do as well."
Paladin studied him, then opened his wallet again. He took back
his pass, replaced it, and carefully took out a one-dollar bill. He
turned it so it faced Cheyney. Cheyney took his own wallet (a
scuffed old Lord Buxton with its seams unravelling; he should
replace it but found it easier to think of than to do) from his jacket
pocket, and removed a dollar bill of his own. He put it next to
Paladin's, and then turned them both around so Paladin could see
them right-side-up-so Paladin could study them.
Which Paladin did, silently, for almost a full minute. His face
slowly flushed dark red ... and then the color slipped from it a little
at a time. He'd probably meant to bellow WHAT THE FUCK IS
GOING ON HERE? Cheyney thought later, but what came out
was a breathless little gasp: -what-"
"I don't know," Cheyney said.
On the right was Cheyney's one, gray-green, not brand-new by any
means, but new enough so that it did not yet have that rumpled,
limp, shopworn look of a bill which has changed hands many
times. Big number 1's at the top corners, smaller 1's at the bottom
corners. FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE in small caps between the
top 1's and THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in larger ones.
The letter A in a seal to the left of Washington, along with the
assurance that THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER, FOR ALL
DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. It was a series 1985 bill, the
signature that of James A. Baker III.
Paladin's one was not the same at all.
The 1's in the four corners were the same; THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA was the same; the assurance that the bill could be
used to pay all public and private debts was the same.
But Paladin's one was a bright blue.
Instead of FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE it said CURRENCY OF
GOVERNMENT.
Instead of the letter A was the letter F.
But most of all it was the picture of the man on the bill that drew
Cheyney's attention, just as the picture of the man on Cheyney's
bill drew Paladin's.
Cheyney's gray-green one showed George Washington.
Paladin's blue one showed James Madison.
Stephen King
The Crate
First appeared in:
Gallery magazine 1979
Available in comic book form in:
Creepshow
Dexter Stanley was scared. More; he felt as if that central axle that
binds us to the state we call sanity were under a greater strain than
it had ever been under before. As he pulled up beside Henry
Northrup's house on North Campus Avenue that August night, he
felt that if he didn't talk to someone, he really, would go crazy.
There was no one to talk to but Henry Northrup. Dex Stanley was
the head of the zoology department, and once might have been
university president if he had been better at academic politics. His
wife had died twenty years before, and they had been childless.
What remained of his own family was all west of the Rockies. He
was not good at making friends.
Northrup was an exception to that. In some ways, they were two of
a kind; both had been disappointed in the mostly meaningless, but
always vicious, game of university politics. Three years before,
Northrup had made his run at the vacant English department
chairmanship. He had lost, and one of the reasons had undoubtedly
been his wife, Wilma, an abrasive and unpleasant woman. At the
few cocktail parties Dex had attended where English people and
zoology people could logically mix, it seemed he could always
recall the harsh mule-bray of her voice, telling some new faculty
wife to "call me Billie, dear everyone does!"
Dex made his way across the lawn to Northrup's door at a
stumbling run. It was Thursday, and Northrup's unpleasant spouse
took two classes on Thursday nights. Consequently, it was Dex and
Henry's chess night. The two men had been playing chess together
for the last eight years.
Dex rang the bell beside the door of his friend's house; leaned on
it. The door opened at ast and Northrup was there.
"Dex," he said. I didn't expect you for another--"
Dex pushed in past him. "Wilma," he said. "Is she here?"
"No, she left fifteen minutes ago. I was just making myself some
chow. Dex, you look awful."
They had walked under the hall light, and it illuminated the cheesy
pallor of Dex's face and seemed to outline wrinkles as deep and
dark as fissures in the earth. Dex was sixty-one, but on the hot
August night, he looked more like ninety.
"I ought to." Dex wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Well, what is it?"
"I'm afraid I'm going crazy, Henry. Or that I've already gone."
"You want something to eat? Wilma left cold ham."
"I'd rather have a drink. A big one."
"All right."
"Two men dead, Henry," Dex said abruptly. "And I could be
blamed. Yes, I can see how I could be blamed. But it wasn't me. It
was the crate. And I don't even know what's in there!" He uttered a
wild laugh.
"Dead?" Northrup said. "What is this, Dex?"
"A janitor. I don't know his name. And Gereson. A graduate
student. He just happened to be there. In the way of... whatever it
was."
Henry studied Dex's face for a long moment and then said, "I'll get
us both a drink."
He left. Dex wandered into the living room, past the low table
where the chess table had already been set up, and stared out the
graceful bow window. That thing in his mind, that axle or
whatever it was, did not feel so much in danger of snapping now.
Thank God for Henry.
Northrup came back with two pony glasses choked with ice. Ice
from the fridge's automatic icemaker, Stanley thought randomly.
Wilma "just call me Billie, everyone does" Northrup insisted on all
the modern conveniences... and when Wilma insisted on a thing,
she did so savagely.
Northrup filled both glasses with Cutty Sark. He handed one of
them to Stanley, who slopped Scotch over his fingers, stinging a
small cut he'd gotten in the lab a couple of days before. He hadn't
realized until then that his hands were shaking. He emptied half the
glass and the Scotch boomed in his stomach, first hot, then
spreading a steadylng warmth.
"Sit down, man," Northrup said.
Dex sat, and drank again. Now it was a lot better. He looked at
Northrup, who was looking levelly back over the rim of his own
glass. Dex looked away, out at the bloody orb of moon sitting over
the rim of the horizon, over the university, which was supposed to
be the seat of rationality, the forebrain of the body politic. How did
that jibe with the matter of the crate? With the screams? With the
blood?
"Men are dead?" Northrup said at last.
"Are you sure they're dead?"
"Yes. The bodies are gone now. At least, I think they are. Even the
bones... the teeth... but the blood... the blood, you know..."
"No, I don't know anything. You've got to start at the beginning."
Stanley took another drink and
set his glass down. "Of course I
do," he said. "Yes. It begins just where it ends. With the crate. The
janitor found the crate..."
Dexter Stanley had come into Amberson Hall, sometimes called
the Old Zoology Building, that afternoon at three o'clock. It was a
blaringly hot day, and the campus looked listless and dead, in spite
of the twirling sprinklers in front of the fraternity houses and the
Old Front dorms.
The Old Front went back to the turn of the century, but Amberson
Hall was much older than that. It was one of the oldest buildings
on a university campus that had celebrated its tricentennial two
years previous. It was a tall brick building, shackled with ivy that
seemed to spring out of the earth like green, clutching hands. Its
narrow windows were more like gun slits than real windows, and
Amberson seemed to frown at the newer buildings with their glass
walls and curvy, unorthodox shapes.
The new zoology building, Cather Hall, had been completed eight
months before, and the process of transition would probably go on
for another eighteen months. No one was completely sure what
would happen to Amberson then. If the bond issue to build the new
gym found favor with the voters, it would probably be demolished.
He paused a moment to watch two young men throwing a Frisbee
back and forth. A dog ran back and forth between them, glumly
chasing the spinning disc. Abruptly the mutt gave up and flopped
in the shade of a poplar. A VW with a NO NUKES sticker on the
back deck trundled slowly past, heading for the Upper Circle.
Nothing else moved. A week before, the final summer session had
ended and the campus lay still and fallow, dead ore on summer's
anvil.
Dex had a number of files to pick up, part of the seemingly endless
process of moving from Amberson to Cather. The old building
seemed spectrally empty. His footfalls echoed back dreamily as he
walked past closed doors with frosted glass panels, past bulletin
boards with their yellowing notices and toward his office at the end
of the first-floor corridor. The cloying smell of fresh paint hung in
the air.
He was almost to his door, and jingling his keys in his pocket,
when the janitor popped out of Room 6, the big lecture hall,
startling him.
He grunted, then smiled a little shamefacedly, the way people will
when they've gotten a mild zap. "You got me that time," he told the
janitor.
The janitor smiled and twiddled the gigantic key ring clipped to his
belt. "Sorry, Perfesser Stanley," he said. "I was hopin' it was you.
Charlie said you'd be in this afternoon."
"Charlie Gereson is still here?" Dex frowned. Gereson was a grad
student who was doing an involved--and possibly very important--
paper on negative environmental factors in long-term animal
migration. It was a subject that could have a strong impact on area
farming practices and pest control. But Gereson was pulling almost
fifty hours a week in the gigantic (and antiquated) basement lab.
The new lab complex in Cather would have been exponentially
better suited to his purposes, but the new labs would not be fully
equipped for another two to four months... if then.
"Think he went over the Union for a burger," the janitor said. "I
told him myself to quit a while and go get something to eat. He's
been here since nine this morning. Told him myself. Said he ought
to get some food. A man don't live on love alone."
The janitor smiled, a little tentatively, and Dex smiled back. The
janitor was right; Gereson was embarked upon a labor of love. Dex
had seen too many squadrons of students just grunting along and
making grades not to appreciate that... and not to worry about
Charlie Gereson's health and well-being from time to time.
"I would have told him, if he hadn't been so busy," the janitor said,
and offered his tentative little smile again. "Also, I kinda wanted to
show you myself."
"What's that?" Dex asked. He felt a little impatient. It was chess
night with Henry; he wanted to get this taken care of and still have
time for a leisurely meal at the Hancock House.
"Well, maybe it's nothin," the janitor said. "But... well, this buildin
is some old, and we keep turnin things up, don't we?"
Dex knew. It was like moving out of a house that has been lived in
for generations. Halley, the bright young assistant professor who
had been here for three years now, had found half a dozen antique
clips with small brass balls on the ends. She'd had no idea what the
clips, which looked a little bit like spring-loaded wishbones, could
be. Dex had been able to tell her. Not so many years after the Civil
War, those clips had been used to hold the heads of white mice,
who were then operated on without anesthetic. Young Halley, with
her Berkeley education and her bright spill of Farrah Fawcett-
Majors golden hair, had looked quite revolted. "No anti-
vivisectionists in those days," Dex had told her jovially. "At least
not around here." And Halley had responded with a blank look that
probably disguised disgust or maybe even loathing. Dex had put
his foot in it again. He had a positive talent for that, it seemed.
They had found sixty boxes of The American Zoologist in a
crawlspace, and the attic had been a maze of old equipment and
mouldering reports. Some of the impedimenta no one--not even
Dexter Stanley--could identify.
In the closet of the old animal pens at the back of the building,
Professor Viney had found a complicated gerbil-run with exquisite
glass panels. It had been accepted for display at the Musuem of
Natural Science in Washington.
But the finds had been tapering off this summer, and Dex thought
Amberson Hall had given up the last of its secrets."What have you
found?" he asked the janitor.
"A crate. I found it tucked right under the basement stairs. I didn't
open it. It's been nailed shut, anyway."
Stanly couldn't believe that anything very interesting could have
escaped notice for long, just by being tucked under the stairs. Tens
of thousands of people went up and down them every week during
the academic year. Most likely the janitor's crate was full of
department records dating back twenty-five years. Or even more
prosaic, a box of National Geographics.
"I hardly think--"
"It's a real crate," the janitor broke in earnestly. "I mean, my father
was a carpenter, and this crate is built tile way he was buildin 'em
back in the twenties. And he learned from his father."
"I really doubt if--"
"Also, it's got about four inches of dust on it. I wiped some off and
there's a date. Eighteen thirty-four."
That changed things. Stanley looked at his watch and decided he
could spare half all hour.
In spite of the humid August heat outside, the smooth tile-faced
throat of the stairway was almost cold. Above them, yellow frosted
globes cast a dim and thoughtful light. The stair levels had once
bee
n red, but in the centers they shaded to a dead black where the
feet of years had worn away layer after layer of resurfacing. The
silence was smooth and nearly perfect.
The janitor reached the bottom first and pointed under the
staircase. "Under here," he said.
Dex joined him in staring into a shadowy, triangular cavity under
the wide staircase. He felt a small tremor of disgust as he saw
where the janitor had brushed away a gossamer veil of cobwebs.
He supposed it was possible that the man had found something a
little older than postwar records under there, now that he acutally
looked at the space. But 1834?
"Just a second," the janitor said, and left momentarily. Left alone,
Dex hunkered down and peered in. He could make out nothing but
a deeper patch of shadow in there. Then the janitor returned with a
hefty four-cell flashlight. "This'll show it up."
"What were you doing under there anyway?" Dex asked.
The janitor grinned. "I was only standin here tryin to decide if I
should buff that second-floor hallway first or wash the lab
windows. I couldn't make up my mind, so I flipped a quarter. Only
I dropped it and it rolled under there." He pointed to the shadowy,
triangular cave. "I prob'ly would have let it go, except that was my
only quarter for the Coke machine. So I got my flash and knocked
down the cobwebs, and when I crawled under to get it, I saw that
crate. Here, have a look."
The janitor shone his light into the hole. Motes of disturbed dust
preened and swayed lazily in the beam. The light struck the far
wall in a spotlight circle, rose to the zigzag undersides of the stairs
briefly, picking out an ancient cobweb in which long-dead bugs
hung mumified, and then the light dropped and centered on a crate
about five feet long and two-and-a-half wide. It was perhaps three
feet deep. As the janitor had said, it was no knocked-together affair
made out of scrap-boards. It was neatly constructed of a smooth,
dark heavy wood. A coffin, Dexter thought uneasily. It looks like a
child's coffin.
The dark color of the wood showed only a fan-shaped swipe on the
side. The rest of the crate was the uniform dull gray of dust.
Something was written on the side-stenciled there.
Dex squinted but couldn't read it. He fumbled his glasses out of his
breast pocket and still couldn't. Part of what had been stenciled on
was obscured by the dust--not four inches of it, by any means, but
The Collective Page 31
