The Collective

STEPHEN KING

The Collective

A collection of Poems, Short Stories, and other

Works by Stephen King

Phantom Press

2000

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This collection is a work in progress. As more items are

discovered, they will be added. All items in this book are short

stories, poems, and other items published by Stephen king, but not

found in any book released by his publishing company at this point

in time. The purpose of this book is to have one archive for all of

the material.

xxXsTmXxx

THIS COPY IS DATED:

06/2000

FOR

PATTY

STEPHEN

KING

An Evening at GODs

A one minit play, 1990

DARK STAGE. Then a spotlight hits a papier-mache globe,

spinning all by itself in the middle of darkness. Little by little, the

stage lights COME UP, and we see a bare-stage representation of a

living room: an easy chair with a table beside it (there's an open

bottle of beer on the table), and a console TV across the room.

There's a picnic cooler-full of beer under the table. Also, a great

many empties. GOD is feeling pretty good. At stage left, there's a

door.

GOD a big guy with a white beard is sitting in the chair,

alternately reading a book (When Bad Things Happen to Good

People) and watching the tube. He has to crane whenever he wants

to look at the set, because the floating globe (actually hung on a

length of string, I imagine) is in his line of vision. There's a sitcom

on TV. Every now and then GOD chuckles along with the laugh-

track.

There is a knock at the door.

GOD (big amplified voice)

Come in! Verily, it is open unto you!

The door opens. In comes ST. PETER, dressed in a snazzy white

robe. He's also carrying a briefcase.

GOD

Peter! I thought you were on vacation!

ST. PETER

Leaving in half an hour, but I thought I'd bring the papers for you

to sign.

How are you, GOD?

GOD

Better. I should know better than to eat those chili peppers. They

burn me at both ends. Are those the letters of transmission from

hell?

ST. PETER

Yes, finally. Thank GOD. Excuse the pun.

He removes some papers from his briefcase. GOD scans them,

then holds out his hand impatiently, ST PETER has been looking

at the floating globe. He looks back, sees GOD is waiting, and puts

a pen in his out-stretched hand. GOD scribbles his signature. As he

does, ST. PETER goes back to gazing at the globe.

ST. PETER

So Earth's still there, Huh? After All these years.

GOD hands the papers back and looks up at it. His gaze is rather

irritated.

GOD

Yes, the housekeeper is the most forgetful bitch in the universe.

An EXPLOSION OF LAUGHTER from the TV. GOD cranes to

see. Too late.

GOD

Damm, was that Alan Alda?

ST. PETER

It may have been, sir I really couldn't see.

GOD

Me, either.

He leans forward and crushes the floating globe to powder.

GOD (inmensely satisfied)

There. Been meaning to do that for a long time. Now I can see the

TV..

ST. PETER looks sadly at the crushed remains of the earth.

ST. PETER

Umm... I believe that was Alan Alda's world, GOD.

GOD

So? (Chuckles at the TV) Robin Williams! I LOVE Robin

Williams!

ST. PETER

I believe both Alda and Williams were on it when

you..umm...passed Judgement, sir.

GOD

Oh, I've got all the videotapes. No problem. Want a beer?

As ST. PETER takes one, the stage-lights begin to dim. A spotlight

come up on the remains on the globe.

ST. PETER

I actually sort of liked that one, GOD Earth, I mean.

GOD

It wasn't bad, but there's more where that came from. Now let's

Drink to your vacation!

They are just shadows in the dimness now, although it's a little

easier to see GOD, because there's a faint nimbus of light around

his head. They clink bottles. A roar of laughter from the TV.

GOD

Look! It's Richard Pryor! That guy kills me! I suppose he was...

ST. PETER

Ummm... yessir.

GOD

Shit. (Pause) Maybe I better cut Down on my drinking. (Pause)

Still... It WAS in the way.

Fade to black, except for the spotlight on the ruins of the floating

globe.

ST. PETER

Yessir.

GOD (muttering)

My son got back, didn't he?

ST. PETER

Yessir, some time ago.

GOD

Good. Everything's hunky-dory, then.

THE SPOTLIGHT GOES OUT.

(Author's note: GOD'S VOICE should be as loud as possible.)

Before The Play

Stephen King

Copyright 1982 by Stephen King.

'Before the Play,' was first published in Whispers,

Vol. 5, No. 1-2, August 1982.

A BEDROOM IN THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING

Coming here had been a mistake, and Lottie Kilgallon didn't like to

admit her mistakes.

And I won't admit this one, she thought with determination as she

stared up at the ceiling that glimmered overhead

Her husband of 10 days slumbered beside hen Sleeping the sleep

of the just was how some might have put it. Others, more honest,

might have called it the sleep of the monumentally stupid. He was

William Pillsbury of the Westchester Pillsburys, only son and heir

of Harold M. Pillsbury, old and comfortable money. Publishing

was what they liked to talk about because publishing was a

gentleman's profession, but there was also a chain of New England

textile mills, a foundry in Ohio, and extensive agricultural holdings

in the South - cotton and citrus and fruit. Old money was always

better than nouveau riche, but either way they had money falling

out of their assholes. If she ever said that aloud to Bill, he would

undoubtedly go pale and might even faint dead away No fear, Bill.

Profanation of the Pillsbury family shall never cross my lips.

It had been her idea to honeymoon at the Overlook in Colorado,

and there had been two reasons for this. First, although it was

tremendously expensive (as the best resorts were), it was not a

"hep" place to go, and Lottie did not like to go to the hep places.

Where did you go on your honeymoon. Lottie? Oh, this perfectly,

wonderful resort hotel in Colorado - the Overlook. Lovely place.

Quite out of the way but so romantic. And her friends - whose

stupidity was exceeded in most cases only by that of William

Pillsbury- himself - would look at her in dumb - literally! - wonder.

Lottie had done it again.

Her second reason had been of more personal importance. She had

wanted to honeymoon at the Overlook because Bill wanted to go to

Rome. It was imperative to find out certain things as soon as

possible. Would she be able to have her own way immediately?

And if not, how long would it take to grind him down? He was

stupid, and he had followed her around like a dog with its tongue

hanging out since her debutante ball, but would he be as malleable

after the ring was slipped on as he had been before?

Lottie smiled a little in the dark despite her lack of sleep and the

bad dreams she had had since they arrived here. Arrived here, that

was the key phrase. "Here" was not the American Hotel in Rome

but the Overlook in Colorado. She was going to be able to manage

him just fine, and that was the important thing. She would only

make him stay another four days (she had originally planned on

three weeks, but the bad dreams had changed that), and then they

could go back to New York. After all, that was where the action

was in this August of 1929. The stock market was going crazy, the

sky was the limit, and Lottie expected to be an heiress to

multimillions instead of just one or two million by this time next

year. Of course there were some weak sisters who claimed the

market was riding for a fall, but no one had ever called Lottie

Kilgallon a weak sister.

Lottie Kilgallon. Pillsbury now at least that's the way I'll have to

sign my checks, of course. But inside I'll always be Lottie

Kilgallon. Because he's never going to touch me Not inside where

it counts.

The most tiresome thing about this first contest of her marriage

was that Bill actually liked the Overlook. He was up even, day at

two minutes past the crack of dawn, disturbing what ragged bits of

sleep she had managed after the restless nights, staring eagerly out

at the sunrise like some sort of disgusting Greek nature boy. He

had been hiking two or three times, he had gone on several nature

rides with other guests, and bored her almost to the point of

screaming with stories about the horse he rode on these jaunts, a

bay mare named Tessie. He had tried to get her to go on these

outings with him, but Lottie refused. Riding meant slacks, and her

posterior was just a trifle too-wide for slacks. The idiot had also

suggested that she go hiking with him and some of the others - the

caretaker's son doubled as a guide, Bill enthused, and he knew a

hundred trails. The amount of game you saw, Bill said, would

make you think it was 1829, instead of a hundred years later. Lottie

had dumped cold water on this idea too.

"I believe, darling, that all hikes should be one-way, you see."

"One-way?" His wide Anglo-Saxon brow crippled and croggled

into its usual expression of befuddlement. "How can you have a

one-way hike, Lottie?"

"By hailing a taxi to take you home when your feet begin to hurt,"

she replied coldly,

The barb was wasted. He went without her, and came back

glowing. The stupid bastard was getting a tan.

She had not even enjoyed their evenings of bridge in the

downstairs recreation room, and that was most unlike her. She was

something of a barracuda at bridge, and if it had been ladylike to

play for stakes in mixed company, she could have brought a cash

dowry to her marriage (not that she would have, of course). Bill

was a good bridge partner, too; he had both qualifications: He

understood the basic rules and he allowed Lottie to dominate him.

She thought it was poetic justice that her new husband spent most

of their bridge evenings as the dummy.

Their partners at the Overlook were the Compsons occasionally,

the Vereckers more frequently. Dr. Verecker was in his early 70s, a

surgeon who had retired after a near-fatal heart attack. His wife

smiled a lot, spoke softly, and had eyes like shiny nickels. They

played only adequate bridge, but they kept beating Lottie and Bill.

On the occasions when the men played against the women, the

men ended up trouncing Lottie and Malvina Verecker. When

Lottie and Dr. Verecker played Bill and Malvina, she and the

doctor usually won, but there was no pleasure in it because Bill

was a dullard and Malvina, could not see the game of bridge as

anything but a social tool.

Two nights before, after the doctor and his wife had made a bid of

four clubs that, they had absolutely no right to make, Lottie had

mussed the cards in a sudden flash of pique that was very unlike

her. She usually kept her feelings under much better control.

"You could have led into my spades on that third trick!" she rattled

at Bill. "That would have put a stop to it right there!"

"But dear," said Bill, flustered , "I thought you were thin in

spades."

'If I had been thin in spades, I shouldn't have bid two of them,

should I? Why I continue to play this game with you I don't.

know!"

The Vereckers blinked at them in mild surprise. Later that evening

Mrs. Verecker, she of the nickel-bright eyes, would tell her

husband that she had thought them such a nice couple, so loving,

but when she rumpled the cards like that she had looked just like a

shrew.

Bill was staring at her with jaws agape.

"I'm very sorry," said Lottie, gathering up the reins of her control

and giving them an inward shake. "I'm off my feed a little, I

suppose. I haven't been sleeping well."

"That's a pity," said the doctor. "Usually this mountain air-we're

almost 12,000 feet above sea level, you know is very conducive to

good rest. Less oxygen, you know. The body doesn't-"

"I've had bad dreams," Lottie told him shortly.

And so she had. Not just bad dreams but nightmares. She had

never been much of one to dream (which said something

disgusting and Freudian about, her psyche, no doubt), even as a

child. Oh, yes, there had been some pretty humdrum affairs, mostly

he only one she could remember that, came even close to being a

nightmare was one in which she had been delivering a Good

Citizenship speech at the school assembly and had looked down to

discover she had forgotten to put on her dress. Later someone had

told her almost everyone had a dream like that at some point or

another.

The dreams she had had at the Overlook were much worse. It was

not a case of one dream or two repeating themselves with

variations; they were all different. Only the setting of each was

similar: In each one she found herself in a different part of the

Overlook Hotel. Each dream would begin with an awareness on

her part that she was dreaming and that something terrible and

frightening was going to happen to her in the course of the dream.

There was an inevitability about it that was particularly awful.

In one of them she had been hurrying for the elevator because she

was late for dinner, so late that Bill had already gone down before

her in a temper.

She rang for the elevator, which came promptly and was empty

except for the operator. She thought too late that it was odd; at

mealtimes you could barely wedge yourself in. The stupid hotel

was only half full, but the elevator had a ridiculously small

capacity. Her unease heightened as the elevator descended and

continued to descend ... for far too long a time. Surely they must

have reached the lobby or even the basement by now, and still the

operator did not open the doors, and still the sensation of

downward motion continued. She tapped him on the shoulder with

mixed feelings of indignation and panic, aware too late of how

spongy he felt, how strange, like a scarecrow stuffed with rotten

straw. And as he turned his head and grinned at her she saw that

the elevator was being piloted by a dead man, his face a greenish-

white corpselike hue, Ms eyes sunken, his hair under his cap

lifeless and sere. The fingers wrapped around the switch were

fallen away to bones.

Even as she filled her lungs to shriek, the corpse threw the switch

over and uttered, "Your floor, madam," in a husky, empty voice.

The door drew open to reveal flames and basalt plateaus and the

stench of brimstone. The elevator operator had taken her to hell.

In another dream it was near the end of the afternoon and she was

on the playground. The light was curiously golden, although the

sky overhead was black with thunderheads. Membranes of shower

danced between two of the saw-toothed peaks further west. It was

like a Brueghel, a moment of sunshine and low pressure. And she

felt something beside her. Moving. Something in the topiary. And

she turned to see with frozen horror that it was the topiary: The

hedge animals had left their places and were creeping toward her,

the lions, the buffalo, even the rabbit that usually looked so comic

and friendly. Their horrid hedge features were bent on her as they

moved slowly toward the playground on their hedge paws, green

and silent and deadly under the black thunderheads.

In the one she had just awakened from, the hotel had been on fire.

She had awakened in their room to find Bill gone and smoke

drifting slowly through the apartment. She fled in her nightgown

but lost her direction in the narrow halls, which were obscured by

smoke. All the numbers seemed to be gone from the doors, and

there was no way to tell if you were running toward the stairwell

and elevator or away from them. She rounded a corner and saw

Bill standing outside the window at the end, motioning her

forward. Somehow she had run all the way to the back of the hotel;

he was standing out there on the fire escape landing. Now there

was heat baking into her back through the thin, filmy stuff of her

nightgown. The place must be in flames behind her, she thought.

Perhaps it had been the boiler. You had to keep an. eye on the

boiler, because if you didn't, she would creep on you. Lottie

started forward and suddenly something wrapped around her arm

like a python, holding her back. It was one of the fire hoses she had

seen along the corridor walls, white canvas hose in a bright red

frame. It had come alive somehow, and it writhed and coiled

around her, now securing a leg, now her other arm. She was held

fast and it was getting hotter, hotter. She could hear the angry

crackle of the flames now only feet behind her. The wallpaper was

peeling and blistering. Bill was gone from the fire-escape landing.

And then she had been-

She had been awake in the big double bed, no smell of smoke, with

Bill Pillsbury sleeping the sleep of the justly stupid beside her. She

was running sweat, and if it, weren't so late she would get up to

shower. It was quarter past three in the morning.

Dr. Verecker had offered to give her a sleeping medicine, but

Lottie had refused. She distrusted any concoction you put in your

body to knock out your mind. It was like giving up command of

your ship voluntarily, and she had sworn to herself that she would

never do that.

But what would she do for the next four clays? Well, Verecker

played shuffleboard in the mornings with his nickeleyed wife.

Perhaps she would look him up and get the prescription after all.

Lottie looked up at the white ceiling high above her, glimmering

ghostlike, and admitted again that the Overlook had been a very

bad mistake. None of the ads for the Overlook in the New Yorker

or The American Mercury mentioned that the place's real specialty

seemed to be giving people the whimwhams. Four more days, and

that was plenty. It had been a mistake, all right, but a mistake she

would never admit, or have to admit. In fact, she was sure she

could.

You had to keep an eye on the boiler, because if you didn't., she

would creep up on you. What did that mean, anyway? Or was it

just one of those nonsensical things that sometimes came to you in

dreams, so much gibberish? Of course, there was undoubtedly a

boiler in the basement or somewhere to heat the place; even

summer resorts had to have heat, sometimes, didn't they? If only to

supply hot water. But creep? Would a boiler creep?

You had to keep an, eye on, the boiler.

It was like one of those crazy riddles:

Why is a mouse when it runs, when is a raven like a writing desk,

what is a creeping boiler? Was it, like the hedges, maybe? She'd

had a dream where the hedges crept. And the fire hose that had

what - what? - slithered?

A chill touched her. It was not good to think much about the

dreams in the night, in the dark. You could ... well, you could

bother yourself. It was better to think about the things you would

be doing when you got back to New York, about how you were

going to convince Bill that a baby was a bad idea for a while, until

he got firmly settled in the vice presidency his father had awarded

him as a wedding present-

She'll creep on you.

- and how you were going to encourage him to bring his work

home so he would get used to the idea that she was going to be

involved with it, very much involved.

Or did the whole hotel, creep? Was that the answer?

I'll make him a good wife, Lottie thought frantically. We'll work at

it the same way we always worked at being bridge partners. He

knows the rules of the game and he knows enough to let me run

him. It will be just like the bridge, just like that, and if we've been

off our game up here that, doesn't mean anything, it's just the hotel,

the dreams-

An affirming voice: That's it. The whole place. It... creeps.

"Oh, shit," Lottie Kilgallon whispered in the dark. It was

dismaying for her to realize just how badly her nerves were shot.

As on the other nights, there would be no more sleep for her now.

She would lie here in bed until the sun started to come up and then

she would get an uneasy hour or so.

Smoking in bed was a bad habit, a terrible habit., but she had

begun to leave her cigarettes in an ashtray on the floor by the bed

in case of the dreams. Sometimes it calmed her. She reached down

to get the ashtray and the thought burst on her like a revelation:

It does creep, the whole place - like it's alive!

And that was when the hand reached out unseen from under the

bed and gripped her wrist firmly ... almost lecherously. A

fingerlike canvas scratched suggestively against her palm and

something was under there, something had been under there the

whole time, and Lottie began to scream. She screamed until her

throat was raw and hoarse and her eyes were bulging from her face

and Bill was awake and pallid with terror beside her.

When he put on the lamp she leaped from the bed, retreated into

the farthest corner of the room and curled up with her thumb in her

mouth.

Both Bill and Dr. Verecker tried to find out what was wrong; she

told them but she was still sucking her thumb, so it was some time

before they realized she was saying, "It crept under the bed. It

crept under the bed."

And even though they flipped up the coverlet and Bill actually

lifted up the whole bed by its foot off the floor to show her there

was nothing under there, not even a litter of dust kitties, she would

not come out of the corner. When the sun came up, she did at last

come out of the corner. She took her thumb out of her mouth. She

stayed away from the bed. She stared at, Bill Pillsbury from her

clown-white face.

"We're going back to New York," she said. "This morning."

"Of course," Bill muttered. "Of course, dear."

Bill Pillsbury's father died of a heart attack two weeks after the

stock-market crash. Bill and Lottie could not keep the company's

head above water. Things went from bad to worse. In the years that

followed she thought often of their honeymoon at the Overlook

Hotel, and the dreams, and the canvas hand that had crept out from

under the bed to squeeze her own. She thought about those things

more and more. She committed suicide in a Yonkers motel room in

1949, a woman who was prematurely gray and prematurely lined.

It had been 20 years and the hand that had gripped her wrist when

she reached down to get her cigarettes had never really let go. She

left a one-sentence suicide note written on Holiday Inn stationery.

The note said: "I wish we had gone to Rome."

AND NOW THIS WORD FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE

In that long, hot summer of 1953, the summer Jacky Torrance

turned 6, his father came home one night from the hospital and

broke Jacky's arm. He almost killed the boy. He was drunk.

Jacky was sitting on the front porch reading a Combat Casey

comic book when his father came down the street, listing to one

side, torpedoed by beer somewhere down the line. As he always

did, the boy felt a mixture of love-hate-fear rise in his chest at the

sight of the old man, who looked like a giant, malevolent ghost in

his hospital whites. Jacky's father was an orderly at the Berlin

Community Hospital. He was like God, like Nature-sometimes

lovable, sometimes terrible. You never knew which it would be.

Jacky's mother feared and served him. Jacky's brothers hated him.

Only Jacky, of all of them, still loved him in spite of the fear and

the hate, and sometimes the volatile mixture of emotions made him

want to cry out at the sight of his father coming, to simply cry out:

"I love you, Daddy! Go away! Hug me! I'll kill you! I'm so afraid

of you! I need you!" And his father seemed to sense in his stupid

way-he was a stupid man, and selfish - that all of them had gone

beyond him but Jacky, the youngest, knew that the only way he

could touch the others was to bludgeon them to attention. But with

Jacky there was still love, and there had been times when he had

cuffed the boy's mouth into running blood and then hugged him

with a frightful force, the killing force just, barely held back by

some other thing, and Jackie would let himself be hugged deep into

the atmosphere of malt and hops that hung around his old man

forever, quailing, loving, fearing.

He leaped off the step and ran halfway down the path before

something stopped him.

"Daddy?" he said. "Where's the car?"

Torrance came toward him, and Jacky saw how very drunk he was.

"Wrecked it up," he said thickly.

"Oh..." Careful now. Careful what you say. For your life, be

careful. "That's too bad"

His father stopped and regarded Jacky from his stupid pig eyes.

Jacky held his breath. Somewhere behind his father's brow, under

the lawn-mowered brush of his crew cut, the scales were turning.

The hot, afternoon stood still while Jacky waited, staring up

anxiously into his father's face to see if his father would throw a

rough bear arm around his shoulder, grinding Jacky's cheek against

the rough, cracked leather of the belt that held up his white pants

and say, "Walk with me into the house, big boy." in the hard and

contemptuous way that was the only way he could even approach

love without destroying himself - or if it would be something else.

Tonight it was something else.

The thunderheads appeared on his father's brow. "What do you

mean, 'That's too bad'? What kind of shit is that?"

"Just...too bad, Daddy. That's all I meant. it's-"

Torrance's hand swept out at the end of his arm, huge hand,

hamhock arm, but speedy, yes, very speedy, and Jacky went down

with church bells in his head and a split lip.

"Shutup" his father said, giving it a broad A.

Jacky said nothing. Nothing would do any good now. The balance

had swung the wrong way.

"You ain't gonna sass me," said Torrance. "You won't sass your

daddy. Get up here and take your medicine."

There was something in his face this time, some dark and blazing

thing. And Jacky suddenly knew that this time there might be no

hug at the end of the blows, and if there was he might, be

unconscious and unknowing ... maybe even dead.

He ran.

Behind him, his father let out a bellow of rage and chased him., a

flapping specter in hospital whites, a juggernaut of doom following

his son from the front yard to the back.

Jacky ran for his life. The tree house, he was thinking. He can't get

up there; the ladder nailed to the tree won't hold him. I'll get up

there, talk to him; maybe he'll go to sleep - Oh, God, please let him

go to sleep - he was weeping in terror as he ran.

"Come back here, goddammit!" His father was roaring behind him.

"Come back here and take your medicine! Take it like a man!"

Jacky flashed past the back steps. His mother, that thin and

defeated woman, scrawny in a faded housedress, had come out

through the screen door from the kitchen, just as Jacky ran past

with his father in pursuit. She opened her mouth as if to speak or

cry out, but her hand came up in a fist and stopped whatever she

might have said, kept it safely behind her teeth. She was afraid for

her son, but more afraid that her husband would turn on her.

"No, you don't! Come back here!"

Jacky reached the large elm in the backyard, the elm where last

year his father had smoke-drugged a colony of wasps then burned

their nest with gasoline. The boy went up the haphazardly hung

nailed-on rungs like greased lightning, and still he was nearly not

fast enough. His father's clutching, enraged hand grasped the boy's

ankle in a grip like flexed steel, then slipped a little and succeeded

only in pulling off Jacky's loafer. Jacky went up the last, three

rungs and crouched on the floor of the tree house, 12 feet above the

ground, panting and crying on his hands and knees.

His father seemed to go crazy. He danced around the tree like an

Indian, Bellowing his rage. He slammed his fists into the tree,

making bark fly and bringing lattices of blood to his knuckles. He

kicked it. His huge moon face was white with frustration and red

with anger.

"Please, Daddy," Jacky moaned. "Whatever I said ... I'm sorry I

said it..."

"Come down! You come down out of there take your fucking

medicine, you little cur! Right now!"

"I Will ... I will If you promise not to ... to hit me too hard ... not

hurt me... just spank me but not hurt me..."

"Get out of that tree!" his father screamed.

Jacky looked toward the house but that was hopeless. His mother

had retreated somewhere far away, to neutral ground.

"GET OUT RIGHT NOW!"

"Oh, Daddy, I don't dare!" Jacky cried out, and that was the truth.

Because now his father might kill him.

There was a period of stalemate. A minute, perhaps, or perhaps

two. His father circled the tree, puffing and blowing like a whale.

Jacky turned around and around on his hands and knees, following

the movements. They were like parts of a visible clock.

The second or third time he came back to the ladder nailed to the

tree, Torrance stopped. He looked speculatively at the ladder. And

laid his hands on the rung before his eyes. He began to climb.

"No, Daddy, it won't hold you," Jacky whispered.

But his father came on relentlessly, like fate, like death, like doom.

Up and up, closer to the tree house. One rung snapped off under

his hands and he almost fell but caught the next one with a grunt

and a lunge. Another one of the rungs twisted around from the

horizontal to the perpendicular under his weight with a rasping

scream of pulling nails, but it did not give way, and then the

working, congested face was visible over the edge of the tree-

house floor, and for that one moment of his childhood Jack

Torrance had his father at bay; if he could have kicked that face

with the foot that still wore its loafer, kicked it where the nose

terminated between the piggy eyes, he could have driven his father

backward off the ladder, perhaps killed him (If he had killed him,

would anyone have said anything but Thanks, Jacky"?) But it was

love that stopped him, and love that, let him just his face in his

hands and give up as first one of his father's pudgy, short-fingered

hands appeared on the boards and then the other.

"Now, by God," his father breathed. He stood above his huddled

son like a giant.

"Oh, Daddy," Jacky mourned for both of them. And for a moment

his father paused, his face sagged into lines of uncertainty, and

Jacky felt a thread of hope.

Then the face drew up. Jacky could smell the beer, and his father

said, "I'll teach you to sass me," and all hope was gone as the foot

swung out, burying itself in Jacky's belly, driving the wind from

his belly in a whoosh. as he flew from the tree-house platform and

fell to the ground, turning over once and landing on the point of his

left elbow, which snapped with a greenstick crack. He didn't even

have breath enough to scream. The last thing he saw before he

blacked out was his father's face, which seemed to be at the end of

a long, dark tunnel. It, seemed to be filling with surprise, the way a

vessel may fill with some pale liquid.

He's just starting to know what he did, Jacky thought incoherently.

And on the heels of that, a thought with no meaning at all, coherent

or otherwise, a thought, that chased him into the blackness as he

fell back on the chewed and tattered grass of the back lawn in a

faint:

What you see is what you'll be, what YOU see is what you'll be,

what you-

The break in his arm was cleanly healed in six months. The

nightmares went, on much longer. In a way, they never stopped.

THE OVERLOOK HOTEL, THIRD FLOOR, 1958

The murderers came up the stairs in their stocking feet.

The two men posted outside the door of the Presidential Suite

never heard them. They were young, dressed in Ivy League suits

with the cut of the jackets a little wider than the fashion of the day

decreed. You couldn't wear a .357 Magnum concealed in a

shoulder holster and be quite in fashion. They were discussing

whether or not the Yankees could take yet another pennant. It was

lacking two days of September, and as usual, the pinstripers looked

formidable. Just talking about the Yankees made them feel a little

better. They were New York boys, on loan from Walt Abruzzi, and

they were a long way from home.

The man inside was a big wheel in the Organization. That was all

they knew all they wanted to know. "You do your job, we all get

well," Abruzzi had told them. "What's to know?"

They had heard things,, of course. That there was a place in

Colorado that was completely neutral ground. A place where even

a crazy little West Coast hood like Tony Giorgio could sit down

and have a fancy brandy in a balloon glass with the Gray Old Men

who saw him as some sort of homicidal stinging insect to be

crushed. A place where guys from Boston who had been used to

putting each other in the trunks of cars behind bowling alleys in

Malden or into garbage cans in Roxbury could get together and

play gin and tell jokes about the Polacks. A place where hatchets

could be buried or unearthed, pacts made, plans laid. A place

where warm people could sometimes cool off.

Well, here they were, and it wasn't so much - in fact, both of them

were homesick for New York, which was why they were talking

about the Yankees. But they never saw New York or the Yankees

again.

Their voices reached down the hall to the stairwell where the

murderers stood six risers down, with their stocking-covered heads

just below line of sight, if you happened to be looking down the

hall from the door of the Presidential Suite. There were three of

them on the stairs, dressed in dark pants and coats, carrying

shotguns with the barrels sawed off to six inches. The shotguns

were loaded with expanding buckshot.

One of the three motioned and they walked up the stairs to the hall.

The two outside the door never even saw them until the murderers

were almost on top of them. One of them was saying animatedly,

"Now you take Ford. Who's better in the American League than

Whitey Ford? No, I want to ask you that sincerely, because when it

comes to the stretch he just

The speaker looked up and saw three black shapes with no

discernable faces standing not 10 paces away. For a moment he

could not believe it. They were just standing there. He shook his

head, fully expecting them to go away like the floating black

specks you sometimes saw in the darkness. They didn't. Then he

knew.

"What's the matter?" his buddy said.

The young man who had been speaking about Whitey Ford clawed

under his jacket for his gun. One of the murderers placed the butt

of his shotgun against a leather pad strapped to his belly beneath

his dark turtleneck. And pulled both triggers. The blast in the

narrow hallway was deafening. The muzzle flash was like summer

lightning, purple in its brilliance. A stink of cordite. The young

man was blown backward down the hall in a disintegrating cloud

of Ivy League jacket, blood, and hair. His arm looped over

backward, spilling the Magnum from his dying fingers, and the

pistol thumped harmlessly to the carpet with the safety still on.

The second young man did not even make an effort to go for his

gun. He stuck his hands high in the air and wet his pants at the

same time.

"I give up, don't shoot me, it's OK-!'

"Say hello to Albert Anastasia when you get down there, punk",

one of the murderers said, and placed the butt of his shotgun

against his belly.

"I ain't a. problem, I ain't a problem!" the young man screamed in a

thick Bronx accent, and then the blast of the shotgun lifted him out

of his shoes and he slammed back against the silk wallpaper with

its delicate raised pattern. He actually stuck for a moment before

collapsing to the hall floor.

The three of them walked to the door of the suite. One of them

tried the knob. "Locked."

"OK."

The third man, who hadn't shot yet, stood in front of the door,

leveled his weapon slightly above the knob, and pulled both

triggers. A jagged hole appeared in the door, and light rayed

through. The third man reached through the hole and grasped the

deadbolt on the other side. There was a pistol shot, then two more.

None of the three flinched.

There was a snap as the deadbolt gave, and then the third man

kicked the door open. Standing in the wide sitting room in front of

the picture window, which now showed a view only of darkness,

was a man of about 35 wearing only jockey shorts. He held a pistol

in each hand and as the murderers walked in he began to fire at

them, spraying bullets wildly. Slugs peeled splinters from the door

frame, dug furrows in the rug, dusted plaster down from the

ceiling. He fired five times, and the closest he came to any of his

assassins was a bullet that twitched the pants of the second man at

the left knee.

They raised their shotguns with almost military precision.

The man in the sitting room screamed, threw both guns on the

floor, and ran for the bedroom. The triple blast caught him just

outside the door and a wet fan of blood, brains, and bits of flesh

splashed across the cherrystriped wallpaper. He fell through the

open bedroom doorway, half in and half out.

"Watch the door," the first man said, and dropped his smoking

shotgun to the rug. He reached into his coat pocket, brought out a

bone-handled switchblade, and thumbed the chrome button. He

approached the dead man, who was lying in the doorway on his

side. He squatted beside the corpse and yanked down the front of

the man's jockey shorts.

Down the hall the door to one of the other suites opened and a

pallid face peered out. The third man raised his shotgun and the

face jerked back in. The door slammed. A bolt rattled frantically.

The first man rejoined them.

'All right," he said. "Down the stairs and out the back door. Let's

go."

They were outside and climbing into the parked car three minutes

later. They left the Overlook behind them, standing gilded in

mountain moonlight, white as bone under high stars. The hotel

would stand long after the three of them were as dead as the three

they had left behind.

The Overlook was at home with the dead.

The Blue Air Compressor

Stephen King

first appeared in

Onan, 1971

The house was tall, with an incredible slope of shingled roof. As he

walked up toward it from the shore road, Gerald Nately thought it

was almost a country in itself, geography in microcosm. The roof

dipped and rose at varying angles above the main building and two

strangely-angled wings; a widow's walk skirted a mushroom-

shaped cupola which looked toward the sea; the porch, facing the

dunes and lusterless September scrubgrass was longer than a

Pullman car and screened in. The high slope of roof made the

house seem to beetle its brows and loom above him. A Baptist

grandfather of a house.

He went to the porch and after a moment of hesitation, through the

screen door to the fanlighted one beyond. There was only a wicker

chair, a rusty porch swing, and an old discarded knitting basket to

watch him go. Spiders had spun silk in the shadowy upper corners.

He knocked.

There was silence, inhabited silence. He was about to knock again

when a chair someplace inside wheezed deeply in its throat. It was

a tired sound. Silence. Then the slow, dreadfully patient sound of

old, overburdened feet finding their way up the hall. Counterpoint

of cane: Whock... whock... whock...

The floorboards creaked and whined. A shadow, huge and

unformed in the pearled glass, bloomed on the fanlight. Endless

sound of fingers laboriously solving the riddle of chain, bolt, and

hasp lock. The door opened. "Hello," the nasal voice said flatly.

"You're Mr. Nately. You've rented the cottage. My husband's

cottage."

"Yes." Gerald said, his tongue swelling in his throat. "That's right.

And you're-"

"Mrs. Leighton," the nasal voice said, pleased with either his

quickness or her name, though neither was remarkable. "I'm Mrs.

Leighton."

* * *

this woman is so goddam fucking big and old she looks like oh

jesus christ print dress she must be six-six and fat my god Shes fat

as a hog can't smell her white hair long white hair her legs those

redwood trees ill that movie a Lank she could be a tank she could

kill me her voice is out of any context like a kazoo jesus if i laugh i

can't laugh can she be seventy god how does she walk and the cane

her hands are bigger than my feet like a goddam tank she could go

through oak oak for christs sake.

* * *

"You write." She hadn't offered him in.

"That's about the size of it," he said, and laughed to cover his own

sudden shrinking from that metaphor.

"Will you show me some after you get settled?" she asked. Her

eyes seemed perpetually luminous and wistful. They were not

touched by the age that had run riot in the rest of her

* * *

wait get that written down

* * *

image: "age had run riot in her with luxuriant fleshiness: she was

like a wild sow let loose in a great and dignified house to shit on

the carpet, gore at the welsh dresser and send the crystal goblets

and wine-glasses all crash-atumble, to trample the wine colored

divans to lunatic puffs of springs and stuffing, to spike the

mirrorbright finish of the great hall floor with barbarian hoofprints

and flying puddles of urine"

okay Shes there its a story i feel her

* * *

body, making it sag and billow.

"If you like," he said. "I didn't even see the cottage from the Shore

Road, Mrs. Leighton. Could you tell me where--"

"Did you drive in?"

"Yes. I left my car over there.'' He pointed beyond the dunes,

toward the road.

A smile, oddly one-dimensional, touched her lips. "That's why.

You can only see a blink from the road: unless you're walking, you

miss it." She pointed west at a slight angle away from the dunes

and the house. "There. Right over that little hill."

"All right," he said, then stood there smiling. He really had no idea

how to terminate the interview.

"Would you like to come in for some coffee? Or a Coca-Cola?"

"Yes," he said instantly.

She seemed a little taken back by his instant agreement. He had,

after 211, been her husband's friend, not her own. The face loomed

above Gerald, moonlike, disconnected, undecided. Then she led

him into the elderly, waiting house.

She had tea. He had Coke, Millions of eyes seemed to watch them.

He felt like a burglar, stealing around the hidden fiction he could

Make of her, carrying only his own youthful winsomeness and a

psychic flashlight.

* * *

My own name, of course, is Steve King, and you'll pardon my

intrusion on your mind-or I hope you will. I could argue that the

drawing-aside of the curtain of presumption between reader and

author is permissible because I am the writer; i.e., since it's my

story I'll do any goddam thing I please with it-but since that leaves

the reader out of it completely, that is not valid. Rule One for all

writers is that the teller is not worth a tin tinker's fart when

compared to the listener. Let us drop the matter, if we may. I am

intruding for the same reason that the Pope defecates: we both

have to.

You should know that Gerald Nately was never brought to the

dock; his crime was not discovered. He paid all the same. After

writing four twisted, monumental, misunderstood novels, he cut

his own head off with an ivory-figured guillotine purchased in

Kowloon.

I invented him first during a moment of eight o'clock boredom in a

class taught by Carroll F. Terrell of the University of Maine

English faculty. Dr. Terrell was speaking of Edgar A. Poe, and I

thought

ivory guillotine Kowloon

twisted woman of shadows, like a pig

some big house

The blue air compressor did not come until later. It is desperately

important that the reader be made cognizant of these facts.

* * *

He did show her some of his writing. Not the important part, the

story he was writing about her, but fragments of poetry, the spine

of a novel that had ached in his mind for a year like embedded

shrapnel, four essays. She was a perceptive critic, and addicted to

marginal notations with her black felt-tip pen. Because she

sometimes dropped in when lie was gone to the village, he kept the

story hidden in the back shed.

September melted into cool October, and the story was completed,

mailed to a friend, returned with suggestions (bad ones), rewritten.

He felt it was good, but not quite right. Some indefinable was

missing. The focus was a shade fuzzy. He began to toy, with the

idea of giving it to her for Criticism, rejected it, toyed with it again.

After all. the story was her; he never doubted she could supply the

final vector.

His attitude concerning her became increasing])- unhealthy; he was

fascinated by her huge, animalistic bulk, by the slow, tortoise-like

way she trekked across the space between the house and the

cottage.

* * *

image: "mammoth shadow of decay swaying across the

shadowless sand, cane held in one twisted hand, feet clad in huge

canvas shoes which pump and push at the coarse grains, face like a

serving platter, puffy dough arms, breasts like drumlins, a

geography in herself, a country of tissue"

* * *

by her reedy, vapid voice; but at the same time he loathed her,

could not stand her touch. lie began to feel like the young man in

"The Tell-Tale Heart, " by Edgar A. Poe. He felt lie could stand at

her bedroom door for endless midnights, shining one Tay of light

on her sleeping eye, ready to pounce and rip the instant it flashed

open.

The urge to show her the story itched at him maddeningly. He had

decided, by the first day of December, that he would do it. The

decision-making did not relieve him, as it is supposed to do in the

novels, but it did leave him with a feeling of antiseptic pleasure. It

was right that it should be so-an omega that quite dovetailed with

he alpha. And it was omega; he was vacating the cottage on he

fifth of December. On this day he had just returned from the Stowe

Travel Agency in Portland, where he had booked passage for the

Far East. He had done this almost on the spur of the moment: the

decision to go and the decision to show his manuscript to Mrs.

Leighton had come together, almost as if he had been guided by an

invoisible hand.

* * *

In truth, he was guide; by an invisible hand-mine.

* * *

The day was white with overcast and the promise of snow lurked

in its throat. The dunes seemed to foreshadow the winter already,

as Gerald crossed them between the slate-roofed house of her

dominion and the low stone cottage of his. The sea, sullen and

gray, curled on the shingle of beach. Gulls rode the slow swells

like buoys.

He Crossed the top of the last dune and knew she it-as there-her

cane, with its white bicycle handgrip at the base, stood against the

side of the door. Smoke rifted from the toy chimney.

Gerald went up the board steps, kicked sand from his high-topped

shoes to make her aware of his presence, and then went in.

"Hi, Mrs. Leighton!"

But the tiny living room and the kitchen both stood empty. The

ship's clock on the mantle ticked only for itself and for Gerald. Her

gigantic fur coat lay draped over the rocker like Some animal sail.

A small fire had been laid in the fireplace, and it glowed and

crackled busily. The teapot was on the gas range in the kitchen,

and one teacup stood on the counter, still waiting for water. He

peered into the narrow hall which led to the bedroom.

"Mrs. Leighton?"

Hall and bedroom both empty.

He was about to turn back to the kitchen when the mammoth

chuckles began. They were large, helpless shakings of laughter, the

kind that stays hidden for years and ages like wine. (There is also

an Edgar A. Poe story about wine.)

The chuckles evolved into large bellows of laughter. They came

from behind the door to the right of Gerald's bed, the last door in

the cottage. From the tool-shed.

* * *

my balls are crawling like in grammar school the old bitch shes

laughing she found it the old fat shebitch goddam her goddam her

goddam her you old whore youre doing that cause im out here you

old she bitch whore you piece of shit

* * *

He went to the door in one step and pulled it open. She was sitting

next to the small space-heater in the sh ed, her dress pulled up over

oak-stump knees to allow her to sit cross-legged, and his

manuscript was held, dwarfed, in her bloated hands.

Her laughter roared and racketed around him. Gerald Nately saw

bursting colors in front of his eyes. She it-as a slug, a maggot, a

gigantic crawling thing evolved in the cellar of the shadowy house

by the sea. a dark bug that had swaddled itself in grotesque human

form.

In the flat light from the one cobwebbed window her face became

a hanging graveyard moon, pocked by the Sterile craters of her

eyes and the Tagged earthquake rift of her mouth.

"Don't you laugh," Gerald said stiffly.

"Oh Gerald," she said, laughing all the same. "This is such a bad

story. I don't blame you for using a penname. it's-" she wiped tears

of laughter from her eyes"it's abominable!"

He began to walk toward her stiffly.

"You haven't made me big enough, Gerald. That's the trouble. I'm

too big for you. Perhaps Poe, or Dosteyevsky, or Melville. . . but

not you, Gerald. Not even under your royal pen-name. Not you.

Not you.

She began to laugh again, huge racking explosions of sound.

"Don't you laugh," Gerald said stiffly.

* * *

The tool-shed, after the manner of Zola:

Wooden walls, which showed occasional chinks of light,

surrounded rabbit-traps hung and slung in corners; a pair of dusty,

unstrung snow-shoes: a rusty spaceheater showing flickers of

yellow flame like cat's eyes; Tales; 2 shovel; hedgeclippers; an

ancient green hose coiled like a garter-snake; four bald tires

stacked like doughnuts; a rust), Winchester rifle with no bolt; a

twohanded saw; a dusty work-bench covered with nails, screws,

bolts, washers, two hammers, a plane, a broken level, a dismantled

carburetor which one sat inside a 1949 Packard convertible; a 4 hp.

air-compressor painted electric blue, plugged into an extension

cord running back into the house.

* * *

"Don't you laugh," Gerald said again, but she continued to rock

back and forth, holding her stomach and flapping the manuscript

with her wheezing breath like a white bird.

His hand found the rusty Winchester rifle and he pole-axed her

with it.

* * *

Most horror stories are sexual in nature.

I'm sorry to break in with this information, but feel I must in order

to make the way clear for the grisly conclusion of this piece, which

is (at least psychologically) a clear metaphor for fears of sexual

impotence on in), part. Mrs. Leighton's large mouth is symbolic of

the vagina; the hose of the compressor is a penis. Her female bu Ik

huge and overpowering, is a mythic representation of the sexual

fear that lives in every male, to a greater or lesser degree: that the

woman, with her opening, is a devouter.

* * *

In the works of Edgar A. Poe, Stephen King, Gerald Nately, and

others who practice this particular literary form, we are apt to find

locked rooms, dungeons. empty mansions (all symbols of the

womb); scenes of living burial (sexual impotence); the dead

returned from the grave (necrophilia); grotesque monsters or

human be ings (externalized fear of the sexual act itself); torture

and/or murder (a viable alternativ e to the sexual act).

These possibilities are not always valid, but the postfreild reader

and writer must take them into consideration when attempting the

genre.

Abnormal psychology has become a part of the human experience.

* * *

She made thick, unconscious noises in her throat as he whirled

around madly, looking for an instrument; her head lolled brokenly

on the thick stalk of her neck.

* * *

He seized the hose of the air-compressor.

"All right," he said thickly. "All right, now. All Tight."

* * *

bitch fat old bitch youve had yours not big enough is that right well

youll be bigger youll be bigger still

* * *

He ripped her head back by the hair and rammed the hose into her

mouth, into her gullet. She screamed around it, a scund like a cat.

* * *

Part of the inspiration for this story came from an old E. C. horror

comic boo), which I bought in a Lisbon Falls drugstore. In one

particular story, a husband and wife murdered each other

simultaneous))- in mutually ironic (and brilliant) fashion. He was

very fat; she was very thin. He shoved the hose of an

aircompressor down her throat and blew her up to dirigible size.

On his way downstairs a booby-trap she had rigged fell on him and

squashed him to a shadow.

Any author who tells you he has never plagiarized is 2 liar. A good

author begins with bad ideas and improbabilities and fashions them

into comments on the human condition.

In a horror story, it is imperative that the grotesque be elevated to

the status of the abnormal.

* * *

The compressor turned on with a whoosh and a chug. The hose

flew out of Mrs. Leighton's mouth. Giggling and gibbering, Gerald

stuffed it back in. Her feet drummed and thumped on the floor. The

flesh of her checks and diaphragm began to swell rhythmically.

Her eyes bulged, and became glass marbles. Her torso began to

expand.

* * *

here it is here it is you lousy louse are you big enough yet are you

big enough

* * *

The compressor wheezed and racketed. Mrs. Leighton swelled like

a beachball. Her lungs became Straining blowfish.

* * *

Fiends! Devils' Dissemble no morel Here! Here! It is the beating of

his hideous heart!

* * *

She seemed to explode all at once.

* * *

Sitting in a boilin hotel room in Bombay, Gerald re-wrote the story

he had begun at the cottage on the other side of the world. The

original title had been "The Hog." After some deliberation he

retitled it "The Blue Air Compressor."

He had resolved it to his own satisfaction. There was a certain lack

of motivation concerning the final scene where the fat old woman

was murdered, but he did not see that as a fault. In "The Tell-Tale

Heart," Edgar A. Poe's finest story, there is no real motivation for

the murder of the old man, and that was as it should be. The motive

is not the point.

* * *

She got very big just before the end: even her legs swelled up to

twice their normal size. At the very end, her tongue popped out of

her mouth like a party-favor.

* * *

After leaving Bombay, Gerald Nately went on to Hong Kong, then

to Kowloon. The ivory guillotine caught his fancy immediately.

* * *

As the author, I can see only one correct omega to this story, and

that is to tell you how Gerald Nately got rid of the body. He tore up

the floor boards of the shed, dismembered Mrs. Leighton, and

buried the sections in the sand beneath.

When he notified the police that she had been rnissing for a week,

the local constable and a State Policeman came at once. Gerald

entertained them quite naturalIy, even offering them coffee. He

heard no beating heart, but then--the interview was conducted in

the big house.

On the following day he flew away, toward Bombay, Hong Kong,

and Kowloon.

The Cat from Hell

By STEPHEN

KING

First appeared in

Cavalier Magazine, 1971

Halston thought the old man in the wheelchair looked sick,

terrified, and ready to die. He had experience in seeing such things.

Death was Halston's business; he had brought it to eighteen men

and six women in his career as an independent hitter. He knew the

death look.

The house - mansion, actually - was cold and quiet. The only

sounds were the low snap of the fire on the big stone hearth and the

low whine of the November wind outside.

"I want you to make a kill," the old man said. His voice was

quavery and high, peevish. "I understand that is what you do."

"Who did you talk to?" Halston asked.

"With a man named Saul Loggia. He says you know him."

Halston nodded. If Loggia was the go-between, it was all right.

And if there was a bug in the room, anything the old man - Drogan

- said was entrapment.

"Who do you want hit?"

Drogan pressed a button on the console built into the arm of his

wheelchair and it buzzed forward. Closeup, Halston could smell

the yellow odors of fear, age, and urine all mixed.

They disgusted him, but he made no sign. His face was still and

smooth. "Your victim is right behind you," Drogan said softly.

Halston moved quickly. His reflexes were his life and they were

always set on a filed pin. He was off the couch, falling to one knee,

turning, hand inside his specially tailored sport coat, gripping the

handle of the short-barreled .45 hybrid that hung below his armpit

in a spring-loaded holster that laid it in his palm at a touch. A

moment later it was out and pointed at ... a cat.

For a moment Halston and the cat stared at each other. It was a

strange moment for Halston, who was an unimaginative man with

no superstitions. For that one moment as he knelt on the floor with

the gun pointed, he felt that he knew this cat, although if he had

ever seen one with such unusual markings he surely would have

remembered.

Its face was an even split: half black, half white. The dividing line

ran from the top of its flat skull and down its nose to its mouth,

straight-arrow. Its eyes were huge in the gloom, and caught in each

nearly circular black pupil was a prism of firelight, like a sullen

coal of hate.

And the thought echoed back to Halston: We know each other, you

and I. Then it passed. He put the gun away and stood up. "I ought

to kill you for that, old man. I don't take a joke."

"And I don't make them," Drogan said. "Sit down. Look in here."

He had taken a fat envelope out from beneath the blanket that

covered his legs.

Halston sat. The cat, which had been crouched on the back of the

sofa, jumped lightly down into his lap. It looked up at Halston for a

moment with those huge dark eyes, the pupils surrounded by thin

green-gold rings, and then it settled down and began to purr.

Halston looked at Drogan questioningly.

"He's very friendly," Drogan said. "At first. Nice friendly pussy

has killed three people in this household. That leaves only me. I am

old, I am sick ... but I prefer to die in my own time."

"I can't believe this," Halston said. "You hired me to hit a cat?"

"Look in the envelope, please."

Halston did. It was filled with hundreds and fifties, all of them old.

"How much is it?"

"Six thousand dollars. There will be another six when you bring

me proof that the cat is dead. Mr. Loggia said twelve thousand was

your usual fee?"

Halston nodded, his hand automatically stroking the cat in his lap.

It was asleep, still purring. Halston liked cats. They were the only

animals he did like, as a matter of fact. They got along on their

own. God - if there was one - had made them into perfect, aloof

killing machines. Cats were the hitters of the animal world, and

Halston gave them his respect.

"I need not explain anything, but I will," Drogan said. "Forewarned

is forearmed, they say, and I would not want you to go into this

lightly. And I seem to need to justify myself. So you'll not think

I'm insane."

Halston nodded again. He had already decided to make this

peculiar hit, and no further talk was needed. But if Drogan wanted

to talk, he would listen. "First of all, you know who I am? Where

the money comes from?"

"Drogan Pharmaceuticals."

"Yes. One of the biggest drug companies in the world. And the

cornerstone of our financial success has been this." From the

pocket of his robe he handed Halston a small, unmarked vial of

pills. "Tri-Dormal-phenobarbin, compound G. Prescribed almost

exclusively for the terminally ill. It's extremely habit-forming, you

see. It's a combination painkiller, tranquilizer, and mild

hallucinogen. It is remarkably helpful in helping the terminally ill

face their conditions and adjust to them."

"Do you take it?" Halston asked.

Drogan ignored the question. "It is widely prescribed throughout

the world. It's a synthetic, was developed in the fifties at our New

Jersey labs. Our testing was confined almost solely to cats, because

of the unique quality of the feline nervous system."

"How many did you wipe out?"

Drogan stiffened. "That is an unfair and prejudicial way to put it."

Halston shrugged.

"In the four-year testing period which led to FDA approval of Tri-

Dormal-G, about fifteen thousand cats ... uh, expired."

Halston whistled. About four thousand cats a year. "And now you

think this one's back to get you, huh?"

"I don't feel guilty in the slightest," Drogan said, but that

quavering, petulant note was back in his voice. "Fifteen thousand

test animals died so that hundreds of thousands of human beings -

"

"Never mind that," Halston said. Justifications bored him.

"That cat came here seven months ago. I've never liked cats. Nasty,

disease-bearing animals ... always out in the fields ... crawling

around in barns ... picking up God knows what germs in their fur ...

always trying to bring something with its insides falling out into

the house for you to look at ... it was my sister who wanted to take

it in. She found out. She paid." He looked at the cat sleeping on

Halston's lap with dead hate.

"You said the cat killed three people."

Drogan began to speak. The cat dozed and purred on Halston's lap

under the soft, scratching strokes of Halston's strong and expert

killer's fingers.

Occasionally a pine knot would explode on the hearth, making it

tense like a series of steel springs covered with hide and muscle.

Outside the wind whined around the big stone house far out in the

Connecticut countryside. There was winter in that wind's throat.

The old man's voice droned on and on.

Seven months ago there had been four of them here-Drogan, his

sister Amanda, who at seventy-four was two years Drogan's elder,

her lifelong friend Carolyn Broadmoor ("of the Westchester

Broadmoors," Drogan.said), who was badly afflicted with

emphysema, and Dick Gage, a hired man who had been with the

Drogan family for twenty years. Gage, who was past sixty himself,

drove the big Lincoln Mark IV, cooked, served the evening sherry.

A day maid came in. The four of them had lived this way for

nearly two years, a dull collection of old people and their family

retainer. Their only pleasures were The Hollywood Squares and

waiting to see who would outlive whom.

Then the cat had come.

"It was Gage who saw it first, whining and skulking around the

house. He tried to drive it away He threw sticks and small rocks at

it, and hit it several times. But it wouldn't go. It smelled the food,

of course. It was little more than a bag of bones. People put them

out beside the road to die at the end of the summer season, you

know. A terrible, inhumane thing."

"Better to fry their nerves?" Halston asked.

Drogan ignored that and went on. He hated cats. He always had.

When the cat refused to be driven away, he had instructed Gage to

put out poisoned food. Large, tempting dishes of Calo cat food

spiked with Tri-Dormal-G, as a matter of fact. The cat ignored the

food. At that point Amanda Drogan had noticed the cat and had

insisted they take it in. Drogan had protested vehemently, but

Amanda - had gotten her way. She always did, apparently.

"But she found out," Drogan said. "She brought it inside herself, in

her arms. It was purring, just as it is now. But it wouldn't come

near me. It never has ... yet. She poured it a saucer of milk. 'Oh,

look at the poor thing, it's starving,' she cooed. She and Carolyn

both cooed over it. Disgusting. It was their way of getting back at

me, of course. They knew the way I've felt about felines ever since

the Tri-Dormal-G testing program twenty years ago. They enjoyed

teasing me, baiting me with it." He looked at Halston grimly. "But

they paid."

In mid-May, Gage had gotten up to set breakfast and found

Amanda Drogan lying at the foot of the main stairs in a litter of

broken crockery and Little Friskies. Her eyes bulged sightlessly up

at the ceiling. She had bled a great deal from the mouth and nose.

Her back was broken, both legs were broken, and her neck had

been literally shattered like glass.

"It slept in her room," Drogan said. "She treated it like a baby ...'Is

oo hungwy, darwing? Does oo need to go out and do poopoos!'

Obscene, coming from an old baffle-ax like my sister. I think it

woke her up, meowing. She got his dish. She used to say that Sam

didn't really like his Friskies unless they were wetted down with a

little milk. So she was planning to go downstairs. The cat was

rubbing against her legs. She was old, not too steady on her feet.

Half asleep. They got to the head of the stairs and the cat got in

front of her ... tripped her .. ."

Yes, it could have happened that way, Halston thought. In his

mind's eye he saw the old woman falling forward and outward, too

shocked to scream. The Friskies spraying out as she tumbled head

over heels to the bottom, the bowl smashing. At last she comes to

rest at the bottom, the old bones shattered, the eyes glaring, the

nose and ears trickling blood. And the purring cat begins to work

its way down the stairs, contentedly munching Little Friskies ...

"What did the coroner say?" he asked Drogan. "Death by accident,

of course. But I knew."

"Why didn't you get rid of the cat then? With Amanda gone?"

Because Carolyn Broadmoor had threatened to leave if he did,

apparently. She was hysterical, obsessed with the subject. She was

a sick woman, and she was nutty on the subject of spiritualism. A

Hartford medium had told her (for a mere twenty dollars) that

Amanda's soul had entered Sam's feline body. Sam had been

Amanda's, she told Drogan, and if Sam went, she went.

Halston, who had become something of an expert at reading

between the lines of human lives, suspected that Drogan and the

old Broadmoor bird had been lovers long ago, and the old dude

was reluctant to let her go over a cat.

"It would have been the same as suicide," Drogan said. "In her

mind she was still a wealthy woman, perfectly capable of packing

up that cat and going to New York or London or even Monte Carlo

with it. In fact she was the last of a great family, living on a

pittance as a result of a number of bad investments in the sixties.

She lived on the second floor here in a specially controlled,

superhumidified room. The woman was seventy, Mr. Halston. She

was a heavy smoker until the last two years of her life, and the

emphysema was very bad. I wanted her here, and if the cat had to

stay ..."

Halston nodded and then glanced meaningfully at his watch.

"Near the end of June, she died in the night. The doctor seemed to

take it as a matter of course ... just came and wrote out the death

certificate and that was the end of it. But the cat was in the room.

Gage told me."

"We all have to go sometime, man," Halston said.

"Of course. That's what the doctor said. But I knew. I remembered.

Cats like to get babies and old people when they're asleep. And

steal their breath."

"An old wives' tale."

"Based on fact, like most so-called old wives' tales," Drogan

replied.

"Cats like to knead soft things with their paws, you see. A pillow, a

thick shag rug... or a blanket. A crib blanket or an old person's

blanket. The extra weight on a person who's weak to start with ..."

Drogan trailed off, and Halston thought about it. Carolyn

Broadmoor asleep in her bedroom, the breath rasping in and out of

her damaged lungs, the sound nearly lost in the whisper of special

humidifiers and air conditioners. The cat with the queer black-and-

white markings leaps silently onto her spinster's bed and stares at

her old and wrinkle-grooved face with those lambent, black-and-

green eyes. It creeps onto her thin chest and settles its weight there,

purring.., and the breathing slows ... slows ... and the cat purrs as

the old woman slowly smothers beneath its weight on her chest.

He was not an imaginative man, but Halston shivered a little.

"Drogan," he said, continuing to stroke the purring cat. "Why don't

you just have it put away? A vet would give it the gas for twenty

dollars."

Drogan said, "The funeral was on the first day of July, I had

Carolyn buried in our cemetery plot next to my sister. The way she

would have wanted it. On July third I called Gage to this room and

handed him a wicker basket.., a picnic hamper sort of thing. Do

you know what I mean?"

Halston nodded.

"I told him to put the cat in it and take it to a vet in Milford and

have it put to sleep. He said, 'Yes, sir,' took the basket, and went

out. Very like him. I never saw him alive again. There was an

accident on the turnpike. The Lincoln was driven into a bridge

abutment at better than sixty miles an hour. Dick Gage was killed

instantly. When they found him there were scratches on his face."

Halston was silent as the picture of how it might have been formed

in his brain again. No sound in the room but the peaceful crackle of

the fire and the peaceful purr of the cat in his lap. He and the cat

together before the fire would make a good illustration for that

Edgar Guest poem, the one that goes: "The cat on my lap, the

hearth's good fire/ ... A happy man, should you enquire."

Dick Gage moving the Lincoln down the turnpike toward Milford,

beating the speed limit by maybe five miles an hour. The wicker

basket beside him - a picnic hamper sort of thing. The chauffeur is

watching traffic, maybe he's passing a big cab-over Jimmy and he

doesn't notice the peculiar black-on-one-side, white-on-the-other

face that pokes out of one side of the basket. Out of the driver's

side. He doesn't notice because he's passing the big trailer truck

and that's when the cat jumps onto his face, spitting and clawing,

its talons raking into one eye, puncturing it, deflating it, blinding it.

Sixty and the hum of the Lincoln's big motor and the other paw is

hooked over the bridge of the nose, digging in with exquisite,

damning pain - maybe the Lincoln starts to veer right, into the path

of the Jimmy, and its airhorn blares ear-shatteringly, but Gage can't

hear it because the cat is yowling, the cat is spread-eagled over his

face like some huge furry black spider, ears laid back, green eyes

glaring like spotlights from hell, back legs jittering and digging

into the soft flesh of the old man's neck. The car veers wildly back

the other way. The bridge abutment looms. The cat jumps down

and the Lincoln, a shiny black torpedo, hits the cement and goes up

like a bomb.

Halston swallowed hard and heard a dry click in his throat. "And

the cat came back?"

Drogan nodded. "A week later. On the day Dick Gage was buried,

as a matter of fact. Just like the old song says. The cat came back."

"It survived a car crash at sixty? Hard to believe."

"They say each one has nine lives. When it comes back ... that's

when I started to wonder if it might not be a...a..."

"Hellcat?" Halston suggested softly.

"For want of a better word, yes. A sort of demon sent ..."

"To punish you."

"I don't know. But I'm afraid of it. I feed it, or rather, the woman

who comes in to do for me feeds it. She doesn't like it either. She

says that face is a curse of God. Of course, she's local." The old

man tried to smile and failed. "I want you to kill it. I've lived with

it for the last four months. It skulks around in the shadows. It looks

at me. It seems to be ... waiting. I lock myself in my room every

night and still I wonder if I'm going to wake up one early and find

it ... curled up on my chest ... and purring."

The wind whined lonesomely outside and made a strange hooting

noise in the stone chimney.

"At last I got in touch with Saul Loggia. He recommended you. He

called you a stick, I believe."

"A one-stick. That means I work on my own."

"Yes. He said you'd never been busted, or even suspected. He said

you always seem to land on your feet.... like a cat."

Halston looked at the old man in the wheelchair. And his long-

fingered, muscular hands were lingering above the cat's neck.

"I'll do it now, if you want me to," he said softly. "I'll snap its neck.

It won't even know-"

"No!" Drogan cried. He drew in a long, shuddering breath. Color

had come up in his sallow cheeks. "Not... not here. Take it away."

Halston smiled humorlessly. He began to stroke the sleeping cat's

head and shoulders and back very gently again. "All right," he said.

"I accept the contract. Do you want the body?"

"No. Kill it. Bury it." He paused. He hunched forward in the

wheelchair like some ancient buzzard. "Bring me the tail," he said.

"So I can throw it in the fire and watch it burn."

Halston drove a 1973 Plymouth with a custom Cyclone Spoiler

engine. The car was jacked and blocked, and rode with the hood

pointing down at the road at a twenty degree angle. He had rebuilt

the differential and the rear end himself. The shift was a Pensy, the

linkage was Hearst. It sat on huge Bobby Unser Wide Ovals and

had a top end of a little past one-sixty.

He left the Drogan house at a little past 9:30. A cold rind of

crescent moon rode overhead through the tattering November

clouds. He rode with all the windows open, because that yellow

stench of age and terror seemed to have settled into his clothes and

he didn't like it. The cold was hard and sharp, eventually numbing,

but it was good. It was blowing that yellow stench away. He got

off the turnpike at Placer's Glen and drove through the silent town,

which was guarded by a single yellow blinker at the intersection, at

a thoroughly respectable thirty-five. Out of town, moving up S.R.

35, he opened the Plymouth up a little, letting her walk. The tuned

Spoiler engine purred like the cat had purred on his lap earlier this

evening. Halston grinned at the simile. They moved between frost-

white November fields full of skeleton cornstalks at a little over

seventy.

The cat was in a double-thickness shopping bag, tied at the top

with heavy twine. The bag was in the passenger bucket seat. The

cat had been sleepy and purring when Halston put it in, and it had

purred through the entire ride. It sensed, perhaps, that Halston

liked it and felt at home with it. Like himself, the cat was a one-

stick.

Strange hit, Halston thought, and was surprised to find that he was

taking it seriously as a hit. Maybe the strangest thing about it was

that he actually liked the cat, felt a kinship with it. If it had

managed to get rid of those three old crocks, more power to it ...

especially Gage, who had been taking it to Milford for a terminal

date with a crew-cut veterinarian who would have been more than

happy to bundle it into a ceramic-lined gas chamber the size of a

microwave oven. He felt a kinship but no urge to renege on the hit.

He would do it the courtesy of killing it quickly and well. He

would park off the road beside one of those November-barren

fields and take it out of the bag and stroke it and then snap its neck

and sever its tail with his pocketknife. And, he thought, the body

I'll bury honorably, saving it from the scavengers. I can't save it

from the worms, but I can save it from the maggots.

He was thinking these things as the car moved through the night

like a dark blue ghost and that was when the cat walked in front of

his eyes, up on the dashboard, tail raised arrogantly, its black-and-

white face turned toward him, its mouth seeming to grin at him.

"Ssssshhhh-" Halston hissed. He glanced to his right and caught a

glimpse of the double-thickness shopping bag, a hole chewed - or

clawed - in its side. Looked ahead again..,and the cat lifted a paw

and batted playfully at him. The paw skidded across Halston's

forehead. He jerked away from it and the Plymouth's big tires

wailed on the road as it swung erratically from one side of the

narrow blacktop to the other.

Halston batted at the cat on the dashboard with his fist. It was

blocking his field of vision. It spat at him, arching its back, but it

didn't move. Halston swung again, and instead of shrinking away,

it leaped at him.

Gage, he thought. Just like Gage -

He stamped the brake. The cat was on his head, blocking his vision

with its furry belly, clawing at him, gouging at him. Halston held

the wheel grimly. He struck the cat once, twice, a third time. And

suddenly the road was gone, the Plymouth was running down into

the ditch, thudding up and down on its shocks. Then, impact,

throwing him forward against his seat belt, and the last sound he

heard was the cat yowling inhumanly, the voice of a woman in

pain or in the throes of sexual climax.

He struck it with his closed fists and felt only the springy, yielding

flex of its muscles.

Then, second impact. And darkness.

* * *

The moon was down. It was an hour before dawn.

The Plymouth lay in a ravine curdled with groundmist. Tangled in

its grille was a snarled length of barbed wire. The hood had come

unlatched, and tendrils of steam from the breached radiator drifted

out of the opening to mingle with the mist.

No feeling in his legs.

He looked down and saw that the Plymouth's firewall had caved in

with the impact. The back of that big Cyclone Spoiler engine block

had smashed into his legs, pinning them.

Outside, in the distance, the predatory squawk of an owl dropping

onto some small, scurrying animal.

Inside, close, the steady purr of the cat.

It seemed to be grinning, like Alice's Cheshire had in Wonderland.

As Halston watched it stood up, arched its back, and stretched. In a

sudden limber movement like rippled silk, it leaped to his shoulder.

Halston tried to lift his hands to push it off.

His arms wouldn't move.

Spinal shock, he thought. Paralyzed. Maybe temporary. More

likely permanent.

The cat purred in his ear like thunder.

"Get off me," Halston said. His voice was hoarse and dry. The cat

tensed for a moment and then settled back. Suddenly its paw batted

Halston's cheek, and the claws were out this time. Hot lines of pain

down to his throat.

And the warm trickle of blood.

Pain.

Feeling.

He ordered his head to move to the right, and it complied. For a

moment his face was buried in smooth, dry fur. Halston snapped at

the cat. It made a startled, disgruntled sound in its throat - yowk! -

and leaped onto the seat. It stared up at him angrily, ears laid back.

"Wasn't supposed to do that, was I?" Halston croaked. The cat

opened its mouth and hissed at him. Looking at that strange,

schizophrenic face, Halston could understand how Drogan might

have thought it was a hellcat. It-

His thoughts broke off as he became aware of a dull, tingling

feeling in both hands and forearms.

Feeling. Coming back. Pins and needles.

The cat leaped at his face, claws out, spitting.

Halston shut his eyes and opened his mouth. He bit at the cat's

belly and got nothing but fur. The cat's front claws were clasped on

his ears, digging in. The pain was enormous, brightly excruciating.

Halston tried to raise his hands.

They twitched but would not quite come out of his lap.

He bent his head forward and began to shake it back and forth, like

a man shaking soap out of his eyes. Hissing and squalling, the cat

held on. Halston could feel blood trickling down his cheeks. It was

hard to get his breath. The cat's chest was pressed over his nose. It

was possible to get some air in by mouth, but not much. What he

did get came through fur. His ears felt as if they had been doused

with lighter fluid and then set on fire.

He snapped his head back and cried out in agony - he must have

sustained a whiplash when the Plymouth hit. But the cat hadn't

been expecting the reverse and it flew off. Halston heard it thud

down in the back seat.

A trickle of blood ran in his eye. He tried again to move his hands,

to raise one of them and wipe the blood away.

They trembled in his lap, but he was still unable to actually move

them. He thought of the .45 special in its holster under his left arm.

If I can get to my piece, kitty, the rest of your nine lives are going

in a lump sum.

More tingles now. Dull throbs of pain from his feet, buried and

surely shattered under the engine block, zips and tingles from his

legs - it felt exactly the way a limb that you've slept on does when

it's starting to wake up. At that moment Halston didn't care about

his feet. It was enough to know that his spine wasn't severed, that

he wasn't going to finish out his life as a dead lump of body

attached to a talking head.

Maybe I had a few lives left myself.

Take care of the cat. That was the first thing. Then get out of the

wreck - maybe someone would come along, that would solve both

problems at once. Not likely at 4:30 in the morning on a back road

like this one, but barely possible. And-

And what was the cat doing back there?

He didn't like having it on his face, but he didn't like having it

behind him and out of sight, either. He tried the rearview mirror,

but that was useless. The crash had knocked it awry and all it

reflected was the grassy ravine he had finished up in.

A sound from behind him, like low, ripping cloth.

Purring.

Hellcat my ass. It's gone to sleep back there.

And even if it hadn't, even if it was somehow planning murder,

what could it do? It was a skinny little thing, probably weighed all

of four pounds soaking wet. And soon ... soon he would be able to

move his hands enough to get his gun. He was sure of it.

Halston sat and waited. Feeling continued to flood back into his

body in a series of pins-and-needles incursions. Absurdly (or

maybe in instinctive reaction to his close brush with death) he got

an erection for a minute or so. Be kind of hard to beat off under

present circumstances, he thought.

A dawn-line was appearing in the eastern sky. Somewhere a bird

sang.

Halston tried his hands again and got them to move an eighth of an

inch before they fell back.

Not yet. But soon.

A soft thud on the seatback beside him. Halston turned his head

and looked into the black-white face, the glowing eyes with their

huge dark pupils.

Halston spoke to it.

"I have never blown a hit once I took it on, kitty. This could be a

first. I'm getting my hands back. Five minutes, ten at most. You

want my advice? Go out the window. They're all open. Go out and

take your tail with you."

The cat stared at him.

Halston tried his hands again. They came up, trembling wildly.

Half an inch. An inch. He let them fall back limply. They slipped

off his lap and thudded to the Plymouth's seat. They glimmered

there palely, like large tropical spiders.

The cat was grinning at him.

Did I make a mistake?, he wondered confusedly. He was a creature

of hunch, and the feeling that he had made one was suddenly

overwhelming. Then the cat's body tensed, and even as it leaped,

Halston knew what it was going to do and he opened his mouth to

scream.

The cat landed on Halston's crotch, claws out, digging.

At that moment, Halston wished he had been paralyzed. The pain

was gigantic, terrible. He had never suspected that there could be

such pain in the world. The cat was a spitting coiled spring of fury,

clawing at his balls.

Halston did scream, his mouth yawning open, and that was when

the cat changed direction and leaped at his face, leaped at his

mouth. And at that moment Halston knew that it was something

more than a cat. It was something possessed of a malign,

murderous intent.

He caught one last glimpse of that black-and-white face below the

flattened ears, its eyes enormous and filled with lunatic hate. It had

gotten rid of the three old people and now it was going to get rid of

John Halston.

It rammed into his mouth, a furry projectile. He gagged on it. Its

front claws pinwheeled, tattering his tongue like a piece of liver.

His stomach recoiled and he vomited. The vomit ran down into his

windpipe, clogging it, and he began to choke.

In this extremity, his will to survive overcame the last of the

impact paralysis. He brought his hands up slowly to grasp the cat.

Oh my God, he thought.

The cat was forcing its way into his mouth, flattening its body,

squirming, working itself farther and farther in. He could feel his

jaws creaking wider and wider to admit it.

He reached to grab it, yank it out, destroy it ...and his hands

clasped only the cat's tail.

Somehow it had gotten its entire body into his mouth. Its strange,

black-and-white face must be crammed into his very throat.

A terrible thick gagging sound came from Halston's throat, which

was swelling like a flexible length of garden hose.

His body twitched. His hands fell back into his lap and the fingers

drummed senselessly on his thighs. His eyes sheened over, then

glazed. They stared out through the Plymouth's windshield blankly

at the coming dawn.

Protruding from his open mouth was two inches of bushy tail ...

half black, half white. It switched lazily back and forth.

It disappeared.

A bird cried somewhere again. Dawn came in breathless silence

then, over the frost-rimmed fields of rural Connecticut.

The farmer's name was Will Reuss.

He was on his way to Placer's Glen to get the inspection sticker

renewed on his farm truck when he saw the late-morning sun

twinkle on something in the ravine beside the road. He pulled over

and saw the Plymouth lying at a drunken, canted angle in the ditch,

barbed wire tangled in its grille like a snarl of steel knitting.

He worked his way down and then sucked in his breath sharply.

"Holy moley," he muttered to the bright November day. There was

a guy sitting bolt upright behind the wheel, eyes open and glaring

emptily into eternity. The Roper organization was never going to

include him in its presidential poll again. His face was smeared

with blood. He was still wearing his seat belt.

The driver's door had been crimped shut, but Reuss managed to get

it open by yanking with both hands. He leaned in and unstrapped

the seat belt, planning to check for ID. He was reaching for the

coat when he noticed that the dead guy's shirt was rippling, just

above the belt buckle. Rippling ... and bulging. Splotches of blood

began to bloom there like sinister roses.

"What the Christ?" He reached out, grasped the dead man's shirt,

and pulled it up.

Will Reuss looked - and screamed.

Above Halston's navel, a ragged hole had been clawed in his flesh.

Looking out was the gore-streaked black-and-white face of a cat,

its eyes huge and glaring.

Reuss staggered back, shrieking, hands clapped to his face. A score

of crows took cawing wing from a nearby field.

The cat forced its body out and stretched in obscene languor.

Then it leaped out the open window. Reuss caught sight of it

moving through the high dead grass and then it was gone.

It seemed to be in a hurry, he later told a reporter from the local

paper.

As if it had unfinished business.

The Dark Man

Stephen King

Published in

"Ubris", 1969 and later in Moth, 1970.

I have stridden the fuming way

of sun-hammered tracks and

smashed cinders;

I have ridden rails

and bumed sterno in the

gantry silence of hob jungles:

I am a dark man.

I have ridden rails

and passed the smuggery

of desperate houses with counterfeit chimneys

and heard from the outside

the inside clink of cocktail ice

while closed doors broke the world -

and over it all a savage sickle moon

that bummed my eyes with bones of light.

I have slept in glaring swamps

where musk-reek rose

to mix with the sex smell of rotting cypress stumps

where witch fire clung in sunken

psycho spheres of baptism -

and heard the suck of shadows

where a gutted columned house

leeched with vines

speaks to an overhung mushroom sky

I have fed dimes to cold machines

in all night filling stations

while traffic in a mad and flowing flame

streaked red in six lanes of darkness,

and breathed the cleaver hitchhike wind

within the breakdown lane with thumb levelled

and saw shadowed faces made complacent

with heaters behind safety glass

faces that rose like complacent moons

in riven monster orbits.

and in a sudden jugular flash

cold as the center af a sun

I forced a girl in a field of wheat

and left her sprawled with the virgin bread

a savage sacrifice

and a sign to those who creep in

fixed ways:

I am a dark man.

Donovan's Brain

Stephen King

Published in "Moth", 1970

Shratt came on limping

obsessed

he tried to run down a little girl

and there was a drag of pain

in his left

kidney

**********

horror

**********

he signed checks with Donovan's name

and made mad love with Donovan's woman.

poor Shratt!

warped and sucked by desert wine

raped by the brain of that monstrous man

shadowed by his legless shadow

Shratt, driven by a thing

(you know about that Thing, don't you?)

in an electric tank:

(AMPS-AMPS-AMPS-AMPS-)

demented paranoia

from "BEYOND THE GRAVE! !"

but the tragedy

was Shratt -oh,

I could weep for Shratt.

For The Birds

Stephen King

From

" Bred Any Good Rooks Lately? "

Okay, this is a science fiction joke.

It seems like in 1995 or so the pollution in the atmosphere of

London has started to kill off all the rooks. And the city

government is very concerned because the rooks roosting on the

cornices and the odd little crannies of the public buildings are a big

attraction. The Yanks with their Kodaks, if you get it. So they say,

" What are we going to do? "

They get a lot of brochures from places with climates similar to

London's so they can raise the rooks until the pollution problem is

finally licked. One place with a similar climate, but low pollution

count, turns to be Bangor, Maine. So they put an ad in the paper

soliciting bird fanciers and talk to a bunch of guys in the trade.

Finally, they engage this one guy at the rate of $50,000 a year to

raise rooks. They send an ornithologist over on the concord with

two cases of rook eggs packed in these shatterproof cases - they

keep the shipping compartment constantly heated and all that stuff.

So this guy has a new business - North American Rook Farms, Inc.

He goes to work right off incubating new rooks so London will not

become a rookless city. The only thing is, the London City Council

is really impatient, and every day they send him a telegram that

says: " Bred Any Good Rooks lately? "

THE

HARDCASE

SPEAKS

STEPHEN KING

From

Contraband #2

In fields and christless allies the psalter is handed

greedily around with purple bottles of cheap port

punctuated by the sodium lightness glare of freights

rising past hobo cinder gantries and pitless bramble

hollows:

Dukane, Grand Rapids, Cedar Forks, Harlow, Dover-

Foxcroft,

names from the back platform of the A-train

so don't gimme that shit don't gimme that crap

I'll put the hoodoo on you, I can do it, it comes in a can

in 1954 in a back alley behind a bar they

found a lady cut in four pieces and written in her juice on

the bricks above

he had scrawled PLEASE STOP ME BEFORE I KILL

AGAIN in letters that leaned and

draggled so they called him The Cleveland Torso Murderer

and never caught him,

it figures

all these liberals are brainless

if you want to see jeans just peak into any alabaster

gravel pit in Mestalinas

all these liberals have hairy shirts

Real life is in the back row of a 2nd run movie house in

Utica, have you been

there

this guy with his hair greased back was drunk

and getting drunker when I sat down and his face kept

twisting; he cried I'm a

goddamn stupid sonofabitch but doan choo try to tell me

nothin I didn't he

might have come from Cleveland

if the stars are right I can witch you I can make your hair

fall out

You don't need hairy jeans to stand outside a Safeway

store in Smalls Falls and watch a cloud under the high

blue sky ripple the last shadows of summer over the asphalt

parking lot two

acres wide

A real hack believes blackboards are true

for myself I would turn them all soft like custard scoop

them feed them to blackbirds save corn for murderers

in huge and ancient Buicks sperm grows on seatcovers

and flows upstream toward the sound of Chuck Berry

once I saw a drunk in Redcliff and he had stuffed a

newspaper in his mouth he

jigged jubilantly

around a two shadowed light pole

I could gun you down with magic nose bullets

There are still drugstore saints

Still virgins pedalling bikes with playing cards affixed to

the rear spokes

with clothespins

The students have made things up

The liberals have shit themselves and produced a satchel-

load of smelly

numbers

Radicals scratch secret sores and pore over back numbers

bore a little hole in your head sez I insert a candle

light a light for Charlie Starkweather and let

your little light shine shine shine

play bebop

buy styrofoam dice on 42nd street

eat sno-cones and read Lois Lane

Learn to do magic like me and we will drive to Princeton

in an old Ford with four retread skins and a loose manifold

that boils up the

graphite stink of freshcooked

exhaust we will do hexes with Budweiser pentagrams and

old

Diamond matchboxes

chew some Red Man and let the juice down your chin when

you spit

sprinkle sawdust on weird messes

buy some plastic puke at Atlantic City

throw away your tape player and gobble Baby Ruths

Go now. I think you are ready.

Harrison State Park '68

Stephen King

Published in "Ubris", 1968

"All mental disorders are simply detective strategies

for handling difficult life situations.''

---Thomas Szasz

''And I feel like homemade shit.''

---Ed Sanders

- Can you do it ?

She asked shrewdly

From the grass where her nylon legs

in gartered splendor

made motions.

- Can you do it ?

Ah!

What do I say?

What are the cools?

Jimmy Dean?

Robert Mitchum?

Soupy Sales?

Modern Screen Romances is a tent on the grass

Over a dozen condoms in a quiet box

and the lady used to say

(before she passed away)

- If you can't be an athlete,

be an athletic supporter.

The moon is set.

A cloud scum has covered the stars.

A man with a gun has passed

this way

BUT -

we do not need your poets.

Progressed beyond them to

Sony

Westinghouse

Cousin Brucie

the Doors

and do I dare

mention Sonny and Cher ?

I remember Mickey Rooney

as Pretty Boy Floyd

and he was the shortest Pretty Boy Floyd

on record

coughing his enthusiastic

guts out in the last

reel.

We have not spilt the blood.

They have spilt the blood.

A little girl lies dead

On the hopscotch grid

No matter

- Can you do it?

She asked shrewdly

With her Playtex living bra

cuddling breasts

softer than a handful of wet Fig Newtons.

Old enough to bleed

Old enough to slaughter

The old farmer said

And grinned at the white

Haystack sky

With sweaty teeth

(radiation radiation

your grandchildren will be monsters)

I remember a skeleton

In Death Valley

A cow in the sunbleached throes of antiseptic death

and someone said:

- Someday there will be skeletons

on the median strip of the Hollywood Freeway

staring up at exhaust-sooty pigeons

amidst the flapping ruins of

Botany 500

call me Ishmael.

I am a semen.

- Can you do it?

She asked shrewdly

When the worms begin

their midnight creep

and the dew has sunk white to

milk the grass...

And the bitter tears

Have no ducts

The eyes have fleshed in.

Only the nose knows that

A loser is always the same.

There is a sharp report.

It slices the night cleanly

And thumps home with a tincan spannnng!

Against the Speed Limit sign down the road.

Laughter

The clean clear sound of a bolt levered back...

Silence...

Spannng!

"Aileen, if poachers poached peaches, would the

poachers peel the peaches to eat with poached eggs

poached before peaches?"

oh don't

don't

please touch me

but don't

don't

and I reach for your hand

but touch only the radiating live pencils

of your bones:

-- Can you do it?

IN A HALF WORLD

OF TERROR

Stephen King

First appeared in

Stories Of Suspense, a.k.a.

I Was A Teenage Graverobber 1966

It was like a nightmare. Like some unreal dream that you wake up

from the next morning. Only this nightmare was happening. Ahead

of me I could see Rankin's flashlight; a large yellow eye in the

sultry summer darkness. I tripped over a gravestone and almost

went sprawling. Rankin whirled on me with a hissed oath.

"Do you want to wake up the caretaker, you fool?"

I muttered a reply and we crept forward. Finally, Rankin stopped

and shone the flashlight's beam on a freshly chiseled gravestone.

On it, it read:

DANILE WHEATHERBY

1899 1962

He has joined his beloved wife in a better land.

I felt a shovel thrust into my hands and suddenly I was sure that I

couldn't go through with it. But I remembered the bursar shaking

his head and saying, "I'm afraid we can't give you any more time,

Dan. You'll have to leave today. If I could help in any way, I

would, believe me ..."

I dug into the still soft earth and lifted it over my shoulder. Perhaps

fifteen minutes later my shovel came in contact with wood. The

two of us quickly excavated the hole until the coffin stood revealed

under Rankin's flashlight. We jumped down and heaved the coffin

up.

Numbed, I watched Rankin swing the spade at the locks and seals.

After a few blows it gave and we lifted the lid. The body of Daniel

Wheatherby looked up at us with glazed eyes. I felt horror gently

wash over me. I had always thought that the eyes closed when one

died.

"Don't just stand there," Rankin whispered, "it's almost four.

We've got to get out of here!"

We wrapped the body in a sheet and lowered the coffin back into

the earth. We shoveled rapidly and carefully replaced the sod. The

dirt we had missed was scattered.

By the time we picked up the white-sheeted body, the first traces

of dawn were beginning to lighten the sky in the east. We went

through the hedge that skirted the cemetery and entered the woods

that fronted it on the west. Rankin expertly picked his way through

it for a quarter of a mile until we came to the car, parked where we

had left it on an overgrown and unused wagon track that had once

been a road. The body was put into the trunk. Shortly thereafter,

we joined the stream of commuters hurrying for the 6.00 train.

I looked at my hands as if I had never seen them before. The dirt

under my fingernails had been piled up on top of a man's final

resting place not twenty-four hours ago. It felt unclean.

Rankin's attention was directed entirely on his driving. I looked at

him and realized that he didn't mind the repulsive act that we had

just performed. To him it was just another job. We turned off the

main road and began to climb the twisting, narrow dirt road. And

then we came out into the open and I could see it, the huge

rambling Victorian mansion that sat on the summit of the steep

grade. Rankin drove around back and wordlessly up to the steep

rock face of a bluff that rose another forty feet upward, slightly to

the right of the house.

There was a hideous grinding noise and a portion of the hill large

enough to carve an entrance for the car slid open. Rankin drove in

and killed the engine. We were in a small, cube-like room that

served as a hidden garage. Just then, a door at the far end slid open

and a tall, rigid man approached us.

Steffen Weinbaum's face was much like a skull; his eyes were

deep-set and the skin was stretched so tautly over his cheekbones

that his flesh was almost transparent.

"Where is it?" His voice was deep, ominous.

Wordlessly, Rankin got out and I followed his lead. Rankin opened

the trunk and we pulled the sheet-swaddled figure out.

Weinbaum nodded slowly.

"Good, very good. Bring him into the lab."

CHAPTER TWO

When I was thirteen, my parents were killed in an automobile

crash. It left me an orphan and should have landed me in an

orphan's home. But my father's will disclosed the fact that he had

left me a substantial sum of money and I was self-reliant. The

welfare people never came around and I was left in the somewhat

bizarre role as the sole tenant of my own house at thirteen. I paid

the mortgage out of the bank account and tried to stretch a dollar as

far as possible.

By the time I was eighteen and was out of school, the money was

low, but I wanted to go to college. I sold the house for $10,000.00

through a real estate buyer. In early September, the roof fell in. I

received a very nice letter from Erwin, Erwin and Bradstreet,

attorneys at law. To put it in layman's language, it said that the

department store at which my father had been employed had just

got around to a general audit of their books. It seemed that there

was $15,000.00 missing and that they had proof that my father had

stolen it. The rest of the letter merely stated that if I didn't pay up

the $15,000.00 we'd got to court and they would try to get double

the amount.

It shook me up and a few questions that should have stood out in

my mind just didn't register as a result. Why didn't they uncover

the error earlier? Why were they offering to settle out of court?

I went down to the office of Erwin, Erwin, & Bradstreet and talked

the matter over. To make a long story short, I paid the sum there

were asking, I had no more money.

The next day I looked up the firm of Erwin, Erwin & Bradstreet in

the phone book. It wasn't listed. I went down to their office and

found a For Rent sign on the door. It was then that I realized that I

had been conned like gullible kid which, I reflected miserably

was what I was.

I bluffed my way through the first for months of college but finally

they discovered that I hadn't been properly registered.

That same day I met Rankin at a bar. It was my first experience in

a tavern. I had a forged driver's license and I bough enough

whiskey to get drunk. I figured that it would take about two

straight whiskeys since I had never had anything but a bottle of

beer now and then prior to that night.

One felt good, two made my trouble seem rather inconsequential. I

was nursing my third when Rankin entered the bar.

He sat on the stool next to me and looked attentively at me.

"You got troubles?" I asked rudely.

Rankin smiled. "Yes, I'm out to find a helper."

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, becoming interested. "You mean you want to

hire somebody?"

"Yes."

""Well, I'm your man."

He started to say something and then changed his mind.

"Let's go over to a booth and talk it over, shall we?"

We walked over to a booth and I realized that I was listing slightly.

Rankin pulled the curtain.

"That's better. Now, you want a job?"

I nodded.

"Do you care what it is?"

"No. Just how much does it pay?"

"Five hundred a job."

I lost a little bit of the rosy fog that encased me. Something was

wrong here. I didn't like the way he used the word "job".

"Who do I have to kill?" I asked with a humorless smile.

"You don't'. But before I can tell you what it is, you'll have to talk

with Mister Weinbaum."

"Who's he?"

"A scientist."

More fog evaporated. I got up.

"Uh-uh. No making a human guinea pig out of yours truly. Get

yourself another boy."

"Don't be silly," he said, "No harm will come to you."

Against my better judgement, I said, "Okay, let's go."

CHAPTER 3

Weinbaum approached the subject of my duties after a tour of the

house, including the laboratory. He wore a white smock and there

was something about him that made me crawl inside. He sat down

in the living room and motioned me into a seat. Rankin had

disappeared. Weinbaum stared at me with fixed eyes and once

again I felt a blast of icy coldness sweep over me.

"I'll put it to you bluntly," he said, "my experiments are too

complicated to explain in any detail, but they concern human flesh.

Dead human flesh."

I was becoming intensely aware that his eyes burnt with flickering

fires. He looked like a spider ready to engulf a fly, and this whole

house was his web. The sun was striking fire to the west and deep

pools of shadows were spreading across the room, hiding his face,

but leaving the glittering eyes as they shifted in the creeping

darkness.

He was still speaking. "Often, people bequeath their bodies to

scientific institutes for study. Unfortunately, I'm only one man, so

I have to resort to other methods."

Horror leapt grinning from the shadows and across my mind there

flitted the black picture of two men digging by the light of an

uncertain moon. A shovel struck wood the noise chilled my soul.

I rose quickly.

"I think I can find my own way out, Mr. Weinbaum."

He laughed softly. "Did Rankin tell you how much this job pays?"

"I'm not interested."

"Too bad. I was hoping you could see it my way. It wouldn't take a

year before you would make enough money to return to college."

I started, and got the uncanny feeling that this man was searching

my soul.

"How much do you know about me? How did you find out?"

"I have my ways." He chuckled again. "Will you reconsider?"

I hesitated.

"Shall we put it on a trial basis?" he asked softly. "I'm quite sure

that we can both reach a mutual satisfaction."

I got the eerie feeling that I was talking to the devil himself, that

somehow I had been tricked into selling my soul.

"Be here at 8.00 sharp, the night after next," he said.

That was how it started.

As Rankin and I laid the sheeted body of Daniel Whetherby on the

lab table, lights flashed on behind sheeted oblongs that looked like

glass tanks.

"Weinbaum " I had dropped the title, Mister, without thinking, "I

think "

"Did you say something?" he asked, his eyes boring into mine. The

laboratory seemed far away. There were only the two of us, sliding

through a half-world peopled with horrors beyond the imagination.

Rankin entered in a white smock coat and broke the spell by

saying, "All ready, professor."

At the door, Rankin stopped me. "Friday, at eight."

A shudder, cold and terrible raced up my spine as I looked back.

Weinbaum had produced a scalpel and the body was unsheeted.

They looked at me strangely and I hurried out.

I took the car and quickly drove down the narrow dirt road. I didn't

look back. The air was fresh and warm with a promise of budding

summer. The sky was blue with fluffy white clouds fleeting along

in the warm summer breeze. The night before seemed like a

nightmare, a vague dream, that, as all nightmares, is unreal and

transparent when the bright light of day shines upon it. But as I

drove past the wrought iron gates of the Crestwood Cemetery I

realized that this was no dream. Four hours ago my shovel had

removed the dirt that covered the grave of Daniel Wheatherby.

For the first time a new thought occurred to me. What was the

body of Daniel Wheatherby being used for at that moment? I

shoved the thought into a deep corner of my mind and let out onto

the go-pedal. The care screamed ahead I put my thoughts into

driving, glad to put the terrible thing I had done out of my mind,

for a short time, anyway.

CHAPTER FOUR

The California countryside blurred by as I tried for the maximum

speed. The tyres sang on the curve and, as I came out of it, several

things happened in rapid succession.

I saw a panel truck crazily parked right on the broken white line, a

girl of about eighteen running right toward my car, an older man

running after her. I slammed on the brakes and they exploded like

bombs. I jockeyed the wheel and the California sky was suddenly

under me. Then everything was right-side up and I realized that I

had flipped right over and up. For a moment I was dazed, then a

scream, shrill and high, piercing, slit my head.

I opened the door and sprinted toward the road. The man had the

girl and was yanking her toward the panel truck. He was stronger

than her and winning, but she was taking an inch of skin for every

foot he made.

He saw me.

"You stay out of this, buddy. I'm her legal guardian."

I halted and shook the cobwebs out of my brain. It was exactly

what he had been waiting for. He let go with a haymaker that got

me on the corner of the chin and knocked me sprawling. He

grabbed the girl and practically threw her into the cab.

By the time that I was on me feet he was around to the driver's

side and peeling out. I took a flying leap and made the roof just as

he took off. I was almost thrown off, but I clawed through about

five layers of paint to stay on. Then I reached through the open

window and got him by the neck. He cursed and grabbed my hand.

He yanked, the truck spun crazily off the ledge of a steep

embankment.

The last thing I remember is the nose of the truck pointing straight

down. Then my enemy saved my life by viciously yanking my

arm. I tumbled off just as the truck plunged over the cliff.

I landed hard, but the rock I landed on was harder. Everything slid

away.

Something cool touched my brow as I cam to. The first thing I saw

was the flashing red light on top of the official looking car parked

by the embankment. I sat bolt upright and soft hands pushed me

down. Nice hands, the hands of the girl who had landed me into

this mess.

Then there was a Highway Patrolman over me and an official

voice said, "The ambulance is coming. How do you feel?"

"Bruised," I said and sat up again. "But tell the ambulance to go

away. I'm all right."

I tried to sound flippant. The last thing I needed after last nights

`job' was the police.

"How about telling me about it?" the policeman said, producing a

notebook. Before I answered, I walked over to the embankment.

My stomach flipped over backwards. The panel truck was nose-

deep in California dirt and my sparring partner was turning that

good California soil into a reddish mud with his own blood. He lay

grotesquely, sprawled half in, half out of the cab. The

photographers were getting their pictures. He was dead.

I turned back. The patrolman looked at me as if he expected me to

throw up, but, after my new job, my stomach was admirably

strong.

"I was driving out of the Belwood district,"I said, "I came around

that curve ..."

I told the rest of the story with the girl's help. Just as I finished the

ambulance came to a halt. Despite my protestations and those of

my still-unnamed girl friend, we were hustled into the back.

Two hours later we had a clean bill of health from the patrolman

and the doctors and we were requested to be witnesses at the

inquest set for the next week.

I saw my car at the curb. It was a little worse for wear, but the flats

had been replaced. There was a witnessed bill on the dash for a

wrecker, tires, and clean-up squad! It came to about $250.00 half

of the last night's pay-check.

"You look preoccupied," the girl said.

I turned to her. "Um, yeah. Well, we almost got killed together this

morning, how about telling me your name and having lunch

together?"

"Okay," she said. "The name's Vicki Pickford. Yours?"

"Danny," I said unemotionally as we pulled away from the curb. I

switched the subject rapidly. "What was going on this morning?

Did I hear that guy say that he was your legal guardian?"

"Yes" she replied.

I laughed. "The name is Danny Gerad. You'll get that out of the

afternoon papers."

She smiled gravely. "All right. He was my guardian. He was also a

drunkard and an all-around crumb."

Her cheeks flamed red. The smile was gone. "I hated him and I'm

glad he's dead."

She gave me a sharp glance and for a moment I saw fear shine

wetly in her eyes; then she recovered her self-control. We parked

and ate lunch.

Forty minutes later I paid the check out of my newly acquired cash

and walked back out to the car.

"Where to?" I asked.

"Bonaventure Motel," she said. "That's where I'm staying."

She saw curiosity jump into my eyes and sighed, "All right, I was

running away. My Uncle David caught up with me and tried to

drag me back to the house. When I told him I wouldn't go, he

dragged me out to the truck. We were going around that curve

when I wrenched the wheel out of his hands. Then you came

along."

She closed up like a clam and I didn't try to get any more out of

her. There was something wrong about her story. I didn't press her.

I drove her into the parking lot and killed the engine.

"When can I see you again?" I asked. "A movie tomorrow?"

"Sure ," she replied.

"I'll pick you up at 7.30," I said and drove out, thoughtfully

pondering the events that had befallen me in the last twenty-four

hours.

CHAPTER FIVE

When I entered the apartment the phone was ringing. I picked it up

and Vicki, accident and the bright workaday world of suburban

California faded into the half-world of phantom-people shadows.

The voice that whispered coldly out of the receiver was

Weinbaum's

"Troubles?" He spoke softly, but there was an ominous tone in his

voice.

"I had an accident," I replied.

"I read about it in the paper ..." Weinbaum's voice trailed off.

Silence hung between us for a moment and then I said, "Does this

mean you're canning me?"

I hoped that he would say yes; I didn't have the guts to resign.

"No," he said softly, "I just wanted to make sure that you didn't

reveal anything about the work you're doing for me."

"Well, I didn't" I told him curtly.

"The night after this," he reminded me, "At eight."

There was a click and then the dial tone. I shivered and hung up

the receiver. I had the oddest feeling that I had just broken

connection with the grave.

The next morning at 7.30 sharp, I picked up Vicki at the

Bonaventure Motel. She was all decked out in an outfit that made

her look stunning. I made a low whistle; she flushed prettily. We

didn't talk about the accident.

The movie was good and we held hands part of the time, ate

popcorn part of the time and kissed once or twice. All in all, a

pleasant evening.

The second feature was just drawing to the climax when an usher

came down the aisle.

He was stopping at every row and looked peeved. Finally, he

stopped at ours. He swept the flashlight down the row and asked*

"Mr. Gerad? Daniel Gerad?"

"Yes" I asked, feeling guilt and fear run through me. "There's a

gentleman on the phone, sir. He says it's a matter of life or death."

Vicki gave me a startled look and I followed the usher hurriedly.

That let out the police. I mentally took stock of my only remaining

relatives. Aunt Polly, Grandma Phibbs and my great-uncle Charlie.

They were all healthy as far as I knew.

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I picked up

the telephone and heard Rankin's voice.

He spoke rapidly and a raw note of fear was in his voice. "Get out

here, right now! We need "

There were sounds of a a scuffle, a muffled scream, then a click

and the empty dial tone.

I hung, up and hurried back for Vicki. "Come on," I said.

She followed without questioning me. At first I wanted to drive her

back to the motel but the muffled scream made me decide that this

was an emergency. I didn't like either Rankin or Weinbaum, but I

knew I would have to help them.

We took off.

"What is it?" Vicki asked anxiously as I stamped on the go-pedal

and let the car unwind.

"Look," I said, "something tells me that you've got your secrets

about your guardian. I've got some of my own. Please, don't ask."

She didn't say another word.

I took possession of the passing lane. The speedometer climbed

from seventy-five to eighty-five, kept rising and trembled on the

verge of ninety. I pulled into the turnoff on two wheels and the car

bounced, clung and exploded up the road.

Grim and gaunt against the overcast sky, I could see the house. I

pulled the car to a stop and was out in a second.

"Wait here," I cried over my shoulder to Vicki.

There was a light on in the laboratory and I flung the door open. It

was empty but ransacked. The place was a mess of broken test

tubes, smashed apparatus, and, yes, bloodstains that trailed through

the half-open door that led to the darkened garage. Then I noticed

the green liquid that was flowing over the floor in sticky rivulets.

For the first time I noticed that one of the several sheeted tanks had

been broken. I walked over to the other three. The lights inside

them were off and the sheets that draped them let by no hint of

what might have been under them - or, for that matter, what was

under them.

I had no time to see. I didn't like the looks of blood, still fresh and

uncoagulated, that led out of the front door into the garage. I

swung open the door and entered the garage. It was dark and I

didn't know where the light switch was. I cursed myself for not

bringing the flashlight that was in the glove compartment. I

advanced a few steps and realized that there was a cold draft

blowing against my face. I advanced toward it.

The light from the lab threw a golden shaft of light along the

garage floor, but it was next to nothing, in the Styngan blackness

of the garage. All my childish fears of the dark returned. Once

again I entered the realms of terror that only a child can know. I

realized that the shadow that leered at me from out of the dark

might not be dispelled by bright light.

Suddenly, my right foot went down. I realized that the draft was

coming from a stairway I had almost fallen down. For a moment I

debated, then turned and hurried back through the lab and out to

the car.

Chapter Six

Vicki pounced on me as soon as I opened the door. "Danny, what

are you doing here?"

Her tone of voice made me look at her. In the sickly yellow glow

of the light her face was terrified.

"I'm working here," I said shortly.

''At first I didn't realize where we were," she said softly. I was only

here once before.

"You've been here?" I exclaimed. "When? '"Why?"

"One night," she said quietly "I brought Uncle David his lunch. He

forgot it."

The name rang a bell. She saw me grasping for it. "My guardian,"

she said. "Perhaps I'd better tell you the whole story. Probably,

you know that people don't get appointed guardians when they

drink. Well, Uncle David didn't always do those things. When my

mother and father were killed in a train-wreck four years ago, my

Uncle David was the kindest person you could imgine. The court

appointed him my guardian until I came of ago, with my complete

support."

For a moment she was quiet, living in memories and the expression

that flitted rapidly through her eyes was not pretty. Then she went

on.

"Two years ago the company be was working for as a night

watchman folded up and my uncle was out of a job. He was out of

work for almost half a year. We were getting desperate, with

only unemployment checks to feed us and college looming up for

me. Then he got a job. It was a good paying one and it brought in

fabulous sums. I used to joke with him about the banks be robbed.

One night he looked at me and said, 'Not banks.'"

I felt fear and guilt tap me on the shoulder with cold fingers. Vicki

went on.

"He started to get mean. He started bringing home whisky and

getting drunk. The times I asked him about his job he evaded me.

One night he told me point-blank to mind my own business."

"I watched him decay before my very eyes. Then one night he let a

name slip - Weinbaum, Steffen Weinbaum. A couple of weeks

later he forgot his midnight lunch. I looked up the name in the

telephone book and took it out to him. He flew into the most

terrible rage I have ever seen."

"In the weeks that followed he was away more and more at this

terrible house. One night, when he came home he beat me. I

decided to run away. To me, the Uncle David I knew was dead. He

caught me - and you came along." She fell silent.

I was shaken right down to my boots. I had a very good idea what

Vicki's uncle did for a living. The time Rankin had signed me up

coincided with the time Vicki's guardian would have been cracking

up. I almost drove away then, despite the wild shambles the lab

was in, despite the secret stairway, despite the blood trail on the

floor. But then a faraway, thin scream reached us. I thumbed the

glove compartment button, and reached in, fumbled around and got

the flashlight.

Vicki's hand went to my arm "No, Danny. Please, Don't. l know

that there's something terrible going on here. Drive away from it!"

The scream sounded again, this time fainter, and I made up my

mind. I grabbed the flashlight. Vicki saw my intention. "All right,

I'm coming with you."

"Uh-uh," I said. "You stay here. I've got a feeling that there's

something ... loose out there. You stay here."

She unwillingly sat back. I shut the door and ran back to the lab. I

didn't pause, but went back into the garage. The flashlight

illuminated the dark hole where the wall had slid away to reveal

the staircase. My blood pounding thickly in my temples, I ventured

down into it. I counted the steps, shining the flashlight at the

featureless walls, at the impenetrable darkness below. "Twenty,

twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three "

At thirty, the stairway suddenly became a short passage. I started

cautiously along it, wishing that I had a revolver, or even a knife to

make me feel a little less naked and vulnerable.

Suddenly a scream, terrible and thick with fear soon sounded in the

darkness ahead of me. It was the sound of terror, the sound of a

man confronted with something out of the deepest pits of horror. I

broke into a run. As I ran I realized that the draft was blowing

coldly against my face. I reasoned that the tunnel must come out in

the outdoors. I stumbled over something.

It was Rankin, lying in a pool of his own blood, his eyes staring in

glazed horror at the ceiling. The back of his head was bashed in.

Ahead of me I heard a pistol shot, a curse, and another scream. I

ran on and almost fell on my face as I stumbled over more stairs. I

climbed and saw stairs framed vaguely in an opening screened

with underbrush above me. I pushed it aside and came upon a

startling tableau: a tall figure silhouetted against the sky that could

only be Weinbaum, a revolver hanging in his hand, looking down

at the shadowed ground. Even the starlight was blotted out as the

hanging clouds that had parted briefly, closed together again.

He heard me and wheeled quickly, his eyes glazing like red

lanterns in the dark.

"Oh, it you Gerad."

"Rankin's dead." I told him.

"I know." he said, "You could have prevented it if you had come a

little quicker"

"Now just hold on," I said, becoming angry. "I hurried "

I was cut off by a sound that has hounded me through nightmares

ever since, a hideous mewing sound, like that of some gigantic rat

in pain. I saw calculation, fear, and finally decision flicker across

Weinbaum's face in a matter of seconds. I fell back in terror.

"What is it?" I choked.

He casually shone the light down into the pit, for all his affected

casualness, I noticed that his eyes were averted by something.

The thing mewed again and I felt another spasm of fear. I craned to

see what horror lay in that pit, the horror that made even

Weinbaum scream in abject terror. And just before I saw, a

horrible wall of terror rose and fell from the vague outline of the

house.

Weinbaum jerked his flashlight from the pit and shone it in my

face.

"Who was that? Whom did you bring up here?"

But I had my own flashlight trained as I ran through the passage

way, Weinbaum close behind. I had recognized the scream. I had

heard it before, when a frightened girl almost ran into my car as

she fled her maniac of a guardian.

Vicki!

CHAPTER SEVEN

I heard Weinbaum gasp as we entered the lab. The place was

swimming in the green, liquid. The other two cases were broken!. I

didn't pause, but ran past the shattered, empty cases and out the

door. Weinbaum did not follow me.

The car was empty, the door on the passengers side open. I shone

my light over the ground. Here and there were footprints of a girl

wearing high heels, a girl who had to be Vicki. The rest of the

tracks were blotted out by a monstrous something I hesitate to

call it a track. It was more as if something huge had dragged itself

into the woods. Its hugeness was testified, too, as I noticed the

broken saplings and crushed underbrush.

I ran back into the lab where Weinbaum was sitting, face pale and

drawn, regarding the three shattered empty tanks. The revolver was

on the table and I grabbed it and made for the door.

"Where do you think you're going with that?" he demanded, rising.

"Out to hunt for Vicki," I snarled. "And if she's hurt or " I didn't

finish.

I hurried out into the velvet darkness of the night. Gun in hand,

flashlight in the other, I plunged into the woods, following the trail

blazed by something that I didn't want to think about. The vital

question that burned in my mind was whether it had Vicki or was

still trailing her. If it had her...

My question was answered by a piercing scream not too far away

from me.

Faster now, I ran and suddenly burst into a clearing.

Perhaps it is because I want to forget, or perhaps it is only because

the nigh was dark and beginning to become foggy, but I can only

remember how Vicki caught sight of my flashlight, ran to me,

buried her head against my shoulder and sobbed.

A huge shadow moved toward me, mewing horribly, driving me

almost mad with terror. Stumblingly, we fled from the horror in the

dark, back toward the comforting lights of the lab, away from the

unseen terror that lurked in the dark. My fear-crazed brain was

putting two and two together and coming up with five.

The three cases had contained three something from the darkest

pits of a twisted mind. One had broken loose. Rankin and

Weinbaum had been after it. It had killed Rankin, but Weinbaum

had trapped it in the concealed pit. The second one was

floundering in the woods now and I suddenly remembered that

whatever-it-was, was huge and that it had a hard time lifting itself

along. Then I realized that it had trapped Vicki in a gully. It had

started down easy enough! But getting up? I was almost positive

that it couldn't.

Two were out of commission. But where was the third? My

question was answered very suddenly but a scream from the lab.

And ... mewing.

CHAPTER EIGHT

We ran up to the lab door and threw it open. It was empty. The

screams and the terrible mewing sounds came from the garage. I

ran through, and ever since have been glad that Vicki stayed in the

lab and was spared the sight that had wakened me from a thousand

awful nightmares.

The lab was darkened and all that I could make out was a huge

shadow moving sluggishly. And the screams! Screams of terror,

the screams of a man faced with a monster from the pits of hell. It

mewed horribly and seemed to pant in delight.

My hand moved around for a light switch. There, I found it! Light

flooded the room, illuminating a tableau of horror that was the

result of the grave thing I had performed, I and the dead uncle.

A huge, white maggot twisted on the garage floor, holding

Weinbaum with long suckers, raising him towards its dripping,

pink mouth from which horrid mewing sounds came. Veins, red

and pulsating, showed under its slimy flesh and millions of

squirming tiny maggots - in the blood vessels, in the skin, even

forming a huge eye that stared out at me. A huge maggot, made up

of hundreds of millions of maggots, the feasters on the dead flesh

that Weinbaum had used so freely.

In a half-world of terror I fired the revolver again and again. It

mewed and twitched.

Weinbaum screamed something as he was dragged inexorably

toward the waiting mouth. Incredibly, I made it out over the

hideous sound that the creature was making.

"Fire it! In the name of heaven, fire it!"

Then I saw the sticky pools of green liquid which had trickled over

the floor from the laboratory. I fumbled for my lighter, got it and

frantically thumbed it. Suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten

to put a flint in. I reached for matches, got one and fired the others.

I threw the pack just as Weinbaum screamed his last. I saw his

body through the translucent skin of the creature, still twitching as

thousands of maggots leeched onto it. Retching, I threw the now

flaring matches into the green ooze. It was flammable, just as I had

thought. It burst into bright flames. The creature was twisted into a

horrid ball of pulsing, putrid flesh.

I turned and stumbled out to where Vicki stood, shaking and white

faced.

"Come on!" I said, "Let's get out of here! The whole place is going

to go up!"

We ran out to the car and drove away rapidly.

CHAPTER NINE

There isn't too much left to say. I'm sure that you have all read

about the fire that swept the residential Belwood District of

California, leveling fifteen square miles of woods and residential

homes. I couldn't feel too badly about that fire. I realize that

hundreds might have been killed by the gigantic maggot-things

that Weinbaum and Rankin were breeding. I drove out there after

the fire. The whole place was smoldering ruins. There was no

discernable remains of the horror that we had battled that final

night, and, after some searching, I found a metal cabinet. Inside

there were three ledgers.

Once of them was Weinbaum's diary. I clears up a lot. It revealed

that they were experimenting on dead flesh, exposing it to gamma

rays. One day they observed a strange thing. The few maggots that

had crawled over the flesh were growing, becoming a group.

Eventually they grew together, forming three separate large

maggots. Perhaps the radioactive bomb had speed up the evolution.

I don't know.

Furthermore, I don't want to know.

In a way, I suppose, I assisted in Rankin's death; the flesh of the

body whose grave I had robbed had fed perhaps the very creature

that had killed him.

I live with that thought. But I believe that there can be forgiveness.

I'm working for it. Or, rather, we're working for it.

Vicki and I. Together.

THE END

IN THE KEY CHORD OF

DAWN

STEPHEN KING

first appeared in

Contraband#2 Onan 1971

In the key-chords of dawn

all waters are depthless.

The fish flash recalls

timberline clefts where water

pours between the rocks of frost.

We live the night and wait

for the day dream

(we fished the Mississippi with

Norville as children

catching mostly crawdaddies from

the brown silk water)

when we say "love is responsibility";

our poles are adrift in a sea of compliments.

Now you fish for me and I for you.

The line, the red bobber, the worm on the hook: the fishing more

than the

eating: bones and scales and gutting knife make a loom of

complexity so we are

forced to say "fishing is responsibility"

and put away our poles.

Jhonathan and the Witches

Stephen King

From

First Words 1993, King wrote this 1956

Once upon a time there was a boy named Jhonathan. He was smart,

handsome, and very brave. But, Jhonathan was cobblers son.

One days his father said, "Jhonathan, you must go and seek your

fortune. You are old enough."

Jhonathan, being a smart boy knew he better ask the king for work.

So, he set out.

On the way, he met a rabbit who was a fairy in disguise. The

scared thing was being pursued by hunters and jumped into

Jhonathans arms. When the hunters came up Jhonathan pointed

excitedly and shouts, "That way, that way !"

After the hunters had gone, the rabbit turned into a fairy and said,

"you have helped me. I will give you three wishes. What are they?"

But Jhonathan could not think of anything, so the fairy agreed to

give him when he needed them.

So Jhonathan kept walking until he made the kingdom without

incident.

So he went to the king and asked for work.

But, as luck would have it, the king was in a very bad mood that

day. So he vented his mood on Jhonathan.

"Yes there is something you can do. On yonder Mountain there are

three witches. If you can kill them, I will give you 5,000 crowns. If

you cannot do it I will have your head! You have 20 days." With

this he dismissed Jhonathan.

"Now what am I to do?", thought Jhonathan. Well I shall try.

The he remembered the three wishes granted him and set out door

the mountain.

* * *

Now Jhonathan was at the mountain and was just going to wish for

a knife to kill the witch, when he heard a voice in his ear, "The first

witch cannot be pierced."

The second witch cannot be pierced or smothered.

The third cannot be pierced, smothered and is invisible.

With this knowledge Jhonathan looked about and saw no one.

Then he remembered the fairy, and smile.

He then went in search of the first witch.

At last he found her. She was in a cave near the foot of the

mountain, and was a mean looking hag.

He remembered the fairy words, and before the witch could do

anything but give him an ugly look, he wished she should be

smothered. And Lo! It was done.

Now he went higher in search of the second witch. There was a

second cave higher up. There he found the second witch. He was

about to wish her smothered when he remembered she could not be

smothered. And the before the witch could do anything but give

him an ugly look, he had wished her crushed. And Lo! It was done

Now he had only to kill the third witch and he would have the

5,000 crowns. But on the way up, he was plagued with thoughts of

how?

Then he it upon a wonderful plan.

The, he saw the last cave. He waited outside the entrance until he

heard the witches footsteps. He then picked up a couple of big

rocks and wishes.

He the wished the witch a normal women and Lo! She became

visible and then Jhonathan struck her head with the rocks he had.

Jhonathan collected his 5,000 crowns and he and his father lived

happily ever after.

The End

STEPHEN

KING

Keyholes

The

Leprechaun

by

Stephen King

Incomplete novel King was writing for his son Owen in 1983. King

had written several pages of the story in longhand in a notebook

and then transcribed them. While on a trip to California, he wrote

about 30 more pages of the story in the same notebook, which was

lost off the back of his motorcycle (somewhere in coastal New

Hampshire) on a trip from Boston to Bangor. He mentioned that he

could reconstruct what was lost, but had not gotten around to it (as

of June, 1983). The only part that still exists today is the 5

typescript pages that had been transcribed. The 5 pages, plus a 3-

page cover letter to a senior editor at Viking are now owned by a

King collector.

Once upon a time--which is how all the best stories start-- a little

boy named Owen was playing outside his big red house. He was

pretty bored because his big brother and big sister, who could

always think of things to do, were in school. His daddy was

working, and his mom was sleeping upstairs. She asked him if he

would like a nap, but Owen didn't really like naps. He thought they

were boring.

He played with his G.I. Joe men for awhile, and then he went

around to the back and swung on the swing for awhile. He gave the

tetherball a big hit with his first--ka-bamp!--and watched the rope

wind up as the ball went around and around the pole. He saw his

big sister's softball bat lying in the grass and wished Chris, the big

boy who sometimes came to play with him, was there to throw him

a few pitches. But Chris was in school too. Owen walked around

the house again. He thought he would pick some flowers for his

mother. She liked flowers pretty well.

He got around to the front of the house and that was when he saw

Springsteen in the grass. Springsteen was his big sister's new cat.

Owen liked most cats, but he didn't like Springsteen much. Hie

was big and black, with deep green eyes that seemed to see

everything. Every day owen had to make sure that Springsteen

wasn't trying to eat Butler. Butler was Owen's guinea pig. When

Springsteen thought no one was around, he would jump up on the

shelf' where Butler's big glass cage was and stare in through the

screen on top with his hungry green eyes. Springsteen wuld sit

there, all crouched down, and hardly move at all. Springsteen's tail

would wag back and forth a little, and sometimes one of his ears

would flick a bit, but that was all. I'll get in there pretty soon, you

cruddy little guinea pig, Springsteen seemed to say. And when I

get you, I'll eat you! Better believe it! If guinea pigs say prayers,

you better say yours!

Whenever Owen saw Springsteen the cat up on Butler's shelf, he

would make him get down. Sometimes Springsteen put his claws

out (although he knew better than to try to put them in Owen) and

Owen imagined the black cat saying, You caught me this time, but

so what? Big deal! Someday you won't! And then, yum! yum!

dinner is served! Owen tried to tell people that Springsteen wanted

to eat Butler, but nobody believed him.

"Don't worry, Owen," Daddy said, and went off to work on a

novel that's what he did for work.

"Don't worry, Owen," Mommy said, and went off to work on a

noivel-because that was what she did for work, too.

"Don't worry, Owen" Big Brother said, and went off to watch The

Tomorrow People on TV.

"You just hate my cat!" Big sister said, and went off to play The

Entertainer on the piano.

But no matter what they said, Owen knew he'd better keep a good

old eye on Springsteen, because Springsteen certainly did like to

kill things. Worse, he liked to play with them before he killed

them. Sometimes Owen would open the door in the morning and

there would be a dead bird on the doorsteo. Then he would look

further, and there would be Springsteen crouched on the porch rail,

the tip of his tail switching slightly and his big green eyes looking

at Owen, as if to say: Ha! I got another one... and you couldn't stop

me, could you? Then Owen would ask permission to bury the dead

bird. Sometimes his mommy or daddy would help him.

So when Owen saw Springsteen on the grass of the front lawn, all

crouched down with his tail twirching, he thought right away that

the cat might be playing with some poor, hurt little animal. Owen

forgot about picking flowers for his mom and ran over to see what

Springsteen had caught.

At first he thought Springsteen didn't have anything at all. Then

the cat leaped, and Owen heard a very tiny scream from the grass.

He saw something green and blue between Springsteen had was

shrieking and trying to get away. And now Owen saw something

else-little spots of blood on the grass.

"No!" Owen shouted. "Get away, Springsteen!" The cat flattened

his ears back and turned towards the sound of Owen's voice. His

big green eyes glared. The green and blue thing between

Springsteen paws squiggled and wiggled and got away. I started to

run and Owen saw it was a person, a little tiny man wearing a

green hat made out of a leaf. The little man looked back over his

shoulder, and Owen saw how scared the little guy was. He was no

bigger than the mice Springsteen sometimes killed in their big dark

cellar. The little man had a cut down one of his cheeks from one of

Springsteen's claws.

Springsteen hissed at Owen and Owen could almost hear him say:

"Leave me alone, he's mine and I'm going to have him!"

Then Springsteen jumped for the little man again, just as quick as a

cat can jump-and if you have a cat of your own, you'll know that

is very fast. The little man in the grass tried to dodge away, but he

didn't quite make it, Owen saw the back of the little man's shirt

tear open as Springsteen's claws ripped it apart. And, I am sorry to

say, he saw more blood and heard the little man cry out in pain. He

went tumbling in the grass. His little leaf hat went flying.

Springsteen got ready to jump again.

"No, Springsteen, no!" Owen cried. "Bad cat!"

He grabbed Springsteen. Springsteen hissed again, and his needle-

sharp teeth sank into one of Owen's hands. It hurt worse than a

doctor's shot. "Ow!" Owen yelled, tears coming to his eyes. But he

didn't let go of Springsteen. Now Springsteen started clawing at

Owen, but Owen would not let go. He ran all the way to the

driveway with Springsteen in his hands. Then he put Springsteen

down. "Leave him alone, Springsteen!" Owen said, and, trying to

think of the very worst thing he could, he added: "Leave him alone

or I'll put you in the Oven and bake you like a pizza!"

Springsteen hissed, showing his teeth. His tail switched back and

forth-not just the tip now but the whole thing.

"I don't care if you are mad!" Owen yelled at him. He was still

crying a little, because his hands hurt as if he had put them in the

fire. They were both bleeding, one from Springsteen biting him

and one from Springsteen clawing him. "You can't kill people on

our lawn even if they are little!"

Springsteen hised again and backed away. Okay, his mean green

eyes seemed to say. Okay for this time. Next time... we'll see!

Then he turned and ran away. Owen hurried back to see it the little

man was all right.

At first he thought the little man was gone. Then he saw the blood

on the grass, and the little leaf hat. The little man was nearby, lying

on his side. The reason Owen hadn't been able to see him at first

was the little man's shirt was the exact color of the grass. Owen

touched him gently with his finger. He was terribly afraid the little

man was dead. But when Owen touched him, the little man

groaned and sat up.

"Are you all right?" Owen asked.

The fellow in the grass made a face and clapped his hands to his

ears. For a moment Owen thought Springsteen must have hurt the

little guy's head as well as his back, and then he realized that his

voice must sound like thunder to such a small person. The little

man in the grass was not much longer than Owen's thumb. This

was Owen's first good look at the little fellow he had rescued, and

he saw right away why the little man had been so hard to find

again. His green shirt was not just the color of grass; it was grass.

Carefully woven blades of green grass. Owen wondered how come

they didn't turn brown.

Silence

Stephen King

Published in "Moth", 1970

Nothing

but the insect whine of

chemicals moving between

refrigerator walls:

the mind becomes CONFESSIONAL

(enamel)

murder

lurks

I stand with books in hand

the feary silence of fury

waiting

for the furnace to kick on

Skybar

by Brian Hartz &

Stephen King

The following story was written from a contest with Doubleday

books to promote the 1982 "Do it Yourself Bestseller" book edited

by Tom Silberkleit and Jerry Biederman.

There were many authors featured in the book, including Belva

Plain and Isaac Asimov. Each writer provided the beginning and

ending to a story.

It was up to the reader to provide the middle, hence the name "Do

It Yourself Bestseller."

As part of the promotion, Doubleday books held a national contest

to see who could write the best middle portion.

Each winner was chosen by the individual writer - in this case,

Stephen King. Brian Hartz was 18 at the time it was written.

This story contains strong language and material that may be

unsuitable for younger readers.

There were twelve of us when we went in that night, but only two

of us came out - my friend Kirby and me. And Kirby was insane.

All of the things I'm going to tell you about happened twelve years

ago. I was eleven then, in the sixth grade. Kirby was ten and in the

fifth. In those days, before gas shot up to $1.40 a gallon or more

(as I recall the best deal in town was at Dewey's Sunoco, where

you could get hi-test for 31.9 cents, plus double S&H Green

stamps), Skybar Amusement Park was still a growing concern; its

great double Ferris wheel turned endlessly against a summer sky,

and you could hear the great, grinding mechanical laugh of the fun-

house clown even at my house, five miles inland, when the wind

was right

Yeah, Skybar was the place to go, all right - you could blast away

with the .22 of your choice at Pop Dupree's Dead Eye Shootin'

Gallery, you could ride the Whip until you puked, wander into the

Mirror Labyrinth, or look at the Adults Only freak tent and wonder

what was in there...you especially wondered when the people came

out, white-faced, some of the women crying, or hysterical. Brant

Callahan said it was all just a fake, whatever it was, but sometimes

I saw the doubt even in Brant's tough gray eyes.

Then, of course, the murders started, and eventually Skybar was

shut down. The double Ferris stood frozen against the sky, and the

only sound the mechanical clown's mouth produced was the lunatic

hooting of the sea breeze. We went in, the twelve of us, and. . .but

I'm getting ahead of myself. It began just after school let out that

June; it began when Randy Stayner, a seventh-grader from the

junior high school, was thrown from the highest point of the

SkyCoaster. I was there that day - Kirby was with me, in fact - and

we both heard his scream as he came down.

It was one of the strangest ways for a person to die - the shadowed

Ferris wheel turned in the sunlight, the bumper cars honked and

sparked the roof and walls of Spunky's Dodge 'Em, the carousel

spun wildly to the rise and fall of horses and lions, and the steady

beat of its repeating tune echoed throughout the park. A man

balancing his screaming son in one hand, ice cream cones in the

other, little kids with cotton candy racing to see who's first to get

on Sandee's Spinning Sombrero, and in the midst of all the

peaceful confusion, Randy Stayner performing a one-time solo

swan dive 100 feet into the solid steel tracks of the SkyCoaster.

For a while, I wasn't all too sure the people around me weren't

thinking it was just an act - a Saturday afternoon performance by a

skilled diver. When blood and bone hit, however, it was clear the

act was over. And then, as if to clear the whole thing up with a

final attempt to achieve his original goal, he rolled lazily over the

bottom rails of the SkyCoaster into the brown murky water of

Skybar Pond, swirls of red and grey following him.

The SkyCoaster was shut down the day of Randy's dive, and

despite weeks of dragging the pond's bottom, his body was never

found. Authorities concluded that his remains had drifted under a

sandbar or some unmarked passageway, and all search ceased after

four weeks.

Skybar lost a lot of customers after that. Most people were afraid

to go there, and other businesses in the town began to boom

because of it. In fact, Starboard Cinema, which showed horror

movies to an audience of four or five during the parks better days

now showed repeats of "I was a Teen Age Werewolf" to sell-out

crowds. More and more, people drifted away from Skybar until it

was shut down for good.

It was during those last few weeks that the worst accidents started

happening. A morning worker, reaching under a car on the Whip

for a paper cup, caught his arm on the supporting bar between two

clamps just as a faulty circuit started the machine. He was crushed

between two cars. Another worker was fixing a bottom rail on the

Ferris wheel when a 500 pound car dropped off the top and

smeared him onto the asphalt below. These and several other rides

were shut down, and when the only thing left open was Pop

Dupree's .22 gallery and the Adults Only freak tent, the spark ran

out of Skybar's amusement, and it was forced to shut down after its

third year in operation.

It had only been closed for two months when Brant Callahan came

up with his plan that night. We were in a group of five camping in

back of John Wilkenson's dad's workshop, in a single five-man

Sportsman pup tent illuminated by four flashlights shining on back

issues of Famous Detective Stories, when he stood up (or rather

scufffled on his knees, due to the height of the tent) and proposed

we all do something to separate the pussies from the men.

I tossed aside my Mystery of the Haunted Hearse, leaned teach in

the glow of Dewey Howardson's light, and squinted halfway at the

hulking shadow crouching by the double-flap zipper door. No one

else appeared to pay any attention to him.

"Come on, lard-asses!" he shouted. "Are ya all just going to sit

around playing Dick-fucking-Tracy all night?"

Kirby slapped at the bugs attacking his glowing arm and looked

from Brant, to me, to the rest of the guys still gazing with mild

interest at their Alfred Hitchcock tales of suspense, unaware of any

other activities going on in their presence. I gazed at my watch. It

was 11:30.

"What the hell are you raving about, Brant?" His face came to life

now that he was being noticed, and he looked at me with great

excitement, like some dumb little kid who was about to tell some

terrible secret and was getting the great flood of details together to

form a top-confidential plan.

"The SkyCoaster."

Dewey looked over the top of his magazine and shot Brant a look

of mild interest.

"Skybar's SkyCoaster?"

"'Course, ya damn idiot. What other roller coaster ya gonna find in

Starboard? Now the way I figger it, we could make it over the

barbed wire and inside to the SkyCoaster easy enough."

"What the fuck for?" I asked. Brant was always pulling stunts like

this, and it was no telling what the crazy bastard was up to this

time. I remember one year when we were out smashing coins on

the BY&W tracks by Harrow's Point, Brant got tired of watching

trains run over his pennies and dimes and dared us to take on a real

challenge. Whenever Brant came up with a real challenge, you

could almost always count on calling up the You Asked For It or

Ripleys Believe It or Not crews for live coverage. Not that the

challenge was anything like that man from Brazil who swallowed

strips of razor blades, or that fat lady from Ohio who balanced fire

sticks on her forehead - Brant's dares were far more challenging

than those. And, as young volunteers from his reluctant audience,

we were obligated to take part in them or kiss our reputation for

bravery goodbye.

Brant reached into his pants pocket that day and pulled out a small

cardboard box wrapped tightly with a red rubber band.

Unwrapping it, he revealed four or five shiny copper bullets, the

kind I used to see on reruns of Mannix when Mike Conners would

stop blasting away at crime rings long enough to load up his

revolver again. They were different from T.V., though. On the tube

they appeared to be no more than tiny pieces of dull plastic

jammed into a Whamco Cap Pistol. In front of me then, they sat

mystically in Brant's hand, the shells glittering bright rays of light

in the late afternoon sun, the tip of greyish lead heavily refusing to

reflect any light at all.

Then Brant clapped them all together in a fist and headed up the

bank toward the tracks. I started after him, half expecting him to

wheel out a gun for them at any minute, hoping he was just going

to relieve himself rather than starting to open fire on something, or

trying some other dangerous stunt. It was dangerous, as it turned

out, but I didn'tsay anything. I just stood there by the rails, taking a

plug off the chewingtobacco Dewey brought along, my mind

watching from some faraway place as he set them up single file on