Uncollected Stories 2003 Read online

  You should know that Gerald Nately was never brought to the dock; his crime was not discovered. He paid all the same. After writing four twisted, monumental, misunderstood novels, he cut his own head off with an ivory-figured guillotine purchased in Kowloon. I invented him first during a moment of eight o'clock boredom in a class taught by Carroll F. Terrell of the University of Maine English faculty. Dr. Terrell was speaking of Edgar A. Poe, and I thought

  ivory guillotine Kowloon

  twisted woman of shadows, like a pig

  some big house

  The blue air compressor did not come until later. It is desperately important that the reader be made cognizant of these facts.

  He did show her some of his writing. Not the important part, the story he was writing about her, but fragments of poetry, the spine of a novel that had ached in his mind for a year like embedded shrapnel, four essays. She was a perceptive critic, and addicted to marginal notations with her black felt-tip pen. Because she sometimes dropped in when he was gone to the village, he kept the story hidden in the back shed.

  September melted into cool October, and the story was completed, mailed to a friend, returned with suggestions (bad ones), rewritten. He felt it was good, but not quite right. Something indefinable was missing.

  The focus was a shade fuzzy. He began to toy with the idea of giving it to her for criticism, rejected it, toyed with it again. After all, the story was her; he never doubted she could supply the final vector.His attitude concerning her became increasingly unhealthy; he was fascinated by her huge, animalistic bulk, by the slow, tortoise-like way she trekked across the space between the house and the cottage

  * * *

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  image: "mammoth shadow of decay swaying across the shadowless sand, cane held in one twisted hand, feet clad in huge canvas shoes which pump and push at the coarse grains, face like a serving platter, puffy dough arms, breasts like drumlins, a geography in herself, a country of tissue"

  by her reedy, vapid voice; but at the same time he loathed her, could not stand her touch. He began to feel like the young man in "The Tell-Tale Heart, " by Edgar A. Poe. He felt he could stand at her bedroom door for endless midnights, shining one ray of light on her sleeping eye, ready to pounce and rip the instant it flashed open.

  The urge to show her the story itched at him maddeningly. He had decided, by the first day of December, that he would do it. The decision-making did not relieve him, as it is supposed to do in the novels, but it did leave him with a feeling of antiseptic pleasure. It was right that it should be so – an omega that quite dovetailed with the alpha. And it was omega; he was vacating the cottage on the fifth of December. On this day he had just returned from the Stowe Travel Agency in Portland, where he had booked passage for the Far East. He had done this almost on the spur of the moment: the decision to go and the decision to show his manuscript to Mrs. Leighton had come together, almost as if he had been guided by an invisible hand.

  In truth, he was guided by an invisible hand-mine.

  The day was white with overcast and the promise of snow lurked in its throat. The dunes seemed to foreshadow the winter already, as Gerald crossed them between the slate-roofed house of her dominion and the low stone cottage of his. The sea, sullen and gray, curled on the shingle of beach. Gulls rode the slow swells like buoys.

  He crossed the top of the last dune and knew she was there – her cane, with its white bicycle handgrip at the base, stood against the side of the door. Smoke drifted from the toy chimney. Gerald went up the board steps, kicked sand from his high-topped shoes to make her aware of his presence, and then went in.

  "Hi, Mrs. Leighton!"

  But the tiny living room and the kitchen both stood empty. The ship's clock on the mantle ticked only for itself and for Gerald. Her gigantic fur coat lay draped over the rocker like some animal sail. A small fire had been laid in the fireplace, and it glowed and crackled busily. The teapot was on the gas range in the kitchen, and one teacup stood on the counter, still waiting for water. He peered into the narrow hall which led to the bedroom.

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  "Mrs. Leighton?"

  Hall and bedroom both empty.

  He was about to turn back to the kitchen when the mammoth chuckles began. They were large, helpless shakings of laughter, the kind that stays hidden for years and ages like wine (There is also an Edgar A. Poe story about wine). The chuckles evolved into large bellows of laughter.

  They came from behind the door to the right of Gerald's bed, the last door in the cottage. From the tool-shed.

  my balls are crawling like in grammar school the old bitch shes laughing she found it the old fat she bitch goddam her goddam her goddam her you old whore youre doing that cause im out here you old she bitch whore you piece of shit

  He went to the door in one step and pulled it open. She was sitting next to the small space-heater in the shed, her dress pulled up over oak-stump knees to allow her to sit cross-legged, and his manuscript was held, dwarfed, in her bloated hands.

  Her laughter roared and racketed around him. Gerald Nately saw bursting colors

  in front of his eyes. She was a slug, a maggot, a gigantic crawling thing evolved in the cellar of the shadowy house by the sea. A dark bug that had swaddled itself in grotesque human form.

  In the flat light from the one cobwebbed window her face became a hanging graveyard moon, pocked by the sterile craters of her eyes and the ragged earthquake rift of her mouth.

  "Don't you laugh," Gerald said stiffly.

  "Oh Gerald," she said, laughing all the same. "This is such a bad story.

  I don't blame you for using a penname. It's – " she wiped tears of laughter from her eyes, "it's abominable!"

  He began to walk toward her stiffly.

  "You haven't made me big enough, Gerald. That's the trouble. I'm too big for you. Perhaps Poe, or Dosteyevsky, or Melville…but not you, Gerald. Not even under your royal pen-name. Not you. Not you.”

  She began to laugh again, huge racking explosions of sound.

  "Don't you laugh," Gerald said stiffly.

  The tool-shed, after the manner of Zola:

  Wooden walls, which showed occasional chinks of light, surrounding rabbit-traps hung and slung in corners; a pair of dusty, unstrung snow-shoes: a rusty spaceheater showing flickers of yellow flame like cat's eyes; a shovel; hedge clippers; an ancient green hose coiled like a garter-snake; four bald tires stacked like doughnuts; a rusty Winchester 53

  rifle with no bolt; a two handed saw; a dusty work-bench covered with nails, screws, bolts, washers, two hammers, a plane, a broken level, a dismantled carburetor which once sat inside a 1949 Packard convertible; a 4 hp. air-compressor painted electric blue, plugged into an extension cord running back into the house.

  "Don't you laugh," Gerald said again, but she continued to rock back and forth, holding her stomach and flapping the manuscript with her wheezing breath like a white bird.

  His hand found the rusty Winchester rifle and he pole-axed her with it.

  Most horror stories are sexual in nature.

  I'm sorry to break in with this information, but feel I must in order to make the way clear for the grisly conclusion of this piece, which is (at least psychologically) a clear metaphor for fears of sexual impotence on his part. Mrs. Leighton's large mouth is symbolic of the vagina; the hose of the compressor is a penis. Her female bulk, huge and overpowering, is a mythic representation of the sexual fear that lives in every male, to a greater or lesser degree: that the woman, with her opening, is a devourer.

  In the works of Edgar A. Poe, Stephen King, Gerald Nately, and others who practice this particular literary form, we are apt to find locked rooms, dungeons, empty mansions (all symbols of the womb); scenes of living burial (sexual impotence); the dead returned from the grave (necrophilia); grotesque monsters or human beings (externalized fear of the sexual act itself); torture and/or murder (a viable alternative to the sexual act).

  These possibilities are not always
valid, but the post-Freud reader and writer must take them into consideration when attempting the genre.

  Abnormal psychology has become a part of the human experience.

  She made thick, unconscious noises in her throat as he whirled around madly, looking for an instrument; her head lolled brokenly on the thick stalk of her neck.

  He seized the hose of the air-compressor.

  "All right," he said thickly. "All right, now. All Tight."

  bitch fat old bitch youve had yours not big enough is that right well youll be bigger youll be bigger still

  * * *

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  He ripped her head back by the hair and rammed the hose into her mouth, into her gullet. She screamed around it, a sound like a cat.

  Part of the inspiration for this story came from an old E. C. horror comic book, which I bought in a Lisbon Falls drugstore. In one particular story, a husband and wife murdered each other simultaneously in mutually ironic (and brilliant) fashion. He was very fat; she was very thin. He shoved the hose of an air compressor down her throat and blew her up to dirigible size. On his way downstairs a booby-trap she had rigged fell on him and squashed him to a shadow.

  Any author who tells you he has never plagiarized is a liar. A good author begins with bad ideas and improbabilities and fashions them into comments on the human condition. In a horror story, it is imperative that the grotesque be elevated to the status of the abnormal.

  The compressor turned on with a whoosh and a chug. The hose flew out of Mrs.Leighton's mouth. Giggling and gibbering, Gerald stuffed it back in. Her feet drummed and thumped on the floor. The flesh of her checks and diaphragm began to swell rhythmically. Her eyes bulged, and became glass marbles. Her torso began to expand.

  here it is here it is you lousy louse are you big enough yet are you big enough

  The compressor wheezed and racketed. Mrs. Leighton swelled like a beachball. Her lungs became straining blowfish.

  Fiends! Devils! Dissemble no more! Here! Here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!

  She seemed to explode all at once.

  Sitting in a boiling hotel room in Bombay, Gerald re-wrote the story he had begun at the cottage on the other side of the world. The original title had been "The Hog." After some deliberation he retitled it "The Blue Air Compressor."

  He had resolved it to his own satisfaction. There was a certain lack of motivation concerning the final scene where the fat old woman was murdered, but he did not see that as a fault. In "The Tell-Tale Heart,"

  Edgar A. Poe's finest story, there is no real motivation for the murder of the old man, and that was as it should be. The motive is not the point.

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  * * *

  She got very big just before the end: even her legs swelled up to twice their normal size. At the very end, her tongue popped out of her mouth like a party-favor.

  After leaving Bombay, Gerald Nately went on to Hong Kong, then to Kowloon. The ivory guillotine caught his fancy immediately.

  As the author, I can see only one correct omega to this story, and that is to tell you how Gerald Nately got rid of the body. He tore up the floor boards of the shed, dismembered Mrs. Leighton, and buried the sections in the sand beneath. When he notified the police that she had been missing for a week, the local constable and a State Policeman came at once. Gerald entertained them quite naturally, even offering them coffee. He heard no beating heart, but then – the interview was conducted in the big house.

  On the following day he flew away, toward Bombay, Hong Kong, and Kowloon.

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  THE CAT FROM HELL

  First appeared in Cavalier Magazine, 1971. The story was initially supposed to be 500 words and intended to be finished by the readers of Cavalier, but King wrote the complete story once he got into the writing mood.

  Halston thought the old man in the wheelchair looked sick, terrified, and ready to die. He had experience in seeing such things. Death was Halston's business; he had brought it to eighteen men and six women in his career as an independent hitter. He knew the death look. The house –

  mansion, actually – was cold and quiet. The only sounds were the low snap of the fire on the big stone hearth and the low whine of the November wind outside.

  "I want you to make a kill," the old man said. His voice was quavery and high, peevish. "I understand that is what you do."

  "Who did you talk to?" Halston asked.

  "With a man named Saul Loggia. He says you know him."

  Halston nodded. If Loggia was the go-between, it was all right. And if there was a bug in the room, anything the old man – Drogan – said was entrapment.

  "Who do you want hit?"

  Drogan pressed a button on the console built into the arm of his wheelchair and it buzzed forward. Closeup, Halston could smell the yellow odors of fear, age, and urine all mixed. They disgusted him, but he made no sign. His face was still and smooth.

  “Your victim is right behind you," Drogan said softly.

  Halston moved quickly. His reflexes were his life and they were always set on a filed pin. He was off the couch, falling to one knee, turning, hand inside his specially tailored sport coat, gripping the handle of the short-barreled .45 hybrid that hung below his armpit in a spring-loaded holster that laid it in his palm at a touch. A moment later it was out and pointed at...a cat. For a moment Halston and the cat stared at each other. It was a strange moment for Halston, who was an unimaginative man with no superstitions. For that one moment as he knelt on the floor with the gun pointed, he felt that he knew this cat, although if he had ever seen one with such unusual markings he surely would have remembered.

  Its face was an even split: half black, half white. The dividing line ran from the top of its flat skull and down its nose to its mouth, straight-57

  arrow. Its eyes were huge in the gloom, and caught in each nearly circular black pupil was a prism of firelight, like a sullen coal of hate.

  And the thought echoed back to Halston: We know each other, you and I. Then it passed. He put the gun away and stood up. "I ought to kill you for that, old man. I don't take a joke."

  "And I don't make them," Drogan said. "Sit down. Look in here."

  He had taken a fat envelope out from beneath the blanket that covered his legs.

  Halston sat. The cat, which had been crouched on the back of the sofa, jumped lightly down into his lap. It looked up at Halston for a moment with those huge dark eyes, the pupils surrounded by thin green-gold rings, and then it settled down and began to purr.

  Halston looked at Drogan questioningly.

  "He's very friendly," Drogan said. "At first. Nice friendly pussy has killed three people in this household. That leaves only me. I am old, I am sick...but I prefer to die in my own time."

  "I can't believe this," Halston said. "You hired me to hit a cat?"

  "Look in the envelope, please."

  Halston did. It was filled with hundreds and fifties, all of them old.

  "How much is it?"

  "Six thousand dollars. There will be another six when you bring me proof that the cat is dead. Mr. Loggia said twelve thousand was your usual fee?"

  Halston nodded, his hand automatically stroking the cat in his lap. It was asleep, still purring. Halston liked cats. They were the only animals he did like, as a matter of fact. They got along on their own. God – if there was one – had made them into perfect, aloof killing machines.

  Cats were the hitters of the animal world, and Halston gave them his respect.

  "I need not explain anything, but I will," Drogan said. "Forewarned is forearmed, they say, and I would not want you to go into this lightly.

  And I seem to need to justify myself. So you'll not think I'm insane."

  Halston nodded again. He had already decided to make this peculiar hit, and no further talk was needed. But if Drogan wanted to talk, he would listen. "First of all, you know who I am? Where the money comes from?"

  "Drogan Pharmaceuticals."

  "Yes. One
of the biggest drug companies in the world. And the cornerstone of our financial success has been this." From the pocket of his robe he handed Halston a small, unmarked vial of pills. "Tri-Dormal-phenobarbin, compound G. Prescribed almost exclusively for the terminally ill. It's extremely habit-forming, you see. It's a combination painkiller, tranquilizer, and mild hallucinogen. It is 58

  remarkably helpful in helping the terminally ill face their conditions and adjust to them."

  "Do you take it?" Halston asked.

  Drogan ignored the question. "It is widely prescribed throughout the world. It's a synthetic, was developed in the fifties at our New Jersey labs. Our testing was confined almost solely to cats, because of the unique quality of the feline nervous system."

  "How many did you wipe out?"

  Drogan stiffened. "That is an unfair and prejudicial way to put it."

  Halston shrugged.

  "In the four-year testing period which led to FDA approval of Tri-Dormal-G, about fifteen thousand cats...uh, expired."

  Halston whistled. About four thousand cats a year. "And now you think this one's back to get you, huh?"

  "I don't feel guilty in the slightest," Drogan said, but that quavering, petulant note was back in his voice. "Fifteen thousand test animals died so that hundreds of thousands of human beings – "

  "Never mind that," Halston said. Justifications bored him.

  "That cat came here seven months ago. I've never liked cats. Nasty, disease-bearing animals...always out in the fields...crawling around in barns...picking up God knows what germs in their fur...always trying to bring something with its insides falling out into the house for you to look at...it was my sister who wanted to take it in. She found out. She paid." He looked at the cat sleeping on Halston's lap with dead hate.