The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories

by William Browning Spencer

  “You can drive,” I said, giving Teller the keys to my truck.

  I sat in the passenger seat and fished through my camera bag.

  “I don’t know how you think you can make me go through with this, mister. And what is it to you anyway?”

  “I’m the photographer,” I told him. “How am I supposed to get the pictures if the wedding doesn’t occur?”

  “I don’t think that you appreciate what’s going on here. You’re talking about my life, the rest of my goddam life.”

  I had found what I was looking for, a silver thirty-eight pistol, as bright and beautiful as any jewel. I pulled it out and, pointing it at Teller, I shouted: “I WILL FUCKING BLOW YOUR HEAD OFF IF YOU DON’T MARRY DEBBIE! GOT THAT?”

  I startled him, I guess, because he drove the pickup off the road and onto the sidewalk. He was resilient however, and wrestled the truck back onto the road.

  He was whispering under his breath, saying “Jesus,” I think.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to alarm you. But I feel strongly about this. The question, I suppose is: ‘Does a wedding exist so that it can be photographed, or are the photographs a mere by-product of the wedding?’ Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? I’m no philosopher, but I am a photographer, so you can guess how I feel about it.”

  “You are crazy,” Teller said.

  As we drove along, I studied my young companion. He had combed his hair and looked considerably better than when I had first encountered him. I put the gun down. It was not loaded and I had never fired it. I had received it as partial payment for a wedding that spring, and I had been intending to sell it. Maybe I would hang onto it after all. I lifted my camera, and snapped Teller’s profile as we flew toward the church and his destiny. One day, perhaps, he would encounter this photo, laugh, draw a curly-headed grandson closer and say, “Those little white flecks are toilet paper. Yes! I cut myself shaving that morning. I was a wreck that day, let me tell you, so nervous …”

  “We’ll have to find another best man,” I said.

  Teller said nothing. We turned into the church’s driveway. I looked at my watch.

  “Fifteen minutes to spare,” I said.

  We recruited one of the ushers for best man honors, gave him the rings and some hurried instructions.

  I needed to get moving in order to document the bride and groom’s approach. “See you at the altar,” I said, leaning forward and clutching young Teller’s arm. I gave it a good squeeze to convey the depth of my sincerity, and then I was off, running down the hill toward the pond, a fat man pursuing his vocation, approaching a colorful crowd fidgeting upon folding chairs. The minister—Episcopalian, I believe—stood at the edge of the pond with a Bible pressed comfortably against his chest.

  The ceremony went smoothly, although, to my way of thinking, it could have been shorter. The minister made a long speech about the solemnity and sanctity of marriage in these troubled times, and it was a speech that ranged over a variety of topics, including the destruction of the ozone layer.

  “Okay, okay,” I muttered as I snapped photographs. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  I got all the obligatory shots: the kiss, the bouquet in the air, the always-awkward garter bit, the cutting of the cake. The obligatory stray dog drifted in and ran off with a little girl’s hat. A rock band whose youngest member must have been fifty played old Beatles’ songs loudly and ineptly.

  I looked at the young couple. Teller had his arm around Debbie’s waist. The glowing bride, although still suggesting a child being swallowed by a monstrous cake, seemed to have accepted her fate. She no longer looked terrified, and as I watched, it was clear that she was instructing her new husband regarding some matter of etiquette.

  Young Teller was beaming, awash on the great wave of adulation and good will that buoys up all young couples on their wedding day. No doubt this emotion was transient, and the young couple might fight before the day was over, might slam doors in some motel room, might hold each other’s faults up to a cold light, might cry and rage.

  As I drove away, I realized that I myself was emotionally drained—and I was only the photographer.

  I didn’t want to drive home. I wasn’t up to facing my apartment, so I drove to a bar, had a few drinks, and gave Patricia a call from the pay phone near the restrooms.

  She answered the phone on the second ring. “Hey, how you doing?” I asked.

  Patricia is not good on phones. I’ve seen her from the other side, and it is clear that she hates talking on the phone. The minute she answers, she wants to hang up. She’ll pace up and down with the receiver lodged between shoulder and ear while she lights a cigarette, one eye closed. She’ll be moving fast, from the kitchen to the living room, going the length of the cord like a hooked fish. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she’ll say, as though she has heard everything the caller has to say before—and often. She’s that way with everyone, so I don’t take it personally.

  “I just thought I’d see what was up,” I said. “I’m thinking of coming by this weekend.”

  She said she didn’t think that would be a good idea; she had plans.

  “Maybe next week then,” I said. “I’ll give you a call before then.”

  “Every day,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Don, you call every day,” she said.

  “That often, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said. Little choppy sentences are one technique people use to terminate conversations. The theory, I guess, is that if you don’t offer anything for the conversation to feed on it will eventually die, starve.

  I always find it sort of a challenge to see how long I can keep Patricia on the phone, though.

  I logged maybe fifteen minutes before she said she heard someone at the door.

  I went back to the bar and drank a few more beers. I lost track of time and didn’t get home until real late, hauled the cameras and lenses and crap up the three flights, and woke the next day sleeping on the top of the bed. I had wrestled my coat off, and my tie was on the floor, but I still had my shoes on. That’s always a bad sign—sleeping in your shoes—and I resolved to cut down on the drinking.

  I sat on the side of the bed and looked at the photo of Patricia on the wall. Okay, I’ve still got one photo. And okay, okay, it is big. I mean, it’s a poster I had made: 3 feet by 4 feet. I snapped it when we were down at Nags Head, and it isn’t great art or anything. It’s contrasty, and her eyes are half-closed with the sun in her face, and you can see the waves behind her and it is grainy and kind of embarrassing—me being a photographer and all I should have something a little more artful on my wall—but she has this dazzle of smile and her hair is still wet from the ocean and unraveling down the left side of her face like a handful of bright yellow ribbons.

  And I was telling the truth about hating the past and loathing all the accusations and regrets that old photos fill up with.

  But this photo is different. I can see myself telling my grandson, “That’s Grandma at the beach.”

  It’s a rare photo, somehow hopeful, without a bit of sorrow or blighted hope in it. Hell, I might have taken it just yesterday.

  Haunted by the Horror King

  During the day it is okay, but at night I am sleeping in my room, and suddenly I snap awake. I know what has awakened me, but I have to slow my breathing and wait before I hear it again. At first I hear nothing but the snores of my roommate, Jack Hodges, a large, gloomy black man who told me—my first day here—not to worry; he wasn’t violent as long as he remembered to take his Thorazine.

  I keep on listening, with my eyes wide open. Then I hear it. Click! It is a dreadful sound, like a switchblade being flicked open in a dark alley. Then: click, click! One last pause on a precipice of silence, and then: click, click, click, click, click, click!

  The noise goes on and on, growing louder, relentless, filling the darkness and making my heart race.

  It is the sound of Stephen King’s t
ypewriter as he brutally bangs the keys. The sound has traveled across six states, to find me here in this mental health facility in Northern Virginia. I lie in bed, helpless, listening to the words being hammered out and falling—click, click, click—like cold rain on my heart.

  When Elaine comes to visit, she tries to disabuse me of this notion. “Stephen King doesn’t even write on a typewriter,” she says. “He uses a word processor.”

  “Why should I believe you?” I say. “You’re sleeping with him.”

  Accused, she feigns shock and outrage, and this usually signals the end of our visit.

  In group, Danny Wolitzer—who is here because he likes to take off all his clothes while riding buses—says I am crazy.

  “Maybe I am, now,” I say. “I wasn’t always.”

  I wasn’t.

  It started in 1978, long before I met and married Elaine. I had written five unpublished novels, and I was just completing my sixth novel while working as a clerk typist for an insurance company. Sarah and I had been living together for a year, and we were, I think, deeply in love.

  I gave the finished manuscript to her to read. She was the person whose opinion mattered most to me, and I was certain she would love this novel. It was the best thing I had ever written, a dark and haunting foray into the mind of an aging high school English teacher.

  Knowing Sarah’s reaction would be positive, I was still jittery and had to leave the apartment to avoid popping in on her every five minutes to ask how it was going. Adjourning to a nearby bar, I encountered two other writers (an accountant and a used car salesman) and we had a few beers.

  When I returned to the apartment, the living room and kitchen were dark. There was a light coming from the bedroom, however, and I tiptoed in, thinking to observe the play of emotions on my beloved’s face as she read my novel. Perhaps I would find her just as she read that heartrending section where my hero is forced to retire.

  My darling lay propped up in bed, three pillows behind her, and the expression on her face was, indeed, enraptured—everything an author could hope for, really. But she was not reading my manuscript; she was reading a hardcover book.

  “Sarah,” I said, bursting into the room.

  She was caught and she knew it. “Oh,” she said, laying the book down (but even then—dear God what inconstancy have you wrought in women!—she held her place with an index finger). “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “I guess not,” I said, and I leaned over and snatched the book from her.

  It was a fat, shiny book printed by Doubleday—a publisher whose interest I coveted. Need I say it? The book was The Stand; its author Stephen King.

  Sarah had purchased the book that morning, begun reading it during her lunch break, and been unable to put it down. With the best intentions in the world, she had begun to read my manuscript, but then—just as murderers come out of a daze with the bloody knife clenched tightly and the bodies strewn about—she unaccountably found herself immersed in The Stand.

  I suggested—rather stiffly—that she finish The Stand so that she could give my manuscript her undivided attention, and with unseemly alacrity, Sarah accepted this proposal.

  She dispatched The Stand in no time at all and then read my manuscript, declaring it a brilliant, poetic achievement. But she was too late with her praise. Faith had been broken, and I suspected that her enthusiasm was all a sham. I knew where her true affections lay. One night I surprised her at the kitchen table, writing a letter. She quickly folded it and left the room. I looked at the blank tablet she had been writing on. The indentations of her ballpoint pen revealed just enough to confirm what I already suspected. She had been writing a fan letter. To whom? Guess.

  Our lives went on. My manuscript was returned by innumerable New York publishers and agents. “This is a good mid-list book,” one agent wrote, “but unfortunately, there is no mid-list anymore. What we want is a blockbuster, I’m afraid. This book just doesn’t pack the wallop contemporary audiences require. The psychological insights are excellent, but you might think of beefing them up with some popular elements—horror, perhaps. You might take a look at The Shining by Stephen King.”

  I quit the insurance company. They were beginning to make too many demands. I found employment as a dishwasher in an all night diner. One morning I came home to hear Sarah talking on the phone about the fire that had started, spontaneously, in the kitchen wastebasket. “Whup!” she said. “Just like that. We were just eating dinner and all of a sudden the wastebasket like exploded, flames right up to the ceiling. No. Absolutely not. We don’t smoke or anything and …”

  I thought nothing of the conversation at the time, assumed she was talking to her friend Janice, and it was much later—years in fact—that I seem to recall a certain evasiveness when I asked her who she was talking to. Did she answer at all? I don’t think so.

  Some eighteen months later, King published Firestarter. I saw no connection at the time. Only later did I piece it together.

  A month after the publication of that book, our cat, Winston, was killed out on the highway. I was still working nights, and poor Sarah found the animal’s stiff body. I overheard the phone conversation in which she tearfully related the discovery of Winston’s body.

  “Who was that?” I asked, hurt that she would seek someone else for the full outpouring of her grief.

  “Janice,” she said, and it never occurred to me that she might be lying.

  Later that year, Sarah confessed she was having an affair.

  “Who?” I demanded.

  She refused to say. I tried following her, but she always managed to lose me in a Walden’s or a B. Dalton’s—she knew my weakness, my inability to leave a bookstore on a moment’s notice.

  Eight months after this announcement, I found the copy of Pet Sematary in the bottom of her dresser, and suddenly, like a blow to the bridge of the nose, enlightenment came. She was having an affair with Stephen King. He had stolen my wife. He had stolen my dead cat.

  She denied it all.

  “What about the cat in Pet Sematary?” I demanded. I had refused to read the novel—had never read any of them—but a skimming of the opening chapters had revealed a cat and its fate. “There is a dead cat in that book, and it too is killed on the highway.”

  “Coincidence,” Sarah said—a bit quickly, I thought.

  “What about the names?” I said.

  She did a fair job of looking baffled. “Well, the name of the cat in the book is Church and our cat was named Winston, so, as you say, what about the names?”

  I was nodding my head rapidly. “Uh huh, uh huh. And Church is short for Winston Churchill. Winston,” I said, with the air of a prosecutor producing a murder weapon. But Sarah was a skilled liar, and she rolled her eyes convincingly and did not crack.

  Nonetheless, I knew what I knew. I wrote King a letter telling him to stay away from Sarah. He did not reply. I hadn’t expected him to.

  I thought of calling his wife. “Tabitha,” I would say. “Your husband is unfaithful.”

  But I didn’t do it. Why bother? And Sarah left, moving back to her parents’ house in New Orleans.

  A year later I met Elaine. She was a lovely, dark-haired woman with gray eyes.

  One night, when we were beginning to get serious, I asked her: “Do you like Stephen King?”

  “Never read him,” she said. “I don’t like horror fiction.”

  I hugged her and let my heart loose. “Go for it, heart,” I said to myself.

  I married Elaine in a small wedding attended by some of her friends from the department store where she worked and my writer friends.

  My writer friends pitched in and got me a pen and pencil set with a silver case. On the case, they had engraved: “May your happiness be unexpurgated.” I was touched.

  But happiness is always edited by events, and so mine was. At first, we could not have been happier. Elaine was very supportive of my writing. I had been working on a multi-generational novel which I tho
ught had great commercial potential. An agent had expressed interest in the opening chapters. Well, what he had actually said was he would be willing to look at it for a reduced reading fee. I took this as a hopeful sign, and so did Elaine.

  You know what is coming, of course. I came home from work for lunch—I had taken a job as a telephone solicitor and my hours were flexible. Elaine was cozily—and the word “brazenly” comes to mind—settled in an armchair and—yes—she was reading Stephen King. The book was The Tommyknockers.

  “Elaine,” I said, trying to control my voice. “I thought you didn’t read horror fiction?”

  And my beloved replied, oblivious to my pain, “I don’t. A friend said this one was science fiction. I’m crazy about science fiction. And you know, this isn’t half bad.”

  I said nothing and went into the study to work on the final draft of my manuscript, tentatively entitled Sinew or perhaps Sinews. It was almost finished and when, in fact, I finished it the following week, I asked Elaine if she would like to read it. My wife said that she certainly would after she finished Cujo, a King novel about a rabid dog. She had decided to go back and read all his books, beginning with Carrie. She was now at Cujo.

  “I thought …” I began, but she had already immersed herself in the book and what did it matter what I thought? I sent my novel off to the agent, and he wrote back to say that it was a large book and would require some time to read and, time being money, would cost more than he had initially stated.

  I sent him the extra money and waited. Several months passed and I called his office. After some equivocating, a secretary admitted that he worked there, but she said he was on vacation. I practiced patience. Three months later he responded. The letter seemed inordinately short considering the money. It read: “A near-miss here. The characterization is good, but the pace flags. You might look at Stephen King’s Firestarter to get a feel for pacing. As it stands, I’m afraid it lacks the focus to penetrate today’s competitive market. Till next time. Best.”

  It was somewhere around this time that I began to hear Stephen King’s typewriter, clacking away at three in the morning, carried on a chill ghost wind all the way from Maine. I identified it easily enough.