by Rocky Wood
Peter (“Pete”) Crager’s background was nearly as exciting. Effectively the hero of the tale and its narrator, he was born 1838 in Pride’s Corner, Pennsylvania, the youngest of four children. He was six foot one inch tall, with black hair and blue eyes. After his father, a blacksmith and farmer of some means, died of a stroke in 1854 his mother re-married. Peter had to leave town after punching her new husband, more of whom later.
After living for a period in Paterson, Kansas before the Civil War Crager headed South to Georgia in late 1859. He took a clerking job in Waycross and joined the local militia. Stars and Bars flags were everywhere in the South in 1861 and Peter had sex sixty odd times on account of his uniform. Fighting for the Confederacy (one of the rare notable King characters to fight on either side) he was at many battles, including the Wilderness, Chickamauga and Gettysburg, but made no higher than corporal. He was wounded at Stone Mountain, captured there (or in Virginia, the manuscript is a little confused on this point) and sent to the brutal prison camp at Shalagh, Pennsylvania, where he was severely beaten by Negro guards in March 1865.
During the Kingston Stage robbery in 1873 he used the fake name “Ray” and he had used other names at various times, including “Peter Kirk.” Immediately after that robbery Jake Box shot Crager and left him for dead.
Crager’s stepfather was the Reverend Floyd Hastings (although he is also called Harkness on page five of this admittedly unedited manuscript). A tall thin preacher from Daniels County, Crager’s mother took up with him after her husband died. Hastings had blue eyes and slicked back hair and they married in 1855 or 1856. He then began selling parts of the family farm and giving the money to Christian missions. In frustration Peter punched him and had to leave town ahead of the law. Hastings died in 1885. Mrs. Crager/Hastings died of consumption, probably in August 1863, while Peter was serving in the Rebel Army.
The woman who first taught McArdle about whoring was Annabelle Dupray, who had whored in Alberta and Saskatchewan and bore ten children! In 1861 she was a gray-haired, old and dirty whore at The Velvet Garter in Curser’s Mills, where McArdle became her friend. Born and raised in a Baptist family in Ohio she had been brutally raped by the boy next door when she was 18. She did not report the rape and he attacked her more and more often, to her slow acceptance. When she fell pregnant he denied responsibility and her parents put her on the road.
As one would expect King produces tremendous back-story for each of McArdle’s “girls.” Crager was attracted to Marianne Franklin. She was shy, 5 foot 9 inches tall, with gray-green eyes. She was 18 and McArdle had recently aborted her unborn child. Another of the girls was Tabitha (“Tabby”) Gordon (one wonders how Mrs. King reacted to this character’s proposed profession). She had brown hair tied in horsetails and was four month’s pregnant. She had decided to take her child to term and then give it up. Helen Grier had given birth to a stillborn child in the second half of 1871 and joined McArdle in early 1872 after working in a St Louis café. Victoria (“Vicky”) Johns was middle-sized and had dark black hair. McArdle’s group found her delirious at Canner’s Falls, Missouri in mid-1872. On recovering, she could not remember her past.
Amanda Lowell was blonde, with blue eyes. She met McArdle in December 1871 or January 1872 when she was two months pregnant and contemplating suicide. McArdle and Jane Stockholm talked her out of it, McArdle aborted her and she agreed to the offer to join in his prostitution plan. Jane (“Janey”) Stockholm was born in 1855. She had milky skin, red hair and played the piano. She fell pregnant in about January 1871 and joined McArdle in September of that year as a servant, initially refusing to consider prostitution. Her son was born in October or November 1871 and was adopted out to a bank teller and his wife in the town of Doogan. At that point she decided to prostitute herself after all.
There are many other interesting characters in both McArdle and Crager’s background. For instance, Henry Hyde was another student at Harvard in McArdle’s time. He almost certainly raped and murdered a barmaid at The Storm Pig tavern near the college. The tavern was then severely damaged by a fire set in the employee’s wing. His father, rich and influential in Boston, probably saved Henry from the consequences of these crimes.
McArdle’s lover at Kingsport Preparatory School for Boys was the auburn haired Jennifer (“Jenny”) Pettigrew. After a lengthy affair, including the exchange of love letters, her husband and McArdle’s fellow maths teacher, Norman discovered the letters. In a deeply melodramatic turn he committed suicide by hanging. Tall, gangling and balding, with a bushy red beard, he was also an unsuccessful writer of short stories and religious verse.
McArdle’s partner in the medicine show and tigers was Asa Burroughs. McArdle invested with him in 1868, when Burroughs was making his CorrectAll “medicine” (McArdle himself had been making and peddling “African Wonder Liniment and Cargo Elixir”). Their business was called Professor D. X. McArdle’s Pandaemonium Magic Show. Burroughs died of a stroke on 8 September 1871, 20 miles from Westbound, Missouri and was buried the next day by the Warren River. The tigers (reminding the reader only slightly of The Night of the Tiger) were Sheenah, a female Bengal who died in the winter of 1870; and Yaphet, a male Bengal with deep emerald eyes. It seems certain King had plot development intentions in mind when he introduced such an exotic animal, caged in McArdle’s wagon.
The man who shot Pete Crager and left him for dead was Jake Box. He claimed to have ridden with Quantrill’s Raiders during the Civil War. Five foot seven, bow-legged and dirty, he had only six teeth left and most of those were black. He had a salt-and-pepper beard and long, clotted hair. Their partner in the robbery was Frank Carter. A country ploughboy from St Louis, he was six foot tall, blonde, with a walleye and a yuk-yuk laugh that showed he was a little slow. He couldn’t “shoot for shit.” During the Kingston Stage robbery he was shot in the elbow. Back at their hideout Jake Box shot him dead.
Frank Sybert and his wife Katherine were childless and farmed near Paterson, Kansas before the Civil War. He employed Peter Crager for just over a year and gave him many books to read, becoming a surrogate father. He was big and gangling, a fierce drinker but also a kind-hearted man. He was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and died from it in 1858.
The manuscript does not bring us in direct contact with the apparent villain of the piece, Bob Valery. Valery was “the meanest railroad dick west of the Mississippi.” Big, with red hair, he had lots of freckles and a scar on his neck. He had been head “prod” on the Benton, St. Louis and Missouri Railroad (BS&M) since it began in 1865. In 1868 he killed three of four would be train robbers. He beat tramps and others taking a free ride on the railroad. Once he threw a pregnant girl off a freight car causing her to give premature birth. He may have invented the “frankfort” and was thought to have killed 36 people with one. He was killed during a robbery on the BS&M and Peter Crager nearly hung for the crime. This part of the story was not written or is no longer extant.
King provides a description of the “frankfort,” a cruel device used by railroad police in the 1880s and 1890s. It was a piece of pig iron about 6 inches long. A railroad policeman would drop it about six cars up when a train was speeding. It would bounce and slash and injure tramps riding on the rods below the cars, sometimes forcing them under the wheels to their deaths. In that case a railroad “dick” would notch his frankfort.
Maine receives a mention in the story in that Bowdoin College initially offered McArdle a teacher’s position but withdrew it when Young and Stewart blackballed him.
King’s personal feelings may be reflected in the character of Sam Backinger. A Confederate, he was wounded and captured near Grand’s Hollow, Virginia in late December 1864. He took a bullet in his left arm, which became gangrenous and had to be amputated. He was also shot in the left kneecap. Big and bluff, he laughed a lot but was dangerous. Crager saw him again in Atlanta in 1885, begging in his uniform (much as certain Vietnam vets would after another war).
There is one interesting
link from this story to King’s other fiction. Quoting Peter Crager in McArdle: “When I was a boy, my poppa gave me a pet rabbit and after I’d gotten used to having it, I forgot to feed it for over a week. When I went into the barn, it was stiff and dead.” Pretty much exactly this happened to Lloyd Henreid as a boy in the Uncut version of The Stand.
In an amusing incident, one of McArdle’s fellow Harvard students and member of The Hellenists read the group an essay disparaging Longfellow and praising Poe. Peabody was so castigated by the silence that followed that he never returned. As he left the room Stewart wittily murmured, “Nevermore.” McArdle’s favorite story was Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado (the inspiration for King’s Dolan’s Cadillac), although George’s attempts at writing were poor compared to it.
Having read the manuscript as it exists one is left wondering where the tale was heading. Crager and McArdle’s back-stories are amusing and interesting and there is certainly the robbery in which Valery was killed to come, the mystery of the tiger and other elements that may have resulted in an interesting conclusion. The undertone of the story is certainly one of humor, not quite satire, but close to it. One is left wondering if King was simply having fun and realized the end result was likely to be somewhat uncommercial and certainly not what the average King fan would have expected. Perhaps one day King will complete a “serious” Western, the results of which would be of great interest to his Constant Readers.
The Glass Floor (1967, 1990)
This America Under Siege story first appeared in Startling Mystery Stories for Fall 1967. It has the honor of being the first fiction for which King was paid ($35). He was but twenty when he received the first payment for his years of writing, and the five years of rejection slips he had collected perhaps seemed to shrink a little on its receipt. There is no doubt that King, like most writers, successful or not, had paid his dues. Barely six or seven years of selling short stories and writing novels later King would sell Carrie and the rest, as they say, is history.
Nearly a quarter century after its first publication King allowed The Glass Floor to be reprinted in the Fall 1990 issue of Weird Tales. As to that republication King says in an introduction, after acknowledging that the story was not as bad as he’d thought:
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.
(See the feature panel for more detail of the story’s history.)
In fact the most significant change is toward the end of the story, in which the original read, “The ladder was still there, stretching up into the darkness and down into the glimmering depths of the mirror,” and was changed to, “The ladder was still there, stretching up into the glimmering depths of the mirror.” There are other minor changes, for instance the changing of the word “accursed” to “cursed.”
Securing either copy of the story is less difficult than it once was. The original publication runs in the hundreds of dollars, on the rare occasion it comes to market. The republication appears more often but has commanded prices near $100.
In the story Charles Wharton visited the home of his brother-in-law, Anthony Reynard, wanting to discover the circumstances of his sister’s death. Initially, Reynard refused to give details but was browbeaten into telling Wharton that Janine had fallen from a ladder in a room that was now plastered shut.
Wharton insisted on breaking through the plaster and entering the room. He found it had a glass floor and ceiling and, losing his own perspective and balance while standing on the floor, died. Reynard used a pole to pull the body from the room and asked his housekeeper to bring more plaster.
The closing sentence is a small classic, “Not for the first time he (Reynard) wondered if there was really a mirror there at all. In the room, a small pool of blood showed on the floor and ceiling, seeming to meet in the center, blood which hung there quietly and one could wait forever for it to drip.”
It is interesting to note that King also used the device of a mirrored floor library in his screenplay for the TV mini-series Rose Red over three decades later. In Rose Red Bollinger disappeared and apparently hung himself in the Mirror Library of the Rose Red house, which had bookcases lined with books and a mirrored floor. In The Glass Floor a library (empty of bookshelves) with a mirrored floor and ceilings was the location of at least two deaths.
Critiquing his own work in the Introduction to the Weird Tales version nearly a quarter century later King writes:
…there is at least a token effort to create characters which are more than paper-doll cutouts; Wharton and Reynard are antagonists, but neither is “the good guy” or “the bad guy.” The real villain is behind that plastered-over door. And I also see an odd echo of “The Library Policeman”. That work, a short novel, will be published as part of a collection of short novels called Four Past Midnight this fall, and if you read it, I think you’ll see what I mean. It was fascinating to me to see the same image coming around again after all this time.
King then writes:
“Mostly, I’m allowing the story to be republished to send a message to young writers who are out there right now, trying to be published, and collecting rejection slips … The message is simple: you can learn, you can get better, and you can get published. If that little spark is there, someone will probably see it sooner or later, gleaming faintly in the dark. And, if you tend the spark nestled in the kindling, it really can grow into a large, blazing fire. It happened to me, and it started here.”
The genesis of the story, according to King:
I remember getting the idea for the story, and it just came as the ideas come now – casually, with no flourish of trumpets. I was walking down a dirt road to see a friend, and for no reason at all I began to wonder what it would be like to stand in a room whose floor was a mirror. The image was so intriguing that writing the story became a necessity. It wasn’t written for money; it was written so I could see better. Of course I did not see it as well as I had hoped; there is still that shortfall between what I hope I will accomplish and what I actually manage. Still, I came away from it with two valuable experiences: a saleable story after five years of rejection slips, and a bit of experience.
Of course, readers of this book will wonder just what the other stories were that resulted in those five years of rejection slips. Does King still have those stories, tucked away in a box or filing cabinet?
There are two likely errors in the tale, relating to historical periods. At the beginning Wharton approaches Reynard’s house, “…craning his neck to get a better look at the Victorian monstrosity his sister had died in. It wasn’t a house at all, he reflected, but a mausoleum …” In the next paragraph, “There was a rose-tinted fanlight over the door, and Wharton could barely make out the date 1770 chiseled into the glass.” Queen Victoria did not ascend the throne until 1839. In 1770 George III was King of England (and still ruled over the Colonies) so the mansion should be described as Georgian or in American terms, Colonial. Later, the house is described as “…this Revolutionary War-vintage crypt.” The American Revolution or War of Independence took place from 1775-1783 but the use of the term “vintage” mitigates or possibly eliminates an error.
Most King experts refer to the Poe-like nature of this story; also pointing out that it is some way from King’s best. For the author’s The Glass Floor is an entertaining tale, informing of King’s development and well worth seeking out and reading. In fact, one of Poe’s stories is recalled by Wharton as he first saw the freshly walled-off room, “…a straggling remnant of Poe’s ‘Black Cat’ clanged through his mind: ‘I had walled the monster up within the tomb…’”
While there are no direct links to other King works, the description of the Reynard house remind
s the reader of other mysterious houses in the King canon, including Joe Newall’s in It Grows on You. King wrote of the Reynard home, “It seemed to grow out of the hill like an outsized, perverted toadstool, all gambrels and gables and jutting, blank-windowed cupolas.”
King Sells His First Story
King’s introduction to the Weird Tales version relates something of the first time he sold a story – The Glass Floor. He says it 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 … (The Magazine of Horror and Startling Mystery Stories) … 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!
