to raise one of them and wipe the blood away.
They trembled in his lap, but he was still unable to actually move
them. He thought of the .45 special in its holster under his left arm.
If I can get to my piece, kitty, the rest of your nine lives are going
in a lump sum.
More tingles now. Dull throbs of pain from his feet, buried and
surely shattered under the engine block, zips and tingles from his
legs - it felt exactly the way a limb that you've slept on does when
it's starting to wake up. At that moment Halston didn't care about
his feet. It was enough to know that his spine wasn't severed, that
he wasn't going to finish out his life as a dead lump of body
attached to a talking head.
Maybe I had a few lives left myself.
Take care of the cat. That was the first thing. Then get out of the
wreck - maybe someone would come along, that would solve both
problems at once. Not likely at 4:30 in the morning on a back road
like this one, but barely possible. And-
And what was the cat doing back there?
He didn't like having it on his face, but he didn't like having it
behind him and out of sight, either. He tried the rearview mirror,
but that was useless. The crash had knocked it awry and all it
reflected was the grassy ravine he had finished up in.
A sound from behind him, like low, ripping cloth.
Purring.
Hellcat my ass. It's gone to sleep back there.
And even if it hadn't, even if it was somehow planning murder,
what could it do? It was a skinny little thing, probably weighed all
of four pounds soaking wet. And soon ... soon he would be able to
move his hands enough to get his gun. He was sure of it.
Halston sat and waited. Feeling continued to flood back into his
body in a series of pins-and-needles incursions. Absurdly (or
maybe in instinctive reaction to his close brush with death) he got
an erection for a minute or so. Be kind of hard to beat off under
present circumstances, he thought.
A dawn-line was appearing in the eastern sky. Somewhere a bird
sang.
Halston tried his hands again and got them to move an eighth of an
inch before they fell back.
Not yet. But soon.
A soft thud on the seatback beside him. Halston turned his head
and looked into the black-white face, the glowing eyes with their
huge dark pupils.
Halston spoke to it.
"I have never blown a hit once I took it on, kitty. This could be a
first. I'm getting my hands back. Five minutes, ten at most. You
want my advice? Go out the window. They're all open. Go out and
take your tail with you."
The cat stared at him.
Halston tried his hands again. They came up, trembling wildly.
Half an inch. An inch. He let them fall back limply. They slipped
off his lap and thudded to the Plymouth's seat. They glimmered
there palely, like large tropical spiders.
The cat was grinning at him.
Did I make a mistake?, he wondered confusedly. He was a creature
of hunch, and the feeling that he had made one was suddenly
overwhelming. Then the cat's body tensed, and even as it leaped,
Halston knew what it was going to do and he opened his mouth to
scream.
The cat landed on Halston's crotch, claws out, digging.
At that moment, Halston wished he had been paralyzed. The pain
was gigantic, terrible. He had never suspected that there could be
such pain in the world. The cat was a spitting coiled spring of fury,
clawing at his balls.
Halston did scream, his mouth yawning open, and that was when
the cat changed direction and leaped at his face, leaped at his
mouth. And at that moment Halston knew that it was something
more than a cat. It was something possessed of a malign,
murderous intent.
He caught one last glimpse of that black-and-white face below the
flattened ears, its eyes enormous and filled with lunatic hate. It had
gotten rid of the three old people and now it was going to get rid of
John Halston.
It rammed into his mouth, a furry projectile. He gagged on it. Its
front claws pinwheeled, tattering his tongue like a piece of liver.
His stomach recoiled and he vomited. The vomit ran down into his
windpipe, clogging it, and he began to choke.
In this extremity, his will to survive overcame the last of the
impact paralysis. He brought his hands up slowly to grasp the cat.
Oh my God, he thought.
The cat was forcing its way into his mouth, flattening its body,
squirming, working itself farther and farther in. He could feel his
jaws creaking wider and wider to admit it.
He reached to grab it, yank it out, destroy it ...and his hands
clasped only the cat's tail.
Somehow it had gotten its entire body into his mouth. Its strange,
black-and-white face must be crammed into his very throat.
A terrible thick gagging sound came from Halston's throat, which
was swelling like a flexible length of garden hose.
His body twitched. His hands fell back into his lap and the fingers
drummed senselessly on his thighs. His eyes sheened over, then
glazed. They stared out through the Plymouth's windshield blankly
at the coming dawn.
Protruding from his open mouth was two inches of bushy tail ...
half black, half white. It switched lazily back and forth.
It disappeared.
A bird cried somewhere again. Dawn came in breathless silence
then, over the frost-rimmed fields of rural Connecticut.
The farmer's name was Will Reuss.
He was on his way to Placer's Glen to get the inspection sticker
renewed on his farm truck when he saw the late-morning sun
twinkle on something in the ravine beside the road. He pulled over
and saw the Plymouth lying at a drunken, canted angle in the ditch,
barbed wire tangled in its grille like a snarl of steel knitting.
He worked his way down and then sucked in his breath sharply.
"Holy moley," he muttered to the bright November day. There was
a guy sitting bolt upright behind the wheel, eyes open and glaring
emptily into eternity. The Roper organization was never going to
include him in its presidential poll again. His face was smeared
with blood. He was still wearing his seat belt.
The driver's door had been crimped shut, but Reuss managed to get
it open by yanking with both hands. He leaned in and unstrapped
the seat belt, planning to check for ID. He was reaching for the
coat when he noticed that the dead guy's shirt was rippling, just
above the belt buckle. Rippling ... and bulging. Splotches of blood
began to bloom there like sinister roses.
"What the Christ?" He reached out, grasped the dead man's shirt,
and pulled it up.
Will Reuss looked - and screamed.
Above Halston's navel, a ragged hole had been clawed in his flesh.
Looking out was the gore-streaked black-and-white face of a cat,
its eyes huge and glaring.
Reuss staggered back, shrieking, hands clapped to his face. A score
of crows took cawing wing f
rom a nearby field.
The cat forced its body out and stretched in obscene languor.
Then it leaped out the open window. Reuss caught sight of it
moving through the high dead grass and then it was gone.
It seemed to be in a hurry, he later told a reporter from the local
paper.
As if it had unfinished business.
The Dark Man
Stephen King
Published in
"Ubris", 1969 and later in Moth, 1970.
I have stridden the fuming way
of sun-hammered tracks and
smashed cinders;
I have ridden rails
and bumed sterno in the
gantry silence of hob jungles:
I am a dark man.
I have ridden rails
and passed the smuggery
of desperate houses with counterfeit chimneys
and heard from the outside
the inside clink of cocktail ice
while closed doors broke the world -
and over it all a savage sickle moon
that bummed my eyes with bones of light.
I have slept in glaring swamps
where musk-reek rose
to mix with the sex smell of rotting cypress stumps
where witch fire clung in sunken
psycho spheres of baptism -
and heard the suck of shadows
where a gutted columned house
leeched with vines
speaks to an overhung mushroom sky
I have fed dimes to cold machines
in all night filling stations
while traffic in a mad and flowing flame
streaked red in six lanes of darkness,
and breathed the cleaver hitchhike wind
within the breakdown lane with thumb levelled
and saw shadowed faces made complacent
with heaters behind safety glass
faces that rose like complacent moons
in riven monster orbits.
and in a sudden jugular flash
cold as the center af a sun
I forced a girl in a field of wheat
and left her sprawled with the virgin bread
a savage sacrifice
and a sign to those who creep in
fixed ways:
I am a dark man.
Donovan's Brain
Stephen King
Published in "Moth", 1970
Shratt came on limping
obsessed
he tried to run down a little girl
and there was a drag of pain
in his left
kidney
**********
horror
**********
he signed checks with Donovan's name
and made mad love with Donovan's woman.
poor Shratt!
warped and sucked by desert wine
raped by the brain of that monstrous man
shadowed by his legless shadow
Shratt, driven by a thing
(you know about that Thing, don't you?)
in an electric tank:
(AMPS-AMPS-AMPS-AMPS-)
demented paranoia
from "BEYOND THE GRAVE! !"
but the tragedy
was Shratt -oh,
I could weep for Shratt.
For The Birds
Stephen King
From
" Bred Any Good Rooks Lately? "
Okay, this is a science fiction joke.
It seems like in 1995 or so the pollution in the atmosphere of
London has started to kill off all the rooks. And the city
government is very concerned because the rooks roosting on the
cornices and the odd little crannies of the public buildings are a big
attraction. The Yanks with their Kodaks, if you get it. So they say,
" What are we going to do? "
They get a lot of brochures from places with climates similar to
London's so they can raise the rooks until the pollution problem is
finally licked. One place with a similar climate, but low pollution
count, turns to be Bangor, Maine. So they put an ad in the paper
soliciting bird fanciers and talk to a bunch of guys in the trade.
Finally, they engage this one guy at the rate of $50,000 a year to
raise rooks. They send an ornithologist over on the concord with
two cases of rook eggs packed in these shatterproof cases - they
keep the shipping compartment constantly heated and all that stuff.
So this guy has a new business - North American Rook Farms, Inc.
He goes to work right off incubating new rooks so London will not
become a rookless city. The only thing is, the London City Council
is really impatient, and every day they send him a telegram that
says: " Bred Any Good Rooks lately? "
THE
HARDCASE
SPEAKS
STEPHEN KING
From
Contraband #2
In fields and christless allies the psalter is handed
greedily around with purple bottles of cheap port
punctuated by the sodium lightness glare of freights
rising past hobo cinder gantries and pitless bramble
hollows:
Dukane, Grand Rapids, Cedar Forks, Harlow, Dover-
Foxcroft,
names from the back platform of the A-train
so don't gimme that shit don't gimme that crap
I'll put the hoodoo on you, I can do it, it comes in a can
in 1954 in a back alley behind a bar they
found a lady cut in four pieces and written in her juice on
the bricks above
he had scrawled PLEASE STOP ME BEFORE I KILL
AGAIN in letters that leaned and
draggled so they called him The Cleveland Torso Murderer
and never caught him,
it figures
all these liberals are brainless
if you want to see jeans just peak into any alabaster
gravel pit in Mestalinas
all these liberals have hairy shirts
Real life is in the back row of a 2nd run movie house in
Utica, have you been
there
this guy with his hair greased back was drunk
and getting drunker when I sat down and his face kept
twisting; he cried I'm a
goddamn stupid sonofabitch but doan choo try to tell me
nothin I didn't he
might have come from Cleveland
if the stars are right I can witch you I can make your hair
fall out
You don't need hairy jeans to stand outside a Safeway
store in Smalls Falls and watch a cloud under the high
blue sky ripple the last shadows of summer over the asphalt
parking lot two
acres wide
A real hack believes blackboards are true
for myself I would turn them all soft like custard scoop
them feed them to blackbirds save corn for murderers
in huge and ancient Buicks sperm grows on seatcovers
and flows upstream toward the sound of Chuck Berry
once I saw a drunk in Redcliff and he had stuffed a
newspaper in his mouth he
jigged jubilantly
around a two shadowed light pole
I could gun you down with magic nose bullets
There are still drugstore saints
Still virgins pedalling bikes with playing cards affixed to
the rear spokes
with clothespins
The students have made things up
The liberals have shit themselves and produced a satchel-
load of smelly
numbers
Radicals scratch
secret sores and pore over back numbers
bore a little hole in your head sez I insert a candle
light a light for Charlie Starkweather and let
your little light shine shine shine
play bebop
buy styrofoam dice on 42nd street
eat sno-cones and read Lois Lane
Learn to do magic like me and we will drive to Princeton
in an old Ford with four retread skins and a loose manifold
that boils up the
graphite stink of freshcooked
exhaust we will do hexes with Budweiser pentagrams and
old
Diamond matchboxes
chew some Red Man and let the juice down your chin when
you spit
sprinkle sawdust on weird messes
buy some plastic puke at Atlantic City
throw away your tape player and gobble Baby Ruths
Go now. I think you are ready.
Harrison State Park '68
Stephen King
Published in "Ubris", 1968
"All mental disorders are simply detective strategies
for handling difficult life situations.''
---Thomas Szasz
''And I feel like homemade shit.''
---Ed Sanders
- Can you do it ?
She asked shrewdly
From the grass where her nylon legs
in gartered splendor
made motions.
- Can you do it ?
Ah!
What do I say?
What are the cools?
Jimmy Dean?
Robert Mitchum?
Soupy Sales?
Modern Screen Romances is a tent on the grass
Over a dozen condoms in a quiet box
and the lady used to say
(before she passed away)
- If you can't be an athlete,
be an athletic supporter.
The moon is set.
A cloud scum has covered the stars.
A man with a gun has passed
this way
BUT -
we do not need your poets.
Progressed beyond them to
Sony
Westinghouse
Cousin Brucie
the Doors
and do I dare
mention Sonny and Cher ?
I remember Mickey Rooney
as Pretty Boy Floyd
and he was the shortest Pretty Boy Floyd
on record
coughing his enthusiastic
guts out in the last
reel.
We have not spilt the blood.
They have spilt the blood.
A little girl lies dead
On the hopscotch grid
No matter
- Can you do it?
She asked shrewdly
With her Playtex living bra
cuddling breasts
softer than a handful of wet Fig Newtons.
Old enough to bleed
The Collective Page 6
