Stephen King latest book setting
"Tenacious Unicorn Ranch" may have once been planned as a haven for those who had none, but one thing was certain: it was now a place best avoided when the night is at its darkest and the owls call out their mournful songs.
"Shit," said Jeannie, leaning over the hood of the Camaro and squinting at the crumpled map, "either that's the Tranch or we've been driving in circles for the last two hours". Randy and Jeannie had been going steady for about six months now, but damned if she didn't have the hots for his college roommate. He'd watched as she'd playfully slipped her tanned thighs out of her daisy dukes and lounged around the house in a half-buttoned men's shirt, casually flirting with Thad. So after half a case of beer, he'd proposed a road trip - just the two of them - visiting haunted sites across America. That's how they found themselves on a back road in rural Colorado, staring down a swinging gate as the sun dipped over the horizon.
A lump of discarded plastic glinted from the dirt by the path - a child's toy, from some half-forgotten television franchise. "Transformers," thought Randy. "I reckon this here's the place. Watchoo say, Jeannie? Shall we go in?"
She laughed. Her laugh always drove him wild. "You betcha!" she volleyed back, and took off running onto the barren land. He hastily followed, making note of the surroundings; the ranches they'd driven past were all verdant pasture, but there was nothing here but bare soil and abandoned trash. The air was oppressively silent but for the thudding of Jeannie's sneakers and the distant far-off snapping of an old tarp fluttering in the wind. Up ahead was their destination - nestled among the skeletal remains of some old trailers was a dome house. THE dome house.
Easing open a rotten door, they flicked on their flashlights. Some effort had been made to scrub the place out - he'd seen the photos of how it had been left, its former residents abandoning the site in a hurry, as if in flight from something unknowable. Everyone had heard the stories - the soft, inquisitive faces of the alpacas being replaced by a haunting emptiness in the fields, a sense of creeping dread, the transmasculine field serfs whittling down in numbers and the excesses of the emasculation cult that had supposedly dwelt here. Little evidence of that remained now. However a whisper of something still echoed through this house like a forgotten cassette tape playing warped tunes. The flashlight illuminated tatters of a faded trans flag. Something was deeply wrong about this place - a real presence, far unlike the charmingly hokey "haunted houses" they'd visited this far. None of the abandoned gas stations or Victorian manors had possessed this subaudible chittering, a sound you could only detect on the edge of your hearing, a sound that could drive you to madness.
"I'm not so sure about this, doll," he muttered. "How about we go back to the motel and try again tomorrow?".
Jeannie's eyes sparkled in the darkness. "Randy, you're not scared, are you? Let's split up. I want to see if I can find the toy basement". Although he had never hit a girl, in that moment he would have hit her with real pleasure, replacing that look of hateur on her face with a bruise in the shape of his hand. Instead, he flipped an Excedrin in his mouth and began to chew, making his way up the stairs as Jeannie sauntered into the bowels of this building.
The first room he entered, closing the door behind him, was a bathroom. The surfaces were filthy but bone dry - the propane tanks that powered the water pump had been removed long ago. The rusty faucets shone weakly in the flashlight, encrusted with grime. A large dirty tub loomed in front of him, causing a sense of disquiet. His nostrils flared a little - the place stank of unwashed men and alpaca grease, but underneath it was a clean smell. Soap. And not one of those all-in-one body wash soaps the troons used, either. This scent was light and perfumed, a lady's soap. It had a pink sort of smell. As he turned to leave, there was a sudden rattling, metallic sound. The shower curtain, a pallid pastel pink, was now drawn protectively around the tub.
The metallic rattle, which had sounded to him like a stir of bones in a crypt, had been the curtain rings on the overhead bar. Randy stared at the curtain. His face felt as if it had been heavily waxed, all dead skin on the outside, live, hot rivulets of fear on the inside. There was something behind the pink plastic shower curtain. There was something in the tub.
He could see it, ill defined and obscure through the plastic, a nearly amorphous shape. It could have been anything. A trick of the light. The shadow of the shower attachment. A thing that perhaps had once been a woman, long dead and reclining in the bath, a bar of soap in one stiffening hand as it waited patiently for whatever carer/lover might come. Randy told himself to step forward boldly and rake the shower curtain back. To expose whatever might be there. Instead he turned with a jerky movement and forced his fingers to curl around the doorknob.
He wrenched the door open, stepped out into the hall, and pulled the door shut without looking back. From inside, he seemed to hear an odd wet thumping sound, far off, dim, as if something had just scrambled belatedly out of the tub, as if to greet a caller, as if it had realized the caller was leaving before the social amenities had been completed and so it was now rushing to the door, all pale and gurning, to invite the caller back inside. Perhaps forever.
Through the door he heard an unmistakable noise. No, not a noise - a voice.
"SQUAWK! POLLY VOICES A ROBOT BABY! SQUAWK!".
