The Collective

by The Collective [lit]

  about Bill, now that they were twenty-five years on, she would

  have left him when she found out about the secretary, a Clairol

  blonde too young to remember the Clairol slogan that went "If I

  have only one life to live," etc., etc. But there were other feelings.

  There was love, for instance. Still love. A kind that girls in

  Catholic-school uniforms didn't suspect, a weedy species too tough

  to die.

  Besides, it wasn't just love that held people together. Secrets held

  them, and common history, and the price you paid.

  "Carol?" he asked her. "Babe? All right?"

  She thought about telling him no, she wasn't all right, she was

  drowning, but then she managed to smile and said, "It's the heat,

  that's all. I feel a little groggy - Get me in the car and crank up the

  air-conditioning. I'll be fine."

  Bill took her by the elbow (Bet you're not checking out my legs,

  though, Carol thought. You know where they go, don't you?) and

  led her toward the Crown Vic as if she were a very old lady. By the

  time the door was closed and cool air was pumping over her face,

  she actually had started to feel a little better.

  If the feeling comes back, I'll tell him, Carol thought. I'll have to.

  It's just too strong Not normal

  Well, deja vu was never normal, she supposed - it was something

  that was part dream, part chemistry, and (she was sure she'd read

  this, maybe in a doctor's office somewhere while waiting for her

  gynecologist to go prospecting up her fifty-two-year-old twat) part

  the result of an electrical misfire in the brain, causing new

  experience to be identified as old data. A temporary hole in the

  pipes, hot water and cold water mingling. She closed her eyes and

  prayed for it to go away.

  Oh, Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to

  thee.

  Please ("Oh puh-lease," they used to say), not back to parochial

  school. This was supposed to be a vacation, not - Floyd - what's

  that over there? Oh shit!

  Oh SHIT!

  Who was Floyd? The only Floyd Bill knew was Floyd Doming (or

  maybe it was Darling), the kid he'd run the snack bar with, the one

  who'd run off to New York with his girlfriend. Carol couldn't

  remember when Bill had told her about that kid, but she knew he

  had.

  Jast quit it, girl. There's nothing here for you. Slam the door on the

  whole train of thought.

  And that worked. There was a final whisper - what's the story and

  then she was just Carol Shelton, on her way to Captiva Island, on

  her way to Palin House with her husband the renowned software

  designer, on their way to the beaches and those rum drinks with the

  little paper umbrellas sticking out of them.

  They passed a Publix market. They passed an old black man

  minding a roadside fruit stand - he made her think of actors from

  the thirties and movies you saw on the American Movie Channel,

  an old yassuh-boss type of guy wearing bib overalls and a straw

  hat with a round crown. Bill made small talk, and she made it right

  back at him. She was faintly amazed that the little girl who had

  worn a Mary medallion every day from ten to sixteen had become

  this woman in the Donna Karan dress - that the desperate couple in

  that Revere apartment were these middle-aged rich folks rolling

  down a lush aisle of palms - but she was and they were. Once in

  those Revere days he had come home drunk and she had hit him

  and drawn blood from below his eye. Once she had been in fear of

  Hell, had lain half-drugged in steel stirrups, thinking, I'm damned,

  I've come to damnation. A million years, and that's only the first

  tick of the clock.

  They stopped at the causeway tollbooth and Carol thought, The

  toll-taker has a strawberry birthmark on the left side of his

  forehead, all mixed in with his eyebrow.

  There was no mark-the toll-taker was just an ordinary guy in his

  late forties or early fifties, iron-gray hair in a buzz cut, horn-

  rimmed specs, the kind of guy who says, "Y'all have a nahce tahm,

  okai?"-but the feeling began to come back, and Carol realized that

  now the things she thought she knew were things she really did

  know, at first not all of them, but then, by the time they neared the

  little market on the right side of Route 41, it was almost

  everything.

  The market's called Corson's and there's a little gid outfront, Carol

  thought. She's wearing a red pinafore. She's got a doll, a dirty old

  yellow-haired thing, that she's left on the store steps so she can

  look at a dog in the back of a station wagon.

  The name of the market turned out to be Carson's, not Corson's,

  but everything else was the same. As the white Crown Vic passed,

  the little girl in the red dress turned her solemn face in Carol's

  direction, a country girl's face, although what a girl from the

  toolies could be doing here in rich folks' tourist country, her and

  her dirty yellow-headed doll, Carol didn't know.

  Here's where I ask Bill how much farther, only I won't do it.

  Because I have to break out of this cycle, this groove. I have to.

  "How much farther?" she asked him. He says there's only one road,

  we can't get lost. He says he promises me we'll get to the Palm

  House with no problem. And, by the way, who's Floyd?

  Bill's eyebrow went up. The dimple beside his mouth appeared.

  "Once you get over the causeway and onto Sanibel Island, there's

  only one road," he said. Carol barely heard him. He was still

  talking about the road, her husband who had spent a dirty weekend

  in bed with his secretary two years ago, risking all they had done

  and all they had made, Bill doing that with his other face on, being

  the Bill Carol's mother had warned would break her heart. And

  later Bill trying to tell her he hadn't been able to help himself, her

  wanting to scream, I once murdered a child for you, the potential

  of a child, anyway. How high is that price? And is this what I get

  in return? To reach my fifties and find out that my husband had to

  get into some Clairol girl's pants?

  Tell him! she shrieked. Make him pull over and stop, make him do

  anything that will break you free-change one thing, change

  everything! You can do it if you could put your feet up in those

  stirrups, you can do anything!

  But she could do nothing, and it all began to tick by faster. The two

  overfed crows lifted off from their splatter of lunch. Her husband

  asked why she was sitting that way, was it a cramp, her saying,

  Yes, yes, a cramp in her back but it was easing. Her mouth

  quacked on about deja vu just as if she weren't drowning in it, and

  the Crown Vic moved forward like one of those sadistic Dodgem

  cars at Revere Beach. Here came Palmdale Motors on the right.

  And on the lefr? Some kind of sign for the local community

  theatre, a production of "Naughty Marietta."

  No, it's Mary, not Marietta. Mary, mother of Jesus, Mary, mother

  of God, she's got her hands out....

  Carol bent all her will toward telling her husband what was

/>   happening, because the right Bill was behind the wheel, the right

  Bill could still hear her. Being heard was what married love was all

  about.

  Nothing came out. In her mind Gram said, "All the hard days are

  coming." In her mind a voice asked Floyd what was over there,

  then said, "Oh shit," then screamed "Oh shit!"

  She looked at the speedometer and saw it was calibrated not in

  miles an hour but thousands of feet: they were at twenty-eight

  thousand. Bill was telling her that she shouldn't have slept on the

  plane and she was agreeing.

  There was a pink house coming up, little more than a bungalow,

  fringed with palm trees that looked like the ones you saw in the

  Second World War movies, fronds framing incoming Learjets with

  their machine guns blazing-

  Blazing. Burning hot. All at once the magazine he's holding turns

  into a torch. Holy Mary, mother of God, hey there, Mary, what's

  the story-

  They passed the house. The old man sat on the porch and watched

  them go by. The lenses of his rimless glasses glinted in the sun.

  Bill's hand established a beachhead on her hip. He said something

  about how they might pause to refresh themselves between the

  doffing of her dress and the donning of her shorts and she agreed,

  although they were never going to get to Palm House. They were

  going to go down this road and down this road, they were for the

  white Crown Vic and the white Crown Vic was for them, forever

  and ever amen.

  The next billboard would say "Palm House 2 Mi." Beyond it was

  the one saying that Mother of Mercy Charities helped the Florida

  sick. Would they help her?

  Now that it was too late she was be-ginning to understand.

  Beginning to see the light the way she could see the subtropical

  sun sparkling off the water on their left. Wondering how many

  wrongs she had done in her life, how many sins if you liked that

  word, God knew her parents and her Gram certainly had, sin this

  and sin that and wear the medallion between those growing things

  the boys look at. And years later she had lain in bed with her new

  husband on hot summer nights, knowing a decision had to be

  made, knowing the clock was ticking, the cigarette butt was

  smoldering, and she remembered making the decision, not telling

  him out loud because about some things you could be silent.

  Her head itched. She scratched it. Black flecks came swirling down

  past her face. On the Crown Vic's instrument panel the

  speedometer froze at sixteen thousand feet and then blew out, but

  Bill appeared not to notice.

  Here came a mailbox with a Grateful Dead sticker pasted on the

  front; here came a little black dog with its head down, trotting

  busily, and God how her head itched, black flakes drifting in the

  air like fallout and Mother Teresa's face looking out of one of

  them.

  "Mother of Mary Charities Help the Florida Hungry-Won't You

  Help Us?"

  Floyd What's that over there? Oh shit

  She has time to see something big. And to read the word "Delta."

  "Bill? Bill?"

  His reply, clear enough but nevertheless coming from around the

  rim of the universe: "Christ, honey, what's in your hair?"

  She plucked the charred remnant of Mother Teresa's face from her

  hair and held it out to him, the older version of the man she had

  married, the secretary fucking man she had married, the man who

  had nonetheless rescued her from people who thought that you

  could live forever in paradise if you only lit enough candles and

  wore the blue blazer and stuck to the approved skipping rhymes -

  Lying there with this man one hot summer night while the drug

  deals went on upstairs and Iron Butterfly sang "In-A-Gadda-Da-

  Vida" for the nine-billionth time, she had asked what he thought

  you got, you know, after. When your part in the show is over. He

  had taken her in his arms and held her, down the beach she had

  heard the jangle-jingle of the mid-way and the bang of the Dodgem

  cars and Bill - Bill's glasses were melted to his face.

  One eye bulged out of its socket. His mouth was a bloodhole. In

  the trees a bird was crying, a bird was screaming, and Carol began

  to scream with it, holding out the charred fragment of paper with

  Mother Teresa's picture on it, screaming, watching as his cheeks

  turned black and his forehead swarmed and his neck split open like

  a poisoned goiter, screaming, she was screaming, somewhere Iron

  Butterfly was singing "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and she was

  screaming.

  "CAROL?"

  It was Bill's voice, from a thousand miles away. His hand was on

  her, but it was concern in his touch rather than lust.

  She opened her eyes and looked around the sun-brilliant cabin of

  the Lear 35, and for a moment she understood everything in the

  way one understands the tremendous import of a dream upon the

  first moment of waking. She remembered asking him what he

  believed you got, you know, after, and he had said you probably

  got what you'd always thought you would get, that if Jerry Lee

  Lewis thought he was going to Hell for playing boogie-woogie,

  that's exactly where he'd go. Heaven, Hell, or Grand Rapids, it was

  your choice or the choice of those who had taught you what to

  believe. It was the human mind's final great service: the perception

  of eternity in the place where you'd always expected to spend it.

  "Carol? You O.K., babe?" In one hand was the magazine he'd been

  reading, a Newsweek with Mother Teresa on the cover.

  "SAINTHOOD NOW?" it said in white.

  Looking around wildly at the cabin, she was thinking, it happens at

  sixteen thousand feet I have to tell them, I have to warn them.

  But it was fading, all of it, the way those feelings always did. They

  went like dreams, or cotton candy turning into a sweet mist just

  above your tongue.

  "Landing? Already." She felt wide awake, but her voice sounded

  thick and muzzy.

  "It's fast, huh?" he said, sounding pleased, as if he'd flown it

  himself instead of paying for it. "Floyd says we'll be on the ground

  in-"

  "Who?" she asked. The cabin of the little plane was warm but her

  fingers were cold. "Who?"

  "Floyd. You know, the pilot" He pointed his thumb toward the

  cockpit's left-hand seat. They were descending into a scrim of

  clouds. The plane began to shake. "He says we'll be on the ground

  in Fort Myers in twenty minutes. You took a hell of a jump, girl.

  And before that you were moaning."

  Carol opened her mouth to say it was that feeling, the one you

  could only say what it was in French, something vu or rous, but it

  was fading and all she said was "I had a nightmare."

  There was a beep as Floyd the pilot switched the seat-belt light on.

  Carol turned her head. Somewhere below, waiting for them now

  and forever, was a white car from Hertz, a gangster car, the kind

  the characters in a Martin Scorsese movie would probably call a

  Crown Vic. She looked at the cover of the news magazine, at the

  face
of Mother Teresa, and all at once she remembered skipping

  rope behind Our Lady of Angels, skipping to one of the forbidden

  rhymes, skipping to the one that went Hey there, Mary, what's the

  story, save my ass from Purgatory

  All the hard days are coming, her Gram had said. She had pressed

  the medal into Carol's palm, wrapped the chain around her fingers.

  The hard days are coming.

  THE GLASS

  FLOOR

  STEPHEN KING

  Appeared in:

  "Weird Tales" Fall, 1990

  Starlight Mystery Stories, 1967

  INTRODUCTION

  In the novel Deliverance, by James Dickey, there is a scene where

  a country fellow who lives way up in the back of beyond whangs

  his hand with a tool while repairing a car. One of the city men who

  are looking for a couple of guys to drive their cars downriver asks

  this fellow, Griner by name, if he's hurt himself. Griner looks at his

  bloody hand, then mutters: "Naw - it ain't as bad as I thought."

  That's the way I felt after re-reading "The Glass Floor," the first

  story for which I was ever paid, after all these years. Darrell

  Schweitzer, the editor of Weird Tales invited me to make changes if

  I wanted to, but I decided that would probably be a bad idea.

  Except for two or three word-changes and the addition of a

  paragraph break (which was probably a typographical error in the

  first place), I've left the tale just as it was. If I really did start

  making changes, the result would be an entirely new story.

  "The Glass Floor" was written, to the best of my recollection, in

  the summer of 1967, when I was about two months shy of my

  twentieth birthday. I had been trying for about two years to sell a

  story to Robert A.W. Lowndes, who edited two horror/fantasy

  magazines for Health Knowledge (The Magazine of Horror and

  Startling Mystery Stories) as well as a vastly more popular digest

  called Sexology. He had rejected several submissions kindly (one

  of them, marginally better than "The Glass Floor," was finally

  published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under

  the title "Night of the Tiger"), then accepted this one when I finally

  got around to submitting it. That first check was for thirty-five

  dollars. I've cashed many bigger ones since then, but none gave me

  more satisfaction; someone had finally paid me some real money

  for something I had found in my head!

  The first few pages of the story are clumsy and badly written -