by Rocky Wood
King is also quoted in Collings’ The Shorter Works of Stephen King as having said of this story, “One of the things I think has been good for me – really, really good – is that I stayed out, mostly by luck, of that circle of fanzines and fans that club together.” To this point Beahm 67 writes:
Unlike H.P. Lovecraft whose life and writing career were handicapped by his involvement with fanzines – amateur publications done for fun and not profit – the young Stephen King, early in his career, wisely avoided organized fandom … As King said “I was never part of a fan network. I never had that kind of a support system.”
In fact, it seems it was indeed luck that kept King out of fanzines. In material sent with the concluding part of I Was a Teenage Grave Robber Garrett told subscribers:
Steve King and I are going ahead with a new fanzine, Teen-Zine. It will feature a variety of things and should be of interest to everyone. So, for further details write either to me or Steve at this address: Steve King / R.F.D. #1, Pownal Maine / Thank you very much for your co-operation.
Having checked with Garrett it can be confirmed this project never proceeded68.
In Chapter One of the tale the narrator, later revealed as Danny Gerad/Gerard, is in a graveyard with a man called Rankin, digging up the freshly buried body of Daniel Wheatherby (“1899-1962 / He has joined his beloved wife in a better land” – all quotes are from In a Half-World of Terror version unless noted). The story starts ominously, “It was like a nightmare, like some unreal dream that you wake up from the next morning. Only this nightmare was happening.” Danny had been asked to leave school, as he could no longer cover his fees. He and Rankin drove to Steffan Weinbaum’s combined home/laboratory with the body. In a flash toward many of King’s future scenes of horror, such as the Marsten House (‘Salem’s Lot), and in the great traditions of horror movies, we read, “And then we came out into the open and I could see it, the huge rambling Victorian mansion that sat on the summit of the steep grade.” Weinbaum himself was in the mould of the archetypal mad scientist, “tall, rigid… face much like a skull; his eyes were deep-set and the skin was stretched so taughtly over the cheekbones that his flesh was almost transparent.”
In Chapter Two readers learn Gerad/Gerard’s parents died in a car crash when he was thirteen:
It left me an orphan and should have landed me in an orphan’s home. But my father’s will disclosed the fact that he had left me a substantial some (sic) of money and I was self-reliant … I was left in the somewhat bizarre role as the sole tenant of my own house. I paid the mortgage … and tried to stretch a dollar as far as possible.
By the age of eighteen there was little money left, and wanting to attend college, Gerad/Gerard sold the house for $10,000. He was then defrauded of all he had and, after bluffing his way through the first four months of college, was asked to leave for failing to pay his fees. That very day he met Rankin in a bar. “It was my first experience in a tavern. I had a forged driver’s license and I bought enough whiskys (sic) to get drunk.” Rankin took him to a secluded booth to discuss an employment proposal. After he offered Gerad/Gerard “five hundred a job,” suspicions were aroused. Against his better judgement, Gerad/Gerard agreed to meet Weinbaum.
In Chapter Three Weinbaum took Gerad/Gerard on a tour of “…the house, including the laboratory.” Weinbaum stared at the boy
…with fixed eyes and once again I felt a blast of icy coldness sweep over me. “I’ll put it to you bluntly,” he said, “my experiments are too complicated to explain in any detail, but they concern human flesh. Dead human flesh.” … He looked like a spider ready to engulf a fly, and this whole house was his web. The sun was striking fire to the west and deep pools of shadows were spreading across the room, hiding his face, but leaving the glittering eyes as they shifted in the creeping darkness.
(Not a bad piece of writing for a teenager). After threatening to leave, Gerad/Gerard found that Weinbaum somehow knew of his college fee problem and finally agreed to working on a “trial basis … I got the eerie feeling I was talking to the devil himself and I had been tricked into selling my soul.”
Reverting to the night of Wheatherby’s disinterment Rankin and “professor” Weinbaum began to work on the body. Gerad/Gerard left, driving past the cemetery, realizing the “nightmare” was real.
In Chapter Four as Gerad/Gerard drove on, he came upon a startling scene, “a panel truck crazily parked” in the middle of the road, “a girl of about eighteen running toward my car, an older man running after her.” Slamming on the brakes, Gerad/Gerard rolled his car but immediately jumped out of it and ran to the girl, who was being yanked into the truck by the other man. In an awkward piece of dialogue he said to Gerad/Gerard, “You stay out of this, buddy. I’m her legal guardian.” He then punched Gerad/Gerard and started to drive off, but not before the boy threw himself onto the van’s roof (!) and “clawed through about five layers of paint to hang on.” Reaching through the driver’s window, Gerad/Gerard then caused the truck to crash over a cliff. “I landed hard, but the rock I landed on was harder.” The driver was dead, but the girl miraculously untouched. After being interviewed by the police, Gerad/Gerard and the girl were taken away in an ambulance. She introduced herself as Vicki Pickford, and told Gerad/Gerard that her guardian was “… a drunkard and all-around crumb … I hated him and I’m glad he’s dead.” They agreed to meet for a movie the following day, “...at 7.30.”
In Chapter Five Weinbaum, having read of the crash in the afternoon paper’s, rang Gerad/Gerard to check that he had not revealed anything of his nocturnal work to the police, and booked his services again for two nights later. “The next morning, at 7.30 sharp,” Gerad/Gerard collected Pickford at her motel. This certainly seems like a strange time to go to a movie! They kissed once or twice. “All in all, a pleasant evening.” (It seems the young King and his “publishers” could have done with some editorial assistance at this point). The plot takes an even less likely twist when an usher approached them and asked if he was “Mr. Gerad. Daniel Gerad” and stated he had a life or death phone call to take. It was Rankin (who presumably had some form of ESP) demanding Gerad/Gerard come to the Weinbaum house immediately. “There were sounds of a scuffle, a muffled scream, then a click and the empty dial tone.” Grabbing Pickford, Gerad/Gerard headed immediately for the danger. As they arrived, “Grim and gaunt against the overcast sky, I could see the house.” Telling his girl to wait in the car, Gerad/Gerard found the laboratory “empty but ransacked” with bloodstains trailing into the “darkened garage.” He also noted that several sheeted tanks had been broken and that a “green liquid” flowed over the floor “in sticky rivulets.”
Entering the garage:
…the light from the lab threw a golden shaft along the garage floor, but it was next to nothing in the Styngan (sic) blackness of the garage. All my childish fears of the dark returned. Once again I entered the realm of terror that only a child can know. I realized that the shadow that leered at me from out of the dark might not be dispelled by bright light.
This passage foreshadows the Monster in the Closet section of Cujo, The Boogeyman and any number of scenes in King’s fiction. Realizing he was standing at the top of a stairway Gerad/Gerard retreats to his car.
In Chapter Six Pickford revealed that she had been to the house once before, and told Gerad/Gerard that “Uncle David” had become her guardian after her parents were killed in a train-wreck four years earlier. He had worked for Weinbaum and she’d brought him his lunch, at midnight. At the time he was appointed guardian David was a kind man, but after losing his job as a night-watchman, he got the job with Weinbaum and became mean, regularly got drunk and she “watched him decay before my very eyes.” One night he returned home and beat her, causing her to run away, leading to the truck crash, and David’s death.
As Pickford told her tale Gerad/Gerard nearly determined to drive away, “but then a faraway, thin scream…” reached them. After failing to convince Gerad/Gerard not to r
e-enter the house, Pickford demanded to go with him, a demand Gerad/Gerard rejected. He then went back into the house, down the stairway, and into a short passage. “Suddenly, a scream, terrible and thick with fear sounded in the darkness ahead of me. It was the sound of terror, the sound of a man confronted with something out of the deepest pits of horror.” Gerad/Gerard stumbled over Rankin’s body, “his eyes staring in glazed horror at the ceiling.” Finding an armed Weinbaum, he and Gerad/Gerard began to argue about the length of time it had taken the boy to arrive. They were cut off “…by a sound that has hounded me through nightmares ever since, a hideous mewling sound, that of some gigantic rat in pain.” (This line reminds the reader of Graveyard Shift.) While craning to see what horror was making this sound from within a pit, they both heard a “wail of terror” and Weinbaum realized Gerad/Gerard had brought a companion.
At the beginning of Chapter Seven the two men returned through the lab, “the place now swimming in green liquid” as the remaining cases had been broken and were now empty. Gerad/Gerard found the girl’s tracks outside and those of something else, “it was more as if something huge had dragged itself into the woods.” Taking Weinbaum’s gun, Gerad/Gerard headed out to rescue the girl, who escaped the shambling creature following her, which seemed to be able to climb down a gully, but not back up it, much as Weinbaum had trapped the other creature in the pit. Still, Gerad/Gerard knew a third thing was still on the loose and now heard “…a scream from the lab. And … mewing.”
In Chapter Eight hero and heroine ran back to the lab. Gerad/Gerard alone kept running into the garage and has “…ever since have been glad that Vicki stayed in the lab and was spared the sight that has wakened me from a thousand awful nightmares.” This is what he saw:
A huge, white maggot twisted on the garage floor, holding Weinbaum with its long suckers, raising him towards its dripping, pink mouth from which horrid mewing sounds came. Veins, red and pulsing, showed under its slimy flesh and millions of squirming tiny maggots in the blood vessels, in the skin, even forming a huge eye that stared out at me … In a half-world of terror I fired the revolver again and again.
In his desperation Weinbaum yelled for Gerad/Gerard to set the creature on fire and, using a box of matches, he set the green liquid aflame, “…just as Weinbaum screamed his last. I saw his body through the translucent skin of the creature, still twitching as thousands of maggots leached onto it.” Grabbing his girl, Gerad/Gerard ran for the car as the whole house went up in flames.
In Chapter Nine Gerad/Gerard says, “There isn’t too much left to say.” The fire swept into the woods, destroying fifteen square miles of forest and residential homes. “I couldn’t feel too badly about that fire; I realize that hundreds might have been killed by the gigantic maggot-things …” He drove out to the house after the fire and, with some unlikely good fortune, found Weinbaum’s diary in a metal cabinet. This revealed that he had been exposing the dead flesh to “gamma rays” (that great staple of science fiction) and these had caused the maggots to group. “Perhaps the radioactive bomb had speeded up the revolution.”
The story ends:
In a way, I suppose, I assisted in Rankin’s death; the flesh of the body whose grave I had robbed had fed perhaps the very creature that had killed him. I live with that thought. But I believe there can be forgiveness. I’m working for it. Or, rather, we’re working for it. Vicki and I. Together.
We know the story is set in 1962 (the date of Wheatherby’s death) and Weinbaum’s lab was in the Belwood District in California. The Crestwood Cemetery, from which Wheatherby was disinterred, is the first cemetery mentioned in King fiction, but certainly not the last! There are no links to King’s other fiction.
As King rightly considers the story to be juvenilia it is very unlikely it will ever be republished in any form. Photocopies of In a Half-World of Terror circulate within the King community and these would represent the best opportunity for readers to access this America Under Siege tale.
A single complete set of “Comics Review” material is held in The Murray Collection at Duke University’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. To the author’s knowledge this is one of only two sets of the three issues that exist (another is held by a comics collector). It seems Duke holds the only extant copy of the concluding material that was to have appeared in Issue #4. The Murray Collection is a huge archive of comics and fanzines collected over 40 years by Edwin and Terry Murray and donated to the Library in 2003.
Not surprisingly, the story is derivative of 1950s B-Grade science fiction/horror movies and has both structural and internal logic problems. However, Spignesi 69 says of it, “…it is an important step forward for the teenaged King. In retrospect, it illustrates just how developed King’s storytelling abilities were by the age of eighteen …”
64 Bob Jackson, a King collector, owns both Issue 3 of Comics Review and the Stories of Suspense version. Comics Review was small in size, measuring only 8.5” by 5.5”.
65 The Stephen King Illustrated Companion by Bev Vincent. It was reproduced from Bob Jackson’s personal copy
66 From personal correspondence between Rocky Wood and Marv Wolfman
67 The Stephen King Story, George Beahm, p.41
68 Personal correspondence with Rocky Wood 19 July 2008
69 The Lost Work of Stephen King, Stephen J. Spignesi, p.23-25
Jhonathan and the Witchs (1993)
King wrote this story in 1956 or 1957, at the age of nine. It was first published over three and a half decades later in First Words: Earliest Writing from Favorite Contemporary Authors, edited by Paul Mandelbaum and published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. In the editor’s introduction King states he wrote the story for his Aunt Gert, who paid him a quarter for every story he wrote. Unfortunately, there are no other known examples of these stories. Reading this, the earliest of King’s writings to come to light, is tremendously interesting (the first page of the manuscript, in King’s handwriting, is also reproduced).
The best way to access this story is to purchase First Words on the second hand market. Copies sometimes appear at specialist King booksellers or at other on line sellers. Among other authors whose “First Words” are included in the book are Isaac Asimov and Joyce Carol Oates. It seems very unlikely that King will re-publish it in one of his short story collections.
Due to the fantasy content, Jhonathan and the Witchs is a New Worlds story. In it the King sets a young man the task of killing three witches (correctly spelled in the manuscript but not in the title), with the penalty for failure to be death. Jhonathan, a cobbler’s son, had been sent out into the world by his father to seek his fortune and he intended to start by asking the King for work. But on the way to see the King he met “…a rabbit who was a fairy in disguise” and was being chased by hunters. After Jhonathan saved the rabbit/fairy it granted Jhonathan three wishes. When he could not think of anything the fairy agreed to give him the wishes when he needed them.
When Jhonathan reached the kingdom, “…as luck would have it, the king was in a very bad mood that day. So he vented his mood on Jhonathan.” The King set Jhonathan a reward of 5,000 crowns for killing three witches who lived on “…yonder Mountain…” but the alternative was dire – “If you cannot do it I will have your head!”
As Jhonathan approached the first witch intending to kill her with a knife, he heard a voice in his ear. This voice explained that each witch could not be killed by certain methods.
The first witch could not be pierced, so he used his first wish, “She was in a cave near the foot of the mountain, and was a mean looking hag … before the witch could do anything but give him an ugly look, he wished she should be smothered. And Lo! It was done.” The second witch could not be pierced or smothered, so he wished her crushed, “And before the witch could do anything but give him an ugly look, he had wished her crushed. And Lo! It was done.”
The final witch could not be pierced or smothered and was invisible, yet he still ha
d to kill her to receive his reward so
…he was plagued with thoughts of how? Then he hit upon a wonderful plan … He waited outside the entrance until he heard the witches (sic) footsteps. He picked up a couple of big rocks and wished the witch a normal woman and ‘Lo! She became visible and then Jhonathan struck her head with the rocks he had.
Jhonathan collected his 5,000 crowns and he and his father lived happily ever after.
The kingdom remained unnamed, the timeline is not given and there are no links to other King works, although the fantasy aspects of Kingdoms and witches make appearances in such later King works as Eyes of the Dragon, The King Family and the Wicked Witch and The Dark Tower cycle.
Basically Jhonathan and the Witchs is a Grimm-like fairy tale, of the sort read and loved by young children. In his development as a writer, we see King attempting his own fairy tale at the tender age of nine, even using the time honored opening, “Once upon a time…” While simplistic, clearly written by a juvenile and short at just over 500 words, there are signs of a sophisticated vocabulary and the ability to organize a fairly consistent story. One last interesting aspect is King’s spelling of Jhonathan, one wonders if it was a spelling mistake at the time or an intentional device?
