by Stephen King
"I suggest," the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with half-lidded eyes, "that you have a great deal to learn."
The applause starts somewhere in the back of the room.
Bill leaves ... but returns the next week, determined to stick with it. In the time between he has written a story called "The Dark," a tale about a small boy who discovers a monster in the cellar of his house. The little boy faces it, battles it, finally kills it. He feels a kind of holy exaltation as he goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much telling the story as he is allowing the story to flow through him. At one point he puts his pen down and takes his hot and aching hand out into ten-degree December cold where it nearly smokes from the temperature change. He walks around, green cut-off boots squeaking in the snow like tiny shutter-hinges which need oil, and his head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete. "Going to knock the shit out of it," he confides to the blowing winter dark, and laughs a little--a shaky laugh. He is aware that he has finally discovered how to do just that--after ten years of trying he has suddenly found the starter button on the vast dead bulldozer taking up so much space inside his head. It has started up. It is revving, revving. It is nothing pretty, this big machine. It was not made for taking pretty girls to proms. It is not a status symbol. It means business. It can knock things down. If he isn't careful, it will knock him down.
He rushes inside and finishes "The Dark" at white heat, writing until four o'clock in the morning and finally falling asleep over his ring-binder. If someone had suggested to him that he was really writing about his brother, George, he would have been surprised. He has not thought about George in years--or so he honestly believes.
The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the title page. Two words are scrawled beneath, in capital letters. PULP, screams one. CRAP, screams the other.
Bill takes the fifteen-page sheaf of manuscript over to the woodstove and opens the door. He is within a bare inch of tossing it in when the absurdity of what he is doing strikes him. He sits down in his rocking chair, looks at a Grateful Dead poster, and starts to laugh. Pulp? Fine! Let it be pulp! The woods were full of it!
"Let them fucking trees fall!" Bill exclaims, and laughs until tears spurt from his eyes and roll down his face.
He retypes the title page, the one with the instructor's judgment on it, and sends it off to a men's magazine named White Tie (although from what Bill can see, it really should be titled Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users). Yet his battered Writer's Market says they buy horror stories, and the two issues he has bought down at the local mom-and-pop store have indeed contained four horror stories sandwiched between the naked girls and the ads for dirty movies and potency pills. One of them, by a man named Dennis Etchison, is actually quite good.
He sends "The Dark" off with no real hopes--he has submitted a good many stories to magazines before with nothing to show for it but rejection slips--and is flabbergasted and delighted when the fiction editor of White Tie buys it for two hundred dollars, payment on publication. The assistant editor adds a short note which calls it "the best damned horror story since Ray Bradbury's 'The Jar.' " He adds, "Too bad only about seventy people coast to coast will read it," but Bill Denbrough does not care. Two hundred dollars!
He goes to his advisor with a drop card for Eh-141. His advisor initials it. Bill Denbrough staples the drop card to the assistant fiction editor's congratulatory note and tacks both to the bulletin board on the creative-writing instructor's door. In the comer of the bulletin board he sees an anti-war cartoon. And suddenly, as if moving of its own accord, his fingers pluck his pen from his breast pocket and across the cartoon he writes this: If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I'm going to kill myself, because I won't know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do. He pauses, and then, feeling a bit small (but unable to help himself), he adds: I suggest you have a lot to learn.
His drop card comes back to him in the campus mail three days later. The instructor has initialed it. On the space marked GRADE AT TIME OF DROP, the instructor has not given him an incomplete or the low C to which his run of grades at that time would have entitled him; instead, another F is slashed angrily across the grade line. Below it the instructor has written: Do you think money proves anything about anything, Denbrough?
"Well, actually, yes," Bill Denbrough says to his empty apartment, and once more begins to laugh crazily.
In his senior year of college he dares to write a novel, because he has no idea what he's getting into. He escapes the experience scratched and frightened ... but alive, and with a manuscript nearly five hundred pages long. He sends it out to The Viking Press, knowing that it will be the first of many stops for his book, which is about ghosts ... but he likes Viking's ship logo, and that makes it as good a place to start as any. As it turns out, the first stop is also the last stop. Viking purchases the book ... and for Bill Denbrough the fairytale begins. The man who was once known as Stuttering Bill has become a success at the age of twenty-three. Three years later and three thousand miles from northern New England, he attains a queer kind of celebrity by marrying a woman who is a movie-star and five years his senior at Hollywood's Church in the Pines.
The gossip columnists give it seven months. The only bet, they say, is whether the end will come in a divorce or an annulment. Friends (and enemies) on both sides of the match feel about the same. The age difference apart, the disparities are startling. He is tall, already balding, already inclining a bit toward fat. He speaks slowly in company, and at times seems nearly inarticulate. Audra, on the other hand, is aubumhaired, statuesque, and gorgeous--she is less like an earthly woman than a creature from some semidivine super-race.
He has been hired to do the screenplay of his second novel, The Black Rapids (mostly because the right to do at least the first draft of the screenplay was an immutable condition of sale, in spite of his agent's moans that he was insane), and his draft has actually turned out pretty well. He has been invited out to Universal City for further rewrites and production meetings.
His agent is a small woman named Susan Browne. She is exactly five feet tall. She is violently energetic and even more violently emphatic. "Don't do it, Billy," she tells him. "Kiss it off. They've got a lot of money tied up in it and they'll get someone good to do the screenplay. Maybe even Goldman."
"Who?"
"William Goldman. The only good writer who ever went out there and did both."
"What are you talking about, Suze?"
"He stayed there and he stayed good," she said. "The odds on both are like the odds on beating lung cancer--it can be done, but who wants to try? You'll burn out on sex and booze. Or some of the nifty new drugs." Susan's crazily fascinating brown eyes sparkle vehemently up at him. "And if it turns out to be some meatball who gets the assignment instead of someone like Goldman, so what? The book's on the shelf there. They can't change a word."
"Susan--"
"Listen to me, Billy! Take the money and run. You're young and strong. That's what they like. You go out there and they will first separate you from your self-respect and then from your ability to write a straight line from point A to point B. Last but not least, they will take your testes. You write like a grownup, but you're just a kid with a very high forehead."
"I have to go."
"Did someone just fart in here?" she returns. "Must have, because something sure stinks."
"But I do. I have to."
"Jesus!"
"I have to get away from New England." He is afraid to say what comes next--it's like mouthing a curse--but he owes it to her. "I have to get away from Maine."
"Why, for God's sake?"
"I don't know. I just do."
"Are you telling me something real, Billy, or just ta
lking like a writer?"
"It's real."
They are in bed together during this conversation. Her breasts are small like peaches, sweet like peaches. He loves her a lot, although not the way they both know would be a really good way to love. She sits up with a pool of sheet in her lap and lights a cigarette. She's crying, but he doubts if she knows he knows. It's just this shine in her eyes. It would be tactful not to mention it, so he doesn't. He doesn't love her in that really good way, but he cares a mountain for her.
"Go on then," she says in a dry businesslike voice as she turns back to him. "Give me a call when you're ready, and if you still have the strength. I'll come and pick up the pieces. If there are any left."
The film version of The Black Rapids is called Pit of the Black Demon, and Audra Phillips is cast as the lead. The title is horrible, but the movie turns out to be quite good. And the only part of him he loses in Hollywood is his heart.
"Bill," Audra said again, bringing him out of these memories. He saw she had snapped off the TV. He glanced out the window and saw fog nuzzling against the panes.
"I'll explain as much as I can," he said. "You deserve that. But first do two things for me."
"All right."
"Fix yourself another cup of tea and tell me what you know about me. Or what you think you know."
She looked at him, puzzled, and then went to the highboy.
"I know you're from Maine," she said, making herself tea from the breakfast pot. She was not British, but just a touch of clipped British had crept into her voice--a holdover from the part she played in Attic Room, the movie they had come over here to do. It was Bill's first original screenplay. He had been offered the directorial shot as well. Thank God he had declined that; his leaving now would have completed the job of bitching things up. He knew what they would all say, the whole crew. Billy Denbrough finally shows his true colors. Just another fucking writer, crazier than a shithouse rat.
God knew he felt crazy right about now.
"I know you had a brother and that you loved him very much and that he died," Audra went on. "I know that you grew up in a town called Derry, moved to Bangor about two years after your brother died, and moved to Portland when you were fourteen. I know your dad died of lung cancer when you were seventeen. And you wrote a best-seller while you were still in college, paying your way with a scholarship and a part-time job in a textile mill. That must have seemed very strange to you ... the change in income. In prospects."
She returned to his side of the room and he saw it in her face then: the realization of the hidden spaces between them.
"I know that you wrote The Black Rapids a year later, and came out to Hollywood. And the week before shooting started on the movie, you met a very mixed-up woman named Audra Phillips who knew a little bit about what you must have been through--the crazy decompression--because she had been plain old Audrey Philpott five years before. And this woman was drowning--"
"Audra, don't."
Her eyes were steady, holding his. "Oh, why not? Let us tell the truth and shame the devil. I was drowning. I discovered poppers two years before I met you, and then a year later I discovered coke and that was even better. A popper in the morning, coke in the afternoon, wine at night, a Valium at bedtime. Audra's vitamins. Too many important interviews, too many good parts. I was so much like a character in a Jacqueline Susann novel it was hilarious. Do you know how I think about that time now, Bill?"
"No."
She sipped her tea, her eyes never leaving his, and grinned. "It was like running on the walkway at L.A. International. You get it?"
"Not exactly, no."
"It's a moving belt," she said. "About a quarter of a mile long."
"I know the walkway," he said, "but I don't see what you're--"
"You just stand there and it carries you all the way to the baggage-claim area. But if you want, you don't have to just stand there. You can walk on it. Or run. And it seems like you're just doing your normal walk or your normal jog or your normal run or your normal all-out sprint--whatever--because your body forgets that what you're really doing is topping the speed the walkway's already making. That's why they have those signs that say SLOW DOWN, MOVING RAMPWAY near the end. When I met you I felt as if I'd run right off the end of that thing onto a floor that didn't move anymore. There I was, my body nine miles ahead of my feet. You can't keep your balance. Sooner or later you fall right on your face. Except I didn't. Because you caught me."
She put her tea aside and lit a cigarette, her eyes never leaving him. He could only see that her hands were shaking in the minute jitter of the lighter-flame, which darted first to the right of the cigarette-end and then to the left before finding it.
She drew deep, blew out a fast jet of smoke.
"What do I know about you? I know you seemed to have it all under control. I know that. You never seemed to be in a hurry to get to the next drink or the next meeting or the next party. You seemed confident that all those things would be there ... if you wanted them. You talked slow. Part of it was the Maine drawl, I guess, but most of it was just you. You were the first man I ever met out there who dared to talk slow. I had to slow down to listen. I looked at you, Bill, and I saw someone who never ran on the walkway, because he knew it would get him there. You seemed utterly untouched by the hype and hysteria. You didn't lease a Rolls so you could drive down Rodeo Drive on Saturday afternoon with your own vanity plates on some glitzy rental company's car. You didn't have a press agent to plant items in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. You'd never done the Carson show."
"Writers can't unless they also do card-tricks or bend spoons," he said, smiling. "It's like a national law."
He thought she would smile, but she didn't. "I know you were there when I needed you. When I came flying off the end of the walkway like O. J. Simpson in that old Hertz ad. Maybe you saved me from eating the wrong pill on top of too much booze. Or maybe I would have made it out the other side on my own and it's all a big dramatization on my part. But ... it doesn't feel like that. Not inside, where I am."
She snuffed the cigarette, only two puffs gone.
"I know you've been there ever since. And I've been there for you. We're good in bed. That used to seem like a big deal to me. But we're also good out of it, and now that seems like a bigger deal. I feel as if I could grow old with you and still be brave. I know you drink too much beer and don't get enough exercise; I know that some nights you dream badly--"
He was startled. Nastily startled. Almost frightened.
"I never dream."
She smiled. "So you tell the interviewers when they ask where you get your ideas. But it's not true. Unless it's just indigestion when you start groaning in the night. And I don't believe that, Billy."
"Do I talk?" he asked cautiously. He could remember no dreams. No dreams at all, good or bad.
Audra nodded. "Sometimes. But I can never make out what it is you say. And on a couple of occasions, you have wept."
He looked at her blankly. There was a bad taste in his mouth; it trailed back along his tongue and down his throat like the taste of melted aspirin. So now you know how fear tastes, he thought. Time you found out, considering all you've written on the subject. He supposed it was a taste he would get used to. If he lived long enough.
Memories were suddenly trying to crowd in. It was as if a black sac in his mind were bulging, threatening to spew noxious
(dreams)
images up from his subconscious and into the mental field of vision commanded by his rational waking mind--and if that happened all at once, it would drive him mad. He tried to push them back, and succeeded, but not before he heard a voice--it was as if someone buried alive had cried out from the ground. It was Eddie Kaspbrak's voice.
You saved my life, Bill. Those big boys, they drive me bugshit. Sometimes I think they really want to kill me--
"Your arms," Audra said.
Bill looked down at them. The flesh there had humped into gooseflesh. Not little b
umps but huge white knobs like insect eggs. They both stared, saying nothing, as if looking at an interesting museum exhibit. The goosebumps slowly melted away.
In the silence that followed Audra said: "And I know one other thing. Someone called you this morning from the States and said you have to leave me."
He got up, looked briefly at the liquor bottles, then went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of orange juice. He said: "You know I had a brother, and you know he died, but you don't know he was murdered."
Audra took in a quick snatch of breath.
"Murdered! Oh, Bill, why didn't you ever--"
"Tell you?" He laughed, that barking sound again. "I don't know."
"What happened?"
"We were living in Derry then. There had been a flood, but it was mostly over, and George was bored. I was sick in bed with the flu. He wanted me to make him a boat out of a sheet of newspaper. I knew how from daycamp the year before. He said he was going to sail it down the gutters on Witcham Street and Jackson Street, because they were still full of water. So I made him the boat and he thanked me and he went out and that was the last time I ever saw my brother George alive. If I hadn't had the flu, maybe I could have saved him."
He paused, right palm rubbing at his left cheek, as if testing for beard-stubble. His eyes, magnified by the lenses of his glasses, looked thoughtful ... but he was not looking at her.
"It happened right there on Witcham Street, not too far from the intersection with Jackson. Whoever killed him pulled his left arm off the way a second-grader would pull a wing off a fly. Medical examiner said he either died of shock or blood-loss. Far as I could ever see, it didn't make a dime's worth of difference which it was."
"Christ, Bill!"
"I imagine you wonder why I never told you. The truth is, I wonder myself. Here we've been married eleven years and until today you never knew what happened to Georgie. I know about your whole family--even your aunts and uncles. I know your grandfather died in his garage in Iowa City frigging around with his chainsaw while he was drunk. I know those things because married people, no matter how busy they are, get to know almost everything after awhile. And if they get really bored and stop listening, they pick it up anyway--by osmosis. Or do you think I'm wrong?"
