The Past Is Now

Sometimes They Come Back, trauma, revenge, and the cycle of anger

Good evening, and welcome to The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club. This week we discuss Sometimes They Come Back, a story in King’s first short story collection, Night Shift. If you missed it and you’d like to join in, grab a copy and read Strawberry Spring.

This weekend we had our first snow, a heavy wet thing that plopped down in inches starting Friday and still hangs in the trees two days later. Sunday morning I woke up to wind gusts so fierce it looked like smoke outside. The snow was whirling in great rolling billows, as close to rough ocean water as I’ll ever get.

I spent most of my time watching out the window and thinking about writing this article, but I’ve been pulled into my own thoughts lately, and opted instead for reminiscing with my husband. We tell each other stories about our past, some we know, others we don’t. I wonder if we’ll reach a day when we run out, either because our memories have dulled with age, or because we’ve talked them all out. Figured out the past. But today is not that day. Today the past is now.

And so it was for our dear Jim Norman, the main character of King’s short story, Sometimes They Come Back. When we meet him, it is 1974. He is married, a young man who just got a job teaching English at a high school. He made it past the interview. He celebrates with a steak dinner. He is happy. Until night falls and he goes to sleep and dreams the same old dream again.

Photo by Rob on Unsplash

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The breakdown

We know he had one after the first couple of paragraphs. The principal, Fenton, had asked him about it in the interview. To see if Jim was ready to take on the pressures of a teenage audience. He assures them, the circumstances that led to his breakdown were nothing like teaching. Sure, he had been teaching. A practice class as part of his senior year in college.

But it was more than that. His mother had died of cancer, his fiance had been hit by a car. And then there was the issue at the school he interned at. It was a trade school, filled with violent kids, and after one punched him, he couldn’t go back.

“That was it. I had a breakdown. No screaming meemies or crouching in the corner. I just couldn’t go back. When I got near Trades, my chest would tighten up. I couldn’t breathe right, I got cold sweat—”

Something we would call panic attacks. And you can’t blame the guy. Teaching at rough high schools can be dangerous.

But Jim isn’t interviewing at that kind of school anymore.

He gets the job at Davis High, a school with big budget, new desks, and a science wing valued in the millions. But there’s something about it when the building empties and the halls are quiet, something not quite right.

But after the kids were gone, something old and brooding seemed to settle over the halls and whisper in the empty rooms. Some black, noxious beast, never quite in view. Sometimes, as he walked down the Wing 4 corridor toward the parking lot with his new briefcase in one hand, Jim Norman thought he could almost hear it breathing.

Of course it doesn’t help that he keeps having his old nightmare, the one where he relives his brothers brutal murder, the one that happened when he was only nine, and Wayne was twelve. It’s a dream he doesn’t talk about. Only assures he he’s fine when he says, “Sometimes it comes back, that’s all. No sweat.”

Things go by alright until after the Christmas holiday. Before that, the worst complaint he has is period seven, the time of day when he gets the slow learners and tries to inspire them. That’s where the trouble makers are, the jocks who need grades to keep playing sports, but could care less about Living with Literature.

His biggest beef is with a big football player named Chip Osway. He’s failing the class, a grade that’ll see him kicked out of basketball and football, and he’s not happy about it.

“If you flunk me, we’ll get you, you son of a bitch!”

Jim Norman writes the F in his grade book that day.

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And that night he has the dream again. It’s him and Wayne in Connecticut. He’s holding his library books and the streets are getting dark. The short way to their destination is under a railroad overpass, but there’s a problem. The local losers hang out there, greasers (it’s 1957) in leather jackets with slicked back hair. Wayne won’t go around. He’s twelve, and the worst thing to be at twelve is a chicken.

So they go past, and they get robbed by three of those losers. A fat kid, a guy with orange-colored hair, and a tall kid with a blond crew cut and a broken nose. Vinnie, one of them is called, laughs when Jim wets himself. He remembers the details of their faces, a strawberry birthmark on one of their chins, a kid with a jittery face.

And then, they kill Wayne, and he gets away. But something has taken hold. After all, it’s nearly twenty years later, and he’s still dreaming about it.

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Real life trauma is like that. It follows you, manifests in your body against your will. You might dream it, or react with emotions that far exceed what the situation calls for. You might shake or yell. You might feel scared. You might not be able to sleep.

But Jim’s problem doesn’t stop with the dreams. After winter break, he returns to a new student for period seven. Robert Lawson, a transfer from another school.

“Hey, I’ve got twenty-seven in there right now, Sim. I’m overloaded.”

“You’ve still got twenty-seven. Bill Stearns got killed the Tuesday after Christmas. Car accident. Hit-and-run.”

His new student is a troublemaker to boot. His folder reveals lengthy records of school discipline detailing hundreds of infractions. Jim’s dread peaks when he sees the photo of a kid with a strawberry birthmark on his chin.

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If you don’t deal with the past, the past comes looking for you.

The kid named Robert Lawson looks just like the killer from his dreams. He hasn’t changed since 1957. A week later, another student dies falling from a building, and David Garcia joins, a student with a face Jim doesn’t recognize from the picture. It’s not until he sees his flitting eyelids that he realizes his dread is being realized. They’re coming back. The third and final reincarnation of his brother’s murderers goes by the name Vincent Corey, Vinnie for short. He’s there to take Chip Osway’s place. The old lug has suddenly decided football wasn’t for him after all. He’s left the school.

I love the way King sprinkled the tiniest details to give us the same sinking feeling Jim would have experienced. The birthmark, the eyes, and the name. We know it doesn’t make sense. These three can’t have returned twenty years later at the same age as when Wayne was murdered. But we also know no one ever went to jail for the stabbing.

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The Inside Scoop.

It’s a horror trope we see over and over. It takes place in libraries and old lady’s houses. It’s how we figure out what’s really going on. And in this story, it’s an old retired cop, Don Nell, who happens to pick up his phone and give Jim the information he desperately needs to know: whatever happened to the suspects in his brother’s case?

There were lineups, but nothing definitive came from them. Jim presses, desperate for anything that could explain how his brother’s murderers ended up in his high school English classroom. Before they hang up and Don Nell goes on to find out about the prime suspects in the case, Jim asks about the school the three boys have all transferred from.

“Is there a Milford High in Stratford?”

“Not that I know of.”

“That’s what I—”

“Only thing name of Milford around here is Milford Cemetery out on the Ash Heights Road. And no one ever graduated from there.” He chuckled dryly, and to Jim’s ears it sounded like the sudden rattle of bones in a pit.

And just like that, we’re dealing with the undead.

Photo by Simon Wijers on Unsplash

It turns out that Jim is unfinished business, and the violent in life are still violent in death.

“We’re gonna kill you dad. You’ll find out about that hole.”

“Get out of here.”

“Maybe that little wifey of yours too.”

So Jim does what any of us would do. He gets a book on conjuring demons. His wife doesn’t like it. She says so on her way out that night. The night that she dies. When he gets to the hospital, an orderly is waiting for him.

Wearing dirty whites with a few drops of drying blood splattered across the front. Cleaning his fingernails with a knife. The orderly looked up and grinned into Jim’s eyes. The orderly was David Garcia.

Jim fainted.

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How do you fight three people who are already dead? Jim has an idea. When Vinnie calls to tell him he’s next, he invites him and his buddies to the school. Room 33, where all this mess started. There, he makes his sacrifice. A picture of him and his brother, the blood of a cat he killed on the way, the knife that did it, and a sweatband taken from Wayne’s old baseball cap.

Of course there’s a pentagram and an incantation and the demand of the demon Jim summons. Both index fingers, severed and tossed into the pentagram as an offering. The undead show up, knives ready, lines echoing from the past.

“Give us your money, dad.”

It’s just like it happened before, but the undead never have their revenge. A small boy, maybe twelve years old, steps out of the darkness and into the pentagram. The scene from the past is playing out again, but this time, the ending is different.

He looked up and saw Vinnie, his face stretched into a caricature of hatred, drive his knife into the Wayne-thing just below the breastbone…and then scream, his face collapsing in on itself, charring, blackening, becoming awful.

Then he was gone.

Garcia and Lawson struck a moment later, writhed, charred, and disappeared.

Jim looks up and sees his brother Wayne looking down at him. But it isn’t Wayne at all. The face changes, turning demonic, eyes yellow and horrible, and the demon leaves with a promise: I’ll come back Jim.

Jim straightens the classroom, cleans up his floor, and walks down the dark hall with his disfigured hands to his chest.

Halfway down, something—a shadow, or perhaps only an intuition—made him whirl around.

Something unseen seemed to leap back.

Jim remembered the warning in Raising Demons—the danger involved. You could perhaps summon them…But sometimes they come back.

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As horrific as the story is, there’s a dark reality that pierces this fiction.

Sometimes terrible things happen to you, and they never seem to leave. At least not without help or treatment of some kind. They alter you, haunt you, wake you up at night. Even in Jim’s vengeance, he isn’t done dealing with the trauma of his brother’s murder. There’s a promise from that demon after all. For now the fingers will do. But later? I’ll have your soul.

The underlying horror, one that a lot of us know well, is that even without the demon, sometimes memories come back. Parts of our past we wish never happened. Some of them were done to us, like in the case of Wayne’s murder. Some of them we do to ourselves, like Jim’s choice to summon demons. Sometimes, there is no easy way out, and the decisions before us are all bad ones. That is a horror all on its own.

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And now to you dear readers.

Did you like this story? It was trope city, but the writing was on point. I love the way King constructed it, the little breadcrumbs of dread he left all along the way. My favorite parts were each character from the past making their appearance in the classroom, one by one.

The demon conjuring was popular with King. We’ve seen it a handful of times in this collection. Was it the time? Were demons a big part of horror in the 70’s? Chime in please if you know.