by Rocky Wood
But if every book is a little light in that darkness – and so I believe, so I believe, so I must believe, for I write the goddamn things, don’t I? – then every library is a grand bonfire around which ten thousand people come to stand and warm themselves each cold day and night.
After turning the last sod Scott handed the ceremonial shovel to his wife and the crowd began to break up, the official party heading for the air-conditioned haven of the English department, Nelson Hall. Lisey again noticed “Blondie,” walking against the flow of the crowd and muttering inanely; and then the gun tucked into the belt below his untucked shirt.
Lisey became entrenched in that dream-like quality of a crisis, unable to move quickly enough or draw attention to the danger only she could she. Before anyone could react, “Blondie,” actually Gerd Allen Cole, a grad student, shot Scott in the right chest. As Cole prepared the coup-de-grace shot to Scott’s heart Lisey swung the silver shovel, striking his gun hand and causing the shot to fly harmlessly skyward. The swing continued, smashing into Cole’s face and bringing the attack to an end.
Concerned about her wounded husband, who was walking off in shock, Lisey handed the shovel to the student reporter, Tony Eddington. As the campus security chief came up he mistakenly thought Eddington had been the hero (something the young man would never correct) and shook him by the hand. At that very moment the photographer, Stefan Queensland (UTenn class of ’83) took the award-winning photograph that would, with time, become nearly as famous as that of the mortally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald clutching his stomach.
As Scott collapsed on the hot blacktop Lisey reached and began to comfort him. Seriously wounded, with blood flowing from his chest and mouth, Scott reverted to an apparently natural depressive mode, “It’s very close, honey. I can’t see it but I … I hear it taking its meal and grunting.” Although Lisey denied knowing what he was talking about Scott insisted she did.
Yes, she knows. It. The long boy, he calls it. Or just the thing. Or sometimes the thing with the endless piebald side … And actually, it’s more than just a few times he’s spoken of that thing. Especially just lately. He says you can see it if you look through dirty water glasses. If you look through them just the right way, and in the hours after midnight.
Landon then made the sound he claimed the monster makes “when it looks around.” Turning to Lisey he said:
“I … could … call it that way … It would come. You’d … be … rid of me.” She understands he means it, and for a moment … she believes it’s true. He will make the sound again, only a little louder this time, and somewhere the long boy – that lord of sleepless nights – will turn its unspeakable hungry head. A moment later, in this world, Scott Landon will simply shiver on the pavement and die. The death certificate will show something sane, but she will know. His dark thing finally saw him and came for him and ate him alive.
…So now come the things they will never speak of later, not to others nor between themselves. Too awful. Each long marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret.
Scott asked Lisey again if he should call but she insisted he be quiet, “Leave that fucking thing alone and it will go away.” Just before the paramedics took him away Scott insisted the monster may have seen Lisey and said the first thing she must do when she checked into a motel was deal with the water glasses. And, when she did check into the Greenview Motel and found the bathroom glasses to be actual glass and not the usual plastic, she “puts both of them in her purse, careful not to look at either one as she does so” and then smashed them in the gutter outside. “The sound of them breaking comforts her even more than the sound of that little shovel’s scoop, connecting first with the pistol and then with Blondie’s face.”
Once again King introduces us to a famous writer based in Maine although the story, both here and in the novel, is from the point of view of the spouse. Among other prominent Maine writers in King’s canon are Mike Noonan (Bag of Bones), Bill Denbrough (It), Jim Gardener (The Tommyknockers), Gordie Lachance (The Body), Thad Beaumont (The Dark Half), Ben Mears (‘Salem’s Lot), Richard Kinnell (The Road Virus Heads North), Morton Rainey (Secret Window, Secret Garden) and, of course, the Stephen King of the latter Dark Tower novels. King has used such characters since at least 1971, starting with Gerald Nately of The Blue Air Compressor.
There is one particularly interesting link into King’s other fiction. In his speech at the groundbreaking ceremony, Scott Landon reviews 1986’s current events; including the “Challenger” shuttle explosion, chaos in the Philippines, the nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl and the AIDS epidemic. He then says, “The world grows dark. Discordia rises.” Discordia is crucial in the last two Dark Tower novels, Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower. Dark Tower expert Bev Vincent defines the term as, “The great chaos. All that will remain if the Tower falls.”131
In both the latter Dark Tower novels the great castle near Fedic is known as Castle Discordia or the Castle on the Abyss. At one point the Crimson King is described as the Lord of Discordia. King even had himself use the term in his fictional journals to indicate the day of his accident. There can be little doubt that, as King wrote Lisey and the Madman in 2004, he deliberately dropped the term “Discordia” into the story.
Typically of King, what appears initially to be the simple description of crazed fan attacking famous artist (Mark David Chapman and John Lennon are referenced), or the great American tradition of gun wielded by crazy man (Bremmer and George Wallace is King’s way of reminding us of this) turns into something much deeper and more sinister. The subtle ways in which King works in both Scott Landon’s “long boy” and the foreshadowing of events yet to be described show once again the depth of King’s mastery of both the novel and short story forms.
Again King provides a number of memorable lines. One, “No one loves a clown at midnight” is attributed to Lon Chaney and is said to be the epigram of Landon’s third novel, Empty Devils, a sort of a riff on Romero’s Living Dead movies. George Romero was, of course, the director of The Dark Half and Creepshow, as well as adapting The Cat from Hell for Tales from the Darkside: The Movie and writing the screenplays for The Dark Half and Creepshow 2.
As always with King even the minor characters are painted whole. The University’s representative, Roger Dashmiel is made wholly unlikeable in just a few sentences. Gerd Allen Cole, “the madman,” is totally believable, fitting the profile of so many “deep space” fans and muttering his inanities, “If it closes the lips of the bells, it will have done the job. I’m sorry, Papa.” The campus cop, Heffernan, realized “he may just get out of this mess with his skin on and his job intact” and will always doubt that Tony Eddington “laid the gun-toting nutjob low” but will never voice those doubts. Eddington himself, thrust into the role of hero, is quickly caught up by events and never declares the truth.
Memory (2006)
Memory first came to public notice when King read it at the Seven Days of Opening Nights arts festival at Florida State University in Tallahassee on 26 February 2006 (he received a standing ovation). It was first published in Tin House magazine for Summer 2006 and by September of that year it became clear the episode would form part of an upcoming King novel, Duma Key. It was also included in the 2007 first edition of Blaze. The piece is revised in the novel.
This America Under Siege story is set in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota (an unusual location for King), although the main events of the novel would move to Florida (the first King novel to be set in that location, although short stories from that region started to appear some years after the Kings first bought a home there).
In the tale, Edgar Freemantle, the owner of a sizeable construction firm, recalls the pain of his initial recovery from a nearly fatal accident and begins to come to terms with the past. Freemantle had lost his right arm and suffered other severe injuries when a crane backed over his pickup truck at a construction site.
As well as his physical recovery st
resses, he suffered rage attacks during his convalescence and tried to strangle his wife Pam (but did not realize this for many months). Shortly after he moved from the convalescent home to their suburban house she asked for a divorce. We learn a little of Freemantle’s life and meet his two young adult daughters – Ilse, a student at Brown and apparently the weaker of the two; and Melissa (“Lissa”), a teacher on a foreign exchange program in France, apparently stronger.
He moved to their lake house in suburban St. Paul after Pam requested the divorce and, while walking one day, saw a dog struck and mortally injured by a yellow Hummer. Distracting a young neighboring girl, Monica Goldstein, who owned the Jack Russell, he was able to put poor Gandalf out of his misery, but the act finally released the memory of attacking Pam.
Freemantle had been secretly planning to commit suicide but his physical therapist, Kathi Green and his hugely fat psychologist, Xander Kamen were able to see the warning signs. Dr. Kamen asked him to wait a year before killing himself, so as not to lay guilt upon his soon-to-be ex-wife and daughters.
The tale is told from a distance of four or so years from the accident and with initial publication seemed unfinished (this was clarified with the announcement of the novel). It is rather obvious to even a casual King fan that at least this part of the tale is another working out of King’s own accident and recovery. He writes specifically of the pain of physical rehabilitation but we also observe some possible emotional scars.
A powerful stand-alone piece, the short description of the accident from Freemantle’s viewpoint as he found himself trapped in his pick-up cabin with a crane slowly crushing it, inexorably moving toward him and then slowly crushing his body from the right, is a tour-de-force of prose. For dog-lovers the short scene in which the dying Gandalf’s “eyes turned up to me and in them I saw a horrible expression of hope,” is harrowing and deeply truthful.
Copies of the magazine are generally available from such sources as eBay and specialist King resellers.
The Monster in the Closet (1981)
An “excerpt” from King’s novel Cujo appeared as a stand-alone story, The Monster in the Closet, in the Ladies Home Journal for October 1981. The story is not in fact a direct excerpt, and spans a number of sections of Cujo. There are some minor changes to the novel’s text and even some material added.
Although Maine is not mentioned, we know Cujo is a Castle Rock story and it is therefore classified as a Maine Street Horror tale.
In the story a young boy sees a monster in his closet. Four year old Tad Trenton awakened his parents with his screams. As Vic and Donna Trenton thought the monster was just a pile of blankets they moved them to the rear of the closet and closed the door. The following morning the blankets had returned to their previous position and Tad claimed that the monster had moved them back.
Vic was due to leave on a business trip two weeks later and created “Monster Words” for Tad, which they could recite together each night to frighten the monster away. The “Monster Words” were:
Monsters, stay out of this room!
You have no business here.
No Monsters under Tad’s bed!
You can’t fit under there.
No monsters hiding in Tad’s closet!
It’s too small in there.
No monsters outside of Tad’s window!
You can’t hold on out there.
No vampires, no werewolves, no things that bite.
You have no business here.
Nothing will touch Tad, or hurt Tad, all this night.
You have no business here.
Despite these brave words it seems the monster never left and, before the summer was over, it really did come out of the closet.
Readers will find it difficult to secure a copy of this issue of the Ladies Home Journal, the best source will be online King booksellers.
The Pulse (2005)
On 7 July 2005 the web site, www.amazon.com released The Pulse, boosting it as “the chilling first chapter of a work in progress,” as part of their 10th Anniversary “Hall of Fame Exclusive Content.” With revisions, the piece became part of Cell, published in 2006. As the novel is about zombies, at this point it can be classified as both an America Under Siege and a New Worlds story.
There are two sub-sections. In the first readers discover “the event which came to be known as The Pulse occurred in the Eastern time zone of the United States at 3:03pm on the afternoon of October 1st.” By the second sentence King has the story racing, “The term was a misnomer, of course, but within ten hours of the event, most of the scientists capable of pointing this out were either dead or insane.” Readers then meet Clayton Riddell, a young man “of no particular importance to history” walking near the Boston Common.
The second sub-section features the typical King scene of normality suddenly being torn apart. Riddell was in a great mood, having “just sold his first graphic novel – and its sequel, both for an amazing, totally unexpected amount of money …” Observing people buying ice cream from a Mr. Softee truck Clay starts to hear some unsettling screams, sees a businessman suddenly attack a dog (“… surely I’m not seeing what I think I’m seeing, Clay thought not man bites dog”) and notices that a woman who had just hung up her cell phone attack the ice-cream vendor. The piece ends at this point.
The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson (1984)
The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson was first published in Rolling Stone magazine for 19 July and 2 August 1984. The story was substantially revised for inclusion as part of the novel The Tommyknockers in 1987. It also appeared in the Limited Edition of Skeleton Crew, published in 1985, but none of the mass-market editions. The last time it appeared in print in this form was in the 1991 anthology, I Shudder at Your Touch, edited by Michele Slung and published by New American Library.
Readers wishing to obtain a copy should start with online King booksellers and second hand bookshops. As Rolling Stone is quite collectable copies of the magazine can also be sourced from specialist traders. For those who cannot find a text copy Penguin Highbridge Books issued an audio book of I Shudder at Your Touch in 1992, which included this version of the story.
In this Maine Street Horror tale strange events follow a gunshot wound. While spring-cleaning, Rebecca (“Becka”) Paulson found her husband’s .22 calibre target pistol. Falling while holding the gun, Becka accidentally shot herself in the head, just above the left eye. When she awoke she was shocked to find a hole in her head that turned out to be five inches deep when she measured it with an eyebrow pencil inserted into the wound. By that night she could not remember anything that had happened to her earlier in the day, including the shooting.
A few days later a picture of Jesus atop her television began “telling” Becka secret things. These included that her husband Joe was cheating on her with Nancy Voss, a fellow postal worker. Also that Moss Harlingen had murdered his father in revenge for being raped as a child but had successfully passed it off as a hunting accident; that Alice Kimball was a lesbian; that 17 year old Darla Gaines took drugs and made love to her boyfriend while her parents were out; and that Hank Buck had placed Ex-Lax in his boss’ milkshake!
The picture of “Jesus” then helped Becka make a modification to the television set that would kill her husband when he turned it on. As Joe turned the TV on Becka realized that it was she, and not “Jesus,” who had been responsible for the modification. When she tried to save Joe she was also killed by the electrical shock.
In this original version of the tale the events occurred in July of 1973, with Rebecca suffering the gunshot wound about 3pm on the 7th and the couple dying on the 10th. When included in The Tommyknockers the story had migrated to the 1988 timeline of that tale, with the picture of Jesus beginning to speak to Rebecca on July 7 and the two dying of electrocution on the July 10.
Even at the time this stand-alone incarnation was published the story linked to other King works of fiction. Among these links are the mention of the town of Derry bei
ng near Haven (by 1984 Derry had already appeared in The Bird and the Album, The Body, Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut, Pet Sematary, The Running Man and the Yankee version of Uncle Otto’s Truck); and Haven itself being mentioned in Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut, published the same year. Apart from The Tommyknockers Rebecca and Joe Paulson and Haven would later be mentioned in It; and Derry would, of course, appear in many King stories, becoming the second most featured fictional town in Maine outside of Castle Rock.
The story was adapted for television as a series episode for the revival of The Outer Limits, with the title The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson. It was first screened on 6 June 1997. Brad Wright wrote the Teleplay and Steven Weber, who only weeks earlier had appeared as Jack Torrance in the mini-series of The Shining132, both directed and played the Guy in the Photo (a normal Joe had replaced Jesus in this version, presumably to avoid offending certain viewers’ sensibilities). Catherine O’Hara played Becka Paulson and John Diehl appeared as Joe Paulson.
The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan (1975)
The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan was originally published in Maine Review magazine for July 1975. King updated the story and included it in his novella The Body, published in 1982. The scenario was so irresistible that Rob Reiner retained it in the widely loved movie version of the novella, Stand By Me. It is very likely that the scene was adapted from The Body, rather than this version of the story.