Dark Screams: Volume Six

The Old Dude’s Ticker ^{Stephen King}

Yeah, spooked, I’m pretty fuckin’ spooked. I been that way ever since I came back from Nam. You dig it? But I’m no section eight. What happened over there, it didn’t screw up my head. I came back from Nam with my head on straight for the first time in my life. Dig it. My ears are like radar. I’ve always had good hearing, but since Nam… I hear everything. I hear the angels in heaven. I hear the devils in the deepest pits of hell. So how can you say I’m some kind of fuckin’ psycho case? Listen, I’ll tell you the whole story. Think I’m crazy? Just listen to how cooled out I am.

I can’t tell you how I got the idea, but once it was there, I couldn’t shoot it down. I thought about it day and night. There was really nothing to pin it on. I had no case against the old dude. I dug him. He never short-dicked me or ranked me out. Yeah, he had bucks, but I’m not into that. Not since Nam. I think it might have been his… yeah, his eye. Jesus, like a vulture’s eye. Pale blue, with a cataract in it. And it bulged. You dig what I’m saying? When he looked at me, my blood ran cold. That’s how bad it freaked me. So little by little, I made up my mind to waste him and get rid of the eye forever.

Okay, now dig this. You think I’m nuts, okay? And crazy people don’t know anything. Run around with drool slobbering out of their mouths, stabbing wetbacks like that guy Corona, stuff like that. But you should have dug me. You should have seen how cool I was. I was always one step ahead, man. I had that old dude jacked up nine miles. I was super-kind to him the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the knob of his door and opened it. Quiet? You better believe it! And when it was just wide enough for me to stick my head in, I put in this penlite with the glass all taped up except for one little place in the middle. You follow? Then I poked my head in. You would have cracked up to see how careful I was, poking my head in. I moved it real slow, so I wouldn’t roust the old dude. It took me an hour, I guess, to get my head in far enough so I could see him lying there on his rack. So tell me… you think any section eight would have been able to carry that off? Huh? But dig this! When my head was in the room, I turned on the penlite. It put out one single ray, and I put it four-oh on that vulture eye. I did that seven nights in a row, man, seven nights! Can you dig that action? I did it every night at midnight, but the eye was always closed and I couldn’t get it on. Because it was the eye. And every morning I went right into his bedroom and clapped him on the back and asked him how he slept. All that good bullshit. So I guess you see he would have to have been some heavy dude to guess that every night I was checkin’ him out while he was asleep. So dig it.

The eighth night I was even more cooled out. The minute hand on my watch was trucking along faster than mine was. And I felt… sharp.

You know? Ready. Like in Nam, when it was our turn for night patrol. I was like a cat. I felt ace-high. There I was, opening the door, little by little, and he’s lying there, probably dreaming he’s balling his granddaughter. I mean, he didn’t even know! Funny? Shit, sometimes I laugh until I scream, just thinking of it. I started to laugh at the idea. Maybe he heard me, because he started to move around. Probably think I split out of there, right? No way. His room was black as a cat’s asshole—he always drew the shutters because he was afraid of junkies—and I knew he couldn’t see through the door, so I kept pushing it open, a little at a time.

I had my head in and I was getting ready to turn on the old penlite when it knocked against the side of the door. The old guy sits up in bed, yelling, “Who’s there?”

I stayed still and kept my mouth shut. You dig it? For a whole hour I didn’t move. But I didn’t hear him lie down, either. He was sitting up in bed, scared shitless, just listening. The way I used to get sometimes in Nam. A lot of guys used to get that way, thinking those guys in the black pajamas were coming, creeping through the jungle, through the dark.

I heard him groan, just a little one, but I knew how scared he was.

It wasn’t the way you groan when you just hurt yourself, or the way old folks sometimes groan at funerals. Uh-uh. It was the sound you make when your head is totally fucked up and you’re starting to blow your circuits. I knew that sound. In Nam, at night, I used to get that way sometimes. Nothing wrong with that, a lot of guys did. Nothing section eight about it. It would come up from your guts like acid, getting worse in your throat, scaring you so bad that you had to put your hand in your mouth and chew it like a chicken drumstick to keep from screaming. Yeah, I knew the sound. I knew how that old dude was feeling and I felt sorry for him, but I was laughing, too, inside. I knew he’d been awake since the first sound. He’d been getting more and more scared. He was trying to, you know, blow them down, but he couldn’t do it. He was saying to himself, It was the wind around the eaves. Or maybe a mouse. Or a cricket. Yeah, it was a cricket. You dig? He was trying to cool himself out with all kinds of shit. But no good. Because Death was in the room with him. Me! Death was sniffing right up his old man’s nightdress. Me! He was feeling that. He didn’t see me or hear me, but he dug me.

After I marked time for a long while without hearing him flop back down, I decided to give him the light. So I turned it on and that single ray shot out from the masking tape and landed square on that fucking eye.

It was wide open and I got more and more pissed off, just looking at it. I saw every detail of it. This dull dusty blue with that gross-out white stuff over it so it looked like the bulging yolk of a poached egg. It froze me out, man, I kid you not. But, see, I couldn’t see anything else of his face or body. Because I held the light straight on that goddamned eye.

And didn’t I tell you that what you call crazy is just how together I am? Didn’t I tell you how sharp my hearing has been since Nam? And what came to my ears was this low, quick noise. You know what that sound was like? Have you ever seen a squad of MPs on a parade ground? They all wear white gloves, and they all carry these little short sticks on their belts. And if one of them takes his stick out and starts tapping it into his palm, it makes a sound like that. I remember that from Nam, and from Fort Benning, where I trained, and from that hospital where they put me after I came home. Sure, they had MPs there. White gloves. Short sticks. Slapping those short sticks into those white palms… white, like the cataract on the old dude’s eye. I knew what that sound was, there in the dark. It wasn’t any GI head-bopper. It was the old dude’s ticker. It made me even madder, the way beating a drum will make a GI feel ballsier.

But I still kept cool. I hardly breathed. I held the flashlight still. I tried to see how steady I could hold that one thread of light on the eye. His heart was beating even faster. I could hear it, are you digging me? Sure I could. Quicker and quicker, louder and louder, it got so it sounded like a whole regiment of MPs beating their sticks into their palms. The old dude must have been scared green! It got louder, you dig what I’m saying? Louder every second! You follow me? I told you I’m spooked, and I am. And in the middle of the night in the creepy quiet of that big old house, that sound really got to me. But I still held off. It got louder… louder! I thought his ticker would bust wide open. And then I thought, Hey, dig it, the neighbors are going to hear it. They got to. I got to shut him the fuck up! I let out a yell and threw the flashlight at him and went across the room like O. J. Simpson. He screamed once, but that was all. I dragged him onto the floor and yanked the bed over on top of him. Dig what I’m saying. I started to grin at how good it was going. I could still hear his heart, but that didn’t get on my case, not at all. No one was going to hear it, not with that bed on top of him. Finally it quit. I pushed the bed off and looked at the body. Yeah, he was dead. Stone dead. I put my hand on his ticker and held it there for five, ten minutes. Nothing. His eye wasn’t going to bother me anymore.

If you still think I’m a section eight, dig on how cool I was getting rid of his body. The night was getting on, and I worked fast, but I kept it quiet. Quiet was the password. You got it? Quiet. I cut him up. I cut off his head and arms and legs.

I pried up three of the planks on the bedroom floor and stuffed the pieces of him down inside. I put the boards back so carefully that no eye in the world—not even his—could have spotted anything wrong. There was nothing to wash out, not a single bloodstain. I was too cool for that. I cut him up in the shower, you dig it? Ha! You dig that scene? Ha! Ha! Far fucking out, am I right?

By then it was four in the morning, still dark as midnight. The doorbell rang. I went down to open it, and I was feeling good. Why not? It was the fuzz. Three of them. They were cool. One of the neighbors had heard a yell.

Sounded like someone had been cut or something. The guy called the cops. They had no search warrant, but would I mind if they took a look around?

I grinned. I had no worries, right? I told them to come on in. The scream was from me, I said. Bad dream. Had a lot of them. War veteran, and blah-blah-blah. You’re digging it, I see you are. I said the old dude had gone up to his country house for a while. I took them all over the house. Told them to look anyplace they wanted. No sweat. After a little while I took them into his bedroom. I opened his desk, showed them that the cash he kept in the lockbox was still there. Also his watch, and the cat’s-eye ruby pinkie ring he wore sometimes. Nothing touched, nothing even out of place. I dragged in some chairs and told them to sit down and rest their feet. Me, I was really flying. I was ace-high. Dig this. I put my own chair right over the spot where the old dude had gone to pieces, you might say. Ha! Ha!

The piggies were satisfied. They were getting my good vibes, I think. They sat and we shot the shit, where was I stationed in Nam, oh, is that so, we were there, how many years were you in, man, what a bitch, you know the scene. I was everything a good Boy Scout is supposed to be, brave, reverent, cheerful. But before too long I started to crash out and wished they’d split. My head was starting to ache, my ears ringing. The way I was when they shipped me back stateside, back to that hospital. Combat fatigue, they said. Fuck that bullshit! And they just sat there, the cops, I mean, shooting the shit, Dong Ha, Saigon, Da Nang, all that creepy crap. The ringing in my ears got sharper. Even sharper. I talked more and more to get rid of it, but it was getting more and more together, more and more like… like it wasn’t in my ears at all.

I could feel myself getting pale. But I talked even faster, and louder, too. Yet the sound got louder. It was this low, quick sound… like a bunch of MPs slapping their nightsticks into their white-gloved palms. I was having trouble catching my breath, but the cops didn’t seem to notice. I talked more quickly, but the sound got worse. A whole battalion of MPs now… whap! whap! whap! Jesus! I started arguing about all kinds of small shit with them, which hill was where, who commanded what, I don’t know. The noise still got worse. Why didn’t they just get the fuck out? I started pacing the floor, stamping up and down, as if something one of the cops said had pissed me off—but the noise got worse. Oh, Christ! What could I do? I raved. I swore at them. I told them their mothers were whores, that their uncles were also their fathers. I started whirling the chair I was sitting on, grinding it on the boards, but I could still hear it in spite of all the noise I was making. A meaty, pulsing sound, like nightsticks whacking into palms covered with white duck cotton gloves. It got louder—louder—louder! And the cops just kept on smiling, shooting the shit. You think maybe they didn’t hear it? God! No, no way! They heard it!—they suspected!—they knew!—they were putting me on!—I thought that then and I think it now. Nothing could be worse than the way they were smiling at me! I couldn’t take it! If I didn’t scream I’d die!—and I could still hear it, MPs, like the ones stationed at the hospital, the hospital where they took me after I scragged the lieutenant, the place I crashed out of—MPs—millions of them—short sticks—whacking—whacking—louder—louder—white cotton gloves—that dull quick meaty sound—louder—

“Stop it!” I screamed at them. “Stop it! I admit it!—I did it!—rip up the boards!—here, here!—it’s his heart! It’s the beating of his hideous heart!”

Statement taken August 14, 1976. Investigation has confirmed that the suspect, going under the name of Richard Drogan, is in fact Robert S. Deisenhoff, who escaped from the Quigly (Ohio) Veterans Hospital on April 9, 1971.