‘sometimes they come back.’
at thirty two pages, ‘sometimes they come back’ is the longest piece in ‘night shift’ and is also the piece that, i would argue, is most similar to his work in the novella (king is that rare writer that understand that the short story, the novella, and the novel are bound as much by structural concerns as concerns of length) and it contains the first real resonance with his uncomfortable nostalgia for the 1950s of his childhood.
ostensibly a combination ghost story and faustian tale, the story of troubled english teacher jim norman (and, to my knowledge, the first example of king using teacher as a main character [a bit that he’ll return to with some regularity, often using the figure as a proxy for the more common ‘sad writer’ that he tends to use) coming face to face with literal demons of the past is, in some ways, the most ambitious story in the collection, so far, even if it fails to live up to those ambitions.
we are introduced to norman, and his wife, in the first two paragraphs as he returns home from his job interview, her anxious and hopeful, him walking up holding some school books. immediately, there’s a sense of warmth between the two, and of hope, but, just as immediately, king pulls that rug out from under them (and the reader) by talking about norman waking up sweating from a nightmare, ‘a scream behind his lips.’ this sort of transition can often be so incredibly clumsy but king handles it adeptly, here, providing a sort of disorientation that prefigures that bleak downward spiral of haunting (both literal and figurative) that is to follow.
we are taken back to the interview and we’re told that norman had a ‘breakdown’ while working on his teaching degree and student teaching at a school in the city known for violence and criminality and, already, snippets of 1950s slang are seeping into the present creating an uncanny relationship with the narrative and eroding the sense of linear time. while this sort of thing can, all too easily, undermine the work king begins with a light hand, allowing the strangeness to echo back into norman’s anxiety as he explains his breakdown (which was caused, we’re told, by his mother’s dead and his wife being the victim of a hit and run which left her with a broken leg, broken ribs, and a great deal of agony. but there’s more to the story and king mentions norman had a brother, older, who also wanted to be a teacher and had died, sometime earlier, and the implication is that something about that death was connected to his wife’s hit and run, even of obliquely.)
as the interview continues, king portrays norman’s growing anxiety in such excruciating and effective detail, focusing on the bodily nature of it over the emotional nature of it in what is, quite honestly, one of the best descriptions of anxiety that i’ve read in quite some time, allowing the anxiety of the interview to thread through itself on multiple levels (the regular stress of interviewing for a desired job, the stress of his previous professional failure and breakdown, and more sources of anxiety that will be revealed through the course of the piece.) what king does so well, here, is put the reader in a situation in which we absolutely KNOW that norman succeeded in his interview and gets the job but, as the interview goes on, and he becomes more and more anxious, more and more... disassociated, we can’t help but doubt the ultimate outcome as we’re taken on a ride through norman’s bodily state of anxiety.
it’s revealed that, even though other things had been mentioned in relation to it, the ‘real’ source of a norman’s breakdown was being assaulted while trying to stop the violent bullying of a student that he saw as ‘sensitive,’ the bullies smashing the boys guitar with the implication that there was more violence to come. at this point, we know that norman has chosen to student teach at a school well known for its violent reputation so why should something so commonplace as classroom bullying (and being ‘slugged’ by a student) get him so upset? king hints that there’s something more to all of this than what it is a relatively straightforward and incredibly common experience in ‘rough’ schools and this is where the story really starts to unfold itself into something darker and stranger.
norman begins teaching (and we see mentions, small echoes, of the fact that the school, even with new desks and the like, holds physical memories of the time of norman’s childhood) with everything mostly okay except for his last class of the day- a remedial english class filled with angry jocks and delinquents (with the requisite pressure to do what he an to pass these kids, making sure that the jocks can stay involved in their chosen sports. it all goes as well as can be expected, with razzing from some of the kids and a general sense of tension and malevolence, him being seen as something they both deeply resent and need to continue their high school careers as they desire, until, during the winter, he catches a kind named chips osway cheating who then threatens him with ‘We’ll get you, creepo.’ what hangs in the air, here, isn’t just the threat, or the old timey ‘creepo,’ but the heaviness of ‘we.’ who is ‘we?’ there’s a darker implication here than chip just meaning his fellow classmates or jocks.
and this experience leads to norman having ‘that dream,’ again, but this time we’re made privy to it. as king describes the dream, which seems to be a clear memory from norman’s childhood with his brother (age nine and twelve, respectively,) he shifts person, from third to second, as we’re told of a small gang of troublesome greasers that hand out near a railway underpass that the norman kids have to walk near, frequently, and the moment that these ruffians go from being troublesome to outright violent, assaulting both kids and, after norman’s brother kicks one in the crotch and norman scuttles between their legs and runs off, seeming to murder his brother with switchblades. with the switch between third and second person, king ratchets up the sense of distorted cognisance and dissociation that he’s been playing with, up until this point, into something entirely new- a nightmare of pure survivor’s guilt that we’re forced to feel along with norman. it’s a brave choice and it works.
norman’s winter break is largely without incident (although we are told that the had the dream, twice, early on) and he returns, thinking that his unease and discomfort are just the normal stress of teaching angry kids who would rather not be taught. before he can get to his class, however, he learns that a new student will be joining him, robert lawson, and that one of his favourite students was killed in a hit and run. he opens the file to see that new student, impossibly, is one of the delinquents that stabbed his brother. lawson immediately becomes the lead troublemaker in the class, with norman struggling to make sense of it all, resorting to simply trying to ignore it and teach the class. but soon another student dies (a girl named kathy that seemed to be one of the better students,) with three boys being seen running from the scene of her death.
two weeks pass and norman is, again, handed the file of a new student (reacting with a sort of fatalism as if he already knew how all of this would soon play out) and, while he doesn’t recognise the student at first, he later realises that, like lawson, this david garcia, is one of the gang that murdered his brother. after a bit, chip osway comes to talk to norman, anxious and nervous, and explains that he had been angry and hanging out with lawson and garcia when they mentioned that they were planning on hurting the teacher, and pressed osway for information, leaving the boy terrified and coming to norman to both confess his sins and relieve his dread (and we’re left recalling his threat of ‘we’ll get you, creepo!’ and wondering if osway had any real understanding of the faustian bargain he was invoking by that) but, the very next day, he disappears (with his suitcase and some cash according to his uncaring possible stepfather) leaving norman to wait for the inevitable- a new student in his class, impossibly from that terrible and fateful day in his past (this time one vincent ‘vinnie’ corey.)
now that the third ‘ghost’ (?) has arrived, they begin to be more explicit about their connection norman and his past, vinnie corey asking how his brother is, for example. deciding to telephone a police officer from when he was a child, norman gives the retired cop the names of the three students (with one being clearly remembered and another ringing a bell) and there’s a hint that there’s something that norman feels guilty over, aside from his brother’s death, related to the three delinquents and he’s told that there is no ‘milford high,’ which the three had supposedly transferred from, but, rather, there’s a millford cemetary (and as he hangs up the phone, we’re treated with the jump scare of corey’s face pressed up against the glass of the phone booth in a scene that would work far better on film.)
at this point, most of what we’ve seen from norman is an combination of anxiety and cowardice (and, to king’s credit, he never equates the former with the latter) so it’s a surprise when he finally has corey stay after class and directly confronts him. while admitting that, yes, he and his pals are dead and were responsible for killing norman’s brother, he gets enraged at the question of WHERE he and his delinquent buddies were all this time (with the implication being that they were in hell, confirmed when he tells norman that’s where he’s going, soon.) what we see in this confrontation is a shift from norman’s being as simply victim to his being something more complex, something with the capacity to be more venomous than the coward we’ve seen up until this point, mocking both corey’s use of outdated 50s slang and his being dead, and it shakes the revenant corey, rattles him in a way that a ghost (?) shouldn’t be, at least not by the living. it’s revealed that the fourth member of the gang, ‘bleach,’ was, in fact, still alive and the mention of this enrages corey who, before storming off, clearly threatens not just norman but also his ‘little wifey’ (which dulls norman’s anger and sends him reeling, allowing corey to take the power back in the exchange by remarking, after norman threatens to kill him, that he’s already dead.)
sitting at home, anxiously reading a book on raising demons, norman practically begs his wife to take a cab home from wherever she’s going (four blocks away) even making up the story of a girl in his class being grabbed in an attempted rape, nearby. as she asks if something’s the matter (mentioning that he was mumbling his brother’s name in his sleep,) he gruffly says that it’s nothing he can’t handle and she leaves before the phone rings. the former officer nell, from his childhood, is returning his call and says that all three boys were, indeed, killed in an automobile accident a few months after the death of his brother but one of the delinquents (the aforementioned ‘bleach’) was alive, having joined the army after what happened with norman’s brother. as the phone cuts out and then rings again in norman’s hand, we know that something terrible has happened to his wife and it’s in this section that king has so deftly played with the idea of fate that her death comes as no surprise but, rather, as a grim inevitability and when he’s told of her death, after driving to the hospital (and being stopped on the way by a cop who then leads the way, siren and lights on) and he sees a blood spattered orderly that he recognises as garcia we, as readers, have no real way of knowing if it actually *is* the revenant of david garcia or if it’s norman’s fractured and grief stricken imagination.
the stark depiction of sally norman’s funeral and her husband’s grief stricken sleepwalk through it is as discomforting as any bit of violence that king has ever written, norman being consumed with the empty derealisation that such deep grief couple with an enormous can bring but that venomous thing inside norman begins to squirm again, with an idea for revenge and closure, and when corey calls him on the phone to gloat over killing his wife (’Wham and splatter’) he’s already prepared and tells corey to come to the school and bring the others with him to end it all. when he arrives at the school, however, what we have is not a broken and grief stricken man but, rather, a man with the steely resolve to avenge his brother, his wife, and himself.
grabbing a sound effects record and a portable record player, he reads a passage from the book on raising demons and prepares to meet the delinquents by setting up the stereo in his classroom and playing the record’s cut of the noise of a freight train, and painstakingly drawing a pentagram and, using a photograph and the sweatband from his brother’s childhood ball cap, summons a demon to make his own faustian bargain with by cutting off his index fingers as payment. the delinquents arrive, all piss and vinegar at first, until a phantom in the shape of norman’s dead brother manifests in the pentagram and the scene of his death is replayed (the delinquents realising that they cannot control what they do and say and are merely puppets, preplaying what they had done those many years ago) and as each of them stab their knives into the phantom, they burn and disappear. having fulfilled his wish for vengeance, norman tidies up and leaves, thinking that he needs to see a doctor about his missing fingers, and he’s started by a shadow behind him, remembering that the book on raising demons had mentioned that, once a demon is summoned, ‘sometimes they come back.’
unfortunately, this last scene just feels so rushed and forced. up until this point, the pacing had been fatalistic and measured, as norman’s world falls apart. as with ‘the mangler,’ we’re given to believe that someone can find real and useful knowledge of demons with ease and, as with that previous piece, it lends a certain goofiness to the proceedings as we’re rushed through the climax.
one of the most striking things about the piece is that king never even attempts to explain how the boys have seemingly come back from the dead. they are not ghosts in any of the common meanings of the word and nor are they simply the resurrected corpses of the boys. in their contemporary being, they are dressed and groomed as normal as everyone else (even to the point of contemporary coolness) with the only clue that they’re not of the time being their penchant to speak using decades old slang. king leaves us with an uncomfortable unbalance between the notion that the loss of youth is something to be mourned as well as the loss of ‘innocence’ (a grotesquely problematic idea grounded in middle class notions of morality and identity) and the idea that the past is something we can never return to but, just like so many ghosts, it returns to us, often unbidden and unwelcome, and we’re shown that king’s rosey nostalgia is covered in thorns as well as blossoms. we have no idea what has drawn them (osway’s rage? norman’s guilt? something else entirely?) and we are, in the end, left only with a recursive notion of the faustian, norman’s vengeance without any real understanding of why any of this has happened or, really, even *how* any of it has and it’s this uncertainty (along with king’s hinting that norman may have more to feel guilty about than just the death of brother) that elevates the story well above the common idea of supernatural vengeance, even though the climax is so frustratingly rushed and forced.
