by Rocky Wood
“His arms dripped blood, and he picked jagged shards of glass out of them numbly. But I made it, he thought, getting up. I made it! And then the parking-meter grabbed him.” No timelines are given in this story but clearly the burglary occurred on a Friday night, as the cash registers were “full of Friday night receipts.”
While not directly linked to any other King work this story has foreshadowing elements for such future stories as Trucks, Maximum Overdrive and The Mangler, where technology suddenly becomes animate, and dangerous. This is one of King’s most original horror themes and, apparently, an old favorite!
King had just turned 18 when this story was published and it shows a growing level of maturity, compared to People, Places and Things, written two to five years earlier. It is similar in maturity to The Aftermath (see the separate chapter in this book), written in 1963.
The 43rd Dream
In this story a high school student relates his dream. The narrator was in his Batmobile when approached by a bum who said, “…you shoot your high school teachers and forbid your birds to fly.” Quickly, a cross-eyed cop accused the narrator of looking like John Wilkes Booth and a crowd formed, beating the narrator with hula-hoops. Running to a bar, he was served by Jack the Ripper before stealing money from a blind, fat card dealer who then hit him with his cane.
The narrator then “…ran down the kitchen drain…” and came up in Lisbon High, “…where a friendly rat said I could,” and attended his favorite class, “…capitalistic Basket-Weaving,” taught by Captain Hook.
After being sent to detention hall the narrator ran into a man in uniform, “…I think it was Captain Bligh,” who wanted to swing him from the yardarm, “…we wanted Pontius Pilate, but you look enough like him.” Just then Brigette (sic) Bardot arrived and the narrator awoke, “…it was just going through my mind, I wouldn’t knock another dream, but not quite the same kind.”
One of the more entertaining aspects of this story is its constant use of rhyme. “‘I’m goin’ outta my head!’ This girl began to scream. Her stockings were red and her makeup sky-blue green.” Or: “I said, ’I need a drink, I’m feeling rather sick.’ He poured it but wanted to know just where was my hockey stick.”
This use of rhyme has caused some experts to speculate The 43rd Dream is actually a poem, but the layout and tone mitigate against that view. It is classified as a New Worlds short story.
The narrator, who wakes from his/her dreams of various matters wishing for a different dream next time, is apparently a student at Lisbon High, and male (after all, the cop likened the person to John Wilkes Booth). It is not too much of a stretch to imagine “him” as Steve King, Lisbon High School senior. No timelines are given.
While there are no links to other King works of fiction the theme of shooting high school teachers would reappear in one of King’s more controversial works, the Bachman novel Rage. Of course, in today’s society rather than being a throw-away line or a sign of some teenage angst a student might be arrested for writing “…you shoot your high school teachers.”
The reference to forbidding “your birds” to fly very interesting indeed (see The Dark Half) and the use of drains as a method of travel recurs in It. It seems that in this short story, written in early 1966, some of King’s later ideas already lay in his fertile imagination, waiting to be translated into print.
King, The Drum And The Village Vomit
King tells of his efforts as the editor of The Drum and his mis-adventure with a satirical equivalent in his non-fiction work, On Writing:
…during my sophomore year at Lisbon High I became editor of our school newspaper, The Drum. I don’t recall being given any choice in this matter; I think I was simply appointed. The Drum did not prosper under my editorship. Then as now, I tend to go through periods of idleness followed by periods of workaholic frenzy. In the schoolyear 1963–1964, The Drum published just one issue, but that one was a monster thicker than the Lisbon Falls telephone book.
One night – sick to death of Class Reports, Cheerleading Updates, and some lamebrain’s efforts to write a school poem – I created a satiric high school newspaper of my own when I should have been captioning photographs for The Drum. What resulted was a four-sheet which I called The Village Vomit. The boxed motto in the upper lefthand corner was not “All the News That’s Fit to Print” but “All the Shit That Will Stick.” That piece of dimwit humor got me into the only real trouble of my high school career. It also led me to the most useful writing lesson I ever got. In typical Mad magazine style (“What, me worry?”), I filled the Vomit with fictional tidbits about the LHS faculty, using teacher nicknames the student body would immediately recognize.
Taking the Vomit to school for his friends to “bust a collective gut” over, King was caught when a copy was confiscated by one of the teachers lampooned in the paper, on which King had, “… either out of over-weening pride or almost unbelievable naiveté, put my name as Editor in Chief & Grand High Poobah, and at the close of school I was for the second time in my student career summoned to the office on account of something I had written.” One teacher (“Maggot” Margitan) took enormous offence at her description and demanded King be disciplined. “In the end, Miss Margitan settled for a formal apology and two weeks of detention for the bad boy who had dared call her Maggot in print.”
If it makes any difference, my apology was heartfelt. Miss Margitan really had been hurt by what I wrote, and that much I could understand. I doubt that she hated me – she was probably too busy – but she was the National Honor Society advisor at LHS, and when my name showed up on the candidate list two years later, she vetoed me. The Honor Society did not need boys “of his type,” she said. I have come to believe she was right. A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn’t belong in a smart people’s club. I haven’t trucked much with satire since then.
(Apart from Slade, which has a separate chapter in this book, King’s most notable later attempts at satire are A Possible Fairy Tale in a UMO Campus newspaper in May 1970; and America the Literate in Book magazine for July 2003.)
As a direct result of this incident the school principal secured King a role as sports reporter for the Lisbon Enterprise. That was the first time King was paid to write professionally.
Tinker has since sold the business but it still operates as a specialist King bookshop.
For the Birds (1986)
This “story” appeared in a collection of stories that all end with a malaproped quotation or popular phrase. The collection also features the writing of Roy Blount, Jr., John D. MacDonald, Peter Schickele, Elmore Leonard, Anna Quindlen, Tony Hillerman and King’s partner in writing The Talisman and Black House, Peter Straub.
King’s closing line, “Bred any good rooks lately?” became the title of the collection and was the malapropism of “read any good books lately?” Bred Any Good Rooks Lately? was published by Doubleday in 1986 and reprinted in 1990 and 1994. While now out of print the book can be purchased from second hand booksellers and online King resources.
The very short story begins with the line, “Okay, this is a science fiction joke.” Only 235 words in length the tone is very casual, as befits a joke – for instance, when describing how two cases of rook eggs are sent via Concorde, King writes, “…they keep the shipping compartment constantly heated and all that stuff.”
In this tale the rooks of London start to become extinct and a solution is sought. As they had been a popular tourist attraction the English decided to breed rooks in Bangor, Maine and re-populate London with them. Each day the English sent a telegram to North American Rook Farms containing the words: “Bred any good rooks lately?”
King vaguely links this story to his other works by the use of his home town as the place chosen to build the repopulation of London’s rooks, with the payment of a guy there, “at the rate of $50,000 a year to raise rooks.” Despite this link, as King himself classifies the tale as “science fiction” it is best placed in the New World
s Reality, rather than that of Maine Street Horror.
In a strangely redundant note for the science fiction date of 1995 (even though the story was written in 1986, just as fax machines were beginning to rollout) King has the London City Council send a daily telegram!
The Furnace (2005)
This America Under Siege piece consists of the first two paragraphs of a story, written by King and is headed “By Stephen King and …” It was first published in a magazine for US school students, Know Your World Extra for September 2005 and simultaneously on the parent company’s web site, www.weeklyreader.com .
Winning entries were posted weekly on The Weekly Reader’s web site. King’s assistant, Marsha DeFilippo, confirmed King would not be completing the story; and that the author himself had not provided the title.
According to the website of the publisher, the Weekly Reader Corporation:
Know Your World Extra builds reading success and self-esteem by motivating students to read with high-interest, age-appropriate topics. Written for teens and near-teens in a mature tone (never patronizing or childish), at a second-to fourth-grade reading level, KYW Extra includes original plays and dynamic nonfiction content …
The magazine is distributed “For teens (and near-teens at a second- to fourth-grade reading level)” by subscription.
In the two paragraphs we learn that a ten-year-old boy, Tommy, has been sent to get firewood from a cellar that he hated. He believes there is something alive behind the furnace (“breathing back there,” he “knew it was watching him”) and, as he is getting the wood, the door swings shut and the light goes out.
There are no links to King’s other fiction. Copies of the magazine will be very difficult to find (one of King’s previous items in a sister magazine, an abridged version of Battleground in Read, is one of the rarest King pieces). As the existence of The Furnace was brought to the attention of the King community during the month of publication some copies of Know Your World Extra may have been saved and, if so, are likely to appear for re-sale. A number of King websites published the entire text in September 2005 and, despite some possible copyright issues, they may still appear. Copies of the website post of the story circulate freely.
George D. X. McArdle (1980s)
George D. X. McArdle is a partial novel held in Box 2315 at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library of the University of Maine at Orono. As this box is unrestricted readers who attend the Library may read the work.
The 123 page single-spaced manuscript is undated, incomplete and there is no indication that King ever continued it. It is likely it was written in the 1980s.
McArdle is a delightful, humorous Western. King has only rarely attempted this genre, most notably in the satirical Slade. One suspects he has an underlying desire to dabble in the genre, having incorporated elements of it in other works such as The Dark Tower, The Shotgunners; and with characters such as Bobbi Anderson (The Tommyknockers) being a successful Western novelist.
In this America Under Siege tale a young man awakes on the side of a stream in the Old West. Peter Crager’s erstwhile partner, Jake Box, had shot him in the head and killed the third member of their gang, which had robbed the Kingston Stage.
George D. X. McArdle and his “girls” found Crager lying wounded. McArdle and Crager began to exchange their personal stories while considering robbing the payroll from a B. S. & M. train that would be guarded by the famously vicious Bob Valery, a railroad private detective, along with one hundred soldiers.
McArdle grew up in Boston and attended Harvard, where he was involved in a cheating episode that lead to his being blackballed from employment at most Eastern schools. He did secure a position in Kingsport, Rhode Island and six years later began an affair with a fellow mathematics teacher’s wife. The man discovered their love letters and committed suicide. As a result of the scandal McArdle was forced to resign, setting him on the road and a spiral of adventures, including being lost in a swamp, time as a gigolo and various business ventures. He was a gun dealer in Richmond, Virginia prior to the Civil War but a bank manager stole his savings after he duelled with the manager’s friend over McArdle’s getting the friend’s middle-aged and unmarried daughter pregnant. After avoiding the Civil War by going to Canada, he returned to America intending to become the world’s first progressive Whoremaster. In 1868 he formed a traveling medicine show with Asa Burroughs and, after the death of Burroughs in September 1871, had collected a group of six girls as part of his prostitution plan. They were headed to San Francisco but the axle of their wagon (which also carried a tiger!) had broken and they were contemplating how to fund its replacement when they met Crager.
Peter Crager grew up in Pennsylvania but had to leave the family farm after punching his stepfather, Rev. Floyd Hastings, who was in the process of selling off parts of the property and giving the money to overseas religious missions. Crager went to Kansas before deciding to head South just before the Civil War. He served in the 215th Georgia, including at the Battles of the Wilderness and Gettysburg before being captured shortly before the war ended. He was sent to the brutal Shalagh prison camp where he was severely beaten by guards in March of 1865. After his release he became a petty criminal and robbed the Kingston Stage in 1873. When Jake Box shot him in the head the bullet entered just above an eye and traveled around the skull, exiting at his neck.
The story ends at this point but we can speculate that McArdle and Crager did rob the payroll train as Crager states he was “nearly hung for the killing of Bob Valery.”
The “present day” of the story is set in 1873, near Gordon’s Stream in the state of Missouri. The back-stories of both McArdle and Crager are deep and full of detail. As most readers will never enjoy reading this partial story, further detail follows.
George McArdle was very tall, at 6 foot 6 inches and fat, weighing 350 lbs. An atheist, he had thinning black hair and blue eyes. Born in 1820 in Boston, the third eldest of the nine children of a successful baker, he attended a Boston grammar school, where he was a good student and was accepted into Harvard in 1838. While there he regularly did magic tricks. In his sophomore year he was elected to the elite Harvard society, The Hellenists, even though he did poorly at Greek. He was involved in trying to steal a Greek exam, which resulted in the expulsion of a fellow student, John Reynolds, but he personally escaped punishment. Afterwards, Reynolds’ father set the son up in a first rate law firm where he did not progress and ran up debts, which the father had to pay off.
McArdle completed his four years at Harvard, graduating 23rd in his class and got his degree. However, he was blackballed from teaching positions across the East by one of the Greek teachers, Young and another student, Stewart, who had failed to have George thrown out after the exam scandal.
In August 1842 McArdle managed to secure a role as maths teacher at the Kingsport Preparatory School for Boys in Rhode Island. In the summer of 1848 he took as a mistress Jennifer Pettigrew, a wife of another teacher at the school. When her husband Norman discovered the affair in August 1849, he committed suicide by hanging, leaving the love letters from McArdle scattered about his body. McArdle collected and burnt them, but was still forced to resign.
He next got a job speechwriting for a US Senator, who died of a heart attack in 1853 while in a brothel with two women. McArdle then became a barker at an Atlanta carnival and medicine show and followed this up by working at building a railroad in Georgia. In 1856 he survived being lost in the Okeefenokee swamp when he came across a mute man with no nose or teeth, three toes on his left foot missing and feet and legs covered with running sores. McArdle thought he was a leper. He successfully demanded McArdle have sex with him before he would guide him out of the swamp!
Traveling to Richmond in January 1857 he became a gun merchant and in the summer of that year got Cynthia Devereaux pregnant. As a result her father challenged him to a duel. His opponent had a heart attack just after the shots were fired and died a month later while tongue la
shing a nurse!
George then drifted to Canada and became a rancher. In 1860 he went into logging but nearly went broke in 1861. That year he got a job as a bartender at The Velvet Garter in Curser’s Mill in Canada, where he was initially exposed to the whoring business. After the Civil War he drifted back to the US intending to become the world’s first “progressive whoremaster.” He next became a pillow vendor on a New York railroad and in 1867 a gigolo to a matron in Port Stephen, New Jersey. In 1868 McArdle invested all his capital with Asa Burroughs and they formed a traveling medicine show. For the purposes of the show he claimed having been Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut and a magician, with a Ph.D. He displayed the letters BA, LMS (for Legerdemanic Magical Specialties) and DM (Doctor of Magic) on his wagon. He wanted to be the greatest whoremaster the West had ever known and, from September 1871, collected a group of working girls. They then set out for San Francisco to set up shop in that city.