by Rocky Wood
The Bird and the Album version reads:
They all look at Mike then, as they had in the gravel pit, and Mike thought: They look at Bill when they need a leader, and me when they need a navigator. I wonder how they’d like it if I told them that in the movies the hero’s never bald and, as for me, I lost my compass and rudder while I was working in my damned journal, trying to make sense of killing fires and giant birds, an explosion in an ironworks where the boilers had been shut down, a mass murder in a bar in Hell’s Half-Acre, a mass murder seems to have happened while the customers went right on drinking; and if I told them all of those things, would I really be telling them anything they don’t already know? Get down to business, what a hell of a phrase that is. Do I tell them that the bodies of the children that were found back then and now weren’t sexually molested, not even precisely mutilated, but partially eaten?
Readers at the time the original was published were intrigued by the tale but had to wait another five years for the context in which to place this slightly less than 3000 word piece. As an historical note this was the first published mention of Derry.
Those wishing to read this original version of the story today will find their task somewhat difficult. The convention book sometimes appears for sale at specialist King booksellers and that would be the best option for those seeking a copy.
Calla Bryn Sturgis (2001)
Calla Bryn Sturgis was first released on King’s official website, www.stephenking.com on 21 August 2001, just three weeks before September 11. King provided the story free of charge as a thank you to long-suffering fans of The Dark Tower cycle, who were awaiting the next installment, The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla.
Readers were told this was the Prologue to the new novel but hints were provided that this would not be its final form in the book. In fact, so as not to give away certain events in the novel, there had been some careful editing and changes. The story was delivered in a substantially different form as the Prologue, Roont when The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla was published more than two years later, in November 2003.
Both versions featured the return of King’s benighted character, Father Callahan of ‘Salem’s Lot, known in the Calla as Pere Callahan. King had said that, despite the Catholic priest having last been seen on a bus out of the Lot, he had not finished with the Father and he would reappear in some future story. ‘Salem’s Lot was published in 1975, so there was in fact more than a quarter century between published novels featuring this character. This is the longest period between appearances by a significant King character!
In this Dark Tower tale a village in End-World considers a coming threat. Tian Jaffords tended his fields with the plough being pulled not by animals but by his twin sister! She, like many others in Calla Bryn Sturgis, was “roont.”
Every generation or so “Wolves” would come and take one child from each set of twins, returning them sometime later, large and strong but slow in the mind. In a village where almost all births were of twins the raids were far from welcome, but a robot named Andy now told Jaffords that the Wolves would return in a month.
That night forty men, mostly farmers from the area, met to discuss the upcoming raid. Various suggestions were offered and discussed, including killing the children, leaving town, accepting the loss of their children, and even standing and fighting. As it had been about 23 years since the Wolves had last appeared there was much speculation about the weaponry the kidnappers carried, which apparently included Light Sticks, Sneetches and Stealthies. Pere Callahan, who ran a Christian church in the village, then told the meeting three gunslingers and their apprentice were heading toward Calla Bryn Sturgis, along the path of the Beam.
It was time to stand and be true.
It was immediately obvious to fans of the Dark Tower series that the three gunslingers (one of whom was a woman) and their apprentice were Roland Deschain, Eddie Dean and Susannah Dean, along with Jake Chambers. In a nod to the later stages of The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass Andy the robot spoke of a Palace of Green Glass that had appeared and then disappeared near the Big River in Out-World.
There is one error in the story. We are told that Tian’s last name is Jaffords, but when Andy is standing in Tian’s Son of a Bitch field, he thinks of, “…that thankless tract of Jaffrey land…” The error was corrected when the novel was released.
The story no longer appears on King’s website and, as it was never published in a paper form, readers wishing to access a copy will need to contact a King collector or fan who has retained it in electronic format and may wish to provide a copy. It should be noted that the story is King’s copyright and should not be purchased or sold.
King’s serious fan base was delighted and intrigued by both the story and Callahan’s appearance. Perhaps as a result of this positive reaction King also allowed another section of the novel, The Tale of Gray Dick, to appear in an altered version ahead of the novel’s release (covered later in this chapter).
Lisey and the Madman (2004)
A chapter of the Lisey’s Story was first published in an anthology, McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, edited by Michael Chabon and released in November 2004, as Lisey and the Madman. This section was heavily revised for the final novel. This was the second time King had been published in a Chabon edited anthology from the McSweeney series. The earlier story was the previous year’s The Tale of Gray Dick in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.
The co-author of The Talisman and Black House, Peter Straub also has a story in the anthology, Mr. Aickman’s Air Rifle. King’s contribution is dedicated to Nan Graham. The “About the Contributors” section notes of King, “He has promised to retire, but ‘Lisey and the Madman’ is from what may eventually be a novel called Lisey’s Story. In his own defense, King points out that all novelists lie – sometimes to others, almost constantly to themselves.” Of course, the novel was published, in October 2006.
The story was also reprinted in an anthology, New Beginnings: A Tsunami Benefit Book, released by Bloomsbury on World Book Day, 3 March 2005. Among other authors to contribute to this book, intended to raise funds to benefit victims of the 26 December 2004 Asian Tsunami, were Maeve Binchy, Margaret Atwood, Paulo Coelho, Scott Turow and Vikram Seth.
This America Under Siege story begins with Lisey Landon, wife of a famous novelist, recalling events eighteen years earlier. She is reminded of them by a now famous photograph, in which she appears, although no one else is aware of that fact. The photo shows a young man holding a small silver shovel, looking somewhat dazed, while a cop shakes his hand. Lisey’s contribution to the photo is half a brown loafer in the far right-hand side of the photo as she had left the scene for something much more important.
It had been a hot, muggy day at the University of Tennessee in August of 1986, when Scott Landon (Pulitzer and National Book Award winning novelist) was due to turn the first earth at the commencement ceremonies for the Shipman Library. From the first thing that morning, back at their Maine home, Lisey Landon had been suffering from a sense of foreboding. She had accidentally smashed a tooth glass in their bathroom and had not felt right since. After the accident Lisey cursed and remembered her grandmother, “that old Irish highpockets,” who had quite a store of sayings and curses and who had most certainly believed in omens, even if Lisey did not.
A large crowd had turned out to see the famous author say a few words. This, combined with the heat, only added to Lisey’s concerns as she recalled the “deep-space” fans that come with fame – one had hitchhiked from Texas to Maine to discuss Bigfoot with Scott (of course, this type of individual is a regular problem for both the King family and his office). She even noted one of the breed (“Blondie”) standing in the crowd but, strangely, was not concerned by him, despite her foreboding.
Attended by the reluctant and pompous representative of the University, a student reporter and local newspaper photographer, the official party proceeded to a point behind velvet-r
ope barriers where Scott Landon was presented with a small silver shovel. Landon proceeded to give a quick speech for the crowd and a small showy display for the photographer. In his speech he spoke briefly of current events, concluding, “The world grows dark. Discordia rises.” Turning the sod he called the names of favored authors and asked the crowd to check out both their books and those of their own personal favorites when the Library opened.
But if every book is a little light in that darkness – and so I believe, so I believe, so I must believe, for I write the goddamn things, don’t I? – then every library is a grand bonfire around which ten thousand people come to stand and warm themselves each cold day and night.
After turning the last sod Scott handed the ceremonial shovel to his wife and the crowd began to break up, the official party heading for the air-conditioned haven of the English department, Nelson Hall. Lisey again noticed “Blondie,” walking against the flow of the crowd and muttering inanely; and then the gun tucked into the belt below his untucked shirt.
Lisey became entrenched in that dream-like quality of a crisis, unable to move quickly enough or draw attention to the danger only she could she. Before anyone could react, “Blondie,” actually Gerd Allen Cole, a grad student, shot Scott in the right chest. As Cole prepared the coup-de-grace shot to Scott’s heart Lisey swung the silver shovel, striking his gun hand and causing the shot to fly harmlessly skyward. The swing continued, smashing into Cole’s face and bringing the attack to an end.
Concerned about her wounded husband, who was walking off in shock, Lisey handed the shovel to the student reporter, Tony Eddington. As the campus security chief came up he mistakenly thought Eddington had been the hero (something the young man would never correct) and shook him by the hand. At that very moment the photographer, Stefan Queensland (UTenn class of ’83) took the award-winning photograph that would, with time, become nearly as famous as that of the mortally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald clutching his stomach.
As Scott collapsed on the hot blacktop Lisey reached and began to comfort him. Seriously wounded, with blood flowing from his chest and mouth, Scott reverted to an apparently natural depressive mode, “It’s very close, honey. I can’t see it but I … I hear it taking its meal and grunting.” Although Lisey denied knowing what he was talking about Scott insisted she did.
Yes, she knows. It. The long boy, he calls it. Or just the thing. Or sometimes the thing with the endless piebald side … And actually, it’s more than just a few times he’s spoken of that thing. Especially just lately. He says you can see it if you look through dirty water glasses. If you look through them just the right way, and in the hours after midnight.
Landon then made the sound he claimed the monster makes “when it looks around.” Turning to Lisey he said:
“I … could … call it that way … It would come. You’d … be … rid of me.” She understands he means it, and for a moment … she believes it’s true. He will make the sound again, only a little louder this time, and somewhere the long boy – that lord of sleepless nights – will turn its unspeakable hungry head. A moment later, in this world, Scott Landon will simply shiver on the pavement and die. The death certificate will show something sane, but she will know. His dark thing finally saw him and came for him and ate him alive.
…So now come the things they will never speak of later, not to others nor between themselves. Too awful. Each long marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret.
Scott asked Lisey again if he should call but she insisted he be quiet, “Leave that fucking thing alone and it will go away.” Just before the paramedics took him away Scott insisted the monster may have seen Lisey and said the first thing she must do when she checked into a motel was deal with the water glasses. And, when she did check into the Greenview Motel and found the bathroom glasses to be actual glass and not the usual plastic, she “puts both of them in her purse, careful not to look at either one as she does so” and then smashed them in the gutter outside. “The sound of them breaking comforts her even more than the sound of that little shovel’s scoop, connecting first with the pistol and then with Blondie’s face.”
Once again King introduces us to a famous writer based in Maine although the story, both here and in the novel, is from the point of view of the spouse. Among other prominent Maine writers in King’s canon are Mike Noonan (Bag of Bones), Bill Denbrough (It), Jim Gardener (The Tommyknockers), Gordie Lachance (The Body), Thad Beaumont (The Dark Half), Ben Mears (‘Salem’s Lot), Richard Kinnell (The Road Virus Heads North), Morton Rainey (Secret Window, Secret Garden) and, of course, the Stephen King of the latter Dark Tower novels. King has used such characters since at least 1971, starting with Gerald Nately of The Blue Air Compressor.
There is one particularly interesting link into King’s other fiction. In his speech at the groundbreaking ceremony, Scott Landon reviews 1986’s current events; including the “Challenger” shuttle explosion, chaos in the Philippines, the nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl and the AIDS epidemic. He then says, “The world grows dark. Discordia rises.” Discordia is crucial in the last two Dark Tower novels, Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower. Dark Tower expert Bev Vincent defines the term as, “The great chaos. All that will remain if the Tower falls.”131
In both the latter Dark Tower novels the great castle near Fedic is known as Castle Discordia or the Castle on the Abyss. At one point the Crimson King is described as the Lord of Discordia. King even had himself use the term in his fictional journals to indicate the day of his accident. There can be little doubt that, as King wrote Lisey and the Madman in 2004, he deliberately dropped the term “Discordia” into the story.
Typically of King, what appears initially to be the simple description of crazed fan attacking famous artist (Mark David Chapman and John Lennon are referenced), or the great American tradition of gun wielded by crazy man (Bremmer and George Wallace is King’s way of reminding us of this) turns into something much deeper and more sinister. The subtle ways in which King works in both Scott Landon’s “long boy” and the foreshadowing of events yet to be described show once again the depth of King’s mastery of both the novel and short story forms.
Again King provides a number of memorable lines. One, “No one loves a clown at midnight” is attributed to Lon Chaney and is said to be the epigram of Landon’s third novel, Empty Devils, a sort of a riff on Romero’s Living Dead movies. George Romero was, of course, the director of The Dark Half and Creepshow, as well as adapting The Cat from Hell for Tales from the Darkside: The Movie and writing the screenplays for The Dark Half and Creepshow 2.
As always with King even the minor characters are painted whole. The University’s representative, Roger Dashmiel is made wholly unlikeable in just a few sentences. Gerd Allen Cole, “the madman,” is totally believable, fitting the profile of so many “deep space” fans and muttering his inanities, “If it closes the lips of the bells, it will have done the job. I’m sorry, Papa.” The campus cop, Heffernan, realized “he may just get out of this mess with his skin on and his job intact” and will always doubt that Tony Eddington “laid the gun-toting nutjob low” but will never voice those doubts. Eddington himself, thrust into the role of hero, is quickly caught up by events and never declares the truth.
Memory (2006)
Memory first came to public notice when King read it at the Seven Days of Opening Nights arts festival at Florida State University in Tallahassee on 26 February 2006 (he received a standing ovation). It was first published in Tin House magazine for Summer 2006 and by September of that year it became clear the episode would form part of an upcoming King novel, Duma Key. It was also included in the 2007 first edition of Blaze. The piece is revised in the novel.
This America Under Siege story is set in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota (an unusual location for King), although the main events of the novel would move to Florida (the first King novel to be set in that location, although short stories from that r
egion started to appear some years after the Kings first bought a home there).
In the tale, Edgar Freemantle, the owner of a sizeable construction firm, recalls the pain of his initial recovery from a nearly fatal accident and begins to come to terms with the past. Freemantle had lost his right arm and suffered other severe injuries when a crane backed over his pickup truck at a construction site.
As well as his physical recovery stresses, he suffered rage attacks during his convalescence and tried to strangle his wife Pam (but did not realize this for many months). Shortly after he moved from the convalescent home to their suburban house she asked for a divorce. We learn a little of Freemantle’s life and meet his two young adult daughters – Ilse, a student at Brown and apparently the weaker of the two; and Melissa (“Lissa”), a teacher on a foreign exchange program in France, apparently stronger.
He moved to their lake house in suburban St. Paul after Pam requested the divorce and, while walking one day, saw a dog struck and mortally injured by a yellow Hummer. Distracting a young neighboring girl, Monica Goldstein, who owned the Jack Russell, he was able to put poor Gandalf out of his misery, but the act finally released the memory of attacking Pam.
