The Collective

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