Danse Macabre

by Stephen King

  According to Mom, I had gone off to play at a neighbor's house--a house that was near a railroad line. About an hour after I left I came back (she said), as white as a ghost. I would not speak for the rest of that day; I would not tell her why I'd not waited to be picked up or phoned that I wanted to come home; I would not tell her why my chum's mom hadn't walked me back but had allowed me to come alone.

  It turned out that the kid I had been playing with had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks (years later, my mother told me they had picked up the pieces in a wicker basket). My mom never knew if I had been near him when it happened, if it had occurred before I even arrived, or if I had wandered away after it happened. Perhaps she had her own ideas on the subject. But as I've said, I have no memory of the incident at all; only of having been told about it some years after the fact.

  I told this story in response to a question from the floor. The questioner had asked, "Can you recall anything in your childhood that was particularly terrible?"--in other words, step right in, Mr. King, the doctor will see you now.

  Robert Marasco, author of Burnt Offerings and Parlor Games, said he could not. I offered my train story mostly so the questioner wouldn't be totally disappointed, finishing just as I have here, by saying that I could not actually remember the incident. To which the third panel member, Janet Jeppson (who is a psychiatrist as well as a novelist), said: "But you've been writing about it ever since."

  There was an approving murmur from the audience. Here was a pigeonhole where I could be filed . . . here was a by-God motive. I wrote 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, and destroyed the world by plague in The Stand because I saw this kid run over by a slow freight in the days of my impressionable youth. I believe this is a totally specious idea--such shoot-from-the-hip psychological judgments are little more than jumped-up astrology.

  Not that the past doesn't supply grist for the writer's mill; of course it does. One example: the most vivid dream I can recall came to me when I was about eight. In this dream I saw the body of a hanged man dangling from the arm of a scaffold on a hill. Rocks perched on the shoulders of the corpse, and behind it was a noxious green sky, boiling with clouds. This corpse bore a sign: ROBERT BURNS. But when the wind caused the corpse to turn in the air, I saw that it was my face--rotted and picked by the birds, but obviously mine. And then the corpse opened its eyes and looked at me. I woke up screaming, sure that that dead face would be leaning over me in the dark. Sixteen years later, I was able to use the dream as one of the central images in my novel 'Salem's Lot. I just changed the name of the corpse to Hubie Marsten. In another dream--this is one which has recurred at times of stress over the last ten years--I am writing a novel in an old house where a homicidal madwoman is reputed to be on the prowl. I'm working in a third-floor room that's very hot. A door on the far side of the room communicates with the attic, and I know--I know--she's in there, and that sooner or later the sound of my typewriter will cause her to come after me (perhaps she's a critic for the Times Book Review). At any rate, she finally comes through the door like a horrid jack from a child's box, all gray hair and crazed eyes, raving and wielding a meat-ax. And when I run, I discover that somehow the house has exploded outward--it's gotten ever so much bigger--and I'm totally lost. On awakening from this dream, I promptly scoot over to my wife's side of the bed.

  But we all have our bad dreams, and we all use them as best we can. Yet it is one thing to use the dream and quite another to suggest the dream is the cause in and of itself. That is to suggest the ridiculous about an interesting subfunction of the human brain that has little or no practical application to the real world. Dreams are only mind-movies, the scraps and remnants of waking life woven into curious little subconscious quilts by the thrifty human mind, which is loath to throw anything out. Some of these mind-movies are of the X-rated variety; some are comedies; some are horror movies.

  I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood trauma--that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force--a force so great that the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself . . . which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor--no artist--is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few people are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is "genius"), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.

  I'm suggesting that, to be successful, the artist in any field has to be in the right place at the right time. The right time is in the lap of the gods, but any mother's son or daughter can work his/her way to the right place and wait.1

  But what is the right place? That is one of the great, amiable mysteries of human experience.

  I can remember going dowsing as a kid with my Uncle Clayton, a real old Mainer if one ever lived. We walked out, my Uncle Clayt and I, he in his red-and-black-checked flannel shirt and his old green cap, me in my blue parka. I was about twelve; he might have been in his late forties or his late sixties. He had his dowsing rod under one arm, a wishbone-shaped piece of applewood. Applewood was the best, he said, although birch would do in a pinch. There was also maple, but Uncle Clayt's scripture was that maple was the worst of the dowsing woods, because the grain wasn't true and it would lie if you let it.

  At twelve, I was old enough not to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or dowsing. One of the odd things about our culture is that many parents seem honor-bound to lay all such lovely stories to rest in their children's minds as soon as possible--Dad and Mom may not be able to find time enough to help their little ones with their homework or to read them a story in the evening (let them watch TV instead, TV's a great sitter, lotsa good stories, let 'em watch TV), but they go to great pains to discredit poor old Santa and such wonders as dowsing and stumpwater-witchcraft. There's enough time for that. Somehow such parents find the fairy tales told on Gilligan's Island, The Odd Couple, and The Love Boat more acceptable. God knows why so many adults have confused enlightenment with emotional and imaginational bank robbery, but they have; they cannot seem to rest content until the wonder has flickered and died out of their children's eyes. (He doesn't mean me, you're whispering to yourself right now--but sir or madam, I just might.) Most parents quite rightly recognize the fact that children are mad, in the classic sense of that word. But I'm not altogether sure that killing Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is the same thing as "rationality." For children, the rationality of madness seems to work remarkably well. For one thing, it keeps the thing in the closet at bay.

  Uncle Clayt had lost very little of that sense of wonder. Among his other amazing talents (amazing to me, at least) was the ability to line bees--that is, to spot a honeybee bumbling at a flower and then follow it back to its hive, tramping through woods, splashing through bogs, scrambling over deadfalls--his ability to roll his own cigarettes with one hand (always giving them that final eccentric twirl before sticking them into his mouth and lighting them with Diamond matches kept in a small waterproof cannister), and his seemingly endless fund of lore and tales . . . Indian stories, ghost stories, family stories, legends, you name it.

  On this day my mother had been complaining to Clayt and his wife, Ella, over dinner about how slowly the water was drawing in the sinks and the toilet tank. She was afraid the well was going dry again. In those days, along about 1959 or 1960, we had a shallow dug w
ell, and it went dry every summer for a month or so. Then my brother and I and our cousin hauled water in a big old tank that another uncle (Uncle Oren, that one was--for many years the best damn carpenter and contractor in southern Maine) had welded together in his workshop. We would perch the tank on the tailgate of an old station wagon and then lug it down to the well in a relay, using big galvanized-steel milk cans. During that dry month or six weeks we drew our drinking water from the town pump.

  So Uncle Clayt grabbed me while the women were washing up and told me we were going to dowse my mother a new well. At twelve, it was an interesting enough way to spend some time, but I was skeptical; Uncle Clayt might as well have told me he was going to show me where a flying saucer had landed behind the Methodist meeting hall.

  He walked around, green cap tilted back on his head, one of his Bugler cigarettes jutting from the corner of his mouth, applewood stick held in both hands. He held it by the wishbone, wrists rotated outward, his big thumbs pressed firmly against the wood. We walked aimlessly around the back yard, the driveway, the hill where the apple tree stood (and still stands today, although new people live in that little five-room house). And Clayt talked . . . stories about baseball, about an attempt to form a copper-mining concern once upon a time in Kittery, of all places, about how Paul Bunyan was supposed to have turned the course of the Prestile Stream once upon a time to provide water for the logging camps.

  And every now and then he would pause, and the rod of that applewood dowser would tremble just a little. He would pause in his story and wait. The trembling might increase to a steady vibration, and then fade out. "You got somethin there, Stevie," he'd say. "Somethin. Not too much." And I would nod wisely, convinced he was doing it all himself. Like the way it's parents, not Santa Claus, who put the presents under the tree, don't you know, or the way they take away the tooth under your pillow after you're asleep and replace it with a dime. But I went along with him. I came from an age of children who wanted to be good, remember; we were taught to "speak when spoken to," and to humor their elders no matter how nutty their ideas might be. This is not a bad way of initiating children into the more exotic realms of human behavior and human belief, by the way; the quiet child (and I was one) is often given walking tours through some extremely bizarre tracts of mental countryside. I did not believe it possible to dowse water with an applewood stick, but I was quite interested in seeing how the trick would be performed.

  We walked around onto the front lawn, and the stick began to tremble again. Uncle Clayt brightened. "We got the real thing here," he said. "Look at this, Stevie! She's gonna dive, be damned if she ain't!"

  Three steps further along, the applewood rod dove--it simply revolved in Uncle Clayt's hands and pointed straight down. It was a good trick, all right; I could actually hear the tendons in his wrists creak, and there was some strain on his face as he forced the straight part of the wishbone-shaped stick skyward again. As soon as he released the pressure, the stick whipped down at the ground again.

  "Got plenty of water here," he said. "You could drink it until Judgment Day and it'd still run. It's close, too."

  "Let me try it," I said.

  "Well, you got to back off a little first," he said, and we did. We went back to the edge of the driveway.

  He gave me the stick, showed me how to hold it with my thumbs cocked just so (wrists outward, thumbs pointing down--"Otherwise, that son of a whore is gonna break your wrists tryin to point when you get over that water," Clayt said), and then he gave me a little push on the ass.

  "It don't feel like nothin' but a piece of wood right now, does it?" he asked.

  I agreed that this was so.

  "But when you start gettin' close to that water, you're gonna feel her come alive," he said. "I mean really alive, like it was still on the tree. Oh, applewood's good for dowsing. Nothing beats applewood when you're huntin' wellwater."

  So some of what happened could well have been suggestion, and I'm not trying to convince you otherwise, although I've read enough since then to believe that dowsing really does work, at least at some times and for some people and for some crazy reason of its own.2 I will say that Uncle Clayt had lulled me into that same state that I have tried again and again to lull the readers of my stories into--that state of believability where the ossified shield of "rationality" has been temporarily laid aside, the suspension of disbelief is at hand, and the sense of wonder is again within reach. And if that's the power of suggestion, it seems okay to me; better than cocaine for the brain.

  I started walking toward the spot where Uncle Clayt had been when the rod dove, and I'll be damned if that applewood stick didn't seem to come alive in my hands. It got warm, and it began to move. At first it was a vibration that I could feel but not see, and then the tip of the rod began to jiggle around.

  "It's working!" I screamed at Uncle Clayt. "I can feel it!"

  Clayt got laughing. I got laughing, too--not a hysterical sort of laughter, but one of pure and utter delight. When I got over the spot where the dowsing rod dove for Uncle Clayt, it dove for me; at one moment it was upright, and at the next it was pointing straight down. I can remember two things very clearly about that moment. One was a sensation of weight--how heavy that wooden wishbone had become. It seemed I could barely hold it up. It was as if the water was inside the stick instead of in the ground; as if it were fairly bloated with water. Clayt had brought the stick up to its original position after it dove. I could not. He took it out of my hands, and as he did I felt the sensation of weight and magnetism break. It did not pass from me to him; it broke. It was there at one moment and at the next it was gone.

  The other thing I remember is a combined feeling of certainty and mystery. The water was there. Uncle Clayt knew it and I knew it, too. It was down there in the earth, a river caught in rock, for all we knew. It was that feeling of having come to the right place. There are lines of power in the world, you know--invisible but thrumming with a tremendous, scary load of energy. Every now and then someone will stumble over one and get fried, or grasp one in the right way and set it to work. But you have to find one.

  Clayt drove a stake into the ground where we had felt the pull of the water. The well did indeed go dry--in July instead of August, as a matter of fact--and as there was no money for a new well that year, the water tank made its yearly summer appearance on the tailgate of the station wagon, and my brother, my cousin, and I made our round trips down to the old well with the milk cans of water again. We did the same the following summer. But around 1963 or '64, we had the artesian well drilled.

  By then the stake Clayt had driven was long gone, but I remembered its location well enough. The well-drillers located their rig, that big red gadget that looked so much like some child's Erector Set vision of a praying mantis, within three feet of where the stake had been (and in my mind now I can still hear Mom moaning about the wet clay that was spewed all over our front lawn). They had to go down less than a hundred feet--and as Clayt had said on that Sunday when he and I walked out with the applewood rod, there was plenty of water. We could have drunk it until Judgment Day and it still would have kept running.

  2

  I'm working my way back to the main point, this main point being why it is useless to ask any writer what he writes about. You might as well ask the rose why it is red. Talent, like the water Uncle Clayt doused out under our lawn after dinner one Sunday afternoon, is there all along--except, instead of water, it's more like a big rude lump of ore. It can be refined--or honed, to return to an earlier image--and it can be set to work in an infinite number of ways. The honing and the setting-to-work are simple operations, completely under the control of the fledgling writer. Refining talent is merely a matter of exercise. If you work out with weights for fifteen minutes a day over a course of ten years, you're gonna get muscles. If you write for an hour and a half a day for ten years, you're gonna turn into a good writer.3

  But what's down there? That's the one great variable, the wild card in
the deck. I don't think the writer has any control over that. When you drill a well and get the water, you send a sample to your state's Water Testing Agency and get back a readout--and the mineral content can vary amazingly. All H2O is not created equal. Similarly, while Joyce Carol Oates and Harold Robbins are both writing English, they are really not writing the same language at all.

  There is a certain fascination inherent in the discovery of talent (although it is a difficult thing to write well about, and something I will not attempt at all--"Leave it to the poets!" he cried. "The poets know how to talk about that, or at least they think they do, and it comes to the same; so leave it to the poets!"), that magical moment when the dowsing rod turns downward and you know that it is here, right here. There's also a certain fascination in the actual drilling of the well, refining the ore, honing the knife (also a difficult thing to write well about; one saga of the Heroic Struggle of the Young and Virile Writer that has always struck me well is Herman Wouk's Youngblood Hawke), but what I really want to spend a couple of minutes talking about is another kind of dowsing--not the actual discovery of talent, but that lightning stroke which occurs when you discover not talent itself, but the particular direction in which that talent will incline. It is the moment, if you will, when a Little Leaguer discovers, not that he or she can pitch (which he/she may have known for some time), but that she or he has a particular ability to throw the good live fastball or to pop a curve that rises or dips outrageously. This is also a particularly fine moment. And all of this, I hope, will justify the bit of autobiography that follows. It doesn't try to explain my own interest in the danse macabre, or justify it, or psychoanalyze it; it only tries to set the stage for an interest that has proved to be lifelong, profitable, and pleasant . . . except, of course, when the madwoman pops out of her attic in that unpleasant dreamhouse in which my subconscious places me every four months or so.