After ninety minutes of jostling around on those old dirt roads, I finally spotted the bent-over weeping willow with the red cross painted on its trunk just like Teddy had described. I turned left into a weed-choked driveway that wound its way through a tunnel of trees. The overhanging branches blocked out the sky, casting enough shadow that I had to turn on the headlights. The trees seemed to swallow the road, and I rolled up my window to keep the branches from slapping at my arm.
I followed that dark, leafy tunnel for what had to be nearly a mile and had just about convinced myself that it was never going to end when it abruptly did just that — and I found myself in the sun again, squinting at a modest, nicely kept log cabin perched in the middle of a gently sloping, grassy hollow. I looked around but didn’t see anyone outside. There were no cars out front. I parked by the porch, as Teddy had directed, and got out.
“Hello?” I called, stretching.
There was no reply. I noticed then how quiet it was. Not even the whir of crickets or the chirp of birds in the surrounding woods. Only thing I heard was the ticking of my cooling engine.
Feeling unsettled, I lowered the truck bed and started unloading the planks of wood and sacks of mulch and soil. I glanced at the house as I worked, searching for a face in a window or any sign of movement. Nothing. I found myself working faster. I wondered who the hell these people were, and why they lived way out here in the middle of nowhere, without even a Walmart nearby. I mean, there’s living in the country, and then there’s living in the country. Aberdeen is surrounded by farms and hunting cabins. But this? This was something else.
When I’d finished unloading, I decided to wait until I got home to sweep out the bed of my truck; no small decision for a man of my stubborn nature and work habits. But that unsettled feeling in my stomach had grown into a full-fledged case of the willies by then, and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
I hopped in the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition—and then it hit me.
I had to pee.
If there’s any single urge stronger than curiosity—or even fear—in a man of my age, it’s the urge to piss. Like my Daddy used to say: when you gotta, you gotta.
I glanced back at the dark mouth of the tree tunnel, and decided I better get it over with right then and there. I’ve always said it was politer to piss in a man’s backyard than his front, so I started around back. By that point, I’d pretty much convinced myself there was nobody home.
I rounded the corner. Cords of firewood were stacked eight feet high along the side of the house. Unusual, considering it was still summertime. I kept walking.
The back yard—it was more meadow than yard; a good three acres of trees had recently been cleared and stumps pulled up—was impressive. I stared in wonder, thinking: it would have taken a work crew a full week and a ton of equipment to do that much clearing. How did they get the equipment back here?
I had just about reached the tree line and was going for my zipper when I heard a sound behind me. Faint laughter. Coming from the house.
I forgot all about my need to pee. Forgot about Teddy’s warning to respect their privacy, as well. I wanted to know what the hell was going on here. I quickly worked my way toward the back of the house. Without thinking, I edged closer and crouched down below a window. I heard more giggles. Clearer now. It sounded like a woman. Unable to resist, I inched up and peered over the windowsill.
And pissed right in my pants.
Piled on several plates in the middle of a big wooden table were mounds of glistening body parts—blood-splattered ears, fingers, toes. And internal organs, too—long, slippery ropes of intestines and plump, shiny brown bags that were either livers or kidneys. I’ve field dressed enough deer in my time to know what organs look like. But these didn’t belong to no deer. The stench was revolting, even muted through the wall. It reeked of foulness and sweetness at the same time—an electric tang not unlike the way a thunderstorm smells when it comes rolling in across the hills.
A wrinkled old couple danced around the cramped dining room, cackling with glee, pausing only to gorge themselves with more mouthfuls of dripping morsels.
The old man said something I couldn’t quite hear, and the woman laughed again, mouth open wide, revealing perfectly straight rows of white—albeit gore-stained—teeth. They had to be dentures. A woman that age? But no, they were her real teeth. If they weren’t, then she had access to the greatest cosmetic dentist of all time. But it wasn’t just her teeth that threw me. Her eyes, two brilliant blue sparks, twinkled like those of a teenaged girl in love.
The old man skipped like a little boy into the next room and returned with a stained brown package. He unraveled it across the table revealing four human hearts.
The woman’s eyes widened. She snatched one of the organs and bit into it like a ripe peach, twisting her head back and forth like it was a particularly tough piece of beef jerky. Blood dripped from her fingers and chin.
The old man tilted his head and smiled lovingly as he watched her chew. It was that gesture that finally broke me. Of all the repulsive sights in that charnel house, it was that smile—and the adoration behind it—that scared me the most.
I turned and ran. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I made it about twenty yards before falling to the ground and puking. Stones and briars jabbed at my knees and palms, but I barely noticed.
I pushed myself up and started running again, and that’s when I saw another patch of trees had been cleared on the opposite side of the house—and row after row of stunning, bright red roses growing in the carefully manicured dark earth. I stumbled to a halt and stood there shaking. The piss on my pants leg began to turn cold.
The old man inside that house had cleared the trees and stacked the firewood by himself; maybe the old woman had even helped. It wasn’t Teddy Jenkins. It wasn’t anyone from town. There was never a work crew up there. The old man and woman had cleared the trees themselves. They were old and wrinkled on the outside but eternally young and strong on the inside, where it counted.
They weren’t human.
They couldn’t be.
They were monsters.
Immortal monsters draining the lives from our helpless children to somehow replenish their own.
Standing there at the edge of that garden, staring out over the dozens of flowers destined for innocent victims, frozen with fear and revulsion, it was too much. I got dizzy and my ears began to ring. Willing myself not to faint, I ran like hell, jumped into my truck, and barreled through that dark tunnel of trees without slowing.
Indeed, I didn’t so much as tap the brake pedal until I was out of that valley and back across the Aberdeen town limits.
And I’ve never been back there since.
****
Another child was killed yesterday…
I’ve never spoken a word about that day to anyone. I had a gut feeling—and gut feelings are usually right—that Teddy knew exactly what the hell was going on at that house. All of it. That would certainly explain his odd behavior that day. I never got the chance to ask him because he dropped dead not long after. Heart attack, down at the VFW. Fell right off his barstool and cracked his head open during the middle of the Redskins game.
Nowadays, when I think about it, it almost feels like a dream. It feels like it happened a long time ago, when I was a younger man, but in the grand scheme of my life, it wasn’t. And yet, that dreamlike feeling remains. As does my confusion. They say wisdom comes with age, but I’ve yet to gain an understanding of what I saw that day.
I don’t know how long they’ve been up there, the old man and woman. Maybe forever. Maybe they were here before us. I don’t know how it all started or when or even why. And I don’t understand a damn thing about those awful roses. Maybe the old woman feels remorse for the killings and leaves the roses as tribute or remembrance; or maybe they enjoy the killings and the rose
is simply a macabre calling card.
And there’s one more thing that really puzzles me on those lonely, sleepless nights when I find myself staring at the ceiling and wondering about this town I call my home and these people I call my neighbors.
I wonder about the storms.
I don’t know, and that makes me angry and frustrated. I just can’t make sense of them.
But then again, I can’t do much of anything these days. Even need help getting to the shithouse when my arthritis gets cranky. Growing old? I don’t recommend it. Friends and loved ones go off and die, leaving you lonely. Everything hurts, physically and emotionally.
Sometimes, when I sit on the back porch and watch the storms roll through and wait to hear if it’s happened again, I can’t help but remember how gracefully the old man moved across the floor; the gleam in the old woman’s crystal blue eyes, and how they stared at each other with such youthful love. It would be nice to feel that again. To feel anything, other than the aches in my joints and the loneliness in my heart. To dance again. To laugh. To have energy again.
To have an appetite.
And more and more every day, while I sit here alone waiting to die, rubbing my aching hands together, watching the children pass without so much as a wave hello anymore, I am tempted to somehow get back to that house again—and ask that old couple to let me join them.
(Written with Brian Keene)
STEPHEN KING AT 70
A TRIBUTE
TO THE
GUNSLINGER
The most important things are the hardest to say…
because words diminish them.
—The Body
How do you say a proper thank you to the man who handed you the key? How do you when words aren’t enough?
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
—IT
I was a sophomore in high school the first time I met Stephen King. It was October of 1981 and my English teacher, a lovely man named Richard Gallagher, showed up for class one afternoon with a stack of photocopies in his arms. He asked several students to pass them out and announced that we would be spending the next couple of days reading a short story he had recently stumbled upon in an obscure magazine.
The story was a nasty little shocker called “The Monkey” by an author I had never heard of, and initially I was just thrilled to have the opportunity to read the word “fart” out loud in class (that’s pretty much a rule, by the way; all fifteen-year-old boys love to talk about farts). But the deeper we got into the story, the more I realized that something else—something far more significant—was happening.
By the time we’d finished reading and discussing “The Monkey,” my path was crystal clear. It was as if a secret door had been opened and I had caught a glimpse of my future in the landscape beyond. I knew I wanted to spend my life doing to others what this Stephen King fellow had just done to me: he’d somehow managed to make the real world around me disappear and replaced it with a fairy tale. A dark and frightening fairy tale, to be sure, but that’s exactly what the whole experience felt like to me: it felt like magic.
Sometimes when you’re young, you have moments
of such happiness, you think you’re living on
someplace magical like Atlantis must have been.
Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.
—Hearts in Atlantis
You forget when you’re young. The world is too big, the sky too bright, the days and nights filled with too many possibilities. So you go where the wind carries you, and you forget. Sometimes even magic slips away.
Books are a uniquely portable magic.
—On Writing
Fast forward five more years: it’s 1986 and I’m in the middle of my junior year of college. And I’m completely lost.
Despite the transformative experience of reading “The Monkey,” I’ve not spent the past five years creating my own form of literary magic. Instead, I’ve devoted my days to playing college lacrosse and attending countless parties and even managing to take in the occasional class or two (if it wasn’t raining). I was majoring in business and the year before I’d been named an All-American midfielder, and it felt like I was holding the world in the palm of my hand.
And then everything changed.
Shortly into the new season, I injured my ankle and re-injured my knee, and before I knew what was happening I was out of the game. For good. I spent the dark days that followed sitting alone in my apartment, drifting aimlessly around campus, dragging myself to physical therapy appointments, and trying desperately to find something—anything—to feel happy about.
And then one day, while wandering around the mall to waste time, I bumped into an old friend—and my world turned upside down again.
I remember stopping in front of the bookstore and staring at the biggest display of books I had ever seen. There had to be at least fifty copies stacked in a spiraling tower. The cover art grabbed my attention first: a cracked gray sidewalk and a paper boat gliding down a rain-filled gutter, and my God, that sharp green claw reaching up out of the sewer grate. Then my eyes moved to the bright red title: IT. And the author’s name above: STEPHEN KING.
I grabbed a copy from the top of the tower, savoring its weight in my hands. I opened the book to the first page and scanned the opening sentence:
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years—if it ever did end—began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
I felt a familiar stirring in my heart. The whispery kiss of a resurfacing memory. I stood there, transfixed, and read to the bottom of the page, and then the next page, and the one after that. The bookstore disappeared. The world disappeared. I was no longer standing in a shopping mall in Maryland. Suddenly, I was walking the stormy streets of Derry, Maine with Georgie Denbrough at my side and Pennywise the Dancing Clown waiting for us down below.
Pennywise was terrifying and grotesque, and he wanted me to float with him down there in the dark sewers of Derry.
But I didn’t care.
I was home again.
The place where you made your stand never mattered.
Only that you were there…and still on your feet.
—The Stand
To this day, I believe that IT saved the life of a very lost and confused young man. At the very least it carved the path for my writing and editing career, and gave me something to dream about again.
I spent two weeks devouring the novel, savoring those final hundred pages, rationing my daily page count because I didn’t want the story to end.
And, along the way, I rediscovered the magic.
Shortly after I finished reading IT, I landed a part-time gig at the college newspaper writing Sports and Feature articles. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but that didn’t matter. I learned as I went. Rediscovering the magic had given me courage I didn’t know I possessed. Within a few months, I was writing and submitting my own short stories to small press magazines. The rejection letters piled in, but so did the acceptances (okay, they didn’t so much as pile in as much as trickle, but those scattered acceptances were more than enough to keep me going). I remember driving away from the post office one winter morning, a publisher’s check for $25 sitting on the passenger seat beside me, and thinking: I’m a writer. I’m a writer. I’m a writer. The words echoing inside my head the whole way home.
I was twenty-one years old.
Six months later, I started Cemetery Dance magazine.
It’s been my life ever since.
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration,
the rest of us just get up and go to work.
—On Writing
The debut issue of Cemetery Dance magazine was published in December of 1988.
In late 1989, a small env
elope postmarked Bangor, Maine showed up in my P.O. Box. I opened it and found a promotional blurb for Cemetery Dance. It was signed Stephen King. I stared at the letter for a long time, thinking: I’m not dreaming, am I?
Two years later, a thick manila envelope arrived in that same P.O. Box. Inside, a brand new short story called “Chattery Teeth” by Stephen King. Once my heart recovered from the shock, I hurried down the hallway of our apartment to show my wife, Kara. There were smiles and whoops of joy. And there were tears—from both of us. She understood. She knew.
Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things,
and no good thing ever dies.
—Rita Hayworth and
the Shawshank Redemption
Fast forward again. It’s 1996. I’m thirty years old, and the doctor has just told me that the cancer I beat six months earlier has come back. It’s in both of my lungs, my liver, my stomach, and my lymph nodes. I’m staring at twelve weeks of chemotherapy and 50/50 odds of surviving.
My family and friends rally around me. Phone calls. Visits. Cards.
Late one night not long after, the fax machine in my office buzzes: a lengthy handwritten letter from Stephen King. He’d heard that the cancer had returned and wanted me to know that he was thinking about me. He wanted me to know that he believed I could beat it.
I’m still here.
And I still have that letter.
Life was such a wheel…and it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.
—The Stand
I could tell you a hundred more stories like these. Each one of them a priceless jewel from a treasure chest of dreams-come-true.
I could tell you what it felt like when the manuscript for From A Buick 8 showed up at my office (talk about a Monday morning surprise!) with a note explaining that Stephen wanted to know if I would be interested in publishing a limited edition.
I could tell you what it felt like when Stephen and his agent extraordinaire, Chuck Verrill, sent me a novella called Blockade Billy, and the three of us shocked the publishing world with a secret-release Stephen King hardcover to mark the start of baseball season.
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