. There were no more cotton plantations, but there were forty or fifty prosperous cotton farms in the southern part of our state. Klaus Detterick owned one of them. By the standards of the NINETEEN-fifties he would have been considered only a rung above shirttail poor, but by those of the thirties he was considered well-to-do because he actually paid his store bill in cash at the end of most months, and he could meet the bank president's eyes if they happened to pass on the street. The farmhouse was clean and commodious. In addition to the cotton, there were the other two c's: chickens and a few cows. He and his wife had three children: Howard, who was twelve or thereabouts, and the twin girls, Cora and Kathe.

Novels\Gwendy's Button Box:19

Novels\IT:"Then Dick Hallorann catches hold of him. He couldn't have been no more than NINETEEN, and his eyes was as big as bil'ard balls, but he kept his head better than we did. He saved our lives. ‘Not that way!' he yells. ‘This way!' And he pointed back toward the bandstand . . . toward the fire, you know.

Novels\IT:Actually, she had no idea what came after that. The vertigo, that sense of being in a place that was really noplace, was threatening again. When she was NINETEEN she had done a whistle-stop tour with a scraggy little production company, forty not-so-wonderful performances of Arsenic and Old Lace in forty not-so-wonderful towns and small cities. All of this in forty-seven not-so-wonderful days. They began at the Peabody Dinner Theater in Massachusetts and ended at Play It Again Sam in Sausalito. And somewhere in between, in some Midwestern town like Ames Iowa or Grand Isle Nebraska or maybe Jubilee North Dakota, she had awakened like this in the middle of the night, panicked by disorientation, unsure what town she was in, what day it was, or why she was wherever she was. Even her name seemed unreal to her.

Novels\IT:At 6:19 A.M., a bolt of lightning struck the so-called Kissing Bridge, which spanned the Canal between Bassey Park and Derry High School. The splintered pieces were thrown high into the air and then rained down into the swiftly moving Canal to be carried away.

Novels\IT:CHAPTER 19

Novels\IT:Dental charts showed conclusively that the body found in Aynesford was not that of the Corcoran youth, who has now been missing for NINETEEN months.

Novels\IT:During 1958, a hundred and twenty-seven children, ranging in age from three to NINETEEN, were reported missing in Derry. Was there a Depression in 1958? I asked Chief Rademacher. No, he said. But people move around a lot, Hanlon. Kids in particular get itchy feet. Have a fight with the folks about coming in late after a date and boom, they're gone.

Novels\IT:What if I find a skull? he thought suddenly. The skull of one of the kids who were killed here while they were hunting for chocolate Easter eggs back in NINETEEN-whenever-it-was?

Novels\Insomnia:"Goddam right I did!" Trigger cried. "We was weekend warriors togedder, back in NINETEEN-seb'ny, maybe seb'ny-one! Closed down Nan's Tavern more'n once! My suds n body! How is Paul dese days, ma'am?"

Novels\Insomnia:19

Novels\Insomnia:Chapter 19

Novels\Joyland:"Darlene Stamnacher. Probably would have changed her last name if she'd gotten into the movie biz, which was her stated goal. White, NINETEEN. From Maxton, North Carolina. Disappeared on June 29th, 1967. Found two days later, after a massive search, inside a roadside lean-to in the sugar-pine williwags south of Elrod. Throat cut."

Novels\Joyland:"Of course not. I also made some calls. Practically dialed my fingers off, if you want to know the truth. You owe me for the long-distance, too. More about Claudine Sharp later. For now, let's move on. Victim number three-according to the News and Courier story-was a girl from Santee, South Carolina. Now we're up to 1965. Eva Longbottom, age NINETEEN. Black. Disappeared on July fourth. Her body was found nine days later by a couple of fishermen, lying on the north bank of the Santee River. Raped and stabbed in the heart. The others were neither black nor raped. You can put her in the Funhouse Killer column if you want to, but I'm doubtful, myself. Last victim-before Linda Gray-was her."

Novels\Lisey's Story:"It's NINETEEN-eighty-eight and the world has grown dark," he says. He slips the ceremonial spade's short wooden handle easily through his loosely curled fist. The scoop winks sun in Lisey's eyes once, then is mostly hidden by the sleeve of Scott's lightweight jacket. With the scoop and blade hidden, he uses the slim wooden handle as a pointer, ticking off trouble and tragedy in the air in front of him.

Novels\Lisey's Story:"No, ma'am, not at all. In high school, he and I played the line on the Castle Hills Knights team that won the Class A State Championship. Bangor Rams was favored by three touchdowns, but we shocked em. Only team from our part of the state to win a gold football since the NINETEEN-fifties. And Joey, no one could stop him, not that whole season. Even with four guys hangin off him, he kept pluggin. So we called him Plug, and I still do."

Novels\Lisey's Story:19

Novels\Lisey's Story:And, as if her voice had activated it, a telephone began to ring behind the closed wooden door on her right. Lisey came to a stop in the barn's main downstairs passage. Once that door had opened upon a stabling area large enough for three horses. Now the sign on it simply said HIGH VOLTAGE! This had been Lisey's idea of a joke. She had intended to put a small office in there, a place where she could keep records and pay the monthly bills (they had-and she still had-a full-time money-manager, but he was in New York and could not be expected to see to such minutiae as her monthly tab at Hilltop Grocery). She'd gotten as far as putting in the desk, the phone, the fax, and a few filing cabinets . . . and then Scott died. Had she even been in there since then? Once, she remembered. Early this spring. Late March, a few stale stoles of snow still on the ground, her mission just to empty the answering machine attached to the phone. The number 21 had been in the gadget's window. Messages one through seventeen and NINETEEN through twenty-one had been from the sort of hucksters Scott had called "phone-lice." The eighteenth (this didn't surprise Lisey at all) had been from Amanda. "Just wanted to know if you ever hooked this damn thing up," she'd said. "You gave me and Darla and Canty the number before Scott died." Pause. "I guess you did." Pause. "Hook it up, I mean." Pause. Then, in a rush: "But there was a very long time between the message and the bleep, sheesh, you must have a lot of messages on there, little Lisey, you ought to check the damn things in case somebody wants to give you a set of Spode or something." Pause. "Well . . . g'bye."

Novels\Lisey's Story:Clutterbuck told her he would send a deputy at once-Deputy Boeckman or Deputy Alston, whichever was closer-to take charge of the letter. Now that he thought of it, he said, the deputy who visited her could take a few Polaroid snaps of the dead cat, too. All the deputies carried Polaroid cameras in their cars. Then the deputy (and, later on, his eleven PM relief) would take up station on Route 19 within view of her house. Unless, of course, there was an emergency call-an accident or something of that nature. If Dooley "checked by" (Clutterbuck's oddly delicate way of putting it), he'd see the County cruiser and move along.

Novels\Lisey's Story:Darla looked every bit as tired as Lisey felt. Somewhere along the way she'd found time to put on a little makeup, but she didn't have enough ammo in her purse to hide the circles under her eyes. Certainly there was no sign of the angry thirtysomething who had in the late NINETEEN-seventies made it her business to call Lisey once a week and hector her about her family duties.

Novels\Lisey's Story:Lisey's heart sank. She instantly pictured Amanda in a closet-sized room at Stephens Memorial in No Soapa, wearing a foodstained johnnie and looking out a barred window at the blinker-light where Route 117 crossed 19. "Oh. I see. Um . . . are you sure? This wouldn't be Medicaid or Blue Cross or any of those things-I'd be paying cash, you see . . ." Grasping at straws. Sounding dumb. When all else fails, chuck money. "If that makes a difference," she finished lamely.

Novels\Lisey's Story:Lisey, bemused, let herself be led. The old Debusher place still stood on its five acres out at the end of the Sabbatus Road in Lisbon, about sixty miles from Castle View. Willed jointly to five women (and three living husbands), it would probably stand there, rotting in high weeds and fallow fields, for years to come, unless property values rose enough to cause them to drop their differing ideas of what should be done with it. A trust fund set up by Scott Landon in the late NINETEEN-eighties paid the property taxes.

Novels\Lisey's Story:Scott does as his father says. It's the NINETEEN-sixties, it's America, men will soon be walking on the moon, but here they have a boy to deal with who has seemingly gone feral in the turn of a moment. The father simply accepts the fact. After his first shocked questions, the son does, as well. When they reach the bottom of the cellar stairs, Paul begins to stir again and make thick sounds deep in his throat. Sparky Landon puts his hands around his older son's throat and begins to choke him. Scott screams in horror and tries to grab his father.

Novels\Lisey's Story:That made sense. Canty and Rich lived a mile or so north of Amanda on Route 19; Darla lived roughly two miles south. In a way, it was like their father's old rhyme: one went north, one went south, one couldn't shut her everlasting mouth. Lisey herself was about five miles away. Mrs. Jones, who lived across the road from Mandy's weather-tight little Cape Cod, would have known well enough to call Canty first, and not just because Canty was closer in terms of distance, either.

Novels\Misery:19

Novels\Mr. Mercedes:"I think you're private security," Hodges says patiently, "but I want to see some ID. Then, you know what? I want to see your carry-concealed permit for the cannon you've got inside your coat. And it better be in your wallet and not in the glove compartment of your car, or you're in violation of section NINETEEN of the city firearms code, which, briefly stated, is this: ‘If you carry concealed, you must also carry your permit to carry concealed.' So let's see your paperwork."

Novels\Mr. Mercedes:"So we did, and you're right on time. It's 19-C, Detective Hodges."

Novels\Mr. Mercedes:"The most precious commodity is privacy, and that's what Debbie's Blue Umbrella and sites like it deliver. They make Facebook look like a partyline back in the NINETEEN-fifties. Hundreds of privacy sites have sprung up since 9/11. That's when the various first-world governments really started to get snoopy. The powers that be fear the Net, dude, and they're right to fear it. Anyway, most of these EP sites-stands for extreme privacy-operate out of Central Europe. They are to Internet chat what Switzerland is to bank accounts. You with me?"

Novels\Mr. Mercedes:19

Novels\Mr. Mercedes:ELIZABETH SIROIS WHARTON, 87, passed away peacefully on May 29, 2010, at Warsaw County Memorial Hospital. She was born on January 19, 1923, the son of Marcel and Catherine Sirois. She is survived by her brother, Henry Sirois, her sister, Charlotte Gibney, her niece, Holly Gibney, and her daughter, Janelle Patterson. Elizabeth was predeceased by her husband, Alvin Wharton, and her beloved daughter, Olivia. Private visitation will be held from 10 AM to 1 PM at Soames Funeral Home on Tuesday, June 1, followed by a 10 AM memorial service at Soames Funeral Home on Wednesday, June 2. After the service, a reception for close friends and family members will take place at 729 Lilac Drive, in Sugar Heights. The family requests no flowers, but suggests contributions to either the American Red Cross or the Salvation Army, Mrs. Wharton's favorite charities.

Novels\Mr. Mercedes:He could see the City Center auditorium slowly revealing itself in all its NINETEEN-seventies tacky architectural glory. He could see the two dozen switchbacks of patiently waiting people and then the tailback of the line disappearing into the fog. Now there was a little conversation, and when a janitor clad in gray fatigues passed through the lobby on the other side of the doors, a small satiric cheer went up.

Novels\Mr. Mercedes:He wakes up at 2:19 A.M. by the bedside clock with the answer as bright in his mind as a neon bar sign. It's risky but right, the kind of thing you do without hesitation or you don't do at all. He goes into his office, a large pale ghost in boxer shorts. He powers up his computer. He goes to Debbie's Blue Umbrella and clicks GET STARTED NOW!

Novels\Mr. Mercedes:He watches the mourners stand around on the walk. The fat ex-cop is impossible to miss; in his black suit he looks as big as a house. Or a hearse. On his head is a ridiculously old-fashioned hat, the kind you saw cops wearing in black-and-white detective movies from the NINETEEN-fifties.

Novels\Mr. Mercedes:Hodges digs in his pocket and hands them over. Jerome examines the fob and nods. "PKE," he says. "Started to come into use during the NINETEEN-nineties, first as an accessory but pretty much standard equipment since the turn of the century. Do you know what it stands for?"

Novels\Mr. Mercedes:Number Six flashes gray, and the boot-up worry-circle starts going round and round. After five seconds or so, gray turns to blue. This should be the password screen, even Hodges knows that, but instead a large 20 appears on the screen. Then 19, 18, and 17.

Novels\Mr. Mercedes:On the far side of the control room is a long shelf about three feet above the floor. Ranged along it are seven laptop computers with their darkened screens flipped up. There's also a chair on casters, so he can roll rapidly from one to another. When Brady speaks the magic word, all seven come to life. The number 20 appears on each screen, then 19, then 18. If he allows this countdown to reach zero, a suicide program will kick in, scrubbing his hard discs clean and overwriting them with gibberish.

Novels\Needful Things:19 Greer St.

Novels\Needful Things:19

Novels\Needful Things:Cora bought the sunglasses for NINETEEN dollars and fifty cents.

Novels\Needful Things:Ricky, NINETEEN and not overburdened with brains, worked down at Sonny's Sunoco. He had closed up hours ago but had hung around in the office, waiting until it was late enough (or early enough) to play a little prank on Rev. Rose. On Friday afternoon, Ricky had stopped by the new shop, and had fallen into conversation with the proprietor, who was one interesting old fellow. One thing led to another, and at some point Ricky had realized he was telling Mr. Gaunt his deepest, most secret wish. He mentioned the name of a young actress-model-a very young actress-model-and told Mr. Gaunt he would give just about anything for some pictures of this young woman with her clothes off.

Novels\Needful Things:William Tupper was only NINETEEN and he was never going to be a Rhodes Scholar, but he was smart enough to be terrified by Henry's behavior when Henry came into the Tiger at twenty minutes to four on the last real day of Castle Rock's existence. He was also smart enough to know trying to refuse Henry the keys to his Pontiac would do no good; in his present mood, Henry (who was, under ordinary circumstances, the best boss Billy had ever had) would just knock him down and take them.

Novels\Outsider, The:19

Novels\Outsider, The:He clicked, and another photo from another surveillance camera came up on the screen at the front of the conference room. This one had its electronic eye trained on an island of gas pumps. The time-code in the corner said 12:19 PM, April 23rd. Holly thought this must be the photo her nurse informant had mentioned. Candy Wilson had guessed that the vehicle in it was probably Holmes's truck, a Chevy Tahoe that was "all fancied up," but she had been wrong. The picture showed Heath Holmes in mid-stride, returning to a panel truck with DAYTON LANDSCAPING & POOLS printed on the side. His gas presumably paid for, he was returning to the vehicle with a soda in each hand. Leaning out the driver's side window to take them was Amber, the older of the two Howard girls.

Novels\Pet Sematary:19

Novels\Revival:Fourteen years later, Jamie Morton woke up in Tulsa. Not in a good hotel, not even in a so-so chain motel; this was a roachpit called the Fairgrounds Inn. Such places were Kelly Van Dorn's idea of economy. It was eleven in the morning, and the bed was wet. I wasn't surprised. When you crash for NINETEEN hours, assisted by Madame H., wetting your bed is almost inevitable. I suppose you'd even do it if you died in that drug-assisted slumber, although look at the bright side: in that case you'd never wake up in pee-soaked Jockeys again.

Novels\Revival:GOD SPEAKS SOFTLY (1 KINGS 19:12)

Novels\Revival:My father (along with Terry, his faithful if clueless acolyte) got the Road Rocket running-God, what a gorgeous, blasting clatter it made when he revved the engine!-and turned it over to Duane Robichaud, newly painted and with the number 19 emblazoned on its side, to race at the Speedway in Castle Rock. In the first lap of the first heat, the idiot rolled it and totaled it. Duane walked away without a scratch. "Accelerator pedal must have stuck," he said, grinning his foolish grin, only he said it ass-celerator, and my father said the only ass was the one behind the wheel.

Novels\Revival:The only car in the driveway was a battered '51 Ford. It looked like the original Road Rocket, but of course that was impossible-Duane Robichaud had wrecked Road Rocket I at Castle Rock Speedway in the first lap of its only race. Yet there was the Delco Batteries sticker on the trunk, and the number 19 on the side, in paint as red as blood. A crow came down and roosted on the hood. I remembered how our dad had taught all us kids to poke the sign of the evil eye at crows (Nothing in it, but it doesn't hurt to be sure, he said), and I thought: I don't like this. Something is wrong here.

Novels\Rose Madder:By the time they got back to the picnic area, the college kids Bill had spoken of had arrived-a van and a four-wheel-drive Scout full of them. They were amiable but noisy as they went about carrying coolers filled with beer into the shade and then setting up their volleyball net. A boy of about NINETEEN was carrying his girlfriend, clad in khaki shorts and a bikini top, around on his shoulders. When he broke into a trot, she began to scream happily and beat the top of his crewcut head with the palms of her hands. As she watched them, Rosie found herself wondering if the girl's screams carried to the vixen in her clearing, and supposed they did. She could almost see her lying there with her brush curled over her sleeping, milk-stuffed kits, listening to the human screams from down the beach, her ears cocked, her eyes bright and crafty and all too capable of madness.

Novels\Rose Madder:The back door of the All-Day booth was open. Gert stood where she was a moment longer, gathering her resolve, and then marched toward it. She had no official capacity at Daughters and Sisters, never had, but she loved Anna, who had helped her out of a relationship with a man who had sent her to the emergency room nine times when Gert had been between the ages of sixteen and NINETEEN. Now she was thirty-seven, and had been Anna's informal second-in-command for almost fifteen years. Teaching battered newcomers what Anna had taught her-that they didn't have to keep going back to abusive husbands and boyfriends and fathers and step-parents-was only one of her functions. She taught self-defense skills (not because they saved lives but because they salvaged dignity); she helped Anna plan fundraisers like this one; she worked with Anna's frail and elderly accountant to keep the place on something which resembled a paying basis. And when there was security work to be done, she tried her best to do it. It was in this capacity that she moved forward now, unsnapping the clasp of her handbag as she did so. It was Gert's traveling office.

Novels\Rose Madder:The cap and dark glasses would serve his purpose; all he had planned for this early evening was what Gordon Satterwaite, his first detective partner, would have called "a little rekky." Gordon had also been fond of grabbing his young associate and telling him it was time to do a little of what he called "the old gumshoe." Gordon had been a fat, smelly, tobacco-chewing slob with brown teeth, and Norman had despised him almost from the first moment he had seen him. Gordon had been a cop for twenty-six years and an inspector for NINETEEN, but he had no feel for the work. Norman did. He didn't like it, and he hated the jizzbags he had to talk to (and sometimes even associate with, if the job was undercover), but he had a feel for it, and that feel had been invaluable over the years. It had helped bring him through the case which had resulted in his promotion, the case which had turned him-however briefly-into a media golden boy. In that investigation, as in most that involved organized crime, there came a point where the path the investigators had been following disappeared into a bewildering maze of diverging paths, and the straight way was lost. The difference in the drug case was that Norman Daniels was-for the first time in his career-in charge, and when logic failed, he did without hesitation what most cops could not or would not do: he had switched over to intuition and then trusted his entire future to what it told him, plunging forward aggressively and fearlessly.

Novels\Shining, The:And he suspected-no, was nearly positive-that several of the guests had seen or heard things, too. In the three years he had been there, the Presidential Suite had been booked NINETEEN times. Six of the guests who had put up there had left the hotel early, some of them looking markedly ill. Other guests had left other rooms with the same abruptness. One night in August of 1974, near dusk, a man who had won the Bronze and Silver Stars in Korea (that man now sat on the boards of three major corporations and was said to have personally pink-slipped a famous TV news anchorman) unaccountably went into a fit of screaming hysterics on the putting green. And there had been dozens of children during Hallorann's association with the Overlook who simply refused to go into the playground. One child had had a convulsion while playing in the concrete rings, but Hallorann didn't know if that could be attributed to the Overlook's deadly siren song or not-word had gone around among the help that the child, the only daughter of a handsome movie actor, was a medically controlled epileptic who had simply forgotten her medicine that day.

Novels\Shining, The:He pushed the mirror-backed bathroom door open and stepped through. The light in here was off. He turned it on and observed the long, Pullman-car room, furnished in the distinctive early NINETEEN-hundreds-remodeled-in-the-twenties style that seemed common to all Overlook bathrooms, except for the ones on the third floor-those were properly Byzantine, as befitted the royalty, politicians, movie stars, and capos who had stayed there over the years.

Novels\Shining, The:He sat down on one of the stools and propped his elbows on the bar's leather-cushioned edge. At his left hand was a bowl for peanuts-now empty, of course. The first bar he'd been in for NINETEEN months and the damned thing was dry-just his luck. All the same, a bitterly powerful wave of nostalgia swept over him, and the physical craving for a drink seemed to work itself up from his belly to his throat to his mouth and nose, shriveling and wrinkling the tissues as it went, making them cry out for something wet and long and cold.

Novels\Shining, The:His finger traced slowly under the words in the reader. Above them was a picture Wendy half-remembered from her own grammar school days, NINETEEN years before. A laughing boy with brown curly hair. A girl in a short dress, her hair in blond ringlets, one hand holding a jump rope. A prancing dog running after a large red rubber ball. The first-grade trinity. Dick, Jane, and Jip.

Novels\Shining, The:Now seventeen, now eighteen, now NINETEEN.

Novels\Shining, The:She reached the stairwell and put her hand on the cold newel post at the top of the railing. There were NINETEEN wide steps down to the lobby. She had counted them enough times to know. NINETEEN carpeted stair risers and nary a Jack crouching on any one of them. Of course not. Jack was locked in the pantry behind a hefty steel bolt and a thick wooden door.

Novels\Shining, The:She sensed movement above her and wheeled to look up the NINETEEN steps leading to the dark second-floor landing and saw nothing; yet there was a disturbing corner-of-the-eye sensation that things

Novels\Shining, The:The paper was the Rocky Mountain News, dated December 19, 1963. He dropped it back onto its pile.

Novels\Sleeping Beauties:"A year younger than me . . ." Jared said. If she'd been older-eighteen or NINETEEN-her birth would have pre-dated his parents' marriage. But younger . . .

Novels\Sleeping Beauties:"I don't know, maybe eighteen, NINETEEN hours." To reduce Linny's concern she added, "I cooped some last night, don't worry." Lies kept falling out of her mouth. There was a fairy tale that warned about this, about how one lie led to other lies, and you eventually turned into a parakeet or something, but Lila's worn-out brain couldn't come up with it. "Never mind me right now. What's the deal with Tiffany what's-her-face, from the trailer? Did the EMTs transport her to the hospital?"

Novels\Sleeping Beauties:19

Novels\Sleeping Beauties:A few minutes after two o'clock, Mr. Alfred Freeman, the Barrowses' neighbor at 19 Eldridge Street, a retired widower, was spraying his curbside hostas with deer repellant. The door of 17 Eldridge banged open and Mr. Freeman observed Ms. Barrows as she staggered from her front door, carrying young Gary under her arm, like a piece of siding. The boy, wearing only a diaper, was screaming and waving his arms. An opaque white mask covered most of his mother's face, except for a flap of material hanging loose from one corner of her mouth to her chin. It can be presumed that it was this rip that awakened the boy's mother and gained her far-from-pleasant attention.

Novels\Sleeping Beauties:CHAPTER 19

Novels\Sleeping Beauties:Frank quickly martialed a half-dozen other volunteers including Coach JT Wittstock, father of the deputies who shared his surname, and the defense-first coach of the Dooling High School varsity football team; Pudge Marone, bartender at the Squeaky Wheel, who brought along his Remington shotgun from beneath the bar; Drew T. Barry of Drew T. Barry Indemnity Company, by-the-book insurance agent and prize-winning deer hunter; Carson "Country Strong" Struthers, Pudge's brother-in-law, who had fought to a 10-1 Golden Gloves record before his doctor told him he had to quit while he still had some brain left; and two town board members, Bert Miller and Steve Pickering, both of whom, like Drew T. Barry, knew their way around a deer stand. That was NINETEEN, and once they were informed that the woman inside the prison might have information related to the sleeping sickness, maybe even knowledge of a cure, every single one was eager to serve.

Novels\Sleeping Beauties:It was Scott Hughes, at NINETEEN the youngest of the bunch, who handed over his keys, his gun, his Taser, and the rest of his gear. If the CDC wasn't coming to take Eve Black, he wasn't staying. He wasn't anybody's white knight; he was just an ordinary Christian who'd been baptized at the Lutheran church right there in Dooling and hardly missed a Sunday. "I like all you guys. You're not like Peters or some of the other dinks at this place. And I don't care that Billy's gay or that Rand's half-retarded. Those guys're okay."

Novels\Sleeping Beauties:They were scheduled to go live at 4:19, after the current in-studio conversation concluded. George Alderson, his pate shining greasily through the strands of his combover, was interviewing a clinical psychiatrist named Erasmus DiPoto.

Novels\Stand, The:"And NINETEEN out by the gate, probably getting heatstroke while you and me chin. You go bring them in."

Novels\Stand, The:"I was just sittin here and thinkin on the Great Depression," she said. "Do you know my daddy once owned all this land for miles around? It's true. No small trick for a black man. And I played my guitar and sang down at the Grange Hall in NINETEEN and oh-two. Long ago, Nick. Long, long ago."

Novels\Stand, The:At last a young man with light blond hair, no more than NINETEEN, was jerked to his feet, screaming and protesting, and led up to the set area. Two of the blacks forced him to his knees.

Novels\Stand, The:CHAPTER 19

Novels\Stand, The:Excerpts from the Minutes of the Permanent Free Zone Committee Meeting August 19, 1990

Novels\Stand, The:It was quarter past seven, July 19, and the shadows were drawing long. They had ridden all day, their few rest stops only five minutes long, their lunch break, which they had taken in Randolph, only half an hour. None of them had complained, although after six hours on a cycle Larry's whole body felt numb and achy and full of pins.

Novels\Stand, The:July 19, 1990

Novels\Stand, The:No you don't, Mamma. You got TB. It's the TB that's going to kill you. In NINETEEN and forty-seven. And George is going to die just about six days after he gets to Korea, time enough for just one letter and then bang bang bang. George is-

Novels\Stand, The:On June 19, the day Larry Underwood came home to New York and the day that Frannie Goldsmith told her father about her impending Little Stranger, Harry Trent stopped at an East Texas café called Babe's Kwik-Eat for lunch. He had the cheeseburger platter and a piece of Babe's delicious strawberry pie for dessert. He had a slight cold, an allergy cold, maybe, and he kept sneezing and having to spit. In the course of the meal he infected Babe, the dishwasher, two truckers in a corner booth, the man who came in to deliver bread, and the man who came in to change the records on the juke. He left the sweet thang that waited his table a dollar tip that was crawling with death.

Novels\Stand, The:The dark man unrolled it, held it up, and began to speak. His voice was deep, sonorous, and pleasing, spreading in the stillness like a single silver ripple on a black pond. "Know you that this is a true bill to which I, Randall Flagg, have put my name on this thirtieth day of September, the year NINETEEN hundred and ninety, now known as The Year One, year of the plague."

Novels\Stand, The:The other half of the double sleeping bag was empty; that was what had wakened her. She thought of just rolling over and going back to sleep-he would come back to bed when he was ready-and then she got up and went quietly toward where she thought he would be, on the west side of camp. She went lithely, without disturbing a soul. Except for the Judge, of course; ten to midnight was his watch, and you'd never catch Judge Farris nodding off on duty. The Judge was seventy, and he'd joined them in Joliet. There were NINETEEN of them now, fifteen adults, three children, and Joe.

Novels\Stand, The:Two miles farther up, at Sunrise Amphitheater, a huge picnic lunch had been spread where Harold Lauder had once waited for just the right moment to speak into his walkie-talkie. At noon, two or three thousand people would sit down together and look east toward Denver and eat venison and deviled eggs and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and fresh pie for dessert. It might be the last mass gathering the Zone would ever have, unless they all went down to Denver and got together in the stadium where the Broncos had once played football. Now, on Mayday, the trickle of early spring had swelled to a flood of immigrants. Since April 15 another eight thousand had come in, and they were now NINETEEN thousand or so-temporarily at least, Sandy's Census Bureau could not keep up. A day when only five hundred came in was a rare day.

Novels\Talisman, The:"Yellin. Sixty-two dollars and NINETEEN cents."

Novels\Talisman, The:19

Novels\Talisman, The:While they walked down the steps of the redbrick Municipal Building, Jack asked Franky Williams why the Judge had asked for their ages. The cop paused on the bottom step and half-turned to glare up at Jack out of his blazing face. "Old Sunlight generally takes em in at twelve and turns em loose at NINETEEN." He grinned. "You tellin me you never heard him on the radio? He's about the most famous thing we got around here. I'm pretty sure they heard of old Sunlight Gardener even way over in Daleville." His teeth were small discolored pegs, irregularly spaced.

Novels\Tommyknockers, The:19

Novels\Under the Dome:"We got the meteorological report at NINETEEN hundred hours," Cox said. "Special emphasis on winds. Just in case . . . well, just in case. Leave it at that. The jet stream's currently coming west as far as Nebraska or Kansas, dipping south, then coming up the Eastern Seaboard. Pretty common pattern for late October."

Novels\Under the Dome:"You've done a lot of good for the town, Jim. We've got the same sewer system we had in NINETEEN sixty, Chester Pond is filthy, the business district is moribund. . . ." She was sitting straight now, gripping the arms of her chair. "You fucking self-righteous turdworm."

Novels\Under the Dome:19

Novels\Under the Dome:A mile or so past the church, they began to see a glow through the trees. They came around a curve and into the glare of lights almost the size of Hollywood premiere kliegs. Two pointed in their direction; two more were tilted straight up. Every pothole in the road stood out in stark relief. The trunks of the birches looked like narrow ghosts. Barbie felt as if they were driving into a noir movie from the late NINETEEN forties.

Novels\Under the Dome:At 19 Mill Street, home of the McClatchey family, there was a moment of silence when the recording ended. Then Norrie Calvert burst into fresh tears. Benny Drake and Joe McClatchey, after looking at each other over her bowed head with identical What do I do now expressions, put their arms around her quaking shoulders and gripped each other's wrists in a kind of soul shake.

Novels\Under the Dome:BURNING LAKE OF FIRE (REV 19:20)

Novels\Under the Dome:But when the charred bus charges clear of the smoke, he sees nothing beyond but a black wasteland. The trees have been burned away to glowing stubs and the road itself is a bubbling ditch. Then an overcoat of fire drops over him from behind and Henry Morrison knows no more. 19 skids from the remains of the road and overturns with flames spewing from every broken window. The quickly blackening message on the back reads: SLOW DOWN, FRIEND! WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN!

Novels\Under the Dome:He agreed, but felt tired and dispirited and not equal to the job he was beginning to see before him. "I'm sure the enemies of Hitler said pretty much the same thing. They said it in NINETEEN thirty-four, and they were right. In thirty-six, and they were right. Also in thirty-eight. ‘The wrong time to challenge him,' they said. And when they realized the right time had finally come, they were protesting in Auschwitz or Buchenwald."

Novels\Under the Dome:He heard an approaching engine, turned around-walking backward now-and stuck out his thumb. What he saw was a lovely combination: a dirty old Ford pickemup with a fresh young blonde behind the wheel. Ash blonde, his favorite blonde of all. Barbie offered his most engaging smile. The girl driving the pickemup responded with one of her own, and oh my Lord if she was a ticktock over NINETEEN, he'd eat his last paycheck from Sweetbriar Rose. Too young for a gentleman of thirty summers, no doubt, but perfectly street-legal, as they'd said back in the days of his cornfed Iowa youth.

Novels\Under the Dome:Henry knows this is no chance at all, but he nods, gives Cox a final look (Cox will never forget the cop's hellish, despairing eyes), takes Pammie Chen's hand, and follows her to Bus 19 as the smoky blackness races toward them.

Novels\Under the Dome:The lights running down the center of the bus are on, casting a weak luncheonette-at-midnight glow over the terrified, sweat-drenched faces of the passengers, but the world outside has turned dead black. Whirlpools of ash eddy in the radically foreshortened beams of the headlights. Henry steers by memory, wondering when the tires will explode beneath him. He's still laughing, although he can't hear himself over the scalded-cat screech of 19's engine. He's keeping to the road; there's that much. How long until they break through the other side of the firewall? Is it possible they can break through? He's beginning to think it might be. Good God, how thick can it be?

Novels\Under the Dome:This would be Joseph McClatchey, age thirteen, also known as King of the Geeks and Skeletor, residing at 19 Mill Street. Standing six-two and weighing one-fifty, he was indeed skeletal. And he was a bona fide brain. Joe remained in the eighth grade only because his parents were adamantly opposed to the practice of "skipping forward."