The Green Mile(89)

I slid in between John and his view of the chair, standing on my tiptoes to make sure I was completely blocking his sight-line. Then I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes, twice, sharply.

'Come on!' I said. 'Walk! You said you didn't need to be chained, now prove it! Walk, big boy! Walk, John Coffey! Over there! That door!'

His eyes cleared. 'Yes, boss.' And praise God, he began to walk.

'Look at the door, John Coffey, just at the door and nowhere else.'

'Yes, boss.' John fixed his eyes obediently on the door.

'Brutal,' I said, and pointed.

He hurried in advance, shaking out his keyring, finding the right one. John kept his gaze fixed on the door to the tunnel and I kept my gaze fixed on John, but from the comer of one eye I could see Harry throwing nervous glances at the chair, as if he had never seen it before in his life.

There are pieces of them still in there... I hear them screaming.

If that was true, then Eduard Delacroix had to be screaming longest and loudest of all, and I was glad I couldn't hear what John Coffey did.

Brutal opened the door. We went down the stairs with Coffey in the lead. At the bottom, he looked glumly down the tunnel, with its low brick ceiling. He was going to have a crick in his back by the time we got to the other end, unless - I pulled the gurney over. The sheet upon which we'd laid Del had been stripped (and probably incinerated), so the gurney's black leather pads were visible. 'Get on,' I told John. He looked at me doubtfully, and I nodded encouragement. 'It'll be easier for you and no harder for us.'

'Okay, Boss Edgecombe.' He sat down, then lay back, looking up at us with worried brown eyes. His feet, clad in cheap prison slippers, dangled almost all the way to the floor. Brutal got in between them and pushed John Coffey along the dank corridor as he had pushed so many others. The only difference was that the current rider was still breathing. About halfway along - under the highway, we would have been, and able to hear the muffled drone of passing cars, had there been any at that hour - John began to smile. 'Say,' he said, 'this is fun.' He wouldn't think so the next time he rode the gurney; that was the thought which crossed my mind. In fact, the next time he rode the gurney, he wouldn't think or feel anything. Or would he? There are pieces of them still in there, he had said; he could hear them screaming.

Walking behind the others and unseen by them, I shivered.

'I hope you remembered Aladdin, Boss Edgecombe,' Brutal said as we reached the far end of the tunnel.

'Don't worry,' I said. Aladdin looked no different from the other keys I carried in those days - and I had a bunch that must have weighed four pounds - but it was the master key of master keys, the one that opened everything. There was one Aladdin key for each of the five cellblocks in those days, each the property of the block super. Other guards could borrow it, but only the bull-goose screw didn't have to sign it out.

There was a steel-barred gate at the far end of the tunnel. It always reminded me of pictures I'd seen of old castles; you know, in days of old when knights were bold and chivalry was in flower. Only Cold Mountain was a long way from Camelot. Beyond the gate, a flight of stairs led up to an unobtrusive bulkhead-style door with signs reading NO TRESPASSING and STATE PROPERTY and ELECTRIFIED WIRE on the outside.

I opened the gate and Harry swung it back. We went up, John Coffey once more in the lead, shoulders slumped and head bent. At the top, Harry got around him (not without some difficulty, either, although he was the smallest of the three of us) and unlocked the bulkhead. It was heavy. He could move it, but wasn't able to flip it up.

'Here, boss,' John said. He pushed to the front again - bumping Harry into the wall with one hip as he did so - and raised the bulkhead with one hand. You would have thought it was painted cardboard instead of sheet steel.

Cold night air, moving with the ridge-running wind we would now get most of the time until March or April, blew down into our faces. A swirl of dead leaves came with it, and John Coffey caught one of them with his free hand. I will never forget the way he looked at it, or how he crumpled it beneath his broad, handsome nose so it would release its smell.

'Come on,' Brutal said. 'Let's go, forward harch.'

We climbed out. John lowered the bulkhead and Brutal locked it - no need for the Aladdin key on this door, but it was needed to unlock the gate in the pole-and-wire cage which surrounded the bulkhead.

'Hands to your sides while you go through, big fella,' Harry murmured. 'Don't touch the wire, if you don't want a nasty bum.'

Then we were clear, standing on the shoulder of the road in a little cluster (three foothills around a mountain is what I imagine we looked like), staring across at the walls and lights and guard-towers of Cold Mountain Penitentiary. I could actually see the vague shape of a guard inside one of those towers, blowing on his hands, but only for a moment; the road-facing windows in the towers were small and unimportant. Still, we would have to be very, very quiet. And if a car did come along now, we could be in deep trouble.

'Come on,' I whispered. 'Lead the way, Harry.'

We slunk north along the highway in a little congaline, Harry first, then John Coffey, then Brutal, then me. We breasted the first rise and walked down the other side, where all we could see of the prison was the bright glow of the lights in the tops of the trees. And still Harry led us onward.

'Where'd you park it?' Brutal stage-whispered, vapor puffing from his mouth in a white cloud. 'Baltimore?'