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
the left rail.
"The train wheels should set 'em off the second they hit," he smiled
smugly, eagerly forming his plan. "All we have to do is stand here
by the rails until they do. How's that for a challenge, huh? Oh, and
the first one to jump is pussy of the year."
I didn't say anything. but I thought a lot about it. About how stupid
it was, how dangerous it was, and how weird a persons brain had
to be to think things like that up. I thought about how I should bug
out right then, just yell "Screw you, Brant!" and take off for home.
But that would have made me green. And if it was one thing we all
had to show each other back then, it was that we were no cowards.
So there we were, Brant, John, Dewey, me, and Kirby, although
Kirby wouldn't set foot near the tracks, bullets or no bullets, with a
train coming (he began to conveniently get sick on the tobacco and
had to lie down). We lined up next to the rails, determination in
our eyes as the bullets gleamed in front of us. John was the first
one to hear the train, and as we stepped closer to Brant's orders, I
could hear him softly muttering a short prayer over and over to
himself. Dewey stood on the far right side of me, the last person in
our Fearless Freddy Fan Club
Then the first heavy rumbling of the cars came, John reeled as it
got louder, and I thought surely he was going to collapse over the
tracks, but he didn't, and we all stood still as the train came on. The
churning squeak of the wheels hit our ears, and I stared blankly at
the bullets in front of us, thinking how small they seemed under
the wheels of the 4:40. But the more I looked, the larger they
began to appear, until it seemed they were almost the size of
cannonballs. I shut my eyes and prayed with John.




In the distance. the whistle rang out a terrifyingly loud Hooooo-
HOO Hoooo, and I was sure it was on top of us, sure that I would
feel the cracks of lead pounding in my ears any second, feel the hot
metal in my legs. Then the steady thud-thud-thud of its wheels
grinding closer bit into my ears, and I screamed. turned, and fell
down the slope to where the black gravel ended and the high
meadowy grass began. I ran and didn't stop or look back until I
was what felt like at least a mile away, and then collapsed in the
stickery high grass, my hands and knees filling with sharp pain.
Behind me, five or six bullets roared into the air consecutively, and
I wondered vaguely how Mike Conners could stand such a loud
sound every time he squeezed the trigger. My ears filled up with a
steady EEEEEEEEEEE, and I lay back in the grass, my hair full of
stickers, my pride full of shame.
Then Kirby was in front of me, telling me I was all right. I sat up in
the grass, and down the hm about ten or fifteen feet from me,
Brant, Dewey, and John sat puffing loudly, laughing, out of breath.
The air filled with smoke and I collapsed again into the high sea of
shrub and stickers, feeling fine.
Brant admitted time after time that we were all brave for going
along with him that day, but he never brought up the fact that we
all had run away, he and Dewey in the lead. Somewhere in my
mind, the fact appeared to me that somewhere in Brant, his ego
ended and his brains began. That's why I listened along with the
others, and why we all wound up going with him that night when
he began scheming up another mastermind stunt.
"First we make it over the fence. When we do, we head for the
SkyCoaster. Here's the trick: we'll all meet in the station and start
up the tracks - not the wooden beams - the tracks, and, in single
file, climb to the King drop, then back down." "You're fuckin nuts,
Brant." "Maybe. But at least I'm not fuckin' pussy." "Who's
pussy?" I asked, pulling my Converse All-Star tennis shoes on.
"You in?" asked Kirby, his lower jaw shaking. It was almost like




that shaking jaw and those glassy, scared deer eves of his were
trying to pull me back, to help me forget about the dare and get
back to reading another chapter in Amazing Detective Stories - as
if that once shaking jaw were a sonar, bouncing off waves of
detection and coming up with the same reading: Dangerous Barrier
Ahead.
"Don't be ridiculous, Kirb. 'Course I'm goin"' I shot a glance at
John and Dewey, who both gave me nods of bravery and
confidence, mixed highly with regrets of Brant's ever being with us
that night. We left the flashlights on in the tent in case John's dad
peeked out the back windows of his house to check on us. It turned
out he never did.
Skybar can be pretty damn dark at night with no lights on. Few
people know that like I do since most have only seen it in the
daytime with sunlight bouncing off of the metal roofs of Pop
Dupree's and the Adults Only freak tent or at night with the
magical lights blazing lazily around on the Ferris wheel and bulbs
flashing crazily in single file, creating a racing form of neon
display up and down the hills of the 100 foot high SkyCoaster.
There were no lights that night, however. No lights, no moon, no
light clouds, zilchamundo. Brant had stopped on the way to pick
up a couple of his friends from the White Dragons. The Dragons
were a street gang that held a high position in thc field of respect
with all wise kids back then, and luckily they brought spare
flashlights, matches for their cigarettes, and 5-inch steel Randell
switchblades (in case some maniacal drunk or thug was claiming
the park space as a home base for his operations).
Both of the White Dragon members appeared to be gods in the
eyes of all of us that evening - their hair slicked back to their scalps
James Dean style, black leather jackets with pale, fire breathing
dragons on them, a general air of confidence and security beaming
off them as if they were more protective beacons for us than
general good company joining us in the daredevil fun.




Five more members of the Dragons were to meet us after a field
party they were having up on Grange's Point. Brant hadn't let us in
on that fact at first, but when I found out they were supposed to
meet us at the front gate at 12:30. more confidence rose in me, and
it began to feel more like we were heading toward a late game of
craps or penny ante poker instead of a 100 foot climb on slick
poles. What we didn't know was that they were practically carrying
the party with them, each with a bottle of Jack Daniel's Black
label, or Southern Comfort, or Everclear, and each was singing in
rackety unison the agonizing 75th stanza to "99 Bottles of Beer."
Excitement heaved up my chest to my throat as we approached the
outer gate, and I can still remember how mystic and strange the
park looked in the dark night air. The chain fence stretched onward
in both directions to what seemed infinity, sealing us out from its
unknown hidden powers, and I recall that it almost seemed that it
was shielding Skybar inside, preventing it from wielding its wrath
on the innocent people living outside its domain. Once you crossed
the barrier, however, there was no turning back. Here was where
the two worlds divided, and the choice was made - pussy or man.
Everybody was anxious to get inside the park's gates to prove
where he stood. With the gang you felt cold and nervous while
awaiting the wrath of whatever might be lurking inside-but outside,
the chances of surviving any lurking danger alone made you even
more nervous- jittery enough to crawl up into a ball and piss your
pants at every crack of a twig.
So, you see, it's not that we all wanted to go inside. But even if we
were scared to death of climbing the cold rails of the SkyCoaster,
staying alone while the rest of the bunch climbed over and
ventured inside was even worse than the original dare itself.
Surprisingly enough, Kirby was the first one up the fence to lay his
jacket across the barbed wire and hop to the soft asphalt of Skybar
on the other side. The rest of us followed, thud, sputt, thud
sounding through the night air as we each dropped to the ground




on the other side. We were in now. Eddie Frachers, the shorter of
the two White Dragons, lit up a smoke, flicked on the flashlight,
and led the way with Brant.
The station was empty when we got to the steel rails of the coaster,
and climbing the steps to the gate station was an unusual
experience in itself since there was no waiting in line for an hour
while an old man standing in front of you blew cigarette fumes in
your face in the riding hot sun as your stomach turned putred, your
facial skin pale. Now it was home free between the coaster and us,
free space all the way.
Hurry hurry step right up!
The metal floor thundered hundreds of beats under our feet as we
made our way across the vacant station to the terminal gates, and I
looked several times over my shoulder as we walked the deserted
leading board, my senses ready for anything that might decide to
go more than "bump" in the night. I was the first one to hear it, in
fact, and my body grew limp, my bowels limp with it when I heard
the direction it was coming from - the coaster cars.
They all sat in front of us, grey and orange from rust and age, their
silent features corrupting the night with an evil air, and I recall
standing there as the others began to hear it too, my hands shaking,
legs drooping, mouth hanging open stupidly as I attempted to say
something - I don't know what - and nothing would come out.
I don't know how long we all stood there, waiting for something,
anything to happen. The cars seemed mystic in their own way as
they stood their ground and refused to let us any nearer by chanting
some evil spell among themselves to keep us back. A spell is one
thing, but if you've ever thought you heard a car (or possibly some
dangerous lunatic hiding behind a car) singing something, you'd
understand how we all felt that night. Even Brant and the two
White Dragons appeared motionless in the soft glow from the




flashlight, but somehow Eddie brought the flashlight up to meet
whatever was occupying the first car.
"Hey! Turn it off damnit!"
A surge of relief at its at least being human swelled up in me, but I
still stood there, motionless and quivering, even as Eddie and the
rest of the bunch, even Kirby, started toward the coaster. I must
have still been in a daze, because I found myself wanting to stop
them, to pull them back to me, to end it all, turn around and get the
hell back over the fence. But I still stood there as fog rolled around
my eyes and my sight blurred, leaving only my ears to tell me the
horrible fate of our party.
"What the hell are you..." ". . are you sure that it's them . . ." "What
are they doing here like this..." A long, ear-piercing scream
followed, the kind women usually scream in those horror movies at
Starboard Cinema when the vampire wraps his cape around his
victim and starts sucking the living blood out of her. It rose to
almost unbelievable splitting levels then faded away with
suppressed laughter followed by "59 bottles of beer on the wall, 59
bottles of beer..."
A hand touched my shoulder and I reeled to find Kirby at my feet,
telling me that the other guys had gone ahead without me and I'd
better hurry up. I ran and caught up with them by the main track,
where they had already begun the climb. Brant was first, then the
White Dragons, and then Dewey and John, clinging tightly to the
steel tracks behind them. I ran the 20 feet to the final, highest 100
foot drop, and started up after them.
The cold steel rails clapped clamily into my skin as I started
shinnying up, looking to where Brant and the Dragons were
perched high above. I couldn't weigh the amount of energy I had
left to figure how I was gonna climb 100 fucking feet barehanded.
It's kind of like that joke about the little ant crawling up the




elephant's hind leg with rape on its mind. I probably wouldn't make
it, but I had high hopes.
Kirby never touched the rails. I couldn't blame him after the train
event, maybe something happened to him when he was younger, or
something. Kirby told me a lot of things best left confidential, but
he never told me anything about it either. He may not have wanted
to climb, but to me he was no pussy.
A lot of things go through your mind when you're 45 feet off the
ground climbing rail by rail on a ladder without rungs. One
hundred feet of sheer pole climbing with occasional crosspieces to
hang on to isn't much, and you begin to wonder, What if Dewey
slips and falls into me? What if I lose my grip and sail to the
bottom? How will I get down once I'm up there? Can drunk
Dragons fly? And then you look at the bottom, and all of your fears
are summed up in one phrase:
Don't look down.
Hand over hand, pull over pull, I made my way upward, trusting
that the pace of those above me wasn't too slow. I never really
looked up to where Brant and his friends were while I was
climbing. Even to this day I remember the blackness of the night
sky mixing well with my own blackout as I shut my eyes tightly to
the things around me. I was climbing to the top, and I just couldn't
stop. Hand over hand. That's when the screaming started, loud and
forceful, over and over, with an occasional splashing behind it as if
someone below were enjoying a late night swim and horseplay in
the murky pond. Ignoring my own rule, I shot a glance down.
God, how weird it looked. If you've ever been on a roller coaster
right as it goes down the steepest slope, you can understand the
feeling; the depth, the rails shooting together as they plummet
below right as you drop over the top. Imagine yourself frozen in
that position. Below, the rails meet and your stomach assumes a
new position in your throat. And standing on those gleaming rails,




still holding Eddie's flashlight and stained with the dark was Kirby,
gazing back up at me, a look of confusion, horror and what to do
next? written across his face. He scared the hell out of me the way
he just stood there, arms at his side, staring at me but saying
nothing.
"What the hell's the matter with you?" I shouted down with extra
force. No answer. "Kirby, what's wrong?" By then I knew damn
well what was wrong. The tracks had begun to drum under my
hands, and the frame of the SkyCoaster itself had begun to sway
rhythmically from side to side. Then the awful sound of the roar of
a coaster car spinning around some distant bend, fading out, then
coming back in, fading out again-and coming back with
thunderous racket that sent my stomach and my heart both jumping
on top of my tonsils.
Then Brant screamed. It was like the scream of a woman's that I
described earlier, but louder, blending in with the steady clack-
clack-clack of a chain-dragged coaster car on an electrified track. I
didn't ask any questions, but simply locked both hands together,
swung both feet together and slid down the rail to the bottom.
If you've ever been on a roller car as it plummets the final hill - the
Grandaddy drop - you'll probably know the feeling of fear that
builds up in you. There's always a chance that you may fly from
the car to the steel tracks below as the force presses your spine
against the back cover and shakes you with head-splitting strength
to the bottom. There was no car for me to ride in that night -no
seat, no belt, no safety bar to pull against my slumped torso. And
as I sailed to the bottom, my mind made a different rule that I was
forced to follow - Don't look.
The wind stopped suddenly in my hair, and I realized that I was
down on the bottom rails of the coaster, hanging dreadfully close
to the murky waters of Skybar Pond. And as I hung there
momentarily I could picture Randy Stayner waiting below, a
mossy green hand beginning to emerge to the surface, and as I
imagined this, I also visualized others like him in a sea of arms,
reaching for my dangling shirt tail as I hung there, all of them
coming up to the surface to get me, or desperately reaching out as
they were dragged down. A splurge of violent bubbling water
popped to the surface, jolting me back to Skybar and, getting to my
feet, I pulled myself to the shore and somehow managed to pull
Kirby with me. He was still standing in a daze, eyes fixed on the
tracks where the coaster car was falling toward us.
And as we ran through the depot station past the empty coaster
cars, I could hear the steady thud-thud-thud of the one car
advancing on us. I shot a glance over my shoulder as we both ran
on, my feet and eyes growing with every step.
Then I let go of Kirby. I can't clearly remember when, but I
remember all that ran through my mind was Run Like Hell! I flew
up the chain link fence behind Pop Dupree's, cutting my hands
severely on the barbed wire. After jumping to the safe ground on
the other side, I didn't stop running until I was almost a mile away
on Granges Point, where I could still hear the soft screaming
laughter of the seabreeze through the Funhouse clown, and could
see the vague form of the SkyCoaster winding through the trees.
Somewhere behind one of the tents - I can still swear it was the
freak tent - a light glowed softly. I sat there, staring at it,
wondering if it was Kirby trying to find his way out of the dark.
Then I heard the cracking grass of footsteps behind me and whirled
to find Kirby standing in front of me. My legs were shaking, and
my teeth began to chatter softly, and he walked up to me and put
his arm around me.
"It's okay. We made it. We're pretty brave, huh? Right up and right
down those rails. We're far away from it now, though. We're not
there now" I stared at him and wondered how the hell he got there.
I couldn't recall dragging him with me. I couldn't believe how calm
he stood there-how he acted like it was all a scary movie at
Starboard Cinema and we were walking home in the dark trying to




calm ourselves down. Then he turned me toward the park and
started to walk away.
"Coming?" "Kirb, you're headin' the wrong way."
I turned toward home and started to run again. After a while. Kirby
came running up to me, and we didn't stop until we were five miles
away from Skybar and on my front porch. I can still see the horror
in poor Kirby's eyes as he saw his best friends and the Dragons
drop to death before him. Even after seeing that smiling, rotting
freak clambering from behind the safety bar of the coaster car that
had rolled over Brant and the others, he stuck with me at the
bottom and didn't run. The only ones who acted as bravely as
Kirby were the drunk Dragons who jumped at the first sight of the
coaster car coming toward them. Maybe it was bravery, maybe it
was the liquor, but it doesn't matter because the 100 foot dive to
the pond was a mistake either way. Brant and the rest may have
tried to slide, but they never made it to safety and the authorities
still haven't pulled their bodies from the murky pond waters to this
day.
And still, in my dreams, I feel Kirby taking my hand and telling
me it was okay; we were safe, we were home free. And then I
heard the thud-thud-thud of a single SkyCoaster car rolling toward
us. I want to tell Kirby not to look -"Don't look, man!" I scream,
but the words won't come out. He does look. And as the car rolls
up to the deserted station, we see Randy Stayner lolling behind the
safety bar, his head driven almost into his chest. The fun-house
clown begins to scream laughter somewhere behind us, and Kirby
begins to scream with it. I try to run, but my feet tangle in each
other and I fall, sprawling. Behind me I can see Randy's corpse
pushing the safety bar back and he begins to stumble toward me,
his dead, shredded fingers hooked into seeking claws. I see these
things in my dreams, and in the moments before I wake,
screaming, in my wife's arms, I know what the grown-ups must
have seen that summer in the freak tent that was for Adults Only. I




see these things in my dreams, yes, but when I visit Kirby in that
place where he still lives, that place where all the windows are
cross-hatched with heavy mesh, I see them in his eyes. I take his
hand and his hand is cold, but I sit with him and sometimes I think:
These things happened to me when I was young.




                     SLADE
            Stephen King




"Slade." The Maine Campus June-August 1970. "Slade" is in some
ways the most exciting of King1s uncollected juvenalia, an
engaging explosion of off the wall humor, literary pastiche, and
cultural criticism, all masquerading as a Western - the adventures
of Slade and his quest for Miss Polly Peachtree of Paduka.
Published in several installments in the UMO college newspaper
during the summer following King's graduation, the story is most
important in showing King reveling in the joy of writing.
     -excerpt from "The Annotated Guide to Stephen King, p.45.




It was almost dark when Slade rode into Dead Steer Springs. He
was tall in the saddle, a grim faced man dressed all in black. Even
the handles of his two sinister .45s, which rode low on his hips,
were black. Ever since the early 1870s, when the name of Slade
had begun to strike fear into the stoutest of Western hearts, there
had been many whispered legends about his dress. One story had it
that he wore black as a perpetual emblem of mourning for his
Illinois sweetheart, Miss Polly Peachtree of Paduka, who passed
tragically from this vale of tears when a flaming Montgolfer
balloon crashed into the Peachtree barn while Polly was milking
the cows. But some said he wore black because Slade was the
Grim Reaper's agent in the American Southwest - the devil's
handyman. And then there were some who thought he was queerer
than a three-dollar bill. No one, however, advanced this last idea to
his face.
Now Slade halted his huge black stallion in front of the Brass
Cuspidor Saloon and climbed down. He tied his horse and pulled
one of his famous Mexican cigars from his breast pocket. He lit it
and let the acrid smoke drift out onto the twilight air. From inside
the bat-wing doors of the Brass Cuspidor came noises of drunken
revelry. A honkytonk piano was beating out "Oh, Them Golden
Slippers."
A faint shuffling noise came to Slade's keen ears, and he wheeled
around, drawing both of his sinister.45s in a single blur of motion
"Watch it there, mister!"
Slade shovelled his pistols back into their holsters with a snarl of
contempt. It was an old man in a battered Confederate cap, dusty
jeans and suspenders. Either the town drunk or the village idiot,
Slade surmised. The old man cackled, sending a wave of bad
breath over to Slade. "Thought you wuz gonna hole me fer sure,
Stranger."
Slade smoked and looked at him.




"Yore Jack Slade, ain'tchee, Pard?" The old man showed his
toothless gums in another smile. "Reckon Miss Sandra of the Bar-
T hired you, that right? She's been havin' a passel of trouble with
Sam Columbine since her daddy died an' left her to run the place."
Slade smoked and looked at him. - The old man suddenly rolled
his eyes. "Or mebbe yore workin' fer Sam Columbine hisseif - that
it? I heer he's been hiring a lot of real hardcases to help pry Miss
Sandra off'n the Bar-T. Is that-"
"Old man," Slade said, "I hope you run as fast as you talk. Because
if you don't, you're gonna be takin' from a plot six feet long an'
three wide."'
The old sourdough grimaced with sudden fear. "You-you wouldn't-
"
Slade drew one sinister.45.
The old geezer started to run in grotesque flying hops. Slade
sighted carefully along the barrel of his sinister.45 and winged him
once for luck. Then he dropped his gun back into its holster, turned
and strode into the Brass Cuspidor, pushing the bat-wing doors
wide.
Every eye in the place turned to stare at him. Faces went white.
The bartender dropped the knife he was using to cut off the foamy
beer heads. The fancy dan gambler at the back table dropped three
aces out of his sleeve - two of them were clubs. The piano player
fell off his stool, scrambled up, and ran out the back door. The
bartender's dog, General Custer, whined and crawled under the
card table. And standing at the bar, calmly downing a straight shot
of whiskey, was John "The Backshooter" Parkinan, one of Sam
Columbine's top guns.
A horrified whisper ran through the crowd. "Slade!" "It's Jack
Slade!" "It's Slade!"




There was a sudden general rush for the doors. Outside someone
ran down the street, screaming.
              "Slade's in town! Lock yore doors! Jack Slade is in
              town an' God help whoever he's after!"
"Parkman!" Slade gritted.
Parkman turned to face Slade. He was chewing a match between
his ugly snaggled teeth, and one hand hovered over the notched
butt of his sinister .41.
"What're you doin' in Dead Steer, Slade?"
"I'm working fer a sweet lady name of Sandra Dawson," Slade said
laconically. "How about yoreself, 'Backshooter'?"
"Workin' fer Sam Columbine, an' go to hell if you don't like the
sound of it, Pard."
"I don't," Slade growled, and threw away his cigar. The bartender,
who was trying to dig a hole in the floor, moaned.
"They say yer fast, Slade."
"Fast enough."
Backshooter grinned evilly. "They also say yore queerer'n a three
dollar bill."
"Fill yore hand, you slimy, snaky son of a bitch!" Slade yelled
`The Backshooter' went for his gun, but before he had even
touched the handle both of Slade's sinister .45s were out and
belching lead. 'Backshooter' was thrown back against the bar,
where he crumpled.
Slade re-holstered his guns and walked over to Parkman, his spurs
jingling. He looked down at him. Slade was a peace-loving man at
heart, and what was more peace-loving than a dead body? The




thought filled him with quiet joy and a sad yearning for his
childhood sweetheart, Miss Polly Peachtree of Paduka, Illinois.
The bartender hurried around the bar and looked at the earthly
remains of John `The Backshooter' Parkman.
"It ain't possible!" He breathed. "Shot in the heart six times and
you could cover all six holes with a twenty-dollar gold piece!"'
Slade pulled one of his famous Mexican cigars from his breast
pocket and lit up. "Better call the undertaker an' cart him out afore
he stinks."
The bartender gave Slade a nervous grin and rushed out through
the bat-wings. Slade went behind the bar, poured himself a shot of
Digger's Rye(190 proof), and thought about the lonely life of a gun
for hire. Every man's hand turned against you, never sure if the
deck was loaded, always expecting a bullet in the back or the gall
bladder, which was even worse. It was sure hard to do your
business with a bullet in the gall bladder. The batwing doors of the
Brass Cuspidor were thrown open, and Slade drew both of his
sinister.45s with a quick, flowing motion. But it was a girl - a
beautiful blonde with a shape which would have made Ponce de
Leon forget about the fountain of youth - Hubba-hubba, Slade
thought to himself. His lips twisted into a thin, lonely smile as he
re-holstered his guns. Such a girl was not for him, he was true - to
the memory of Polly Peachtree, his one true love.
"Are you Jack Slade?" The blonde asked, parting her lovely red
lips, which were the color of cherry blossoms in the month of May.
"Yes ma'am," Slade said, knocking off his shot of Digger's Rye
and pouring another.
"I'm Sandra Dawson," she said, coming over to the bar.
"I figgered," Slade said.




Sandra came forward and looked down at the sprawled body of
John "The Backshooter" Parkman with burning eyes. "This is one
of the men that murdered my father!" She cried "One of the low,
murdering swine that Sam Columbine hired!"
"I reckon," Slade said.
Sandra Dawson's bosom heaved. Slade was keeping an eye on it,
just for safety's sake. "Did you dispatch him, Mr. Slade?"
"I shore did, ma'am. And it was my pleasure."
Sandra threw her arms around Slade's neck and kissed him, her full
lips burning against his own. "You're the man I've been looking
for," she breathed, her heart racing. "Anything I can do to help
you, Slade, anything -"'
Slade shoved her away and drew deeply on his famous Mexican
cigar to regain his composure. "Reckon you took me wrong,
ma'am. I'm bein' true to the memory of my one true love, Miss
Polly Peachtree of Paduka, Illinois. But anything I can do to help
you -"
'You can, you can!" She breathed. "That's why I wrote you. Sam
Columbine is trying to take over my ranch, the Bar-T! He
murdered my father, and now he's trying to scare me off the land
so he can buy it cheap and sell it dear when the Great
Southwestern Railroad decides to put a branch line through here!
He's hired a lot of hardcases like this one-" she prodded "The
Backshooter" with the toe of of her shoe- "and he's trying to scare
me out!" She looked at Slade pleadingly. "Can you help me?"
"I reckon so," Slade said. "Just don't get yore bowels in an uproar,
ma'am."
"Oh, Slade!" She whispered. She was just melting into his arms
when the bartender rushed back into the saloon, with the
undertaker in tow. By this time the bartender's dog, General




Custer, had crawled out from under the card table and was eating
John "The Backshooter" Parkman's vest.
"Miss Dawson! Miss Dawson!" The bartender yelled. "Mose Hart,
yore top hand, just rode into town! He says the Bar-T bunkhouse is
on fire!"
But before Sandra Dawson could reply, Slade was on his way.
Before a minute had passed,he was galloping toward the fire at
Sandra Dawson's Bar-T ranch.
Slade's huge black stallion, Stokely, carried him rapidiy up
Winding Bluff Road toward the sinister fire glow on the horizon.
As he rode, a grim determination settled over him like warm
butter. To find Sam Columbine and put a crimp in his style!
When he arrived at Sandra Dawson's Bar-T ranch the bunkhouse
was a red ball of flame. And standing in front of it, laughing evilly,
were three of Sam Columbine's gunmen--Sunrise Jackson, Shifty
Jack Mulloy, and Doc Logan. Doc Logan himseif was rumored to
have sent twelve sheep-ranchers to Boot Hill in the bloody
Abeliene range war. But at that time Slade had been spending his
days in a beautiful daze with his one true love, Miss Polly
Peachtree of Paduka, Illinois. She had since been killed in a
dreadful accident, and now Slade was cold steel and hot blood -
not to mention his silk underwear with the pretty blue flowers.
He climbed down from his stallion and pulled one of his famous
Mexican cigars from his pocket. "What're you boys doin' here?"
He asked calmly.
"Havin' a little clambake!" Sunrise Jackson said, dropping one
hand to the butt of his sinister.50 caliber horse-pistoL "Maw, haw-,
haw!",
A wounded cowpoke ran out of the red-flickering shadows. "They
put fire to the bunkhouse!" He said. "That one--" he pointed at Doc




Logan--"said they wuz doin'it on the orders of that murderin' skunk
Sam Columbine!"
Doc Logan pulled leather and blew three new holes in the
wounded cowpoke, who flopped. "Thought he looked hot from all
that fire," Doc told Slade, "so I ventilated him. Haw','haw,haw!"
"You can always tell a low murderin' puckerbelly by the way he
laughs,"Slade said, dropping his hands over the butts of his
sinister.45s.
"Is that right?" Doe said. "How do they laugh?"
"Haw, haw, haw," Slade gritted.
      "Pull leather, you Republican skunk!" Shifty Jack Mulloy
      yelled, and went for his gun, Slade yanked both of his
      sinister.45s out in a smooth sweep and blasted Shifty Jack
      before Mulloy's
piece had even cleared leather. Sunrise Jackson was already
blasting away, and Slade felt a bullet shave by his temple. Slade hit
the dirt and let Jackson have it. He took two steps backward and
fell over, dead as a turtle with smallpox.
But Doc Logan was running. He vaulted into the saddle of an
Indian pony with a shifty eye and slapped its flank. Slade squeezed
off two shots at him, but the light was tricky, Logan's pony jumped
the shakepole fence and was gone into the darkness - to report back
to Sam Columbine, no doubt.
Slade walked over to Sunrise Jackson and rolled him over with his
boot. Jackson had a hole right between the eyes. Then he went over
to Shifty Jack Mulloy, who was gasping his last.
"You got me, Pard!" Shifty Jack gasped. "I feel worse'n a turtle
with smallpox"
'You never shoulda called me a Republican." Slade snarled down
at him. He showed Shifty Jack his Gene McCarthy button and then
blasted him.
Slade holstered his sinister.45 and threw away the smoldering butt
of his famous Mexican cigar. He started toward the darkened
ranch-house to make sure that no more of Sam Columbine's men
were lurking within. He was almost there when the front door was
ripped open and someone ran out.
Slade drew in one lightning movement and blasted away, the
gunflashes from the barrels of his sinister.45 lighting the dark with
bright flashes. Slade walked over and lit a match. He had bagged
Sing-Loo, the Chinese cook.
"Well," Slade said sadly, holstering his gun and feeling a great
wave of longing for his one true love, Miss Polly Peachtree of
Paduka, "I guess you can't win them all."
He started to reach for another famous Mexican cigar, changed his
mind and rolled a joint. After he had begun to see all sorts of
interesting blue and green lights in the sky, he climbed back on his
sinister black scallion and started towards Dead Steer Springs.
When he got back to the Brass Cuspidor saloon, Mose Hart, the top
hand at the Bar-T rushed out, holding a bottle of Digger's Rye in
one hand, with which he had been soothing his jangled nerves.
"Slade!" He yelled. "Miss Dawson's been kidnapped by Sam
Columbine!"
Slade got down from his huge black stallion, Stokely, and lit up a
famous Mexican cigar. He was still brooding over Sing-Loo, the
Chinese cook at the Bar-T, who he had drilled by mistake.
"Ain't you going after her?" Hart asked, his eyes rolling wildly.
"Sam Columbine may try to rape her - or even rob her! Ain't you
gonna get on their trail?"




"Right now," Slade snarled, "I'm gonna check into the Dead Steer
Springs Hotel and catch a good night's sleep. Since I got to this
damn town I have had to blast three gunslingers and one Chinese
cook and I'm mighty tired."
`Yeah," Hart said sympathetically, "It must really make you feel
turrible, havin' snuffed out four human lives in the space of six
hours."
"That's right," Slade said, tying Stokely to the hitching rack, "And
I got blisters on my trigger finger. Do you know where I could get
some Solarcaine?"
Hart shook his head, and so Slade started down towards the hotel,
his spurs jingling below the heels of his Bonanza cowboy boots
(they had elevator lifts inside the heels, Slade was very sensitive
about his height). When old men and pregnant ladies saw him
coming they took to the other side of the street. One small boy
came up and asked for his autograph. Slade, who didn't want to
encourage that sort of thing, shot him in the leg and walked on.
At the hotel he asked for a room, and the trembling clerk said the
second floor suite was available, and Slade went up. He undressed,
then put his boots on again, and climbed into bed. He was asleep in
moments.
Around one in the morning, while Slade was dreaming sweetly of
his chlldhood sweetheart Miss Polly Paduka of Peachtree, Illinois,
the window was eased up little by little, without even a squeak to
alert Slade's keen ears. The shape that crept in was frightful indeed
- for if Jack Slade was the most feared gunslinger in the American
Southwest, the Hunchback Fred Agnew was the most detested
killer. He was a two foot three inch midget with a hump big
enough for a camel halfway down his crooked back. In one hand
he held a three foot Arabian skinning knife (and although
Hunchback Fred had never skinned an Arab with it, he was known
to have put it to work changing the faces of three U.S. marshals,




two county sheriffs and an old lady from Boston on the way to
Arizona to recuperate from Parkinson's disease). In the other hand
he held a large box made of woven river reeds.
He slid across the floor in utter silence, holding his Arabian
skinning knife ready, should Slade awake. Then he carefully put
the box down on the chair by the bed. Grinning fiendishly, he
opened the lid and pulled out a twelve-foot python named Sadie
Hawkins. Sadie had been Hunchback Fred's bosom companion for
the last twelve years, and had saved the terrifying little man from
death many times.
"Do your stuff, hon." Fred whispered affectionately. Sadie seemed
to almost grin at him as Hunchback Fred kissed her on her dead
black mouth. The snake slid onto the bed and began to crawl
towards Slade's head. Giggling fiendishly, Hunchback Fred
retreated to the corner to watch the fun.
Sadie wiggled in slow S-curves up the side of the bed, and drew
back to strike. In that instant, the faint hiss of scales on the sheet
came to Slade's ears.
A woman was in bed with him! That was his first thought as he
rolled off the bed and onto the floor, grabbing for the sinister
derringer that was always strapped to his right calf. Sadie struck at
the pillow where his head had been only a second before.
Hunchback Fred screamed with disappointment and threw his
three-foot Arabian skinning knife, which nicked the corner of one
of Slade's earlobes and quivered in the floor.
Slade fired the derringer and Hunchback Fred fell back against the
wall, knocking the picture Niagara Falls off the dresser. His
sinister career was at an end.
Carefully avoiding the python (which seemed to have gone to sleep
on the bed), Slade got dressed. lt was time to go out to Sam




Columbine's ranch and put an end to that slimy coyote once and
for all.
Strapping on the twin gunbelts of his sinister.45s, Slade went
downstairs. The desk clerk looked at him even more nervously
than before. "D-did I hear a shot?" He asked.
"Don't think so," Slade said, "But you better go up and close the
window by the bed. I left it open -"
"Yessir, Mr. Slade. Of course. Of course."
And then Slade was off, grimly deterniined to find Sam Columbine
and put a crimp in his style once and for all.
Slade shoved his way into the Brass Cuspidor where the foreman
of Sandra Dawson's Bar-T, Mose Hart, was leaning over the bar
with a bottle of Digger's Rye (206 proof) in one hand.
"Okay, you slimy drunkard," Slade gritted, pulling Hart around
and yanking the bottle out of his hand. "Where is Sam Columbine's
ranch? I'm going to get that rotten liver-eater, he just sent
Hunchback Fred Agnew up against me."
"Hunchback Fred?!" Hart gasped, going white as a sheet. "And
you're still alive?"
"I filled him full of lead," Slade said grimly. "He should have
known that putting a snake in my bed was a no-no."
"Hunchback Fred Agnew," Hart whispered, still awed, "There was
talk that he might be the next Vice President of the American
Southwest."
Slade let go of a grating laugh that even made the bartenders dog,
General Custer, cringe.




"W'ell I reckon that now he can be Vice President of Hell!" Slade
proclaimed. He motioned to the bartender, who was standing at the
far end of the bar reading a western novel.
"Bartender! What have you got for mixed drinks?"
The bartender approached cautiously, tucking the dog-eared copy
of Blood Brides of Sitting Bull into his back pocket. "
Wal, Mr. Slade, we got about the usual - The Geronimo, The Fort
Bragg Backbreaker, Popskull Pete, Sourdough Armpit -"
"How about a shot of Digger's Rye (206 proof)?" Mose Hart said
with a glassy grin.
"Shut up," Slade growled. He turned to the bartender and drew one
of his sinister.45s.
"If you don't produce a drink that I ain't never had before, friend,
you're gonna be pushing up daisies before dawn."
The bartender went white, "W-well, we do have drink of my own
invention, Mr. Slade. But it's so potent that I done stopped serving
them. I got plumb tired of having people pass out on the roulette
wheel"
"What's it called?"
"We call it a zombie," the bartender said.
"Well mix me up three of them and make it fast!" Slade
commanded.
"Three zombies?" Mose Hart said with popping eyes. "M'God, are
you crazy?"
Slade turned to him coldly "Friend, smile when you say that."'
Hart smiled and took another drink of Digger's Rye.




"Okay," Slade said, when the three drinks had been placed in front
of him. They came in huge beer steins and smelled like the wrath
of God. He drained the first one at a single draught, blew out his
breath, staggered a little, and lit one of his famous Mexican cigars.
Then he turned to Mose.
"Now just where is Sam Columbine's ranch?" He asked.
"Three miles west and across the ford," Mose said. "It's called the
Rotten Vulture Ranch"
"That figursh," Slade said, draining his second drink to the ice-
cubes. He was beginning to feel a trifle woozy. It probably had
something to do with the lateness of the hour, he thought, and
began to work on his third drink.
"Say " Mose Hart said timidly, "I don't really think you're in any
shape to go up against Sam Columbine, Slade. He's apt to put a
crimp in your style."
"Doan tell me w'hat to do," Slade, swaggering over to pat General
Custer. He breathed in the dog's face and General Custer promptly
went to sleep. "If there'sh one thing that I can do, it's lick my
holder, I mean hold my liquor. Ho get out of my way before I blon
you in tno."
"The door's out the other way," the bartender said cautiously.
"Coursh it is. You think I doan tinow where I'm goin'?"
Slade staggered across the bar, stepping on General Custer's tail
(the dog didn't wake up) and managed to make his way out through
the batwing doors where he almost fell off the sidewalk. Just then a
steely arm clamped his elbow. Slade looked around blearily.
"I'm Deputy Marshall Hoagy Charmichael," the stranger said, "and
rm taking yuh in-"
"On what charge?" Slade asked.




"Public intoxication. Now let's go."
Slade burped. "Everything happen'sh to me," he groaned. The two
of them started off for the Dead Steer Springs jail.
After Slade was sprung from the pokey, Sandra Dawson's top
hand, Mose Hart, went his bail. Slade filled both Hart an Deputy
Marshall Hoagy Charmichael full of lead (blame it on his terrible
hangover). Then, mounting his huge black stallion, Stokely, Slade
made it out to the Rotten Vulture Ranch to have it out once an for
all with Sam Columbine.
But Columbine was not there. He was off torturing ex border
guards, leaving Sandra Dawson under the watch of three trusted
henchmen - Big Fran Nixon, "Quick Draw" John Mitchell, and
Shifty Ron Ziegfeld. After a heated shootout, Slade dropped al
three of them in their slimy tracks and freed the fair Sandra.
The acrid, choking smell of gunsmoke filled the room where the
lovely Sandra Dawson had been held prisoner. As she saw Slade
standing tall and victorious, with a sinister.45 in each hand and a
Mexican cigar clenched between his teeth, her eyes filled with love
and passion.
"Slade!" she cried, jumping to her feet and running to him. "'I'm
saved! Thank heaven! When Sam Columbine got back from
torturing the Mexican border guards, he was going to feed me to
his alligators! You came just in time!"
"Damn right," Slade gritted. "I always do. Steve King sees to that."
Her firm, supple, silken fleshed body swooned into his arms, and
her lush lips sought Slade's mouth with ripe humid passion. Slade
promptly clubbed her over the head with one sinister.45 and threw
his Mexican cigar away, a snarl pulling at his lips.
"Watch it," he growled "my mom told me about girls like you."
And he strode off to find Sam Columbine.
Slade strode out of the bunk-room leaving Sandra Dawson in the
smoke-filled chamber to rub the bump on her head where he had
clouted her with the barrel of his sinister.45. He mounted his huge
black stallion, Stokely, and headed for the border, where Sam
Columbine was torturing Mexican customs men with the help of
his A No.1 Top Gun - "Pinky" Lee. The only two men in the
American Southwest that could ever approach "Pinky" for pure,
dad-ratted evil were Hunchback Fred Agnew (who Slade gunned
down three weeks ago) and Sam Columbine himself. "Pinky" had
gotten his infamous nickname during the Civil War when he rode
with Captain Quantrill and his Regulators. While passed out in the
kitchen of a fancy bordello in Bleeding Heart, Kansas, a Union
officer named Randolph P. Sorghum dropped a homemade bomb
down the kitchen chimney. "Pinky"' lost all his hair, his eyebrows,
and all the fingers on his left hand, except for the forth, and
smallest. His hair and eyebrows grew back. His fingers did not. He
has, however, still faster than greased lightning and meaner than
heIl. He had sworn to find Randolph P. Sorghum some day and
stake him over the nearest anthill.
But Slade was not worried about Lee, because his heart was pure
and his strength was as ten.
In a short time the agonized screams of the Mexican customs
officials told him he was nearing the border. He dismounted, tied
Stokely to a parking-meter and advanced through the sagebrush as
noiselessly as a cat. The night was dark and moonless.
            "No More! amigo!" The guard was screaming. "I
            confess! I confess! I am - who am I?"
"Fergetful bastid, ain't ye?" Pinky said. "Yore Randolph P.
Sorghum, the sneakun' low life that blew off 90% 0' my hand
durin' the Civil War."
"I admit it! I admit it!"




Slade had crept close enough now to see what was happening. Lee
had the customs official tied to a straight-backed chair, with his
bare feet on a hassock. Both feet were coated with honey and Lee's
trained bear, Whomper, was licking it off with his long tongue.
"I can't stand it!" The guard screamed. "I am theese
whatyoumacalluma, Sorghum!"
"Caught you at last!" Lee gloated. He pulled out his sinister
Buntline Special and prepared to blow the poor old fellow all the
way to Trinidad. Sam Columbine, who was standing far back in
the shadows, was ready to bring in the next guard.
Slade stood up suddenly. "Okay, you two skulkin' varmits! Hold it
right there!"
Pinky Lee dropped to his chest, fanning the hammer of his sinister
Buntline Special. Slade felt bullets race all around him. He fired
back twice, but curse it - the hammers of his two sinister .45s only
clicked on empty chambers. He had forgotten to load up after
downing the three badmen back at the Rotten Vulture.
Lee rolled to cover behind a barrel of taco chips. Columbine was
already crouched behind a giant bottle of mayonnaise that had been
air-dropped a month before after the worst flood disaster in
American Southwest history (why drop mayonnaise after a
disaster? None of your damn business).
"Who's that out there?" Lee yelled.
Slade thought quickly. "It's Randolph P. Sorghum" Hh cried. "The
real McCoy, Lee! And this time I'm gunna blow off more than
three fingers!"
His crafty challenge had the desired effect. Pinky rushed rashly (or
rashly rushed if you preferred) from cover, his sinister Buntline
Special blazing. "I'll blow ya apart!" he yelled "I'll -"




But at that moment Slade carefully put a bullet through his head.
Pinky Lee flopped, his evil days done.
"Lee?" Sam Columbine called. "Pinky: You out there:" A craven
cowardly note had crept into his voice. "I just dropped him,
Columbine!" Slade yelled. "And now it's just you and me...and I'm
comin' to get you!"
Sinister.45s blazing, a Mexican cigar clamped between his teeth,
Slade started down the hill after Sam Columbine.
Halfway down the slope, Sam Columbine let loose such a volley of
shots that Slade had to duck behind a barrel cactus. He could not
get off a clear shot at Columbine because the wily villain had
hidden behind a convenient, giant bottle of mayonnaise.
"Slade!" Columbine yelled. "It's time we settled this like men!
Holster yore gun and I'll holster mine! Then we'll come out an'
draw! The better man will walk away!"
"Okay, you lowdown sidewinder!" Slade yelled back. He holstered
his sinister.45s and stepped out from behind the barrel cactus.
Columbine stepped out from behind the bottle of mayonnaise. He
was a tall man with an olive complexion and an evil grin. His hand
hovered over the barrel of the sinister Smith & Wesson pistol that
hung on his hip.
"Well, this is it, pard!" Slade sneered. There was a Mexican cigar
clamped between his teeth as he started to walk toward Columbine.
"Say hello to everyone in hell for me, Columbine!"
"We'll see," Columbine sneered back, but his knees were knocking
as he halted, ready for the showdown.
"Okay!" Slade called. "Go fer yore gun!"
"Wait," Someone screamed. "Wait, wait, WAIT!"




They both stared. It was Sandra Dawson! She was runniug toward
them breathless.
"Slade!" She cried. "Slade!"
"Get down!" Slade growled. "Sam Columbine is-"
"I had to tell you, Slade! I couldn't let you go off, maybe to get
killed! And you'd never know!"
"Know what?" Slade asked.
"That I'm Polly Peachtree!"
Slade gaped at her. "But you can't be Polly Peachtree! She was my
one true love and she was killed by a flaming Montgolfer balloon
while milking the cows!"
"I escaped but I had amnesia!" She cried. "It's all just come back to
me tonight. Look!" And she pulled off a blond wig she had been
wearing. She was indeed the beautiful Polly Peachtree of Paduka,
returned from the dead!
"POLLY!!!"
"SLADE!!!"
Slade rushed to her and they embraced, Sam Columbine forgotten.
Slade was just about to ask her how things were going when Sam
Columbine, evil rat that he was, crept up behind him and shot
Slade in the back three times.
"Thank God!" Polly whispered as she and Sam embraced "At last.
he's gone and we are free, my darling!"
Yeah," Sam growled "How are things going Polly?"
tYou don't know how terrible it's been," she sobbed "Not only was
he killing everybody, but he was queerer than a three-dollar bill."
"Well it's over," Sam said.




"Like fun!" Slade said. He sat up and blasted them both. "Good
thing I was wearing my bullet proof underwear," he said lighting a
new Mexican cigar. He stared at the cooling bodies of Sam
Columbine and Polly Peachtree, and a great wave of sadness swept
over him. He threw away his cigar and lit a joint. Then he walked
over to where he had tethered Stokely, his black stallion. He
wrapped his arms around Stokely's neck and held him close.
"At last, darling," Slade whispered. "We're alone."
      After a long while, Slade and Stokely rode off into the sunset in
                         search of new adventures.


                                 THE END




             Squad D
            Stephen King

                             Written for
                       Dangerous Visions #3


Billy Clewson died all at once, with nine of the ten other members
of D Squad on April 8, 1974. It took his mother two years, but she
got started right away on the afternoon the telegram announcing
her son's death came, in fact. Dale Clewson simply sat on the
bench in the front hall for five minutes, the sheet of yellow flimsy
paper dangling from his fingers, not sure if he was going to faint or
puke or scream or what. When he was able to get up, he went into
the living room. He was in time to observe Andrea down the last
swallow of the first drink and pour the post-Billy era's second
drink. A good many more drinks followed - it was really amazing,
how many drinks that small and seemingly frail woman had been
able to pack into a two-year period. The written cause - that which
appeared on her death certificate - was liver dysfunction and renal
failure. Both Dale and the family doctor knew that was formalistic
icing on an extremely alcoholic cake - baba au rum, perhaps. But




only Dale knew there was a third level. The Viet Cons had killed
their son in a place called Ky Doe, and Billy's death had killed his
mother.
It was three years - three years almost to the day - after Billy's
death on the bridge that Dale Clewson began to believe that he
must be going mad.
Nine, he thought. There were nine. There were always nine. Until
now.
Were there? His mind replied to itself. Are you sure? Maybe you
really counted - the lieutenant's letter said there were nine, and
Bortman's letter said there were nine. So just how can you be so
sure? Maybe you just assumed.
But he hadn't just assumed, and he could be sure because he knew
how many nine was, and there had been nine boys in the D Squad
photograph which had come in the mail, along with Lieutenant
Anderson's letter.
You could be wrong, his mind insisted with an assurance that was
slightly hysterical. You're been through a lot these last couple of
years, what with losing first Billy and then Andrea. You could be
wrong.
It was really surprising, he thought, to what insane lengths the
human mind would go to protect its own sanity.
He put his finger down on the new figure - a boy of Billy's age, but
with blonde crewcut hair, looking no more than sixteen, surely too
young to be on the killing ground. He was sitting cross-legged in
front of Gibson, who had, according to Billy's letters, played the
guitar, and Kimberley, who told lots of dirty Jokes. The boy with
the blonde hair was squinting slightly into the sun - so were several
of the others, but they had always been there before. The new boy's
fatigue shirt was open, his dog tags lying against his hairless chest.




Dale went into the kitchen, sorted through what he and Andrea had
always called "the jumble drawers," and came up with an old,
scratched magnifying glass. He took it and the picture over the
living room window, tilted the picture so there was no glare, and
held the glass over the new boy's dog-tags. He couldn't read them.
Thought, in fact, that the tags were both turned over and lying face
down against the skin.
And yet, a suspicion had dawned in his mind - it ticked there like
the clock on the mantle. He had been about to wind that clock
when he had noticed the change in the picture. Now he put the
picture back in its accustomed place, between a photograph of
Andrea and Billy's graduation picture, found the key to the clock.
And wound it.
Lieutenant's Anderson's letter had been simple enough. Now Dale
found it in his study desk and read it again. Typed lines on Army
stationary. The prescribed follow-up to the telegram, Dale had
supposed. First: Telegram. Second: Letter of Condolence from
Lieutenant. Third: Coffin, One Boy Enclosed. He had noticed then
and noticed again now that the typewriter Anderson used had a
Flying "o". Clewson kept coming out Clewson.
Andrea had wanted to tear the letter up. Dale insisted that they
keep it. Now he was glad.
Billy's squad and two others had been involved in a flank sweep of
a jungle quadrant of which Ky Doe was the only village. Enemy
contact had been anticipated, Anderson's letter said, but there
hadn't been any. The Cong which had been reliably reported to be
in the area had simply melted away into the jungle - it was a trick
with which the American soldiers had become very familiar over
the previous ten years or so.
Dale could imagine them heading back to their base at Homan,
happy, relieved. Squads A and C had waded across the Ky River,
which was almost dry. Squad D used the bridge. Halfway across, it




blew up. Perhaps it had been detonated from downstream. More
likely, someone - perhaps even Billy himself - had stepped on the
wrong board. All nine of them had been killed. Not a single
survivor.
God - if there really is such a being - is usually kinder than that,
Dale thought. He put Lieutenant Anderson's letter back and took
out Josh Bortman's letter. It had been written on blue-lined paper
from what looked like a child's tablet. Bortman's handwriting was
nearly illegible, the scrawl made worse by the writing implement -
a soft-lead pencil. Obviously blunt to start with, it must have been
no more than a nub by the time Bortman signed his name at the
bottom. In several places Bortman had borne down hard enough
with his instrument to tear the paper.
It had been Bortman, the tenth man, who sent Dale and Andrea the
squad picture, already framed, the glass over the photo
miraculously unbroken in its long trip from Homan to Saigon to
San Francisco and finally to Binghamton, New York.
Bortman's letter was anguished. He called the other nine "the best
friends I ever had in my life, I loved them all like they was my
brothers."
Dale held the blue-lined paper in his hand and looked blankly
through his study door and toward the sound of the ticking clock
on the mantelpieces. When the letter came, in early May of 1974,
he had been too full of his own anguish to really consider
Bortman's. Now he supposed he could understand it - a little,
anyway. Bortman had been feeling a deep and inarticulate guilt.
Nine letters from his hospital bed on the Homan base, all in that
pained scrawl, all probably written with that same soft-lead pencil.
The expense of having nine enlargements of the Squad D
photograph made, and framed, and mailed off. Rites Of atonement
with a soft-lead pencil, Dale thought, folding the letter again and
putting it back In the drawer with Anderson's. As if he had killed
them by taking their picture. That's really what was between the
lines, wasn't it? "Please don't hate me, Mr. Clewson, please don't
think I killed your son and the other's by--"
In the other room the mantelpiece clock softly began to chime the
hour of five.
Dale went back into the living room, and took the picture down
again.
What you're talking about is madness.
Looked at the boy with the short blonde hair again.
I loved them all like they was my brothers.
Turned the picture over.
Please don't think I killed your son - all of your sons - by taking
their picture. Please don't hate me because I was in the Homan
base hospital with bleeding haemorrhoids instead of on the Ky Doe
bridge with the best friends I ever had in my life. Please don't hate
me, because I finally caught up, it took me ten years of trying, but I
finally caught up.
Written on the back, in the same soft-lead pencil, was this notation:
Jack Bradley Omaha, Neb.
Billy Clewson Binghamton, NY.
Rider Dotson Oneonta, NY
Charlie Gibson Payson, ND
Bobby Kale Henderson, IA
Jack Kimberley Truth or Consequences. NM
Andy Moulton Faraday, LA Staff Sgt. I
Jimmy Oliphant Beson, Del.




Asley St. Thomas Anderson, Ind.
*Josh Bortman Castle Rock, Me.
He had put his own name last, Dale saw - he had seen all of this
before, or course, and had noticed it... but had never really noticed
it until now, perhaps. He had put his name last, out of alphabetical
order, and with an asterisk.
The asterisk means "still alive.' The asterisk means "don't hate
me."
Ah, but what you're thinking is madness, and you damned well
know it.
Nevertheless, he went to the telephone, dialled 0, and ascertained
that the area code for Maine was 207. He dialed Maine directory
assistance, and ascertained that there was a single Bortman family
in Castle Rock.
He thanked the operator, wrote the number down, and looked at
the telephone.
You don't really intend to call those people, do you?
No answer - only the sound of the ticking clock. He had put the
picture on the sofa and now he looked at it - looked first at his own
son, his hair pulled back behind his head, a bravo little moustache
trying to grow on his upper lip, frozen forever at the age of twenty-
one, and then at the new boy in that old picture, the boy with the
short blonds hair, the boy whose dog-tags were twisted so they lay
face-down and unreadable against his chest. He thought of the way
Josh Bortman had carefully segregated himself from the others,
thought of the asterisk, and suddenly his eyes filled with warm
tears.
I never hated you, son, he thought. Nor did Andrea, for all her
grief. Maybe I should have picked up a pen and dropped you a note
saying so, but honest to Christ, the thought never crossed my mind.




He picked up the phone now and dialled the Bortman number in
Castle Rock, Maine.
Busy.
He hung up and sat for five minutes, looking out at the street where
Billy had learned to ride first a trike, then a bike with trainer
wheels, then a two-wheeler. At eighteen he had brought home the
final improvement - a Yamaha 500. For just a moment he could
see Billy with paralysing clarity, as if he might walk through the
door and sit down.
He dialled the Bortman number again. This time it rang. The voice
on the other end managed to convey an unmistakable impression of
wariness in just two syllables. "Hello?" At that same moment,
Dale's eyes fell on the dial of his wristwatch and read the date - not
for the first time that day, but it was the first time it really sunk in.
It was April 9th. Billy and the others had died eleven years ago
yesterday. They -
"Hello?" the voice repeated sharply. "Answer me, or I'm hanging
up! Which one are you?"
Which one are you? He stood in the ticking living room, cold,
listening to words croak out of him mouth.
"My name is Dale Clewson, Mr. Bortman. My son--"
"Clewson. Billy Clewson's father." Now the voice was flat,
inflectionless.
"Yes, that's--"
"So you say."
Dale could find no reply. For the first time in his life, he really was
tongue-tied.
"And has your picture of Squad D changed, too?"




"Yes." It came out in a strangled little gasp.
Bortman's voice remained inflectionless, but it was nonetheless
filled with savagery. "You listen to me, and tell the others. There's
going to be tracer equipment on my phone by this afternoon. If it's
some kind of joke, you fellows are going to be laughing all the way
to jail, I can assure you."
"Mr. Bortman--"
"Shut up! First someone calling himself Peter Moulton calls,
supposedly from Louisiana, and tells my wife that our boy has
suddenly showed up in a picture Josh sent them of Squad D. She's
still having hysterics over that when a woman purporting to be
Bobby Kale's mother calls with the same insane story. Next,
Oliphant! Five minutes ago, Rider Dotson's brother! He says. Now
you."
"But Mr. Bortman--"
"My wife is Upstairs sedated, and if all of this is a case or 'Have
you got Prince Albert in a can,' I swear to God -"
"You know it isn't a joke," Dale whispered. His fingers felt cold
and numb - ice cream fingers. He looked across the room at the
photograph. At the blonde boy. Smiling, squinting into the camera.
Silence from the other end.
"You know it isn't a joke, so what happened?"
"My son killed himself yesterday evening," Bortman said evenly.
"If you didn't know It."
"I didn't. I swear."
Bortman signed. "And you really are calling from long distance,
aren't you?"
"From Binghamton, New York."




"Yes. You can tell the difference--local from long distance, I mean.
Long distance has a sound...a...a hum..."
Dale realized, belatedly, that expression had finally crept into that
voice. Bortman was crying.
"He was depressed off and on, ever since he got back from Nam, in
late 1974," Bortman said. "it always got worse in the spring, it
always peaked around the 8th of April when the other boys ... and
your son..."
"Yes," Dale said.
"This year, it just didn't ... didn't peak."
There was a muffled honk-Bortman using his handkerchief.
"He hung himself in the garage, Mr. Clewson."
"Christ Jesus," Dale muttered. He shut his eyes very tightly, trying
to ward off the image. He got one which was arguably even worse
- that smiling face, the open fatigue shirt, the twisted dog-tags. "I'm
sorry."
"He didn't want people to know why he wasn't with the others that
day, but of course the story got out." A long, meditative pause
from Bortman's end. "Stories like that always do."
"Yes. I suppose they do."
"Joshua didn't have many friends when he was growing up, Mr.
Clewson. I don't think he had any real friends until he got to Nam.
He loved your son, and the others."
Now it's him. comforting me.
"I'm sorry for your loss;" Dale said. "And sorry to have bothered
you at a time like this. But you'll understand ... I had to."
"Yes. Is he smiling, Mr. Clewson? The others ... they said he was
smiling."




Dale looked toward the picture beside the ticking clock. "He's
smiling."
"Of course he is. Josh finally caught up with them."
Dale looked out the window toward the sidewalk where Billy had
once ridden a bike with training wheels. He supposed he should
say something, but he couldn't seem to think of a thing. His
stomach hurt. His bones were cold.
"I ought to go, Mr. Clewson. In case my wife wakes up." He
paused. "I think I'll take the phone off the hook."
"That might not be a bad idea."
"Goodbye, Mr. Clewson."
"Goodbye. Once again, my sympathies."
"And mine, too."
Click.
Dale crossed the room and picked up the photograph of Squad D.
He looked at the smiling blonde boy, who was sitting cross-legged
in front of Kimberley and Gibson, sitting casually and comfortably
on the ground as if he had never had a haemorrhoid in his life, as if
he had never stood atop a stepladder in a shadowy garage and
slipped a noose around his neck.
Josh finally caught up with them.
He stood looking fixedly at the photograph for a long time before
realizing that the depth of silence In the room had deepened. The
clock had stopped.




     THAT FEELING, YOU
     CAN ONLY SAY WHAT
      IT IS IN FRENCH




     STEPHEN KING
                 From
          The New Yorker, 1998




A second honeymoon in the Florida Keys. What could be more
relaxing?
FLOYD, what's that over there? Oh shit. The mans voice speaking
these words was vaguely familiar, but the words themselves were
just a disconnected snip of dialogue, the kind of thing you heard
when you were channel-surfing with the remote. There was no one
named Floyd in her life. Still, that was the start. Even before she
saw the little girl in the red pinafore, there were those disconnected
words.
But it was the little girl who brought it on strong. "Oh-oh, I'm
getting that feeling," Carol said.
The girl in the pinafore was in front of a country market called
Carson's "Beer, Wine, Groc, Fresh Bait, Lottery" - crouched down
with her butt between her ankles and the bright-red apron-dress
tucked between her thighs, playing with a doll. The doll was
yellow-haired and dirty the kind that's round and stuffed and
boneless in the body.
"What feeling?" Bill asked.
"You know. The one you can only say what it is in French. Help
me here."
"Deja vu," he said.
"That's it," she said, and turned to look at the little girl one more
time. She'll have the doll by one leg, Carol thought. Holding it
upside down by one leg with its grimy yellow hair hanging down.
But the little girl had abandoned the doll on the store's splintery
gray steps and had gone over to look at a dog caged up in the back
of a station wagon. Then Bill and Carol Shelton went around a
curve in the road and the store was out of sight.
"How much farther?" Carol asked.




Bill looked at her with one eyebrow raised and his mouth dimpled
at one corner - left eyebrow right dimple, always the same. The
look that said, You think I'm amused, but I'm really irritated For
the ninety-trillionth or so time in the marriage, I'm really irritated
You don't know that, though, because you can only see about two
inches into me and then your vision fails.
But she had better vision than he realized; it was one of the secrets
of the marriage. Probably he had a few secrets of his own. And
there were, of course, the ones they kept together.
"I don't know" he said. "I've never been here."
"Once you get over the causeway and onto Sanibel Island, there's
only one," he said. "It goes across to Captiva, and there it ends. But
before it does we'll come to Palin House. That I promise you."
The arch in his eyebrow began to flatten. The dimple began to fill
in. He was returning to what she thought of as the Great Level. She
had come to dislike the Great Level, too, but not as much as the
eyebrow and the dimple, or his sarcastic way of saying "Excuse
me?" when you said something he considered stupid, or his habit
of pooching out his lower lip when he wanted to appear thoughtful
and deliberative.
"Bill?"
"Do you know anyone named Floyd?"
"There was Floyd Denning. He and I ran the downstairs snack bar
at Christ the Redeemer in our senior year. I told you about him,
didn't I? He stole the Coke money one Friday and spent the
weekend in New York with his girlfriend. They suspended him and
expelled her. What made you think of him?"
"I don't know," she said. Easier than telling him that the Floyd with
whom Bill had gone to high school wasn't the Floyd the voice in
her head was speaking to. At least, she didn't think it was.




Second honeymoon, that's what you call this, she thought, looking
at the palms a that lined Highway 867, a white bird that stalked
along the shoulder like an angry preacher, and a sign that read
"Seminole Wildlife Park, Bring a Carfull for $10." Florida the
Sunshine State. Florida the Hospitality State. Not to mention
Florida the Second-Honeymoon State. Florida, where Bill Shelton
and Carol Shelton, the former Carol O'Neill, of Lynn,
Massachusetts, came on their first honeymoon twenty-five years
before. Only that was on the other side, the Atlantic side, at a little
cabin colony, and there were cockroaches in the bureau drawers.
He couldn't stop touching me. That was all right, though, in those
days I wanted to be touched Hell I wanted to he torched like
Atlanta in "Gone with the wind," and he torched me, rebuilt me,
torched me again. Now it's silver. Twenty-five is silver. And
sometimes I get that feeling.
They were approaching a curve, and she thought, Three crosses on
the right side of the road. Two small ones flanking a bigger one.
The small ones are clapped-together wood. The one in the middle
is white birch with a picture on it, a tiny photograph of the
seventeen-year-old boy who lost control of his car on this curve,
one drunk nght that was his last drunk night, and this is where his
girlfriend and her girlfriends marked the spot -
Bill drove around the curve. A pair of black crows, plump and
shiny, lifted off from something pasted to the macadam in a splat
of blood. They had eaten so well that Carol wasn't sure they were
going to get out of the way until they did. There were no crosses,
not on the left, not on the right. Just roadkill in the middle, a
woodchuck or something, now passing beneath a luxury car that
had never been north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Floyd, what's that over there?
"What's wrong?"
"Huh?" She looked at him, bewildered, feeling a little wild.




"You're sitting bolt upright. Got a cramp in your back?"
"Just a slight one." She settled back by degrees. "I had that feeling
again. The deja vu."
"Is it gone?"
'Yes," she said, but she was lying. It had retreated a little, but that
was all. She'd had this before, but never so continuously. It came
up and went down, but it didn't go away. She'd been aware of it
ever since that thing about Floyd started knocking around in her
head - and then the little girl in the red pinafore.
But, really, hadn't she felt something before either of those things?
Hadn't it actually started when they came down the steps of the
Lear 35 into the hammering heat of the Fort Myers sunshine? Or
even before? En route from Boston?
They were coming to an intersection. Overhead was a flashing
yellow light, and she thought, To the right is a used-car lot and a
sign for the Sanibel Community Theatre.
Then she thought, No, it'll be like the crosses that weren't there. It's
a strong feeling but it's a false feeling.
Here was the intersection. On the right there was a used-car lot-
Palm-dale Motors. Carol felt a real jump at that, a stab of
something sharper than disquiet. She told herself to quit being
stupid. There had to be car lots all over Florida and if you
predicted one at every intersection sooner or later the law of
averages made you a prophet. It was a trick mediums had been
using for hundreds of years.
Besides, there's no theatre sign.
But there was another sign. It was Mary the Mother of God, the
ghost of all her childhood days, holding out her hands the way she
did on the medallion Carol's grandmother had given her for her
tenth birthday. Her grandmother had pressed it into her hand and
looped the chain around her fingers, saying, "Wear her always as
you grow, because all the hard days are coming. " She had worn it,
all right. At Our Lady of Angels grammar and middle school she
had worn it, then at St. Vincent de Paul high. She wore the medal
until breasts grew around it like ordinary miracles, and then
someplace, probably on the class trip to Hampton Beach, she had
lost it. Coming home on the bus she had tongue-kissed for the first
time. Butch Soucy had been the boy; and she had been able to taste
the cotton candy he'd eaten.
Mary on that long-gone medallion and Mary on this billboard had
exactly the same look, the one that made you feel guilty of
thinking impure thoughts even when all you were thinking about
was a peanut-butter sandwich. Beneath Mary, the sign said
"Mother of Mercy Charities Help the Florida Homeless Won't You
Help Us?"
Hey there, Mary, what's the story.
More than one voice this time; many voices, girls' voices, chanting
ghost voices. There were ordinary miracles; there were also
ordinary ghosts. You found these things out as you got older.
"What's wrong with you?" She knew that voice as well as she did
the eyebrow-and-dimple look. Bill's I'm-only-pretending-to-be-
pissed tone of voice, the one that meant he really was pissed, at
least a little.
"Nothing." She gave him the best smile she could manage.
"You really don't seem like yourself Maybe you shouldn't have
slept on the plane.
'You're probably right," she said, and not just to be agreeable,
either. After all, how many women got a second honeymoon on
Captiva Island for their twenty-fifth anniversary? Round trip on a
chartered Learjet? Ten days at one of those places where your
money was no good (at least until MasterCard coughed up the bill




at the end of the month) and if you wanted a massage a big
Swedish babe would come and pummel you in your six-room
beach house?
Things had been different at the start. Bill, whom she'd first met at
a crosstown high-school dance and then met again at college three
years later (another ordinarv miracle), had begun their married life
working as a janitor, because there were no openings in the
computer industry. It was 1973, and computers were essentially
going nowhere and they were living in a grotty place in Revere,
not on the beach but close to it, and all night people kept going up
the stairs to buy drugs from the two sallow creatures who lived in
the apartment above them and listened endlessly to dopey records
from the sixties. Carol used to lie awake waiting for the shouting to
start, thinking, We won't ever get out of here, we'll grow old and
die within earshot of Cream and Blue Cheer and the fucking
Dodgem cars down on the beach.
Bill, exhausted at the end of his shift, would sleep through the
noise, lying on his side, sometimes with one hand on her hip. And
when it wasn't there she often put it there, especially if the
creatures upstairs were arguing with their customers. Bill was all
she had. Her parents had practically disowned her when she
married him. He was a Catholic, but the wrong sort of Catholic.
Gram had asked why she wanted to go with that boy when anyone
could tell he was shanty; how could she fall for all his foolish talk,
why did she want to break her father's heart. And what could she
say?
It was a long distance from that place in Revere to a private jet
soaring at forty-one thousand feet; a long way to this rental car;
which was a Crown Victoria-what the goodfellas in the gangster
movies invariably called a Crown Vic heading for ten days in a
place where the tab would probably be... well, she didn't even want
to think about it.
Floyd?... Ohshit.




"Carol? What is it now?"
"Nothing," she said. Up ahead by the road was a little pink
bungalow, the porch flanked by palms - seeing those trees with
their fringy heads lifted against the blue sky made her think of
Japanese Zeros coming in low; their underwing machine guns
firing, such an association clearly the result of a youth misspent in
front of the TV - and as they passed a black woman would come
out. She would be drying her hands on a piece of pink towelling
and would watch them expressionlessly as they passed, rich folks
in a Crown Vic headed for Captiva, and she'd have no idea that
Carol Shelton once lay awake in a ninety-dollar-a-month
apartment, listening to the records and the drug deals upstairs,
feeling something alive inside her, something that made her think
of a cigarette that had fallen down behind the drapes at a party,
small and unseen but smoldering away next to the fabric.
"Hon?"
"Nothing, I said." They passed the house. There was no woman.
An old man - white, not black-sat in a rocking chair, watching
them pass. There were rimless glasses on his nose and a piece of
ragged pink towelling, the same shade as the house, across his lap.
"I'm fine now. Just anxious to get there and change into some
shorts."
His hand touched her hip where he had so often touched her during
those first days - and then crept a little farther inland. She thought
about stopping him (Roman hands and Russian fingers, they used
to say) and didn't. They were, after all, on their second
honeymoon. Also, it would make that expression go away.
"Maybe," he said, "we could take a pause. You know, after the
dress comes off and before the shorts go on.
"I think that's a lovely idea," she said, and put her hand over his,
pressed both more tightly against her. Ahead was a sign that would




read "Palm House 3 Mi. on Left" when they got close enough to
see it.
The sign actually read "Palm House 2 Mi. on Left." Beyond it was
another sign, Mother Mary again, with her hands outstretched and
that little electric shimmy that wasn't quite a halo around her head.
This version read "Mother of Mercy Charities Help the Florida
Sick - Won't You Help Us?"
Bill said, "The next one ought to say 'Burma Shave."'
She didn't understand what he meant, but it was clearly a joke and
so she smiled. The next one would say "Mother of Mercy Charities
Help the Florida Hungry;" but she couldn't tell him that. Dear Bill.
Dear in spite of his sometimes stupid expressions and his
sometimes unclear allusions. He'll most likely leave you, and you
know something? If you go through with it that's probably the best
luck you can expect. This according to her father. Dear Bill, who
had proved that just once, just that one crucial time, her judgment
had been far better than her father's. She was still married to the
man her Gram had called "the big boaster." At a price, true, but
everyone paid a price.
Her head itched. She scratched at it absently, watching for the next
Mother of Mercy billboard.
Horrible as it was to say, things had started turning around when
she lost the baby. That was just before Bill got a job with Beach
Computers, out on Route 128; that was when the first winds of
change in the industry began to blow.
Lost the baby, had a miscarriage - they all believed that except
maybe Bill. Certainly her family had believed it: Dad, Mom,
Gram. "Miscarriage" was the story they told, miscarriage was a
Catholic's story if ever there was one. Hey, Mary, what's the story,
they had sometimes sung when they skipped rope, feeling daring,
feeling sinful, the skirts of their uniforrns flipping up and down




over their scabby knees. That was at Our Lady of Angels, where
Sister Annunciata would spank your knuckles with her ruler if she
caught you gazing out the window during Sentence Time, where
Sister Dormatilla would tell you that a million years was but the
first tick of eternity's endless clock (and you could spend eternity
in Hell, most people did, it was easy). In Hell you would live
forever with your skin on fire and your bones roasting. Now she
was in Florida, now she was in a Crown Vic sitting next to her
husband, whose hand was still in her crotch; the dress would be
wrinkled but who cared if it got that look off his face, and why
wouldn't the feeling stop?
She thought of a mailbox with "Raglan" painted on the side and an
American-flag decal on the front, and although the name turned
out to be "Reagan" and the flag a Grateful Dead sticker; the box
was there. She thought of a small black dog trotting briskly along
the other side of the road, its head down, sniffling, and the small
black dog was there. She thought again of the billboard and, yes,
there it was: "Mother of Mercy Charities Help the Florida Hungry -
Won't You Help Us?"
Bill was pointing. "There-see? I think that's Palm House. No, not
where the billboard is, the other side. Why do they let people put
those things up out here, anyway?"
"I don't know." Her head itched. She scratched, and black dandruff
began falling past her eyes. She looked at her fingers and was
horrified to see dark smutches on the tips; it was as if someone had
just taken her fingerprints.
"Bill?" She raked her hand through her blond hair and this time the
flakes were bigger. She saw they were not flakes of skin but flakes
of paper. There was a face on one, peering out of the char like a
face peering out of a botched negative.
"Bill?"




"What? Wh-" Then a total change in his voice, and that frightened
her more than the way the car swerved. "Christ, honey, what's in
your hair?"
The face appeared to be Mother Teresa's. Or was that just because
she'd been thinking about Our Lady of Angels? Carol plucked it
from her dress, meaning to show it to Bill, and it crumbled
between her fingers before she could. She turned to him and saw
that his glasses were melted to his cheeks. One of his eyes had
popped from its socket and then split like a grape pumped full of
blood.
And I knew it, she thought. Even before I turned, I knew it. Because
I had that feeling.
A bird was crying in the trees. On the billboard, Mary held out her
hands. Carol tried to scream. Tried to scream.
"CAROL?"
It was Bill's voice, coming from a thousand miles away. Then his
hand - not pressing the folds of her dress into her crotch, but on her
shoulder.
"You O.K., babe?"
She opened her eyes to brilliant sunlight and her ears to the steady
hum of the Learjet's engines. And something else-pressure against
her eardrums. She looked from Bill's mildly concerned face to the
dial below the temperature gauge in the cabin and saw that it had
wound down to 28,000.
"Landing?" she said, sounding muzzy to herself "Already?"
"It's fast, huh?" Sounding pleased, as if he had flown it himself
instead of only paying for it. "Pilot says we'll be on the ground in
Fort Myers in twenty minutes. You took a hell of a jump, girl."
"I had a nightmare."




He laughed-the plummy ain't-you-the-silly-billy laugh she had
come really to detest. "No nightmares allowed on your second
honeymoon, babe. What was it?"
"I don't remember," she said, and it was the truth. There were only
fragments: Bill with his glasses melted all over his face, and one of
the three or four forbidden skip rhymes they had sometimes
chanted back in fifth and sixth grade. This one had gone Hey there,
Mary, what's the story... and then something-something-
something. She couldn't come up with the rest. She could
remember Jangle-tangle jingle-bingle, I saw your daddy's great
big dingle, but she couldn't remember the one about Mary-
Mary helps the Florida sick, she thought, with no idea of what the
thought meant, and just then there was a beep as the pilot turned
the seatbelt light on. They had started their final descent. Let the
wild rumpus start, she thought, and tightened her belt.
"You really don't remember?" he asked, tightening his own. The
little jet ran through a cloud filled with bumps, one of the pilots in
the cockpit made a minor adjustment, and the ride smoothed out
again. "Because usually, just after you wake up, you can still
remember. Even the bad ones."
"I remember Sister Annunciata, from Our Lady of Angels.
Sentence Time."
"Now, that's a nightmare.
Ten minutes later the landing gear came down with a whine and a
thump. Five minutes after that they landed.
"They were supposed to bring the car right out to the plane," Bill
said, already starting up the Type A shit. This she didn't like, but at
least she didn't detest it the way she detested the plummy laugh
and his repertoire of patronizing looks. "I hope there hasn't been a
hitch."




There hasn't been, she thought, and the feeling swept over her full
force. I'm going to see it out the window on my side in just a
second or two. It's your total Florida vacation car, a great big white
goddam Cadillac, or maybe it's a Lincoln - And, yes, here it came,
proving what? Well, she supposed, it proved that sometimes when
you had deja vu what you thought was going to happen next really
did happen next. It wasn't a Caddy or a Lincoln after all, but a
Crown Victoria - what the gangsters in a Martin Scorsese film
would no doubt call a Crown Vic.
"Whoo," she said as he helped her down the steps and off the
plane. The hot sun made her feel dizzy.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing, really. I've got deja' vu. Left over from my dream, I
guess. We've been here before, that kind of thing."
"It's being in a strange place, that's all," he said, and kissed her
cheek. "Come on, let the wild rumpus start."
They went to the car. Bill showed his driver's license to the young
woman who had driven it out. Carol saw him check out the hem of
her skirt, then sign the paper on her clipboard.
She's going to drop it, Carol thought. The feeling was now so
strong it was like being on an amusement-park ride that goes just a
little too fast; all at once you realize you're edging out of the Land
of Fun and into the Kingdom of Nausea. She'll drop it, and Bill
will say "Whoopsy-daisy" and pick it up for her, get an even closer
look at her legs.
But the Hertz woman didn't drop her clipboard. A white courtesy
van had appeared, to take her back to the Butler Aviation terminal.
She gave Bill a final smile-Carol she had ignored completely-and
opened the front passenger door. She stepped up, then slipped.
"Whoopsy-daisy, don't be crazy," Bill said, and took her elbow,
steadying her. She gave him a smile, he gave her well-turned legs a




goodbye look, and Carol stood by the growing pile of their luggage
and thought, Hey there, Mary...
"Mrs. Shelton?" It was the co-pilot. He had the last bag, the case
with Bill's laptop inside it, and he looked concerned. "Are you all
right? You're very pale."
Bill heard and turned away from the departing white van, his face
worried. If her strongest feelings about Bill were her only feelings
about Bill, now that they were twenty-five years on, she would
have left him when she found out about the secretary, a Clairol
blonde too young to remember the Clairol slogan that went "If I
have only one life to live," etc., etc. But there were other feelings.
There was love, for instance. Still love. A kind that girls in
Catholic-school uniforms didn't suspect, a weedy species too tough
to die.
Besides, it wasn't just love that held people together. Secrets held
them, and common history, and the price you paid.
"Carol?" he asked her. "Babe? All right?"
She thought about telling him no, she wasn't all right, she was
drowning, but then she managed to smile and said, "It's the heat,
that's all. I feel a little groggy - Get me in the car and crank up the
air-conditioning. I'll be fine."
Bill took her by the elbow (Bet you're not checking out my legs,
though, Carol thought. You know where they go, don't you?) and
led her toward the Crown Vic as if she were a very old lady. By the
time the door was closed and cool air was pumping over her face,
she actually had started to feel a little better.
If the feeling comes back, I'll tell him, Carol thought. I'll have to.
It's just too strong Not normal
Well, deja vu was never normal, she supposed - it was something
that was part dream, part chemistry, and (she was sure she'd read




this, maybe in a doctor's office somewhere while waiting for her
gynecologist to go prospecting up her fifty-two-year-old twat) part
the result of an electrical misfire in the brain, causing new
experience to be identified as old data. A temporary hole in the
pipes, hot water and cold water mingling. She closed her eyes and
prayed for it to go away.
Oh, Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to
thee.
Please ("Oh puh-lease," they used to say), not back to parochial
school. This was supposed to be a vacation, not - Floyd - what's
that over there? Oh shit!
Oh SHIT!
Who was Floyd? The only Floyd Bill knew was Floyd Doming (or
maybe it was Darling), the kid he'd run the snack bar with, the one
who'd run off to New York with his girlfriend. Carol couldn't
remember when Bill had told her about that kid, but she knew he
had.
Jast quit it, girl. There's nothing here for you. Slam the door on the
whole train of thought.
And that worked. There was a final whisper - what's the story and
then she was just Carol Shelton, on her way to Captiva Island, on
her way to Palin House with her husband the renowned software
designer, on their way to the beaches and those rum drinks with the
little paper umbrellas sticking out of them.
They passed a Publix market. They passed an old black man
minding a roadside fruit stand - he made her think of actors from
the thirties and movies you saw on the American Movie Channel,
an old yassuh-boss type of guy wearing bib overalls and a straw
hat with a round crown. Bill made small talk, and she made it right
back at him. She was faintly amazed that the little girl who had
worn a Mary medallion every day from ten to sixteen had become




this woman in the Donna Karan dress - that the desperate couple in
that Revere apartment were these middle-aged rich folks rolling
down a lush aisle of palms - but she was and they were. Once in
those Revere days he had come home drunk and she had hit him
and drawn blood from below his eye. Once she had been in fear of
Hell, had lain half-drugged in steel stirrups, thinking, I'm damned,
I've come to damnation. A million years, and that's only the first
tick of the clock.
They stopped at the causeway tollbooth and Carol thought, The
toll-taker has a strawberry birthmark on the left side of his
forehead, all mixed in with his eyebrow.
There was no mark-the toll-taker was just an ordinary guy in his
late forties or early fifties, iron-gray hair in a buzz cut, horn-
rimmed specs, the kind of guy who says, "Y'all have a nahce tahm,
okai?"-but the feeling began to come back, and Carol realized that
now the things she thought she knew were things she really did
know, at first not all of them, but then, by the time they neared the
little market on the right side of Route 41, it was almost
everything.
The market's called Corson's and there's a little gid outfront, Carol
thought. She's wearing a red pinafore. She's got a doll, a dirty old
yellow-haired thing, that she's left on the store steps so she can
look at a dog in the back of a station wagon.
The name of the market turned out to be Carson's, not Corson's,
but everything else was the same. As the white Crown Vic passed,
the little girl in the red dress turned her solemn face in Carol's
direction, a country girl's face, although what a girl from the
toolies could be doing here in rich folks' tourist country, her and
her dirty yellow-headed doll, Carol didn't know.
Here's where I ask Bill how much farther, only I won't do it.
Because I have to break out of this cycle, this groove. I have to.




"How much farther?" she asked him. He says there's only one road,
we can't get lost. He says he promises me we'll get to the Palm
House with no problem. And, by the way, who's Floyd?
Bill's eyebrow went up. The dimple beside his mouth appeared.
"Once you get over the causeway and onto Sanibel Island, there's
only one road," he said. Carol barely heard him. He was still
talking about the road, her husband who had spent a dirty weekend
in bed with his secretary two years ago, risking all they had done
and all they had made, Bill doing that with his other face on, being
the Bill Carol's mother had warned would break her heart. And
later Bill trying to tell her he hadn't been able to help himself, her
wanting to scream, I once murdered a child for you, the potential
of a child, anyway. How high is that price? And is this what I get
in return? To reach my fifties and find out that my husband had to
get into some Clairol girl's pants?
Tell him! she shrieked. Make him pull over and stop, make him do
anything that will break you free-change one thing, change
everything! You can do it if you could put your feet up in those
stirrups, you can do anything!
But she could do nothing, and it all began to tick by faster. The two
overfed crows lifted off from their splatter of lunch. Her husband
asked why she was sitting that way, was it a cramp, her saying,
Yes, yes, a cramp in her back but it was easing. Her mouth
quacked on about deja vu just as if she weren't drowning in it, and
the Crown Vic moved forward like one of those sadistic Dodgem
cars at Revere Beach. Here came Palmdale Motors on the right.
And on the lefr? Some kind of sign for the local community
theatre, a production of "Naughty Marietta."
No, it's Mary, not Marietta. Mary, mother of Jesus, Mary, mother
of God, she's got her hands out....
Carol bent all her will toward telling her husband what was
happening, because the right Bill was behind the wheel, the right




Bill could still hear her. Being heard was what married love was all
about.
Nothing came out. In her mind Gram said, "All the hard days are
coming." In her mind a voice asked Floyd what was over there,
then said, "Oh shit," then screamed "Oh shit!"
She looked at the speedometer and saw it was calibrated not in
miles an hour but thousands of feet: they were at twenty-eight
thousand. Bill was telling her that she shouldn't have slept on the
plane and she was agreeing.
There was a pink house coming up, little more than a bungalow,
fringed with palm trees that looked like the ones you saw in the
Second World War movies, fronds framing incoming Learjets with
their machine guns blazing-
Blazing. Burning hot. All at once the magazine he's holding turns
into a torch. Holy Mary, mother of God, hey there, Mary, what's
the story-
They passed the house. The old man sat on the porch and watched
them go by. The lenses of his rimless glasses glinted in the sun.
Bill's hand established a beachhead on her hip. He said something
about how they might pause to refresh themselves between the
doffing of her dress and the donning of her shorts and she agreed,
although they were never going to get to Palm House. They were
going to go down this road and down this road, they were for the
white Crown Vic and the white Crown Vic was for them, forever
and ever amen.
The next billboard would say "Palm House 2 Mi." Beyond it was
the one saying that Mother of Mercy Charities helped the Florida
sick. Would they help her?
Now that it was too late she was be-ginning to understand.
Beginning to see the light the way she could see the subtropical
sun sparkling off the water on their left. Wondering how many
wrongs she had done in her life, how many sins if you liked that
word, God knew her parents and her Gram certainly had, sin this
and sin that and wear the medallion between those growing things
the boys look at. And years later she had lain in bed with her new
husband on hot summer nights, knowing a decision had to be
made, knowing the clock was ticking, the cigarette butt was
smoldering, and she remembered making the decision, not telling
him out loud because about some things you could be silent.
Her head itched. She scratched it. Black flecks came swirling down
past her face. On the Crown Vic's instrument panel the
speedometer froze at sixteen thousand feet and then blew out, but
Bill appeared not to notice.
Here came a mailbox with a Grateful Dead sticker pasted on the
front; here came a little black dog with its head down, trotting
busily, and God how her head itched, black flakes drifting in the
air like fallout and Mother Teresa's face looking out of one of
them.
"Mother of Mary Charities Help the Florida Hungry-Won't You
Help Us?"
Floyd What's that over there? Oh shit
She has time to see something big. And to read the word "Delta."
"Bill? Bill?"
His reply, clear enough but nevertheless coming from around the
rim of the universe: "Christ, honey, what's in your hair?"
She plucked the charred remnant of Mother Teresa's face from her
hair and held it out to him, the older version of the man she had
married, the secretary fucking man she had married, the man who
had nonetheless rescued her from people who thought that you
could live forever in paradise if you only lit enough candles and
wore the blue blazer and stuck to the approved skipping rhymes -




Lying there with this man one hot summer night while the drug
deals went on upstairs and Iron Butterfly sang "In-A-Gadda-Da-
Vida" for the nine-billionth time, she had asked what he thought
you got, you know, after. When your part in the show is over. He
had taken her in his arms and held her, down the beach she had
heard the jangle-jingle of the mid-way and the bang of the Dodgem
cars and Bill - Bill's glasses were melted to his face.
One eye bulged out of its socket. His mouth was a bloodhole. In
the trees a bird was crying, a bird was screaming, and Carol began
to scream with it, holding out the charred fragment of paper with
Mother Teresa's picture on it, screaming, watching as his cheeks
turned black and his forehead swarmed and his neck split open like
a poisoned goiter, screaming, she was screaming, somewhere Iron
Butterfly was singing "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and she was
screaming.
"CAROL?"
It was Bill's voice, from a thousand miles away. His hand was on
her, but it was concern in his touch rather than lust.
She opened her eyes and looked around the sun-brilliant cabin of
the Lear 35, and for a moment she understood everything in the
way one understands the tremendous import of a dream upon the
first moment of waking. She remembered asking him what he
believed you got, you know, after, and he had said you probably
got what you'd always thought you would get, that if Jerry Lee
Lewis thought he was going to Hell for playing boogie-woogie,
that's exactly where he'd go. Heaven, Hell, or Grand Rapids, it was
your choice or the choice of those who had taught you what to
believe. It was the human mind's final great service: the perception
of eternity in the place where you'd always expected to spend it.
"Carol? You O.K., babe?" In one hand was the magazine he'd been
reading, a Newsweek with Mother Teresa on the cover.
"SAINTHOOD NOW?" it said in white.




Looking around wildly at the cabin, she was thinking, it happens at
sixteen thousand feet I have to tell them, I have to warn them.
But it was fading, all of it, the way those feelings always did. They
went like dreams, or cotton candy turning into a sweet mist just
above your tongue.
"Landing? Already." She felt wide awake, but her voice sounded
thick and muzzy.
"It's fast, huh?" he said, sounding pleased, as if he'd flown it
himself instead of paying for it. "Floyd says we'll be on the ground
in-"
"Who?" she asked. The cabin of the little plane was warm but her
fingers were cold. "Who?"
"Floyd. You know, the pilot" He pointed his thumb toward the
cockpit's left-hand seat. They were descending into a scrim of
clouds. The plane began to shake. "He says we'll be on the ground
in Fort Myers in twenty minutes. You took a hell of a jump, girl.
And before that you were moaning."
Carol opened her mouth to say it was that feeling, the one you
could only say what it was in French, something vu or rous, but it
was fading and all she said was "I had a nightmare."
There was a beep as Floyd the pilot switched the seat-belt light on.
Carol turned her head. Somewhere below, waiting for them now
and forever, was a white car from Hertz, a gangster car, the kind
the characters in a Martin Scorsese movie would probably call a
Crown Vic. She looked at the cover of the news magazine, at the
face of Mother Teresa, and all at once she remembered skipping
rope behind Our Lady of Angels, skipping to one of the forbidden
rhymes, skipping to the one that went Hey there, Mary, what's the
story, save my ass from Purgatory




All the hard days are coming, her Gram had said. She had pressed
the medal into Carol's palm, wrapped the chain around her fingers.
The hard days are coming.




THE GLASS
FLOOR
STEPHEN KING


              Appeared in:
        "Weird Tales" Fall, 1990
     Starlight Mystery Stories, 1967




                           INTRODUCTION

In the novel Deliverance, by James Dickey, there is a scene where
a country fellow who lives way up in the back of beyond whangs
his hand with a tool while repairing a car. One of the city men who
are looking for a couple of guys to drive their cars downriver asks
this fellow, Griner by name, if he's hurt himself. Griner looks at his
bloody hand, then mutters: "Naw - it ain't as bad as I thought."
That's the way I felt after re-reading "The Glass Floor," the first
story for which I was ever paid, after all these years. Darrell
Schweitzer, the editor of Weird Tales invited me to make changes if
I wanted to, but I decided that would probably be a bad idea.
Except for two or three word-changes and the addition of a
paragraph break (which was probably a typographical error in the
first place), I've left the tale just as it was. If I really did start
making changes, the result would be an entirely new story.
"The Glass Floor" was written, to the best of my recollection, in
the summer of 1967, when I was about two months shy of my
twentieth birthday. I had been trying for about two years to sell a
story to Robert A.W. Lowndes, who edited two horror/fantasy
magazines for Health Knowledge (The Magazine of Horror and
Startling Mystery Stories) as well as a vastly more popular digest
called Sexology. He had rejected several submissions kindly (one
of them, marginally better than "The Glass Floor," was finally
published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under
the title "Night of the Tiger"), then accepted this one when I finally
got around to submitting it. That first check was for thirty-five
dollars. I've cashed many bigger ones since then, but none gave me
more satisfaction; someone had finally paid me some real money
for something I had found in my head!
The first few pages of the story are clumsy and badly written -
clearly the product of an unformed story-teller's mind - but the last




bit pays off better than I remembered; there is a genuine frisson in
what Mr. Wharton finds waiting for him in the East Room. I
suppose that's at least part of the reason I agreed to allow this
mostly unremarkable work to be reprinted after all these years.
And there is at least a token effort to create characters which are
more than paper-doll cutouts; Wharton and Reynard are
antagonists, but neither is "the good guy" or "the bad guy." The
real villain is behind that plastered-over door. And I also see an
odd echo of "The Glass Floor" in a very recent work called "The
Library Policeman." That work, a short novel, will be published as
part of a collection of short novels called Four Past Midnight this
fall, and if you read it, I think you'll see what I mean. It was
fascinating to see the same image coming around again after all
this time.
Mostly I'm allowing the story to be republished to send a message
to young writers who are out there right now, trying to be
published, and collecting rejection slips from such magazines as
F&SF Midnight Graffiti, and, of course, Weird Tales, which is the
granddaddy of them all. The message is simple: you can learn, you
can get better, and you can get published.
If that Little spark is there, someone will probably see it sooner
orlater, gleaming faintly in the dark. And, if you tend the spark
nestled in the kindling, it really can grow into a large, blazing fire.
It happened to me, and it started here.
I remember getting the idea for the story, and it just came as the
ideas come now - casually, with no flourish of trumpets. I was
walking down a dirt road to see a friend, and for no reason at all I
began to wonder what it would be like to stand in a room whose
floor was a mirror. The image was so intriguing that writing the
story became a necessity. It wasn't written for money; it was
written so I could see better. Of course I did not see it as well as I
had hoped; there is still that shortfall between what I hope I will
accomplish and what I actually manage. Still, I came away from it




with two valuable things: a salable story after five years of
rejection slips, and a bit of experience. So here it is, and as that
fellow Griner says in Dickey's novel, it ain't really as bad as I
thought.
- Stephen King
Wharton moved slowly up the wide steps, hat in hand, craning his
neck to get a better look at the Victorian monstrosity that his sister
had died in. It wasn't a house at all, he reflected, but a mausoleum -
a huge, sprawling mausoleum. It seemed to grow out of the top of
the hill like an outsized, perverted toadstool, all gambrels and
gables and jutting, blank-windowed cupolas. A brass weather-vane
surmounted the eighty degree slant of shake-shingled roof, the
tarnished effigy of a leering little boy with one hand shading eyes
Wharton was just as glad he could not see.
Then he was on the porch, and the house as a whole was cut off
from him. He twisted the old-fashioned bell, and listened to it echo
hollowly through the dim recesses within. There was a rose-tinted
fanlight over the door, and Wharton could barely make out the date
1770 chiseled into the glass. Tomb is right, he thought.
The door suddenly swung open. "Yes, sir?" The housekeeper
stared out at him. She was old, hideously old. Her face hung like
limp dough on her skull, and the hand on the door above the chain
was grotesquely twisted by arthritis.
"I've come to see Anthony Reynard," Wharton said. He fancied he
could even smell the sweetish odor of decay emanating from the
rumpled silk of the shapeless black dress she wore.
"Mr Reynard isn't seein' anyone. He's mournin'."
"He'll see me," Wharton said. "I'm Charles Wharton. Janine's
brother."
"Oh." Her eyes widened a little, and the loose bow of her mouth
worked around the empty ridges of her gums. "Just a minute." She
disappeared, leaving the door ajar.
Wharton stared into the dim mahogany shadows, making out high-
backed easy chairs, horse-hair upholstered divans, tall narrow-
shelved bookcases, curlicued, floridly carven wainscoting.




Janine, he thought. Janine, Janine, Janine. How could you live
here? How in hell could you stand it?
A tall figure materialized suddenly out of the gloom, slope-
shouldered, head thrust forward, eyes deeply sunken and downcast.
Anthony Reynard reached out and unhooked the door-chain.
"Come in, Mr. Wharton, " he said heavily.
Wharton stepped into the vague dimness of the house, looking up
curiously at the man who had married his sister. There were rings
beneath the hollows of his eyes, blue and bruised-looking. The suit
he wore was wrinkled and hung limp on him, as if he had lost a
great deal of weight. He looks tired, Wharton thought. Tired and
old.
"My sister has already been buried?" Wharton asked.
"Yes." He shut the door slowly, imprisoning Wharton in the
decaying gloom of the house. "My deepest sorrow, sir. Wharton. I
loved your sister dearly." He made a vague gesture. "I'm sorry."
He seemed about to add more, then shut his mouth with an abrupt
snap. When he spoke again, it was obvious he had bypassed
whatever had been on his lips. "Would you care to sit down? I'm
sure you have questions.
"I do. Somehow it came out more curtly than he had intended.
Reynard sighed and nodded slowly. He led the Way deeper into the
living room and gestured at a chair. Wharton sank deeply into it,
and it seemed to gobble him up rather than give beneath him.
Reynard sat next to the fireplace and dug for cigarettes. He offered
them wordlessly to Wharton, and he shook his head.
He waited until Reynard lit his cigarette, then asked, "Just how did
she die? Your letter didn't say much.




Reynard blew out the match and threw it into the fireplace. It
landed on one of the ebony iron fire-dogs, a carven gargoyle that
stared at Wharton with toad's eyes.
"She fell," he said. "She was dusting in one of the other rooms, up
along the eaves. We were planning to paint, and she said it would
have to be well-dusted before we could begin. She had the ladder.
It slipped. Her neck was broken." There was a clicking sound in
his throat as he swallowed.
"She died - instantly?"
"Yes." He lowered his head and placed a hand against his brow. "I
was heartbroken.
The gargoyle leered at him, squat torso and flattened, sooty head.
Its mouth was twisted upward in a weird, gleeful grin, and its eyes
seemed turned inward at some private joke. Wharton looked away
from it with an effort. "I want to see where it happened.
Reynard stubbed out his cigarette half-smoked. "You can't.
"I'm afraid I must," Wharton said coldly. "After all, she was my .. .
"It's not that," Reynard said. "The room has been partitioned off.
That should have been done a long time ago.
"If it's just a matter of prising a few boards off a door...
"You don't understand. The room has been plastered off
completely There's nothing but a wall there.
Wharton felt his gaze being pulled inexorably back to the fire-dog.
Damn the thing, what did it have to grin about?
"I can't help it. I want to see the room."
Reynard stood suddenly, towering over him. "Impossible."
Wharton also stood. "I'm beginning to wonder if you don't have
something to hide in there," he said quietly.




"Just what are you implying?"
Wharton shook his head a little dazedly. What was he implying?
That perhaps Anthony Reynard had murdered his Sister in this
Revolutionary War-vintage crypt? That there might be Something
more sinister here than shadowy corners and hideous iron fire-
dogs?
"I don't know what I'm implying, " he said slowly, "except that
Janine was shoveled under in a hell of a hurry, and that you're
acting damn strange now."
For moment the anger blazed brighter, and then it died away,
leaving only hopelessness and dumb sorrow. "Leave me alone," he
mumbled. "Please leave me alone, Mr. Wharton."
"I can't. I've got to know .. ."
The aged housekeeper appeared, her face thrusting from the
shadowy cavern of the hall. "Supper's ready, Mr. Reynard."
"Thank you, Louise, but I'm not hungry. Perhaps Mr. Wharton ...
?" Wharton shook his head.
"Very well, then. Perhaps we'll have a bite later."
"As you say, sir." She turned to go. "Louise?" "Yes, sir?"
"Come here a moment.
Louise shuffled slowly back into the room, her loose tongue
slopping wetly over her lips for a moment and then disappearing.
"Sir?"
"Mr. Wharton seems to have some questions about his sister's
death. Would you tell him all you know about it?"
"Yes, sir." Her eyes glittered with alacrity. "She was dustin', she
was. Dustin' the East Room. Hot on paintin' it, she was. Mr.
Reynard here, I guess he wasn't much interested, because ...




"Just get to the point, Louise," Reynard said impatiently.
"No," Wharton said. "Why wasn't he much interested?"
Louise looked doubtfully from one to the other.
"Go ahead," Reynard said tiredly. "He'll find out in the village if he
doesn't up here.
"Yes, sir." Again he saw the glitter, caught the greedy purse of the
loose flesh of her mouth as she prepared to impart the precious
story. "Mr. Reynard didn't like no one goin' in the East Room. Said
it was dangerous."
"Dangerous?"
"The floor," she said. "The floor's glass. It's a mirror. The whole
floor's a mirror. "
Wharton turned to Reynard, feeling dark blood suffuse his face.
"You mean to tell me you let her go up on a ladder in a room with
a glass floor?"
"The ladder had rubber grips," Reynard began. "That wasn't why ...
"You damned fool," Wharton whispered. "You damned, bloody
fool.
"I tell you that wasn't the reason!" Reynard shouted suddenly. "I
loved your sister! No one is sorrier than I that she is dead! But I
warned her! God knows I warned her about that floor!"
Wharton was dimly aware of Louise staring greedily at them,
storing up gossip like a squirrel stores up nuts. "Get her out of
here," he said thickly.
"Yes," Reynard said. "Go see to supper. "
"Yes, sir." Louise moved reluctantly toward the hall, and the
shadows swallowed her.




"Now," Wharton said quietly. "It seems to me that you have some
explaining to do, Reynard. This whole thing sounds funny to me.
Wasn't there even an inquest?"
"No," Reynard said. He slumped back into his chair suddenly, and
he looked blindly into the darkness of the vaulted overhead ceiling.
"They know around here about the - East Room."
"And just what is there to know?" Wharton asked tightly
"The East Room is bad luck," Reynard said. "Some people might
even say it's cursed.
"Now listen," Wharton said, his ill temper and unlaid grief building
up like steam in a teakettle, "I'm not going to be put off, Reynard.
Every word that comes out of your mouth makes me more
determined to see that room. Now are you going to agree to it or do
I have to go down to that village and ... ?"
"Please." Something in the quiet hopelessness of the word made
Wharton look up. Reynard looked directly into his eyes for the first
time and they were haunted, haggard eyes. "Please, Mr. Wharton.
Take my word that your sister died naturally and go away. I don't
want to see you die!" His voice rose to a wail. "I didn't want to see
anybody die!"
Wharton felt a quiet chill steal over him. His gaze skipped from the
grinning fireplace gargoyle to the dusty, empty-eyed bust of Cicero
in the corner to the strange wainscoting carvings. And a voice
came from within him: Go away from here. A thousand living yet
insentient eyes seemed to stare at him from the darkness, and again
the voice spoke... "Go away from here."
Only this time it was Reynard.
"Go away from here," he repeated. "Your sister is beyond caring
and beyond revenge. I give you my word...




"Damn your word!" Wharton said harshly. "I'm going down to the
sheriff, Reynard. And if the sheriff won't help me, I'll go to the
county commissioner. And if the county commissioner won't help
me ...
"Very well." The words were like the faraway tolling of a
churchyard bell.
"Come."
Reynard led the way into the hall, down past the kitchen, the empty
dining room with the chandelier catching and reflecting the last
light of day, past the pantry, toward the blind plaster of the
corridor's end.
This is it, he thought, and suddenly there was a strange crawling in
the pit of his stomach.
"I..." he began involuntarily.
"What?" Reynard asked, hope glittering in his eyes.
"Nothing. "
They stopped at the end of the hall, stopped in the twilight gloom.
There seemed to be no electric light. On the floor Wharton could
see the still-damp plasterer's trowel Reynard had used to wall up
the doorway, and a straggling remnant of Poe's "Black Cat"
clanged through his mind:
"I had walled the monster up within the tomb...
Reynard handed the trowel to him blindly. "Do whatever you have
to do, Wharton. I won't be party to it. I wash my hands of it.
Wharton watched him move off down the hall with misgivings, his
hand opening and closing on the handle of the trowel. The faces of
the Little-boy weathervane, the fire-dog gargoyle, the wizened
housemaid all seemed to mix and mingle before him, all grinning
at something he could not understand. Go away from here ...
With a sudden bitter curse he attacked the wall, hacking into the
soft, new plaster until the trowel scraped across the door of the
East Room. He dug away plaster until he could reach the
doorknob. He twisted, then yanked on it until the veins stood out in
his temples .
The plaster cracked, schismed, and finally split. The door swung
ponderously open, shedding plaster like a dead skin.
Wharton stared into the shimmering quicksilver pool.
It seemed to glow with a light of its own in the darkness, ethereal
and fairy-like. Wharton stepped in, half-expecting to sink into
warm, pliant fluid.
But the floor was solid.
His own reflection hung suspended below him, attached only by
the feet, seeming to stand on its head in thin air. It made him dizzy
just to look at it.
Slowly his gaze shifted around the room. The ladder was still
there, stretching up into the glimmering depths of the mirror. The
room was high, he saw. High enough for a fall to he winced - to
kill.
It was ringed with empty bookcases, all seeming to lean over him
on the very threshold of imbalance. They added to the room's
strange, distorting effect.
He went over to the ladder and stared down at the feet. They were
rubbershod, as Reynard had said, and seemed solid enough. But if
the ladder had not slid, how had Janine fallen?
Somehow he found himself staring through the floor again. No, he
corrected himself. Not through the floor. At the mirror; into the
mirror . . .




He wasn't standing on the floor at all he fancied. He Was poised in
thin air halfway between the identical ceiling and floor, held up
only by the stupid idea that he was on the floor. That was silly, as
anyone could see, for there was the floor, way down there.. . .
Snap out of it!' he yelled at himself suddenly. He was on the floor,
and that was nothing but a harmless reflection of the ceiling. It
would only be the floor if I was standing on my head, and I'm not;
the other me is the one standing on his head... .
He began to feel vertigo, and a sudden lump of nausea rose in his
throat. He tried to look away from the glittering quicksilver depths
of the mirror, but he couldn't.
The door.. where was the door? He suddenly wanted out very
badly.
Wharton turned around clumsily, but there were only crazily-tilted
bookcases and the jutting ladder and the horrible chasm beneath
his feet.
"Reynard!" He screamed. "I'm falling! "
Reynard came running, the sickness already a gray lesion on his
heart. It was done; it had happened again.
He stopped at the door's threshold, Staring in at the Siamese twins
staring at each other in the middle of the two-roofed, no-floored
room.
"Louise," he croaked around the dry ball of sickness in his throat.
"Bring the pole."
Louise came shuffling out of the darkness and handed the hook-
ended pole to Reynard. He slid it out across the shining quicksilver
pond and caught the body sprawled on the glass. He dragged it
slowly toward the door, and when he could reach it, he pulled it




out. He stared down into the contorted face and gently shut the
staring eyes.
"I'll want the plaster," he said quietly.
"Yes, sir."
She turned to go, and Reynard stared somberly into the room. Not
for the first time he wondered if there was really a mirror there at
all. In the room, a small pool of blood showed on the floor and
ceiling, seeming to meet in the center, blood which hung there
quietly and one could wait forever for it to drip.




The King Family &
The Wicked Witch



STEPHEN KING




     Illustrated by King's children
            Flint Magazine




EDITOR'S NOTE:
Stephen King and I went to college together. No, we were not the
best of friends, but we did share a few brews together at University
Motor Inn. We did work for the school newspaper at the same
time. No, Steve and I are not best friends. But I sure am glad he
made it. He worked hard and believed in himself. After eight
million book sales, it's hard to remember him as a typically broke
student. We all knew he'd make it through.
Last January I wrote of a visit with Steve over the holiday
vacation. We talked about his books, Carrie - Salems Lot. The
Shinning. and the soon to be released, The Stand. We talked about
how Stanley Kubrick wants to do the film versions of his new
books. We didn't talk about the past much though. We talked of the
future - his kids, FLINT ...
He gave me a copy of a story he had written for his children. We
almost ran it then, but there was much concern on the staff as to
how it would be received by our readers. We didn't run it. Well,
we've debated long enough. It's too cute for you not to read it. We
made the final decision after spending in evening watching TV last
week. There were at least 57 more offensive things said, not to
mention all the murders, rapes, and wars...we decided to let you be
the judge. If some of you parents might be offended by the word
'fart', you'd better not read it - but don't stop your kids, they'll love
it!




On the Secret Road in the town of Bridgton, there lived a wicked
witch. Her name was Witch Hazel.
How wicked was Witch Hazel? Well, once she had changed a
Prince from the Kingdom of New Hampshire into a woodchuck.
She turned a little kid's favorite kitty into whipped cream. And she
liked to turn mommies' baby carriages into big piles of horse-turds
while the mommies and their babies were shopping.
She was a mean old witch.
The King family lived by Long Lake In Bridgton, Maine. They
were nice people.
There was a daddy who wrote books. There was a mommy who
wrote poems and cooked food. There was a girl named Naomi who
was six years old. She went to school. She was tall and straight and
brown. There was a boy named Joe who was four years old. He
went to school too, although he only went two days a week. He
was short and blonde with hazel eyes.
And Witch Hazel hated the Kings more than anyone else In
Bridgton. Witch Hazel especially hated the Kings because they
were the happiest family In Bridgton. She would peer out at their
bright red Cadillac when it passed her dirty, falling down haunted
house with mean hateful eyes. Witch Hazel hated bright colors.
She would see the mommy reading Joe a story on the bench
outside the drug store and her bony fingers would itch to cast a
spell. She would see the daddy talking to Naomi on their way
home from school in the red Cadillac or the blue truck, and she
would want to reach out her awful arms and catch them and pop
into her witches cauldron.
And finally, she cast her spell.
One day Witch Hazel put on a nice dress. She went to the Bridgton
Beauty Parlor and had her hair permed. She put on a pair of




Rockers from Fayva (an East Coast shoe store chain). She looked
almost pretty.
She bought some of daddy's books at the Bridgton Pharmacy. Then
she drove out to the Kings' house and pretended she wanted daddy
to sign his books. She drove in a car. She could have ridden her
broom, but she didn't want the Kings to know she was a witch.
And in her handbag were four magic cookies. Four evil. magic
cookies.
Four cookies! Four cookies full of black magic!
The banana cookie, the milk bottle cookie, and worst of all, two
crying cookies. Don't let her in Kings!' Oh please don't let her in!
But she looked so nice. . . and she was smiling. . . and she had the
daddy's books. soooo....they let her in. Daddy signed her book,
mommy offered her tea. Naomi asked if she would like to see her
room.
Joe asked if she would like to see him write his name. Witch Hazel
smiled and smiled. It almost broke her face to smile.
"You have been so nice to me that I would like to be nice to you."
said Witch Hazel. "I have baked four cookies. A cookie for each
King."
"Cookies'" Shouted Naomi "Hooray!"
"Cookies" Shouted Joe. "Cookies!"
That was awfully nice," laid mommy. "You shouldn't have."
"But we're glad you did." said the daddy.
They took the cookies. Witch Hazel smiled. And when she was in
her car she shrieked and cackled with laughter. She laughed so
hard that her cat Basta hissed and shrank away from her. Witch
Hazel was happy when her wicked plan succeeded.




"I will like this banana cookie." Daddy said. He ate it and what a
terrible thing happened. His nose turned into a banana and when he
went down to his office to work on his book much later that
terrible day the only word he could write was banana.
It was Witch Hazel's wicked magic Banana Cookie.
Poor Daddy!
"I will like this milk-bottle cookie." Mommy said. "What a funny
name for a cookie. She ate it and (the evil cookie turned her hands
into milk-bottles.
What an awful thing. Could she fix the food with Milk-bottles for
hands? Could she type? No! She could not even pick her nose.
Poor Mommy!
"We will like these crying cookies." Naomi and Joe said. What a
funny name for a cookie." They each ate one and they began to
cry! They cried and cried and could not stop! The tears streamed
out of their eyes. There were puddles on the rug. Their clothes got
aII wet. They couldn't eat good meals because they were crying.
They even cried in their sleep.
It was all because of Witch Hazel's evil crying cookies.
The Kings were not the happiest family in Bridgton anymore. Now
they were the saddest family in Bridgton. Mommy didn't want to
go shopping because everybody laughed at her milk-bottle hands.
Daddy couldn't write books because all the words came out banana
and it was hard to see the typewriter anyway because his nose was
a banana. And Joe and Naomi just cried and cried and cried.
Witch Hazel was as happy as wicked witch ever gets. It was her
greatest spell.
One day, about a month after the horrible day of the four cookies
Mommy was walking in the woods. It was about the only thing she
liked to do with her milk-bottle hands. And in the woods she found
a woodchuck caught in a trap.
Poor thing! It was almost dead from fright and pain. There was
blood alI over the trap.
"Poor old thing," Mommy said. "I'll get you out of that nasty trap."
But could she open the trap with milk bottles for hands? No.
So she ran for Daddy and Naomi and Joe. Fifteen minutes later all
four Kings were standing around the poor bloody woodchuck in
the trap. The Kings were not bloody, but what a strange, sad sight
they were! Daddy had a banana In the middle of his face. Mommy
had milk-bottle hands. And the two children could not stop crying.
"I think we can get him out." Daddy said. "Yes. " Mummy said. "I
think we can get him out if we all work together. And I will start. I
will give the poor thing a drink of milk from my hands " And she
gave him a drink. She felt a little better. Naomi and Joe were trying
to open the jaws of the cruel trap while the woodchuck looked at
them hopefully. But the trap would not open. It was an old trap,
and its hinges and mean sharp teeth were cloggled with rust.
"It will not open." Naomi said and cried harder than ever. "No. it
will not open at all!"
"I can't open it." Joe said and cried his eyes. The tears streamed out
of his eyes and down his cheeks. "I can't open it either."
And Daddy said. "I know what to do. I think." Daddy bent over the
hinge of the trap with his funny banana nose. He squeezed the end
of it with both hands. Ouch! It hurt! But out came six drops of
banana oil. They felt onto the rusty hinge of the trap, one drop at a
time.
"Now try," said Daddy.
This time the trap opened easily.




"Hooray!" shouted Naomi.
"He's out! He's out!" Shouted Joe.
"We have all worked together." said Mommy. "I gave the
woodchuck milk. Daddy oiled the trap with his banana nose. And
Naomi and Joe opened the trap to let him out."
And then they all felt a little better, for the first time since Witch
Hazel cast he wicked spell.
And have you guessed yet? Oh, I bet you have. The woodchuck
was really not a woodchuck at all. He was the Prince of the
Kingdom of New Hampshire who had also fallen under the spell of
Wicked Witch Hazel.
When the trap was opened the spell was broken, and instead of a
woodchuck, a radiant Prince In a Brooks Brothers suit stood before
the King family.
"You have been kind to me even, in your own sadness." said the
Prince, "and that is the most difficult thing of all. And so through
the power vested in me, the spell of the wicked witch is broken and
you are free!"
Oh, happy day.
Daddy's banana nose disappeared and was replaced with his own
nose, which was not too handsome but certainly better than a
slightly squeezed banana. Mommy's milk-bottles were replaced
with her own pink hands.
Best of all, Naomi and Joe stopped crying. They began to smile,
then they began to laugh! Then the Prince of New Hampshire
began to laugh Then Daddy and Mommy began to laugh The
Prince danced with Mommy and Naomi and carried Joe on his
shoulders. He shook hands with Daddy and said he had admired
Daddy's books before he had been turned into a woodchuck.




AlI five of them went back to the nice house by the lake, and
Mommy made tea for everyone. They all sat at the table and drank
their tea.
"We ought to do something about that witch," Mommy said. "So
the can't do something wicked to someone else." . -
"I think that is true." said the Prince. "And it so happens that I
know one spell myself. It will get rid of her."
He whispered to Daddy. Ha whispered to Mommy. He whispered
to Naomi and Joe, and they nodded and giggled and laughed.
That very afternoon they drove up to Witch Hazel's haunted house
on the Secret Road. Basta, the cat, looked at them with his big
yellow eyes, hissed, and ran away.
They did not drive up in the Kings' pretty red Cadillac, or in the
Prince's Mist Grey Mercedes 390SL. They drove up in an old, old
car that wheezed and blew oil.
They were wearing old clothes with fleas jumping out of them.
They wanted to look poor to fool Witch Hazel.
They went up and the Prince knocked on the door.
Witch Hazel ripped the door open. She was wearing a tall black
hat. There was a wart on the end of her nose. She smelled of frog's
blood and owls' hearts and ant's eyeballs, because the had been
whipping up horrible brew to make more black magic cookies.
"What do you want?" she rasped at them. She didn't recognize
them in their old clothes. "Get out. I'm busy!"
"We are a poor family on our way to California to pick oranges."
the Prince said. "What has that to do with me?" The witch
shrieked. "I ought to turn you into oranges for disturbing me! Now
good day!"




She tried to close the door but the Prince put his foot in it. Naomi
and Joe shoved it
back open.
"We have something to sell you." Daddy said. "It is the wickedest
cookie in the world. If you eat it. It will make you the wickedest
witch in the world, even wickeder than Witch Indira in India. We
will sell it to you for one thousand dollars."
"I don't buy what I can steal!" Witch Hazel shrieked. She snatched
the cookie and gobbled it down "Now I will be the wickedest witch
in the whole world!" And she cackled so loudly that the shutters
fell off her house.
But the Prince wasn't sorry. He was glad. And Mommy wasn't
sorry, because she had baked the cookie. And Daddy wasn't sorry,
because he had gone to New Hampshire to get the 300 year-old
baked beans that went into the cookie.
Naomi and Joe? They just laughed and laughed, because they
knew that it wasn't a Wicked Cookie that Witch Hazel had just
eaten.
It was a Farting Cookie.
Witch Hazel felt something funny.
She felt it building in her tummy and her behind. It felt like a of
gas. It felt like an explosion looking for a place to happen.
"What have you done to me!" she shrieked. "Who are you?'"
"I am the Prince of New Hampshire.'" The Prince cried, raising his
face to she could see it clearly for the first time.
"And we are the Kings." Daddy said. "Shame on you for turning
my wife's hands into milk bottles! Double shame on you for
turning my nose into a banana. Triple shame on you for making




my Naomi and my Joe cry all day and all night. But we've fixed
you now, Wicked Witch Hazel!"
"You won't be casting anymore spells." said Naomi. "Because you
are going to the moon!"
"I'm not going to the moon!" Witch Hazel screeched so loudly that
the chimney fell on the lawn. "I'm going to turn you all into cheap
antiques that not even tourists will buy!"
"No you're not." said Joe, "because you ate the magic cookie. You
ate the magic farting cookie."
The wicked witch foamed and frothed. She tried to cast her spell.
But it was too late: the Farting Cookie had done its work. She felt a
big fart coming on. She squeezed her butt to keep it in until she
could cast her spell, but it was too late.
WHONK! Went the fart. It blew all the fur off her cat, Basta. lt
blew in the windows. And Witch Hazel went up in the air like a
rocket.
"Get me down!'' Witch Hazel screamed. Witch Hazel came down
all right. She came down on her fanny. And when the came down,
she let another fart.
DRRRRRRAPPP! Went the fart. lt was so windy it knocked down
the witch's home and the Bridgton Trading Post. You could see
Dom Cardozl sitting on the toilet where he had been pooping. It
was all that was left of the Trading Post except for one bureau that
had been made in Grand Rapids
The witch went flying up into the sky. She flew up and up until she
was as small as a speck of coal dust.
"Get me down. " Witch Hazel called, sounding very small and far
away.
"You'll come down all right." Naomi said.




Down came Witch Hazel.
"Yeeeaaahhhh'" she screamed falling out of the sky.
Just before the could hit the ground and be crushed (as maybe she
deserved), she cut another fart, the biggest one of all the smell was
like two million egg salad sandwiches. And the sound was KA-
HIONK!!!
Up she went again
"Goodbye, Witch Hazel " yelled Mommy waving. "Enjoy the
moon."
"Hope you stay a long time"' called Joe.
Up and up went Witch Hazel until she was out of sight. During the
news that night the Kings and the Prince of New Hampshire heard
Barbara Walters report that a UFW had been seen by a 74 7
airplane over Bridgton. Maine - an unidentified flying witch.
And that was the end of wicked Witch Hazel. She is on the moon
now, and probably still farting.
And the Kings are the happiest family in Bridgton again. They
often exchange visits with the Prince of New Hampshire, who is
now now King. Daddy writes books and never uses the word
banana. Mommy uses her hands more than ever. And Joe and
Naomi King hardly ever cry.
As for Witch Hazel, she was never seen again, and considering
those terrible farts she was letting when she left, that is probably a
good thing!
THE END




THE LITTLE
SISTERS OF
ELURIA


STEPHEN KING




                  From:
     Legends: The Book Of Fantasy 1998




                         INTRODUCTION

The Gunslinger (1982)
The Drawing of the Three (1987)
The Waste Lands (1991)
Wizard and Glass (1997)
These novels, using thematic elements from Robert Browning's
poem 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'. tell the saga of
Roland, last of the gunslingers, who embarks on a quest to find the
Dark Tower for reasons that the author has yet to reveal. Along the
way, Roland encounters the remains of what was once a thriving
society, feudal in nature but technologically quite advanced, that
now has fallen into decay and ruin. King combines elements of
fantasy with science fiction into a surreal blend of past and future.
The first book, The Gunslinger, introduces Roland, who is chasing
the Dark Man, an enigmatic sorcerer figure, across a vast desert.
Through flashbacks, the reader learns that Roland was a member
of a noble family in the Dark Tower world, and that that world
may or may not have been destroyed with help from the Dark Man.
Along the way, Roland encounters strange inhabitants of this
unnamed world, including Jake, a young boy who, even though he
is killed by the end of the first book, will figure prominently in
later volumes. Roland does catch up with the Dark Man, and learns
that he must seek out the Dark Tower to find the answers to the
questions of why he must embark on this quest and what is
contained in the Tower.
The next book, The Drawing of the Three, shows Roland recruiting
three people from present-day Earth to join him on his way to the
Dark Tower. They are Eddie, a junkie 'mule' working for the
Mafia; Suzannah, a paraplegic with multiple personalities; and




Jake, whose arrival is startling to Roland, who sacrificed Jake in
his own world during his pursuit of the Dark Man. Roland saves
Jake's life on Earth, but the resulting schism nearly drives him
insane. Roland must also help the other two battle their own
demons, Eddie's being his heroin addiction and guilt over not being
able to save his brother's life, and Suzannah's the war between her
different personalities, one a kind and gentle woman, the other a
racist psychopath. Each of the three deals with their problems with
the help of the others, and together the quartet set out on the
journey to the Tower.
The third book, The Waste Lands, chronicles the first leg of that
journey, examining the background of the three Earth-born
characters in detail. The book reaches its climax when Jake is
kidnapped by a cult thriving in the ruins of a crumbling city, led by
a man known only as Flagg (a character who has appeared in
several of King's other novels as the embodiment of pure evil).
Roland rescues Jake and the group escapes the city on a monorail
system whose artificial intelligence program has achieved
sentience at the cost of its sanity. The monorail challenges them to
a riddle-contest, with their lives as the prize if they can stump the
machine, who claims to know every riddle ever created.
Wizard and Glass, the fourth volume in the series, finds Roland,
Jake, Eddie and Suzannah continuing their journey towards the
Dark Tower, moving through a deserted part of Mid-World that is
eerily reminiscent of twentieth-century Earth. During their travels
they encounter a thinny, a dangerous weakening of the barrier
between different times and places. Roland recognizes it and
realizes that his world is breaking down faster than he had thought.
The thinny prompts him to recall the first time he encountered it,
many years before on a trip out west with his friends Cuthbert and
Alain, when Roland had just earned his gunslinger status. It is this
story - of the three boys uncovering a plot against the ruling
government and of Roland's first love, a girl named Susan Delgado
- that is the central focus of the book. While the three manage to
destroy the conspirators, Susan is killed during the fight by the
townspeople of Hambry. The story gives Jake, Eddie and
Suzannah new insight into Roland's background and why he may
sacrifice them to attain his ultimate goal of saving his world. The
book ends with the foursome moving onward once more towards
the Tower.




              THE LITTLE SISTERS OF ELURIA
                           BY STEPHEN KING

[Author's Note: The Dark Tower books begin with Roland of
Gilead, the last gunslinger in an exhausted world that has 'moved
on', pursuing a magician in a black robe. Roland has been chasing
Walter for a very long time. In the first book of the cycle, he finally
catches up. This story, however, takes place while Roland is still
casting about for Walter's trail. A knowledge of the books is
therefore not necessary for you to understand - and hopefully enjoy
-the story which follows. S.K.]

I. Full Earth. The Empty Town. The Bells. The Dead Boy.
The Overturned Wagon. The Green Folk.
On a day in Full Earth so hot that it seemed to suck the breath from
his chest before his body could use it, Roland of Gilead came to
the gates of a village in the Desatoya Mountains. He was travelling
alone by then, and would soon be travelling afoot, as well. This
whole last week he had been hoping for a horse-doctor, but
guessed such a fellow would do him no good now, even if this
town had one. His mount, a two-year-old roan, was pretty well
done for.
The town gates, still decorated with flowers from some festival or
other, stood open and welcoming, but the silence beyond them was
all wrong. The gunslinger heard no clip-clop of horses, no rumble
of wagon-wheels, no merchants' huckstering cries from the
marketplace. The only sounds were the low hum of crickets (some
sort of bug, at any rate; they were a bit more tuneful than crickets,
at that), a queer wooden knocking sound, and the faint, dreamy
tinkle of small bells.




Also, the flowers twined through the wrought-iron staves of the
ornamental gate were long dead.
Between his knees, Topsy gave two great, hollow sneezes -
K'chow! K'chow! - and staggered sideways. Roland dismounted,
partly out of respect for the horse, partly out of respect for himself
- he didn't want to break a leg under Topsy if Topsy chose this
moment to give up and canter into the clearing at the end of his
path.
The gunslinger stood in his dusty boots and faded jeans under the
beating sun, stroking the roan's matted neck, pausing every now
and then to yank his fingers through the tangles of Topsy's mane,
and stopping once to shoo off the tiny flies clustering at the corners
of Topsy's eyes. Let them lay their eggs and hatch their maggots
there after Topsy was dead, but not before.
Roland thus honoured his horse as best he could, listening to those
distant, dreamy bells and the strange wooden tocking sound as he
did. After a while he ceased his absent grooming and looked
thoughtfully at the open gate.
The cross above its centre was a bit unusual, but otherwise the gate
was a typical example of its type, a western commonplace which
was not useful but traditional - all the little towns he had come to
in the last tenmonth seemed to have one such where you came in
(grand) and one more such where you went out (not so grand).
None had been built to exclude visitors, certainly not this one. It
stood between two walls of pink adobe that ran into the scree for a
distance of about twenty feet on either side of the road and then
simply stopped. Close the gate, lock it with many locks, and all
that meant was a short walk around one bit of adobe wall or the
other.
Beyond the gate, Roland could see what looked in most respects
like a perfectly ordinary High Street - an inn, two saloons (one of
which was called The Bustling Pig; the sign over the other was too




faded to read), a mercantile, a smithy, a Gathering Hall. There was
also a small but rather lovely wooden building with a modest bell-
tower on top, a sturdy fieldstone foundation on bottom, and a gold-
painted cross on its double doors. The cross, like the one over the
gate, marked this as a worshipping place for those who held to the
Jesus-man. This wasn't a common religion in Mid-World, but far
from unknown; that same thing could have been said about most
forms of worship in those days, including the worship of Baal,
Asmodeus, and a hundred others. Faith, like everything else in the
world these days, had moved on. As far as Roland was concerned,
God o' the Cross was just another religion which taught that love
and murder were inextricably bound together - that in the end, God
always drank blood.
Meanwhile, there was the singing hum of insects which sounded
almost like crickets. The dreamlike tinkle of the bells. And that
queer wooden thumping, like a fist on a door. Or on a coffin top.
Something here's a long way from right, the gunslinger thought.
Ware, Roland; this place has a reddish odour.
He led Topsy through the gate with its adornments of dead flowers
and down the High Street. On the porch of the mercantile, where
the old men should have congregated to discuss crops, politics, and
the follies of the younger generation, there stood only a line of
empty rockers. Lying beneath one, as if dropped from a careless
(and long-departed) hand, was a charred corncob pipe. The
hitching-rack in front of The Bustling Pig stood empty; the
windows of the saloon itself were dark. One of the batwing doors
had been yanked off and stood propped against the side of the
building; the other hung ajar, its faded green slats splattered with
maroon stuff that might have been paint but probably wasn't.
The shopfront of the livery stable stood intact, like the face of a
ruined woman who has access to good cosmetics, but the double
barn behind it was a charred skeleton. That fire must have
happened on a rainy day, the gunslinger thought, or the whole




damned town would have gone up in flames; a jolly spin and raree
for anyone around to see it.
To his right now, halfway up to where the street opened into the
town square, was the church. There were grassy borders on both
sides, one separating the church from the town's Gathering Hall,
the other from the little house set aside for the preacher and his
family (if this was one of the Jesus-sects which allowed its
shamans to have wives and families, that was; some of them,
clearly administered by lunatics, demanded at least the appearance
of celibacy). There were flowers in these grassy strips, and while
they looked parched, most were still alive. So whatever had
happened here to empty the place out had not happened long ago.
A week, perhaps. Two at the outside, given the heat.
Topsy sneezed again - K'chow! - and lowered his head wearily.
The gunslinger saw the source of the tinkling. Above the cross on
the church doors, a cord had been strung in a long, shallow arc.
Hung from it were perhaps two dozen tiny silver bells. There was
hardly any breeze today, but enough so these small bells were
never quite still ... and if a real wind should rise, Roland thought,
the sound made by the tintinnabulation of the bells would probably
be a good deal less pleasant; more like the strident parley of
gossips' tongues.
'Hello!' Roland called, looking across the street at what a large
falsefronted sign proclaimed to be the Good Beds Hotel. 'Hello, the
town!'
No answer but the bells, the tunesome insects, and that odd
wooden clunking. No answer, no movement ... but there were folk
here. Folk or something. He was being watched. The tiny hairs on
the nape of his neck had stiffened.
Roland stepped onward, leading Topsy towards the centre of town,
puffing up the unlaid High Street dust with each step. Forty paces
further along, he stopped in front of a low building marked with a
single curt word: LAW. The Sheriffs office (if they had such this
far from the Inners) looked remarkably similar to the church -
wooden boards stained a rather forbidding shade of dark brown
above a stone foundation.
The bells behind him rustled and whispered.
He left the roan standing in the middle of the street and mounted
the steps to the LAW office. He was very aware of the bells, the
sun beating against his neck, and of the sweat trickling down his
sides. The door was shut but unlocked. He opened it, then winced
back, half-raising a hand as the heat trapped inside rushed out in a
soundless gasp. If all the closed buildings were this hot inside, he
mused, the livery barns would soon not be the only burned-out
hulks. And with no rain to stop the flames (and certainly no
volunteer fire department, not any more), the town would not be
long for the face of the earth.
He stepped inside, trying to sip at the stifling air rather than taking
deep breaths. He immediately heard the low drone of flies.
There was a single cell, commodious and empty, its barred door
standing open. Filthy skin-shoes, one of the pair coming unsewn,
lay beneath a bunk sodden with the same dried maroon stuff which
had marked The Bustling Pig. Here was where the flies were,
crawling over the stain, feeding from it.
On the desk was a ledger. Roland turned it towards him and read
what was embossed upon its red cover:
             REGISTRY OF MISDEEDS & REDRESS
                  IN THE YEARS OF OUR LORD
                                ELURIA
So now he knew the name of the town, at least - Eluria. Pretty, yet
somehow ominous, as well. But any name would have seemed




ominous, Roland supposed, given these circumstances. He turned
to leave, and saw a closed door secured by a wooden bolt.
He went to it, stood before it for a moment, then drew one of the
big revolvers he carried low on his hips. He stood a moment
longer, head down, thinking (Cuthbert, his old friend, liked to say
that the wheels inside Roland's head ground slow but exceedingly
fine), and then retracted the bolt. He opened the door and
immediately stood back, levelling his gun, expecting a body
(Eluria's Sheriff, mayhap) to come tumbling into the room with his
throat cut and his eyes gouged out, victim of a MISDEED in need
of REDRESS
Nothing.
Well, half a dozen stained jumpers which longer-term prisoners
probably required to wear, two bows, a quiver of arrows, an old,
dusty motor, a rifle that had probably last been fired a hundred
years agog and a mop ... but in the gunslinger's mind, all that came
down to nothing. Just a storage closet.
He went back to the desk, opened the register, and leafed through
it. Even the pages were warm, as if the book had been baked. In a
way, he supposed it had been. If the High Street layout had been
different, he might have expected a large number of religious
offences to be recorded, but he wasn't surprised to find none here -
if the Jesus-man church had coexisted with a couple of saloons, the
churchfolk must have been fairly reasonable.
What Roland found were the usual petty offences, and a few not so
petty - a murder, a horse-thieving, the Distressal of a Lady (which
probably meant rape). The murderer had been removed to a place
called Lexingworth to be hanged. Roland had never heard of it.
One note towards the end read Green folk sent hence. It meant
nothing to Roland. The most recent entry was this: 12/Fe/99. Chas.
Freeborn, cattle-theef to be tryed.




Roland wasn't familiar with the notation 12/Fe/99, but as this was
a long stretch from February, he supposed Fe might stand for Full
Earth. In any case, the ink looked about as fresh as the blood on the
bunk in the cell, and the gunslinger had a good idea that Chas.
Freeborn, cattle-theef, had reached the clearing at the end of his
path.
He went out into the heat and the lacy sound of bells. Topsy looked
at Roland dully, then lowered his head again, as if there were
something in the dust of the High Street which could be cropped.
As if he would ever want to crop again, for that matter.
The gunslinger gathered up the reins, slapped the dust off them
against the faded no-colour of his jeans, and continued on up the
street. The wooden knocking sound grew steadily louder as he
walked (he had not holstered his gun when leaving LAW, nor
cared to holster it now), and as he neared the town square, which
must have housed the Eluria market in more normal times, Roland
at last saw movement.
On the far side of the square was a long watering trough, made of
iron-wood from the look (what some called 'seequoiah' out here),
apparently fed in happier times from a rusty steel pipe which now
jutted waterless above the trough's south end. Lolling over one side
of this municipal oasis, about halfway down its length, was a leg
clad in faded grey pants and terminating in a well-chewed cowboy
boot.
The chewer was a large dog, perhaps two shades greyer than the
corduroy pants. Under other circumstances, Roland supposed the
mutt would have had the boot off long since, but perhaps the foot
and lower calf inside it had swelled. In any case, the dog was well
on its way to simply chewing the obstacle away. It would seize the
boot and shake it back and forth. Every now and then the boot's
heel would collide with the wooden side of the trough, producing
another hollow knock. The gunslinger hadn't been so wrong to
think of coffin tops after all, it seemed.




Why doesn't it just back off a few steps, jump into the trough, and
have at him? Roland wondered. No water coming out of the pipe,
so it can't be afraid of drowning.
Topsy uttered another of his hollow, tired sneezes, and when the
dog lurched around in response, Roland understood why it was
doing things the hard way. One of its front legs had been badly
broken and crookedly mended. Walking would be a chore for it,
jumping out of the question. On its chest was a patch of dirty white
fur. Growing out of this patch was black fur in a roughly cruciform
shape. A Jesus-dog, mayhap, hoping for a spot of afternoon
communion.
There was nothing very religious about the snarl which began to
wind out of its chest, however, or the roll of its rheumy eyes. It
lifted its upper lip in a trembling sneer, revealing a goodish set of
teeth.
'Light out,' Roland said. 'While you can.'
The dog backed up until its hindquarters were pressed against the
chewed boot. It regarded the oncoming man fearfully, but clearly
meant to stand its ground. The revolver in Roland's hand held no
significance for it. The gunslinger wasn't surprised - he guessed the
dog had never seen one, had no idea it was anything other than a
club of some kind, which could only be thrown once.
'Hie on with you, now,' Roland said, but still the dog wouldn't
move.
He should have shot it - it was no good to itself, and a dog that had
acquired a taste for human flesh could be no good to anyone else -
but he somehow didn't like to. Killing the only thing still living in
this town (other than the singing bugs, that was) seemed like an
invitation to bad luck.
He fired into the dust near the dog's good forepaw, the sound
crashing into the hot day and temporarily silencing the insects. The




dog could run, it seemed, although at a lurching trot that hurt
Roland's eyes ... and his heart, a little, too. It stopped at the far side
of the square, by an overturned flatbed wagon (there looked to be
more dried blood splashed on the freighter's side), and glanced
back. It uttered a forlorn howl that raised the hairs on the nape of
Roland's neck even further.
Then it turned, skirted the wrecked wagon, and limped down a lane
which opened between two of the stalls. This way towards Eluria's
back gate, Roland guessed.
Still leading his dying horse, the gunslinger crossed the square to
the ironwood trough and looked in.
The owner of the chewed boot wasn't a man but a boy who had just
been beginning to get his man's growth - and that would have been
quite a large growth indeed, Roland judged, even setting aside the
bloating effects which had resulted from being immersed for some
unknown length of time in nine inches of water simmering under a
summer sun.
The boy's eyes, now just milky balls, stared blindly up at the
gunslinger like the eyes of a statue. His hair appeared to be the
white of old age, although that was the effect of the water; he had
likely been a towhead. His clothes were those of a cowboy,
although he couldn't have been much more than fourteen or
sixteen. Around his neck, gleaming blearily in water that was
slowly turning into a skin stew under the summer sun, was a gold
medallion.
Roland reached into the water, not liking to but feeling a certain
obligation. He wrapped his fingers around the medallion and
pulled. The chain parted, and he lifted the thing, dripping, into the
air.




He rather expected a Jesus-man sigil - what was called the crucifix
or the rood -but a small rectangle hung from the chain, instead. The
object looked like pure gold. Engraved into it was this legend:
James
Loved of Family, Loved of GOD
Roland, who had been almost too revolted to reach into the
polluted water (as a younger man, he could never have brought
himself to that), was now glad he'd done it. He might never run
into any of those who had loved this boy, but he knew enough of
ka to think it might be so. In any case, it was the right thing. So
was giving the kid a decent burial ... assuming, that was, he could
get the body out of the trough without having it break apart inside
the clothes.
Roland was considering this, trying to balance what might be his
duty in this circumstance against his growing desire to get out of
this town, when Topsy finally fell dead.
The roan went over with a creak of gear and a last whuffling groan
as it hit the ground. Roland turned and saw eight people in the
street, walking towards him in a line, like beaters who hope to
flush out birds or drive small game. Their skin was waxy green.
Folk wearing such skin would likely glow in the dark like ghosts.
It was hard to tell their sex, and what could it matter - to them or
anyone else? They were slow mutants, walking with the hunched
deliberation of corpses reanimated by some arcane magic.
The dust had muffled their feet like carpet. With the dog banished,
they might well have gotten within attacking distance if Topsy
hadn't done Roland the favour of dying at such an opportune
moment. No guns that Roland could see; they were armed with
clubs. These were chair-legs and table-legs, for the most part, but
Roland saw one that looked made rather than seized - it had a




bristle of rusty nails sticking out of it, and he suspected it had once
- been the property of a saloon bouncer, possibly
the one who kept school in The Bustling Pig.
Roland raised his pistol, aiming at the fellow in the centre of the
line. Now he could hear the shuffle of their feet, and the wet
snuffle of their breathing. As if they all had bad chest-colds.
Came out of the mines, most likely, Roland thought. There are
radium mines somewhere about. That would account for the skin. I
wonder that the sun doesn't kill them.
Then, as he watched, the one on the end - a creature with a face
like melted candle-wax - did die ... or collapsed, at any rate. He
(Roland was quite sure it was a male) went to his knees with a low,
gobbling cry, groping for the hand of the thing walking next to him
- something with a lumpy bald head and red sores sizzling on its
neck. This creature took no notice of its fallen companion, but kept
its dim eyes on Roland, lurching along in rough step with its
remaining companions.
'Stop where you are!' Roland said. "Ware me, if you'd live to see
day's end! 'Ware me very well!'
He spoke mostly to the one in the centre, who wore ancient red
suspenders over rags of shirt, and a filthy bowler hat. This gent had
only one good eye, and it peered at the gunslinger with a greed as
horrible as it was unmistakable. The one beside Bowler Hat
(Roland believed this one might be a woman, with the dangling
vestiges of breasts beneath the vest it wore) threw the chair-leg it
held. The arc was true, but the missile fell ten yards short.
Roland thumbed back the trigger of his revolver and fired again.
This time the dirt displaced by the slug kicked up on the tattered
remains of Bowler Hat's shoe instead of on a lame dog's paw.




The green folk didn't run as the dog had, but they stopped, staring
at him with their dull greed. Had the missing folk of Eluria
finished up in these creatures' stomachs? Roland couldn't believe it
. . . although he knew perfectly well that such as these held no
scruple against cannibalism. (And perhaps it wasn't cannibalism,
not really; how could such things as these be considered human,
whatever they might once have been?) They were too slow, too
stupid. If they had dared come back into town after the Sheriff had
run them out, they would have been burned or stoned to death.
Without thinking about what he was doing, wanting only to free
his other hand to draw his second gun if the apparitions didn't see
reason, Roland stuffed the medallion which he had taken from the
dead boy into the pocket of his jeans, pushing the broken fine-link
chain in after.
They stood staring at him, their strangely twisted shadows drawn
out behind them. What next? Tell them to go back where they'd
come from? Roland didn't know if they'd do it, and in any case had
decided he liked them best where he could see them. And at least
there was no question now about staying to bury the boy named
James; that conundrum had been solved.
'Stand steady,' he said in the low speech, beginning to retreat. 'First
fellow that moves -'
Before he could finish, one of them - a thick-chested troll with a
pouty toad's mouth and what looked like gills on the sides of his
wattled neck - lunged forward, gibbering in a high-pitched and
peculiarly flabby voice.
It might have been a species of laughter. He was waving what
looked like a piano-leg.
Roland fired. Mr Toad's chest caved in like a bad piece of roofing.
He ran backwards several steps, trying to catch his balance and
clawing at his chest with the hand not holding the piano-leg. His




feet, clad in dirty red velvet slippers with curled-up toes, tangled in
each other and he fell over, making a queer and somehow lonely
gargling sound. He let go of his club, rolled over on one side, tried
to rise, and then fell back into the dust. The brutal sun glared into
his open eyes, and as Roland watched, white tendrils of steam
began to rise from his skin, which was rapidly losing its green
undertint. There was also a hissing sound, like a gob of spit on top
of a hot stove.
Saves explaining, at least, Roland thought, and swept his eyes over
the others. 'All right; he was the first one to move. Who wants to
be the second?'
None did, it seemed. They only stood there, watching him, not
coming at him ... but not retreating, either. He thought (as he had
about the crucifix-dog) that he should kill them as they stood there,
just draw his other gun and mow them down. It would be the work
of seconds only, and child's play to his gifted hands, even if some
ran. But he couldn't.
Not just cold, like that. He wasn't that kind of killer ... at least, not
yet.
Very slowly, he began to step backwards, first bending his course
around the watering trough, then putting it between him and them.
When Bowler Hat took a step forward, Roland didn't give the
others in the line a chance to copy him; he put a bullet into the dust
of High Street an inch in advance of Bowler Hat's foot.
'That's your last warning,' he said, still using the low speech. He
had no idea if they understood it, didn't really care. He guessed
they caught this tune's music well enough. 'Next bullet I fire eats
up someone's heart. The way it works is, you stay and I go. You
get this one chance. Follow me, and you all die. It's too hot to play
games and I've lost my -'




'Booh!' cried a rough, liquidy voice from behind him. There was
unmistakable glee in it. Roland saw a shadow grow from the
shadow of the overturned freight wagon, which he had now almost
reached, and had just time to understand that another of the green
folk had been hiding beneath it.
As he began to turn, a club crashed down on Roland's shoulder,
numbing his right arm all the way to the wrist. He held on to the
gun and fired once, but the bullet went into one of the wagon-
wheels, smashing a wooden spoke and turning the wheel on its hub
with a high screeching sound. Behind him, he heard the green folk
in the street uttering hoarse, yapping cries as they charged forward.
The thing which had been hiding beneath the overturned wagon
was a monster with two heads growing out of his neck, one with
the vestigial, slack face of a corpse. The other, although just as
green, was more lively. Broad lips spread in a cheerful grin as he
raised his club to strike again.
Roland drew with his left hand - the one that wasn't numbed and
distant. He had time to put one bullet through the bushwhacker's
grin, flinging him backwards in a spray of blood and teeth, the
bludgeon flying out of his relaxing fingers. Then the others were
on him, clubbing and drubbing.
The gunslinger was able to slip the first couple of blows, and there
was one moment when he thought he might be able to spin around
to the rear of the overturned wagon, spin and turn and go to work
with his guns. Surely he would be able to do that. Surely his quest
for the Dark Tower wasn't supposed to end on the sun-blasted
street of a little far-western town called Eluria, at the hands of half
a dozen green-skinned slow mutants. Surely ka could not be so
cruel.
But Bowler Hat caught him with a vicious sidehand blow, and
Roland crashed into the wagon's slowly spinning rear wheel
instead of skirting around it. As he went to his hands and knees,




still scrambling and trying to turn, trying to evade the blows which
rained down on him, he saw there were now many more than half a
dozen. Coming up the street towards the town square were at least
thirty green men and women. This wasn't a clan but a damned tribe
of them. And in broad, hot daylight! Slow mutants were, in his
experience, creatures that loved the dark, almost like toadstools
with brains, and he had never seen any such as these before. They -
The one in the red vest was female. Her bare breasts swinging
beneath the dirty red vest were the last things he saw clearly as
they gathered around and above him, bashing away with their
clubs. The one with the nails studded in it came down on his lower
right calf, sinking its stupid rusty fangs in deep. He tried again to
raise one of the big guns (his vision was fading, now, but that
wouldn't help them if he got to shooting; he had always been the
most hellishly talented of them; Jamie DeCurry had once
proclaimed that Roland could shoot blindfolded, because he had
eyes in his fingers), and it was kicked out of his hand and into the
dust. Although he could still feel the smooth sandalwood grip of
the other, he thought it was nevertheless already gone.
He could smell them - the rich, rotted smell of decaying meat. Or
was that only his hands, as he raised them in a feeble and useless
effort to protect his head? His hands, which had been in the
polluted water where flecks and strips of the dead boy's skin
floated?
The clubs slamming down on him, slamming down all over him, as
if the green folk wanted not just to beat him to death but to
tenderize him as they did so. And as he went down into the
darkness of what he most certainly believed would be his death, he
heard the bugs singing, the dog he had spared barking, and the
bells hung on the church door ringing. These sounds merged
together into strangely sweet music. Then that was gone, too; the
darkness ate it all.




II. Rising. Hanging Suspended. White Beauty.
Two Others. The Medallion.
The gunslinger's return to the world wasn't like coming back to
consciousness after a blow, which he'd done several times before,
and it wasn't like waking from sleep, either. It was like rising.
I'm dead, he thought at some point during this process ... when the
power to think had been at least partially restored to him. Dead
and rising into whatever afterlife there is. That's what it must be.
The singing I hear is the singing of dead souls.
Total blackness gave way to the dark grey of rainclouds, then to
the lighter grey of fog. This brightened to the uniform clarity of a
heavy mist moments before the sun breaks through. And through it
all was that sense of rising, as if he had been caught in some mild
but powerful updraught.
As the sense of rising began to diminish and the brightness behind
his eyelids grew, Roland at last began to believe he was still alive.
It was the singing that convinced him. Not dead souls, not the
heavenly host of angels sometimes described by the Jesus-man
preachers, but only those bugs. A little like crickets, but sweeter-
voiced. The ones he had heard in Eluria.
On this thought, he opened his eyes.
His belief that he was still alive was severely tried, for Roland
found himself hanging suspended in a world of white beauty - his
first bewildered thought was that he was in the sky, floating within
a fair-weather cloud. All around him was the reedy singing of the
bugs. Now he could hear the tinkling of bells, too.
He tried to turn his head and swayed in some sort of harness. He
could hear it creaking. The soft singing of the bugs, like crickets in
the grass at the end of day back home in Gilead, hesitated and
broke rhythm. When it did, what felt like a tree of pain grew up




Roland's back. He had no idea what its burning branches might be,
but the trunk was surely his spine. A far deadlier pain sank into one
of his lower legs ~ in his confusion, the gunslinger could not tell
which one. That's where the club with the nails in it got me, he
thought. And more pain in his head. His skull felt like a badly
cracked egg. He cried out, and could hardly believe that the harsh
crow's caw he heard came from his own throat. He thought he
could also hear, very faintly, the barking of the cross-dog, but
surely that was his imagination.
Am I dying? Have I awakened once more at the very end?
A hand stroked his brow. He could feel it but not see it - fingers
trailing across his skin ' pausing here and there to massage a knot
or a line. Delicious, like a drink of cool water on a hot day. He
began to close his eyes, and then a horrible idea came to him:
suppose that hand were green, its owner wearing a tattered red vest
over her hanging dugs?
What if it is? What could you do?
'Hush, man,' a young woman's voice said ... or perhaps it was the
voice of a girl. Certainly the first person Roland thought of was
Susan, the girl from Mejis, she who had spoken to him as thee.
'Where ... where . . .'
'Hush, stir not. 'Tis far too soon.'
The pain in his back was subsiding now, but the image of the pain
as a tree remained, for his very skin seemed to be moving like
leaves in a light breeze. How could that be?
He let the question go - let all questions go - and concentrated on
the small, cool hand stroking his brow.
'Hush, pretty man, God's love be upon ye. Yet it's sore hurt ye are.
Be still. Heal.'




The dog had hushed its barking (if it had ever been there in the first
place), and Roland became aware of that low, creaking sound
again. It reminded him of horse-tethers, or something - hangropes -
he didn't like to think of. Now he believed he could feel pressure
beneath his thighs, his buttocks, and perhaps . . . yes ... his
shoulders.
I'm not in a bed at all. I think I'm above a bed. Can that be?
He supposed he could be in a sling. He seemed to remember once,
as a boy, that some fellow had been suspended that way in the
horse-doctor's room behind the Great Hall. A stablehand who had
been burned too badly by kerosene to be laid in a bed. The man
had died, but not soon enough; for two nights, his shrieks had filled
the sweet summer air of the Gathering Fields.
Am I burned, then, nothing but a cinder with legs, hanging in a
sling?
The fingers touched the centre of his brow, rubbing away the
frown forming there. And it was as if the voice which went with
the hand had read his thoughts, picking them up with the tips of her
clever, soothing fingers.
'Ye'll be fine if God wills, sai,' the voice which went with the hand
said. 'But time belongs to God, not to you.'
No, he would have said, if he had been able. Time belongs to the
Tower.
Then he slipped down again, descending as smoothly as he had
risen, going away from the hand and the dreamlike sounds of the
singing insects and chiming bells. There was an interval that might
have been sleep, or perhaps unconsciousness, but he never went all
the way back down.
At one point he thought he heard the girl's voice, although he
couldn't be sure, because this time it was raised in fury, or fear, or




both. 'No!' she cried. 'Ye can't have it off him and ye know it! Go
your course and stop talking of it, do!'
When he rose back to consciousness the second time, he was no
stronger in body, but a little more himself in mind. What he saw
when he opened his eyes wasn't the inside of a cloud, but at first
that same phrase - white beauty - recurred to him. It was in some
ways the most beautiful place Roland had ever been in his life ...
partially because he still had a life, of course, but mostly because it
was so fey and peaceful.
It was a huge room, high and long. When Roland at last turned his
head - cautiously, so cautiously - to take its measure as well as he
could, he thought it must run at least two hundred yards from end
to end. It was built narrow, but its height gave the place a feeling
of tremendous airiness.
There were no walls or ceilings such as those he was familiar with,
although it was a little like being in a vast tent. Above him, the sun
struck and diffused its light across billowy panels of thin white
silk, turning them into the bright swags which he had first mistaken
for clouds. Beneath this silk canopy, the room was as grey as
twilight. The walls, also silk, rippled like sails in a faint breeze.
Hanging from each wall-panel was a curved rope bearing small
bells. These lay against the fabric and rang in low and charming
unison, like wind-chimes, when the walls rippled.
An aisle ran down the centre of the long room; on either side of it
were scores of beds, each made up with clean white sheets and
headed with crisp white pillows. There were perhaps forty on the
far side of the aisle, all empty, and another forty on Roland's side.
There were two other occupied beds here, one next to Roland on
his left. This fellow
It's the boy. The one who was in the trough.




The idea ran goosebumps up Roland's arms and gave him a nasty,
superstitious start. He peered more closely at the sleeping boy.
Can't be. You're just dazed, that's all; it can't be.
Yet closer scrutiny refused to dispel the idea. It certainly seemed to
be the boy from the trough, probably ill (why else would he be in a
place like this?) but far from dead; Roland could see the slow rise
and fall of his chest, and the occasional twitch of the fingers which
dangled over the side of the bed.
You didn't get a good enough look at him to be sure of anything,
and after a few days in that trough, his own mother couldn't have
said for sure who it was.
But Roland, who'd had a mother, knew better than that. He also
knew that he'd seen the gold medallion around the boy's neck. just
before the attack of the green folk, he had taken it from this lad's
corpse and put it in his pocket. Now someone - the proprietors of
this place, most likely, they who had sorcerously restored the lad
named James to his interrupted life - had taken it back from Roland
and put it around the boy's neck again.
Had the girl with the wonderfully cool hand done that? Did she in
consequence think Roland a ghoul who would steal from the dead?
He didn't like to think so. In fact, the notion made him more
uncomfortable than the idea that the young cowboy's bloated body
had been somehow returned to its normal size and then reanimated.
Further down the aisle on this side, perhaps a dozen empty beds
away from the boy and Roland Deschain, the gunslinger saw a
third inmate of this queer infirmary. This fellow looked at least
four times the age of the lad, twice the age of the gunslinger. He
had a long beard, more grey than black, that hung to his upper
chest in two straggly forks. The face above it was sun-darkened,
heavily lined, and pouched beneath the eyes. Running from his left
cheek and across the bridge of his nose was a thick dark mark




which Roland took to be a scar. The bearded man was either asleep
or unconscious - Roland could hear him snoring - and was
suspended three feet above his bed, held up by a complex series of
white belts that glimmered in the dim air. These crisscrossed each
other, making a series of figure eights all the way around the man's
body. He looked like a bug in some exotic spider's web. He wore a
gauzy white bed-dress. One of the belts ran beneath his buttocks,
elevating his crotch in a way that seemed to offer the bulge of his
privates to the grey and dreaming air. Further down his body,
Roland could see the dark shadow-shapes of his legs. They
appeared to be twisted like ancient dead trees. Roland didn't like to
think in how many places they must have been broken to look like
that. And yet they appeared to be moving. How could they be, if
the bearded man was unconscious? It was a trick of the light,
perhaps, or of the shadows ... perhaps the gauzy singlet the man
was wearing was stirring in a light breeze, or ...
Roland looked away, up at the billowy silk panels high above,
trying to control the accelerating beat of his heart. What he saw
hadn't been caused by the wind, or a shadow, or anything else. The
man's legs were somehow moving without moving ... as Roland
had seemed to feel his own back moving without moving. He
didn't know what could cause such a phenomenon, and didn't want
to know, at least not yet.
'I'm not ready,' he whispered. His lips felt very dry. He closed his
eyes again, wanting to sleep, wanting not to think about what the
bearded man's twisted legs might indicate about his own condition.
But
But you'd better get ready.
That was the voice that always seemed to come when he tried to
slack off, to scamp a job, or take the easy way around an obstacle.
It was the voice of Cort, his old teacher. The man whose stick they
had all feared, as boys. They hadn't feared his stick as much as his




mouth, however. His jeers when they were weak, his contempt
when they complained or tried whining about their lot.
Are you a gunslinger, Roland? If you are, you better get ready.
Roland opened his eyes again and turned his head to the left again.
As he did, he felt something shift against his chest.
Moving very slowly, he raised his right hand out of the sling that
held it. The pain in his back stirred and muttered. He stopped
moving until he decided the pain was going to get no worse (if he
was careful, at least), then lifted the hand the rest of the way to his
chest. It encountered finely-woven cloth. Cotton. He lowered his
chin to his breastbone and saw he was wearing a bed-dress like the
one draped on the body of the bearded man.
Roland reached beneath the neck of the gown and felt a fine chain.
A little further down, his fingers encountered a rectangular metal
shape. He thought he knew what it was, but had to be sure. He
pulled it out, still moving with great care, trying not to engage any
of the muscles in his back. A gold medallion. He dared the pain,
lifting it until he could read what was engraved upon it:
James
Loved of family, Loved of GOD
He tucked it into the top of the bed-dress again and looked back at
the sleeping boy in the next bed - in it, not suspended over it. The
sheet was only pulled up to the boy's ribcage, and the medallion
lay on the pristine white breast of his bed-dress. The same
medallion Roland now wore. Except ...
Roland thought he understood, and understanding was a relief.
He looked back at the bearded man, and saw an exceedingly
strange thing: the thick black line of scar across the bearded man's
cheek and nose was gone. Where it had been was the pinkish-red
mark of a healing wound ... a cut, or perhaps a slash.




I imagined it.
No, gunslinger, Cort's voice returned. Such as you was not made to
imagine. As you well know.
The little bit of movement had tired him out again ... or perhaps it
was the thinking which had really tired him out. The singing bugs
and chiming bells combined and made something too much like a
lullaby to resist. This time when Roland closed his eyes, he slept.


III. Five Sisters. Jenna. The Doctors of Eluria.
The Medallion. A Promise of Silence.
When Roland awoke again, he was at first sure that he was still
sleeping. Dreaming. Having a nightmare.
Once, at the time he had met and fallen in love with Susan
Delgado, he had known a witch named Rhea - the first real witch
of Mid-World he had ever met. It was she who had caused Susan's
death, although Roland had played his own part. Now, opening his
eyes and seeing Rhea not just once but five times over, he thought:
This is what comes of remembering those old times. By conjuring
Susan, I've conjured Rhea of the Coos, as well. Rhea and her
sisters.
The five were dressed in billowing habits as white as the walls and
the panels of the ceiling. Their antique crones' faces were framed
in wimples just as white, their skin as grey and runnelled as
droughted earth by comparison. Hanging like phylacteries from the
bands of silk imprisoning their hair (if they indeed had hair) were
lines of tiny bells which chimed as they moved or spoke. Upon the
snowy breasts of their habits was embroidered a blood-red rose ...
the sigil of the Dark Tower. Seeing this, Roland thought: I am not
dreaming. These harridans are real.




'He wakes!' one of them cried in a gruesomely coquettish voice.
'Oooo!'
'Ooooh!'
'Ah!'
They fluttered like birds. The one in the centre stepped forward,
and as she did, their faces seemed to shimmer like the silk walls of
the ward. They weren't old after all, he saw - middle-aged, perhaps,
but not old.
Yes. They are old. They changed.
The one who now took charge was taller than the others, and with
a broad, slightly bulging brow. She bent towards Roland, and the
bells which fringed her forehead tinkled. The sound made him feel
sick, somehow, and weaker than he had felt a moment before. Her
hazel eyes were intent. Greedy, mayhap. She touched his cheek for
a moment, and a numbness seemed to spread there. Then she
glanced down, and a look which could have been disquiet cramped
her face. She took her hand back.
'Ye wake, pretty man. So ye do. 'Tis well.'
'Who are you? Where am l?'
'We are the Little Sisters of Eluria,' she said. 'I am Sister Mary.
Here is Sister Louise, and Sister Michela, and Sister Coquina -'
'And Sister Tamra,' said the last. 'A lovely lass of one-and-twenty.'
She giggled. Her face shimmered, and for a moment she was again
as old as the world. Hooked of nose, grey of skin. Roland thought
once more of Rhea.
They moved closer, encircling the complication of harness in
which he lay suspended, and when Roland shrank away, the pain
roared up his back and injured leg again. He groaned. The straps
holding him creaked.




'Ooooo!'
'It hurts!'
'Hurts him!'
'Hurts so fierce!'
They pressed even closer, as if his pain fascinated them. And now
he could smell them, a dry and earthy smell. The one named Sister
Michela reached out
'Go away! Leave him! Have I not told ye before?'
They jumped back from this voice, startled. Sister Mary looked
particularly annoyed. But she stepped back, with one final glare
(Roland would have sworn it) at the medallion lying on his chest.
He had tucked it back under the bed-dress at his last waking, but it
was out again now.
A sixth sister appeared, pushing rudely in between Mary and
Tamra. This one perhaps was only one-and-twenty, with flushed
cheeks, smooth skin, and dark eyes. Her white habit billowed like a
dream. The red rose over her breast stood out like a curse.
'Go! Leave him!'
'Oooo, my dear!' cried Sister Louise in a voice both laughing and
angry. 'Here's Jenna, the baby, and has she fallen in love with
him?'
'She has!' laughed Tamra. 'Baby's heart is his for the purchase,'
'Oh, so it is!' agreed Sister Coquina.
Mary turned to the newcomer, lips pursed into a tight line. 'Ye
have no business here, saucy girl.'
'I do if I say I do,' Sister Jenna replied. She seemed more in charge
of herself now. A curl of black hair had escaped her wimple and




lay across her forehead in a comma. 'Now go. He's not up to your
jokes and laughter.'
'Order us not,' Sister Mary said, 'for we never joke. So you know,
Sister Jenna.'
The girl's face softened a little, and Roland saw she was afraid. It
made him afraid for her. For himself, as well. 'Go,' she repeated.
`'Tis not the time. Are there not others to tend?'
Sister Mary seemed to consider. The others watched her. At last
she nodded, and smiled down at Roland. Again her face seemed to
shimmer, like something seen through a heat-haze. What he saw
(or thought he saw) beneath was horrible and watchful. 'Bide well,
pretty man,' she said to Roland. 'Bide with us a bit, and we'll heal
ye.'
What choice have I? Roland thought.
The others laughed, birdlike titters which rose into the dimness like
ribbons. Sister Michela actually blew him a kiss.
'Come, ladies!' Sister Mary cried. 'We'll leave Jenna with him a bit
in memory of her mother, who we loved well!' And with that, she
led the others away, five white birds flying off down the centre
aisle, their skirts nodding this way and that.
'Thank you,' Roland said, looking up at the owner of the cool
hand.. . for he knew it was she who had soothed him.
She took up his fingers as if to prove this, and caressed them. 'They
mean ye no harm,' she said ... yet Roland saw she believed not a
word of it, nor did he. He was in trouble here, very bad trouble.
'What is this place?'
'Our place,' she said simply. 'The home of the Little Sisters of
Eluria. Our convent, if 'ee like.'




'This is no convent,' Roland said, looking past her at the empty
beds. It's an infirmary. Isn't it?'
'A hospital,' she said, still stroking his fingers. 'We serve the
doctors ... and they serve us.' He was fascinated by the black curl
lying on the cream of her brow - would have stroked it, if he had
dared reach up. Just to tell its texture. He found it beautiful because
it was the only dark thing in all this white. The white had lost its
charm for him. 'We are hospitallers ... or were, before the world
moved on.'
'Are you for the Jesus-man?'
She looked surprised for a moment, almost shocked, and then
laughed merrily. 'No, not us!'
'If you are hospitallers ... nurses ... where are the doctors?'
She looked at him, biting at her lip, as if trying to decide
something. Roland found her doubt utterly charming, and he
realized that, sick or not, he was looking at a woman as a woman
for the first time since Susan Delgado had died, and that had been
long ago. The whole world had changed since then, and not for the
better.
'Would you really know?'
'Yes, of course,' he said, a little surprised. A little disquieted, too.
He kept waiting for her face to shimmer and change, as the faces of
the others had done. It didn't. There was none of that unpleasant
dead-earth smell about her, either.
Wait, he cautioned himself. Believe nothing here, least of all your
senses. Not yet.
'I suppose you must,' she said with a sigh. It tinkled the bells at her
forehead, which were darker in colour than those the others wore -
not black like her hair but charry, somehow, as if they had been
hung in the smoke of a campfire. Their sound, however, was




brightest silver. 'Promise me you'll not scream and wake the pube
in yonder bed.'
'Pube?'
'The boy. Do ye promise?'
'Aye,' he said, falling into the half-forgotten patois of the Outer Arc
without even being aware of it. Susan's dialect. 'It's been long since
I screamed, pretty.'
She coloured more definitely at that, roses more natural and lively
than the one on her breast mounting in her cheeks.
'Don't call pretty what ye can't properly see,' she said.
'Then push back the wimple you wear.'
Her face he could see perfectly well, but he badly wanted to see
her hair - hungered for it, almost. A full flood of black in all this
dreaming white. Of course it might be cropped, those of her order
might wear it that way, but he somehow didn't think so.
'No, 'tis not allowed.'
'By who?'
'Big Sister.'
'She who calls herself Mary?'
'Aye, her.' She started away, then paused and looked back over her
shoulder. In another girl her age, one as pretty as this, that look
back would have been flirtatious. This girl's was only grave.
'Remember your promise.'
'Aye, no screams.'
She went to the bearded man, skirt swinging. In the dimness, she
cast only a blur of shadow on the empty beds she passed. When
she reached the man (this one was unconscious, Roland thought,




not just sleeping), she looked back at Roland once more. He
nodded.
Sister Jenna stepped close to the suspended man on the far side of
his bed, so that Roland saw her through the twists and loops of
woven white silk. She placed her hands lightly on the left side of
his chest, bent over him ... and shook her head from side to side,
like one expressing a brisk negative. The bells she wore on her
forehead rang sharply, and Roland once more felt that weird
stirring up his back, accompanied by a low ripple of pain. It was as
if he had shuddered without actually shuddering, or shuddered in a
dream.
What happened next almost did jerk a scream from him; he had to
bite his lips against it. Once more the unconscious man's legs
seemed to move without moving ... because it was what was on
them that moved. The man's hairy shins, ankles, and feet were
exposed below the hem of his bed-dress. Now a black wave of
bugs moved down them. They were singing fiercely, like an army
column that sings as it marches.
Roland remembered the black scar across the man's cheek and
nose - the scar which had disappeared. More such as these, of
course. And they were on him, as well. That was how he could
shiver without shivering. They were all over his back. Battening on
him.
No, keeping back a scream wasn't as easy as he had expected it to
be.
The bugs ran down to the tips of the suspended man's toes, then
leaped off them in waves, like creatures leaping off an
embankment and into a swimming hole. They organized
themselves quickly and easily on the bright white sheet below, and
began to march down to the floor in a battalion about a foot wide.
Roland couldn't get a good look at them, the distance was too far
and the light too dim, but he thought they were perhaps twice the
size of ants, and a little smaller than the fat honeybees which had
swarmed the flowerbeds back home.
They sang as they went.
The bearded man didn't sing. As the swarms of bugs which had
coated his twisted legs began to diminish, he shuddered and
groaned. The young woman put her hand on his brow and soothed
him, making Roland a little jealous even in his revulsion at what he
was seeing.
And was what he was seeing really so awful? In Gilead, leeches
had been used for certain ailments - swellings of the brain, the
armpits, and the groin, primarily. When it came to the brain, the
leeches, ugly as they were, were certainly preferable to the next
step, which was trepanning.
Yet there was something loathsome about them, perhaps only
because he couldn't see them well, and something awful about
trying to imagine them all over his back as he hung here, helpless.
Not singing, though. Why? Because they were feeding? Sleeping?
Both at once?
The bearded man's groans subsided. The bugs marched away
across the floor, towards one of the mildly rippling silken walls.
Roland lost sight of them in the shadows.
Jenna came back to him, her eyes anxious. 'Ye did well. Yet I see
how ye feel; it's on your face.'
'The doctors,' he said.
'Yes. Their power is very great, but. . .'She dropped her voice. 'I
believe that drover is beyond their help. His legs are a little better,
and the wounds on his face are all but healed, but he has injuries
where the doctors cannot reach.' She traced a hand across her
midsection, suggesting the location of these injuries, if not their
nature.




'And me?' Roland asked.
'Ye were ta'en by the green folk,' she said. 'Ye must have angered
them powerfully, for them not to kill ye outright. They roped ye
and dragged ye, instead. Tamra, Michela, and Louise were out
gathering herbs. They saw the green folk at play with ye, and bade
them stop, but -,
'Do the muties always obey you, Sister Jenna
She smiled, perhaps pleased he remembered her name. 'Not
always, but mostly. This time they did, or ye'd have now found the
clearing in the trees.'
'I suppose so.'
'The skin was stripped almost clean off your back - red ye were
from nape to waist. Ye'll always bear the scars, but the doctors
have gone far towards healing ye. And their singing is passing fair,
is it not?'
'Yes,' Roland said, but the thought of those black things all over his
back, roosting in his raw flesh, still revolted him. 'I owe you
thanks, and give it freely. Anything I can do for you -
'Tell me your name, then. Do that.'
'I'm Roland of Gilead. A gunslinger. I had revolvers, Sister Jenna.
Have you seen them?'
'I've seen no shooters,' she said, but cast her eyes aside. The roses
bloomed in her cheeks again. She might be a good nurse, and fair,
but Roland thought her a poor liar. He was glad. Good liars were
common. Honesty, on the other hand, came dear.
Let the untruth pass for now, he told himself. She speaks it out of
fear, I think.
'Jenna!' The cry came from the deeper shadows at the far end of the
infirmary - today it seemed longer than ever to the gunslinger - and




Sister Jenna jumped guiltily. 'Come away! Ye've passed words
enough to entertain twenty men! Let him sleep!'
'Aye!' she called, then turned back to Roland. 'Don't let on that I
showed you the doctors.'
'Mum is the word, Jenna.'
She paused, biting her lip again, then suddenly swept back her
wimple. It fell against the nape of her neck in a soft chiming of
bells. Freed from its confinement, her hair swept against her
cheeks like shadows.
'Am I pretty? Am I? Tell me the truth, Roland of Gilead - no
flattery. For flattery's kind only a candle's length.'
'Pretty as a summer night.'
What she saw in his face seemed to please her more than his
words, because she smiled radiantly. She pulled the wimple up
again, tucking her hair back in with quick little finger-pokes. 'Am I
decent?'
'Decent as fair,' he said, then cautiously lifted an arm and pointed
at her brow. 'One curl's out ... just there.'
'Aye, always that one to devil me.' With a comical little grimace,
she tucked it back. Roland thought how much he would like to kiss
her rosy cheeks ... and perhaps her rosy mouth, for good measure.
'All's well,' he said.
'Jenna!' The cry was more impatient than ever. 'Meditations!'
`I'm coming just now!' she called, and gathered her voluminous
skirts to go. Yet she turned back once more, her face now very
grave and very serious. 'One more thing,' she said in a voice only a
step above a whisper. She snatched a quick look around. 'The gold
medallion ye wear - ye wear it because it's yours. Do'ee understand
... James?'




'Yes.' He turned his head a bit to look at the sleeping boy. 'This is
my brother.'
`If they ask, yes. To say different would be to get Jenna in serious
trouble.'
How serious he did not ask, and she was gone in any case, seeming
to flow along the aisle between all the empty beds, her skirt caught
up in one hand. The roses had fled from her face, leaving her
cheeks and brow ashy. He remembered the greedy look on the
faces of the others, how they had gathered around him in a
tightening knot ... and the way their faces had shimmered.
Six women, five old and one young.
Doctors that sang and then crawled away across the floor when
dismissed by jingling bells.
And an improbable hospital ward of perhaps a hundred beds, a
ward with a silk roof and silk walls ...
... and all the beds empty save three.
Roland didn't understand why Jenna had taken the dead boy's
medallion from his pants pocket and put it around his neck, but he
had an idea that if they found out she had done so, the Little Sisters
of Eluria might kill her.
Roland closed his eyes, and the soft singing of the doctor-insects
once again floated him off into sleep.




IV. A Bowl of Soup. The Boy
in the Next Bed. The Night-Nurses.
Roland dreamed that a very large bug (a doctor-bug, mayhap) was
flying around his head and banging repeatedly into his nose -
collisions which were annoying rather than painful. He swiped at
the bug repeatedly, and although his hands were eerily fast under
ordinary circumstances, he kept missing it. And each time he
missed, the bug giggled.
I'm slow because I've been sick, he thought.
No, ambushed. Dragged across the ground by slow mutants, saved
by the Little Sisters of Eluria.
Roland had a sudden, vivid image of a man's shadow growing
from the shadow of an overturned freight-wagon; heard a rough,
gleeful voice cry, 'Booh!'
He jerked awake hard enough to set his body rocking in its
complication of slings, and the woman who had been standing
beside his head, giggling as she tapped his nose lightly with a
wooden spoon, stepped back so quickly that the bowl in her other
hand slipped from her fingers.
Roland's hands shot out, and they were as quick as ever - his
frustrated failure to catch the bug had been only part of his dream.
He caught the bowl before more than a few drops could spill. The
woman - Sister Coquina - looked at him with round eyes.
There was pain all up and down his back from the sudden
movement but it was nowhere near as sharp as it had been before,
and there was no sensation of movement on his skin. Perhaps the
'doctors' were only sleeping, but he had an idea they were gone.
He held out his hand for the spoon Coquina had been teasing him
with (he found he wasn't surprised at all that one of these would
tease a sick and sleeping man in such a way; it only would have




surprised him if it had been Jenna), and she handed it to him, her
eyes still big.
'How speedy ye are!' she said. `'Twas like a magic trick, and you
still rising from sleep!'
'Remember it, sai,' he said, and tried the soup. There were tiny bits
of chicken floating in it. He probably would have considered it
bland under other circumstances, but under these, it seemed
ambrosial. He began to eat greedily.
'What do 'ee mean by that?' she asked. The light was very dim
now, the wall-panels across the way a pinkish-orange that
suggested sunset. In this light, Coquina looked quite young and
pretty ... but it was a glamour, Roland was sure; a sorcerous kind
of make-up.
'I mean nothing in particular.' Roland dismissed the spoon as too
slow, preferring to tilt the bowl itself to his lips. In this way he
disposed of the soup in four large gulps. 'You have been kind to
me'
'Aye, so we have!' she said, rather indignantly.
'- and I hope your kindness has no hidden motive. If it does, Sister,
remember that I'm quick. And, as for myself, I have not always
been kind.'
She made no reply, only took the bowl when Roland handed it
back. She did this delicately, perhaps not wanting to touch his
fingers. Her eyes dropped to where the medallion lay, once more
hidden beneath the breast of his bed-dress. He said no more, not
wanting to weaken the implied threat by reminding her that the
man who made it was unarmed, next to naked, and hung in the air
because his back couldn't yet bear the weight of his body.
'Where's Sister Jenna?' he asked.




'Oooo!' Sister Coquina said, raising her eyebrows. 'We like her, do
we? She makes our heart go . . .' She put her hand against the rose
on her breast and fluttered it rapidly.
'Not at all, not at all,' Roland said, 'but she was kind. I doubt she
would have teased me with a spoon, as some would.'
Sister Coquina's smile faded. She looked both angry and worried.
'Say nothing of that to Mary, if she comes by later. Ye might get
me in trouble.'
'Should I care?'
'I might get back at one who caused me trouble by causing little
Jenna trouble,' Sister Coquina said. 'She's in Big Sister's black
books, just now, anyway. Sister Mary doesn't care for the way
Jenna spoke to her about ye ... nor does she like it that Jenna came
back to us wearing the Dark Bells.'
This was no sooner out of her mouth before Sister Coquina put her
hand over that frequently imprudent organ, as if realizing she had
said too much.
Roland, intrigued by what she'd said but not liking to show it just
now, only replied: 'I'll keep my mouth shut about you, if you keep
your mouth shut to Sister Mary about Jenna.'
Coquina looked relieved. 'Aye, that's a bargain.' She leaned
forward confidingly. 'She's in Thoughtful House. That's the little
cave in the hillside where we have to go and meditate when Big
Sister decides we've been bad. She'll have to stay and consider her
impudence until Mary lets her out.' She paused, then said abruptly:
'Who's this beside ye? Do ye know?'
Roland turned his head and saw that the young man was awake,
and had been listening. His eyes were as dark as Jenna's.
'Know him?' Roland asked, with what he hoped was the right touch
of scorn. 'Should I not know my own brother?'




'Is he, now, and him so young and you so old?' Another of the
sisters materialized out of the darkness: Sister Tamra, who had
called herself one-and-twenty. In the moment before she reached
Roland's bed, her face was that of a hag who will never see eighty
again ... or ninety. Then it shimmered and was once more the
plump, healthy countenance of a thirty-year-old matron. Except for
the eyes. They remained yellowish in the corneas, gummy in the
corners, and watchful.
'He's the youngest, I the eldest,' Roland said. 'Betwixt us are seven
others, and twenty years of our parents' lives.'
'How sweet! And if he's yer brother, then ye'll know his name,
won't ye? Know it very well.'
Before the gunslinger could flounder, the young man said: 'They
think you've forgotten such a simple hook as John Norman. What
culleens they be, eh, Jimmy?'
Coquina and Tamra looked at the pale boy in the bed next to
Roland's, clearly angry ... and clearly trumped. For the time being,
at least.
'You've fed him your muck,' the boy (whose medallion
undoubtedly proclaimed him John, Loved of Family, Loved of
God) said `Why don't you go, and let us have a natter?'
'Well!' Sister Coquina huffed. 'I like the gratitude around here, so I
do!'
'I'm grateful for what's given me,' Norman responded, looking at
her steadily, 'but not for what folk would take away.'
Tamra snorted through her nose, turned violently enough for her
swirling dress to push a draught of air into Roland's face, and then
took her leave. Coquina stayed a moment.




'Be discreet, and mayhap someone ye like better than ye like me
will get out of hack in the morning, instead of a week from
tonight.'
Without waiting for a reply, she turned and followed Sister Tamra.
Roland and John Norman waited until they were both gone, and
then Norman turned to Roland and spoke in a low voice. 'My
brother. Dead?'
Roland nodded. 'The medallion I took in case I should meet with
any of his people. It rightly belongs to you. I'm sorry for your loss.'
'Thankee-sai. ' John Norman's lower lip trembled, then firmed. 'I
knew the green men did for him, although these old biddies
wouldn't tell me for sure. They did for plenty, and cotched the rest.'
'Perhaps the Sisters didn't know for sure.'
'They knew. Don't you doubt it. They don't say much, but they
know plenty. The only one any different is Jenna. That's who the
old battle-axe meant when she said "your friend". Aye?'
Roland nodded. 'And she said something about the Dark Bells. I'd
know more of that, if would were could.'
'She's something special, Jenna is. More like a princess - someone
whose place is made by bloodline and can't be refused - than like
the other Sisters. I lie here and look like I'm asleep - it's safer, I
think - but I've heard 'em talking. Jenna's just come back among
'em recently, and those Dark Bells mean something special ... but
Mary's still the one who swings the weight. I think the Dark Bells
are only ceremonial, like the rings the old Barons used to hand
down from father to son. Was it she who put Jimmy's medal
around your neck?'
'Yes.'




'Don't take it off, whatever you do.' His face was strained, grim. 'I
don't know if it's the gold or the God, but they don't like to get too
close. I think that's the only reason I'm still here.' Now his voice
dropped all the way to a whisper. 'They ain't human.'
'Well, perhaps a bit fey and magical, but-`
'No!' With what was clearly an effort, the boy got up on one elbow.
He looked at Roland earnestly. 'You're thinking about hubber-
women, or witches. These ain't hubbers, nor witches, either. They
ain't human!'
'Then what are they?'
'Don't know.'
'How came you here, John?'
Speaking in a low voice, John Norman told Roland what he knew
of what had happened to him. He, his brother, and four other
young men who were quick and owned good horses had been hired
as scouts, riding drogue-and-forward, protecting a long-haul
caravan of seven freightwagons taking goods - seeds, food, tools,
mail, and four ordered brides - to an unincorporated township
called Tejuas some two hundred miles further west of Eluria. The
scouts rode fore and aft of the goods-train in turn and turn about
fashion; one brother rode with each party because, Norman
explained, when they were together they fought like ... well ...
'Like brothers,' Roland suggested.
John Norman managed a brief, pained smile. 'Aye,' he said.
The trio of which John was a part had been riding drogue, about
two miles behind the freight-wagons, when the green mutants had
sprung an ambush in Eluria.
'How many wagons did you see when you got there?' he asked
Roland. 'Only one. Overturned.'




'How many bodies?'
'Only your brother's.'
John Norman nodded grimly. 'They wouldn't take him because of
the medallion, I think.'
'The muties?'
'The Sisters. The muties care nothing for gold or God. These
bitches, though . . .' He looked into the dark, which was now
almost complete. Roland felt lethargy creeping over him again, but
it wasn't until later that he realized the soup had been drugged.
'The other wagons?' Roland asked. 'The ones not overturned?'
'The muties would have taken them, and the goods, as well,'
Norman said. 'They don't care for gold or God; the Sisters don't
care for goods. Like as not they have their own foodstuffs,
something I'd as soon not think of. Nasty stuff ... like those bugs.'
He and the other drogue riders galloped into Eluria, but the fight
was over by the time they got there. Men had been lying about,
some dead but many more still alive. At least two of the ordered
brides had still been alive, as well. Survivors able to walk were
being herded together by the,,' green folk - John Norman
remembered the one in the bowler hat very well, and the woman in
the ragged red vest.
Norman and the other two had tried to fight. He had seen one of hi
pards gutshot by an arrow, and then he saw no more - someone had
cracked him over the head from behind, and the lights had gone
out.
Roland wondered if the ambusher had cried 'Booh!' before he had
struck, but didn't ask.
'When I woke up again, I was here,' Norman said. 'I saw that some
of the others - most of them - had those cursed bugs on them.'




'Others?' Roland looked at the empty beds. In the growing
darkness, they glimmered like white islands. 'How many were
brought here?'
'At least twenty. They healed ... the bugs healed 'em ... and then,
one by one, they disappeared. You'd go to sleep, and when you
woke up there'd, be one more empty bed. One by one they went,
until only me and that, one down yonder was left.'
He looked at Roland solemnly.
'And now you.'
'Norman,' Roland's head was swimming. `I-`
'I reckon I know what's wrong with you,' Norman said. He seemed
to speak from far away . . . perhaps from all the way around the
curve of I the earth. 'It's the soup. But a man has to eat. A woman,
too. If she's a natural woman, anyway. These ones ain't natural.
Even Sister Jenna's not natural. Nice don't mean natural.' Further
and further away. 'And she'll be like them in the end. Mark me
well.'
'Can't move.' Saying even that required a huge effort. It was like
moving boulders.
'No.' Norman suddenly laughed. It was a shocking sound, and
echoed in the growing blackness which filled Roland's head. 'It
ain't just sleepmedicine they put in their soup; it's can't-move-
medicine, too. There's nothing much wrong with me, brother ... so
why do you think I'm still here?'
Norman was now speaking not from around the curve of the earth
but perhaps from the moon. He said: 'I don't think either of us is
ever going to see the sun shining on a flat piece of ground again.'
You're wrong about that, Roland tried to reply, and more in that
vein, as well, but nothing came out. He sailed around to the black
side of the moon, losing all his words in the void he found there.




Yet he never quite lost awareness of himself. Perhaps the dose of
'medicine' in Sister Coquina's soup had been badly calculated, or
perhaps it was just that they had never had a gunslinger to work
their mischief on, and did not know they had one now.
Except, of course, for Sister Jenna - she knew.
At some point in the night, whispering, giggling voices and lightly
chiming bells brought him back from the darkness where he had
been biding, not quite asleep or unconscious. Around him, so
constant he now barely heard it, were the singing 'doctors'.
Roland opened his eyes. He saw pale and chancy light dancing in
the black air. The giggles and whispers were closer. Roland tried to
turn his head and at first couldn't. He rested, gathered his will into
a hard blue ball, and tried again. This time his head did turn. Only
a little, but a little was enough.
It was five of the Little Sisters - Mary, Louise, Tamra, Coquina,
Michela. They came up the long aisle of the black infirmary,
laughing together like children out on a prank, carrying long tapers
in silver holders, the bells lining the forehead-bands of their
wimples chiming little silver runs of sound. They gathered about
the bed of the bearded man. From within their circle, candleglow
rose in a shimmery column that died before it got halfway to the
silken ceiling.
Sister Mary spoke briefly. Roland recognized her voice, but not the
words - it was neither low speech nor the High, but some other
language entirely. One phrase stood out - can de lach, mi him en
tow - and he had no idea what it might mean.
He realized that now he could hear only the tinkle of bells - the
doctor-bugs had stilled.
'Ras me! On! On!' Sister Mary cried in a harsh, powerful voice.
The candles went out. The light which had shone through the




wings of their wimples as they gathered around the bearded man's
bed vanished, and all was darkness once more.
Roland waited for what might happen next, his skin cold. He tried
to flex his hands and feet, and could not. He had been able to move
his head perhaps fifteen degrees; otherwise he was as paralysed as
a fly neatly wrapped up and hung in a spider's web.
The low jingling of bells in the black ... and then sucking sounds.
As soon as he heard them, Roland knew he'd been waiting for
them. Some part of him had known what the Little Sisters of Eluria
were, all along.
If Roland could have raised his hands, he would have put them to
his ears to block those sounds out. As it was, he could only lie still,
listening and waiting for them to stop.
For a long time - for ever, it seemed - they did not. The women
slurped and grunted like pigs snuffling half-liquefied feed out of a
trough. There was even one resounding belch, followed by more
whispered giggles (these, ended when Sister Mary uttered a single
curt word - 'Hais!'). And once there was a low, moaning cry - from
the bearded man, Roland was quite sure. If so, it was his last on
this side of the clearing.
In time, the sound of their feeding began to taper off. As it did, the
bugs began to sing again - first hesitantly, then with more
confidence. The whispering and giggling recommenced. The
candles were re-lit. Roland was by now lying with his head turned
in the other direction. He didn't want them to know what he'd seen,
but that wasn't all; he had no urge to see more on any account. He
had seen and heard enough.
But the giggles and whispers now came his way. Roland closed his
eyes concentrating on the medallion which lay against his chest. I
don't know if it's the gold or the God, but they don't like to get too
close, John Norman had said. It was good to have such a thing to




remember as the Little Sister drew nigh, gossiping and whispering
in their strange other tongue, but the medallion seemed a thin
protection in the dark.
Faintly, at a great distance, Roland heard the cross-dog barking.
As the Sisters circled him, the gunslinger realized he could smell
them. It was a low, unpleasant odour, like spoiled meat. And what
else would they smell of, such as these?
'Such a pretty man it is.' Sister Mary. She spoke in a low,
meditative tone.
'But such an ugly sigil it wears.' Sister Tamra.
'We'll have it off him!' Sister Louise.
'And then we shall have kisses!' Sister Coquina.
'Kisses for all!' exclaimed Sister Michela, with such fervent
enthusiasm that they all laughed.
Roland discovered that not all of him was paralysed, after all. Part
of him had, in fact, arisen from its sleep at the sound of their voices
and now stood tall. A hand reached beneath the bed-dress he wore,
touched that stiffened member, encircled it, caressed it. He lay in
silent horror, feigning sleep, as wet warmth almost immediately
spilled from him. The hand remained where it was for a moment,
the thumb rubbing up and down the wilting shaft. Then it let him
go and rose a little higher. Found the wetness pooled on his lower
belly. Giggles, soft as wind. Chiming bells. Roland opened his
eyes the tiniest crack and looked up at the ancient faces laughing
down at him in the light of their candles - glittering eyes, yellow
cheeks, hanging teeth that jutted over lower lips. Sister Michela
and sister Louise appeared to have grown goatees, but of course
that wasn't the darkness of hair but of the bearded man's blood.
Mary is hand was cupped. She passed it from Sister to Sister; each
licked from her palm in the candlelight.




Roland closed his eyes all the way and waited for them to be gone.
Eventually they were.
I'll never sleep again, he thought, and was five minutes later lost to
himself and the world.


V. Sister Mary. A Message. A Visit from Ralph.
Norman's Fate. Sister Mary Again.
When Roland awoke, it was full daylight, the silk roof overhead a
bright white and billowing in a mild breeze. The doctor-bugs were
singing contentedly. Beside him on his left, Norman was heavily
asleep with his head turned so far to one side that his stubbly cheek
rested on his shoulder.
Roland and John Norman were the only ones here. Further down
on their side of the infirmary, the bed where the bearded man had
been was empty, it's top sheet pulled up and neatly tucked in, the
pillow neatly nestled in a crisp white case. The complication of
slings in which his body had rested was gone.
Roland remembered the candles - the way their glow had
combined and streamed up in a column, illuminating the Sisters as
they gathered around the bearded man. Giggling. Their damned
bells jingling.
Now, as if summoned by his thoughts, came Sister Mary, gliding
along rapidly with Sister Louise in her wake. Louise bore a tray,
and looked nervous. Mary was frowning, obviously not in good
temper.
To be grumpy after you've fed so well? Roland thought. Fie, Sister.
She reached the gunslinger's bed and looked down at him. 'I have
little to thank ye for, sai,' she said with no preamble.




'Have I asked for your thanks?' he responded in a voice that
sounded as dusty and little-used as the pages of an old book.
She took no notice. 'Ye've made one who was only impudent and
restless with her place outright rebellious. Well, her mother was
the same way, and died of it not long after returning Jenna to her
proper Place. Raise your hand, thankless man.'
'I can't. I can't move at all.'
'Oh, cully! Haven't you heard it said "fool not your mother 'less
she's out of face"? I know pretty well what ye can and can't do.
Now raise your hand.'
Roland raised his right hand, trying to suggest more effort than it,
actually took. He thought that this morning he might be strong
enough to slip free of the slings ... but what then? Any real walking
would beyond him for hours yet, even without another dose of
'medicine' . . and behind Sister Mary, Sister Louise was taking the
cover from a fresh bowl of soup. As Roland looked at it, his
stomach rumbled.
Big Sister heard and smiled a bit. 'Even lying in bed builds an
appetite in a strong man, if it's done long enough. Wouldn't you
say so, Jason brother of John?'
'My name is James. As you well know, Sister.'
'Do I?' She laughed angrily. 'Oh, la! And if I whipped your little
sweetheart hard enough and long enough - until the blood jumped
her back like drops of sweat, let us say - should I not whip a
different name out of her? Or didn't ye trust her with it, during
your little talk?'
'Touch her and I'll kill you.'
She laughed again. Her face shimmered; her firm mouth turned
into something that looked like a dying jellyfish. 'Speak not of
killing to us cully, lest we speak of it to you.'




'Sister, if you and Jenna don't see eye to eye, why not release her
from her vows and let her go her course?'
'Such as us can never be released from our vows, nor be let go. Her
mother tried and then came back, her dying and the girl sick. Why,
it was we nursed Jenna back to health after her mother was nothing
but dirt in the breeze that blows out towards End-World, and how
little she thanks us! Besides, she bears the Dark Bells, the sigil of
our sisterhood. Of our ka-tet. Now eat - yer belly says ye're
hungry!'
Sister Louise offered the bowl, but her eyes kept drifting to the
shape the medallion made under the breast of his bed-dress. Don't
like it, do you? Roland thought, and then remembered Louise by
candlelight, the freighter's blood on her chin, her ancient eyes
eager as she leaned forward to lick his spend from Sister Mary's
hand.
He turned his head aside. 'I want nothing.'
'But ye're hungry!' Louise protested. 'If'ee don't eat, James, how
will'ee get'ee strength back?'
'Send Jenna. I'll eat what she brings.'
Sister Mary's frown was black. 'Ye'll see her no more. She's been
released from Thoughtful House only on her solemn promise to
double her time of meditation ... and to stay out of the infirmary.
Now eat, James, or whoever ye are. Take what's in the soup, or
we'll cut ye with knives and rub it in with flannel poultices. Either
way, makes no difference to us. Does it? Louise?'
'Nar,' Louise said. She still held out the bowl. Steam rose from it,
and the good smell of chicken.
'But it might make a difference to you.' Sister Mary grinned
humourlessly, baring her unnaturally large teeth. 'Flowing blood's
risky around here. The doctors don't like it. It stirs them up.'




It wasn't just the bugs that were stirred up at the sight of blood, and
Roland knew it. He also knew he had no choice in the matter of the
soup. He took the bowl from Louise and ate slowly. He would
have given much to wipe but the look of satisfaction he saw on
Sister Mary's face.
'Good,' she said after he had handed the bowl back and she had
peered inside to make sure it was completely empty. His hand
thumped back into the sling which had been rigged for it, already
too heavy to hold up. He could feel the world drawing away again.
Sister Mary leaned forward, the billowing top of her habit touching
the skin of his left shoulder. He could smell her, an aroma both
ripe and dry, and would have gagged if he'd had the strength.
'Have that foul gold thing off ye when yer strength comes back a
little - put it in the pissoir under the bed. Where it belongs. For to
be even this close to where it lies hurts my head and makes my
throat close.'
Speaking with enormous effort, Roland said: 'If you want it, take
it. How can I stop you, you bitch?'
Once more her frown turned her face into something like a
thunderhead. He thought she would have slapped him, if she had
dared touch him so close to where the medallion lay. Her ability to
touch seemed to end above his waist, however.
'I think you had better consider the matter a little more fully,' she
said. 'I can still have Jenna whipped, if I like. She bears the Dark
Bells, but I am the Big Sister. Consider that very well.'
She left. Sister Louise followed, casting one look - a strange
combination Of fright and lust - back over her shoulder.
Roland thought, I must get out of here - I must.
Instead, he drifted back to that dark place which wasn't quite sleep.
Or perhaps he did sleep, at least for a while; perhaps he dreamed.




Fingers once more caressed his fingers, and lips first kissed his ear
and then whispered into it: 'Look beneath your pillow, Roland ...
but let no one know I was here.'
At some point after this, Roland opened his eyes again, half-
expecting to see Sister Jenna's pretty young face hovering above
him, and that comma of dark hair once more poking out from
beneath her wimple. There was no one. The swags of silk overhead
were at their brightest, and although it was impossible to tell the
hours in here with any real accuracy, Roland guessed it to be
around noon. Perhaps three hours since his second bowl of the
Sisters' soup.
Beside him, John Norman still slept, his breath whistling out in
faint, nasal snores.
Roland tried to raise his hand and slide it under his pillow. The
hand wouldn't move. He could wiggle the tips of his fingers, but
that was all. He waited, calming his mind as well as he could,
gathering his patience.' Patience wasn't easy to come by. He kept
thinking about what Norman had said - that there had been twenty
survivors of the ambush ... at least to start with. One by one they
went, until only me and that one down yonder was left. And now
you.
The girl wasn't here. His mind spoke in the soft, regretful tone of
Alain, one of his old friends, dead these many years now. She
wouldn't dare, not with the others watching. That was only a
dream you had.
But Roland thought perhaps it had been more than a dream.
Some length of time later - the slowly shifting brightness overhead
made him believe it had been about an hour - Roland tried his hand
again. This time he was able to get it beneath his pillow. This was
puffy and soft, tucked snugly into the wide sling which supported
the gunslinger's neck. At first he found nothing, but as his fingers




worked their slow way deeper, they touched what felt like a stiffish
bundle of thin rods.
He paused, gathering a little more strength (every movement was
like swimming in glue), and then burrowed deeper. It felt like a
dead bouquet. Wrapped around it was what felt like a ribbon.
Roland looked around to make sure the ward was still empty and
Norman still asleep, then drew out what was under the pillow. It
was six brittle stems of fading green with brownish reed-heads at
the tops. They gave off a strange, yeasty aroma that made Roland
think of early-morning begging expeditions to the Great House
kitchens as a child - forays he had usually made with Cuthbert. The
reeds were tied with a wide white silk ribbon, and smelled like
burned toast. Beneath the ribbon was a fold of cloth. Like
everything else in this cursed place, it seemed, the cloth was of
silk.
Roland was breathing hard and could feel drops of sweat on his
brow. Still alone, though - good. He took the scrap of cloth and
unfolded it. Printed painstakingly in blurred charcoal letters, was
this message:
                  NIBBLE HEDS. Once each hour. Too
                         much, CRAMPS or DETH.
                  TOMORROW NITE. Can't be sooner.
                             BE CAREFUL!
No explanation, but Roland supposed none was needed. Nor did he
have any option; if he remained here, he would die. All they had to
do was have the medallion off him, and he felt sure Sister Mary
was smart enough to figure a way to do that.
He nibbled at one of the dry reed-heads. The taste was nothing like
the toast they had begged from the kitchen as boys; it was bitter in
his throat and hot in his stomach. Less than a minute after his




nibble, his heart-rate had doubled. His muscles awakened, but not
in a pleasant way, as after good sleep; they felt first trembly and
then hard, as if they were gathered into knots. This feeling passed
rapidly, and his heartbeat was back to normal before Norman
stirred awake an hour or so later, but he understood why Jenna's
note had warned him not to take more than a nibble at a time - this
was very powerful stuff.
He slipped the bouquet of reeds back under the pillow, being
careful to brush away the few crumbles of vegetable matter which
had dropped to the sheet. Then he used the ball of his thumb to
blur the painstaking charcoaled words on the bit of silk. When he
was finished, there was nothing on the square but meaningless
smudges. The square he also tucked back under his pillow.
When Norman awoke, he and the gunslinger spoke briefly of the
young scout's home - Delain, it was, sometimes known jestingly as
Dragon's Lair, or Liar's Heaven. All tall tales were said to orginate
in Delain. The boy asked Roland to take his medallion and that of
his brother home to their parents, if Roland was able, and explain
as well as he could what had happened to James and John, sons of
Jesse.
'You'll do all that yourself,' Roland said.
'No.' Norman tried to raise his hand, perhaps to scratch his nose,
and was unable to do even that. The hand rose perhaps six inches,
then fell back to the counterpane with a small thump. 'I think not.
It's a pity for us to have run up against each other this way, you
know - I like you.'
'And I you, John Norman. Would that we were better met.'
'Aye. When not in the company of such fascinating ladies.'
He dropped off to sleep again soon after. Roland never spoke with
him again ... although he certainly heard from him. Yes. Roland




was lying above his bed, shamming sleep, as John Norman
screamed his last.
Sister Michela came with his evening soup just as Roland was
getting past the shivery muscles and galloping heartbeat that
resulted from his second nibble of brown reed. Michela looked at
his flushed face with some concern, but had to accept his
assurances that he did not feel feverish; she couldn't bring herself
to touch him and judge the heat of his skin for herself - the
medallion held her away.
With the soup was a popkin. The bread was leathery and the meat
inside it tough, but Roland demolished it greedily, just the same.
Michela watched with a complacent smile, hands folded in front of
her, nodding from time to time. When he had finished the soup,
she took the bowl back from him carefully, making sure their
fingers did not touch.
'Ye're healing,' she said. 'Soon you'll be on yer way, and we'll have
just yer memory to keep, Jim.'
'Is that true?' he asked quietly.
She only looked at him, touched her tongue against her upper lip,
giggled, and departed. Roland closed his eyes and lay back against
hi pillow, feeling lethargy steal over him again. Her speculative
eyes ... he peeping tongue. He had seen women look at roast
chickens and joints of mutton that same way, calculating when
they might be done.
His body badly wanted to sleep, but Roland held on to wakefulness
for what he judged was an hour, then worked one of the reeds out
from under the pillow. With a fresh infusion of their 'can't-move-
medicine' in his system, this took an enormous effort, and he
wasn't sure he could have done it at all, had he not separated this
one reed from the ribbon holding the others. Tomorrow night,
Jenna's note had said. If that meant escape, the idea seemed




preposterous. The way he felt now, he might be lying in this bed
until the end of the age.
He nibbled. Energy washed into his system, clenching his muscles
and racing his heart, but the burst of vitality was gone almost as
soon as it came, buried beneath the Sisters' stronger drug. He could
only hope ... and sleep.
When he woke it was full dark, and he found he could move his
arms and legs in their network of slings almost naturally. He
slipped one of the reeds out from beneath his pillow and nibbled
cautiously. She had left half a dozen, and the first two were now
almost entirely consumed.
The gunslinger put the stem back under the pillow, then began to
shiver like a wet dog in a downpour. I took too much, he thought.
I'll be lucky not to convulse -
His heart, racing like a runaway engine. And then, to make matters
worse, he saw candlelight at the far end of the aisle. A moment
later he heard the rustle of their gowns and the whisk of their
slippers.
Gods, why now? They'll see me shaking, they'll know
Calling on every bit of his willpower and control, Roland dosed his
eyes and concentrated on stilling his jerking limbs. If only he had
been in bed instead of in these cursed slings, which seemed to
tremble as if with their own ague at every movement!
The Little Sisters drew closer. The light of their candles bloomed
red within his closed eyelids. Tonight they were not giggling, nor
whispering amongst themselves. It was not until they were almost
on top of him that Roland became aware of the stranger in their
midst - a creature that breathed through its nose in great, slobbery
gasps of mixed air and snot.




The gunslinger lay with his eyes closed, the gross twitches and
jumps of his arms and legs under control, but with his muscles still
knotted arid crampy, thrumming beneath the skin. Anyone who
looked at him closely would see at once that something was wrong
with him. His heart was larruping away like a horse under the
whip, surely they must see
But it wasn't him they were looking at - not yet, at least.
'Have it off him,' Mary said. She spoke in a bastardized version of
the low speech Roland could barely understand. 'Then t'other 'un.
Go on, Ralph.'
'U'se has whik-sky?' the slobberer asked, his dialect even heavier
than Mary's. Use has 'backky?'
'Yes, yes, plenty whisky and plenty smoke, but not until you have
these wretched things off!' Impatient. Perhaps afraid, as well.
Roland cautiously rolled his head to the left and cracked his
eyelids open.
Five of the six Little Sisters of Eluria were clustered around the far
side of the sleeping John Norman's bed, their candles raised to cast
their light upon him. It also cast light upon their own faces, faces
which would have given the strongest man nightmares. Now, in the
ditch of the night, their glamours were set aside, and they were but
ancient corpses in voluminous habits.
Sister Mary had one of Roland's guns in her hand. Looking at her
holding it, Roland felt a bright flash of hate for her, and promised
himself she would pay for her temerity.
The thing standing at the foot of the bed, strange as it was, looked
almost normal in comparison to the Sisters. It was one of the green
folk.
Roland recognized Ralph at once. He would be a long time
forgetting that bowler hat.




Now Ralph walked slowly around to the side of Norman's bed
closest to Roland, momentarily blocking the gunslinger's view of
the Sisters. The mutie went all the way to Norman's head,
however, clearing the hags to Roland's slitted view once more.
Norman's medallion lay exposed - the boy had perhaps waken
enough to take it out of his bed-dress, hoping it would protect him
better so. Ralph picked it up in his melted-tallow hand. The Sister
watched eagerly in the glow of their candles as the green man
stretched to the end of its chain. . . and then put it down again.
Their faces droop in disappointment.
'Don't care for such as that,' Ralph said in his clotted voice. 'Want
whik-sky! Want 'backky!'
'You shall have it,' Sister Mary said. 'Enough for you and all you
verminous clan. But first, you must have that horrid thing off him!
both of them! Do you understand? And you shan't tease us.'
'Or what?' Ralph asked. He laughed. It was a choked and gargly
sound the laughter of a man dying from some evil sickness of the
throat an lungs, but Roland still liked it better than the giggles of
the Sisters 'Or what, Sisser Mary, you'll drink my bluid? My
bluid'd drop'ee dead where'ee stand, and glowing in the dark!'
Mary raised the gunslinger's revolver and pointed it at Ralph. 'Take
that wretched thing, or you die where you stand.'
'And die after I've done what you want, likely.'
Sister Mary said nothing to that. The others peered at him with
their black eyes.
Ralph lowered his head, appearing to think. Roland suspected hi
friend Bowler Hat could think, too. Sister Mary and her cohorts
might, not believe that, but Ralph had to be trig to have survived as
long as he had. But of course when he came here, he hadn't
considered Roland's guns.




'Smasher was wrong to give them shooters to you,' he said at last.
'Give em and not tell me. Did u'se give him whik-sky? Give him
'backky?'
'That's none o' yours,' Sister Mary replied. 'You have that
goldpiece off the boy's neck right now, or I'll put one of yonder
man's bullets in what's left of yer brain.'
'All right,' Ralph said. 'Just as you wish, sai.'
Once more he reached down and took the gold medallion in his
melted fist. That he did slow; what happened after, happened fast.
He snatched it away, breaking the chain and flinging the gold
heedlessly into the dark. With his other hand he reached down,
sank his long and ragged nails into John Norman's neck, and tore it
open.
Blood flew from the hapless boy's throat in a jetting, heart-driven
gush more black than red in the candlelight, and he made a single
bubbly cry. The women screamed - but not in horror. They
screamed as women do in a frenzy of excitement. The green man
was forgotten; Roland was forgotten; all was forgotten save the
life's blood pouring out of John Norman's throat.
They dropped their candles. Mary dropped Roland's revolver in the
same hapless, careless fashion. The last the gunslinger saw as
Ralph darted away into the shadows (whisky and tobacco another
time, wily Ralph must have thought; tonight he had best
concentrate on saving his own life) was the sisters bending forward
to catch as much of the flow as they could before it dried up.
Roland lay in the dark, muscles shivering, heart pounding,
listening to the harpies as they fed on the boy lying in the bed next
to his own. It seemed to go on for ever, but at last they had done
with him. The Sisters re-lit their candles and left, murmuring.




When the drug in the soup once more got the better of the drug in
the reeds, Roland was grateful ... yet for the first time since coming
here, his sleep was haunted.
In his dream he stood looking down at the bloated body in the
town trough, thinking of a line in the book marked REGISTRY OF
MISDEEDS & REDRESS. Green folk sent hence, it had read, and
perhaps the green folk had been sent hence, but then a worse tribe
had come. The Little Sisters of Eluria, they called themselves. And
a year hence, they might be the Little Sisters of Tejuas, or of
Kambero, or some other far-western village. They came with their
bells and their bugs ... from where? Who knew? Did it matter?
A shadow fell beside his on the scummy water of the trough.
Roland tried to turn and face it. He couldn't; he was frozen in
place. Then a green hand grasped his shoulder and whirled him
about. It was Ralph. His bowler hat was cocked back on his head;
John Norman's medallion, now red with blood, hung around his
neck.
'Booh!' cried Ralph, his lips stretching in a toothless grin. He raised
a big revolver with worn sandalwood grips. He thumbed the
hammer back
- and Roland jerked awake, shivering all over, dressed in skin both
wet and icy cold. He looked at the bed on his left. It was empty, the
sheet pulled up and tucked about neatly, the pillow resting above it
in its snowy sleeve. Of John Norman there was no sign. It might
have been empty for years, that bed.
Roland was alone now. Gods help him, he was the last patient of
the Little Sisters of Eluria, those sweet and patient hospitallers.
The last human being still alive in this terrible place, the last with
warm blood flowing in his veins.
Roland, lying suspended, gripped the gold medallion in his fist and
looked across the aisle at the long row of empty beds. After a little




while, he brought one of the reeds out from beneath his pillow and
nibbled at it.
When Mary came fifteen minutes later, the gunslinger took the
bowl she brought with a show of weakness he didn't really feel.
Porridge instead of soup this time ... but he had no doubt the basic
ingredient was still the same.
'How well ye look this morning, sai,' Big Sister said. She looked
well herself - there were no shimmers to give away the ancient
wampir hiding inside her. She had supped well, and her meal had
firmed her up. Roland, stomach rolled over at the thought. 'Ye'll be
on yer pins in no time, I warrant.'
'That's shit,' Roland said, speaking in an ill-natured growl. 'Put me
on my pins and you'd be picking me up off the floor directly after.
I've start to wonder if you're not putting something in the food.'
She laughed merrily at that. 'La, you lads! Always eager to blame
weakness on a scheming woman! How scared of us ye are - aye,
way down in yer little boys' hearts, how scared ye are!'
'Where's my brother? I dreamed there was a commotion about him
in the night, and now I see his bed's empty.'
Her smile narrowed. Her eyes glittered. 'He came over fevery and
pitched a fit. We've taken him to Thoughtful House, which has
been home to contagion more than once in its time.'
To the grave is where you've taken him, Roland thought. Mayhap
that is a Thoughtful House, but little would you know it, sai, one
way or another.
'I know ye're no brother to that boy,' Mary said, watching him eat.
Already Roland could feel the stuff hidden in the porridge draining
his strength once more. 'Sigil or no sigil, I know ye're no brother to
him. Why do you lie? 'Tis a sin against God.'




'What gives you such an idea, sai?' Roland asked, curious to see if
she would mention the guns.
'Big Sister knows what she knows. Why not 'fess up, Jimmy?
Confession's good for the soul, they say.'
'Send me Jenna to pass the time, and perhaps I'd tell you much,'
Roland said.
The narrow bone of smile on Sister Mary's face disappeared like
chalkwriting in a rainstorm. 'Why would ye talk to such as her?'
'She's passing fair,' Roland said. 'Unlike some.'
Her lips pulled back from her overlarge teeth. 'Ye'll see her no
more, cully. Ye've stirred her up, so you have, and I won't have
that.'
She turned to go. Still trying to appear weak and hoping he would
not overdo it (acting was never his forte), Roland held out the
empty porridge bowl. 'Do you not want to take this?'
'Put it on your head and wear it as a nightcap, for all of me. Or
stick it ill your ass. You'll talk before I'm done with ye, cully - talk
till I bid you shut up and then beg to talk some more!'
On this note she swept regally away, hands lifting the front of her
skirt off the floor. Roland had heard that such as she couldn't go
about in daylight, and that part of the old tales was surely a lie. Yet
another part was almost true, it seemed: a fuzzy, amorphous shape
kept pace with her, running along the row of empty beds to her
right, but she cast no real shadow at all.




VI. Jenna. Sister Coquina. Tamra, Michela, Louise.
The Cross-Dog. What Happened in the Sage.
That was one of the longest days of Roland's life. He dozed, but
never deeply; the reeds were doing their work, and he had begun to
believe that he might, with Jenna's help, actually get out of here.
And there was the matter of his guns, as well - perhaps she might
be able to help there, too.
He passed the slow hours thinking of old times - of Gilead and his
friends, of the riddling he had almost won at one Wide Earth Fair.
In the end another had taken the goose, but he'd had his chance,
aye. He thought of his mother and father; he thought of Abel
Vannay, who had limped his way through a life of gentle
goodness, and Eldred Jonas, who had limped his way through a life
of evil ... until Roland had blown him loose of his saddle, one fine
desert day.
He thought, as always, of Susan.
If you love me, then love me, she'd said ... and so he had.
So he had.
In this way the time passed. At rough hourly intervals, he took one
of the reeds from beneath his pillow and nibbled it. Now his
muscles didn't tremble so badly as the stuff passed into his system,
nor his heart pound so fiercely. The medicine in the reeds no
longer had to battle the Sisters' medicine so fiercely, Roland
thought; the reeds were winning.
The diffused brightness of the sun moved across the white silk
ceiling of the ward, and at last the dimness which always seemed
to hover at bed-level began to rise. The long room's western wall
bloomed with the rose-melting-to-orange shades of sunset.
It was Sister Tamra who brought him his dinner that night - soup
and another popkin. She also laid a desert lily beside his hand. She




smiled she did it. Her cheeks were bright with colour. All of them
were bright with colour today, like leeches which had gorged until
they were almost to bursting.
'From your admirer, Jimmy,' she said. 'She's so sweet on ye! The I
means "Do not forget my promise". What has she promised ye,
Jimmy brother of Johnny?'
'That she'd see me again, and we'd talk.'
Tamra laughed so hard that the bells lining her forehead jingled.
She clasped her hands together in a perfect ecstasy of glee. 'Sweet
as honey
Oh, yes!' She bent her smiling gaze on Roland. 'It's sad such a
promise can never be kept. Ye'll never see her again, pretty man.'
She took the bowl. 'Big Sister has decided.' She stood up, still
smiling. 'Why not take that ugly gold sigil off?'
'I think not.'
'Yer brother took his off - look!' She pointed, and Roland spied the
gold medallion lying far down the aisle, where it had landed when
Ralph threw it.
Sister Tamra looked at him, still smiling.
'He decided it was part of what was making him sick, and cast it
away Ye'd do the same, were ye wise.'
Roland repeated: 'I think not.'
'So,' she said dismissively, and left him alone with the empty beds
glimmering in the thickening shadows.
Roland hung on, in spite of growing sleepiness, until the hot
colours bleeding across the infirmary's western wall had cooled to
ashes. Then he nibbled one of the reeds and felt strength - real
strength, not a jittery, heart-thudding substitute -bloom in his body.
He looked towards where the castaway medallion gleamed in the




last light and made a silent promise to John Norman: he would take
it with the other one to Norman's kin, if ka chanced that he should
encounter them in his travels.
Feeling completely easy in his mind for the first time that day, the
gunslinger dozed. When he awoke it was full dark. The doctor-
bugs were singing with extraordinary shrillness. He had taken one
of the reeds out from under the pillow and had begun to nibble on
it when a cold voice said, 'So - Big Sister was right. Ye've been
keeping secrets.'
Roland's heart seemed to stop dead in his chest. He looked around
and saw Sister Coquina getting to her feet. She had crept in while
he was dozing and hidden under the bed on his right side to watch
him. 'Where did ye get that?' she asked. 'Was it 'He got it from me.'
Coquina whirled about. Jenna was walking down the aisle towards
them. Her habit was gone. She still wore her wimple with its
foreheadfringe of bells, but its hem rested on the shoulders of a
simple checkered shirt. Below this she wore jeans and scuffed
desert boots. She had something in her hands. It was too dark for
Roland to be sure, but he thought
YOU,' Sister Coquina whispered with infinite hate. 'When I tell
Big Sister -
`you'll tell no one anything,' Roland said.
If he had planned his escape from the slings which entangled him,
he no doubt would have made a bad business of it, but, as always,
the gunslinger did best when he thought least. His arms were free
in a moment; so was his left leg. His right caught at the ankle,
however, twisting, hanging him up with his shoulders on the bed
and his leg in the air.
Coquina turned on him, hissing like a cat. Her lips pulled back
from teeth that were needle-sharp. She rushed at him, her fingers
splayed. The nails at the ends of them looked sharp and ragged.




Roland clasped the medallion and shoved it out towards her. She
recoiled from it, still hissing, and whirled back to Sister Jenna in a
flare of white skirt. 'I'll do for ye, ye interfering trull!' she cried in a
low, harsh voice.
Roland struggled to free his leg and couldn't. It was firmly caught,
the shitting sling actually wrapped around the ankle somehow, like
a noose.
Jenna raised her hands, and he saw he had been right: it was his
revolvers she had brought, holstered and hanging from the two old
gunbelts he had worn out of Gilead after the last burning.
'Shoot her, Jenna! Shoot her!'
Instead, still holding the holstered guns up, Jenna shook her head
as she had on the day when Roland had persuaded her to push back
her wimple so he could see her hair. The bells rang with a
sharpness that seemed to go into the gunslinger's head like a spike.
The Dark Bells. The sigil of their ka-tet. What
The sound of the doctor-bugs rose to a shrill, reedy scream that
was eerily like the sound of the bells Jenna wore. Nothing sweet
about them now. Sister Coquina's hands faltered on their way to
Jenna's throat; Jenna herself had not so much as flinched or blinked
her eyes.
'No,' Coquina whispered. 'You can't!'
'I have,' Jenna said, and Roland saw the bugs. Descending from the
legs of the bearded man, he'd observed a battalion. What he saw
coming from the shadows now was an army to end all armies; had
they been men instead of insects, there might have been more than
all the men who had ever carried arms in the long and bloody
history of World.
Yet the sight of them advancing down the boards of the aisle was
what Roland would always remember, nor what would haunt his
dream for a year or more; it was the way they coated the beds.
These were turning black two by two on both sides of the aisle,
like pairs of dim rectangular lights going out.
Coquina shrieked and began to shake her own head, to ring her
bells. The sound they made was thin and pointless compared to the
sharp ringing of the Dark Bells.
Still the bugs marched on, darkening the floor, blacking out the be
Jenna darted past the shrieking Sister Coquina, dropped Roland's
beside him, then yanked the twisted sling straight with one hard p
Roland slid his leg free.
'Come,' she said. 'I've started them, but staying them could be a
different thing.'
Now Sister Coquina's shrieks were not of horror but of pain. The
bugs had found her.
'Don't look,' Jenna said, helping Roland to his feet. He thought that
never in his life had he been so glad to be upon them. 'Come. We
mu be quick - she'll rouse the others. I've put your boots and
clothes aside the path that leads away from here - I carried as much
as I could. How ye? Are ye strong?'
'Thanks to you.' How long he would stay strong Roland didn't
know... and right now it wasn't a question that mattered. He saw
Jenna snatch up two of the reeds - in his struggle to escape the
slings, they had scattered all over the head of the bed - and then
they were hurrying up the aisle, away from the bugs and from
Sister Coquina, whose cries were now failing.
Roland buckled on his guns and tied them down without breaking
stride.
They passed only three beds on each side before reaching the flap
of the tent . . . and it was a tent, he saw, not a vast pavilion. The
silk walls and ceiling were fraying canvas, thin enough to let in the




light of a threequarters Kissing Moon. And the beds weren't beds
at all, but only a double row of shabby cots.
He turned and saw a black, writhing hump on the floor where
Sister Coquina had been. At the sight of her, Roland was struck by
an unpleasant thought.
'I forgot John Norman's medallion!' A keen sense of regret - almost
of mourning - went through him like wind.
Jenna reached into the pocket of her jeans and brought it out. It
glimmered in the moonlight.
'I picked it up off the floor.'
He didn't know which made him gladder - the sight of the
medallion or the sight of it in her hand. It meant she wasn't like the
others.
Then, as if to dispel that notion before it got too firm a hold on
him, she said: 'Take it, Roland - I can hold it no more.' And, as he
took it, he saw unmistakable marks of charring on her fingers.
He took her hand and kissed each burn.
'Thankee-sai,' she said, and he saw she was crying. 'Thankee, dear.
To be kissed so is lovely, worth every pain. Now . . .'
Roland saw her eyes shift, and followed them. Here were bobbing
lights descending a rocky path. Beyond them he saw the building
where the Little Sisters had been living - not a convent but a ruined
hacienda that looked a thousand years old. There were three
candles; as they drew closer, Roland saw that there were only three
sisters. Mary wasn't among them.
He drew his guns.
'Oooo, it's a gunslinger-man he is!' Louise.
'A scary man!' Michela.




'And he's found his ladylove as well as his shooters!' Tamra.
'His slut-whore!' Louise.
Laughing angrily. Not afraid ... at least, not of his weapons.
'Put them away,' Jenna told him, and when she looked, saw that he
already had.
The others, meanwhile, had drawn closer.
'Ooo, see, she cries!' Tamra.
'Doffed her habit, she has!' Michela. 'Perhaps it's her broken vows
she cries for.'
'Why such tears, pretty?' Louise.
'Because he kissed my fingers where they were burned,' Jenna said.
'I've never been kissed before. It made me cry.'
'Ooooo!'
'Luv-ly!'
'Next he'll stick his thing in her! Even luv-lier!'
Jenna bore their japes with no sign of anger. When they were done,
she said: 'I'm going with him. Stand aside.'
They gaped at her, counterfeit laughter disappearing in shock.
'No!' Louise whispered. 'Are ye mad? Ye know what'll happen!'
'No, and neither do you,' Jenna said. 'Besides, I care not.' She half-
turned and held her hand out to the mouth of the ancient hospital
tent. It was a faded olive-drab in the moonlight, with an old red
cross drawn on its roof.
Roland wondered how many towns the Sisters had been to With
this tent which was so small and plain on the outside, so huge and




gloriously on the inside. How many towns and over how many
years.
Now, cramming the mouth of it in a black, shiny tongue, were
doctor-bugs. They had stopped their singing. Their silence was
somehow terrible.
'Stand aside or I'll have them on ye,' Jenna said.
'Ye never would!' Sister Michela cried in a low, horrified voice.
'Aye. I've already set them on Sister Coquina. She's a part of the
medicine, now.'
Their gasp was like cold wind passing through dead trees. Nor was
all that dismay directed towards their own precious hides. What
Jenna h done was clearly far outside their reckoning.
'Then you're damned,' Sister Tamra said.
'Such ones to speak of damnation! Stand aside.'
They did. Roland walked past them and they shrank away from
him. but they shrank from her more.
'Damned?' he asked after they had skirted the haci and reached the
path beyond it. The Kissing Moon glimmered above a tumbled
scree of rocks In its light Roland could see a small black opening
low on the scarp. guessed it was the cave the Sisters called
Thoughtful House. 'What did they mean, damned?'
'Never mind. All we have to worry about now is Sister Mary. I like
not that we haven't seen her.'
She tried to walk faster, but he grasped her arm and turned her
about. He could still hear the singing of the bugs, but faintly; they
were leaving the place of the Sisters behind. Eluria, too, if the
compass in his head was still working; he thought the town was in
the other direction. The husk of the town, he amended.




'Tell me what they meant.'
'Perhaps nothing. Ask me not, Roland - what good is it? 'Tis done,
the bridge burned. I can't go back. Nor would if I could.' She
looked down, biting her lip, and when she looked up again, Roland
saw fresh tears falling on her cheeks. 'I have supped with them.
There were times when I couldn't help it, no more than you could
help drinking their wretched soup, no matter if you knew what was
in it.'
Roland remembered John Norman saying A man has to eat... a
woman, too. He nodded.
'I'd go no further down that road. If there's to be damnation, let it
be of my choosing, not theirs. My mother meant well by bringing
me back to them, but she was wrong.' She looked at him shyly and
fearfully ... but met his eyes. 'I'd go beside ye on yer road, Roland
of Gilead. For as long as I may, or as long as ye'd have me.'
`you're welcome to your share of my way,' he said. 'And I am `
Blessed by your company, he would have finished, but before he
could, a voice spoke from the tangle of moonshadow ahead of
them, where the path at last climbed out of the rocky, sterile valley
in which the Little Sisters had practised their glamours.
`It's a sad duty to stop such a pretty elopement, but stop it I must.'
Sister Mary came from the shadows. Her fine white habit with its
bright red rose had reverted to what it really was: the shroud of a
corpse. Caught, hooded in its grimy folds, was a wrinkled, sagging
face from which two black eyes stared. They looked like rotted
dates. Below them, exposed by the thing's smile, four great incisors
gleamed.
Upon the stretched skin of Sister Mary's forehead, bells tinkled ...
but not the Dark Bells, Roland thought. There was that.
'Stand clear,' Jenna said. 'Or I'll bring the can tam on ye.'




'No,' Sister Mary said, stepping closer, 'ye won't. They'll not stray
so far from the others. Shake your head and ring those damned
bells until the clappers fall out, and still they'll never come.'
Jenna did as bid, shaking her head furiously from side to side. The
Dark Bells rang piercingly, but without that extra, almost psychic
tone-quality that had gone through Roland's head like a spike. And
the doctor-bugs
what Jenna had called the can tam - did not come.
Smiling ever more broadly (Roland had an idea Mary herself
hadn't been completely sure they wouldn't come until the
experiment was made), the corpse-woman closed in on them,
seeming to float above the ground. Her eyes flicked towards him.
'And put that away,' she said.
Roland looked down and saw that one of his guns was in his hand.
He had no memory of drawing it.
'Unless it's been blessed or dipped in some sect's holy wet - blood,
water, semen - it can't harm such as I, gunslinger. For I am more
shade than substance ... yet still the equal to such as yerself, for all
that.'
She thought he would try shooting her, anyway; he saw it in her
eyes. Those shooters are all ye have, her eyes said. Without 'em,
you might as well be back in the tent we dreamed around ye,
caught up in our slings and awaiting our pleasure.
Instead of shooting, he dropped the revolver back into its holster
and launched himself at her with his hands out. Sister Mary uttered
a scream that was mostly surprise, but it was not a long one;
Roland's fingers clamped down on her throat and choked the sound
off before it was fairly started.
The touch of her flesh was obscene - it seemed not just alive but
various beneath his hands, as if it was trying to crawl away from




him. He could feel it running like liquid, flowing, and the sensation
was horrible beyond description. Yet he clamped down harder,
determined to choke the I out of her.
Then there came a blue flash (not in the air, he would think later;
that flash happened inside his head, a single stroke of lightning as
she touch off some brief but powerful brainstorm), and his hands
flew away from h neck. For one moment his dazzled eyes saw
great wet gouges in her flesh - gouges in the shapes of his hands.
Then he was flung backwards hitting the scree on his back and
sliding, striking his head on a jutting rock hard enough to provoke
a second, lesser, flash of light.
'Nay, my pretty man,' she said, grimacing at him, laughing with
those terrible dull eyes of hers. 'Ye don't choke such as I, and I'll
take ye slow yer impertinence - cut ye shallow in a hundred places
to refresh my thirst First, though, I'll have this vowless girl ... and
I'll have those damned bells off her, in the bargain.'
'Come and see if you can!' Jenna cried in a trembling voice, and
shook her head from side to side. The Dark Bells rang mockingly,
provokingly
Mary's grimace of a smile fell away. 'Oh, I can,' she breathed. Her
mouth yawned. In the moonlight, her fangs gleamed in her gums
like bone needles poked through a red pillow. 'I can and I -'
There was a growl from above them. It rose, then splintered into a
volley of snarling barks. Mary turned to her left, and in the
moment before the snarling thing left the rock on which it was
standing, Roland could clearly read the startled bewilderment on
Big Sister's face.
It launched itself at her, only a dark shape against the stars, legs
outstretched so it looked like some sort of weird bat, but even
before it crashed into the woman, striking her in the chest above




her half-raise arms and fastening its own teeth on her throat,
Roland knew exactly what it was.
As the shape bore her over on to her back, Sister Mary uttered a
gibbering shriek that went through Roland's head like the Dark
Bells themselves. He scrambled to his feet, gasping. The shadowy
thing tore at her, forepaws on either side of her head, rear paws
planted on the grave-shroud above her, chest, where the rose had
been.
Roland grabbed Jenna, who was looking down at the fallen Sister
with a kind of frozen fascination.
'Come on!' he shouted. 'Before it decides it wants a bite of you,
too!'
The dog took no notice of them as Roland pulled Jenna past. It had
torn
Sister Mary's head mostly off. Her flesh seemed to be changing,
somehow - decomposing, very likely - but whatever was
happening, Roland did not want to see it. He didn't want Jenna to
see it, either.
They half-walked, half-ran to the top of the ridge, and when they
got there paused for breath in the moonlight, heads down, hands
linked, both of them gasping harshly.
The growling and snarling below them had faded, but was still
faintly audible when Sister Jenna raised her head and asked him,
'What was it? you know - I saw it in your face. And how could it
attack her? We all have power over animals, but she has - had - the
most.'
'Not over that one.' Roland found himself recalling the unfortunate
boy in the next bed. Norman hadn't known why the medallions
kept the Sisters at arm's length - whether it was the gold or the
God. Now Roland knew the answer. 'It was a dog. Just a town-dog.




I saw it in the square, before the green folk knocked me out and
took me to the Sisters. I suppose the other animals that could run
away did run away, but not that one. it had nothing to fear from the
Little Sisters of Eluria, and somehow it knew it didn't. It bears the
sign of the Jesus-man on its chest. Black fur on white. just an
accident of its birth, I imagine. In any case, it's done for her now. I
knew it was lurking around. I heard it barking two or three times.'
'Why?' Jenna whispered. 'Why would it come? Why would it stay?
And why would it take on her as it did?'
Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when
such useless, mystifying questions were raised: 'Ka. Come on.
Let's get as far as we can from this place before we hide up for the
day.'
As far as they could turned out to be eight miles at most ... and
probably, Roland thought as the two of them sank down in a patch
of sweet-smelling sage beneath an overhang of rock, a good deal
less. Five, perhaps. It was him slowing them down; or rather, it
was the residue of the poison in the soup. When it was clear to him
that he could not go farther without help, he asked her for one of
the reeds. She refused, saying that the stuff in it might combine
with the unaccustomed exercise to burst his heart.
'Besides,' she said as they lay back against the embankment of the
little nook they had found, 'they'll not follow. Those that are left -
Michela, Louise, Tamra - will be packing up to move on. They
know to leave when the time comes; that's why the Sisters have
survived as long as they have. As We have. We're strong in some
ways, but weak in many more. Sister
Mary forgot that. It was her arrogance that did for her as much as
the cross-dog, I think.'
She had cached not just his boots and clothes beyond the top of the
ridge, but the smaller of his two purses, as well. When she tried




apologize for not bringing his bedroll and the larger purse (she'd
tried she said, but they were simply too heavy), Roland hushed her
with a finger to her lips. He thought it a miracle to have as much as
he did. And besides (this he did not say, but perhaps she knew it,
anyway), the guns were the only things which really mattered. The
guns of his father, and his father before him, all the way back to
the days of Arthur Eld when dreams about dragons had still walked
the earth.
'Will you be all right?' he asked her as they settled down. The
moon had set, but dawn was still at least three hours away. They
were surrounded the sweet smell of the sage. A purple smell, he
thought it then ... and ever after. Already he could feel it forming a
kind of magic carpet under him, which would soon float him away
to sleep. He thought he had never been so tired.
'Roland, I know not.' But even then, he thought she had known.
Her mother had brought her back once; no mother would bring her
back again. And she had eaten with the others, had taken the
communion of the Sisters. Ka was a wheel; it was also a net from
which none ever escaped.
But then he was too tired to think much of such things ... and what
good would thinking have done, in any case? As she had said, the
bridge was burned. Even if they were to return to the valley,
Roland guess they would find nothing but the cave the Sisters had
called Thoughtful House. The surviving Sisters would have packed
their tent of bad dreams and moved on, just a sound of bells and
singing insects moving down the late night breeze.
He looked at her raised a hand (it felt heavy), and touched the curl
which once more lay across her forehead.
Jenna laughed, embarrassed. 'That one always escapes. It's
wayward Like its mistress.'




She raised her hand to poke it back in, but Roland took her fingers
before she could. 'It's beautiful,' he said. 'Black as night and as
beautiful as forever.'
He sat up - it took an effort; weariness dragged at his body like soft
hands. He kissed the curl. She closed her eyes and sighed. He felt
her trembling beneath his lips. The skin of her brow was very cool;
the dark curve of the wayward curl like silk.
'Push back your wimple, as you did before,' he said.
She did it without speaking. For a moment he only looked at her.
Jenna looked back gravely, her eyes never leaving his. He ran his
hands through her hair, feeling its smooth weight (like rain, he
thought, rain with weight), then took her shoulders and kissed each
of her cheeks. He drew back for a moment.
'Would ye kiss me as a man does a woman, Roland? On my
mouth?'
Aye.
And, as he had thought of doing as he lay caught in the silken
infirmary tent, he kissed her lips. She kissed back with the clumsy
sweetness of one who has never kissed before, except perhaps in
dreams. Roland thought to make love to her then - it had been long
and long, and she was beautiful but he fell asleep instead, still
kissing her.
He dreamed of the cross-dog, barking its way across a great open
landscape. He followed, wanting to see the source of its agitation,
and soon he did. At the far edge of that plain stood the Dark
Tower, its smoky stone outlined by the dull orange ball of a setting
sun, its fearful windows rising in a spiral. The dog stopped at the
sight of it and began to howl.
Bells - peculiarly shrill and as terrible as doom - began to ring.
Dark bells, he knew, but their tone was as bright as silver. At their




sound, the dark windows of the Tower glowed with a deadly red
light - the red of poisoned roses. A scream of unbearable pain rose
in the night.
The dream blew away in an instant, but the scream remained, now
unravelling to a moan. That part was real - as real as the Tower,
brooding in its place at the very end of End-World. Roland came
back to the brightness of dawn and the soft purple smell of desert
sage. He had drawn both his guns, and was on his feet before he
had fully realized he was awake.
Jenna was gone. Her boots lay empty beside his purse. A little
distance from them, her jeans lay as flat as discarded snakeskins.
Above them was her shirt. It was, Roland observed with wonder,
still tucked into the pants. Beyond them was her empty wimple,
with its fringe of bells lying on the powdery ground. He thought
for a moment that they were ringing, mistaking the sound he heard
at first.
Not bells but bugs. The doctor-bugs. They sang in the sage,
sounding a bit like crickets, but far sweeter.
'Jenna?'
No answer ... unless the bugs answered. For their singing suddenly
stopped.
'Jenna?'
Nothing. Only the wind and the smell of the sage.
Without thinking about what he was doing (like play-acting,
reasoned thought was not his strong suit), he bent, picked up the
wimple, and shook it. The Dark Bells rang.
For a moment there was nothing. Then a thousand small dark
creatures came scurrying out of the sage, gathering on the broken
earth. Roland thought of the battalion marching down the side of
the freighter's and took a step back. Then he held his position. As,
he saw, the bugs holding theirs.
He believed he understood. Some of this understanding came from
his memory of how Sister Mary's flesh had felt under his hands...
how it had felt various, not one thing but many. Part of it was what
she had Said: I have supped with them. Such as them might never
die but they might change.
The insects trembled, a dark cloud of them blotting out the white
powdery earth.
Roland shook the bells again.
A shiver ran through them in a subtle wave, and then they began
form a shape. They hesitated as if unsure of how to go on,
regrouped, began again. What they eventually made on the
whiteness of the sand there between the blowing fluffs of lilac-
coloured sage was one of Great Letters: the letter C.
Except it wasn't really a letter, the gunslinger saw; it was a curl.
They began to sing, and to Roland it sounded as if they were
singing his name.
The bells fell from his unnerved hand, and when they struck
ground and chimed there, the mass of bugs broke apart, running
every direction. He thought of calling them back - ringing the bell
again might do that - but to what purpose? To what end?
Ask me not, Roland. 'Tis done, the bridge burned.
Yet she had come to him one last time, imposing her will over
thousand various parts that should have lost the ability to think
when the whole lost its cohesion . . . and yet she had thought,
somehow enough to make that shape. How much effort might that
have taken?




They fanned wider and wider, some disappearing into the sage,
some trundling up the sides of rock overhang, pouring into the
cracks where they would, mayhap, wait out the heat of the day.
They were gone. She was gone.
Roland sat down on the ground and put his hands over his face. He
thought he might weep, but in time the urge passed; when he raised
his head again, his eyes were as dry as the desert he would
eventually come to, still following the trail of Walter, the man in
black.
If there's to be damnation, she had said, let it be of my choosing,
not theirs.
He knew a little about damnation himself ... and he had an idea that
the lessons, far from being done, were just beginning.
She had brought him the purse with his tobacco in it. He rolled a
cigarette and smoked it hunkered over his knees. He smoked it
down to a glowing roach, looking at her empty clothes the while,
remembering the steady gaze of her dark eyes. Remembering the
scorch-marks on her fingers from the chain of the medallion. Yet
she had picked it up, because she had known he would want it; had
dared that pain, and Roland now wore both around his neck.
When the sun was fully up, the gunslinger moved on west. He
would find another horse eventually, or a mule, but for now he was
content to walk. All that day he was haunted by a ringing, singing
sound in his ears, like bells. Several times he stopped and looked
around, sure he would see a dark following shape flowing over the
ground, chasing after as the shadows of our best and worst
memories chase after, but no shape was ever there. He was alone in
the low hill country west of Eluria.
Quite alone.




  The Night
 of The Tiger




STEPHEN KING



               From
  Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1978




I first saw Mr. Legere when the circus swung through Steubenville,
but I'd only been with the show for two weeks; he might have been
making his irregular visits indefinitely. No one much wanted to
talk about Mr. Legere, not even that last night when it seemed that
the world was coming to an end -- the night that Mr. Indrasil
disappeared.
But if I'm going to tell it to you from the beginning, I should start
by saying that I'm Eddie Johnston, and I was born and raised in
Sauk City. Went to school there, had my first girl there, and
worked in Mr. Lillie's five-and-dime there for a while after I
graduated from high school. That was a few years back... more
than I like to count, sometimes. Not that Sauk City's such a bad
place; hot, lazy summer nights sitting on the front porch is all right
for some folks, but it just seemed to itch me, like sitting in the
same chair too long. So I quit the five-and-dime and joined Farnum
& Williams' All-American 3-Ring Circus and Side Show. I did it
in a moment of giddiness when the calliope music kind of fogged
my judgment, I guess.
So I became a roustabout, helping put up tents and take them
down, spreading sawdust, cleaning cages, and sometimes selling
cotton candy when the regular salesman had to go away and bark
for Chips Baily, who had malaria and sometimes had to go
someplace far away, and holler. Mostly things that kids do for free
passes -- things I used to do when I was a kid. But times change.
They don't seem to come around like they used to.
We swung through Illinois and Indiana that hot summer, and the
crowds were good and everyone was happy. Everyone except Mr.
Indrasil. Mr. Indrasil was never happy. He was the lion tamer, and
he looked like old pictures I've seen of Rudolph Valentine. He was
tall, with handsome, arrogant features and a shock of wild black
hair. And strange, mad eyes -- the maddest eyes I've ever seen. He
was silent most of the time; two syllables from Mr. Indrasil was a




sermon. All the circus people kept a mental as well as a physical
distance, because his rages were legend. There was a whispered
story about coffee spilled on his hands after a particularly difficult
performance and a murder that was almost done to a young
roustabout before Mr. Indrasil could be hauled off him. I don't
know about that. I do know that I grew to fear him worse than I
had cold-eyed Mr. Edmont, my high school principal, Mr. Lillie, or
even my father, who was capable of cold dressing-downs that
would leave the recipient quivering with shame and dismay.
When I cleaned the big cats' cages, they were always spotless. The
memory of the few times I had the vituperative wrath of Mr.
Indrasil called down on me still have the power to turn my knees
watery in retrospect.
Mostly it was his eyes - large and dark and totally blank. The eyes,
and the feeling that a man capable of controlling seven watchful
cats in a small cage must be part savage himself.
And the only two things he was afraid of were Mr. Legere and the
circus's one tiger, a huge beast called Green Terror.
As I said, I first saw Mr. Legere in Steubenville, and he was staring
into Green Terror's cage as if the tiger knew all the secrets of life
and death.
He was lean, dark, quiet. His deep, recessed eyes held an
expression of pain and brooding violence in their green-flecked
depths, and his hands were always crossed behind his back as he
stared moodily in at the tiger.
Green Terror was a beast to be stared at. He was a huge, beautiful
specimen with a flawless striped coat, emerald eyes, and heavy
fangs like ivory spikes. His roars usually filled the circus grounds -
fierce, angry, and utterly savage. He seemed to scream defiance
and frustration at the whole world.




Chips Baily, who had been with Farnum &Williams since Lord
knew when, told me that Mr. Indrasil used to use Green Terror in
his act, until one night when the tiger leaped suddenly from its
perch and almost ripped his head from his shoulders before he
could get out of' the cage. I noticed that Mr. Indrasil always wore,
his hair long down the back of his neck.
I can still remember the tableau that day in Steubenville. It was
hot, sweatingly hot, and we had a shirtsleeve crowd. That was why
Mr. Legere and Mr. Indrasil stood out. Mr. Legere, standing
silently by the tiger cage, was fully dressed in a suit and vest, his
face unmarked by perspiration. And Mr. Indrasil, clad in one of his
beautiful silk shirts and white whipcord breeches, was staring at
them both, his face dead-white, his eyes bulging in lunatic anger,
hate, and fear. He was carrying a currycomb and brush, and his
hands were trembling as they clenched on them spasmodically.
Suddenly he saw me, and his anger found vent. "You!" He
shouted. "Johnston!"
"Yes sir?" I felt a crawling in the pit of my stomach. I knew I was
about to have the wrath of Indrasil vented on me, and the thought
turned me weak with fear. I like to think I'm as brave as the next,
and if it had been anyone else, I think I would have been fully
determined to stand up for myself. But it wasn't anyone else. It was
Mr. Indrasil, and his eyes were mad.
"These cages, Johnston. Are they supposed to be clean?" He
pointed a finger, and I followed it. I saw four errant wisps of straw
and an incriminating puddle of hose water in the far corner of one.
"Y-yes, sir," I said, and what was intended to be firmness became
palsied bravado.
Silence, like the electric pause before a downpour. People were
beginning to look, and I was dimly aware that Mr. Legere was
staring at us with his bottomless eyes.




"Yes, sir?" Mr. Indrasil thundered suddenly. "Yes, sir? Yes, sir?
Don't insult my intelligence, boy! Don't you think I can see?
Smell? Did you use the disinfectant?''
"I used disinfectant yes----"
"Don't answer me back!" He screeched, and then the sudden drop
in his voice made my skin crawl. "Don't you dare answer me
back." Everyone was staring now. I wanted to retch, to die. "Now
you get the hell into that tool shed, and you get that disinfectant
and swab out those cages," he whispered, measuring every word.
One hand suddenly shot out, grasping my shoulder. "And don't you
ever, ever, speak back to me again."
I don't know where the words came from, but they were suddenly
there, spilling off my lips. "I didn't speak back to you, Mr. Indrasil,
and I don't like you saying I did. I-- resent it. Now let me go."
His face went suddenly red, then white, then almost saffron with
rage. His eyes were blazing doorways to hell.
Right then I thought I was going to die.
He made an inarticulate gagging sound, and the grip on my
shoulder became excruciating. His right hand went up...up...up,
and then descended with unbelievable speed.
If that hand had connected with my face, it would have knocked
me senseless at best. At worst, it would have broken my neck.
It did not connect.
Another hand materialized magically out of space, right in front of
me. The two straining limbs came together with a flat Smacking
sound. It was Mr. Legere.
"Leave the boy alone," he said emotionlessly.
Mr. Indrasil stared at him for a long second, and I think there was
nothing so unpleasant in the whole business as watching the fear of




Mr. Legere and the mad lust to hurt (or to kill!) mix in those
terrible eyes.
Then he turned and stalked away.
I turned to look at Mr. Legere. "Thank you," I said.
"Don't thank me." And it wasn't a "don't thank me," but a "don't
thank me.'' Not a gesture of modesty but a literal command. In a
sudden flash of intuition empathy if you will I understood
exactly what he meant by that comment. I was a pawn in what
must have been a long combat between the two of them. I had been
captured by Mr. Legere rather than Mr. Indrasil. He had stopped
the lion tamer not because he felt for me, but because it gained him
an advantage, however slight, in their private war.
"What's your name?" I asked, not at all offended by what I had
inferred. He had, after all, been honest with me.
"Legere," he said briefly. He turned to go.
"Are you with a circus?" I asked, not wanting to let him go so
easily. "You seemed to know --- him."
A faint smile touched his thin lips, and warmth kindled in his eyes
for a moment; "No. You might call me a-policeman." And before I
could reply, he had disappeared into the surging throng passing by.
The next day we picked up stakes and moved on.
I saw Mr. Legere again in Danville and, two weeks later, in
Chicago. In the time between I tried to avoid Mr. Indrasil as much
as possible and kept the cat cages spotlessly clean. On the day
before we pulled out for St. Louis, I asked Chips Baily and Sally
O'Hara, the red-headed wire walker, if Mr. Legere and Mr. Indrasil
knew each other. I was pretty sure they did, because Mr. Legere
was hardly following the circus to eat our fabulous lime ice.




Sally and Chips looked at each other over their coffee cups. "No
one knows much about what's between those, two," she said. "But
it's been going on for a long time maybe twenty years. Ever since
Mr. Indrasil came over from Ringling Brothers, and maybe before
that."
Chips nodded. "This Legere guy picks up the circus almost every
year when we swing through the Midwest and stays with us until
we catch the train for Florida in Little Rock. Makes old Leopard
Man touchy as one of his cats."
"He told me he was a police-man," I said. "What do you suppose
he looks for around here? You don't suppose Mr. Indrasil--?"
Chips and Sally looked at each other strangely, and both just about
broke their backs getting up. "Got to see those weights and counter
weights get stored right," Sally said, and Chips muttered something
not too convincing about checking on the rear axle of his U-Haul.
And that's about the way any conversation concerning Mt. Indrasil
or Mr. Legere usually broke up--- hurriedly, with many hard-
forced excuses.
We said farewell to Illinois and comfort at the same time. A killing
hot spell came on, seemingly at the very instant we crossed the
border, and it stayed with us for the next month and a half, as we
moved slowly across Missouri and into Kansas. Everyone grew
short of temper, including the animals. And that, of course,
included the cats, which were Mr. Indrasil's responsibility. He rode
the roustabouts unmercifully, and myself in particular. I grinned
and tried to bear it, even though I had my own case of prickly heat.
You just don't argue with a crazy man, and I'd pretty well decided
that was what Mr. Indrasil was.
No one was getting any sleep, and that is the curse of all circus
performers. Loss of sleep slows up reflexes, and slow reflexes
make for danger. In Independence Sally O'Hara fell seventy-five




feet into the nylon netting and fractured her shoulder. Andrea
Solienni, our bareback rider, fell off one of her horses during
rehearsal and was knocked unconscious by a flying hoof. Chips
Baily suffered silently with the fever that was always with him, his
face a waxen mask, with cold perspiration clustered at each temple.
And in many ways, Mr. Indrasil had the roughest row to hoe of all.
The cats were nervous and short-tempered, and every time he
stepped into the Demon Cat Cage, as it was billed, he took his life
in his hands. He was feeding the lions ordinate amounts of raw
meat right before he went on, something that lion tamers rarely do,
contrary to popular belief. His face grew drawn and haggard, and
his eyes were wild.
Mr. Legere was almost always there, by Green Terror's cage,
watching him. And that, of course, added to Mr. Indrasil's load.
The circus began eyeing the silk-shirted figure nervously as he
passed, and I knew they were all thinking the same thing I was:
He's going to crack wide open, and when he does ---
When he did, God alone knew what would happen.
The hot spell went on, and temperatures were climbing well into
the nineties every day. It seemed as if the rain gods were mocking
us. Every town we left would receive the showers of blessing.
Every town we entered was hot, parched, sizzling.
And one night, on the road between Kansas City and Green Bluff, I
saw something that upset me more than anything else.
It was hot -- abominably hot. It was no good even trying to sleep. I
rolled about on my cot like a man in a fever-delirium, chasing the
sandman but never quite catching him. Finally I got up, pulled on
my pants, and went outside.
We had pulled off into a small field and drawn into a circle. Myself
and two other roustabouts had unloaded the cats so they could
catch whatever breeze there might be. The cages were there now,




painted dull silver by the swollen Kansas moon, and a tall figure in
white whipcord breeches was standing by the biggest of them. Mr.
Indrasil.
He was baiting Green Terror with a long, pointed pike. The big cat
was padding silently around the cage, trying to avoid the sharp tip.
And the frightening thing was, when the staff did punch into the
tiger's flesh, it did not roar in pain and anger as it should have. It
maintained an ominous silence, more terrifying to the person who
knows cats than the loudest of roars.
It had gotten to Mr. Indrasil, too. "Quiet bastard, aren't you?" He
grunted. Powerful arms flexed, and the iron shaft slid forward.
Green Terror flinched, and his eyes rolled horribly. But he did not
make a sound. "Yowl!" Mr. Indrasil hissed. "Go ahead and yowl,
you monster Yowl!" And he drove his spear deep into the tiger's
flank.
Then I saw something odd. It seemed that a shadow moved in the
darkness under one of the far wagons, and the moonlight seemed to
glint on staring eyes -- green eyes.
A cool wind passed silently through the clearing, lifting dust and
rumpling my hair.
Mr. Indrasil looked up, and there was a queer listening expression
on his face. Suddenly he dropped the bar, turned, and strode back
to his trailer.
I stared again at the far wagon, but the shadow was gone. Green
Tiger stood motionlessly at the bars of his cage, staring at Mr.
Indrasil's trailer. And the thought came to me that it hated Mr.
Indrasil not because he was cruel or vicious, for the tiger respects
these qualities in its own animalistic way, but rather because he
was a deviate from even the tiger's savage norm. He was a rogue.
That's the only way I can put it. Mr. Indrasil was not only a human
tiger, but a rogue tiger as well.




The thought jelled inside me, disquieting and a little scary. I went
back inside, but still I could not sleep.

The heat went on.
Every day we fried, every night we tossed and turned, sweating
and sleepless. Everyone was painted red with sunburn, and there
were fistfights over trifling affairs. Everyone was reaching the
point of explosion.
Mr. Legere remained with us, a silent watcher, emotionless on the
surface, but, I sensed, with deep-running currents of - what? Hate?
Fear? Vengeance? I could not place it. But he was potentially
dangerous, I was sure of that. Perhaps more so than Mr. Indrasil
was, if anyone ever lit his particular fuse.
He was at the circus at every performance, always dressed in his
nattily creased brown suit, despite the killing temperatures. He
stood silently by Green Terror's cage, seeming to commune deeply
with the tiger, who was always quiet when he was around.
From Kansas to Oklahoma, with no letup in the temperature. A day
without a heat prostration case was a rare day indeed. Crowds were
beginning to drop off; who wanted to sit under a stifling canvas
tent when there was an air-conditioned movie just around the
block?
We were all as jumpy as cats, to coin a particularly applicable
phrase. And as we set down stakes in Wildwood Green, Oklahoma,
I think we all knew a climax of some sort was close at hand. And
most of us knew it would involve Mr. Indrasil. A bizarre
occurrence had taken place just prior to our first Wildwood
performance. Mr. Indrasil had been in the Demon Cat Cage,
putting the ill-tempered lions through their paces. One of them
missed its balance on its pedestal, tottered and almost regained it.




Then, at that precise moment, Green Terror let out a terrible, ear-
splitting roar.
The lion fell, landed heavily, and suddenly launched itself with
rifle-bullet accuracy at Mr. Indrasil. With a frightened curse, he
heaved his chair at the cat's feet, tangling up the driving legs. He
darted out just as the lion smashed against the bars.
As he shakily collected himself preparatory to re-entering the cage,
Green Terror let out another roar -- but this one monstrously like a
huge, disdainful chuckle.
Mr. Indrasil stared at the beast, white-faced, then turned and
walked away. He did not come out of his trailer all afternoon.
That afternoon wore on interminably. But as the temperature
climbed, we all began looking hopefully toward the west, where
huge banks of thunderclouds were forming.
"Rain, maybe," I told Chips, stopping by his barking platform in
front of the sideshow.
But he didn't respond to my hopeful grin. "Don't like it," he said.
"No wind. Too hot. Hail or tornadoes." His face grew grim. "It
ain't no picnic, ridin' out a tornado with a pack of crazy-wild
animals all over the place, Eddie. I've thanked God mor'n once
when we've gone through the tornado belt that we don't have no
elephants.
"Yeah" he added gloomily, "you better hope them clouds stay right
on the horizon."
But they didn't. They moved slowly toward us, cyclopean pillars in
the sky, purple at the bases and awesome blue-black through the
cumulonimbus. All air movement ceased, and the heat lay on us
like a woolen winding-shroud. Every now and again, thunder
would clear its throat further west.




About four, Mr. Farnum himself, ringmaster and half-owner of the
circus, appeared and told us there would be no evening
performance; just batten down and find a convenient hole to crawl
into in case of trouble. There had been corkscrew funnels spotted
in several places between Wildwood and Oklahoma City, some
within forty miles of us.
There was only a small crowd when the announcement came,
apathetically wandering through the sideshow exhibits or ogling
the animals. But Mr. Legere had not been present all day; the only
person at Green Terror's cage was a sweaty high-school boy with
clutch of books. When Mr. Farnum announced the U.S. Weather
Bureau tornado warning that had been issued, he hurried quickly
away.
I and the other two roustabouts spent the rest of the-afternoon
working our tails off, securing tents, loading animals back into
their wagons, and making generally sure that everything was nailed
down.
Finally only the cat cages were left, and there was a special
arrangement for those. Each cage had a special mesh "breezeway"
accordioned up against it, which, when extended completely,
connected with the Demon Cat Cage. When the smaller cages had
to be moved, the felines could be herded into the big cage while
they were loaded up. The big cage itself rolled on gigantic casters
and could be muscled around to a position where each cat could be
let back into its original cage. It sounds complicated, and it was,
but it was just the only way.
We did the lions first, then Ebony Velvet, the docile black panther
that had set the circus back almost one season's receipts. It was a
tricky business coaxing them up and then back through the
breezeways, but all of us preferred it to calling Mr. Indrasil to
help.




By the time we were ready for Green Terror, twilight had come ---
a queer, yellow twilight that hung humidly around us. The sky
above had taken on a flat, shiny aspect that I had never seen and
which I didn't like in the least.
"Better hurry," Mr. Farnum said, as we laboriously trundled the
Demon Cat Cage back to where we could hook it to the back of
Green Terror's show cage. "Barometer's falling off fast." He shook
his head worriedly. "Looks bad, boys. Bad.'' He hurried on, still
shaking his head.
We got Green Terror's breezeway hooked up and opened the back
of his cage. "In you go," I said encouragingly.
Green Terror looked at me menacingly and didn't move.
Thunder rumbled again, louder, closer, sharper. The sky had gone
jaundice, the ugliest color I have ever seen. Wind-devils began to
pick jerkily at our clothes and whirl away the flattened candy
wrappers and cotton-candy cones that littered the area.
"Come on, come on," I urged and poked him easily with the blunt-
tipped rods we were given to herd them with.
Green Terror roared ear-splittingly, and one paw lashed out with
blinding speed. The hardwood pole was jerked from my hands and
splintered as if it had been a greenwood twig. The tiger was on his
feet now, and there was murder in his eyes.
"Look," I said shakily. "One of you will have to go get Mr.
Indrasil, that's all. We can't wait around."
As if to punctuate my words, thunder cracked louder, the clapping
of mammoth hands.
Kelly Nixon and Mike McGregor flipped for it; I was excluded
because of my previous run-in with Mr. Indrasil. Kelly drew the
task, threw us a wordless glance that said he would prefer facing
the storm and then started off.




He was gone almost ten minutes. The wind was picking up
velocity now, and twilight was darkening into a weird six o'clock
night. I was scared, and am not afraid to admit it. That rushing,
featureless sky, the deserted circus grounds, the sharp, tugging
wind-vortices all that makes a memory that will stay with me
always, undimmed.
And Green Terror would not budge into his breezeway.
Kelly Nixon came rushing back, his eyes wide. "I pounded on his
door for 'most five minutes!" He gasped. "Couldn't raise him!"
We looked at each other, at a loss. Green Terror was a big
investment for the circus. He couldn't just be left in the open. I
turned bewilderedly, looking for Chips, Mr. Farnum, or anybody
who could tell me what to do. But everyone was gone. The tiger
was our responsibility. I considered trying to load the cage bodily
into the trailer, but I wasn't going to get my fingers in that cage.
"Well, we've just got to go and get him," I said. "The three of us.
Come on." And we ran toward Mr. Indrasil's trailer through the
gloom of coming night.

We pounded on his door until he must have thought all the demons
of hell were after him. Thankfully, it finally jerked open. Mr.
Indrasil swayed and stared down at us, his mad eyes rimmed and
oversheened with drink. He smelled like a distillery.
"Damn you, leave me alone," he snarled.
"Mr. Indrasil --" I had to shout over the rising whine of the wind. It
was like no storm I had ever heard of or read about, out there. It
was like the end of the world .
"You," he gritted softly. He reached down and gathered my shirt
up in a knot. "I'm going to teach you a lesson you'll never forget."




He glared at Kelly and Mike, cowering back in the moving storm
shadows. "Get out!"
They ran. I didn't blame them; I've told you -- Mr. Indrasil was
crazy. And not just ordinary crazy -- he was like a crazy animal,
like one of his own cats gone bad.
"All right," he muttered, staring down at me, his eyes like
hurricane lamps. "No juju to protect you now. No grisgris." His
lips twitched in a wild, horrible smile. "He isn't here now, is he?
We're two of a kind, him and me. Maybe the only two left. My
nemesis -- and I'm his." He was rambling, and I didn't try to stop
him. At least his mind was off me.
"Turned that cat against me, back in '58. Always had the power
more'n me. Fool could make a million -- the two of us could make
a million if he wasn't so damned high and mighty...what's that?"
It was Green Terror, and he had begun to roar ear-splittingly.
"Haven't you got that damned tiger in?" He screamed, almost
falsetto. He shook me like a rag doll.
"He won't go!" I found myself yelling back. "You've got to --"
But he flung me away. I stumbled over the fold-up steps in front of
his trailer and crashed into a bone-shaking heap at the bottom.
With something between a sob and a curse, Mr. Indrasil strode past
me, face mottled with anger and fear.
I got up, drawn after him as if hypnotized. Some intuitive part of
me realized I was about to see the last act played out.
Once clear of the shelter of Mr. Indrasil's trailer, the power of the
wind was appalling. It screamed like a runaway freight train. I was
an ant, a speck, an unprotected molecule before that thundering,
cosmic force.
And Mr. Legere was standing by Green Terror's cage.




It was like a tableau from Dante. The near-empty cage-clearing
inside the circle of trailers; the two men, facing each other silently,
their clothes and hair rippled by the shrieking gale; the boiling sky
above; the twisting wheatfields in the background, like damned
souls bending to the whip of Lucifer.
"It's time, Jason," Mr. Legere said, his words flayed across the
clearing by the wind.
Mr. Indrasil's wildly whipping hair lifted around the livid scar
across the back of his neck. His fists clenched, but he said nothing.
I could almost feel him gathering his will, his life force, his id. It
gathered around him like an unholy nimbus.
And, then, I saw with sudden horror that Mr. Legere was
unhooking Green Terror's breezeway -- and the back of the cage
was open!
I cried out, but the wind ripped my words away.
The great tiger leaped out and almost flowed past Mr. Legere. Mr.
Indrasil swayed, but did not run. He bent his head and stared down
at the tiger.
And Green Terror stopped.
He swung his huge head back to Mr. Legere, almost turned, and
then slowly turned back to Mr. Indrasil again. There was a
terrifyingly palpable sensation of directed force in the air, a mesh
of conflicting wills centered around the tiger. And the wills were
evenly matched.
I think, in the end, it was Green Terror's own will -- his hate of Mr.
Indrasil -- that tipped the scales.
The cat began to advance, his eyes hellish, flaring beacons. And.
something strange began to happen to Mr. Indrasil. He seemed to
be folding in on himself, shriveling, accordioning. The silk-shirt




lost shape, the dark, whipping hair became a hideous toadstool
around his collar.
Mr. Legere called something across to him, and, simultaneously,
Green Terror leaped.
I never saw the outcome. The next moment I was slammed flat on
my back, and the breath seemed to be sucked from my body. I
caught one crazily tilted glimpse of a huge, towering cyclone
funnel, and then the darkness descended.
When I awoke, I was in my cot just aft of the grainery bins in the
all-purpose storage trailer we carried. My body felt as if it had
been beaten with padded Indian clubs.
Chips Baily appeared, his face lined and pale. He saw my eyes
were open and grinned relievedly. "Didn't know as you were ever
gonna wake up. How you feel?"
"Dislocated," I said. "What happened? How'd I get here?"
"We found you piled up against Mr. Indrasil's trailer. The tornado
almost carried you away for a souvenir, m'boy."
At the mention of Mr. Indrasil, all the ghastly memories came
flooding back. "Where is Mr. Indrasil? And Mr. Legere?"
His eyes went murky, and he started to make some kind of an
evasive answer.
"Straight talk," I said, struggling up on one elbow. "I have to know,
Chips. I have to."
Something in my face must have decided him. "Okay. But this isn't
exactly what we told the cops -- in fact we hardly told the cops any
of it. No sense havin' people think we're crazy. Anyhow, Indrasil's
gone. I didn't even know that Legere guy was around."
"And Green Tiger?"
Chips' eyes were unreadable again. "He and the other tiger fought
to death."
"Other tiger? There's no other ---"
"Yeah, but they found two of 'em, lying in each other's blood. Hell
of a mess. Ripped each other's throats out."
"What -- where --"
"Who knows? We just told the cops we had two tigers. Simpler
that way." And before I could say another word, he was gone.
And that's the end of my story -- except for two little items. The
words Mr. Legere shouted just before the tornado hit: "When a
man and an animal live in the same shell, Indrasil, the instincts
determine the mold!"
The other thing is what keeps me awake nights. Chips told me
later, offering it only for what it might be worth. What he told me
was that the strange tiger had a long scar on the back of its neck.




        THE
     REPLOIDS

     Stephen King




              Appeared in
         Night Visions #5, 1988




No one knew exactly how long it had been going on. Not long.
Two days, two weeks; it couldn't have been much longer than that,
Cheyney reasoned. Not that it mattered. It was just that people got
to watch a little more of the show with the added thrill of knowing
the show was real. When the United States - the whole world -
found out about the Reploids, it was pretty spectacular. just as
well, maybe. These days, unless it's spectacular, a thing can go on
damned near forever. It is neither believed nor disbelieved. It is
simply part of the weird Godhead mantra that made up the
accelerating flow of events and experience as the century neared its
end. It's harder to get peoples' attention. It takes machine-guns in a
crowded airport or a live grenade rolled up the aisle of a bus load
of nuns stopped at a roadblock in some Central American country
overgrown with guns and greenery. The Reploids became national
- and international - news on the morning of November 30, 1989,
after what happened during the first two chaotic minutes of the
Tonight Show taping in Beautiful Downtown Burbank, California,
the night before.
The floor manager watched intently as the red sweep secondhand
moved upward toward the twelve. The studio audience
clockwatched as intently as the floor manager. When the red sweep
second-hand crossed the twelve, it would be five o'clock and
taping of the umpty-umptieth Tonight Show would commence.
As the red second-hand passed the eight, the audience stirred and
muttered with its own peculiar sort of stage fright. After all, they
represented America, didn't they? Yes!
"Let's have it quiet, people, please," the floor manager said
pleasantly, and the audience quieted like obedient children. Doc
Severinsen's drummer ran off a fast little riff on his snare and then
held his sticks easily between thumbs and fingers, wrists loose,
watching the floor manager instead of the clock, as the show -
people always did. For crew and performers, the floor manager




was the clock. When the second-hand passed the ten, the floor
manager counted down aloud to four, and then held up three
fingers, two fingers, one finger ... and then a clenched fist from
which one finger pointed dramatically at the audience. An
APPLAUSE sign lit up, but the studio audience was primed to
whoop it up; it would have made no difference if it had been
written in Sanskrit.
So things started off just as they were supposed to start off: dead
on time. This was not so surprising; there were crewmembers on
the Tonight Show who, had they been LAPD officers, could have
retired with full benefits. The Doc Severinsen band, one of the best
showbands in the world, launched into the familiar theme: Ta-da-
da-Da-da ... and the large, rolling voice of Ed
McMahon cried enthusiastically: "From Los Angeles,
entertainment capital of the world, it's The Tonight Show, live,
with Johnny Carson! Tonight, Johnny's guests are actress Cybill
Shepherd of Moonlighting!" Excited applause from the audience.
"Magician Doug Henning!" Even louder applause from the
audience. "Pee Wee Herman!" A fresh wave of applause, this time
including hoots of joy from Pee Wee's rooting section. "From
Germany, the Flying Schnauzers, the world's only canine
acrobats!" Increased applause, with a mixture of laughter from the
audience. "Not to mention Doc Severinsen, the world's only Flying
Bandleader, and his canine band!"
The band members not playing horns obediently barked. The
audience laughed harder, applauded harder.
In the control room of Studio C, no one was laughing.
A man in a loud sport-coat with a shock of curly black hair was
standing in the wings, idly snapping his fingers and looking across
the stage at Ed, but that was all.




The director signaled for Number   Two Cam's medium shot on Ed
for the umpty-umptieth time, and   there was Ed on the ON
SCREEN monitors. He barely heard   someone mutter, "Where the
hell is he?" before Ed's rolling   tones announced, also for the
umpty-umptieth time: "And now heeeere's JOHNNY!"
Wild applause from the audience.
"Camera Three," the director snapped.
"But there's only that-"
"Camera Three, goddammit!"
Camera Three came up on the ON SCREEN monitor, showing
every TV director's private nightmare, a dismally empty stage ...
and then someone, some stranger, was striding confidently into
that empty space, just as if he had every right in the world to be
there, filling it with unquestionable presence, charm, and authority.
But, whoever he was, he was most definitely not Johnny Carson.
Nor was it any of the other familiar faces TV and studio audiences
had grown used to during Johnny's absences. This man was taller
than Johnny, and instead of the familiar silver hair, there was a
luxuriant cap of almost Pan-like black curls. The stranger's hair
was so black that in places it seemed to glow almost blue, like
Superman's hair in the comic-books. The sport-coat he wore was
not quite loud enough to put him in the Pleesda-Meetcha-Is-This-
The-Missus? car salesman category, but Carson would not have
touched it with a twelve-foot pole.
The audience applause continued, but it first seemed to grow
slightly bewildered, and then clearly began to thin.
"What the fuck's going on?" someone in the control room asked.
The director simply watched, mesmerized.
Instead of the familiar swing of the invisible golf-club, punctuated
by a drum-riff and high-spirited hoots of approval from the studio




audience, this dark-haired, broad-shouldered, loud-jacketed,
unknown gentleman began to move his hands up and down, eyes
flicking rhythmically from his moving palms to a spot just above
his head - he was miming a juggler with a lot of fragile items in the
air, and doing it with the easy grace of the long-time showman. It
was only something in his face, something as subtle as a shadow,
that told you the objects were eggs or something, and would break
if dropped. It was, in fact, very like the way Johnny's eyes
followed the invisible ball down the invisible fairway, registering
one that had been righteously stroked ... unless, of course, he chose
to vary the act, which he could and did do from time to time, and
without even breathing hard.
He made a business of dropping the last egg, or whatever the
fragile object was, and his eyes followed it to the floor with
exaggerated dismay. Then, for a moment, he froze. Then he
glanced toward Cam Three Left ... toward Doc and the orchestra,
in other words.
After repeated viewings of the videotape, Dave Cheyney came to
what seemed to him to be an irrefutable conclusion, although many
of his colleagues - including his partner - questioned it.
"He was waiting for a sting," Cheyney said. "Look, you can see it
on his face. It's as old as burlesque."
His partner, Pete Jacoby, said, "I thought burlesque was where the
girl with the heroin habit took off her clothes while the guy with
the heroin habit played the trumpet."
Cheyney gestured at him impatiently. "Think of the lady that used
to play the piano in the silent movies, then. Or the one that used to
do schmaltz on the organ during the radio soaps."
Jacoby looked at him, wide-eyed. 'Mid they have those things
when you were a kid, daddy?" he asked in a falsetto voice.




"Will you for once be serious?" Cheyney asked him. "Because this
is a serious thing we got here, I think."
"What we got here is very simple. We got a nut."
"No," Cheyney said, and hit rewind on the VCR again with one
hand while he lit a fresh cigarette with the other. "What we got is a
seasoned performer who's mad as hell because the guy on the snare
dropped his cue." He paused thoughtfully and added: "Christ,
Johnny does it all the time. And if the guy who was supposed to
lay in the sting dropped his cue, I think he'd look the same way.
By then it didn't matter. The stranger who wasn't Johnny Carson
had time to recover, to look at a flabbergasted Ed McMahon and
say, "The moon must be full tonight, Ed - do you think - " And that
was when the NBC security guards came out and grabbed him.
"Hey! What the fuck do you think you're - "
But by then they had dragged him away.
In the control room of Studio C, there was total silence. The
audience monitors picked up the same silence. Camera Four was
swung toward the audience, and showed a picture of one hundred
and fifty stunned, silent faces. Camera Two, the one medium-close
on Ed McMahon, showed a man who looked almost cosmically
befuddled.
The director took a package of Winstons from his breast pocket,
took one out, put it in his mouth, took it out again and reversed it
so the filter was facing away from him, and abruptly bit the
cigarette in two. He threw the filtered half in one direction and spat
the unfiltered half in another.
"Get up a show from the library with Rickles," he said. "No Joan
Rivers. And if I see Totie Fields, someone's going to get fired."
Then he strode away, head down. He shoved a chair with such
violence on his way out of the control room that it struck the wall,




rebounded, nearly fractured the skull of a white-faced intern from
USC, and fell on its side.
One of the PA's told the intern in a low voice, "Don't worry; that's
just Fred's way of committing honorable seppuku."
The man who was not Johnny Carson was taken, bellowing loudly
not about his lawyer but his team of lawyers, to the Burbank Police
Station. In Burbank, as in Beverly Hills and Hollywood Heights,
there is a wing of the police station which is known simply as
"special security functions." This may cover many aspects of the
sometimes crazed world of Tinsel-Town law enforcement. The
cops don't like it, the cops don't respect it ... but they ride with it.
You don't shit where you eat. Rule One.
"Special security functions" might be the place to which a coke-
snorting movie-star whose last picture grossed seventy million
dollars might be conveyed; the place to which the battered wife of
an extremely powerful film producer might be taken; it was the
place to which the man with the dark crop of curls was taken.
The man who showed up in Johnny Carson's place on the stage of
Studio C on the afternoon of November 29th identified himself as
Ed Paladin, speaking the name with the air of one who expects
everyone who hears it to fall on his or her knees and, perhaps,
genuflect. His California driver's license, Blue Cross - Blue Shield
card, Amex and Diners' Club cards, also identified him as Edward
Paladin.
His trip from Studio C ended, at least temporarily, in a room in the
Burbank PD's "special security" area. The room was panelled with
tough plastic that almost did look like mahogany and furnished
with a low, round couch and tasteful chairs. There was a cigarette
box on the glass-topped coffee table filled with Dunhills, and the
magazines included Fortune and Variety and Vogue and Billboard
and GQ. The wall-to-wall carpet wasn't really ankle-deep but
looked it, and there was a CableView guide on top of the large-




screen TV. There was a bar (now locked), and a very nice neo-
Jackson Pollock painting on one of the walls. The walls, however,
were of drilled cork, and the mirror above the bar was a little bit
too large and a little bit too shiny to be anything but a piece of one-
way glass.
The man who called himself Ed Paladin stuck his hands in his just-
too-loud sport-coat pockets, looked around disgustedly, and said:
"An interrogation room by any other name is still an interrogation
room."
Detective 1st Grade Richard Cheyney looked at him calmly for a
moment. When he spoke, it was in the soft and polite voice that
had earned him the only halfkidding nickname "Detective to the
Stars." Part of the reason he spoke this way was because he
genuinely liked and respected show people. Part of the reason was
because he didn't trust them. Half the time they were lying they
didn't know it.
"Could you tell us, please, Mr Paladin, how you got on the set of
The Tonight Show, and where Johnny Carson is?"
"Who's Johnny Carson?"
Pete Jacoby - who wanted to be Henny Youngman when he grew
up, Cheyney often thought - gave Cheyney a momentary dry look
every bit as good as a Jack Benny deadpan. Then he looked back at
Edward Paladin and said, "Johnny Carson's the guy who used to be
Mr Ed. You know, the talking horse? I mean, a lot of people know
about Mr Ed, the famous talking horse, but an awful lot of people
don't know that he went to Geneva to have a species-change
operation and when he came back he was-"
Cheyney often allowed Jacoby his routines (there was really no
other word for them, and Cheyney remembered one occasion when
Jacoby had gotten a man charged with beating his wife and infant
son to death laughing so hard that tears of mirth rather than




remorse were rolling down his cheeks as he signed the confession
that was going to put the bastard in jail for the rest of his life), but
he wasn't going to tonight. He didn't have to see the flame under
his ass; he could feel it, and it was being turned up. Pete was
maybe a little slow on the uptake about some things, and maybe
that was why he wasn't going to make Detective 1st for another
two or three years ... if he ever did.
Some ten years ago a really awful thing had happened in a little
nothing town called Chowchilla. Two people (they had walked on
two legs, anyway, if you could believe the newsfilm) had hijacked
a busload of kids, buried them alive, and then had demanded a
huge sum of money. Otherwise, they said, those kiddies could just
stay where they were and swap baseball trading cards until their air
ran out. That one had ended happily, but it could have been a
nightmare. And God knew Johnny Carson was no busload of
schoolkids, but the case had the same kind of fruitcake appeal: here
was that rare event about which both the Los Angeles Times-
Mirror and The National Enquirer would hobnob on their front
pages. What Pete didn't understand was that something extremely
rare had happened to them: in the world of day-to-day police work,
a world where almost everything came in shades of gray, they had
suddenly been placed in a situation of stark and simple contrasts:
produce within twenty-four hours, thirty-six at the outside, or
watch the Feds come in ... and kiss your ass goodbye.
Things happened so rapidly that even later he wasn't completely
sure, but he believed both of them had been going on the unspoken
presumption, even then, that Carson had been kidnapped and this
guy was part of it.
"We're going to do it by the numbers, Mr Paladin," Cheyney said,
and although he was speaking to the man glaring up at him from
one of the chairs (he had refused the sofa at once), his eyes flicked
briefly to Pete. They had been partners for nearly twelve years, and
a glance was all it took.




No more Comedy Store routines, Pete.
Message received.
"First comes the Miranda Warning," Cheyney said pleasantly. "I
am required to inform you that you are in the custody of the
Burbank City Police. Although not required to do so immediately,
I'll add that a preliminary charge of trespassing-"
"Trespassing!" An angry flush burst over Paladin's face.
"-on property both owned and leased by the National Broadcasting
Company has been lodged against you. I am Detective 1st Grade
Richard Cheyney. This man with me is my partner, Detective 2nd
Grade Peter Jacoby. We'd like to interview you."
"Fucking interrogate me is what you mean."
"I only have one question, as far as interrogation goes," Cheyney
said. "Otherwise, I only want to interview you at this time. In other
words, I have one question relevant to the charge which has been
lodged; the rest deal with other matters."
"Well, what's the fucking question?"
"That wouldn't be going by the numbers," Jacoby said.
Cheyney said:. "I am required to tell you that you have the right-"
"To have my lawyer here, you bet," Paladin said. "And I just
decided that before I answer a single fucking question, and that
includes where I went to lunch today and what I had, he's going to
be in here. Albert K. Dellums."
He spoke this name as if it should rock both detectives back on
their heels, but Cheyney had never heard of it and could tell by
Pete's expression that he hadn't either.
Whatever sort of crazy this Ed Paladin might turn out to be, he was
no dullard. He saw the quick glances which passed between the




two detectives and read them easily. You know him? Cheyney's
eyes asked Jacoby's, and Jacoby's replied, Never heard of him in
my life.
For the first time an expression of perplexity - it was not fear, not
yet - crossed Mr Edward Paladin's face.
"Al Dellums," he said, raising his voice like some Americans
overseas who seem to believe they can make the waiter understand
if they only speak loudly enough and slowly enough. "Al Dellums
of Dellums, Carthage, Stoneham, and Tayloe. I guess I shouldn't
be all that surprised that you haven't heard of him. He's only one of
the most important, well-known lawyers in the country." Paladin
shot the left cuff of his just-slightly-too-loud sport-coat and
glanced at his watch. "If you reach him at home, gentlemen, he'll
be pissed. If you have to call his club - and I think this is his club-
night - he's going to be pissed like a bear."
Cheyney was not impressed by bluster. If you could sell it at a
quarter a pound, he never would have had to turn his hand at
another day's work. But even a quick peck had been enough to
show him that the watch Paladin was wearing was not just a Rolex
but a Rolex Midnight Star. It might be an imitation, of course, but
his gut told him it was genuine. Part of it was his clear impression
that Paladin wasn't trying to make an impression - he'd wanted to
see what time it was, no more or less than that. And if the watch
was the McCoy ... well, there were cabin-cruisers you could buy
for less. What was a man who could afford a Rolex Midnight Star
doing mixed up in something weird like this?
Now he was the one who must have been showing perplexity clear
enough for Paladin to read it, because the man smiled - a
humorless skinning-back of the lips from the capped teeth. "The
air-conditioning in here's pretty nice," he said, crossing his legs
and flicking the crease absently. "You guys want to enjoy it while
you can. It's pretty muggy walking a beat out in Watts, even this
time of year."




In a harsh and abrupt tone utterly unlike his bright pitter-patter
Comedy Store voice, Jacoby said: "Shut your mouth, jag-off."
Paladin jerked around and stared at him, eyes wide. And again
Cheyney would have sworn it had been years since anyone had
spoken to this man in that way. Years since anyone would have
dared.
"What did you say?"
"I said shut your mouth when Detective Cheyney is talking to you.
Give me your lawyer's number. I'll see that he is called. In the
meantime, I think you need to take a few seconds to pull your head
out of your ass and look around and see exactly where you are and
exactly how serious the trouble is that you are in. I think you need
to reflect on the fact that, while only one charge has been lodged
against you, you could be facing enough to put you in the slam
well into the next century ... and you could be facing them before
the sun comes up tomorrow morning."
Jacoby smiled. It wasn't his howaya-folks-anyone-here-from-
Duluth Comedy Store smile, either. Like Paladin's, it was a brief
pull of the lips, no more.
"You're right - the air-conditioning in here isn't halfbad. Also, the
TV works and for a wonder the people on it don't look like they're
seasick. The coffee's good - perked, not instant. Now, if you want
to make another two or three wisecracks, you can wait for your
legal talent in a holding cell on the fifth floor. On Five, the only
entertainment consists of kids crying for their mommies and winos
puking on their sneakers. I don't know who you think you are and I
don't care, because as far as I'm concerned, you're nobody. I never
saw you before in my life, never heard of you before in my life,
and if you push me enough I'll widen the crack in your ass for
you."
"That's enough," Cheyney said quietly.




"I'll retool it so you could drive a Ryder van up there, Mister
Paladin - you understand me? Can you grok that?"
Now Paladin's eyes were all but hanging from their sockets on
stalks. His mouth was open. Then, without speaking, he removed
his wallet from his coat pocket (some kind of lizard-skin, Cheyney
thought, two months' salary ... maybe three). He found his lawyer's
card (the home number was jotted on the back, Cheyney notedit
was most definitely not part of the printed matter on the front) and
handed it to Jacoby. His fingers now showed the first observable
tremor.
"Pete?"
Jacoby looked at him and Cheyney saw it was no act; Paladin had
actually succeeded in pissing his easy-going partner off. No mean
feat.
"Make the call yourself."
"Okay." Jacoby left.
Cheyney looked at Paladin and was suddenly amazed to find
himself feeling sorry for the man. Before he had looked perplexed;
now he looked both stunned and frightened, like a man who wakes
from a nightmare only to discover the nightmare is still going on.
"Watch closely," Cheyney said after the door had closed, "and I'll
show you one of the mysteries of the West. West LA, that is."
He moved the neo-Pollock and revealed not a safe but a toggle
switch. He flicked it, then let the painting slide back into place.
"That's one-way glass," Cheyney said, cocking a thumb at the too-
large mirror over the bar.
"I am not terribly surprised to hear that," Paladin said, and
Cheyney reflected that, while the man might have some of the
shitty egocentric habits of the Veddy Rich and Well-Known in LA,
he was also a near-superb actor: only a man as experienced as he
was himself could have told how really close Paladin was to the
ragged edge of tears.
But not of guilt, that was what was so puzzling, so goddamn-
maddening.
Of perplexity.
He felt that absurd sense of sorrow again, absurd because it
presupposed the man's innocence: he did not want to be Edward
Paladin's nightmare, did not want to be the heavy in a Kafka novel
where suddenly nobody knows where they are, or why they are
there.
"I can't do anything about the glass," Cheyney said. He came back
and sat down across the coffee table from Paladin, "but I've just
killed the sound. So it's you talking to me and vice-versa." He took
a pack of Kents from his breast pocket, stuck one in the corner of
his mouth, then offered the pack to Paladin. "Smoke?"
Paladin picked up the pack, looked it over, and smiled. "Even my
old brand. I haven't smoked one since night Yul Brynner died, Mr
Cheyney. I don't think ant to start again now."
Cheyney put the pack back into his pocket. "Can we talk?" he
asked.
Paladin rolled his eyes. "Oh my God, it's Joan Raiford."
"Who?"
"Joan Raiford. You know, "I took Elizabeth Taylor to Marine
World and when she saw Shamu the Whale she asked me if it
came with vegetables?" I repeat, Detective Cheyney: grow up. I
have no reason in the world to believe that switch is anything but a
dummy. My God, how innocent do you think I am?"
Joan Raiford? Is that what he really said?, Joan Raiford?




"What's the matter?" Paladin asked pleasantly. He crossed his legs
the other way. "Did you perhaps think you saw a clear path? Me
breaking down, maybe saying I'd tell everything, everything, just
don't let 'em fry me, copper?"
With all the force of personality he could muster, Cheyney said: "I
believe things are very wrong here, Mr Paladin. You've got them
wrong and I've got them wrong. When your lawyer gets here,
maybe we can sort them out and maybe we can't. Most likely we
can't. So listen to me, and for God's sake use your brain. I gave you
the Miranda Warning. You said you wanted your lawyer present. If
there was a tape turning, I've buggered my own case. Your lawyer
would have to say just one word - enticement - and you'd walk
free, whatever has happened to Carson. And I could go to work as
a security guard in one of those flea-bitten little towns down by the
border."
"You say that," Paladin said, "but I'm no lawyer.
But ... Convince me, his eyes said. Yeah, let's talk about this, lees
see if we can't get together, because you're right, something is
weird. So ... convince me.
"Is your mother alive?" Cheyney asked abruptly.
"What - yes, but what does that have to-"
"You talk to me or I'm going to personally take two CHP
motorcycle cops and the three of us are going to rape your mother
tomorrow!" Cheyney screamed. "I'm personally going to take her
up the ass! Then we're going to cut off her tits and leave them on
the front lawn! So you better talk!"
Paladin's face was as white as milk: a white so white it is nearly
blue.
"Now are you convinced?" Cheyney asked softly. 'I'm not crazy.
I'm not going to rape your mother. But with a statement like that




on a reel of tape, you could say you were the guy on the grassy
knoll in Dallas and the Burbank police wouldn't produce the tape. I
want to talk to you, man. What's going on here?"
Paladin shook his head dully and said, "I don't know."
In the room behind the one-way glass, Jacoby joined Lieutenant
McEachern, Ed McMahon (still looking stunned), and a cluster of
technical people at a bank of high-tech equipment. The LAPD
chief of police and the mayor were rumored to be racing each other
to Burbank.
"He's talking?" Jacoby asked.
"I think he's going to," McEachern said. His eyes had moved
toward Jacoby once, quickly, when he came in. Now they were
centered only on the window. The men seated on the other side,
Cheyney smoking, relaxed, Paladin tense but trying to control it,
looked slightly lowish through the one-way glass. The sound of
their voices was clear and undistorted through the overhead
speakers - a top-of-the-line Bose in each corner.
Without taking his eyes off the men, McEachern said: "You get his
lawyer?"
Jacoby said: "The home number on the card belongs to a cleaning
woman named Howlanda Moore."
McEachern flicked him another fast glance.
"Black, from the sound, delta Mississippi at a guess. Kids yelling
and fighting in the background. She didn't quite say I'se gwine
whup you if you don't quit!, but it was close. She's had the number
three years. I re-dialed twice.
"Jesus," McEachern, said. "Try the office number?"
"Yeah," Jacoby replied. "Got a recording. You think ConTel's a
good buy, Loot?"




McEachern flicked his gray eyes in Jacoby's direction again.
"The number on the front of the card is that of a fairly large stock
brokerage," Jacoby said quietly. "I looked under lawyers in the
Yellow Pages. Found no Albert K. Dellums. Closest is an Albert
Dillon, no middle initial. No law firm like the one on the card."
"Jesus please us," McEachern said, and then the door banged open
and a little man with the face of a monkey barged in. The mayor
had apparently won the race to Burbank.
"What's going on here?" he said to McEachern.
"'I don't know," McEachern said.
"All right," Paladin said wearily. "Let's talk about it. I feel,
Detective Cheyney, like a man who had just spent two hours or so
on some disorienting amusement park ride. Or like someone
slipped some LSD into my drink. Since we're not on the record,
what was your one interrogatory? Let's start with that."
"All right," Cheyney said. "How did you get into the broadcast
complex, and how did you get into Studio C?"
"Those are two questions."
"I apologize."
Paladin smiled faintly.
"I got on the property and into the studio," he said, "the same way
I've been getting on the property and into the studio for over
twenty years. My pass. Plus the fact that I know every security
guard in the place. Shit, I've been there longer than most of them."
"May I see that pass?" Cheyney asked. His voice was quiet, but a
large pulse beat in his throat.




Paladin looked at him warily for a moment, then pulled out the
lizard-skin wallet again. After a moment of rifling, he tossed a
perfectly correct NBC Performer's Pass onto the coffee table.
Correct, that was, in every way but one.
Cheyney crushed out his smoke, picked it up, and looked at it. The
pass was laminated. In the corner was the NBC peacock,
something only long-timers had on their cards. The face in the
photo was the face of Edward Paladin. Height and weight were
correct. No space for eye-color, hair-color, or age, of course; when
you were dealing with ego. Walk softly, stranger, for here there be
tygers.
The only problem with the pass was that it was salmon pink.
NBC Performer's Passes were bright red.
Cheyney had seen something else while Paladin was looking for
his pass. "Could you put a one-dollar bill from your wallet on the
coffee table there?" he asked softly.
"Why?"
"I'll show you in a moment," Cheyney said. "A five or a ten would
do as well."
Paladin studied him, then opened his wallet again. He took back
his pass, replaced it, and carefully took out a one-dollar bill. He
turned it so it faced Cheyney. Cheyney took his own wallet (a
scuffed old Lord Buxton with its seams unravelling; he should
replace it but found it easier to think of than to do) from his jacket
pocket, and removed a dollar bill of his own. He put it next to
Paladin's, and then turned them both around so Paladin could see
them right-side-up-so Paladin could study them.
Which Paladin did, silently, for almost a full minute. His face
slowly flushed dark red ... and then the color slipped from it a little
at a time. He'd probably meant to bellow WHAT THE FUCK IS




GOING ON HERE? Cheyney thought later, but what came out
was a breathless little gasp: -what-"
"I don't know," Cheyney said.
On the right was Cheyney's one, gray-green, not brand-new by any
means, but new enough so that it did not yet have that rumpled,
limp, shopworn look of a bill which has changed hands many
times. Big number 1's at the top corners, smaller 1's at the bottom
corners. FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE in small caps between the
top 1's and THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in larger ones.
The letter A in a seal to the left of Washington, along with the
assurance that THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER, FOR ALL
DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. It was a series 1985 bill, the
signature that of James A. Baker III.
Paladin's one was not the same at all.
The 1's in the four corners were the same; THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA was the same; the assurance that the bill could be
used to pay all public and private debts was the same.
But Paladin's one was a bright blue.
Instead of FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE it said CURRENCY OF
GOVERNMENT.
Instead of the letter A was the letter F.
But most of all it was the picture of the man on the bill that drew
Cheyney's attention, just as the picture of the man on Cheyney's
bill drew Paladin's.
Cheyney's gray-green one showed George Washington.
Paladin's blue one showed James Madison.




Stephen King

 The Crate




         First appeared in:
      Gallery magazine 1979
  Available in comic book form in:
            Creepshow




Dexter Stanley was scared. More; he felt as if that central axle that
binds us to the state we call sanity were under a greater strain than
it had ever been under before. As he pulled up beside Henry
Northrup's house on North Campus Avenue that August night, he
felt that if he didn't talk to someone, he really, would go crazy.
There was no one to talk to but Henry Northrup. Dex Stanley was
the head of the zoology department, and once might have been
university president if he had been better at academic politics. His
wife had died twenty years before, and they had been childless.
What remained of his own family was all west of the Rockies. He
was not good at making friends.
Northrup was an exception to that. In some ways, they were two of
a kind; both had been disappointed in the mostly meaningless, but
always vicious, game of university politics. Three years before,
Northrup had made his run at the vacant English department
chairmanship. He had lost, and one of the reasons had undoubtedly
been his wife, Wilma, an abrasive and unpleasant woman. At the
few cocktail parties Dex had attended where English people and
zoology people could logically mix, it seemed he could always
recall the harsh mule-bray of her voice, telling some new faculty
wife to "call me Billie, dear everyone does!"
Dex made his way across the lawn to Northrup's door at a
stumbling run. It was Thursday, and Northrup's unpleasant spouse
took two classes on Thursday nights. Consequently, it was Dex and
Henry's chess night. The two men had been playing chess together
for the last eight years.
Dex rang the bell beside the door of his friend's house; leaned on
it. The door opened at ast and Northrup was there.
"Dex," he said. I didn't expect you for another--"




Dex pushed in past him. "Wilma," he said. "Is she here?"
"No, she left fifteen minutes ago. I was just making myself some
chow. Dex, you look awful."
They had walked under the hall light, and it illuminated the cheesy
pallor of Dex's face and seemed to outline wrinkles as deep and
dark as fissures in the earth. Dex was sixty-one, but on the hot
August night, he looked more like ninety.
"I ought to." Dex wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Well, what is it?"
"I'm afraid I'm going crazy, Henry. Or that I've already gone."
"You want something to eat? Wilma left cold ham."
"I'd rather have a drink. A big one."
"All right."
"Two men dead, Henry," Dex said abruptly. "And I could be
blamed. Yes, I can see how I could be blamed. But it wasn't me. It
was the crate. And I don't even know what's in there!" He uttered a
wild laugh.
"Dead?" Northrup said. "What is this, Dex?"
"A janitor. I don't know his name. And Gereson. A graduate
student. He just happened to be there. In the way of... whatever it
was."
Henry studied Dex's face for a long moment and then said, "I'll get
us both a drink."
He left. Dex wandered into the living room, past the low table
where the chess table had already been set up, and stared out the
graceful bow window. That thing in his mind, that axle or
whatever it was, did not feel so much in danger of snapping now.
Thank God for Henry.




Northrup came back with two pony glasses choked with ice. Ice
from the fridge's automatic icemaker, Stanley thought randomly.
Wilma "just call me Billie, everyone does" Northrup insisted on all
the modern conveniences... and when Wilma insisted on a thing,
she did so savagely.
Northrup filled both glasses with Cutty Sark. He handed one of
them to Stanley, who slopped Scotch over his fingers, stinging a
small cut he'd gotten in the lab a couple of days before. He hadn't
realized until then that his hands were shaking. He emptied half the
glass and the Scotch boomed in his stomach, first hot, then
spreading a steadylng warmth.
"Sit down, man," Northrup said.
Dex sat, and drank again. Now it was a lot better. He looked at
Northrup, who was looking levelly back over the rim of his own
glass. Dex looked away, out at the bloody orb of moon sitting over
the rim of the horizon, over the university, which was supposed to
be the seat of rationality, the forebrain of the body politic. How did
that jibe with the matter of the crate? With the screams? With the
blood?
"Men are dead?" Northrup said at last.
"Are you sure they're dead?"
"Yes. The bodies are gone now. At least, I think they are. Even the
bones... the teeth... but the blood... the blood, you know..."
"No, I don't know anything. You've got to start at the beginning."
Stanley took another drink and set his glass down. "Of course I
do," he said. "Yes. It begins just where it ends. With the crate. The
janitor found the crate..."
Dexter Stanley had come into Amberson Hall, sometimes called
the Old Zoology Building, that afternoon at three o'clock. It was a
blaringly hot day, and the campus looked listless and dead, in spite




of the twirling sprinklers in front of the fraternity houses and the
Old Front dorms.
The Old Front went back to the turn of the century, but Amberson
Hall was much older than that. It was one of the oldest buildings
on a university campus that had celebrated its tricentennial two
years previous. It was a tall brick building, shackled with ivy that
seemed to spring out of the earth like green, clutching hands. Its
narrow windows were more like gun slits than real windows, and
Amberson seemed to frown at the newer buildings with their glass
walls and curvy, unorthodox shapes.
The new zoology building, Cather Hall, had been completed eight
months before, and the process of transition would probably go on
for another eighteen months. No one was completely sure what
would happen to Amberson then. If the bond issue to build the new
gym found favor with the voters, it would probably be demolished.
He paused a moment to watch two young men throwing a Frisbee
back and forth. A dog ran back and forth between them, glumly
chasing the spinning disc. Abruptly the mutt gave up and flopped
in the shade of a poplar. A VW with a NO NUKES sticker on the
back deck trundled slowly past, heading for the Upper Circle.
Nothing else moved. A week before, the final summer session had
ended and the campus lay still and fallow, dead ore on summer's
anvil.
Dex had a number of files to pick up, part of the seemingly endless
process of moving from Amberson to Cather. The old building
seemed spectrally empty. His footfalls echoed back dreamily as he
walked past closed doors with frosted glass panels, past bulletin
boards with their yellowing notices and toward his office at the end
of the first-floor corridor. The cloying smell of fresh paint hung in
the air.




He was almost to his door, and jingling his keys in his pocket,
when the janitor popped out of Room 6, the big lecture hall,
startling him.
He grunted, then smiled a little shamefacedly, the way people will
when they've gotten a mild zap. "You got me that time," he told the
janitor.
The janitor smiled and twiddled the gigantic key ring clipped to his
belt. "Sorry, Perfesser Stanley," he said. "I was hopin' it was you.
Charlie said you'd be in this afternoon."
"Charlie Gereson is still here?" Dex frowned. Gereson was a grad
student who was doing an involved--and possibly very important--
paper on negative environmental factors in long-term animal
migration. It was a subject that could have a strong impact on area
farming practices and pest control. But Gereson was pulling almost
fifty hours a week in the gigantic (and antiquated) basement lab.
The new lab complex in Cather would have been exponentially
better suited to his purposes, but the new labs would not be fully
equipped for another two to four months... if then.
"Think he went over the Union for a burger," the janitor said. "I
told him myself to quit a while and go get something to eat. He's
been here since nine this morning. Told him myself. Said he ought
to get some food. A man don't live on love alone."
The janitor smiled, a little tentatively, and Dex smiled back. The
janitor was right; Gereson was embarked upon a labor of love. Dex
had seen too many squadrons of students just grunting along and
making grades not to appreciate that... and not to worry about
Charlie Gereson's health and well-being from time to time.
"I would have told him, if he hadn't been so busy," the janitor said,
and offered his tentative little smile again. "Also, I kinda wanted to
show you myself."




"What's that?" Dex asked. He felt a little impatient. It was chess
night with Henry; he wanted to get this taken care of and still have
time for a leisurely meal at the Hancock House.
"Well, maybe it's nothin," the janitor said. "But... well, this buildin
is some old, and we keep turnin things up, don't we?"
Dex knew. It was like moving out of a house that has been lived in
for generations. Halley, the bright young assistant professor who
had been here for three years now, had found half a dozen antique
clips with small brass balls on the ends. She'd had no idea what the
clips, which looked a little bit like spring-loaded wishbones, could
be. Dex had been able to tell her. Not so many years after the Civil
War, those clips had been used to hold the heads of white mice,
who were then operated on without anesthetic. Young Halley, with
her Berkeley education and her bright spill of Farrah Fawcett-
Majors golden hair, had looked quite revolted. "No anti-
vivisectionists in those days," Dex had told her jovially. "At least
not around here." And Halley had responded with a blank look that
probably disguised disgust or maybe even loathing. Dex had put
his foot in it again. He had a positive talent for that, it seemed.
They had found sixty boxes of The American Zoologist in a
crawlspace, and the attic had been a maze of old equipment and
mouldering reports. Some of the impedimenta no one--not even
Dexter Stanley--could identify.
In the closet of the old animal pens at the back of the building,
Professor Viney had found a complicated gerbil-run with exquisite
glass panels. It had been accepted for display at the Musuem of
Natural Science in Washington.
But the finds had been tapering off this summer, and Dex thought
Amberson Hall had given up the last of its secrets."What have you
found?" he asked the janitor.




"A crate. I found it tucked right under the basement stairs. I didn't
open it. It's been nailed shut, anyway."
Stanly couldn't believe that anything very interesting could have
escaped notice for long, just by being tucked under the stairs. Tens
of thousands of people went up and down them every week during
the academic year. Most likely the janitor's crate was full of
department records dating back twenty-five years. Or even more
prosaic, a box of National Geographics.
"I hardly think--"
"It's a real crate," the janitor broke in earnestly. "I mean, my father
was a carpenter, and this crate is built tile way he was buildin 'em
back in the twenties. And he learned from his father."
"I really doubt if--"
"Also, it's got about four inches of dust on it. I wiped some off and
there's a date. Eighteen thirty-four."
That changed things. Stanley looked at his watch and decided he
could spare half all hour.
In spite of the humid August heat outside, the smooth tile-faced
throat of the stairway was almost cold. Above them, yellow frosted
globes cast a dim and thoughtful light. The stair levels had once
been red, but in the centers they shaded to a dead black where the
feet of years had worn away layer after layer of resurfacing. The
silence was smooth and nearly perfect.
The janitor reached the bottom first and pointed under the
staircase. "Under here," he said.
Dex joined him in staring into a shadowy, triangular cavity under
the wide staircase. He felt a small tremor of disgust as he saw
where the janitor had brushed away a gossamer veil of cobwebs.
He supposed it was possible that the man had found something a




little older than postwar records under there, now that he acutally
looked at the space. But 1834?
"Just a second," the janitor said, and left momentarily. Left alone,
Dex hunkered down and peered in. He could make out nothing but
a deeper patch of shadow in there. Then the janitor returned with a
hefty four-cell flashlight. "This'll show it up."
"What were you doing under there anyway?" Dex asked.
The janitor grinned. "I was only standin here tryin to decide if I
should buff that second-floor hallway first or wash the lab
windows. I couldn't make up my mind, so I flipped a quarter. Only
I dropped it and it rolled under there." He pointed to the shadowy,
triangular cave. "I prob'ly would have let it go, except that was my
only quarter for the Coke machine. So I got my flash and knocked
down the cobwebs, and when I crawled under to get it, I saw that
crate. Here, have a look."
The janitor shone his light into the hole. Motes of disturbed dust
preened and swayed lazily in the beam. The light struck the far
wall in a spotlight circle, rose to the zigzag undersides of the stairs
briefly, picking out an ancient cobweb in which long-dead bugs
hung mumified, and then the light dropped and centered on a crate
about five feet long and two-and-a-half wide. It was perhaps three
feet deep. As the janitor had said, it was no knocked-together affair
made out of scrap-boards. It was neatly constructed of a smooth,
dark heavy wood. A coffin, Dexter thought uneasily. It looks like a
child's coffin.
The dark color of the wood showed only a fan-shaped swipe on the
side. The rest of the crate was the uniform dull gray of dust.
Something was written on the side-stenciled there.
Dex squinted but couldn't read it. He fumbled his glasses out of his
breast pocket and still couldn't. Part of what had been stenciled on




was obscured by the dust--not four inches of it, by any means, but
an extraordinarily thick coating, all the same.
Not wanting to crawl and dirty his pants, Dex duck-walked under
the stairway, stifling a sudden and amazingly strong feeling of
claustrophobia. The spit dried in his mouth and was replaced by a
dry, woolly taste, like an old mitten. He thought of the generations
of students trooping up and down these stairs, all male until 1888,
then in coeducational platoons, carrying their books and papers and
anatomical drawings, their bright faces and clear eyes, each of
them convinced that a useful and exciting future lay ahead ... and
here, below their feet, the spider spun his eternal snare for the fly
and the trundling beetle, and here this crate sat impassively,
gathering dust, waiting...
A tendril of spidersilk brushed across his forehead and he swept it
away with a small cry of loathing and an uncharacteristic inner
cringe.
"Not very nice under there, is it?" the janitor asked
sympathetically, holding his light centered on the crate. "God, I
hate tight places."
Dex didn't reply. He had reached the crate. He looked at the letters
that were stenciled there and then brushed the dust away from
them. It rose in a cloud, intensifying that mitten taste, making him
cough dryly. The dust hung in the beam of the janitor's light like
old magic, and Dex Stanley read what some long-dead chief of
lading had stenciled on this crate.
SHIP TO HORLICKS UNIVERSITY, the top line read. VIA
JULIA CARPENTER, read the middle line. The third line read
simply: ARCTIC EXPEDITION.
Below that, someone had written in heavy black charcoal strokes:
JUNE 19, 1834. That was the one line the janitor's hand-swipe had
completely cleared.




ARCTIC EXPEDITION, Dex read again. His heart began to
thump. "So what do you think?" the janitor's voice floated in.
Dex grabbed one end and lifted it. Heavy. As he let it settle back
with a mild thud, something shifted inside--he did not hear it but
felt it through the palms of his hands, as if whatever it was had
moved of its own volition. Stupid, of course. It had been an almost
liquid feel, as if something not quite jelled had moved sluggishly.
ARCTIC EXPEDITION.
Dex felt the excitement of an antiques collector happening upon a
neglected armoire with a twenty-five dollar price tag in the back
room of some hick-town junk shop ... an armoire that just might be
a Chippendale. "Help me get it out," he called to the janitor.
Working bent over to keep from slamming their heads on the
underside of the stairway, sliding the crate along, they got it out
and then picked it up by the bottom. Dex had gotten his pants dirty
after all, and there were cobwebs in his hair.
As they carried it into the old-fashioned, train-terminal-sized lab,
Dex felt that sensation of shift inside the crate again, and he could
see by the expression on the janitor's face that he had felt it as well.
They set it on one of the formica-topped lab tables. The next one
over was littered with Charlie Gereson's stuff--notebooks, graph
paper, contour maps, a Texas Instruments calculator.
The janitor stood back, wiping his hands on his double-pocket gray
shirt, breathing hard. "Some heavy mother," he said. "That bastard
must weigh two hunnert pounds. You okay, Perfesser Stanley?"
Dex barely heard him. He was looking at the end of the box, where
there was vet another series of stencils:
PAELLA/SANTIAGO/SAN FRANCISCO/CHICAGO/NEW
YORK/HORLICKS
"Perfesser--"




"Paella," Dex muttered, and then said it again, slightly louder. He
was seized with an unbelieving kind of excitement that was held in
check only by the thought that it might be some sort of hoax.
"Paella!"
"Paella, Dex?" Henry Northrup asked. The moon had risen in the
sky, turning silver.
"Paella is a very small island south of Tierra del Fuego," Dex said.
"Perhaps the smallest island ever inhabited by the race of man. A
number of Easter Island-type monoliths were found there just after
World War II. Not very interesting compared to their bigger
brothers, but every bit as mysterious. The natives of Paella and
Tierra del Fuego were Stone-Age people. Christian missionaries
killed them with kindness."
"I beg your pardon?"
"It's extremely cold down there. Summer temperatures rarely range
above the mid-forties. The missionaries gave them blankets, partly
so they would be warm, mostly to cover their sinful nakedness.
The blankets were crawling with fleas, and the natives of both
islands were wiped out by European diseases for which they had
developed no immunities. Mostly by smallpox."
Dex drank. The Scotch had lent his cheeks some color, but it was
hectic and flaring--double spots of flush that sat above his
cheekbones like rouge.
"But Tierra del Fuego--and this Paella--that's not the Arctic, Dex.
It's the Antarctic."
"It wasn't in 1834," Dex said, setting his glass down, careful in
spite of his distraction to put it on the coaster Henry had provided.
If Wilma found a ring on one of her end tables, his friend would
have hell to pay. "The terms subarctic, Antarctic and Antarctica
weren't invented yet. In those days there was only the north arctic
and the south arctic."




"Okay."
"Hell, I made the same kind of mistake. I couldn't figure out why
Frisco was on the itinerary as a port of call. Then I realized I was
figuring on the Panama Canal, which wasn't built for another
eighty vears or so.
"An Arctic expedition? In 1834?" Henry asked doubtfully.
"I haven't had a chance to check the records yet," Dex said, picking
up his drink again. "But I know from my history that there were
'Arctic expeditions' as early as Francis Drake. None of them made
it, that was all. They were convinced they'd find gold, silver,
jewels, lost civilizations, God knows what else. The Smithsonian
Institution outfitted an attempted exploration of the North Pole in, I
think it was 1881 or '82. They all died. A bunch of men from the
Explorers' Club in London tried for the South Pole in the 1850's.
Their ship was sunk by icebergs, but three or four of them
survived. They stayed alive by sucking dew out of their clothes and
eating the kelp that caught on their boat, until they were picked up.
They lost their teeth. And they claimed to have seen sea monsters."
"What happened, Dex?" Henry asked softly.
Stanley looked up. "We opened the crate," he said dully. "God help
us, Henry, we opened the crate."
He paused for a long time, it seemed, before beginning to speak
again.
"Paella?" the janitor asked. "What's that?"
"An island off the tip of South America," Dex said. "Never mind.
Let's get this open." He opened one of the lab drawers and began to
rummage through it, looking for something to pry with."




"Never mind that stuff," the janitor said. He looked excited himself
now. "I got a hammer and chisel in my closet upstairs. I'll get 'em.
Just hang on."
He left. The crate sat on the table's formica top, squat and mute. It
sits squat and mute, Dex thought, and shivered a little. Where had
that thought come from? Some story? The words had a cadenced
yet unpleasant sound. He dismissed them. He was good at
dismissing the extraneous. He was a scientist.
He looked around the lab just to get his eyes off the crate. Except
for Charlie's table, it was unnaturally neat and quiet--like the rest
of the university. White-tiled, subway-station walls gleamed
freshly under the overhead globes; the globes themselves seemed
to be double--caught and submerged in the polished formica
surfaces, like eerie lamps shining from deep quarry water. A huge,
old-fashioned slate blackboard dominated the wall opposite the
sinks. And cupboards, cupboards everywhere. It was easy enough--
too easy, perhaps--to see the antique, sepia-toned ghosts of all
those old zoology students, wearing their white coats with the
green cuffs, their hairs marcelled or pomaded, doing their
dissections and writing their reports...
Footfalls clattered on the stairs and Dex shivered, thinking again of
the crate sitting there--yes, squat and mute--under the stairs for so
many years, long after the men who had pushed it under there had
died and gone back to dust.
Paella, he thought, and then the janitor came back in with a
hammer and chisel.
"Let me do this for you, perfesser?" he asked, and Dex was about
to refuse when he saw the pleading, hopeful look in the man's eyes.
"Of course," he said. After all, it was this man's find.




"Prob'ly nothin in here but a bunch of rocks and plants so old
they'll turn to dust when you touch 'em. But it's funny; I'm pretty
hot for it."
Dex smiled noncommittally. He had no idea what was in the crate,
but he doubted if it was just plant and rock specimens. There was
that slightly liquid shifting sensation when they had moved it.
"Here goes," the janitor said, and began to pound the chisel under
the board with swift blows of the hammer. The board hiked up a
bit, revealing a double row of nails that reminded Dex absurdly of
teeth. The janitor levered the handle of his chisel down and the
board pulled loose, the nails shrieking out of the wood. He did the
same thing at the other end, and the board came free, clattering to
the floor. Dex set it aside, noticing that even the nails looked
different, somehow--thicker, squarer at the tip, and without that
blue-steel sheen that is the mark of a sophisticated alloying
process.
The janitor was peering into the crate through the long, narrow
strip he had uncovered. "Can't see nothin," he said. "Where'd I
leave my light?"
"Never mind," Dex said. "Go on and open it."
"Okay." He took off a second board, then a third. Six or seven had
been nailed across the top of the box. He began on the fourth,
reaching across the space he had already uncovered to place his
chisel under the board, when the crate began to whistle.
It was a sound very much like the sound a teakettle makes when it
has reached a rolling boil, Dex told Henry Northrup; no cheerful
whistle this, but something like an ugly, hysterical shriek by a
tantrumy child. And this suddenly dropped and thickened into a
low, hoarse growling sound. It was not loud, but it had a primitive,
savage sound that stood Dex Stanley's hair up on the slant. The
janitor stared around at him, his eyes widening... and then his arm




was seized. Dex did not see what grabbed it; his eyes had gone
instinctively to the man's face.
The janitor screamed, and the sound drove a stiletto of panic into
Dex's chest. The thought that came unbidden was: This is the first
time in my life that I've heard a grown man scream--what a
sheltered life I've led!
The janitor, a fairly big guy who weighed maybe two hundred
pounds, was suddenly yanked powerfully to one side. Toward the
crate. "Help me!" He screamed. "Oh help doc it's got me it's biting
me it's biting meeeee--"
Dex told himself to run forward and grab the janitor's free arm, but
his feet might as well have been bonded to the floor. The janitor
had been pulled into the crate up to his shoulder. That crazed
snarling went on and on. The crate slid backwards along the table
for a foot or so and then came firmly to rest against a bolted
instrument mount. It began to rock back and forth. The janitor
screamed and gave a tremendous lunge away from the crate.The
end of the box came up off the table and then smacked back down.
Part of his arm came out of the crate, and Dex saw to his horror
that the gray sleeve of his shirt was chewed and tattered and
soaked with blood. Smiling crescent bites were punched into what
he could see of the man's skin through the shredded flaps of cloth.
Then something that must have been incredibly strong yanked him
back down. The thing in the crate began to snarl and gobble. Every
now and then there would be a breathless whistling sound in
between.
At last Dex broke free of his paraiysis and lunged creakily forward.
He grabbed the janitor's free arm. He yanked ... with no result at
all. It was like trying to pull a man who has been handcuffed to the
bumper of a trailer truck.




The janitor screamed again--a long, ululating sound that rolled
back and forth between the lab's sparkling, white-tiled walls. Dex
could see the gold glimmer of the fillings at the back of the man's
mouth. He could see the yellow ghost of nicotine on his tongue.
The janitor's head slammed down against the edge of the board he
had been about to remove when the thing had grabbed him. And
this time Dex did see something, although it happened with such
mortal, savage speed that later he was unable to describe it
adequately to Henry. Something as dry and brown and scaly as a
desert reptile came out of the crate--something with huge claws. It
tore at the janitor's straining, knotted throat and severed his jugular
vein. Blood began to pump across the table, pooling on the formica
and jetting onto the white-tiled floor. For a moment, a mist of
blood seemed to hang in the air.
Dex dropped the janitor's arm and blundered backward, hands
clapped flat to his cheeks, eyes bulging.
The janitor's eyes rolled wildly at the ceiling. His mouth dropped
open and then snapped closed. The click of his teeth was audible
even below that hungry growling. His feet, clad in heavy black
work shoes, did a short and jittery tap dance on the floor.
Then he seemed to lose interest. His eyes grew almost benign as
they looked raptly at the overhead light globe, which was also
blood-spattered. His feet splayed out in a loose V. His shirt pulled
out of his pants, displaying his white and bulging belly.
"He's dead," Dex whispered. "Oh, Jesus."
The pump of the janitor's heart faltered and lost its rhythm. Now
the blood that flowed from the deep, irregular gash in his neck lost
its urgency and merely flowed down at the command of indifferent
gravity. The crate was stained and splashed with blood. The
snarling seemed to go on endlessly. The crate rocked back and
forth a bit, but it was too well-braced against the instrument mount




to go very far. The body of the janitor lolled grotesquely, still
grasped firmly by whatever was in there. The small of his back
was pressed against the lip of the lab table. His free hand dangled,
sparse hair curling on the fingers between the first and second
knuckles. His big key ring glimmered chrome in the light.
And now his body began to rock slowly this way and that. His
shoes dragged back and forth, not tap dancing now but waltzing
obscenely. And then they did not drag. They dangled an inch off
the floor... then two inches.., then half a foot above the floor. Dex
realized that the janitor was being dragged into the crate.
Tile nape of his neck came to rest against the board fronting the far
side of the hole in the top of the crate. He looked like a man resting
in some weird Zen position of contemplation. His dead eyes
sparkled. And Dex heard, below the savage growling noises, a
smacking, rending sound. And the crunch of a bone.
Dex ran.
He blundered his way across the lab and out the door and up the
stairs. Halfway up, he fell down, clawed at the risers, got to his
feet, and ran again. He gained the first floor hallway and sprinted
down it, past the closed doors with their frosted-glass panels, past
the bulletin boards. He was chased by his own footfalls. In his ears
he could hear that damned whistling.
He ran right into Charlie Gereson's arms and almost knocked him
over, and he spilled the milk shake Charlie had been drinking all
over both of them.
"Holy hell, what's wrong?" Charlie asked, comic in his extreme
surprise. He was short and compact, wearing cotton chinos and a
white tee shirt. Thick spectacles sat grimly on his nose, meaning
business, proclaiming that they were there for a long haul.
"Charlie," Dex said, panting harshly. "My boy... the janitor... the
crate... it whistles... it whistles when it's hungry and it whistles




again when it's full... my boy ... we have to ... campus security ...
we .... We..."
"Slow down, Professor Stanley," Charlie said. He looked
concerned and a little frightened. You don't expect to be seized by
the senior professor in your department when you had nothing
more aggressive in mind yourself than charting the continued
outmigration of sandflies. "Slow down, I don't know what you're
talking about."
Stanley, hardly aware of what he was saying, poured out a garbled
version of what had happened to the janitor. Charlie Gereson
looked more and more confused and doubtful. As upset as he was,
Dex began to realize that Charlie didn't believe a word of it. He
thought, with a new kind of horror, that soon Charlie would ask
him if he had been working too hard, and that when he did, Stanley
would burst into mad cackles of laughter.
But what Charlie said was, "That's pretty far out, Professor
Stanley."
"It's true. We've got to get campus security over here. We--"
"No, that's no good. One of them would stick his hand in there,
first thing." He saw Dex's stricken look and went on. "If I'm having
trouble swallowing this, what are they going to think?"
"I don't know," Dex said. "I... I never thought..."
"They'd think you just came off a helluva toot and were seeing
Tasmanian devils instead of pink elephants," Charlie Gereson said
cheerfully, and pushed his glasses up on his pug nose. "Besides,
from what you say, the responsibility has belonged with zo all
along... like for a hundred and forty years."
"But..." He swallowed, and there was a click in his throat as he
prepared to voice his worst fear. "But it may be out."




"I doubt that," Charlie said, but didn't elaborate. And in that, Dex
saw two things: that Charlie didn't believe a word he had said, and
that nothing he could say would dissuade Charlie from going back
down there.
Henry Northrup glanced at his watch. They had been sitting in the
study for a little over an hour; Wilma wouldn't be back for another
two. Plenty of time. Unlike Charlie Gereson, he had passed no
judgment at all on the factual basis of Dex's story. But he had
known Dex for a longer time than young Gereson had, and he
didn't believe his friend exhibited the signs of a man who has
suddenly developed a psychosis. What he exhibited was a kind of
bug-eyed fear, no more or
less than you'd expect to see a man who has had an extremely close
call with... well, just an extremely close call.
"He went down, Dex?"
"Yes. He did."
"You went with him?"
"Yes."
Henry shifted position a little. "I can understand why he didn't
want to get campus security until he had checked the situation
himself. But Dex, you knew you were telling the flat-out truth,
even if he didn't. Why didn't you call?"
"You believe me?" Dex asked. His voice trembled. "You believe
me, don't you, Henry?"
Henry considered briefly. The story was mad, no question about
that. The implication that there could be something in that box big
enough and lively enough to kill a man after some one hundred and
forty years was mad. He didn't believe it. But this was Dex... and
he didn't disbelieve it either.
"Yes," he said.
"Thank God for that," Dex said. He groped for his drink. "Thank
God for that, Henry."
"It doesn't answer the question, though. Why didn't you call the
campus cops?"
"I thought... as much as I did think... that it might not want to come
out of the crate, into the bright light. It must have lived in the dark
for so long... so very long... and ... grotesque as this sounds... I
though it might be pot-bound, or something. I thought ... well, he'll
see it... he'll see the crate... the janitor's body... he'll see the blood...
and then we'd call security. You see?" Stanley's eyes pleaded with
him to see, and Henry did. He thought that, considering the fact
that it had been a snap judgment in a presure situation, that Dex
had thought quite clearly. The blood. When the young graduate
student saw the blood, he would have been happy to call in the
cops.
"But it didn't work out that way."
"No." Dex ran a hand through his thinning hair.
"Why not?"
"Because when we got down there, the body was gone."
"It was gone?"
"That's right. And the crate was gone, too."
When Charlie Gereson saw the blood, his round and good-natured
face went very pale. His eyes, already magnified by his thick
spectacles, grew even huger. Blood was puddled on the lab table. It
had run down one of the table legs. It was pooled on the floor, and
beads of it clung to the light globe and to the white tile wall. Yes,
there was plenty of blood.
But no janitor. No crate.




Dex Stanley's jaw dropped. "What the fuck!" Charlie whispered.
Dex saw something then, perhaps the only thing that allowed him
to keep his sanity. Already he could feel that central axle trying to
pull free. He grabbed Charlie's shoulder and said, "Look at the
blood on the table!"
"I've seen enough," Charlie said.
His Adam's apple rose and fell like an express elevator as he
struggled to keep his lunch down.
"For God's sake, get hold of yourself," Dex said harshly. "You're a
zoology major. You've seen blood before."
It was the voice of authority, for that moment anyway. Charlie did
get a hold of himself, and they walked a little closer. The random
pools of blood on the table were not as random as they had first
appeared. Each had been neatly straight-edged on one side.
"The crate sat there," Dex said. He felt a little better. The fact that
the crate really had been there steadied him a good deal. "And look
there." He pointed at the floor. Here the blood had been smeared
into a wide, thin trail. It swept toward where the two of them stood,
a few paces inside the double doors. It faded and faded, petering
out altogether about halfway between the lab table and the doors. It
was crystal clear to Dex Stanley, and the nervous sweat on his skin
went cold and clammy.
It had gotten out.
It had gotten out and pushed the crate off the table. And then it had
pushed the crate... where? Under the stairs, of course. Back under
the stairs. Where it had been safe for so long.
"Where's the... the..." Charlie couldn't finish.
"Under the stairs," Dex said numbly. "It's gone back to where it
came from."




"No. The..." He jerked it out finally. "The body."
"I don't know," Dex said. But he thought he did know. His mind
would simply not admit the truth.
Charlie turned abruptly and walked back through the doors.
"Where are you going?" Dex called shrilly, and ran after him.
Charlie stopped opposite the stairs. The triangular black hole
beneath them gaped. The janitor's big four-cell flashlight still sat
on the floor. And beside it was a bloody scrap of gray cloth, and
one of the pens that had been clipped to the man's breast pocket.
"Don't go under there, Charlie! Don't." His heartbeat whammed
savagely in his ears, frightening him even more.
"No," Charlie said. "But the body..."
Charlie hunkered down, grabbed the flashlight, and shone it under
the stairs. And the crate was there, shoved up against the far wall,
just as it had been before, squat and mute. Except that now it was
free of dust and three boards had been pried off the top.
The light moved and centered on one of the janitor's big, sensible
work shoes. Charlie drew breath in a low, harsh gasp. The thick
leather of the shoe had been savagely gnawed and chewed. The
laces hung, broken, from the eyelets. "It looks like somebody put it
through a hay baler," he said hoarsely.
"Now do you believe me?" Dex asked.
Charlie didn't answer. Holding onto the stairs lightly with one
hand, he leaned under the overhang--presumably to get the shoe.
Later, sitting in Henry's study, Dex said he could think of only one
reason why Charlie would have done that--to measure and perhaps
categorize the bite of the thing in the crate. He was, after all, a
zoologist, and a damned good one.
"Don't!" Dex screamed, and grabbed the back of Charlie's shirt.
Suddenly there were two green gold eyes glaring over the top of




the crate. They were almost exactly the color of owls' eyes, but
smaller. There was a harsh, chattering growl of anger. Charlie
recoiled, startled, and slammed the back of his head on the
underside of the stairs. A shadow moved from the crate toward him
at projectile speed. Charlie howled. Dex heard the dry purr of his
shirt as it ripped open, the click as Charlie's glasses struck the floor
and spun away. Once more Charlie tried to back away. The thing
began to snarl--then the snarls suddenly stopped. And Charlie
Gereson began to scream in agony.
Dex pulled on the back of his white tee shirt with all his might. For
a moment Charlie came backwards and he caught a glimpse of a
furry, writhing shape spread-eagled on the young man's chest, a
shape that appeared to have not four but six legs and the flat bullet
head of a young lynx. The front of Charlie Gereson's shirt had been
so quickly and completely tattered that it now looked like so many
crepe streamers hung around his neck.
Then the thing raised its head and those small green gold eyes
stared balefully into Dex's own. He had never seen or dreamed
such savagery. His strength failed. His grip on the back of Charlie's
shirt loosened momentarily.
A moment was all it took. Charlie Gereson's body was snapped
under the stairs with grotesque, cartoonish speed. Silence for a
moment. Then the growling, smacking sounds began again.
Charlie screamed once more, a long sound of terror and pain that
was abruptly cut off... as if something had been clapped over his
mouth.
Or stuffed into it.
Dex fell silent. The moon was high in the sky. Half of his third
drink--an almost unheard-of phenomenon--was gone, and he felt
the reaction setting in as sleepiness and extreme lassitude.




"What did you do then?" Henry asked. What he hadn't done, he
knew, was to go to campus security; they wouldn't have listened to
such a story and then released him so he could go and tell it again
to his friend Henry.
"I just walked around, in utter shock, I suppose. I ran up the stairs
again, just as I had after... after it took the janitor, only this time
there was no Charlie Gereson to run into. I walked... miles, I
suppose. I think I was mad. I kept thinking about Ryder's Quarry.
You know that place?"
"Yes," Henry said.
"I kept thinking that would be deep enough. If... if there would be a
way to get that crate out there. I kept... kept thinking..." He put his
hands to his face. "I don't know. I don't know anymore. I think I'm
going crazy."
"If the story you just told is true, I can understand that," Henry said
quietly. He stood up suddenly. "Come on. I'm taking you home."
"Home?" Dex looked at this friend vacantly. "But--"
"I'll leave a note for Wilma telling her where we've gone and then
we'll call... who do you suggest, Dex? Campus security or the state
police?"
"You believe me, don't you? You believe me? Just say you do."
"Yes, I believe you," Henry said, and it was the truth. "I don't
know what that thing could be or where it came from, but I believe
you." Dex Stanley began to weep.
"Finish your drink while I write my wife," Henry said, apparently
not noticing the tears. He even grinned a little. "And for Christ's
sake, let's get out of here before she gets back."




Dex clutched at Henry's sleeve. "But we won't go anywhere near
Amberson Hall, will we? Promise me, Henry! We'll stay away
from there, won't we?"
"Does a bear shit in the woods?" Henry Northrup asked. It was a
three-mile drive to Dex's house on the outskirts of town, and
before they got there, he was half-asleep in the passenger seat.
"The state cops, I think," Henry said. His words seemed to come
from a great distance. "I think Charlie Gereson's assessment of the
campus cops was pretty accurate. The first one there would happily
stick his arm into that box."
"Yes. All right." Through the drifting, lassitudinous aftermath of
shock, Dex felt a dim but great gratitude that his friend had taken
over with such efficiency. Yet a deeper part of him believed that
Henry could not have done it if he had seen the things he had seen.
"Just... the importance of caution ..."
"I'll see to that," Henry said grimly, and that was when Dex fell
asleep.
He awoke the next morning with August sunshine making crisp
patterns on the sheets of his bed. Just a dream, he thought with
indescribable relief. All some crazy dream.
But there was a taste of Scotch in his mouth--Scotch and
something else. He sat up, and a lance of pain bolted through his
head. Not the sort of pain you got from a hangover, though; not
even if you were the type to get a hangover from three Scotches,
and he wasn't.
He sat up, and there was Henry, sitting across the room. His first
thought was that Henry needed a shave. His second was that there
was something in Henry's eyes that he had never seen before--
something like chips of ice. A ridiculous thought came to Dex; it
passed through his mind and was gone. Sniper's eyes. Henry




Northrup, whose specialty is the earlier English poets, has got
sniper's eyes.
"How are you feeling, Dex?"
"A slight headache," Dex said. "Henry... the police... what
happened?"
"The police aren't coming," Northrup said calmly. "As for your
head, I'm very sorry. I put one of Wilma's sleeping powders in
your third drink. Be assured that it will pass."
"Henry, what are you saying?"
Henry took a sheet of notepaper from his breast pocket. "This is
the note I left my wife. It will explain a lot, I think. I got it back
after everything was over. I took a chance that she'd leave it on the
table, and I got away with it."
"I don't know what you're--"
He took the note from Henry's fingers and read it, eyes widening.
            Dear Billie,
            I've just had a call from Dex Stanley. He's hysterical.
            Seems to have committed some sort of indiscretion with
            one of his female grad students. He's at Amberson Hall.
            So is the girl. For God's sake, come quickly. I'm not
            sure exactly what the situation is, but a woman's
            presence may be imperative, and under the
            circumstances, a nurse from the infirmary just won't do.
            I know you don't like Dex much, but a scandal like this
            could ruin his career. Please come.
            Henry.
"What in God's name have you done?" Dex asked hoarsely.




Henry plucked the note from Dex's nerveless fingers, produced his
Zippo, and set flame to the corner. When it was burning well, he
dropped the charring sheet of paper into an ashtray on the
windowsill.
"I've killed Wilma," he said in the same calm voice. "Ding-dong,
the wicked bitch is dead." Dex tried to speak and could not. That
central axle was trying to tear loose again.The abyss of utter
insanity was below. "I've killed my wife, and now I've put myself
into your hands."
Now Dex did find his voice. It had a sound that was rusty yet
shrill. "The crate," he said. "What have you done with the crate?"
"That's the beauty of it," Henry said. "You put the final piece in the
jigsaw yourself. The crate is at the bottom of Ryder's Quarry."
Dex groped at that while he looked into Henry's eyes. The eyes of
his friend. Sniper's eyes. You can't knock off your own queen,
that's not in anyone's rules of chess, he thought, and restrained an
urge to roar out gales of rancid laughter. The quarry, he had said.
Ryder's Quarry. It was over four hundred feet deep, some said. It
was perhaps twelve miles east of the university. Over the thirty
years that Dex had been here, a dozen people had drowned there,
and three years ago the town had posted the place.
"I put you to bed," Henry said. "Had to carry you into your room.
You were out like a light. Scotch, sleeping powder, shock. But you
were breathing normally and well. Strong heart action. I checked
those things. Whatever else you believe, never think I had any
intention of hurting you, Dex."
"It was fifteen minutes before Wilma's last class ended, and it
would take her another fifteen minutes to drive home and another
fifteen minutes to get over to Amberson Hall. That gave me forty-
five minutes. I got over to Amberson in ten. It was unlocked. That
was enough to settle any doubts I had left."




"What do you mean?"
"The key ring on the janitor's belt. It went with the janitor."
Dex shuddered.
"If the door had been locked--forgive me, Dex, but if you're going
to play for keeps, you ought to cover every base--there was still
time enough to get back home ahead of Wilma and burn that note.
"I went downstairs--and I kept as close to the wall going down
those stairs as I could, believe me..."
Henry stepped into the lab and glanced around. It was just as Dex
had left it. He slicked his tongue over his dry lips and then wiped
his face with his hand. His heart was thudding in his chest. Get
hold of yourself, man. One thing at a time. Don't look ahead.
The boards the janitor had pried off the crate were still stacked on
the lab table. One table over was the scatter of Charlie Gereson's
lab notes, never to be completed now. Henry took it all in, and then
pulled his own flashlight--the one he always kept in the glovebox
of his car for emergencies--from his back pocket. If this didn't
qualify as an emergency, nothing did.
He snapped it on and crossed the lab and went out the door. The
light bobbed uneasily in the dark for a moment, and then he trained
it on the floor. He didn't want to step on anything he shouldn't.
Moving slowly and cautiously, Henry moved around to the side of
the stairs and shone the light underneath. His breath paused, and
then resumed again, more slowly. Sudenly the tension and fear
were gone, and he only felt cold. The crate was under there, just as
Dex had said it was. And the janitor's ballpoint pen. And his shoes.
And Charlie Gereson's glasses.
Henry moved the light from one of these artifacts to the next
slowly, spotlighting each. Then he glanced at his watch, snapped




the flashlight off and jammed it back in his pocket. He had half an
hour. There was no time to waste.
In the janitor's closet upstairs he found buckets, heavy-duty
cleaner, rags... and gloves. No prints. He went back downstairs like
the sorcerer's apprentice, a heavy plastic bucket full of hot water
and foaming cleaner in each hand, rags draped over his shoulder.
His footfalls clacked hollowly in the stillness. He thought of Dex
saying, It sits squat and mute. And still he was cold.
He began to clean up.
"She came," Henry said. "Oh yes, she came. And she was... excited
and happy."
"What?" Dex said.
"Excited," he repeated. "She was whining and carping the way she
always did in that high, unpleasant voice, but that was just habit, I
think. All those years, Dex, the only part of me she wasn't able to
completely control, the only part she could never get completely
under her thumb, was my friendship with you. Our two drinks
while she was at class. Our chess. Our... companionship."
Dex nodded. Yes, companionship was the right word. A little light
in the darkness of loneliness. It hadn't just been the chess or the
drinks; it had been Henry's face over the board, Henry's voice
recounting how things were in his department, a bit of harmless
gossip, a laugh over something.
"So she was whining and bitching in her best 'just call me Billie'
style, but I think it was just habit. She was excited and happy, Dex.
Because she was finally going to be able to get control over the last
... little.., bit." He looked at Dex calmly. "I knew she'd come, you
see. I knew she'd want to see what kind of mess you gotten
yourself into, Dex."




"They're downstairs," Henry told Wilma. Wilma was wearing a
bright yellow sleeveless blouse and green pants that were too tight
for her. "Right downstairs." And he uttered a sudden, loud laugh.
Wilma's head whipped around and her narrow face darkened with
suspicion. "What are you laughing about?" She asked in her loud,
buzzing voice. "Your best friend gets in a scrape with a girl and
you're laughing?"
No, he shouldn't be laughing. But he couldn't help it. It was sitting
under the stairs, sitting there squat and mute, just try telling that
thing in the crate to call you Billie, Wilma--and another loud laugh
escaped him and went rolling down the dim first-floor hall like a
depth charge.
"Well, there is a funny side to it," he said, hardly aware of what he
was saying. "Wait'Il you see. You'll think--"
Her eyes, always questing, never still, dropped to his front pocket,
where he had stuffed the rubber gloves.
"What are those? Are those gloves?"
Henry began to spew words. At the same time he put his arm
around Wilma's bony shoulders and led her toward the stairs.
"Well, he's passed out, you know. He smells like a distillery. Can't
guess how much he drank. Threw up all over everything. I've been
cleaning up. Hell of an awful mess, Billie. I persuaded the girl to
stay a bit. You'll help me, won't you? This is Dex, after all."
"I don't know," she said, as they began to descend the stairs to the
basement lab. Her eyes snapped with dark glee. "I'll have to see
what the situation is. You don't know anything, that's obvious.
You're hysterical. Exactly what I would have expected."
"That's right," Henry said. They had reached the bottom of the
stairs. "Right around here. Just step right around here."
"But the lab's that way--"




"Yes... but the girl..." And he began to laugh again in great,
loonlike bursts.
"Henry, what is wrong with you?" And now that acidic contempt
was mixed with something else--something that might have been
fear.
That made Henry laugh harder. His laughter echoed and
rebounded, filling the dark basement with a sound like laughing
banshees or demons approving a particularly good jest. "The girl,
Billie," Henry said between bursts of helpless laughter. "That's
what's so funny, the girl, the girl has crawled under the stairs and
won't come out, that what's so funny, ah-heh-heh-hahahahaa--"
And now the dark kerosene of joy lit in her eyes; her lips curled up
like charring paper in what the denizens of hell might call a smile.
And Wilma whispered, "What did he do to her?"
"You can get her out," Henry babbled, leading her to the dark.
triangular, gaping maw. "I'm sure you can get her out, no trouble,
no problem." He suddenly grabbed Wilma at the nape of the neck
and the waist, forcing her down even as he pushed her into the
space under the stairs.
"What are you doing?" she screamed querulously. "What are you
doing, Henry?"
"What I should have done a long time ago," Henry said, laughing.
"Get under there, Wilma. Just tell it to call you Billie, you bitch."
She tried to turn, tried to fight him. One hand clawed for his wrist--
he saw her spade-shaped nails slice down, but they clawed only
air. "Stop it, Henry!" She cried. "Stop it right now! Stop this
foolishness! I--I'll scream!"
"Scream all you want!" he bellowed, still laughing. He raised one
foot, planted it in the center of her narrow and joyless backside,
and pushed. "I'll help you, Wilma! Come on out! Wake up,
whatever you are! Wake up! Here's your dinner! Poison meat!
Wake up! Wake up!"
Wilma screamed piercingly, an inarticulate sound that was still
more rage than fear.
And then Henry heard it.
First a low whistle, the sound a man might make while working
alone without even being aware of it. Then it rose in pitch, sliding
up the scale to an earsplitting whine that was barely audible. Then
it suddenly descended again and became a growl... and then a
hoarse yammering. It was an utterly savage sound. All his married
life Henry Northrup had gone in fear of his wife, but the thing in
the crate made Wilma sound like a child doing a kindergarten
tantram. Henry had time to think: Holy God, maybe it really is a
Tasmanian devil... it's some kind of devil, anyway.
Wilma began to scream again, but this time it was a sweeter tune--
at least to the ear of Henry Northrup. It was a sound of utter terror.
Her yellow blouse flashed in the dark under the stairs, a vague
beacon. She lunged at the opening and Henry pushed her back,
using all his strength.
"Henry!" She howled. "Henreeeee!"
She came again, head first this time, like a charging bull. Henry
caught her head in both hands, feeling the tight, wiry cap of her
curls squash under his palms. He Pushed. And then, over Wilma's
shoulder, he saw something that might have been the gold-glinting
eyes of a small owl. Eyes that were infinitely cold and hateful. The
yammering became louder, reaching a crescendo. And when it
struck at Wilma, the vibration running through her body was
enough to knock him backwards.
He caught one glimpse of her face, her bulging eyes, and then she
was dragged back into the darkness. She screamed once more.Only
once.




"Just tell it to call you Billie," he whispered.
Henry Northrup drew a great, shuddering breath.
"It went on ... for quite a while," he said. After a long time, maybe
twenty minutes, the growling and the... the sounds of its feeding...
that stopped, too. And it started to whistle. Just like you said, Dex.
As if it were a happy teakettle or something. It whistled for maybe
five minutes, and then it stopped. I shone my light underneath
again. The crate had been pulled out a little way. Thre was... fresh
blood. And Wilma's purse had spilled everywhere. But it got both
of her shoes. That was something, wasn't it?"
Dex didn't answer. The room basked in sunshine. Outside, a bird
sang.
"I finished cleaning the lab," Henry resumed at last. "It took me
another forty minutes, and I almost missed a drop of blood that
was on the light globe ... saw it just as I was going out. But when I
was done, the place was as neat as a pin. Then I went out to my car
and drove across campus to the English department. It was getting
late, but I didn't feel a bit tired. In fact, Dex, I don't think I ever felt
more clear-headed in my life. There was a crate in the basement of
the English department. I flashed on that very early in your story.
Associating one monster with another, I suppose."
"What do you mean?"
"Last year when Badlinger was in England--you remember
Badlinger, don't you?"
Dex nodded. Badlinger was the man who had beaten Henry out for
the English department chair... partly because Badlinger's wife was
bright, vivacious and sociable, while Henry's wife was a shrew.
Had been a shrew.
"He was in England on sabbatical," Henry said. "Had all their
things crated and shipped back. One of them was a giant stuffed




animal. Nessie, they call it. For his kids. That bastard bought it for
his kids. I always wanted children, you know. Wilma didn't. She
said kids get in the way.
"Anyway, it came back in this gigantic wooden crate, and
Badlinger dragged it down to the English department basement
because there was no room in the garage at home, he said, but he
didn't want to throw it out because it might come in handy
someday. Meantime, our janitors were using it as a gigantic sort of
wastebasket. When it was full of trash, they'd dump it into the back
of the truck on trash day and then fill it up again.
"I think it was the crate Badlinger's damned stuffed monster came
back from England in that put the idea in my head. I began to see
how your Tasmanian devil could be gotten rid of. And that started
me thinking about something else I wanted to be rid of. That I
wanted so badly to be rid of.
"I had my keys, of course. I let myself in and went downstairs. The
crate was there. It was a big, unwieldy thing, but the janitors' dolly
was down there as well. I dumped out the little bit of trash that was
in it and got the crate onto the dolly by standing it on end. I pulled
it upstairs and wheeled it straight across the mall and back to
Amberson."
"You didn't take your car?"
"No, I left my car in my space in the English department parking
lot. I couldn't have gotten the crate in there, anyway."
For Dex, new light began to break. Henry would have been driving
his MG, of course--an elderly sportscar that Wilma had always
called Henry's toy. And if Henry had the MG, then Wilma would
have had the Scout--a jeep with a fold-down back seat. Plenty of
storage space, as the ads said.
"I didn't meet anyone," Henry said. "At this time of year--and at no
other--the campus is quite deserted. The whole thing was almost




hellishly perfect. I didn't see so much as a pair of headlights. I got
back to Amberson Hall and took Badlinger's crate downstairs. I left
it sitting on the dolly with the open end facing under the stairs.
Then I went back upstairs to the janitors' closet and got that long
pole they use to open and close the windows. They only have those
poles in the old buildings now. I went back down and got ready to
hook the crate--your Paella crate--out from under the stairs. Then I
had a bad moment. I realized the top of Badlinger's crate was gone,
you see. I'd noticed it before, but now I realized it. In my guts."
"What did you do?"
"Decided to take the chance," Henry said. "I took the window pole
and pulled the crate out. I eased it out, as if it were full of eggs. No
... as if it were full of Mason jars with nitroglycerine in them."
Dex sat up, staring at Henry. "What... what..."
Henry looked back somberly. "It was my first good look at it,
remember. It was horrible." He paused deliberately and then said it
again: "It was horrible, Dex. It was splattered with blood, some of
it seemingly grimed right into tile wood. It made me think of... do
you remember those joke boxes they used to sell? You'd push a
little lever and tile box would grind and shake, and then a pale
green hand would come out of the top and push the lever back and
snap inside again. It made me think of that.
"I pulled it out--oh, so carefully--and I said I wouldn't look down
inside, no matter what. But I did, of course. And I saw..." His voice
dropped helplessly, seeming to lose all strength. "I saw Wilma's
face, Dex. Her face."
"Henry, don't--"
"I saw her eyes, looking up at me from that box. Her glazed eyes. I
saw something else, too. Something white. A bone, I think. And a
black something. Furry. Curled up. Whistling, too. A very low
whistle. I think it was sleeping."




"I hooked it out as far as I could, and then I just stood there
looking at it, realizing that I couldn't drive knowing that thing
could come out at any time... come out and land on the back of my
neck. So I started to look around for something--anything--to cover
the top of Badlinger's crate.
"I went into the animal husbandry room, and there were a couple
of cages big enough to hold the Paella crate, but I couldn't find the
goddamned keys. So I went upstairs and I still couldn't find
anything. I don't know how long I hunted, but there was this
continual feeling of time... slipping away. I was getting a little
crazy. Then I happened to poke into that big lecture room at the far
end of the hall--"
"Room 6?"
"Yes, I think so. They had been painting the walls. There was a big
canvas dropcloth on the floor to catch the splatters. I took it, and
then I went back downstairs, and I pushed the Paella crate into
Badlinger's crate. Carefully!... you wouldn't believe how carefully
I did it, Dex."
When the smaller crate was nested inside the larger, Henry
uncinched the straps on the English department dolly and grabbed
the end of the dropcloth. It rustled stiffly in the stillness of
Amberson Hall's basement. His breathing rustled stiffly as well.
And there was that low whistle. He kept waiting for it to pause, to
change. It didn't. He had sweated his shirt through; it was plastered
to his chest and back.
Moving carefully, refusing to hurry, he wrapped the dropcloth
around Badlinger's crate three times, then four, then five. In the
dim light shining through from the lab, Badlinger's crate now
looked mummified. Holding the seam with one splayed hand, he
wrapped first one strap around it, then the other. He cinched them
tight and then stood back a moment. He glanced at his watch. It
was just past one o'clock. A pulse beat rhythmically at his throat.




Moving forward again, wishing absurdly for a cigarette (he had
given them up sixteen years before), he grabbed the dolly, tilted it
back, and began pulling it slowly up the stairs.
Outside, the moon watched coldly as he lifted the entire load, dolly
and all, into the back of what he had come to think of as Wilma's
Jeep--although Wilma had not earned a dime since the day he had
married her. It was the biggest lift he had done since he had
worked with a moving company in Westbrook as an
undergraduate. At the highest point of the lift, a lance of pain
seemed to dig into his lower back. And still he slipped it into the
back of the Scout as gently as a sleeping baby.
He tried to close the back, but it wouldn't go up; the handle of the
dolly stuck out four inches too far. He drove with the tailgate
down, and at every bump and pothole, his heart seemed to stutter.
His ears felt for the whistle, waiting for it to escalate into a shrill
scream and then descend to a guttural howl of fury waiting for the
hoarse rip of canvas as teeth and claws pulled their way through it.
And overhead the moon, a mystic silver disc, rode the sky.
"I drove out to Ryder's Quarry," Henry went on. "There was a
chain across the head of the road, but I geared the Scout down and
got around. I backed right up to the edge of the water. The moon
was still up and I could see its reflection way down in the
blackness, like a drowned silver dollar. I went around, but it was a
long time before I could bring myself to grab the thing. In a very
real way, Dex, it was three bodies... the remains of three human
beings. And I started wondering...where did they go? I saw
Wilma's face, but it looked ... God help me, it looked all flat, like a
Halloween mask. How much of them did it eat, Dex? How much
could it eat? And I started to understand what you meant about that
central axle pulling loose."
"It was still whistling. I could hear it, muffled and faint, through
that canvas dropcloth. Then I grabbed it and I heaved... I really




believe it was do it then or do it never. It came sliding out... and I
think maybe it suspected, Dex... because, as the dolly started to tilt
down toward the water it started to growl and yammer again ... and
the canvas started to ripple and bulge ... and I yanked it again. I
gave it all I had ... so much that I almost fell into the damned
quarry myself. And it went in. There was a splash ... and then it
was gone. Except for a few ripples, it was gone. And then the
ripples were gone, too."
He fell silent, looking at his hands.
"And you came here," Dex said.
"First I went back to Amberson Hall. Cleaned under the stairs.
Picked up all of Wilma's things and put them in her purse again.
Picked up the janitor's shoe and his pen and your grad student's
glasses. Wilma's purse is still on the seat. I parked the car in our--
in my--driveway. On the way there I threw the rest of the stuff in
the river."
"And then did what? Walked here?"
"Yes."
"Henry, what if I'd waked up before you got here? Called the
police?"
Henry Northrup said simply: "You didn't."
They stared at each other, Dex from his bed, Henry from the chair
by the window.
Speaking in tones so soft as to be nearly inaudible, Henry said,
"The question is, what happens now? Three people are going to be
reported missing soon. There is no one element to connect all
three. There are no signs of foul play; I saw to that. Badlinger's
crate, the dolly, the painters' dropcloth--those things will be
reported missing too, presumably. There will be a search. But the




weight of the dolly will carry the crate to the bottom of the quarry,
and ... there are really no bodies, are there, Dex?"
"No," Dexter Stanley said. "No, I suppose there aren't."
"But what are you going to do, Dex? What are you going to say?"
"Oh, I could tell a tale," Dex said. "And if I told it, I suspect I'd end
up in the state mental hospital. Perhaps accused of murdering the
janitor and Gereson, if not your wife. No matter how good your
cleanup was, a state police forensic unit could find traces of blood
on the floor and walls of that laboratory. I believe I'll keep my
mouth shut."
"Thank you," Henry said. "Thank you, Dex."
Dex thought of that elusive thing Henry had mentioned
companionship. A little light in the darkness. He thought of
playing chess perhaps twice a week instead of once. Perhaps even
three times a week... and if the game was not finished by ten,
perhaps playing until midnight if neither of them had any early
morning classes, instead of having to put the board away (and, as
likely as not, Wilma would just "accidentally" knock over the
pieces "while dusting," so that the game would have to be started
all over again the following Thursday evening). He thought of his
friend, at last free of that other species of Tasmanian devil that
killed more slowly but just as surely--by heart attack, by stroke, by
ulcer, by high blood pressure, yammering and whistling in the ear
all the while.
Last of all, he thought of the janitor, casually flicking his quarter,
and of the quarter coming down and rolling under the stairs, where
a very old horror sat squat and mute, covered with dust and
cobwebs, waiting... biding its time...
What had Henry said? The whole thing was almost hellishly
perfect.




"No need to thank me, Henry," he said.
Henry stood up. "If you got dressed," he said, "you could run me
down to the campus. I could get my MG and go back home and
report Wilma missing."
Dex thought about it. Henry was inviting him to cross a nearly
invisible line, it seemed, from bystander to accomplice. Did he
want to cross that line?
At last he swung his legs out of bed. "All right, Henry."
"Thank you, Dexter."
Dex smiled slowly. "That's all right," he said. "After all, what are
friends for?"




       STEPHEN KING

The Revelations Of 'Becka Paulson
                                       From Rolling Stone Magazine 1984
       An excerpt from The Tommyknockers




    What happened was simple enough at least, at the start. What
happened was that Rebecca Paulson shot herself in the head with her
husband Joe's .22-caliber pistol. This occurred during her annual
spring cleaning, which took place this year (as it did most years)
around the middle of June. 'Becka had a way of falling behind in
such things.
         She was standing on a short stepladder and rummaging through
the accumulated junk on the high shelf in the downstairs hall closet
while the Paulson cat, a big brindle tom named Ozzie Nelson, sat in
the living-room doorway, watching her. From behind Ozzie came the
anxious voices of Another World, blaring out of the Paulsons' big old
Zenith TV which would later become something much more than a
TV.
         'Becka pulled stuff down and examined it, hoping for
something that was still good, but not really expecting to find such a
thing. There were four or five knitted winter caps, all moth-eaten and
unraveling. She tossed them behind her onto the hall floor. Here was
a Reader's Digest Condensed Book from the summer of 1954,
featuring Run Silent, Run Deep and Here's Goggle. Water damage
had swelled it to the size of a Manhattan telephone book. She tossed
it behind her. Ah! Here was an umbrella that looked salvageable ...
and a box with something in it.
         It was a shoebox. Whatever was inside was heavy. When she
tilted the box, it shifted. She took the lid off, also tossing this behind
her (it almost hit Ozzie Nelson, who decided to split the scene). Inside
the box was a gun with a long barrel and imitation wood-grip
handles.
         "Oh," she said. "That." She took it out of the box, not noticing
that it was cocked, and turned it around to look into the small beady
eye of the muzzle, believing that if there was a bullet in there she
would see it.
       She remembered the gun. Until five years ago, Joe had been a
member of Derry Elks. Some ten years ago (or maybe it had been
fifteen), Joe had bought fifteen Elks raffle tickets while drunk. 'Becka
had been so mad she had refused to let him put his manthing in her
for two weeks. The first prize had been a Bombardier Skidoo, second
prize an Evinrude motor. This .22 target pistol had been the third
prize.
       He had shot it for a while in the backyard, she remembered
plinking away at cans and bottles until 'Becka complained about the
noise. Then he had taken it up to the gravel pit at the dead end of
their road, although she had sensed he was losing interest, even then
he'd just gone on shooting for a while to make sure she didn't think
she had gotten the better of him. Then it had disappeared. She had
thought he had swapped it for something a set of snow tires, maybe,
or a battery but here it was.
       She held the muzzle of the gun up to her eye, peering into the
darkness, looking for the bullet. She could see nothing but darkness.
Must be unloaded, then.
       I'll make him get rid of it just the same, she thought, backing
down the stepladder. Tonight. When he gets back from the post
office. I'll stand right up to him. "Joe" I'll say, "it's no good having a
gun sitting around the house even if there's no kids around and it's
unloaded. You don't even use it to shoot bottles anymore." That's
what I'll say.
       This was a satisfying thing to think, but her undermind knew
that she would of course say no such thing. In the Paulson house, it
was Joe who mostly picked the roads and drove the horses. She
supposed that it would be best to just dispose of it herself put it in a
plastic garbage bag under the other rickrack from the closet shelf.
The gun would go to the dump with everything else the next time
Vinnie Margolies stopped by to pick up their throw-out. Joe would
not miss what he had already forgotten the lid of the box had been
thick with undisturbed dust. Would not miss it, that was, unless she
was stupid enough to bring it to his attention.




      'Becka reached the bottom of the ladder. Then she stepped
backward onto the Reader's Digest Condensed Book with her left
foot. The front board of the book slid backward as the rotted binding
gave way. She tottered, holding the gun with one hand and flailing
with the other. Her right foot came down on the pile of knitted caps,
which also slid backward. As she fell she realised that she looked
more like a woman bent on suicide than on cleaning.
      Well, it ain't loaded, she had time to think, but the gun was
loaded, and it had been cocked; cocked for years, as if waiting for her
to come along. She sat down hard in the hallway and when she did
the hammer of the pistol snapped forward. There was a flat,
unimportant bang not much louder than a baby firecracker in a tin
cup, and a .22 Winchester short entered 'Becka Paulson's brain just
above the left eye. It made a small black hole what was the faint blue
of just-bloomed irises around the edges.
      Her head thumped back against the wall, and a trickle of blood
ran from the hole into her left eyebrow. The gun, with a tiny thread of
white smoke rising from its muzzle, fell into her lap. Her hands
drummed lightly up and down on the floor for a period of about five
seconds, her right leg flexed, then shot straight out. Her loafer flew
across the hall and hit the far wall. Her eyes remained open for the
next thirty minutes, the pupils dilating and constricting, dilating and
constricting.
      Ozzie Nelson came to the living-room door, miaowed at her,
and then began washing himself.
   She was putting supper on the table that night before Joe
noticed the Band-Aid over her eye. He had been home for an hour
and a half, but just lately he didn't notice much at all around the
house he seemed preoccupied with something, far away from her a
lot of the time. This didn't bother her as much as it might have once
at least he wasn't always after her to let him put his manthing into her
ladyplace.
      "What'd you do to your head?" he asked as she put a bowl of
beans and a plate of red hot dogs on the table.




      She touched the Band-Aid vaguely. Yes what exactly had she
done to her head? She couldn't really remember. The whole middle of
the day had a funny dark place in it, like an inkstain. She
remembered feeding Joe his breakfast and standing on the porch as he
headed off to the post office in his Wagoneer that much was crystal
clear. She remembered doing the white load in the new Sears washer
while Wheel of Fortune blared from the TV. That was also clear.
Then the inkstain began. She remembered putting in the colors and
starting the cold cycle. She had the faintest, vaguest recollection of
putting a couple of Swanson's Hungary man frozen dinners in the
oven for herself 'Becka Paulson was a hefty eater but after that
there was nothing. Not until she had awakened sitting on the living-
room couch. She had changed from slacks and her flowed smock into
a dress and high heel; she had put her hair in braids. There was
something heavy in her lap and on her shoulders and her forehead
tickled. It was Ozzie Nelson. Ozzie was standing with his hind legs in
her crotch and his forepaws on her shoulders. He was busily licking
blood off her forehead and out of her eyebrow. She swotted Ozzie
away from her lap and then looked at the clock. Joe would be home
in an hour and she hadn't even started dinner. Then she had touched
her head, which throbbed vaguely.
   "'Becka?"
      "What?" She sat down at her place and began to spoon beans
onto her plate.
      "I asked you what you did to your head?"
      "Bumped it," she said ... although, when she went down to the
bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, it hadn't looked like a
bump; it had looked like a hole. "I just bumped it."
      "Oh," he said, losing interest. He opened the new issue of
Sports Illustrated which had come that day and immediately fell into
a daydream. In it he was running his hands slowly over the body of
Nancy Voss an activity he had been indulging in the last six weeks
or so. God bless the United States Postal Authority for sending Nancy
Voss from Falmouth to Haven, that was all he could say. Falmouth's
loss was Joe Paulson's gain. He had whole days when he was quite
sure he had died and gone to heaven, and his pecker hadn't been so
frisky since he was nineteen and touring West Germany with the U.S.
Army. It would have taken more than a Band-Aid on his wife's
forehead to engage his full attention.
       'Becka helped herself to three hot dogs, paused to debate a
moment, and then added a fourth. She doused the dogs and the beans
with ketchup and then stirred everything together. The result looked a
bit like the aftermath of a bad motorcycle accident. She poured
herself a glass of grape Kool-Aid from the pitcher on the table (Joe
had a beer) and then touched the Band-Aid with the tips of her fingers
 she had been doing that ever since she put it on. Nothing but a cool
plastic strip. That was okay ... but she could feel the circular
indentation beneath. The hole. That wasn't so okay.
       "Just bumped it," she murmured again, as if saying would
make it so. Joe didn't look up and 'Becka began to eat.
       Hasn't hurt my appetite any, whatever it was, she thought. Not
that much ever does probably nothing ever will. When they say on
the radio that all those missiles are flying and it's the end of the world.
I'll probably go right on eating until one of those rockets lands on
Haven.
       She cut herself a piece of bread from the homemade loaf and
began mopping up bean juice with it.
       Seeing that ... that mark on her forehead had unnerved her at
the time, unnerved her plenty. No sense kidding about that, just as
there was no sense kidding that it was just a mark, like a bruise. And
in case anyone ever wanted to know, 'Becka thought, she would tell
them that looking into the mirror and seeing that you had an extra
hole in your head wasn't one of life's cheeriest experiences. Your
head, after all, was where your brains were. And as for what she had
done next
       She tried to shy away from that, but it was too late.
       Too late, 'Becka, a voice tolled in her mind it sounded like
her dead father's voice.




      She had stared at the hole, stared at it and stared at it, and then
she had pulled open the drawer to the left of the sink and had pawed
through her few meager items of makeup with hands that didn't seem
to belong to her. She took out her eyebrow pencil and then looked
into the mirror again.
      She raised the hand holding the eyebrow pencil with the blunt
end towards her, and slowly began to push it into the hole in her
forehead. No, she moaned to herself, stop it, 'Becka, you don't want to
do this
      But apparently part of her did, because she went right on doing
it. There was no pain and the eyebrow pencil was a perfect fit. She
pushed it in an inch, then two, then three. She looked at herself in the
mirror, a woman in a flowered dress who had a pencil sticking out of
her head. She pushed it in a fourth inch.
      Not much left, 'Becka, be careful, wouldn't want to lose it in
there, I'd rattle when you turned over in the night, wake up Joe
      She tittered hysterically.
      Five inches in and the blunt end of the eyebrow pencil had
finally encountered resistance. It was hard, but a gentle push also
communicated a feeling of sponginess. At the same moment the
whole world turned a brilliant, momentary green and an interlacing
of memories jigged through her mind sledding at four in her older
brother's snowsuit, washing high school blackboards, a '59 Impala
her Uncle Bill had owned, the smell of cut hay.
      She pulled the eyebrow pencil out of her head, shocked back to
herself, terrified that blood would come gushing out of the hole. But
no blood came, nor was there any blood on the shiny surface of the
eyebrow pencil. Blood or ... or ...
      But she would not think of that. She threw the pencil back into
the drawer and slammed the draw shut. Her first impulse, to cover the
hole, came back, stronger than ever.
      She swung the mirror away from the medicine cabinet and
grabbed the tin box of Band-Aids. It fell from her trembling fingers
and cluttered into the basin. 'Becka had cried out at the sound and
then told herself to stop it, just stop it. Cover it up, make it gone. That




was the thing to do; that was the ticket. Never mind the eyebrow
pencil, just forget that she had none of the signs of brain injury she
had seen on the afternoon stories and Marcus Welby, M.D., that was
the important thing. She was all right. As for the eyebrow pencil, she
would just forget that part.
      And so she had, at least until now. She looked at her half-eaten
dinner and realized with a sort of dull humor that she had been wrong
about her appetite she couldn't eat another bite.
      She took her plate over to the garbage and scrapped what was
left into the can, while Ozzie wound restlessly around her ankles. Joe
didn't look up from his magazine. In his mind, Nancy Voss was
asking him again if that tongue of his was as long as it looked.
 She woke up in the middle of the night from some confusing dream in
which all the clocks in the house had been talking in her father's
voice. Joe lay beside her, flat on his back in his boxer shorts, snoring.
      Her hand went to the Band-Aid. The hole didn't hurt, didn't
exactly throb, but it itched. She rubbed at it gently, afraid of another
of those dazzling green flashes. None came.
      She rolled over on her side and though: You got to go to the
doctor, 'Becka. You got to get that seen to. I don't know what you
did, but
      No, she answered herself. No doctor. She rolled to her other
side, thinking she would be awake for hours now, wondering, asking
herself frightened questions. Instead, she was asleep again in
moments.
   In the morning the hole under the Band-Aid hardly itched at all,
and that made it easier not to think about. She made Joe his breakfast
and saw him off to work. She finished washing the dishes and took
out the garbage. They kept it in a little shed beside the house that Joe
had built, a structure not much bigger than a doghouse. You had to
lock it up or the coons came out of the woods and made a mess.
      She stepped in, wrinkling her nose at the smell, and put the
green bag down with the others. Vinnie would be by in Friday or
Saturday and then she would give the shed a good airing. As she was
backing out, she saw a bag that hadn't been tied up like the others. A
curved handle, like the handle of a cane protruded from the top.
      Curious, she pulled it out and saw it was an umbrella. A
number of moth-eaten, unraveling hats came out with the umbrella.
      A dull warning sound in her head. For a moment she could
almost see through the inkstain to what was behind it, to what had
happened to her
      (bottom it's in the bottom something heavy something in a box
what Joe don't remember won't)
      yesterday. But did she want to know?
      No.
      She didn't.
      She wanted to forget.
      She backed out of the little shed and rebolted the door with
hands that trembled the slightest bit.
   A week later (she still changed the band-Aid each morning, but
the wound was closing up she could see the pink new tissue filling
it when she shone Joe's flashlight into it and peered into the bathroom
mirror) 'Becka found out what half of have already either knew or
surmised that Joe was cheating on her. Jesus told her. In the last
three days or so, Jesus had told her the most amazing, terrible,
distressing things imaginable. They sickened her, they destroyed her
sleep, they were destroying her sanity ... but were they wonderful?
Weren't they just! And would she stop listening, simply tip Jesus over
on His face, perhaps scream at Him to shut up? Absolutely not. For
one thing, he was the Savior. For another thing, there was a grisly
sort of compulsion in knowing the things Jesus told her.
      Jesus was on top of the Paulsons' Zenith television and He had
been in that same spot for just about twenty years. Before resting atop
the Zenith, He had rested atop two RCAs (Joe Paulson had always
bought American). This was a beautiful 3-D picture of Jesus that
Rebecca's sister, who lived in Portsmouth, had sent her. Jesus was
dressed in a simple white robe, and He was holding a Shepard's staff.




Because the picture had been created ('Becka considered "made"
much too mundane a word for a likeness which seemed so real you
could almost stick your hand into it) before the Beatles and the
changes they had wreaked on male hairstyles, His hair was not too
long, and perfectly neat. The Christ on 'Becka Paulson's TV combed
His hair a little bit like Elvis Presley after Elvis got out of the army.
His eyes were brown and mild and kind. Behind Him, in perfect
perspective, sheep as white as the linens in TV soap commercials
trailed away into the distance. 'Becka and her sister Corinne and her
brother Roland had grown up on a sheep farm in New Gloucester,
and 'Becka knew from personal experience that sheep were never that
white and uniformly woolly, like little fair weather clouds that had
fallen to earth. But, she reasoned, if Jesus could turn water into wine
and bring the dead back to life, there was no reason at all why He
couldn't make the shit caked around a bunch of lambs' rumps
disappear if He wanted to.
      A couple of times Joe had tried to move that picture off the TV,
and she supposed that now she new why, oh yessirree Bob, oh yes
indeedy. Joe of course, had his trumped-up tales. "it doesn't seem
right to have Jesus on top of the television while we're watching
Three's Company or Charlie's Angels" he'd say. "Why don't you put it
up on your bureau, 'Becka? Or ... I'll tell you what! Why not put it
up on your bureau until Sunday, and then you can bring it down and
out it back on the TV while you watch Jimmy Swaggart and Rex
Humbard and Jerry Falwell? I'll bet Jesus likes Jerry Falwell one hell
of a lot better than he likes Charlie's Angels."
      She refused.
      "When it's my turn to have the Thursday-night poker game, the
guys don't like it," he said another time. "No one wants to have Jesus
Christ looking at them while He tries to fill a flush or draw to an
inside straight."
      "Maybe they feel uncomfortable because they know gambling's
the Devil's work," 'Becka said.
      Joe, who was a good poker player, bridled. "then it was the
Devil's work that bought you your hair dryer and that garnet ring you




like so well," he said. "better take 'em back for refunds and give the
money to the Salvation Army. Wait, I think I got the receipts in my
den."
           She allowed as how Joe could turn the 3-D picture of Jesus
around to face the wall on the one Thursday night a month that he
had his dirty-talking, beer-swilling friends in to play poker ... but
that was all.
          And now she knew the real reason he wanted to get rid of that
picture. He must have had an idea all along that that picture was a
magic picture. Oh ... she supposed sacred was a better word, magic
was for pagans headhunters and Catholics and people like that
but the came almost to one and the same, didn't they? All along Joe
must have sensed that picture was special, that it would be the means
by which his sin would be found out.
          Oh, she supposed she must have had some idea of what all his
recent preoccupation had meant, must have known there was a reason
why he was never after her at night anymore. But the truth was, that
had been a relief sex was just as her mother had told her it would
be, nasty and brutish, sometimes painful and always humiliating.
Had she also smelled perfume on his collar from time to time? If so,
she had ignored that, too, and she might have gone on ignoring it
indefinitely if the picture of Jesus on the Sony hadn't begun to speak
on July 7th.   She realized now that she had ignored a third factor, as
well; at about the same time the pawings had stopped the perfume
smells had begun, old Charlie Estabrooke had retired and a woman
named Nancy Voss had come up from the Falmouth post office to
take his place. She guessed that the Voss woman (whom, 'Becka had
now come to think of simply as The Hussy) was perhaps five years
older than her and Joe, which would make her around fifty, but she
was a trim, well-kept and handsome fifty. 'Becka herself had put on a
little weight during her marriage, going from one hundred and
twenty-six to a hundred and ninety-three, most of that since Byron,
their only chick and child, had flown from the nest.
          She could have gone on ignoring it, and perhaps what would
even have been for the best. If The Hussey really enjoyed the
animalism of sexual congress, with its gruntings and thrustings and
that final squirt of sticky stuff that smelled faintly like codfish and
looked like cheap dish detergent, then it only proved that The Hussy
was little more than an animal herself and of course it freed 'Becka
of a tiresome, if ever more occasional, obligation. But when the
picture of Jesus spoke up, telling her exactly what was going on, it
became impossible to ignore. She knew that something would have to
be done.
      The picture first spoke at just past three in the afternoon on
Thursday. This was eight days after shooting herself in the head and
about four days after her resolution to forget it was a hole and not
just a mark had begun to take effect. 'Becka was coming back into
the living room from the kitchen with a little snack (half a coffeecake
and a beer stein filled with Kool-Aid) to watch General Hospital. She
no longer really believed that Luke would ever find Laura, but she
could not quite find it in her heart to completely give up hope.
      She was bending down to turn on the Zenith when Jesus said,
"'Becka, Joe is putting the boots to that Hussey down at the pee-oh
just about every lunch hour and sometimes after punching out time in
the afternoon. Once he was so randy he drove it to her while he was
supposed to be helping her sort the mail. And do you know what?
She never even said 'At least wait until I get the first-class into the
boxes.' "
      'Becka screamed and spilled her Kool-Aid down the front of the
TV. It was a wonder, she thought later, when she was able to think at
all, that the picture tube didn't blow. Her coffeecake went on the rug.
      "And that's not all," Jesus told her. He walked halfway across
the picture, His robe fluttering around His ankles, and sat down on a
rock that jutted out of the ground. He held His staff between his
knees and looked at her grimly. "There's a lot going on in Haven.
Why, you wouldn't believe the half of it."
      'Becka screamed again and fell on her knees. One of them
landed squarely on her coffeecake and squirted raspberry filling into
the face of Ozzie Nelson, who had crept into the living room to see
what was going on. "My Lord! My Lord!" 'Becka shrieked. Ozzie




ran, hissing, for the kitchen, where he crawled under the stove with
red goo dripping from his whiskers. He stayed under there the rest of
the day.
      "Well, none of the Paulsons was ever any good," Jesus said. A
sheep wandered towards Him and He whacked it away, using His
staff with an absentminded impatience that reminded 'Becka, even in
her current frozen state, of her long-dead father. The sheep went,
rippling slightly through the 3-D effect. It disappeared from the
picture, actual seeming to curve as it went off the edge ... but that
was just an optical illusion, she felt sure. "No good at all, "Jesus went
on. "Joe's granddad was a whoremaster of the purest sense, as you
well know, 'Becka. Spent his whole life pecker-led. And when he
came up here, do you know what we said? 'No room!' that's what we
said." Jesus leaned forward, still holding His staff. "'Go see Mr.
Splitfoot down below,' we said. 'You'll find your haven-home, all
right. But you may find you new landlord a hard taskmaster,' we
said." Incredibly, Jesus winked at her ... and that was when 'Becka
fled, shrieking, from the house.
   She stopped in the backyard, panting, her hair, a mousy blond
that was really not much of any color at all, hanging in her face. Her
heart was beating so fast in her chest that it frightened her. No one
had heard her shriekings and carryings-on, thank the Lord; she and
Joe lived far out on the Nista Road, and their nearest neighbors were
the Brodskys were half a mile away. If anyone had heard her, they
would have thought there was a crazywoman down at Joe and 'Becka
Paulson's.
      Well there is a crazywoman at the Paulsons', isn't there? she
thought. If you really think that picture of Jesus started to talk to you,
why, you really must be crazy. Daddy'd beat you three shades of blue
for thinking such a thing one shade for lying, another shade for
believing the lie, and a third for raising your voice. 'Becka, you are
crazy. Pictures don't talk.
      No ... and it didn't, another voice spoke up suddenly. That
voice came out of your own head, 'Becka. I don't know how it could




be ... how you could know such things ... but that's what happened.
Maybe it had something to do with what happened to you last week,
or maybe not, but you made that picture of Jesus talk your own self.
It didn't really no more than that little rubber Topo Gigio mouse on
the Ed Sullivan Show.
       But somehow the idea that it might have something to do with
that ... that
       (hole)
       other thing was scarier than the idea that the picture itself had
spoken, because that was the sort of thing they sometimes had on
Marcus Welby, like that show about the fellow who had the brain
tumor and it was making him wear his wife's nylon stockings and
step-ins. She refused to allow it mental houseroom. It might be a
miracle. After all, miracles happened every day. There was the
Shroud of Turin, and the cures at Lourdes, and that Mexican fellow
who had a picture of the Virgin Mary burned into the surface of a
taco or an enchilada or something. Not to mention those children that
had made the headlines of one of the tabloids children who cried
rocks. Those were all bona fide miracles (the children who wept
rocks was, admittedly, a rather gritty one), as uplifting as a Jimmy
Swaggart sermon. Hearing voices was only crazy.
       But that's what happened. And you've been hearing voices for
quite a little while now, haven't you? You've been hearing His voice.
Joe's voice. And that's where it came from, not from Jesus but from
Joe, from Joe's head
       "No," 'Becka whimpered. "No, I ain't heard any voices in my
head."
           She stood by her clothesline in the hot backyard, looking
blankly off toward the woods on the other side of the Nista Road,
blue-gray-hazy in the heat. She wrung her hands in front of her and
begun to weep.
       "I ain't no heard no voices in my head."
       Crazy, her dead father's implacable voice replied. Crazy with
the heat. You come on over here, 'Becka Bouchard, I'm gonna beat
you three shades of blister-blue for that crazy talk.




      "I ain't heard no voices in my head," 'Becka moaned. "That
picture really did talk, I swear, I can't do ventriloquism!"
      Better believe the picture. If it was the hole, it was a brain
tumor, sure. If it was the picture, it was a miracle. Miracles came
from God. Miracles came from Outside. A miracle could drive you
crazy and the dear God knew she felt like she was going crazy now
 but it didn't mean you were crazy, or that your brains were
scrambled. As for believing that you could hear other people's
thoughts ... that was just crazy.
      'Becka looked down at her legs and saw blood gushing from her
left knee. She shrieked again and ran back into the house to call the
doctor, MEDIX, somebody. She was in the living room again,
pawing at the dial with the phone to her ear, when Jesus said:
      "That's raspberry filling from your coffeecake, 'Becka. Why
don't you just relax, before you have a heart attack?"
      She looked at the TV, the telephone receiver falling to the table
with a clunk. Jesus was still sitting on the rock outcropping. It looked
as though He had crossed His legs. It was really surprising how much
He looked like her own father ... only He didn't seem forbidding,
ready to be hitting angry at a moment's notice. He was looking at her
with a kind of exasperated patience.
      "Try it and see if I'm not right," Jesus said.
      She touched her knee gently, wincing, expecting pain. There
was none. She saw the seeds in the red stuff and relaxed. She licked
the raspberry filling off her fingers.
      "Also," Jesus said, "you have got to get these ideas about
hearing voices and going crazy out of your head. It's just Me. And I
can talk to anyone I want to, any way I want to."
      "Because you're the Savior," 'Becka whispered.
      "That's right," Jesus said, and looked down. Below Him, a
couple of animated salad bowls were dancing in appreciation of the
hidden Valley Ranch Dressing which they were about to receive.
"And I'd like you to please turn that crap off, if you don't mind. We
don't need that thing running. Also, it makes My feet tingle."
      'Becka approached the TV and turned it off.




       "My Lord," she whispered.
   Now it was Sunday, July 10th. Joe was lying fast asleep out in
the backyard hammock with Ozzie lying limply across him ample
stomach like a black and white fur stole. She stood in the living
room, holding the curtain back with her left hand and looking out at
Joe. Sleeping in the hammock, dreaming of The Hussy, no doubt
dreaming of throwing her down in a great big pile of catalogs from
Carroll Reed and fourth-class junk mail and then how would Joe
and his piggy poker-buddies out it? "putting the boots to her."
       She was holding the curtain with her left hand because she had
a      handful of square nine-volt batteries in her right. She had
bought them yesterday down at the town hardware store. Now she let
the curtain drop and took the batteries into the kitchen, where she was
assembling a little something on the counter. Jesus had told her how
to make it. She told Jesus she couldn't build things. Jesus told her not
to be a cussed fool. If she could follow a recipe, she could build this
little gadget. She was delighted to find that Jesus was absolutely
right. It was not only easy, it was fun. A lot more fun than cooking,
certainly; she had never really had the knack for that. Her cakes
almost always fell and her breads almost never rose. She had begun
this little thing yesterday, working with the toaster, the motor from
her old Hamilton-Beach blender, and a funny board full of electronic
things which had come from the back of an old radio in the shed. She
thought she would be done long before Joe woke up and came in to
watch the Red Sox on TV at two o'clock.
       Actually, it was funny how many ideas she'd had in the last few
days. Some Jesus had told her about; others just seemed to come to
her at odd moments.
       Her sewing machine, for instance she'd always wanted one of
those attachments that made the zigzag stitches, but Joe had told her
she would have to wait until he could afford to buy her a new
machine (and that would probably be along about the twelfth of
Never, if she knew Joe). Just four days ago she had seen how, if she
just moved the button stitcher and added a second needle where it had




been at an angle of forty-five degrees to the first needle, she could
make all the zigzags she wanted. All it took was a screwdriver even
a dummy like her could use one of those and it worked just as well
as you could want. She saw that the camshaft would probably warp
out of true before long because of the weight differential, but there
were ways to fix that, too, when it happened.
      Then there was the Electrolux. Jesus had told her about that
one. Getting her ready for Joe, maybe. It had been Jesus who told her
how to use Joe's little butane welding torch, and that made it easier.
She had gone over to Derry and bought three of those electronic
Simon games at KayBee Toys. Once she was back home she broke
them open and pulled out the memory boards. Following Jesus'
instructions, she connected the boards and wired Eveready dry cells
to the memory circuits she had created. Jesus told her how to
program the Electrolux and power it (she had in fact, already figured
this out for herself, but she was much too polite to tell Him so). Now
it vacuumed the kitchen, living room, and downstairs bathroom all by
itself. It had a tendency to get caught under the piano bench or in the
bathroom (where it just kept on butting its stupid self against the
toilet until she came running to turn it around), and it scared the
granola out of Ozzie, but it was still an improvement over dragging a
thirty-pound vac around like a dead dog. She had much more time to
catch up on the afternoon stories and now these included true
stories Jesus told her. Her new, improved Electrolux used juice
awfully fast, though, and sometimes it got tangled in its own
electrical cord. She thought she might just scratch the dry cells and
hook up a motorcycle battery to it one day soon. There would be time
 after this problem of Joe and The Hussy had been solved.
      Or ... just last night. She had lain awake in bed long after Joe
was snoring beside her, thinking about numbers. It occurred to
'Becka (who had never gotton beyond Business Math in high school)
that if you gave numbers letter values, you could un-freeze them
you could turn them into something that was like Jell-O. When they
 the numbers were letters, you could pour them into any old mold
you liked. Then you could turn the letters back into numbers, and




that was like putting the Jell-O into the fridge so it would set, and
keep the shape of the mold when you turned it out onto a plate later
on.
         That way you could always figure things out, 'Becka had
thought, delighted. She was unaware that her fingers had gone to the
spot above her left eye and were rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. For
instance, just look! You could make things fall into a line every time
by saying ax + bx + c = 0, and that proves it. It always works. It's
like Captain Marvel saying Shazam! Well, there is the zero factor;
you can't let "a" be zero or that spoils it. But otherwise
         She had lain awake a while longer, considering this, and then
had fallen asleep, unaware that she had just reinvented the quadratic
equation, and polynomials, and the concept of factoring.
         Ideas. Quite a few of them just lately.
    'Becka picked up Joe's little blowtorch and lit it deftly with a
kitchen match. She would have laughed last month if you'd told her
she would ever be working with something like this. But it was easy.
Jesus had told her exactly how to solder the wires to the electronics
board from the old radio. It was just like fixing up the vacuum
cleaner, only this idea was even better.
         Jesus had told her a lot of other things in the last three days or
so. They had murdered her sleep (and what little sleep she had gotton
was nightmare-driven), they had made her afraid to show her face in
the village itself (I'll always know when you've done something
wrong, 'Becka, her father had told her, because your face just can't
keep a secret), they had made her lose her appetite. Joe, totally
bound up in his work, the Red Sox, and his Hussy, noticed none of
these tings ... although he had noticed the other night as the watched
television that 'Becka was gnawing her fingernails, something she
had never done before it was, in fact, one of the many things she
nagged him about. But she was doing it now, all right; they were
bitten right down to the quick. Joe Paulson considered this for all of
twelve seconds before looking back at the Sony TV and losing
himself in dreams of Nancy Voss's billowy white breasts.




      Here were just a few of the afternoon stories Jesus had told her
which had caused 'Becka to sleep poorly and to begin biting her
fingernails at the advanced age of forty-five:
          In 1973, Moss Harlingen, one of Joe's poker buddies, had
      murdered his father. They had been hunting deer up in
      Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic
      accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no
      accident. Moss simply lay up behind a fallen tree with his rifle
      and waited until his father splashed towards him across a small
      stream about fifty yards down the hill from where Moss was.
      Moss shot his father carefully and deliberately through the
      head. Moss thought he had killed his father for money. His
      (Moss's) business, Big Ditch Construction, had two notes
      falling due with two different banks, and neither bank would
      extend because of the other. Moss went to Abel, but Abel
      refused to help, although he could afford to. So Moss shot his
      father and inherited a lot of money as soon as the county
      coroner handed down his verdict of death by misadventure. The
      note was paid and Moss Harlingen really believed (except
      perhaps in his deepest dreams) that he had committed the
      murder for gain. The real motive had been something else. Far
      in the past, when Moss was ten and his little brother Emery but
      seven, Abel's wife went south to Rhode Island for one whole
      winter. Moss's and Emery's uncle had died suddenly, and his
      wife needed help getting on her feet. While their mother was
      gone, there were several incidents of buggery in the Harlingens'
      Troy home. The buggery stopped when the boy's mother came
      back, and the incidents were never repeated. Moss had
      forgotten all about them. He never remembered lying awake in
      the dark anymore, lying awake in mortal terror and watching
      the doorway for the shadow of his father. He had absolutely no
      recollection of lying with his mouth pressed against his
      forearm, hot salty tears of shame and rage squeezing out of his
      eyes and coursing down his face to his mouth as Abel




  Harlingen slathered lard onto his cock and then slid it up his
  son's back door with a grunt and a sigh. It had all made so little
  impression on Moss that he could not remember biting his arm
  until it bled to keep from crying out, and he certainly could not
  remember Emery's breathless little cries from the next bed
  "Please, no, daddy, please not me tonight, please, daddy, please
  no." Children, of course, forget very easily. But some
  subconscious memory must have lingered, because when Moss
  Harlingen actually pulled the trigger, as he had dreamed of
  doing every night for the last thirty-two years of his life, as the
  echoes first rolled away and then rolled back, finally
  disappearing into the great forested silence of the up-Maine
  wilderness, Moss whispered: "Not you, Em, not tonight." That
  Jesus had told her this not two hours after Moss had stopped in
  to return a fishing rod which belonged to Joe never crossed
  'Becka's mind.
1      Alice Kimball, who taught at the Haven Grammar School,
  was a lesbian. Jesus told 'Becka this Friday, not long after the
  lady herself, looking large and solid and respectable in a green
  pant suit, had stopped by, collecting for the American Cancer
  Society.
2       Darla Gaines, the pretty seventeen-year-old girl who brought
  the Sunday paper, had half an ounce of "bitchin' reefer"
  between the mattress and box spring of her bed. Jesus told
  'Becka not fifteen minutes after Darla had come by on Saturday
  to collect for the last five weeks (three dollars plus a fifty-cent
  tip 'Becka now wished she had withheld). That she and her
  boyfriend smoked the reefer in Darla's bed after doing what
  they called "the horizontal bop." They did the horizontal bop
  and smoked reefer almost every weekday from two until three
  o'clock or so. Darla's parents both worked at Splended Shoe in
  Derry and they didn't get home until well past four.
3        Hank Buck, another of Joe's poker buddies, worked at a
  large supermarket in Bangor and hated his boss so much that a
  year ago he had put half a box of Ex-Lax in the man's chocolate




      shake when he, the boss, sent Hank out to McDonald's to get
      his lunch one day. The boss had shit his pants promptly at
      quarter past three in the afternoon, as he was slicing luncheon
      meat in the deli of Paul's Down-East Grocery Mart. Hank
      managed to hold on until punching-out time, and then he sat in
      his car, laughing until he almost shit his pants. "He laughed,"
      Jesus told 'Becka. "He laughed. Can you believe that?"
      And these things were only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. It
seemed that Jesus knew something unpleasant or upsetting about
everyone everyone 'Becka herself came in contact with, anyway.
She couldn't live with such an awful outpouring.
      But she didn't know if she could live without it anymore, either.
      One thing was certain she had to do something. Something.
      "You are doing something," Jesus said. He spoke from behind
her, from the picture on top of the TV of course He did and the
idea that the voice was coming from inside her own head, and that it
was a cold mutation of her own thoughts ... that was nothing but a
dreadful passing illusion. "In fact, you're almost done with this part,
'Becka. Just solder that red wire to that point beside the long
doohickey ... not that one, the one next to it ... that's right. Not too
much solder! It's like Brylcreem, 'Becka. A little dab'll do ya."
      Strange, hearing Jesus Christ talk about Brylcreem.
   Joe woke up at quarter of two, tossed Ozzie off his lap, strolled
to the back of his lawn, had a comfortable whizz into the poison ivy
back there, then headed into the house to watch the Yankees and the
Red Sox. He opened the refrigerator in the kitchen, glancing briefly
at the little snips of wire on the counter and wondering just what the
hell his wife had been up to. Then he dismissed it and grabbed a quart
of Bud.
      He padded into the living room. 'Becka was sitting in her
rocking chair, pretending to read a book. Just ten minutes before Joe
came in, she had finished wiring her little gadget into the Zenith
console television, following Jesus' instructions to the letter.




      "You got to be careful, taking the back off a television,
'Becka," Jesus had told her. "More juice back there than there is in a
Bird's Eye warehouse."
      "Thought you'd have this all warmed up for me," Joe said.
      "I guess you can do it," 'Becka said.
      "Ayuh, guess I can," Joe said, completing the last
conversational exchange the two of them would ever have.
      He pushed the button that made the TV come on and better
than two thousand volts of electricity slammed into him. His eyes
popped wide open. When the electricity hit him, his hand clenched
hard enough to break the bottle in his hand and drive brown glass
into his palm and fingers. Beer foamed and ran.
      "EEEEEEOOOOOOOOAARRRRRRRUMMMMMMMM!"
Joe screamed.
      His face began to turn black. Blue smoke began to pour from
his hair. His finger appeared nailed to the Zenith's ON button. A
picture popped up on the TV. It showed Joe and Nancy Voss
screwing on the post office floor in a litter of catalogues and
Congressional newsletters and sweepstakes announcements from
Publishers' Clearing House.
      "No!" 'Becka screamed, and the picture changed. Now she saw
Moss Harlingen behind a fallen pine, slightly down the barrel of a
.30-.30. the picture changed and she saw Darla Gaines and her
boyfriend doing the horizontal bop in Darla's upstairs bedroom while
Rick Springfield stared at them from the wall.
      Joe Paulson's clothes burst into flames.
      The living room was filled with the hot smell of cooking beer.
      A moment later, the 3-D picture of Jesus exploded.
      "No!" 'Becka shrieked, suddenly understanding that it had been
her all along, her, her, her, she had thought everything up, she had
read their thoughts, somehow read their thoughts, it had been the hole
in her head and it had done something to her mind had suped it up
somehow. The picture on the TV changed again and she saw herself
backing down the stepladder with the .22 pistol in her hand, pointed




toward her she looked like a woman bent on suicide rather than on
cleaning.
      Her husband was turning black before her very eyes.
      She ran to him, seized his shredded, wet hand and ... and was
herself galvanized by electricity. She was no more able to let go than
Brer Rabbit had been after he slapped the tar baby for insolence.
      Jesus oh Jesus, she thought as the current slammed into her,
driving her up on her toes.
      And a mad, cackling voice, the voice of her father, rode in her
brain: Fooled you, 'Becka! Fooled you, didn't I? Fooled you good!
      The back of the television, which she had screwed back on after
she had finished with her alterations (on the off-chance that Joe might
look back there), exploded backward in a mighty blue flash of light.
Joe and 'Becka Paulson tumbled to the carpet. Joe was already dead.
And by the time the smouldering wallpaper behind the TV had
ignited the, 'Becka was dead, too.




      STEPHEN
     KING

 THE ROAD VIRUS HEADS NORTH
            Appears in novel

                  999
           published in 1999




Richard Kinnell wasn't frightened when he first saw the picture at
the yard sale in Rosewood.
He was fascinated by it, and he felt he'd had the good luck to find
something which might be very special, but fright? No. It didn't
occur to him until later ("not until it was too late," as he might
have written in one of his own numbingly successful novels) that
he had felt much the same way about certain illegal drugs as a
young man.
He had gone down to Boston to participate in a PEN/New England
conference tided "The Threat of Popularity." You could count on
PEN to come up with such subjects, Kinnell had found; it was
actually sort of comforting. He drove the two hundred and sixty
miles from Derry rather than flying because he'd come to a plot
impasse on his latest book and wanted some quiet time to try to
work it out.
At the conference, he sat on a panel where people who should have
known better asked him where he got his ideas and if he ever
scared himself. He left the city by way of the Tobin Bridge, then
got on Route 1. He never took the turnpike when he was trying to
work out problems; the turnpike lulled him into a state that was
like dreamless, waking sleep. It was restful, but not very creative.
The stop-and-go traffic on the coast road, however, acted like grit
inside an oyster-it created a fair amount of mental activity ... and
sometimes even a pearl.
Not, he supposed, that his critics would use that word. In an issue
of Esquire last year, Bradley Simons had begun his review of
Nightmare City this way: "Richard Kinnell, who writes like Jeffery
Dahmer cooks, has suffered a fresh bout of projectile vomiting. He
has tided this most recent mass of ejecta Nightmare City."
Route 1 took him through Revere, Malden, Everett, and up the
coast to Newburyport. Beyond Newburyport and just south of the




Massachusetts-New Hampshire border was the tidy little town of
Rosewood. A mile or so beyond the town center, he saw an array
of cheap-looking goods spread out on the lawn of a two-story
Cape. Propped against an avocado-colored electric stove was a
sign reading YARD SALE. Cars were parked on both sides of the
road, creating one of those bottlenecks which travelers unaffected
by the yard sale mystique curse their way through. Kinnell liked
yard sales, particularly the boxes of old books you sometimes
found at them. He drove through the bottleneck, parked his Audi at
the head of the line of cars pointed toward Maine and New
Hampshire, then walked back.
A dozen or so people were circulating on the littered front lawn of
the blue-and-gray Cape Cod. A large television stood to the left of
the cement walk, its feet planted on four paper ashtrays that were
doing absolutely nothing to protect the lawn. On top was a sign
reading MAKE AN OFFER-YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED. An
electrical cord, augmented by an extension, mailed back from the
TV and through the open front door. A fat woman sat in a lawn
chair before it, shaded by an umbrella with CINZANO printed on
the colorful scalloped flaps. There was a card table beside her with
a cigar box, a pad of paper, and another handlettered sign on it.
This sign read ALL SALES CASH, ALL SALES FINAL. The TV
was on, turned to an afternoon soap opera where two beautiful
young people looked on the verge of having deeply unsafe sex.
The fat woman glanced at Kinnell, then back at the TV. She looked
at it for a moment, then looked back at him again. This time her
mouth was slightly sprung.
Ah, Kinnell thought, looking around for the liquor box fined with
paperbacks that was sure to be here someplace, a fan.
He didn't see any paperbacks, but he saw the picture, leaning
against an ironing board and held in place by a couple of plastic
laundry baskets, and his breath stopped in his throat. He wanted it
at once.




He walked over with a casualness that felt exaggerated and
dropped to one knee in front of it. The painting was a watercolor,
and technically very good. Kinnell didn't care about that; technique
didn't interest him (a fact the critics of his own work had duly
noted). What he liked in works of art was content, and the more
unsettling the better. This picture scored high in that department.
He knelt between the two laundry baskets, which had been filled
with a jumble of small appliances, and let his fingers slip over the
glass facing of the picture. He glanced around briefly, looking for
others like it, and saw none - only the usual yard sale art collection
of Little Bo Peeps, praying hands, and gambling dogs.
He looked back at the framed watercolor, and in his mind he was
already moving his suitcase into the backseat of the Audi so he
could slip the picture comfortably into the trunk.
It showed a young man behind the wheel of a muscle car-maybe a
Grand Am, maybe a GTX, something with a T-top, anyway -
crossing the Tobin Bridge at sunset. The T-top was off, turning the
black car into a half-assed convertible. The young man's left arm.
was cocked on the door, his right wrist was draped casually over
the wheel. Behind him, the sky was a bruise-colored mass of
yellows and grays, streaked with veins of pink. The young man
had lank blond hair that spilled over his low forehead. He was
grinning, and his parted lips revealed teeth which were not teeth at
all but fangs.
Or maybe they're filed to points, Kinnell thought. Maybe he's
supposed to be a cannibal.
He liked that; liked the idea of a cannibal crossing the Tobin
Bridge at sunset. In a Grand Am. He knew what most of the
audience at the PEN panel discussion would have thought - Oh,
yes, great picture for Rich Kinnell he probably wants it for
inspiration, a feather to tickle his tired old gorge into one more fit
of projectile vomiting-but most of those folks were ignoramuses, at
least as far as his work went, and what was more, they treasured
their ignorance, cossetted it the way some people inexplicably
treasured and cossetted those stupid, mean-spirited little dogs that
yapped at visitors and sometimes bit the paperboy's ankles. He
hadn't been attracted to this painting because he wrote horror
stories; he wrote horror stories because he was attracted to things
like this painting. His fans sent him stuff - pictures, mostly - and he
threw most of them away, not because they were bad art but
because they were tiresome and predictable. One fan from Omaha
had sent him a little ceramic sculpture of a screaming, horrified
monkey's head poking out of a refrigerator door, however, and that
one he had kept. It was unskillfully executed, but there was an
unexpected juxtaposition there that lit UP his dials. This painting
had some of the same quality, but it was even better. Much better.
As he was reaching for it, wanting to pick it up right now, this
second, wanting to tuck it under his arm and proclaim his
intentions, a voice spoke up behind him: "Aren't you Richard
Kinnell?"
He jumped, then turned. The fat woman was standing directly
behind him, blotting out most of the immediate landscape. She had
put on fresh lipstick before approaching, and now her mouth had
been transformed into a bleeding grin.
"Yes, I am," he said, smiling back.
Her eyes dropped to the picture. "I should have known you'd go
right to that," she said, simpering. "It's so You."
"It is, isn't it?" he said, and smiled his best celebrity smile. "How
much would you need for it?"
"Forty-five dollars," she said. "I'll be honest with you, I started it at
seventy, but nobody likes it, so now it's marked down. If you come
back tomorrow, you can probably have it for thirty." The simper
had grown to frightening proportions. Kinnell could see little gray
spit-buds in the dimples at the comers of her stretched mouth.




"I don't think I want to take that chance," he said. "I'll write you a
check right now."
The simper continued to stretch; the woman now looked like some
grotesque John Waters parody. Divine does Shirley Temple. "I'm
really not supposed to take checks, but all right," she said, her tone
that of a teenage girl finally consenting to have sex with her
boyfriend. "Only while you have your pen out, could you write an
autograph for my daughter? Her name is Michela?"
"What a beautiful name," Kinnell said automatically. He took the
picture and followed the fat woman back to the card table. On the
TV next to it, the lustful young people had been temporarily
displaced by an elderly woman gobbling bran flakes.
" Michela reads all your books," the fat woman said. "Where in the
world do you get all those crazy ideas?"
"I don't know," Kinnell said, smiling more widely than ever. "They
just come to me. Isn't that amazing?. "
The yard sale minder's name was Judy Diment, and she lived in the
house next door. When Kinnell asked her if she knew who the
artist happened to be, she said she certainly did; Bobby Hastings
had done it, and Bobby Hastings was the reason she was selling off
the Hastings' things. "That's the only painting he didn't bum," she
said. "Poor Iris! She's the one I really feel sorry for. I don't think
George cared much, really. And I know he didn't understand why
she wants to sell the house." She rolled her eyes in her large,
sweaty face - the old can-you-imagine-that look. She took
Kinnell's check when he tore it off, then gave him the pad where
she had written down all the items she'd sold and the prices she'd
obtained for them. "Just make it out to Michela," she said. "Pretty
please with sugar on it?" The simper reappeared, like an old
acquaintance you'd hoped was dead.




"Uh-huh," Kinnell said, and wrote his standard thanks-for-being-a-
fan message. He didn't have to watch his hands or even think about
it anymore, not after twenty-five years of writing autographs. "Tell
me about the picture, and the Hastingses."
Judy Diment folded her pudgy hands in the manner of a woman
about to recite a favorite story.
"Bobby was just twenty-three when he killed himself this spring.
Can you believe that? He was the tortured genius type, you know,
but still living at home." Her eyes rolled, again asking Kinnell if he
could imagine it. "He must have had seventy, eighty paintings, plus
all his sketchbooks. Down in the basement, they were." She
pointed her chin at the Cape Cod, then looked at the picture of the
fiendish young man driving across the Tobin Bridge at sunset.
"Iris-that's Bobby's mother - said most of them were real bad, lots
worse'n this. Stuff that'd curl your hair." She lowered her voice to a
whisper, glancing at a woman who was looking at the Hastings'
mismatched silverware and a pretty good collection of old
McDonald's plastic glasses in a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids motif.
"Most of them had sex stuff in them."
"Oh no," Kinnell said.
"He did the worst ones after he got on drugs," Judy Diment
continued. "After he was dead-he hung himself down in the
basement, where he used to paint-they found over a hundred of
those little bottles they sell crack cocaine in. Aren't drugs awful,
Mr. Kinnell?"
"They sure are."
"Anyway, I guess he finally just got to the end of his rope, no pun
intended. He took all of his sketches and paintings out into the
back yard-except for that one, I guess - and burned them. Then he
hung himself down in the basement. He pinned a note to his shirt.




It said, 'I can't stand what's happening to me.' Isn't that awful, Mr.
Kinnell? Isn't that just the awfulest thing you ever heard?"
'Yes," Kinnell said, sincerely enough. "It just about is."
'Like I say, I think George would go right on living in the house if
he had his druthers, " Judy Diment said. She took the sheet of
paper with Michela's autograph on it, held it up next to Kinnell's
check, and shook her head, as if the similarity of the signatures
amazed her. "But men are different."
"Are they?"
"Oh, yes, much less sensitive. By the end of his life, Bobby
Hastings was just skin and bone, dirty all the time-you could smell
him - and he wore the same T-shirt, day in and day out. It had a
picture of the Led Zeppelins on it. His eyes were red, he had a
scraggle on his cheeks that you couldn't quite call a beard, and his
pimples were coming back, like he was a teenager again. But she
loved him, because a mother's love sees past all those things."
The woman who had been looking at the silverware and the glasses
came over with a set of Star Wars placemats. Mrs. Diment took
five I dollars for them, wrote the sale carefully down on her pad
below "ONE DOZ. ASSORTED POTHOLDERS & HOTPADS,"
then turned back to Kinnell.
They went out to Arizona," she said, "to stay with Iris's folks. I
know George is looking for work out there in Flagstaff-he's a
draftsman-but I don't know if he's found any yet. If he has, I
suppose we might not ever see them again here in Rosewood. She
marked out all the stuff she wanted me to sell-Iris did - and told me
I could keep twenty percent for my trouble. I'll send a check for the
rest. There won't be much." She sighed.
"The picture is great," Kinnell said.




"Yeah, too bad he burned the rest, because most of this other stuff
is your standard yard sale crap, pardon my French. What's that?"
Kinnell had turned the picture around. There was a length of
Dymotape pasted to the back.
"A tide, I think."
"What does it say?"
He grabbed the picture by the sides and held it up so she could read
it for herself This put the picture at eye level to him, and he studied
it eagerly, once again taken by the simpleminded weirdness of the
subject; kid behind the wheel of a muscle car, a kid with a nasty,
knowing grin that revealed the filed points of an even nastier set of
teeth.
It fits, he thought. If ever a title futted a painting, this one does.
" The Road Virus Heads North," she read. "I never noticed that
when my boys were lugging stuff out. Is it the tide, do you think?"
"Must be." Kinnell couldn't take his eyes off the blond kid's grin. I
know something, the grin said. I know something you never will.
"Well, I guess you'd have to believe the fella who did this was high
on drugs," she said, sounding upset - authentically upset, Kinnell
thought. "No wonder he could kill himself and break his mamma's
heart."
"I've got to be heading north myself," Kinnell said, tucking the
picture under his arm. "Thanks for-"
" Mr. Kinnell?"
"Yes?"
"Can I see your driver's license?" She apparently found nothing
ironic or even amusing in this request. "I ought to write the number
on the back of your check."




Kinnell put the picture down so he could dig for his wallet. "Sure.
You bet."
The woman who'd bought the Star Wars placemats had paused on
her way back to her car to watch some of the soap opera playing on
the lawn TV. Now she glanced at the picture, which Kinnell had
propped against his shins.
"Ag," she said. "Who'd want an ugly old thing like that? I'd think
about it every time I turned the lights out."
"What's wrong with that?" Kinnell asked.
Kinnell's Aunt Trudy lived in Wells, which is about six miles north
of the Maine - New Hampshire border. Kinnell pulled off at the
exit which circled the bright green Wells water tower, the one with
the comic sign on it (KEEP MAINE GREEN, BRING MONEY in
letters four feet high), and five minutes later he was turning into
the driveway of her neat little saltbox house. No TV sinking into
the lawn on paper ashtrays here, only Aunt Trudy's amiable masses
of flowers. Kinnell needed to pee and hadn't wanted to take care of
that in a roadside rest stop when he could come here, but he also
wanted an update on all the family gossip. Aunt Trudy retailed the
best; she was to gossip what Zabar's is to deli. Also, of course, he
wanted to show her his new acquisition.
She came out to meet him, gave him a hug, and covered his face
with her patented little birdy-kisses, the ones that had made him
shiver all over as a kid.
"Want to see something?" he asked her. "It'll blow your pantyhose
off."
"What a charming thought," Aunt Trudy said, clasping her elbows
in her palms and looking at him with amusement.
He opened the trunk and took out his new picture. It affected her,
all right, but not in the way he had expected. The color fell out of




her face in a sheet-he had never seen anything quite like it in his
entire life. "It's horrible," she said in a tight, controlled voice. "I
hate it. I suppose I can see what attracted you to it, Richie, but
what you play at, it does for, real. Put it back in your trunk, like a
good boy. And when you get to the Saco River, why don't you pull
over into the breakdown lane and throw it in?"
He gaped at her. Aunt Trudy's lips were pressed tightly together to
stop them trembling, and now her long, thin hands were not just
clasping her elbows but clutching them, as if to keep her from
flying away. At that moment she looked not sixty-one but ninety-
one.
" Auntie?" Kinnell spoke tentatively, not sure what was going on
here. "Auntie, what's wrong?"
"That." she said, unlocking her right hand and pointing at the
picture. "I'm surprised you don't feel it more strongly yourself, an
imaginative guy like you."
Well, he felt something, obviously he had, or he never would have
unlimbered his checkbook in the first place. Aunt Trudy was
feeling something else, though ... or something more. He turned
the picture around so he could see it (he had been holding it out for
her, so the side with the Dymotaped title faced him), and looked at
it again. What he saw hit him in the chest and belly like a one-two
punch.
The picture had changed, that was punch number one. Not much,
but it had dearly changed. The young blond man's smile was wider,
revealing more of those filed cannibal-teeth. His eyes were
squinted down more, too, giving his face a look which was more
knowing and nastier than ever.
The degree of a smile ... the vista of sharpened teeth widening
slightly ... the tilt and squint of the eyes ... all pretty subjective
stuff. A person could be mistaken about things like that, and of




course he hadn't really studied the painting before buying it. Also,
there had been the distraction of Mrs. Diment, who could probably
talk the cock off a brass monkey.
But there was also punch number two, and that wasn't subjective.
In the darkness of the Audi's trunk, the blond young man had
turned his left arm, the one cocked on the door, so that Kinnell
could now see a tattoo which had been hidden before. It was a
vine-wrapped dagger with a bloody tip. Below it were words.
Kinnell could make Out DEATH BEFORE, and he supposed you
didn't have to be a big best-selling novelist to figure out the word
that was still hidden. DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR was, after
all, just the sort of a thing a hoodoo traveling man like this was apt
to have on his arm. And an ace of spades or a pot plant on the other
one, Kinnell thought.
"You hate it, don't you, Auntie?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, and now he saw an even more amazing thing: she
had turned away from him, pretending to look out at the street
(which was dozing and deserted in the hot afternoon sunlight), so
she wouldn't have to look at the picture. "In fact, Auntie loathes it.
Now put it away and come on into the house. I'll bet you need to
use the bathroom."
Aunt Trudy recovered her savoir faire almost as soon as the
watercolor was back in the trunk. They talked about Kinnell's
mother (Pasadena), his sister (Baton Rouge), and his ex-wife, Sally
(Nashua). Sally was a space-case who ran an animal shelter out of
a double-wide trailer and published two newsletters each month.
Survivors was filled with astral info and supposedly true tales of
the spirit world; Visitors contained the reports of people who'd had
close encounters with space aliens. Kinnell no longer went to fan
conventions which specialized in fantasy and horror. One Sally in
a lifetime, he sometimes told people, was enough.




When Aunt Trudy walked him back out to the car, it was fourthirty
and he'd turned down the obligatory dinner invitation. "I can get
most of the way back to Derry in daylight, if I leave now."
"Okay," she said. "And I'm sorry I was so mean about your picture.
Of course you like it, you've always liked your ... your oddities. It
just hit me the wrong way. That awful face. " She shuddered. "As
if we were looking at him . . . and he was looking right back."
Kinnell grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. "You've got quite an
imagination yourself, sweetheart."
"Of course, it runs in the family. Are you sure you don't want to
use the facility again before you go?"
He shook his head. "That's not why I stop, anyway, not really."
"Oh? Why do you?"
He grinned. "Because you know who's being naughty and who's
being nice. And you're not afraid to share what you know."
"Go on, get going," she said, pushing at his shoulder but clearly
pleased. "If I were you, I'd want to get home quick. I wouldn't want
that nasty guy riding along behind me in the dark, even in the
trunk. I mean, did you see his teeth? Ag!"
He got on the turnpike, trading scenery for speed, and made it as
far as the Gray service area before deciding to have another look at
the picture. Some of his aunt's unease had transmitted itself to him
like a germ, but he didn't think that was really the problem. The.
problem was his perception that the picture had changed.
The service area featured the usual gourmet chow - burgers by Roy
Rogers, cones by TCBY - and had a small, littered picnic and
dogwalking area at the rear. Kinnell parked next to a van with
Missouri plates, drew in a deep breath, let it out. He'd driven to
Boston in order to kill some plot gremlins in the new book, which
was pretty ironic. He'd spent the ride down working out what he'd




say on the panel if certain tough questions were tossed at him, but
none had been-once they'd found out he didn't know where he got
his ideas, and yes, he did sometimes scare himself, they'd only
wanted to know how you got an agent.
And now, heading back, he couldn't think of anything but the
damned picture.
Had it changed? If it had, if the blond kid's arm had moved enough
so he, Kinnell, could read a tattoo which had been partly hidden
before, then he could write a column for one of Sally's magazines.
Hell, a fourpart series. If, on the other hand, it wasn't changing,
then ... what? He was suffering a hallucination? Having a
breakdown? That was crap. His life was pretty much in order, and
he felt good. Had, anyway, until his fascination with the picture
had begun to waver into something else, something darker.
"Ah, fuck, you just saw it wrong the first time," he said out loud as
he got out of the car. Well, maybe. Maybe. It wouldn't be the first
time his head had screwed with his perceptions. That was also a
part of what he did. Sometimes his imagination got a little ...well ...
"Feisty," Kinnell said, and opened the trunk. He took the picture
out of the trunk and looked at it, and it was during the space of the
ten seconds when he looked at it without remembering to breathe
that he became authentically afraid of the thing, afraid the way you
were afraid of a sudden dry rattle in the bushes, afraid the way you
were when you saw an insect that would probably sting if you
provoked it.
The blond driver was grinning insanely at him now-yes, at him,
Kinnell was sure of it-with those filed cannibal-teeth exposed all
the way to the gumlines. His eyes simultaneously glared and
laughed. And the Tobin Bridge was gone. So was the Boston
skyline. So was the sunset. It was almost dark in the painting now,
the car and its wild rider illuminated by a single streetlamp that ran
a buttery glow across the road and the car's chrome. It looked to
Kinnell as if the car (he was pretty sure it was a Grand Am) was on
the edge of a small town on Route 1, and he was pretty sure he
knew what town it was-he had driven through it himself only a few
hours ago.
"Rosewood," he muttered. "That's Rosewood. I'm pretty sure."
The Road Virus was heading north, all right, coming up Route 1
just as he had. The blond's left arm was still cocked out the
window, but it had rotated enough back toward its original position
so that Kinnell could no longer see the tattoo. But he knew it was
there, didn't he? Yes, you bet.
The blond kid looked like a Metallica fan who had escaped from a
mental asylum for the criminally insane.
"Jesus," Kinnell whispered, and the word seemed to come from
someplace else, not from him. The strength suddenly ran out of his
body, ran out like water from a bucket with a hole in the bottom,
and he sat down heavily on the curb separating the parking lot
from the dog-walking zone. He suddenly understood that this was
the truth he'd missed in all his fiction, this was how people really
reacted when they came face-to-face with something which made
no rational sense. You felt as if you were bleeding to death, only
inside your head.
"No wonder the guy who painted it killed himself," he croaked,
still staring at the picture, at the ferocious grin, at the eyes that
were both shrewd and stupid.
There was a note pinned to his shirt, Mrs. Diment had said. "I can't
stand what's happening to me. " Isn't that awful, Mr. Kinnell?
Yes, it was awful, all right.
Really awful.
He got up, gripping the picture by its top, then strode across the
dog-walking area. He kept his eyes trained strictly in front of him,




looking for canine land mines. He did not look down at the picture.
His legs felt trembly and untrustworthy, but they seemed to
support him all right. just ahead, close to the belt of trees at the rear
of the service area, was a pretty young thing in white shorts and a
red halter. She was walking a cocker spaniel. She began to smile at
Kinnell, then saw something in his face that straightened her lips
out in a hurry. She headed left, and fast. The cocker didn't want to
go that fast so she dragged it, coughing, in her wake.
The scrubby pines behind the service area sloped down to a boggy
area that stank of plant and animal decomposition. The carpet of
pine needles was a road litter fallout zone: burger wrappers, paper
soft drink cups, TCBY napkins, beer cans, empty wine-cooler
bottles, cigarette butts. He saw a used condom lying like a dead
snail next to a torn pair of panties with the word TUESDAY
stitched on them in cursive girly-girl script.
Now that he was here, he chanced another look down at the
picture. He steeled himself for further changes even for the
possibility that the painting would be in motion, like a movie in a
frame - but there was none. There didn't have to be, Kinnell
realized; the blond kid's face was enough. That stone-crazy grin.
Those pointed teeth. The face said, Hey, old man, guess what? I'm
done fucking with civilization. I'm a representative of the real
generation X, the next millennium is tight here behind the wheel of
this fine, high-steppin' mo-sheen.
Aunt Trudy's initial reaction to the painting had been to advise
Kinnell that he should throw it into the Saco River. Auntie had
been right. The Saco was now almost twenty miles behind him,
but...
"This'll do," he said. "I think this'll do just fine."
He raised the picture over his head like a guy holding up some
kind of sports trophy for the postgame photographers and then
heaved it down the slope. It flipped over twice, the frame caching




winks of hazy late-day sun, then struck a tree. The glass facing
shattered. The picture fell to the ground and then slid down the dry,
needle-carpeted slope, as if down a chute. It landed in the bog, one
comer of the frame protruding from a thick stand of reeds.
Otherwise, there was nothing visible but the strew of broken glass,
and Kinnell thought that went very well with the rest of the litter.
He turned and went back to his car, already picking up his mental
trowel. He would wall this incident off in its own special niche, he
thought ... and it occurred to him that that was probably what most
people did when they ran into stuff like this. Liars and wannabees
(or maybe in this case they were wannasees) wrote up their
fantasies for publications like Survivors and called them truth;
those who blundered into authentic occult phenomena kept their
mouths shut and used those trowels. Because when cracks like this
appeared in your life, you had to do something about them; if you
didn't, they were apt to widen and sooner or later everything would
fall in.
Kinnell glanced up and saw the pretty young thing watching him
apprehensively from what she probably hoped was a safe distance.
When she saw him looking at her, she turned around and started
toward the restaurant building, once more dragging the cocker
spaniel behind her and trying to keep as much sway Out of her hips
as possible.
You think I'm crazy, don't you pretty girl? Kinnell thought. He saw
he had left his trunk lid up. It gaped like a mouth. He slammed it
shut. You and half the fiction-reading population of America, I
guess. But I'm not crazy. Absolutely not. I just made a little
mistake, that's all. Stopped at a yard sale I should have passed up.
Anyone could have done it. You could have done it. And that
picture
" What picture?" Rich Kinnell asked the hot summer evening, and
tried on a smile. "I don't see any picture."




He slid behind the wheel of his Audi and started the engine. He
looked at the fuel gauge and saw it had dropped under a half. He
was going to need gas before he got home, but he thought he'd fill
the tank a little further up the line. Right now all he wanted to do
was to put a belt of miles - as thick a one as possible - between him
and the discarded painting.
Once outside the city limits of Derry, Kansas Street becomes
Kansas Road. As it approaches the incorporated town limits (an
area that is actually open countryside), it becomes Kansas Lane.
Not long after,, Kansas Lane passes between two fieldstone posts.
Tar gives way to' gravel. What is one of Derry's busiest downtown
streets eight miles east of here has become a driveway leading up a
shallow hill, and on moonlit summer nights it glimmers like
something out of an Alfred Noyes poem. At the top of the hill
stands an angular, handsome barn-board structure with
reflectorized windows, a stable that is actually a garage, and a
satellite dish tilted at the stars. A waggish reporter from the Derry
News once called it the House that Gore Built ... not meaning the
vice president of the United States. Richard Kinnell simply called
it home, and he parked in front of it that night with a sense of
weary satisfaction. He felt as if he had lived through a week's
worth of time since getting up in the Boston Harbor hotel that
morning at nine o'clock.
No more yard sales, he thought, looking up at the moon. No more
yard sales ever.
I "Amen," he said, and started toward the house. He probably
should stick the car in the garage, but the hell with it. What he
wanted right now was a drink, a light meal - something
microwaveable - and then sleep. Preferably the kind without
dreams. He couldn't wait to put this day behind him.
He stuck his key in the lock, turned it, and punched 3817 to silence
the warning bleep from the burglar alarm panel. He turned on the
front hall light, stepped through the door, pushed it shut behind




him, began to turn, saw what was on the wall where his collection
of framed book covers had been just two days ago, and screamed.
In his head he screamed. Nothing actually came out of his mouth
but a harsh exhalation of air. He heard a thump and a tuneless little
jingle as his keys fell out of his relaxing hand and dropped to the
carpet between his feet.
The Road Virus Heads North was no longer in the puckerbrush
behind the Gray turnpike service area.
It was mounted on his entry wall.
It had changed yet again. The car was now parked in the driveway
of the yard sale yard. The goods were still spread out
everywhereglassware and furniture and ceramic knickknacks
(Scottie dogs smoking pipes, bare-assed toddlers, winking fish),
but now they gleamed beneath the light of the same skullface
moon that rode in the sky above Kinnell's house. The TV was still
there, too, and it was still on, casting its own pallid radiance onto
the grass, and what lay in front of it, next to an overturned lawn
chair. Judy Diment was on her back, and she was no longer all
there. After a moment, Kinnell saw the rest. It was on the ironing
board, dead eyes glowing like fifty-cent pieces in the moonlight.
The Grand Am's taillights were a blur of red-pink watercolor paint.
It was Kinnell's first look at the car's back deck. Written across it
in Old English letters were three words: THE ROAD VIRUS.
Makes perfect sense, Kinnell thought numbly. Not him, his car.
Except for a guy like this, there's probably not much difference.
"This isn't happening," he whispered, except it was. Maybe it
wouldn't have happened to someone a little less open to such
things, but it was happening. And as he stared at the painting he
found himself remembering the little sign on Judy Diment's card
table. ALL SALES CASH, it had said (although she had taken his




check, only adding his driver's license ID number for safety's
sake). And it had said something else, too.
ALL SALES FINAL.
Kinnell walked past the picture and into the living room. He felt
like a stranger inside his own body, and he sensed part of his mind
groping for the trowel he had used earlier. He seemed to have
misplaced it.
He turned on the TV, then the Toshiba satellite tuner which sat on
top of it. He turned to V-14, and all the time he could feel the
picture out there in the hall, pushing at the back of his head. The
picture that had somehow beaten him here.
"Must have known a shortcut," Kinnell said, and laughed.
He hadn't been able to see much of the blond in this version of the
picture, but there had been a blur behind the wheel which Kinnell
assumed had been him. The Road Virus had finished his business
in Rosewood. It was time to move north. Next stop
He brought a heavy steel door down on that thought, cutting it off
before he could see all of it. "After all, I could still be imagining all
this," he told the empty living room. Instead of comforting him, the
hoarse, shaky quality of his voice frightened him even more. "This
could be ... But he couldn't finish. All that came to him was an old
song, belted out in the pseudo-hip style of some early '50s Sinatra
done: This could be the start of something BIG ...
The tune oozing from the TV's stereo speakers wasn't Sinatra but
Paul Simon, arranged for strings. The white computer type on the
blue screen said WELCOME TO NEW ENGLAND NEWSWIRE.
There were ordering instructions below this, but Kinnell didn't
have to read them; he was a Newswire junkie and knew the drill by
heart. He dialed, punched in his Mastercard number, then 508.




"You have ordered Newswire for [slight pause] central and
northem Massachusetts," the robot voice said. "Thank you very m-
-"
Kinnell dropped the phone back into the cradle and stood looking
at the New England Newswire logo, snapping his fingers
nervously. "Come on," he said. "Come on, come on."
The screen flickered then, and the blue background became green.
Words began scrolling up, something about a house fire in
Taunton. This was followed by the latest on a dog-racing scandal,
then tonight's weather - clear and mild. Kinnell was starting to
relax, starting to wonder if he'd really seen what he thought he'd
seen on the entryway wall or if it had been a bit of travel-induced
fugue, when the TV beeped shrilly and the words BREAKING
NEWS appeared. He stood watching the caps scroll up.
NENphAUG19/8:40P A ROSEWOOD WOMAN HAS BEEN
BRUTALLY MURDER-ED WHILE DOING A FAVOR FOR AN
ABSENT FRIEND. 38-YEAR-OLD JUDITH DIMENT WAS
SAVAGELY HACKED TO DEATH ON THE LAWN OF HER
NEIGHBOR'S HOUSE, WHERE SHE HAD BEEN
CONDUCTING A YARD SALE. NO SCREAMS WERE
HEARD AND MRS. DIMENT WAS NOT FOUND UNTIL
EIGHT O'CLOCK, WHEN A NEIGHBOR ACROSS THE
STREET CAME OVER TO COMPLAIN ABOUT LOUD
TELEVISION NOISE. THE NEIGHBOR, DAVID GRAVES,
SAID THAT MRS. DIMENT HAD BEEN DECAPITATED.
"HER HEAD WAS ON THE IRONING BOARD," HE SAID. "IT
WAS THE MOST AWFUL THING I'VE EVER SEEN IN MY
LIFE." GRAVES SAID HE HEARD NO SIGNS OF A
STRUGGLE, ONLY THE TV AND, SHORTLY BEFORE
FINDING THE BODY, A LOUD CAR, POSSIBLY EQUIPPED
WITH A GLASSPACK MUFFLER, ACCELERATING AWAY
FROM THE VICINITY ALONG ROUTE ONE. SPECULATION




THAT THIS VEHICLE MAY HAVE BELONGED TO THE
KILLER
Except that wasn't speculation; that was a simple fact.
Breathing hard, not quite panting, Kinnell hurried back into the
entryway. The picture was still there, but it had changed once
more. Now it showed two glaring white circles - headlights - with
the dark shape of the car hulking behind them.
He's on the move again, Kinnell thought, and Aunt Trudy was on
top of his mind now - sweet Aunt Trudy, who always knew who
had been naughty and who had been nice. Aunt Trudy, who lived
in Wells, no more than forty miles from Rosewood.
"God, please God, please send him by the coast road," Kinnell
said, reaching for the picture. Was it his imagination or were the
headlights farther apart now, as if the car were actually moving
before his eyes ... but stealthily, the way the minute hand moved on
a Pocket watch? "Send him by the coast road, please."
He tore the picture off the wall and ran back into the living room
with it. The screen was in place before the fireplace, of course; it
would be at least two months before a fire was wanted in here.
Kinnell batted it aside and threw the painting in, breaking the glass
fronting-which he had already broken once, at the Gray service
area - against the firedogs. Then he pelted for the kitchen,
wondering what he would do if this didn't work either.
It has to, he thought. It will because it has to, and that's A there is
to it.
He opened the kitchen cabinets and pawed through them, spilling
the oatmeal, spilling a canister of salt, spilling the vinegar. The
bottle broken open on the counter and assaulted his nose and eyes
with the high stink.
Not there. What he wanted wasn't there.




He raced into the pantry, looked behind the door - nothing but a
plastic bucket and an 0 Cedar - and then on the shelf by the dryer.
There it was, next to the briquettes.
Lighter fluid.
He grabbed it and ran back, glancing at the telephone on the
kitchen wall as he hurried by. He wanted to stop, wanted to call
Aunt Trudy. Credibility wasn't an issue with her; if her favorite
nephew called and told her to get out of the house, to get out light
now, she would do it ... but what if the blond kid followed her?
Chased her?
And he would. Kinnell knew he would.
He hurried across the living room and stopped in front of the
fireplace.
"Jesus," he whispered. "Jesus, no."
The picture beneath the splintered glass no longer showed
oncoming headlights. Now it showed the Grand Am on a sharply
curving piece of road that could only be an exit ramp. Moonlight
shone like liquid satin on the car's dark flank. In the background
was a water tower, and the words on it were easily readable in the
moonlight. KEEP MAINE GREEN, they said. BRING MONEY.
Kinnell didn't hit the picture with the first squeeze of lighter fluid;
his hands were shaking badly and the aromatic liquid simply ran
down the unbroken part of the glass, blurring the Road Virus's
back deck. He took a deep breath, aimed, then squeezed again.
This time the lighter fluid squirted in through the jagged hole made
by one of the firedogs and ran down the picture, cutting through
the paint, making it run, turning a Goodyear Wide Oval into a
sooty teardrop.
Kinnell took one of the ornamental matches from the jar on the
mantel, struck it on the hearth, and poked it in through the hole in




the glass. The painting caught at once, fire billowing up and down
across the Grand Am and the water tower. The remaining glass in
the frame turned black, then broke outward in a shower of flaming
pieces. Kinnell crunched them under his sneakers, putting them out
before they could set the rug on fire.
He went to the phone and punched in Aunt Trudy's number,
unaware that he was crying. On the third ring, his aunt's answering
machine picked up. "Hello," Aunt Trudy said, "I know it
encourages the burglars to say things like this, but I've gone up to
Kennebunk to watch the new Harrison Ford movie. If you intend to
break in, please don't take my china pigs. If you want to leave a
message, do so at the beep."
Kinnell waited, then, keeping his voice as steady as possible, he
said:
"It's Richie, Aunt Trudy. Call me when you get back, okay? No
matter how late."
He hung up, looked at the TV, then dialed Newswire again, this
time punching in the Maine area code. While the computers on the
other end processed his order, he went back and used a poker to jab
at the blackened, twisted thing in the fireplace. The stench was
ghastly - it made the spilled vinegar smell like a flower patch in
comparison-but Kinnell found he didn't mind. The picture was
entirely gone, reduced to ash, and that made it worthwhile.
Mat if it comes back again?
"It won't," he said, putting the poker back and returning to the TV.
"I'm sure it won't."
But every time the news scroll started to recycle, he got up to
check. The picture was just ashes on the hearth ... and there was no
word of elderly women being murdered in the Wells-Saco-
Kennebunk area of the state. Kinnell kept watching, almost
expecting to see A GRAND AM MOVING AT HIGH SPEED




CRASHED INTO A KENNEBUNK MOVIE THEATER
TONIGHT, KILLING AT LEAST TEN, but nothing of the sort
showed up.
At a quarter of eleven the telephone rang. Kinnell snatched it up.
"Hello?"
"It's Trudy, dear. Are you all right?"
"Yes, fine."
"You don't sound fine," she said. "Your voice sounds trembly and
funny. What's wrong? What is it?" And then, chilling him but not
really surprising him: "It's that picture you were so pleased with,
isn't it? That goddamned picture!"
It calmed him somehow, that she should guess so much ... and, of
course, there was the relief of knowing she was safe.
"Well, maybe," he said. "I had the heebie-jeebies all the way back
here, so I burned it. In the fireplace."
She's going to find out about Judy Diment, you know, a voice
inside warned. She doesn't have a twenty-thousand-dollar satellite
hookup, but she does subscribe to the Union-Leader and this'll be
on the front page. She'll put two and two together. She's far from
stupid.
Yes, that was undoubtedly true, but further explanations could wait
until the morning, when he might be a little less freaked ... when he
might've found a way to think about the Road Virus without losing
his mind ... and when he'd begun to be sure it was really over.
"Good!" she said emphatically. "You ought to scatter the ashes,
too!" She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was lower.
"You were worried about me, weren't you? Because you showed it
to me.
"A little, yes."




"But you feel better now?"
He leaned back and closed his eyes. It was true, he did. "Uh-huh.
How was the movie?"
"Good. Harrison Ford looks wonderful in a uniform. Now, if he'd
just get rid of that little bump on his chin . . ."
"Good night, Aunt Trudy. We'll talk tomorrow."
"Will we?"
"Yes," he said. "I think so."
He hung up, went over to the fireplace again, and stirred the ashes
with the poker. He could see a scrap of fender and a ragged little
flap of road, but that was it. Fire was what it had needed all along,
apparently. Wasn't that how you usually killed supernatural
emissaries of evil? Of course it was. He'd used it a few times
himself, most notably in The Departing, his haunted train station
novel.
"Yes, indeed," he said. "Bum, baby, bum."
He thought about getting the drink he'd promised himself, then
remembered the spilled bottle of vinegar (which by now would
probably be soaking into the spilled oatmeal-what a thought). He
decided he would simply go on upstairs instead. In a book-one by
Richard Kinnell, for instance - sleep would be out of the question
after the sort of thing which had just happened to him.
In real life, he thought he might sleep just fine.
He actually dozed off in the shower, leaning against the back wall
with his hair full of shampoo and the water beating on his chest.
He was at the yard sale again, and the TV standing on the paper
ashtrays was broadcasting Judy Diment. Her head was back on, but
Kinnell could see the medical examiner's primitive industrial stitch
work; it circled her throat like a grisly necklace. "Now this New




England Newswire update," she said, and Kinnell, who had always
been a vivid dreamer, could actually see the stitches on her neck
stretch and relax as she spoke. "Bobby Hastings took all his
paintings and burned them, including yours, Mr. Kinnell ... and it
is yours, as I'm sure you know. All sales are final, you saw the
sign. Why, you just ought to be glad I took your check."
Burned all his paintings, yes, of course he did, Kinnell thought in
his watery dream. He couldn't stand what was happening to him,
that's what the note said, and when you get to that point in the
festivities, you don't pause to see if you want to except one special
piece of work from the bonfire. It's just that you got something
special into The Road Virus Heads North, didn't you, Bobby? And
probably completely by accident. You were talented, I could see
that right away, but talent has nothing to do with what's going on
in that picture.
"Some things are just good at survival," Judy Diment said on the
TV. "They keep coming back no matter how hard you try to get rid
of them. They keep coming back like viruses."
Kinnell reached out and changed the channel, but apparently there
was nothing on all the way around the dial except for The Judy
Diment Show.
" You might say he opened a hole into the basement of the
universe," she was saying now. "Bobby Hastings, I mean. And this
is what drove out. Nice, isn't it?"
Kinnell's feet slid then, not enough to go out from under him
completely, but enough to snap him to.
He opened his eyes, winced at the immediate sting of the soap
(Prell had run down his face in thick white rivulets while he had
been dozing), and cupped his hands under the shower-spray to
splash it away. He did this once and was reaching out to do it again
when he heard something. A ragged rumbling sound.




Don't be stupid, he told himself. All you hear is the shower. The
rest is only imagination.
Except it wasn't.
Kinnell reached out and turned off the water.
The rumbling sound continued. Low and powerful. Coming from
outside.
He got out of the shower and walked, dripping, across his bedroom
on the second floor. There was still enough shampoo in his hair to
make him look as if it had turned white while he was dozing-as if
his dream of Judy Diment had turned it white.
My did I ever stop at that yard sale? he asked himself, but for this
he had no answer. He supposed no one ever did.
The rumbling sound grew louder as he approached the window
overlooking the driveway-the driveway that glimmered in the
summer moonlight like something out of an Alfred Noyes poem.
As he brushed aside the curtain and looked out, he found himself
thinking of his ex-wife, Sally, whom he had met at the World
Fantasy Convention in 1978. Sally, who now published two
magazines out of
her trailer home, one called Survivors, one called Visitors. Looking
down at the driveway, these two tides came together in Kinnell's
mind like a double image in a stereopticon.
He had a visitor who was definitely a survivor.
The Grand Am idled in front of the house, the white haze from its
twin chromed tailpipes rising in the still night air. The Old English
letters on the back deck were perfectly readable. The driver's side
door stood open, and that wasn't all; the light spilling down the
porch steps suggested that Kinnell's front door was also open.




Forgot to lock it, Kinnell thought, wiping soap off his forehead
with a hand he could no longer feel. Forgot to reset the burglar
alarm, too . not that it would have made much difference to this
guy.
Well, he might have caused it to detour around Aunt Trudy, and
that was something, but just now the thought brought him no
comfort.
Survivors.
The soft rumble of the big engine, probably at least a 442 with a
four-barrel carb, reground valves, fuel injection.
He turned slowly on legs that had lost all feeling, a naked man with
a headful of soap, and saw the picture over his bed, just as he'd
known he would. In it, the Grand Am stood in his driveway with
the driver's door open and two plumes of exhaust rising from the
chromed tailpipes. From this angle he could also see his own front
door, standing open, and a long man-shaped shadow stretching
down the hall.
Survivors.
Survivors and visitors.
Now he could hear feet ascending the stairs. It was a heavy tread,
and he knew without having to see that the blond kid was wearing
motorcycle boots. People with DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR
tattooed on their arms always wore motorcycle boots, just as they
always smoked unfiltered Camels. These things were like a
national law.
And the knife. He would be carrying a long, sharp knife - more of
a machete, actually, the sort of knife that could strike off a person's
head in a single sweeping stroke.
And he would be grinning, showing those filed cannibal-teeth.
Kinnell knew these things. He was an imaginative guy, after all.
He didn't need anyone to draw him a picture.
"No," he whispered, suddenly conscious of his global nakedness,
suddenly freezing all the way around his skin. "No, please, go
away." But the footfalls kept coming, of course they did. You
couldn't tell a guy like this to go away. It didn't work; it wasn't the
way the story was supposed to end.
Kinnell could hear him nearing the top of the stairs. Outside the
Grand Am went on rumbling in the moonlight.
The feet coming down the hall now, worn bootheels rapping on
polished hardwood.
A terrible paralysis had gripped Kinnell. He threw it off with an
effort and bolted toward the bedroom door, wanting to lock it
before the thing could get in here, but he slipped in a puddle of
soapy water and this time he did go down, flat on his back on the
oak planks, and what he saw as the door clicked open and the
motorcycle boots crossed the room toward where he lay, naked and
with his hair full of Prell, was the picture hanging on the wall over
his bed, the picture of the Road Virus idling in front of his house
with the driver's side door open.
The driver's side bucket seat, he saw, was full of blood. I'm going
outside, I think, Kinnell thought, and closed his eyes.




Will We Close the Book on Books?
BY STEPHEN KING

From: Visions of the 21st Century
           Time Magazine, June 2000

 Book lovers are the Luddites of the intellectual world. I can no
more imagine their giving up the printed page than I can imagine a
picture in the New York Post showing the Pope technoboogieing
the night away in a disco. My adventure in cyberspace ("Riding the
Bullet", available on any computer near you) has confirmed this
idea dramatically. My mail and the comments on my website
(www.stephenking.com) reflect two things: first, readers enjoyed
the story; second, most didn't like getting it on a screen, where it
appeared and then disappeared like Aladdin's genie.
 Books have weight and texture; they make a pleasant presence in
the hand. Nothing smells as good as a new book, especially if you
get your nose right down in the binding, where you can still catch
an acrid tang of the glue. The only thing close is the peppery smell
of an old one. The odor of an old book is the odor of history, and
for me, the look of a new one is still the look of the future.
 I suspect that the growth of the Internet has actually been
something of a boon when it comes to reading: people with more
Beanie Babies than books on their shelves spend more time
reading than they used to as they surf from site to site. But it's not a
book, dammit, that perfect object that speaks without speaking,
needs no batteries and never crashes unless you throw it in the
corner. So, yes, there'll be books. Speaking personally, you can
have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead
fingers off the binding.




   NOT FOR SALE

This PDF file was created for educational,
scholarly, and Internet archival use ONLY.

  With utmost respect & courtesy to the
 author, NO money or profit will ever be
  made from this text or it's distribution.

                  xxXsTmXxx
                     06/2000