Annotation

Stephen King invites readers into the terrible world of the death row prison block, from where they leave never to return, and opens the door to the final refuge of those who have transgressed not only human, but also God's law. There is no deadlier place this side of the electronic chair! Nothing you've ever read before compares to Stephen King's most audacious of horror experiences - a story that begins on the Road of Death and goes deep into the depths of the most monstrous secrets. human soul…

Read Stephen King's bestseller "The Green Mile" - and you will really get scared!

Stephen King

Stephen King

Green Mile

Part 1

Two murdered girls

This happened in 1932, when the state prison was still in Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was, of course, there too.

The prisoners made jokes about the chair in the way people usually make jokes, talking about something that scares them, but which cannot be avoided. They called him Old Sparky or Big Juicy. They made jokes about the electric bill, about how Warden Moores would cook Thanksgiving dinner this fall since his wife, Melinda, was too sick to cook.

For those who actually had to sit on this chair, the humor disappeared at the moment. During my stay in Kholodnaya Gora, I oversaw seventy-eight executions (I never confuse this number; I will remember it on my deathbed) and I think that for most of these people it became clear what was happening to them at the very moment when they ankles were strapped to Old Sparky's powerful oak legs. The understanding came (one could see the realization rising from the depths of the eyes, similar to cold fear) that their own legs had finished their journey. The blood was still running through the veins, the muscles were still strong, but it was all over, they could no longer walk a kilometer across the fields, nor dance with the girls at village festivals. The awareness of approaching death comes to Old Sparky's clients from the ankles. There is also a black silk bag, they put it on their heads after incoherent and inarticulate last words. This bag is supposed to be for them, but I always thought that it was actually for us, so that we would not see the terrible rush of fear in their eyes when they realize that they are about to die with their knees bent.

There was no death row at Kholodnaya Gora, only Block G, standing apart from the others, about four times smaller than the others, brick rather than wood, with a flat metal roof that shone in the summer sun like a mad eye. Inside there are six cells, three on each side of a wide central corridor, and each cell is almost twice the size of the cells in the other four blocks. And all are single. Excellent conditions for a prison (especially in the thirties), but the inhabitants of these cells would give a lot to get into any other one. Honestly, they would have paid dearly.

During my entire service as a warden, all six cells were never filled - and thank God. The maximum was four, there were whites and blacks (there was no racial segregation among the walking dead in Kholodnaya Gora), and it still resembled hell.

One day a woman appeared in the cell - Beverly McCall. She was as black as the queen of spades, and as beautiful as the sin that you will never have enough gunpowder to commit. She put up with the fact that her husband beat her for six years, but could not tolerate even a day of his love affairs. Having learned that her husband was cheating on her, the next evening she lay in wait for poor Lester McCall, whom his friends (and perhaps this very short-lived lover) called the Carver, upstairs on the stairs leading to the apartment from his hairdresser's. She waited until he unbuttoned his robe and then bent down to untie the laces with unsteady hands. And she used one of the Carver's razors. Two days before boarding Old Sparky, she called me and told me that she had seen her African spiritual father in a dream. He told her to give up her slave surname and die under the free surname Matuomi. Her request was that the death warrant be read to her under the name Beverly Matuomi. For some reason she spiritual father didn’t give her a name, or at least she didn’t give it. I replied that, of course, there was no problem. Years of working in prison have taught me not to refuse requests from prisoners, except, of course, for what is really prohibited. In the case of Beverly Matuomi, this no longer mattered. The next day, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, the governor called and commuted her death sentence to life imprisonment in the Grassy Valley Correctional Facility for Women: all confinement and no fun - that was our saying. I was glad, I assure you, when I saw Bev's round butt sway to the left instead of the right as she walked up to the duty desk.

Thirty-five years later, no less, I saw this name in a newspaper on the obituaries page under a photograph of a thin black lady with a cloud gray hair, wearing glasses with rhinestones in the corners of the frames. It was Beverly. She spent the last ten years of her life as a free woman, her obituary said, and she could be said to have saved the library of the small town of Rains Falls. She also taught Sunday school and was loved in this safe haven. The obituary was headlined: “Librarian Died of Heart Failure,” and below it, in small letters, like an afterthought, “Spent more than 20 years in prison for murder.” And only the eyes, wide open and shining behind glasses with stones in the corners, remained the same. The eyes of a woman who, even at seventy-something, if need dictates, will not hesitate to take a razor out of a glass of disinfectant. You always recognize murderers, even if they end their lives as elderly librarians in small sleepy towns. And, of course, you will know if you spent as many years with the murderers as I did. Just once did I think about the nature of my work. That is why I am writing these lines.

The floor in the wide corridor in the center of block "G" was covered with lemon-green linoleum, and what in other prisons was called the Last Mile was called the Green Mile in Kholodnaya Gora. Its length was, I suppose, sixty long steps from south to north, counting from bottom to top. Below was a restraint room. Upstairs there is a T-shaped corridor. Turning left meant life - if you can call it that in the sun-drenched walking yard. And many called it that, many lived that way for years without any visible bad consequences. Thieves, arsonists and rapists with their conversations, walks and small affairs.

Turning right is a completely different matter. First you go into my office (where the carpet is also green, I kept meaning to replace it, but never got around to it) and walk in front of my desk, with an American flag on the left and a state flag on the right. There are two doors on the far wall: one leads to a small toilet, which I and other guards of block "G" (sometimes even Warden Moores) use, the other leads to a small room like a storage room. This is where the path called the Green Mile ends.

The door is small, I have to bend down, and John Coffey even had to sit down and get through. You come to a small area, then go down three concrete steps to a wooden floor. A small room without heating with a metal roof, exactly the same as the one next door in the same block. It's cold in winter, and steam is coming from the mouth, and in summer you can suffocate from the heat. At the time of Elmer Manfred's execution - either in July or August of '30 - the temperature, I think, was about forty degrees Celsius.

On the left in the closet there was life again. Tools (all covered with bars crossed with chains, as if they were carbines rather than shovels and picks), rags, bags of seeds for spring planting in the prison garden, boxes of toilet paper, pallets loaded with forms for the prison printing press... even a bag of lime to mark out the baseball diamond and net on the football field. The prisoners played in the so-called pasture, and therefore many in Kholodnaya Gora were looking forward to the autumn evenings.

On the right is death again. Old Sparky, himself, stands on a wooden platform in the southeast corner, strong oak legs, wide oak armrests that have absorbed the cold sweat of many men in the last moments of their lives, and a metal helmet, usually hanging carelessly on the back of a chair, like baby robot cap from Buck Rogers comics. A wire comes out of it and goes through a sealed hole in the cinder block wall behind the back. On the side is a galvanized bucket. If you look into it, you will see a circle made of sponge exactly the size of a metal helmet. Before execution, it is soaked in brine to better conduct the direct current charge running through the wire through the sponge directly into the brain of the condemned person.

Stephen King

Green Mile

Two murdered girls

This happened in 1932, when the state prison was still in Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was, of course, there too.

The prisoners made jokes about the chair in the way people usually make jokes, talking about something that scares them, but which cannot be avoided. They called him Old Sparky or Big Juicy. They made jokes about the electric bill, about how Warden Moores would cook Thanksgiving dinner this fall since his wife, Melinda, was too sick to cook.

For those who actually had to sit on this chair, the humor disappeared at the moment. During my stay in Kholodnaya Gora, I oversaw seventy-eight executions (I never confuse this number; I will remember it on my deathbed) and I think that for most of these people it became clear what was happening to them at the very moment when they ankles were strapped to Old Sparky's powerful oak legs. The understanding came (one could see the realization rising from the depths of the eyes, similar to cold fear) that their own legs had finished their journey. The blood was still running through the veins, the muscles were still strong, but it was all over, they could no longer walk a kilometer across the fields, nor dance with the girls at village festivals. The awareness of approaching death comes to Old Sparky's clients from the ankles. There is also a black silk bag, which is put on their heads after incoherent and inarticulate last words. This bag is supposed to be for them, but I always thought that it was actually for us, so that we would not see the terrible rush of fear in their eyes when they realize that they are about to die with their knees bent.

There was no death row at Kholodnaya Gora, only Block G, standing apart from the others, about four times smaller than the others, brick rather than wood, with a flat metal roof that shone in the summer sun like a mad eye. Inside there are six cells, three on each side of a wide central corridor, and each cell is almost twice the size of the cells in the other four blocks. And all are single. Excellent conditions for a prison (especially in the thirties), but the inhabitants of these cells would give a lot to get into any other one. Honestly, they would have paid dearly.

During my entire service as a warden, all six cells were never filled - and thank God. The maximum was four, there were whites and blacks (there was no racial segregation among the walking dead in Kholodnaya Gora), and it still resembled hell.

One day a woman appeared in the cell - Beverly McCall. She was as black as the queen of spades, and as beautiful as the sin that you will never have enough gunpowder to commit. She put up with the fact that her husband beat her for six years, but could not tolerate even a day of his love affairs. Having learned that her husband was cheating on her, the next evening she lay in wait for poor Lester McCall, whom his friends (and perhaps this very short-lived lover) called the Carver, upstairs on the stairs leading to the apartment from his hairdresser's. She waited until he unbuttoned his robe and then bent down to untie the laces with unsteady hands. And she used one of the Carver's razors. Two days before boarding Old Sparky, she called me and told me that she had seen her African spiritual father in a dream. He told her to give up her slave surname and die under the free surname Matuomi. Her request was that the death warrant be read to her under the name Beverly Matuomi. For some reason, her spiritual father did not give her a name, or at least she did not name it. I replied that, of course, there was no problem. Years of working in prison have taught me not to refuse requests from prisoners, except, of course, for what is really prohibited. In the case of Beverly Matuomi, this no longer mattered. The next day, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, the governor called and commuted her death sentence to life imprisonment in the Grassy Valley Correctional Facility for Women: all confinement and no fun - that was our saying. I was glad, I assure you, when I saw Bev's round butt sway to the left instead of the right as she walked up to the duty desk.

Thirty-five years later, no less, I saw this name in a newspaper on the obituaries page under a photograph of a thin black lady with a cloud of gray hair, wearing glasses with rhinestones in the corners of the frames. It was Beverly. She spent the last ten years of her life as a free woman, her obituary said, and she could be said to have saved the library of the small town of Rains Falls. She also taught Sunday school and was loved in this safe haven. The obituary was headlined: “Librarian Died of Heart Failure,” and below it, in small letters, like an afterthought, “Spent more than 20 years in prison for murder.” And only the eyes, wide open and shining behind glasses with stones in the corners, remained the same. The eyes of a woman who, even at seventy-something, if need dictates, will not hesitate to take a razor out of a glass of disinfectant. You always recognize murderers, even if they end their lives as elderly librarians in small sleepy towns. And, of course, you will know if you spent as many years with the murderers as I did. Just once did I think about the nature of my work. That is why I am writing these lines.

The floor in the wide corridor in the center of block "G" was covered with lemon-green linoleum, and what in other prisons was called the Last Mile was called the Green Mile in Kholodnaya Gora. Its length was, I suppose, sixty long steps from south to north, counting from bottom to top. Below was a restraint room. Upstairs there is a T-shaped corridor. Turning left meant life - if you can call it that in the sun-drenched walking yard. And many called it that, many lived that way for years without any visible bad consequences. Thieves, arsonists and rapists with their conversations, walks and small affairs.

Turning right is a completely different matter. First you go into my office (where the carpet is also green, I kept meaning to replace it, but never got around to it) and walk in front of my desk, with an American flag on the left and a state flag on the right. There are two doors on the far wall: one leads to a small toilet, which I and other guards of block "G" (sometimes even Warden Moores) use, the other leads to a small room like a storage room. This is where the path called the Green Mile ends.

The door is small, I have to bend down, and John Coffey even had to sit down and get through. You come to a small area, then go down three concrete steps to a wooden floor. A small room without heating with a metal roof, exactly the same as the one next door in the same block. In winter it is cold and steam comes out of your mouth, and in summer you can suffocate from the heat. At the time of Elmer Manfred's execution - either in July or August of '30 - the temperature, I think, was about forty degrees Celsius.

On the left in the closet there was life again. Tools (all covered with bars crossed with chains, as if they were carabiners rather than shovels and picks), rags, bags of seeds for spring planting in the prison garden, boxes of toilet paper, pallets loaded with forms for the prison printing press... even a bag of lime for marking out a baseball diamond diamond and net on a football field. The prisoners played in the so-called pasture, and therefore many in Kholodnaya Gora were looking forward to the autumn evenings.

On the right is death again. Old Sparky, himself, stands on a wooden platform in the southeast corner, strong oak legs, wide oak armrests that have absorbed the cold sweat of many men in the last moments of their lives, and a metal helmet, usually hanging carelessly on the back of a chair, like baby robot cap from Buck Rogers comics. A wire comes out of it and goes through a sealed hole in the cinder block wall behind the back. On the side is a galvanized bucket. If you look into it, you will see a circle made of sponge exactly the size of a metal helmet. Before execution, it is soaked in brine to better conduct the direct current charge running through the wire through the sponge directly into the brain of the condemned person.

1932 was the year of John Coffey. The details were published in the newspapers, and anyone wondering who has more energy than a very old man living out his days in a Georgia nursing home can look them up now. It was a hot autumn then, I remember exactly, very hot. October - almost like August, then Melinda, the wife of the prison warden, ended up with an attack in the hospital in Indianola. That fall, I had the worst urinary tract infection of my life, not bad enough to go to the hospital, but terrible enough for me, because every time I relieved myself, I wished I had died. It was the fall of Delacroix, a small, half-bald Frenchman with a mouse, he appeared in the summer and did a cool trick with a reel. But most of all, it was the fall when John Coffey appeared in G Block, sentenced to death for the rape and murder of the Detterick twin girls.

Part 1.

TWO KILLED GIRLS

1.

This happened in 1932, when the state prison was still in Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was, of course, there too.

The prisoners made jokes about the chair in the way people usually make jokes, talking about something that scares them, but which cannot be avoided. They called him Old Sparky or Big Juicy. They made jokes about the electric bill, about how Warden Moores would cook Thanksgiving dinner this fall since his wife, Melinda, was too sick to cook.

For those who actually had to sit on this chair, the humor disappeared at the moment. During my stay in Kholodnaya Gora, I oversaw eight executions in the seventies (I never confuse this number, I will remember it on my deathbed) and I think that for most of these people it became clear what was happening to them precisely at the moment when they ankles were strapped to Old Sparky's powerful oak legs. The understanding came (one could see the realization rising from the depths of the eyes, similar to cold fear) that their own legs had finished their journey. The blood was still running through the veins, the muscles were still strong, but it was all over, they could no longer walk a kilometer across the fields, nor dance with the girls at village festivals. The awareness of approaching death comes to Old Sparky's clients from the ankles. There is also a black silk bag, which is put on their heads after incoherent and inarticulate last words. This bag is supposed to be for them, but I always thought that it was actually for us, so that we would not see the terrible rush of fear in their eyes when they realize that they are about to die with their knees bent.

There was no death row at Kholodnaya Gora, only Block G, standing apart from the others, about four times smaller than the others, brick rather than wood, with a flat metal roof that shone in the summer sun like a mad eye. Inside there are six cells, three on each side of a wide central corridor, and each cell is almost twice the size of the cells in the other four blocks. And all are single. Excellent conditions for a prison (especially in the thirties), but the inhabitants of these cells would give a lot to get into any other one. Honestly, they would have paid dearly.

During my entire service as a warden, all six cells were never filled - and thank God. The maximum was four, there were whites and blacks (there was no racial segregation among the walking dead in Kholodnaya Gora), and it still resembled hell.

One day a woman appeared in the cell - Beverly McCall. She was as black as the queen of spades, and as beautiful as the sin that you will never have enough gunpowder to commit. She put up with the fact that her husband beat her for six years, but could not tolerate even a day of his love affairs. Having learned that her husband was cheating on her, the next evening she lay in wait for poor Lester McCall, whom his friends (and perhaps this very short-lived lover) called the Carver, upstairs on the stairs leading to the apartment from his hairdresser's. She waited until he unbuttoned his robe and then bent down to untie the laces with unsteady hands. And she used one of the Carver's razors. Two days before boarding Old Sparky, she called me and told me that she had seen her African spiritual father in a dream. He told her to give up her slave surname and die under the free surname Matuomi. Her request was that the death warrant be read to her under the name Beverly Matuomi. For some reason, her spiritual father did not give her a name, or at least she did not name it. I replied that, of course, there was no problem. Years of working in prison have taught me not to refuse requests from prisoners, except, of course, for what is really prohibited. In the case of Beverly Matuomi, this no longer mattered. The next day, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, the governor called and commuted her death sentence to life imprisonment in the Grassy Valley Correctional Facility for Women: all confinement and no fun - that was our saying.

Review of the novel " Green Mile"by Stephen King, written as part of the "My Favorite Book" competition. Review author: Elena Filchenko. Elena's other works:
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"The Green Mile" is one of the best, if not the best, of the works.
In fact, in this novel you will find not so much horror as drama. The drama is endless kind person who wanted to help people. However, by the will of circumstances, he found himself behind bars and sentenced to terrible death. He awaits the sacred hour with incredible calm and humility. He tries to make the lives of all the inhabitants of the block at least a little better.

A slight touch of mysticism (in this novel it lies only in the unusual gift of John Coffey) only gives the novel additional poignancy and does not at all obscure the realism of what is happening. The author's language is figurative and vivid. However, as always. The characters pass before your eyes as if they were alive.

A work that makes the reader freeze with a palm pressed to his mouth, with eyes widened in amazement, with the thought that you are powerless: you can’t change anything, you can’t help the hero, is worth a lot.

It is simply impossible to tear yourself away from this thing. Yes, and you shouldn’t do this. “The Green Mile” gives you the opportunity to take another look at life with all its cruelties and injustices, without closing your eyes.

“What do you think, Mr. Edgecombe,” he asked me, “if a person sincerely repents of what he has done, can he return to the time when he felt at the height of happiness and live in it forever? Maybe this is Paradise?

Do you think humanity needed the death penalty? Is it needed now? Does a person who took the life of another deserve to lose his own? And can the death sentence be carried out? ordinary people, if this is their... job?

We learn the answers to these questions from Paul Edgecombe, who in 1932 was the senior warden of cell block E. This is the place where they while away their lives. last days those who were sentenced to death in the electric chair. Once they've walked their Green Mile, they won't come back. Paul's duty is to carry out executions along with other guards. And it seemed to me that it was not the execution process itself that was terrible, it was the rehearsal that was more terrible. What is hopelessly frightening is the fact that even the death of a person (without the participation of the person himself) needs to be rehearsed so that everything happens exactly on time, without delay and as needed.

"Dead Man Walking!"

We can’t help but mention John Coffey, whose last name sounds just like a drink, only the letters are different. The story of this big guy can't just get out of your head. From the very beginning, it is surprising that he could commit any crime, much less kill and rape two little girls. “I couldn't do anything about it. I tried to push it back, but it was too late.” But a great gift could have helped many people, however, it became only a punishment.

Edouard Delacroix evokes sympathy. Watching how he trained the mouse - Mr. Jingles, it completely disappears from my mind that he also ended up in prison for a reason, and the murders follow after him.

Paul Edgecombe attended 78 executions. We will visit several, but this will be enough. How did the man feel while going through his last way to Staraya Zamykalka? Fear, anxiety, remorse, indifference? And what did the people who passed this judgment on life feel by signing a paper or pressing a lever?

Part 1.
TWO KILLED GIRLS.

1.

This happened in 1932, when the state prison was still in Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was, of course, there too.

The prisoners made jokes about the chair in the way people usually make jokes, talking about something that scares them, but which cannot be avoided. They called him Old Sparky or Big Juicy. They made jokes about the electric bill, about how Warden Moores would cook Thanksgiving dinner this fall since his wife, Melinda, was too sick to cook.

For those who actually had to sit on this chair, the humor disappeared at the moment. During my stay in Kholodnaya Gora, I oversaw eight executions in the seventies (I never confuse this number, I will remember it on my deathbed) and I think that for most of these people it became clear what was happening to them precisely at the moment when they ankles were strapped to Old Sparky's powerful oak legs. The understanding came (one could see the realization rising from the depths of the eyes, similar to cold fear) that their own legs had finished their journey. The blood was still running through the veins, the muscles were still strong, but it was all over, they could no longer walk a kilometer across the fields, nor dance with the girls at village festivals. The awareness of approaching death comes to Old Sparky's clients from the ankles. There is also a black silk bag, which is put on their heads after incoherent and inarticulate last words. This bag is supposed to be for them, but I always thought that it was actually for us, so that we would not see the terrible rush of fear in their eyes when they realize that they are about to die with their knees bent.

There was no death row at Kholodnaya Gora, only Block G, standing apart from the others, about four times smaller than the others, brick rather than wood, with a flat metal roof that shone in the summer sun like a mad eye. Inside there are six cells, three on each side of a wide central corridor, and each cell is almost twice the size of the cells in the other four blocks. And all are single. Excellent conditions for a prison (especially in the thirties), but the inhabitants of these cells would give a lot to get into any other one. Honestly, they would have paid dearly.

During my entire service as a warden, all six cells were never filled - and thank God. The maximum was four, there were whites and blacks (there was no racial segregation among the walking dead in Kholodnaya Gora), and it still resembled hell.

One day a woman appeared in the cell - Beverly McCall. She was as black as the queen of spades, and as beautiful as the sin that you will never have enough gunpowder to commit. She put up with the fact that her husband beat her for six years, but could not tolerate even a day of his love affairs. Having learned that her husband was cheating on her, the next evening she lay in wait for poor Lester McCall, whom his friends (and perhaps this very short-lived lover) called the Carver, upstairs on the stairs leading to the apartment from his hairdresser's. She waited until he unbuttoned his robe and then bent down to untie the laces with unsteady hands. And she used one of the Carver's razors. Two days before boarding Old Sparky, she called me and told me that she had seen her African spiritual father in a dream. He told her to give up her slave surname and die under the free surname Matuomi. Her request was that the death warrant be read to her under the name Beverly Matuomi. For some reason, her spiritual father did not give her a name, or at least she did not name it. I replied that, of course, there was no problem. Years of working in prison have taught me not to refuse requests from prisoners, except, of course, for what is really prohibited. In the case of Beverly Matuomi, this no longer mattered. The next day, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, the governor called and commuted her death sentence to life imprisonment in the Grassy Valley Correctional Facility for Women: all confinement and no fun - that was our saying. I was glad, I assure you, when I saw Bev's round butt sway to the left instead of the right as she walked up to the duty desk.

Thirty-five years later, no less, I saw this name in a newspaper on the obituaries page under a photograph of a thin black lady with a cloud of gray hair, wearing glasses with rhinestones in the corners of the frames. It was Beverly. She spent the last ten years of her life as a free woman, her obituary said, and she could be said to have saved the library of the small town of Rains Falls. She also taught Sunday school and was loved in this safe haven. The obituary was headlined: “Librarian Died of Heart Failure,” and below it, in small letters, like an afterthought, “Spent more than 20 years in prison for murder.” And only the eyes, wide open and shining behind glasses with stones in the corners, remained the same. The eyes of a woman who, even at seventy-something, if need dictates, will not hesitate to take a razor out of a glass of disinfectant. You always recognize murderers, even if they end their lives as elderly librarians in small sleepy towns. And, of course, you will know if you spent as many years with the murderers as I did. Just once did I think about the nature of my work. That is why I am writing these lines.

The floor in the wide corridor in the center of block "G" was covered with lemon-green linoleum, and what in other prisons was called the Last Mile was called the Green Mile in Kholodnaya Gora. Its length was, I suppose, sixty long steps from south to north, counting from bottom to top. Below was a restraint room. Upstairs there is a T-shaped corridor. Turning left meant life - if you can call it that in the sun-drenched walking yard. And many called it that, many lived that way for years without any visible bad consequences. Thieves, arsonists and rapists with their conversations, walks and small affairs.