Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  The simple fact is, it’s why the world spins. Just the possibility of love has kept you going in the three years since Karen.

  Well, let me tell you. Marian is in love with you, and before the day is over, you will be in love with her. You can believe that or not, as you choose, but I, at the end of my life here this day, can take as one of my few consolations that I/you will have, tomorrow/today, the exquisite pleasure of falling in love with Marian.

  I envy you, you skeptical bastard.

  ***

  And since it’s just you and me, I’ll add this. Even with a girl you don’t love, “the first time” is always pretty damn interesting, isn’t it?

  For you, it’s always the first time … except when it’s the second time, just before sleep … which Marian seems to be suggesting this very moment.

  ***

  As usual, I have anticipated all your objections.

  You think it might be tough for her? You think she’s suffering?

  Okay. Admitted, the first few hours are what you might call repetitive for her. You gotta figure she’s bored, by now, at your invariant behavior when you first wake up. But it is a cross she bears willingly for the pleasure of your company during the rest of the day.

  She is a healthy, energetic girl, one who is aware that no woman ever had such an attentive, energetic lover. She loves a man who is endlessly fascinated by her, body and soul, who sees her with new eyes each and every day.

  She loves your perpetual enthusiasm, your renewable infatuation.

  There isn’t time to fall out of love.

  Anything more I could say would be wasting your time, and believe me, when you see what today is going to be like, you’d hate me for it.

  We could wish things were different. It is not fair that we have only one day. I, who am at the end of it, can feel the pain you only sense. I have my wonderful memories … which will soon be gone. And I have Marian, for a few more minutes.

  But I swear to you, I feel like an old, old man who has lived a full life, who has no regrets for anything he ever did, who accomplished something in his life, who loved, and was loved in return.

  Can many “normal” people die saying that?

  In just a few seconds that one, last locked door will open, and your new life and future love will come through it. I guarantee it will be interesting.

  I love you, and I now leave you …

  Have a nice day.

  ***

  © 1989 by John Varley.

  Originally appeared in Twilight Zone.

  STEPHEN KING

  Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.

  Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.

  He and Tabitha Spruce married in January of 1971. He met Tabitha in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, where they both worked as students. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.

  Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many of these were later gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.

  In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.

  In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication. On Mother's Day of that year, Stephen learned from his new editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, that a major paperback sale would provide him with the means to leave teaching and write full-time.

  At the end of the summer of 1973, the Kings moved their growing family to southern Maine because of Stephen's mother's failing health. Renting a summer home on Sebago Lake in North Windham for the winter, Stephen wrote his next-published novel, originally titled Second Coming and then Jerusalem's Lot, before it became'Salem's Lot, in a small room in the garage. During this period, Stephen's mother died of cancer, at the age of 59.

  Carrie was published in the spring of 1974. That same fall, the Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado. They lived there for a little less than a year, during which Stephen wrote The Shining, set in Colorado. Returning to Maine in the summer of 1975, the Kings purchased a home in the Lakes Region of western Maine. At that house, Stephen finished writing The Stand, much of which also is set in Boulder. The Dead Zone was also written in Bridgton.

  In 1977, the Kings spent three months of a projected year- long stay in England, cut the sojourn short and returned home in mid-December, purchasing a new home in Center Lovell, Maine. After living there one summer, the Kings moved north to Orrington, near Bangor, so that Stephen could teach creative writing at the University of Maine at Orono. The Kings returned to Center Lovell in the spring of 1979. In 1980, the Kings purchased a second home in Bangor, retaining the Center Lovell house as a summer home.

  Stephen and Tabitha now spend winters in Florida and the remainder of the year at their Bangor and Center Lovell homes.

  The Kings have three children: Naomi Rachel, Joe Hill and Owen Phillip, and four grandchildren.

  Stephen is of Scots-Irish ancestry, stands 6'4" and weighs about 200 pounds. He is blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and has thick, black hair, with a frost of white most noticeable in his beard, which he sometimes wears between the end of the World Series and the opening of baseball spring training in Florida. Occasionally he wears a moustache in other seasons. He has worn glasses since he was a child.

  He has put some of his college dramatic society experience to use doing cameos in several of the film adaptations of his works as well as a bit part in a George Romero picture, Knightriders. Joe Hill King also appeared in Creepshow, which was released in 1982. Stephen made his directorial debut, as well as writing the screenplay, for the movie Maximum Overdrive (an adaptation of his short story "Trucks") in 1985.

  Stephen and Tabitha provide scholarships for local high school students and contribute to many other local and national charities.

  Stephen is the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

  The Mangier, by Stephen King

  In the Middle Ages the ancient custom of naming inanimate objects reached its peak. Medieval people had proper names for their houses, jewels, swords, ships, bells, and war machines, as if these objects were imbued with their own special
life. Some of this has trickled down to our own "modern" times. We still have names for particularly precious (and cursed) jewels such as the Hope Diamond. During World War Two we had a name for our big guns, and we still name our ships, and even small boats. We even name our hurricanes.

  Perhaps some ancient instinct tells us that anything "created" is in some sense alive. Perhaps we name the things around us to help us maintain the illusion that we can control them. Or perhaps it is the primitive understanding that the spiritual—the sublime or the demonic-—can adhere in anything. The demons that modern, enlightened psychology has supposedly exorcised might be real. Even now they might be taking up residence in our cars, our houses . . . or our factories.

  And even the most neutral of objects might be suddenly turned into a thing as sinister and malignant as the mangier

  It hardly seems necessary to introduce Stephen King, since he is one of the most famous writers alive and one of the best-selling authors of all time. King is without doubt the foremost contemporary practitioner of the modern horror story, a subgenre that he is almost single-handedly responsible for bringing to a widespread public in the I970's. He has dominated the best-seller lists for almost a decade with books such as Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, Firestarter, Christine, The Dead Zone, and Cujo, most of which have been made into films as well. Recently, he was revealed as the author of the "Richard Bachman " thrillers, and they promptly topped the best-seller lists as well. His most recent books are Pet Semetary, a novel, and Skeleton Crew, a collection.

  Officer Hunton got to the laundry just as the ambulance was leaving—slowly, with no siren or flashing lights. Ominous. Inside, the office was stuffed with milling, silent people, some of them weeping. The plant itself was empty; the big automatic washers at the far end had not even been shut down. It made Hunton very wary. The crowd should be at the scene of the accident, not in the office. It was the way things worked—the human animal had a built-in urge to view the remains. A very bad one, then. Hunton felt his stomach tighten as it always did when the accident was very bad. Fourteen years of cleaning human litter from highways and streets and the sidewalks at the bases of very tall buildings had not been able to erase that little hitch in the belly, as if something evil had clotted there.

  A man in a white shirt saw Hunton and walked toward him reluctantly. He was a buffalo of a man with head thrust forward between shoulders, nose and cheeks vein-broken either from high blood pressure or too many conversations with the brown bottle. He was trying to frame words, but after two tries Hunton cut him off briskly:

  "Are you the owner? Mr. Gartley?"

  "No . . . no. I'm Stanner. The foreman. God, this—"

  Hunton got out his notebook. "Please show me the scene of the accident, Mr. Stanner, and tell me what happened."

  Stanner seemed to grow even more white; the blotches on his nose and cheeks stood out like birthmarks. "D-do I have to?"

  Hunton raised his eyebrows. "I'm afraid you do. The call I got said it was serious."

  "Serious—" Stanner seemed to be battling with his gorge; for a moment his Adam's apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick. "Mrs. Frawley is dead. Jesus, I wish Bill Gartley was here."

  "What happened?"

  Stanner said, "You better come over here."

  He led Hunton past a row of hand presses, a shirt-folding unit, and then stopped by a laundry-marking machine. He passed a shaky hand across his forehead. "You'll have to go over by yourself, Officer. I can't look at it again. It makes me . . . I can't. I'm sorry."

  Hunton walked around the marking machine with a mild feeling of contempt for the man. They run a loose shop, cut corners, run live steam through home-welded pipes, they work with dangerous cleaning chemicals without the proper protection, and finally, someone gets hurt. Or gets dead. Then they can't look. They can't—

  Hunton saw it.

  The machine was still running. No one had shut it off. The machine he later came to know intimately: the Hadley-Watson Model-6 Speed Ironer and Folder. A long and clumsy name. The people who worked here in the steam and the wet had a better name for it. The mangier.

  Hunton took a long, frozen look, and then he performed a first in his fourteen years as a law-enforcement officer: he turned around, put a convulsive hand to his mouth, and threw up.

  "You didn't eat much," Jackson said.

  The women were inside, doing dishes and talking babies while John Hunton and Mark Jackson sat in lawn chairs near the aromatic barbecue. Hunton smiled slightly at the understatement. He had eaten nothing.

  "There was a bad one today," he said. "The worst."

  "Car crash?"

  "No. Industrial."

  "Messy?"

  Hunton did not reply immediately, but his face made an involuntary, writhing grimace. He got a beer out of the cooler between them, opened it, and emptied half of it. "I suppose you college profs don't know anything about industrial laundries?"

  Jackson chuckled. "This one does. I spent a summer working in one as an undergraduate."

  "Then you know the machine they call the speed ironer?"

  Jackson nodded. "Sure. They run damp flatwork through them, mostly sheets and linen. A big, long machine."

  "That's it," Hunton said. "A woman named Adelle Frawley got caught in it at the Blue Ribbon Laundry crosstown. It sucked her right in."

  Jackson looked suddenly ill. "But . . . that can't happen, Johnny. There's a safety bar. If one of the women feeding the machine accidentally gets a hand under it, the bar snaps up and stops the machine. At least that's how I remember it."

  Hunton nodded. "It's a state law. But it happened."

  Hunton closed his eyes and in the darkness he could see the Hadley-Watson speed ironer again, as it had been that afternoon. It formed a long, rectangular box in shape, thirty feet by six. At the feeder end, a moving canvas belt moved under the safety bar, up at a slight angle, and then down. The belt carried the damp-dried, wrinkled sheets in continuous cycle over and under sixteen huge revolving cylinders that made up the main body of the machine. Over eight and under eight, pressed between them like thin ham between layers of superheated bread. Steam heat in the cylinders could be adjusted up to 300 degrees for maximum drying. The pressure on the sheets that rode the moving canvas belt was set at 800 pounds per square foot to get out every wrinkle.

  And Mrs. Frawley, somehow, had been caught and dragged in. The steel, asbestos-jacketed pressing cylinders had been as red as barn paint, and the rising steam from the machine had carried the sickening stench of hot blood. Bits of her white blouse and blue slacks, even ripped segments of her bra and panties, had been torn free and ejected from the machine's far end thirty feet down, the bigger sections of cloth folded with grotesque and bloodstained neatness by the automatic folder. But not even that was the worst.

  "It tried to fold everything," he said to Jackson, tasting bile in his throat. "But a person isn't a sheet, Mark. What I saw . . . what was left of her . . ." Like Stanner, the hapless foreman, he could not finish. "They took her out in a basket," he said softly.

  Jackson whistled. "Who's going to get it in the neck? The laundry or the state inspectors?"

  "Don't know yet," Hunton said. The malign image still hung behind his eyes, the image of the mangier wheezing and thumping and hissing, blood dripping down the green sides of the long cabinet in runnels, the burning stink of her . . . "It depends on who okayed that goddamn safety bar and under what circumstances."

  "If it's the management, can they wiggle out of it?"

  Hunton smiled without humor. "The woman died, Mark. If Gartley and Stanner were cutting corners on the speed ironer's maintenance, they'll go to jail. No matter who they know on the City Council."

  "Do you think they were cutting corners?"

  Hunton thought of the Blue Ribbon Laundry, badly lighted, floors wet and slippery, some of the machines incredibly ancient and creaking. "I think it's likely," he said quietly.

  They got up to go in the house to
gether. "Tell me how it comes out, Johnny," Jackson said. "I'm interested."

  Hunton was wrong about the mangier; it was clean as a whistle.

  Six state inspectors went over it before the inquest, piece by piece. The net result was absolutely nothing. The inquest verdict was death by misadventure.

  Hunton, dumbfounded, cornered Roger Martin, one of the inspectors, after the hearing. Martin was a tall drink of water with glasses as thick as the bottoms of shot glasses. He fidgeted with a ball-point pen under Hunton's questions.

  "Nothing? Absolutely nothing doing with the machine?"

  "Nothing," Martin said. "Of course, the safety bar was the guts of the matter. It's in perfect working order. You heard that Mrs. Gillian testify. Mrs. Frawley must have pushed her hand too far. No one saw that; they were watching their own work. She started screaming. Her hand was gone already, and the machine was taking her arm. They tried to pull her out instead of shutting it down—pure panic. Another woman, Mrs. Keene, said she did try to shut it off, but it's a fair assumption that she hit the start button rather the stop in the confusion. By then it was too late."

  "Then the safety bar malfunctioned," Hunton said flatly. "Unless she put her hand over it rather than under?"

  "You can't. There's a stainless-steel facing above the safety bar. And the bar itself didn't malfunction. It's circuited into the machine itself. If the safety bar goes on the blink, the machine shuts down."

  "Then how did it happen, for Christ's sake?"

  "We don't know. My colleagues and I are of the opinion that the only way the speed ironer could have killed Mrs. Frawley was for her to have fallen into it from above. And she had both feet on the floor when it happened. A dozen witnesses can testify to that."