Skeleton Crew

by Stephen King

  It did not happen.

  Sometime later, she noticed that the day's bright whiteness had begun to dull to a more uniform gray. The snow fell heavier and thicker than ever. Her feet were still planted on the crust but now she was walking through five inches of fresh snow. She looked at her watch, but it had stopped. Stella realized she must have forgotten to wind it that morning for the first time in twenty or thirty years. Or had it just stopped for good? It had been her mother's and she had sent it with Alden twice to the Head, where Mr. Dostie had first marveled over it and then cleaned it. Her watch, at least, had been to the mainland.

  She fell down for the first time some fifteen minutes after she began to notice the day's growing grayness. For a moment she remained on her hands and knees, thinking it would be so easy just to stay here, to curl up and listen to the wind, and then the determination that had brought her through so much reasserted itself and she got up, grimacing. She stood in the wind, looking straight ahead, willing her eyes to see ... but they saw nothing.

  Be dark soon.

  Well, she had gone wrong. She had slipped off to one side or the other. Otherwise she would have reached the mainland by now. Yet she didn't believe she had gone so far wrong that she was walking parallel to the mainland or even back in the direction of Goat. An interior navigator in her head whispered that she had overcompensated and slipped off to the left. She believed she was still approaching the mainland but was now on a costly diagonal.

  That navigator wanted her to turn right, but she would not do that. Instead, she moved straight on again, but stopped the artificial limp. A spasm of coughing shook her, and she spat bright red into the snow.

  Ten minutes later (the gray was now deep indeed, and she found herself in the weird twilight of a heavy snowstorm) she fell again, tried to get up, failed at first, and finally managed to gain her feet. She stood swaying in the snow, barely able to remain upright in the wind, waves of faintness rushing through her head, making her feel alternately heavy and light.

  Perhaps not all the roaring she heard in her ears was the wind, but it surely was the wind that finally succeeded in prying Alden's hat from her head. She made a grab for it, but the wind danced it easily out of her reach and she saw it only for a moment, flipping gaily over and over into the darkening gray, a bright spot of orange. It struck the snow, rolled, rose again, was gone. Now her hair flew around her head freely.

  "It's all right, Stella," Bill said. "You can wear mine."

  She gasped and looked around in the white. Her gloved hands had gone instinctively to her bosom, and she felt sharp fingernails scratch at her heart.

  She saw nothing but shifting membranes of snow--and then, moving out of that evening's gray throat, the wind screaming through it like the voice of a devil in a snowy tunnel, came her husband. He was at first only moving colors in the snow: red, black, dark green, lighter green; then these colors resolved themselves into a flannel jacket with a flapping collar, flannel pants, and green boots. He was holding his hat out to her in a gesture that appeared almost absurdly courtly, and his face was Bill's face, unmarked by the cancer that had taken him (had that been all she was afraid of? that a wasted shadow of her husband would come to her, a scrawny concentration-camp figure with the skin pulled taut and shiny over the cheekbones and the eyes sunken deep in the sockets ?) and she felt a surge of relief.

  "Bill? Is that really you?"

  "Course."

  "Bill," she said again, and took a glad step toward him. Her legs betrayed her and she thought she would fall, fall right through him--he was, after all, a ghost-but he caught her in arms as strong and as competent as those that had carried her over the threshold of the house that she had shared only with Alden in these latter years. He supported her, and a moment later she felt the cap pulled firmly onto her head.

  "Is it really you?" she asked again, looking up into his face, at the crow's-feet around his eyes which hadn't sunk deep yet, at the spill of snow on the shoulders of his checked hunting jacket, at his lively brown hair.

  "It's me," he said. "It's all of us."

  He half-turned with her and she saw the others coming out of the snow that the wind drove across the Reach in the gathering darkness. A cry, half joy, half fear, came from her mouth as she saw Madeline Stoddard, Hattie's mother, in a blue dress that swung in the wind like a bell, and holding her hand was Hattie's dad, not a mouldering skeleton somewhere on the bottom with the Dancer, but whole and young. And there, behind those two--

  "Annabelle!" she cried. "Annabelle Frane, is it you?"

  It was Annabelle; even in this snowy gloom Stella recognized the yellow dress Annabelle had worn to Stella's own wedding, and as she struggled toward her dead friend, holding Bill's arm, she thought that she could smell roses.

  "Annabelle!"

  "We're almost there now, dear," Annabelle said, taking her other arm. The yellow dress, which had been considered Daring in its day (but, to Annabelle's credit and to everyone else's relief, not quite a Scandal), left her shoulders bare, but Annabelle did not seem to feel the cold. Her hair, a soft, dark auburn, blew long in the wind. "Only a little further."

  She took Stella's other arm and they moved forward again. Other figures came out of the snowy night (for it was night now). Stella recognized many of them, but not all. Tommy Frane had joined Annabelle; Big George Havelock, who had died a dog's death in the woods, walked behind Bill; there was the fellow who had kept the lighthouse on the Head for most of twenty years and who used to come over to the island during the cribbage tournament Freddy Dinsmore held every February--Stella could almost but not quite remember his name. And there was Freddy himself! Walking off to one side of Freddy, by himself and looking bewildered, was Russell Bowie.

  "Look, Stella," Bill said, and she saw black rising out of the gloom like the splintered prows of many ships. It was not ships, it was split and fissured rock. They had reached the Head. They had crossed the Reach.

  She heard voices, but was not sure they actually spoke:

  Take my hand, Stella--

  (do you)

  Take my hand, Bill--

  (oh do you do you)

  Annabelle... Freddy... Russell... John... Ettie ... Frank... take my hand, take my hand . . . my hand ...

  (do you love)

  "Will you take my hand, Stella?" a new voice asked.

  She looked around and there was Bull Symes. He was smiling kindly at her and yet she felt a kind of terror in her at what was in his eyes and for a moment she drew away, clutching Bill's hand on her other side the tighter.

  "Is it--"

  "Time?" Bull asked. "Oh, ayuh, Stella, I guess so. But it don't hurt. At least, I never heard so. All that's before."

  She burst into tears suddenly--all the tears she had never wept--and put her hand in Bull's hand. "Yes," she said, "yes I will, yes I did, yes I do."

  They stood in a circle in the storm, the dead of Goat Island, and the wind screamed around them, driving its packet of snow, and some kind of song burst from her. It went up into the wind and the wind carried it away. They all sang then, as children will sing in their high, sweet voices as a summer evening draws down to summer night. They sang, and Stella felt herself going to them and with them, finally across the Reach. There was a bit of pain, but not much; losing her maidenhead had been worse. They stood in a circle in the night. The snow blew around them and they sang. They sang, and--

  --and Alden could not tell David and Lois, but in the summer after Stella died, when the children came out for their annual two weeks, he told Lona and Hal. He told them that during the great storms of winter the wind seems to sing with almost human voices, and that sometimes it seemed to him he could almost make out the words: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow/Praise Him, ye creatures here below . . ."

  But he did not tell them (imagine slow, unimaginative Alden Flanders saying such things aloud, even to the children!) that sometimes he would hear that sound and feel cold even by the stove; that he would put his
whittling aside, or the trap he had meant to mend, thinking that the wind sang in all the voices of those who were dead and gone . . .that they stood somewhere out on the Reach and sang as children do. He seemed to hear their voices and on these nights he sometimes slept and dreamed that he was singing the doxology, unseen and unheard, at his own funeral.

  There are things that can never be told, and there are things, not exactly secret, that are not discussed. They had found Stella frozen to death on the mainland a day after the storm had blown itself out. She was sitting on a natural chair of rock about one hundred yards south of the Raccoon Head town limits, frozen just as neat as you please. The doctor who owned the Corvette said that he was frankly amazed. It would have been a walk of over four miles, and the autopsy required by law in the case of an unattended, unusual death had shown an advanced cancerous condition--intruth, the old woman had been riddled with it. Was Alden to tell David and Lois that the cap on her head had not been his? Larry McKeen had recognized that cap. So had John Bensohn. He had seen it in their eyes, and he supposed they had seen it in his. He had not lived long enough to forget his dead father's cap, the look of its bill or the places where the visor had been broken.

  "These are things made for thinking on slowly," he would have told the children if he had known how. "Things to be thought on at length, while the hands do their work and the coffee sits in a solid china mug nearby. They are questions of Reach, maybe: do the dead sing? And do they love the living?"

  On the nights after Lona and Hal had gone back with their parents to the mainland in Al Curry's boat, the children standing astern and waving good-bye, Alden considered that question, and others, and the matter of his father's cap.

  Do the dead sing? Do they love?

  On those long nights alone, with his mother Stella Flanders at long last in her grave, it often seemed to Alden that they did both.

  Notes

  Not everyone is interested in where short stories come from, and that is perfectly proper--you don't have to understand the internal-combustion engine to drive a car, and you don't need to know the circumstances which surrounded the making of a story to get a bit of pleasure from it. Engines interest mechanics; the creation of stories interests academics, fans, and snoops (the first and the last are almost synonymous, but never mind). I've included a few notes here on a few of the stories--such things as I thought might interest the casual reader. But if you're even more casual than that, I assure you that you can close the book without a qualm--you won't be missing much.

  "The Mist"--This was written in the summer of 1976, for an anthology of new stories being put together by my agent, Kirby McCauley. McCauley had created another book of this sort, called Frights, two or three years previous. That book was a paperback. This one was to be a hardcover and much more ambitious in scope. It was called Dark Forces. Kirby wanted a story from me, and he pursued that story with doggedness, determination... and a kind of gentle diplomacy that is, I think, the hallmark of a really good agent.

  I couldn't think of a thing. The harder I thought, the more easily nothing came. I began to think that maybe the short-story machine in my head was temporarily or permanently broken. Then came the storm, which was much as described in this story. At the height of it there was indeed a waterspout on Long Lake in Bridgton, where we were living at the time, and I did insist that my family come downstairs with me for a while (although my wife's name is Tabitha--Stephanie is her sister's name). The trip to the market the next day was also much as described in the story, although I was spared the company of such an odious creature as Norton--in the real world, the people living in Norton's summer cottage were a very pleasant doctor, Ralph Drews, and his wife.

  In the market, my muse suddenly shat on my head--this happened as it always does, suddenly, with no warning. I was halfway down the middle aisle, looking for hot-dog buns, when I imagined a big prehistoric bird flapping its way toward the meat counter at the back, knocking over cans of pineapple chunks and bottles of tomato sauce. By the time my son Joe and I were in the checkout lane, I was amusing myself with a story about all these people trapped in a supermarket surrounded by prehistoric animals. I thought it was wildly funny--what The Alamo would have been like if directed by Bert I. Gordon. I wrote half the story that night and the rest the following week.

  It got a little long, but Kirby thought it was good and it went into the book. I never liked it that much until the rewrite--I particularly didn't like David Drayton sleeping with Amanda and then never finding out what happened to his wife. That seemed cowardly to me. But in the rewrite, I discovered a rhythm of language that I liked--and keeping that rhythm in mind, I was able to peel the story down to its basics more successfully than with some of my other long stories ("Apt Pupil" in Different Seasons is a particularly good example of this disease I have--literary elephantiasis).

  The real key to this rhythm lay in the deliberate use of the story's first line, which I simply stole from Douglas Fairbairn's brilliant novel Shoot. The line is, for me, the essence of all story, a kind of Zen incantation.

  I must tell you that I also liked the metaphor implied in David Drayton's discovery of his own limitations, and I liked the story's cheery cheesiness--you're supposed to see this one in black-and-white, with your arm around your girl's shoulders (or your guy's), and a big speaker stuck in the window. You make up the second feature.

  "Here There Be Tygers"--My first-grade teacher in Stratford, Connecticut, was Mrs. Van Buren. She was pretty scary. I guess if a tiger had come along and eaten her up, I could have gotten behind that. You know how kids are.

  "The Monkey"--I was in New York City on business about four years ago. I was walking back to my hotel after visiting my people at New American Library when I saw a guy selling wind-up monkeys on the street. There was a platoon of them standing on a gray blanket he'd spread on the sidewalk at the corner of Fifth and Forty-fourth, all bending and grinning and clapping their cymbals. They looked really scary to me, and I spent the rest of my walk back to the hotel wondering why. I decided it was because they reminded me of the lady with the shears... the one who cuts everyone's thread one day. So keeping that idea in mind, I wrote the story, mostly longhand, in a hotel room.

  "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut"--My wife is the real Mrs. Todd; the woman really is mad for a shortcut, and much of the one in the story actually exists. She found it, too. And Tabby really does seem to be getting younger sometimes, although I hope I am not like Worth Todd. I try not to be.

  I like this story a lot; it tickles me. And the old guy's voice is soothing. Every now and then you write something that brings back the old days, when everything you wrote seemed fresh and full of invention. "Mrs. Todd" felt that way to me when I was writing it.

  One final note on it--three women's magazines turned it down, two because of that line about how a woman will pee down her own leg if she doesn't squat. They apparently felt that either women don't pee or don't want to be reminded of the fact. The third magazine to reject it, Cosmopolitan, did so because they felt the main character was too old to interest their target audience.

  No comment--except to add that Redbook finally took it. God bless 'em.

  "The Jaunt"--This was originally for Omni, which quite rightly rejected it because the science is so wonky. It was Ben Bova s idea to have the colonists in the story mining for water, and I have incorporated that in this version.

  "The Raft"--I wrote this story in the year 1968 as "The Float." In late 1969 I sold it to Adam magazine, which--like most of the girlie magazines--paid not on acceptance but only on publication. The amount promised was two hundred and fifty dollars.

  In the spring of 1970, while creeping home in my white Ford station wagon from the University Motor Inn at 12:30 in the morning, I ran over a number of traffic cones which were guarding a crosswalk that had been painted that day. The paint had dried, but no one had bothered to take the cones in when it got dark. One of them bounced up and knocked my muffler loose from the rotted remains
of my tailpipe. I was immediately suffused with the sort of towering, righteous rage which only drunk undergraduates can feel. I decided to circle the town of Orono, picking up traffic cones. I would leave them all in front of the police station the next morning, with a note saying that I had saved numerous mufflers and exhaust systems from extinction, and ought to get a medal.

  I got about a hundred and fifty before blue lights started to swirl around in the rearview mirror.

  I will never forget the Orono cop turning to me after a long, long look into the back of my station wagon and asking: "Son, are those traffic cones yours?"

  The cones were confiscated and so was I; that night I was a guest of the town of Orono, that crossword-puzzle favorite. A month or so later, I was brought to trial in Bangor District Court on a charge of petty larceny. I was my own attorney and did indeed have a fool for a client. I was fined two hundred and fifty dollars, which I of course did not have. I was given seven days to come up with it, or do thirty more days as a guest of Penobscot County. I probably could have borrowed it from my mother, but the circumstances were not easy to understand (unless you had a skinful of booze, that was).

  Although one is now not supposed to ever use a deus ex machina in his or her fiction because these gods from the machine are not believable, I notice that they arrive all the time in real life. Mine came three days after the judge levied my fine and arrived in the form of a check from Adam magazine for two hundred and fifty dollars. It was for my story "The Float." It was like having someone send you a real Get Out of Jail Free card. I cashed the check immediately and paid my fine. I determined to go straight and give all traffic cones a wide berth thereafter. Straight I have not exactly gone, but believe me when I tell you I'm quits with the cones.

  But here's the thing: Adam paid only on publication, dammit, and since I got the money, the story must have come out. But no copy was ever sent to me, and I never saw one on the stands, although I checked regularly--I would simply push my way in between the dirty old men checking out such literary pinnacles as Boobs and Buns and Spanking Lesbians and thumb through every magazine the Knight Publishing Company put out. I never saw that story in any of them.