by Rocky Wood
King actually wrote the story nearly three decades earlier. He explained the story’s genesis in an introduction to the tale:
In the two years after I was married (1971-1972), I sold nearly two dozen stories to various men’s magazines. Most were purchased by Nye Willden, the fiction editor at Cavalier. These stories were important supplements to the meager income I was earning in my two day jobs, one as a high school English teacher and the other as an employee of The New Franklin Laundry, where I washed motel sheets. These were not good times for short horror fiction … but I sold an almost uninterrupted run of mine – no mean feat for an unknown, unagented scribbler from Maine …
Two of them, however, did not sell. Both were pastiches. The first was a modern day revision of Nikolai Gogol’s story, “The Ring” (my version was called “The Spear”, I think). That one is lost. The second was the one that follows, a crazed revisionist telling of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. I thought the idea was a natural: crazed Vietnam vet kills elderly benefactor as a result of post-traumatic stress syndrome. I’m not sure what Nye’s problem with it might have been; I loved it, but he shot it back at me with a terse “not for us” note. I gave it a final sad look, then put it in a desk drawer and went on to something else. It stayed in said drawer until rescued by Marsha DeFilippo, who found it in a pile of old manuscripts consigned to a collection of my stuff in the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine.
I was tempted to tinker with it – the seventies slang is pretty out of date – but resisted the impulse, deciding to let it be what it was then: partly satire and partly affectionate homage…
The story is short, only six small pages in the Volume, and is headed The Old Dude’s Ticker – Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe. Typically of King in an environment where he feels very comfortable with the “audience,” he signs the introduction “Steve King.”
It is unlikely King will include this tale in one of his short story collections. As he says, the slang is very dated and the story would have fitted much more comfortably in one of the early collections such as Skeleton Crew. It would be jarringly out of place with King’s more modern style in a collection such as Everything’s Eventual. This being the case, readers will need to purchase either the NECON XX Volume or the reprint in the much easier to find Big Book of NECON, edited by Bob Booth (Cemetery Dance, 2009).
King says in his introduction, “If you have half as much fun reading it as I had writing it, we’ll both be well off, I think. I hope some of Poe’s feverish intensity comes through here … and I hope the master isn’t rolling in his grave too much.” In fact, Poe’s style does come through in the story and it is certainly excellent homage to The Tell-Tale Heart. While the seventies slang is indeed dated, it serves the story well as it is supposed to be the killer’s own words recorded shortly after the murder. All in all, this is a fun story, to be appreciated as much for its intent as its content.
In the tale an old man is murdered. Richard Drogan apparently lived with the Old Dude but even though he “…had no case against him …” he became obsessed with one of his eyes – “Pale blue, with a cataract on it. And it bulged. When he looked at me, my blood ran cold. That’s how bad it freaked me. So little by little, I made up my mind to waste him and get rid of the eye forever.” Richard watched him sleep each night for a week, using a narrow penlight beam to search out the man’s eye but it was always closed. On the eighth night the Old Dude woke up while Richard was watching. As he stood and waited for the Old Dude to go back to sleep Richard finally decided to shine the light on the eye, only to find it open (“This dull dusty blue with that gross-out white stuff all over it so it looked like the bulging yolk of a poached egg”).
Richard claimed to have supersensitive hearing following service in Vietnam and could hear the old man’s heart (“ticker”) beating. Panicking and thinking the neighbors would hear it he smothered the old man. He then cut up the body in the shower and pushed the parts under the bedroom floorboards.
At four the next morning, alerted by a neighbor’s call about a yell in the night, the police asked to look around the house. Richard invited them in but after talking for a while he began to suspect they knew his secret. He became agitated as time progressed and could now hear a beating noise growing steadily louder, presumably that of the old dude’s ticker under the floorboards. Fearing the cops would hear it he then confessed to the murder and showed them the body. “‘Stop it!’ I screamed at them. ‘Stop it! I admit it! – I did it! – rip up the boards! – here, here! its (sic) his heart! It’s the beating of his hideous heart!’”
It turns out that Richard Drogan was actually Robert Deisenhoff, a Vietnam veteran who had scragged an officer there and been sent to the Quigly Veterans Hospital, from which he had escaped more than five years earlier. At the end of the story we find the whole thing is actually Deisenhoff’s statement to the police. This is King’s little twist at the end of the tale, even though we knew early on Richard/Robert was a killer, it is only at the last we realize he had been caught and come to fully understand his mental illness.
Working backwards we come to understand that Deisenhoff had been in Vietnam but had lost his mind and killed (“scragged” in the parlance of the time) his lieutenant and been shipped back to a Veteran’s Hospital and placed under armed guard. Richard/Robert tells the police he heard a sound from the old dude as he held the light beam to his eye.
Didn’t I tell you how sharp my hearing has been since Nam? And what came to my ears was this low, quick noise. You know what that sound was like? Have you ever seen a squad of MPs on a parade ground? They all wear white gloves, and they all carry these little short sticks on their belts. And if one of them takes his stick out and starts tapping it into his palm, it makes a sound like that. I remember that … from that hospital where they put me after I came home. Sure, they had MPs there.
King’s twist on Poe’s tale is to have the killer compare the sound of the heart/ticker to his military background. “I knew what that sound was, there in the dark. It wasn’t any GI head-bopper. It was the old dude’s ticker. It made me even madder, the way beating a drum will make a GI feel ballsier.”
The closing paragraph of the story reveals that the police statement was taken on August 14, 1976 and that investigations had confirmed that Richard Drogan was indeed Robert Deisenhoff, “who escaped from the Quigly (Ohio) Veteran’s Hospital on April 9, 1971.” This leaves one wondering what other deeds or misdeeds Richard/Robert may have got up to in the intervening five years. One also wonders if there is just a hint of General Anthony Hecksler, the insane killer in both versions of The Plant? Deisenhoff’s name reminds one of Dieffenbaker, the new lieutenant and Vietnam veteran in The New Lieutenant’s Rap, although the soldier “scragged” in that story was Ralph Clemson, shot by Slocum under Dieffenbaker’s orders to stop Clemson from massacring Vietnamese civilians. Dieffenbaker also appears as the lieutenant in the heavily revised version of The New Lieutenant’s Rap published as Why We’re in Vietnam in the Hearts in Atlantis collection.
King had not written a great deal relating to America’s Vietnam trauma until the Hearts in Atlantis collection. Despite being at University during the heyday of the anti-war movement, or perhaps because of that, King seemed to almost studiously avoid both the War and its impact upon American society in his fiction until later in his career. The Old Dude’s Ticker was apparently written about 1971-2 (but not published until 2000) and Squad D (which has never been published) was written in the late 1970s. The next significant Vietnam stories appeared decades after King’s involvement with the anti-war movement. Blind Willie, the next King story heavily influenced by Vietnam, was first published in 1994, before being heavily revised for its appearance in the Hearts in Atlantis collection. The New Lieutenant’s Rap, Hearts in Atlantis, Why We’re in Vietnam and Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling were all first published in 1999. However, King had written of many characters who served in Vietnam or even died there (for ins
tance, Peter St. George from Dolores Claiborne) and referenced some of the events there from time to time.
The influence of Vietnam and the fact that King never reveals the geographical location of the murders makes this an America Under Siege story. There are no direct links to other King works from this story.
King in Men’s Magazines
Before King was a best-selling novelist, and for some time afterward, he supplemented his income selling short stories to lurid men’s magazines, which contrasted articles and fiction with spreads of naked women. In recent times he returned to the now venerable Playboy magazine. The following is a list of these stories (and two poems)
Graveyard Shift Cavalier October 1970
I Am the Doorway Cavalier March 1971
Suffer the Little Children Cavalier February 1972
The Fifth Quarter (*) Cavalier April 1972
Battleground Cavalier September 1972
The Mangler Cavalier December 1972
The Boogeyman Cavalier March 1973
Trucks Cavalier June 1973
Gray Matter Cavalier October 1973
Sometimes They Come Back Cavalier March 1974
Night Surf (^) Cavalier August 1974
Strawberry Spring (#) Cavalier November 1975
The Boogeyman (+) Gent December 1975
Weeds Cavalier May 1976
The Ledge Penthouse July 1976
Strawberry Spring (+) Gent February 1977
Children of the Corn Penthouse March 1977
The Cat from Hell Cavalier March and June 1977
The Man Who Loved Flowers Gallery August 1977
The Man with a Belly Cavalier December 1978
Weeds (+) Nugget April 1979
The Crate Gallery July 1979
The Man with a Belly (+) Gent December 1979
The Monkey Gallery November 1980
The Raft Gallery November 1982
The Word Processor Playboy January 1983
Willa Playboy December 2006
Mute Playboy December 2007
The Bone Church (%) Playboy November 2009
Tommy (%) Playboy March 2010
(*) under the pseudonym John Swithen
(^) in a revised version, it was originally published in Ubris for Spring 1969
(#) in a revised version, it was originally published in Ubris for Fall 1968
(+) effectively a reprint, as there were no changes from the earlier version
(%) poem
People, Places and Things (1960)
People, Places and Things is a collection of eighteen short stories self-published by King and his friend Chris Chesley under the name “Triad Publishing Company.” First published in 1960, it was reprinted in 1963. Chesley was one of King’s close childhood friends growing up in Durham, Maine.79 They apparently wrote many stories together, and singly, for their amusement and that of their family and friends and it is a small tragedy that most have been lost.
King owns the sole known copy of the collection, which he re-discovered in his papers in 1985. However, partial photocopies of the “Second Printing, 1963” version circulate freely in the King community. It is thought that less than a dozen original copies were ever printed.80
The Table of Contents for People, Places and Things is as follows:
Forward (sic), 1
Hotel at the End of the Road, 2 Steve King
Genius, 3 Chris Chesley
Top Forty, News, Weather and Sports, 4 Chris Chesley
Bloody Child, 5 Chris Chesley
I’ve Got to Get Away!, 6 Steve King
The Dimension Warp, 7 Steve King
The Thing at the Bottom of the Well, 8 Steve King
Reward, 9 Chris Chesley
The Stranger, 10 Steve King
A Most Unusual Thing, 11 Chris Chesley
Gone, 12 Chris Chesley
They’ve Come, 13 Chris Chesley
I’m Falling, 14 Steve King
The Cursed Expedition, 15 Steve King
The Other Side of the Fog, 16 Steve King
Scared, 17 Chris Chesley
Curiousity (sic) Killed the Cat, 18 Chris Chesley
Never Look Behind You, 19 Steve King – Chris Chesley
The cover is headed “People, Places and Things – Volume 1” and the authors are listed as Steve King and Chris Chesley. This version is listed as the “Second Edition – Complete and Unabridged.” The Table of Contents page shows the booklet as being “Produced in Association with the Triad Publishing Company,” with “Copyright 1963, by Steve King and Chris Chesley – First Printing, 1960 – Second Printing, 1963.” In simple terms, King and Chesley “self-published” these stories.
Unfortunately, two of the King stories listed in the Table of Contents have been lost – no known copies of The Dimension Warp and I’m Falling exist.
All in all the stories are best described as what they are – “juvenilia.” However, clear hints of the King to come appear in each story and it is in this that they perhaps retain their greatest value. Michael Collings writes in his Horror Plum’d81, “In approach, content, theme, and treatment, however, they clearly suggest directions the mature King would explore in greater detail…”
Six King stories and one written with Chesley have survived the years and each is briefly reviewed below.
The Hotel at the End of the Road
Readers can access this story in The Market Guide for Young Writers (Fourth Edition onwards only) by Kathy Henderson82. To date, this is the only time the story has been republished. According to King bibliographer Justin Brooks, King sent a copy of the story to Carol Fenner, the managing editor of a student literary magazine, Flip, but the magazine folded before the story could be republished!
In the story Tommy Riviera and Kelso Black are the target of a high speed police chase. They turned up a dirt road, saw an old hotel ahead and decided to stay for the night. After being initially ignored by an old man at reception he directed them to Room Five, but only after being threatened at gunpoint!
When Tommy woke up the following morning he was totally paralysed. The old man he had seen the night before came into view and informed him that they were new additions to his living “museum,” but they would be well cared for and would not die.
This 365-word story is as derivative as one could expect from an early teenage writer.
This story is in King’s America Under Siege Reality but it is possible the criminals had driven into another reality, which would make it a very early New Worlds story. In support of this view, as Riviera and Black were being chased by the police, they turned onto a gravel road then, “The uniformed policeman scratched his head. ‘Where did they go?’ His partner frowned. ‘I don’t know. They just – disappeared.’” When the fleeing pair arrived at the Hotel it “looked just like a scene out of the early 1900s.”
The main characters are the two criminals – Riviera and Black, and the mysterious old man, who informs them they are “the first additions to my museum in twenty-five years” and, “You’ll go well with the rest of my collection of living mummies.” The key setting is the Hotel, which is old and, in Black’s words, “…a crummy joint. I’ll bet there’s enough cockroaches in here to fill a five-gallon can.” The old man had Kelso and Black stay (perhaps forever?) in Room Five, which was “…barren except for an iron double bed, a cracked mirror and soiled wallpaper.”
No timeline is given in the story. This early King work has one very interesting link – Kelso Black also appears in The Stranger but meets a very different end in that story.
It should be noted that the title shown on the story page is The Hotel at the End of the Road, even though the first ‘The’ is not shown on the Table of Contents page of the compendium.
I’ve Got to Get Away!
In this story Denny Phillips woke to find himself on an atomic factory assembly line but could remember nothing. Those around him looked like zombies or prisoners.
As he tried to escape guards shot him and he
blacked out. One of the guards commented that the x-238A robots occasionally seemed to go haywire and try to run away. Two weeks later, after being repaired and returned to work, Denny Phillips again had the urge to get away.
The roots of the story appear to be in King’s voluminous science fiction readings, with the ‘conscious’ robot wishing for humanity being a staple of the pulp SF market. An interesting development in King’s early writing is changing from first person narrative in the first half of the story where the robot feels ‘…as if I had just awakened from a slumber’ to third person as the guards comment on the problems with the ‘x-238A … Denny Phillips, name’ and Phillips’ second re-awakening, two weeks later. King also uses repetition to bring the reader into Phillips’ dilemma – ‘I had to get away!’; ‘I’ve got to get away’; and the final words of the story, now capitalized: ‘I’VE GOT TO GET AWAY!!’
Due to science fiction theme of this story (robots working on ‘an atomic factory assembly line’) it is part of King’s New Worlds Reality.
The main character is, of course, an x-238A robot, Denny Phillips and the setting is the factory. King’s device of having the factory guarded, ‘…and the guards had guns’ is required to prevent the robot’s escape after it becomes self-aware but also serves to provide a dark, almost concentration-camp like feel to the story. The ubiquitous ‘Acme Robot Repairs’ company took Phillips away for repair, although there is no sign of the Coyote! No timeline is given in the story.
