STEPHEN KING

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change agent. When he turns up in a ﬁlm, you know he’s there because the screenwriter put him there. But who is screenwriting our lives? Fate or coincidence? I want to believe it’s the latter. I want that with all my heart and soul. When I think of Charles Jacobs—my ﬁfth business, my change agent, my nemesis—I can’t bear to believe his presence in my life had anything to do with fate. It would mean that all these terrible things—these

horrors

—were meant to happen. If that is so, then there is no such thing as light, and our belief in it is a foolish illusion. If that is so, we live in dark- ness like animals in a burrow , or ants deep in their hill. And not alone.

Claire gave me an army

for my sixth birthday , and on a Saturday in October of 1962 I was gearing up for a major battle. I came from a big family—four boys, one girl—and as the young- est I always got lots of presents. Claire always gave the best ones. I don’t know if it was because she was the eldest, because she was the only girl, or both. But o f all the awesome presents she gave me over the years, that army was by far the best. There were two hundred green plastic soldiers, some with riﬂes, some with machine guns, a dozen welded to tubelike gadgets she said were mortars. There were also eight trucks and twelve jeeps. Perhaps the coolest thing about the army was the box it came in, a cardboard footlocker in camou- ﬂage shades of green and brown, with PROPER TY OF U.S. ARMY stenciled on the front. Below this, Claire had added her own sten- ciling: JAMIE MORTON, COMMANDER. That was me. “I saw an ad for them in the back of o ne of T erry’ s comic books,” she said when I was done screaming with delight. “He didn’t want me to cut it out because he’s a booger—”