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Bing! Joe rapped his knuckles against his head and crossed his eyes. Roland chuckled again even though he couldnt have the slightest idea where (or even what) Florida was. Susannahs smile was wider than ever. Floridas a helluva place, Joe said. Helluva place. Home of the newly wed and the nearly dead. My grandfather retired to Florida, God rest his soul. When I die, I want to go peacefully, in my sleep, like Grampa Fred. Not screaming, like the passengers in his car. Roland roared with laughter at that one, and Susannah did, too. Oys grin was wider than ever. My grandma, she was great, too. She said she learned how to swim when someone took her out on the Cuyahoga River and threw her off the boat. I said, Hey, Nana, they werent trying to teach you how to swim. Roland snorted, wiped his nose, then snorted again. His cheeks had bloomed with color. Laughter elevated the entire metabolism, put it almost on a fightorflight basis; Susannah had read that somewhere. Which meant her own must be rising, because she was laughing, too. It was as if all the horror and sorrow were gushing out of an open wound, gushing out like Well, like blood. She heard a faint alarmbell start to ring, far back in her mind, and ignored it. What was there to be alarmed about? They were laughing, for goodness sake! Having a good time! Can I be serious a minute? No? Well, fuck you and the nag you rode in ontomorrow when I wake up, Ill be sober, but youll still be ugly. And bald. (Roland roared.) Im gonna be serious, okay? If you dont like it, stick it where you keep your changepurse. My Nana was a great lady. Women in general are great, you know it? But they have their flaws, just like men. If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving a babys life, for instance, shell save the baby without even considering how many men are on base. Bing! He rapped his head with his knuckles and popped his eyes in a way that made them both laugh. Roland tried to put his coffee cup down and spilled it. He was holding his stomach. Hearing him laugh so hardto surrender to laughter so completely was funny in itself, and Susannah burst out in a fresh gale. Men are one thing, women are another. Put em together and youve got a whole new taste treat. Like Oreos. Like Peanut Butter Cups. Like raisin cake with snot sauce. Show me a man and a woman and Ill show you the Peculiar Institutionnot slavery, marriage. But I repeat myself. Bing! He rapped his head. Popped his eyes. This time they seemed to come kasproing halfway out of their sockets (how does he do that) and Susannah had to clutch her stomach, which was beginning to ache with the force of her laughter. And her temples were beginning to pound. It hurt, but it was a good hurt. Marriage is having a wife or a husband. Yeah! Check Websters! Bigamy is having a wife or husband too many. Of course, thats also monogamy. Bing! If Roland laughed any harder, Susannah thought, he would go sliding right out of his chair and into the puddle of spilled coffee. Then theres divorce, a Latin term meaning to rip a mans genitals out through the wallet. But I was talking about Cleveland, remember? You know how Cleveland got started? A bunch of people in New York said, Gee Im starting to enjoy the crime and the poverty, but its not quite cold enough. Lets go west. Laughter, Susannah would reflect later, is like a hurricane once it reaches a certain point, it becomes selffeeding, selfsupporting. You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own condition is funny. Joe Collins took them to this point with his next sally. Hey, remember in elementary school, you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quietly with the smallest people in front and the tallest people at the end of the line? Whats the logic in that? Do tall people burn slower? Susannah shrieked with laughter and slapped the side of her face. This produced a sudden and unexpected burst of pain that drove all the laughter out of her in a moment. The sore beside her mouth had been growing again, but hadnt bled in two or three days. When she inadvertently struck it with her flailing hand, she knocked away the blackishred crust covering it. The sore did not just bleed; it gushed. For a moment she was unaware of what had just happened. She only knew that slapping the side of her face hurt much more than it should have done. Joe also seemed unaware (his eyes were mostly closed again), must have been unaware, because he rapped faster than ever Hey, and what about that seafood restaurant they have at Sea World? I got halfway through my fishburger and wondered if I was eating a slow learner! Bing! And speaking of fish Oy barked in alarm. Susannah felt sudden wet warmth run down the side of her neck and onto her shoulder. Stop, Joe, Roland said. He sounded out of breath. Weak. With laughter, Susannah supposed. Oh, but the side of her face hurt, and Joe opened his eyes, looking annoyed. What? Jesus Christ, you wanted it and I was giving it to ya! Susannahs hurt herself. The gunslinger was up and looking at her, laughter lost in concern. Im not hurt, Roland, I just slapped myself upside the head a little harder than I m Then she looked at her hand and was dismayed to see it was wearing a red glove. NINE Oy barked again. Roland snatched the napkin from beside his overturned cup. One end was brown and soaking with coffee, but the other was dry. He pressed it against the gushing sore and Susannah winced away from his touch at first, her eyes filling with tears. Nay, let me stop the bleeding at least, Roland murmured, and grasped her head, working his fingers gently into the tight cap of her curls. Hold steady. And for him she managed to do it. Through her watering eyes Susannah thought Joe still looked pissed that she had interrupted his comedy routine in such drastic (not to mention messy) fashion, and in a way she didnt blame him. Hed been doing a really good job; shed gone and spoiled it. Aside from the pain, which was abating a little now, she was horribly embarrassed, remembering the time she had started her period in gym class and a little trickle of blood had run down her thigh for the whole world to seethat part of it with whom she had thirdperiod PE, at any rate. Some of the girls had begun chanting Plug it UP!, as if it were the funniest thing in the world. Mixed with this memory was fear concerning the sore itself. What if it was cancer? Before, shed always been able to thrust this idea away before it was fully articulated in her mind. This time she couldnt. What if shed caught her stupid self a cancer on her trek through the Badlands? Her stomach knotted, then heaved. She kept her fine dinner in its place, but perhaps only for the time being. Suddenly she wanted to be alone, needed to be alone. If she was going to vomit, she didnt want to do it in front of Roland and this stranger. Even if she wasnt, she wanted some time to get herself back under control. A gust of wind strong enough to shake the entire cottage roared past like a hotenj in full flight; the lights flickered and her stomach knotted again at the seasick motion of the shadows on the wall. Ive got to go the bathroom she managed to say. For a moment the world wavered, but then it steadied down again. In the fireplace a knot of wood exploded, shooting a flurry of crimson sparks up the chimney. You sure? Joe asked. He was no longer angry (if he had been), but he was looking at her doubtfully. Let her go, Roland said. She needs to settle herself down, I think. Susannah began to give him a grateful smile, but it hurt the sore place and started it bleeding again, too. She didnt know what else might change in the immediate future thanks to the dumb, unhealing sore, but she did know she was done listening to jokes for awhile. Shed need a transfusion if she did much more laughing. Ill be back, she said. Dont you boys go and eat all the rest of that pudding on me. The very thought of food made her feel ill, but it was something to say. On the subject of pudding, I make no promise, Roland said. Then, as she began to turn away If thee feels lightheaded in there, call me. I will, she said. Thank you, Roland. TEN Although Joe Collins lived alone, his bathroom had a pleasantly feminine feel to it. Susannah had noticed that the first time shed used it. The wallpaper was pink, with green leaves and what else?wild roses. The john looked perfectly modern except for the ring, which was wood instead of plastic. Had he carved it himself? She didnt think it was out of the question, although probably the robot had brought it from some forgotten store of stuff. Stuttering Carl? Was that what Joe called the robot? No, Bill. Stuttering Bill. On one side of the john there was a stool, on the other a clawfoot tub with a shower attachment that made her think of Hitchcocks Psycho (but every shower made her think of that damned movie since shed seen it in Times Square). There was also a porcelain washstand set in a waisthigh wooden cabinetgood old plainoak rather than ironwood, she judged. There was a mirror above it. She presumed you swung it out and there were your pills and potions. All the comforts of home. She removed the napkin with a wince and a little hissing cry. It had stuck in the drying blood, and pulling it away hurt. She was dismayed by the amount of blood on her cheeks, lips, and chinnot to mention her neck and the shoulder of her shirt. She told herself not to let it make her crazy; you ripped the top off something and it was going to bleed, that was all. Especially if it was on your stupid face. In the other room she heard Joe say something, she couldnt tell what, and Rolands response a few words with a chuckle tacked on at the end. So weird to hear him do that, she thought. Almost like hes drunk. Had she ever seen Roland drunk? She realized she had not. Never fallingdown drunk, never mothernaked, never fully caught by laughter until now. Ten yo business, woman, Detta told her. All right, she muttered. All right, all right. Thinking drunk. Thinking naked. Thinking lost in laughter. Thinking they were all so close to being the same thing. Maybe they were the same thing. Then she got up on the stool and turned on the water. It came in a gush, blotting out the sounds from the other room. She settled for cold, splashing it gently on her face, then using a faceclotheven more gentlyto clean the skin around the sore. When that was done, she patted the sore itself. Doing it didnt hurt as much as shed been afraid it might. Susannah was a little encouraged. When she was done, she rinsed out Joes facecloth before the bloodstains could set and leaned close to the mirror. What she saw made her breathe a sigh of relief. Slapping her hand incautiously to her face like that had torn the entire top off the sore, but maybe in the end that would turn out to be for the best. One thing was for sure if Joe had a bottle of hydrogen peroxide or some kind of antibiotic cream in his medicine cabinet, she intended to give the damned mess a good cleaningout while it was open. And nemine how much it might sting. Such a cleansing was due and overdue. Once it was finished, shed bandage it over and then just hope for the best. She spread the facecloth on the side of the basin to dry, then plucked a towel (it was the same shade of pink as the wallpaper) from a fluffy stack on a nearby shelf. She got it halfway to her face, then froze. There was a piece of notepaper lying on the next towel in the stack. It was headed with a flowerdecked bench being lowered by a pair of happy cartoon angels. Beneath was this printed, boldface line And, in faded fountain pen ink Frowning, Susannah plucked the sheet of notepaper from the stack of towels. Who had left it here? Joe? She doubted it like hell. She turned the paper over. Here the same hand had written In the other room, Joe continued to speak and this time Roland burst out laughing instead of just chuckling. It sounded to Susannah as if Joe had resumed his monologue. In a way she could understand thathed been doing something he loved, something he hadnt had a chance to do in a good long stretch of yearsbut part of her didnt like the idea at all. That Joe would resume while she was in the bathroom tending to herself, that Roland would let him resume. Would listen and laugh while she was shedding blood. It seemed like a rotten, boysclubby kind of thing to do. She supposed she had gotten used to better from Eddie. Why dont you forget the boys for the time being and concentrate on whats right in front of you? What does it mean? One thing seemed obvious someone had expected her to come in here and find that note. Not Roland, not Joe. Her. What a bad girl, it said. Girl. But who could have known? Who could have been sure? It wasnt as if she made a habit of slapping her face (or her chest, or her knee) when she laughed; she couldnt remember a single other instance when But she could. Once. At a Dean MartinJerry Lewis movie. Dopes at Sea, or something like that. Shed been caught up in the same fashion then, laughing simply because the laughter had reached some point of critical mass and become selffeeding. The whole audienceat the Clark in Times Square, for all she knewdoing the same, rocking and rolling, swinging and swaying, spraying popcorn from mouths that were no longer their own. Mouths that belonged, at least for a few minutes, to Martin and Lewis, those dopes at sea. But it had only happened that once. Comedy plus tragedy equals makebelieve. But theres no tragedy here, is there? She didnt expect an answer to this, but she got one. It came in the cold voice of intuition. Not yet, there isnt. For no reason whatsoever she found herself thinking of Lippy. Grinning, gruesome Lippy. Did the folken laugh in hell? Susannah was somehow sure they did. They grinned like Lippy the WonderNag when Satan began his (take my horse please) routine, and then they laughed. Helplessly. Hopelessly. For all of eternity, may it please ya not at all. What in the hells wrong with you, woman? In the other room, Roland laughed again. Oy barked, and that also sounded like laughter. Odds Lane, Odd Lane think about it. What was there to think about? One was the name of the street, the other was the same thing, only without the Whoaback, wait a minute, she said in a low voice. Little more than a whisper, really, and who did she think would hear her? Joe was talkingpretty much nonstop, it sounded like and Roland was laughing. So who did she think might be listening? The cellardweller, if there really was one? Whoaon a minute, just wait. She closed her eyes and once more saw the two streetsigns on their pole, signs that were actually a little below the pilgrims, because the newcomers had been standing on a snowbank nine feet high. TOWER ROAD, one of the signs had read that one pointing to the plowed road that disappeared over the horizon. The other, the one indicating the short lane with the cottages on it, had said ODDS LANE, only Only it didnt, she murmured, clenching the hand that wasnt holding the note into a fist. It didnt. She could see it clearly enough in her minds eye ODD LANE, with the apostrophe and the S added, and why would somebody do that? Was the signchanger maybe a compulsive neatnik who couldnt stand What? Couldnt stand what? Beyond the closed bathroom door, Roland roared louder than ever. Something fell over and broke. Hes not used to laughing like that, Susannah thought. You best look out, Roland, or youll do yourself damage. Laugh yourself into a hernia, or something. Think about it, her unknown correspondent had advised, and she was trying. Was there something about the words odd and lane that someone didnt want them to see? If so, that person had no need to worry, because she sure wasnt seeing it. She wished Eddie was here. Eddie was the one who was good at the funky stuff jokes and riddles and an Her breath stopped. An expression of wideeyed comprehension started to dawn on her face, and on the face of her twin in the mirror. She had no pencil and was terrible at the sort of mental rearrangements that she now had to Balanced on the stool, Susannah leaned over the waisthigh washstand and blew on the mirror, fogging it. She printed ODD LANE. Looked at it with growing understanding and dismay. In the other room, Roland laughed harder than ever and now she recognized what she should have seen thirty valuable seconds ago that laughter wasnt merry. It was jagged and out of control, the laughter of a man struggling for breath. Roland was laughing the way the folken laughed when comedy turned to tragedy. The way folken laughed in hell. Below ODD LANE she used the tip of her finger to print DANDELO, the anagram Eddie might have seen right away, and surely once he realized the apostropheS on the sign had been added to distract them. In the other room the laughter dropped and changed, becoming a sound that was alarming instead of amusing. Oy was barking crazily, and Roland Roland was choking. CHAPTER VI PATRICK DANVILLE ONE She wasnt wearing her gun. Joe had insisted she take the LaZBoy recliner when theyd returned to the living room after dinner, and shed put the revolver on the magazinelittered endtable beside it, after rolling the cylinder and drawing the shells. The shells were in her pocket. Susannah tore open the bathroom door and scrambled back into the living room. Roland was lying on the floor between the couch and the television, his face a terrible purple color. He was scratching at his swollen throat and still laughing. Their host was standing over him, and the first thing she saw was that his hairthat babyfine, shoulderlength white hairwas now almost entirely black. The lines around his eyes and mouth had been erased. Instead of ten years younger, Joe Collins now looked twenty or even thirty years younger. The son of a bitch. The vampire son of a bitch. Oy leaped at him and seized Joes left leg just above the knee. Twennyfive, sissyfour, nineteen, hike! Joe cried merrily, and kicked out, now as agile as Fred Astaire. Oy flew through the air and hit the wall hard enough to knock a plaque reading GOD BLESS OUR HOME to the floor. Joe turned back to Roland. What I think, he said, is that women need a reason to have sex. Joe put one foot on Rolands chest like a biggame hunter with his trophy, Susannah thought. Men, on the other hand, only need a place! Bing! He popped his eyes. The thing about sex is that God gives men a brain and a dick, but only enough blood to operate one at a He never heard her approach or lift herself into the LaZBoy in order to gain the necessary height; he was concentrating too completely on what he was doing. Susannah laced her hands together into a single fist, raised them to the height of her right shoulder, then brought them down and sideways with all the force she could manage. The fist struck the side of Joes head hard enough to knock him away. She had connected with solid bone, however, and the pain in her hands was excruciating. Joe staggered, waving his arms for balance and looking around at her. His upper lip rose, exposing his teethperfectly ordinary teeth, and why not? He wasnt the sort of vampire who survived on blood. This was Empathica, after all. And the face around those teeth was changing darkening, contracting, turning into something that was no longer human. It was the face of a psychotic clown. You, he said, but before he could say anything else, Oy had raced forward again. There was no need for the bumbler to use his teeth this time because their host was still staggering. Oy crouched behind the things ankle and Dandelo simply fell over him, his curses ceasing abruptly when he struck his head. The blow might have put him out if not for the homey rag rug covering the hardwood. As it was he forced himself to a sitting position almost at once, looking around groggily. Susannah knelt by Roland, who was also trying to sit up but not doing as well. She seized his gun in its holster, but he closed a hand around her wrist before she could pull it out. Instinct, of course, and to be expected, but Susannah felt close to panic as Dandelos shadow fell over them. You bitch, Ill teach you to interrupt a man when hes on a Roland, let it go! she screamed, and he did. Dandelo dropped, meaning to land on her and crush the gun between them, but she was an instant too quick. She rolled aside and he landed on Roland, instead. Susannah heard the tortured Owuff! as the gunslinger lost whatever breath he had managed to regain. She raised herself on one arm, panting, and pointed the gun at the one on top, the one undergoing some horridly busy change inside his clothes. Dandelo raised his hands, which were empty. Of course they were, it wasnt his hands he used to kill with. As he did so, his features began to pull together, becoming more and more surface thingsnot features at all but markings on some animals hide or an insects carapace. Stop! he cried in a voice that was dropping in pitch and becoming something like a cicadas buzz. I want to tell you the one about the archbishop and the chorus girl! Heard it, she said, and shot him twice, one bullet following another into his brain from just above what had been his right eye. TWO Roland floundered to his feet. His hair was matted to the sides of his swollen face. When she tried to take his hand, he waved her away and staggered to the front door of the little cottage, which now looked dingy and illlit to Susannah. She saw there were foodstains on the rug, and a large waterblemish on one wall. Had those things been there before? And dear Lord in heaven, what exactly had they eaten for supper? She decided she didnt want to know, as long as it didnt make her sick. As long as it wasnt poisonous. Roland of Gilead pulled open the door. The wind ripped it from his grasp and threw it against the wall with a bang. He staggered two steps into the screaming blizzard, bent forward with his hands placed on his lower thighs, and vomited. She saw the jet of egested material, and how the wind whipped it away into the dark. When Roland came back in, his shirt and the side of his face were rimed with snow. It was fiercely hot in the cottage; that was something else Dandelos glammer had hidden from them until now. She saw that the thermostata plain old Honeywell not much different from the one in her New York apartmentwas still on the wall. She went to it and examined it. It was twisted as far as it would go, beyond the eightyfivedegree mark. She pushed it back to seventy with the tip of a finger, then turned to survey the room. The fireplace was actually twice the size it had appeared to them, and filled with enough logs to make it roar like a steelfurnace. There was nothing she could do about that for the time being, but it would eventually die down. The dead thing on the rug had mostly burst out of its clothes. To Susannah it now looked like some sort of bug with misshapen appendagesalmost arms and legssticking out of the sleeves of its shirt and the legs of its jeans. The back of the shirt had split down the middle and what she saw in the gap was a kind of shell on which rudimentary human features were printed. She would not have believed anything could be worse than Mordred in his spiderform, but this thing was. Thank God it was dead. The tidy, welllit cottagelike something out of a fairytale, and hadnt she seen that from the first?was now a dim and smoky peasants hut. There were still electric lights, but they looked old and longused, like the kind of fixtures one might find in a flophouse hotel. The rag rug was dark with dirt as well as splotched with spilled food, and unraveling in places. Roland, are you all right? Roland looked at her, and then, slowly, went to his knees before her. For a moment she thought he was fainting, and she was alarmed. When she realized, only a second later, what was really happening, she was more alarmed still. Gunslinger, I was mazed, Roland said in a husky, trembling voice. I was taken in like a child, and I cry your pardon. Roland, no! Git up! That was Detta, who always seemed to come out when Susannah was under great strain. She thought, Its a wonder I didnt say Git up, honky, and had to choke back a cry of hysterical laughter. He would not have understood. Give me pardon, first, Roland said, not looking at her. She fumbled for the formula and found it, which was a relief. She couldnt stand to see him on his knees like that. Rise, gunslinger, I give you pardon in good heart. She paused, then added If I save your life another nine times, well be somewhere close to even. He said, Your kind heart makes me ashamed of my own, and rose to his feet. The terrible color was fading from his cheeks. He looked at the thing on the rug, casting its grotesquely misshapen shadow up the wall in the firelight. Looked around at the close little hut with its ancient fixtures and flickering electric bulbs. What he fed us was all right, he said. It was as if hed read her mind and seen the worst fear that it held. Hed never poison what he meant to eat. She was holding his gun out to him, butt first. He took it and reloaded the two empty chambers before dropping it back into the holster. The huts door was still open and snow came blowing in. It had already created a white delta in the little entryway, where their makeshift hide coats hung. The room was a little cooler now, a little less like a sauna. How did you know? he asked. She thought back to the hotel where Mia had left Black Thirteen. Later on, after theyd left, Jake and Callahan had been able to get into Room 1919 because someone had left them a note and (dadachee) a key. Jakes name and This is the truth had been written on the envelope in a hybrid of cursive script and printing. She was sure that if she had that envelope with its brief message and compared it to the message shed found in the bathroom, she would find the same hand made both. According to Jake, the deskclerk at the New York PlazaPark Hotel had told them the message had been left by a man named Stephen King. Come with me, she said. Into the bathroom. THREE Like the rest of the hut, the bathroom was smaller now, not much more than a closet. The tub was old and rusty, with a thin layer of dirt in the bottom. It looked like it had last been used Well, the truth was that it looked to Susannah like it had never been used. The showerhead was clotted with rust. The pink wallpaper was dull and dirty, peeling in places. There were no roses. The mirror was still there, but a crack ran down the middle of it, and she thought it was sort of a wonder that she hadnt cut the pad of her finger, writing on it. The vapor of her breath had faded but the words were still there, visible in the grime ODD LANE, and, below that, DANDELO. Its an anagram, she said. Do you see? He studied the writing, then shook his head, looking a bit ashamed. Not your fault, Roland. Theyre our letters, not the ones you know. Take my word for it, its an anagram. Eddie would have seen it right away, I bet. I dont know if it was Dandelos idea of a joke, or if there are some sort of rules glammer things like him have to follow, but the thing is, we figured it out in time, with a little help from Stephen King. You figured it out, he said. I was busy laughing myself to death. We both would have done that, she said. You were just a little more vulnerable because your sense of humor forgive me, Roland, but as a rule, its pretty lame. I know that, he said bleakly. Then he suddenly turned and left the room. A horrid idea came to Susannah, and it seemed a very long time before the gunslinger came back. Roland, is he still ? He nodded, smiling a little. Still as dead as ever was. You shot true, Susannah, but all at once I needed to be sure. Im glad, she said simply. Oys standing guard. If anything were to happen, Im sure hed let us know. He picked the note up from the floor and carefully puzzled out what was written on the back. The only term she had to help him with was medicine cabinet. Ive left you something. Do you know what? She shook her head. I didnt have time to look. Where is this medicine cabinet? She pointed at the mirror and he swung it out. It squalled on its hinges. There were indeed shelves behind it, but instead of the neat rows of pills and potions she had imagined, there were only two more brown bottles, like the one on the table beside the LaZBoy, and what looked to Susannah like the worlds oldest box of Smith Brothers Wild Cherry Cough Drops. There was also an envelope, however, and Roland handed it to her. Written on the front, in that same distinctive halfwriting, halfprinting, was this Childe? she asked. Does that mean anything to you? He nodded. Its a term that describes a knightor a gunslingeron a quest. A formal term, and ancient. We never used it among ourselves, you must ken, for it means holy, chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such terms, and I havent thought of myself so in many years. Yet you are Childe Roland? Perhaps once I was. Were beyond such things now. Beyond ka. But still on the Path of the Beam. Aye. He traced the last line on the envelope All debts are paid. Open it, Susannah, for Id see whats inside. She did. FOUR It was a photocopy of a poem by Robert Browning. King had written the poets name in his halfscript, halfprinting above the title. Susannah had read some of Brownings dramatic monologues in college, but she wasnt familiar with this poem. She was, however, extremely familiar with its subject; the title of the poem was Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. It was narrative in structure, the rhymescheme balladic (abbaab), and thirtyfour stanzas long. Each stanza was headed with a Roman numeral. SomeoneKing, presumablyhad circled stanzas I, II, XIII, XIV, and XVI. Read the marked ones, he said hoarsely, because I can only make out a word here and there, and I would know what they say, would know it very well. Stanza the First, she said, then had to clear her throat. It was dry. Outside the wind howled and the naked overhead bulb flickered in its flyspecked fixture. My first thought was, he lied in every word, That hoary cripple, with malicious eye Askance to watch the working of his lie On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby. Collins, Roland said. Whoever wrote that spoke of Collins as sure as King ever spoke of our katet in his stories! He lied in every word! Aye, so he did! Not Collins, she said. Dandelo. Roland nodded. Dandelo, say true. Go on. Okay; Stanza the Second. What else should he be set for, with his staff? What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare All travellers who might find him posted there, And ask the road? I guessed what skulllike laugh Would break, what crutch gin write my epitaph For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare. Does thee remember his stick, and how he waved it? Roland asked her. Of course she did. And the thoroughfare had been snowy instead of dusty, but otherwise it was the same. Otherwise it was a description of what had just happened to them. The idea made her shiver. Was this poet of your time? Roland asked. Your when? She shook her head. Not even of my country. He died at least sixty years before my when. Yet he must have seen what just passed. A version of it, anyway. Yes. And Stephen King knew the poem. She had a sudden intuition, one that blazed too bright to be anything but the truth. She looked at Roland with wild, startled eyes. It was this poem that got King going! It was his inspiration! Do you say so, Susannah? Yes! Yet this Browning must have seen us. She didnt know. It was too confusing. Like trying to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg. Or being lost in a hall of mirrors. Her head was swimming. Read the next one marked, Susannah! Read exeyeeyeeye. Thats Stanza Thirteen, she said. |
As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. One stiff blind horse, his every bone astare, Stood stupefied, however he came there; Thrust out past service from the devils stud! Now Stanza the Fourteenth I read thee. Alive? He might be dead for aught I know, With that red gaunt and colloped neck astrain, And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane; Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. Lippy, the gunslinger said, and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. Yonders pluggit, colloped neck and all, only female instead of male. She made no replyneeded to make none. Of course it was Lippy blind and bony, her neck rubbed right down to the raw pink in places. Her an ugly old thing, I know, the old man had said the thing that had looked like an old man. Ye old kibox and gammergurt, ye lost fourlegged leper! And here it was in black and white, a poem written long before sai King was even born, perhaps eighty or even a hundred years before as scant as hairIn leprosy. Thrust out past service from the devils stud! Roland said, smiling grimly. And while shell never stud nor ever did, well see shes back with the devil before we leave! No, she said. We wont. Her voice sounded drier than ever. She wanted a drink, but was now afraid to take anything flowing from the taps in this vile place. In a little bit she would get some snow and melt it. Then she would have her drink, and not before. Why do you say so? Because shes gone. She went out into the storm when we got the best of her master. How does thee know it? Susannah shook her head. I just do. She shuffled to the next page in the poem, which ran to over two hundred lines. Stanza the Sixteenth. Not it! I fancied She ceased. Susannah? Why do you Then his eyes fixed on the next word, which he could read even in English letters. Go on, he said. His voice was low, the words little more than a whisper. Are you positive? Read, for I would hear. She cleared her throat. Stanza the Sixteenth. Not it! I fancied Cuthberts reddening face Beneath its garniture of curly gold, Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold An arm in mine to fix me to the place, That way he used. Alas, one nights disgrace! Out went my hearts new fire and left it cold. He writes of Mejis, Roland said. His fists were clenched, although she doubted that he knew it. He writes of how we fell out over Susan Delgado, for after that it was never the same between us. We mended our friendship as best we could, but no, it was never quite the same. After the woman comes to the man or the man to the woman, I dont think it ever is, she said, and handed him the photocopied sheets. Take this. Ive read all the ones he mentioned. If theres stuff in the rest about coming to the Dark Toweror notpuzzle it out by yourself. You can do it if you try hard enough, I reckon. As for me, I dont want to know. Roland, it seemed, did. He shuffled through the pages, looking for the last one. The pages werent numbered, but he found the end easily enough by the white space beneath that stanza marked XXXIV. Before he could read, however, that thin cry came again. This time the wind was in a complete lull and there was no doubt about where it came from. Thats someone below us, in the basement, Roland said. I know. And I think I know who it is. He nodded. She was looking at him steadily. It all fits, doesnt it? Its like a jigsaw puzzle, and weve put in all but the last few pieces. The cry came again, thin and lost. The cry of someone who was next door to dead. They left the bathroom, drawing their guns. Susannah didnt think theyd need them this time. FIVE The bug that had made itself look like a jolly old joker named Joe Collins lay where it had lain, but Oy had backed off a step or two. Susannah didnt blame him. Dandelo was beginning to stink, and little trickles of white stuff were beginning to ooze through its decaying carapace. Nevertheless, Roland bade the bumbler remain where he was, and keep watch. The cry came again when they reached the kitchen, and it was louder, but at first they saw no way down to the cellar. Susannah moved slowly across the cracked and dirty linoleum, looking for a hidden trapdoor. She was about to tell Roland there was nothing when he said, Here. Behind the coldbox. The refrigerator was no longer a topoftheline Amana with an icemaker in the door but a squat and dirty thing with the cooling machinery on top, in a drumshaped casing. Her mother had had one like it when Susannah had been a little girl who answered to the name of Odetta, but her mother would have died before ever allowing her own to be even a tenth as dirty. A hundredth. Roland moved it aside easily, for Dandelo, sly monster that hed been, had put it on a little wheeled platform. She doubted that he got many visitors, not way out here in EndWorld, but he had been prepared to keep his secrets if someone did drop by. As she was sure folken did, every once and again. She imagined that few if any got any further along their way than the little hut on Odd Lane. The stairs leading down were narrow and steep. Roland felt around inside the door and found a switch. It lit two bare bulbs, one halfway down the stairs and one below. As if in response to the light, the cry came again. It was full of pain and fear, but there were no words in it. The sound made her shiver. Come to the foot of the stairs, whoever you are! Roland called. No response from below. Outside the wind gusted and whooped, driving snow against the side of the house so hard that it sounded like sand. Come to where we can see you, or well leave you where you are! Roland called. The inhabitant of the cellar didnt come into the scant light but cried out again, a sound that was loaded with woe and terror andSusannah feared itmadness. He looked at her. She nodded and spoke in a whisper. Go first. Ill back your play, if you have to make one. Ware the steps that you dont take a tumble, he said in the same low voice. She nodded again and made his own impatient twirling gesture with one hand Go on, go on. That raised a ghost of a smile on the gunslingers lips. He went down the stairs with the barrel of his gun laid into the hollow of his right shoulder, and for a moment he looked so like Jake Chambers that she could have wept. SIX The cellar was a maze of boxes and barrels and shrouded things hanging from hooks. Susannah had no wish to know what the dangling things were. The cry came again, a sound like sobbing and screaming mingled together. Above them, dim and muffled now, came the whoop and gasp of the wind. Roland turned to his left and threaded his way down a zigzag aisle with crates stacked headhigh on either side. Susannah followed, keeping a good distance between them, looking constantly back over her shoulder. She was also alert for the sound of Oy raising the alarm from above. She saw one stack of crates that was labeled TEXAS INSTRUMENTS and another stack with HO FAT CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE CO. stenciled on the side. She was not surprised to see the joke name of their longabandoned taxi; she was far beyond surprise. Ahead of her, Roland stopped. Tears of my mother, he said in a low voice. She had heard him use this phrase once before, when they had come upon a deer that had fallen into a ravine and lay there with both back legs and one front one broken, starving and looking up at them sightlessly, for the flies had eaten the unfortunate animals living eyes out of their sockets. She stayed where she was until he gestured for her to join him, and then moved quickly up to his right side, boosting herself along on the palms of her hands. In the stonewalled far corner of Dandelos cellar the southeast corner, if she had her directions rightthere was a makeshift prison cell. Its door was made of crisscrossing steel bars. Nearby was the welding rig Dandelo must have used to construct it but long ago, judging from the thick layer of dust on the acetylene tank. Hanging from an Sshaped hook pounded into the stone wall, just out of the prisoners reach left close by to mock him, Susannah had no doubtwas a large and oldfashioned (dadachum dadachee) silver key. The prisoner in question stood at the bars of his detainment, holding his filthy hands out to them. He was so scrawny that he reminded Susannah of certain terrible concentrationcamp photos she had seen, images of those who had survived Auschwitz and BergenBelsen and Buchenwald, living (if barely) indictments of mankind as a whole with their striped uniforms hanging off them and their ghastly bellboys pillbox hats still on their heads and their terrible bright eyes, so full of awareness. We wish we did not know what we have become, those eyes said, but unfortunately we do. Something like that was in Patrick Danvilles eyes as he held out his hands and made his inarticulate pleading noises. Close up, they sounded to her like the mocking cries of some jungle bird on a movie soundtrack Iyeee, Iyeee, Iyowk, Iyowk! Roland took the key from its hook and went to the door. One of Danvilles hands clutched at his shirt and the gunslinger pushed it off. It was a gesture entirely without anger, she thought, but the scrawny thing in the cell backed away with his eyes bulging in their sockets. His hair was longit hung all the way to his shouldersbut there was only the faintest haze of beard on his cheeks. It was a little thicker on his chin and upper lip. Susannah thought he might be seventeen, but surely not much older. No offense, Patrick, Roland said in a purely conversational voice. He put the key in the lock. Is thee Patrick? Is thee Patrick Danville? The scrawny thing in the dirty jeans and billowing gray shirt (it hung nearly to his knees) backed into the corner of his triangular cell without replying. When his back was against the stone, he slid slowly to a sitting position beside what Susannah assumed was his slopbucket, the front of his shirt first bunching together and then flowing into his crotch like water as his knees rose to nearly frame his emaciated, terrified face. When Roland opened the cell door and pulled it outward as far as it would go (there were no hinges), Patrick Danville began to make the birdsound again, only this time louder IYEEE! IYOWK! IYEEEEEE! Susannah gritted her teeth. When Roland made as if to enter the cell, the boy uttered an even louder shriek, and began to beat the back of his head against the stones. Roland stepped back out of the cell. The awful headbanging ceased, but Danville looked at the stranger with fear and mistrust. Then he held out his filthy, longfingered hands again, as if for succor. Roland looked to Susannah. She swung herself on her hands so she was in the door of the cell. The emaciated boything in the corner uttered its weird birdshriek again and pulled the supplicating hands back, crossing them at the wrists, turning their gesture into one of pathetic defense. No, honey. This was a Detta Walker Susannah had never heard before, nor suspected. No, honey, Ah ain goan hurt you, if Ah meant tdo dat, Ahd just put two in yo haid, like Ah did that mahfah upstairs. She saw something in his eyes perhaps just a minute widening that revealed more of the bloodshot whites. She smiled and nodded. Dass ri! Mistuh Collins, he daid! He ain nev goan come down he no mo an whuh? Whut he do to you, Patrick? Above them, muffled by the stone, the wind gusted. The lights flickered; the house creaked and groaned in protest. Whuh he do tyou, boy? It was no good. He didnt understand. She had just made up her mind to this when Patrick Danville put his hands to his stomach and held it. He twisted his face into a cramp that she realized was supposed to indicate laughter. He make you laugh? Patrick, crouched in his corner, nodded. His face twisted even more. Now his hands became fists that rose to his face. He rubbed his cheeks with them, then screwed them into his eyes, then looked at her. Susannah noticed there was a little scar on the bridge of his nose. He make you cry, too. Patrick nodded. He did the laughing mime again, holding the stomach and going hohoho; he did the crying mime, wiping tears from his fuzzy cheeks; this time he added a third bit of mummery, scooping his hands toward his mouth and making smacksmack sounds with his lips. From above and slightly behind her, Roland said He made you laugh, he made you cry, he made you eat. Patrick shook his head so violently it struck the stone walls that were the boundaries of his corner. He ate, Detta said. Dass whut you trine tsay, aint it? Dandelo ate. Patrick nodded eagerly. He made you laugh, he made you cry, and den he ate whut came out. Cause dass what he do! Patrick nodded again, bursting into tears. He made inarticulate wailing sounds. Susannah worked her way slowly into the cell, pushing herself along on her palms, ready to retreat if the headbanging started again. It didnt. When she reached the boy in the corner, he put his face against her bosom and wept. Susannah turned, looked at Roland, and told him with her eyes that he could come in now. When Patrick looked up at her, it was with dumb, doglike adoration. Dont you worry, Susannah saidDetta was gone again, probably worn out from all that nice. Hes not going to get you, Patrick, hes dead as a doornail, dead as a stone in the river. Now I want you to do something for me. I want you to open your mouth. Patrick shook his head at once. There was fear in his eyes again, but something else she hated to see even more. It was shame. Yes, Patrick, yes. Open your mouth. He shook his head violently, his greasy long hair whipping from side to side like the head of a mop. Roland said, What Hush, she told him. Open your mouth, Patrick, and show us. Then well take you out of here and youll never have to be down here again. Never have to be Dandelos dinner again. Patrick looked at her, pleading, but Susannah only looked back at him. At last he closed his eyes and slowly opened his mouth. His teeth were there, but his tongue was not. At some point, Dandelo must have tired of his prisoners voiceor the words it articulated, anywayand had pulled it out. SEVEN Twenty minutes later, the two of them stood in the kitchen doorway, watching Patrick Danville eat a bowl of soup. At least half of it was going down the boys gray shirt, but Susannah reckoned that was all right; there was plenty of soup, and there were more shirts in the huts only bedroom. Not to mention Joe Collinss heavy parka hung on the hook in the entry, which she expected Patrick would wear hence from here. As for the remains of DandeloJoe Collins that wasthey had wrapped them in three blankets and tossed them unceremoniously out into the snow. She said, Dandelo was a vampire that fed on emotions instead of blood. Patrick, there Patrick was his cow. Theres two ways you can take nourishment from a cow meat or milk. The trouble with meat is that once you eat the prime cuts, the notsoprime cuts, and then the stew, its gone. If you just take the milk, though, you can go on forever always assuming you give the cow something to eat every now and then. How long do you suppose he had him penned up down there? Roland asked. I dont know. But she remembered the dust on the acetylene tank, remembered it all too well. A fairly long time, anyway. What must have seemed like forever to him. And it hurt. Plenty. Much as it must have hurt when Dandelo pulled the poor kids tongue out, I bet the emotional bloodsucking hurt more. You see how he is. Roland saw, all right. He saw something else, as well. We cant take him out in this storm. Even if we dressed him up in three layers of clothes, Im sure it would kill him. Susannah nodded. She was sure, too. Of that, and something else she could not stay in the house. That might kill her. Roland agreed when she said so. Well camp out in yonder barn until the storm finishes. Itll be cold, but I see a pair of possible gains Mordred may come, and Lippy may come back. Youd kill them both? Aye, if I could. Doee have a problem with that? She considered it, then shook her head. All right. Lets put together what wed take out there, for well have no fire for the next two days, at least. Maybe as long as four. EIGHT It turned out to be three nights and two days before the blizzard choked on its own fury and blew itself out. Near dusk of the second day, Lippy came limping out of the storm and Roland put a bullet in the blind shovel that was her head. Mordred never showed himself, although she had a sense of him lurking close on the second night. Perhaps Oy did, too, for he stood at the mouth of the barn, barking hard into the blowing snow. During that time, Susannah found out a good deal more about Patrick Danville than she had expected. His mind had been badly damaged by his period of captivity, and that did not surprise her. What did was his capacity for recovery, limited though it might be. She wondered if she herself could have come back at all after such an ordeal. Perhaps his talent had something to do with it. She had seen his talent for herself, in Sayres office. Dandelo had given his captive the bare minimum of food necessary to keep him alive, and had stolen emotions from him on a regular basis two times a week, sometimes three, once in awhile even four. Each time Patrick became convinced that the next time would kill him, someone would happen by. Just lately, Patrick had been spared the worst of Dandelos depredations, because company had been more frequent than ever before. Roland told her later that night, after theyd bedded down in the hayloft, that he believed many of Dandelos most recent victims must have been exiles fleeing either from Le Casse Roi Russe or the town around it. Susannah could certainly sympathize with the thinking of such refugees The King is gone, so lets get the hell out of here while the gettings good. After all, Big Red might take it into his head to come back, and hes off his chump, round the bend, possessed of an elevator that no longer goes to the top floor. On some occasions, Joe had assumed his true Dandelo form in front of his prisoner, then had eaten the boys resulting terror. But he had wanted much more than terror from his captive cow. Susannah guessed that different emotions must produce different flavors like having pork one day, chicken the next, and fish the day after that. Patrick couldnt talk, but he could gesture. And he could do more than that, once Roland showed them a queer find hed come upon in the pantry. On one of the highest shelves was a stack of oversized drawing pads marked MICHELANGELO, FINE FOR CHARCOAL. They had no charcoal, but near the pads was a clutch of brandnew EberhardFaber 2 pencils held together by a rubber band. What qualified the find as especially queer was the fact that someone (presumably Dandelo) had carefully cut the eraser off the top of each pencil. These were stored in a canning jar next to the pencils, along with a few paper clips and a pencilsharpener that looked like the whistles on the undersides of the few remaining Oriza plates from Calla Bryn Sturgis. When Patrick saw the pads, his ordinarily dull eyes lit up and he stretched both hands longingly toward them, making urgent hooting sounds. Roland looked at Susannah, who shrugged and said, Lets see what he can do. I have a pretty good idea already, dont you? It turned out that he could do a lot. Patrick Danvilles drawing ability was nothing short of amazing. And his pictures gave him all the voice he needed. He produced them rapidly, and with clear pleasure; he did not seem disturbed at all by their harrowing clarity. One showed Joe Collins chopping into the back of an unsuspecting visitors head with a hatchet, his lips pulled back in a snarling grin of pleasure. Beside the point of impact, the boy had printed CHUNT! And SPLOOSH! in big comicbook letters. Above Collinss head, Patrick drew a thoughtballoon with the words Take that, ya lunker! in it. Another picture showed Patrick himself, lying on the floor, reduced to helplessness by laughter that was depicted with terrible accuracy (no need of the Ha! Ha! Ha! scrawled above his head), while Collins stood over him with his hands on his hips, watching. Patrick then tossed back the sheet of paper with that drawing on it and quickly produced another picture which showed Collins on his knees, with one hand twined in Patricks hair while his pursed lips hovered in front of Patricks laughing, agonized mouth. Quickly, in a single practiced movement (the tip of the pencil never left the paper), the boy made another comicstrip thoughtballoon over the old mans head and then put seven letters and two exclamation points inside. What does it say? Roland asked, fascinated. YUM! Good! Susannah answered. Her voice was small and sickened. Subject matter aside, she could have watched him draw for hours; in fact, she did. The speed of the pencil was eerie, and neither of them ever thought to give him one of the amputated erasers, for there seemed to be no need. So far as Susannah could see, the boy either never made a mistake, or incorporated the mistakes into his drawings in a way that made themwell, why stick at the words if they were the right words?little acts of genius. And the resulting pictures werent sketches, not really, but finished works of art in themselves. She knew what Patrickthis one or another Patrick from another world along the path of the Beam would later be capable of with oil paints, and such knowledge made her feel cold and hot at the same time. What did they have here? A tongueless Rembrandt? It occurred to her that this was their second idiotsavant. Their third, if you counted Oy as well as Sheemie. Only once did his lack of interest in the erasers cross Susannahs mind, and she put it down to the arrogance of genius. Not a single time did it occur to heror to Rolandthat this young version of Patrick Danville might not yet know that such things as erasers even existed. NINE Near the end of the third night, Susannah awoke in the loft, looked at Patrick lying asleep beside her, and descended the ladder. Roland was standing in the doorway of the barn, smoking a cigarette and looking out. The snow had stopped. A late moon had made its appearance, turning the fresh snow on Tower Road into a sparkling land of silent beauty. The air was still and so cold she felt the moisture in her nose crackle. Far in the distance she heard the sound of a motor. As she listened, it seemed to her that it was drawing closer. She asked Roland if he had any idea what it was or what it might mean to them. I think its likely the robot he called Stuttering Bill, out doing his afterstorm plowing, he said. He may have one of those antennathings on his head, like the Wolves. You remember? She remembered very well, and said so. It may be that he holds some special allegiance to Dandelo, Roland said. I dont think thats likely, but it wouldnt be the strangest thing I ever ran across. Be ready with one of your plates if he shows red. And Ill be ready with my gun. But you dont think so. She wanted to be a hundred per cent clear on this point. No, Roland said. He could give us a ride, perhaps all the way to the Tower itself. Even if not, he might take us to the far edge of the White Lands. That would be good, for the boys still weak. This raised a question in her mind. We call him the boy, because he looks like a boy, she said. How old do you think he is? Roland shook his head. Surely no younger than sixteen or seventeen, but he might be as old as thirty. Time was strange when the Beams were under attack, and it took strange hops and twists. I can attest to that. Did Stephen King put him in our way? I cant say, only that he knew of him, sure. He paused. The Tower is so close! Do you feel it? She did, and all the time. Sometimes it was a pulsing, sometimes it was singing, quite often it was both. And the Polaroid still hung in Dandelos hut. That, at least, had not been part of the glammer. Each night in her dreams, at least once, she saw the Tower in that photograph standing at the end of its field of roses, sooty grayblack stone against a troubled sky where the clouds streamed out in four directions, along the two Beams that still held. She knew what the voices sangcommala! commala! commalacomecome!but she did not think that they sang to her, or for her. No, say no, say never in life; this was Rolands song, and Rolands alone. But she had begun to hope that that didnt necessarily mean she was going to die between here and the end of her quest. She had been having her own dreams. TEN Less than an hour after the sun rose (firmly in the east, and we all say thankya), an orange vehiclecombination truck and bulldozerappeared over the horizon and came slowly but steadily toward them, pushing a big wing of fresh snow to its right, making the high bank even higher on that side. Susannah guessed that when it reached the intersection of Tower Road and Odd Lane, Stuttering Bill (almost surely the plows operator) would swing it around and plow back the other way. Maybe he stopped here, as a rule, not for coffee but for a fresh squirt of oil, or something. She smiled at the idea, and at something else, as well. There was a loudspeaker mounted on the cabs roof and a rock and roll song she actually knew was issuing forth. Susannah laughed, delighted. California Sun! The Rivieras! Oh, doesnt it sound fine! If you say so, Roland agreed. Just keep hold of thy plate. You can count on that, she said. Patrick had joined them. As always since Roland had found them in the pantry, he had a pad and a pencil. Now he wrote a single word in capital letters and held it out to Susannah, knowing that Roland could read very little of what he wrote, even if it was printed in letters that were bigbig. The word in the lower quadrant of the sketchpad was BILL. This was below an amazing drawing of Oy, with a comicstrip speechballoon over his head reading YARK! YARK! All this he had casually crossed out so she wouldnt think it was what he wanted her to look at. The slashed X sort of broke her heart, because the picture beneath its crossed lines was Oy to the life. ELEVEN The plow pulled up in front of Dandelos hut, and although the engine continued to run, the music cut off. Down from the drivers seat there galumphed a tall (eight feet at the very least), shinyheaded robot who looked quite a lot like Nigel from the Arc 16 Experimental Station and Andy from Calla Bryn Sturgis. He cocked his metal arms and put his metal hands on his hips in a way that would likely have reminded Eddie of George Lucass C3P0, had Eddie been there. The robot spoke in an amplified voice that rolled away across the snowfields HELLO, JJOE! WHAT DO YOU NUHNUHKNOW? HOW ARE TRICKS IN KUHKUHKOKOMO? Roland stepped out of the late Lippys quarters. Hile, Bill, he said mildly. Long days and pleasant nights. The robot turned. His eyes flashed bright blue. That looked like surprise to Susannah. He showed no alarm that she could see, however, and didnt appear to be armed, but she had already marked the antenna rising from the center of his headtwirling and twirling in the bright morning lightand she felt confident she could clip it with an Oriza if she needed to. EasypeasyJapaneezy, Eddie would have said. Ah! said the robot. A guddagah, gunnagah, ggg He raised an arm that had not one elbowjoint but two and smacked his head with it. From inside came a little whistling noiseWheeep!and then he finished A gunslinger! Susannah laughed. She couldnt help it. They had come all this way to meet an oversized electronic version of Porky Pig. Tbeyatbeyatbeya, thats all, folks! I had heard rumors of such on the lllland, the robot said, ignoring her laughter. Are you RuhRuhRoland of GGilead? So I am, Roland said. And you? William, D746541M, Maintenance Robot, Many Other Functions. Joe Collins calls me Stuhhuttering BBill. Ive got a fffried sirhirkit somewhere inside. I could fix it, but he fuhfuhforbade me. And since hes the only hhuman around or was He stopped. Susannah could quite clearly hear the clitterclack of relays somewhere inside and what she thought of wasnt C3P0, who shed of course never seen, but Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet. Then Stuttering Bill quite touched her heart by putting one metal hand to his forehead and bowing but not to either her or to Roland. He said, Hile, Patrick DDanville, son of SSSonia! Its good to see you out and in the ccclear, so it is! And Susannah could hear the emotion in Stuttering Bills voice. It was genuine gladness, and she felt more than okay about lowering her plate. TWELVE They palavered in the yard. Bill would have been quite willing to go into the hut, for he had but rudimentary olfactory equipment. The humes were better equipped and knew that the hut stank and had not even warmth to recommend it, for the furnace and the fire were both out. In any case, the palaver didnt take long. William the Maintenance Robot (Many Other Functions) had counted the being that sometimes called itself Joe Collins as his master, for there was no longer anyone else to lay claim to the job. Besides, CollinsDandelo had the necessary codewords. I wwas nuhnot able to ggive him the ccode wuhwuhhurds when he aasked, said Stuttering Bill, but my pprogramming did not pruhprohibit bringing him cerhertain mmanuals that had the ihinformation he needed. Bureaucracy is so wonderful, Susannah said. Bill said he had stayed away from JJJoe as often (and as long) as he could, although he had to come when Tower Road needed plowing that was also in his programming and once a month to bring provisions (canned goods, mostly) from what he called the Federal. He also liked to see Patrick, who had once given Bill a wonderful picture of himself that he looked at often (and of which he had made many copies). Yet every time he came, he confided, he was sure he would find Patrick gonekilled and thrown casually into the woods somewhere back toward what Bill called the BuhBuhBads, like an old piece of trash. But now here he was, alive and free, and Bill was delighted. For I do have rrrudimentary emmmotions, he said, sounding to Susannah like someone owning up to a bad habit. Do you need the codewords from us, in order to accept our orders? Roland asked. Yes, sai, Stuttering Bill said. Shit, Susannah muttered. They had had similar problems with Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis. HHHowever, said Stuttering Bill, if you were to cccouch your orders as suhhuhhugestions, Im sure Id be huhhuhhuhhuh He raised his arm and smacked his head again. The Wheep! sound came once more, not from his mouth but from the region of his chest, Susannah thought. happy to oblige, he finished. My first suggestion is that you fix that fucking stutter, Roland said, and then turned around, amazed. Patrick had collapsed to the snow, holding his belly and voicing great, blurry cries of laughter. Oy danced around him, barking, but Oy was harmless; this time there was no one to steal Patricks joy. It belonged only to him. And to those lucky enough to hear it. THIRTEEN In the woods beyond the plowed intersection, back toward what Bill would have called the Bads, a shivering adolescent boy wrapped in stinking, halfscraped hides watched the quartet standing in front of Dandelos hut. Die, he thought at them. Die, why dont you all do me a favor and just die? But they didnt die, and the cheerful sound of their laughter cut him like knives. Later, after they had all piled into the cab of Bills plow and driven away, Mordred crept down to the hut. There he would stay for at least two days, eating his fill from the cans in Dandelos pantryand eating something else as well, something he would live to regret. He spent those days regaining his strength, for the big storm had come close to killing him. |
He believed it was his hate that had kept him alive, that and no more. Or perhaps it was the Tower. For he felt it, toothat pulse, that singing. But what Roland and Susannah and Patrick heard in a major key, Mordred heard in a minor. And where they heard many voices, he heard only one. It was the voice of his Red Father, telling him to come. Telling him to kill the mute boy, and the blackbird bitch, and especially the gunslinger out of Gilead, the uncaring White Daddy who had left him behind. (Of course his Red Daddy had also left him behind, but this never crossed Mordreds mind.) And when the killing was done, the whispering voice promised, they would destroy the Dark Tower and rule todash together for eternity. So Mordred ate, for Mordred was ahungry. And Mordred slept, for Mordred was aweary. And when Mordred dressed himself in Dandelos warm clothes and set out along the freshly plowed Tower Road, pulling a rich sack of gunna on a sled behind himcanned goods, mostlyhe had become a young man who looked to be perhaps twenty years old, tall and straight and as fair as a summer sunrise, his human form marked only by the scar on his side where Susannahs bullet had winged him, and the bloodmark on his heel. That heel, he had promised himself, would rest on Rolands throat, and soon. CHAPTER I THE SORE AND THE DOOR (GOODBYE, MY DEAR) ONE In the final days of their long journey, after Billjust Bill now, no longer Stuttering Billdropped them off at the Federal, on the edge of the White Lands, Susannah Dean began to suffer frequent bouts of weeping. She would feel these impending cloudbursts and would excuse herself from the others, saying she had to go into the bushes and do her necessary. And there she would sit on a fallen tree or perhaps just the cold ground, put her hands over her face, and let her tears flow. If Roland knew this was happeningand surely he must have noted her red eyes when she returned to the roadhe made no comment. She supposed he knew what she did. Her time in MidWorldand EndWorldwas almost at an end. TWO Bill took them in his fine orange plow to a lonely Quonset hut with a faded sign out front reading FEDERAL OUTPOST 19 TOWER WATCH TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT IS FORBIDDEN! She supposed Federal Outpost 19 was still technically in the White Lands of Empathica, but the air had warmed considerably as Tower Road descended, and the snow on the ground was little more than a scrim. Groves of trees dotted the ground ahead, but Susannah thought the land would soon be almost entirely open, like the prairies of the American Midwest. There were bushes that probably supported berries in warm weatherperhaps even pokeberriesbut now they were bare and clattering in the nearly constant wind. Mostly what they saw on either side of Tower Roadwhich had once been paved but had now been reduced to little more than a pair of broken rutswere tall grasses poking out of the thin snowcover. They whispered in the wind and Susannah knew their song Commalacomecome, journeys almost done. I may go no further, Bill said, shutting down the plow and cutting off Little Richard in midrave. Tell ya sorry, as they say in the Arc o the Borderlands. Their trip had taken one full day and half of another, and during that time he had entertained them with a constant stream of what he called golden oldies. Some of these were not old at all to Susannah; songs like Sugar Shack and Heat Wave had been current hits on the radio when shed returned from her little vacation in Mississippi. Others she had never heard at all. The music was stored not on records or tapes but on beautiful silver discs Bill called ceedees. He pushed them into a slot in the plows instrumentcluttered dashboard and the music played from at least eight different speakers. Any music would have sounded fine to her, she supposed, but she was especially taken by two songs she had never heard before. One was a deliriously happy little rocker called She Loves You. The other, sad and reflective, was called Hey Jude. Roland actually seemed to know the latter one; he sang along with it, although the words he knew were different from the ones coming out of the plows multiple speakers. When she asked, Bill told her the group was called The Beetles. Funny name for a rockandroll band, Susannah said. Patrick, sitting with Oy in the plows tiny rear seat, tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and he held up the pad through which he was currently working his way. Beneath a picture of Roland in profile, he had printed BEATLES, not Beetles. Its a funny name for a rockandroll band no matter which way you spell it, Susannah said, and that gave her an idea. Patrick, do you have the touch? When he frowned and raised his handsI dont understand, the gesture saidshe rephrased the question. Can you read my mind? He shrugged and smiled. This gesture said I dont know, but she thought Patrick did know. She thought he knew very well. THREE They reached the Federal near noon, and there Bill served them a fine meal. Patrick wolfed his and then sat off to one side with Oy curled at his feet, sketching the others as they sat around the table in what had once been the common room. The walls of this room were covered with TV screensSusannah guessed there were three hundred or more. They must have been built to last, too, because some were still operating. A few showed the rolling hills surrounding the Quonset, but most broadcast only snow, and one showed a series of rolling lines that made her feel queasy in her stomach if she looked at it too long. The snowscreens, Bill said, had once shown pictures from satellites in orbit around the Earth, but the cameras in those had gone dead long ago. The one with the rolling lines was more interesting. Bill told them that, until only a few months ago, that one had shown the Dark Tower. Then, suddenly, the picture had dissolved into nothing but those lines. I dont think the Red King liked being on television, Bill told them. Especially if he knew company might be coming. Wont you have another sandwich? There are plenty, I assure you. No? Soup, then? What about you, Patrick? Youre too thin, you knowfar, far too thin. Patrick turned his pad around and showed them a picture of Bill bowing in front of Susannah, a tray of neatly cut sandwiches in one metal hand, a carafe of iced tea in the other. Like all of Patricks pictures, it went far beyond caricature, yet had been produced with a speed of hand that was eerie. Susannah applauded. Roland smiled and nodded. Patrick grinned, holding his teeth together so that the others wouldnt have to look at the empty hole behind them. Then he tossed the sheet back and began something new. Theres a fleet of vehicles out back, Bill said, and while many of them no longer run, some still do. I can give you a truck with fourwheel drive, and while I cannot assure you it will run smoothly, I believe you can count on it to take you as far as the Dark Tower, which is no more than one hundred and twenty wheels from here. Susannah felt a great and fluttery liftdrop in her stomach. One hundred and twenty wheels was a hundred miles, perhaps even a bit less. They were close. So close it was scary. You would not want to come upon the Tower after dark, Bill said. At least I shouldnt think so, considering the new resident. But whats one more night camped at the side of the road to such great travelers as yourselves? Not much, I should say! But even with one last night on the road (and barring breakdowns, which the gods know are always possible), youd have your goal in sight by midmorning of tomorrowday. Roland considered this long and carefully. Susannah had to tell herself to breathe while he did so, because part of her didnt want to. Im not ready, that part thought. And there was a deeper parta part that remembered every nuance of what had become a recurring (and evolving) dreamthat thought something else Im not meant to go at all. Not all the way. At last Roland said I thank you, Billwe all say thank you, Im surebut I think well pass on your kind offer. Were you to ask me why, I couldnt say. Only that part of me thinks that tomorrowdays too soon. That part of me thinks we should go the rest of the way on foot, just as weve already traveled so far. He took a deep breath, let it out. Im not ready to be there yet. Not quite ready. You too, Susannah marveled. You too. I need a little more time to prepare my mind and my heart. Mayhap even my soul. He reached into his back pocket and brought out the photocopy of the Robert Browning poem that had been left for them in Dandelos medicine chest. Theres something writ in here about remembering the old times before coming to the last battle . . . or the last stand. Its wellsaid. And perhaps, really, all I need is what this poet speaks ofa draught of earlier, happier sights. I dont know. But unless Susannah objects, I believe well go on foot. Susannah doesnt object, she said quietly. Susannah thinks its just what the doctor ordered. Susannah only objects to being dragged along behind like a busted tailpipe. Roland gave her a grateful (if distracted) smilehe seemed to have gone away from her somehow during these last few daysand then turned back to Bill. I wonder if you have a cart I could pull? For well have to take at least some gunna ...and theres Patrick. Hell have to ride part of the time. Patrick looked indignant. He cocked an arm in front of him, made a fist, and flexed his muscle. The resulta tiny gooseegg rising on the biceps of his drawingarmseemed to shame him, for he dropped it quickly. Susannah smiled and reached out to pat his knee. Dont look like that, sugar. Its not your fault that you spent God knows how long caged up like Hansel and Gretel in the witchs house. Im sure I have such a thing, Bill said, and a batterypowered version for Susannah. What I dont have, I can make. It would take an hour or two at most. Roland was calculating. If we leave here with five hours of daylight ahead of us, we might be able to make twelve wheels by sunset. What Susannah would call nine or ten miles. Another five days at that rather leisurely speed would bring us to the Tower Ive spent my life searching for. Id come to it around sunset if possible, for thats when Ive always seen it in my dreams. Susannah? And the voice insidethat deep voicewhispered Four nights. Four nights to dream. That should be enough. Maybe more than enough. Of course, ka would have to intervene. If they had indeed outrun its influence, that wouldntcouldnthappen. But Susannah now thought ka reached everywhere, even to the Dark Tower. Was, perhaps, embodied by the Dark Tower. Thats fine, she told him in a faint voice. Patrick? Roland asked. What do you say? Patrick shrugged and flipped a hand in their direction, hardly looking up from his pad. Whatever they wanted, that gesture said. Susannah guessed that Patrick understood little about the Dark Tower, and cared less. And why would he care? He was free of the monster, and his belly was full. Those things were enough for him. He had lost his tongue, but he could sketch to his hearts content. She was sure that to Patrick, that seemed like more than an even trade. And yet . . . and yet . . . Hes not meant to go, either. Not him, not Oy, not me. But what is to become of us, then? She didnt know, but she was queerly unworried about it. Ka would tell. Ka, and her dreams. FOUR An hour later the three humes, the bumbler, and Bill the robot stood clustered around a cutdown wagon that looked like a slightly larger version of Ho Fats Luxury Taxi. The wheels were tall but thin, and spun like a dream. Even when it was full, Susannah thought, it would be like pulling a feather. At least while Roland was fresh. Pulling it uphill would undoubtedly rob him of his energy after awhile, but as they ate the food they were carrying, Ho Fat II would grow lighter still . . . and she thought there wouldnt be many hills, anyway. They had come to the open lands, the prairielands; all the snow and treecovered ridges were behind them. Bill had provided her with an electric runabout that was more scooter than golfcart. Her days of being dragged along behind (like a busted tailpipe) were done. If youll give me another half an hour, I can smooth this off, Bill said, running a threefingered steel hand along the edge where he had cut off the front half of the small wagon that was now Ho Fat II. We say thankya, but it wont be necessary, Roland said. Well lay a couple of hides over it, just so. Hes impatient to be off, Susannah thought, and after all this time, why wouldnt he be? Im anxious to be off, myself. Well, if you say so, let it be so, Bill said, sounding unhappy about it. I suppose I just hate to see you go. When will I see humes again? None of them answered that. They didnt know. Theres a mighty loud horn on the roof, Bill said, pointing at the Federal. I dont know what sort of trouble it was meant to signalradiation leaks, mayhap, or some sort of attackbut I do know the sound of it will carry across a hundred wheels at least. More, if the winds blowing in the right direction. If I should see the fellow you think is following you, or if such motionsensors as still work pick him up, Ill set it off. Perhaps youll hear. Thank you, Roland said. Were you to drive, you could outrun him easily, Bill pointed out. Youd reach the Tower and never have to see him. Thats true enough, Roland said, but he showed absolutely no sign of changing his mind, and Susannah was glad. What will you do about the one you call his Red Father, if he really does command CanKa No Rey? Roland shook his head, although he had discussed this probability with Susannah. He thought they might be able to circle the Tower from a distance and come then to its base from a direction that was blind to the balcony on which the Crimson King was trapped. Then they could work their way around to the door beneath him. They wouldnt know if that was possible until they could actually see the Tower and the lay of the land, of course. Well, therell be water if God wills it, said the robot formerly known as Stuttering Bill, or so the old people did say. And mayhap Ill see you again, in the clearing at the end of the path, if nowhere else. If robots are allowed to go there. I hope its so, for theres many Ive known that Id see again. He sounded so forlorn that Susannah went to him and raised her arms to be picked up, not thinking about the absurdity of wanting to hug a robot. But he did and she didquite fervently, too. Bill made up for the malicious Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis, and was worth hugging for that, if nothing else. As his arms closed around her, it occurred to Susannah that Bill could break her in two with those titaniumsteel arms if he wanted to. But he didnt. He was gentle. Long days and pleasant nights, Bill, she said. May you do well, and we all say so. Thank you, madam, he said and put her down. I say thuddathank, thummathank, thukka Wheep! And he struck his head, producing a bright clang. I say thank ya kindly. He paused. I did fix the stutter, say true, but as I may have told you, I am not entirely without emotions. FIVE Patrick surprised them both by walking for almost four hours beside Susannahs electric scooter before tiring and climbing into Ho Fat II. They listened for the horn warning them that Bill had seen Mordred (or that the instruments in the Federal had detected him), but did not hear it . . . and the wind was blowing their way. By sunset, they had left the last of the snow. The land continued to flatten out, casting their shadows long before them. When they finally stopped for the night, Roland gathered enough brush for a fire and Patrick, who had dozed off, woke up long enough to eat an enormous meal of Vienna sausage and baked beans. (Susannah, watching the beans disappear into Patricks tongueless mouth, reminded herself to spread her hides upwind of him when she finally laid down her weary head.) She and Oy also ate heartily, but Roland hardly touched his own food. When dinner was done, Patrick took up his pad to draw, frowned at his pencil, and then held out a hand to Susannah. She knew what he wanted, and took the glass canning jar from the little bag of personals she kept slung over her shoulder. She held onto this because there was only the one pencil sharpener, and she was afraid that Patrick might lose it. Of course Roland could sharpen the EberhardFabers with his knife, but it would change the quality of the points somewhat. She tipped the jar, spilling erasers and paperclips and the required object into her cupped palm. Then she handed it to Patrick, who sharpened his pencil with a few quick twists, handed it back, and immediately fell to his work. For a moment Susannah looked at the pink erasers and wondered again why Dandelo had bothered to cut them off. As a way of teasing the boy? If so, it hadnt worked. Later in life, perhaps, when the sublime connections between his brain and his fingers rusted a little (when the small but undeniably brilliant world of his talent had moved on), he might require erasers. For now even his mistakes continued to be inspirations. He didnt draw long. When Susannah saw him nodding over his pad in the orange glare of the fading sunset, she took it from his unprotesting fingers, bedded him down in the back of the cart (propped level with the front end on a convenient boulder jutting from the ground), covered him with hides, and kissed his cheek. Sleepily, Patrick reached up and touched the sore below her own cheek. She winced, then held steady at his gentle touch. The sore had clotted over again, but it throbbed painfully. Even smiling hurt her these days. The hand fell away and Patrick slept. The stars had come out. Roland was looking raptly up at them. What do you see? she asked him. What do you see? he asked in turn. She looked at the brightening celestial landscape. Well, she said, theres Old Star and Old Mother, but they seem to have moved west. And that thereoh my goodness! She placed her hands on his stubbly cheeks (he never seemed to grow an actual beard, only a bristly scruff) and turned it. That wasnt there back when we left from the Western Sea, I know it wasnt. That ones in our world, Rolandwe call it the Big Dipper! He nodded. And once, according to the oldest books in my fathers library, it was in the sky of our world, as well. Lydias Dipper, it was called. And now here it is again. He turned to her, smiling. Another sign of life and renewal. How the Crimson King must hate to look up from his entrapment and see it riding the sky again! SIX Not long after, Susannah slept. And dreamed. SEVEN Shes in Central Park again, under a bright gray sky from which the first few snowflakes are once more drifting; carolers nearby are singing not Silent Night or What Child Is This but the Rice Song Rice be a greeno, See what we seeno, Seeno the greeno, Comecomecommala! She takes off her cap, afraid it will have changed somehow, but it still says MERRY CHRISTMAS! and (no twins here) she is comforted. She looks around and there stand Eddie and Jake, grinning at her. Their heads are bare; she has gotten their hats. She has combined their hats. Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZALA! Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT! None of this is precisely new. What she sees behind them, standing near a carriagepath leading back to Fifth Avenue, most certainly is. Its a door about six and a half feet high, and made of solid ironwood, from the look of it. The doorknobs of solid gold, and filigreed with a shape the lady gunslinger finally recognizes two crossed pencils. EberhardFaber 2s, she has no doubt. And the erasers have been cut off. Eddie holds out a cup of hot chocolate. Its the perfect kind mit schlag on top, and a little sprinkling of nutmeg dotting the cream. Here, he says, I brought you hot chocolate. She ignores the outstretched cup. Shes fascinated by the door. Its like the ones along the beach, isnt it? she asks. Yes, Eddie says. No, Jake says at the same time. Youll figure it out, they say together, and grin at each other, delighted. She walks past them. Writ upon the doors through which Roland drew them were THE PRISONER and THE LADY OF SHADOWS and THE PUSHER . Writ upon this one is . And below that THE ARTIST She turns back to them and they are gone. Central Park is gone. She is looking at the ruination of Lud, gazing upon the waste lands. On a cold and bitter breeze she hears four whispered words Times almost up ...hurry ... EIGHT She woke in a kind of panic, thinking I have to leave him ...and best I do it before I can smuch as see his Dark Tower on the horizon. But where do I go? And how can I leave him to face both Mordred and the Crimson King with only Patrick to help him? This idea caused her to reflect on a bitter certainty come a showdown, Oy would almost certainly be more valuable to Roland than Patrick. The bumbler had proved his mettle on more than one occasion and would have been worthy of the title gunslinger, had he but a gun to sling and a hand to sling it with. Patrick, though . . . Patrick was a . . . well, a pencilslinger. Faster than blue blazes, but you couldnt kill much with an EberhardFaber unless it was very sharp. Shed sat up. Roland, leaning against the far side of her little scooter and keeping the watch, hadnt noticed. And she didnt want him to notice. That would lead to questions. She lay back down, pulling her hides around her and thinking of their first hunt. She remembered how the yearling buck had swerved and run right at her, and how shed decapitated it with the Oriza. She remembered the whistling sound in the chilly air, the one that resulted when the wind blew through the little attachment on the bottom of the plate, the attachment that looked so much like Patricks pencil sharpener. She thought her mind was trying to make some sort of connection here, but she was too tired to know what it might be. And maybe she was trying too hard, as well. If so, what was she to do about that? There was at least one thing she did know, from her time in Calla Bryn Sturgis. The meaning of the symbols writ upon the door was UNFOUND. Times almost up. Hurry. The next day her tears began. NINE There were still plenty of bushes behind which she could go to do her necessary (and cry her tears, when she could no longer hold them back), but the land continued to flatten and open. Around noon of their second full day on the road, Susannah saw what she at first thought was a cloudshadow moving across the land far up ahead, only the sky above was solid blue from horizon to horizon. Then the great dark patch began to veer in a very uncloudlike way. She caught her breath and brought her little electric scooter to a stop. Roland! she said. Yonders a herd of buffalo, or maybe theyre bison! Sure as death n taxes! Aye, do you say so? Roland asked, with only passing interest. We called em bannock, in the long ago. Its a goodsized herd. Patrick was standing in the back of Ho Fat II, sketching madly. He switched his grip on the pencil he was using, now holding the yellow barrel against his palm and shading with the tip. She could almost smell the dust boiling up from the herd as he shaded it with his pencil. Although it seemed to her that hed taken the liberty of moving the herd five or even ten miles closer, unless his vision was a good deal sharper than her own. That, she supposed, was entirely possible. In any case, her eyes had adjusted and she could see them better herself. Their great shaggy heads. Even their black eyes. There hasnt been a herd of buffalo that size in America for almost a hundred years, she said. Aye? Still only polite interest. But theyre in plenty here, I should say. If a little tet of em comes within pistolshot range, lets take a couple. Id like to taste some fresh meat that isnt deer. Would you? She let her smile answer for her. Roland smiled back. And it occurred to her again that soon she would see him no more, this man shed believed was either a mirage or a daemon before she had come to know him both antet and dandinh. Eddie was dead, Jake was dead, and soon she would see Roland of Gilead no more. Would he be dead, as well? Would she? She looked up into the glare of the sun, wanting him to mistake the reason for her tears if he saw them. And they moved on into the southeast of that great and empty land, into the everstrengthening beatbeatbeat that was the Tower at the axis of all worlds and time itself. Beatbeatbeat. Commalacomecome, journeys almost done. That night she stood the first watch, then awakened Roland at midnight. I think hes out there someplace, she said, pointing into the northwest. There was no need to be more specific; it could only be Mordred. Everyone else was gone. Watch well. I will, he said. And if you hear a gunshot, wake well. And fast. You can count on it, said she, and lay down in the dry winter grass behind Ho Fat II. At first she wasnt sure shed be able to sleep; she was still jazzed from the sense of an unfriendly other in the vicinity. But she did sleep. And dreamed. TEN The dream of the second night is both like and unlike the dream of the first. The main elements are exactly the same Central Park, gray sky, spits of snow, choral voices (this time harmonizing Come Go With Me, the old DelVikings hit), Jake (I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!) and Eddie (this time wearing a sweatshirt reading CLICK! ITS A SHINNARO CAMERA!). Eddie has hot chocolate but doesnt offer it to her. She can see the anxiety not only in their faces but in the tensedup set of their bodies. That is the main difference in this dream there is something to see, or something to do, or perhaps its both. Whatever it is, they expected her to see it or do it by now and she is being backward. A rather terrible question occurs to her is she being purposely backward? Is there something here she doesnt want to confront? Could it even be possible that the Dark Tower is fucking up communications? Surely thats a stupid ideathese people she sees are but figments of her longing imagination, after all; they are dead! Eddie killed by a bullet, Jake as a result of being run over by a carone slain in this world, one in the Keystone World where fun is fun and done is done (must be done, for there time always runs in one direction) and Stephen King is their poet laureate. Yet she cannot deny that look on their faces, that look of panic that seems to tell her You have it, Suzeyou have what we want to show you, you have what you need to know. Are you going to let it slip away? Its the fourth quarter. Its the fourth quarter and the clock is ticking and will continue to tick, must continue to tick because all your timeouts are gone. You have to hurry . . . hurry . . . ELEVEN She snapped awake with a gasp. It was almost dawn. She wiped a hand across her brow, and it came away wet with sweat. What do you want me to know, Eddie? What is it youd have me know? To this question there was no answer. How could there be? Mistuh Dean, he daid, she thought, and lay back down. She lay that way for another hour, but couldnt get back to sleep. TWELVE Like Ho Fat I, Ho Fat II was equipped with handles. Unlike those on Ho Fat I, these handles were adjustable. When Patrick felt like walking, the handles could be moved apart so he could pull one and Roland the other. When Patrick felt like riding, Roland moved the handles together so he could pull on his own. They stopped at noon for a meal. When it was done, Patrick crawled into the back of Ho Fat II for a snooze. Roland waited until he heard the boy (for so they continued to think of him, no matter what his age) snoring, then turned to her. What fashes thee, Susannah? Id have you tell me. Id have you tell me dandinh, even though theres no longer a tet and Im your dinh no more. He smiled. The sadness in that smile broke her heart and she could hold her tears back no more. Nor the truth. If Im still with you when we see your Tower, Roland, things have gone all wrong. How wrong? he asked her. She shook her head, beginning to weep harder. Theres supposed to be a door. Its the Unfound Door. But I dont know how to find it! Eddie and Jake come to me in my dreams and tell me I knowthey tell me with their eyesbut I dont! I swear I dont! He took her in his arms and held her and kissed the hollow of her temple. At the corner of her mouth, the sore throbbed and burned. It wasnt bleeding, but it had begun to grow again. Let be what will be, said the gunslinger, as his own mother had once told him. Let be what will be, and hush, and let ka work. You said wed outrun it. He rocked her in his arms, rocked her, and it was good. It was soothing. I was wrong, he said. As thee knows. THIRTEEN It was her turn to watch early on the third night, and she was looking back behind them, northwest along the Tower Road, when a hand grasped her shoulder. Terror sprang up in her mind like a jackinthebox and she whirled (hes behind me oh dear God Mordreds got around behind me and its the spider!) with her hand going to the gun in her belt and yanking it free. Patrick recoiled from her, his own face long with terror, raising his hands in front of him. If hed cried out he would surely have awakened Roland, and then everything might have been different. But he was too frightened to cry out. He made a low sound in his throat and that was all. She put the gun back, showed him her empty hands, then pulled him to her and hugged him. At first he was stiff against herstill afraidbut after a little he relaxed. What is it, darling? she asked him, sotto voce. Then, using Rolands phrase without even realizing it What fashes thee? He pulled away from her and pointed dead north. For a moment she still didnt understand, and then she saw the orange lights dancing and darting. She judged they were at least five miles away, and she could hardly believe she hadnt seen them before. Still speaking low, so as not to wake Roland, she said Theyre nothing but foolights, sugarthey cant hurt you. Roland calls em hobs. Theyre like St. Elmos fire, or something. But he had no idea of what St. Elmos fire was; she could see that in his uncertain gaze. She settled again for telling him they couldnt hurt him, and indeed, this was the closest the hobs had ever come. Even as she looked back at them, they began to dance away, and soon most of them were gone. Perhaps she had thought them away. Once she would have scoffed at such an idea, but no longer. Patrick began to relax. Why dont you go back to sleep, honey? You need to take your rest. And she needed to take hers, but she dreaded it. Soon she would wake Roland, and sleep, and the dream would come. The ghosts of Jake and Eddie would look at her, more frantic than ever. Wanting her to know something she didnt, couldnt know. Patrick shook his head. Not sleepy yet? He shook his head again. Well then, why dont you draw awhile? Drawing always relaxed him. Patrick smiled and nodded and went at once to Ho Fat for his current pad, walking in big exaggerated sneaksteps so as not to wake Roland. It made her smile. Patrick was always willing to draw; she guessed that one of the things that kept him alive in the basement of Dandelos hut had been knowing that every now and then the rotten old fuck would give him a pad and one of the pencils. He was as much an addict as Eddie had been at his worst, she reflected, only Patricks dope was a narrow line of graphite. He sat down and began to draw. Susannah resumed her watch, but soon felt a queer tingling all over her body, as if she were the one being watched. She thought of Mordred again, and then smiled (which hurt; with the sore growing fat again, it always did now). Not Mordred; Patrick. Patrick was watching her. Patrick was drawing her. She sat still for nearly twenty minutes, and then curiosity overcame her. |
For Patrick, twenty minutes would be long enough to do the Mona Lisa, and maybe St. Pauls Basilica in the background for good measure. That tingling sense was so queer, almost not a mental thing at all but something physical. She went to him, but Patrick at first held the pad against his chest with unaccustomed shyness. But he wanted her to look; that was in his eyes. It was almost a lovelook, but she thought it was the drawn Susannah hed fallen in love with. Come on, honeybunch, she said, and put a hand on the pad. But she would not tug it away from him, not even if he wanted her to. He was the artist; let it be wholly his decision whether or not to show his work. Please? He held the pad against him a moment longer. Thenshyly, not looking at herhe held it out. She took it, and looked down at herself. For a moment she could hardly breathe, it was that good. The wide eyes. The high cheekbones, which her father had called those jewels of Ethiopia. The full lips, which Eddie had so loved to kiss. It was her, it was her to the very life . . . but it was also more than her. She would never have thought love could shine with such perfect nakedness from the lines made with a pencil, but here that love was, oh say true, say so true; love of the boy for the woman who had saved him, who had pulled him from the dark hole where he otherwise would surely have died. Love for her as a mother, love for her as a woman. Patrick, its wonderful! she said. He looked at her anxiously. Doubtfully. Really? his eyes asked her, and she realized that only hethe poor needy Patrick inside, who had lived with this ability all his life and so took it for grantedcould doubt the simple beauty of what he had done. Drawing made him happy; this much hed always known. That his pictures could make others happy . . . that idea would take some getting used to. She wondered again how long Dandelo had had him, and how the mean old thing had come by Patrick in the first place. She supposed shed never know. Meantime, it seemed very important to convince him of his own worth. Yes, she said. Yes, it is wonderful. Youre a fine artist, Patrick. Looking at this makes me feel good. This time he forgot to hold his teeth together. And that smile, tongueless or not, was so wonderful she could have eaten it up. It made her fears and anxieties seem small and silly. May I keep it? Patrick nodded eagerly. He made a tearing motion with one hand, then pointed at her. Yes! Tear it off! Take it! Keep it! She started to do so, then paused. His love (and his pencil) had made her beautiful. The only thing to spoil that beauty was the black splotch beside her mouth. She turned the drawing toward him, tapped the sore on it, then touched it on her own face. And winced. Even the lightest touch hurt. This is the only damned thing, she said. He shrugged, raising his open hands to his shoulders, and she had to laugh. She did it softly so as not to wake Roland, but yes, she did have to laugh. A line from some old movie had occurred to her I paint what I see. Only this wasnt paint, and it suddenly occurred to her that he could take care of the rotten, ugly, painful thing. As it existed on paper, at least. Then shell be my twin, she thought affectionately. My better half; my pretty twin sis And suddenly she understood Everything? Understood everything? Yes, she would think much later. Not in any coherent fashion that could be written downif a b c, then c b a and c a bbut yes, she understood everything. Intuited everything. No wonder the dreamEddie and dreamJake had been impatient with her; it was so obvious. Patrick, drawing her. Nor was this the first time she had been drawn. Roland had drawn her to his world . . . with magic. Eddie had drawn her to himself with love. As had Jake. Dear God, had she been here so long and been through so much without knowing what katet was, what it meant? Katet was family. Katet was love. To draw is to make a picture with a pencil, or maybe charcoal. To draw is also to fascinate, to compel, and to bring forward. To bring one out of ones self. The drawers were where Detta went to fulfill herself. Patrick, that tongueless boy genius, pent up in the wilderness. Pent up in the drawers. And now? Now? Now he my forspecial, thought SusannaOdettaDetta, and reached into her pocket for the glass jar, knowing exactly what she was going to do and why she was going to do it. When she handed back the pad without tearing off the sheet that now held her image, Patrick looked badly disappointed. Nar, nar, said she (and in the voice of many). Only theres something Id have you do before I take it for my pretty, for my precious, for my ever, to keep and know how I was at this where, at this when. She held out one of the pink rubber pieces, understanding now why Dandelo had cut them off. For hed had his reasons. Patrick took what she offered and turned it over between his fingers, frowning, as if he had never seen such a thing before. Susannah was sure he had, but how many years ago? How close might he have come to disposing of his tormentor, once and for all? And why hadnt Dandelo just killed him then? Because once he took away the erasers he thought he was safe, she thought. Patrick was looking at her, puzzled. Beginning to be upset. Susannah sat down beside him and pointed at the blemish on the drawing. Then she put her fingers delicately around Patricks wrist and drew it toward the paper. At first he resisted, then let his hand with the pink nubbin in it be tugged forward. She thought of the shadow on the land that hadnt been a shadow at all but a herd of great, shaggy beasts Roland called bannock. She thought of how shed been able to smell the dust when Patrick began to draw the dust. And she thought of how, when Patrick had drawn the herd closer than it actually was (artistic license, and we all say thankya), it had actually looked closer. She remembered thinking that her eyes had adjusted and now marveled at her own stupidity. As if eyes could adjust to distance the way they could adjust to the dark. No, Patrick had moved them closer. Had moved them closer by drawing them closer. When the hand holding the eraser was almost touching the paper, she took her own hand awaythis had to be all Patrick, she was somehow sure of it. She moved her fingers back and forth, miming what she wanted. He didnt get it. She did it again, then pointed to the sore beside the full lower lip. Make it gone, Patrick, she said, surprised by the steadiness of her own voice. Its ugly, make it gone. Again she made that rubbing gesture in the air. Erase it. This time he got it. She saw the light in his eyes. He held the pink nubbin up to her. Perfectly pink it wasnot a smudge of graphite on it. He looked at her, eyebrows raised, as if to ask if she was sure. She nodded. Patrick lowered the eraser to the sore and began to rub it on the paper, tentatively at first. Then, as he saw what was happening, he worked with more spirit. FOURTEEN She felt the same queer tingling sensation, but when hed been drawing, it had been all over her. Now it was in only one place, to the right side of her mouth. As Patrick got the hang of the eraser and bore down with it, the tingling became a deep and monstrous itch. She had to clutch her hands deep into the dirt on either side of her to keep from reaching up and clawing at the sore, scratching it furiously, and never mind if she tore it wide open and sent a pint of blood gushing down her deerskin shirt. It be over in a few more seconds, it have to be, it have to be, oh dear God please LET IT END Patrick, meanwhile, seemed to have forgotten all about her. He was looking down at his picture, his hair hanging to either side of his face and obscuring most of it, completely absorbed by this wonderful new toy. He erased delicately . . . then a little harder (the itch intensified) . . . then more softly again. Susannah felt like shrieking. That itch was suddenly everywhere. It burned in her forebrain, buzzed across the wet surfaces of her eyes like twin clouds of gnats, it shivered at the very tips of her nipples, making them hopelessly hard. Ill scream, I cant help it, I have to scream She was drawing in her breath to do just that when suddenly the itch was gone. The pain was gone, as well. She reached toward the side of her mouth, then hesitated. I dont dare. You better dare! Detta responded indignantly. After all you been throughall we been throughyou must have enough backbone left to touch yo own damn face, you yella bitch! She brought her fingers down to the skin. The smooth skin. The sore which had so troubled her since Thunderclap was gone. She knew that when she looked in a mirror or a still pool of water, she would not even see a scar. FIFTEEN Patrick worked a little longerfirst with the eraser, then with the pencil, then with the eraser againbut Susannah felt no itch and not even a faint tingle. It was as though, once he had passed some critical point, the sensations just ceased. She wondered how old Patrick had been when Dandelo snipped all the erasers off the pencils. Four? Six? Young, anyway. She was sure that his original look of puzzlement when she showed him one of the erasers had been unfeigned, and yet once he began, he used it like an old pro. Maybe its like riding a bicycle, she thought. Once you learn how, you never forget. She waited as patiently as she could, and after five very long minutes, her patience was rewarded. Smiling, Patrick turned the pad around and showed her the picture. He had erased the blemish completely and then faintly shaded the area so that it looked like the rest of her skin. He had been careful to brush away every single crumb of rubber. Very nice, she said, but that was a fairly shitty compliment to offer genius, wasnt it? So she leaned forward, put her arms around him, and kissed him firmly on the mouth. Patrick, its beautiful. The blood rushed so quickly and so strongly into his face that she was alarmed at first, wondering if he might not have a stroke in spite of his youth. But he was smiling as he held out the pad to her with one hand, making tearing gestures again with the other. Wanting her to take it. Wanting her to have it. Susannah tore it off very carefully, wondering in a dark back corner of her mind what would happen if she tore ittore herright down the middle. She noted as she did that there was no amazement in his face, no astonishment, no fear. He had to have seen the sore beside her mouth, because the nasty thing had pretty much dominated her face for all the time hed known her, and he had drawn it in nearphotographic detail. Now it was goneher exploring fingers told her soyet Patrick wasnt registering any emotion, at least in regard to that. The conclusion seemed clear enough. When hed erased it from his drawing, hed also erased it from his own mind and memory. Patrick? He looked at her, smiling. Happy that she was happy. And Susannah was very happy. The fact that she was also scared to death didnt change that in the slightest. Will you draw something else for me? He nodded. Made a mark on his pad, then turned it around so she could see ? She looked at the questionmark for a moment, then at him. She saw he was clutching the eraser, his wonderful new tool, very tightly. Susannah said I want you to draw me something that isnt there. He cocked his head quizzically to the side. She had to smile a little in spite of her rapidly thumping heartOy looked that way sometimes, when he wasnt a hundred per cent sure what you meant. Dont worry, Ill tell you. And she did, very carefully. Patrick listened. At some point Roland heard Susannahs voice and awoke. He came over, looked at her in the dim red light of the embering campfire, started to look away, then snapped back, eyes widening. Until that moment, she hadnt been sure Roland would see what was no longer there, either. She thought it at least possible that Patricks magic would have been strong enough to erase it from the gunslingers memory, too. Susannah, thy face! Whats happened to thy Hush, Roland, if you love me. The gunslinger hushed. Susannah returned her attention to Patrick and began to speak again, quietly but urgently. Patrick listened, and as he did, she saw the light of understanding begin to enter his gaze. Roland replenished the fire without having to be asked, and soon their little camp was bright under the stars. Patrick wrote a question, putting it thriftily to the left of the questionmark he had already drawn How tall? Susannah took Roland by the elbow and positioned him in front of Patrick. The gunslinger stood about sixfootthree. She had him pick her up, then held a hand roughly three inches over his head. Patrick nodded, smiling. And look you at something that has to be on it, she said, and took a branch from their little pile of brush. She broke it over her knee, creating a point of her own. She could remember the symbols, but it would be best if she didnt think about them overmuch. She sensed they had to be absolutely right or the door she wanted him to make for her would either open on some place she didnt want to go, or would not open at all. Therefore once she began to draw in the mixed dirt and ash by the campfire, she did it as rapidly as Patrick himself might have done, not pausing long enough to cast her eye back upon a single symbol. For if she looked back at one she would surely look back at all, and she would see something that looked wrong to her, and uncertainty would set in like a sickness. Dettabrash, foulmouthed Detta, who had turned out on more than one occasion to be her saviormight step in and take over, finish for her, but she couldnt count on that. On her hearts deepest level, she still did not entirely trust Detta not to send everything to blazes at a crucial moment, and for no other reason than the black joy of the thing. Nor did she fully trust Roland, who might want to keep her for reasons he did not fully understand himself. So she drew quickly in the dirt and ashes, not looking back, and these were the symbols that flowed away beneath the flying tip of her makeshift implement Unfound, Roland breathed. Susannah, whathow Hush, she repeated. Patrick bent over his pad and began to draw. SIXTEEN She kept looking around for the door, but the circle of light thrown by their fire was very small even after Roland had set it to blazing. Small compared to the vast darkness of the prairie, at least. She saw nothing. When she turned to Roland she could see the unspoken question in his eyes, and so, while Patrick kept working, she showed him the picture of her the young man had drawn. She indicated the place where the blemish had been. Holding the page close to his face, Roland at last saw the erasers marks. Patrick had concealed what few traces hed left behind with great cunning, and Roland had found them only with the closest scrutiny; it was like casting for an old trail after many days of rain. No wonder the old man cut off his erasers, he said, giving the picture back to her. Thats what I thought. From there she skipped ahead to her single true intuitive leap that if Patrick could (in this world, at least) uncreate by erasing, he might be able to create by drawing. When she mentioned the herd of bannock that had seemed mysteriously closer, Roland rubbed his forehead like a man who has a nasty headache. I should have seen that. Should have realized what it meant, too. Susannah, Im getting old. She ignored thatshed heard it beforeand told him about the dreams of Eddie and Jake, being sure to mention the productnames on the sweatshirts, the choral voices, the offer of hot chocolate, and the growing panic in their eyes as the nights passed and still she did not see what the dream had been sent to show her. Why didnt you tell me this dream before now? Roland asked. Why didnt you ask for help in interpreting it? She looked at him steadily, thinking she had been right not to ask for his help. Yesno matter how much that might hurt him. Youve lost two. How eager would you have been to lose me, as well? He flushed. Even in the firelight she could see it. Thee speaks ill of me, Susannah, and have thought worse. Perhaps I have, she said. If so, I say sorry. I wasnt sure of what I wanted myself. Part of me wants to see the Tower, you know. Part of me wants that very badly. And even if Patrick can draw the Unfound Door into existence and I can open it, its not the real world it opens on. Thats what the names on the shirts mean, Im sure of it. You mustnt think that, Roland said. Reality is seldom a thing of black and white, I think, of is and isnt, be and not be. Patrick made a hooting sound and they both looked. He was holding his pad up, turned toward them so they could see what he had drawn. It was a perfect representation of the Unfound Door, she thought. THE ARTIST wasnt printed on it, and the doorknob was plain shiny metalno crossed pencils adorned itbut that was all right. She hadnt bothered to tell him about those things, which had been for her benefit and understanding. They did everything but draw me a map, she thought. She wondered why everything had to be so damn hard, so damn (riddlededum) mysterious, and knew that was a question to which she would never find a satisfactory answer . . . except it was the human condition, wasnt it? The answers that mattered never came easily. Patrick made another of those hooting noises. This time it had an interrogative quality. She suddenly realized that the poor kid was practically dying of anxiety, and why not? He had just executed his first commission, and wanted to know what his patrono darte thought of it. Its great, Patrickterrific. Yes, Roland agreed, taking the pad. The door looked to him exactly like those hed found as he staggered along the beach of the Western Sea, delirious and dying of the lobstrositys poisoned bite. It was as if the poor tongueless creature had looked into his head and seen an actual picture of that doora fottergraff. Susannah, meanwhile, was looking around desperately. And when she began to swing along on her hands toward the edge of the firelight, Roland had to call her back sharply, reminding her that Mordred might be out there anywhere, and the darkness was Mordreds friend. Impatient as she was, she retreated from the edge of the light, remembering all too well what had happened to Mordreds bodymother, and how quickly it had happened. Yet it hurt to pull back, almost physically. Roland had told her that he expected to catch his first glimpse of the Dark Tower toward the end of the coming day. If she was still with him, if she saw it with him, she thought its power might prove too strong for her. Its glammer. Now, given a choice between the door and the Tower, she knew she could still choose the door. But as they drew closer and the power of the Tower grew stronger, its pulse deeper and more compelling in her mind, the singing voices ever sweeter, choosing the door would be harder to do. I dont see it, she said despairingly. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is no damn door. Oh, Roland I dont think you were wrong, Roland told her. He spoke with obvious reluctance, but as a man will when he has a job to do, or a debt to repay. And he did owe this woman a debt, he reckoned, for had he not pretty much seized her by the scruff of the neck and hauled her into this world, where shed learned the art of murder and fallen in love and been left bereaved? Had he not kidnapped her into this present sorrow? If he could make that right, he had an obligation to do so. His desire to keep her with himand at the risk of her own lifewas pure selfishness, and unworthy of his training. More important than that, it was unworthy of how much he had come to love and respect her. It broke what remained of his heart to think of bidding her goodbye, the last of his strange and wonderful katet, but if it was what she wanted, what she needed, then he must do it. And he thought he could do it, for he had seen something about the young mans drawing that Susannah had missed. Not something that was there; something that wasnt. Look thee, he said gently, showing her the picture. Do you see how hard hes tried to please thee, Susannah? Yes! she said. Yes, of course I do, but It took him ten minutes to do this, I should judge, and most of his drawings, good as they are, are the work of three or four at most, wouldnt you say? I dont understand you! She nearly screamed this. Patrick drew Oy to him and wrapped an arm around the bumbler, all the while looking at Susannah and Roland with wide, unhappy eyes. He worked so hard to give you what you want that theres only the Door. It stands by itself, all alone on the paper. It has no ...no... He searched for the right word. Vannays ghost whispered it dryly into his ear. It has no context! For a moment Susannah continued to look puzzled, and then the light of understanding began to break in her eyes. Roland didnt wait; he simply dropped his good left hand on Patricks shoulder and told him to put the door behind Susannahs little electric golfcart, which she had taken to calling Ho Fat III. Patrick was happy to oblige. For one thing, putting Ho Fat III in front of the door gave him a reason to use his eraser. He worked much more quickly this timealmost carelessly, an observer might have saidbut the gunslinger was sitting right next to him and didnt think Patrick missed a single stroke in his depiction of the little cart. He finished by drawing its single front wheel and putting a reflected gleam of firelight in the hubcap. Then he put his pencil down, and as he did, there was a disturbance in the air. Roland felt it push against his face. The flames of the fire, which had been burning straight up in the windless dark, streamed briefly sideways. Then the feeling was gone. The flames once more burned straight up. And standing not ten feet from that fire, behind the electric cart, was a door Roland had last encountered in Calla Bryn Sturgis, in the Cave of the Voices. SEVENTEEN Susannah waited until dawn, at first passing the time by gathering up her gunna, then putting it aside againwhat would her few possessions (not to mention the little hide bag in which they were stored) avail her in New York City? People would laugh. They would probably laugh anyway . . . or scream and run at the very sight of her. The Susannah Dean who suddenly appeared in Central Park would look to most folks not like a college graduate or an heiress to a large fortune; not even like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, say sorry. No, to civilized city people shed probably look like some kind of freakshow escapee. And once she went through this door, would there be any going back? Never. Never in life. So she put her gunna aside and simply waited. As dawn began to show its first faint white light on the horizon, she called Patrick over and asked him if he wanted to go along with her. Back to the world you came from or one very much like it, she told him, although she knew he didnt remember that world at alleither hed been taken from it too young, or the trauma of being snatched away had erased his memory. Patrick looked at her, then at Roland, who was squatted on his hunkers, looking at him. Either way, son, the gunslinger said. You can draw in either world, tell ya true. Although where shes going, therell be more to appreciate it. He wants him to stay, she thought, and was angry. Then Roland looked at her and gave his head a minute shake. She wasnt sure, but she thought that meant And no, she didnt just think. She knew what it meant. Roland wanted her to know he was hiding his thoughts from Patrick. His desires. And while shed known the gunslinger to lie (most spectacularly at the meeting on the Calla Bryn Sturgis commonground before the coming of the Wolves), she had never known him to lie to her. To Detta, maybe, but not to her. Or Eddie. Or Jake. There had been times when he hadnt told them all he knew, but outright lie ...? No. Theyd been katet, and Roland had played them straight. Give the devil his due. Patrick suddenly took up his pad and wrote quickly on the clean sheet. Then he showed it to them I will stay. Scared to go sumplace new. As if to emphasize exactly what he meant, he opened his lips and pointed into his tongueless mouth. And did she see relief on Rolands face? If so, she hated him for it. All right, Patrick, she said, trying to show none of her feelings in her voice. She even reached over and patted his hand. I understand how you feel. And while its true that people can be cruel ...cruel and mean . . . theres plenty who are kind. Listen, thee Im not going until dawn. If you change your mind, the offer is open. He nodded quickly. Grateful I aint goan try no harder tchange his mine, Detta thought angrily. Ole white man probably grateful, too! Shut up, Susannah told her, and for a wonder, Detta did. EIGHTEEN But as the day brightened (revealing a mediumsized herd of grazing bannock not two miles away), she let Detta back into her mind. More she let Detta take over. It was easier that way, less painful. It was Detta who took one more stroll around the campsite, briskly breathing the last of this world for both of them, and storing away the memory. It was Detta who went around the door, rocking first one way and then the other on the toughened pads of her palms, and saw the nothing at all on the other side. Patrick walked on one side of her, Roland on the other. Patrick hooted with surprise when he saw the door was gone. Roland said nothing. Oy walked up to the place where the door had been, sniffed at the air ...and then walked through the place where it was, if you were looking from the other side. If we was over there, Detta thought, wed see him walk right through it, like a magic trick. She returned to Ho Fat III, which she had decided to ride through the door. Always assuming it would open, that was. This whole business would be quite a joke if it turned out it wouldnt. Roland made to help her up into the seat; she brushed him brusquely away and mounted on her own. She pushed the red button beside the wheel, and the carts electric motor started with a faint hum. The needle marked CHG still swung well over into the green. She turned the throttle on the right handlebar and rolled slowly toward the closed door with the symbols meaning UNFOUND marching across the front. She stopped with the carts little bullet nose almost touching it. She turned to the gunslinger with a fixed makebelieve smile. All ri, RolandAhll say gbye to you, then. Long days n pleasant nights. May you reach ydamn Tower, and No, he said. She looked at him, Detta looked at him with her eyes both blazing and laughing. Challenging him to turn this into something she didnt want it to be. Challenging him to turn her out now that she was in. Cmon, honky white boy, lessee you do it. What? she asked. Whats on yo mine, big boy? Id not say goodbye to you like this, after all this time, he said. What do you mean? Only in Dettas angry burlesque, it came out Whatchu mean? You know. She shook her head defiantly. Doan. For one thing, he said, taking her trailtoughened left hand gently in his mutilated right one, theres another who should have the choice to go or stay, and Im not speaking of Patrick. For a moment she didnt understand. Then she looked down at a certain pair of goldringed eyes, a certain pair of cocked ears, and did. She had forgotten about Oy. If Detta asks him, hell surely stay, for shes never been to his liking. If Susannah asks him . . . why, then I dont know. Just like that, Detta was gone. She would be backSusannah understood now that she would never be entirely free of Detta Walker, and that was all right, because she no longer wanted to bebut for now she was gone. Oy? she said gently. Will you come with me, honey? It may be well find Jake again. Maybe not quite the same, but still . . . Oy, who had been almost completely silent during their trek across the Badlands and the White Lands of Empathica and the open rangelands, now spoke. Ake? he said. But he spoke doubtfully, as one who barely remembers, and her heart broke. She had promised herself she wouldnt cry, and Detta all but guaranteed she wouldnt cry, but now Detta was gone and the tears were here again. Jake, she said. You remember Jake, honeybunch, I know you do. Jake and Eddie. Ake? Ed? With a little more certainty now. He did remember. Come with me, she urged, and Oy started forward as if he would jump up in the cart beside her. Then, with no idea at all why she should say it, she added There are other worlds than these. Oy stopped as soon as the words were out of her mouth. He sat down. Then he got up again, and she felt a moment of hope perhaps there could still be some little katet, a dantetetet, in some version of New York where folks drove Takuro Spirits and took pictures of each other drinking NozzALa with their Shinnaro cameras. Instead, Oy trotted back to the gunslinger and sat beside one battered boot. They had walked far, those boots, far. Miles and wheels, wheels and miles. But now their walking was almost done. Olan, said Oy, and the finality in his strange little voice rolled a stone against her heart. She turned bitterly to the old man with the big iron on his hip. There, she said. You have your own glammer, dont you? Always did. You drew Eddie on to one death, and Jake to a pair of em. Now Patrick, and even the bumbler. Are you happy? No, said he, and she saw he truly was not. She believed she had never seen such sadness and such loneliness on a human face. Never was I farther from happy, Susannah of New York. Will you change your mind and stay? Will thee come the last little while with me? That would make me happy. For a wild moment she thought she would. That she would simply turn the little electric cart from the doorwhich was onesided and made no promisesand go with him to the Dark Tower. Another day would do it; they could camp at midafternoon and thus arrive tomorrow at sunset, as he wanted. Then she remembered the dream. The singing voices. The young man holding out the cup of hot chocolatethe good kind, mit schlag. No, she said softly. Ill take my chance and go. For a moment she thought he would make it easy on her, just agree and let her go. Then his angerno, his despairbroke in a painful burst. But you cant be sure! Susannah, what if the dream itself is a trick and a glammer? What if the things you see even when the doors open are nothing but tricks and glammers? What if you roll right through and into todash space? Then Ill light the darkness with thoughts of those I love. And that might work, said he, speaking in the bitterest voice she had ever heard. For the first ten years . . . or twenty . . . or even a hundred. And then? What about the rest of eternity? Think of Oy! Do you think hes forgotten Jake? Never! Never! Never in your life! Never in his! He senses something wrong! Susannah, dont. I beg you, dont go. Ill get on my knees, if that will help. And to her horror, he began to do exactly that. It wont, she said. And if this is to be my last sight of youmy heart says it isthen dont let it be of you on your knees. Youre not a kneeling man, Roland, son of Steven, never were, and I dont want to remember you that way. I want to see you on your feet, as you were in Calla Bryn Sturgis. As you were with your friends at Jericho Hill. He got up and came to her. For a moment she thought he meant to restrain her by force, and she was afraid. But he only put his hand on her arm for a moment, and then took it away. Let me ask you again, Susannah. Are you sure? She conned her heart and saw that she was. She understood the risks, but yesshe was. And why? Because Rolands way was the way of the gun. Rolands way was death for those who rode or walked beside him. |
He had proved it over and over again, since the earliest days of his questno, even before, since overhearing Hax the cook plotting treachery and thus assuring his death by the rope. It was all for the good (for what he called the White), she had no doubt of it, but Eddie still lay in his grave in one world and Jake in another. She had no doubt that much the same fate was waiting for Oy, and for poor Patrick. Nor would their deaths be long in coming. Im sure, said she. All right. Will you give me a kiss? She took him by the arm and pulled him down and put her lips on his. When she inhaled, she took in the breath of a thousand years and ten thousand miles. And yes, she tasted death. But not for you, gunslinger, she thought. For others, but never for you. May I escape your glammer, and may I do fine. She was the one who broke their kiss. Can you open the door for me? she asked. Roland went to it, and took the knob in his hand, and the knob turned easily within his grip. Cold air puffed out, strong enough to blow Patricks long hair back, and with it came a few flakes of snow. She could see grass that was still green beneath light frost, and a path, and an iron fence. Voices were singing What Child Is This, just as in her dream. It could be Central Park. Yes, it could be; Central Park of some other world along the axis, perhaps, and not the one she came from, but close enough so that in time she would know no difference. Or perhaps it was, as he said, a glammer. Perhaps it was the todash darkness. It could be a trick, he said, most certainly reading her mind. Life is a trick, love a glammer, she replied. Perhaps well meet again, in the clearing at the end of the path. As you say so, let it be so, he told her. He put out one leg, the rundown heel of his boot planted in the earth, and bowed to her. Oy had begun to weep, but he sat firmly beside the gunslingers left boot. Goodbye, my dear. Goodbye, Roland. Then she faced ahead, took in a deep breath, and twisted the little carts throttle. It rolled smoothly forward. Wait! Roland cried, but she never turned, nor looked at him again. She rolled through the door. It slammed shut behind her at once with a flat, declamatory clap he knew all too well, one hed dreamed of ever since his long and feverish walk along the edge of the Western Sea. The sound of the singing was gone and now there was only the lonely sound of the prairie wind. Roland of Gilead sat in front of the door, which already looked tired and unimportant. It would never open again. He put his face in his hands. It occurred to him that if he had never loved them, he would never have felt so alone as this. Yet of all his many regrets, the reopening of his heart was not among them, even now. NINETEEN Laterbecause theres always a later, isnt there?he made breakfast and forced himself to eat his share. Patrick ate heartily, then withdrew to do his necessary while Roland packed up. There was a third plate, and it was still full. Oy? Roland asked, tipping it toward the billybumbler. Willee not have at least a bite? Oy looked at the plate, then backed away two firm steps. Roland nodded and tossed away the uneaten food, scattering it into the grass. Mayhap Mordred would come along in good time, and find something to his liking. At midmorning they moved on, Roland pulling Ho Fat II and Patrick walking along beside with his head hung low. And soon the beat of the Tower filled the gunslingers head again. Very close now. That steady, pulsing power drove out all thoughts of Susannah, and he was glad. He gave himself to the steady beating and let it sweep away all his thoughts and all his sorrow. Commalacomecome, sang the Dark Tower, now just over the horizon. Commalacomecome, gunslinger may ya come. CommalacomeRoland, the journeys nearly done. CHAPTER II MORDRED ONE The dantete was watching when the longhaired fellow they were now traveling with grabbed Susannahs shoulder to point out the dancing orange hobs in the distance. Mordred watched as she whirled, pulling one of the White Daddys big revolvers. For a moment the farseeing glass eyes hed found in the house on Odds Lane trembled in Mordreds hand, that was how hard he was rooting for his Blackbird Mommy to shoot the Artist. How the guilt would have bitten into her! Like the blade of a dull hatchet, yar! It was even possible that, overcome by the horror of what she had done, shedve put the barrel of the gun to her own head and pulled the trigger a second time, and how would Old White Daddy like waking up to that? Ah, children are such dreamers. It didnt happen, of course, but there had been much more to watch. Some of it was hard to see, though. Because it wasnt just excitement that made the binoculars tremble. He was dressed warmly now, in layers of Dandelos hume clothes, but he was still cold. Except when he was hot. And either way, hot or cold, he trembled like a toothless old gaffer in a chimney corner. This state of affairs had been growing gradually worse since he left Joe Collinss house behind. Fever roared in his bones like a blizzard wind. Mordred was no longer ahungry (for Mordred no longer had an appetite), but Mordred was asick, asick, asick. In truth, he was afraid Mordred might be adying. Nonetheless he watched Rolands party with great interest, and once the fire was replenished, he saw even better. Saw the door come into being, although he could not read the symbols there writ upon. He understood that the Artist had somehow drawn it into beingwhat a godlike talent that was! Mordred longed to eat him just on the chance such a talent might be transmittable! He doubted it, the spiritual side of cannibalism was greatly overrated, but what harm in seeing for ones self? He watched their palaver. He sawand also understoodher plea to the Artist and the Mutt, her whining entreaties (come with me so I dont have to go alone, come on, be a sport, in fact be a couple of sports, oh boohoo) and rejoiced in her sorrow and fury when the plea was rejected by both boy and beast; Mordred rejoiced even though he knew it would make his own job harder. (A little harder, anyway; how much trouble could a mute young man and a billybumbler really give him, once he changed his shape and made his move?) For a moment he thought that, in her anger, she might shoot Old White Daddy with his own gun, and that Mordred did not want. Old White Daddy was meant to be his. The voice from the Dark Tower had told him so. Asick he surely was, adying he might be, but Old White Daddy was still meant to be his meal, not the Blackbird Mommys. Why, shed leave the meat to rot without taking a single bite! But she didnt shoot him. Instead she kissed him. Mordred didnt want to see that, it made him feel sicker than ever, and so he put the binoculars aside. He lay in the grass amid a little clump of alders, trembling, hot and cold, trying not to puke (he had spent the entire previous day puking and shitting, it seemed, until the muscles of his midsection ached with the strain of sending such heavy traffic in two directions at once and nothing came up his throat but thick, mucusy strings and nothing out of his backside but brown stew and great hollow farts), and when he looked through the binoculars again, it was just in time to see the back end of the little electric cart disappear as the Blackbird Mommy drove it through the door. Something swirled out around it. Dust, maybe, but he thought snow. There was also singing. The sound of it made him feel almost as sick as seeing her kiss Old White Gunslinger Daddy. Then the door slammed shut behind her and the singing was gone and the gunslinger just sat there near it, with his face in his hands, boohoo, sobsob. The bumbler went to him and put its long snout on one of his boots as if to offer comfort, how sweet, how puking sweet. By then it was dawn, and Mordred dozed a little. When he woke up, it was to the sound of Old White Daddys voice. Mordreds hiding place was downwind, and the words came to him clearly Oy? Willee not have at least a bite? The bumbler would not, however, and the gunslinger had scattered the food that had been meant for the little furry houken. Later, after they moved on (Old White Gunslinger Daddy pulling the cart the robot had made for them, plodding slowly along the ruts of Tower Road with his head down and his shoulders all aslump), Mordred crept to the campsite. He did indeed eat some of the scattered foodsurely it had not been poisoned if Roland had hoped it would go down the bumblers gulletbut he stopped after only three or four chunks of meat, knowing that if he went on eating, his guts would spew everything back out, both north and south. He couldnt have that. If he didnt hold onto at least some nourishment, he would be too weak to follow them. And he must follow, had to stay close a little while longer. It would have to be tonight. It would have to be, because tomorrow Old White Daddy would reach the Dark Tower, and then it would almost certainly be too late. His heart told him so. Mordred plodded as Roland had, but even more slowly. Every now and then he would double over as cramps seized him and his human shape wavered, that blackness rising and receding under his skin, his heavy coat bulging restlessly as the other legs tried to burst free, then hanging slack again as he willed them back inside, gritting his teeth and groaning with effort. Once he shit a pint or so of stinky brown fluid in his pants, and once he managed to get his trousers down, and he cared little either way. No one had invited him to the Reap Ball, haha! Invitation lost in the mail, no doubt! Later, when it came time to attack, he would let the little Red King free. But if it happened now, he was almost positive he wouldnt be able to change back again. He wouldnt have the strength. The spiders faster metabolism would fan the sickness the way a strong wind fans a low groundfire into a forestgobbling blaze. What was killing him slowly would kill him rapidly, instead. So he fought it, and by afternoon he felt a little better. The pulse from the Tower was growing rapidly now, growing in strength and urgency. So was his Red Daddys voice, urging him on, urging him to stay within striking distance. Old White Gunslinger Daddy had gotten no more than four hours sleep a night for weeks now, because he had been standing watchandwatch with the nowdeparted Blackbird Mommy. But Blackbird Mommy hadnt ever had to pull that cart, had she? No, just rode in it like Queen Shit o Turd Hill did she, hee! Which meant Old White Gunslinger Daddy was plenty tired, even with the pulse of the Dark Tower to buoy him up and pull him onward. Tonight Old White Daddy would either have to depend on the Artist and the Mutt to stand the first watch or try to do the whole thing on his own. Mordred thought he could stand one more wakeful night himself, simply because he knew hed never have to have another. He would creep close, as he had the previous night. He would watch their camp with the old manmonsters glass eyes for farseeing. And when they were all asleep, he would change for the last time and rush down upon them. Scrabblededee comes me, hee! Old White Daddy might never even wake up, but Mordred hoped he would. At the very end. Just long enough to realize what was happening to him. Just long enough to know that his son was snatching him into the land of death only hours before he would have reached his precious Dark Tower. Mordred clenched his fists and watched the fingers turn black. He felt the terrible but pleasurable itching up the sides of his body as the spiderlegs tried to burst throughseven instead of eight, thanks to the terriblenastyawful Blackbird Mommy who had been both preg and notpreg at the same time, and might she rot screaming in todash space forever (or at least until one of the Great Ones who lurked there found her). He fought and encouraged the change with equal ferocity. At last he only fought it, and the urge to change subsided. He gave out a victoryfart, but although this one was long and smelly, it was silent. His asshole was now a broken squeezebox that could no longer make music but only gasp. His fingers returned to their normal pinkishwhite shade and the itching up and down the sides of his body disappeared. His head swam and slithered with fever; his thin arms (little more than sticks) ached with chills. The voice of his Red Daddy was sometimes loud and sometimes faint, but it was always there Come to me. Run to me. Hie thy doubleton self. Comecommala, you good son of mine. Well bring the Tower down, well destroy all the light there is, and then rule the darkness together. Come to me. Come. TWO Surely those three who remained (four, counting himself) had outrun kas umbrella. Not since the Prim receded had there been such a creature as Mordred Deschain, who was part hume and part of that rich and potent soup. Surely such a creature could never have been meant by ka to die such a mundane death as the one that now threatened fever brought on by foodpoisoning. Roland could have told him that eating what he found in the snow around to the side of Dandelos barn was a bad idea; so could Robert Browning, for that matter. Wicked or not, actual horse or not, Lippy (probably named after another, and betterknown, Browning poem called Fra Lippo Lippi) had been a sick animal herself when Roland ended her life with a bullet to the head. But Mordred had been in his spiderform when hed come upon the thing which at least looked like a horse, and almost nothing would have stopped him from eating the meat. It wasnt until hed resumed his human form again that he wondered uneasily how there could be so much meat on Dandelos bony old nag and why it had been so soft and warm, so full of uncoagulated blood. It had been in a snowdrift, after all, and had been lying there for some days. The mares remains should have been frozen stiff. Then the vomiting began. The fever came next, and with it the struggle not to change until he was close enough to his Old White Daddy to rip him limb from limb. The being whose coming had been prophesied for thousands of years (mostly by the Mannifolk, and usually in frightened whispers), the being who would grow to be halfhuman and halfgod, the being who would oversee the end of humanity and the return of the Prim . . . that being had finally arrived as a nave and badhearted child who was now dying from a bellyful of poisoned horsemeat. Ka could have had no part in this. THREE Roland and his two companions didnt make much progress on the day Susannah left them. Even had he not planned to travel short miles so that they could come to the Tower at sunset of the day following, Roland wouldnt have been able to go far. He was disheartened, lonely, and tired almost to death. Patrick was also tired, but he at least could ride if he chose to, and for most of that day he did so choose, sometimes napping, sometimes sketching, sometimes walking a little while before climbing back into Ho Fat II and napping some more. The pulse from the Tower was strong in Rolands head and heart, and its song was powerful and lovely, now seemingly composed of a thousand voices, but not even these things could take the lead from his bones. Then, as he was looking for a shady spot where they could stop and eat a little midday meal (by now it was actually midafternoon), he saw something that momentarily made him forget both his weariness and his sorrow. Growing by the side of the road was a wild rose, seemingly the exact twin of the one in the vacant lot. It bloomed in defiance of the season, which Roland put as very early spring. It was a light pink shade on the outside and darkened to a fierce red on the inside; the exact color, he thought, of hearts desire. He fell on his knees before it, tipped his ear toward that coral cup, and listened. The rose was singing. The weariness stayed, as weariness will (on this side of the grave, at least), but the loneliness and the sadness departed, at least for a little while. He peered into the heart of the rose and saw a yellow center so bright he couldnt look directly at it. Gans gateway, he thought, not sure exactly what that was but positive that he was right. Aye, Gans gateway, so it is! This was unlike the rose in the vacant lot in one crucial way the feeling of sickness and the faint voices of discord were gone. This one was rich with health as well as full of light and love. It and all the others . . . they . . . they must . . . They feed the Beams, dont they? With their songs and their perfume. As the Beams feed them. Its a living forcefield, a giving and taking, all spinning out from the Tower. And this is only the first, the farthest outrider. In CanKa No Rey there are tens of thousands, just like this. The thought made him faint with amazement. Then came another that filled him with anger and fear the only one with a view of that great red blanket was insane. Would blight them all in an instant, if allowed free rein to do so. There was a hesitant tap on his shoulder. It was Patrick, with Oy at his heel. Patrick pointed to the grassy area beside the rose, then made eating gestures. Pointed at the rose and made drawing motions. Roland wasnt very hungry, but the boys other idea pleased him a great deal. Yes, he said. Well have a bite here, then maybe Ill take me a little siesta while you draw the rose. Will you make two pictures of it, Patrick? He showed the two remaining fingers on his right hand to make sure Patrick understood. The young man frowned and cocked his head, still not understanding. His hair hung to one shoulder in a bright sheaf. Roland thought of how Susannah had washed that hair in a stream in spite of Patricks hooted protests. It was the sort of thing Roland himself would never have thought to do, but it made the young fellow look a lot better. Looking at that sheaf of shining hair made him miss Susannah in spite of the roses song. She had brought grace to his life. It wasnt a word that had occurred to him until she was gone. Meanwhile, here was Patrick, wildly talented but awfully slow on the uptake. Roland gestured to his pad, then to the rose. Patrick noddedthat part he got. Then Roland raised two of the fingers on his good hand and pointed to the pad again. This time the light broke on Patricks face. He pointed to the rose, to the pad, to Roland, and then to himself. Thats right, big boy, Roland said. A picture of the rose for you and one for me. Its nice, isnt it? Patrick nodded enthusiastically, setting to work while Roland rustled the grub. Once again Roland fixed three plates, and once again Oy refused his share. When Roland looked into the bumblers goldringed eyes he saw an emptiness therea kind of lossthat hurt him deep inside. And Oy couldnt stand to miss many meals; he was far too thin already. Trailfrayed, Cuthbert would have said, probably smiling. In need of some hot sassafras and salts. But the gunslinger had no sassy here. Why doee look so? Roland asked the bumbler crossly. Ifee wanted to go with her, thee should have gone when thee had the chance! Why willee cast thy sad houkens eyes on me now? Oy looked at him a moment longer, and Roland saw that he had hurt the little fellows feelings; ridiculous but true. Oy walked away, little squiggle of tail drooping. Roland felt like calling him back, but that would have been more ridiculous yet, would it not? What plan did he have? To apologize to a billybumbler? He felt angry and ill at ease with himself, feelings he had never suffered before hauling Eddie, Susannah, and Jake from Americaside into his life. Before theyd come hed felt almost nothing, and while that was a narrow way to live, in some ways it wasnt so bad; at least you didnt waste time wondering if you should apologize to animals for taking a high tone to them, by the gods. Roland hunkered by the rose, leaning into the soothing power of its song and the blaze of lighthealthy lightfrom its center. Then Patrick hooted at him, gesturing for Roland to move away so he could see it and draw it. This added to Rolands sense of dislocation and annoyance, but he moved back without a word of protest. He had, after all, asked Patrick to draw it, hadnt he? He thought of how, if Susannah had been here, their eyes would have met with amused understanding, as the eyes of parents do over the antics of a small child. But she wasnt here, of course; shed been the last of them and now she was gone, too. All right, canee see howgit rosengaff a tweakit better? he asked, striving to sound comic and only sounding crosscross and tired. Patrick, at least, didnt react to the harshness in the gunslingers tone; probably didnt even ken what I said, Roland thought. The mute boy sat with his ankles crossed and his pad balanced on his thighs, his halffinished plate of food set off to one side. Dont get so busy you forget to eat that, Roland said. You mind me, now. He got another distracted nod for his pains and gave up. Im going to snooze, Patrick. Itll be a long afternoon. And an even longer night, he added to himself . . . and yet he had the same consolation as Mordred tonight would likely be the last. He didnt know for sure what waited for him in the Dark Tower at the end of the field of roses, but even if he managed to put paid to the Crimson King, he felt quite sure that this was his last march. He didnt believe he would ever leave CanKa No Rey, and that was all right. He was very tired. And, despite the power of the rose, sad. Roland of Gilead put an arm over his eyes and was asleep at once. FOUR He didnt sleep for long before Patrick woke him with a childs enthusiasm to show him the first picture of the rose hed drawnthe sun suggested no more than ten minutes had passed, fifteen at most. Like all of his drawings, this one had a queer power. Patrick had captured the rose almost to the life, even though he had nothing but a pencil to work with. Still, Roland would much have preferred another hours sleep to this exercise in art appreciation. He nodded his approval, thoughno more grouch and grump in the presence of such a lovely thing, he promised himselfand Patrick smiled, happy even with so little. He tossed back the sheet and began drawing the rose again. One picture for each of them, just as Roland had asked. Roland could have slept again, but what was the point? The mute boy would be done with the second picture in a matter of minutes and would only wake him again. He went to Oy instead, and stroked the bumblers dense fur, something he rarely did. Im sorry I spoke rough toee, fella, Roland said. Will you not set me on with a word? But Oy would not. Fifteen minutes later, Roland repacked the few things hed taken out of the cart, spat into his palms, and hoisted the handles again. The cart was lighter now, had to be, but it felt heavier. Of course its heavier, he thought. Its got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do. Soon Ho Fat II had Patrick Danville in it, as well. He crawled up, made himself a little nest, and fell asleep almost at once. Roland plodded on, head down, shadow growing longer at his heels. Oy walked beside him. One more night, the gunslinger thought. One more night, one more day to follow, and then its done. One way or t other. He let the pulse of the Tower and its many singing voices fill his head and lighten his heels . . . at least a little. There were more roses now, dozens scattered on either side of the road and brightening the otherwise dull countryside. A few were growing in the road itself and he was careful to detour around them. Tired though he might be, he would not crush a single one, or roll a wheel over a single fallen petal. FIVE He stopped for the night while the sun was still well above the horizon, too weary to go farther even though there would be at least another two hours of daylight. Here was a stream that had gone dry, but in its bed grew a riot of those beautiful wild roses. Their songs didnt diminish his weariness, but they revived his spirit to some extent. He thought this was true for Patrick and Oy, as well, and that was good. When Patrick had awakened hed looked around eagerly at first. Then his face had darkened, and Roland knew he was realizing all over again that Susannah was gone. The boy had cried a little then, but perhaps there would be no crying here. There was a grove of cottonwood trees on the bankat least the gunslinger thought they were cottonwoodsbut they had died when the stream from which their roots drank had disappeared. Now their branches were only bony, leafless snarls against the sky. In their silhouettes he could make out the number nineteen over and over again, in both the figures of Susannahs world and those of his own. In one place the branches seemed to clearly spell the word CHASSIT against the deepening sky. Before making a fire and cooking them an early suppercanned goods from Dandelos pantry would do well enough tonight, he reckonedRoland went into the dry streambed and smelled the roses, strolling slowly among the dead trees and listening to their song. Both the smell and the sound were refreshing. Feeling a little better, he gathered wood from beneath the trees (snapping off a few of the lower branches for good measure, leaving dry, splintered stumps that reminded him a little of Patricks pencils) and piled kindling in the center. Then he struck a light, speaking the old catechism almost without hearing it Sparkadark, whos my sire? Will I lay me? Will I stay me? Bless this camp with fire. While he waited for the fire to first grow and then die down to a bed of rosy embers, Roland took out the watch he had been given in New York. Yesterday it had stopped, although he had been assured the battery that ran it would last for fifty years. Now, as late afternoon faded to evening, the hands had very slowly begun to move backward. He looked at this for a little while, fascinated, then closed the cover and looked at the siguls inscribed there key and rose and Tower. A faint and eldritch blue light had begun to gleam from the windows that spiraled upward. They didnt know it would do that, he thought, and then put the watch carefully back in his lefthand front pocket, checking first (as he always did) that there was no hole for it to fall through. Then he cooked. He and Patrick ate well. Oy would touch not a single bite. SIX Other than the night he had spent in palaver with the man in blackthe night during which Walter had read a bleak fortune from an undoubtedly stacked deckthose twelve hours of dark by the dry stream were the longest of Rolands life. The weariness settled over him ever deeper and darker, until it felt like a cloak of stones. Old faces and old places marched in front of his heavy eyes Susan, riding hellbent across the Drop with her blond hair flying out behind; Cuthbert running down the side of Jericho Hill in much the same fashion, screaming and laughing; Alain Johns raising a glass in a toast; Eddie and Jake wrestling in the grass, yelling, while Oy danced around them, barking. Mordred was somewhere out there, and close, yet again and again Roland found himself drifting toward sleep. Each time he jerked himself awake, staring around wildly into the dark, he knew he had come nearer to the edge of unconsciousness. Each time he expected to see the spider with the red mark on its belly bearing down on him and saw nothing but the hobs, dancing orange in the distance. Heard nothing but the sough of the wind. But he waits. He bides. And if I sleepwhen I sleephell be on us. Around three in the morning he roused himself by willpower alone from a doze that was on the very verge of tumbling him into deeper sleep. He looked around desperately, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms hard enough to make mirks and fouders and sankofites explode across his field of vision. The fire had burned very low. Patrick lay about twenty feet from it, at the twisted base of a cottonwood tree. From where Roland sat, the boy was no more than a hidecovered hump. Of Oy there was no immediate sign. Roland called to the bumbler and got no response. The gunslinger was about to try his feet when he saw Jakes old friend a little beyond the edge of the failing firelightor at least the gleam of his goldringed eyes. Those eyes looked at Roland for a moment, then disappeared, probably when Oy put his snout back down on his paws. Hes tired, too, Roland thought, and why not? The question of what would become of Oy after tomorrow tried to rise to the surface of the gunslingers troubled, tired mind, and Roland pushed it away. He got up (in his weariness his hands slipped down to his formerly troublesome hip, as if expecting to find the pain still there), went to Patrick, and shook him awake. It took some doing, but at last the boys eyes opened. That wasnt good enough for Roland. He grasped Patricks shoulders and pulled him up to a sitting position. When the boy tried to slump back down again, Roland shook him. Hard. He looked at Roland with dazed incomprehension. Help me build up the fire, Patrick. Doing that should wake him up at least a little. And once the fire was burning bright again, Patrick would have to stand a brief watch. Roland didnt like the idea, knew full well that leaving Patrick in charge of the night would be dangerous, but trying to watch the rest of it on his own would be even more dangerous. He needed sleep. An hour or two would be enough, and surely Patrick could stay awake that long. Patrick was willing enough to gather up some sticks and put them on the fire, although he moved like a bougiea reanimated corpse. And when the fire was blazing, he slumped back down in his former place with his arms between his bony knees, already more asleep than awake. Roland thought he might actually have to slap the boy to bring him around, and would later wishbitterlythat he had done just that. Patrick, listen to me. He shook Patrick by the shoulders hard enough to make his long hair fly, but some of it flopped back into his eyes. Roland brushed it away. I need you to stay awake and watch. Just for an hour . . . just until . . . look up, Patrick! Look! Gods, dont you dare go to sleep on me again! Do you see that? The brightest star of all those close to us! It was Old Mother Roland was pointing to, and Patrick nodded at once. There was a gleam of interest in his eye now, and the gunslinger thought that was encouraging. It was Patricks I want to draw look. And if he sat drawing Old Mother as she shone in the widest fork of the biggest dead cottonwood, then the chances were good that hed stay awake. Maybe until dawn, if he got fully involved. Here, Patrick. He made the boy sit against the base of the tree. It was bony and knobby andRoland hopeduncomfortable enough to prohibit sleep. All these movements felt to Roland like the sort you made underwater. Oh, he was tired. So tired. Do you still see the star? Patrick nodded eagerly. He seemed to have thrown off his sleepiness, and the gunslinger thanked the gods for this favor. When it goes behind that thick branch and you cant see it or draw it anymore without getting up . . . you call me. Wake me up, no matter how hard it is. Do you understand? Patrick nodded at once, but Roland had now traveled with him long enough to know that such a nod meant little or nothing. Eager to please, thats what he was. If you asked him if nine and nine made nineteen, he would nod with the same instant enthusiasm. When you cant see it anymore from where youre sitting . . . His own words seemed to be coming from far away, now. Hed just have to hope that Patrick understood. The tongueless boy had taken out his pad, at least, and a freshly sharpened pencil. Thats my best protection, Rolands mind muttered as he stumbled back to his little pile of hides between the campfire and Ho Fat II. He wont fall asleep while hes drawing, will he? He hoped not, but supposed he didnt really know. |
And it didnt matter, because he, Roland of Gilead, was going to sleep in any case. Hed done the best he could, and it would have to be enough. An hour, he muttered, and his voice was far and wee in his own ears. Wake me in an hour . . . when the star . . . when Old Mother goes behind . . . But Roland was unable to finish. He didnt even know what he was saying anymore. Exhaustion grabbed him and bore him swiftly away into dreamless sleep. SEVEN Mordred saw it all through the farseeing glass eyes. His fever had soared, and in its bright flame, his own exhaustion had at least temporarily departed. He watched with avid interest as the gunslinger woke the mute boythe Artistand bullied him into helping him build up the fire. He watched, rooting for the mute to finish this chore and then go back to sleep before the gunslinger could stop him. That didnt happen, unfortunately. They had camped near a grove of dead cottonwoods, and Roland led the Artist to the biggest tree. Here he pointed up at the sky. It was strewn with stars, but Mordred reckoned Old White Gunslinger Daddy was pointing to Old Mother, because she was the brightest. At last the Artist, who didnt seem to be rolling a full barrow (at least not in the brains department) seemed to understand. He got out his pad and had already set to sketching as Old White Daddy stumbled a little way off, still muttering instructions and orders to which the Artist was pretty clearly paying absolutely no attention at all. Old White Daddy collapsed so suddenly that for a moment Mordred feared that perhaps the strip of jerky that served the son of a bitch as a heart had finally given up beating. Then Roland stirred in the grass, resettling himself, and Mordred, lying on a knoll about ninety yards west of the dry streambed, felt his own heartbeat slow. And deep though the Old White Gunslinger Daddys exhaustion might be, his training and his long lineage, going all the way back to the Eld himself, would be enough to wake him with his gun in his hand the second the Artist gave one of his wordless but devilishly loud cries. Cramps seized Mordred, the deepest yet. He doubled over, fighting to hold his human shape, fighting not to scream, fighting not to die. He heard another of those long flabbering noises from below and felt more of the lumpy brown stew begin coursing down his legs. But his preternaturally keen nose smelled more than excreta in this new mess; this time he smelled blood as well as shit. He thought the pain would never end, that it would go on deepening until it tore him in two, but at last it began to let up. He looked at his left hand and was not entirely surprised to see that the fingers had blackened and fused together. They would never come back to human again, those fingers; he believed he had but only one more change left in him. Mordred wiped sweat from his brow with his right hand and raised the bindoculars to his eyes again, praying to his Red Daddy that the stupid mutie boy would be asleep. But he was not. He was leaning against the cottonwood tree and looking up between the branches and drawing Old Mother. That was the moment when Mordred Deschain came closest to despair. Like Roland, he thought drawing was the one thing that would likely keep the idiot boy awake. Therefore, why not give in to the change while he had the heat of this latest feverspike to fuel him with its destructive energy? Why not take his chance? It was Roland he wanted, after all, not the boy; surely he could, in his spider form, sweep down on the gunslinger rapidly enough to grab him and pull him against the spiders craving mouth. Old White Daddy might get off one shot, possibly even two, but Mordred thought he could take one or two, if the flying bits of lead didnt find the white node on the spiders back his dual bodys brain. And once I pull him in, Ill never let him go until hes sucked dry, nothing but a dustmummy like the other one, Mia. He relaxed, ready to let the change sweep over him, and then another voice spoke from the center of his mind. It was the voice of his Red Daddy, the one who was imprisoned on the side of the Dark Tower and needed Mordred alive, at least one more day, in order to set him free. Wait a little longer, this voice counseled. Wait a little more. I might have another trick up my sleeve. Wait . . . wait just a little longer . . . Mordred waited. And after a moment or two, he felt the pulse from the Dark Tower change. EIGHT Patrick felt that change, too. The pulse became soothing. And there were words in it, ones that blunted his eagerness to draw. He made another line, paused, then put his pencil aside and only looked up at Old Mother, who seemed to pulse in time with the words he heard in his head, words Roland would have recognized. Only these were sung in an old mans voice, quavering but sweet Babybunting, darling one, Now another day is done. May your dreams be sweet and merry, May you dream of fields and berries. Babybunting, babydear, Baby, bring your berries here. Oh chussit, chissit, chassit! Bring enough to fill your basket! Patricks head nodded. His eyes closed . . . opened . . . slipped closed again. Enough to fill my basket, he thought, and slept in the firelight. NINE Now, my good son, whispered the cold voice in the middle of Mordreds hot and melting brains. Now. Go to him and make sure he never rises from his sleep. Murder him among the roses and well rule together. Mordred came from hiding, the binoculars tumbling from a hand that was no longer a hand at all. As he changed, a feeling of huge confidence swept through him. In another minute it would be done. They both slept, and there was no way he could fail. He rushed down on the camp and the sleeping men, a black nightmare on seven legs, his mouth opening and closing. TEN Somewhere, a thousand miles away, Roland heard barking, loud and urgent, furious and savage. His exhausted mind tried to turn away from it, to blot it out and go deeper. Then there was a horrible scream of agony that awoke him in a flash. He knew that voice, even as distorted by pain as it was. Oy! he cried, leaping up. Oy, where are you? To me! To m There he was, twisting in the spiders grip. Both of them were clearly visible in the light of the fire. Beyond them, sitting propped against the cottonwood tree, Patrick gazed stupidly through a curtain of hair that would soon be dirty again, now that Susannah was gone. The bumbler wriggled furiously to and fro, snapping at the spiders body with foam flying from his jaws even as Mordred bent him in a direction his back was never meant to go. If hed not rushed out of the tall grass, Roland thought, that would be me in Mordreds grip. Oy sent his teeth deep into one of the spiders legs. In the firelight Roland could see the coinsized dimples of the bumblers jawmuscles as he chewed deeper still. The thing squalled and its grip loosened. At that moment Oy might have gotten free, had he chosen to do so. He did not. Instead of jumping down and leaping away in the momentary freedom granted him before Mordred was able to reset his grip, Oy used the time to extend his long neck and seize the place where one of the things legs joined its bloated body. He bit deep, bringing a flood of blackishred liquor that ran freely from the sides of his muzzle. In the firelight it gleamed with orange sparks. Mordred squalled louder still. He had left Oy out of his calculations, and was now paying the price. In the firelight, the two writhing forms were figures out of a nightmare. Somewhere nearby, Patrick was hooting in terror. Worthless whoreson fell asleep after all, Roland thought bitterly. But who had set him to watch in the first place? Put him down, Mordred! he shouted. Put him down and Ill let you live another day! I swear it on my fathers name! Red eyes, full of insanity and malevolence, peered at him over Oys contorted body. Above them, high on the curve of the spiders back, were tiny blue eyes, hardly more than pinholes. They stared at the gunslinger with a hate that was all too human. My own eyes, Roland thought with dismay, and then there was a bitter crack. It was Oys spine, but in spite of this mortal injury he never loosened his grip on the joint where Mordreds leg joined his body, although the steely bristles had torn away much of his muzzle, baring sharp teeth that had sometimes closed on Jakes wrist with gentle affection, tugging him toward something Oy wanted the boy to see. Ake! he would cry on such occasions. AkeAke! Rolands right hand dropped to his holster and found it empty. It was only then, hours after she had taken her leave, that he realized Susannah had taken one of his guns with her into the other world. Good, he thought. Good. If it is the darkness she found, there would have been five for the things in it and one for herself. Good. But this thought was also dim and distant. He pulled the other revolver as Mordred crouched on his hindquarters and used his remaining middle leg, curling it around Oys midsection and pulling the animal, still snarling, away from his torn and bleeding leg. The spider twirled the furry body upward in a terrible spiral. For a moment it blotted out the bright beacon that was Old Mother. Then he hurled Oy away from him and Roland had a moment of dj vu, realizing he had seen this long ago, in the Wizards Glass. Oy arced across the fireshot dark and was impaled on one of the cottonwood branches the gunslinger himself had broken off for firewood. He gave an awful hurt crya deathcryand then hung, suspended and limp, above Patricks head. Mordred came at Roland without a pause, but his charge was a slow, shambling thing; one of his legs had been shot away only minutes after his birth, and now another hung limp and broken, its pincers jerking spasmodically as they dragged on the grass. Rolands eye had never been clearer, the chill that surrounded him at moments like this never deeper. He saw the white node and the blue bombardiers eyes that were his eyes. He saw the face of his only son peering over the back of the abomination and then it was gone in a spray of blood as his first bullet tore it off. The spider reared up, legs clashing at the black and starshot sky. Rolands next two bullets went into its revealed belly and exited through the back, pulling dark sprays of liquid with it. The spider slewed to one side, perhaps trying to run away, but its remaining legs would not support it. Mordred Deschain fell into the fire, casting up a flume of red and orange sparks. It writhed in the embers, the bristles on its belly beginning to burn, and Roland, grinning bitterly, shot it again. The dying spider rolled out of the now scattered fire on its back, its remaining legs twitching together in a knot and then spreading apart. One fell back into the fire and began to burn. The smell was atrocious. Roland started forward, meaning to stamp out the little fires the scattered embers had started in the grass, and then a howl of outraged fury rose in his head. My son! My only son! Youve murdered him! He was mine, too, Roland said, looking at the smoldering monstrosity. He could own the truth. Yes, he could do that much. Come then! Come, sonkiller, and look at your Tower, but know thisyoull die of old age at the edge of the CanKa before you ever so much as touch its door! I will never let you pass! Todash space itself will pass away before I let you pass! Murderer! Murderer of your mother, murderer of your friendsaye, every one, for Susannah lies dead with her throat cut on the other side of the door you sent her throughand now murderer of your own son! Who sent him to me? Roland asked the voice in his head. Who sent yonder childfor thats what he is, inside that black skinto his death, ye red boggart? To this there was no answer, so Roland reholstered his gun and put out the patches of fire before they could spread. He thought of what the voice had said about Susannah, decided he didnt believe it. She might be dead, aye, might be, but he thought Mordreds Red Father knew for sure no more than Roland himself did. The gunslinger let that thought go and went to the tree, where the last of his katet hung, impaled . . . but still alive. The goldringed eyes looked at Roland with what might almost have been weary amusement. Oy, Roland said, stretching out his hand, knowing it might be bitten and not caring in the least. He supposed that part of himand not a small one, eitherwanted to be bitten. Oy, we all say thank you. I say thank you, Oy. The bumbler did not bite, and spoke but one word. Olan, said he. Then he sighed, licked the gunslingers hand a single time, hung his head down, and died. ELEVEN As dawn strengthened into the clear light of morning, Patrick came hesitantly to where the gunslinger sat in the dry streambed, amid the roses, with Oys body spread across his lap like a stole. The young man made a soft, interrogative hooting sound. Not now, Patrick, Roland said absently, stroking Oys fur. It was dense but smooth to the touch. He found it hard to believe that the creature beneath it had gone, in spite of the stiffening muscles and the tangled places where the blood had now clotted. He combed these smooth with his fingers as best he could. Not now. We have all the livelong day to get there, and well do fine. No, there was no need to hurry; no reason why he should not leisurely mourn the last of his dead. There had been no doubt in the old Kings voice when he had promised that Roland should die of old age before he so much as touched the door in the Towers base. They would go, of course, and Roland would study the terrain, but he knew even now that his idea of coming to the Tower on the old monsters blind side and then working his way around was not an idea at all, but a fools hope. There had been no doubt in the old villains voice; no doubt hiding behind it, either. And for the time being, none of that mattered. Here was another one he had killed, and if there was consolation to be had, it was this Oy would be the last. Now he was alone again except for Patrick, and Roland had an idea Patrick was immune to the terrible germ the gunslinger carried, for he had never been katet to begin with. I only kill my family, Roland thought, stroking the dead billybumbler. What hurt most was remembering how unpleasantly he had spoken to Oy the day before. Ifee wanted to go with her, thee should have gone when thee had thy chance! Had he stayed because he knew that Roland would need him? That when push came down to shove (it was Eddies phrase, of course), Patrick would fail? Why willee cast thy sad houkens eyes on me now? Because he had known it was to be his last day, and his dying would be hard? I think you knew both things, Roland said, and closed his eyes so he could feel the fur beneath his hands better. Im so sorry I spoke toee sowould give the fingers on my good left hand if I could take the words back. So I would, every one, say true. But here as in the Keystone World, time only ran one way. Done was done. There would be no taking back. Roland would have said there was no anger left, that every bit of it had been burned away, but when he felt the tingling all over his skin and understood what it meant, he felt fresh fury rise in his heart. And he felt the coldness settle into his tired but still talented hands. Patrick was drawing him! Sitting beneath the cottonwood just as if a brave little creature worth ten of himno, a hundred!hadnt died in that very tree, and for both of them. Its his way, Susannah spoke up calmly and gently from deep in his mind. Its all he has, everything else has been taken from himhis home world as well as his mother and his tongue and whatever brains he might once have had. Hes mourning, too, Roland. Hes frightened, too. This is the only way he has of soothing himself. Undoubtedly all true. But the truth of it actually fed his rage instead of damping it down. He put his remaining gun aside (it lay gleaming between two of the singing roses) because having it close to hand wouldnt do, no, not in his current mood. Then he rose to his feet, meaning to give Patrick the scolding of his life, if for no other reason than it would make Roland feel a little bit better himself. He could already hear the first words Do you enjoy drawing those who saved your mostly worthless life, stupid boy? Does it cheer your heart? He was opening his mouth to begin when Patrick put his pencil down and seized his new toy, instead. The eraser was halfgone now, and there were no others; as well as Rolands gun, Susannah had taken the little pink nubbins with her, probably for no other reason than that shed been carrying the jar in her pocket and her mind had been studying other, more important, matters. Patrick poised the eraser over his drawing, then looked upperhaps to make sure he really wanted to erase at alland saw the gunslinger standing in the streambed and frowning at him. Patrick knew immediately that Roland was angry, although he probably had no idea under heaven as to why, and his face cramped with fear and unhappiness. Roland saw him now as Dandelo must have seen him time and time again, and his anger collapsed at the thought. He would not have Patrick fear himfor Susannahs sake if not his own, he would not have Patrick fear him. And discovered that it was for his own sake, after all. Why not kill him, then? asked the sly, pulsing voice in his head. Kill him and put him out of his misery, if thee feels so tender toward him? He and the bumbler can enter the clearing together. They can make a place there for you, gunslinger. Roland shook his head and tried to smile. Nay, Patrick, son of Sonia, he said (for that was how Bill the robot had called the boy). Nay, I was wrongagainand will not scold thee. But . . . He walked to where Patrick was sitting. Patrick cringed away from him with a doglike, placatory smile that made Roland angry all over again, but he quashed the emotion easily enough this time. Patrick had loved Oy too, and this was the only way he had of dealing with his sorrow. Little that mattered to Roland now. He reached down and gently plucked the eraser out of the boys fingers. Patrick looked at him questioningly, then reached out his empty hand, asking with his eyes that the wonderful (and useful) new toy be given back. Nay, Roland said, as gently as he could. You made do for the gods only know how many years without ever knowing such things existed; you can make do the rest of this one day, I think. Mayhap therell be something for you to drawand then undrawlater on. Doee ken, Patrick? Patrick did not, but once the eraser was safely deposited in Rolands pocket along with the watch, he seemed to forget about it and just went back to his drawing. Put thy picture aside for a little, too, Roland told him. Patrick did so without argument. He pointed first to the cart, then to the Tower Road, and made his interrogative hooting sound. Aye, Roland said, but first we should see what Mordred had for gunnathere may be something useful thereand bury our friend. Willee help me see Oy into the ground, Patrick? Patrick was willing, and the burial didnt take long; the body was far smaller than the heart it had held. By midmorning they had begun to cover the last few miles on the long road which led to the Dark Tower. CHAPTER III THE CRIMSON KING AND THE DARK TOWER ONE The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip has been long and the cost has been high . . . but no great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time. Now, however, as the end draws closer, you must mark yon two travelers walking toward us with great care. The older manhe with the tanned, lined face and the gun on his hipis pulling the cart they call Ho Fat II. The younger onehe with the oversized drawing pad tucked under his arm that makes him look like a student in days of oldis walking along beside it. They are climbing a long, gently upsloping hill not much different from hundreds of others they have climbed. The overgrown road they follow is lined on either side with the remains of rock walls; wild roses grow in amiable profusion amid the tumbles of fieldstone. In the open, brushdotted land beyond these fallen walls are strange stone edifices. Some look like the ruins of castles; others have the appearance of Egyptian obelisks; a few are clearly Speaking Rings of the sort where demons may be summoned; one ancient ruin of stone pillars and plinths has the look of Stonehenge. One almost expects to see hooded Druids gathered in the center of that great circle, perhaps casting the runes, but the keepers of these monuments, these precursors of the Great Monument, are all gone. Only small herds of bannock graze where once they worshipped. Never mind. Its not old ruins weve come to observe near the end of our long journey, but the old gunslinger pulling the handles of the cart. We stand at the crest of the hill and wait as he comes toward us. He comes. And comes. Relentless as ever, a man who always learns to speak the language of the land (at least some of it) and the customs of the country; he is still a man who would straighten pictures in strange hotel rooms. Much about him has changed, but not that. He crests the hill, so close to us now that we can smell the sour tang of his sweat. He looks up, a quick and automatic glance he shoots first ahead and then to either side as he tops any hillAlways con yer vantage was Corts rule, and the last of his pupils has still not forgotten it. He looks up without interest, looks down . . . and stops. After a moment of staring at the broken, weedinfested paving of the road, he looks up again, more slowly this time. Much more slowly. As if in dread of what he thinks he has seen. And its here we must join himsink into himalthough how we will ever con the vantage of Rolands heart at such a moment as this, when the singleminded goal of his lifetime at last comes in sight, is more than this poor excuse for a storyman can ever tell. Some moments are beyond imagination. TWO Roland glanced up quickly as he topped the hill, not because he expected trouble but because the habit was too deeply ingrained to break. Always con yer vantage, Cort had told them, drilling it into their heads from the time when they had been little more than babbies. He looked back down at the roadit was becoming more and more difficult to swerve among the roses without crushing any, although he had managed the trick so farand then, belatedly, realized what he had just seen. What you thought you saw, Roland told himself, still looking down at the road. Its probably just another of the strange ruins weve been passing ever since we started moving again. But even then Roland knew it wasnt so. What hed seen was not to either side of the Tower Road, but dead ahead. He looked up again, hearing his neck creak like hinges in an old door, and there, still miles ahead but now visible on the horizon, real as roses, was the top of the Dark Tower. That which he had seen in a thousand dreams he now saw with his living eyes. Sixty or eighty yards ahead, the road rose to a higher hill with an ancient Speaking Ring moldering in the ivy and honeysuckle on one side and a grove of ironwood trees on the other. At the center of this near horizon, the black shape rose in the near distance, blotting out a tiny portion of the blue sky. Patrick came to a stop beside Roland and made one of his hooting sounds. Do you see it? Roland asked. His voice was dusty, cracked with amazement. Then, before Patrick could answer, the gunslinger pointed to what the boy wore around his neck. In the end, the binoculars had been the only item in Mordreds little bit of gunna worth taking. Give them over, Pat. Patrick did, willingly enough. Roland raised them to his eyes, made a minute adjustment to the knurled focus knob, and then caught his breath as the top of the Tower sprang into view, seemingly close enough to touch. How much was visible over the horizon? How much was he looking at? Twenty feet? Perhaps as much as fifty? He didnt know, but he could see at least three of the narrow slitwindows which ascended the Towers barrel in a spiral, and he could see the oriel window at the top, its many colors blazing in the spring sunshine, the black center seeming to peer back down the binoculars at him like the very Eye of Todash. Patrick hooted and held out a hand for the binoculars. He wanted his own look, and Roland handed the glasses over without a murmur. He felt lightheaded, not really there. It occurred to him that he had sometimes felt like that in the weeks before his battle with Cort, as though he were a dream or a moonbeam. He had sensed something coming, some vast change, and that was what he felt now. Yonder it is, he thought. Yonder is my destiny, the end of my lifes road. And yet my heart still beats (a little faster than before, tis true), my blood still courses, and no doubt when I bend over to grasp the handles of this becurst cart my back will groan and I may pass a little gas. Nothing at all has changed. He waited for the disappointment this thought surely presagedthe letdown. It didnt come. What he felt instead was a queer, soaring brightness that seemed to begin in his mind and then spread to his muscles. For the first time since setting out at midmorning, thoughts of Oy and Susannah left his mind. He felt free. Patrick lowered the binoculars. When he turned to Roland, his face was excited. He pointed to the black thumb jutting above the horizon and hooted. Yes, Roland said. Someday, in some world, some version of you will paint it, along with Llamrei, Arthur Elds horse. That I know, for Ive seen the proof. As for now, its where we must go. Patrick hooted again, then pulled a long face. He put his hands to his temples and swayed his head back and forth, like someone who has a terrible headache. Yes, Roland said. Im afraid, too. But theres no help for it. I have to go there. Would you stay here, Patrick? Stay and wait for me? If you would, I give you leave to do so. Patrick shook his head at once. And, just in case Roland didnt take the point, the mute boy seized his arm in a hard grip. The right hand, the one with which he drew, was like iron. Roland nodded. Even tried to smile. Yes, he said, thats fine. Stay with me as long as you like. As long as you understand that in the end Ill have to go on alone. THREE Now, as they rose from each dip and topped each hill, the Dark Tower seemed to spring closer. More of the spiraling windows which ran around its great circumference became visible. Roland could see two steel posts jutting from the top. The clouds which followed the Paths of the two working Beams seemed to flow away from the tips, making a great Xshape in the sky. The voices grew louder, and Roland realized they were singing the names of the world. Of all the worlds. He didnt know how he could know that, but he was sure of it. That lightness of being continued to fill him up. Finally, as they crested a hill with great stone men marching away to the north on their left (the remains of their faces, painted in some bloodred stuff, glared down upon them), Roland told Patrick to climb up into the cart. Patrick looked surprised. He made a series of hooting noises Roland took to mean But arent you tired? Yes, but I need an anchor, even so. Without one Im apt to start running toward yonder Tower, even though part of me knows better. And if plain old exhaustion doesnt burst my heart, the Red Kings apt to take my head off with one of his toys. Get in, Patrick. Patrick did so. He rode sitting hunched forward, with the binoculars pressed against his eyes. FOUR Three hours later, they came to the foot of a much steeper hill. It was, Rolands heart told him, the last hill. CanKa No Rey was beyond. At the top, on the right, was a cairn of boulders that had once been a small pyramid. What remained stood about thirty feet high. Roses grew around its base in a rough crimson ring. Roland set this in his sights and took the hill slowly, pulling the cart by its handles. As he climbed, the top of the Dark Tower once more appeared. Each step brought a greater length of it into view. Now he could see the balconies with their waisthigh railings. There was no need of the binoculars; the air was preternaturally clear. He put the distance remaining at no more than five miles. Perhaps only three. Level after level rose before his notquitedisbelieving eye. Just shy of this hills top, with the crumbling rock pyramid twenty paces ahead of them on the right, Roland stopped, bent, and set the handles of the cart on the road for the last time. Every nerve in his body spoke of danger. Patrick? Hop down. Patrick did so, looking anxiously into Rolands face and hooting. The gunslinger shook his head. I cant say why just yet. Only its not safe. The voices sang in a great chorus, but the air around them was still. Not a bird soared overhead or sang in the distance. The wandering herds of bannock had all been left behind. A breeze soughed around them, and the grasses rippled. The roses nodded their wild heads. The two of them walked on together, and as they did, Roland felt a timid touch against the side of his twofingered right hand. He looked at Patrick. The mute boy looked anxiously back, trying to smile. Roland took his hand, and they crested the hill in that fashion. Below them was a great blanket of red that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The road cut through it, a dusty white line perfectly straight and perhaps twelve feet wide. In the middle of the rosefield stood the sooty dark gray Tower, just as it had stood in his dreams; its windows gleamed in the sun. Here the road split and made a perfect white circle around the Towers base to continue on the other side, in a direction Roland believed was now dead east instead of southbyeast. Another road ran off at right angles to the Tower Road to the north and south, if he was right in believing that the points of the compass had been reestablished. From above, the Dark Tower would look like the center of a bloodfilled gunsight. Its Roland began, and then a great, crazed shriek floated to them on the breeze, weirdly undiminished by the distance of miles. It comes on the Beam, Roland thought. And its carried by the roses. GUNSLINGER! screamed the Crimson King. NOW YOU DIE! There was a whistling sound, thin at first and then growing, cutting through the combined song of the Tower and the roses like the keenest blade ever ground on a wheel dusted with diamonds. Patrick stood transfixed, peering dumbly at the Tower; he would have been blown out of his boots if not for Roland, whose reflexes were as quick as ever. He pulled the mute boy behind the heaped stone of the pyramid by their joined hands. There were other stones hidden in the high grass of dock and jimson; they stumbled over these and went sprawling. Roland felt the corner of one digging painfully into his ribs. The whistle continued to rise, becoming an earsplitting whine. Roland saw a golden something flash past in the airone of the sneetches. It struck the cart and it blew up, scattering their gunna every which way. Most of the stuff settled back to the road, cans rattling and bouncing, some of them burst. Then came high, chattering laughter that set Rolands teeth on edge; beside him, Patrick covered his ears. The lunacy in that laughter was almost unbearable. COME OUT! urged that distant, mad, laughing voice. COME OUT AND PLAY, ROLAND! COME TO ME! COME TO YOUR TOWER, AFTER ALL THE LONG YEARS WILL YOU NOT? Patrick looked at him, his eyes desperate and frightened. He was holding his drawing pad against his chest like a shield. |
Roland peered carefully around the edge of the pyramid, and there, on a balcony two levels up from the Towers base, he saw exactly what he had seen in sai Sayres painting one blob of red and three blobs of white; a face and two upraised hands. But this was no painting, and one of the hands moved rapidly forward in a throwing gesture and there came another hellish, rising whine. Roland rolled back against the tumble of the pyramid. There was a pause that seemed endless, and then the sneetch struck the pyramids other side and exploded. The concussion threw them forward onto their faces. Patrick screamed in terror. Rocks flew to either side in a spray. Some of them rattled down on the road, but Roland saw not a single piece of shrapnel strike so much as a single rose. The boy scrambled to his knees and would have runlikely back into the roadbut Roland grabbed him by the collar of his hide coat and yanked him down again. Were safe enough here, he murmured to Patrick. Look. He reached into a hole revealed by the falling rock, knocked on the interior with his knuckles, produced a dull ringing noise, and showed his teeth in a strained grin. Steel! Yar! He can hit this thing with a dozen of his flying fireballs and not knock it down. All he can do is blast away the rocks and blocks and expose what lies beneath. Kennit? And I dont think hell waste his ammunition. He cant have much more than a donkeys carry. Before Patrick could reply, Roland peered around the pyramids ragged edge once more. He cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed TRY AGAIN, SAI! WERE STILL HERE, BUT PERHAPS YOUR NEXT THROW WILL BE LUCKY! There was a moment of silence, then an insane scream EEEEEEEEEEE! YOU DONT DARE MOCK ME! YOU DONT DARE! EEEEEEEEEEE! Now came another of those rising whistles. Roland grabbed Patrick and fell on top of him, behind the pyramid but not against it. He was afraid it might vibrate hard enough when the sneetch struck to give them concussion injuries, or turn their soft insides to jelly. Only this time the sneetch didnt strike the pyramid. It flew past it instead, soaring above the road. Roland rolled off Patrick and onto his back. His eyes picked up the golden blur and marked the place where it buttonhooked back toward its targets. He shot it out of the air like a clay plate. There was a blinding flash and then it was gone. OH DEAR, STILL HERE! Roland called, striving to put just the right note of mocking amusement into his voice. It wasnt easy when you were screaming at the top of your lungs. Another crazed scream in responseEEEEEEEEE! Roland was amazed that the Red King didnt split his own head wide open with such cries. He reloaded the chamber hed emptiedhe intended to keep a full gun just as long as he couldand this time there was a double whine. Patrick moaned, rolled over onto his belly, and plunged his face into the rockstrewn grass, covering his head with his hands. Roland sat with his back against the pyramid of rock and steel, the long barrel of his sixgun lying on his thigh, relaxed and waiting. At the same time he bent all of his willpower toward one object. His eyes wanted water in response to that high, approaching whistle, and he must not let them. If he ever needed the preternaturally keen eyesight for which hed been famous in his time, this was it. Those blue eyes were still clear when the sneetches bolted past above the road. This time one buttonhooked left and the other right. They took evasive action, jigging crazily first one way and then another. It made no difference. Roland waited, sitting with his legs outstretched and his old broken boots cocked into a relaxed V, his heart beating slow and steady, his eye filled with all the worlds clarity and color (had he seen better on that last day, he believed he would have been able to see the wind). Then he snapped his gun up, blew both sneetches out of the air, and was once more reloading the empty chambers while the afterimages still pulsed with his heartbeat in front of his eyes. He leaned to the corner of the pyramid, plucked up the binoculars, braced them on a convenient spur of rock, and looked through them for his enemy. The Crimson King almost jumped at him, and for once in his life Roland saw exactly what he had imagined an old man with an enormous nose, hooked and waxy; red lips that bloomed in the snow of a luxuriant beard; snowy hair that spilled down the Crimson Kings back almost all the way to his scrawny bottom. His pinkflushed face peered toward the pilgrims. The King wore a robe of brilliant red, dotted here and about with lightning strokes and cabalistic symbols. To Susannah, Eddie, and Jake, he would have looked like Father Christmas. To Roland he looked like what he was Hell, incarnate. HOW SLOW YOU ARE! the gunslinger cried in a tone of mock amazement. TRY THREE, PERHAPS THREE AT ONCE WILL DO YA! Looking into the binoculars was like looking into a magic hourglass tipped on its side. Roland watched the Big Red King leaping up and down, shaking his hands beside his face in a way that was almost comic. Roland thought he could see a crate at that robed figures feet, but wasnt entirely sure; the scrolled iron staves between the balconys floor and its railing obscured it. Must be his ammunition supply, he thought. Must be. How many can he have in a crate that size? Twenty? Fifty? It didnt matter. Unless the Red King could throw more than twelve at a time, Roland was confident he could shoot anything out of the air the old daemon sent his way. This was, after all, what hed been made for. Unfortunately, the Crimson King knew it as well as Roland did. The thing on the balcony gave another gruesome, earsplitting cry (Patrick plugged his dirty ears with his dirty fingers) and made as if to dip down for fresh ammunition. Then, however, he stopped himself. Roland watched him advance to the balconys railing . . . and then peer directly into the gunslingers eyes. That glare was red and burning. Roland lowered the binoculars at once, lest he be fascinated. The Kings call drifted to him. WAIT THEN, A BITAND MEDITATE ON WHAT YOUD GAIN, ROLAND! THINK HOW CLOSE IT IS! AND . . . LISTEN! HEAR THE SONG YOUR DARLING SINGS! He fell silent then. No more whistling; no more whines; no more oncoming sneetches. What Roland heard instead was the sough of the wind . . . and what the King wanted him to hear. The call of the Tower. Come, Roland, sang the voices. They came from the roses of CanKa No Rey, they came from the strengthening Beams overhead, they came most of all from the Tower itself, that for which he had searched all his life, that which was now in reach . . . that which was being held away from him, now, at the last. If he went to it, he would be killed in the open. Yet the call was like a fishhook in his mind, drawing him. The Crimson King knew it would do his work if he only waited. And as the time passed, Roland came to know it, too. Because the calling voices werent constant. At their current level he could withstand them. Was withstanding them. But as the afternoon wore on, the level of the call grew stronger. He began to understandand with growing horrorwhy in his dreams and visions he had always seen himself coming to the Dark Tower at sunset, when the light in the western sky seemed to reflect the field of roses, turning the whole world into a bucket of blood held up by one single stanchion, black as midnight against the burning horizon. He had seen himself coming at sunset because that was when the Towers strengthening call would finally overcome his willpower. He would go. No power on Earth would be able to stop him. Come . . . come . . . became COME . . . COME . . . and then COME! COME! His head ached with it. And for it. Again and again he found himself getting to his knees and forced himself to sit down once more with his back against the pyramid. Patrick was staring at him with growing fright. He was partly or completely immune to that callRoland understood thisbut he knew what was happening. FIVE They had been pinned down for what Roland judged to be an hour when the King tried another pair of sneetches. This time they flew on either side of the pyramid and hooked back almost at once, coming at him in perfect formation but twenty feet apart. Roland took the one on the right, snapped his wrist to the left, and blew the other one out of the sky. The explosion of the second one was close enough to buffet his face with warm air, but at least there was no shrapnel; when they blew, they blew completely, it seemed. TRY AGAIN! he called. His throat was rough and dry now, but he knew the words were carryingthe air in this place was made for such communication. And he knew each one was a dagger pricking the old lunatics flesh. But he had his own problems. The call of the Tower was growing steadily stronger. COME, GUNSLINGER! the madmans voice coaxed. PERHAPS ILL LET THEE COME, AFTER ALL! WE COULD AT LEAST PALAVER ON THE SUBJECT, COULD WE NOT? To his horror, Roland thought he sensed a certain sincerity in that voice. Yes, he thought grimly. And well have coffee. Perhaps even a little fryup. He fumbled the watch out of his pocket and snapped it open. The hands were running briskly backward. He leaned against the pyramid and closed his eyes, but that was worse. The call of the Tower (come, Roland come, gunslinger, commalacomecome, now the journeys done) was louder, more insistent than ever. He opened them again and looked up at the unforgiving blue sky and the clouds that raced across it in columns to the Tower at the end of the rosefield. And the torture continued. SIX He hung on for another hour while the shadows of the bushes and the roses growing near the pyramid lengthened, hoping against hope that something would occur to him, some brilliant idea that would save him from having to put his life and his fate in the hands of the talented but softminded boy by his side. But as the sun began to slide down the western arc of the sky and the blue overhead began to darken, he knew there was nothing else. The hands of the pocketwatch were turning backward ever faster. Soon they would be spinning. And when they began to spin, he would go. Sneetches or no sneetches (and what else might the madman be holding in reserve?), he would go. He would run, he would zigzag, he would fall to the ground and crawl if he had to, and no matter what he did, he knew he would be lucky to make it even half the distance to the Dark Tower before he was blown out of his boots. He would die among the roses. Patrick, he said. His voice was husky. Patrick looked up at him with desperate intensity. Roland stared at the boys handsdirty, scabbed, but in their way as incredibly talented as his ownand gave in. It occurred to him that hed only held out as long as this from pride; he had wanted to kill the Crimson King, not merely send him into some null zone. And of course there was no guarantee that Patrick could do to the King what hed done to the sore on Susannahs face. But the pull of the Tower would soon be too strong to resist, and all his other choices were gone. Change places with me, Patrick. Patrick did, scrambling carefully over Roland. He was now at the edge of the pyramid nearest the road. Look through the farseeing instrument. Lay it in that notchyes, just soand look. Patrick did, and for what seemed to Roland a very long time. The voice of the Tower, meanwhile, sang and chimed and cajoled. At long last, Patrick looked back at him. Now take thy pad, Patrick. Draw yonder man. Not that he was a man, but at least he looked like one. At first, however, Patrick only continued to gaze at Roland, biting his lip. Then, at last, he took the sides of the gunslingers head in his hands and brought it forward until they were brow to brow. Very hard, whispered a voice deep in Rolands mind. It was not the voice of a boy at all, but of a grown man. A powerful man. Hes not entirely there. He darkles. He tincts. Where had Roland heard those words before? No time to think about it now. Are you saying you cant? Roland asked, injecting (with an effort) a note of disappointed incredulity into his voice. That you cant? That Patrick cant? The Artist cant? Patricks eyes changed. For a moment Roland saw in them the expression that would be there permanently if he grew to be a man . . . and the paintings in Sayres office said that he would do that, at least on some track of time, in some world. Old enough, at least, to paint what he had seen this day. That expression would be hauteur, if he grew to be an old man with a little wisdom to match his talent; now it was only arrogance. The look of a kid who knows hes faster than blue blazes, the best, and cares to know nothing else. Roland knew that look, for had he not seen it gazing back at him from a hundred mirrors and still pools of water when he had been as young as Patrick Danville was now? I can, came the voice in Rolands head. I only say it wont be easy. Ill need the eraser. Roland shook his head at once. In his pocket, his hand closed around what remained of the pink nubbin and held it tight. No, he said. Thee must draw cold, Patrick. Every line right the first time. The erasing comes later. For a moment the look of arrogance faltered, but only for a moment. When it returned, what came with it pleased the gunslinger mightily, and eased him a little, as well. It was a look of hot excitement. It was the look the talented wear when, after years of just moving sleepily along from pillar to post, they are finally challenged to do something that will tax their abilities, stretch them to their limits. Perhaps even beyond them. Patrick rolled to the binoculars again, which hed left propped aslant just below the notch. He looked long while the voices sang their growing imperative in Rolands head. And at last he rolled away, took up his pad, and began to draw the most important picture of his life. SEVEN It was slow work compared to Patricks usual methodrapid strokes that produced a completed and compelling drawing in only minutes. Roland again and again had to restrain himself from shouting at the boy Hurry up! For the sake of all the gods, hurry up! Cant you see that Im in agony here? But Patrick didnt see and wouldnt have cared in any case. He was totally absorbed in his work, caught up in the unknowing greed of it, pausing only to go back to the binoculars now and then for another long look at his redrobed subject. Sometimes he slanted the pencil to shade a little, then rubbed with his thumb to produce a shadow. Sometimes he rolled his eyes back in his head, showing the world nothing but the waxy gleam of the whites. It was as if he were conning some version of the Red King that stood aglow in his brain. And really, how did Roland know that was not possible? I dont care what it is. Just let him finish before I go mad and sprint to what the Old Red King so rightly called my darling. Half an hour at least three days long passed in this fashion. Once the Crimson King called more coaxingly than ever to Roland, asking if he would not come to the Tower and palaver, after all. Perhaps, he said, if Roland were to free him from his balcony prison, they might bury an arrow together and then climb to the top room of the Tower in that same spirit of friendliness. It was not impossible, after all. A hard rain made for queer bedfellows at the inn; had Roland never heard that saying? The gunslinger knew the saying well. He also knew that the Red Kings offer was essentially the same false request as before, only this time dressed up in morning coat and cravat. And this time Roland heard worry lurking in the old monsters voice. He wasted no energy on reply. Realizing his coaxing had failed, the Crimson King threw another sneetch. This one flew so high over the pyramid it was only a spark, then dove down upon them with the scream of a falling bomb. Roland took care of it with a single shot and reloaded from a plentitude of shells. He wished, in fact, that the King would send more of the flying grenados against him, because they took his mind temporarily off the dreadful call of the Tower. Its been waiting for me, he thought with dismay. Thats what makes it so hard to resist, I thinkits calling me in particular. Not to Roland, exactly, but to the entire line of Eld . . . and of that line, only I am left. EIGHT At last, as the descending sun began to take on its first hues of orange and Roland felt he could stand it no longer, Patrick put his pencil aside and held the pad out to Roland, frowning. The look made Roland afraid. He had never seen that particular expression in the mute boys repertoire. Patricks former arrogance was gone. Roland took the pad, however, and for a moment was so amazed by what he saw there that he looked away, as if even the eyes in Patricks drawing might have the power to fascinate him; might perhaps compel him to put his gun to his temple and blow out his aching brains. It was that good. The greedy and questioning face was long, the cheeks and forehead marked by creases so deep they might have been bottomless. The lips within the foaming beard were full and cruel. It was the mouth of a man who would turn a kiss into a bite if the spirit took him, and the spirit often would. WHAT DO YOU THINK YOURE DOING? came that screaming, lunatic voice. IT WONT DO YOU ANY GOOD, WHATEVER IT IS! I HOLD THE TOWEREEEEEEEE!IM LIKE THE DOG WITH THE GRAPES, ROLAND! ITS MINE EVEN IF I CANT CLIMB IT! AND YOULL COME! EEEEE! SAY TRUE! BEFORE THE SHADOW OF THE TOWER REACHES YOUR PALTRY HIDINGPLACE, YOULL COME! EEEEEEEE! EEEEEEEE!EEEEEEEE! Patrick covered his ears, wincing. Now that he had finished drawing, he registered those terrible screams again. That the picture was the greatest work of Patricks life Roland had absolutely no doubt. Challenged, the boy had done more than rise above himself; he had soared above himself and committed genius. The image of the Crimson King was haunting in its clarity. The farseeing instrument cant explain this, or not all of it, Roland thought. Its as if he has a third eye, one that looks out from his imagination and sees everything. Its that eye he looks through when he rolls the other two up. To own such an ability as this . . . and to express it with something as humble as a pencil! Ye gods! He almost expected to see the pulse begin to beat in the hollows of the old mans temples, where clocksprings of veins had been delineated with only a few gentle, feathered shadings. At the corner of the full and sensuous lips, the gunslinger could see the wink of a single sharp (tusk) tooth, and he thought the lips of the drawing might come to life and part as he looked, revealing a mouthful of fangs one mere wink of white (which was only a bit of unmarked paper, after all) made the imagination see all the rest, and even to smell the reek of meat that would accompany each outflow of breath. Patrick had perfectly captured a tuft of hair curling from one of the Kings nostrils, and a tiny thread of scar that wove in and out of the Kings right eyebrow like a bit of string. It was a marvelous piece of work, better by far than the portrait the mute boy had done of Susannah. Surely if Patrick had been able to erase the sore from that one, then he could erase the Crimson King from this one, leaving nothing but the balcony railing before him and the closed door to the Towers barrel behind. Roland almost expected the Crimson King to breathe and move, and so surely it was done! Surely . . . But it was not. It was not, and wanting would not make it so. Not even needing would make it so. Its his eyes, Roland thought. They were wide and terrible, the eyes of a dragon in human form. They were dreadfully good, but they werent right. Roland felt a kind of desperate, miserable certainty and shuddered from head to toe, hard enough to make his teeth chatter. Theyre not quite r Patrick took hold of Rolands elbow. The gunslinger had been concentrating so fiercely on the drawing that he nearly screamed. He looked up. Patrick nodded at him, then touched his fingers to the corners of his own eyes. Yes. His eyes. I know that! But whats wrong with them? Patrick was still touching the corners of his eyes. Overhead, a flock of rusties flew through a sky that would soon be more purple than blue, squalling the harsh cries that had given them their name. It was toward the Dark Tower that they flew; Roland arose to follow them so they should not have what he could not. Patrick grabbed him by his hide coat and pulled him back. The boy shook his head violently, and this time pointed toward the road. I SAW THAT, ROLAND! came the cry. YOU THINK THAT WHATS GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE BIRDS IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU, DO YOU NOT? EEEEEEEEE! AND ITS TRUE, SURE! SURE AS SUGAR, SURE AS SALT, SURE AS RUBIES IN KING DANDOS VAULTEEEEEEEE, HA! I COULD HAVE HAD YOU JUST NOW, BUT WHY BOTHER? I THINK ID RATHER SEE YOU COME, PISSING AND SHAKING AND UNABLE TO STOP YOURSELF! As I will, Roland thought. I wont be able to help myself. I may be able to hold here another ten minutes, perhaps even another twenty, but in the end . . . Patrick interrupted his thoughts, once more pointing at the road. Pointing back the way they had come. Roland shook his head wearily. Even if I could fight the pull of the thingand I couldnt, its all I can do to bide hereretreat would do us no good. Once were no longer in cover, hell use whatever else he has. He has something, Im sure of it. And whatever it is, the bullets of my revolver arent likely to stop it. Patrick shook his head hard enough to make his long hair fly from side to side. The grip on Rolands arm tightened until the boys fingernails bit into the gunslingers flesh even through three layers of hide clothing. His eyes, always gentle and usually puzzled, now peered at Roland with a look close to fury. He pointed again with his free hand, three quick jabbing gestures with the grimy forefinger. Not at the road, however. Patrick was pointing at the roses. What about them? Roland asked. Patrick, what about them? This time Patrick pointed first to the roses, then to the eyes in his picture. And this time Roland understood. NINE Patrick didnt want to get them. When Roland gestured to him to go, the boy shook his head at once, whipping his hair once more from side to side, his eyes wide. He made a whistling noise between his teeth that was a remarkably good imitation of an oncoming sneetch. Ill shoot anything he sends, Roland said. Youve seen me do it. If there was one close enough so that I could pick it myself, I would. But theres not. So it has to be you who picks the rose and me who gives you cover. But Patrick only cringed back against the ragged side of the pyramid. Patrick would not. His fear might not have been as great as his talent, but it was surely a close thing. Roland calculated the distance to the nearest rose. It was beyond their scant cover, but perhaps not by too much. He looked at his diminished right hand, which would have to do the plucking, and asked himself how hard it could be. The fact, of course, was that he didnt know. These were not ordinary roses. For all he knew, the thorns growing up the green stem might have a poison in them that would drop him paralyzed into the tall grass, an easy target. And Patrick would not. Patrick knew that Roland had once had friends, and that now all his friends were dead, and Patrick would not. If Roland had had two hours to work on the boypossibly even onehe might have broken through his terror. But he didnt have that time. Sunset had almost come. Besides, its close. I can do it if I have to . . . and I must. The weather had warmed enough so there was no need for the clumsy deerskin gloves Susannah had made them, but Roland had been wearing his that morning, and they were still tucked in his belt. He took one of them and cut off the end, so his two remaining fingers would poke through. What remained would at least protect his palm from the thorns. He put it on, then rested on one knee with his remaining gun in his other hand, looking at the nearest rose. Would one be enough? It would have to be, he decided. The next was fully six feet further away. Patrick clutched his shoulder, shaking his head frantically. I have to, Roland said, and of course he did. This was his job, not Patricks, and he had been wrong to try and make the boy do it in the first place. If he succeeded, fine and well. If he failed and was blown apart here at the edge of CanKa No Rey, at least that dreadful pulling would cease. The gunslinger took a deep breath, then leaped from cover and at the rose. At the same moment, Patrick clutched at him again, trying to hold him back. He grabbed a fold of Rolands coat and twisted him offtrue. Roland landed clumsily on his side. The gun flew out of his hand and fell in the tall grass. The Crimson King screamed (the gunslinger heard both triumph and fury in that voice) and then came the approaching whine of another sneetch. Roland closed his mittened right hand around the stem of the rose. The thorns bit through the tough deerskin as if it were no more than a coating of cobwebs. Then into his hand. The pain was enormous, but the song of the rose was sweet. He could see the blaze of yellow deep in its cup, like the blaze of a sun. Or a million of them. He could feel the warmth of blood filling the hollow of his palm and running between the remaining fingers. It soaked the deerskin, blooming another rose on its scuffed brown surface. And here came the sneetch that would kill him, blotting out the roses song, filling his head and threatening to split his skull. The stem never did break. In the end, the rose tore free of the ground, roots and all. Roland rolled to his left, grabbed his gun, and fired without looking. His heart told him there was no longer time to look. There was a shattering explosion, and the warm air that buffeted his face this time was like a hurricane. Close. Very close, that time. The Crimson King screamed his frustrationEEEEEEEEEEE!and the cry was followed by multiple approaching whistles. Patrick pressed himself against the pyramid, facefirst. Roland, clutching the rose in his bleeding right hand, rolled onto his back, raised his gun, and waited for the sneetches to make their turn. When they did, he took care of them one and two and three. STILL HERE! he cried at the old Red King. STILL HERE, YOU OLD COCKSUCKER, MAY IT DO YA FINE! The Crimson King gave another of his terrible howls, but sent no more sneetches. SO NOW YOU HAVE A ROSE! he screamed. LISTEN TO IT, ROLAND! LISTEN WELL, FOR IT SINGS THE SAME SONG! LISTEN AND COMMALACOMECOME! Now that song was all but imperative in Rolands head. It burned furiously along his nerves. He grasped Patrick and turned him around. Now, he said. For my life, Patrick. For the lives of every man and woman who ever died in my place so I could go on. And child, he thought, seeing Jake in the eye of his memory. Jake first hanging over darkness, then falling into it. He stared into the mute boys terrified eyes. Finish it! Show me that you can. TEN Now Roland witnessed an amazing thing when Patrick took the rose, he wasnt cut. Not so much as scratched. Roland pulled his own lacerated glove off with his teeth and saw that not only was his palm badly slashed, but one of his remaining fingers now hung by a single bloody tendon. It drooped like something that wants to go to sleep. But Patrick was not cut. The thorns did not pierce him. And the terror had gone out of his eyes. He was looking from the rose to his drawing, back and forth with tender calculation. ROLAND! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? COME, GUNSLINGER, FOR SUNSETS ALMOST NIGH! And yes, he would come. One way or the other. Knowing it was so eased him somewhat, enabled him to remain where he was without trembling too badly. His right hand was numb to the wrist, and Roland suspected he would never feel it again. That was all right; it hadnt been much of a shake since the lobstrosities had gotten at it. And the rose sang Yes, Roland, yesyoull have it again. Youll be whole again. There will be renewal. Only come. Patrick plucked a petal from the rose, judged it, then plucked another to go with it. He put them in his mouth. For a moment his face went slack with a peculiar sort of ecstasy, and Roland wondered what the petals might taste like. Overhead the sky was growing dark. The shadow of the pyramid that had been hidden by the rocks stretched nearly to the road. When the point of that shadow touched the way that had brought him here, Roland supposed he would go whether the Crimson King still held the Tower approach or not. WHATS THEE DOING? EEEEEEEEE! WHAT DEVILTRY WORKS IN THY MIND AND THY HEART? Youre a great one to speak of deviltry, Roland thought. He took out his watch and snapped back the cover. Beneath the crystal, the hands now sped backward, five oclock to four, four to three, three to two, two to one, and one to midnight. Patrick, hurry, he said. Quick as you can, I beg, for my time is almost up. Patrick cupped a hand beneath his mouth and spat out a red paste the color of fresh blood. The color of the Crimson Kings robe. And the exact color of his lunatics eyes. Patrick, on the verge of using color for the first time in his life as an artist, made to dip the tip of his right forefinger into this paste, and then hesitated. An odd certainty came to Roland then the thorns of these roses only pricked when their roots still tied the plant to Mim, or Mother Earth. Had he gotten his way with Patrick, Mim would have cut those talented hands to ribbons and rendered them useless. Its still ka, the gunslinger thought. Even out here in EndWBefore he could finish the thought, Patrick took the gunslingers right hand and peered into it with the intensity of a fortuneteller. He scooped up some of the blood that flowed there and mixed it with his rosepaste. Then, carefully, he took a tiny bit of this mixture upon the second finger of his right hand. He lowered it to his painting . . . hesitated . . . looked at Roland. Roland nodded to him and Patrick nodded in return, as gravely as a surgeon about to make the first cut in a dangerous operation, then applied his finger to the paper. The tip touched down as delicately as the beak of a hummingbird dipping into a flower. It colored the Crimson Kings left eye and then lifted away. Patrick cocked his head, looking at what he had done with a fascination Roland had never seen on a human face in all his long and wandering time. It was as if the boy were some Manni prophet, finally granted a glimpse of Gans face after twenty years of waiting in the desert. Then he broke into an enormous, sunny grin. The response from the Dark Tower was more immediate andto Roland, at leastimmensely gratifying. The old creature pent on the balcony howled in pain. WHATS THEE DOING? EEEEEEE! EEEEEEEE! STOP! IT BURNS! BURRRRNS! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Now finish the other, Roland said. Quickly! For your life and mine! Patrick colored the other eye with the same delicate dip of the finger. Now two brilliant crimson eyes looked out of Patricks blackandwhite drawing, eyes that had been colored with attar of rose and the blood of Eld; eyes that burned with Hells own fire. It was done. Roland produced the eraser at last, and held it out to Patrick. Make him gone, he said. Make yonder foul hob gone from this world and every world. Make him gone at last. ELEVEN There was no question it would work. From the moment Patrick first touched the eraser to his drawingto that curl of nostrilhair, as it happenedthe Crimson King began to scream in fresh pain and horror from his balcony redoubt. And in understanding. Patrick hesitated, looking at Roland for confirmation, and Roland nodded. Aye, Patrick. His time has come and youre to be his executioner. Go on with it. The Old King threw four more sneetches, and Roland took care of them all with calm ease. |
After that he threw no more, for he had no hands with which to throw. His shrieks rose to gibbering whines that Roland thought would surely never leave his ears. The mute boy erased the full, sensuous mouth from within its foam of beard, and as he did it, the screams first grew muffled and then ceased. In the end Patrick erased everything but the eyes, and these the remaining bit of rubber would not even blur. They remained until the piece of pink gum (originally part of a PencilPak bought in a Norwich, Connecticut, Woolworths during a backtoschool sale in August of 1958) had been reduced to a shred the boy could not even hold between his long, dirty nails. And so he cast it away and showed the gunslinger what remained two malevolent bloodred orbs floating threequarters of the way up the page. All the rest of him was gone. TWELVE The shadow of the pyramids tip had come to touch the road; now the sky in the west changed from the orange of a reaptide bonfire to that cauldron of blood Roland had seen in his dreams ever since childhood. When it did, the call of the Tower doubled, then trebled. Roland felt it reach out and grasp him with invisible hands. The time of his destiny was come. Yet there was this boy. This friendless boy. Roland would not leave him to die here at the end of EndWorld if he could help it. He had no interest in atonement, and yet Patrick had come to stand for all the murders and betrayals that had finally brought him to the Dark Tower. Rolands family was dead; his misbegotten son had been the last. Now would Eld and Tower be joined. First, thoughor lastthis. Patrick, listen to me, he said, taking the boys shoulder with his whole left hand and his mutilated right. If youd live to make all the pictures ka has stored away in your future, ask me not a single question nor ask me to repeat a single thing. The boy looked at him, largeeyed and silent in the red and dying light. And the Song of the Tower rose around them to a mighty shout that was nothing but commala. Go back to the road. Pick up all the cans that are whole. That should be enough to feed you. Go back the way we came. Never leave the road. Youll do fine. Patrick nodded with perfect understanding. Roland saw he believed, and that was good. Belief would protect him even more surely than a revolver, even one with the sandalwood grips. Go back to the Federal. Go back to the robot, Stuttering Bill that was. Tell him to take you to a door that swings open on Americaside. If it wont open to your hand, draw it open with thy pencil. Doee understand? Patrick nodded again. Of course he understood. If ka should eventually lead you to Susannah in any where or when, tell her Roland loves her still, and with all his heart. He drew Patrick to him and kissed the boys mouth. Give her that. Doee understand? Patrick nodded. All right. I go. Long days and pleasant nights. May we meet in the clearing at the end of the path when all worlds end. Yet even then he knew this would not happen, for the worlds would never end, not now, and for him there would be no clearing. For Roland Deschain of Gilead, last of Elds line, the path ended at the Dark Tower. And that did him fine. He rose to his feet. The boy looked up at him with wide, wondering eyes, clutching his pad. Roland turned. He drew in breath to the bottom of his lungs and let it out in a great cry. NOW COMES ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER! I HAVE BEEN TRUE AND I STILL CARRY THE GUN OF MY FATHER AND YOU WILL OPEN TO MY HAND! Patrick watched him stride to where the road ended, a black silhouette against that bloody burning sky. He watched as Roland walked among the roses, and sat shivering in the shadows as Roland began to cry the names of his friends and loved ones and kamates; those names carried clear in that strange air, as if they would echo forever. I come in the name of Steven Deschain, he of Gilead! I come in the name of Gabrielle Deschain, she of Gilead! I come in the name of Cortland Andrus, he of Gilead! I come in the name of Cuthbert Allgood, he of Gilead! I come in the name of Alain Johns, he of Gilead! I come in the name of Jamie DeCurry, he of Gilead! I come in the name of Vannay the Wise, he of Gilead! I come in the name of Hax the Cook, he of Gilead! I come in the name of David the hawk, he of Gilead and the sky! I come in the name of Susan Delgado, she of Mejis! I come in the name of Sheemie Ruiz, he of Mejis! I come in the name of Pere Callahan, he of Jerusalems Lot, and the roads! I come in the name of Ted Brautigan, he of America! I come in the name of Dinky Earnshaw, he of America! I come in the name of Aunt Talitha, she of River Crossing, and will lay her cross here, as I was bid! I come in the name of Stephen King, he of Maine! I come in the name of Oy, the brave, he of MidWorld! I come in the name of Eddie Dean, he of New York! I come in the name of Susannah Dean, she of New York! I come in the name of Jake Chambers, he of New York, whom I call my own true son! I am Roland of Gilead, and I come as myself; you will open to me. After that came the sound of a horn. It simultaneously chilled Patricks blood and exalted him. The echoes faded into silence. Then, perhaps a minute later, came a great, echoing boom the sound of a door swinging shut forever. And after that came silence. THIRTEEN Patrick sat where he was at the base of the pyramid, shivering, until Old Star and Old Mother rose in the sky. The song of the roses and the Tower hadnt ceased, but it had grown low and sleepy, little more than a murmur. At last he went back to the road, gathered as many whole cans as he could (there was a surprising number of them, considering the force of the explosion that had demolished the cart), and found a deerskin sack that would hold them. He realized he had forgotten his pencil and went back to get it. Beside the pencil, gleaming in the starlight, was Rolands watch. The boy took it with a small (and nervous) hoot of glee. He put it in his pocket. Then he went back to the road and slung his little sack of gunna over his shoulder. I can tell you that he walked until nearly midnight, and that he looked at the watch before taking his rest. I can tell you that the watch had stopped completely. I can tell you that, come noon of the following day, he looked at it again and saw that it had begun to run in the correct direction once more, albeit very slowly. But of Patrick I can tell you no more, not whether he made it back to the Federal, not whether he found Stuttering Bill that was, not whether he eventually came once more to Americaside. I can tell you none of these things, say sorry. Here the darkness hides him from my storytellers eye and he must go on alone. SUSANNAH IN NEW YORK (EPILOGUE) No one takes alarm as the little electric cart slides out of nowhere an inch at a time until its wholly here in Central Park; no one sees it but us. Most of those here are looking skyward, as the first snowflakes of what will prove to be a great preChristmas snowstorm come skirling down from a white sky. The Blizzard of 87, the newspapers will call it. Visitors to the park who arent watching the snowfall begin are watching the carolers, who are from public schools far uptown. They are wearing either dark red blazers (the boys) or dark red jumpers (the girls). This is the Harlem School Choir, sometimes called The Harlem Roses in the Post and its rival tabloid, the New York Sun . They sing an old hymn in gorgeous doowop harmony, snapping their fingers as they make their way through the staves, turning it into something that sounds almost like early Spurs, Coasters, or Dark Diamonds. They are standing not too far from the environment where the polar bears live their city lives, and the song theyre singing is What Child Is This. One of those looking up into the snow is a man Susannah knows well, and her heart leaps straight up to heaven at the sight of him. In his left hand hes holding a large paper cup and shes sure it contains hot chocolate, the good kind mit schlag. For a moment shes unable to touch the controls of the little cart, which came from another world. Thoughts of Roland and Patrick have left her mind. All she can think of is EddieEddie in front of her right here and now, Eddie alive again. And if this is not the Keystone World, not quite, what of that? If CoOp City is in Brooklyn (or even in Queens!) and Eddie drives a Takuro Spirit instead of a Buick Electra, what of those things? It doesnt matter. Only one thing would, and its that which keeps her hand from rising to the throttle and trundling the cart toward him. What if he doesnt recognize her? What if when he turns he sees nothing but a homeless black lady in an electric cart whose battery will soon be as flat as a saton hat, a black lady with no money, no clothes, no address (not in this where and when, say thankee sai) and no legs? A homeless black lady with no connection to him? Or what if he does know her, somewhere far back in his mind, yet still denies her as completely as Peter denied Jesus, because remembering is just too hurtful? Worse still, what if he turns to her and she sees the burnedout, fuckedup, emptyeyed stare of the longtime junkie? What if, what if, and here comes the snow that will soon turn the whole world white. Stop thy grizzling and go to him, Roland tells her. You didnt face Blaine and the taheen of Blue Heaven and the thing under Castle Discordia just to turn tail and run now, did you? Surely youve got a moit more guts than that. But she isnt sure she really does until she sees her hand rise to the throttle. Before she can twist it, however, the gunslingers voice speaks to her again, this time sounding wearily amused. Perhaps theres something you want to get rid of first, Susannah? She looks down and sees Rolands weapon stuck through her crossbelt, like a Mexican bandidos pistola, or a pirates cutlass. She pulls it free, amazed at how good it feels in her hand . . . how brutally right. Parting from this, she thinks, will be like parting from a lover. And she doesnt have to, does she? The question is, what does she love more? The man or the gun? All other choices will flow from this one. On impulse she rolls the cylinder and sees that the rounds inside look old, their casings dull. Thesell never fire, she thinks . . . and, without knowing why, or precisely what it means These are wets. She sights up the barrel and is queerly saddenedbut not surprisedto find that the barrel lets through no light. Its plugged. Has been for decades, from the look of it. This gun will never fire again. There is no choice to be made, after all. This gun is over. Susannah, still holding the revolver with the sandalwood grips in one hand, twists the throttle with the other. The little electric cartthe one she named Ho Fat III, although that is already fading in her mindrolls soundlessly forward. It passes a green trash barrel with KEEP LITTER IN ITS PLACE! stenciled on the side. She tosses Rolands revolver into this litter barrel. Doing it hurts her heart, but she never hesitates. Its heavy, and sinks into the crumpled fastfood wrappers, advertising circulars, and discarded newspapers like a stone into water. She is still enough of a gunslinger to bitterly regret throwing away such a storied weapon (even if the final trip between worlds has spoiled it), but shes already become enough of the woman whos waiting for her up ahead not to pause or look back once the job is done. Before she can reach the man with the paper cup, he turns. He is indeed wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZALA!, but she barely registers that. Its him thats what she registers. Its Edward Cantor Dean. And then even that becomes secondary, because what she sees in his eyes is all she has feared. Its total puzzlement. He doesnt know her. Then, tentatively, he smiles, and it is the smile she remembers, the one she always loved. Also hes clean, she knows it at once. She sees it in his face. Mostly in his eyes. The carolers from Harlem sing, and he holds out the cup of hot chocolate. Thank God, he says. Id just about decided Id have to drink this myself. That the voices were wrong and I was going crazy after all. That . . . well . . . He trails off, looking more than puzzled. He looks afraid. Listen, you are here for me, arent you? Please tell me Im not making an utter ass of myself. Because, lady, right now I feel as nervous as a longtailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. Youre not, she says. Making an ass of yourself, I mean. Shes remembering Jakes story about the voices he heard arguing in his mind, one yelling that he was dead, the other that he was alive. Both of them utterly convinced. She has at least some idea of how terrible that must be, because she knows a little about other voices. Strange voices. Thank God, he says. Your name is Susannah? Yes, she says. My name is Susannah. Her throat is terribly dry, but the words come out, at least. She takes the cup from him and sips the hot chocolate through the cream. It is sweet and good, a taste of this world. The sound of the honking cabs, their drivers hurrying to make their day before the snow shuts them down, is equally good. Grinning, he reaches out and wipes a tiny dab of the cream from the tip of her nose. His touch is electric, and she sees that he feels it, too. It occurs to her that he is going to kiss her again for the first time, and sleep with her again for the first time, and fall in love with her again for the first time. He may know those things because voices have told him, but she knows them for a far better reason because those things have already happened. Ka is a wheel, Roland said, and now she knows its true. Her memories of (MidWorld) the gunslingers where and when are growing hazy, but she thinks she will remember just enough to know its all happened before, and there is something incredibly sad about this. But at the same time, its good. Its a damn miracle, is what it is. Are you cold? he asks. No, Im okay. Why? You shivered. Its the sweetness of the cream. Then, looking at him as she does it, she pokes her tongue out and licks a bit of the nutmegdusted foam. If you arent cold now, you will be, he says. WRKO says the temperatures gonna drop twenty degrees tonight. So I bought you something. From his back pocket he takes a knitted cap, the kind you can pull down over your ears. She looks at the front of it and sees the words there printed in red MERRY CHRISTMAS. Bought it in Brendios, on Fifth Avenue, he says. Susannah has never heard of Brendios. Brentanos, maybethe bookstorebut not Brendios. But of course in the America where she grew up, she never heard of NozzALa or Takuro Spirit automobiles, either. Did your voices tell you to buy it? Teasing him a little now. He blushes. Actually, you know, they sort of did. Try it on. Its a perfect fit. Tell me something, she says. Whos the President? Youre not going to tell me its Ronald Reagan, are you? He looks at her incredulously for a moment, and then smiles. What? That old actor who used to host Death Valley Days on TV? Youre kidding, right? Nope. I always thought you were the one who was kidding about Ronnie Reagan, Eddie. I dont know what you mean. Thats okay, just tell me who the President is. Gary Hart, he says, as if speaking to a child. From Colorado. He almost dropped out of the race in 1980as Im sure you knowover that Monkey Business business. Then he said Fuck em if they cant take a joke and hung on in there. Ended up winning in a landslide. His smile fades a little as he studies her. Youre not kidding me, are you? Are you kidding me about the voices? The ones you hear in our head? The ones that wake you up at two in the morning? Eddie looks almost shocked. How can you know that? Its a long story. Maybe someday Ill tell you. If I can still remember, she thinks. Its not just the voices. No? No. Ive been dreaming of you. For months now. Ive been waiting for you. Listen, we dont know each other . . . this is crazy . . . but do you have a place to stay? You dont, do you? She shakes her head. Doing a passable John Wayne (or maybe its Blaine the train shes imitating), she says Ahm a stranger here in Dodge, pilgrim. Her heart is pounding slowly and heavily in her chest, but she feels a rising joy. This is going to be all right. She doesnt know how it can be, but yes, its going to be just fine. This time ka is working in her favor, and the force of ka is enormous. This she knows from experience. If I asked how I know you . . . or where you come from . . . He pauses, looking at her levelly, and then says the rest of it. Or how I can possibly love you already . . . ? She smiles. It feels good to smile, and it no longer hurts the side of her face, because whatever was there (some sort of scar, maybeshe cant quite remember) is gone. Sugar, she tells him, its what I said a long story. Youll get some of it in time, though . . . what I remember of it. And it could be that we still have some work to do. For an outfit called the Tet Corporation. She looks around and then says, What year is this? 1987, he says. And do you live in Brooklyn? Or maybe the Bronx? The young man whose dreams and squabbling voices have led him herewith a cup of hot chocolate in his hand and a MERRY CHRISTMAS hat in his back pocketbursts out laughing. God, no! Im from White Plains! I came in on the train with my brother. Hes right over there. He wanted a closer look at the polar bears. The brother. Henry. The great sage and eminent junkie. Her heart sinks. Let me introduce you, he says. No, really, I Hey, if were gonna be friends, you gotta be friends with my kid brother. Were tight. Jake! Hey, Jake! She hasnt noticed the boy standing down by the railing which guards the sunken polar bears environment from the rest of the park, but now he turns and her heart takes a great, giddy leap in her chest. Jake waves and ambles toward them. Jakes been dreaming about you, too, Eddie tells her. Its the only reason I know Im not going crazy. Any crazier than usual, at least. She takes Eddies handthat familiar, wellloved hand. And when the fingers close over hers, she thinks she will die of joy. She will have many questionsso will theybut for the time being she has only one that feels important. As the snow begins to fall more thickly around them, landing in his hair and in his lashes and on the shoulders of his sweatshirt, she asks it. You and Jakewhats your last name? Toren, he says. Its German. Before either of them can say anything else, Jake joins them. And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live. Beneath the flowing and sometimes glimpsed glammer of the Beam that connects Shardik the Bear and Maturin the Turtle by way of the Dark Tower, they did live. Thats all. Thats enough. Say thankya. FOUND (CODA) ONE Ive told my tale all the way to the end, and am satisfied. It was (I set my watch and warrant on it) the kind only a good God would save for last, full of monsters and marvels and voyaging here and there. I can stop now, put my pen down, and rest my weary hand (although perhaps not forever; the hand that tells the tales has a mind of its own, and a way of growing restless). I can close my eyes to MidWorld and all that lies beyond MidWorld. Yet some of you who have provided the ears without which no tale can survive a single day are likely not so willing. You are the grim, goaloriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the lovemaking all confused with the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking (the orgasm is, after all, Gods way of telling us weve finished, at least for the time being, and should go to sleep). You are the cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens, where tired characters go to rest. You say you want to know how it all comes out. You say you want to follow Roland into the Tower; you say that is what you paid your money for, the show you came to see. I hope most of you know better. Want better. I hope you came to hear the tale, and not just munch your way through the pages to the ending. For an ending, you only have to turn to the last page and see what is there writ upon. But endings are heartless. An ending is a closed door no man (or Manni) can open. Ive written many, but most only for the same reason that I pull on my pants in the morning before leaving the bedroombecause it is the custom of the country. And so, my dear Constant Reader, I tell you this You can stop here. You can let your last memory be of seeing Eddie, Susannah, and Jake in Central Park, together again for the first time, listening to the childrens choir sing What Child Is This. You can be content in the knowledge that sooner or later Oy (probably a canine version with a long neck, odd goldringed eyes, and a bark that sometimes sounds eerily like speech) will also enter the picture. Thats a pretty picture, isnt it? I think so. And pretty close to happily ever after, too. Close enough for government work, as Eddie would say. Should you go on, you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken. I have one key left on my belt, but all it opens is that final door, the one marked . Whats behind it wont improve your lovelife, grow hair on your bald spot, or add five years to your natural span (not even five minutes). There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal Once upon a time. Endings are heartless. Ending is just another word for goodbye. TWO Would you still? Very well, then, come. (Do you hear me sigh?) Here is the Dark Tower, at the end of EndWorld. See it, I beg. See it very well. Here is the Dark Tower at sunset. THREE He came to it with the oddest feeling of remembrance; what Susannah and Eddie called dj vu. The roses of CanKa No Rey opened before him in a path to the Dark Tower, the yellow suns deep in their cups seeming to regard him like eyes. And as he walked toward that grayblack column, Roland felt himself begin to slip from the world as he had always known it. He called the names of his friends and loved ones, as he had always promised himself he would; called them in the gloaming, and with perfect force, for no longer was there any need to reserve energy with which to fight the Towers pull. To give infinallywas the greatest relief of his life. He called the names of his compadres and amoras, and although each came from deeper in his heart, each seemed to have less business with the rest of him. His voice rolled away to the darkening red horizon, name upon name. He called Eddies and Susannahs. He called Jakes, and last of all he called his own. When the sound of it had died out, the blast of a great horn replied, not from the Tower itself but from the roses that lay in a carpet all around it. That horn was the voice of the roses, and cried him welcome with a kingly blast. In my dreams the horn was always mine, he thought. I should have known better, for mine was lost with Cuthbert, at Jericho Hill. A voice whispered from above him It would have been the work of three seconds to bend and pick it up. Even in the smoke and the death. Three seconds. Time, Rolandit always comes back to that. That was, he thought, the voice of the Beamthe one they had saved. If it spoke out of gratitude it could have saved its breath, for what good were such words to him now? He remembered a line from Brownings poem One taste of the old times sets all to rights. Such had never been his experience. In his own, memories brought only sadness. They were the food of poets and fools, sweets that left a bitter aftertaste in the mouth and throat. Roland stopped for a moment still ten paces from the ghostwood door in the Towers base, letting the voice of the rosesthat welcoming hornecho away to nothing. The feeling of dj vu was still strong, almost as though he had been here after all. And of course he had been, in ten thousand premonitory dreams. He looked up at the balcony where the Crimson King had stood, trying to defy ka and bar his way. There, about six feet above the cartons that held the few remaining sneetches (the old lunatic had had no other weapons after all, it seemed), he saw two red eyes, floating in the darkening air, looking down at him with eternal hatred. From their backs, the thin silver of the optic nerves (now tinted redorange with the light of the leaving sun) trailed away to nothing. The gunslinger supposed the Crimson Kings eyes would remain up there forever, watching CanKa No Rey while their owner wandered the world to which Patricks eraser and enchanted Artists eye had sent him. Or, more likely, to the space between the worlds. Roland walked on to where the path ended at the steelbanded slab of black ghostwood. Upon it, a sigul that he now knew well was engraved threequarters of the way up Here he laid two things, the last of his gunna Aunt Talithas cross, and his remaining sixgun. When he stood up, he saw the first two hieroglyphics had faded away UNFOUND had become FOUND. He raised his hand as if to knock, but the door swung open of its own accord before he could touch it, revealing the bottom steps of an ascending spiral stairway. There was a sighing voiceWelcome, Roland, thee of Eld. It was the Towers voice. This edifice was not stone at all, although it might look like stone; this was a living thing, Gan himself, likely, and the pulse hed felt deep in his head even thousands of miles from here had always been Gans beating lifeforce. Commala, gunslinger. Commalacomecome. And wafting out came the smell of alkali, bitter as tears. The smell of . . . what? What, exactly? Before he could place it the odor was gone, leaving Roland to surmise he had imagined it. He stepped inside and the Song of the Tower, which he had always heardeven in Gilead, where it had hidden in his mothers voice as she sang him her cradle songsfinally ceased. There was another sigh. The door swung shut with a boom, but he was not left in blackness. The light that remained was that of the shining spiral windows, mixed with the glow of sunset. Stone stairs, a passage just wide enough for one person, ascended. Now comes Roland, he called, and the words seemed to spiral up into infinity. Thee at the top, hear and make me welcome if you would. If youre my enemy, know that I come unarmed and mean no ill. He began to climb. Nineteen steps brought him to the first landing (and to each one thereafter). A door stood open here and beyond it was a small round room. The stones of its wall were carved with thousands of overlapping faces. Many he knew (one was the face of Calvin Tower, peeping slyly over the top of an open book). The faces looked at him and he heard their murmuring. Welcome Roland, you of the many miles and many worlds; welcome thee of Gilead, thee of Eld. On the far side of the room was a door flanked by dark red swags traced with gold. About six feet up from the doorat the exact height of his eyeswas a small round window, little bigger than an outlaws peekhole. There was a sweet smell, and this one he could identify the bag of pine sachet his mother had placed first in his cradle, then, later, in his first real bed. It brought back those days with great clarity, as aromas always do; if any sense serves us as a time machine, its that of smell. Then, like the bitter call of the alkali, it was gone. The room was unfurnished, but a single item lay on the floor. He advanced to it and picked it up. It was a small cedar clip, its bow wrapped in a bit of blue silk ribbon. He had seen such things long ago, in Gilead; must once have worn one himself. When the sawbones cut a newly arrived babys umbilical cord, separating mother from child, such a clip was put on above the babys navel, where it would stay until the remainder of the cord fell off, and the clip with it. (The navel itself was called tetka can Gan.) The bit of silk on this one told that it had belonged to a boy. A girls clip would have been wrapped with pink ribbon. Twas my own, he thought. He regarded it a moment longer, fascinated, then put it carefully back where it had been. Where it belonged. When he stood up again, he saw a babys face (Can this be my darling bahbo? If you say so, let it be so!) among the multitude of others. It was contorted, as if its first breath of air outside the womb had not been to its liking, already fouled with death. Soon it would pronounce judgment on its new situation with a squall that would echo throughout the apartments of Steven and Gabrielle, causing those friends and servants who heard it to smile with relief. (Only Marten Broadcloak would scowl.) The birthing was done, and it had been a livebirth, tell Gan and all the gods thankya. There was an heir to the Line of Eld, and thus there was still the barest outside chance that the worlds rueful shuffle toward ruin might be reversed. Roland left that room, his sense of dj vu stronger than ever. So was the sense that he had entered the body of Gan himself. He turned to the stairs and once more began to climb. FOUR Another nineteen steps took him to the second landing and the second room. Here bits of cloth were scattered across the circular floor. Roland had no question that they had once been an infants clout, torn to shreds by a certain petulant interloper, who had then gone out onto the balcony for a look back at the field of roses and found himself betaken. He was a creature of monumental slyness, full of evil wisdom . . . but in the end he had slipped, and now he would pay forever and ever. If it was only a look he wanted, why did he bring his ammunition with him when he stepped out? Because it was his only gunna, and slung over his back, whispered one of the faces carved into the curve of the wall. This was the face of Mordred. Roland saw no hatefulness there now but only the lonely sadness of an abandoned child. That face was as lonesome as a trainwhistle on a moonless night. There had been no clip for Mordreds navel when he came into the world, only the mother he had taken for his first meal. No clip, never in life, for Mordred had never been part of Gans tet. No, not he. My Red Father would never go unarmed, whispered the stone boy. Not once he was away from his castle. He was mad, but never that mad. In this room was the smell of talc put on by his mother while he lay naked on a towel, fresh from his bath and playing with his newly discovered toes. She had soothed his skin with it, singing as she caressed him Babybunting, baby dear, baby bring your basket here! This smell too was gone as quickly as it had come. Roland crossed to the little window, walking among the shredded bits of diaper, and looked out. The disembodied eyes sensed him and rolled over giddily to regard him. That gaze was poisonous with fury and loss. Come out, Roland! Come out and face me one to one! Man to man! An eye for an eye, may it do ya! I think not, Roland said, for I have more work to do. A little more, even yet. It was his last word to the Crimson King. Although the lunatic screamed thoughts after him, he screamed in vain, for Roland never looked back. He had more stairs to climb and more rooms to investigate on his way to the top. FIVE On the third landing he looked through the door and saw a corduroy dress that had no doubt been his when hed been only a year old. Among the faces on this wall he saw that of his father, but as a much younger man. Later on that face had become cruelevents and responsibilities had turned it so. But not here. Here, Steven Deschains eyes were those of a man looking on something that pleases him more than anything else ever has, or ever could. Here Roland smelled a sweet and husky aroma he knew for the scent of his fathers shaving soap. |
A phantom voice whispered, Look, Gabby, look you! Hes smiling! Smiling at me! And hes got a new tooth! On the floor of the fourth room was the collar of his first dog, RingALevio. Ringo, for short. Hed died when Roland was three, which was something of a gift. A boy of three was still allowed to weep for a lost pet, even a boy with the blood of Eld in his veins. Here the gunslinger that was smelled an odor that was wonderful but had no name, and knew it for the smell of the Full Earth sun in Ringos fur. Perhaps two dozen floors above Ringos Room was a scattering of breadcrumbs and a limp bundle of feathers that had once belonged to a hawk named Davidno pet he, but certainly a friend. The first of Rolands many sacrifices to the Dark Tower. On one section of the wall Roland saw David carved in flight, his stubby wings spread above all the gathered court of Gilead (Marten the Enchanter not least among them). And to the left of the door leading onto the balcony, David was carved again. Here his wings were folded as he fell upon Cort like a blind bullet, heedless of Corts upraised stick. Old times. Old times and old crimes. Not far from Cort was the laughing face of the whore with whom the boy had sported that night. The smell in Davids Room was her perfume, cheap and sweet. As the gunslinger drew it in, he remembered touching the whores pubic curls and was shocked to remember now what he had remembered then, as his fingers slid toward her slickysweet cleft being fresh out of his babys bath, with his mothers hands upon him. He began to grow hard, and Roland fled that room in fear. SIX There was no more red to light his way now, only the eldritch blue glow of the windowsglass eyes that were alive, glass eyes that looked upon the gunless intruder. Outside the Dark Tower, the roses of CanKa No Rey had closed for another day. Part of his mind marveled that he should be here at all; that he had one by one surmounted the obstacles placed in his path, as dreadfully singleminded as ever. Im like one of the old peoples robots, he thought. One that will either accomplish the task for which it has been made or beat itself to death trying. Another part of him was not surprised at all, however. This was the part that dreamed as the Beams themselves must, and this darker self thought again of the horn that had fallen from Cuthberts fingersCuthbert, who had gone to his death laughing. The horn that might to this very day lie where it had fallen on the rocky slope of Jericho Hill. And of course Ive seen these rooms before! Theyre telling my life, after all. Indeed they were. Floor by floor and tale by tale (not to mention death by death), the rising rooms of the Dark Tower recounted Roland Deschains life and quest. Each held its memento; each its signature aroma. Many times there was more than a single floor devoted to a single year, but there was always at least one. And after the thirtyeighth room (which is nineteen doubled, do ya not see it), he wished to look no more. This one contained the charred stake to which Susan Delgado had been bound. He did not enter, but looked at the face upon the wall. That much he owed her. Roland, I love thee! Susan Delgado had screamed, and he knew it was the truth, for it was only her love that rendered her recognizable. And, love or no love, in the end she had still burned. This is a place of death, he thought, and not just here. All these rooms. Every floor. Yes, gunslinger, whispered the Voice of the Tower. But only because your life has made it so. After the thirtyeighth floor, Roland climbed faster. SEVEN Standing outside, Roland had judged the Tower to be roughly six hundred feet high. But as he peered into the hundredth room, and then the two hundredth, he felt sure he must have climbed eight times six hundred. Soon he would be closing in on the mark of distance his friends from Americaside had called a mile. That was more floors than there possibly could beno Tower could be a mile high!but still he climbed, climbed until he was nearly running, yet never did he tire. It once crossed his mind that hed never reach the top; that the Dark Tower was infinite in height as it was eternal in time. But after a moments consideration he rejected the idea, for it was his life the Tower was telling, and while that life had been long, it had by no means been eternal. And as it had had a beginning (marked by the cedar clip and the bit of blue silk ribbon), so it would have an ending. Soon now, quite likely. The light he sensed behind his eyes was brighter now, and did not seem so blue. He passed a room containing Zoltan, the bird from the weedeaters hut. He passed a room containing the atomic pump from the Way Station. He climbed more stairs, paused outside a room containing a dead lobstrosity, and by now the light he sensed was much brighter and no longer blue. It was . . . He was quite sure it was . . . It was sunlight. Past twilight it might be, with Old Star and Old Mother shining from above the Dark Tower, but Roland was quite sure he was seeingor sensingsunlight. He climbed on without looking into any more of the rooms, without bothering to smell their aromas of the past. The stairwell narrowed until his shoulders nearly touched its curved stone sides. No songs now, unless the wind was a song, for he heard it soughing. He passed one final open door. Lying on the floor of the tiny room beyond it was a pad from which the face had been erased. All that remained were two red eyes, glaring up. I have reached the present. I have reached now. Yes, and there was sunlight, commala sunlight inside his eyes and waiting for him. It was hot and harsh upon his skin. The sound of the wind was louder, and that sound was also harsh. Unforgiving. Roland looked at the stairs curving upward; now his shoulders would touch the walls, for the passage was no wider than the sides of a coffin. Nineteen more stairs, and then the room at the top of the Dark Tower would be his. I come! he called. Ifee hear me, hear me well! I come! He took the stairs one by one, walking with his back straight and his head held up. The other rooms had been open to his eye. The final one was closed off, his way blocked by a ghostwood door with a single word carved upon it. That word was ROLAND. He grasped the knob. It was engraved with a wild rose wound around a revolver, one of those great old guns from his father and now lost forever. Yet it will be yours again, whispered the voice of the Tower and the voice of the rosesthese voices were now one. What do you mean? To this there was no answer, but the knob turned beneath his hand, and perhaps that was an answer. Roland opened the door at the top of the Dark Tower. He saw and understood at once, the knowledge falling upon him in a hammerblow, hot as the sun of the desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts. How many times had he climbed these stairs only to find himself peeled back, curved back, turned back? Not to the beginning (when things might have been changed and times curse lifted), but to that moment in the Mohaine Desert when he had finally understood that his thoughtless, questionless quest would ultimately succeed? How many times had he traveled a loop like the one in the clip that had once pinched off his navel, his own tetka can Gan? How many times would he travel it? Oh, no! he screamed. Please, not again! Have pity! Have mercy! The hands pulled him forward regardless. The hands of the Tower knew no mercy. They were the hands of Gan, the hands of ka, and they knew no mercy. He smelled alkali, bitter as tears. The desert beyond the door was white; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon. The smell beneath the alkali was that of the devilgrass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. But not for you, gunslinger. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank? You go on. And each time you forget the last time.For you, each time is the first time. He made one final effort to draw back hopeless. Ka was stronger. Roland of Gilead walked through the last door, the one he always sought, the one he always found. It closed gently behind him. EIGHT The gunslinger paused for a moment, swaying on his feet. He thought hed almost passed out. It was the heat, of course; the damned heat. There was a wind, but it was dry and brought no relief. He took his waterskin, judged how much was left by the heft of it, knew he shouldnt drinkit wasnt time to drinkand had a swallow, anyway. For a moment he had felt he was somewhere else. In the Tower itself, mayhap. But of course the desert was tricky, and full of mirages. The Dark Tower still lay thousands of wheels ahead. That sense of having climbed many stairs and looked into many rooms where many faces had looked back at him was already fading. I will reach it, he thought, squinting up at the pitiless sun. I swear on the name of my father that I will. And perhaps this time if you get there it will be different, a voice whisperedsurely the voice of desert delirium, for what other time had there ever been? He was what he was and where he was, just that, no more than that, no more. He had no sense of humor and little imagination, but he was steadfast. He was a gunslinger. And in his heart, wellhidden, he still felt the bitter romance of the quest. Youre the one who never changes, Cort had told him once, and in his voice Roland could have sworn he heard fear . . . although why Cort should have been afraid of hima boyRoland couldnt tell. Itll be your damnation, boy. Youll wear out a hundred pairs of boots on your walk to hell. And Vannay Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. And his mother Roland, must you always be so serious? Can you never rest? Yet the voice whispered it again (different this time mayhap different) and Roland did seem to smell something other than alkali and devilgrass. He thought it might be flowers. He thought it might be roses. He shifted his gunna from one shoulder to the other, then touched the horn that rode on his belt behind the gun on his right hip. The ancient brass horn had once been blown by Arthur Eld himself, or so the story did say. Roland had given it to Cuthbert Allgood at Jericho Hill, and when Cuthbert fell, Roland had paused just long enough to pick it up again, knocking the deathdust of that place from its throat. This is your sigul, whispered the fading voice that bore with it the dusksweet scent of roses, the scent of home on a summer eveningO lost!a stone, a rose, an unfound door; a stone, a rose, a door. This is your promise that things may be different, Rolandthat there may yet be rest. Even salvation. A pause, and then If you stand. If you are true. He shook his head to clear it, thought of taking another sip of water, and dismissed the idea. Tonight. When he built his campfire over the bones of Walters fire. Then he would drink. As for now . . . As for now, he would resume his journey. Somewhere ahead was the Dark Tower. Closer, however, much closer, was the man (was he a man? was he really?) who could perhaps tell him how to get there. Roland would catch him, and when he did, that man would talkaye, yes, yar, tell it on the mountain as youd hear it in the valley Walter would be caught, and Walter would talk. Roland touched the horn again, and its reality was oddly comforting, as if he had never touched it before. Time to get moving. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. June 19, 1970April 7, 2004 I tell God thankya. ROBERT BROWNING CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME I My first thought was, he lied in every word, That hoary cripple, with malicious eye Askance to watch the workings of his lie On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby. II What else should he be set for, with his staff? What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare All travellers who might find him posted there, And ask the road? I guessed what skulllike laugh Would break, what crutch gin write my epitaph For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare. III If at his counsel I should turn aside Into that ominous tract which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly I did turn as he pointed, neither pride Nor hope rekindling at the end descried, So much as gladness that some end might be. IV For, what with my whole worldwide wandering; What with my search drawn out through years, my hope Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope With that obstreperous joy success would bring, I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring My heart made, finding failure in its scope. V As when a sick man very near to death Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end The tears and takes the farewell of each friend, And hears one bid the other go, draw breath Freelier outside, (since all is oer, he saith And the blow fallen no grieving can amend;) VI When some discuss if near the other graves Be room enough for this, and when a day Suits best for carrying the corpse away, With care about the banners, scarves and staves And still the man hears all, and only craves He may not shame such tender love and stay. VII Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest, Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ So many times among The Band to wit, The knights who to the Dark Towers search addressed Their stepsthat just to fail as they, seemed best, And all the doubt was nowshould I be fit? VIII So, quiet as despair I turned from him, That hateful cripple, out of his highway Into the path he pointed. All the day Had been a dreary one at best, and dim Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim Red leer to see the plain catch its estray. IX For mark! No sooner was I fairly found Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, Than, pausing to throw backwards a last view Oer the safe road, twas gone; grey plain all round Nothing but plain to the horizons bound. I might go on, naught else remained to do. X So on I went. I think I never saw Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve For flowersas well expect a cedar grove! But cockle, spurge, according to their law Might propagate their kind with none to awe, Youd think; a burr had been a treasure trove. XI No! penury, inertness and grimace, In some strange sort, were the lands portion. See Or shut your eyes, said Nature peevishly, It nothing skills I cannot help my case Tis the Last Judgements fire must cure this place Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free. XII If there pushed any ragged thistlestalk Above its mates, the head was chopped, the bents Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents In the docks harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk All hope of greenness? tis a brute must walk Pashing their life out, with a brutes intents. XIII As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. One stiff blind horse, his every bone astare, Stood stupefied, however he came there Thrust out past service from the devils stud! XIV Alive? he might be dead for aught I know, With that red gaunt and colloped neck astrain. And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane; Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. XV I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart, As a man calls for wine before he fights, I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights, Ere fitly I could hope to play my part. Think first, fight afterwards, the soldiers art One taste of the old time sets all to rights. XVI Not it! I fancied Cuthberts reddening face Beneath its garniture of curly gold, Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold An arm to mine to fix me to the place, The way he used. Alas, one nights disgrace! Out went my hearts new fire and left it cold. XVII Giles then, the soul of honourthere he stands Frank as ten years ago when knighted first, What honest man should dare (he said) he durst. Goodbut the scene shiftsfaugh! what hangman hands Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst! XVIII Better this present than a past like that Back therefore to my darkening path again! No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain. Will the night send a howlet or a bat? I asked when something on the dismal flat Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train. XIX A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes. No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath For the fiends glowing hoofto see the wrath Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes. XX So petty yet so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit Of mute despair, a suicidal throng The river which had done them all the wrong, Whateer that was, rolled by, deterred no whit. XXI Which, while I fordedgood saints, how I feared To set my foot upon a dead mans cheek, Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! It may have been a waterrat I speared, But, ugh! it sounded like a babys shriek. XXII Glad was I when I reached the other bank. Now for a better country. Vain presage! Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage, Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank Or wild cats in a redhot iron cage XXIII The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque, What penned them there, with all the plain to choose? No footprint leading to that horrid mews, None out of it. Mad brewage set to work Their brains, no doubt, like galleyslaves the Turk Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews. XXIV And more than thata furlong onwhy, there! What bad use was that engine for, that wheel, Or brake, not wheelthat harrow fit to reel Mens bodies out like silk? With all the air Of Tophets tool, on earth left unaware Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel. XXV Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood Bog, clay and rubble, sand, and stark black dearth. XXVI Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soils Broke into moss, or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils. XXVII And just as far as ever from the end! Naught in the distance but the evening, naught To point my footstep further! At the thought, A great black bird, Apollyons bosom friend, Sailed past, not best his wide wing dragonpenned That brushed my capperchance the guide I sought. XXVIII For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountainswith such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surprised mesolve it, you! How to get from them was no clearer case. XXIX Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick Of mischief happened to me, God knows when In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shutsyoure inside the den. XXX Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce, Dotard, adozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight! XXXI What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fools heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempests mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes on, only when the timbers start. XXXII Not see? because of night perhaps?why day Came back again for that! before it left The dying sunset kindled through a cleft The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, Now stab and end the creatureto the heft! XXXIII Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears Of all the lost adventurers, my peers How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. XXXIV There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! In a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set, And blew. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came. AUTHORS NOTE Sometimes I think I have written more about the Dark Tower books than I have written about the Dark Tower itself. These related writings include the evergrowing synopsis (known by the quaint old word Argument) at the beginning of each of the first five volumes, and afterwords (most totally unnecessary and some actually embarrassing in retrospect) at the end of all the volumes. Michael Whelan, the extraordinary artist who illustrated both the first volume and this last, proved himself to be no slouch as a literary critic as well when, after reading a draft of Volume Seven, he suggestedin refreshingly blunt termsthat the rather lighthearted afterword Id put at the end was jarring and out of place. I took another look at it and realized he was right. The first half of that wellmeant but offkey essay can now be found as an introduction to the first four volumes of the series; its called On Being Nineteen. I thought of leaving Volume Seven without any afterword at all; of letting Rolands discovery at the top of his Tower be my last word on the matter. Then I realized that I had one more thing to say, a thing that actually needed to be said. It has to do with my presence in my own book. Theres a smarmy academic term for thismetafiction. I hate it. I hate the pretentiousness of it. Im in the story only because Ive known for some time now (consciously since writing Insomnia in 1995, unconsciously since temporarily losing track of Father Donald Callahan near the end of Salems Lot) that many of my fictions refer back to Rolands world and Rolands story. Since I was the one who wrote them, it seemed logical that I was part of the gunslingers ka. My idea was to use the Dark Tower stories as a kind of summation, a way of unifying as many of my previous stories as possible beneath the arch of some ber tale. I never meant that to be pretentious (and I hope it isnt), but only as a way of showing how life influences art (and viceversa). I think that, if you have read these last three Dark Tower volumes, youll see that my talk of retirement makes more sense in this context. In a sense, theres nothing left to say now that Roland has reached his goal . . . and I hope the reader will see that by discovering the Horn of Eld, the gunslinger may finally be on the way to his own resolution. Possibly even to redemption. It was all about reaching the Tower, you seemine as well as Rolandsand that has finally been accomplished. You may not like what Roland found at the top, but thats a different matter entirely. And dont write me any angry letters about it, either, because I wont answer them. Theres nothing left to say on the subject. I wasnt exactly crazy about the ending, either, if you want to know the truth, but its the right ending. The only ending, in fact. You have to remember that I dont make these things up, not exactly; I only write down what I see. Readers will speculate on how real the Stephen King is who appears in these pages. The answer is not very, although the one Roland and Eddie meet in Bridgton (Song of Susannah) is very close to the Stephen King I remember being at that time. As for the Stephen King who shows up in this final volume . . . well, lets put it this way my wife asked me if I would kindly not give fans of the series very precise directions to where we live or who we really are. I agreed to do that. Not because I wanted to, exactlypart of what makes this story go, I think, is the sense of the fictional world bursting through into the real onebut because this happens to be my wifes life as well as mine, and she should not be penalized for either loving me or living with me. So I have fictionalized the geography of western Maine to a great extent, trusting readers to grasp the intent of the fiction and to understand why I treated my own part in it as I did. And if you feel a need to drop in and say hello, please think again. My family and I have a good deal less privacy than we used to, and I have no wish to give up any more, may it do ya fine. My books are my way of knowing you. Let them be your way of knowing me, as well. Its enough. And on behalf of Roland and all his katetnow scattered, say sorryI thank you for coming along, and sharing this adventure with me. I never worked harder on a project in my life, and I knownone better, alasthat it has not been entirely successful. What work of makebelieve ever is? And yet for all of that, I would not give back a single minute of the time that I have lived in Rolands where and when. Those days in MidWorld and EndWorld were quite extraordinary. Those were days when my imagination was so clear I could smell the dust and hear the creak of leather. Stephen King August 21, 2003 |
AFTERWORD In the High Speech, Gabrielle Deschains final message to her son looks like this The two most beautiful words in any language are I forgive. OTHER DARK TOWERRELATED WORKS BY STEPHEN KING NOVELS Salems Lot The Stand The Dark Tower I The Gunslinger The Talisman (with Peter Straub) It The Eyes of the Dragon The Dark Tower II The Drawing of the Three The Dark Tower III The Waste Lands Insomnia Rose Madder Desperation The Regulators (as Richard Bachman) The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass Bag of Bones Black House (with Peter Straub) From a Buick 8 The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla The Dark Tower VI Song of Susannah The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower COLLECTIONS Skeleton Crew Hearts in Atlantis Everythings Eventual SHANE LEONARD STEPHEN KING is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His most recent include 112263, named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review; Full Dark, No Stars; Under the Dome; Just Past Sunset; and Liseys Story. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT SimonandSchuster.com THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS JACKET DESIGN BY REX BONOMELLI JACKET PHOTO ILLUSTRATION PLATINUM FMD REPRESENTED BY RAY BROWN COPYRIGHT 2012 SIMON SCHUSTER CONTENTS Foreword Starkblast The SkinMan (Part 1) The Wind Through the Keyhole The SkinMan (Part 2) Storms Over Afterword SCRIBNER A Division of Simon Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Copyright 2012 by Stephen King All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Scribner hardcover edition April 2012 SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon Schuster Special Sales at 18665061949 or businesssimonandschuster.com. The Simon Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon Schuster Speakers Bureau at 18662483049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING Library of Congress Control Number 2011050590 ISBN 9781451658903 ISBN 9781451658927 (ebook) This is for Robin Furth, and the gang at Marvel Comics. We hope you enjoyed reading this Scribner eBook. Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Scribner and Simon Schuster. or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com Which sounds like S, in the Low Speech. FOREWORD Many of the people holding this book have followed the adventures of Roland and his bandhis katetfor years, some of them from the very beginning. Othersand I hope there are many, newcomers and Constant Readers alikemay ask, Can I read and enjoy this story if I havent read the other Dark Tower books? My answer is yes, if you keep a few things in mind. First, MidWorld lies next to our world, and there are many overlaps. In some places there are doorways between the two worlds, and sometimes there are thin places, porous places, where the two worlds actually mingle. Three of Rolands katetEddie, Susannah, and Jakehave been drawn separately from troubled lives in New York into Rolands MidWorld quest. Their fourth traveling companion, a billybumbler named Oy, is a goldeneyed creature native to MidWorld. MidWorld is very old, and falling to ruin, filled with monsters and untrustworthy magic. Second, Roland Deschain of Gilead is a gunslingerone of a small band that tries to keep order in an increasingly lawless world. If you think of the gunslingers of Gilead as a strange combination of knights errant and territorial marshals in the Old West, youll be close to the mark. Most of them, although not all, are descended from the line of the old White King, known as Arthur Eld (I told you there were overlaps). Third, Roland has lived his life under a terrible curse. He killed his mother, who was having an affairmostly against her will, and certainly against her better judgmentwith a fellow you will meet in these pages. Although it was by mistake, he holds himself accountable, and the unhappy Gabrielle Deschains death has haunted him since his young manhood. These events are fully narrated in the Dark Tower cycle, but for our purposes here, I think its all you have to know. For longtime readers, this book should be shelved between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla . . . which makes it, I suppose, Dark Tower 4.5. As for me, I was delighted to discover my old friends had a little more to say. It was a great gift to find them again, years after I thought their stories were told. Stephen King September 14, 2011 1 During the days after they left the Green Palace that wasnt Oz after allbut which was now the tomb of the unpleasant fellow Rolands katet had known as the TickTock Manthe boy Jake began to range farther and farther ahead of Roland, Eddie, and Susannah. Dont you worry about him? Susannah asked Roland. Out there on his own? Hes got Oy with him, Eddie said, referring to the billybumbler who had adopted Jake as his special friend. Mr. Oy gets along with nice folks all right, but hes got a mouthful of sharp teeth for those who arent so nice. As that guy Gasher found out to his sorrow. Jake also has his fathers gun, Roland said. And he knows how to use it. That he knows very well. And he wont leave the Path of the Beam. He pointed overhead with his reduced hand. The lowhanging sky was mostly still, but a single corridor of clouds moved steadily southeast. Toward the land of Thunderclap, if the note left behind for them by the man who styled himself RF had told the truth. Toward the Dark Tower. But why Susannah began, and then her wheelchair hit a bump. She turned to Eddie. Watch where youre pushin me, sugar. Sorry, Eddie said. Public Works hasnt been doing any maintenance along this stretch of the turnpike lately. Must be dealing with budget cuts. It wasnt a turnpike, but it was a road . . . or had been two ghostly ruts with an occasional tumbledown shack to mark the way. Earlier that morning they had even passed an abandoned store with a barely readable sign TOOKS OUTLAND MERCANTILE. They investigated inside for suppliesJake and Oy had still been with them thenand had found nothing but dust, ancient cobwebs, and the skeleton of what had been either a large raccoon, a small dog, or a billybumbler. Oy had taken a cursory sniff and then pissed on the bones before leaving the store to sit on the hump in the middle of the old road with his squiggle of a tail curled around him. He faced back the way they had come, sniffing the air. Roland had seen the bumbler do this several times lately, and although he had said nothing, he pondered it. Someone trailing them, maybe? He didnt actually believe this, but the bumblers posturenose lifted, ears pricked, tail curledcalled up some old memory or association that he couldnt quite catch. Why does Jake want to be on his own? Susannah asked. Do you find it worrisome, Susannah of New York? Roland asked. Yes, Roland of Gilead, I find it worrisome. She smiled amiably enough, but in her eyes, the old mean light sparkled. That was the Detta Walker part of her, Roland reckoned. It would never be completely gone, and he wasnt sorry. Without the strange woman she had once been still buried in her heart like a chip of ice, she would have been only a handsome black woman with no legs below the knees. With Detta onboard, she was a person to be reckoned with. A dangerous one. A gunslinger. He has plenty of stuff to think about, Eddie said quietly. Hes been through a lot. Not every kid comes back from the dead. And its like Roland saysif someone tries to face him down, its the someone whos apt to be sorry. Eddie stopped pushing the wheelchair, armed sweat from his brow, and looked at Roland. Are there someones in this particular suburb of nowhere, Roland? Or have they all moved on? Oh, there are a few, I wot. He did more than wot; they had been peeked at several times as they continued their course along the Path of the Beam. Once by a frightened woman with her arms around two children and a babe hanging in a sling from her neck. Once by an old farmer, a halfmutie with a jerking tentacle that hung from one corner of his mouth. Eddie and Susannah had seen none of these people, or sensed the others that Roland felt sure had, from the safety of the woods and high grasses, marked their progress. Eddie and Susannah had a lot to learn. But they had learned at least some of what they would need, it seemed, because Eddie now asked, Are they the ones Oy keeps scenting up behind us? I dont know. Roland thought of adding that he was sure something else was on Oys strange little bumbler mind, and decided not to. The gunslinger had spent long years with no katet, and keeping his own counsel had become a habit. One he would have to break, if the tet was to remain strong. But not now, not this morning. Lets move on, he said. Im sure well find Jake waiting for us up ahead. 2 Two hours later, just shy of noon, they breasted a rise and halted, looking down at a wide, slowmoving river, gray as pewter beneath the overcast sky. On the northwestern banktheir sidewas a barnlike building painted a green so bright it seemed to yell into the muted day. Its mouth jutted out over the water on pilings painted a similar green. Docked to two of these pilings by thick hawsers was a large raft, easily ninety feet by ninety, painted in alternating stripes of red and yellow. A tall wooden pole that looked like a mast jutted from the center, but there was no sign of a sail. Several wicker chairs sat in front of the pole, facing the shore on their side of the river. Jake was seated in one of these. Next to him was an old man in a vast straw hat, baggy green pants, and longboots. On his top half he wore a thin white garmentthe kind of shirt Roland thought of as a slinkum. Jake and the old man appeared to be eating wellstuffed popkins. Rolands mouth sprang water at the sight of them. Oy was beyond them, at the edge of the circuspainted raft, looking raptly down at his own reflection. Or perhaps at the reflection of the steel cable that ran overhead, spanning the river. Is it the Whye? Susannah asked Roland. Yar. Eddie grinned. You say Whye; I say Whye Not? He raised one hand and waved it over his head. Jake! Hey, Jake! Oy! Jake waved back, and although the river and the raft moored at its edge were still a quarter of a mile away, their eyes were uniformly sharp, and they saw the white of the boys teeth as he grinned. Susannah cupped her hands around her mouth. Oy! Oy! To me, sugar! Come see your mama! Uttering shrill yips that were the closest he could get to barks, Oy flew across the raft, disappeared into the barnlike structure, then emerged on their side. He came charging up the path with his ears lowered against his skull and his goldringed eyes bright. Slow down, sug, youll give yourself a heart attack! Susannah shouted, laughing. Oy seemed to take this as an order to speed up. He arrived at Susannahs wheelchair in less than two minutes, jumped up into her lap, then jumped down again and looked at them cheerfully. Olan! Ed! Suze! Hile, Sir Throcken, Roland said, using the ancient word for bumbler hed first heard in a book read to him by his mother The Throcken and the Dragon. Oy lifted his leg, watered a patch of grass, then faced back the way they had come, scenting at the air, eyes on the horizon. Why does he keep doing that, Roland? Eddie asked. I dont know. But he almost knew. Was it some old story, not The Throcken and the Dragon but one like it? Roland thought so. For a moment he thought of green eyes, watchful in the dark, and a little shiver went through himnot of fear, exactly (although that might have been a part of it), but of remembrance. Then it was gone. Therell be water if God wills it, he thought, and only realized he had spoken aloud when Eddie said, Huh? Never mind, Roland said. Lets have a little palaver with Jakes new friend, shall we? Perhaps he has an extra popkin or two. Eddie, tired of the chewy staple they called gunslinger burritos, brightened immediately. Hell, yeah, he said, and looked at an imaginary watch on his tanned wrist. Goodness me, I see its just gobble oclock. Shut up and push, honeybee, Susannah said. Eddie shut up and pushed. 3 The old man was sitting when they entered the boathouse, standing when they emerged on the river side. He saw the guns Roland and Eddie were wearingthe big irons with the sandalwood gripsand his eyes widened. He dropped to one knee. The day was still, and Roland actually heard his bones creak. Hile, gunslinger, he said, and put an arthritisswollen fist to the center of his forehead. I salute thee. Rise up, friend, Roland said, hoping the old man was a friendJake seemed to think so, and Roland had come to trust his instincts. Not to mention the billybumblers. Rise up, do. The old man was having trouble managing it, so Eddie stepped aboard and gave him an arm. Thankee, son, thankee. Be you a gunslinger as well, or are you a prentice? Eddie looked at Roland. Roland gave him nothing, so Eddie looked back at the old man, shrugged, and grinned. Little of both, I guess. Im Eddie Dean, of New York. This is my wife, Susannah. And this is Roland Deschain. Of Gilead. The rivermans eyes widened. Gilead that was? Do you say so? Gilead that was, Roland agreed, and felt an unaccustomed sorrow rise up from his heart. Time was a face on the water, and like the great river before them, it did nothing but flow. Step aboard, then. And welcome. This young man and I are already fast friends, so we are. Oy stepped onto the big raft and the old man bent to stroke the bumblers raised head. And we are, too, arent we, fella? Does thee remember my name? Bix! Oy said promptly, then turned to the northwest again, raising his snout. His goldringed eyes stared raptly at the moving column of clouds that marked the Path of the Beam. 4 Willee eat? Bix asked them. What I have is poor and rough, but such as there is, Id be happy to share. With thanks, Susannah said. She looked at the overhead cable that ran across the river on a diagonal. This is a ferry, isnt it? Yeah, Jake said. Bix told me there are people on the other side. Not close, but not far, either. He thinks theyre rice farmers, but they dont come this way much. Bix stepped off the big raft and went into the boathouse. Eddie waited until he heard the old guy rummaging around, then bent to Jake and said in a low voice, Is he okay? Hes fine, Jake said. Its the way were going, and hes happy to have someone to take across. He says its been years. Ill bet it has been, Eddie agreed. Bix reappeared with a wicker basket, which Roland took from himotherwise the old man might have tumbled into the water. Soon they were all sitting in the wicker chairs, munching popkins filled with some sort of pink fish. It was seasoned and delicious. Eat all you like, Bix said. The rivers filled with shannies, and most are truethreaded. The muties I throw back. Once upon a time we were ordered to throw the bad uns up abank so they wouldnt breed more, and for a while I did, but now . . . He shrugged. Live and let live is what I say. As someone whos lived long himself, I feel like I can say it. How old are you? Jake asked. I turned a hundred and twenty quite some time ago, but since then Ive lost count, so I have. Times short on this side of the door, kennit. On this side of the door. That memory of some old story tugged at Roland again, and then was gone. Do you follow that? The old man pointed to the moving band of clouds in the sky. We do. To the Callas, or beyond? Beyond. To the great darkness? Bix looked both troubled and fascinated by the idea. We go our course, Roland said. What fee would you take to cross us, sai ferryman? Bix laughed. The sound was cracked and cheerful. Moneys no good with nothing to spend it on, you have no livestock, and its clear as day that I have more to eat than you do. And you could always draw on me and force me to take you across. Never, Susannah said, looking shocked. I know that, Bix said, waving a hand at her. Harriers mightand then burn my ferry for good measure once they got tother sidebut true men of the gun, never. And women too, I suppose. You dont seem armed, missus, but with women, one can never tell. Susannah smiled thinly at this and said nothing. Bix turned to Roland. Ye come from Lud, I wot. Id hear of Lud, and how things go there. For it was a marvelous city, so it was. Crumbling and growing strange when I knew it, but still marvelous. The four of them exchanged a look that was all antet, that peculiar telepathy they shared. It was a look that was also dark with shume, the old MidWorld term that can mean shame, but also means sorrow. What? Bix asked. What have I said? If Ive asked for something youd not give, I cry your pardon. Not at all, Roland said, but Lud . . . Lud is dust in the wind, Susannah said. Well, Eddie said, not dust, exactly. Ashes, Jake said. The kind that glow in the dark. Bix pondered this, then nodded slowly. Id hear anyway, or as much as you can tell in an hours time. Thats how long the crossing takes. 5 Bix bristled when they offered to help him with his preparations. It was his job, he said, and he could still do itjust not as quickly as once upon a time, when there had been farms and a few little trading posts on both sides of the river. In any case, there wasnt much to do. He fetched a stool and a large ironwood ringbolt from the boathouse, mounted the stool to attach the ringbolt to the top of the post, then hooked the ringbolt to the cable. He took the stool back inside and returned with a large metal crank shaped like a block Z. This he laid with some ceremony by a wooden housing on the far end of the raft. Dont none of you kick that overboard, or Ill never get home, he said. Roland squatted on his hunkers to study it. He beckoned to Eddie and Jake, who joined him. He pointed to the words embossed on the long stroke of the Z. Does it say what I think it does? Yep, Eddie said. North Central Positronics. Our old pals. When did you get that, Bix? Susannah asked. Ninety year ago, or more, if I were to guess. Theres an underground place over there. He pointed vaguely in the direction of the Green Palace. It goes for miles, and its full of things that belonged to the old people, perfectly preserved. Strange music still plays from overhead, music such as youve never heard. It scrambles your thinking, like. And you dont dare stay there long, or you break out in sores and puke and start to lose your teeth. I went once. Never again. I thought for a while I was going to die. Did you lose your hair as well as your chompers? Eddie asked. Bix looked surprised, then nodded. Yar, some, but it grew back. That crank, its still, you know. Eddie pondered this a moment. Of course it was still, it was an inanimate object. Then he realized the old man was saying steel. Areee ready? Bix asked them. His eyes were nearly as bright as Oys. Shall I cast off? Eddie snapped off a crisp salute. Ayeaye, capn. Were away to the Treasure Isles, arr, so we be. Come and help me with these ropes, Roland of Gilead, will ya do. Roland did, and gladly. 6 The raft moved slowly along the diagonal cable, pulled by the rivers slow current. Fish jumped all around them as Rolands katet took turns telling the old man about the city of Lud, and what had befallen them there. For a while Oy watched the fish with interest, his paws planted on the upstream edge of the raft. Then he once more sat and faced back the way they had come, snout raised. Bix grunted when they told him how theyd left the doomed city. Blaine the Mono, ysay. I remember. Crack train. There was another un, too, although I cant remember the name Patricia, Susannah said. Aye, that was it. Beautiful glass sides, she had. And you say the citys all gone? All gone, Jake agreed. Bix lowered his head. Sad. It is, Susannah said, taking his hand and giving it a brief, light squeeze. MidWorlds a sad place, although it can be very beautiful. They had reached the middle of the river now, and a light breeze, surprisingly warm, ruffled their hair. They had all laid aside their heavy outer clothes and sat at ease in the wicker passenger chairs, which rolled this way and that, presumably for the views this provided. A large fishprobably one of the kind that had fed their bellies at gobble oclockjumped onto the raft and lay there, flopping at Oys feet. Although he was usually death on any small creature that crossed his path, the bumbler appeared not even to notice it. Roland kicked it back into the water with one of his scuffed boots. Yer throcken knows its coming, Bix remarked. He looked at Roland. Youll want to take heed, aye? For a moment Roland could say nothing. A clear memory rose from the back of his mind to the front, one of a dozen handcolored woodcut illustrations in an old and wellloved book. Six bumblers sitting on a fallen tree in the forest beneath a crescent moon, all with their snouts raised. That volume, Magic Tales of the Eld, he had loved above all others when he had been but a sma one, listening to his mother as she read him to sleep in his high tower bedroom, while an autumn gale sang its lonely song outside, calling down winter. The Wind Through the Keyhole was the name of the story that went with the picture, and it had been both terrible and wonderful. All my gods on the hill, Roland said, and thumped the heel of his reduced right hand to his brow. I should have known right away. If only from how warm its gotten the last few days. You mean you didnt? Bix asked. And you from InWorld? He made a tsking sound. Roland? Susannah asked. What is it? Roland ignored her. He looked from Bix to Oy and back to Bix. The starkblasts coming. Bix nodded. Aye. Throcken say so, and about starkblast the throcken are never wrong. Other than speaking a little, its their bright. Bright what? Eddie asked. He means their talent, Roland said. Bix, do you know of a place on the other side where we can hide up and wait for it to pass? Happens I do. The old man pointed to the wooded hills sloping gently down to the far side of the Whye, where another dock and another boathousethis one unpainted and far less grandwaited for them. Yell find your way forward on the other side, a little lane that used to be a road. It follows the Path of the Beam. Sure it does, Jake said. All things serve the Beam. As you say, young man, as you say. Which doee ken, wheels or miles? Both, Eddie said, but for most of us, miles are better. All right, then. Follow the old Calla road five miles . . . maybe six . . . and yell come to a deserted village. Most of the buildings are wood and no use toee, but the town meeting hall is good stone. Yell be fine there. Ive been inside, and theres a lovely big fireplace. Yell want to check the chimney, accourse, as yell want a good draw up its throat for the day or two ye have to sit out. As for wood, ye can use whats left of the houses. What is this starkblast? Susannah asked. Is it a storm? Yes, Roland said. I havent seen one in many, many years. Its a lucky thing we had Oy with us. Even then I wouldnt have known, if not for Bix. He squeezed the old mans shoulder. Thankeesai. We all say thankee. 7 The boathouse on the southeastern side of the river was on the verge of collapse, like so many things in MidWorld; bats roosted headsdown from the rafters and fat spiders scuttered up the walls. They were all glad to be out of it and back under the open sky. Bix tied up and joined them. They each embraced him, being careful not to hug tight and hurt his old bones. When theyd all taken their turn, the old man wiped his eyes, then bent and stroked Oys head. Keep em well, do, Sir Throcken. Oy! the bumbler replied. Then Bix! The old man straightened, and again they heard his bones crackle. He put his hands to the small of his back and winced. Will you be able to get back across okay? Eddie asked. Oh, aye, Bix said. If it was spring, I might notthe Whye ent so placid when the snow melts and the rains comebut now? Piece o piss. The storms still some way off. I crank for a bit against the current, then click the bolt tight so I can rest and not slip backards, then I crank some more. It might take four hours instead of one, but Ill get there. I always have, anyway. I only wish I had some more food to giveee. Well be fine, Roland said. Good, then. Good. The old man seemed reluctant to leave. He looked from face to faceseriouslythen grinned, exposing toothless gums. Were wellmet along the path, are we not? So we are, Roland agreed. And if you come back this way, stop and visit awhile with old Bix. Tell him of your adventures. We will, Susannah said, although she knew they would never be this way again. It was a thing they all knew. And mind the starkblast. Its nothing to fool with. But ye might have a day, yet, or even two. Hes not turning circles yet, are ye, Oy? Oy! the bumbler agreed. Bix fetched a sigh. Now you go your way, he said, and I go mine. Well both be laid up undercover soon enough. Roland and his tet started up the path. One other thing! Bix called after them, and they turned back. If you see that cussed Andy, tell him I dont want no songs, and I dont want my godsdamned horrascope read! Whos Andy? Jake called back. Oh, never mind, you probably wont see him, anyway. That was the old mans last word on it, and none of them remembered it, although they did meet Andy, in the farming community of Calla Bryn Sturgis. But that was later, after the storm had passed. 8 It was only five miles to the deserted village, and they arrived less than an hour after theyd left the ferry. It took Roland less time than that to tell them about the starkblast. They used to come down on the Great Woods north of New Canaan once or twice a year, although we never had one in Gilead; they always rose away into the air before they got so far. But I remember once seeing carts loaded with frozen bodies drawn down Gilead Road. Farmers and their families, I suppose. Where their throcken had beentheir billybumblersI dont know. Perhaps they took sick and died. In any case, with no bumblers to warn them, those folks were unprepared. The starkblast comes suddenly, you ken. One moment youre warm as toastbecause the weather always warms up beforeand then it falls on you, like wolves on a ruttle of lambs. The only warning is the sound the trees make as the cold of the starkblast rolls over them. A kind of thudding sound, like grenados covered with dirt. The sound living wood makes when it contracts all at once, I suppose. And by the time they heard that, it would have been too late for those in the fields. Cold, Eddie mused. How cold? The temperature can fall to as much as forty limbits below freezing in less than an hour, Roland said grimly. Ponds freeze in an instant, with a sound like bullets breaking windowpanes. Birds turn to icestatues in the sky and fall like rocks. Grass turns to glass. Youre exaggerating, Susannah said. You must be. Not at all. But the colds only part of it. The wind comes, toogaleforce, snapping the frozen trees off like straws. Such storms might roll for three hundred wheels before lifting off into the sky as suddenly as they came. How do the bumblers know? Jake asked. Roland only shook his head. The how and why of things had never interested him much. 9 They came to a broken piece of signboard lying on the path. Eddie picked it up and read the faded remains of a single word. It sums up MidWorld perfectly, he said. Mysterious yet strangely hilarious. He turned toward them with the piece of wood held at chest level. What it said, in large, uneven letters, was GOOK. A gook is a deep well, Roland said. Common law says any traveler may drink from it without let or penalty. Welcome to Gook, Eddie said, tossing the signboard into the bushes at the side of the road. I like it. In fact, I want a bumper sticker that says I Waited Out the Starkblast in Gook. Susannah laughed. Jake didnt. He only pointed at Oy, who had begun turning in tight, rapid circles, as if chasing his own tail. We might want to hurry a little, the boy said. 10 The woods drew back and the path widened to what had once been a village high street. The village itself was a sad cluster of abandonment that ran on both sides for about a quarter mile. Some of the buildings had been houses, some stores, but now it was impossible to tell which had been which. They were nothing but slumped shells staring out of dark empty sockets that might once have held glass. The only exception stood at the southern end of the town. Here the overgrown high street split around a squat blockhouselike building constructed of gray fieldstone. It stood hipdeep in overgrown shrubbery and was partly concealed by young fir trees that must have grown up since Gook had been abandoned; the roots had already begun to work their way into the meeting halls foundations. In the course of time they would bring it down, and time was one thing MidWorld had in abundance. He was right about the wood, Eddie said. He picked up a weathered plank and laid it across the arms of Susannahs wheelchair like a makeshift table. Well have plenty. He cast an eye at Jakes furry pal, who was once more turning in brisk circles. If we have time to pick it up, that is. Well start gathering as soon as we make sure weve got yonder stone building to ourselves, Roland said. Lets make this quick. 11 The Gook meeting hall was chilly, and birdswhat the New Yorkers thought of as swallows and Roland called binrustieshad gotten into the second floor, but otherwise they did indeed have the place to themselves. Once he was under a roof, Oy seemed freed of his compulsion to either face northwest or turn in circles, and he immediately reverted to his essential curious nature, bounding up the rickety stairs toward the soft flutterings and cooings above. He began his shrill yapping, and soon the members of the tet saw the binrusties streaking away toward less populated areas of MidWorld. Although, if Roland was right, Jake thought, the ones heading in the direction of the River Whye would all too soon be turned into birdsicles. The first floor consisted of a single large room. Tables and benches had been stacked against the walls. Roland, Eddie, and Jake carried these to the glassless windows, which were mercifully small, and covered the openings. The ones on the northwest side they covered from the outside, so the wind from that direction would press them tighter rather than blow them over. While they did this, Susannah rolled her wheelchair into the mouth of the fireplace, a thing she was able to accomplish without even ducking her head. She peered up, grasped a rusty hanging ring, and pulled it. There was a hellish skreek sound . . . a pause . . . and then a great black cloud of soot descended on her in a flump. Her reaction was immediate, colorful, and all Detta Walker. Oh, kiss my ass and go to heaven! she screamed. You cockknocking motherfucker, just lookit this shittin mess! She rolled back out, coughing and waving her hands in front of her face. The wheels of her chair left tracks in the soot. A huge pile of the stuff lay in her lap. She slapped it away in a series of hard strokes that were more like punches. |
Filthy fucking chimbly! Dirty old cunttunnel! You badass, sonofabitching She turned and saw Jake staring at her, openmouthed and wideeyed. Beyond him, on the stairs, Oy was doing the same thing. Sorry, honey, Susannah said. I got a little carried away. Mostly Im mad at myself. I grew up with stoves n fireplaces, and should have known better. In a tone of deepest respect, Jake said, You know better swears than my father. I didnt think anyone knew better swears than my father. Eddie went to Susannah and started wiping at her face and neck. She brushed his hands away. Youre just spreadin it around. Lets go see if we can find that gook, or whatever it is. Maybe theres still water. There will be if God wills it, Roland said. She swiveled to regard him with narrowed eyes. You being smart, Roland? You dont want to be smart while Im sittin here like Missus Tarbaby. No, sai, never think it, Roland said, but there was the tiniest twitch at the left corner of his mouth. Eddie, see if you can find gookwater so Susannah can clean herself. Jake and I will begin gathering wood. Well need you to help us as soon as you can. I hope our friend Bix has made it to his side of the river, because I think time is shorter than he guessed. 12 The town well was on the other side of the meeting hall, in what Eddie thought might once have been the town common. The rope hanging from the crankoperated drum beneath the wells rotting cap was long gone, but that was no problem; they had a coil of good rope in their gunna. The problem, Eddie said, is what were going to tie to the end of the rope. I suppose one of Rolands old saddlebags might Whats that, honeybee? Susannah was pointing at a patch of high grass and brambles on the left side of the well. I dont see . . . But then he did. A gleam of rusty metal. Taking care to be scratched by the thorns as little as possible, Eddie reached into the tangle and, with a grunt of effort, pulled out a rusty bucket with a coil of dead ivy inside. There was even a handle. Let me see that, Susannah said. He dumped out the ivy and handed it over. She tested the handle and it broke immediately, not with a snap but a soft, punky sigh. Susannah looked at him apologetically and shrugged. S okay, Eddie said. Better to know now than when its down in the well. He tossed the handle aside, cut off a chunk of their rope, untwisted the outer strands to thin it, and threaded what was left through the holes that had held the old handle. Not bad, Susannah said. You mighty handy for a white boy. She peered over the lip of the well. I can see the water. Not even ten feet down. Ooo, it looks cold. Chimney sweeps cant be choosers, Eddie said. The bucket splashed down, tilted, and began to fill. When it sank below the surface of the water, Eddie hauled it back up. It had sprung several leaks at spots where the rust had eaten through, but they were small ones. He took off his shirt, dipped it in the water, and began to wash her face. Oh my goodness! he said. I see a girl! She took the balledup shirt, rinsed it, wrung it out, and began to do her arms. At least I got the dang flue open. You can draw some more water once I get the worst of this mess cleaned off me, and when we get a fire going, I can wash in warm Far to the northwest, they heard a low, thudding crump. There was a pause, then a second one. It was followed by several more, then a perfect fusillade. Coming in their direction like marching feet. Their startled eyes met. Eddie, bare to the waist, went to the back of her wheelchair. I think we better speed this up. In the distancebut definitely moving closercame sounds that could have been armies at war. I think youre right, Susannah said. 13 When they got back, they saw Roland and Jake running toward the meeting hall with armloads of decaying lumber and splintered chunks of wood. Still well across the river but definitely closer, came those low, crumping explosions as trees in the path of the starkblast yanked themselves inward toward their tender cores. Oy was in the middle of the overgrown high street, turning and turning. Susannah tipped herself out of her wheelchair, landed neatly on her hands, and began crawling toward the meetinghouse. What the hell are you doing? Eddie asked. You can carry more wood in the chair. Pile it high. Ill get Roland to give me his flint and steel, get a fire going. But Mind me, Eddie. Let me do what I can. And put your shirt back on. I know its wet, but itll keep you from getting scratched up. He did so, then turned the chair, tilted it on its big back wheels, and pushed it toward the nearest likely source of fuel. As he passed Roland, he gave the gunslinger Susannahs message. Roland nodded and kept running, peering over his armload of wood. The three of them went back and forth without speaking, gathering wood against the cold on this weirdly warm afternoon. The Path of the Beam in the sky was temporarily gone, because all the clouds were in motion, roiling away to the southeast. Susannah had gotten a fire going, and it roared beastily up the chimney. The big downstairs room had a huge jumble of wood in the center, some with rusty nails poking out. So far none of them had been cut or punctured, but Eddie thought it was just a matter of time. He tried to remember when hed last had a tetanus shot and couldnt. As for Roland, he thought, his blood would probably kill any germ the second it dared show its head inside of that leather bag he calls skin. What are you smiling about? Jake asked. The words came out in little outofbreath gasps. The arms of his shirt were filthy and covered with splinters; there was a long smutch of dirt on his forehead. Nothing much, little hero. Watch out for rusty nails. One more load each and wed better call it good. Its close. Okay. The thuds were on their side of the river now, and the air, although still warm, had taken on a queer thick quality. Eddie loaded up Susannahs wheelchair a final time and trundled it back toward the meetinghouse. Jake and Roland were ahead of him. He could feel heat baking out of the open door. It better get cold, he thought, or were going to fucking roast in there. Then, as he waited for the two ahead of him to turn sideways so they could get their loads of lumber inside, a thin and pervasive screaming joined the pops and thuds of contracting wood. It made the hair bristle on the nape of Eddies neck. The wind coming toward them sounded alive, and in agony. The air began to move again. First it was warm, then cool enough to dry the sweat on his face, then cold. This happened in a matter of seconds. The creepy screech of the wind was joined by a fluttering sound that made Eddie think of the plastic pennants you sometimes saw strung around usedcar lots. It ramped up to a whir, and leaves began to blow off the trees, first in bundles and then in sheets. The branches thrashed against clouds that were lensing darker even as he looked at them, mouth agape. Oh, shit, he said, and ran the wheelchair straight at the door. For the first time in ten trips, it stuck. The planks hed stacked across the chairs arms were too wide. With any other load, the ends would have snapped off with the same soft, almost apologetic sound the bucket handle had made, but not this time. Oh no, not now that the storm was almost here. Was nothing in MidWorld ever easy? He reached over the back of the chair to shove the longest boards aside, and that was when Jake shouted. Oy! Oys still out there! Oy! To me! Oy took no notice. He had stopped his turning. Now he only sat with his snout raised toward the coming storm, his goldringed eyes fixed and dreamy. 14 Jake didnt think, and he didnt look for the nails that were protruding from Eddies last load of lumber. He simply scrambled up the splintery pile and jumped. He struck Eddie, sending him staggering back. Eddie tried to keep his balance but tripped on his own feet and fell on his butt. Jake went to one knee, then scrambled up, eyes wide, long hair blowing back from his head in a tangle of licks and ringlets. Jake, no! Eddie grabbed for him and got nothing but the cuff of the kids shirt. It had been thinned by many washings in many streams, and tore away. Roland was in the doorway. He batted the toolong boards to the right and left, as heedless of the protruding nails as Jake had been. The gunslinger yanked the wheelchair through the doorway and grunted, Get in here. Jake Jake will either be all right or he wont. Roland seized Eddie by the arm and hauled him to his feet. Their old bluejeans were making machinegun noises around their legs as the wind whipped them. Hes on his own. Get in here. No! Fuck you! Roland didnt argue, simply yanked Eddie through the door. Eddie went sprawling. Susannah knelt in front of the fire, staring at him. Her face was streaming with sweat, and the front of her deerskin shirt was soaked. Roland stood in the doorway, face grim, watching Jake run to his friend. 15 Jake felt the temperature of the air around him plummet. A branch broke off with a dry snap and he ducked as it whistled over his head. Oy never stirred until Jake snatched him up. Then the bumbler looked around wildly, baring his teeth. Bite if you have to, Jake said, but I wont put you down. Oy didnt bite and Jake might not have felt it if he had. His face was numb. He turned back toward the meetinghouse and the wind became a huge cold hand planted in the middle of his back. He began running again, aware that now he was doing so in absurd leaps, like an astronaut running on the surface of the moon in a science fiction movie. One leap . . . two . . . three . . . But on the third one he didnt come down. He was blown straight forward with Oy cradled in his arms. There was a gutteral, garumphing explosion as one of the old houses gave in to the wind and went flying southeast in a hail of shrapnel. He saw a flight of stairs, the crude plank banister still attached, spinning up toward the racing clouds. Well be next, he thought, and then a hand, minus two fingers but still strong, gripped him above the elbow. Roland turned him toward the door. For a moment the issue was in doubt as the wind bullied them away from safety. Then Roland lunged forward into the doorway with his remaining fingers sinking deep into Jakes flesh. The pressure of the wind abruptly left them, and they both landed on their backs. Thank God! Susannah cried. Thank him later! Roland was shouting to be heard over the pervasive bellow of the gale. Push! All of you push on this damned door! Susannah, you at the bottom! All your strength! You bar it, Jake! Do you understand me? Drop the bar into the clamps! Dont hesitate! Dont worry about me, Jake snapped. Something had gashed him at one temple and a thin ribbon of blood ran down the side of his face, but his eyes were clear and sure. Now! Push! Push for your lives! The door swung slowly shut. They could not have held it for longmere secondsbut they didnt have to. Jake dropped the thick wooden bar, and when they moved cautiously back, the rusty clamps held. They looked at each other, gasping for breath, then down at Oy. Who gave a single cheerful yap, and went to toast himself by the fire. The spell that the oncoming storm had cast on him seemed to be broken. Away from the hearth, the big room was already growing cold. You should have let me grab the kid, Roland, Eddie said. He could have been killed out there. Oy was Jakes responsibility. He should have gotten him inside sooner. Tied him to something, if he had to. Or dont you think so, Jake? Yeah, I do. Jake sat down beside Oy, stroking the bumblers thick fur with one hand and rubbing blood from his face with the other. Roland, Susannah said, hes just a boy. No more, Roland said. Cry your pardon, but . . . no more. 16 For the first two hours of the starkblast, they were in some doubt if even the stone meetinghouse would hold. The wind screamed and trees snapped. One slammed down on the roof and smashed it. Cold air jetted through the boards above them. Susannah and Eddie put their arms around each other. Jake shielded Oynow lying placidly on his back with his stubby legs splayed to all points of the compassand looked up at the swirling cloud of birdshit that had sifted through the cracks in the ceiling. Roland went on calmly laying out their little supper. What do you think, Roland? Eddie asked. I think that if this building stands one more hour, well be fine. The cold will intensify, but the wind will drop a little when dark comes. It will drop still more come tomorrowlight, and by the day after tomorrow, the air will be still and much warmer. Not like it was before the coming of the storm, but that warmth was unnatural and we all knew it. He regarded them with a halfsmile. It looked strange on his face, which was usually so still and grave. In the meantime, we have a good firenot enough to heat the whole room, but fine enough if we stay close to it. And a little time to rest. Weve been through much, have we not? Yeah, Jake said. Too much. And more ahead, I have no doubt. Danger, hard work, sorrow. Death, mayhap. So now we sit by the fire, as in the old days, and take what comfort we can. He surveyed them, still with that little smile. The firelight cast him in strange profile, making him young on one side of his face and ancient on the other. We are katet. We are one from many. Be grateful for warmth, shelter, and companionship against the storm. Others may not be so lucky. Well hope they are, Susannah said. She was thinking of Bix. Come, Roland said. Eat. They came, and settled themselves around their dinh, and ate what he had set out for them. 17 Susannah slept for an hour or two early that night, but her dreamsof nasty, maggoty foods she was somehow compelled to eatwoke her. Outside, the wind continued to howl, although its sound was not quite so steady now. Sometimes it seemed to drop away entirely, then rose again, uttering long, icy shrieks as it ran under the eaves in cold currents and made the stone building tremble in its old bones. The door thudded rhythmically against the bar holding it shut, but like the ceiling above them, both the bar and the rusty clamps seemed to be holding. She wondered what would have become of them if the wooden bar had been as punky and rotted as the handle of the bucket theyd found near the gook. Roland was awake and sitting by the fire. Jake was with him. Between them, Oy was asleep with one paw over his snout. Susannah joined them. The fire had burned down a little, but this close it threw a comforting heat on her face and arms. She took a board, thought about snapping it in two, decided it might wake Eddie, and tossed it onto the fire as it was. Sparks gushed up the chimney, swirling as the draft caught them. She could have spared the consideration, because while the sparks were still swirling, a hand caressed the back of her neck just below the hairline. She didnt have to look; she would have known that touch anywhere. Without turning, she took the hand, brought it to her mouth, and kissed the cup of the palm. The white palm. Even after all this time together and all the lovemaking, she could sometimes hardly believe that. Yet there it was. At least I wont have to bring him home to meet my parents, she thought. Cant sleep, sugar? A little. Not much. I had funny dreams. The wind brings them, Roland said. Anyone in Gilead would tell you the same. But I love the sound of the wind. I always have. It soothes my heart and makes me think of old times. He looked away, as if embarrassed to have said so much. None of us can sleep, Jake said. So tell us a story. Roland looked into the fire for a while, then at Jake. The gunslinger was once more smiling, but his eyes were distant. A knot popped in the fireplace. Outside the stone walls, the wind screamed as if furious at its inability to get in. Eddie put an arm around Susannahs waist and she laid her head on his shoulder. What story would you hear, Jake, son of Elmer? Any. He paused. About the old days. Roland looked at Eddie and Susannah. And you? Would you hear? Yes, please, Susannah said. Eddie nodded. Yeah. If you want to, that is. Roland considered. Mayhap Ill tell you two, since its long until dawn and we can sleep tomorrow away, if we like. These tales nest inside each other. Yet the wind blows through both, which is a good thing. Theres nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world. He took a broken piece of wood paneling, poked the glowing embers with it, then fed it to the flames. One I know is a true story, for I lived it along with my old kamate, Jamie DeCurry. The other, The Wind Through the Keyhole, is one my mother read to me when I was still sma. Old stories can be useful, you know, and I should have thought of this one as soon as I saw Oy scenting the air as he did, but that was long ago. He sighed. Gone days. In the dark beyond the firelight, the wind rose to a howl. Roland waited for it to die a little, then began. Eddie, Susannah, and Jake listened, rapt, all through that long and contentious night. Lud, the TickTock Man, Blaine the Mono, the Green Palaceall were forgotten. Even the Dark Tower itself was forgotten for a bit. There was only Rolands voice, rising and falling. Rising and falling like the wind. Not long after the death of my mother, which as you know came by my own hand . . . STARKBLAST Not long after the death of my mother, which as you know came by my own hand, my fatherSteven, son of Henry the Tallsummoned me to his study in the north wing of the palace. It was a small, cold room. I remember the wind whining around the slit windows. I remember the high, frowning shelves of booksworth a fortune, they were, but never read. Not by him, anyway. And I remember the black collar of mourning he wore. It was the same as my own. Every man in Gilead wore the same collar, or a band around his shirtsleeve. The women wore black nets on their hair. This would go on until Gabrielle Deschain was six months in her tomb. I saluted him, fist to forehead. He didnt look up from the papers on his desk, but I knew he saw it. My father saw everything, and very well. I waited. He signed his name several times while the wind whistled and the rooks cawed in the courtyard. The fireplace was a dead socket. He rarely called for it to be lit, even on the coldest days. At last he looked up. How is Cort, Roland? How goes it with your teacher that was? You must know, because Ive been given to understand that you spend most of your time in his hut, feeding him and such. He has days when he knows me, I said. Many days he doesnt. He still sees a little from one eye. The other . . . I didnt need to finish. The other was gone. My hawk, David, had taken it from him in my test of manhood. Cort, in turn, had taken Davids life, but that was to be his last kill. I know what happened to his other peep. Do you truly feed him? Aye, Father, I do. Do you clean him when he messes? I stood there before his desk like a chastened schoolboy called before the master, and that is how I felt. Only how many chastened schoolboys have killed their own mothers? Answer me, Roland. I am your dinh as well as your father and Id have you answer. Sometimes. Which was not really a lie. Sometimes I changed his dirty clouts three and four times a day, sometimes, on the good days, only once or not at all. He could get to the jakes if I helped him. And if he remembered he had to go. Does he not have the white ammies who come in? I sent them away, I said. He looked at me with real curiosity. I searched for contempt in his facepart of me wanted to see itbut there was none that I could tell. Did I raise you to the gun so you could become an ammie and nurse a broken old man? I felt my anger flash at that. Cort had raised a moit of boys to the tradition of the Eld and the way of the gun. Those who were unworthy he had bested in combat and sent west with no weapons other than what remained of their wits. There, in Cressia and places even deeper in those anarchic kingdoms, many of those broken boys had joined with Farson, the Good Man. Who would in time overthrow everything my fathers line had stood for. Farson had armed them, sure. He had guns, and he had plans. Would you throw him on the dungheap, Father? Is that to be his reward for all his years of service? Who next, then? Vannay? Never in this life, as you know. But done is done, Roland, as thee also knows. And thee doesnt nurse him out of love. Thee knows that, too. I nurse him out of respect! If twas only respect, I think youd visit him, and read to himfor you read well, your mother always said so, and about that she spoke truebut youd not clean his shit and change his bed. You are scourging yourself for the death of your mother, which was not your fault. Part of me knew this was true. Part of me refused to believe it. The publishment of her death was simple Gabrielle Deschain, she of Arten, died while possessed of a demon which troubled her spirit. It was always put so when someone of high blood committed suicide, and so the story of her death was given. It was accepted without question, even by those who had, either secretly or not so secretly, cast their lot with Farson. Because it became knowngods know how, not from me or my friendsthat she had become the consort of Marten Broadcloak, the court magis and my fathers chief advisor, and that Marten had fled west. Alone. Roland, hear me very well. I know you felt betrayed by your lady mother. So did I. I know that part of you hated her. Part of me hated her, too. But we both also loved her, and love her still. You were poisoned by the toy you brought back from Mejis, and you were tricked by the witch. One of those things alone might not have caused what happened, but the pink ball and the witch together . . . aye. Rhea. I could feel tears stinging my eyes, and I willed them back. I would not weep before my father. Never again. Rhea of the Cos. Aye, she, the blackhearted cunt. It was she who killed your mother, Roland. She turned you into a gun . . . and then pulled the trigger. I said nothing. He must have seen my distress, because he resumed shuffling his papers, signing his name here and there. Finally he raised his head again. The ammies will have to see to Cort for a while. Im sending you and one of your kamates to Debaria. What? To Serenity? He laughed. The retreat where your mother stayed? Yes. Not there, not at all. Serenity, what a joke. Those women are the black ammies. Theyd flay you alive if you so much as trespassed their holy doors. Most of the sisters who bide there prefer the longstick to a man. I had no idea what he meantremember I was still very young, and very innocent about many things, in spite of all Id been through. Im not sure Im ready for another mission, Father. Let alone a quest. He looked at me coldly. Ill be the judge of what youre ready for. Besides, this is nothing like the mess you walked into in Mejis. There may be danger, it may even come to shooting, but at bottom its just a job that needs to be done. Partly so that people whove come to doubt can see that the White is still strong and true, but mostly because whats wrong cannot be allowed to stand. Besides, as Ive said, I wont be sending you alone. Wholl go with me? Cuthbert or Alain? Neither. I have work for Laughing Boy and Thudfoot right here. You go with Jamie DeCurry. I considered this and thought I would be glad to ride with Jamie RedHand. Although I would have preferred either Cuthbert or Alain. As my father surely knew. Will you go without argument, or will you annoy me further on a day when I have much to do? Ill go, I said. In truth, it would be good to escape the palaceits shadowy rooms, its whispers of intrigue, its pervasive sense that darkness and anarchy were coming and nothing could stop them. The world would move on, but Gilead would not move on with it. That glittering, beautiful bubble would soon burst. Good. Youre a fine son, Roland. I may never have told you that, but its true. I hold nothing against you. Nothing. I lowered my head. When this meeting was finally over, I would go somewhere and let my heart free, but not just then. Not as I stood before him. Ten or twelve wheels beyond the hall of the womenSerenity, or whatever they call itis the town of Debaria itself, on the edge of the alkali flats. Nothing serene about Debaria. Its a dusty, hidesmelling railhead town where cattle and block salt are shipped south, east, and northin every direction except the one where that bastard Farsons laying his plans. There are fewer traildrive herds these days, and I expect Debaria will dry up and blow away like so many other places in MidWorld before long, but now its still a busy place, full of saloons, whoredens, gamblers, and confidence men. Hard as it might be to believe, there are even a few good people there. One is the High Sheriff, Hugh Peavy. Its him that you and DeCurry will report to. Let him see your guns and a sigul which I will give to you. Do you ken everything Ive told you so far? Yes, Father, I said. Whats so bad there that it warrants the attention of gunslingers? I smiled a little, a thing I had done seldom in the wake of my mothers death. Even baby gunslingers such as us? According to the reports I havehe lifted some of the papers and shook them at metheres a skinman at work. I have my doubts about that, but theres no doubt the folk are terrified. I dont know what that is, I said. Some sort of shapechanger, or so the old tales say. Go to Vannay when you leave me. Hes been collecting reports. All right. Do the job, find this lunatic who goes around wearing animal skinsthats probably what it amounts tobut be not long about it. Matters far graver than this have begun to teeter. Id have you backyou and all your kamatesbefore they fall. Two days later, Jamie and I led our horses onto the stablecar of a special twocar train that had been laid on for us. Once the Western Line ran a thousand wheels or more, all the way to the Mohaine Desert, but in the years before Gilead fell, it went to Debaria and no farther. Beyond there, many tracklines had been destroyed by washouts and groundshakers. Others had been taken up by harriers and roving bands of outlaws who called themselves landpirates, for that part of the world had fallen into bloody confusion. We called those far western lands OutWorld, and they served John Farsons purposes well. He was, after all, just a landpirate himself. One with pretensions. The train was little more than a steamdriven toy; Gilead folk called it Sma Toot and laughed to see it puffing over the bridge to the west of the palace. We could have ridden faster ahorseback, but the train saved the mounts. And the dusty velveteen seats of our car folded out into beds, which we felt was a fine thing. Until we tried to sleep in them, that was. At one particularly hard jounce, Jamie was thrown right off his makeshift bed and onto the floor. Cuthbert would have laughed and Alain would have cursed, but Jamie RedHand only picked himself up, stretched out again, and went back to sleep. We spoke little that first day, only looked out the wavery isinglass windows, watching as Gileads green and forested land gave way to dirty scrub, a few struggling ranches, and herders huts. There were a few towns where folkmany of them mutiesgaped at us as Sma Toot wheezed slowly past. A few pointed at the centers of their foreheads, as if at an invisible eye. It meant they stood for Farson, the Good Man. In Gilead, such folk would have been imprisoned for their disloyalty, but Gilead was now behind us. I was dismayed by how quickly the allegiance of these people, once taken for granted, had thinned. On the first day of our journey, outside BeesfordonArten, where a few of my mothers people still lived, a fat man threw a rock at the train. It bounced off the closed stablecar door, and I heard our horses whinny in surprise. The fat man saw us looking at him. He grinned, grabbed his crotch with both hands, and waddled away. Someone has eaten well in a poor land, Jamie remarked as we watched his butters jounce in the seat of his old patched pants. The following morning, after the servant had put a cold breakfast of porridge and milk before us, Jamie said, I suppose youd better tell me what its about. Will you tell me something, first? If you know, that is? Of course. My father said that the women at the retreat in Debaria prefer the longstick to a man. Do you know what he meant? Jamie regarded me in silence for a bitas if to make sure I wasnt shaking his kneeand then his lips twitched at the corners. For Jamie this was the equivalent of holding his belly, rolling around the floor, and howling with glee. Which Cuthbert Allgood certainly would have done. It must be what the whores in the low town call a diddlestick. Does that help? Truly? And they . . . what? Use it on each other? So tis said, but much talk is just lalala. You know more of women than I do, Roland; Ive never lain with one. But never mind. Given time, I suppose I will. Tell me what were about in Debaria. A skinman is supposedly terrorizing the good folk. Probably the bad folk, as well. A man who becomes some sort of animal? It was actually a little more complicated in this case, but he had the nub of it. The wind was blowing hard, flinging handfuls of alkali at the side of the car. After one particularly vicious gust, the little train lurched. Our empty porridge bowls slid. We caught them before they could fall. If we hadnt been able to do such things, and without even thinking of them, we would not have been fit to carry the guns we wore. Not that Jamie preferred the gun. Given a choice (and the time to make it), he would reach for either his bow or his bah. My father doesnt believe it, I said. But Vannay does. He At that moment, we were thrown forward into the seats ahead of us. The old servant, who was coming down the center aisle to retrieve our bowls and cups, was flung all the way back to the door between the car and his little kitchen. His front teeth flew out of his mouth and into his lap, which gave me a start. Jamie ran up the aisle, which was now severely tilted, and knelt by him. As I joined him, Jamie plucked up the teeth and I saw they were made of painted wood and held together by a cunning clip almost too small to see. Are you all right, sai? Jamie asked. The old fellow got slowly to his feet, took his teeth, and filled the hole behind his upper lip with them. Im fine, but this dirty bitch has derailed again. No more Debaria runs for me, I have a wife. Shes an old nag, and Im determined to outlive her. You young men had better check your horses. With luck, neither of them will have broken a leg. Neither had, but they were nervous and stamping, anxious to get out of confinement. We lowered the ramp and tethered them to the connecting bar between the two cars, where they stood with their heads lowered and their ears flattened against the hot and gritty wind blowing out of the west. Then we clambered back inside the passenger car and collected our gunna. The engineer, a broadshouldered, bowlegged plug of a man, came down the side of his listing train with the old servant in tow. When he reached us, he pointed to what we could see very well. Yonder on that ridge be Debaria high roadsee the markingposts? You can be at the place o the females in less than an hour, but dont bother asking nothing o those bitches, because you wont get it. He lowered his voice. They eat men, is what Ive heard. Not just a way o speakin, boys they . . . eat . . . the mens. I found it easier to believe in the reality of the skinman than in this, but I said nothing. It was clear that the enjie was shaken up, and one of his hands was as red as Jamies. But the enjies was only a little burn, and would go away. Jamies would still be red when he was sent down in his grave. |
It looked as if it had been dipped in blood. They may call to you, or make promises. They may even show you their titties, as they know a young man cant take his eyes off such. But never mind. Turn yer ears from their promises and yer eyes from their titties. You just go on into the town. Itll be less than another hour by horse. Well need a work crew to put this poxy whore upright. The rails are fine; I checked. Just covered with that damned alkali dust, is all. I suppose ye cant pay men to come out, but if ye can writeas I suppose such gentle fellows as yerselves surely canyou can give em a premissary note or whatever its called We have specie, I said. Enough to hire a small crew. The enjies eyes widened at this. I supposed they would widen even more if I told him my father had given me twenty gold knuckles to carry in a special pocket sewn inside my vest. And oxes? Because well need oxes if theyve got em. Hosses if they dont. Well go to the livery and see what they have, I said, mounting up. Jamie tied his bow on one side of his saddle and then moved to the other, where he slid his bah into the leather boot his father had made special for it. Dont leave us stuck out here, young sai, the enjie said. Weve no horses, and no weapons. We wont forget you, I said. Just stay inside. If we cant get a crew out today, well send a bucka to take you into town. Thankee. And stay away from those women! They . . . eat . . . the mens! The day was hot. We ran the horses for a bit because they wanted to stretch after being pent up, then pulled them down to a walk. Vannay, Jamie said. Pardon? Before the train derailed, you said your father didnt believe there was a skinman, but Vannay does. He said that after reading the reports High Sheriff Peavy sent along, it was hard not to believe. You know what he says at least once in every class When facts speak, the wise man listens. Twentythree dead makes a moit of facts. Not shot or stabbed, mind you, but torn to pieces. Jamie grunted. Whole families, in two cases. Large ones, almost clans. The houses turned all upsyturvy and splashed with blood. Limbs ripped off the bodies and carried away, some foundpartly eatensome not. At one of those farms, Sheriff Peavy and his deputy found the youngest boys head stuck on a fencepole with his skull smashed in and his brains scooped out. Witnesses? A few. A sheepherder coming back with strays saw his partner attacked. The one who survived was on a nearby hill. The two dogs with him ran down to try and protect their other master, and were torn apart too. The thing came up the hill after the herder, but got distracted by the sheep instead, so the fellow struck lucky and got away. He said it was a wolf that ran upright, like a man. Then there was a woman with a gambler. He was caught cheating at Watch Me in one of the local pits. The two of them were given a bill of circulation and told to leave town by nightfall or be whipped. They were headed for the little town near the saltmines when they were beset. The man fought. It gave the woman just enough time to get clear. She hid up in some rocks until the thing was gone. Shes said twas a lion. On its back legs? If so, she didnt wait to see. Last, two cowpunchers. They were camped on Debaria Stream near a young Manni couple on marriage retreat, although the punchers didnt know it until they heard the couples screams. As they rode toward the sound, they saw the killer go loping off with the womans lower leg in its jaws. It wasnt a man, but they swore on watch and warrant that it ran upright like a man. Jamie leaned over the neck of his horse and spat. Cant be so. Vannay says it can. He says there have been such before, although not for years. He believes they may be some sort of mutation thats pretty much worked its way out of the true thread. All these witnesses saw different animals? Aye. The cowpokes described it as a tyger. It had stripes. Lions and tygers running around like trained beasts in a traveling show. And out here in the dust. Are you sure we arent being tickled? I wasnt old enough to be sure of much, but I did know the times were too desperate to be sending young guns even so far west as Debaria for a prank. Not that Steven Deschain could have been described as a prankster even in the best of times. Im only telling what Vannay told me. The ropeswingers who came into town with the remains of those two Manni behind them on a travois had never even heard of such a thing as a tyger. Yet that is what they described. The testimonys in here, green eyes and all. I took the two creased sheets of paper I had from Vannay out of my inner vest pocket. Care to look? Im not much of a reader, Jamie said. As thee knows. Aye, fine. But take my word. Their description is just like the picture in the old story of the boy caught in the starkblast. What old story is that? The one about Tim StoutheartThe Wind Through the Keyhole. Never mind. Its not important. I know the punchers may have been drunk, they usually are if theyre near a town that has liquor, but if its true testimony, Vannay says the creature is a shapeshifter as well as a shapechanger. Twentythree dead, you say. Ayyi. The wind gusted, driving the alkali before it. The horses shied, and we raised our neckerchiefs over our mouths and noses. Boogery hot, Jamie said. And this damned dust. Then, as if realizing he had been excessively chatty, he fell silent. That was fine with me, as I had much to think about. A little less than an hour later, we breasted a hill and saw a sparkling white haci below us. It was the size of a barony estate. Behind it, tending down toward a narrow creek, was a large greengarden and what looked like a grape arbor. My mouth watered at the sight of it. The last time Id had grapes, my armpits had still been smooth and hairless. The walls of the haci were tall and topped with forbidding sparkles of broken glass, but the wooden gates stood open, as if in invitation. In front of them, seated on a kind of throne, was a woman in a dress of white muslin and a hood of white silk that flared around her head like gullwings. As we drew closer, I saw the throne was ironwood. Surely no other chair not made of metal could have borne her weight, for she was the biggest woman I had ever seen, a giantess who could have mated with the legendary outlaw prince David Quick. Her lap was full of needlework. She might have been knitting a blanket, but held before that barrel of a body and breasts so big each of them could have fully shaded a baby from the sun, whatever it was looked no bigger than a handkerchief. She caught sight of us, laid her work aside, and stood up. There was six and a half feet of her, maybe a bit more. The wind was less in this dip, but there was enough to flutter her dress against her long thighs. The cloth made a sound like a sail in a runningbreeze. I remembered the enjie saying they eat the mens, but when she put one large fist to the broad plain of her forehead and lifted the side of her dress to dip a curtsey with her free hand, I nonetheless reined up. Hile, gunslingers, she called. She had a rolling voice, not quite a mans baritone. In the name of Serenity and the women who bide here, I salute thee. May your days be long upon the earth. We raised our own fists to our brows, and wished her twice the number. Have you come from InWorld? I think so, for your duds arent filthy enough for these parts. Although they will be, if you bide longer than a day. And she laughed. The sound was moderate thunder. We do, I said. It was clear Jamie would say nothing. Ordinarily closemouthed, he was now stunned to silence. Her shadow rose on the whitewashed wall behind her, as tall as Lord Perth. And have you come for the skinman? Yes, I said. Have you seen him, or do you only know of him from the talk? If thats the case, well move on and say thankee. Not a him, lad. Never think it. I only looked at her. Standing, she was almost tall enough to look into my eyes, although I sat on Young Joe, a fine big horse. An it, she said. A monster from the Deep Cracks, as sure as you two serve the Eld and the White. It may have been a man once, but no more. Yes, Ive seen it, and seen its work. Sit where you are, never move, and you shall see its work, too. Without waiting for any reply, she went through the open gate. In her white muslin she was like a sloop running before the wind. I looked at Jamie. He shrugged and nodded. This was what we had come for, after all, and if the enjie had to wait a bit longer for help putting Sma Toot back on the rails, so be it. ELLEN! she bawled. Raised to full volume, it was like listening to a woman shouting into an electric megaphone. CLEMMIE! BRIANNA! BRING FOOD! BRING MEAT AND BREAD AND ALETHE LIGHT, NOT THE DARK! BRING A TABLE, AND MIND YOU DONT FORGET THE CLOTH! SEND FORTUNA TO ME NOW! HIE TO IT! DOUBLEQUICK! With these orders delivered she returned to us, delicately lifting her hem to keep it out of the alkali that puffed around the black boats she wore on her enormous feet. Ladysai, we thank you for your offer of hospitality, but we really must You must eat is what you must do, she said. Well have it out here aroadside, so your digestion will not be discomposed. For I know what stories they tell about us in Gilead, aye, so do we all. Men tell the same about any women who dare to live on their own, I wot. It makes em doubt the worth of their hammers. We heard no stories about She laughed and her bosom heaved like the sea. Polite of you, young gunnie, aye, and very snick, but its long since I was weaned. Well not eat ye. Her eyes, as black as her shoes, twinkled. Although yed make a tasty snack, I thinkone or both. I am Everlynne of Serenity. The prioress, by the grace of God and the Man Jesus. Roland of Gilead, I said. And this is Jamie of same. Jamie bowed from his saddle. She curtsied to us again, this time dropping her head so that the wings of her silken hood closed briefly around her face like curtains. As she rose, a tiny woman glided through the open gate. Or perhaps she was of normal size, after all. Perhaps she only looked tiny next to Everlynne. Her robe was rough gray cotton instead of white muslin; her arms were crossed over her scant bosom, and her hands were buried deep in her sleeves. She wore no hood, but we could still see only half of her face. The other half was hidden beneath a thick swath of bandagement. She curtsied to us, then huddled in the considerable shade of her prioress. Raise your head, Fortuna, and make your manners to these young gentlemen. When at last she looked up, I saw why she had kept her head lowered. The bandages could not fully conceal the damage to her nose; on the right side, a good part of it was gone. Where it had been was only a raw red channel. Hile, she whispered. May your days be long upon the earth. May you have twice the number, Jamie said, and I saw from the woeful glance she gave him with her one visible eye that she hoped this was not true. Tell them what happened, Everlynne said. What you remember, anyro. I know t isnt much. Must I, Mother? Yes, she said, for theyve come to end it. Fortuna peered doubtfully at us, just a quick snatch of a glance, and then back at Everlynne. Can they? They look so young. She realized what she had said must sound impolite, and a flush colored the cheek we could see. She staggered a little on her feet, and Everlynne put an arm around her. It was clear that she had been badly hurt, and her body was still far from complete recovery. The blood that had run to her face had more important work to do in other parts of her body. Chiefly beneath the bandage, I supposed, but given the voluminous robe she wore, it was impossible to tell where else she might have been wounded. They may still be a year or more from having to shave but once a week, but theyre gunslingers, Fortie. If they cant set this cursed town right, then no one can. Besides, it will do you good. Horrors a worm that needs to be coughed out before it breeds. Now tell them. She told. As she did, other Sisters of Serenity came out, two carrying a table, the others carrying food and drink to fill it. Better viands than any wed had on Sma Toot, by the look and the smell, yet by the time Fortuna had finished her short, terrible story, I was no longer hungry. Nor, by the look of him, was Jamie. It was dusk, a fortnight and a day gone. She and another, Dolores, had come out to close the gate and draw water for the evening chores. Fortuna was the one with the bucket, and so she was the one who lived. As Dolores began to swing the gate closed, a creature knocked it wide, grabbed her, and bit her head from her shoulders with its long jaws. Fortuna said that she saw it well, for the Peddlers Moon had just risen full in the sky. Taller than a man it was, with scales instead of skin and a long tail that dragged behind it on the ground. Yellow eyes with slitted dark pupils glowed in its flat head. Its mouth was a trap filled with teeth, each as long as a mans hand. They dripped with Doloress blood as it dropped her stilltwitching body on the cobbles of the courtyard and ran on its stubby legs toward the well where Fortuna stood. I turned to flee . . . it caught me . . . and I remember no more. I do, Everlynne said grimly. I heard the screams and came running out with our gun. Its a great long thing with a bell at the end of the barrel. Its been loaded since time out of mind, but none of us has ever fired it. For all I knew, it could have blown up in my hands. But I saw it tearing at poor Forties face, and then something else, too. When I did, I never thought of the risk. I never even thought that I might kill her, poor thing, as well as it, should the gun fire. I wish you had killed me, Fortuna said. Oh, I wish you had. She sat in one of the chairs that had been brought to the table, put her face in her hands, and began to weep. Her one remaining eye did, at least. Never say so, Everlynne told her, and stroked her hair on the side of her head not covered by the bandagement. For tis blasphemy. Did you hit it? I asked. A little. Our old gun fires shot, and one of the pelletsor praps more than onetore away some of the knobs and scales on its head. Black tarry stuff flew up. We saw it later on the cobbles, and sanded it over without touching it, for fear it might poison us right through our skin. The chary thing dropped her, and I think it had almost made up its mind to come for me. So I pointed the gun at it, though a gun like that can only be fired once, then must be recharged down its throat with powder and shot. I told it to come on. Told it Id wait until it was good and close, so the shot wouldnt spread. She hawked back and spat into the dust. It must have a brain of some sort even when its out of its human shape, because it heard me and ran. But before I lost sight of it round the wall, it turned and looked back at me. As if marking me. Well, let it. I have no more shot for the gun, and wont unless a trader happens to have some, but I have this. She lifted her skirts to her knee, and we saw a butchers knife in a rawhide scabbard strapped to the outside of her calf. So let it come for Everlynne, daughter of Roseanna. You said you saw something else, I said. She considered me with her bright black eyes, then turned to the women. Clemmie, Brianna, serve out. Fortuna, you will say grace, and be sure to ask God forgiveness for your blasphemy and thank Him that your heart still beats. Everlynne grasped me above the elbow, drew me through the gate, and walked me to the well where the unfortunate Fortuna had been attacked. There we were alone. I saw its prick, she said in a low voice. Long and curved like a scimitar, twitching and full of the black stuff that serves it for blood . . . serves it for blood in that shape, anyro. It meant to kill her as it had Dolores, aye, right enough, but it meant to fuck her, too. It meant to fuck her as she died. Jamie and I ate with themFortuna even ate a littleand then we mounted up for town. But before we left, Everlynne stood by my horse and spoke to me again. When your business here is done, come and see me again. I have something for you. What might that be, sai? She shook her head. Now is not the time. But when the filthy thing is dead, come here. She took my hand, raised it to her lips, and kissed it. I know who you are, for does your mother not live in your face? Come to me, Roland, son of Gabrielle. Fail not. Then she stepped away before I could say another word, and glided in through the gate. The Debaria high street was wide and paved, although the pavement was crumbling away to the hardpan beneath in many places and would be entirely gone before too many years passed. There was a good deal of commerce, and judging from the sound coming from the saloons, they were doing a fine business. We only saw a few horses and mules tied to the hitchingposts, though; in that part of the world, livestock was for trading and eating, not for riding. A woman coming out of the mercantile with a basket over her arm saw us and stared. She ran back in, and several more people came out. By the time we reached the High Sheriffs officea little wooden building attached to the much larger stonebuilt town jailthe streets were lined with spectators on both sides. Have ye come to kill the skinman? the lady with the basket called. Those two dont look old enough to kill a bottle of rye, a man standing in front of the Cheery Fellows Saloon Caf called back. There was general laughter and murmurs of agreement at this sally. Town looks busy enough now, Jamie said, dismounting and looking back at the forty or fifty men and women whod come away from their business (and their pleasure) to have a gleep at us. Itll be different after sundown, I said. Thats when such creatures as this skinman do their marauding. Or so Vannay says. We went into the office. Hugh Peavy was a bigbellied man with long white hair and a droopy mustache. His face was deeply lined and careworn. He saw our guns and looked relieved. He noted our beardless faces and looked less so. He wiped off the nib of the pen he had been writing with, stood up, and held out his hand. No foreheadknocking for this fellow. After wed shaken with him and introduced ourselves, he said I dont mean to belittle you, young fellows, but I was hoping to see Steven Deschain himself. And perhaps Peter McVries. McVries died three years ago, I said. Peavy looked shocked. Do you say so? For he was a trig hand with a gun. Very trig. He died of a fever. Very likely induced by poison, but this was nothing the High Sheriff of the Debaria Outers needed to know. As for Steven, hes otherwise occupied, and so he sent me. I am his son. Yar, yar, Ive heard your name and a bit of your exploits in Mejis, for we get some news even out here. Theres the ditdah wire, and even a jingjang. He pointed to a contraption on the wall. Written on the brick beneath it was a sign reading DO NOT TOUCH WITHOUT PERMIZION. It used to go all the way to Gilead, but these days only to Sallywood in the south, the Jefferson spread to the north, and the village in the foothillsLittle Debaria, its called. We even have a few streetlamps that still worknot gas or kerosene but real sparklights, dontcha see. Townfolk think suchll keep the creature away. He sighed. I am less confident. This is a bad business, young fellows. Sometimes I feel the world has come loose of its moorings. It has, I said. But what comes loose can be tied tight again, Sheriff. If you say so. He cleared his throat. Now, dont take this as disrespect, I know ye are who ye say ye are, but I was promised a sigul. If youve brought it, Id have it, for it means special to me. I opened my swagbag and brought out what Id been given a small wooden box with my fathers markthe D with the S inside of itstamped on the hinged lid. Peavy took it with the smallest of smiles dimpling the corners of his mouth beneath his mustache. To me it looked like a remembering smile, and it took years off his face. Doee know whats inside? No. I had not been asked to look. Peavy opened the box, looked within, then returned his gaze to Jamie and me. Once, when I was still only a deputy, Steven Deschain led me, and the High Sheriff that was, and a posse of seven against the Crow Gang. Has your father ever spoken to you of the Crows? I shook my head. Not skinmen, no, but a nasty lot of work, all the same. They robbed what there was to rob, not just in Debaria but all along the ranchlands out this way. Trains, too, if they got word one was worth stopping. But their main business was kidnapping for ransom. A cowards crime, sureIm told Farson favors itbut it paid well. Your da showed up in town only a day after they stole a ranchers wifeBelinda Doolin. Her husband called on the jingjang as soon as they left and he was able to get himself untied. The Crows didnt know about the jingjang, and that was their undoing. Accourse it helped that there was a gunslinger doing his rounds in this part of the world; in those days, they had a knack of turning up when and where they were needed. He eyed us. Praps they still do. Anyro, we got out tranch while the crime was still fresh. There were places where any of us would have lost the trailits mostly hardpan out north of here, dontcha seebut your father had eyes like you wouldnt believe. Hawks aint even in it, dear, or eagles, either. I knew of my fathers sharp eyes and gift for trailing. I also knew that this story probably had nothing to do with our business, and I should have told him to move along. But my father never talked about his younger days, and I wanted to hear this tale. I was hungry to hear it. And it turned out to have a little more to do with our business in Debaria than I at first thought. The trail led in the direction of the mineswhat Debaria folk call the salthouses. The workings had been abandoned in those days; it was before the new plug was found twenty year ago. Plug? Jamie asked. Deposit, I said. He means a fresh deposit. Aye, as you say. But all that were abandoned then, and made a fine hideout for such as those beastly Crows. Once the trail left the flats, it went through a place of high rocks before coming out on the Low Pure, which is to say the foothill meadows below the salthouses. The Low is where a sheepherder was killed just recent, by something that looked like a Like a wolf, I said. This we know. Go on. Wellinformed, are ye? Well, thats all to the good. Where was I, now? Ah, I knowthose rocks that are now known in these parts as Ambush Arroyo. Its not an arroyo, but I suppose people like the sound. Thats where the tracks went, but Deschain wanted to go around and come in from the east. From the High Pure. The sheriff, Pea Anderson it was back then, didnt want none o that. Eager as a bird with its eye on a worm he was, mad to press on. Said it would take em three days, and by then the woman might be dead and the Crows anywhere. He said he was going the straight way, and hed go alone if no one wanted to go with him. Or unless you order me in the name of Gilead to do different, he says to your da. Never think it, Deschain says, for Debaria is your fill; I have my own. The posse went. I stayed with your da, lad. Sheriff Anderson turned to me in the saddle and said, I hope theyre hiring at one of the ranches, Hughie, because your days of wearing tin on your vest are over. Im done withee. Those were the last words he ever said to me. They rode off. Steven of Gilead squatted on his hunkers and I hunkered with him. After half an hour of quietmight have been longerI says to him, I thought we were going to hook around . . . unless youre done with me, too. No, he says. Your hire is not my business, Deputy. Then what are we waitin for? Gunfire, says he, and not five minutes later we heard it. Gunfire and screams. It didnt last long. The Crows had seen us comingprobably nummoren a glint of sun on a bootcap or bit o saddle brightwork was enough to attract their attention, for Pa Crow was powerful trigand doubled back. They got up in those high rocks and poured down lead on Anderson and his possemen. There were more guns in those days, and the Crows had a good share. Even a speedshooter or two. So we went around, all right? Took us only two days, because Steven Deschain pushed hard. On the third day, we camped downslope and rose before dawn. Now, if ye dont know, and no reason ye should, salthouses are just caverns in the cliff faces up there. Whole families lived in em, not just the miners themselves. The tunnels go down into the earth from the backs of em. But as I say, in those days all were deserted. Yet we saw smoke coming from the vent on top of one, and that was as good as a kinkman standing out in front of a carnival tent and pointing at the show inside, dontcha see it. This is the time, Steven says, because they will have spent the last nights, once they were sure they were safe, deep in drink. Theyll still be sleeping it off. Will you stand with me? Aye, gunslinger, that I will, I tells him. When Peavy said this, he unconsciously straightened his back. He looked younger. We snuck the last fifty or sixty yards, yer da with his gun drawn in case theyd posted a guard. They had, but he was only a lad, and fast asleep. The Deschain holstered his gun, swotted him with a rock, and laid him out. I later saw that young fellow standing on a trapdoor with tears running out of his eyes, a mess in his pants, and a rope around his neck. He wasnt but fourteen, yet hed taken his turn at sai Doolinthe kidnapped woman, dontcha know, and old enough to be his grandmotherjust like the rest of them, and I shed no tears when the rope shut off his cries for mercy. The salt ye take is the salt ye must pay for, as anyone from these parts will tell you. The gunslinger crep inside, and I right after him. They was all lying around, snoring like dogs. Hell, boys, they were dogs. Belinda Doolin was tied to a post. She saw us, and her eyes widened. Steven Deschain pointed to her, then to himself, then cupped his hands together, then pointed to her again. Youre safe, he meant. I never forgot the look of gratitude in her face as she nodded to him that she understood. Youre safethats the world we grew up in, young men, the one thats almost gone now. Then the Deschain says, Wake up, Allan Crow, unless youd go into the clearing at the end of the path with your eyes shut. Wake up, all. They did. He never meant to try and bring them all in alivetwould have been madness, that Im sure you must seebut he wouldnt shoot them as they slept, either. They woke up to varying degrees, but not for long. Steven drew his guns so fast I never saw his hands move. Lightning aint in it, dear. At one moment those revolvers with their big sandalwood grips were by his sides; at the next he was blazing away, the noise like thunder in that closedin space. But that didnt keep me from drawing my own gun. It was just an old barrelshooter I had from my granda, but I put two of them down with it. The first two men I ever killed. There have been plenty since, sad to say. The only one who survived that first fusillade was Pa Crow himselfAllan Crow. He was an old man, all snarled up and frozen on one side of his face from a stroke or summat, but he moved fast as the devil just the same. He was in his longjohns, and his gun was stuck in the top of one of his boots there at the end of his bedroll. He grabbed it up and turned toward us. Steven shot him, but the old bastard got off a single round. It went wild, but . . . Peavy, who could have been no older in those days than we two young men standing before him, opened the box on its cunning hinges, mused a moment at what he saw inside, then looked up at me. That little remembering smile still touched the corners of his mouth. Have you ever seen a scar on your fathers arm, Roland? Right here? He touched the place just above the crook of his elbow, where a mans yanks begin. My fathers body was a map of scars, but it was a map I knew well. The scar above his inner elbow was a deep dimple, almost like the ones not quite hidden by Sheriff Peavys mustache when he smiled. Pa Crows last shot hit the wall above the post where the woman was tied, and richocheted. He turned the box and held it out to me. Inside was a smashed slug, a big one, a hard caliber. I dug this out of your das arm with my skinning knife, and gave it to him. He thanked me, and said someday I should have it back. And here it is. Ka is a wheel, sai Deschain. Have you ever told this story? I asked. For I have never heard it. That I dug a bullet from the flesh of Arthurs true descendant? Eld of the Eld? No, never until now. For who would believe it? I do, I said, and I thank you. It could have poisoned him. Nar, nar, Peavy said with a chuckle. Not him. The blood of Elds too strong. And if Id been laid low . . . or too squeamy . . . he would have done it himself. As it was, he let me take most of the credit for the Crow Gang, and Ive been sheriff ever since. But not much longer. This skinman business has done for me. Ive seen enough blood, and have no taste for mysteries. Wholl take your place? I asked. He seemed surprised by the question. Probably nobody. The mines will play out again in a few years, this time for good, and such rail lines as there are wont last much longer. The two things together will finish Debaria, which was once a fine little city in the time of yer grandfathers. That holy hencoop Im sure ye passed on the way in may go on; nothing else. Jamie looked troubled. But in the meantime? Let the ranchers, drifters, whoremasters, and gamblers all go to hell in their own way. Its none o mine, at least for much longer. But Ill not leave until this business is settled, one way or another. I said, The skinman was at one of the women at Serenity. Shes badly disfigured. Been there, have ye? The women are terrified. I thought this over, and remembered a knife strapped to a calf as thick as the trunk of a young birch. Except for the prioress, that is. He chuckled. Everlynne. That oned spit in the devils face. And if he took her down to Nis, shed be running the place in a month. I said, Do you have any idea who this skinman might be when hes in his human shape? If you do, tell us, I beg. For, as my father told your Sheriff Anderson that was, this is not our fill. I cant give ye a name, if thats what you mean, but I might be able to give ye something. Follow me. He led us through the archway behind his desk and into the jail, which was in the shape of a T. I counted eight big cells down the central aisle and a dozen small ones on the crosscorridor. All were empty except for one of the smaller ones, where a drunk was snoozing away the late afternoon on a straw pallet. The door to his cell stood open. Once all of these cells would have been filled on Efday and Ethday, Peavy said. Loaded up with drunk cowpunchers and farmhands, dontcha see it. Now most people stay in at night. Even on Efday and Ethday. Cowpokes in their bunkhouses, farmhands in theirs. No one wants to be staggering home drunk and meet the skinman. The saltminers? Jamie asked. Do you pen them, too? Not often, for they have their own saloons up in Little Debaria. Two of em. Nasty places. When the whores down here at the Cheery Fellows or the Busted Luck or the BiderWee get too old or too diseased to attract custom, they end up in Little Debaria. Once theyre drunk on White Blind, the salties dont much care if a whore has a nose as long as she still has her sugarpurse. Nice, Jamie muttered. Peavy opened one of the large cells. Come on in here, boys. I havent any paper, but I do have some chalk, and heres a nice smooth wall. Its private, too, as long as old Salty Sam down there doesnt wake up. And he rarely does until sundown. |
From the pocket of his twill pants the sheriff took a goodish stick of chalk, and on the wall he drew a kind of long box with jags all across the top. They looked like a row of upsidedown V s. Heres the whole of Debaria, Peavy said. Over heres the rail line you came in on. He drew a series of hashmarks, and as he did so I remembered the enjie and the old fellow whod served as our butler. Sma Toot is off the rails, I said. Can you put together a party of men to set it right? We have money to pay for their labor, and Jamie and I would be happy to work with them. Not today, Peavy said absently. He was studying his map. Enjie still out there, is he? Yes. Him and another. Ill send Kellin and Vikka Frye out in a bucka. Kellins my best deputythe other two aint worth muchand Vikkas his son. Theyll pick em up and bring em back in before dark. Theres time, because the days is long this time o year. For now, just pay attention, boys. Heres the tracks and heres Serenity, where that poor girl you spoke to was mauled. On the High Road, dontcha see it. He drew a little box for Serenity, and put an X in it. North of the womens retreat, up toward the jags at the top of his map, he put another X. This is where Yon Curry, the sheepherder, was killed. To the left of this X, but pretty much on the same levelwhich is to say, below the jagshe put another. The Alora farm. Seven killed. Farther yet to the left and little higher, he chalked another X. Heres the Timbersmith farm on the High Pure. Nine killed. Its where we found the little boys head on a pole. Tracks all around it. Wolf? I asked. He shook his head. Nar, some kind o big cat. At first. Before we lost the trail, they changed into what looked like hooves. Then . . . He looked at us grimly. Footprints. First biglike a giants, almostbut then smaller and smaller until they were the size of any mans tracks. Anyro, we lost em in the hardpan. Mayhap your father wouldntve, sai. He went on marking the map, and when he was done, stepped away so we could see it clearly. Such as you are supposed to have good brains as well as fast hands, I was always told. So what do you make of this? Jamie stepped forward between the rows of pallets (for this cell must have been for many guests, probably brought in on drunkanddisorderly), and traced the tip of his finger over the jags at the top of the map, blurring them a little. Do the salthouses run all along here? In all the foothills? Yar. The Salt Rocks, those hillsre called. Little Debaria is where? Peavy made another box for the saltminers town. It was close to the X hed made to mark the place where the woman and the gambler had been killed . . . for it was Little Debaria theyd been headed for. Jamie studied the map a bit more, then nodded. Looks to me like the skinman could be one of the miners. Is that what you think? Aye, a saltie, even though a couple of them has been torn up, too. It makes senseas much as anything in a crazy business like this can make sense. The new plugs a lot deeper than the old ones, and everyone knows there are demons in the earth. Mayhap one of the miners struck on one, wakened it, and was done a mischief by it. There are also leftovers from the Great Old Ones in the ground, I said. Not all are dangerous, but some are. Perhaps one of those old things . . . those whatdoyoucallums, Jamie? Artyfax, he said. Yes, those. Perhaps one of those is responsible. Mayhap the fellow will be able to tell us, if we take him alive. Sma chance of that, Peavy growled. I thought there was a good chance. If we could identify him and close on him in the daytime, that was. How many of these salties are there? I asked. Not smany as in the old days, because now its just the one plug, dontcha see it. I shd say no moren . . . two hundred. I met Jamies eyes, and saw a glint of humor in them. No fret, Roland, said he. Im sure we can interview em all by Reaptide. If we hurry. He was exaggerating, but I still saw several weeks ahead of us in Debaria. We might interview the skinman and still not be able to pick him out, either because he was a masterful liar or because he had no guilt to cover up; his dayself might truly not know what his nightself was doing. I wished for Cuthbert, who could look at things that seemed unrelated and spot the connections, and I wished for Alain, with his power to touch minds. But Jamie wasnt so bad, either. He had, after all, seen what I should have seen myself, what was right in front of my nose. On one matter I was in complete accord with Sheriff Hugh Peavy I hated mysteries. Its a thing that has never changed in this long life of mine. Im not good at solving them; my mind has never run that way. When we trooped back into the office, I said, I have some questions I must ask you, Sheriff. The first is, will you open to us, if we open to you? The second The second is do I see you for what you are and accept what you do. The third is do I seek aid and succor. Sheriff Peavy says yar, yar, and yar. Now for gods sake set your brains to working, fellows, for its over two weeks since this thing showed up at Serenity, and that time it didnt get a full meal. Soon enough itll be out there again. It only prowls at night, Jamie said. Youre sure of that much? I am. Does the moon have any effect on it? I asked. Because my fathers advisorand our teacher that wassays that in some of the old legends . . . Ive heard the legends, sai, but in that theyre wrong. At least for this particular creatur they are. Sometimes the moons been full when it strikesit was Full Peddler when it showed up at Serenity, all covered with scales and knobs like an alligator from the Long Salt Swampsbut it did its work at Timbersmith when the moon was dark. Id like to tell you different, but I cant. Id also like to end this without having to pick anyone elses guts out of the bushes or pluck some other kiddies head offn a fencepost. Yeve been sent here to help, and I hope like hell you can . . . although Ive got my doubts. When I asked Peavy if there was a good hotel or boardinghouse in Debaria, he chuckled. The last boardinghouse was the Widow Brailleys. Two year ago, a drunk saddletramp tried to rape her in her own outhouse, as she sat at business. But she was always a trig one. Shed seen the look in his eye, and went in there with a knife under her apron. Cut his throat for him, she did. Stringy Bodean, who used to be our Justice Man before he decided to try his luck at raising horses in the Crescent, declared her not guilty by reason of selfdefense in about five minutes, but the lady decided shed had enough of Debaria and trained back to Gilead, where she yet bides, Ive no doubt. Two days after she left, some drunken buffoon burned the place to the ground. The hotel still stands. Its called the Delightful View. The view aint delightful, young fellows, and the beds is full of bugs as big as toads eyeballs. I wouldnt sleep in one without putting on a full suit of Arthur Elds armor. And so we ended up spending our first night in Debaria in the large drunkanddisorderly cell, beneath Peavys chalked map. Salty Sam had been set free, and we had the jail to ourselves. Outside, a strong wind had begun to blow off the alkali flats to the west of town. The moaning sound it made around the eaves caused me to think again of the story my mother used to read to me when I was just a sma toot myselfthe story of Tim Stoutheart and the starkblast Tim had to face in the Great Woods north of New Canaan. Thinking of the boy alone in those woods has always chilled my heart, just as Tims bravery has always warmed it. The stories we hear in childhood are the ones we remember all our lives. After one particularly strong gustthe Debaria wind was warm, not cold like the starkblaststruck the side of the jail and puffed alkali grit in through the barred window, Jamie spoke up. It was rare for him to start a conversation. I hate that sound, Roland. Its apt to keep me awake all night. I loved it myself; the sound of the wind has always made me think of good times and far places. Although I confess I could have done without the grit. How are we supposed to find this thing, Jamie? I hope you have some idea, because I dont. Well have to talk to the saltminers. Thats the place to start. Someone may have seen a fellow with blood on him creeping back to where the salties live. Creeping back naked. For he cant come back clothed, unless he takes them off beforehand. That gave me a little hope. Although if the one we were looking for knew what he was, he might take his clothes off when he felt an attack coming on, hide them, then come back to them later. But if he didnt know . . . It was a small thread, but sometimesif youre careful not to break ityou can pull on a small thread and unravel a whole garment. Goodnight, Roland. Goodnight, Jamie. I closed my eyes and thought of my mother. I often did that year, but for once they werent thoughts of how she had looked dead, but of how beautiful she had been in my early childhood, as she sat beside me on my bed in the room with the colored glass windows, reading to me. Look you, Roland, shed say, here are the billybumblers sitting all arow and scenting the air. They know, dont they? Yes, I would say, the bumblers know. And what is it they know? the woman I would kill asked me. What is it they know, dear heart? They know the starkblast is coming, I said. My eyes would be growing heavy by then, and minutes later I would drift off to the music of her voice. As I drifted off now, with the wind outside blowing up a strong gale. I woke in the first thin light of morning to a harsh sound BRUNG! BRUNG! BRUNNNNG! Jamie was still flat on his back, legs splayed, snoring. I took one of my revolvers from its holster, went out through the open cell door, and shambled toward that imperious sound. It was the jingjang Sheriff Peavy had taken so much pride in. He wasnt there to answer it; hed gone home to bed, and the office was empty. Standing there barechested, with a gun in my hand and wearing nothing but the swabbies and slinkum Id slept infor it was hot in the cellI took the listening cone off the wall, put the narrow end in my ear, and leaned close to the speaking tube. Yes? Hello? Who the hells this? a voice screamed, so loud that it sent a nail of pain into the side of my head. There were jingjangs in Gilead, perhaps as many as a hundred that still worked, but none spoke so clear as this. I pulled the cone away, wincing, and could still hear the voice coming out of it. Hello? Hello? Gods curse this fucking thing! HELLO? I hear you, I said. Lower thy voice, for your fathers sake. Who is this? There was just enough drop in volume for me to put the listening cone a little closer to my ear. But not in it; I would not make that mistake twice. A deputy. Jamie DeCurry and I were the farthest things in the world from that, but simplest is usually best. Always best, I wot, when speaking with a panicky man on a jingjang. Wheres Sheriff Peavy? At home with his wife. It isnt yet five o the clock, I reckon. Now tell me who you are, where youre speaking from, and whats happened. Its Canfield of the Jefferson. I Of the Jefferson what? I heard footsteps behind me and turned, halfraising my revolver. But it was only Jamie, with his hair standing up in sleepspikes all over his head. He was holding his own gun, and had gotten into his jeans, although his feet were yet bare. The Jefferson Ranch, ye great grotting idiot! You need to get the sheriff out here, and jinjin. Everyones dead. Jefferson, his fambly, the cookie, all the proddies. Blood from one end tother. How many? I asked. Maybe fifteen. Maybe twenty. Who can tell? Canfield of the Jefferson began to sob. Theyre all in pieces. Whatever it was did for em left the two dogs, Rosie and Mozie. They was in there. We had to shoot em. They was lapping up the blood and eating the brains. It was a tenwheel ride, straight north toward the Salt Hills. We went with Sheriff Peavy, Kellin Fryethe good deputyand Fryes son, Vikka. The enjie, whose name turned out to be Travis, also came along, for hed spent the night at the Fryes place. We pushed our mounts hard, but it was still full daylight by the time we got to the Jefferson spread. At least the wind, which was still strengthening, was at our backs. Peavy thought Canfield was a pokiewhich is to say a wandering cowboy not signed to any particular ranch. Some such turned outlaw, but most were honest enough, just men who couldnt settle down in one place. When we rode through the wide stock gate with JEFFERSON posted over it in white birch letters, two other cowboyshis mateswere with him. The three of them were bunched together by the shakepole fence of the horse corral, which stood near to the big house. A half a mile or so north, standing atop a little hill, was the bunkhouse. From this distance, only two things looked out of place the door at the south end of the bunkie was unlatched, swinging back and forth in the alkaliwind, and the bodies of two large black dogs lay stretched on the dirt. We dismounted and Sheriff Peavy shook with the men, who looked mightily glad to see us. Aye, Bill Canfield, see you very well, pokiefella. The tallest of them took off his hat and held it against his shirt. I aint no pokie nummore. Or maybe I am, I dunno. For a while here I was Canfield of the Jefferson, like I told whoever answered the goddam speakie, because I signed on just last month. Old man Jefferson himself oversaw my mark on the wall, but now hes dead like the rest of em. He swallowed hard. His Adams apple bobbed up and down. The stubble on his face looked very black, because his skin was very white. There was drying vomit on the front of his shirt. His wife and daughtersve gone into the clearing, too. You can tell em by their long hair and their . . . their . . . ay, ay, Man Jesus, you see a thing like that and it makes you wish you were born blind. He raised his hat to his face to hide it and began to weep. One of Canfields mates said, Is those gunslingers, Sheriff? Mighty young to be hauling iron, aint they? Never mind them, said Peavy. Tell me what brought you here. Canfield lowered his hat. His eyes were red and streaming. The three of us was camped out on the Pure. Roundin strays, we were, and camped for the night. Then we heard screamin start from the east. Woke us from a sound sleep, because we was that tired. Then gunshots, two or three of em. They quit and there was more screamin. And somethinsomethin bigroarin and snarlin. One of the others said, It sounded like a bear. No, it didnt, said the third. Never at all. Canfield said, Knew it was comin from the ranch, whatever it was. Had tove been four wheels from where we were, maybe six, but sound carries on the Pure, as ye know. We mounted up, but I got here way ahead of these two, because I was signed and theyre yet pokies. I dont understand, I said. Canfield turned to me. I had a ranch horse, didnt I? A good un. Snip and Arn there had nothing but mules. Put em in there, with the others. He pointed into the corral. A big gust of wind blew through just then, driving dust before it, and all the livestock galloped away like a wave. Theyre still spooked, Kellin Frye said. Looking toward the bunkhouse, the enjieTravissaid, They ent the only ones. By the time Canfield, the Jefferson Ranchs newest proddiewhich is to say hired handreached the home place, the screaming had stopped. So had the roaring of the beast, although there was still a good deal of snarling going on. That was the two dogs, fighting over the leavings. Knowing which side of the biscuit his honey went on, Canfield bypassed the bunkhouseand the dogs snarling withinfor the big house. The front door was wide open and there were lit seners in both the hall and the kitchen, but no one answered his hail. He found Jeffersons ladysai in the kitchen with her body under the table and her halfeaten head rolled up against the pantry door. There were tracks going out the stoop door, which was banging in the wind. Some were human; some were the tracks of a monstrous great bear. The bear tracks were bloody. I took the sener off o sinkside where itd been left and followed the tracks outside. The two girls was alayin in the dirt between the house and the barn. One had gotten three or four dozen running steps ahead of her sissa, but they were both just as dead, with their nightdresses tore off em and their backs carved open right down to the spines. Canfield shook his head slowly from side to side, his large eyesswimming with tears, they werenever leaving High Sheriff Peavys face. I never want to see the claws that could do a thing like that. Never, never, never in my life. I seen what they done, and thats enough. The bunkhouse? Peavy asked. Aye, there I went next. You can see whats inside for yourself. The womenfolk too, for theyre still where I found em. I wont take ye. Snip and Arn might Not me, said Snip. Me, neither, said Arn. Ill see un all in my dreams, and thatll do me fine. I dont think we need a guide, Peavy said. You three boys stay right here. Sheriff Peavy, closely followed by the Fryes and Travis the enjie, started toward the big house. Jamie put a hand on Peavys shoulder, and spoke almost apologetically when the High Sheriff turned to look at him. Mind the tracks. Theyll be important. Peavy nodded. Yar. Well mind em very well. Especially those headed off to wherever the thing went. The women were as sai Canfield had told us. I had seen bloodshed beforeaye, plenty of it, both in Mejis and in Gileadbut I had never seen anything like this, and neither had Jamie. He was as pale as Canfield, and I could only hope he would not discredit his father by passing out. I neednt have worried; soon he was down on his knees in the kitchen, examining several enormous bloodrimmed animal tracks. These really are bear tracks, he said, but there was never one so big, Roland. Not even in the Endless Forest. There was one here last night, cully, Travis said. He looked toward the body of the ranchers wife and shivered, even though she, like her unfortunate daughters, had been covered with blankets from upstairs. Ill be glad to get back to Gilead, where such things are just legends. What do the tracks tell otherwise? I asked Jamie. Anything? Yes. It went to the bunkhouse first, where the most . . . the most food was. The rumpus would have wakened the four of them here in the house . . . were there only four, Sheriff? Aye, Peavy said. There are two sons, but Jefferson would have sent em to the auctions in Gilead, I expect. Theyll find a sack of woe when they return. The rancher left his womenfolk and went running for the bunkhouse. The gun Canfield and his mates heard must have been his. Much good it did him, Vikka Frye said. His father hit him on the shoulder and told him to hush. Then the thing came up here, Jamie went on. The ladysai Jefferson and the two girls were in the kitchen by then, I think. And I think the sai must have told her daughters to run. Aye, Peavy said. And shed try to keep it from coming after them long enough for them to get away. Thats how it reads. Only it didnt work. If theyd been at the front of the houseif theyd seen how big it wasshed have known better, and we would have found all three of em out there in the dirt. He fetched a deep sigh. Come on, boys, lets see whats in the bunkhouse. Waiting wont make it any prettier. I think I might just stay out by the corral with those saddletramps, Travis said. Ive seen enough. Vikka Frye blurted Can I do that too, Pa? Kellin looked at his sons haunted face and said he could. Before he let the boy go, he put a kiss on his cheek. Ten feet or so in front of the bunkhouse, the bare earth had been scuffed into a bloody churn of bootprints and clawed animal tracks. Nearby, in a clump of jugweed, was an old shortarm fourshot with its barrel bent to one side. Jamie pointed from the confusion of tracks, to the gun, to the open bunkhouse door. Then he raised his eyebrows, silently asking me if I saw it. I saw it very well. This is where the thingthe skinman wearing the shape of a bearmet the rancher, I said. He got off a few rounds, then dropped the gun No, Jamie said. The thing took it from him. Thats why the barrels bent. Maybe Jefferson turned to run. Maybe he stood his ground. Either way, it did no good. His tracks stop here, so the thing picked him up and threw him through that door and into the bunkhouse. It went to the big house next. So were backtracking it, Peavy said. Jamie nodded. Well fronttrack it soon enough, he said. The thing had turned the bunkhouse into an abattoir. In the end, the butchers bill came to eighteen sixteen proddies, the cookwho had died beside his stove with his rent and bloodstained apron thrown over his face like a shroudand Jefferson himself, who had been torn limbless. His severed head stared up at the rafters with a fearful grin that showed only his top teeth. The skinman had ripped the ranchers lower jaw right out of his mouth. Kellin Frye found it under a bunk. One of the men had tried to defend himself with a saddle, using it as a shield, but it had done him no good; the thing had torn it in half with its claws. The unfortunate cowboy was still holding onto the pommel with one hand. He had no face; the thing had eaten it off his skull. Roland, Jamie said. His voice was strangled, as if his throat had closed up to no more than a straw. We have to find this thing. We have to. Lets see what the outward tracks say before the wind wipes them out, I replied. We left Peavy and the others outside the bunkhouse and circled the big house to where the covered bodies of the two girls lay. The tracks beyond them had begun to blur at the edges and around the clawpoints, but they would have been hard to miss even for someone not fortunate enough to have had Cort of Gilead as a teacher. The thing that made them must have weighed upwards of eight hundred pounds. Look here, Jamie said, kneeling beside one. See how its deeper at the front? It was running. And on its hind legs, I said. Like a man. The tracks went past the pump house, which was in shambles, as if the thing had given it a swipe out of pure malice as it went by. They led us onto an uphill lane that headed north, toward a long unpainted outbuilding that was either a tack shed or a smithy. Beyond this, perhaps twenty wheels farther north, were the rocky badlands below the salt hills. We could see the holes that led to the workedout mines; they gaped like empty eyesockets. We may as well give this up, I said. We know where the tracks goup to where the salties live. Not yet, Jamie said. Look here, Roland. Youve never seen anything like this. The tracks began to change, the claws merging into the curved shapes of large unshod hooves. It lost its bearshape, I said, and became . . . what? A bull? I think so, Jamie said. Lets go a little further. I have an idea. As we approached the long outbuilding, the hoofprints became pawprints. The bull had become some kind of monstrous cat. These tracks were large at first, then started to grow smaller, as if the thing were shrinking from the size of a lion to that of a cougar even as it ran. When they veered off the lane and onto the dirt path leading to the tack shed, we found a large patch of jugweed grass that had been beaten down. The broken stalks were bloody. It fell, Jamie said. I think it fell . . . and then thrashed. He looked up from the bed of matted weed. His face was thoughtful. I think it was in pain. Good, I said. Now look there. I pointed to the path, which was imprinted with the hooves of many horses. And other signs, as well. Bare feet, going to the doors of the building, which were run back on rusty metal tracks. Jamie turned to me, wideeyed. I put my finger to my lips, and drew one of my revolvers. Jamie did likewise, and we moved toward the shed. I waved him around to the far side. He nodded and split off to the left. I stood outside the open doors, gun held up, giving Jamie time to get to the other end of the building. I heard nothing. When I judged my pard must be in place, I bent down, picked up a goodsize stone with my free hand, and tossed it inside. It thumped, then rolled across wood. There was still nothing else to hear. I swung inside, crouched low, gun at the ready. The place seemed empty, but there were so many shadows it was at first hard to tell for sure. It was already warm, and by noonday would be an oven. I saw a pair of empty stalls on either side, a little smithystove next to drawers full of rusty shoes and equally rusty shoenails, dustcovered jugs of liniment and stinkum, branding irons in a tin sleeve, and a large pile of old tack that needed either to be mended or thrown out. Above a couple of benches hung a fair assortment of tools on pegs. Most were as rusty as the shoes and nails. There were a few wooden hitching hooks and a pedestal pump over a cement trough. The water in the trough hadnt been changed for a while; as my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I could see bits of straw floating on the surface. I kenned that this had once been more than a tack shed. It had also been a kind of hostelry where the ranchs working stock was seen to. Likely a jackleg veterinary, as well. Horses could be led in at one end, dealt with, and led out the other. But it looked in disrepair, abandoned. The tracks of the thing that had by then been human led up the center aisle to other doors, also open, at the far end. I followed them. Jamie? Its me. Dont shoot me, for your fathers sake. I stepped outside. Jamie had holstered his gun, and now pointed at a large heap of horseapples. He knows what he is, Roland. You know this from a pile of horseshit? As happens, I do. He didnt tell me how, but after a few seconds I saw it for myself. The hostelry had been abandoned, probably in favor of one built closer in to the main house, but the horseapples were fresh. If he came ahorseback, he came as a man. Aye. And left as one. I squatted on my hunkers and thought about this. Jamie rolled a smoke and let me. When I looked up, he was smiling a little. Do you see what it means, Roland? Two hundred salties, give or take, I said. Ive ever been slow, but in the end I usually get there. Aye. Salties, mind, not pokies or proddies. Diggers, not riders. As a rule. As you say. How many of em up there have horses, do you suppose? How many even know how to ride? His smile broadened. There might be twenty or thirty, I suppose. Its better than two hundred, I said. Better by a long stride. Well go up as soon as I never finished what I was going to say, because thats when the moaning started. It was coming from the tack shed Id dismissed as empty. How glad I was at that moment Cort wasnt there. He would have cuffed my ear and sent me sprawling. At least in his prime, he would have. Jamie and I looked into each others startled eyes, then ran back inside. The moaning continued, but the place looked as empty as before. Then that big heap of old tackbusted hames, bridles, cinch straps and reinsstarted to heave up and down, as if it were breathing. The tangled bunches of leather began to tumble away to either side and from them a boy was born. His whiteblond hair was sticking up in all directions. He wore jeans and an old shirt that hung open and unbuttoned. He didnt look hurt, but in the shadows it was hard to tell. Is it gone? he asked in a trembling voice. Please, sais, say it is. Say its gone. It is, I said. He started to wade his way out of the pile, but a strip of leather had gotten wound around one of his legs and he fell forward. I caught him and saw a pair of eyes, bright blue and utterly terrified, looking up into my face. Then he passed out. I carried him to the trough. Jamie pulled off his bandanna, dipped it in the water, and began to wipe the boys dirtstreaked face with it. He might have been eleven; he might have been a year or two younger. He was so thin it was hard to tell. After a bit his eyes fluttered open. He looked from me to Jamie and then back to me again. Who are you? he asked. You dont blong to the ranch. Were friends of the ranch, I said. Who are you? Bill Streeter, he said. The proddies call me Young Bill. Aye, do they? And is your father Old Bill? He sat up, took Jamies bandanna, dipped it in the trough, and squeezed it out so the water ran down his thin chest. No, Old Bills my granther, went into the clearing two years ago. My da, hes just plain Bill. Something about speaking his fathers name made his eyes widen. He grasped my arm. He aint dead, is he? Say he aint, sai! Jamie and I exchanged another look, and that scared him worse than ever. Say he aint! Please say my daddy aint dead! He started to cry. Hush and go easy now, I said. What is he, your da? A proddie? Nay, no, hes the cook. Say he aint dead! But the boy knew he was. I saw it in his eyes as clearly Id seen the bunkhouse cook with his bloodstained apron thrown over his face. There was a willatree on one side of the big house, and that was where we questioned Young Bill Streeterjust me, Jamie, and Sheriff Peavy. The others we sent back to wait in the shade of the bunkhouse, thinking that to have too many folks around him would only upset the boy more. As it happened, he could tell us very little of what we needed to know. My da said to me that it was going to be a warm night and I should go up to the graze tother side of the corral and sleep under the stars, Young Bill told us. He said itd be cooler and Id sleep better. But I knew why. Elrodd got a bottle somewhereagainand he was in drink. Thatd be Elrod Nutter? Sheriff Peavy asked. Aye, him. Foreman of the boys, he is. I know him well, Peavy said to us. Aint I had him locked up half a dozen times and more? Jefferson keeps him on because hes a helluva rider and roper, but hes one mean whoredog when hes in drink. Aint he, Young Bill? Young Bill nodded earnestly and brushed his long hair, still all dusty from the tack hed hidden in, out of his eyes. Yessir, and he had a way of takin after me. Which my father knew. Cooks apprentice, were ye? Peavy asked. I knew he was trying to be kind, but I wished hed mind his mouth and stop talking in the way that says once, but no more. But the boy didnt seem to notice. Bunkhouse boy. Not cooks boy. He turned to Jamie and me. I make the bunks, coil the rope, cinch the bedrolls, polish the saddles, set the gates at the end of the day after the horses is turned in. Tiny Braddock taught me how to make a lasso, and I throw it pretty. Roscoes teaching me the bow. Freddy TwoStep says hell show me how to brand, come fall. Do well, I said, and tapped my throat. That made him smile. Theyre good fellas, mostly. The smile went away as fast as it had come, like the sun going behind a cloud. Except for Elrod. Hes just grouchy when hes sober, but when hes in drink, he likes to tease. Mean teasing, if you do ken it. Ken it well, I said. Aye, and if you dont laugh and act like its all a jokeeven if its twisting on your hand or yanking you around on the bunkhouse floor by your hairhe gets uglier still. So when my da told me to sleep out, I took my blanket and my shaddie and I went. A word to the wise is sufficient, my da says. Whats a shaddie? Jamie asked the sheriff. Bit o canvas, Peavy said. Wont keep off rain, but itll keep you from getting damp after dewfall. Where did you roll in? I asked the boy. He pointed beyond the corral, where the horses were still skitty from the rising wind. Above us and around us, the willa sighed and danced. Pretty to hear, prettier still to look at. I guess my blanket n shaddie must still be there. I looked from where he had pointed, to the tackshed hostelry where wed found him, then to the bunkhouse. The three places made the corners of a triangle probably a quartermile on each side, with the corral in the middle. |
How did you get from where you slept to hiding under that pile of tack, Bill? Sheriff Peavy asked. The boy looked at him for a long time without speaking. Then the tears began to fall again. He covered them with his fingers so we wouldnt see them. I dont remember, he said. I dont remember nuffink. He didnt exactly lower his hands; they seemed to drop into his lap, as if theyd grown too heavy for him to hold up. I want my da. Jamie got up and walked away, with his hands stuffed deep in his back pockets. I tried to say what needed saying, and couldnt. You have to remember that although Jamie and I wore guns, they werent yet the big guns of our fathers. Id never again be so young as before I met Susan Delgado, and loved her, and lost her, but I was still too young to tell this boy that his father had been torn to pieces by a monster. So I looked to Sheriff Peavy. I looked to the grownup. Peavy took off his hat and laid it aside on the grass. Then he took the boys hands. Son, he said, Ive got some very hard news for you. I want you to pull in a deep breath and be a man about it. But Young Bill Streeter had only nine or ten summers behind him, eleven at most, and he couldnt be a man about anything. He began to wail. When he did it, I saw my mothers pale dead face as clear as if she had been lying next to me under that willa, and I couldnt stand it. I felt like a coward, but that didnt stop me from getting up and walking away. The lad either cried himself to sleep or into unconsciousness. Jamie carried him into the big house and put him in one of the beds upstairs. He was just the son of a bunkhouse cook, but there was no one else to sleep in them, not now. Sheriff Peavy used the jingjang to call his office where one of the notsogood deputies had been ordered to wait for his ring. Soon enough, Debarias undertakerif there was onewould organize a little convoy of wagons to come and pick up the dead. Sheriff Peavy went into sai Jeffersons little office and plunked himself down in a chair on rollers. Whats next, boys? he asked. The salties, I reckon . . . and I suppose youll want to get up there before this wind blows into a simoom. Which it certainly means tdo. He sighed. The boys no good to ye, thats certain. Whatever he saw was evil enough to scrub his mind clean. Jamie began, Roland has a way of Im not sure whats next, I said. Id like to talk it over a little with my pard. We might take a little pasear back up to that tack shed. Tracksll be blown away by now, Peavy said, but have at it and may it do ya well. He shook his head. Telling that boy was hard. Very hard. You did it the right way, I said. Do ya think so? Aye? Well, thankya. Poor little cullie. Reckon he can stay with me n the wife for a while. Until we figure what comes next for him. You boys go on and palaver, if it suits you. I think Ill just sit here and try to get back even wi myself. No hurry about anything now; that damned thing ate well enough last night. Itll be a good while before it needs to go hunting again. Jamie and I walked two circuits around the shed and corral while we talked, the strengthening wind rippling our pantlegs and blowing back our hair. Is it all truly erased from his mind, Roland? What do you think? I asked. No, he said. Because Is it gone? was the first thing he asked. And he knew his father was dead. Even when he asked us, it was in his eyes. Jamie walked without replying for a while, his head down. Wed tied our bandannas over our mouths and noses because of the blowing grit. Jamies was still wet from the trough. Finally he said, When I started to tell the sheriff you have a way of getting at things that are buriedburied in peoples mindsyou cut me off. He doesnt need to know, because it doesnt always work. It had with Susan Delgado, in Mejis, but part of Susan had wanted badly to tell me what the witch, Rhea, had tried to hide from Susans frontmind, where we hear our own thoughts very clearly. Shed wanted to tell me because we were in love. But will you try? You will, wont you? I didnt answer him until we had started our second circuit of the corral. I was still putting my thoughts in order. As I may have said, that has always been slow work for me. The salties dont live in the mines anymore; they have their own encampment a few wheels west of Little Debaria. Kellin Frye told me about it on the ride out here. I want you to go up there with Peavy and the Fryes. Canfield, too, if hell go. I think he will. Those two pokiesCanfields trailmatescan stay here and wait for the undertaker. You mean to take the boy back to town? Yes. Alone. But Im not sending you up there just to get you and the others away. If you travel fast enough, and they have a remuda, you may still be able to spot a horse thats been rode hard. Under the bandanna, he might have smiled. I doubt it. I did, too. It would have been more likely but for the windwhat Peavy had called the simoom. It would dry the sweat on a horse, even one that had been ridden hard, in short order. Jamie might spot one that was dustier than the rest, one with burdocks and bits of jugweed in its tail, but if we were right about the skinman knowing what he was, he would have given his mount a complete rubdown and curry, from hooves to mane, as soon as he got back. Someone may have seen him ride in. Yes . . . unless he went to Little Debaria first, cleaned up, and came back to the saltie encampment from there. A clever man might do that. Even so, you and the sheriff should be able to find out how many of them own horses. And how many of them can ride, even if they dont own, Jamie said. Aye, we can do that. Round that bunch up, I told him, or as many of them as you can, and bring them back to town. Any who protests, remind them that theyll be helping to catch the monster thats been terrorizing Debaria . . . Little Debaria . . . the whole Barony. You wont have to tell them that any who still refuse will be looked at with extra suspicion; even the dumbest of them will know. Jamie nodded, then grabbed the fencerail as an especially strong gust of wind blasted us. I turned to face him. And one other thing. Youre going to pull a cosy, and Kellins son, Vikka, will be your catspaw. Theyll believe a kid might run off at the mouth, even if hes been told not to. Especially if hes been told not to. Jamie waited, but I felt sure he knew what I was going to say, for his eyes were troubled. It was a thing hed never have done himself, even if he thought of it. Which was why my father had put me in charge. Not because Id done well in MejisI hadnt, not reallyand not because I was his son, either. Although in a way, I suppose that was it. My mind was like his cold. Youll tell the salties who know about horses that there was a witness to the murders at the ranch. Youll say you cant tell them who it wasnaturallybut that he saw the skinman in his human form. You dont know that Young Bill actually saw him, Roland. And even if he did, he might not have seen the face. He was hiding in a pile of tack, for your fathers sake. Thats true, but the skinman wont know its true. All the skinman will know is that it might be true, because he was human when he left the ranch. I began to walk again, and Jamie walked beside me. Now heres where Vikka comes in. Hell get separated from you and the others a bit and whisper to someoneanother kid, one his own age, would be bestthat the survivor was the cooks boy. Bill Streeter by name. The boy just lost his father and you want to use him as bait. It may not come to that. If the story gets to the right ears, the one were looking for may bolt on the way to town. Then youll know. And none of it matters if were wrong about the skinman being a saltie. We could be, you know. What if were right, and the fellow decides to face it out? Bring them all to the jail. Ill have the boy in a cella locked one, you kenand you can walk the horsemen past, one by one. Ill tell Young Bill to say nothing, one way or the other, until theyre gone. Youre right, he may not be able to pick our man out, even if I can help him remember some of what happened last night. But our man wont know that, either. Its risky, said Jamie. Risky for the kid. Small risk, I said. Itll be daylight, with the skinman in his human shape. And Jamie . . . I grasped his arm. Ill be in the cell, too. The bastard will have to go through me if he wants to get to the boy. Peavy liked my plan better than Jamie had. I wasnt a bit surprised. It was his town, after all. And what was Young Bill to him? Only the son of a dead cook. Not much in the great scheme of things. Once the little expedition to Saltie Town was on its way, I woke the boy and told him we were going to Debaria. He agreed without asking questions. He was distant and dazed. Every now and then he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. As we walked out to the corral, he asked me again if I was sure his da was dead. I told him I was. He fetched a deep sigh, lowered his head, and put his hands on his knees. I gave him time, then asked if hed like me to saddle a horse for him. If its all right to ride Millie, I can saddle her myself. I feed her, and shes my special friend. People say mules aint smart, but Millie is. Lets see if you can do it without getting kicked, I said. It turned out he could, and smartly. He mounted up and said, I guess Im ready. He even tried to give me a smile. It was awful to look at. I was sorry for the plan Id set in motion, but all I had to do was think of the carnage we were leaving behind and Sister Fortunas ruined face to remind myself of what the stakes were. Will she skit in the wind? I asked, nodding at the trim little mule. Sitting on her back, Young Bills feet came almost down to the ground. In another year, hed be too big for her, but of course in another year, hed probably be far from Debaria, just another wanderer on the face of a fading world. Millie would be a memory. Not Millie, he said. Shes as solid as a dromedary. Aye, and whats a dromedary? Dunno, do I? Its just something my da says. One time I asked him, and he didnt know, either. Come on, then, I said. The sooner we get to town, the sooner well get out of this grit. But I intended to make one stop before we got to town. I had something to show the boy while we were still alone. About halfway between the ranch and Debaria, I spied a deserted sheepherders leanto, and suggested we shelter in there for a bit and have a bite. Bill Streeter agreed willingly enough. He had lost his da and everyone else hed known, but he was still a growing boy and hed had nothing to eat since his dinner the night before. We tethered our mounts away from the wind and sat on the floor inside the leanto with our backs against the wall. I had dried beef wrapped in leaves in my saddlebag. The meat was salty, but my waterskin was full. The boy ate half a dozen chunks of the meat, tearing off big bites and washing them down with water. A strong gust of wind shook the leanto. Millie blatted a protest and fell silent. Itll be a fullgoing simoom by dark, Young Bill said. You watch and see if it aint. I like the sound of the wind, I said. It makes me think of a story my mother read to me when I was a sma one. The Wind Through the Keyhole, it was called. Does thee know it? Young Bill shook his head. Mister, are you really a gunslinger? Say true? I am. Can I hold one of your guns for a minute? Never in life, I said, but you can look at one of these, if youd like. I took a shell from my belt and handed it to him. He examined it closely, from brass base to lead tip. Gods, its heavy! Long, too! I bet if you shot someone with one of these, hed stay down. Yes. A shells a dangerous thing. But it can be pretty, too. Would you like to see a trick I can do with this one? Sure. I took it back and began to dance it from knuckle to knuckle, my fingers rising and falling in waves. Young Bill watched, wideeyed. How does thee do it? The same way anyone does anything, I said. Practice. Will you show me the trick? If you watch close, you may see it for yourself, I said. Here it is . . . and here it isnt. I palmed the shell so fast it disappeared, thinking of Susan Delgado, as I supposed I always would when I did this trick. Now here it is again. The shell danced fast . . . then slow . . . then fast again. Follow it with your eyes, Bill, and see if you can make out how I get it to disappear. Dont take your eyes off it. I dropped my voice to a lulling murmur. Watch . . . and watch . . . and watch. Does it make you sleepy? A little, he said. His eyes slipped slowly closed, then the lids rose again. I didnt sleep much last night. Did you not? Watch it go. Watch it slow. See it disappear and then . . . see it as it speeds up again. Back and forth the shell went. The wind blew, as lulling to me as my voice was to him. Sleep if you want, Bill. Listen to the wind and sleep. But listen to my voice, too. I hear you, gunslinger. His eyes closed again and this time didnt reopen. His hands were clasped limply in his lap. I hear you very well. You can still see the shell, cant you? Even with your eyes closed. Yes . . . but its bigger now. It flashes like gold. Do you say so? Yes . . . Go deeper, Bill, but hear my voice. I hear. I want you to turn your mind back to last night. Your mind and your eyes and your ears. Will you do that? A frown creased his brow. I dont want to. Its safe. All thats happened, and besides, Im with you. Youre with me. And you have guns. So I do. Nothing will happen to you as long as you can hear my voice, because were together. Ill keep thee safe. Do you understand that? Yes. Your da told you to sleep out under the stars, didnt he? Aye. It was to be a warm night. But that wasnt the real reason, was it? No. It was because of Elrod. Once he twirled the bunkhouse cat by her tail, and she never came back. Sometimes he pulls me around by my hair and sings The Boy Who Loved Jenny. My da cant stop him, because Elrods bigger. Also, he has a knife in his boot. He could cut with it. But he couldnt cut the beast, could he? His clasped hands twitched. Elrods dead and Im glad. Im sorry about all the others . . . and my da, I dont know what Ill do wiout my da . . . but Im glad about Elrod. He wont tease me nummore. He wont scare me nummore. I seen it, aye. So he did know more than the top of his mind had let him remember. Now youre out on the graze. On the graze. Wrapped up in your blanket and shinnie. Shaddie. Your blanket and shaddie. Youre awake, maybe looking up at the stars, at Old Star and Old Mother No, no, asleep, Bill said. But the screams wake me up. The screams from the bunkhouse. And the sounds of fighting. Things are breaking. And somethings roaring. What do you do, Bill? I go down. Im afraid to, but my da . . . my das in there. I look in the window at the far end. Its greasepaper, but I can see through it well enough. More than I want to see. Because I see . . . I see . . . mister, can I wake up? Not yet. Remember that Im with you. Have you drawn your guns, mister? He was shivering. I have. To protect you. What do you see? Blood. And a beast. What kind, can you tell? A bear. One so tall its head reaches the ceiling. It goes up the middle of the bunkhouse . . . between the cots, ye ken, and on its back legs . . . and it grabs the men . . . it grabs the men and pulls them to pieces with its great long claws. Tears began to escape his closed lids and roll down his cheeks. The last one was Elrod. He ran for the back door . . . where the woodpile is just outside, ye ken . . . and when he understood it would have him before he could open the door and dash out, he turned around to fight. He had his knife. He went to stab it. . . . Slowly, as if underwater, the boys right hand rose from his lap. It was curled into a fist. He made a stabbing motion with it. The bear grabbed his arm and tore it off his shoulder. Elrod screamed. He sounded like a horse I saw one time, after it stepped in a gompa hole and broke its leg. The thing . . . it hit Elrod in the face with is own arm. The blood flew. There was gristle that flapped and wound around the skin like strings. Elrod fell against the door and started to slide down. The bear grabbed him and lifted him up and bit into his neck and there was a sound . . . mister, it bit Elrods head right off his neck. I want to wake up now. Please. Soon. What did you do then? I ran. I meant to go to the big house, but sai Jefferson . . . he . . . he . . . He what? He shot at me! I dont think he meant to. I think he just saw me out of the corner of his eye and thought . . . I heard the bullet go by me. Wishhh! Thats how close it was. So I ran for the corral instead. I went between the poles. While I was crossing, I heard two more shots. Then there was more screaming. I didnt look to see, but I knew it was sai Jefferson screaming that time. This part we knew from the tracks and leavings how the thing had come charging out of the bunkhouse, how it had grabbed away the fourshot pistol and bent the barrel, how it had unzipped the ranchers guts and thrown him into the bunkhouse with his proddies. The shot Jefferson had thrown at Young Bill had saved the boys life. If not for that, he would have run straight to the big house and been slaughtered with the Jefferson womenfolk. You go into the old hostelry where we found you. Aye, so I do. And hide under the tack. But then I hear it . . . coming. He had gone back to the now way of remembering, and his words came more slowly. They were broken by bursts of weeping. I knew it was hurting him, remembering terrible things always hurts, but I pressed on. I had to, for what happened in that abandoned hostelry was the important part, and Young Bill was the only one who had been there. Twice he tried to come back to the then way of remembering, the ago. This was a sign that he was trying to struggle free of his trance, so I took him deeper. In the end I got it all. The terror hed felt as the grunting, snuffling thing approached. The way the sounds had changed, blurring into the snarls of a cat. Once it had roared, Young Bill said, and when he heard that sound, hed let loose water in his trousers. He hadnt been able to hold it. He waited for the cat to come in, knowing it would scent him where he layfrom the urineonly the cat didnt. There was silence . . . silence . . . and then more screaming. At first its the cat screaming, then it changes into a human screaming. High to begin with, its like a woman, but then it starts to go down until its a man. It screams and screams. It makes me want to scream. I thought Think, I said. You think, Bill, because its happening now. Only Im here to protect you. My guns are drawn. I think my head will split open. Then it stops . . . and it comes in. It walks up the middle to the other door, doesnt it? He shook his head. Not walks. Shuffles. Staggers. Like its hurt. It goes right past me. He. Now its he. He almost falls down, but grabs one of the stall doors and stays up. Then he goes on. He goes on a little better now. Stronger? Aye. Do you see his face? I thought I already knew the answer to that. No, only his feet, through the tack. The moons up, and I see them very well. Perhaps so, but we wouldnt be identifying the skinman from his feet, I felt quite sure. I opened my mouth, ready to start bringing him up from his trance, when he spoke again. Theres a ring around one of his ankles. I leaned forward, as if he could see me . . . and if he was deep enough, mayhap he could, even with his eyes closed. What kind of ring? Was it metal, like a manacle? I dont know what that is. Like a bridlering? You know, a hossclinkum? No, no. Like on Elrods arm, but thats a picture of a nekkid woman, and you can hardly make it out nummore. Bill, are you talking about a tattoo? In his trance, the boy smiled. Aye, thats the word. But this one wasnt a picture, just a blue ring around his ankle. A blue ring in his skin. I thought, We have you. You dont know it yet, sai skinman, but we have you. Mister, can I wake up now? I want to wake up. Is there anything else? The white mark? He seemed to be asking himself. What white mark? He shook his head slowly from side to side, and I decided to let it go. Hed had enough. Come to the sound of my voice. As you come, youll leave everything that happened last night behind, because its over. Come, Bill. Come now. Im coming. His eyes rolled back and forth behind his closed lids. Youre safe. Everything that happened at the ranch is ago. Isnt it? Yes . . . Where are we? On Debaria high road. Were going to town. I aint been there but once. My da bought me candy. Ill buy you some, too, I said, for youve done well, Young Bill of the Jefferson. Now open your eyes. He did, but at first he only looked through me. Then his eyes cleared and he gave an uncertain smile. I fell asleep. You did. And now we should push for town before the wind grows too strong. Can you do that, Bill? Aye, he said, and as he got up he added, I was dreaming of candy. The two notsogood deputies were in the sheriffs office when we got there, one of thema fat fellow wearing a tall black hat with a gaudy rattlesnake bandtaking his ease behind Peavys desk. He eyed the guns I was wearing and got up in a hurry. Youre the gunslinger, aintcha? he said. Wellmet, wellmet, we both say so. Wheres tother one? I escorted Young Bill through the archway and into the jail without answering. The boy looked at the cells with interest but no fear. The drunk, Salty Sam, was long gone, but his aroma lingered. From behind me, the other deputy asked, What do you think youre doing, young sai? My business, I said. Go back to the office and bring me the keyring to these cells. And be quick about it, if you please. None of the smaller cells had mattresses on their bunks, so I took Young Bill to the drunkanddisorderly cell where Jamie and I had slept the night before. As I put the two straw pallets together to give the boy a little more comfortafter what hed been through, I reckoned he deserved all the comfort he could getBill looked at the chalked map on the wall. What is it, sai? Nothing to concern you, I said. Now listen to me. Im going to lock you in, but youre not to be afraid, for youve done nothing wrong. Tis but for your own safety. I have an errand that needs running, and when its done, Im going to come in there with you. And lock us both in, said he. Youd better lock us both in. In case it comes back. Do you remember it now? A little, said he, looking down. It wasnt a man . . . then it was. It killed my da. He put the heels of his hands against his eyes. Poor Da. The deputy with the black hat returned with the keys. The other was right behind him. Both were gawking at the boy as if he were a twoheaded goat in a roadshow. I took the keys. Good. Now back to the office, both of you. Seems like you might be throwing your weight around a little, youngster, Black Hat said, and the othera little man with an undershot jawnodded vigorously. Go now, I said. This boy needs rest. They looked me up and down, then went. Which was the correct thing. The only thing, really. My mood was not good. The boy kept his eyes covered until their bootheels faded back through the arch, then he lowered his hands. Will you catch him, sai? Yes. And will you kill him? Does thee want me to kill him? He considered this, and nodded. Aye. For what he did to my da, and to sai Jefferson, and all the others. Even Elrod. I closed the door of the cell, found the right key, and turned it. The keyring I hung over my wrist, for it was too big for my pocket. Ill make you a promise, Young Bill, I said. One I swear to on my fathers name. I wont kill him, but you shall be there when he swings, and with my own hand Ill give you the bread to scatter beneath his dead feet. In the office, the two notsogood deputies eyed me with caution and dislike. That was nothing to me. I hung the keyring on the peg next to the jingjang and said, Ill be back in an hour, maybe a little less. In the meantime, no one goes into the jail. And that includes you two. Highhanded for a shaveling, the one with the undershot jaw remarked. Dont fail me in this, I said. It wouldnt be wise. Do you understand? Black Hat nodded. But the sheriff will hear how you done with us. Then youll want to have a mouth still capable of speech when he gets back, I said, and went out. The wind had continued to strengthen, blowing clouds of gritty, saltflavored dust between the falsefronted buildings. I had Debaria high street entirely to myself except for a few hitched horses that stood with their hindquarters turned to the wind and their heads unhappily lowered. I would not leave my own sonor Millie, the mule the boy had riddenand led them down to the livery stable at the far end of the street. There the hostler was glad to take them, especially when I split him off half a gold knuck from the bundle I carried in my vest. No, he said in answer to my first question, there was no jeweler in Debaria, nor ever had been in his time. But the answer to my second question was yar, and he pointed across the street to the blacksmiths shop. The smith himself was standing in the doorway, the hem of his toolfilled leather apron flapping in the wind. I walked across and he put his fist to his forehead. Hile. I hiled him in return and told him what I wantedwhat Vannay had said I might need. He listened closely, then took the shell I handed him. It was the very one Id used to entrance Young Bill. The blackie held it up to the light. How many grains of powder does it blow, canee say? Of course I could. Fiftyseven. As many as that? Gods! Its a wonder the barrel of your revolver dont bust whenee pull the trigger! The shells in my fathers gunsthe ones I might someday carryblew seventysix, but I didnt say so. Hed likely not have believed it. Can you do what I ask, sai? I think so. He considered, then nodded. Aye. But not today. I dont like to run my smithhold hot in the wind. One loose ember and the whole town might catch ablaze. Weve had no fire department since my da was a boy. I took out my bag of gold knuckles and shook two into the palm of my hand. I considered, then added a third. The smith stared at them with wonder. He was looking at two years wages. It has to be today, I said. He grinned, showing teeth of amazing whiteness within the forest of his ginger beard. Tempting devil, get not aside! For what youre showin me, Id risk burning Gilead herself to her foundations. Youll have it by sundown. Ill have it by three. Aye, threes what I meant. To the shaved point of the minute. Good. Now tell me, which restaurant cooks the best chow in town? Theres only two, and neither of emll make you remember your mothers bird puddin, but neitherll poisonee. Raceys Caf is probably the better. That was good enough for me; I thought a growing boy like Bill Streeter would take quantity over quality any day. I headed for the caf, now working against the wind. Itll be a fullgoing simoom by dark, the boy had told me, and I thought he was right. He had been through a lot, and needed time to rest. Now that I knew about the ankle tattoo, I might not need him at all . . . but the skinman wouldnt know that. And in the jail, Young Bill was safe. At least I hoped so. It was stew, and I could have sworn it had been seasoned with alkali grit instead of salt, but the kid ate all of his and finished mine as well when I put it aside. One of the notsogood deputies had made coffee, and we drank that from tin cups. We made our meal right there in the cell, sitting crosslegged on the floor. I listened for the jingjang, but it stayed quiet. I wasnt surprised. Even if Jamie and the High Sheriff came near one at their end, the wind had probably taken the wires down. I guess you know all about these storms you call simooms, I said to Young Bill. Oh, yes, he said. This is the season for em. The proddies hate em and the pokies hate em even more, because if theyre out on the range, they have to sleep rough. And they cant have a fire at night, accourse, because of Because of the embers, I said, remembering the blacksmith. Just as you say. Stew all gone, is it? So it is, but theres one more thing. I handed over a little sack. He looked inside it and lit up. Candy! Rollers and chockertwists! He extended the bag. Here, you have the first. I took one of the little chocolate twists, then pushed the bag back to him. You have the rest. If it wont make your belly sick, that is. It wont! And he dived in. It did me good to see him. After the third roller went into his gob, he cheeked itwhich made him look like a squirrel with a nutand said, Whatll happen to me, sai? Now that my das gone? I dont know, but therell be water if God wills it. I already had an idea where that water might be. If we could put paid to the skinman, a certain large lady named Everlynne would owe us a good turn, and I doubt if Bill Streeter would be the first stray shed taken in. I returned to the subject of the simoom. How much will it strengthen? Itll blow a gale tonight. Probably after midnight. And by noon tomorrow, itll be gone. Does thee know where the salties live? Aye, Ive even been there. Once with my da, to see the races they sometimes have up there, and once with some proddies looking for strays. The salties take em in, and we pay with hard biscuit for the ones that have the Jefferson brand. My trailmates gone there with Sheriff Peavy and a couple of others. Think they have any chance of getting back before nightfall? I felt sure he would say no, but he surprised me. Being as its all downhill from Salt Villagewhich is on this side of Little DebariaId say they could. If they rode hard. That made me glad Id told the blacksmith to hurry, although I knew better than to trust the reckoning of a mere boy. Listen to me, Young Bill. When they come back, I expect theyll have some of the salties with em. Maybe a dozen, maybe as many as twenty. Jamie and I may have to walk em through the jail for you to look at, but you neednt be afraid, because the door of this cell will be locked. And you dont have to say anything, just look. If youre thinking I can tell which one killed my da, I cant. I dont even remember if I saw him. You probably wont have to see them at all, I said. This I truly believed. Wed have them into the sheriffs office by threes, and have them hike their pants. When we found the one with the blue ring tattooed around his ankle, wed have our man. Not that he was a man. Not anymore. Not really. Wouldnt you like another chocker, sai? Theres three left, and I cant eat nummore. Save them for later, I said, and got up. His face clouded. Will you come back? I dont want to be in here on my own. Aye, Ill come back. I stepped out, locked the cell door, then tossed the keys to him through the bars. Let me in when I do. The fat deputy with the black hat was Strother. The one with the undershot jaw was Pickens. They looked at me with care and mistrust, which I thought a good combination, coming from the likes of them. I could work with care and mistrust. If I asked you fellows about a man with a blue ring tattooed on his ankle, would it mean anything to you? They exchanged a glance and then Black HatStrothersaid, The stockade. What stockade would that be? Already I didnt like the sound of it. Beelie Stockade, Pickens said, looking at me as if I were the utterest of utter idiots. Does thee not know of it? And thee a gunslinger? Beelie Towns west of here, isnt it? I asked. Was, Strother said. Its Beelie Ghost Town now. Harriers tore through it five year ago. Some say John Farsons men, but I dont believe that. Never in life. Twas plain old gardenvariety outlaws. Once there was a militia outpostback in the days when there was a militiaand Beelie Stockade was their place o business. It was where the circuit judge sent thieves and murderers and card cheats. Witches n warlocks, too, Pickens volunteered. |
He wore the face of a man remembering the good old days, when the railroad trains ran on time and the jingjang no doubt rang more often, with calls from more places. Practicers of the dark arts. Once they took a cannibal, Strother said. He ate his wife. This caused him to give out with a foolish giggle, although whether it was the eating or the relationship that struck him funny I couldnt say. He was hung, that fellow, Pickens said. He bit off a chunk of chew and worked it with his peculiar jaw. He still looked like a man remembering a better, rosier past. There was lots of hangings at Beelie Stockade in those days. I went several times wi my da and my marmar to see em. Marmar allus packed a lunch. He nodded slowly and thoughtfully. Aye, many and manya. Lots o folks came. There was booths and clever people doing clever things such as juggling. Sometimes there was dogfights in a pit, but accourse it was the hangins that was the real show. He chuckled. I remember this one fella who kicked a regular commala when the drop didnt break is Whats this to do with blue ankle tattoos? Oh, Strother said, recalled to the initial subject. Anyone who ever did time in Beelie had one of those put on, ysee. Although I disremember if it was for punishment or just identification in case they ran off from one o the work gangs. All that stopped ten year ago, when the stockade closed. Thats why the harriers was able to have their way with the town, you knowbecause the militia left and the stockade closed. Now we have to deal with all the bad element and riffraff ourselves. He eyed me up and down in the most insolent way. We dont get much help from Gilead these days. Nawp. Apt to get more from John Farson, and theres some thatd send a parlayparty west to ask him. Perhaps he saw something in my eyes, because he sat up a little straighter in his chair and said, Not me, accourse. Never. I believe in the straight law and the Line of Eld. So do we all, Pickens said, nodding vigorously. Would you want to guess if some of the saltminers did time in Beelie Stockade before it was decommissioned? I asked. Strother appeared to consider, then said Oh, probably a few. Nummoren four in every ten, I should say. In later years I learned to control my face, but those were early times, and he must have seen my dismay. It made him smile. I doubt if he knew how close that smile brought him to suffering. Id had a difficult two days, and the boy weighed heavily on my mind. Who didee think would take a job digging salt blocks out of a miserable hole in the ground for penny wages? Strother asked. Model citizens? It seemed that Young Bill would have to look at a few of the salties, after all. Wed just have to hope the fellow we wanted didnt know the ring tattoo was the only part of him the kid had seen. When I went back to the cell, Young Bill was lying on the pallets, and I thought hed gone to sleep, but at the sound of my bootheels he sat up. His eyes were red, his cheeks wet. Not sleeping, then, but mourning. I let myself in, sat down beside him, and put an arm around his shoulders. This didnt come naturally to meI know what comfort and sympathy are, but Ive never been much good at giving such. I knew what it was to lose a parent, though. Young Bill and Young Roland had that much in common. Did you finish your candy? I asked. Dont want the rest, he said, and sighed. Outside the wind boomed hard enough to shake the building, then subsided. I hate that sound, he saidjust what Jamie DeCurry had said. It made me smile a little. And I hate being in here. Its like I did something wrong. You didnt, I said. Maybe not, but it already seems like Ive been here forever. Cooped up. And if they dont get back before nightfall, Ill have to stay longer. Wont I? Ill keep you company, I said. If those deputies have a deck of cards, we can play Jacks Pop Up. For babies, said he, morosely. Then Watch Me or poker. Can thee play those? He shook his head, then brushed at his cheeks. The tears were flowing again. Ill teach thee. Well play for matchsticks. Id rather hear the story you talked about when we stopped in the sheppies layby. I dont remember the name. The Wind Through the Keyhole, I said. But its a long one, Bill. We have time, dont we? I couldnt argue that. There are scary bits in it, too. Those things are all right for a boy such as I wassitting up in his bed with his mother beside himbut after what youve been through . . . Dont care, he said. Stories take a person away. If theyre good ones, that is. It is a good one? Yes. I always thought so, anyway. Then tell it. He smiled a little. Ill even let you have two of the last three chockers. Those are yours, but I might roll a smoke. I thought about how to begin. Do you know stories that start, Once upon a bye, before your grandfathers grandfather was born? They all start that way. At least, the ones my da told me. Before he said I was too old for stories. A persons never too old for stories, Bill. Man and boy, girl and woman, never too old. We live for them. Do you say so? I do. I took out my tobacco and papers. I rolled slowly, for in those days it was a skill yet new to me. When I had a smoke just to my likingone with the draw end tapered to a pinholeI struck a match on the wall. Bill sat crosslegged on the straw pallets. He took one of the chockers, rolled it between his fingers much as Id rolled my smoke, then tucked it into his cheek. I started slowly and awkwardly, because storytelling was another thing that didnt come naturally to me in those days . . . although it was a thing I learned to do well in time. I had to. All gunslingers have to. And as I went along, I began to speak more naturally and easily. Because I began hearing my mothers voice. It began to speak through my own mouth every rise, dip, and pause. I could see him fall into the tale, and that pleased meit was like hypnotizing him again, but in a better way. A more honest way. The best part, though, was hearing my mothers voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, Ive found. You wouldnt think it could be so, butas the oldtimers used to saythe worlds tilted, and theres an end to it. Once upon a bye, before your grandfathers grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time, the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little. . . . THE SKINMAN (Part 1) Once upon a bye, long before your grandfathers grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little. I have only four things to pass on to you, Big Ross told his son, but fours enough. Can you say them to me, young boy? Tim had said them to him many and manya, but never tired of it. Thy ax, thy lucky coin, thy plot, and thy place, which is as good as the place of any king or gunslinger in MidWorld. He would then pause and add, My mama, too. That makes five. Big Ross would laugh and kiss the boys brow as he lay in his bed, for this catechism usually came at the end of the day. Behind them, in the doorway, Nell waited to put her kiss on top of her husbands. Aye, Big Ross would say, we must never forget Mama, for wiout her, alls for naught. So Tim would go off to sleep, knowing he was loved, and knowing he had a place in the world, and listening to the night wind slip its strange breath over the cottage sweet with the scent of the blossiewood at the edge of the Endless Forest, and faintly sourbut still pleasantwith the smell of the ironwood trees deeper in, where only brave men dared go. Those were good years, but as we knowfrom stories and from lifethe good years never last long. One day, when Tim was eleven, Big Ross and his partner, Big Kells, drove their wagons down Main Road to where the Ironwood Trail entered the forest, as they did every morning save the seventh, when all in the village of Tree rested. On this day, however, only Big Kells came back. His skin was sooty and his jerkin charred. There was a hole in the left leg of his homespun pants. Red and blistered flesh peeped through it. He slumped on the seat of his wagon, as if too weary to sit up straight. Nell Ross came to the door of her house and cried, Where is Big Ross? Where is my husband? Big Kells shook his head slowly from side to side. Ash sifted out of his hair and onto his shoulders. He spoke only a single word, but one was enough to turn Tims knees to water. His mother began to shriek. The word was dragon. No one living today has ever seen the like of the Endless Forest, for the world has moved on. It was dark and full of dangers. The woodsmen of Tree Village knew it better than anyone in MidWorld, and even they knew nothing of what might live or grow ten wheels beyond the place where the blossie groves ended and the ironwood treesthose tall, brooding sentinelsbegan. The great depths were a mystery filled with strange plants, stranger animals, stinking weirdmarshes, andso twas saidleavings of the Old People that were often deadly. The folken of Tree feared the Endless Forest, and rightly so; Big Ross wasnt the first woodsman who went down Ironwood Trail and did not come back. Yet they loved it, too, for twas ironwood fed and clothed their families. They understood (though none would have said so aloud) that the forest was alive. And, like all living things, it needed to eat. Imagine that you were a bird flying above that great tract of wildland. From up there it might look like a giant dress of a green so dark it was almost black. Along the bottom of the dress was a hem of lighter green. These were the blossiewood groves. Just below the blossies, at the farthest edge of Northrd Barony, was the village of Tree. It was the last town in what was then a civilized country. Once Tim asked his father what civilized meant. Taxes, Big Ross said, and laughedbut not in a funny way. Most of the woodsmen went no farther than the blossie groves. Even there, sudden dangers could arise. Snakes were the worst, but there were also poisonous rodents called wervels that were the size of dogs. Many men had been lost in the blossies over the years, but on the whole, blossie was worth the risk. It was a lovely finegrained wood, golden in color and almost light enough to float on air. It made fine lake and rivercraft, but was no good for sea travel; even a moderate gale would tear apart a boat made of blossie. For sea travel ironwood was wanted, and ironwood brought a high price from Hodiak, the barony buyer who came twice a year to the Tree sawmill. It was ironwood that gave the Endless Forest its greenblack hue, and only the bravest woodsmen dared go after it, for there were dangers along the Ironwood Trailwhich barely pierced the skin of the Endless Forest, rememberthat made the snakes, wervels, and mutie bees of the blossie groves seem mild by comparison. Dragons, for instance. So it was that in his eleventh year, Tim Ross lost his da. Now there was no ax and no lucky coin hanging around Big Rosss burly neck on its fine silver chain. Soon there might be no plot in the village or place in the world, either. For in those days, when the time of Wide Earth came around, the Barony Covenanter came with it. He carried a scroll of parchment paper, and the name of every family in Tree was writ upon it, along with a number. That number was the amount of tax. If you could pay itfour or six or eight silver knucks, even a gold one for the largest of the freeholdsall was well. If you couldnt, the Barony took your plot and you were turned out on the land. There was no appeal. Tim went halfdays to the cottage of the Widow Smack, who kept school and was paid in foodusually vegetables, sometimes a bit of meat. Long ago, before the bloodsores had come on her and eaten off half her face (so the children whispered, although none had actually seen it), she had been a great lady in the barony estates far away (or so the childrens elders claimed, although none actually knew). Now she wore a veil and taught likely lads, and even a few lassies, how to read and practice the slightly questionable art known as mathmatica. She was a fearsomely smart woman who took no guff, and most days she was tireless. Her pupils usually came to love her in spite of her veil, and the horrors they imagined might lie beneath it. But on occasion she would begin to tremble all over, and cry that her poor head was splitting, and that she must lie down. On these days she would send the children home, sometimes commanding them to tell their parents that she regretted nothing, least of all her beautiful prince. Sai Smack had one of her fugues about a month after the dragon burned Big Ross to ashes, and when Tim came back to his cottage, which was called Goodview, he looked in the kitchen window and saw his mother crying with her head on the table. He dropped the slate with his mathmatica problems on it (long division, which he had feared but turned out to be only backwards multiplication) and rushed to her side. She looked up at him and tried to smile. The contrast between her upturned lips and her streaming eyes made Tim feel like crying himself. It was the look of a woman at the end of her tether. What is it, Mama? Whats wrong? Just thinking of your father. Sometimes I miss him so. Why are you home early? He began to tell her, but stopped when he saw the leather purse with the drawstring top. She had put one of her arms over it, as if to hide it from him, and when she saw him looking, she swept it off the table and into her lap. Now Tim was far from a stupid boy, so he made tea before saying anything else. When she had drunk somewith sugar, which he insisted she take, although there was little enough left in the potand had calmed, he asked her what else was wrong. I dont know what you mean. Why were you counting our money? What little there is to count, said she. Covenant Man will be here once Reaptides goneaye, while the embers of the bonfire are still hot, if I know his waysand what then? Hell want six silver knuckles this year, praps as many as eight, for taxes have gone up, so they do say, probably another of their stupid wars somewhere far from here, soldiers with their banners flying, aye, very fine. How much do we have? Four and a scrap of a fifth. We have no livestock to sell, nor a single round of ironwood since your father died. What shall we do? She began to cry again. What shall we do? Tim was as frightened as she was, but since there was no man to comfort her, he held his own tears back and put his arms around her and soothed her as best he could. If we had his ax and his coin, Id sell them to Destry, she said at last. Tim was horrified even though the ax and lucky coin were gone, burned in the same fiery blast that had taken their cheerful, goodhearted owner. You never would! Aye. To keep his plot and his place, I would. Those were the things he truly cared about, and thee, and me. Could he speak hed say Do it, Nell, and welcome, for Destry has hard coin. She sighed. But then would come old Barony Covenant Man next year . . . and the year after that . . . She put her hands over her face. Oh, Tim, we shall be turned out on the land, and theres not one thing I can think to change it. Can you? Tim would have given everything he owned (which was very little) to be able to give her an answer, but he could not. He could only ask how long it would be before the Covenant Man would appear in Tree on his tall black horse, sitting astride a saddle worth more than Big Ross had made in twentyfive years of risking his life on that narrow track known as the Ironwood Trail. She held up four fingers. This many weeks if the weather is fair. She held up four more. This many if its foul, and hes held up in the farming villages of the Middles. Eight is the most we can hope for, I think. And then . . . Something will happen before he comes, Tim said. Da always said that the forest gives to them that love it. All Ive ever seen it do is take, said Nell, and covered her face again. When he tried to put an arm around her, she shook her head. Tim trudged out to get his slate. He had never felt so sad and frightened. Something will happen to change it, he thought. Please let something happen to change it. The worst thing about wishes is that sometimes they come true. That was a rich Full Earth in Tree; even Nell knew it, although the ripe land was bitter in her eye. The following year she and Tim might be following the crops with burlap rucksacks on their backs, farther and farther from the Endless Forest, and that made summers beauty hard to look at. The forest was a terrible place, and it had taken her man, but it was the only place she had ever known. At night, when the wind blew from the north, it stole to her bed through her open window like a lover, bringing its own special smell, one both bitter and sweet, like blood and strawberries. Sometimes when she slept, she dreamed of its deep tilts and secret corridors, and of sunshine so diffuse that it glowed like old green brass. The smell of the forest when the winds out of the north brings visions, the old folken said. Nell didnt know if this was true or just chimneycorner blather, but she knew the smell of the Endless Forest was the smell of life as well as death. And she knew that Tim loved it as his father had. As she herself had (although often against her will). She had secretly feared the day when the boy would grow tall enough and strong enough to go down that dangerous trail with his da, but now she found herself sorry that day would never come. Sai Smack and her mathmatica were all very well, but Nell knew what her son truly wanted, and she hated the dragon that had stolen it from him. Probably it had been a shedragon, and only protecting her egg, but Nell hated it just the same. She hoped the plated yelloweyed bitch would swallow her own fire, as the old stories said they sometimes did, and explode. One day not so many after Tim had arrived home early and found her in tears, Big Kells came calling on Nell. Tim had gotten two weeks work helping farmer Destry with the haycutting, so she was by her onesome in her garden, weeding on her knees. When she saw her late husbands friend and partner, she got to her feet and wiped her dirty hands on the burlap apron she called her weddiken. A single look at his clean hands and carefully trimmed beard was enough to tell her why hed come. Once upon a bye, Nell Robertson, Jack Ross, and Bern Kells had been children together, and great pals. Littermates from different litters, people of the village sometimes said when they saw the three together; in those days they were inseparable. When they grew to young manhood, both boys fancied her. And while she loved them both, it was Big Ross she burned for, Big Ross shed wed and taken to bed (although whether that was the order of it no one knew, nor really cared). Big Kells had taken it as well as any man can. He stood beside Ross at the wedding, and slipped the silk around them for their walk back down the aisle when the preacher was done. When Kells took it off them at the door (although it never really comes off, so they do say), he kissed them both and wished them a lifetime of long days and pleasant nights. Although the afternoon Kells came to her in the garden was hot, he was wearing a broadcloth jacket. From the pocket he took a loosely knotted length of silk rope, as she knew he would. A woman knows. Even if shes long married, a woman knows, and Kellss heart had never changed. Willee? he asked. Ifee will, Ill sell my place to Old Destryhe wants it, for it sits next to his east fieldand keep thisun. Covenant Mans coming, Nellie, and hell have his hand out. With no man, howllee fill it? I cannot, as thee knows, said she. Then tell meshall we slip the rope? She wiped her hands nervously on her weddiken, although they were already as clean as theyd be without water from the creek. I . . . I need to think about it. Whats to think about? He took his bandannaneatly folded in his pocket instead of tied loosely, woodsmanstyle, around his neckand mopped his forehead with it. Eitheree do and we go on in Tree as we always haveIll find the boy something to work at thatll bring in a little, although hes far too wee for the woodsor ye and hell go on the land. I can share, but I cant give, much as I might like to. I have only one place to sell, kennit. She thought, Hes trying to buy me to fill the empty side of the bed that Millicent left behind. But that seemed an unworthy thought for a man shed known long before he was a man, and one who had worked for years by her beloved husbands side in the dark and dangerous trees near the end of the Ironwood Trail. One to watch and one to work, the oldtimers said. Pull together and never apart. Now that Jack Ross was gone, Bern Kells was asking her to pull with him. It was natural. Yet she hesitated. Come tomorrow at this same time, if you still have a mind, Nell told him. Ill give thee an answer then. He didnt like it; she saw he didnt like it; she saw something in his eyes that she had occasionally glimpsed when she had been a green girl sparked by two likely lads and the envy of all her friends. That look was what caused her to hesitate, even though he had appeared like an angel, offering herand Tim, of coursea way out of the terrible dilemma that had come with Big Rosss death. Perhaps he saw her seeing it, for he dropped his gaze. He studied his feet for a bit, and when he looked up again, he was smiling. It made him almost as handsome as hed been as a youth . . . but never so handsome as Jack Ross. Tomorrow, then. But no longer. They have a saying in the Westrds, my dear. Look not long at whats offered, for every precious thing has wings and may fly away. She washed at the edge of the creek, stood smelling the sweetsour aroma of the forest for a bit, then went inside and lay down upon her bed. It was unheard of for Nell Ross to be horizontal while the sun was still in the sky, but she had much to think of and much to remember from those days when two young woodsmen had vied for her kisses. Even if her blood had called toward Bern Kells (not yet Big Kells in those days, although his father was dead, slain in the woods by a vurt or some such nightmare) instead of Jack Ross, she wasnt sure she would have slipped the rope with him. Kells was goodhumored and laughing when he was sober, and as steady as sand through a glass, but he could be angry and quick with his fists when he was drunk. And he was drunk often in those days. His binges grew longer and more frequent after Ross and Nell were wed, and on many occasions he woke up in jail. Jack had borne it awhile, but after a binge where Kells had destroyed most of the furniture in the saloon before passing out, Nell told her husband something had to be done. Big Ross reluctantly agreed. He got his partner and old friend out of jailas he had many times beforebut this time he spoke to him frankly instead of just telling Kells to go jump in the creek and stay there until his head was clear. Listen to me, Bern, and with both ears. Youve been my friend since I could toddle, and my pard since we were old enough to go past the blossie and into the ironwood on our own. Youve watched my back and Ive watched yours. Theres not a man I trust more, when youre sober. But once you pour the redeye down your throat, youre no more reliable than quickmud. I cant go into the forest alone, and everything I haveeverything we both haveis at risk if I cant depend onee. Id hate to cast about for a new pard, but fair warning I have a wife and a kiddy on the way, and Ill do what I have to do. Kells continued his drinking, brawling, and bawding for a few more months, as if to spite his old friend (and his old friends new wife). Big Ross was on the verge of severing their partnership when the miracle happened. It was a small miracle, hardly more than five feet from toes to crown, and her name was Millicent Redhouse. What Bern Kells would not do for Big Ross, he did for Milly. When she died in childbirth six seasons later (and the babby soon aftereven before the flush of labor had faded from the poor womans dead cheek, the midwife confided to Nell), Ross was gloomy. Hell go back for the drink now, and gods know what will become of him. But Big Kells stayed sober, and when his business happened to bring him into the vicinity of Gittys Saloon, he crossed to the other side of the street. He said it had been Millys dying request, and to do otherwise would be an insult to her memory. Ill die before I take another drink, he said. He had kept this promise . . . but Nell sometimes felt his eyes upon her. Often, even. He had never touched her in a way that could be called intimate, or even forward, had never stolen so much as a Reaptide kiss, but she felt his eyes. Not as a man looks at a friend, or at a friends wife, but as a man looks at a woman. Tim came home an hour before sunset with hay stuck to every visible inch of his sweaty skin, but happy. Farmer Destry had paid him in scrip for the town store, a fairish sum, and his goodwife had added a sack of her sweet peppers and busturd tomatoes. Nell took the scrip and the sack, thanked him, kissed him, gave him a wellstuffed popkin, and sent him down to the spring to bathe. Ahead of him, as he stood in the cold water, ran the dreaming, mistbanded fields toward the Inners and Gilead. To his left bulked the forest, which began less than a wheel away. In there it was twilight even at noonday, his father had said. At the thought of his father, his happiness at being paid a mans wages (or almost) for a days work ran out of him like grain from a sack with a hole in it. This sorrow came often, but it always surprised him. He sat for a while on a big rock with his knees drawn up to his chest and his head cradled in his arms. To be taken by a dragon so close to the edge of the forest was unlikely and terribly unfair, but it had happened before. His father wasnt the first and wouldnt be the last. His mothers voice came floating to him over the fields, calling him to come in and have some real supper. Tim called cheerily back to her, then knelt on the rock to splash cold water on his eyes, which felt swollen, although he had shed no tears. He dressed quickly and trotted up the slope. His mother had lit the lamps, for the gloaming had come, and they cast long rectangles of light across her neat little garden. Tired but happy againfor boys turn like weathercocks, so they doTim hurried into the welcoming glow of home. When the meal was done and the few dishes ridded between them, Nell said Id talk to you mother to son, Tim . . . and a bit more. Youre old enough to work a little now, youll soon be leaving your childhood behindsooner than Id likeand you deserve a say in what happens. Is it about the Covenant Man, Mama? In a way, but I . . . I think more than that. She came close to saying I fear instead of I think, but why would she? There was a hard decision to be made, an important decision, but what was there to fear? She led the way into their sitting roomso cozy Big Ross had almost been able to touch the opposing walls when he stood in the middle with his arms outstretchedand there, as they sat before the cold hearth (for it was a warm Full Earth night), she told him all that had passed between Big Kells and herself. Tim listened with surprise and mounting unease. So, Nell said when she had finished. What does thee think? But before he could answerperhaps she saw in his face the worry she felt in her own heartshe rushed on. Hes a good man, and was more brother than mate to your da. I believe he cares for me, and cares for thee. No, thought Tim, Im just what comes in the same saddlebag. He never even looks at me. Unless I happened to be with Da, that is. Or with you. Mama, I dont know. The thought of Big Kells in the houselying next to Mama in his das placemade him feel light in his stomach, as if his supper had not set well. In truth, it no longer was sitting well. Hes quit the drink, she said. Now she seemed to be talking to herself instead of to him. Years ago. He could be wild as a youth, but your da tamed him. And Millicent, of course. Maybe, but neither of them is here anymore, Tim pointed out. And Ma, he hasnt found anyone yet to partner him on the Ironwood. He goes acutting on his own, and thats dead risky. Its early days yet, she said. Hell find someone to partner up with, for hes strong and he knows where the good stands are. Your father showed him how to find them when they were both fresh to the work, and they have fine stakeouts near the place where the trail ends. Tim knew this was so, but was less sure Kells would find someone to partner with. He thought the other woodcutters kept clear of him. They seemed to do it without knowing they were doing it, the way a seasoned woodsman would detour around a poisonthorn bush, even if he only saw it from the corner of his eye. Maybe Im only making that up, he thought. I dont know, he said again. A rope thats slipped in church cant be unslipped. Nell laughed nervously. Where in Full Earth did thee hear that? From you, Tim said. She smiled. Yar, praps thee did, for my mouths hung in the middle and runs at both ends. Well sleep on it, and see clearer in the morning. But neither of them slept much. Tim lay wondering what it would be like to have Big Kells as a steppa. Would he be good to them? Would he take Tim into the forest with him to begin learning the woodsmans life? That would be fine, he thought, but would his mother want him going into the line of work that had killed her husband? Or would she want him to stay south of the Endless Forest? To be a farmer? I like Destry well enough, he thought, but Id never in life be a farmer. Not with the Endless Forest so close, and so much of the world to see. Nell lay a wall away, with her own uncomfortable thoughts. Mostly she wondered what their lives would be like if she refused Kellss offer and they were turned out on the land, away from the only place theyd ever known. What their lives would be like if the Barony Covenanter rode up on his tall black horse and they had nothing to give him. The next day was even hotter, but Big Kells came wearing the same broadcloth coat. His face was red and shining. Nell told herself she didnt smell graf on his breath, and if she did, what of it? Twas only hard cider, and any man might take a drink or two before going to hear a womans decision. Besides, her mind was made up. Or almost. Before he could ask his question, she spoke boldly. As boldly as she was able, anyhap. My boy reminds me that a rope slipped in church cant be unslipped. Big Kells frowned, although whether it was the mention of the boy or the marriageloop that fashed him, she could not tell. Aye, and what of that? Only will you be good to Tim and me? Aye, good as I can be. His frown deepened. She couldnt tell if it was anger or puzzlement. She hoped for puzzlement. Men who could cut and chop and dare beasts in the deep wood often found themselves lost in affairs like this, she knew, and at the thought of Big Kells lost, her heart opened to him. Set your word on it? she asked. The frown eased. White flashed in his neatly trimmed black beard as he smiled. Aye, by watch and by warrant. Then I say yes. And so they were wed. That is where many stories end; its where this onesad to sayreally begins. There was graf at the wedding reception, and for a man who no longer drank spirits, Big Kells tossed a goodly amount down his gullet. Tim viewed this with unease, but his mother appeared not to notice. |
Another thing that made Tim uneasy was how few of the other woodsmen showed up, although it was Ethday. If he had been a girl instead of a boy, he might have noticed something else. Several of the women whom Nell counted among her friends were looking at her with expressions of guarded pity. That night, long after midnight, he was awakened by a thump and a cry that might have been part of a dream, but it seemed to come through the wall from the room his mother now shared (true, but not yet possible to believe) with Big Kells. Tim lay listening, and had almost dropped off to sleep again when he heard quiet weeping. This was followed by the voice of his new steppa, low and gruff Shut it, cant you? You aint a bit hurt, theres no blood, and I have to be up with the birdies. The sounds of crying stopped. Tim listened, but there was no more talk. Shortly after Big Kellss snores began, he fell asleep. The next morning, while she was at the stove frying eggs, Tim saw a bruise on his mothers arm above the inside of her elbow. Its nothing, Nell said when she saw him looking. I had to get up in the night to do the necessary, and bumped it on the bedpost. Ill have to get used to finding my way in the dark again, now that Im not alone. Tim thought, Yarthats what Im afraid of. When the second Ethday of his married life came round, Big Kells took Tim with him to the house that now belonged to Baldy Anderson, Trees other big farmer. They went in Kellss woodwagon. The mules stepped lightly with no rounds or strakes of ironwood to haul; today there were only a few little piles of sawdust in the back of the wagon. And that lingering sweetsour smell, of course, the smell of the deep woods. Kellss old place looked sad and abandoned with its shutters closed and the tall, unscythed grass growing up to the splintery porch slats. Once I get my gunna outn it, let Baldy take it all for kindling, do it please im, Kells grunted. Fine wi me. As it turned out, there were only two things he wanted from the housea dirty old footrest and a large leather trunk with straps and a brass lock. This was in the bedroom, and Kells stroked it as if it were a pet. Cant leave this, he said. Never this. Twas my fathers. Tim helped him get it outside, but Kells had to do most of the work. The trunk was very heavy. When it was in the wagonbed, Big Kells leaned over with his hands on the knees of his newly (and neatly) mended trousers. At last, when the purple patches began to fade from his cheeks, he stroked the trunk again, and with a gentleness Tim had as yet not seen applied to his mother. All I own stowed in one trunk. As for the house, did Baldy pay the price I should have had? He looked at Tim challengingly, as if expecting an argument on this subject. I dont know, Tim said cautiously. Folk say sai Andersons close. Kells laughed harshly. Close? Close? Tight as a virgins cootchie is what he is. Nar, nar, I got crumbs instead of a slice, for he knew I couldnt afford to wait. Help me tie up this tailboard, boy, and be not sluggardly. Tim was not sluggardly. He had his side of the tailboard roped tight before Kells had finished tying his in a sloppy ollieknot that would have made his father laugh. When he was finally done, Big Kells gave his trunk another of those queerly affectionate caresses. All in here now, all I have. Baldy knew I had to have silver before Wide Earth, didnt he? Old You Know Who is coming, and hell have his hand out. He spat between his old scuffed boots. This is all your mas fault. Mas fault? Why? Didnt you want to marry her? Watch your mouth, boy. Kells looked down, seemed surprised to see a fist where his hand had been, and opened his fingers. Youre too young to understand. When youre older, youll find out how women can get the good of a man. Lets go on back. Halfway to the driving seat, he stopped and looked across the stowed trunk at the boy. I love yer ma, and thats enough for you to be going on with. And as the mules trotted up the village high street, Big Kells sighed and added, I loved yer da, too, and how I miss im. Taint the same wiout him beside me in the woods, or seein Misty and Bitsy up the trail ahead of me. At this Tims heart opened a little to the big, slumpshouldered man with the reins in his handsin spite of himself, reallybut before the feeling had any chance to grow, Big Kells spoke again. Yeve had enough of books and numbers and that weirdy Smack woman. She with her veils and shakeshow she manages to wipe her arse after she shits is more than Ill ever know. Tims heart seemed to clap shut in his chest. He loved learning things, and he loved the Widow Smackveil, shakes, and all. It dismayed him to hear her spoken of with such crude cruelty. What would I do, then? Go into the woods with you? He could see himself on Das wagon, behind Misty and Bitsy. That would not be so bad. No, not so bad at all. Kells barked a laugh. You? In the woods? And not yet twelve? Ill be twelve next m You wont be big enough to lumber on the Ironwood Trail at twice that age, foree take after yer mas side of things, and will be Sma Ross all yer life. That bark of laughter again. Tim felt his face grow hot at the sound of it. No, lad, Ive spoke a place foree at the sawmill. You aint too sma to stack boards. Yell start after harvests done, and before first snow. What does Mama say? Tim tried to keep the dismay out of his voice and failed. She dont get aye, no, or maybe in the matter. Im her husband, and that makes me the one to decide. He snapped the reins across the backs of the plodding mules. Hup! Tim went down to Tree Sawmill three days later, with one of the Destry boysStraw Willem, so called for his nearly colorless hair. Both were hired on to stack, but they would not be needed for yet awhile, and only parttime, at least to begin with. Tim had brought his fathers mules, which needed the exercise, and the boys rode back side by side. Thought you said your new steppoppa didnt drink, Willem said, as they passed Gittyswhich at midday was shuttered tight, its barrelhouse piano silent. He doesnt, Tim said, but he remembered the wedding reception. Do you say so? I guess the fella my big brother seed rollin out of yonder redeye last night mustve been some other orphingboys steppa, because Randy said he was as sloshed as a shindybug and heavin up over the hitchinrail. Having said this, Willem snapped his suspenders, as he always did when he felt hed gotten off a good one. Should have let you walk back to town, you stupid git, Tim thought. That night, his mother woke him again. Tim sat bolt upright in bed and swung his feet out onto the floor, then froze. Kellss voice was soft, but the wall between the two rooms was thin. Shut it, woman. If you wake the boy and get him in here, Ill give you double. Her crying ceased. It was a slip, is alla mistake. I went in with Mellon just to have a gingerbeer and hear about his new stake, and someone put a glass of jackaroe in front of me. It was down my throat before I knew what I was drinking, and then I was off. Twont happen again. Ye have my word on it. Tim lay back down again, hoping that was true. He looked up at a ceiling he could not see, and listened to an owl, and waited for either sleep or the first light of morning. It seemed to him that if the wrong man stepped into the marriageloop with a woman, it was a noose instead of a ring. He prayed that wasnt the case here. He already knew he couldnt like his mothers new husband, let alone love him, but perhaps his mother could do both. Women were different. They had larger hearts. Tim was still thinking these long thoughts as dawn tinted the sky and he finally fell asleep. That day there were bruises on both of his mothers arms. The bedpost in the room she now shared with Big Kells had grown very lively, it seemed. Full Earth gave way to Wide Earth, as it always must. Tim and Straw Willem went to work stacking at the sawmill, but only three days a week. The foreman, a decent sai named Rupert Venn, told them they might get more time if that seasons snowfall was light and the winter haul was goodmeaning the ironwood rounds that cutters such as Kells brought back from the forest. Nells bruises faded and her smile came back. Tim thought it a more cautious smile than before, but it was better than no smile at all. Kells hitched his mules and went down the Ironwood Trail, and although the stakes he and Big Ross had claimed were good ones, he still had no one to partner him. He consequently brought back less haul, but ironwood was ironwood, and ironwood always sold for a good price, one paid in shards of silver rather than scrip. Sometimes Tim wonderedusually as he was wheeling boards into one of the sawmills long covered shedsif life might be better were his new steppoppa to fall afoul a snake or a wervel. Perhaps even a vurt, those nasty flying things sometimes known as bulletbirds. One such had done for Bern Kellss father, boring a hole right through him with its stony beak. Tim pushed these thoughts away with horror, amazed to find that some room in his heartsome black roomcould hold such things. His father, Tim was sure, would be ashamed. Perhaps was ashamed, for some said that those in the clearing at the end of the path knew all the secrets the living kept from each other. At least he no longer smelled graf on his stepfathers breath, and there were no more storiesfrom Straw Willem or anyone elseof Big Kells reeling out of the redeye when Old Gitty shut and locked the doors. He promised and hes keeping his promise, Tim thought. And the bedpost has stopped moving around in Mamas room, because she doesnt have those bruises. Lifes begun to come right. Thats the thing to remember. When he got home from the sawmill on the days he had work, his mother would have supper on the stove. Big Kells would come in later, first stopping to wash the sawdust from his hands, arms, and neck at the spring between the house and the barn, then gobbling his own supper. He ate prodigious amounts, calling for seconds and thirds that Nell brought promptly. She didnt speak when she did this; if she did, her new husband would only growl a response. Afterward, he would go into the back hall, sit on his trunk, and smoke. Sometimes Tim would look up from his slate, where he was working the mathmatica problems the Widow Smack still gave him, and see Kells staring at him through his pipesmoke. There was something disconcerting about that gaze, and Tim began to take his slate outside, even though it was growing chilly in Tree, and dark came earlier each day. Once his mother came out, sat beside him on the porch step, and put her arm around his shoulders. Youll be back to school with sai Smack next year, Tim. Its a promise. Ill bring him round. Tim smiled at her and said thankee, but he knew better. Next year hed still be at the sawmill, only by then hed be big enough to carry boards as well as stack them, and there would be less time to do problems, because hed have work five days a week instead of three. Mayhap even six. The year after that, hed be planing as well as carrying, then using the swingsaw like a man. In a few more years hed be a man, coming home too tired to think about reading the Widow Smacks books even if she still wanted to lend them out, the orderly ways of the mathmatica fading in his mind. That grown Tim Ross might want no more than to fall into bed after meat and bread. He would begin to smoke a pipe and perhaps get a taste for graf or beer. He would watch his mothers smile grow pale; he would watch her eyes lose their sparkle. And for these things he would have Bern Kells to thank. Reaping was gone by; Huntress Moon grew pale, waxed again, and pulled her bow; the first gales of Wide Earth came howling in from the west. And just when it seemed he might not come after all, the Barony Covenanter blew into the village of Tree on one of those cold winds, astride his tall black horse and as thin as Tom Scrawny Death. His heavy black cloak flapped around him like a batwing. Beneath his wide hat (as black as his cloak), the pale lamp of his face turned ceaselessly from side to side, marking a new fence here, a cow or three added to a herd there. The villagers would grumble but pay, and if they couldnt pay, their land would be taken in the name of Gilead. Perhaps even then, in those olden days, some were whispering it wasnt fair, the taxes were too much, that Arthur Eld was long dead (if he had ever existed at all), and the Covenant had been paid a dozen times over, in blood as well as silver. Perhaps some of them were already waiting for a Good Man to appear, and make them strong enough to say No more, enoughs enough, the world has moved on. Perhaps, but not that year, and not for many and manya to come. Late in the afternoon, while the swagbellied clouds tumbled across the sky and the yellow cornstalks clattered in Nells gardenlike teeth in a loose jaw, sai Covenanter nudged his tall black horse between gateposts Big Ross had set up himself (with Tim looking on and helping when asked). The horse paced slowly and solemnly up to the front steps. There it halted, nodding and blowing. Big Kells stood on the porch and still had to look up to see the visitors pallid face. Kells held his hat crushed to his breast. His thinning black hair (now showing the first streaks of gray, for he was nearing forty and would soon be old) flew around his head. Behind him in the doorway stood Nell and Tim. She had an arm around her boys shoulders and was clutching him tightly, as if afraid (maybe twas a mothers intuition) that the Covenant Man might steal him away. For a moment there was silence save for the flapping of the unwelcome visitors cloak, and the wind, which sang an eerie tune beneath the eaves. Then the Barony Covenanter bent forward, regarding Kells with wide dark eyes that did not seem to blink. His lips, Tim saw, were as red as a womans when she paints them with fresh madder. From somewhere inside his cloak he produced not a book of slates but a roll of real parchment paper, and pulled it down so twas long. He studied it, made it short again, and replaced it in whatever inner pocket it had come from. Then he returned his gaze to Big Kells, who flinched and looked at his feet. Kells, isnt it? He had a rough, husky voice that made Tims skin pucker into hard points of gooseflesh. He had seen the Covenant Man before, but only from a distance; his da had made shift to keep Tim away from the house when the baronys taxman came calling on his annual rounds. Now Tim understood why. He thought he would have bad dreams tonight. Kells, aye. His steppoppas voice was shakily cheerful. He managed to raise his eyes again. Welcome, sai. Long days and pleasant Yar, all that, all that, the Covenant Man said with a dismissive wave of one hand. His dark eyes were now looking over Kellss shoulder. And . . . Ross, isnt it? Now two instead of three, they tell me, Big Ross having fallen to unfortunate happenstance. His voice was low, little more than a monotone. Like listening to a deaf man try to sing a lullabye, Tim thought. Just so, Big Kells said. He swallowed hard enough for Tim to hear the gulping sound, then began to babble. He n me were in the forest, ye ken, in one of our little stakes off the Ironwood Pathwe have four or five, all marked proper wi our names, so they are, and I havent changed em, because in my mind hes still my partner and always will beand we got separated a bit. Then I heard a hissin. You know that sound when you hear it, theres no sound on earth like the hiss of a bitch dragon drawrin in breath before she Hush, the Covenant Man said. When I want to hear a story, I like it to begin with Once upon a bye. Kells began to say something elseperhaps only to cry pardonand thought better of it. The Covenant Man leaned an arm on the horn of his saddle and stared at him. I understand you sold your house to Rupert Anderson, sai Kells. Yar, and he cozened me, but I The visitor overrode him. The tax is nine knuckles of silver or one of rhodite, which I know you dont have in these parts, but Im bound to tell you, as its in the original Covenant. One knuck for the transaction, and eight for the house where you now sit your ass at sundown and no doubt hide your tallywhacker after moonrise. Nine? Big Kells gasped. Nine? Thats Its what? the Covenant Man said in his rough, crooning voice. Be careful how you answer, Bern Kells, son of Mathias, grandson of Limping Peter. Be ever so careful, because, although your neck is thick, I believe it would stretch thin. Aye, so I do. Big Kells turned pale . . . although not as pale as the Barony Covenanter. Its very fair. Thats all I meant to say. Ill get it. He went into the house and came back with a deerskin purse. It was Big Rosss moneysack, the one over which Tims mother had been crying on a day early on in Full Earth. A day when life had seemed fairer, even though Big Ross was dead. Kells handed the sack to Nell and let her count the precious knuckles of silver into his cupped hands. All during this, the visitor sat silent on his tall black horse, but when Big Kells made to come down the steps and hand him the taxalmost all they had, even with Tims little bit of wages added into the common potthe Covenant Man shook his head. Keep your place. Id have the boy bring it to me, for hes fair, and in his countenance I see his fathers face. Aye, I see it very well. Tim took the double handful of knucksso heavy!from Big Kells, barely hearing the whisper in his ear Have a care and dont drop em, ye gormless boy. Tim walked down the porch steps like a boy in a dream. He held up his cupped hands, and before he knew what was happening, the Covenant Man had seized him by the wrists and hauled him up onto his horse. Tim saw that bow and pommel were decorated with a cascade of silver runes moons and stars and comets and cups pouring cold fire. At the same time, he realized his double handful of knucks was gone. The Covenant Man had taken them, although Tim couldnt remember exactly when it had happened. Nell screamed and ran forward. Catch her and hold her! the Covenant Man thundered, so close by Tims ear that he was near deafened on that side. Kells grabbed his wife by the shoulders and jerked her roughly backwards. She tripped and tumbled to the porch boards, long skirts flying up around her ankles. Mama! Tim shouted. He tried to jump from the saddle, but the Covenant Man restrained him easily. He smelled of campfire meat and old cold sweat. Sit easy, young Tim Ross, shes not hurt a mite. See how spry she rises. Then, to Nellwho had indeed regained her feet Be not fashed, sai, Id only have a word with him. Would I harm a future taxpayer of the realm? If you harm him, Ill kill you, you devil, said she. Kells raised a fist to her. Shut yer stupid mouth, woman! Nell did not shrink from the fist. She had eyes only for Tim, sitting on the high black horse in front of the Covenant Man, whose arms were banded across her sons chest. The Covenant Man smiled down at the two on the porch, one with his fist still upraised to strike, the other with tears coursing down her cheeks. Nell and Kells! he proclaimed. The happy couple! He kneed his mount in a circle and slowwalked it as far as the gate, his arms still firmly around Tims chest, his rank breath puffing against Tims cheek. At the gate he squeezed his knees again and the horse halted. In Tims earwhich was still ringinghe whispered How does thee like thy new steppa, young Tim? Speak the truth, but speak it low. This is our palaver, and they have no part in it. Tim didnt want to turn, didnt want the Covenant Mans pallid face any closer than it already was, but he had a secret that had been poisoning him. So he did turn, and in the taxmans ear he whispered, When hes in drink, he beats my ma. Does he, now? Ah, well, does that surprise me? For did not his da beat his own ma? And what we learn as children sets as a habit, so it does. A gloved hand threw one wing of the heavy black cloak over them like a blanket, and Tim felt the other gloved hand slither something small and hard into his pants pocket. A gift for you, young Tim. Its a key. Does thee know what makes it special? Tim shook his head. Tis a magic key. It will open anything, but only a single time. After that, tis as useless as dirt, so be careful how you use it! He laughed as if this were the funniest joke hed ever heard. His breath made Tims stomach churn. I . . . He swallowed. I have nothing to open. Theres no locks in Tree, cept at the redeye and the jail. Oh, I think thee knows of another. Does thee not? Tim looked into the Covenant Mans blackly merry eyes and said nothing. That worthy nodded, however, as if he had. What are you telling my son? Nell screamed from the porch. Pour not poison in his ears, devil! Pay her no mind, young Tim, shell know soon enough. Shell know much but see little. He snickered. His teeth were very large and very white. A riddle for you! Can you solve it? No? Never mind, the answer will come in time. Sometimes he opens it, Tim said, speaking in the slow voice of one who talks in his sleep. He takes out his honing bar. For the blade of his ax. But then he locks it again. At night he sits on it to smoke, like it was a chair. The Covenant Man didnt ask what it was. And does he touch it each time he passes by, young Tim? As a man would touch a favorite old dog? He did, of course, but Tim didnt say so. He didnt need to say so. He felt there wasnt a secret he could keep from the mind ticking away behind that long white face. Not one. Hes playing with me, Tim thought. Im just a bit of amusement on a dreary day in a dreary town hell soon leave behind. But he breaks his toys. You only have to look at his smile to know that. Ill camp a wheel or two down the Ironwood Trail the next night or two, the Covenant Man said in his rusty, tuneless voice. Its been a long ride, and Im weary of all the quack I have to listen to. There are vurts and wervels and snakes in the forest, but they dont quack. Youre never weary, Tim thought. Not you. Come and see me if you care to. No snicker this time; this time he tittered like a naughty girl. And if you dare to, of course. But come at night, for this jillys son likes to sleep in the day when he gets the chance. Or stay here if youre timid. Its naught to me. Hup! This was to the horse, which paced slowly back to the porch steps, where Nell stood wringing her hands and Big Kells stood glowering beside her. The Covenant Mans thin strong fingers closed over Tims wrists againlike handcuffsand lifted him. A moment later he was on the ground, staring up at the white face and smiling red lips. The key burned in the depths of his pocket. From above the house came a peal of thunder, and it began to rain. The Barony thanks you, the Covenant Man said, touching one gloved finger to the side of his widebrimmed hat. Then he wheeled his black horse around and was gone into the rain. The last thing Tim saw was passing odd when the heavy black cloak belled out, he spied a large metal object tied to the top of the Covenant Mans gunna. It looked like a washbasin. Big Kells came striding down the steps, seized Tim by the shoulders, and commenced shaking him. Rain matted Kellss thinning hair to the sides of his face and streamed from his beard. Black when he had slipped into the silk rope with Nell, that beard was now heavily streaked with gray. What did he tellee? Was it about me? What lies didee speak? Tell! Tim could tell him nothing. His head snapped back and forth hard enough to make his teeth clack together. Nell rushed down the steps. Stop it! Let him alone! You promised youd never Get out of what dont concern you, woman, he said, and struck her with the side of his fist. Tims mama fell into the mud, where the teeming rain was now filling the tracks left by the Covenant Mans horse. You bastard! Tim screamed. You cant hit my mama, you cant ever! He felt no immediate pain when Kells dealt him a similar sidehand blow, but white light sheared across his vision. When it lifted, he found himself lying in the mud next to his mother. He was dazed, his ears were ringing, and still the key burned in his pocket like a live coal. Nis take both of you, Kells said, and strode away into the rain. Beyond the gate he turned right, in the direction of Trees little length of high street. Headed for Gittys, Tim had no doubt. He had stayed away from drink all of that Wide Earthas far as Tim knew, anywaybut he would not stay away from it this night. Tim saw from his mothers sorrowful facewet with rain, her hair hanging limp against her reddening mucksplattered cheekthat she knew it, too. Tim put his arm around her waist, she put hers about his shoulders. They made their way slowly up the steps and into the house. She didnt so much sit in her chair at the kitchen table as collapse into it. Tim poured water from the jug into the basin, wetted a cloth, and put it gently on the side of her face, which had begun to swell. She held it there for a bit, then extended it wordlessly to him. To please her, he took it and put it on his own face. It was cool and good against the throbbing heat. This is a pretty business, wouldnt you say? she asked, with an attempt at brightness. Woman beaten, boy slugged, new husband off tboozer. Tim had no idea what to say to this, so said nothing. Nell lowered her head to the heel of her hand and stared at the table. Ive made such a mess of things. I was frightened and at my wits end, but thats no excuse. We would have been better on the land, I think. Turned off the place? Away from the plot? Wasnt it enough that his das ax and lucky coin were gone? She was right about one thing, though; it was a mess. But I have a key, Tim thought, and his fingers stole down to his pants to feel the shape of it. Where has he gone? Nell asked, and Tim knew it wasnt Bern Kells she was speaking of. A wheel or two down the Ironwood. Where hell wait for me. I dont know, Mama. So far as he could remember, it was the first time he had ever lied to her. But we know where Berns gone, dont we? She laughed, then winced because it hurt her face. He promised Milly Redhouse he was done with the drink, and he promised me, but hes weak. Or . . . is it me? Did I drive him to it, do you think? No, Mama. But Tim wondered if it might not be true. Not in the way she meantby being a nag, or keeping a dirty house, or refusing him what men and women did in bed after darkbut in some other way. There was a mystery here, and he wondered if the key in his pocket might solve it. To keep from touching it again, he got up and went to the pantry. What would you like to eat? Eggs? Ill scramble them, if you do. She smiled wanly. Thankee, son, but Im not hungry. I think Ill lie down. She rose a bit shakily. Tim helped her into the bedroom. There he pretended to look at interesting things out the window while she took off her mudstained day dress and put on her nightgown. When Tim turned around again, she was under the covers. She patted the place beside her, as she had sometimes done when he was sma. In those days his da might have been in bed beside her, wearing his long woodsmans underwear and smoking one of his rollups. I cant turn him out, she said. I would if I could, but now that the ropes slipped, the place is more his than mine. The law can be cruel to a woman. I never had cause to think about that before, but now . . . now . . . Her eyes had gone glassy and distant. She would sleep soon, and that was probably a good thing. He kissed her unbruised cheek and made to get up, but she stayed him. What did the Covenant Man say to thee? Asked me how I liked my new stepda. I cant remember how I answered him. I was scared. When he covered thee with his cloak, I was, too. I thought he meant to ride away with thee, like the Red King in the old story. She closed her eyes, then opened them again, very slowly. There was something in them now that could have been horror. I remember him coming to my das when I was but a wee girl not long out of cloutsthe black horse, the black gloves and cape, the saddle with the silver siguls on it. His white face gave me nightmaresits so long. And do you know what, Tim? He shook his head slowly from side to side. He even carries the same silver basin roped on behind, for I saw it then, too. Thats twenty years agoneaye, twenty and a doubletondeucy morebut he looks the same. He hasnt aged a day. Her eyes closed again. This time they didnt reopen, and Tim stole from the room. When he was sure his mother was asleep, Tim went down the little bit of back hall to where Big Kellss trunk, a squarish shape under an old remnant of blanket, stood just outside the mudroom. When hed told the Covenant Man he knew of only two locks in Tree, the Covenant Man had replied, Oh, I think thee knows of another. He stripped off the blanket and looked at his stepdas trunk. The trunk he sometimes caressed like a wellloved pet and often sat upon at night, puffing at his pipe with the back door cracked open to let out the smoke. Tim hurried back to the front of the housein his stocking feet, so as not to risk waking his motherand peered out the front window. The yard was empty, and there was no sign of Big Kells on the rainy road. Tim had expected nothing else. Kells would be at Gittys by now, getting through as much of what he had left as he could before falling down unconscious. I hope somebody beats him up and gives him a taste of his own medicine. Id do it myself, were I big enough. He went back to the trunk, padding noiselessly in his stockings, knelt in front of it, and took the key from his pocket. It was a tiny silver thing the size of half a knuck, and strangely warm in his fingers, as if it were alive. The keyhole in the brass facing on the front of the trunk was much bigger. The key he gave me will never work in that, Tim thought. Then he remembered the Covenant Man saying Tis a magic key. It will open anything, but only a single time. Tim put the key in the lock, where it clicked smoothly home, as if it had been meant for just that place all along. When he applied pressure, it turned smoothly, but the warmth left it as soon as it did. Now there was nothing between his fingers but cold dead metal. After that, tis as useless as dirt, Tim whispered, then looked around, half convinced hed see Big Kells standing there with a scowl on his face and his hands rolled into fists. There was no one, so he unbuckled the straps and raised the lid. He cringed at the screak of the hinges and looked over his shoulder again. His heart was beating hard, and although that rainy evening was chilly, he could feel a dew of sweat on his forehead. There were shirts and pants on top, stuffed in any whichway, most of them ragged. Tim thought (with a bitter resentment that was entirely new to him), Its my Mama wholl wash them and mend them and fold them neat when he tells her to. And will he thank her with a blow to the arm or a punch to her neck or face? He pulled the clothes out, and beneath them found what made the trunk heavy. Kellss father had been a carpenter, and here were his tools. Tim didnt need a grownup to tell him they were valuable, for they were of made metal. He could have sold these to pay the tax, he never uses them nor even knows how, I warrant. He could have sold them to someone who doesHaggerty the Nail, for instanceand paid the tax with a good sum left over. There was a word for that sort of behavior, and thanks to the Widow Smacks teaching, Tim knew it. The word was miser. He tried to lift the toolbox out, and at first couldnt. It was too heavy for him. Tim laid the hammers and screwdrivers and honing bar aside on the clothes. Then he could manage. Beneath were five axheads that would have made Big Ross slap his forehead in disgusted amazement. |
The precious steel was speckled with rust, and Tim didnt have to test with his thumb to see that the blades were dull. Nells new husband occasionally honed his current ax, but hadnt bothered with these spare heads for a long time. By the time he needed them, they would probably be useless. Tucked into one corner of the trunk were a small deerskin bag and an object wrapped in fine chamois cloth. Tim took this latter up, unwrapped it, and beheld the likeness of a woman with a sweetly smiling face. Masses of dark hair tumbled over her shoulders. Tim didnt remember Millicent Kellshe would have been no more than three or four when she passed into the clearing where we must all eventually gatherbut he knew it was she. He rewrapped it, replaced it, and picked up the little bag. From the feel there was only a single object inside, small but quite heavy. Tim pulled the drawstring with his fingers and tipped the bag. More thunder boomed, Tim jerked with surprise, and the object which had been hidden at the very bottom of Kellss trunk fell out into Tims hand. It was his fathers lucky coin. Tim put everything but his fathers property back into the trunk, loading the toolbox in, returning the tools hed removed to lighten it, and then piling in the clothes. He refastened the straps. All well enough, but when he tried the silver key, it turned without engaging the tumblers. Useless as dirt. Tim gave up and covered the trunk with the old piece of blanket again, fussing with it until it looked more or less as it had. It might serve. Hed often seen his new steppa pat the trunk and sit on the trunk, but only infrequently did he open the trunk, and then just to get his honing bar. Tims burglary might go undiscovered for a little while, but he knew better than to believe it would go undiscovered forever. There would come a daymaybe not until next month, but more likely next week (or even tomorrow!), when Big Kells would decide to get his bar, or remember that he had more clothes than the ones hed brought in his kickbag. He would discover the trunk was unlocked, hed dive for the deerskin bag, and find the coin it had contained was gone. And then? Then his new wife and new stepson would take a beating. Probably a fearsome one. Tim was afraid of that, but as he stared at the familiar reddishgold coin on its length of silver chain, he was also truly angry for the first time in his life. It was not a boys impotent fury but a mans rage. He had asked Old Destry about dragons, and what they might do to a fellow. Did it hurt? Would there be . . . well . . . parts left? The farmer had seen Tims distress and put a kindly arm around his shoulders. Nar to both, son. Dragons fire is the hottest fire there isas hot as the liquid rock that sometimes drools from cracks in the earth far south of here. So all the stories say. A man caught in dragonblast is burned to finest ash in but a secondclothes, boots, buckle and all. So if youre asking did yer da suffer, set yer mind at rest. Twas over for him in an instant. Clothes, boots, buckle and all. But Das lucky coin wasnt even smudged, and every link of the silver chain was intact. Yet he didnt take it off even to sleep. So what had happened to Big Jack Ross? And why was the coin in Kellss trunk? Tim had a terrible idea, and he thought he knew someone who could tell him if the terrible idea was right. If Tim were brave enough, that was. Come at night, for this jillys son likes to sleep in the day when he gets the chance. It was night now, or almost. His mother was still sleeping. By her hand Tim left his slate. On it he had written I WILL BE BACK. DONT WORRY ABOUT ME. Of course, no boy who ever lived can comprehend how useless such a command must be when addressed to a mother. Tim wanted nothing to do with either of Kellss mules, for they were illtempered. The two his father had raised from guffins were just the opposite. Misty and Bitsy were mollies, unsterilized females theoretically capable of bearing offspring, but Ross had kept them so for sweetness of temper rather than for breeding. Perish the thought, he had told Tim when Tim was old enough to ask about such things. Animals like Misty and Bitsy werent meant to breed, and almost never give birth to truethreaded offspring when they do. Tim chose Bitsy, who had ever been his favorite, leading her down the lane by her bridle and then mounting her bareback. His feet, which had ended halfway down the mules sides when his da had first lifted him onto her back, now came almost to the ground. At first Bitsy plodded with her ears lopped dispiritedly down, but when the thunder faded and the rain slackened to a drizzle, she perked up. She wasnt used to being out at night, but she and Misty had been cooped up all too much since Big Ross had died, and she seemed eager enough to Maybe hes not dead. This thought burst into Tims mind like a skyrocket and for a moment dazzled him with hope. Maybe Big Ross was still alive and wandering somewhere in the Endless Forest Yar, and maybe the moons made of green cheese, like Mama used to tell me when I was wee. Dead. His heart knew it, just as he was sure his heart would have known if Big Ross were still alive. Mamas heart would have known, too. She would have known and never married that . . . that . . . That bastard. Bitsys ears pricked. They had passed the Widow Smacks house now, which was at the end of the high street, and the woodland scents were stronger the light and spicy aroma of blossiewood and, overlaying that, the stronger, graver smell of ironwood. For a boy to go up the trail alone, with not so much as an ax to defend himself with, was madness. Tim knew it and went on just the same. That hitting bastard. This time he spoke in a voice so low it was almost a growl. Bitsy knew the way, and didnt hesitate when Tree Road narrowed at the edge of the blossies. Nor did she when it narrowed again at the edge of the ironwood. But when Tim understood he was truly in the Endless Forest, he halted her long enough to rummage in his pack and bring out a gaslight hed filched from the barn. The little tin bulb at the base was heavy with fuel, and he thought it would give at least an hours light. Two, if he used it sparingly. He popped a sulphur match with a thumbnail (a trick his da had taught him), turned the knob where the bulb met the gaslights long, narrow neck, and stuck the match through the little slot known as the marygate. The lamp bloomed with a bluewhite glow. Tim raised it and gasped. He had been this far up the Ironwood several times with his father, but never at night, and what he saw was awesome enough to make him consider going back. This close to civilization the best irons had been cut to stumps, but the ones that remained towered high above the boy on his little mule. Tall and straight and as solemn as Manni elders at a funeral (Tim had seen a picture of this in one of the Widows books), they rose far beyond the light thrown by his puny lamp. They were completely smooth for the first forty feet or so. Above that, the branches leaped skyward like upraised arms, tangling the narrow trail with a cobweb of shadows. Because they were little more than thick black stakes at ground level, it would be possible to walk among them. Of course it would also be possible to cut your throat with a sharp stone. Anyone foolish enough to wander off the Ironwood Trailor go beyond itwould quickly be lost in a maze, where he might well starve. If he were not eaten first, that was. As if to underline this idea, somewhere in the darkness a creature that sounded big uttered a hoarse chuckling sound. Tim asked himself what he was doing here when he had a warm bed with clean sheets in the cottage where he had grown up. Then he touched his fathers lucky coin (now hanging around his own neck), and his resolve hardened. Bitsy was looking around as if to ask, Well? Which way? Forward or back? Youre the boss, you know. Tim wasnt sure he had the courage to extinguish the gaslight until it was done and he was in darkness again. Although he could no longer see the ironwoods, he could feel them crowding in. Still forward. He squeezed Bitsys flanks with his knees, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and Bitsy got moving again. The smoothness of her gait told him she was keeping to the righthand wheelrut. The placidity of it told him she did not sense danger. At least not yet, and honestly, what did a mule know of danger? From that he was supposed to protect her. He was, after all, the boss. Oh, Bitsy, he thought. If thee only knew. How far had he come? How far did he still have to go? How far would he go before he gave this madness up? He was the only thing in the world his mother had left to love and depend on, so how far? It felt like hed ridden ten wheels or more since leaving the fragrant aroma of the blossies behind, but he knew better. As he knew that the rustling he heard was the Wide Earth wind in the high branches, and not some nameless beast padding along behind him with its jaws opening and closing in anticipation of a small evening snack. He knew this very well, so why did that wind sound so much like breathing? Ill count to a hundred and then turn Bitsy around, he told himself, but when he reached a hundred and there was still nothing in the pitch black save for him and his brave little molliemule (plus whatever beast treads behind us, closer and closer, his traitorous mind insisted on adding), he decided he would go on to two hundred. When he reached one hundred and eightyseven, he heard a branch snap. He lit the gaslight and whirled around, holding it high. The grim shadows seemed first to rear up, then leap forward to clutch him. And did something retreat from the light? Did he see the glitter of a red eye? Surely not, but Tim hissed air through his teeth, turned the knob to shut off the gas, and clucked his tongue. He had to do it twice. Bitsy, formerly placid, now seemed uneasy about going forward. But, good and obedient thing that she was, she gave in to his command and once more began walking. Tim resumed his count, and reaching two hundred didnt take long. Ill count back down to ought, and if I see no sign of him, I really will go back. He had reached nineteen in this reverse count when he saw an orangered flicker ahead and to his left. It was a campfire, and Tim was in no doubt of who had built it. The beast stalking me was never behind, he thought. Its ahead. Yon flicker may be a campfire, but its also the eye I saw. The red eye. I should go back while theres still time. Then he touched the lucky coin lying against his breast and pushed on. He lit his lamp again and lifted it. There were many short sidetrails, called stubs, shooting off from either side of the main way. Just ahead, nailed to a humble birch, was a wooden board marking one of these. Daubed on it in black paint was COSINGTONMARCHLY. Tim knew these men. Peter Cosington (who had suffered his own ill luck that year) and Ernest Marchly were cutters who had come to supper at the Ross cottage on many occasions, and the Ross family had many times eaten at one or the other of theirs. Fine fellows, but they wont go deep, Big Ross told his son after one of these meals. Theres plenty of good ironwood left in close to the blossie, but the true treasurethe densest, purest woodis in deep, close to where the trail ends at the edge of the Fagonard. So perhaps I only did come a wheel or two, but the dark changes everything. He turned Bitsy up the CosingtonMarchly stub, and less than a minute later entered a clearing where the Covenant Man sat on a log before a cheery campfire. Why, heres young Tim, he said. Youve got balls, even if there wont be hair on em for another year or three. Come, sit, have some stew. Tim wasnt entirely sure he wanted to share whatever this strange fellow ate for his supper, but hed had none of his own, and the smell wafting from the pot hung over the fire was savory. Reading the cast of his young visitors thoughts with an accuracy that was unsettling, the Covenant Man said Itll not poison thee, young Tim. Im sure not, Tim said . . . but now that poison had been mentioned, he wasnt sure at all. Nevertheless, he let the Covenant Man ladle a goodly helping onto a tin plate, and took the offered tin spoon, which was battered but clean. There was nothing magical about the meal; the stew was beef, taters, carrots, and onions swimming in a flavorsome gravy. While he squatted on his hunkers and ate, Tim watched Bitsy cautiously approach his hosts black horse. The stallion briefly touched the humble mules nose, then turned away (rather disdainfully, Tim thought) to where the Covenant Man had spread a moit of oats on ground which had been carefully cleared of splintersthe leavings of sais Cosington and Marchly. The tax collector made no conversation while Tim ate, only kicked repeatedly into the ground with one bootheel, making a small hole. Beside it was the basin that had been tied on top of the strangers gunna. It was hard for Tim to believe his mother had been right about ita basin made of silver would be worth a fortunebut it certainly looked like silver. How many knucks would have to be melted and smelted to make such a thing? The Covenant Mans bootheel encountered a root. From beneath his cloak he produced a knife almost as long as Tims forearm and slit it at a stroke. Then he resumed with his heel thud and thud and thud. Why does thee dig? asked Tim. The Covenant Man looked up long enough to flash the boy a thin smile. Perhaps youll find out. Perhaps you wont. I think you will. Have you finished your meal? Aye, and say thankya. Tim tapped his throat three times. It was fine. Good. Kissin dont last, cookin do. So say the Mannifolk. I see you admiring my basin. Its fine, isnt it? A relic of Garlan that was. In Garlan there really were dragons, and bonfires of them still live deep in the Endless Forest, I feel sure. There, young Tim, youve learned something. Many lions is a pride; many crows is a murder; many bumblers is a throcket; many dragons is a bonfire. A bonfire of dragons, Tim said, tasting it. Then the full sense of what the Covenant Man had said came home to him. If the dragons of the Endless Forest are in deep But the Covenant Man interrupted before Tim could finish his thought. Tata, shasha, nana. Save thy imaginings. For now, take the basin and fetch me water. Youll find it at the edge of the clearing. Youll want your little lamp, for the glow of the fire doesnt reach so far, and theres a pooky in one of the trees. Hes fair swole, which means hes eaten not long ago, but I still wouldnt draw water from beneath him. He flashed another smile. Tim thought it a cruel one, but this was no surprise. Although a boy brave enough to come into the Endless Forest with only one of his fathers mules for company must do as he likes. The basin was silver; it was too heavy to be anything else. Tim carried it clumsily beneath one arm. In his free hand he held up the gaslight. As he approached the far end of the clearing, he began to smell something brackish and unpleasant, and to hear a low smacking sound, like many small mouths. He stopped. You dont want this water, sai, its stagnant. Dont tell me what I do or dont want, young Tim, just fill the basin. And mind the pooky, do ya, I beg. The boy knelt, set the basin down in front of him, and looked at the sluggish little stream. The water teemed with fat white bugs. Their oversize heads were black, their eyes on stalks. They looked like waterborne maggots and appeared to be at war. After a moments study, Tim realized they were eating each other. His stew lurched in his stomach. From above him came a sound like a hand gliding down a long length of sandpaper. He raised his gaslight. In the lowest branch of an ironwood tree to his left, a huge reddish snake hung down in coils. Its spadeshaped head, bigger than his mamas largest cooking pot, was pointed at Tim. Amber eyes with black slit pupils regarded him sleepily. A ribbon of tongue, split into a fork, appeared, danced, then snapped back, making a liquid sloooop sound. Tim filled the basin with the stinking water as fast as he could, but with most of his attention fixed on the creature looking at him from above, several of the bugs got on his hands, where they immediately began to bite. He brushed them off with a low cry of pain and disgust, then carried the basin back to the campfire. He did this slowly and carefully, determined not to spill a drop on himself, because the foul water squirmed with life. If this is to drink or to wash . . . The Covenant Man looked at him with his head cocked to one side, waiting for him to finish, but Tim couldnt. He just put the basin down beside the Covenant Man, who seemed to have done with his pointless hole. Not to drink, not to wash, although we could do either, if we wanted to. Youre joking, sai! Its foul! The world is foul, young Tim, but we build up a resistance, dont we? We breathe its air, eat its food, do its doings. Yes. Yes, we do. Never mind. Hunker. The Covenant Man pointed to a spot, then rummaged in his gunna. Tim watched the bugs eating each other, revolted but fascinated. Would they go on until only onethe strongestwas left? Ah, here we are! His host produced a steel rod with a white tip that looked like ivory, and squatted so the two of them faced each other above the lively brew in the basin. Tim stared at the steel rod in the gloved hand. Is that a magic wand? The Covenant Man appeared to consider. I suppose so. Although it started life as the gearshift of a Dodge Dart. Americas economy car, young Tim. Whats America? A kingdom filled with toyloving idiots. It has no part in our palaver. But know this, and tell your children, should you ever be so unfortunate as to have any in the proper hand, any object can be magic. Now watch! The Covenant Man threw back his cloak to fully free his arm, and passed the wand over the basin of murky, infested water. Before Tims wide eyes, the bugs fell still . . . floated on the surface . . . disappeared. The Covenant Man made a second pass and the murk disappeared, as well. The water did indeed now look drinkable. In it, Tim found himself staring down at his own amazed face. Gods! How did Hush, stupid boy! Disturb the water even the slightest bit and theell see nothing! The Covenant Man passed his makeshift wand over the basin yet a third time, and Tims reflection disappeared just as the bugs and the murk had. What replaced it was a shivery vision of Tims own cottage. He saw his mother, and he saw Bern Kells. Kells was walking unsteadily into the kitchen from the back hall where he kept his trunk. Nell was standing between the stove and the table, wearing the nightgown shed had on when Tim last saw her. Kellss eyes were redrimmed and bulging in their sockets. His hair was plastered to his forehead. Tim knew that, if he had been in that room instead of only watching it, he would have smelled redeye jackaroe around the man like a fog. His mouth moved, and Tim could read the words as they came from his lips How did you open my trunk? No! Tim wanted to cry. Not her, me! But his throat was locked shut. Like it? the Covenant Man whispered. Enjoying the show, are you? Nell first shrank back against the pantry door, then turned to run. Kells seized her before she could, one hand gripping her shoulder, the other wrapped in her hair. He shook her back and forth like a Rag Sally, then threw her against the wall. He swayed back and forth in front of her, as if about to collapse. But he didnt fall, and when Nell once more tried to run, he seized the heavy ceramic jug that stood by the sinkthe same waterjug Tim had poured from earlier to ease her hurtand brought it crashing into the center of her forehead. It shattered, leaving him holding nothing but the handle. Kells dropped it, grabbed his new wife, and began to rain blows upon her. NO! Tim screamed. His breath ruffled the water and the vision was gone. Tim sprang to his feet and lunged toward Bitsy, who was looking at him in surprise. In his mind, the son of Jack Ross was already riding back down the Ironwood Trail, urging Bitsy with his heels until she was running fullout. In reality, the Covenant Man seized him before he could manage three steps, and hauled him back to the campfire. Tata, nana, young Tim, be not so speedy! Our palavers well begun but far from done. Let me loose! Shes dying, if he aint killed her already! Unless . . . was it a glam? Your little joke? If so, Tim thought, it was the meanest joke ever played on a boy who loved his mother. Yet he hoped it was. He hoped the Covenant Man would laugh and say I really pulled your snout that time, didnt I, young Tim? The Covenant Man was shaking his head. No joke and no glammer, for the basin never lies. Its already happened, I fear. Terrible what a man in drink may do to a woman, isnt it? Yet look again. This time thee may find some comfort. Tim fell on his knees in front of the basin. The Covenant Man flicked his steel stick over the water. A vague mist seemed to pass above it . . . or perhaps it was only a trick of Tims eyes, which were filled with tears. Whichever it was, the obscurity faded. Now in the shallow pool he saw the porch of their cottage, and a woman who seemed to have no face bending over Nell. Slowly, slowly, with the newcomers help, Nell was able to get to her feet. The woman with no face turned her toward the front door, and Nell began taking shuffling, painful steps in that direction. Shes alive! Tim shouted. My mamas alive! So she is, young Tim. Bloody but unbowed. Well . . . a bit bowed, praps. He chuckled. This time Tim had shouted across the basin rather than into it, and the vision remained. He realized that the woman helping his mother appeared to have no face because she was wearing a veil, and the little burro he could see at the very edge of the wavering picture was Sunshine. He had fed, watered, and walked Sunshine many times. So had the other pupils at the little Tree school; it was part of what the headmistress called their tuition, but Tim had never seen her actually ride him. If asked, he would have said she was probably unable. Because of her shakes. Thats the Widow Smack! Whats she doing at our house? Perhaps youll ask her, young Tim. Did you send her, somehow? Smiling, the Covenant Man shook his head. I have many hobbies, but rescuing damsels in distress isnt one of them. He bent close to the basin, the brim of his hat shading his face. Oh, dearie me. I believe shes still in distress. Which is no surprise; it was a terrible beating she took. People say the truth can be read in a persons eyes, but look at the hands, I always say. Look at your mamas, young Tim! Tim bent close to the water. Supported by the Widow, Nell crossed the porch with her spread hands held out before her, and she was walking toward the wall instead of the door, although the porch was not wide and the door right in front of her. The Widow gently corrected her course, and the two women went inside together. The Covenant Man used his tongue to make a tchtch sound against the roof of his mouth. Doesnt look good, young Tim. Blows to the head can be very nasty things. Even when they dont kill, they can do terrible damage. Lasting damage. His words were grave, but his eyes twinkled with unspeakable merriment. Tim barely noticed. I have to go. My mother needs me. Once again he started for Bitsy. This time he got almost half a dozen steps before the Covenant Man laid hold of him. His fingers were like rods of steel. Before you go, Timand with my blessing, of courseyou have one more thing to do. Tim felt as if he might be going mad. Maybe, he thought, Im in bed with tick fever and dreaming all this. Take my basin back to the stream and dump it. But not where you got it, because yon pooky has begun to look far too interested in his surroundings. The Covenant Man picked up Tims gaslight, twisted the feedknob fully open, and held it up. The snake now hung down for most of its length. The last three feet, howeverthe part ending in the pookys spadeshaped headwas raised and weaving from side to side. Amber eyes stared raptly into Tims blue ones. Its tongue lashed outsloooopand for a moment Tim saw two long curved fangs. They sparkled in the glow cast by the gaslight. Go to the left of him, the Covenant Man advised. I shall accompany you and stand watch. Cant you just dump it yourself? I want to go to my mother. I need to Your mother isnt why I brought you here, young Tim. The Covenant Man seemed to grow taller. Now do as I say. Tim picked up the basin and cut across the clearing to his left. The Covenant Man, still holding up the gaslight, kept between him and the snake. The pooky had swiveled to follow their course but made no attempt to follow, although the ironwoods were so close and their lowest branches so intertwined, it could have done so with ease. This stub is part of the CosingtonMarchly stake, the Covenant Man said chattily. Perhaps thee read the sign. Aye. A boy who can read is a treasure to the Barony. The Covenant Man was now treading so close to Tim that it made the boys skin prickle. You will pay great taxes some dayalways assuming you dont die in the Endless Forest this night . . . or the next . . . or the night after that. But why look for storms that are still over the horizon, eh? You know whose stake this is, but I know a little more. Discovered it when I made my rounds, along with news of Frankie Simonss broken leg, the Wyland babys milksick, the Riverlys dead cowsabout which theyre lying through their few remaining teeth, if I know my business, and I doand all sorts of other interesting fiddlededum. How people talk! But heres the point, young Tim. I discovered that, early on in Full Earth, Peter Cosington was caught under a tree that fell wrong. Trees will do that from time to time, especially ironwood. I believe that ironwood trees actually think, which is where the tradition of crying their pardon before each days chopping comes from. I know about sai Cosingtons accident, Tim said. In spite of his anxiety, he was curious about this turn of the conversation. My mama sent them a soup, even though she was in mourning for my da at the time. The tree fell across his back, but not square across. That would have killed him. What of it? Hes better these days. They were near the water now, but the smell here was less strong and Tim heard none of those smacking bugs. That was good, but the pooky was still watching them with hungry interest. Bad. Yar, Square Fella Cosies back to work and we all say thankya. But while he was laid upfor two weeks before your da met his dragon and for six weeks afterthis stub and all the others in the CosingtonMarchly stake were empty, because Ernie Marchlys not like your steppa. Which is to say, he wont come cutting in the Endless Forest without a pard. But of coursealso not like your steppaSlow Ernie actually has a pard. Tim remembered the coin lying against his skin, and why hed come on this mad errand in the first place. There was no dragon! If thered been a dragon, it would have burned up my das lucky coin with the rest of him! And why was it in Kellss trunk? Dump out my basin, young Tim. I think youll find there are no bugs in the water to trouble thee. No, not here. But I want to know Close thy clam and dump my basin, for youll not leave this clearing while its full. Tim knelt to do as he was told, wanting only to complete the chore and be gone. He cared nothing about Peter Square Fella Cosington, and didnt believe the man in the black cloak did, either. Hes teasing me, or torturing me. Maybe he doesnt even know the difference. But as soon as this damn basin is empty, Ill mount Bitsy and ride back as fast as I can. Let him try to stop me. Just let him tr Tims thoughts broke as cleanly as a dry stick under a bootheel. He lost his hold on the basin and it fell upsyturvy in the matted underbrush. There were no bugs in the water here, the Covenant Man was right about that; the stream was as clear as the water that flowed from the spring near their cottage. Lying six or eight inches below the surface was a human body. The clothes were only rags that floated in the current. The eyelids were gone, and so was most of the hair. The face and arms, once deeply tanned, were now as pale as alabaster. But otherwise, the body of Big Jack Ross was perfectly preserved. If not for the emptiness in those lidless, lashless eyes, Tim could have believed his father might rise, dripping, and fold him into an embrace. The pooky made its hungry sloooop. Something broke inside of Tim at the sound, and he began to scream. The Covenant Man was forcing something into Tims mouth. Tim tried to fend him off, but it did no good. The Covenant Man simply seized Tims hair at the back of his head, and when Tim yelled, the mouth of a flask was shoved between his teeth. Some fiery liquid gushed down his throat. Not redeye, for instead of making him drunk, it calmed him. Moreit made him feel like an icy visitor in his own head. That will wear off in ten minutes, and then Ill let you go your course, the Covenant Man said. His jocularity was gone. He no longer called the boy young Tim; he no longer called him anything. Now dig out thy ears and listen. I began to hear stories in Tavares, forty wheels east of here, of a woodsman whod been cooked by a dragon. It was on everyones lips. A bitch dragon as big as a house, they said. I knew it was bullshit. I believe there might still be a tyger somewhere in the forest At that the Covenant Mans lips twitched in a rictus of a grin, there and gone almost too quickly to see. but a dragon? Never. There hasnt been one this close to civilization for years ten times ten, and never one as a big as a house. My curiosity was aroused. Not because Big Ross is a taxpayeror wasalthough thats what Idve told the toothless multitude, were any member of it trig enoughand brave enoughto ask. No, it was curiosity for its own sake, because wanting to know secrets has always been my besetting vice. Someday twill be the death of me, I have no doubt. I was camped on the Ironwood Trail last night, toobefore I started my rounds. Only last night I went all the way to the trails end. The signs on the last few stubs before the Fagonard Swamp say Ross and Kells. There I filled my basin at the last clear stream before the swamp begins, and what did I see in the water? Why, a sign reading CosingtonMarchly. I packed up my gunna, mounted Blackie, and rode him back here, just to see what I might see. There was no need to consult the basin again; I saw where yon pooky would not venture and where the bugs hadnt polluted the stream. The bugs are voracious flesheaters, but according to the old wives, theyll not eat the flesh of a virtuous man. The old wives are often wrong, but not about that, it seems. The chill of the water has preserved him, and he appears to be unmarked, because the man who murdered him struck from behind. I saw the riven skull when I turned him over, and have put him back as you see him now to spare you that sight. The Covenant Man paused, then added And so hed see you, I suppose, if his essence lingers near his corse. On that, the old wives reach no consensus. Still all right, or would you like another small dose of nen? Im all right. Never had he told such a lie. I felt quite sure of who the culprit wasas you do, I reckonbut any remaining doubts were put to rest at Gittys Saloon, my first stop in Tree. The local boozers always good for a dozen knucks come tax time, if not more. There I found out that Bern Kells had slipped the rope with his dead partners widow. Because of you, Tim said in a monotone that didnt sound like his own voice at all. Because of your godsdamned taxes. The Covenant Man laid a hand on his breast and spoke in wounded tones. |
You wrong me! Twasnt taxes that kept Big Kells burning in his bed all these years, aye, even when he still had a woman next to him to quench his torch. He went on, but the stuff he called nen was wearing off, and Tim lost the sense of the words. Suddenly he was no longer cold but hot, burning up, and his stomach was a churning bag. He staggered toward the remains of the campfire, fell on his knees, and vomited his supper into the hole the Covenant Man had been digging with his bootheel. There! the man in the black cloak said in a tone of hearty selfcongratulation. I thought that might come in handy. Youll want to go and see your mother now, said the Covenant Man when Tim had finished puking and was sitting beside the dying campfire with his head down and his hair hanging in his eyes. Good son that you are. But I have something you may want. One more minute. Itll make no difference to Nell Kells; she is as she is. Dont call her so! Tim spat. How can I not? Is she not wed? Marry in haste, repent at leisure, the old folken say. The Covenant Man squatted once more in front of his heaped gunna, his cloak billowing around him like the wings of an awful bird. They also say whats slipped cannot be unslipped, and they say true. An amusing concept called divorce exists on some levels of the Tower, but not in our charming little corner of MidWorld. Now let me see . . . its here somewhere . . . I dont understand why Square Peter and Slow Ernie didnt find him, Tim said dully. He felt deflated, empty. Some emotion still pulsed deep in his heart, but he didnt know what it was. This is their plot . . . their stake . . . and theyve been back cutting ever since Cosington was well enough to work again. Aye, they cut the iron, but not here. Theyve plenty of other stubs. Theyve left this one fallow for a bit. Does thee not know why? Tim supposed he did. Square Peter and Slow Ernie were good and kindly, but not the bravest men ever to log the iron, which was why they didnt go much deeper into the forest than this. Theyve been waiting for the pooky to move on, I wot. Its a wise child, the Covenant Man said approvingly. He wots well. And how does thee think thy steppa felt, knowing yon treeworm might move on at any time, and those two come back? Come back and find his crime, unless he screws up enough gut to come himself and move the body deeper into the woods? The new emotion in Tims heart was pulsing more strongly now. He was glad. Anything was better than the helpless terror he felt for his mother. I hope he feels bad. I hope he cant sleep. And then, with dawning understanding Its why he went back to the drink. A wise child indeed, wise beyond his Ah! Here it is! The Covenant Man turned toward Tim, who was now untying Bitsy and preparing to mount up. He approached the boy, holding something beneath his cloak. He did it on impulse, sure, and afterward he must have been in a panic. Why else would he concoct such a ridiculous story? The other woodsmen doubt it, of that you may be sure. He built a fire and leaned into it as far as he dared and for as long as he could take it, scorching his clothes and blistering his skin. I know, because I built my fire on the bones of his. But first he threw his dead pards gunna across yon stream, as far into the woods as his strength would allow. Did it with your das blood not yet dry on his hands, I warrant. I waded across and found it. Most of its useless mickle, but I saved thee one thing. It was rusty, but my pumice stone and honing bar have cleaned it up very well. From beneath his cloak he produced Big Rosss handax. Its freshly sharpened edge glittered. Tim, now astride Bitsy, took it, brought it to his lips, and kissed the cold steel. Then he shoved the handle into his belt, blade turned out from his body, just as Big Ross had taught him, once upon a bye. I see you wear a rhodite double around your neck. Was it your das? Mounted, Tim was almost eyetoeye with the Covenant Man. It was in that murdering bastards trunk. You have his coin; now you have his ax, as well. Where will you put it, I wonder, if ka offers you the chance? In his head. The emotionpure ragehad broken free of his heart like a bird with its wings on fire. Back or front, either will do me fine. Admirable! I like a boy with a plan! Go with all the gods you know, and the Man Jesus for good measure. Then, having wound the boy to his fullest stop, he turned to build up his fire. I may bide along the Iron for another night or two. I find Tree strangely interesting this Wide Earth. Watch for the green sighe, my boy! She glows, so she does! Tim made no reply, but the Covenant Man felt sure he had heard. Once they were wound to the fullest stop, they always did. The Widow Smack must have been watching from the window, for Tim had just led a footsore Bitsy up to the porch (in spite of his growing anxiety he had walked the last halfmile to spare her) when she came rushing out. Thank gods, thank gods. Your mother was three quarters to believing you were dead. Come in. Hurry. Let her hear and touch you. The import of these words didnt strike Tim fully until later. He tied Bitsy beside Sunshine and hurried up the steps. How did you know to come to her, sai? The Widow turned her face to him (which, given her veil, was hardly a face at all). Has thee gone soft in the head, Timothy? You rode past my house, pushing that mule for all she was worth. I couldnt think why youd be out so late, and headed in the direction of the forest, so I came here to ask your mother. But come, come. And keep a cheery voice, if you love her. The Widow led him across the living room, where two seners burned low. In his mothers room another sener burned on the bed table, and by its light he saw Nell lying in bed with much of her face wrapped in bandages and anotherthis one badly bloodstainedaround her neck like a collar. At the sound of their footsteps, she sat up with a wild look upon her face. If its Kells, stay away! Youve done enough! Its Tim, Mama. She turned toward him and held out her arms. Tim! To me, to me! He knelt beside the bed, and the part of her face not covered by bandages he covered with kisses, crying as he did so. She was still wearing her nightgown, but now the neck and bosom were stiff with rusty blood. Tim had seen his steppa fetch her a terrible lick with the ceramic jug, and then commence with his fists. How many blows had he seen? He didnt know. And how many had fallen on his hapless mother after the vision in the silver basin had disappeared? Enough so he knew she was very fortunate to be alive, but one of those blowslikely the one dealt with the ceramic jughad struck his mother blind. Twas a concussive blow, the Widow Smack said. She sat in Nells bedroom rocker; Tim sat on the bed, holding his mothers left hand. Two fingers of the right were broken. The Widow, who must have been very busy since her fortuitous arrival, had splinted them with pieces of kindling and flannel strips torn from another of Nells nightgowns. Ive seen it before. Theres swelling to the brain. When it goes down, her sight may return. May, Tim said bleakly. There will be water if God wills it, Timothy. Our water is poisoned now, Tim thought, and it was none of any gods doing. He opened his mouth to say just that, but the Widow shook her head. Shes asleep. I gave her an herb drinknot strong, I didnt dare give her strong after he cuffed her so around the headbut its taken hold. I wasnt sure twould. Tim looked down at his mothers faceterribly pale, with freckles of blood still drying on the little exposed skin the Widows bandagements had leftand then back up at his teacher. Shell wake again, wont she? The Widow repeated, There will be water if God wills it. Then the ghostmouth beneath the veil lifted in what might have been a smile. In this case, I think there will be. Shes strong, your ma. Can I talk to you, sai? For if I dont talk to someone, Ill explode. Of course. Come out on the porch. Ill stay here tonight, by your leave. Will you have me? And will you stable Sunshine, if so? Aye, Tim said. In his relief, he actually managed a smile. And say thankya. The air was even warmer. Sitting in the rocker that had been Big Rosss favorite roost on summer nights, the Widow said, It feels like starkblast weather. Call me crazyyou wouldnt be the firstbut so it does. Whats that, sai? Never mind, its probably nothing . . . unless you see Sir Throcken dancing in the starlight or looking north with his muzzle upraised, that is. There hasnt been a starkblast in these parts since I was a weebee, and thats many and manya year agone. Weve other things to talk about. Is it only what that beast did to your mother that troubles you so, or is there more? Tim sighed, not sure how to start. I see a coin around your neck that I believe Ive seen around your fathers. Perhaps thats where youll begin. But theres one other thing we have to speak of first, and thats protecting your ma. Id send you to Constable Howards, no matter its late, but his house is dark and shuttered. I saw that for myself on my way here. No surprise, either. Everyone knows that when the Covenant Man comes to Tree, Howard Tasley finds some reason to make himself scarce. Im an old woman and youre but a child. What will we do if Bern Kells comes back to finish what he started? Tim, who no longer felt like a child, reached down to his belt. My fathers coin isnt all I found tonight. He pulled Big Rosss handax and showed it to her. This was also my das, and if he dares to come back, Ill put it in his head, where it belongs. The Widow Smack began to remonstrate, but saw a look in his eyes that made her change direction. Tell me your tale, said she. Leave out not a word. When Tim had finishedminding the Widows command to leave nothing out, he made sure to tell what his mother had said about the peculiar changelessness of the man with the silver basinhis old teacher sat quietly for a moment . . . although the night breeze caused her veil to flutter eerily and made her look as though she were nodding. Shes right, you know, she said at last. Yon chary man hasnt aged a day. And tax collectings not his job. I think its his hobby. Hes a man with hobbies, aye. He has his little pastimes. She raised her fingers in front of her veil, appeared to study them, then returned them to her lap. Youre not shaking, Tim ventured. No, not tonight, and thats a good thing if Im to sit vigil at your mothers bedside. Which I mean to do. You, Tim, will make yourself a pallet behind the door. Twill be uncomfortable, but if your steppa comes back, and if youre to have a chance against him, youll have to come at him from behind. Not much like Brave Bill in the stories, is it? Tims hands rolled shut, the fingernails digging into his palms. Its how the bastard did for my da, and all he deserves. She took one of his hands in her own and soothed it open. Hell probably not come back, anyway. Certainly not if he thinks hes done for her, and he may. There was so much blood. Bastard, Tim said in a low and choking voice. Hes probably lying up drunk somewhere. Tomorrow you must go to Square Peter Cosington and Slow Ernie Marchly, for its their patch where your da now lies. Show them the coin you wear, and tell how you found it in Kellss trunk. They can round up a posse and search until Kells is found and locked up tight in the jailhouse. It wont take them long to run him down, I warrant, and when he comes back sober, hell claim he has no idea of what hes done. He may even be telling the truth, for when it gets in some men, strong drink draws down a curtain. Ill go with them. Nay, its no work for a boy. Bad enough you have to watch for him tonight with your das handax. Tonight you need to be a man. Tomorrow you can be a boy again, and a boys place when his mother has been badly hurt is by her side. The Covenant Man said he might bide along the Ironwood Trail for another night or two. Maybe I should The hand that had soothed moments before now grasped Tims wrist where the flesh was thin, and hard enough to hurt. Never think it! Hasnt he done damage enough? What are you saying? That he made all this happen? It was Kells who killed my da, and it was Kells who beat my mama! But twas the Covenant Man who gave you the key, and theres no telling what else he may have done. Or will do, if he gets the chance, for he leaves ruin and weeping in his wake, and has for time out of mind. Do you think people only fear him because he has the power to turn them out on the land if they cant pay the barony taxes? No, Tim, no. Do you know his name? Nay, nor need to, for I know what he ispestilence with a heartbeat. Once upon a bye, after hed done a foul business here Id not talk about to a boy, I determined to find out what I could. I wrote a letter to a great lady I knew long ago in Gileada woman of discretion as well as beauty, a rare combinationand paid good silver for a messenger to take it and bring a reply . . . which my correspondent in the great city begged me to burn. She said that when Gileads Covenant Man is not at his hobby of collecting taxesa job that comes down to licking the tears from the faces of poor working folkhes an advisor to the palace lords who call themselves the Council of Eld. Although its only themselves who claim they have any blood connection to the Eld. Tis said hes a great mage, and there may be at least some truth in that, for youve seen his magic at work. So I have, Tim said, thinking of the basin. And of the way sai Covenant Man seemed to grow taller when he was wroth. My correspondent said there are even some who claim hes Maerlyn, he who was court mage to Arthur Eld himself, for Maerlyn was said to be eternal, a creature who lives backward in time. From behind the veil came a snorting sound. Just thinking of it makes my head hurt, for such an idea makes no earthly sense. But Maerlyn was a white magician, or so the stories do say. Those who claim the Covenant Mans Maerlyn in disguise say he was turned evil by the glam of the Wizards Rainbow, for he was given the keeping of it in the days before the Elden Kingdom fell. Others say that, during his wanderings after the fall, he discovered certain artyfax of the Old People, became fascinated by them, and was blackened by them to the bottom of his soul. This happened in the Endless Forest, they say, where he still keeps in a magic house where time stands still. Doesnt seem too likely, Tim said . . . although he was fascinated by the idea of a magic house where clock hands never moved and sand never fell in the glass. Bullshit is what it is! And, noting his shocked look Cry your pardon, but sometimes only vulgarity will serve. Even Maerlyn couldnt be two places at the same time, mooning around the Endless Forest at one end of the Northrd Barony and serving the lords and gunslingers of Gilead at the other. Nay, the tax mans no Maerlyn, but he is a magiciana black one. So said the lady I once taught, and so I believe. Thats why you must never go near him again. Any good he offers to do you will be a lie. Tim considered this, then asked Do you know what a sighe is, sai? Of course. The sighe are the fairyfolk, who supposedly live in the deep woods. Did the dark man speak of them? No, twas just some story Straw Willem told me one day at the sawmill. Now why did I lie? But deep in his heart, Tim knew. Bern Kells didnt come back that night, which was for the best. Tim meant to stay on guard, but he was just a boy, and exhausted. Ill close my eyes for a few seconds, to rest them, was what he told himself when he lay down on the straw pallet he made for himself behind the door, and it felt like no more than a few seconds, but when he opened them again, the cottage was filled with morning light. His fathers ax lay on the floor beside him, where his relaxing hand had dropped it. He picked it up, put it back in his belt, and hurried into the bedroom to see his mother. The Widow Smack was fast asleep in the Tavares rocker, which she had drawn up close to Nells bed, her veil fluttering with her snores. Nells eyes were wide open, and they turned toward the sound of Tims steps. Who comes? Tim, Mama. He sat beside her on the bed. Has your sight come back? Even a little? She tried to smile, but her swollen mouth could do little more than twitch. Still dark, Im afraid. Its all right. He raised the hand that wasnt splinted and kissed the back of it. Probably still too early. Their voices had roused the Widow. He says true, Nell. Blind or not, next year well be turned out for sure, and then what? Nell turned her face to the wall and began to cry. Tim looked at the Widow, not sure what to do. She motioned for him to leave. Ill give her something to calm hertis in my bag. You have men to see, Tim. Go at once, or theyll be off to the woods. He might have missed Peter Cosington and Ernie Marchly anyway, if Baldy Anderson, one of Trees big farmers, hadnt stopped by the pairs storing shed to chat as they hitched their mules and prepared for the day. The three men listened to his story in grim silence, and when Tim finally stumbled to a halt, telling them his mother was still blind this morning, Square Peter gripped Tim by the upper arms and said, Count on us, boy. Well rouse every axman in town, those who work the blossies as well as those who go up the Ironwood. Therell be no cutting in the forest today. Anderson said, And Ill send my boys around to the farmers. To Destry and to the sawmill, as well. What about the constable? Slow Ernie asked, a trifle nervously. Anderson dipped his head, spat between his boots, and wiped his chin with the heel of his hand. Gone up Tavares way, I hear, either looking for poachers or visiting the woman he keeps up there. Makes no difference. Howard Tasley ent never been worth a fart in a high wind. Well do the job ourselves, and have Kells jugged by the time he comes back. With a pair of broken arms, if he kicks up rough, Cosington added. Hes never been able to hold his drink or his temper. He was all right when he had Jack Ross to rein im in, but look what its come to! Nell Ross beaten blind! Big Kells always kept a warm eye for her, and the only one who didnt know it was Anderson hushed him with an elbow, then turned to Tim, bending forward with his hands on his knees, for he was tallish. Twas the Covenant Man who found your das corse? Aye. And you saw the body yourself. Tims eyes filled, but his voice was steady enough. Aye, so I did. On our stake, Slow Ernie said. Tback of one of our stubs. The one where the pookys set up housekeeping. Aye. I could kill him just for that, Cosington said, but well bring him alive if we can. Ernie, you n med best ride up there and bring back the . . . you know, remains . . . before we get in on the search. Baldy, can you get the word around on your own? Aye. Well gather at the mercantile. Keep a good eye out along the Ironwood Trail as you go, boys, but my best guess is that well find the booger in town, laid up drunk. And, more to himself than to the others I never believed that dragon story. Start behind Gittys, Slow Ernie said. Hes slept it off there more than once. So we will. Baldy Anderson looked up at the sky. I dont care much for this weather, tell ya true. Its too warm for Wide Earth. I hope it dont bring a storm, and I hope to gods it dont bring a starkblast. Thatd cap everything. Wouldnt be none of us able to pay the Covenant Man when he comes next year. Although if its true what the boy says, hes turned a bad apple out of the basket and done us a service. He didnt do my mama one, Tim thought. If he hadnt given me that key, and if I hadnt used it, shed still have her sight. Go on home now, Marchly said to Tim. He spoke kindly, but in a tone that brooked no argument. Stop by my house on the way, do ya, and tell my wife theres ladies wanted at yours. Widow Smack must need to go home and rest, for shes neither young nor well. Also . . . He sighed. Tell her theyll be wanted at Stokess burying parlor later on. This time Tim had taken Misty, and she was the one who had to stop and nibble at every bush. By the time he got home, two wagons and a ponytrap had passed him, each carrying a pair of women eager to help his mother in her time of hurt and trouble. He had no more than stabled Misty next to Bitsy before Ada Cosington was on the porch, telling him he was needed to drive the Widow Smack home. You can use my ponytrap. Go gentle where theres ruts, for the poor womans fair done up. Has she got her shakes, sai? Nay, I think the poor things too tired to shake. She was here when she was most needed, and may have saved your mamas life. Never forget that. Can my mother see again? Even a little? Tim knew the answer from sai Cosingtons face before she opened her mouth. Not yet, son. You must pray. Tim thought of telling her what his father had sometimes said Pray for rain all you like, but dig a well as you do it. In the end, he kept silent. It was a slow trip to the Widows house with her little burro tied to the back of Ada Cosingtons ponytrap. The unseasonable heat continued, and the sweetsour breezes that usually blew from the Endless Forest had fallen still. The Widow tried to say cheerful things about Nell, but soon gave up; Tim supposed they sounded as false to her ears as they did to his own. Halfway up the high street, he heard a thick gurgling sound from his right. He looked around, startled, then relaxed. The Widow had fallen asleep with her chin resting on her birdlike chest. The hem of her veil lay in her lap. When they reached her house on the outskirts of the village, he offered to see her inside. Nay, only help me up the steps and after that Ill be fineo. I want tea with honey and then my bed, for Im that tired. You need to be with your mother now, Tim. I know half the ladies in town will be there by the time you get back, but its you she needs. For the first time in the five years hed had her as a schoolteacher, she gave Tim a hug. It was dry and fierce. He could feel her body thrumming beneath her dress. She wasnt too tired to shake after all, it seemed. Nor too tired to give comfort to a boya tired, angry, deeply confused boywho badly needed it. Go to her. And stay away from that dark man, should he appear to thee. Hes made of lies from boots to crown, and his gospels bring nothing but tears. On his way back down the high street, he encountered Straw Willem and his brother, Hunter (known as Spot Hunter for his freckles), riding to meet the posse, which had gone out Tree Road. They mean to search every stake and stub on the Ironwood, Spot Hunter said excitedly. Well find him. The posse hadnt found Kells in town after all, it seemed. Tim had a feeling theyd not find him along the Iron, either. There was no basis for the feeling, but it was strong. So was his feeling that the Covenant Man hadnt finished with him yet. The man in the black cloak had had some of his fun . . . but not all of it. His mother was sleeping, but woke when Ada Cosington ushered him in. The other ladies sat about in the main room, but they had not been idle while Tim was away. The pantry had been mysteriously stockedevery shelf groaned with bottles and sacksand although Nell was a fine country housekeeper, Tim had never seen the place looking so snick. Even the overhead beams had been scrubbed clean of woodsmoke. Every trace of Bern Kells had been removed. The awful trunk had been banished to beneath the back porch stoop, to keep company with the spiders, fieldmice, and moortoads. Tim? And when he put his hands in Nells, which were reaching out, she sighed with relief. All right? Aye, Mama, passing fine. This was a lie, and they both knew it. We knew he was dead, didnt we? But its no comfort. Its as if hes been killed all over again. Tears began to spill from her sightless eyes. Tim cried, himself, but managed to do it silently. Hearing him sob would do her no good. Theyll bring him to the little burying parlor Stokes keeps out behind his smithy. Most of these kind ladies will go to him there, to do the fitting things, but will you go to him first, Timmy? Will you take him your love and all of mine? For I cant. The man I was fool enough to marry has lamed me so badly I can hardly walk . . . and of course I cant see anything. What a kamai I turned out to be, and what a price weve paid! Hush. I love you, Mama. Of course Ill go. But because there was time, he went first to the barn (there were far too many women in the cottage for his taste) and made a jackleg bed with hay and an old mule blanket. He fell asleep almost at once. He was awakened around three of the clock by Square Peter, who held his hat clasped to his breast and wore an expression of sad solemnity. Tim sat up, rubbing his eyes. Have you found Kells? Nay, lad, but weve found your father, and brought him back to town. Your mother says youll pay respects for the both of you. Does she say true? Aye, yes. Tim stood up, brushing hay from his pants and shirt. He felt ashamed to have been caught sleeping, but his rest the previous night had been thin, and haunted by bad dreams. Come, then. Well take my wagon. The burying parlor behind the smithy was the closest thing the town had to a mortuary in a time when most country folk preferred to see to their own dead, interring them on their own land with a wooden cross or a slab of roughly carved stone to mark the grave. Dustin Stokesinevitably known as Hot Stokesstood outside the door, wearing white cotton pants instead of his usual leathers. Over them billowed a vast white shirt, falling all the way to the knees so it looked almost like a dress. Looking at him, Tim remembered it was customary to wear white for the dead. He understood everything in that moment, realizing the truth in a way that not even looking at his fathers openeyed corse in running water had been able to make him realize it, and his knees loosened. Square Peter bore him up with a strong hand. Canee do it, lad? Ifee cant, theres no shame. He was your da, and I know you loved him well. We all did. Ill be all right, Tim said. He couldnt seem to get enough air into his lungs, and the words came out in a whisper. Hot Stokes put a fist to his forehead and bowed. It was the first time in his life that Tim had been saluted as a man. Hile, Tim, son of Jack. His kas gone into the clearing, but whats left is here. Willee come and see? Yes, please. Square Peter stayed behind, and now it was Stokes who took Tims arm, Stokes not dressed in his leather breeches and cursing as he fanned an open furnacehole with his bellows, but clad in ceremonial white; Stokes who led him into the little room with forest scenes painted on the walls all around; Stokes who took him to the ironwood bier in the centerthat open space that had ever represented the clearing at the end of the path. Big Jack Ross also wore white, although his was a fine linen shroud. His lidless eyes stared raptly at the ceiling. Against one painted wall leaned his coffin, and the room was filled with the sour yet somehow pleasant smell of it, for the coffin was also of ironwood, and would keep this poor remnant very well for a thousand years and more. Stokes let go of his arm, and Tim went forward on his own. He knelt. He slipped one hand into the linen shrouds overlap and found his das hand. It was cold, but Tim did not hesitate to entwine his warm and living fingers with the dead ones. This was the way the two of them had held hands when Tim was only a sma one, and barely able to toddle. In those days, the man walking beside him had seemed twelve feet tall, and immortal. Tim knelt by the bier and beheld the face of his father. When he came out, Tim was startled by the declining angle of the sun, which told him more than an hour had passed. Cosington and Stokes stood near the manhigh ash heap at the rear of the smithy, smoking rollups. There was no news of Big Kells. Praps hes thowd hisself in the river and drownded, Stokes speculated. Hop up in the wagon, son, Cosington said. Ill driveee back to yer mas. But Tim shook his head. Thankee, Ill walk, if its all the same to you. Need time to think, is it? Well, thats fine. Ill go on to my own place. Itll be a cold dinner, but Ill eat it gladly. No one begrudges your ma at a time like this, Tim. Never in life. Tim smiled wanly. Cosington put his feet on the splashboard of his wagon, seized the reins, then had a thought and bent down to Tim. Have an eye out for Kells as ye walk, is all. Not that I think yell see im, not in daylight. And therell be two or three strong fellas posted around yer homeplace tonight. Thankeesai. Nar, none of that. Call me Peter, lad. Youre old enough, and Id have it. He reached down and gave Tims hand a brief squeeze. So sorry about yer da. Dreadful sorry. Tim set out along Tree Road with the sun declining red on his right side. He felt hollow, scooped out, and perhaps it was better so, at least for the time being. With his mother blind and no man in the house to bring a living, what future was there for them? Big Rosss fellow woodcutters would help as much as they could, and for as long as they could, but they had their own burdens. His da had always called the homeplace a freehold, but Tim now saw that no cottage, farm, or bit of land in Tree Village was truly free. Not when the Covenant Man would come again next year, and all the years after that, with his scroll of names. Suddenly Tim hated faroff Gilead, which for him had always seemed (when he thought of it at all, which was seldom) a place of wonders and dreams. If there were no Gilead, there would be no taxes. Then they would be truly free. He saw a cloud of dust rising in the south. The lowering sun turned it into a bloody mist. He knew it was the women who had been at the cottage. They were bound in their wagons and traps for the burying parlor Tim had just left. There they would wash the body that had already been washed by the stream into which it had been cast. They would anoint it with oils. They would put birch bark inscribed with the names of his wife and son in the dead mans right hand. They would put the blue spot on his forehead and place him in his coffin. This Hot Stokes would nail shut with short blows of his hammer, each blow terrible in its finality. The women would offer Tim their condolences with the best will in the world, but Tim didnt want them. Didnt know if he could bear them without breaking down once again. He was so tired of crying. With that in mind, he left the road and walked overland to the little chuckling rivulet known as Stape Brook, which would in short order bring him to its sourcepoint the clear spring between the Ross cottage and barn. He trudged in a halfdream, thinking first of the Covenant Man, then of the key that would work only once, then of the pooky, then of his mothers hands reaching toward the sound of his voice . . . Tim was so preoccupied that he almost passed the object jutting up from the path that followed the course of the stream. It was a steel rod with a white tip that looked like ivory. He hunkered, staring at it with wide eyes. He remembered asking the Covenant Man if it was a magic wand, and heard the enigmatic reply It started life as the gearshift of a Dodge Dart. It had been jammed to half its length in the hardpan, something that must have taken great strength. Tim reached for it, hesitated, then told himself not to be a fool, it was no pooky that would paralyze him with its bite and then eat him alive. He pulled it free and examined it closely. Steel it was, fineforged steel of the sort only the Old Ones had known how to make. Very valuable, for sure, but was it really magic? To him it felt like any other metal thing, which was to say cold and dead. In the proper hand, the Covenant Man whispered, any object can be magic. Tim spied a frog hopping along a rotted birch on the far side of the stream. |
He pointed the ivory tip at it and said the only magic word he knew abbakadabba. He halfexpected the frog to fall over dead or change into . . . well, something. It didnt die and it didnt change. What it did was hop off the log and disappear into the high green grass at the edge of the brook. Yet this had been left for him, he was sure of it. The Covenant Man had somehow known hed come this way. And when. Tim turned south again, and saw a flash of red light. It came from between their cottage and the barn. For a moment Tim only stood looking at that bright scarlet reflection. Then he broke into a run. The Covenant Man had left him the key; the Covenant Man had left him his wand; and beside the spring where they drew their water, he had left his silver basin. The one he used in order to see. Only it wasnt the basin, just a battered tin pail. Tims shoulders slumped and he started for the barn, thinking he would give the mules a good feed before he went in. Then he stopped and turned around. A pail, but not their pail. Theirs was smaller, made of ironwood, and equipped with a blossie handle. Tim returned to the spring and picked it up. He tapped the ivory knob of the Covenant Mans wand against the side. The pail gave back a deep and ringing note that made Tim leap back a step. No piece of tin had ever produced such a resonant sound. Now that he thought of it, no old tin pail could reflect the declining sun as perfectly as this one had, either. Did you think Id give up my silver basin to a halfgrown sprat like you, Tim, son of Jack? Why would I, when any object can be magic? And, speaking of magic, havent I given you my very own wand? Tim understood that this was but his imagination making the Covenant Mans voice, but he believed the man in the black cloak would have said much the same, if he had been there. Then another voice spoke in his head. Hes made of lies from boots to crown, and his gospels bring nothing but tears. This voice he pushed away and stooped to fill the pail that had been left for him. When it was full, doubt set in again. He tried to remember if the Covenant Man had made any particular series of passes over the waterwerent mystic passes part of magic?and couldnt. All Tim could remember was the man in black telling him that if he disturbed the water, he would see nothing. Doubtful not so much of the magic wand as of his ability to use it, Tim waved the rod aimlessly back and forth above the water. For a moment there was nothing. He was about to give up when a mist clouded the surface, blotting out his reflection. It cleared, and he saw the Covenant Man looking up at him. It was dark wherever the Covenant Man was, but a strange green light, no bigger than a thumbnail, hovered over his head. It rose higher, and by its light Tim saw a board nailed to the trunk of an ironwood tree. ROSSKELLS had been painted on it. The bit of green light spiraled up until it was just below the surface of the water in the pail, and Tim gasped. There was a person embedded in that green lighta tiny green woman with transparent wings on her back. Its a sigheone of the fairyfolk! Seemingly satisfied that she had his attention, the sighe spun away, lighted briefly on the Covenant Mans shoulder, then seemed to leap from it. Now she hovered between two posts holding up a crossbar. From this there hung another sign, and, as was the case with the lettering on the sign marking out the RossKells stake, Tim recognized his fathers careful printing. IRONWOOD TRAIL ENDS HERE, the sign read. BEYOND LIES FAGONARD. And below this, in larger, darker letters TRAVELER, BEWARE! The sighe darted back to the Covenant Man, made two airy circles around him that seemed to leave spectral, fading trails of greenglow behind, then rose and hovered demurely beside his cheek. The Covenant Man looked directly at Tim; a figure that shimmered (as Tims own father had when Tim beheld the corse in the water) and yet was perfectly real, perfectly there. He raised one hand in a semicircle above his head, scissoring the first two fingers as he did so. This was sign language Tim knew well, for everyone in Tree used it from time to time Make haste, make haste. The Covenant Man and his fairy consort faded to nothing, leaving Tim staring at his own wideeyed face. He passed the wand over the pail again, barely noticing that the steel rod was now vibrating in his fist. The thin caul of mist reappeared, seeming to rise from nowhere. It swirled and disappeared. Now Tim saw a tall house with many gables and many chimneys. It stood in a clearing surrounded by ironwoods of such great girth and height that they made the ones along the trail look small. Surely, Tim thought, their tops must pierce the very clouds. He understood this was deep in the Endless Forest, deeper than even the bravest axman of Tree had ever gone, and by far. The many windows of the house were decorated with cabalistic designs, and from these Tim knew he was looking at the home of Maerlyn Eld, where time stood still or perhaps even ran backward. A small, wavering Tim appeared in the pail. He approached the door and knocked. It was opened. Out came a smiling old man whose white waistlength beard sparkled with gems. Upon his head was a conical cap as yellow as the Full Earth sun. WaterTim spoke earnestly to WaterMaerlyn. WaterMaerlyn bowed and went back inside his house . . . which seemed to be constantly changing shape (although that might have been the water). The mage returned, now holding a black cloth that looked like silk. He lifted it to his eyes, demonstrating its use a blindfold. He handed it toward WaterTim, but before that other Tim could take it, the mist reappeared. When it cleared, Tim saw nothing but his own face and a bird passing overhead, no doubt wanting to get home to its nest before sunset. Tim passed the rod across the top of the pail a third time, now aware of the steel rods thrumming in spite of his fascination. When the mist cleared, he saw WaterTim sitting at WaterNells bedside. The blindfold was over his mothers eyes. WaterTim removed it, and an expression of unbelieving joy lit WaterNells face. She clasped him to her, laughing. WaterTim was laughing, too. The mist overspread this vision as it had the other two, but the vibration in the steel rod ceased. Useless as dirt, Tim thought, and it was true. When the mist melted away, the water in the tin pail showed him nothing more miraculous than the dying light in the sky. He passed the Covenant Mans wand over the water several more times, but nothing happened. That was all right. He knew what he had to do. Tim got to his feet, looked toward the house, and saw no one. The men who had volunteered to stand watch would be here soon, though. He would have to move fast. In the barn, he asked Bitsy if she would like to go for another evening ride. The Widow Smack was exhausted by her unaccustomed labors on Nell Rosss behalf, but she was also old, and sick, and more disturbed by the queerly unseasonable weather than her conscious mind would admit. So it was that, although Tim did not dare knock loudly on her door (knocking at all after sunset took most of his resolve), she woke at once. She took a lamp, and when by its light she saw who stood there, her heart sank. If the degenerative disease that afflicted her had not taken the ability of her remaining eye to make tears, she would have wept at the sight of that young face so full of foolish resolve and lethal determination. You mean to go back to the forest, said she. Aye. Tim spoke low, but firmly. In spite of all I told thee. Aye. Hes fascinated you. And why? For gain? Nay, not him. He saw a bright light in the darkness of this forgotten backwater, thats all, and nothing will do for him but to put it out. Sai Smack, he showed me Something to do with your mother, I wot. He knows what levers move folk; aye, none better. He has magic keys to unlock their hearts. I know I cant stop thee with words, for one eye is enough to read your face. And I know I cant restrain thee with force, and so do you. Why else was it me you came to for whatever it is you want? At this Tim showed embarrassment but no flagging of resolve, and by this she understood he was truly lost to her. Worse, he was likely lost to himself. What is it you want? Only to send word to my mother, will it please ya. Tell her Ive gone to the forest, and will return with something to cure her sight. Sai Smack said nothing to this for several seconds, only looked at him through her veil. By the light of her raised lamp, Tim could see the ruined geography of her face far better than he wanted to. At last she said, Wait here. Dont skitter away wiout taking leave, lest youd have me think thee a coward. Be not impatient, either, for thee knows Im slow. Although he was in a fever to be off, Tim waited as she asked. The seconds seemed like minutes, the minutes like hours, but she returned at last. I made sure you were gone, said she, and the old woman could not have wounded Tim more if she had whipped his face with a quirt. She handed him the lamp she had brought to the door. To light your way, for I see you have none. It was true. In his fever to be off, he had forgotten. Thankeesai. In her other hand she held a cotton sack. Theres a loaf of bread in here. Tisnt much, and two days old, but for provender tis the best I can do. Tims throat was temporarily too full for speech, so he only tapped his throat three times, then held out his hand for the bag. But she held it a moment longer. Theres something else in here, Tim. It belonged to my brother, who died in the Endless Forest almost twenty years ago now. He bought it from a roving peddler, and when I chafed him about it and called him a fool easily cozened, he took me out to the fields west of town and showed me it worked. Ay, gods, such a noise it made! My ears rang for hours! From the bag she brought a gun. Tim stared at it, wideeyed. He had seen pictures of them in the Widows books, and Old Destry had on the wall of his parlor a framed drawing of a kind called a rifle, but he had never expected to see the real thing. It was about a foot long, the gripping handle of wood, the trigger and barrels of dull metal. The barrels numbered four, bound together by bands of what looked like brass. The holes at the end, where whatever it shot came out, were square. He fired it twice before showing me, and its never been fired since the day he did, because he died soon after. I dont know if it still will fire, but Ive kept it dry, and once every yearon his birthdayI oil it as he showed me. Each chamber is loaded, and there are five more projectiles. Theyre called bullets. Pullets? Tim asked, frowning. Nay, nay, bullets. Look you. She handed him the bag to free both of her gnarled hands, then turned to one side in the doorway. Joshua said a gun must never be pointed at a person unless you want to hurt or kill him. For, he said, guns have eager hearts. Or perhaps he said evil hearts? After all these years, I no longer remember. Theres a little lever on the side . . . just here . . . There was a click, and the gun broke open between the handle and the barrels. She showed him four square brass plates. When she pulled one from the hole where it rested, Tim saw that the plate was actually the base of a projectilea bullet. The brass bottom remains after you fire, said she. You must pull it out before you can load in another. Do you see? Aye. He longed to handle the bullets himself. More; he longed to hold the gun in his hand, and pull the trigger, and hear the explosion. The Widow closed the gun (again it made that perfect little click) and then showed him the handle end. He saw four small cocking devices meant to be pulled back with the thumb. These are the hammers. Each one fires a different barrel . . . if the cursed thing still fires at all. Do you see? Aye. Its called a fourshot. Joshua said it was safe as long as none of the hammers were drawn. She reeled a bit on her feet, as if she had come over lightheaded. Giving a gun to a child! One who means to go into the Endless Forest at night, to meet a devil! Yet what else can I do? And then, not to Tim But he wont expect a child to have a gun, will he? Mayhap theres White in the world yet, and one of these old bullets will end up in his black heart. Put it in the bag, do ya. She held the gun out to him, handle first. Tim almost dropped it. That such a small thing could be so heavy seemed astounding. And, like the Covenant Mans magic wand when it had passed over the water in the pail, it seemed to thrum. The extra bullets are wrapped in cotton batting. With the four in the gun, you have nine. May they do you well, and may I not find myself cursed in the clearing for giving them to you. Thank . . . thankeesai! It was all Tim could manage. He slipped the gun into the bag. She put her hands to the sides of her head and uttered a bitter laugh. Youre a fool, and Im another. Instead of bringing you my brothers fourshot, I should have brought my broom and hit you over the head wi it. She voiced that bitter, despairing laugh again. Yet twould do no good, with my old womans strength. Will you take word to my mama in the morning? For it wont be just a little way down the Ironwood Trail Ill be going this time, but all the way to the end. Aye, and break her heart, likely. She bent toward him, the hem of her veil swinging. Has thee thought of that? I see by your face thee has. Why do you do this when you know the news of it will harrow her soul? Tim flushed from chin to hairline, but held his ground. In that moment he looked very much like his goneon father. I mean to save her eyesight. He has left me enough of his magic to show me how its to be done. Black magic! In support of lies! Of lies, Tim Ross! So you say. Now his jaw jutted, and that was also very like Jack Ross. But he didnt lie about the keyit worked. He didnt lie about the beatingit happened. He didnt lie about my mama being blindshe is. As for my da . . . thee knows. Yar, she said, now speaking in a harsh country accent Tim had never heard before. Yar, and each o his truths has worked two ways they hurtee, and theyve baited his trap foree. He said nothing to this at first, only lowered his head and studied the toes of his scuffed shorboots. The Widow had almost allowed herself to hope when he raised his head, met her eyes, and said, Ill leave Bitsy tethered uptrail from the CosingtonMarchly stake. I dont want to leave her at the stub where I found my da, because theres a pooky in the trees. When you go to see Mama, will you ask sai Cosington to fetch Bitsy home? A younger woman might have continued to argue, perhaps even to pleadbut the Widow was not that woman. Anything else? Two things. Speak. Will you give my mama a kiss for me? Aye, and gladly. Whats the other? Will you set me on with a blessing? She considered this, then shook her head. As for blessings, my brothers fourshot is the best I can do. Then it will have to be enough. He made a leg and brought his fist to his forehead in salute; then he turned and went down the steps to where the faithful little mollie mule was tethered. In a voice almostbut not quitetoo low to hear, the Widow Smack said, In Gans name, I bless thee. Now let ka work. The moon was down when Tim dismounted Bitsy and tethered her to a bush at the side of the Ironwood Trail. He had filled his pockets with oats ere leaving the barn, and he now spread them before her as hed seen the Covenant Man do for his horse the previous night. Be easy, and sai Cosington will come for thee in the morning, Tim said. An image of Square Peter finding Bitsy dead, with a gaping hole in her belly made by one of the predators of the forest (perhaps the very one hed sensed behind him on his pasear down the Ironwood the night before) lit up his mind. Yet what else could he do? Bitsy was sweet, but not smart enough to find her way home on her own, no matter how many times shed been up and down this same trail. Theell be passing fine, he said, stroking her smooth nose . . . but would she? The idea that the Widow had been right about everything and this was just the first evidence of it came to his mind, and Tim pushed it aside. He told me the truth about the rest; surely he told the truth about this, too. By the time he was three wheels farther up the Ironwood Trail, he had begun to believe this. You must remember he was only eleven. He spied no campfire that night. Instead of the welcoming orange glow of burning wood, Tim glimpsed a cold green light as he approached the end of the Ironwood Trail. It flickered and sometimes disappeared, but it always came back, strong enough to cast shadows that seemed to slither around his feet like snakes. The trailfaint now, because the only ruts were those made by the wagons of Big Ross and Big Kellsswept left to skirt an ancient ironwood with a trunk bigger than the largest house in Tree. A hundred paces beyond this curve, the way forward ended in a clearing. There was the crossbar, and there the sign. Tim could read every word, for above it, suspended in midair by virtue of wings beating so rapidly they were all but invisible, was the sighe. He stepped closer, all else forgotten in the wonder of this exotic vision. The sighe was no more than four inches tall. She was naked and beautiful. It was impossible to tell if her body was as green as the glow it gave off, for the light around her was fierce. Yet he could see her welcoming smile, and knew she was seeing him very well even though her upturned, almondshaped eyes were pupilless. Her wings made a steady low purring sound. Of the Covenant Man there was no sign. The sighe spun in a playful circle, then dived into the branches of a bush. Tim felt a tingle of alarm, imagining those gauzy wings torn apart by thorns, but she emerged unharmed, rising in a dizzy spiral to a height of fifty feet or moreas high as the first upreaching ironwood branchesbefore plunging back down, right at him. Tim saw her shapely arms cast out behind her, making her look like a girl who dives into a pool. He ducked, and as she passed over his head close enough to stir his hair, he heard laughter. It sounded like bells coming from a great distance. He straightened up cautiously and saw her returning, now somersaulting over and over in the air. His heart was beating fiercely in his chest. He thought he had never seen anything so lovely. She flew above the crossbar, and by her firefly light he saw a faint and mostly overgrown path leading into the Endless Forest. She raised one arm. The hand at the end of it, glowing with green fire, beckoned to him. Enchanted by her otherworldly beauty and welcoming smile, Tim did not hesitate but at once ducked beneath the crossbar with never a look at the last two words on his dead fathers sign TRAVELER, BEWARE. The sighe hovered until he was almost close enough to reach out and touch her, then whisked away, down the remnant of path. There she hovered, smiling and beckoning. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders, sometimes concealing her tiny breasts, sometimes fluttering upward in the breeze of her wings to reveal them. The second time he drew close, Tim called out . . . but low, afraid that if he hailed her in a voice too loud, it might burst her tiny eardrums. Where is the Covenant Man? Another silvery tinkle of laughter was her reply. She barrelrolled twice, knees drawn all the way up to the hollows of her shoulders, then was off, pausing only to look back and make sure Tim was following before darting onward. So it was that she led the captivated boy deeper and deeper into the Endless Forest. Tim didnt notice when the poor remnant of path disappeared and his course took him between tall ironwood trees that had been seen by the eyes of only a few men, and that long ago. Nor did he notice when the grave, sweetsour smell of the ironwoods was replaced by the far less pleasant aroma of stagnant water and rotting vegetation. The ironwood trees had fallen away. There would be more up ahead, countless leagues of them, but not here. Tim had come to the edge of the great swamp known as the Fagonard. The sighe, once more flashing her teasing smile, flew on. Now her glow was reflected up at her from murky water. Somethingnot a fishbroke the scummy surface, stared at the airy interloper with a glabrous eye, and slid back below the surface. Tim didnt notice. What he saw was the tussock above which she was now hovering. It would be a long stride, but there was no question of not going. She was waiting. He jumped just to be safe and still barely made it; that greenglow was deceptive, making things look closer than they actually were. He tottered, pinwheeling his arms. The sighe made things worse (unintentionally, Tim was sure; she was just playing) by spinning rapid circles around his head, blinding him with her aura and filling his ears with the bells of her laughter. The issue was in doubt (and he never saw the scaly head that surfaced behind him, the protruding eyes, or the yawning jaws filled with triangular teeth), but Tim was young and agile. He caught his balance and was soon standing on top of the tussock. Whats thy name? he asked the glowing sprite, who was now hovering just beyond the tussock. He wasnt sure, in spite of her tinkling laughter, that she could speak, or that she would respond in either the low speech or the high if she could. But she answered, and Tim thought it was the loveliest name hed ever heard, a perfect match for her ethereal beauty. Armaneeta! she called, and then was off again, laughing and looking flirtatiously back at him. He followed her deeper and deeper into the Fagonard. Sometimes the tussocks were close enough for him to step from one to the next, but as they progressed onward, he found that more and more frequently he had to jump, and these leaps grew longer and longer. Yet Tim wasnt frightened. On the contrary, he was dazzled and euphoric, laughing each time he tottered. He did not see the Vshapes that followed him, cutting through the black water as smoothly as a seamstresss needle through silk; first one, then three, then half a dozen. He was bitten by suckerbugs and brushed them off without feeling their sting, leaving bloody splats on his skin. Nor did he see the slumped but more or less upright shapes that paced him on one side, staring with eyes that gleamed in the dark. He reached for Armaneeta several times, calling, Come to me, I wont hurt thee! She always eluded him, once flying between his closing fingers and tickling his skin with her wings. She circled a tussock that was larger than the others. There were no weeds growing on it, and Tim surmised it was actually a rockthe first one hed seen in this part of the world, where things seemed more liquid than solid. Thats too far! Tim called to Armaneeta. He looked for another steppingstone, but there was none. If he wanted to reach the next tussock, he would have to leap onto the rock first. And she was beckoning. Maybe I can make it, he thought. Certainly she thinks I can; why else would she beckon me on? There was no space on his current tussock to back up and get a running start, so Tim flexed his knees and broadjumped, putting every ounce of his strength into it. He flew over the water, saw he wasnt going to make the rockalmost, but not quiteand stretched out his arms. He landed on his chest and chin, the latter connecting hard enough to send bright dots flocking in front of eyes already dazzled by fairyglow. There was a moment to realize it wasnt a rock he was clutchingnot unless rocks breathedand then there was a vast and filthy grunt from behind him. This was followed by a great splash that spattered Tims back and neck with warm, buginfested water. He scrambled up on the rock that was not a rock, aware that he had lost the Widows lamp but still had the bag. Had he not knotted the neck of it tightly around one wrist, he would have lost that, too. The cotton was damp but not actually soaked. At least not yet. Then, just as he sensed the thing behind him closing in, the rock began to rise. He was standing on the head of some creature that had been taking its ease in the mud and silt. Now it was fully awake and not happy. It let out a roar, and greenorange fire belched from its mouth, sizzling the reeds poking up from the water just ahead. Not as big as a house, no, probably not, but its a dragon, all right, and oh, gods, Im standing on its head! The creatures exhalation lit this part of the Fagonard brightly. Tim saw the reeds bending this way and that as the critters that had been following him made away from the dragons fire as fast as they could. Tim also saw one more tussock. It was a little bigger than the ones he had hopscotched across to arrive at his currentand very perilouslocation. There was no time to worry about being eaten by an oversize cannibal fish if he landed short, or being turned into a charcoal boy by the dragons next breath if he actually reached the tussock. With an inarticulate cry, Tim leaped. It was by far his longest jump, and almost too long. He had to grab at handfuls of sawgrass to keep from tumbling off the other side and into the water. The grass was sharp, cutting into his fingers. Some bunches were also hot and smoking from the irritated dragons broadside, but Tim held on. He didnt want to think about what might be waiting for him if he tumbled off this tiny island. Not that his position here was safe. He rose onto his knees and looked back the way he had come. The dragontwas a bitch, for he could see the pink maidenscomb on her headhad risen from the water, standing on her back legs. Not the size of a house, but bigger than Blackie, the Covenant Mans stallion. She fanned her wings twice, sending droplets in every direction and creating a breeze that blew Tims sweatclotted hair off his forehead. The sound was like his mothers sheets on the clothesline, snapping in a brisk wind. She was looking at him from beady, redveined eyes. Ropes of burning saliva dropped from her jaws and hissed out when they struck the water. Tim could see the gill high up between her plated breasts fluttering as she pulled in air to stoke the furnace in her guts. He had time to think how strange it wasalso a bit funnythat what his steppa had lied about would now become the truth. Only Tim would be the one cooked alive. The gods must be laughing, Tim thought. And if they werent, the Covenant Man probably was. With no rational consideration, Tim fell to his knees and held his hands out to the dragon, the cotton sack still swinging from his right wrist. Please, my lady! he cried. Please dont burn me, for I was led astray and cry your pardon! For several moments the dragon continued to regard him, and her gill continued to pulse; her fiery spittle went on dripping and hissing. Then, slowlyto Tim it seemed like inches at a timeshe began to submerge again. Finally there was nothing left but the top of her head . . . and those awful, staring eyes. They seemed to promise that she would not be merciful, should he choose to disturb her repose a second time. Then they were gone, too, and once more all that Tim could see was something that might have been a rock. Armaneeta? He turned around, looking for her greenglow, knowing he would not see it. She had led him deep into the Fagonard, to a place where there were no more tussocks ahead and a dragon behind. Her job was done. Nothing but lies, Tim whispered. The Widow Smack had been right all along. He sat down on the hummock, thinking he would cry, but there were no tears. That was fine with Tim. What good would crying do? He had been made a fool of, and that was an end to it. He promised himself he would know better next time . . . if there was a next time. Sitting here alone in the gloom, with the hidden moon casting an ashy glow through the overgrowth, that didnt seem likely. The submerged things that had fled were back. They avoided the dragons watery boudoir, but that still left them plenty of room to maneuver, and there could be no doubt that the sole object of their interest was the tiny island where Tim sat. He could only hope they were fish of some kind, unable to leave the water without dying. He knew, however, that large creatures living in water this thick and shallow were very likely airbreathers as well as waterbreathers. He watched them circle and thought, Theyre getting up their courage to attack. He was looking at death and knew it, but he was still eleven, and hungry in spite of everything. He took out the loaf, saw that only one end was damp, and had a few bites. Then he set it aside to examine the fourshot as well as he could by the chancy moonlight and the faint phosphorescent glow of the swampwater. It looked and felt dry enough. So did the extra shells, and Tim thought he knew a way to make sure they stayed that way. He tore a hole in the dry half of the loaf, poked the spare bullets deep inside, plugged the cache, and put the loaf beside the bag. He hoped the bag would dry, but he didnt know. The air was very damp, and And here they came, two of them, arrowing straight for Tims island. He jumped to his feet and shouted the first thing to come into his head. You better not! You better not, cullies! Theres a gunslinger here, a true son of Gilead and the Eld, so you better not! He doubted if such beasts with their pea brains had the slightest idea what he was shoutingor would care if they didbut the sound of his voice startled them, and they sheared off. Ware you dont wake yon firemaiden, Tim thought. Shes apt to rise up and crisp you just to stop the noise. But what choice did he have? The next time those living underwater boats came charging at him, the boy clapped his hands as well as shouted. He would have pounded on a hollow log if hed had a log to pound on, and Naar take the dragon. Tim thought that, should it come to the push, her burning death would be more merciful than what he would suffer in the jaws of the swimming things. Certainly it would be quicker. He wondered if the Covenant Man was somewhere close, watching this and enjoying it. Tim decided that was halfright. Watching, yes, but the Covenant Man wouldnt dirty his boots in this stinking swamp. He was somewhere dry and pleasant, watching the show in his silver basin with Armaneeta circling close. Perhaps even sitting on his shoulder, her chin propped on her tiny hands. By the time a dirty dawnlight began to creep through the overhanging trees (gnarled, mosshung monstrosities of a sort Tim had never seen before), his tussock was surrounded by two dozen of the circling shapes. The shortest looked to be about ten feet in length, but most were far longer. Shouting and clapping no longer drove them away. They were going to come for him. If that wasnt bad enough, there was now enough light coming through the greenroof for him to see that his death and ingestion would have an audience. It wasnt yet bright enough for him to make out the faces of the watchers, and for this Tim was miserably glad. Their slumped, semihuman shapes were bad enough. They stood on the nearest bank, seventy or eighty yards away. He could make out half a dozen, but thought there were more. The dim and misty light made it hard to tell for sure. Their shoulders were rounded, their shaggy heads thrust forward. The tatters hanging from their indistinct bodies might have been remnants of clothing or ribbons of moss like those hanging from the branches. To Tim they looked like a small tribe of mudmen who had risen from the watery floor of the swamp just to watch the swimmers first tease and then take their prey. What does it matter? Im a goner whether they watch or not. One of the circling reptiles broke from the pack and drove at the tussock, tail lashing the water, prehistoric head raised, jaws split in a grin that looked longer than Tims whole body. |
It struck below the place where Tim stood, and hard enough to make the tussock shiver like jelly. On the bank, several of the watching mudmen hooted. Tim thought they were like spectators at a Saturdayafternoon Points match. The idea was so infuriating that it drove his fear out. What rushed in to fill the place where it had been was fury. Would the waterbeasts have him? He saw no way they would not. Yet if the fourshot the Widow had given him hadnt taken too much of a wetting, he might be able to make at least one of them pay for its breakfast. And if it doesnt fire, Ill turn it around and club the beast with the butt end until it tears my arm off my shoulder. The thing was crawling out of the water now, the claws at the ends of its stubby front legs tearing away clumps of reed and weed, leaving black gashes that quickly filled up with water. Its tailblackishgreen on top, white as a dead mans belly beneathdrove it ever forward and upward, slapping at the water and throwing fans of muddy filth in all directions. Above its snout was a nest of eyes that pulsed and bulged, pulsed and bulged. They never left Tims face. The long jaws gnashed; the teeth sounded like stones driven together. On the shoreseventy yards or a thousand wheels, it made no differencethe mudmen called again, seeming to cheer the monster on. Tim opened the cotton sack. His hands were steady and his fingers sure, although the thing had hauled half its length onto the little island and there was now only three feet between Tims sodden boots and those clicking teeth. He pulled back one of the hammers as the Widow had shown him, curled his finger around the trigger, and dropped to one knee. Now he and the approaching horror were on the same level. Tim could smell its rich carrion breath and see deep into its pulsing pink gullet. Yet Tim was smiling. He felt it stretching his lips, and he was glad. It was good to smile in ones final moments, so it was. He only wished it was the barony tax collector crawling up the bank, with his treacherous green familiar on his shoulder. Lets see howee like this, cully, Tim murmured, and pulled the trigger. There was such a huge bang that Tim at first believed the fourshot had exploded in his hand. Yet it wasnt the gun that exploded, but the reptiles hideous nest of eyes. They splattered blackishred ichor. The creature uttered an agonized roar and curled backward on its tail. Its short forelegs pawed the air. It fell into the water, thrashed, then rolled over, displaying its belly. A red cloud began to grow around its partially submerged head. Its hungry ancient grin had become a death rictus. In the trees, rudely awakened birds flapped and chattered and screamed down abuse. Still wrapped in that coldness (and still smiling, although he wasnt aware of it), Tim broke open the fourshot and removed the spent casing. It was smoking and warm to the touch. He grabbed the halfloaf, stuck the breadplug in his mouth, and thumbed one of the spare loads into the empty chamber. He snapped the pistol closed, then spat out the plug, which now had an oily taste. Come on! he shouted to the reptiles that were now swimming back and forth in agitated fashion (the hump marking the top of the submerged dragon had disappeared). Come have some more! Nor was this bravado. Tim discovered he actually wanted them to come. Nothingnot even his fathers ax, which he still carried in his belthad ever felt so divinely right to him as did the heavy weight of the fourshot in his left hand. From the shore came a sound Tim could not at first identify, not because it was strange but because it ran counter to all the assumptions he had made about those watching. The mudmen were clapping. When he turned to face them, the smoking gun still in his hand, they dropped to their knees, fisted their foreheads, and spoke the only word of which they seemed capable. That word was hile, one of the few which is exactly the same in both low and high speech, the one the Manni called finGan, or the first word; the one that set the world spinning. Is it possible . . . Tim Ross, son of Jack, looked from the kneeling mudmen on the bank to the antique (but very effective) weapon he still held. Is it possible they think . . . It was possible. More than possible, in fact. These people of the Fagonard believed he was a gunslinger. For several moments he was too stunned to move. He stared at them from the tussock where he had fought for his life (and might yet lose it); they knelt in high green reeds and oozy mud seventy yards away, fisted hands to their shaggy heads, and stared back. Finally some semblance of reason began to reassert itself, and Tim understood that he must use their belief while he still could. He groped for the stories his mama and his da had told him, and those the Widow Smack had read to her pupils from her precious books. Nothing quite seemed to fit the situation, however, until he recalled a fragment of an old story hed heard from Splinter Harry, one of the codgers who worked parttime at the sawmill. Halffoolish was Old Splint, apt to point a fingergun at you and pretend to pull the trigger, also prone to babbling nonsense in what he claimed was the high speech. He loved nothing better than talking about the men from Gilead who carried the big irons and went forth on quests. Oh, Harry, I only hope it was ka that put me in earshot on that particular noonrest. Hile, bondsmen! he cried to the mudmen on the bank. I see you very well! Rise in love and service! For a long moment, nothing happened. Then they rose and stood staring at him from deepsocketed and fundamentally exhausted eyes. Their sloping jaws hung almost to their breastbones in identical expressions of wonder. Tim saw that some carried primitive bows; others had bludgeons strapped to their sunken chests with woven vines. What do I say now? Sometimes, Tim thought, only the bald truth would do. Get me off this fucking island! he shouted. At first the mudmen only gaped at him. Then they drew together and palavered in a mixture of grunts, clicks, and unsettling growls. Just when Tim was beginning to believe the conference would go on forever, several of the tribesmen turned and sprinted off. Another, the tallest, turned to Tim and held out both of his hands. They were hands, although there were too many fingers on them and the palms were green with some mossy substance. The gesture they made was clear and emphatic Stay put. Tim nodded, then sat down on the tussock (like Sma Lady Muffin on her tuffin, he thought) and began munching the rest of his bread. He cocked an eye for the wakes of returning swimmers as he ate, and kept the fourshot in one hand. Flies and small bugs settled on his skin long enough to sip his sweat before flying off again. Tim thought that if something didnt happen soon, hed have to jump in the water just to get away from the irritating things, which were too quick to catch with a slap. Only who knew what else might be hiding in that murk, or creeping along the bottom? As he swallowed the last bite of bread, a rhythmic thudding began to pulse across the morningmisty swamp, startling more birds into flight. Some of these were surprisingly large, with pink plumage and long, thin legs that paddled the water as they fought their way into the air. They made high, ululating cries that sounded to Tim like the laughter of children who had lost their minds. Someones beating on the hollow log I wished for, not so long ago. The thought raised a tired grin. The pounding went on for five minutes or so, then ceased. The cullies on the bank were staring in the direction from which Tim had comea much younger Tim that had been, foolishly laughing and following a bad fairy named Armaneeta. The mudmen shaded their eyes against the sun, now shining fiercely through the overhanging foliage and burning off the mist. It was shaping to be another unnaturally hot day. Tim heard splashing, and it was not long before a queer, misshapen boat emerged from the unraveling mists. It had been cobbled together of woodscraps gleaned from gods knew where and rode low in the water, trailing long tangles of moss and waterweed. There was a mast but no sail; at the top, acting as lookout, was a boars head surrounded by a shifting skein of flies. Four of the swampdwellers rowed with paddles of some orange wood Tim did not recognize. A fifth stood at the prow, wearing a black silk top hat decorated with a red ribbon that trailed down over one bare shoulder. He peered ahead, sometimes waving left, sometimes right. The oarsmen followed his wigwagging with the efficiency of long practice, the boat swooping neatly between the tussocks that had led Tim into his present difficulty. When the boat approached the black stretch of still water where the dragon had been, the helmsman bent, then stood up with a grunt of effort. In his arms he held a dripping chunk of carcass that Tim assumed had not long ago been attached to the head decorating the mast. The helmsman cradled it, never minding the blood that smeared his shaggy chest and arms, peering down into the water. He uttered a sharp, hooting cry, followed by several rapid clicks. The crew shipped their oars. The boat maintained a little headway toward the tussock where Tim waited, but Helmsman paid no attention; he was still peering raptly into the water. With a quiet more shocking than the noisiest splash, a giant claw rose up, the talons halfclenched. Sai Helmsman laid the bloody chunk of boar into that demanding palm as gently as a mother lays her sleeping babe into its crib. The talons closed around the meat, squeezing out droplets of blood that pattered into the water. Then, as quietly as it had come, the claw disappeared, bearing its tribute. Now you know how to appease a dragon, Tim thought. It occurred to him that he was amassing a wonderful store of tales, ones that would hold not just Old Splint but the whole village of Tree in thrall. He wondered if he would ever live to tell them. The scow bumped the tussock. The oarsmen bent their heads and fisted their brows. Helmsman did the same. When he gestured to Tim from the boat, indicating that he should board, long strands of green and brown swung back and forth from his scrawny arm. More of this growth hung on his cheeks and straggled from his chin. Even his nostrils seemed plugged with vegetable matter, so that he had to breathe through his mouth. Not mudmen at all, Tim thought as he climbed into the boat. Theyre plantmen. Muties who are becoming a part of the swamp they live in. I say thankee, Tim told Helmsman, and touched the side of his fist to his own forehead. Hile! Helmsman replied. His lips spread in a grin. The few teeth thus revealed were green, but the grin was no less charming for that. We are wellmet, Tim said. Hile, Helmsman repeated, and then they all took it up, making the swamp ring Hile! Hile! Hile! Onshore (if ground that trembled and oozed at every step could be called shore), the tribe gathered around Tim. Their smell was earthy and enormous. Tim kept the fourshot in his hand, not because he intended to shoot or even threaten them with it, but because they so clearly wanted to see it. If any had reached out to actually touch it, he would have put it back in the bag, but none did. They grunted, they gestured, they made those chittering bird cries, but none of them spoke a word other than hile that Tim could understand. Yet when Tim spoke to them, he had no doubt that he was understood. He counted at least sixteen, all men and all muties. As well as plant life, most were supporting fungoid growths that looked like the shelf mushrooms Tim sometimes saw growing on the blossiewood hed hauled at the sawmill. They were also afflicted with boils and festering sores. A nearcertainty grew in Tim somewhere there might be womena fewbut there would be no children. This was a dying tribe. Soon the Fagonard would take them just as the bitch dragon had taken her sacrificial chunk of boar. In the meantime, though, they were looking at him in a way he also recognized from his days in the sawmill. It was the way he and the rest of the boys looked at the foreman when the last job had been done and the next not yet assigned. The Fagonard tribe thought he was a gunslingerridiculous, he was only a kid, but there it wasand they were, at least for the time being, his to command. Easy enough for them, but Tim had never been a boss nor dreamed of being one. What did he want? If he asked them to take him back to the south end of the swamp, they would; he was sure of it. From there he believed he could find his way to the Ironwood Trail, which would in turn take him back to Tree Village. Back home. That was the reasonable thing, and Tim knew it. But when he got back, his mother would still be blind. Even Big Kellss capture would not change that. He, Tim Ross, would have dared much to no gain. Even worse, the Covenant Man might use his silver basin to watch him slink south, beaten. Hed laugh. Probably with his wretched pixie sitting on his shoulder, laughing right along with him. As he considered this, he minded something the Widow Smack used to say in happier days, when he was just a schoolboy whose biggest concern was to finish his chores before his da came back from the woods The only stupid question, my cullies, is the one you dont ask. Speaking slowly (and without much hope), Tim said Im on a quest to find Maerlyn, who is a great magician. I was told he has a house in the Endless Forest, but the man who told me so was . . . Was a bastard. Was a liar. Was a cruel trickster who passed the time cozening children. . . . was untrustworthy, he finished. Have you of the Fagonard ever heard of this Maerlyn? He may wear a tall cap the color of the sun. He expected headshakes or incomprehension. Instead, the members of the tribe moved away from him and formed a tight, jabbering circle. This went on for at least ten minutes, and on several occasions the discussion grew quite warm. At last they returned to where Tim waited. Crooked hands with soreraddled fingers pushed the erstwhile helmsman forward. This worthy was broadshouldered and sturdily built. Had he not grown up in the waterlogged poisonbowl that was the Fagonard, he might have been considered handsome. His eyes were bright with intelligence. On his chest, above his right nipple, an enormous infected sore bulged and trembled. He raised a finger in a way Tim recognized it was the Widow Smacks attend me gesture. Tim nodded and pointed the first two fingers of his right handthe one not holding the gunat his eyes, as the Widow had taught them. Helmsmanthe tribes best playactor, Tim surmisednodded back, then stroked the air below the straggly growth of intermixed stubble and weed on his chin. Tim felt a stab of excitement. A beard? Yes, he has a beard! Helmsman next stroked the air above his head, closing his fist as he did so, indicating not just a tall cap but a tall conical cap. Thats him! Tim actually laughed. Helmsman smiled, but Tim thought it a troubled smile. Several of the others jabbered and twittered. Helmsman motioned them quiet, then turned back to Tim. Before he could continue his dumbshow, however, the sore above his nipple burst open in a spray of pus and blood. From it crawled a spider the size of a robins egg. Helmsman grabbed it, crushed it, and tossed it aside. Then, as Tim watched with horrified fascination, he used one hand to push the wound wide. When the sides gaped like lips, he used his other hand to reach in and scoop out a slick mass of faintly throbbing eggs. He slatted these casually aside, ridding himself of them as a man might rid himself of a palmful of snot he has blown out of his nose on a cold morning. None of the others paid this any particular attention. They were waiting for the show to continue. With his sore attended to, Helmsman dropped to his hands and knees and began to make a series of predatory lunges this way and that, growling as he did so. He stopped and looked up at Tim, who shook his head. He was also struggling with his stomach. These people had just saved his life, and he reckoned it would be very impolite to puke in front of them. I dont understand that one, sai. Say sorry. Helmsman shrugged and got to his feet. The matted weeds growing from his chest were now beaded with blood. Again he made the beard and the tall conical cap. Again he dropped to the ground, snarling and making lunges. This time all the others joined him. The tribe briefly became a pack of dangerous animals, their laughter and obvious good cheer somewhat spoiling the illusion. Tim once more shook his head, feeling quite stupid. Helmsman did not look cheerful; he looked worried. He stood for a moment, hands on hips, thinking, then beckoned one of his fellow tribesmen forward. This one was tall, bald, and toothless. The two of them palavered at length. Then the tall man ran off, making great speed even though his legs were so severely bent that he rocked from side to side like a skiff in a swell. Helmsman beckoned two others forward and spoke to them. They also ran off. Helmsman then dropped to his hands and knees and recommenced his fierceanimal imitation. When he was done, he looked up at Tim with an expression that was close to pleading. Is it a dog? Tim ventured. At this, the remaining tribesmen laughed heartily. Helmsman got up and patted Tim on the shoulder with a sixfingered hand, as if to tell him not to take it to heart. Just tell me one thing, Tim said. Maerlyn . . . sai, is he real? Helmsman considered this, then flung his arms skyward in an exaggerated delah gesture. It was body language any Tree villager would have recognized Who knows? The two tribesmen who had run off together came back carrying a basket of woven reeds and a hemp shoulder strap to carry it with. They deposited it at Helmsmans feet, turned to Tim, saluted him, then stood back, grinning. Helmsman hunkered and motioned for Tim to do the same. The boy knew what the basket held even before Helmsman opened it. He could smell freshcooked meat and had to wipe his mouth on his sleeve to keep from drooling. The two men (or perhaps their women) had packed the Fagonard equivalent of a woodsmans lunch. Sliced pork had been layered with rounds of some orange vegetable that looked like squash. These were wrapped in thin green leaves to make breadless popkins. There were also strawberries and blueberries, fruits long gone by for the season in Tree. Thankeesai! Tim tapped his throat three times. This made them all laugh and tap their own throats. The tall tribesman returned. From one shoulder hung a waterskin. In his hand he carried a small purse of the finest, smoothest leather Tim had ever seen. The purse he gave to Helmsman. The waterskin he held out to the boy. Tim wasnt aware of how thirsty he was until he felt the skins weight and pressed his palms against its plump, gently yielding sides. He pulled the plug with his teeth, raised it on his elbow as did the men of his village, and drank deep. He expected it to be brackish (and perhaps buggy), but it was as cool and sweet as that which came from their own spring between the house and the barn. The tribesmen laughed and applauded. Tim saw a sore on the shoulder of Tallman getting ready to give birth, and was relieved when Helmsman tapped him on the shoulder, wanting him to look at something. It was the purse. There was some sort of metal seam running across the middle of it. When Helmsman pulled a tab attached to this seam, the purse opened like magic. Inside was a brushed metal disc the size of a small plate. There was writing on the top side that Tim couldnt read. Below the writing were three buttons. Helmsman pushed one of these, and a short stick emerged from the plate with a low whining sound. The tribesmen, who had gathered round in a loose semicircle, laughed and applauded some more. They were clearly having a wonderful time. Tim, with his thirst slaked and his feet on solid (semisolid, at least) ground, decided he was having a pretty good time himself. Is that from the Old People, sai? Helmsman nodded. Such things are held to be dangerous where I come from. Helmsman at first didnt seem to understand this, and from their puzzled expressions, none of the other plantfellas did, either. Then he laughed and made a sweeping gesture that took in everything the sky, the water, the oozing land upon which they stood. As if to say everything was dangerous. And in this place, Tim thought, everything probably is. Helmsman poked Tims chest, then gave an apologetic little shrug Sorry, but you must pay attention. All right, Tim said. Im watching. And forked two fingers at his eyes, which made them all chuckle and elbow each other, as if he had gotten off an especially good one. Helmsman pushed a second button. The disc beeped, which made the watchers murmur appreciatively. A red light came on below the buttons. Helmsman began to turn in a slow circle, holding the metal device out before him like an offering. Three quarters of the way around the circle, the device beeped again and the red light turned green. Helmsman pointed one overgrown finger in the direction the device was now pointing. As well as Tim could ken from the mostly hidden sun, this was north. Helmsman looked to see if Tim understood. Tim thought he did, but there was a problem. Theres water that way. I can swim, but . . . He bared his teeth and chomped them together, pointing toward the tussock where he had almost become some scaly things breakfast. They all laughed hard at this, none harder than Helmsman, who actually had to bend and grip his mossy knees to keep from falling over. Yar, Tim thought, very funny, I almost got eaten alive. When his throe had passed and Helmsman was able to stand up straight again, he pointed at the rickety boat. Oh, Tim said. I forgot about that. He was thinking that he made a very stupid gunslinger. Helmsman saw Tim onboard, then took his accustomed place beneath the pole where the decaying boars head had been. The crew took theirs. The food and water were handed in; the little leather case with the compass (if that was what it was) Tim had stowed in the Widows cotton sack. The fourshot went into his belt on his left hip, where it made a rough balance for the handax on his right side. There was a good deal of hileing back and forth, then Tallmanwho Tim believed was probably Headman, although Helmsman had done most of the communicatingapproached. He stood on the bank and looked solemnly at Tim in the boat. He forked two fingers at his eyes Attend me. I see you very well. And he did, although his eyes were growing heavy. He couldnt remember when he had last slept. Not last night, certainly. Headman shook his head, made the forkedfinger gesture againwith more emphasis this timeand deep in the recesses of Tims mind (perhaps even in his soul, that tiny shining splinter of ka), he seemed to hear a whisper. For the first time it occurred to him that it might not be his words that these swampfolk understood. Watch? Headman nodded; the others muttered agreement. There was no laughter or merriment in their faces now; they looked sorrowful and strangely childlike. Watch for what? Headman got down on his hands and knees and began turning in rapid circles. This time instead of growls, he made a series of doglike yipping sounds. Every now and then he stopped and raised his head in the northerly direction the device had pointed out, flaring his greencrusted nostrils, as if scenting the air. At last he rose and looked at Tim questioningly. All right, Tim said. He didnt know what Headman was trying to conveyor why all of them now looked so downcastbut he would remember. And he would know what Headman was trying so hard to show him, if he saw it. If he saw it, he might understand it. Sai, do you hear my thoughts? Headman nodded. They all nodded. Then thee knows I am no gunslinger. I was but trying to spark my courage. Headman shook his head and smiled, as if this were of no account. He made the attend me gesture again, then clapped his arms around his soreridden torso and began an exaggerated shivering. The otherseven the seated crewmembers on the boatcopied him. After a little of this, Headman fell over on the ground (which squelched under his weight). The others copied this, too. Tim stared at this litter of bodies, astonished. At last, Headman stood up. Looked into Tims eyes. The look asked if Tim understood, and Tim was terribly afraid he did. Are you saying He found he couldnt finish, at least not aloud. It was too terrible. (Are you saying youre all going to die) Slowly, while looking gravely into his eyesyet smiling a little, just the sameHeadman nodded. Then Tim proved conclusively that he was no gunslinger. He began to cry. Helmsman pushed off with a long stick. The oarsmen on the left side turned the boat, and when it had reached open water, Helmsman gestured with both hands for them to row. Tim sat in the back and opened the food hamper. He ate a little because his belly was still hungry, but only a little, because the rest of him now wasnt. When he offered to pass the basket around, the oarsmen grinned their thanks but declined. The water was smooth, the steady rhythm of the oars lulling, and Tims eyes soon closed. He dreamed that his mother was shaking him and telling him it was morning, that if he stayed slugabed, hed be too late to help his da saddle the mollies. Is he alive, then? Tim asked, and the question was so absurd that Nell laughed. He was shaken awake, that much did happen, but not by his mother. It was Helmsman who was bending over him when he opened his eyes, the man smelling so powerfully of sweat and decaying vegetable matter that Tim had to stifle a sneeze. Nor was it morning. Quite the opposite the sun had crossed the sky and shone redly through stands of strange, gnarled trees that grew right out of the water. Those trees Tim could not have named, but he knew the ones growing on the slope beyond the place where the swamp boat had come to ground. They were ironwoods, and real giants. Deep drifts of orange and gold flowers grew around their bases. Tim thought his mother would swoon at their beauty, then remembered she would no longer be able to see them. They had come to the end of the Fagonard. Ahead were the true forest deeps. Helmsman helped Tim over the side of the boat, and two of the oarsmen handed out the basket of food and the waterskin. When his gunna was at Tims feetthis time on ground that didnt ooze or quakeHelmsman motioned for Tim to open the Widows cotton sack. When Tim did, Helmsman made a beeping sound that brought an appreciative chuckle from his crew. Tim took out the leather case that held the metal disc and tried to hand it over. Helmsman shook his head and pointed at Tim. The meaning was clear enough. Tim pulled the tab that opened the seam and took out the device. It was surprisingly heavy for something so thin, and eerily smooth. Mustnt drop it, he told himself. Ill come back this way and return it as Id return any borrowed dish or tool, back in the village. Which is to say, as it was when it was given to me. If I do that, Ill find them alive and well. They were watching to see if he remembered how to use it. Tim pushed the button that brought up the short stick, then the one that made the beep and the red light. There was no laughter or hooting this time; now it was serious business, perhaps even a matter of life and death. Tim began to turn slowly, and when he was facing a rising lane in the treeswhat might once have been a paththe red light changed to green and there was a second beep. Still north, Tim said. It shows the way even after sundown, does it? And if the trees are too thick to see Old Star and Old Mother? Helmsman nodded, patted Tim on the shoulder . . . then bent and kissed him swiftly and gently on the cheek. He stepped back, looking alarmed at his own temerity. Its all right, Tim said. Its fine. Helmsman dropped to one knee. The others had gotten out of the boat, and they did the same. They fisted their foreheads and cried Hile! Tim felt more tears rise and fought them back. He said Rise, bondsmen . . . if thats what you think you are. Rise in love and thanks. They rose and scrambled back into their boat. Tim raised the metal disc with the writing on it. Ill bring this back! Good as I found it! I will! Slowlybut still smiling, and that was somehow terribleHelmsman shook his head. He gave the boy a last fond and lingering look, then poled the ramshackle boat away from solid ground and into the unsteady part of the world that was their home. Tim stood watching it make its slow and stately turn south. When the crew raised their dripping paddles in salute, he waved. He watched them go until the boat was nothing but a phantom waver on the belt of fire laid down by the setting sun. He dashed warm tears from his eyes and restrained (barely) an urge to call them back. When the boat was gone, he slung his gunna about his slender body, turned in the direction the device had indicated, and began to walk deeper into the forest. Dark came. At first there was a moon, but its glow was only an untrustworthy glimmer by the time it reached the ground . . . and then that too was gone. There was a path, he was sure of it, but it was easy to wander to one side or the other. The first two times this happened he managed to avoid running into a tree, but not the third. He was thinking of Maerlyn, and how likely it was there was no such person, and smacked chestfirst into the bole of an ironwood. He held onto the silver disc, but the basket of food tumbled to the ground and spilled. Now Ill have to grope around on my hands and knees, and unless I stay here until morning, Ill still probably miss some of the Would you like a light, traveler? a womans voice asked. Tim would later tell himself he shouted in surprisefor dont we all have a tendency to massage our memories so they reflect our better selves?but the truth was a little balder he screamed in terror, dropped the disc, bolted to his feet, and was on the verge of taking to his heels (and never mind the trees he might crash into) when the part of him dedicated to survival intervened. If he ran, he would likely never be able to find the food scattered at the edge of the path. Or the disc, which he had promised to protect and bring back undamaged. It was the disc that spoke. A ridiculous idea, even a fairy the size of Armaneeta couldnt fit inside that thin plate of metal . . . but was it any more ridiculous than a boy on his own in the Endless Forest, searching for a mage who had to be long centuries dead? Who, even if alive, was likely thousands of wheels north of here, in that part of the world where the snow never melted? He looked for the greenglow and didnt see it. With his heart still hammering in his chest, Tim got down on his knees and felt around, touching a litter of leafwrapped pork popkins, discovering a small basket of berries (most spilled on the ground), discovering the hamper itself . . . but no silver disc. In despair, he cried Where in Nis are you? Here, traveler, the womans voice said. Perfectly composed. Coming from his left. Still on his hands and knees, he turned in that direction. Where? Here, traveler. Keep talking, will ya do. The voice was obliging. Here, traveler. Here, traveler, here, traveler. He reached toward the voice; his hand closed on the precious artifact. When he turned it over in his hand, he saw the green light. He cradled it to his chest, sweating. He thought he had never been so terrified, not even when he realized he was standing on the head of a dragon, nor so relieved. Here, traveler. Here, traveler. Here Ive got you, Tim said, feeling simultaneously foolish and not foolish at all. You can, um, be quiet now. Silence from the silver disc. |
Tim sat still for perhaps five minutes, listening to the nightnoises of the forestnot so threatening as those in the swamp, at least so farand getting himself under control. Then he said, Yes, sai, Id like a light. The disc commenced the same low whining noise it made when it brought forth the stick, and suddenly a white light, so brilliant it made Tim temporarily blind, shone out. The trees leaped into being all around him, and some creature that had crept close without making a sound leaped back with a startled yark sound. Tims eyes were still too dazzled for him to get a good look, but he had an impression of a smoothfurred body andperhapsa squiggle of tail. A second stick had emerged from the plate. At the top, a small hooded bulge was producing that furious glare. It was like burning phosphorous, but unlike phosphorous, it did not burn out. Tim had no idea how sticks and lights could hide in a metal plate so thin, and didnt care. One thing he did care about. How long will it last, my lady? Your question is nonspecific, traveler. Rephrase. How long will the light last? Battery power is eightyeight percent. Projected life is seventy years, plus or minus two. Seventy years, Tim thought. That should be enough. He began picking up and repacking his gunna. With the bright glare to guide him, the path he was following was even clearer than it had been on the edge of the swamp, but it sloped steadily upward, and by midnight (if it was midnight; he had no way of telling), Tim was tired out in spite of his long sleep in the boat. The oppressive and unnatural heat continued, and that didnt help. Neither did the weight of the hamper and the waterskin. At last he sat, put the disc down beside him, opened the hamper, and munched one of the popkins. It was delicious. He considered a second, then reminded himself that he didnt know how long he would have to make these rations last. It also crossed his mind that the brilliant light shining from the disc could be seen by anything that happened to be in the vicinity, and some of those things might not be friendly. Would you turn the light off, lady? He wasnt sure she would respondhe had tried several conversational gambits in the last four or five hours, with no resultbut the light went off, plunging him into utter darkness. At once Tim seemed to sense living things all around himboars, woodswolves, vurts, mayhap a pooky or twoand he had to restrain an urge to ask for the light again. These ironwoods seemed to know it was Wide Earth in spite of the unnatural heat, and had sprinkled down plenty of yearend duff, mostly on the flowers that surrounded their bases, but also beyond them. Tim gathered up enough to make a jackleg bed and lay down upon it. Ive gone jippa, he thoughtthe unpleasant Tree term for people who lost their minds. But he didnt feel jippa. What he felt was full and content, although he missed the Fagonarders and worried about them. Im going to sleep, he said. Will you wake me if something comes, sai? She responded, but not in a way Tim understood Directive Nineteen. Thats the one after eighteen and before twenty, Tim thought, and closed his eyes. He began to drift at once. He thought to ask the disembodied female voice another question Did thee speak to the swamp people? But by then he was gone. In the deepest crease of the night, Tim Rosss part of the Endless Forest came alive with small, creeping forms. Within the sophisticated device marked North Central Positronics Portable Guidance Module DARIA, NCP1436345AN, the ghost in the machine marked the approach of these creatures but remained silent, sensing no danger. Tim slept on. The throckensix in allgathered around the slumbering boy in a loose semicircle. For a while they watched him with their strange goldringed eyes, but then they turned north and raised their snouts in the air. Above the northernmost reaches of MidWorld, where the snows never end and New Earth never comes, a great funnel had begun to form, turning in air lately arrived from the south that was far too warm. As it began to breathe like a lung, it sucked up a moit of frigid air from below and began to turn faster, creating a selfsustaining energy pump. Soon the outer edges found the Path of the Beam, which Guidance Module DARIA read electronically and which Tim Ross saw as a faint path through the woods. The Beam tasted the storm, found it good, and sucked it in. The starkblast began to move south, slowly at first, then faster. Tim awoke to birdsong and sat up, rubbing his eyes. For a moment he didnt know where he was, but the sight of the hamper and the greenish shafts of sunlight falling through the high tops of the ironwood trees soon set him in place. He stood up, started to step off the path to do his morning necessary, then paused. He saw several tight little bundles of scat around the place where he had slept, and wondered what had come to investigate him in the night. Something smaller than wolves, he thought. Let that be enough. He unbuttoned his flies and took care of his business. When he was finished, he repacked the hamper (a little surprised that his visitors hadnt raided it), had a drink from the waterskin, and picked up the silver disc. His eye fell on the third button. The Widow Smack spoke up inside his head, telling him not to push it, to leave well enough alone, but Tim decided this was advice he would disregard. If he had paid attention to wellmeaning advice, he wouldnt be here. Of course, his mother might also have her sight . . . but Big Kells would still be his steppa. He supposed all of life was full of similar trades. Hoping the damned thing wouldnt explode, Tim pushed the button. Hello, traveler! the womans voice said. Tim began to hello her back, but she went on without acknowledging him. Welcome to DARIA, a guidance service of North Central Positronics. You are on the Beam of the Cat, sometimes known as the Beam of the Lion or of the Tyger. You are also on the Way of the Bird, known variously as the Way of the Eagle, the Way of the Hawk, and the Way of the Vulturine. All things serve the Beam! So they do say, Tim agreed, so wonderstruck he was hardly aware he was speaking. Although no one knows what it means. You have left Waypoint Nine, in Fagonard Swamp. There is no Dogan in Fagonard Swamp, but there is a charging station. If you need a charging station, say yes and I will compute your course. If you do not need a charging station, say continue. Continue, Tim said. Lady . . . Daria . . . I seek Maerlyn She overrode him. The next Dogan on the current course is on the North Forest Kinnock, also known as the Northern Aerie. The charging station at the North Forest Kinnock Dogan is offline. Disturbance in the Beam suggests magic at that location. There may also be Changed Life at that location. Detour is recommended. If you would like to detour, say detour and I will compute the necessary changes. If you would like to visit the North Forest Kinnock Dogan, also known as the Northern Aerie, say continue. Tim considered the choices. If the Dariathing was suggesting a detour, this Doganplace was probably dangerous. On the other hand, wasnt magic exactly what he had come in search of? Magic, or a miracle? And hed already stood on the head of a dragon. How much more dangerous could the North Forest Kinnock Dogan be? Maybe a lot, he admitted to himself . . . but he had his fathers ax, he had his fathers lucky coin, and he had a fourshot. One that worked, and had already drawn blood. Continue, he said. The distance to the North Forest Kinnock Dogan is fifty miles, or fortyfivepointfortyfive wheels. The terrain is moderate. Weather conditions . . . Daria paused. There was a loud click. Then Directive Nineteen. What is Directive Nineteen, Daria? To bypass Directive Nineteen, speak your password. You may be asked to spell. I dont know what that means. Are you sure you would not like me to plot a detour, traveler? I am detecting a strong disturbance in the Beam, indicating deep magic. Is it white magic or black? It was as close as Tim could come to asking a question the voice from the plate probably wouldnt understand Is it Maerlyn or is it the man who got Mama and me into this mess? When there was no answer for ten seconds, Tim began to believe there would be no answer at all . . . or another repetition of Directive Nineteen, which really amounted to the same thing. But an answer came back, although it did him little good. Both, said Daria. His way continued upward, and the heat continued, as well. By noon, Tim was too tired and hungry to go on. He had tried several times to engage Daria in conversation, but she had once again gone silent. Pushing the third button did not help, although her navigation function seemed unimpaired; when he deliberately turned to the right or left of the discernible path leading ever deeper into the woods (and ever upward), the green light turned red. When he turned back, the green reappeared. He ate from the hamper, then settled in for a nap. When he awoke, it was late afternoon and a little cooler. He reslung the hamper on his back (it was lighter now), shouldered the waterskin, and pushed ahead. The afternoon was short and the twilight even shorter. The night held fewer terrors for him, partly because he had already survived one, but mostly because, when he called for the light, Daria provided it. And after the heat of the day, the cool of evening was refreshing. Tim went on for a good many hours before he began to tire again. He was gathering some duff to sleep on until daylight when Daria spoke up. There is a scenic opportunity ahead, traveler. If you wish to take advantage of this scenic opportunity, say continue. If you do not wish to observe, say no. Tim had been in the act of putting the hamper on the ground. Now he picked it up again, intrigued. Continue, he said. The discs bright light went out, but after Tims eyes had a chance to adjust, he saw light up ahead. Only moonlight, but far brighter than that which filtered through the trees overhanging the path. Use the green navigation sensor, Daria said. Move quietly. The scenic opportunity is one mile, or pointeight wheels, north of your current location. With that, she clicked off. Tim moved as quietly as he could, but to himself he sounded very loud. In the end, it probably made no difference. The path opened into the first large clearing he had come to since entering the forest, and the beings occupying it took no notice of him at all. There were six billybumblers sitting on a fallen ironwood tree, with their snouts raised to the crescent moon. Their eyes gleamed like jewels. Throcken were hardly ever seen in Tree these days, and to see even one was considered extremely lucky. Tim never had. Several of his friends claimed to have glimpsed them at play in the fields, or in the blossie groves, but he suspected they were fibbing. And now . . . to see a full halfdozen . . . They were, he thought, far more beautiful than the treacherous Armaneeta, because the only magic about them was the plain magic of living things. These were the creatures that surrounded me last nightI know they were. He approached them as in a dream, knowing he would probably frighten them away, but helpless to stay where he was. They did not move. He stretched his hand out to one, ignoring the doleful voice in his head (it sounded like the Widows) telling him he would certainly be bitten. The bumbler did not bite, but when it felt Tims fingers in the dense fur below the shelf of its jaw, it seemed to awake. It leaped from the log. The others did the same. They began to chase around his feet and between his legs, nipping at each other and uttering highpitched barks that made Tim laugh. One looked over its shoulder at him . . . and seemed to laugh back. They left him and raced to the center of the clearing. There they made a moving ring in the moonlight, their faint shadows dancing and weaving. They all stopped at once and rose on their hind legs with their paws outstretched, looking for all the world like little furry men. Beneath the cold smile of the crescent moon, they all faced north, along the Path of the Beam. Youre wonderful! Tim called. They turned to him, concentration broken. Wunnerful! one of them said . . . and then they all raced into the trees. It happened so quickly that Tim could almost believe he had imagined the whole thing. Almost. He made camp in the clearing that night, hoping they might return. And, as he drifted toward sleep, he remembered something the Widow Smack had said about the unseasonably warm weather. Its probably nothing . . . unless you see Sir Throcken dancing in the starlight or looking north with his muzzle upraised. He had seen not just one bumbler but a full halfdozen doing both. Tim sat up. The Widow had said those things were a sign of somethingwhat? A stunblast? That was close, but not quite Starkblast, he said. That was it. Starkblast, Daria said, startling him more wide awake than ever. A fastmoving storm of great power. Its features include steep and sudden drops in temperature accompanied by strong winds. It has been known to cause major destruction and loss of life in civilized portions of the world. In primitive areas, entire tribes have been wiped out. This definition of starkblast has been a service of North Central Positronics. Tim lay down again on his bed of duff, arms crossed behind his head, looking up at the circle of stars this clearing made visible. A service of North Central Positronics, was it? Well . . . maybe. He had an idea it might really have been a service of Daria. She was a marvelous machine (although he wasnt sure a machine was all she was), but there were things she wasnt allowed to tell him. He had an idea she might be hinting at some things, though. Was she leading him on, as the Covenant Man and Armaneeta had done? Tim had to admit it was a possibility, but he didnt really believe it. He thoughtpossibly because he was just a stupid kid, ready to believe anythingthat maybe she hadnt had anyone to talk to for a long time, and had taken a shine to him. One thing he knew for sure if there was a terrible storm coming, he would do well to finish his business quickly, and then get undercover. But where would be safe? This led his musings back to the Fagonard tribe. They werent a bit safe . . . as they knew, for hadnt they already imitated the bumblers for him? He had promised himself he would recognize what they were trying to show him if it was put before him, and he had. The storm was comingthe starkblast. They knew it, probably from the bumblers, and they expected it to kill them. With such thoughts in his mind, Tim guessed it would be a long time before he could get to sleep, but five minutes later he was lost to the world. He dreamed of throcken dancing in the moonlight. He began to think of Daria as his companion, although she didnt speak much, and when she did, Tim didnt always understand why (or what in Naar she was talking about). Once it was a series of numbers. Once she told him she would be offline because she was searching for satellite and suggested he stop. He did, and for half an hour the plate seemed completely deadno lights, no voice. Just when hed begun to believe she really had died, the green light came back on, the little stick reappeared, and Daria announced, I have reestablished satellite link. Wish you joy of it, Tim replied. Several times, she offered to calculate a detour. This Tim continued to decline. And once, near the end of the second day after leaving the Fagonard, she recited a bit of verse See the Eagles brilliant eye, And wings on which he holds the sky! He spies the land and spies the sea And even spies a child like me. If he lived to be a hundred (which, given his current mad errand, Tim doubted was in the cards), he thought he would never forget the things he saw on the three days he and Daria trudged ever upward in the continuing heat. The path, once vague, became a clear lane, one that for several wheels was bordered by crumbling rock walls. Once, for a space of almost an hour, the corridor in the sky above that lane was filled with thousands of huge red birds flying south, as if in migration. But surely, Tim thought, they must come to rest in the Endless Forest. For no birds like that had ever been seen above the village of Tree. Once four blue deer less than two feet high crossed the path ahead of him, seeming to take no notice of the thunderstruck boy who stood staring at these mutie dwarfs. And once they came to a field filled with giant yellow mushrooms standing four feet high, with caps the size of umbrellas. Are they good to eat, Daria? Tim asked, for he was reaching the end of the goods in the hamper. Does thee know? No, traveler, Daria replied. They are poison. If you even brush their dust on your skin, you will die of seizures. I advise extreme caution. This was advice Tim took, even holding his breath until he was past that deadly grove filled with treacherous, sunshiny death. Near the end of the third day, he emerged on the edge of a narrow chasm that fell away for a thousand feet or more. He could not see the bottom, for it was filled with a drift of white flowers. They were so thick that he at first mistook them for a cloud that had fallen to earth. The smell that wafted up to him was fantastically sweet. A rock bridge spanned this gorge, on the other side passing through a waterfall that glowed bloodred in the reflected light of the setting sun. Am I meant to cross that? Tim asked faintly. It looked not much wider than a barnbeam . . . and, in the middle, not much thicker. No answer from Daria, but the steadily glowing green light was answer enough. Maybe in the morning, Tim said, knowing he would not sleep for thinking about it, but also not wanting to chance it so close to days end. The idea of having to negotiate the last part of that lofty causeway in the dark was terrifying. I advise you to cross now, Daria told him, and continue to the North Forest Kinnock Dogan with all possible speed. Detour is no longer possible. Looking at the gorge with its chancy bridge, Tim hardly needed the voice from the plate to tell him that a detour was no longer possible. But still . . . Why cant I wait until morning? Surely it would be safer. Directive Nineteen. A click louder than any he had heard before came from the plate and then Daria added, But I advise speed, Tim. He had several times asked her to call him by name rather than as traveler. This was the first time she had done so, and it convinced him. He left the Fagonard tribes basketnot without some regretbecause he thought it might unbalance him. He tucked the last two popkins into his shirt, slung the waterskin over his back, then checked to make sure both the fourshot and his fathers handax were firmly in place on either hip. He approached the stone causeway, looked down into the banks of white flowers, and saw the first shadows of evening beginning to pool there. He imagined himself making that one youcannevertakeitback misstep; saw himself whirling his arms in a fruitless effort to keep his balance; felt his feet first losing the rock and then running on air; heard his scream as the fall began. There would be a few moments to regret all the life he might have lived, and then Daria, he said in a small, sick voice, do I have to? No answer, which was answer enough. Tim stepped out over the drop. The sound of his bootheels on rock was very loud. He didnt want to look down, but had no choice; if he didnt mind where he was going, he would be doomed for sure. The rock bridge was as wide as a village path when he began, but by the time he got to the middleas he had feared, although he had hoped it was just his eyes playing tricksit was only the width of his shorboots. He tried walking with his arms outstretched, but a breeze came blowing down the gorge, billowing his shirt and making him feel like a kite about to lift off. He lowered them and walked on, heeltotoe and heeltotoe, wavering from side to side. He became convinced his heart was beating its last frenzied beats, his mind thinking its last random thoughts. Mama will never know what happened to me. Halfway across, the bridge was at its narrowest, also its thinnest. Tim could feel its fragility through his feet, and could hear the wind playing its pitch pipe along its eroded underside. Now each time he took a step, he had to swing a boot out over the drop. Dont freeze, he told himself, but he knew that if he hesitated, he might do just that. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw movement below, and he did hesitate. Long, leathery tentacles were emerging from the flowers. They were slategray on top and as pink as burned skin underneath. They rose toward him in a wavery dancefirst two, then four, then eight, then a forest of them. Daria again said, I advise speed, Tim. He forced himself to start walking again. Slowly at first, but faster as the tentacles continued to close in. Surely no beast had a thousandfoot reach, no matter how monstrous the body hiding down there in the flowers, but when Tim saw the tentacles thinning out and stretching to reach even higher, he began to hurry. And when the longest of them reached the underside of the bridge and began to fumble its way along it, he broke into a run. The waterfallno longer red, now a fading pinkishorangethundered ahead of him. Cold spray spattered his hot face. Tim felt something caress his boot, seeking purchase, and threw himself forward at the water with an inarticulate yell. There was one moment of freezing coldit encased his body like a gloveand then he was on the other side of the falls and back on solid ground. One of the tentacles came through. It reared up like a snake, dripping . . . and then withdrew. Daria! Are you all right? Im waterproof, Daria replied with something that sounded suspiciously like smugness. Tim picked himself up and looked around. He was in a little rock cave. Written on one wall, in paint that once might have been red but had over the years (or perhaps centuries) faded to a dull rust, was this cryptic notation JOHN 316 FEER HELL HOPE FOR HEVEN MAN JESUS Ahead of him was a short stone staircase filled with fading sunset light. To one side of it was a litter of tin cans and bits of broken machinerysprings, wires, broken glass, and chunks of green board covered with squiggles of metal. On the other side of the stairs was a grinning skeleton with what looked like an ancient canteen draped over its ribcage. Hello, Tim! that grin seemed to say. Welcome to the far side of the world! Want a drink of dust? I have plenty! Tim climbed the stairs, skittering past the relic. He knew perfectly well it wouldnt come to life and try to snare him by the boot, as the tentacles from the flowers had tried to do; dead was dead. Still, it seemed safer to skitter. When he emerged, he saw that the path once more entered the woods, but he wouldnt be there for long. Not far ahead, the great old trees pulled back and the long, long upslope he had been climbing ended in a clearing far larger than the one where the bumblers had danced. There an enormous tower made of metal girders rose into the sky. At the top was a blinking red light. You have almost reached your destination, Daria said. The North Forest Kinnock Dogan is three wheels ahead. That click came again, even louder than before. You really must hurry, Tim. As Tim stood looking at the tower with its blinking light, the breeze that had so frightened him while crossing the rock bridge came again, only this time its breath was chilly. He looked up into the sky and saw the clouds that had been lazing toward the south were now racing. Its the starkblast, Daria, isnt it? The starkblast is coming. Daria didnt reply, but Tim didnt need her to. He began to run. By the time he reached the Dogan clearing, he was out of breath and only able to trot, in spite of his sense of urgency. The wind continued to rise, pushing against him, and the high branches of the ironwood trees had begun to whisper. The air was still warm, but Tim didnt think it would stay that way for long. He needed to get undercover, and he hoped to do so in this Doganthing. But when he entered the clearing, he barely spared a glance for the round, metalroofed building which stood at the base of the skeletal tower with its blinking light. He had seen something else that took all his attention, and stole his breath. Am I seeing that? Am I really seeing that? Gods, he whispered. The path, as it crossed the clearing, was paved in some smooth dark material, so bright that it reflected both the trees dancing in the rising wind and the sunsettinged clouds flowing overhead. It ended at a rock precipice. The whole world seemed to end there, and to begin again a hundred wheels or more distant. In between was a great chasm of rushing air in which leaves danced and swirled. There were binrusties as well. They rose and twisted helplessly in the eddies and currents. Some were obviously dead, the wings ripped from their bodies. Tim hardly noticed the great chasm and the dying birds, either. To the left of the metal road, about three yards from the place where the world dropped off into nothingness, there stood a round cage made of steel bars. Overturned in front of it was a battered tin bucket he knew all too well. In the cage, pacing slowly around a hole in the center, was an enormous tyger. It saw the staring, gapemouthed boy and approached the bars. Its eyes were as large as Points balls, but a brilliant green instead of blue. On its hide, stripes of dark orange alternated with those of richest midnight black. Its ears were cocked. Its snout wrinkled back from long white teeth. It growled. The sound was low, like a silk garment being ripped slowly up a seam. It could have been a greeting . . . but Tim somehow doubted it. Around its neck was a silver collar. From this hung two objects. One looked like a playing card. The other was a key with a strange twisted shape. Tim had no idea how long he stood captured by those fabulous emerald eyes, or how long he might have remained so, but the extreme peril of his situation announced itself in a series of low, thudding explosions. Whats that? Trees on the far side of the Great Canyon, Daria said. Extreme rapid temperature change is causing them to implode. Seek shelter, Tim. The starkblastwhat else? How long before it gets here? Less than an hour. There was another of those loud clicks. I may have to shut down. No! I have violated Directive Nineteen. All I can say in my defense is that its been a very long time since I have had anyone to talk to. Click! Thenmore worrisome, more ominousClunk! What about the tyger? Is it the Guardian of the Beam? As soon as he articulated the idea, Tim was filled with horror. I cant leave a Guardian of the Beam out here to die in the starkblast! The Guardian of the Beam at this end is Aslan, Daria said. Aslan is a lion, and if he still lives, he is far from here, in the land of endless snows. This tyger is . . . Directive Nineteen! Then an even louder clunk as she overrode the directive, at what cost Tim did not know. This tyger is the magic of which I spoke. Never mind it. Seek shelter! Good luck, Tim. You have been my fr Not a click this time, nor a clunk, but an awful crunch. Smoke drifted up from the plate and the green light went out. Daria! Nothing. Daria, come back! But Daria was gone. The artillery sounds made by the dying trees were still far across that cloudy gap in the world, but there could be no doubt that they were approaching. The wind continued to strengthen, growing ever colder. High above, a final batch of clouds was boiling past. Behind them was an awful violet clarity in which the first stars had begun to appear. The whisper of the wind in the high branches of the surrounding trees had risen to an unhappy chorus of sighs. It was as if the ironwoods knew their long, long lives were coming to an end. A great woodsman was on the way, swinging an ax made of wind. Tim took another look at the tyger (it had resumed its slow and stately pacing, as if Tim had been worth only momentary consideration), then hurried to the Dogan. Small round windows of real glassvery thick, from the lookmarched around its circumference at the height of Tims head. The door was also metal. There was no knob or latch, only a slot like a narrow mouth. Above the slot, on a rusting steel plate, was this NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD. North Forest Kinnock Bend Quadrant OUTPOST 9 Low Security USE KEYCARD These words were hard for him to make out, because they were in a weird mixture of High and Low Speech. What had been scrawled below them, however, was easy All here are dead. At the base of the door was a box that looked like the one Tims mother had for her little trinkets and keepsakes, only of metal instead of wood. He tried to open it, but it was locked. Engraved upon it were letters Tim couldnt read. There was a keyhole of odd shapelike the letter but no key. He tried to lift the box and couldnt. It might have been anchored to the ground at the top of a buried stone post. A dead binrusty smacked the side of Tims face. More feathered corpses flew past, turning over and over in the increasingly lively air. Some struck the side of the Dogan and fell around him. Tim read the last words on the steel plate again USE KEYCARD. If he had any doubt about what such a thing might be, he had only to look at the slot just below the words. He thought he even knew what a keycard looked like, for he believed he had just seen it, along with a more recognizable key that might fit the shaped keyhole of the metal box. Two keysand possible salvationhanging around the neck of a tyger that could probably swallow him down in three bites. And, since there had been no food that Tim could see in the cage, it might only take two. This was smelling more and more like a practical joke, although only a very cruel man would find such a joke amusing. The sort of fellow who might use a bad fairy to lure a boy into a dangerous swamp, perhaps. What to do? Was there anything he could do? Tim would have liked to ask Daria, but he was terribly afraid his friend in the platea good fairy to match the Covenant Mans bad onewas dead, killed by Directive Nineteen. Slowly, he approached the cage, now having to lean against the wind. The tyger saw him and came padding around the hole in the middle to stand by the door of the cage. It lowered its great head and stared at him with its lambent eyes. The wind rippled its thick coat, making the stripes waver and seem to change places. The tin bucket should have rolled away in the wind, but it didnt. Like the steel box, it seemed anchored in place. The bucket he left for me back home, so I could see his lies and believe them. The whole thing had been a joke, and under this bucket he would find the point of it, that final clever linelike I cant fork hay with a spoon! or So then I turned her over and warmed the other sidethat was supposed to make folks roar with laughter. But since it was the end, why not? He could use a laugh. Tim grasped the bucket and lifted it. He expected to find the Covenant Mans magic wand beneath, but no. The joke was better than that. It was another key, this one large and ornately carved. Like the Covenant Mans seeingbasin and the tygers collar, it was made of silver. A note had been attached to the keys head with a bit of twine. Across the gorge, the trees cracked and boomed. Now dust came rolling up from the chasm in giant clouds that were whipped away in ribbons like smoke. The Covenant Mans note was brief Greetings, Brave and Resourceful Boy! Welcome to the North Forest Kinnock, which was once known as the Gateway of OutWorld. Here I have left you a troublesome Tyger. He is VERY hungry! But as you may have guessed, the Key to SHELTER hangs about his Neck. |
As you may have also guessed, this Key opens the Cage. Use it if you dare! With all regards to your Mother (whose New Husband will visit her SOON), I remain your Faithful Servant! RFMB The manif he was a manwho left Tim that note was surprised by very little, but he might have been surprised by the smile on the boys face as he rose to his feet with the key in his hand and booted away the tin bucket. It rose and flew off on the rising wind, which had now almost reached gale force. Its purpose had been served, and all the magic was out of it. Tim looked at the tyger. The tyger looked at Tim. It seemed completely unaware of the rising storm. Its tail swished slowly back and forth. He thinks Id rather be blown away or die of the cold than face your claws and teeth. Perhaps he didnt see this. Tim drew the fourshot from his belt. It did for the fishthing in the swamp, and Im sure it would do for you, Sai Tyger. Tim was once more amazed by how right the gun felt. Its function was so simple, so clear. All it wanted to do was shoot. And when Tim held it, shooting was all he wanted to do. But. Oh, he saw it, Tim said, and smiled more widely. He could hardly feel the corners of his mouth drawing up, because the skin on his face had begun to grow numb from the cold. Yar, he saw it very well. Did he think I would get so far as this? Perhaps not. Did he think that if I did, Id shoot you to live? Why not? He would. But why send a boy? Why, when hes probably hung a thousand men and cut a hundred throats and turned who knows how many poor widows like my mama out on the land? Can you answer that, Sai Tyger? The tyger only stared, head lowered and tail swishing slowly from side to side. Tim put the fourshot back into his belt with one hand; with the other he slid the ornate silver key into the lock on the cages curved door. Sai Tyger, I offer a bargain. Let me use the key around your neck to open yon shelter and well both live. But if you tear me to shreds, well both die. Does thee kennit? Give me a sign if thee does. The tyger gave no sign. It only stared at him. Tim really hadnt expected one, and perhaps he didnt need one. There would be water if God willed it. I love you, Mama, he said, and turned the key. There was a thud as the ancient tumblers turned. Tim grasped the door and pulled it open on hinges that uttered a thin screaming sound. Then he stood back with his hands at his sides. For a moment the tyger stood where it was, as if suspicious. Then it padded out of the cage. He and Tim regarded each other beneath the deepening purple sky while the wind howled and the marching explosions neared. They regarded each other like gunslingers. The tyger began to walk forward. Tim took one step back, but understood if he took another his nerve would break and he would take to his heels. So he stood where he was. Come, thee. Here is Tim, son of Big Jack Ross. Instead of tearing out Tims throat, the tyger sat down and raised its head to expose its collar and the keys that hung from it. Tim did not hesitate. Later he might be able to afford the luxury of amazement, but not now. The wind was growing stronger by the second, and if he didnt act fast, hed be lifted and blown into the trees, where he would probably be impaled. The tyger was heavier, but it would follow soon enough. The key that looked like a card and the key that looked like an were welded to the silver collar, but the collars clasp was easy enough. Tim squeezed its sides at the indentations and the collar dropped off. He had a moment to register the fact that the tyger was still wearing a collarthis one made of pink hide where the fur had been rubbed awayand then he was hurrying to the Dogans metal door. He lifted the keycard and inserted it. Nothing happened. He turned it around and tried it the other way. Still nothing. The wind gusted, a cold dead hand that slammed him into the door and started his nose bleeding. He pushed back from it, turned the card upside down, and tried again. Still nothing. Tim suddenly remembered something Daria had saidhad it only been three days ago? North Forest Kinnock Dogan is offline. Tim guessed he now knew what that meant. The flasher on the tower of metal girders might still be working, but down here the sparkpower that had run the place was out. He had dared the tyger, and the tyger had responded by not eating him, but the Dogan was locked. They were going to die out here just the same. It was the end of the joke, and somewhere the man in black was laughing. He turned and saw the tyger pushing its nose against the metal box with the engraving on top. The beast looked up, then nuzzled the box again. All right, Tim said. Why not? He knelt close enough to the tygers lowered head to feel its warm breath puffing against his cold cheek. He tried the key. It fit the lock perfectly. For a moment he had a clear memory of using the key the Covenant Man had given him to open Kellss trunk. Then he turned this one, heard the click, and lifted the lid. Hoping for salvation. Instead of that, he saw three items that seemed of no earthly use to him a large white feather, a small brown bottle, and a plain cotton napkin of the sort that were laid out on the long tables behind the Tree meeting hall before each years Reaptide dinner. The wind had passed gale force; a ghostly screaming had begun as it blew through the crisscrossing girders of the metal tower. The feather whirled out of the box, but before it could fly away, the tyger stretched out its neck and snatched it in its teeth. It turned to the boy, holding it out. Tim took it and stuck it in his belt beside his fathers handax, not really thinking about it. He began to creep away from the Dogan on his hands and knees. Flying into the trees and being struck through by a branch would not be a pleasant way to die, but it might be betterquickerthan having the life crushed out of him against the Dogan while that deadly wind crept through his skin and into his vitals, freezing them. The tyger growled; that sound of slowly ripping silk. Tim started to turn his head and was slammed into the Dogan. He fought to catch another breath, but the wind kept trying to rip it out of his mouth and nose. Now it was the napkin the tyger was holding out, and as Tim finally whooped air into his lungs (it numbed his throat as it went down), he saw a surprising thing. Sai Tyger had picked the napkin up by the corner, and it had unfolded to four times its former size. Thats impossible. Except he was seeing it. Unless his eyesnow gushing water that froze on his cheekswere deceiving him, the napkin in the tygers jaws had grown to the size of a towel. Tim reached out for it. The tyger held on until it saw the thing firmly clutched in Tims numb fist, then let go. The gale was howling around them, now hard enough to make even a sixhundredpound tyger brace against it, but the napkin that was now a towel hung limply from Tims hand, as if in a dead calm. Tim stared at the tyger. It stared back, seemingly at complete ease with itself and the howling world around it. The boy found himself thinking of the tin bucket, which had done as well for seeing as the Covenant Mans silver basin. In the proper hand, he had said, any object can be magic. Mayhap even a humble swatch of cotton. It was still doubledat least doubled. Tim unfolded it again, and the towel became a tablecloth. He held it up in front of him, and although the rising gale continued to storm past on both sides, the air between his face and the hanging cloth was dead calm. And warm. Tim grabbed the tablecloth that had been a napkin in both hands, shook it, and it opened once again. Now it was a sheet, and it lay easily on the ground even though a storm of dust, twigs, and dead binrusties flew past it and on either side. The sound of all that loose gunna striking the curved side of the Dogan was like hail. Tim started to crawl beneath the sheet, then hesitated, looking into the tygers brilliant green eyes. He also looked at the thick spikes of its teeth, which its muzzle did not quite cover, before raising the corner of the magic cloth. Come on. Get under here. Theres no wind or cold. But you knew that, Sai Tyger. Didnt you? The tyger crouched, extended its admirable claws, and crawled forward on its belly until it was beneath the sheet. Tim felt something like a nest of wires brush down his arm as the tyger made itself comfortable whiskers. He shivered. Then the long furred length of the beast was lying against the side of his body. It was very large, and half its body still lay outside the thin white covering. Tim half rose, fighting the wind that buffeted his head and shoulders as they emerged into the open air, and shook the sheet again. There was a rippling sound as it once more unfolded, this time becoming the size of a lakeboats mainsail. Now its hem lay almost at the base of the tygers cage. The world roared and the air raged, but beneath the sheet, all was still. Except, that was, for Tims pounding heart. When that began to settle, he felt another heart pounding slowly against his ribcage. And heard a low, rough rumble. The tyger was purring. Were safe, arent we? Tim asked it. The tyger looked at him for a moment, then closed its eyes. It seemed to Tim answer enough. Night came, and the full fury of the starkblast came with it. Beyond the strong magic that had at first looked to be no more than a humble napkin, the cold grew apace, driven by a wind that was soon blowing at well over one hundred wheels an hour. The windows of the Dogan grew inchthick cataracts of frost. The ironwood trees behind it first imploded inward, then toppled backward, then blew southward in a deadly cloud of branches, splinters, and entire treetrunks. Beside Tim, his bedmate snoozed on, oblivious. Its body relaxed and spread as its sleep deepened, pushing Tim toward the edge of their covering. At one point he found himself actually elbowing the tyger, the way one might elbow any fellow sleeper who is trying to steal all the covers. The tyger made a furry growling sound and flexed its claws, but moved away a bit. Thankeesai, Tim whispered. An hour after sunsetor perhaps it was two; Tims sense of time had gotten losta ghastly screeching sound joined the howl of the wind. The tyger opened its eyes. Tim cautiously pulled down the top edge of the sheet and looked out. The tower above the Dogan had begun to bend. He watched, fascinated, as the bend became a lean. Then, almost too fast to see, the tower disintegrated. At one moment it was there; at the next it was flying bars and spears of steel thrown by the wind into a wide lane of what had been, only that day, a forest of ironwood trees. The Dogan will go next, Tim thought, but it didnt. The Dogan stayed, as it had for a thousand years. It was a night he never forgot, but one so fabulously strange that he could never describe it . . . or even remember rationally, as we remember the mundane events of our lives. Full understanding only returned to him in his dreams, and he dreamed of the starkblast until the end of his life. Nor were they nightmares. These were good dreams. They were dreams of safety. It was warm beneath the sheet, and the sleeping bulk of his bunkmate made it even warmer. At some point he slipped down their covering enough to see a trillion stars sprawled across the dome of the sky, more than he had ever seen in his life. It was as if the storm had blown tiny holes in the world above the world, and turned it into a sieve. Shining through was all the brilliant mystery of creation. Perhaps such things were not meant for human eyes, but Tim felt sure he had been granted a special dispensation to look, for he was under a blanket of magic, and lying next to a creature even the most credulous villagers in Tree would have dismissed as mythical. He felt awe as he looked up at those stars, but also a deep and abiding contentment, such as he had felt as a child, awakening in the night, safe and warm beneath his quilt, drowsing half in and half out of sleep, listening to the wind sing its lonely song of other places and other lives. Time is a keyhole, he thought as he looked up at the stars. Yes, I think so. We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we dothe wind that blows through the keyholeis the breath of all the living universe. The wind roared across the empty sky, the cold deepened, but Tim Ross lay safe and warm, with a tyger sleeping beside him. At some point he slipped away himself, into a rest that was deep and satisfying and untroubled by dreams. As he went, he felt that he was very wee, and flying on the wind that blew through times keyhole. Away from the edge of the Great Canyon, over the Endless Forest and the Fagonard, above the Ironwood Trail, past Treejust a brave little nestle of lights from where he rode the windand farther, farther, oh, very much farther, across the entire reach of MidWorld to where a huge ebony Tower reared itself into the heavens. I will go there! Someday I will! It was his last thought before sleep took him. In the morning, the steady shriek of the wind had lowered to a drone. Tims bladder was full. He pushed back the sheet, crawled out onto ground that had been swept clean all the way to the bone of underlying rock, and hurried around the Dogan with his breath emerging from his mouth in bursts of white vapor that were immediately yanked away by the wind. The other side of the Dogan was in the lee of that wind, but it was cold, cold. His urine steamed, and by the time he finished, the puddle on the ground was starting to freeze. He hurried back, fighting the wind for every step and shivering all over. By the time he crawled back beneath the magic sheet and into the blessed warmth, his teeth were chattering. He wrapped his arms around the tygers heavily muscled body without even thinking, and had only a moments fright when its eyes and mouth opened. A tongue that looked as long as a rug runner and as pink as a New Earth rose emerged. It licked the side of his face and Tim shivered again, not from fright but from memory his father rubbing his cheek against Tims early in the morning, before Big Ross filled the basin and scraped his face smooth. He said he would never grow a beard like his partners, said twouldnt suit him. The tyger lowered its head and began to sniff at the collar of his shirt. Tim laughed as its whiskers tickled his neck. Then he remembered the last two popkins. Ill share, he said, although we know thee could have both if thee wanted. He gave one of the popkins to the tyger. It disappeared at once, but the beast only watched as Tim went to work on the other one. He ate it as fast as he could, just in case Sai Tyger changed its mind. Then he pulled the sheet over his head and drowsed off again. When he woke the second time, he guessed it might be noon. The wind had dropped still more, and when he poked his head out, the air was a trifle warmer. Still, he guessed the false summer the Widow Smack had been so right to distrust was now gone for good. As was the last of his food. What did thee eat in there? Tim asked the tyger. This question led naturally to another. And how long was thee caged? The tyger rose to its feet, walked a little distance toward the cage, and then stretched first one rear leg and then the other. It walked farther toward the edge of the Great Canyon, where it did its own necessary. When it had finished, it sniffed the bars of its prison, then turned from the cage as though it were of no interest, and came back to where Tim lay propped on his elbows, watching. It regarded him somberlyso it seemed to Timwith its green eyes, then lowered its head and nosed back the magic sheet that had sheltered them from the starkblast. The metal box lay beneath. Tim couldnt remember picking it up, but he must have; if it had been left where it was, it would have blown away. That made him think of the feather. It was still safely tucked in his belt. He took it out and examined it closely, running his fingers over its rich thickness. It might have been a hawk feather . . . if, that was, it had been half the size. Or if he had ever seen a white hawk, which he had not. This came from an eagle, didnt it? Tim asked. Gans blood, it did. The tyger seemed uninterested in the feather, although it had been eager enough to snatch it from the breath of the rising storm last evening. The long, yellowfuzzed snout lowered and pushed the box at Tims hip. Then it looked at him. Tim opened the box. The only thing left inside was the brown bottle, which looked like the sort that might contain medicine. Tim picked it up and immediately felt a tingle in his fingertips, very like the one hed felt in the Covenant Mans magic wand when he passed it back and forth over the tin bucket. Shall I open it? For its certain thee cant. The tyger sat, its green eyes fixed unwaveringly on the tiny bottle. Those eyes seemed to glow from within, as if its very brain burned with magic. Carefully, Tim unscrewed the top. When he took it off, he saw a small transparent dropper fixed beneath. The tyger opened its mouth. The meaning was clear enough, but . . . How much? Tim asked. Id not poison thee for the world. The tyger only sat with its head slightly uptilted and its mouth open, looking like a baby bird waiting to receive a worm. After a little experimentationhed never used a dropper before, although hed seen a larger, cruder version that Destry called a bullsquirterTim got some of the fluid into the little tube. It sucked up almost all the liquid in the bottle, for there was only a bit. He held it over the tygers mouth, heart beating hard. He thought he knew what was going to happen, for he had heard many legends of skinmen, but it was impossible to be sure the tyger was an enchanted human. Ill put it in drop by drop, he told the tyger. If you want me to stop before its gone, close thy mouth. Give me a sign if you understand. But, as before, the tyger gave no sign. It only sat, waiting. One drop . . . two . . . three . . . the little tube halfempty now . . . four . . . fi Suddenly the tygers skin began to ripple and bulge, as if creatures were trapped beneath and struggling to get out. The snout melted away to reveal its cage of teeth, then reknit itself so completely that its mouth was sealed over. Then it gave a muffled roar of either pain or outrage, seeming to shake the clearing. Tim scooted away on his bottom, terrified. The green eyes began to bulge in and out, as if on springs. The lashing tail was yanked inward, reappeared, was yanked inward again. The tyger staggered away, this time toward the precipice at the edge of the Great Canyon. Stop! Tim screamed. Theell fall over! The tyger lurched drunkenly along the edge, one paw actually going over and dislodging a spall of pebbles. It walked behind the cage that had held it, the stripes first blurring, then fading. Its head was changing shape. White emerged, and then, above it, a brilliant yellow where its snout had been. Tim could hear a grinding sound as the very bones inside its body rearranged themselves. On the far side of the cage, the tyger roared again, but halfway through, the roar became a very human cry. The blurring, changing creature reared up on its back legs, and where there had been paws, Tim now saw a pair of ancient black boots. The claws became silver siguls moons, crosses, spirals. The yellow top of the tygers head continued to grow until it became the conical hat Tim had seen in the tin pail. The white below it, where the tygers bib had been, turned into a beard that sparkled in the cold and windy sunshine. It sparkled because it was full of rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds. Then the tyger was gone, and Maerlyn of the Eld stood revealed before the wondering boy. He was not smiling, as he had been in Tims vision of him . . . but of course that had never been his vision at all. It had been the Covenant Mans glammer, meant to lead him on to destruction. The real Maerlyn looked at Tim with kindness, but also with gravity. The wind blew his robe of white silk around a body so thin it could have been little more than a skeleton. Tim got on one knee, bowed his head, and raised a trembling fist to his brow. He tried to say Hile, Maerlyn, but his voice had deserted him, and he could manage nothing but a dusty croak. Rise, Tim, son of Jack, the mage said. But before you do, put the cap back on the bottle. Theres a few drops left, I wot, and youll want them. Tim raised his head and looked questioningly at the tall figure standing beside the cage that had held him. For thy mother, said Maerlyn. For thy mothers eyes. Say true? Tim whispered. True as the Turtle that holds up the world. Youve come a goodly way, youve shown great braveryand not a little foolishness, but well pass that, since they often go together, especially in the youngand youve freed me from a shape Ive been caught in for many and manya. For that you must be rewarded. Now cap the bottle and get on your feet. Thankee, Tim said. His hands were trembling and his eyes were blurred with tears, but he managed to get the cap on the bottle without spilling what was left. I thought you were a Guardian of the Beam, so I did, but Daria told me different. And who is Daria? A prisoner, like you. Locked in a little machine the people of the Fagonard gave me. I think shes dead. Sorry for your loss, son. She was my friend, Tim said simply. Maerlyn nodded. Its a sad world, Tim Ross. As for me, since this is the Beam of the Lion, twas his little joke to put me in the shape of a great cat. Although not in the shape of Aslan, for thats magic not even he can do . . . although hed like to, aye. Or slay Aslan and all the other Guardians, so the Beams collapse. The Covenant Man, Tim whispered. Maerlyn threw back his head and laughed. His conical cap stayed on, which Tim thought magical in itself. Nay, nay, not he. Little magic and long lifes all hes capable of. No, Tim, theres one far greater than he of the broad cloak. When the Great One points his finger from where he bides, the Broad Cloak scurries. But sending you was none of the Red Kings bidding, and the one you call the Covenant Man will pay for his foolery, Im sure. Hes too valuable to kill, but to hurt? To punish? Aye, I think so. What will he do to him? This Red King? Best not to know, but of one thing you can be sure no one in Tree will ever see him again. His taxcollecting days are finally over. And will my mother . . . will she really be able to see again? Aye, for you have done me fine. Nor will I be the last youll serve in your life. He pointed at Tims belt. Thats only the first gun youll wear, and the lightest. Tim looked at the fourshot, but it was his fathers ax he took from his belt. Guns are not for such as me, sai. Im just a village boy. Ill be a woodcutter, like my father. Trees my place, and Ill stay there. The old mage looked at him shrewdly. You say so with the ax in your hand, but would you say so if twas the gun? Would your heart say so? Dont answer, for I see the truth in your eyes. Ka will take you far from Tree Village. But I love it, Tim whispered. Theell bide there yet awhile, so be not fashed. But hear me well, and obey. He put his hands on his knees and leaned his tall, scrawny body toward Tim. His beard lashed in the dying wind, and the jewels caught in it flickered like fire. His face was gaunt, like the Covenant Mans, but illuminated by gravity instead of malicious humor, and by kindness rather than cruelty. When you return to your cottagea trip that will be much faster than the one you made to get here, and far less riskyyou will go to your mother and put the last drops from the bottle in her eyes. Then you must give thy fathers ax to her. Do you understand me? His coin youll wear all your lifeyoull be buried with it yet around your neckbut give the ax to thy mother. Do it at once. WWhy? The wild tangle of Maerlyns brows drew together; his mouth turned down at the corners; suddenly the kindness was gone, replaced by a frightening obduracy. Not yours to ask, boy. When ka comes, it comes like the windlike the starkblast. Will you obey? Yes, Tim said, frightened. Ill give it to her as you say. Good. The mage turned to the sheet beneath which they had slept and raised his hands over it. The end near the cage flipped up with a brisk ruffling sound, folded over, and was suddenly half the size it had been. It flipped up again and became the size of a tablecloth. Tim thought the women of Tree would much like to have magic like that when beds needed to be made, and wondered if such an idea were blasphemy. No, no, Im sure youre right, Maerlyn said absently. But twould go wrong and cause hijinks. Magics full of tricks, even for an old fellow like me. Sai . . . is it true you live backwards in time? Maerlyn raised his hands in amused irritation; the sleeves of his robe slipped back, revealing arms as thin and white as birch branches. Everyone thinks so, and if I said different, theyd still think it, wouldnt they? I live as I live, Tim, and the truth is, Im mostly retired these days. Have you also heard of my magical house in the woods? Aye! And if I told you I lived in a cave with nothing but a single table and a pallet on the floor, and if you told others that, would they believe you? Tim considered this, and shook his head. No. They wouldnt. I doubt folk will believe I met you at all. Thats their business. As for yours . . . are you ready to go back? May I ask one more question? The mage raised a single finger. Only one. For Ive been here many long years in yon cagewhich you see keeps its place to the very inch, in spite of how hard the wind blewand Im tired of shitting in that hole. Living monksimple is all very fine, but theres a limit. Ask your question. How did the Red King catch thee? He cant catch anyone, Timhes himself caught, pent at the top of the Dark Tower. But he has his powers, and he has his emissaries. The one you met is far from the greatest of them. A man came to my cave. I was fooled into believing he was a wandering peddler, for his magic was strong. Magic lent to him by the King, as you must ken. Tim risked another question. Magic stronger than yours? Nay, but . . . Maerlyn sighed and looked up at the morning sky. Tim was astounded to realize that the magician was embarrassed. I was drunk. Oh, Tim said in a small voice. He could think of nothing else to say. Enough palaver, said the mage. Sit on the dibbin. The? Maerlyn gestured at what was sometimes a napkin, sometimes a sheet, and was now a tablecloth. That. And dont worry about dirtying it with your boots. Its been used by many far more travelstained than thee. Tim had been worried about exactly that, but he stepped onto the tablecloth and then sat down. Now the feather. Take it in your hands. Its from the tail of Garuda, the eagle who guards the other end of this Beam. Or so I was told, although as a wee one myselfyes, I was once wee, Tim, son of JackI was also told that babies were found under cabbages in the garden. Tim barely heard this. He took the feather which the tyger had saved from flying away into the wind, and held it. Maerlyn regarded him from beneath his tall yellow cap. When thee gets home, whats the first thing theell do? Put the drops in Mamas eyes. Good, and the second? Give her my das ax. Dont forget. The old man leaned forward and kissed Tims brow. For a moment the whole world flared as brilliantly in the boys eyes as the stars at the height of the starkblast. For a moment it was all there. Thees a brave boy with a stout heartas others will see and come to call you. Now go with my thanks, and fly away home. FFFly? How? How does thee walk? Just think of it. Think of home. A thousand wrinkles flowed from the corners of the old mans eyes as he broke into a radiant grin. For, as someone or other famous once said, theres no place like home. See it! See it very well! So Tim thought of the cottage where he had grown up, and the room where he had all his life fallen asleep listening to the wind outside, telling its stories of other places and other lives. He thought of the barn where Misty and Bitsy were stabled, and hoped someone was feeding them. Straw Willem, perhaps. He thought of the spring where he had drawn so many buckets of water. He thought most of all of his mother her sturdy body with its wide shoulders, her chestnut hair, her eyes when they had been full of laughter instead of worry and woe. He thought, How I miss you, Mama . . . and when he did, the tablecloth rose from the rocky ground and hovered over its shadow. Tim gasped. The cloth rocked, then turned. Now he was higher than Maerlyns cap, and the magician had to look up at him. What if I fall? Tim cried. Maerlyn laughed. Sooner or later, we all do. For now, hold tight to the feather! The dibbin wont spill thee, so just hold tight to the feather and think of home! Tim clutched it before him and thought of Tree the high street, the smithy with the burial parlor between it and the cemetery, the farms, the sawmill by the river, the Widows cottage, andmost of allhis own plot and place. The dibbin rose higher, floated above the Dogan for several moments (as if deciding), then headed south along the track of the starkblast. It moved slowly at first, but when its shadow fell over the tangled, frostrimed deadfalls that had lately been a million acres of virgin forest, it began to go faster. A terrible thought came to Tim what if the starkblast had rolled over Tree, freezing it solid and killing everyone, including Nell Ross? He turned to call his question back to Maerlyn, but Maerlyn was already gone. Tim saw him once more, but when that happened, Tim was an old man himself. And that is a story for another day. The dibbin rose until the world below was spread out like a map. Yet the magic that had protected Tim and his furry bedmate from the storm still held, and although he could hear the last of the starkblasts cold breath whooshing all around him, he was perfectly warm. He sat crosslegged on his transport like a young prince of the Mohaine on an elephaunt, the Feather of Garuda held out before him. He felt like Garuda, soaring above a great tract of wildland that looked like a giant dress of a green so dark it was almost black. Yet a gray scar ran through it, as if the dress had been slashed to reveal a dirty underskirt beneath. The starkblast had ruined everything it had touched, although the forest as a whole was very little hurt. The lane of destruction was no more than forty wheels wide. Yet forty wheels wide had been enough to lay waste to the Fagonard. The black swampwater had become yellowishwhite cataracts of ice. The gray, knotted trees that had grown out of that water had all been knocked over. The tussocks were no longer green; now they looked like tangles of milky glass. Run aground on one of them and lying on its side was the tribes boat. Tim thought of Helmsman and Headman and all the others, and burst into bitter tears. If not for them, he would be lying frozen on one of those tussocks five hundred feet below. The people of the swamp had fed him, and they had gifted him with Daria, his good fairy. It was not fair, it was not fair, it was not fair. So cried his childs heart, and then his childs heart died a little. For that is also the way of the world. Before leaving the swamp behind, he saw something else that hurt his heart a large blackened patch where the ice had been melted. Sooty chunks of ice floated around a vast, plated corse lying on its side like the beached boat. It was the dragon that had spared him. Tim could imagineaye, all too wellhow she must have fought the cold with blasts of her fiery breath, but in the end the starkblast had taken her, as it had everything else in the Fagonard. It was now a place of frozen death. Above the Ironwood Trail, the dibbin began to descend. |
Down and down it glided, and when it came to the CosingtonMarchly stub, it touched down. But before the wider sweep of the world was lost, Tim had observed the path of the starkblast, formerly dead south, bending to a course more westerly. And the damage seemed less, as if the storm had been starting to lift off. It gave him hope that the village had been spared. He studied the dibbin thoughtfully, and then waved his hands over it. Fold! he said (feeling a trifle foolish). The dibbin did not, but when he bent to do the job himself, it flipped over once, then twice, then thrice, becoming smaller each timebut no thicker. In a matter of seconds it once more appeared to be nothing but a cotton napkin lying on the path. Not one youd want to spread on your lap at dinner, though, for it had a bootprint square in the middle of it. Tim put it in his pocket and began walking. And, when he reached the blossie groves (where most of the trees were still standing), he began to run. He skirted the town, for he didnt want to waste even minutes answering questions. Few people would have had time for him, anyway. The starkblast had largely spared Tree, but he saw folk tending to livestock theyd managed to pull from flattened barns, and inspecting their fields for damage. The sawmill had been blown into Tree River. The pieces had floated away downstream, and nothing was left but the stone foundation. He followed Stape Brook, as he had on the day when he had found the Covenant Mans magic wand. Their spring, which had been frozen, was already beginning to thaw, and although some of the blossie shingles had been ripped from the roof of the cottage, the building itself stood as firm as ever. It looked as though his mother had been left alone, for there were no wagons or mules out front. Tim understood that people would want to see to their own plots with such a storm as a starkblast coming, but it still made him angry. To leave a woman who was blind and beaten to the whims of a storm . . . that wasnt right. And it wasnt the way folk in Tree neighbored. Someone took her to safety, he told himself. To the Gathering Hall, most likely. Then he heard a bleat from the barn that didnt sound like either of their mules. Tim poked his head in, and smiled. The Widow Smacks little burro, Sunshine, was tethered to a post, munching hay. Tim reached into his pocket and felt a moments panic when he couldnt find the precious bottle. Then he discovered it hiding under the dibbin, and his heart eased. He climbed to the porch (the familiar creak of the third step making him feel like a boy in a dream), and eased the door open. The cottage was warm, for the Widow had made a good fire in the hearth, which was only now burning down to a thick bed of gray ash and rosy embers. She sat sleeping in his das chair with her back to him and her face to the fire. Although he was wild to go to his mother, he paused long enough to slip off his boots. The Widow had come when there was no one else; she had built a fire to keep the cottage warm; even with the prospect of what looked like ruin for the whole village, she had not forgotten how to neighbor. Tim wouldnt have wakened her for anything. He tiptoed to the bedroom door, which stood open. There in bed lay his mother, her hands clasped on the counterpane, her eyes staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. Mama? Tim whispered. For a moment she didnt stir, and Tim felt a cold shaft of fear. He thought, Im too late. Shes alying there dead. Then Nell rose on her elbows, her hair cascading in a flood to the down pillow behind her, and looked toward him. Her face was wild with hope. Tim? Is it you, or am I dreaming? Youre awake, he said. And rushed to her. Her arms enfolded him in a strong grip, and she covered his face with the heartfelt kisses that are only a mothers to give. I thought you were killed! Oh, Tim! And when the storm came, I made sure of it, and I wanted to die myself. Where have you been? How could you break my heart so, you bad boy? And then the kissing began again. Tim gave himself over to it, smiling and rejoicing in the familiar clean smell of her, but then he remembered what Maerlyn had said When thee gets home, whats the first thing theell do? Where have you been? Tell me! Ill tell you everything, Mama, but first lie back and open your eyes wide. As wide as you can. Why? Her hands kept fluttering over his eyes and nose and mouth, as if to reassure herself that he was really here. The eyes Tim hoped to cure stared at him . . . and through him. They had begun to take on a milky look. Why, Tim? He didnt want to say, in case the promised cure didnt work. He didnt believe Maerlyn would have liedit was the Covenant Man who made lies his hobbybut he might have been mistaken. Oh please, dont let him have been mistaken. Never mind. Ive brought medicine, but theres only a little, so you must lie very still. I dont understand. In her darkness, Nell thought what he said next might have come from the dead father rather than the living son. Just know Ive been far and dared much for what I hold. Now lie still! She did as he bade, looking up at him with her blind eyes. Her lips were trembling. Tims hands were, too. He commanded them to grow still, and for a wonder, they did. He took a deep breath, held it, and unscrewed the top of the precious bottle. He drew all there was into the dropper, which was little enough. The liquid didnt even fill half of the short, thin tube. He leaned over Nell. Still, Mama! Promise me, for it may burn. Still as can be, she whispered. One drop in the left eye. Does it? he asked. Does it burn? No, said she. Cool as a blessing. Put some in the other, will ya please. Tim put a drop into the right eye, then sat back, biting his lip. Was the milkiness a little less, or was that only wishing? Can you see anything, Mama? No, but . . . Her breath caught. Theres light! Tim, theres light! She started to rise up on her elbows again, but Tim pressed her back. He put another drop in each eye. It would have to be enough, for the dropper was empty. A good thing, too, for when Nell shrieked, Tim dropped it on the floor. Mama? Mama! What is it? I see thy face! she cried, and put her hands on his cheeks. Now her eyes were filling with tears, but that did Tim very well, because now they were looking at him instead of through him. And they were as bright as they ever had been. Oh, Tim, oh my dear, I see thy face, I see it very well ! Next came a bit of time which needs no tellinga good thing, too, for some moments of joy are beyond description. You must give thy fathers ax to her. Tim fumbled in his belt, brought the handax from it, and placed it beside her on the bed. She looked at itand saw it, a thing still marvelous to both of themthen touched the handle, which had been worn smooth by long years and much use. She raised her face to him questioningly. Tim could only shake his head, smiling. The man who gave me the drops told me to give it to you. Thats all I know. Who, Tim? What man? Thats a long story, and one that would go better with some breakfast. Eggs! she said, starting to rise. At least a dozen! And the pork side from the cold pantry! Still smiling, Tim gripped her shoulders and pushed her gently back to the pillow. I can scramble eggs and fry meat. Ill even bring it to you. A thought occurred to him. Sai Smack can eat with us. Its a wonder all the shouting didnt wake her. She came when the wind began to blow, and was up all through the storm, feeding the fire, Nell said. We thought the house would blow over, but it stood. She must be so tired. Wake her, Tim, but be gentle about it. Tim kissed his mothers cheek again and left the room. The Widow slept on in the dead mans chair by the fire, her chin upon her breast, too tired even to snore. Tim shook her gently by the shoulder. Her head jiggled and rolled, then fell back to its original position. Filled with a horrid certainty, Tim went around to the front of the chair. What he saw stole the strength from his legs and he collapsed to his knees. Her veil had been torn away. The ruin of a face once beautiful hung slack and dead. Her one remaining eye stared blankly at Tim. The bosom of her black dress was rusty with dried blood, for her throat had been cut from ear to ear. He drew in breath to scream, but was unable to let it out, for strong hands had closed around his throat. Bern Kells had stolen into the main room from the mudroom, where he had been sitting on his trunk and trying to remember why he had killed the old woman. He thought it was the fire. He had spent two nights shivering under a pile of hay in Deaf Rincons barn, and this old kitty, she who had put all sorts of useless learning into his stepsons head, had been warm as toast the whole time. Twasnt right. He had watched the boy go into his mothers room. He had heard Nells cries of joy, and each one was like a nail in his vitals. She had no right to cry out with anything but pain. She was the author of all his misery; had bewitched him with her high breasts, slim waist, long hair, and laughing eyes. He had believed her hold on his mind would lessen over the years, but it never had. Finally he simply had to have her. Why else would he have murdered his best and oldest friend? Now came the boy who had turned him into a hunted man. The bitch was bad and the whelp was worse. And what was that jammed into his belt? Was it a gun, by gods? Where had he gotten such a thing? Kells choked Tim until the boys struggles began to weaken and he simply hung from the woodsmans strong hands, rasping. Then he plucked the gun from Tims belt and tossed it aside. A bullets too good for a meddler such as you, Kells said. His mouth was against Tims ear. Distantlyas if all sensation were retreating deep into his bodyTim felt his steppas beard tickling his skin. Sos the knife I used to cut the diseased old bitchs throat. Its the fire for you, whelp. Theres plenty of coals yet. Enough to fry your eyeballs and boil the skin from your There was a low, meaty sound, and suddenly the choking hands were gone. Tim turned, gasping in air that burned like fire. Kells stood beside Big Rosss chair, looking unbelievingly over Tims head at the gray fieldstone chimney. Blood pattered down on the right sleeve of his flannel woodsmans shirt, which was still speckled with hay from his fugitive nights in Deaf Rincons barn. Above his right ear, his head had grown an axhandle. Nell Ross stood behind him, the front of her nightgown spattered with blood. Slowly, slowly, Big Kells shuffled around to face her. He touched the buried blade of the ax, and held his hand out to her, the palm full of blood. I cut the rope so, chary man! Nell screamed into his face, and as if the words rather than the ax had done it, Bern Kells collapsed dead on the floor. Tim put his hands to his face, as if to blot from sight and memory the thing he had just seen . . . although he knew even then it would be with him the rest of his life. Nell put her arms around him and led him out onto the porch. The morning was bright, the frost on the fields beginning to melt, a misty haze rising in the air. Are you all right, Tim? she asked. He drew in a deep breath. The air in his throat was still warm, but no longer burning. Yes. Are you? Ill be fine, said she. Well be fine. Its a beautiful morning, and were alive to see it. But the Widow . . . Tim began to cry. They sat down on the porch steps and looked out on the yard where, not long ago, the Barony Covenanter had sat astride his tall black horse. Black horse, black heart, Tim thought. Well pray for Ardelia Smack, Nell said, and all of Tree will come to her burying. Ill not say Kells did her a favormurders never a favorbut she suffered terribly for the last three years, and her life would not have been long, in any case. I think we should go to town, and see if the constables back from Taveres. On the way, you can tell me everything. Can thee help me hitch Misty and Bitsy to the wagon? Yes, Mama. But I have to get something, first. Something she gave me. All right. Try not to look at whats left in there, Tim. Nor did he. But he picked up the gun, and put it in his belt. . . . THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE She told him not to look at what was left insidethe body of his steppa, you kenand he said he wouldnt. Nor did he, but he picked up the gun, and put it in his belt The fourshot the widowwoman gave him, Young Bill Streeter said. He was sitting against the cell wall below the chalked map of Debaria with his chin on his chest, he had said little, and in truth, I thought the lad had fallen asleep and I was telling the tale only to myself. But he had been listening all along, it seemed. Outside, the rising wind of the simoom rose to a brief shriek, then settled back to a low and steady moan. Aye, Young Bill. He picked up the gun, put it in his belt on the left side, and carried it there for the next ten years of his life. After that he carried bigger onessixshooters. That was the story, and I ended it just as my mother had ended all the stories she read me when I was but a sma one in my tower room. It made me sad to hear those words from my own mouth. And so it happened, once upon a bye, long before your grandfathers grandfather was born. Outside, the light was beginning to fail. I thought it would be tomorrow after all before the deputation that had gone up to the foothills would return with the salties who could sit a horse. And really, did it matter so much? For an uncomfortable thought had come to me while I was telling Young Bill the story of Young Tim. If I were the skinman, and if the sheriff and a bunch of deputies (not to mention a young gunslinger all the way from Gilead) came asking if I could saddle, mount, and ride, would I admit it? Not likely. Jamie and I should have seen this right away, but of course we were still new to the lawmans way of thinking. Sai? Yes, Bill. Did Tim ever become a real gunslinger? He did, didnt he? When he was twentyone, three men carrying hard calibers came through Tree. They were bound for Tavares and hoping to raise a posse, but Tim was the only one who would go with them. They called him the lefthanded gun, for that was the way he drew. He rode with them, and acquitted himself well, for he was both fearless and a dead shot. They called him tetfa, or friend of the tet. But there came a day when he became katet, one of the very, very few gunslingers not from the proven line of Eld. Although who knows? Dont they say that Arthur had many sons from three wives, and moitymore born on the dark side of the blanket? I dunno what that means. With that I could sympathize; until two days before, I hadnt known what was meant by the longstick. Never mind. He was known first as Lefty Ross, thenafter a great battle on the shores of Lake Cawnas Tim Stoutheart. His mother finished her days in Gilead as a great lady, or so my mother said. But all those things are a tale for another day, Bill finished. Thats what my da always says when I ask for more. His face drew in on itself and his mouth trembled at the corners as he remembered the bloody bunkhouse and the cook who had died with his apron over his face. What he said. I put my arm around his shoulders again, a thing that felt a little more natural this time. Id made my mind up to take him back to Gilead with us if Everlynne of Serenity refused to take him in . . . but I thought she would not refuse. He was a good boy. Outside the wind whined and howled. I kept an ear out for the jingjang, but it stayed silent. The lines were surely down somewhere. Sai, how long was Maerlyn caged as a tyger? I dont know, but a very long time, surely. What did he eat? Cuthbert would have made something up on the spot, but I was stumped. If he was shitting in the hole, he must have eaten, Bill said, and reasonably enough. If you dont eat, you cant shit. I dont know what he ate, Bill. Praps he had enough magic lefteven as a tygerto make his own dinner. Out of thin air, like. Yes, thats probably it. Did Tim ever reach the Tower? For there are stories about that, too, arent there? Before I could answer, Strotherthe fat deputy with the rattlesnake hatbandcame into the jail. When he saw me sitting with my arm around the boy, he gave a smirk. I considered wiping it off his faceit wouldnt have taken longbut forgot the idea when I heard what he had to say. Riders comin. Must be a moit, and wagons, because we can hear em even over the damn beastly wind. People is steppin out into the grit to see. I got up and let myself out of the cell. Can I come? Bill asked. Better that you bide here yet awhile, I said, and locked him in. I wont be long. I hate it here, sai! I know, I told him. Itll be over soon enough. I hoped I was right about that. When I stepped out of the sheriffs office, the wind made me stagger and alkali grit stung my cheeks. In spite of the rising gale, both boardwalks of the high street were lined with spectators. The men had pulled their bandannas over their mouths and noses; the women were using their kerchiefs. I saw one ladysai wearing her bonnet backwards, which looked strange but was probably quite useful against the dust. To my left, horses began to emerge from the whitish clouds of alkali. Sheriff Peavy and Canfield of the Jefferson were in the van, with their hats yanked low and their neckcloths pulled high, so only their eyes showed. Behind them came three long flatbed wagons, open to the wind. They were painted blue, but their sides and decks were rimed white with salt. On the side of each the words DEBARIA SALT COMBYNE had been daubed in yellow paint. On each deck sat six or eight fellows in overalls and the straw workingmens hats known as clobbers (or clumpets, I disremember which). On one side of this caravan rode Jamie DeCurry, Kellin Frye, and Kellins son, Vikka. On the other were Snip and Arn from the Jefferson spread and a big fellow with a sandcolored handlebar mustache and a yellow duster to match. This turned out to be the man who served as constable in Little Debaria . . . at least when he wasnt otherwise occupied at the faro or Watch Me tables. None of the new arrivals looked happy, but the salties looked least happy of all. It was easy to regard them with suspicion and dislike; I had to remind myself that only one was a monster (assuming, that was, the skinman hadnt slipped our net entirely). Most of the others had probably come of their own free will when told they could help put an end to the scourge by doing so. I stepped into the street and raised my hands over my head. Sheriff Peavy reined up in front of me, but I ignored him for the time being, looking instead at the huddled miners in the flatbed wagons. A swift count made their number twentyone. That was twenty more suspects than I wanted, but far fewer than I had feared. I shouted to make myself heard over the wind. You men have come to help us, and on behalf of Gilead, I say thankya! They were easier to hear, because the wind was blowing toward me. Balls to your Gilead, said one. Snotnosed brat, said another. Lick my johnny on behalf of Gilead, said a third. I can smarten em up anytime youd like, said the man with the handlebar mustache. Say the word, youngun, for Im constable of the shithole they come from, and that makes em my fill. Will Wegg. He put a perfunctory fist to his brow. Never in life, I said, and raised my voice again. How many of you men want a drink? That stopped their grumbling in its tracks, and they raised a cheer instead. Then climb down and line up! I shouted. By twos, if you will! I grinned at them. And if you wont, go to hell and go there thirsty! That made most of them laugh. Sai Deschain, Wegg said, puttin drink in these fellers aint a good idea. But I thought it was. I motioned Kellin Frye to me and dropped two gold knucks into his hand. His eyes widened. Youre the trailboss of this herd, I told him. What youve got there should buy them two whiskeys apiece, if theyre short shots, and thats all I want them to have. Take Canfield with you, and that one there. I pointed to one of the pokies. Is it Arn? Snip, the fellow said. Tother ones Arn. Aye, good. Snip, you at one end of the bar, Canfield at the other. Frye, you stand behind them at the door and watch their backs. I wont be taking my son into the Busted Luck, Kellin Frye said. Its a whorehole, so it is. You wont need to. Soh Vikka goes around back with the other pokie. I cocked my thumb at Arn. All you two fellows need to do is watch for any saltie trying to sneak out the back door. If you do, let loose a yell and then scat, because hell probably be our man. Understand? Yep, Arn said. Come on, kid, off we go. Maybe if I get out of this wind, I can get a smoke to stay lit. Not just yet, I said, and beckoned to the boy. Hey, gunbunny! one of the miners yelled. You gonna let us out of this wind before nightfall? Im fuckin thirsty! The others agreed. Hold your gabber, I said. Do that, and you get to wet your throat. Run your gums at me while Im doing my job and youll sit out here in the back of a wagon and lick salt. That quieted them, and I bent to Vikka Frye. You were to tell someone something while you were up there at the Salt Rocks. Did you do it? Yar, I His father elbowed him almost hard enough to knock him over. The boy remembered his manners and started again, this time with a fist to his brow. Yes, sai, do it please you. Who did you speak to? Puck DeLong. Hes a boy I know from Reap Fairday. Hes just a miners kid, but we palled around some, and did the threeleg race together. His das foreman of the nightwork crew. Thats what Puck says, anyways. And what did you tell him? That it was Billy Streeter who seen the skinman in his human shape. I said how Billy hid under a pile of old tack, and that was what saved him. Puck knew who I was talking about, because Billy was at Reap Fairday, too. It was Billy who won the Goose Dash. Do you know the Goose Dash, sai gunslinger? Yes, I said. I had run it myself on more than one Reap Fairday, and not that long ago, either. Vikka Frye swallowed hard, and his eyes filled with tears. Billys da cheered like to bust his throat when Billy come in first, he whispered. Im sure he did. Did this Puck DeLong put the story on its way, do you think? Dunno, do I? But I wouldve, if itd been me. I thought that was good enough, and clapped Vikka on the shoulder. Go on, now. And if anyone tries to take it on the sneak, raise a shout. A good loud one, so to be heard over the wind. He and Arn struck off for the alley that would take them behind the Busted Luck. The salties paid them no mind; they only had eyes for the batwing doors and thoughts for the rotgut waiting behind them. Men! I shouted. And when they turned to me Wet thy whistles! That brought another cheer, and they set off for the saloon. But walking, not running, and still two by two. They had been well trained. I guessed that their lives as miners were little more than slavery, and I was thankful ka had pointed me along a different path . . . although, when I look back on it, I wonder how much difference there might be between the slavery of the mine and the slavery of the gun. Perhaps one Ive always had the sky to look at, and for that I tell Gan, the Man Jesus, and all the other gods that may be, thankya. I motioned Jamie, Sheriff Peavy, and the new oneWeggto the far side of the street. We stood beneath the overhang that shielded the sheriffs office. Strother and Pickens, the notsogood deputies, were crowded into the doorway, fair goggling. Go inside, you two, I told them. We dont take orders from you, Pickens said, just as haughty as Mary Dame, now that the boss was back. Go inside and shut the door, Peavy said. Have you thudbrains not kenned even yet whos in charge of this raree? They drew back, Pickens glaring at me and Strother glaring at Jamie. The door slammed hard enough to rattle the glass. For a moment the four of us stood there, watching the great clouds of alkali dust blow up the high street, some of them so thick they made the saltwagons disappear. But there was little time for contemplation; it would be night all too soon, and then one of the salties now drinking in the Busted Luck might be a man no longer. I think we have a problem, I said. I was speaking to all of them, but it was Jamie I was looking at. It seems to me that a skinturner who knows what he is would hardly admit to being able to ride. Thought of that, Jamie said, and tilted his head to Constable Wegg. Weve got all of em who can sit a horse, Wegg said. Depend on it, sai. Aint I seen em myself? I doubt if youve seen all of them, I said. I think he has, Jamie said. Listen, Roland. Theres one rich fella up in Little Debaria, name of Sam Shunt, Wegg said. The miners call him Shunt the Cunt, which aint surprising, since hes got most of em where the hair grows short. He dont own the Combyneits big bugs in Gilead whove got thatbut he owns most of the rest the bars, the whores, the skiddums I looked at Sheriff Peavy. Shacks in Little Debaria where some of the miners sleep, he said. Skiddums aint much, but they aint underground. I looked back at Wegg, who had hold of his dusters lapels and was looking pleased with himself. Sammy Shunt owns the company store. Which means he owns the miners. He grinned. When I didnt grin back, he took his hands from his lapels and flipped them skyward. Its the way of the world, young saiI didnt make it, and neither did you. Now Sammys a great one for fun n games . . . always assumin he can turn a few pennies on em, that is. Four times a year, he sets up races for the miners. Some are footraces, and some are obstaclecourse races, where they have to jump over wooden barrycades, or leap gullies filled up with mud. Its pretty comical when they fall in. The whores always come to watch, and that makes em laugh like loons. Hurry it up, Peavy growled. Those fellas wont take long to get through two drinks. He has hossraces, too, said Wegg, although he wont provide nothing but old nags, in case one of them ponies breaks a leg and has to be shot. If a miner breaks a leg, is he shot? I asked. Wegg laughed and slapped his thigh as if Id gotten off a good one. Cuthbert could have told him I dont joke, but of course Cuthbert wasnt there. And Jamie rarely says anything, if he doesnt have to. Trig, young gunslinger, very trig ye are! Nay, theyre mended right enough, if they can be mended; theres a couple of whores that make a little extra coin working as ammies after Sammy Shunts little competitions. They dont mind; its servicin em either way, aint it? Theres an entry fee, accourse, taken out of wages. That pays Sammys expenses. As for the miners, the winner of whatever the particular competition happens to bedash, obstaclecourse, hossracegets a years worth of debt forgiven at the company store. Sammy keeps the indrest shigh on the others that he never loses by it. You see how it works? Quite snick, wouldnt you say? Snick as the devil, I said. Yar! So when it comes to racing those nags around the little track he had made, any miner who can ride, does ride. Its powerful comical to watch em smashin their nutsacks up n down, set my watch and warrant on that. And Im allus there to keep order. Ive seen every race for the last seven years, and every diggerboy whos ever run in em. For riders, those boys over there are it. There was one more, but in the race Sammy put on this New Earth, that perticler saltmole fell off his mount and got his guts squashed. Lived a day or two, then goozled. So I dont think hes your skinman, do you? At this, Wegg laughed heartily. Peavy looked at him with resignation, Jamie with a mixture of contempt and wonder. Did I believe this man when he said theyd rounded up every saltie who could sit a horse? I would, I decided, if he could answer one question in the affirmative. Do you bet on these horseraces yourself, Wegg? Made a goodish heap last year, he said proudly. Course Shunt only pays in scriphes tightbut it keeps me in whores and whiskey. I like the whores young and the whiskey old. Peavy looked at me over Weggs shoulder and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, Hes what they have up there, so dont blame me for it. Nor did I. Wegg, go on in the office and wait for us. Jamie and Sheriff Peavy, come with me. I explained as we crossed the street. It didnt take long. You tell them what we want, I said to Peavy as we stood outside the batwings. I kept it low because we were still being watched by the whole town, although the ones clustered outside the saloon had drawn away from us, as if we might have something that was catching. They know you. Not as well as they know Wegg, he said. Why do you think I wanted him to stay across the street? He grunted a laugh at that, and pushed his way through the batwings. Jamie and I followed. The regular patrons had drawn back to the gaming tables, giving the bar over to the salties. Snip and Canfield flanked them; Kellin Frye stood with his back leaning against the barnboard wall and his arms folded over his sheepskin vest. There was a second floorgiven over to bumpcribs, I assumedand the balcony up there was loaded with lessthancharming ladies, looking down at the miners. You men! Peavy said. Turn around and face me! They did as he said, and promptly. What was he to them but just another foreman? A few held onto the remains of their short whiskeys, but most had already finished. They looked livelier now, their cheeks flushed with alcohol rather than the scouring wind that had chased them down from the foothills. Now heres what, Peavy said. Youre going to sit up on the bar, every mothers son of you, and take off your boots so we can see your feet. A muttering of discontent greeted this. If you want to know whos spent time in Beelie Stockade, why not just ask? a graybeard called. I was there, and I ent ashamed. I stole a loaf for my old woman and our two babbies. Not that it did the babbies any good; they both died. What if we wont? a younger one asked. Them gunnies shoot us? Not sure Id mind. At least I wouldnt have to go down in the plug nummore. A rumble of agreement met this. Someone said something that sounded like green light. Peavy took hold of my arm and pulled me forward. It was this gunny got you out of a days work, then bought you drinks. And unless youre the man were looking for, what the hell are you afraid of? The one that answered this couldnt have been more than my age. Sai Sheriff, were always afraid. This was truth a little balder than they were used to, and complete silence dropped over the Busted Luck. Outside, the wind moaned. The grit hitting the thin board walls sounded like hail. Boys, listen to me, Peavy said, now speaking in a lower and more respectful tone of voice. These gunslingers could draw and make you do what has to be done, but I dont want that, and you shouldnt need it. Counting what happened at the Jefferson spread, theres over three dozen dead in Debaria. Three at the Jefferson was women. He paused. Nar, I tell a lie. One was a woman, the other two mere girls. I know youve got hard lives and nothing to gain by doing a good turn, but Im asking you, anyway. And why not? Theres only one of you with something to hide. Well, what the fuck, said the graybeard. He reached behind him to the bar and boosted himself up so he was sitting on it. He must have been the Old Fella of the crew, for all the others followed suit. I watched for anyone showing reluctance, but to my eye there was none. Once it was started, they took it as a kind of joke. Soon there were twentyone overalled salties sitting on the bar, and the boots rained down on the sawdusty floor in a series of thuds. Ay, gods, I can smell the reek of their feet to this day. Oogh, thats enough for me, one of the whores said, and when I looked up, I saw our audience vacating the balcony in a storm of feathers and a swirl of pettislips. |
The bartender joined the others by the gaming tables, holding his nose pinched shut. Ill bet they didnt sell many steak dinners in Raceys Caf at suppertime; that smell was an appetitekiller if ever there was one. Yank up your cuffs, Peavy said. Let me gleep yer ankles. Now that the thing was begun, they complied without argument. I stepped forward. If I point to you, I said, get down off the bar and go stand against the wall. You can take your boots, but dont bother putting them on. Youll only be walking across the street, and you can do that barefooty. I walked down the line of extended feet, most pitifully skinny and all but those belonging to the youngest miners clogged with bulging purple veins. You . . . you . . . and you . . . In all, there were ten of them with blue rings around their ankles that meant time in the Beelie Stockade. Jamie drifted over to them. He didnt draw, but he hooked his thumbs in his crossed gunbelts, with his palms near enough to the butts of his sixshooters to make the point. Barkeep, I said. Pour these men who are left another short shot. The miners without stockade tattoos cheered at this and began putting on their boots again. What about us? the graybeard asked. The tattooed ring above his ankle was faded to a blue ghost. His bare feet were as gnarled as old treestumps. How he could walk on themlet alone work on themwas more than I could understand. Nine of you will get long shots, I said, and that wiped the gloom from their faces. The tenth will get something else. A yank of rope, Canfield of the Jefferson said in a low voice. And after what I seen out tranch, I hope he dances at the end of it a long time. We left Snip and Canfield to watch the eleven salties drinking at the bar, and marched the other ten across the street. The graybeard led the way and walked briskly on his treestump feet. That days light had drained to a weird yellow I had never seen before, and it would be dark all too soon. The wind blew and the dust flew. I was watching for one of them to make a breakhoping for it, if only to spare the child waiting in the jailbut none did. Jamie fell in beside me. If hes here, hes hoping the kiddo didnt see any higher than his ankles. He means to face it out, Roland. I know, I said. And since thats all the kiddo did see, hell probably ride the bluff. What then? Lock em all up, I suppose, and wait for one of em to change his skin. What if its not just something that comes over him? What if he can keep it from happening? Then I dont know, I said. Wegg had started a pennyin, threetostay Watch Me game with Pickens and Strother. I thumped the table with one hand, scattering the matchsticks they were using as counters. Wegg, youll accompany these men into the jail with the sheriff. Itll be a few minutes yet. Theres a few more things to attend to. Whats in the jail? Wegg asked, looking at the scattered matchsticks with some regret. I guessed hed been winning. The boy, I suppose? The boy and the end of this sorry business, I said with more confidence than I felt. I took the graybeard by the elbowgentlyand pulled him aside. Whats your name, sai? Steg Luka. Whats it to you? You think Im the one? No, I said, and I didnt. No reason; just a feeling. But if you know which one it isif you even think you knowyou ought to tell me. Theres a frightened boy in there, locked in a cell for his own good. He saw something that looked like a giant bear kill his father, and Id spare him any more pain if I could. Hes a good boy. He considered, then it was him who took my elbow . . . and with a hand that felt like iron. He drew me into the corner. I cant say, gunslinger, for weve all been down there, deep in the new plug, and we all saw it. Saw what? A crack in the salt with a green light shining through. Bright, then dim. Bright, then dim. Like a heartbeat. And . . . it speaks to your face. I dont understand you. I dont understand myself. The only thing I know is weve all seen it, and weve all felt it. It speaks to your face and tells you to come in. Its bitter. The light, or the voice? Both. Its of the Old People, Ive no doubt of that. We told Banderlyhim thats the bull foremanand he went down himself. Saw it for himself. Felt it for himself. But was he going to close the plug for that? Balls he was. Hes got his own bosses to answer to, and they know theres a moit of salt left down there. So he ordered a crew to close it up with rocks, which they did. I know, because I was one of em. But rocks that are put in can be pulled out. And they have been, Id swear to it. They were one way then, now theyre another. Someone went in there, gunslinger, and whatevers on the other side . . . it changed him. But you dont know who. Luka shook his head. All I can say is it mustve been between twelve o the clock and six in the morning, for then alls quiet. Go on back to your mates, and say thankee. Youll be drinking soon enough, and welcome. But sai Lukas drinking days were over. We never know, do we? He went back and I surveyed them. Luka was the oldest by far. Most of the others were middleaged, and a couple were still young. They looked interested and excited rather than afraid, and I could understand that; theyd had a couple of drinks to perk them up, and this made a change in the drudgery of their ordinary days. None of them looked shifty or guilty. None looked like anything more or less than what they were salties in a dying mining town where the rails ended. Jamie, I said. A word with you. I walked him to the door, and spoke directly into his ear. I gave him an errand, and told him to do it as fast as ever he could. He nodded and slipped out into the stormy afternoon. Or perhaps by then it was early evening. Wheres he off to? Wegg asked. Thats nonnies to you, I said, and turned to the men with the blue tattoos on their ankles. Line up, if you please. Oldest to youngest. I dunno how old I am, do I? said a balding man wearing a wristclock with a rusty stringmended band. Some of the others laughed and nodded. Just do the best you can, I said. I had no interest in their ages, but the discussion and argument took up some time, which was the main object. If the blacksmith had fulfilled his commission, all would be well. If not, I would improvise. A gunslinger who cant do that dies early. The miners shuffled around like kids playing When the Music Stops, swapping spots until they were in some rough approximation of age. The line started at the door to the jail and ended at the door to the street. Luka was first; WristClock was in the middle; the one who looked about my agethe one whod said they were always afraidwas last. Sheriff, will you get their names? I asked. I want to speak to the Streeter boy. Billy was standing at the bars of the drunkanddisorderly cell. Hed heard our palaver, and looked frightened. Is it here? he asked. The skinman? I think so, I said, but theres no way to be sure. Sai, Im ascairt. I dont blame you. But the cells locked and the bars are good steel. He cant get at you, Billy. You aint seen him when hes a bear, Billy whispered. His eyes were huge and shiny, fixed in place. Ive seen men with eyes like that after theyve been punched hard on the jaw. Its the look that comes over them just before their knees go soft. Outside, the wind gave a thin shriek along the underside of the jail roof. Tim Stoutheart was afraid, too, I said. But he went on. I expect you to do the same. Will you be here? Aye. My mate, Jamie, too. As if I had summoned him, the door to the office opened and Jamie hurried in, slapping alkali dust from his shirt. The sight of him gladdened me. The smell of dirty feet that accompanied him was less welcome. Did you get it? I asked. Yes. Its a pretty enough thing. And heres the list of names. He handed both over. Are you ready, son? Jamie asked Billy. I guess so, Billy said. Im going to pretend Im Tim Stoutheart. Jamie nodded gravely. Thats a fine idea. May you do well. A particularly strong gust of wind blew past. Bitter dust puffed in through the barred window of the drunkanddisorderly cell. Again came that eerie shriek along the eaves. The light was fading, fading. It crossed my mind that it might be bettersaferto jail the waiting salties and leave this part for tomorrow, but nine of them had done nothing. Neither had the boy. Best to have it done. If it could be done, that was. Hear me, Billy, I said. Im going to walk them through nice and slow. Maybe nothing will happen. AAll right. His voice was faint. Do you need a drink of water first? Or to have a piss? Im fine, he said, but of course he didnt look fine; he looked terrified. Sai? How many of them have blue rings on their ankles? All, I said. Then how They dont know how much you saw. Just look at each one as he passes. And stand back a little, doya. Out of reachingdistance was what I meant, but I didnt want to say it out loud. What should I say? Nothing. Unless you see something that sets off a recollection, that is. I had little hope of that. Bring them in, Jamie. Sheriff Peavy at the head of the line and Wegg at the end. He nodded and left. Billy reached through the bars. For a second I didnt know what he wanted, then I did. I gave his hand a brief squeeze. Stand back now, Billy. And remember the face of your father. He watches you from the clearing. He obeyed. I glanced at the list, running over names (probably misspelled) that meant nothing to me, with my hand on the butt of my righthand gun. That one now contained a very special load. According to Vannay, there was only one sure way to kill a skinman with a piercing object of the holy metal. I had paid the blacksmith in gold, but the bullet hed made methe one that would roll under the hammer at first cockwas pure silver. Perhaps it would work. If not, I would follow with lead. The door opened. In came Sheriff Peavy. He had a twofoot ironwood headknocker in his right hand, the rawhide drop cord looped around his wrist. He was patting the business end gently against his left palm as he stepped through the door. His eyes found the whitefaced lad in the cell, and he smiled. Heyup, Billy, son of Bill, he said. Were with ye, and alls fine. Fear nothing. Billy tried to smile, but looked like he feared much. Steg Luka came next, rocking from side to side on those treestump feet of his. After him came a man nearly as old, with a mangy white mustache, dirty gray hair falling to his shoulders, and a sinister, squinted look in his eyes. Or perhaps he was only nearsighted. The list named him as Bobby Frane. Come slow, I said, and give this boy a good look at you. They came. As each one passed, Bill Streeter looked anxiously into his face. Gd even toee, boy, Luka said as he went by. Bobby Frane tipped an invisible cap. One of the younger onesJake Marsh, according to the liststuck out a tongue yellow from bingoweed tobacco. The others just shuffled past. A couple kept their heads lowered until Wegg barked at them to raise up and look the kiddo in the eye. There was no dawning recognition on Bill Streeters face, only a mixture of fright and perplexity. I kept my own face blank, but I was losing hope. Why, after all, would the skinman break? He had nothing to lose by playing out his string, and he must know it. Now there were only four left . . . then two . . . then only the kid who in the Busted Luck had spoken of being afraid. I saw change on Billys face as that one went by, and for a moment I thought we had something, then realized it was nothing more than the recognition of one young person for another. Last came Wegg, who had put away his headknocker and donned brass knuckledusters on each hand. He gave Billy Streeter a not very pleasant smile. Dont see no merchandise you want to buy, younker? Well, Im sorry, but I cant say Im surpri Gunslinger! Billy said to me. Sai Deschain! Yes, Billy. I shouldered Wegg aside and stood in front of the cell. Billy touched his tongue to his upper lip. Walk them by again, if it please you. Only this time have them hold up their pants. I cant see the rings. Billy, the rings are all the same. No, he said. They aint. The wind was in a lull, and Sheriff Peavy heard him. Turn around, my cullies, and back you march. Only this time hike up your trousers. Aint enough enough? the man with the old wristclock grumbled. The list called him Ollie Ang. We was promised shots. Long ones. Whats it to you, honey? Wegg asked. Aint you got to go back that way anyro? Did yer marmar dropee on your head? They grumbled about it, but started back down the corridor toward the office, this time from youngest to oldest, and holding up their pants. All the tattoos looked about the same to me. I at first thought they must to the boy, as well. Then I saw his eyes widen, and he took another step away from the bars. Yet he said nothing. Sheriff, hold them right there for a moment, if you will, I said. Peavy moved in front of the door to the office. I stepped to the cell and spoke low. Billy? See something? The mark, he said. I seen the mark. Its the man with the broken ring. I didnt understand . . . then I did. I thought of all the times Cort had called me a slowkins from the eyebrows up. He called the others those things and worseof course he did, it was his jobbut standing in the corridor of that Debaria jail with the simoom blowing outside, I thought he had been right about me. I was a slowkins. Only minutes ago Id thought that if there had been more than the memory of the tattoo, Id have gotten it from Billy when he was hypnotized. Now, I realized, I had gotten it. Is there anything else? Id asked him, already sure that there wasnt, only wanting to raise him from the trance that was so obviously upsetting him. And when hed said the white markbut dubiously, as if asking himselffoolish Roland had let it pass. The salties were getting restless. Ollie Ang, the one with the rusty wristclock, was saying theyd done as asked and he wanted to go back to the Busted to get his drink and his damn boots. Which one? I asked Billy. He leaned forward and whispered. I nodded, then turned to the knot of men at the end of the corridor. Jamie was watching them closely, hands resting on the butts of his revolvers. The men must have seen something in my face, because they ceased their grumbling and just stared. The only sound was the wind and the constant gritty slosh of dust against the building. As to what happened next, Ive thought it over many times since, and I dont think we could have prevented it. We didnt know how fast the change happened, you see; I dont think Vannay did, either, or he would have warned us. Even my father said as much when I finished making my report and stood, with all those books frowning down upon me, waiting for him to pass judgment on my actions in Debarianot as my father, but as my dinh. For one thing I was and am grateful. I almost told Peavy to bring forward the man Billy had named, but then I changed my mind. Not because Peavy had helped my father once upon a bye, but because Little Debaria and the salthouses were not his fill. Wegg, I said. Ollie Ang to me, do it please ya. Which? The one with the clock on his wrist. Here, now! Ollie Ang squawked as Constable Wegg laid hold of him. He was slight for a miner, almost bookish, but his arms were slabbed with muscle and I could see more muscle lifting the shoulders of his chambray workshirt. Here, now, I aint done nothing! It aint fair to single me out just because this here kid wants to show off! Shut your hole, Wegg said, and pulled him through the little clot of miners. Huck up your pants again, I told him. Fuck you, brat! And the horse you rode in on! Huck up or Ill do it for you. He raised his hands and balled them into fists. Try! Just you t Jamie strolled up behind him, drew one of his guns, tossed it lightly into the air, caught it by the barrel, and brought the butt down on Angs head. A smartly calculated blow it didnt knock the man out, but he dropped his fists, and Wegg caught him under the armpit when his knees loosened. I pulled up the right leg of his overalls, and there it was a blue Beelie Stockade tattoo that had been cutbroken, to use Billy Streeters wordby a thick white scar that ran all the way to his knee. Thats what I saw, Billy breathed. Thats what I saw when I was alayin under that pile of tack. Hes making it up, Ang said. He looked dazed and his words were muzzy. A thin rill of blood ran down the side of his face from where Jamies blow had opened his scalp a little. I knew better. Billy had mentioned the white mark long before hed set eyes on Ollie Ang in the jail. I opened my mouth, meaning to tell Wegg to throw him in a cell, but that was when the Old Man of the crew burst forward. In his eyes was a look of belated realization. Nor was that all. He was furious. Before I or Jamie or Wegg could stop him, Steg Luka grabbed Ang by the shoulders and bore him back against the bars across the aisle from the drunkanddisorderly cell. I should have known! he shouted. I should have known weeks ago, ye great growit shifty asshole! Ye murderin trullock! He seized the arm bearing the old watch. Whered ye get this, if not in the crack the green light comes from? Where else? Oh, ye murderin skinchangin bastard! Luka spit into Angs dazed face, then turned to Jamie and me, still holding up the miners arm. Said he found it in a hole outside one of the old foothill plugs! Said it was probably leftover outlaw booty from the Crow Gang, and like fools we believed him! Even went diggin around for more on our days off, didnt we! He turned back to the dazed Ollie Ang. Dazed was how he looked to us, anyway, but who knows what was going on behind those eyes? And you laughin up your fuckin sleeve at us while we did it, Ive no doubt. You found it in a hole, all right, but it wasnt in one of the old plugs. You went into the crack! Into the green light! It was you! It was you! It was Ang twisted from the chin up. I dont mean he grimaced; his entire head twisted. It was like watching a cloth being wrung by invisible hands. His eyes rose up until one was almost above the other, and they turned from blue to jetblack. His skin paled first to white, then to green. It rose as if pushed by fists from beneath, and cracked into scales. His clothes dropped from his body, because his body was no longer that of a man. Nor was it a bear, or a wolf, or a lion. Those things we might have been prepared for. We might even have been prepared for an allygator, such as the thing that had assaulted the unfortunate Fortuna at Serenity. Although it was closer to an allygator than anything else. In a space of three seconds, Ollie Ang turned into a manhigh snake. A pooky. Luka, still holding onto an arm that was shrinking toward that fat green body, gave out a yell that was muffled when the snakestill with a flopping tonsure of human hair around its elongating headjammed itself into the old mans mouth. There was a wet popping sound as Lukas lower jaw was torn from the joints and tendons holding it to the upper. I saw his wattled neck swell and grow smooth as that thingstill changing, still standing on the dwindling remnants of human legsbored into his throat like a drill. There were yells and screams of horror from the head of the aisle as the other salties stampeded. I paid them no notice. I saw Jamie wrap his arms around the snakes growing, swelling body in a fruitless attempt to pull it out of the dying Steg Lukas throat, and I saw the enormous reptilian head when it tore its way through the nape of Lukas neck, its red tongue flicking, its scaly head painted with beads of blood and bits of flesh. Wegg threw one of his brassknuckledecorated fists at it. The snake dodged easily, then struck forward, exposing enormous, stillgrowing fangs two on top, two on bottom, all dripping with clear liquid. It battened on Weggs arm and he shrieked. Burns! Dear gods, it BURNS! Luka, impaled at the head, seemed to dance as the snake dug its fangs into the struggling constable. Blood and gobbets of flesh spattered everywhere. Jamie looked at me wildly. His guns were drawn, but where to shoot? The pooky was writhing between two dying men. Its lower body, now legless, flipped free of the heaped clothes, wound itself around Lukas waist in fat coils, drew tight. The part behind the head was slithering out through the widening hole at the nape of Lukas neck. I stepped forward, seized Wegg, and dragged him backward by the scruff of his vest. His bitten arm had already turned black and swelled to twice its normal size. His eyes were bulging from their sockets as he stared at me, and white foam began to drizzle from his lips. Somewhere, Billy Streeter was screaming. The fangs tore free. Burns, Wegg said in a low voice, and then he could say no more. His throat swelled, and his tongue shot out of his mouth. He collapsed, shuddering in his deaththroes. The snake stared at me, its forked tongue licking in and out. They were black snakeeyes, but they were filled with human understanding. I lifted the revolver holding the special load. I had only one silver shell and the head was weaving erratically from side to side, but I never doubted I could make the shot; its what such as I was made for. It lunged, fangs flashing, and I pulled the trigger. The shot was true, and the silver bullet went right into that yawning mouth. The head blew away in a splatter of red that had begun to turn white even before it hit the bars and the floor of the corridor. Id seen such mealy white flesh before. It was brains. Human brains. Suddenly it was Ollie Angs ruined face peering at me from the ragged hole in the back of Lukas neckpeering from atop a snakes body. Shaggy black fur sprang from between the scales on its body as whatever force dying inside lost all control of the shapes it made. In the moment before it collapsed, the remaining blue eye turned yellow and became a wolfs eye. Then it went down, bearing the unfortunate Steg Luka with it. In the corridor, the dying body of the skinman shimmered and burned, wavered and changed. I heard the pop of muscles and the grind of shifting bones. A naked foot shot out, turned into a furry paw, then became a mans foot again. The remains of Ollie Ang shuddered all over, then grew still. The boy was still screaming. Go to yon pallet and lie down, I said to him. My voice was not quite steady. Close your eyes and tell yourself its over, for now it is. I want you, Billy sobbed as he went to the pallet. His cheeks were speckled with blood. I was drenched with it, but this he didnt see. His eyes were already closed. I want you with me! Please, sai, please! Ill come to you as soon as I can, I said. And I did. Three of us spent the night on pushedtogether pallets in the drunkanddisorderly cell Jamie on the left, me on the right, Young Bill Streeter in the middle. The simoom had begun to die, and until late, we heard the sound of revels on the high street as Debaria celebrated the death of the skinman. What will happen to me, sai? Billy asked just before he finally fell asleep. Good things, I said, and hoped Everlynne of Serenity would not prove me wrong about that. Is it dead? Really dead, sai Deschain? Really. But on that score I meant to take no chance. After midnight, when the wind was down to a bare breeze and Bill Streeter lay in an exhausted sleep so deep even bad dreams couldnt reach him, Jamie and I joined Sheriff Peavy on the waste ground behind the jail. There we doused the body of Ollie Ang with coal oil. Before setting match to it, I asked if either of them wanted the wristclock as a souvenir. Somehow it hadnt been broken in the struggle, and the cunning little second hand still turned. Jamie shook his head. Not I, said Peavy, for it might be haunted. Go on, Roland. If I may call ye so. And welcome, I said. I struck the sulphur and dropped it. We stood watching until the remains of Debarias skinman were nothing but black bones. The wristclock was a charred lump in the ash. The following morning, Jamie and I rounded up a crew of menmore than willing, they wereto go out to the rail line. Once they were there, it was a matter of two hours to put Sma Toot back on the doublesteel. Travis, the enjie, directed the operation, and I made many friends by telling them Id arranged for everyone in the crew to eat free at Raceys at top o day and drink free at the Busted Luck that afternoon. There was to be a town celebration that night, at which Jamie and I would be guests of honor. It was the sort of thing I could happily do withoutI was anxious to get home, and as a rule, company doesnt suit mebut such events are often part of the job. One good thing there would be women, some of them no doubt pretty. That part I wouldnt mind, and suspected Jamie wouldnt, either. He had much to learn about women, and Debaria was as good a place to begin his studies as any. He and I watched Sma Toot puff slowly up to the roundway and then make its way toward us again, pointed in the right direction toward Gilead. Will we stop at Serenity on the way back to town? Jamie asked. To ask if theyll take the boy in? Aye. And the prioress said she had something for me. Do you know what? I shook my head. Everlynne, that mountain of a woman, swept toward us across the courtyard of Serenity, her arms spread wide. I was almost tempted to run; it was like standing in the path of one of the vast trucks that used to run at the oilfields near Kuna. Instead of running us down, she swept us into a vast and bosomy double hug. Her aroma was sweet a mixture of cinnamon and thyme and baked goods. She kissed Jamie on the cheekhe blushed. Then she kissed me full on the lips. For a moment we were enveloped by her complicated and billowing garments and shaded by her winged silk hood. Then she drew back, her face shining. What a service you have done this town! And how we say thankya! I smiled. Sai Everlynne, you are too kind. Not kind enough! Youll have noonies with us, yes? And meadow wine, although only a little. Yell have more to drink tonight, I have no doubt. She gave Jamie a roguish sideglance. But yell want to be careful when the toasts go around; too much drink can make a man less a man later on, and blur memories he might otherwise want to keep. She paused, then broke into a knowing grin that went oddly with her robes. Or . . . praps not. Jamie blushed harder than ever, but said nothing. We saw you coming, Everlynne said, and theres someone else whod like to give you her thanks. She moved aside and there stood the tiny Sister of Serenity named Fortuna. She was still swathed in bandagement, but she looked less wraithlike today, and the side of the face we could see was shining with happiness and relief. She stepped forward shyly. I can sleep again. And in time, I may even be able to sleep wiout nightmares. She twitched up the skirt of her gray robe, andto my deep discomfortfell on her knees before us. Sister Fortuna, Annie Clay that was, says thank you. So do we all, but this comes from my own heart. I took her gently by the shoulders. Rise, bondswoman. Kneel not before such as us. She looked at me with shining eyes, and kissed me on the cheek with the side of her mouth that could still kiss. Then she fled back across the courtyard toward what I assumed was their kitchen. Wonderful smells were already arising from that part of the haci. Everlynne watched her go with a fond smile, then turned back to me. Theres a boy I began. She nodded. Bill Streeter. I know his name and his story. We dont go to town, but sometimes the town comes to us. Friendly birds twitter news in our ears, if you take my meaning. I take it well, I said. Bring him tomorrow, after your heads have shrunk back to their normal size, said she. Were a company of women, but were happy to take an orphan boy . . . at least until he grows enough hair on his upper lip to shave. After that, women trouble a boy, and it might not be so well for him to stay here. In the meantime, we can set him about his letters and numbers . . . if hes trig enough to learn, that is. Would you say hes trig enough, Roland, son of Gabrielle? It was odd to be called from my mothers side rather than my fathers, but strangely pleasant. Id say hes very trig. Thats well, then. And well find a place for him when its time for him to go. A plot and a place, I said. Everlynne laughed. Aye, just so, like in the story of Tim Stoutheart. And now well break bread together, shall we? And with meadow wine well toast the prowess of young men. We ate, we drank, and all in all, it was a very merry meeting. When the sisters began to clear the trestle tables, Prioress Everlynne took me to her private quarters, which consisted of a bedroom and a much larger office where a cat slept in a bar of sun on a huge oaken desk heaped high with papers. Few men have been here, Roland, she said. One was a fellow you might know. He had a white face and black clothes. Do you know the man of whom I speak? Marten Broadcloak, I said. The good food in my stomach was suddenly sour with hate. And jealousy, I supposenor just on behalf of my father, whom Gabrielle of Arten had decorated with cuckolds horns. Did he see her? He demanded to, but I refused and sent him hence. At first he declined to go, but I showed him my knife and told him there were other weapons in Serenity, aye, and women who knew how to use them. One, I said, was a gun. I reminded him he was deep inside the haci, and suggested that, unless he could fly, he had better take heed. He did, but before he went he cursed me, and he cursed this place. She hesitated, stroked the cat, then looked up at me. There was a time when I thought perhaps the skinman was his work. I dont think so, I said. Nor I, but neither of us will ever be entirely sure, will we? The cat tried to climb into the vast playground of her lap, and Everlynne shooed it away. Of one thing I am sure he spoke to her anyway, although whether through the window of her cell late at night or only in her troubled dreams, no one will ever know. That secret she took with her into the clearing, poor woman. To this I did not reply. When one is amazed and heartsick, its usually best to say nothing, for in that state, any word will be the wrong word. Your ladymother quit her retirement with us shortly after we turned this Broadcloak fellow around. She said she had a duty to perform, and much to atone for. She said her son would come here. I asked her how she knew and she said, Because ka is a wheel and it always turns. She left this for you. Everlynne opened one of the many drawers of her desk and removed an envelope. Written on the front was my name, in a hand I knew well. Only my father would have known it better. That hand had once turned the pages of a fine old book as she read me The Wind Through the Keyhole. Aye, and many others. I loved all the stories held in the pages that hand turned, but never so much as I loved the hand itself. Even more, I loved the sound of the voice that told them as the wind blew outside. Those were the days before she was mazed and fell into the sad bitchery that brought her under a gun in another hand. My gun, my hand. Everlynne rose, smoothing her large apron. I must go and see how things are advancing in other parts of my little kingdom. Ill bid you goodbye now, Roland, son of Gabrielle, only asking that you pull the door shut when you go. It will lock itself. You trust me with your things? I asked. She laughed, came around the desk, and kissed me again. Gunslinger, Id trust you with my life, said she, and left. She was so tall she had to duck her head when she went through the door. I sat looking at Gabrielle Deschains last missive for a long time. My heart was full of hate and love and regretall those things that have haunted me ever since. I considered burning it, unread, but at last I tore the envelope open. Inside was a single sheet of paper. |
The lines were uneven, and the pigeonink in which they had been written was blotted in many places. I believe the woman who wrote those lines was struggling to hold onto a few last shreds of sanity. Im not sure many would have understood her words, but I did. Im sure my father would have, as well, but I never showed it to him or told him of it. The feast I ate was rotten what I thought was a palace was a dungeon how it burns Roland I thought of Wegg, dying of snakebite. If I go back and tell what I know what I overheard Gilead may yet be saved a few years you may be saved a few years your father little that he ever cared for me The words little that he ever cared for me had been crossed out with a series of heavy lines, but I could read them anyway. he says I dare not he says Bide at Serenity until death finds you. he says If you go back death will find you early. he says Your death will destroy the only one in the world for whom you care. he says Would you die at your brats hand and see every goodness every kindness every loving thought poured out of him like water from a dipper? for Gilead that cared for you little and will die anyway? But I must go back. I have prayed on it and meditated on it and the voice I hear always speaks the same words THIS IS WHAT KA DEMANDS There was a little more, words I traced over and over during my wandering years after the disastrous battle at Jericho Hill and the fall of Gilead. I traced them until the paper fell apart and I let the wind take itthe wind that blows through times keyhole, ye ken. In the end, the wind takes everything, doesnt it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all. I stayed in Everlynnes office until I had myself under control. Then I put my mothers last wordher deadletterin my purse and left, making sure the door locked behind me. I found Jamie and we rode to town. That night there were lights and music and dancing; many good things to eat and plenty of liquor to wash it down with. There were women, too, and that night Silent Jamie left his virginity behind him. The next morning . . . THE SKINMAN (Part 2) 1 That night, Roland said, there were lights and music and dancing; many good things to eat and plenty of liquor to wash it down with. Booze, Eddie said, and heaved a seriocomic sigh. I remember it well. It was the first thing any of them had said in a very long time, and it broke the spell that had held them through that long and windy night. They stirred like people awaking from a deep dream. All except Oy, who still lay on his back in front of the fireplace with his short paws splayed and the tip of his tongue lolling comically from the side of his mouth. Roland nodded. There were women, too, and that night Silent Jamie left his virginity behind him. The next morning we reboarded Sma Toot, and made our way back to Gilead. And so it happened, once upon a bye. Long before my grandfathers grandfather was born, Jake said in a low voice. Of that I cant say, Roland said with a slight smile, and then took a long drink of water. His throat was very dry. For a moment there was silence among them. Then Eddie said, Thank you, Roland. That was boss. The gunslinger raised an eyebrow. He means it was wonderful, Jake said. It was, too. I see light around the boards we put over the windows, Susannah said. Just a little, but its there. You talked down the dark, Roland. I guess youre not the strong silent Gary Cooper type after all, are you? I dont know who that is. She took his hand and gave it a brief hard squeeze. Nemine, sugar. Winds dropped, but its still blowing pretty hard, Jake observed. Well build up the fire, then sleep, the gunslinger said. This afternoon it should be warm enough for us to go out and gather more wood. And tomorrowday . . . Back on the road, Eddie finished. As you say, Eddie. Roland put the last of their fuel on the guttering fire, watched as it sprang up again, then lay down and closed his eyes. Seconds later, he was asleep. Eddie gathered Susannah into his arms, then looked over her shoulder at Jake, who was sitting crosslegged and looking into the fire. Time to catch forty winks, little trailhand. Dont call me that. You know I hate it. Okay, buckaroo. Jake gave him the finger. Eddie smiled and closed his eyes. The boy gathered his blanket around him. My shaddie, he thought, and smiled. Beyond the walls, the wind still moaneda voice without a body. Jake thought, Its on the other side of the keyhole. And over there, where the wind comes from? All of eternity. And the Dark Tower. He thought of the boy Roland Deschain had been an unknown number of years ago, lying in a circular bedroom at the top of a stone tower. Tucked up cozy and listening to his mother read the old tales while the wind blew across the dark land. As he drifted, Jake saw the womans face and thought it kind as well as beautiful. His own mother had never read him stories. In his plot and place, that had been the housekeepers job. He closed his eyes and saw billybumblers on their hind legs, dancing in the moonlight. He slept. 2 When Roland woke in the early afternoon, the wind was down to a whisper and the room was much brighter. Eddie and Jake were still deeply asleep, but Susannah had awakened, boosted herself into her wheelchair, and removed the boards blocking one of the windows. Now she sat there with her chin propped on her hand, looking out. Roland went to her and put his own hand on her shoulder. Susannah reached up and patted it without turning around. Storms over, sugar. Yes. Lets hope we never see another like it. And if we do, lets hope theres a shelter as good as this one close by. As for the rest of Gook village . . . She shook her head. Roland bent a little to look out. What he saw didnt surprise him, but it was what Eddie would have called awesome. The high street was still there, but it was full of branches and shattered trees. The buildings that had lined it were gone. Only the stone meeting hall remained. We were lucky, werent we? Lucks the word those with poor hearts use for ka, Susannah of New York. She considered this without speaking. The last breezes of the dying starkblast came through the hole where the window had been and stirred the tight cap of her hair, as if some invisible hand were stroking it. Then she turned to him. She left Serenity and went back to Gileadyour ladymother. Yes. Even though the sonofabitch told her shed die at her own sons hand? I doubt if he put it just that way, but . . . yes. Its no wonder she was halfcrazy when she wrote that letter. Roland was silent, looking out the window at the destruction the storm had brought. Yet they had found shelter. Good shelter from the storm. She took his threefingered right hand in both of hers. What did she say at the end? What were the words you traced over and over until her letter fell apart? Can you tell me? He didnt answer for a long time. Just when she was sure he wouldnt, he did. In his voicealmost undetectable, but most certainly therewas a tremor Susannah had never heard before. She wrote in the low speech until the last line. That she wrote in the High, each character beautifully drawn I forgive you everything. And Can you forgive me? Susannah felt a single tear, warm and perfectly human, run down her cheek. And could you, Roland? Did you? Still looking out the window, Roland of Gileadson of Steven and Gabrielle, she of Arten that wassmiled. It broke upon his face like the first glow of sunrise on a rocky landscape. He spoke a single world before going back to his gunna to build them an afternoon breakfast. The word was yes. 3 They spent one more night in the meeting hall. There was fellowship and palaver, but no stories. The following morning they gathered their gunna and continued along the Path of the Beamto Calla Bryn Sturgis, and the borderlands, and Thunderclap, and the Dark Tower beyond. These are things that happened, once upon a bye. STORMS OVER |
Its easy enoughperhaps too easy to memorialize the dead. This book is for six great writers of the macabre who are still alive. ROBERT BLOCH JORGE LUIS BORGES RAY BRADBURY FRANK BELKNAP LONG DONALD WANDREI MANLY WADE WELLMAN Enter, Stranger, at your Riske Here there be Tygers. CONTENTS FORENOTE I October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance II Tales of the Hook III Tales of the Tarot IV An Annoying Autobiographical Pause V Radio and the Set of Reality VI The Modern American Horror MovieText and Subtext VII The Horror Movie as Junk Food VIII The Glass Teat, or, This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburgers IX Horror Fiction X The Last WaltzHorror and Morality, Horror and Magic AFTERWORD APPENDIX 1. THE FILMS APPENDIX 2. THE BOOKS Forenote THIS BOOK is in your hands as the result of a telephone call made to me in November of 1978. I was at that time teaching creative writing and a couple of literature courses at the University of Maine at Orono and working, in whatever spare time I could find, on the final draft of a novel, Firestarter, which will have been published by now. The call was from Bill Thompson, who had edited my first five books ( Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, and The Stand) in the years 19741978. More important than that, Bill Thompson, then an editor at Doubleday, was the first person connected with the New York publishing establishment to read my earlier, unpublished work with sympathetic interest. He was that allimportant first contact that new writers wait and wish for . . . and so seldom find. Doubleday and I came to a parting of the ways following The Stand, and Bill also moved onhe became the senior editor at Everest House, whose imprint you will find on the volume you now hold. Because we had become friends as well as colleagues over the years of our association, we stayed in touch, had the occasional lunch together . . . and the occasional drinking bout as well. The best one was maybe during the AllStar baseball game in July of 1978, which we watched on a bigscreen TV over innumerable beers in an Irish pub somewhere in New York. There was a sign over the backbar which advertised an EARLY BIRD HAPPY HOUR, 810 A.M. with all drinks priced at fifty cents. When I asked the barkeep what sort of clientele wandered in at 815 A.M. for a rum collins or a gin rickey, he fixed me with a baleful smile, wiped his hands on his apron, and said "College boys . . . like you." But on this November night not long after Halloween, Bill called me and said, "Why don't you do a book about the entire horror phenomenon as you see it? Books, movies, radio, TV, the whole thing. We'll do it together, if you want." The concept intrigued and frightened me at the same time. Intrigued because I've been asked time and time again why I write that stuff, why people want to read it or go to the flicks to see itthe paradox seeming to be, why are people willing to pay good money to be made extremely uncomfortable? I had spoken to enough groups on the subject and written enough words on the subject (including a rather lengthy foreword to my collection of short stories, Night Shift) to make the idea of a Final Statement on the subject an attractive one. Forever after, I thought, I could choke off the subject by saying if you want to know what I think about horror, there's this book I wrote on the subject. Read that. It's my Final Statement on the clockwork of the horror tale. It frightened me because I could see the work stretching out over years, decades, centuries. If one were to begin with Grendel and Grendel's mum and work up from there, even the Reader's Digest Condensed Book version would encompass four volumes. Bill's counter was that I should restrict myself to the last thirty years or so, with a few side trips to explore the roots of the genre. I told him I would think about it, and I did. I thought about it hard and long. I had never attempted a booklength nonfiction project, and the idea was intimidating. The thought of having to tell the truth was intimidating. Fiction, after all, is lies and more lies . . . which is why the Puritans could never really get behind it and go with the flow. In a work of fiction, if you get stuck you can always just make something up or back up a few pages and change something around. With nonfiction, there's all that bothersome business of making sure your facts are straight, that the dates jibe, that the names are spelled right . . . and worst of all, it means being out front. A novelist, after all, is a hidden creature; unlike the musician or the actor, he may pass on any street unremarked. His PunchandJudy creations strut across the stage while he himself remains unseen. The writer of nonfiction is all too visible. Still, the idea had its attractions. I began to understand how the loonies who preach in Hyde Park ("the nutters," as our British cousins call them) must feel as they drag their soapboxes into position and prepare to mount them. I thought of having pages and pages in which to ride all my hobbyhorses"And to be paid for it!' he cried, rubbing his hands together and cackling madly. I thought of a lit class I would be teaching the following semester titled Themes in Supernatural Literature. But most of all I thought that here was an opportunity to talk about a genre I love, an opportunity few plain writers of popular fiction are ever offered. As for my Themes in Supernatural Literature course on that November night Bill called, I was sitting at the kitchen table with a beer, trying to dope out a syllabus for it . . . and musing aloud to my wife that I was shortly going to be spending a lot of time in front of a lot of people talking about a subject in which I had previously only felt my way instinctively, like a blind man. Although many of the books and films discussed in the pages which follow are now taught routinely in colleges, I read the books, saw the films, and formed my conclusions pretty much on my own, with no texts or scholarly papers of any type to guide my thoughts. It seemed that very shortly I would get to see the true color of my thoughts for the first time. That may seem a strange phrase. Further along in this book I have written my belief that no one is exactly sure of what they mean on any given subject until they have written their thoughts down; I similarly believe that we have very little understanding of what we have thought until we have submitted those thoughts to others who are at least as intelligent as ourselves. So, yeah, I was nervous at the prospect of stepping into that Barrows Hall classroom, and I spent too much of an otherwise lovely vacation in St. Thomas that year agonizing over Stoker's use of humor in Dracula and the paranoia quotient of Jack Finney's Body Snatchers. In the days following Bill's call, I began to think more and more that if my series of talks (I don't quite have balls enough to call them lectures) on the horrorsupernaturalgothic field seemed well receivedby myself as well as by my studentsthen perhaps writing a book on the subject would complete the circle. Finally I called Bill and told him I would try to write the book. And as you can see, I did. All this is by way of acknowledging Bill Thompson, who created the concept of this book. The idea was and is a good one. If you like the book which follows, thank Bill, who thought it up. If you don't, blame the author, who screwed it up. It is also an acknowledgment of those one hundred Eh90 students who listened patiently (and sometimes forgivingly) as I worked out my ideas. As a result of that class, many of these ideas cannot even be said to be my own, for they were modified during class discussions, challenged, and, in many cases, changed. During that class, an English professor at the University of Maine, Burton Hatlen, came in to lecture one day on Stoker's Dracula, and you will find that his insightful thoughts on horror as a potent part of a mythpool in which we all bathe communally also form a part of this book's spine. So, thanks, Burt. My agent, Kirby McCauley, a fantasyhorror fan and unregenerate Minnesotan, also deserves thanks for reading this manuscript, pointing out errors of fact, arguing conclusions . . . and most of all for sitting up with me one fine drunk night in the U.N. Plaza Hotel in New York and helping me to make up the list of recommended horror films during the years 19501980 which forms Appendix 1 of this book. I owe Kirby for more than that, much more, but for now that will have to do. I've also drawn upon a good many outside sources during the course of my work in Danse Macabre, and have tried as conscientiously as I can to acknowledge these on a payasyougo basis, but I must mention a few that were invaluable Carlos Clarens's seminal work on the horror film, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film; the careful episodebyepisode rundown of The Twilight Zone in Starlog; The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, edited by Peter Nichols, which was particularly helpful in making sense (or trying to, anyway) of the works of Harlan Ellison and of the TV program The Outer Limits; and countless other odd byways that I happened to wander down. Lastly, thanks are due to the writersRay Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Jack Finney, Peter Straub, and Anne Rivers Siddons among themwho were kind enough to answer my letters of enquiry and to provide information about the genesis of the works discussed here. Their voices provide a dimension to this work which would otherwise be sadly lacking. I guess that's about it . . . except I wouldn't want to leave you with any idea whatsoever that I believe what follows even approaches perfection. I suspect plenty of errors still remain in spite of careful combing; I can only hope that they are not too serious or too many. If you find such errors, I hope you'll write to me and point them out, so I can make corrections in any future editions. And, you know, I hope you have some fun with this book. Nosh and nibble at the corners or read the mother straight through, but enjoy. That's what it's for, as much as any of the novels. Maybe there will be something here to make you think or make you laugh or just make you mad. Any of those reactions would please me. Boredom, however, would be a bummer. For me, writing this book has been both an exasperation and a deep pleasure, a duty on some days and a labor of .love on others. As a result, I suppose you will find the course you are about to follow bumpy and uneven. I can only hope that you will also find, as I have, that the trip has not been without its compensations. "What was the worst thing you've ever done?" "I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . the most dreadful thing . . . PETER STRAUB, Ghost Story "Well we'll really have a party but we gotta post a guard outside . . . EDDIE COCHRAN, "Come On Everybody" CHAPTER I October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance FOR ME, the terrorthe real terror, as opposed to whatever demons and boogeys which might have been living in my own mindbegan on an afternoon in October of 1957. I had just turned ten. And, as was only fitting, I was in a movie theater the Stratford Theater in downtown Stratford, Connecticut. The movie that day was and is one of my alltime favorites, and the fact that itrather than a Randolph Scott western or a John Wayne war moviewas playing was also only fitting. The Saturday matinee on that day when the real terror began was Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, starring Hugh Marlowe, who at the time was perhaps best known for his role as Patricia Neal's jilted and rabidly xenophobic boyfriend in The Day the Earth Stood Stilla slightly older and altogether more rational science fiction movie. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, an alien named Klaatu (Michael Rennie in a bright white intergalactic leisure suit) lands on The Mall in Washington, D.C., in a flying saucer (which, when under power, glows like one of those plastic Jesuses they used to give out at Vacation Bible School for memorizing Bible verses). Klaatu strides down the gangway and pauses there at the foot, the focus of every horrified eye and the muzzles of several hundred Army guns. It is a moment of memorable tension, a moment that is sweet in retrospectthe sort of moment that makes people like me simple movie fans for life. Klaatu begins fooling with some sort of gadgetit looked kind of like a WeedEater, as I recalland a triggerhappy soldierboy promptly shoots him in the arm. It turns out, of course, that the gadget was a gift for the President. No death ray here; just a simple startostar communicator. That was in 1951. On that Saturday afternoon in Connecticut some six years later, the folks in the flying saucers looked and acted a good deal less friendly. Far from the noble and rather sad good looks of Michael Rennie as Klaatu, the space people in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers looked like old and extremely evil living trees, with their gnarled, shriveled bodies and their snarling old men's faces. Rather than bringing a communicator to the President like any new ambassador bringing a token of his country's esteem, the saucer people in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers bring death rays, destruction, and, ultimately, allout war. All of thismost particularly the destruction of Washington, D.C.was rendered with marvelous reality by the special effects work of Ray Harryhausen, a fellow who used to go to the movies with a chum named Ray Bradbury when he was a kid. Klaatu comes to extend the hand of friendship and brotherhood. He offers the people of Earth membership in a kind of interstellar United Nationsalways provided we can put our unfortunate habit of killing each other by the millions behind us. The saucerians of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers come only to conquer, the last armada of a dying planet, old and greedy, seeking not peace but plunder. The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of a select handfulthe real science fiction movies. The ancient saucerians of Earth vs, the Flying Saucers are emissaries of a much more common breed of filmthe horrorshow. No nonsense about "It was to be a gift for your President" here; these folks simply descend upon Hugh Marlowe's Project Skyhook at Cape Canaveral and begin kicking ass. It is in the space between these two philosophies that the terror was seeded, I think. If there is a line of force between such neatly opposing ideas, then the terror almost certainly grew there. Because, just as the saucers were mounting their attack on Our Nation's Capital in the movie's final reel, everything just stopped. The screen went black. The theater was full of kids, but there was remarkably little disturbance. If you think back to the Saturday matinees of your misspent youth, you may recall that a bunch of kids at the movies has any number of ways of expressing its pique at the interruption of the film or its overdue commencementrhythmic clapping; that great childhood tribal chant of "Wewantthe show! Wewantthe show! Wewantthe show! "; candy boxes that fly at the screen; popcorn boxes that become bugles. If some kid has had a Black Cat firecracker in his pocket since the last Fourth of July, he will take this opportunity to remove it, pass it around to his friends for their approval and admiration, and then light it and toss it over the balcony. None of these things happened on that October day. The film hadn't broken; the projector had simply been turned off. And then the houselights began to come up, a totally unheardof occurrence. We sat there looking around, blinking in the light like moles. The manager walked out into the middle of the stage and held his hands upquite unnecessarilyfor quiet. Six years later, in 1963, I flashed on that moment when, one Friday afternoon in November, the guy who drove us home from school told us that the President had been shot in Dallas. 2 If there is any truth or worth to the danse macabre, it is simply that novels, movies, TV and radio programseven the comic booksdealing with horror always do their work on two levels. On top is the "grossout" levelwhen Regan vomits in the priest's face or masturbates with a crucifix in The Exorcist, or when the rawlooking, terribly insideout monster in John Frankenheimer's Prophecy crunches off the helicopter pilot's head like a TootsiePop. The grossout can be done with varying degrees of artistic finesse, but it's always there. But on another, more potent level, the work of horror really is a dancea moving, rhythmic search. And what it's looking for is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive level. The work of horror is not interested in the civilized furniture of our lives. Such a work dances through these rooms which we have fitted out one piece at a time, each piece expressingwe hope!our socially acceptable and pleasantly enlightened character. It is in search of another place, a room which may sometimes resemble the secret den of a Victorian gentleman, sometimes the torture chamber of the Spanish Inquisition . . . but perhaps most frequently and most successfully, the simple and brutally plain hole of a Stone Age cavedweller. Is horror art? On this second level, the work of horror can be nothing else; it achieves the level of art simply because it is looking for something beyond art, something that predates art it is looking for what I would call phobic pressure points. The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew ofas both Albert Camus and Billy Joel have pointed out, The Stranger makes us nervous . . . but we love to try on his face in secret. Do spiders give you the horrors? Fine. We'll have spiders, as in Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and Kingdom of the, Spiders. What about rats? In James Herbert's novel of the same name, you can feel them crawl all over you . . . and eat you alive. How about snakes? That shutin feeling? Heights? Or . . . whatever there is. Because books and movies are mass media, the field of horror has often been able to do better than even these personal fears over the last thirty years. During that period (and to a lesser degree, in the seventy or so years preceding), the horror genre has often been able to find national phobic pressure points, and those books and films which have been the most successful almost always seem to play upon and express fears which exist across a wide spectrum of people. Such fears, which are often political, economic, and psychological rather than supernatural, give the best work of horror a pleasing allegorical feeland it's the one sort of allegory that most filmmakers seem at home with. Maybe because they know that if the shit starts getting too thick, they can always bring the monster shambling out of the darkness again. We're going back to Stratford in 1957 before much longer, but before we do, let me suggest that one of the films of the last thirty years to find a pressure point with great accuracy was Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Further along, we'll discuss the noveland Jack Finney, the author, will also have a few things to saybut for now, let's look briefly at the film. There is nothing really physically horrible in the Siegel version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; no gnarled and evil star travelers here, no twisted, mutated shape under the facade of normality. The pod people are just a little different, that's all. A little vague. A little messy. Although Finney never puts this fine a point on it in his book, he certainly suggests that the most horrible thing about "them" is that they lack even the most common and easily attainable sense of aesthetics. Never mind, Finney suggests, that these usurping aliens from outer space can't appreciate La Traviata or Moby Dick or even a good Norman Rockwell cover on the Saturday Evening Post. That's bad enough, butmy God!they don't mow their lawns or replace the pane of garage glass that got broken when the kid down the street batted a baseball through it. They don't repaint their houses when they get flaky. The roads leading into Santa Mira, we're told, are so full of potholes and washouts that pretty soon the salesmen who service the townwho aerate its municipal lungs with the lifegiving atmosphere of capitalism, you might saywill soon no longer bother to come. There is in the Philip Kaufman remake, though. There is a moment in that film which is repulsively horrible. It comes when Donald Sutherland uses a rake to smash in the face of a mostly formed pod. This "person's" face breaks in with sickening ease, like a rotted piece of fruit, and lets out an explosion of the most realistic stage blood that I have ever seen in a color film. When that moment came I winced, clapped a hand over my mouth . . and wondered how in the hell the movie had ever gotten its PG rating. The grossout level is one thing, but it is on that second level of horror that we often experience that low sense of anxiety which we call "the creeps." Over the years, Invasion of the Body Snatchers has given a lot of people the creeps, and all sorts of highflown ideas have been imputed to Siegel's film version. It was seen as an antiMcCarthy film until someone pointed out the fact that Don Siegel's political views could hardly be called leftish. Then people began seeing it as a "better dead than Red" picture. Of the two ideas, I think that second one better fits the film that Siegel made, the picture that ends with Kevin McCarthy in the middle of a freeway, screaming "They're coming! They're coming" to cars which rush heedlessly by him. But in my heart, I don't really believe that Siegel was wearing a political hat at all when he made the movie (and you will see later that Jack Finney has never believed it, either); I believe he was simply having fun and that the undertones . . . just happened. This doesn't invalidate the idea that there is an allegorical element in Invasion of the Body Snatchers; it is simply to suggest that sometimes these pressure points, these terminals of fear, are so deeply buried and yet so vital that we may tap them like artesian wellssaying one thing out loud while we express something else in a whisper. The Philip Kaufman version of Finney's novel is fun (although, to be fair, not quite as much fun as Siegel's ) , but that whisper has changed into something entirely different the subtext of Kaufman's picture seems to satirize the whole I'mokayyou'reokaysolet'sgetinthehottubandmassageourpreciousconsciousness movement of the egocentric seventies. Which is to suggest that, although the uneasy dreams of the mass subconscious may change from decade to decade, the pipeline into that well of dreams remains constant and vital. This is the real danse macabre, I suspect those remarkable moments when the creator of a horror story is able to unite the conscious and subconscious mind with one potent idea. I believe it happened to a greater degree with the Siegel version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but of course both Siegel and Kaufman were able to proceed courtesy of Jack Finney, who sank the original well. All of which brings us back, I think, to the Stratford Theater on a warm fall afternoon in 1957. 3 We sat there in our seats like dummies, staring at the manager. He looked nervous and sallowor perhaps that was only the footlights. We sat wondering what sort of catastrophe could have caused him to stop the movie just as it was reaching that apotheosis of all Saturday matinee shows, "the good part." And the way his voice trembled when he spoke did not add to anyone's sense of wellbeing. "I want to tell you," he said in that trembly voice, "that the Russians have put a space satellite into orbit around the earth. They call it . . . Spootnik." This piece of intelligence was greeted by absolute, tomblike silence. We just sat there, a theaterful of 1950s kids with crew cuts, white cuts, ponytails, ducktails, crinolines, chinos, jeans with cuffs, Captain Midnight rings; kids who had just discovered Chuck Berry and Little Richard on New York's one black rhythm and blues station, which we could get at night, wavering in and out like a powerful jive language from a distant planer. We were the, kids who grew up on Captain Video and Terry and the Pirates. We were the kids who had seen Combat Casey kick the teeth out of North Korean gooks without number in the comic books. We were the kids who saw Richard Carlson catch thousands of dirty Commie spies in I Led Three Lives. We were the kids who had ponied up a quarter apiece to watch Hugh Marlowe in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and got this piece of upsetting news as a kind of nasty bonus. I remember this very clearly cutting through that awful dead silence came one shrill voice, whether that of a boy or a girl I do not know; a voice that was near tears but that was also full of a frightening anger "Oh, go show the movie, you liar!" The manager did not even look toward the place from which that voice had come, and that was somehow the worst thing of all. Somehow that proved it. The Russians had beaten us into space. Somewhere over our heads, beeping triumphantly, was an electronic ball which had been launched and constructed behind the Iron Curtain. Neither Captain Midnight nor Richard Carlson (who also starred in Riders to the Stars; and oh boy, the bitter irony in that) had been able to stop it. It was up there. . . and they called it Spootnik. The manager stood there for a moment longer, looking out at us as if he wished he had something else to say but could not think what it might be. Then he walked off and pretty soon the movie started up again. 4 So here's a question. You remember where you were when President Kennedy was assassinated. You remember where you were when you heard that RFK had taken a dive in some hotel kitchen as the result of another crazy. Maybe you even remember where you were during the Cuban missile crisis. Do you remember where you were when the Russians launched Sputnik I? Terrorwhat Hunter Thompson calls "fear and loathing"often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personalif it hits you around the heartthen it lodges in the memory as a complete set. Just the fact that almost everyone remembers where heshe was at the instant heshe heard the news of the Kennedy assassination is something I find almost as interesting as the fact that one nurd with a mailorder gun was able to change the entire course of world history in just fourteen seconds or so. That moment of knowledge and the threeday spasm of stunned grief which followed it is perhaps the closest any people in history has ever come to a total period of mass consciousness and mass empathy andin retrospectmass memory two hundred million people in a living frieze. Love cannot achieve that sort of acrosstheboard hammerstrike of emotion, apparently. More's the pity. I'm not suggesting that the news of Sputnik's launching had anywhere near the same sort of effect on the American psyche (although it was not without effect; see, for instance, Tom Wolfe's amusing narrative of events following the successful Russian launch in his superlative book about our space program, The Right Stuff), but I am guessing that a great many kidsthe war babies, we were calledremember the event as well as I do. We were fertile ground for the seeds of terror, we war babies; we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told that we were the greatest nation on earth and that any Iron Curtain outlaw who tried to draw down on us in that great saloon of international politics would discover who the fastest gun in the West was (as in Pat Frank's illuminating novel of the period, Alas, Babylon), but we were also told exactly what to keep in our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay in there after we won the war. We had more to eat than any nation in the history of the world, but there were traces of Strontium90 in our milk from nuclear testing. We were the children of the men and women who won what Duke Wayne used to call "the big one," and when the dust cleared, America was on top. We had replaced England as the colossus that stood astride the world. When the folks got together again to make me and millions of kids like me, London had been bombed almost flat, the sun was setting every twelve hours or so on the British Empire, and Russia had been bled nearly white in its war against the Nazis; during the siege of Stalingrad, Russian soldiers had been reduced to dining on their dead comrades. But not a single bomb had fallen on New York, and America had the lightest casualty rate of any major power involved in the war. Further, we had a great history to draw upon (all short histories are great histories), particularly in matters of invention and innovation. Every gradeschool teacher produced the same two words for the delectation of hisher students; two magic words glittering and glowing like a beautiful neon sign; two words of almost incredible power and grace; and these two words were PIONEER SPIRIT. I and my fellow kids grew up secure in this knowledge of America's PIONEER SPIRITa knowledge that could be summed up in a litany of names learned by rote in the classroom. Eli Whitney. Samuel Morse. Alexander Graham Bell. Henry Ford. Robert Goddard. Wilbur and Orville Wright. Robert Oppenheimer. These men, ladies and gentlemen, all had one great thing in common. They were all Americans simply bursting with PIONEER SPIRIT. We were and always had been, in that pungent American phrase, fastest and bestest with the mostest. And what a world stretched ahead! It was all outlined in the stories of Robert A. Heinlein, Lester del Rey, Alfred Bester, Stanley Weinbaum, and dozens of others! These dreams came in the last of the science fiction pulp magazines, which were shrinking and dying by that October in 1957 . . . but science fiction itself had never been in better shape. Space would be more than conquered, these writers told us; it would . . . it would be . . . why, it would be PIONEERED! Silver needles piercing the void, followed by flaming rockets lowering huge ships onto alien worlds, followed by hardy colonies full of men and women ( American men and women, need one add) with PIONEER SPIRIT bursting from every pore. Mars would become our backyard, the new gold rush (or possibly the new rhodium rush) might well be in the asteroid belt . . . and ultimately, of course, the stars themselves would be oursa glorious future awaited with tourists snapping Kodak prints of the six moons of Procyon IV and a Chevrolet JetCar assembly line on Sirius III. Earth itself would be transformed into a utopia that you could see on the cover of any '50s issue of Fantasy arid Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Galaxy, or Astounding Stories. A future filled with the PIONEER SPIRIT; even better, a future filled with the AMERICAN PIONEER SPIRIT. See, for example, the cover of the original Bantam paperback edition of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. In this artistic visiona figment of the artist's imagination and not of Bradbury's; there is nothing so ethnocentric or downright silly in this classic melding of science fiction and fantasythe landing space travelers look a great deal like gyrenes storming up the beach at Saipan or Tarawa. It's a rocket instead of an LST in the background, true, but their jutjawed, automaticbrandishing commander might have stepped right out of a John Wayne movie "Come on, you suckers, do you want to live forever? Where's your PIONEER SPIRIT?" This was the cradle of elementary political theory and technological dreamwork in which I and a great many other war babies were rocked untiI that day in October, when the cradle was rudely upended and all of us fell out. |
For me, it was the end of the sweet dream . . . and the beginning of the nightmare. The children grasped the implication of what the Russians had done as well and as quickly as anyone elsecertainly as fast as the politicians who were falling all over themselves to cut the good lumber out of this nasty deadfall. The big bombers that had smashed Berlin and Hamburg in World War II were even then, in 1957, becoming obsolete. A new and ominous abbreviation had come into the working vocabulary of terror ICBM. The ICBMS, we understood, were only the German Vrockets grown up. They would carry enormous payloads of nuclear death and destruction, and if the Russkies tried anything funny, we would simply blow them right off the face of the earth. Watch out, Moscow! Here comes a big, hot dose of the PIONEER SPIRIT for you, you turkeys! Except that somehow, incredibly, the Russians were looking pretty good in the old ICBM department themselves. After all, ICBMs were only big rockets, and the Commies certainly hadn't lofted Sputnik I into orbit with a potato masher. And in that context, the movie began again in Stratford, with the ominous, warbling voices of the saucerians echoing everywhere " Look to your skies . . . a warning will come from your skies . . . look to your skies . . ." 5 This book is intended to be an informal overview of where the horror genre has been over the last thirty years, and not an autobiography of yours truly. The autobiography of a father, writer, and exhigh school teacher would make dull reading indeed. I am a writer by trade, which means that the most interesting things that have happened to me have happened in my dreams. But because I am a horror novelist and also a child of my times, and because I believe that horror does not horrify unless the reader or viewer has been personally touched, you will find the autobiographical element constantly creeping in. Horror in real life is an emotion that one grapples withas I grappled with the realization that the Russians had beaten us into spaceall alone. It is a combat waged in the secret recesses of the heart. I believe that we are all ultimately alone and that any deep and lasting human contact is nothing more nor less than a necessary illusionbut at least the feelings which we think of as "positive" and "constructive" are a reachingout, an effort to make contact and establish some sort of communication. Feelings of love and kindness, the ability to care and empathize, are all we know of the light. They are efforts to link and integrate; they are the emotions which brings us together, if not in fact then at least in a comforting illusion that makes the burden of mortality a little easier to bear. Horror, terror, fear, panic these are the emotions which drive wedges between us, split us off from the crowd, and make us alone. It is paradoxical that feelings and emotions we associate with the "mob instinct" should do this, but crowds are lonely places to be, we're told, a fellowship with no love in it. The melodies of the horror tale are simple and repetitive, and they are melodies of disestablishment and disintegration. . . but another paradox is that the ritual outletting of these emotions seems to bring things back to a more stable and constructive state again. Ask any psychiatrist what his patient is doing when he lies there on the couch and talks about what keeps him awake and what he sees in his dreams. What do you see when you turn out the light? the Beatles asked; their answer I can't tell you, but I know that it's mine. The genre we're talking about, whether it be in terms of books, film, or TV, is really all one makebelieve horrors. And one of the questions that frequently comes up, asked by people who have grasped the paradox (but perhaps not fully articulated it in their own minds) is Why do you want to make up horrible things when there is so much real horror in the world? The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. With the endless inventiveness of humankind, we grasp the very elements which are so divisive and destructive and try to turn them into toolsto dismantle themselves. The term catharsis is as old as Greek drama, and it has been used rather too glibly by some practitioners in my field to justify what they do, but it still has its limited uses here. The dream of horror is in itself an outletting and a lancing . . . and it may well be that the massmedia dream of horror can sometimes become a nationwide analyst's couch. So, for the final time before we push on, October of 1957; Now, absurd as it looks on the face of it, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers has become a symbolic political statement. Below its pulpy invadersfromspace storyline, it becomes a preview of the ultimate war. Those greedy, twisted old monsters piloting the saucers are really the Russians; the destruction of the Washington Monument, the Capitol dome, and the Supreme Courtall rendered with graphic, eerie believability by Harry Hausen's stopmotion effectsbecomes nothing less than the destruction one would logically expect when the Abombs finally fly. And then the end of the movie comes. The last saucer has been shot down by Hugh Marlowe's secret weapon, an ultrasonic gun that interrupts the electromagnetic drive of the flying saucers, or some sort of similar agreeable foolishness. Loudspeakers blare from every Washington street corner, seemingly " The present danger . . . is over. The present danger . . . is over. The present danger is over." The camera shows us clear skies. The evil old monsters with Heir frozen snarls and their twistedroot faces have been vanquished. We cut to a California beach, magically deserted except for Hugh Marlowe and his new wife (who is, of course, the daughter of the Crusty Old Military Man Who Died For His Country); they are on their honeymoon. "Russ," she ask him, "will they ever come back?" Marlowe looks sagely up at the sky, then back at his wife. "Not on such a pretty day," he say comfortingly. "And not to such a nice world." They run hand in hand into the surf, and the end credits roll. For a momentjust for a momentthe paradoxical trick has worked. We have taken horror in hand and used it to destroy itself, a trick akin to pulling one's self up by one's own bootstraps. For a little while the deeper fearthe reality of the Russian Sputnik and what it meanshas been excised. It will grow back again, but that is for later. For now, the worst has been faced and it wasn't so bad after all. There was that magic moment of reintegration and safety at the end, that same feeling that comes when the roller coaster stops at the end of its run and you get off with your best girl, both of you whole and unhurt. I believe it's this feeling of reintegration, arising from a field specializing in death, fear, and monstrosity, that make the danse macabre so rewarding and magical . . . that, and the boundless ability of the human imagination to create endless dreamworlds and then put them to work. It is a world which a fine poet such as Anne Sexton was able to use to "write herself sane." From her poems expressing and delineating her descent into the maelstrom of insanity, her own ability to cope with the world eventually returned, at least for awhile . . . and perhaps others have been able to use her poems in their turn. This is not to suggest that writing must be justified on the basis of its usefulness; to simply delight the reader is enough, isn't it? This is a world I've lived in of my own choosing since I was a kid, since long before the Stratford Theater and Sputnik I. I am certainly not trying to tell you that the Russians traumatized me into an interest in horror fiction, but am simply pointing out that instant when I began to sense a useful connection between the world of fantasy and that of what My Weekly Reader used to call Current Events. This book is only my ramble through that world, through all the worlds of fantasy and horror that have delighted and terrified me. It comes with very little plan or order, and if you are sometimes reminded of a hunting dog with a substandard nose casting back and forth and following any trace of interesting scent it happens to come across, that is fine with me. But it's not a hunt. It's a dance. And sometimes they turn off the lights in this ballroom. But we'll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark. May I have the pleasure? CHAPTER II Tales of the Hook THE FIRST ISSUE of Forrest Ackerman's gruesomely jovial magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland that I ever bought contained a long, almost scholarly article by Robert Bloch on the difference between science fiction films and horror films. It was an interesting piece of work, and while I do not recall all of it after eighteen years, I do remember Bloch saying that the Howard HawksChristian Nyby collaboration on The Thing (based on John W. Campbell's classic science fiction novella "Who Goes There?") was science fiction to the core in spite of its scary elements, and that the later film Them! , about giant ants spawned in the New Mexico desert (as the result of Abomb tests, naturally), was a pure horror film in spite of its science fiction trappings. This dividing line between fantasy and science fiction (for properly speaking, fantasy is what it is; the horror genre is only a subset of the larger genre) is a subject that comes up at some point at almost every fantasy or science fiction convention held (and for those of you unaware of the subculture, there are literally hundreds each year). If I had a nickel for every letter printed on the fantasysf dichotomy in the columns of the amateur magazines and the prozines of both fields, I could buy the island of Bermuda. It's a trap, this matter of definition, and I can't think of a more boring academic subject. Like endless discussions of breath units in modern poetry or the possible intrusiveness of some punctuation in the short story, it is really a discussion of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and not really interesting unless those involved in the discussion are drunk or graduate studentstwo states of roughly similar incompetence. I'll content myself with stating the obvious inarguables both are works of the imagination, and both try to create worlds which do not exist, cannot exist, or do not exist yet. There is a difference, of course, but you can draw your own borderline, if you wantand if you try, you may find that it's a very squiggly border indeed. Alien, for instance, is a horror movie even though it is more firmly grounded in scientific projection than Star Wars. Star Wars is a science fiction film, although we must recognize the fact that it's sf of the E. E. "Doc" SmithMurray Leinster whackandslash school an outer space western just overflowing with PIONEER SPIRIT. Somewhere in between these two, in a buffer zone that has been little used by the movies, are works that seem to combine science fiction and fantasy in a nonthreatening way Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for instance. With such a number of divisions (and any dedicated science fiction or fantasy fan could offer a dozen more, ranging from Utopian Fiction, Negative Utopian Fiction, Sword and Sorcery, Heroic Fantasy, Future History, and on into the sunset), you can see why I don't want to open this particular door any wider than I have to. Let me, instead of defining, offer a couple of examples, and then we'll move alongand what better example than Donovan's Brain? Horror fiction doesn't necessarily have to be nonscientific. Curt Siodmak's novel Donovan's Brain moves from a scientific basis to outright horror (as did Alien). It was adapted twice for the screen, and both versions enjoyed fair popular success. Both the novel and the films focus on a scientist who, if not quite mad, is certainly operating at the far borders of rationality. Thus we can place him in a direct line of descent from the original Mad Labs proprietor, Victor Frankenstein. This scientist has been experimenting with a technique designed to keep the brain alive after the body has diedspecifically, in a tank filled with an electrically charged saline solution. And on back to Faust? Daedalus? Prometheus? Pandora? A genealogy leading straight back into the mouth of hell if ever there was one! In the course of the novel, the private plane of W. D. Donovan, a rich and domineering millionaire, crashes near the scientist's desert lab. Recognizing the knock of opportunity, the scientist removes the dying millionaire's skull and pops Donovan's brain into his tank. So far, so good. This story has elements of both horror and science fiction; at this point it could go either way, depending on Siodmak's handling of the subject. The earlier version of the film tips its hand almost at once the removal operation takes place in a howling thunderstorm and the scientist's Arizona laboratory looks more like Baskerville Hall. And neither film version is up to the tale of mounting terror Siodmak tells in his careful, rational prose. The operation is a success. The brain is alive and possibly even thinking in its tank of cloudy liquid. The problem now becomes one of communication. The scientists begins trying to contact the brain by means of telepathy . . . and finally succeeds. In a halftrance, he writes the name W. D. Donovan three or four times on a scrap of paper, and comparison shows that his signature is interchangeable with that of the millionaire. In its tank, Donovan's brain begins to change and mutate. It grows stronger, more able to dominate our young hero. He begins to do Donovan's bidding, said bidding all revolving around Donovan's psychopathic determination to make sure the right person inherits his fortune. The scientist begins to experience the frailties of Donovan's physical body (now moldering in an unmarked grave) low back pain, a decided limp. As the story builds to its climax, Donovan tries to use the scientist to run down a little girl who stands in the way of his implacable, monstrous will. In one of its film incarnations, the Beautiful Young Wife (no comparable creature exists in Siodmak's novel) rigs up lightning rods, which zap the brain in its tank. At the end of the book, the scientist attacks the tank with an ax, resisting the endless undertow of Donovan's will by reciting a simple yet haunting mnemonic phrase He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he seer the ghosts. The glass shatters, the saline solution pours out, and the loathsome, pulsing brain is left to die like a slug on the laboratory floor. Siodmak is a fine thinker and an okay writer. The flow of his speculative ideas in Donovan's Brain is as exciting to follow as the flow of ideas in a novel by Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke or my personal favorite in the field, the late John Wyndham. But none of those esteemed gentlemen has ever written a novel quite like Donovan's Brain . . . in fact, no one has. The final tipoff comes at the very end of the book, when Donovan's nephew (or perhaps it was his bastard son, I'll be damned if I can remember which) is hanged for murder. Three times the scaffold's trapdoor refuses to open when the switch is thrown, and the narrator speculates that Donovan's spirit still remains, indomitable, implacable . . . and hungry. You can see why Donovan liked the kid enough to want to leave him his money, I think. Just a chip off the old block. For all its scientific trappings, Donovan's Brain is as much a horror story as M. R. James's "Casting the Runes" or H. P. Lovecraft's nominal science fiction tale, "The Colour Out of Space." Now let's take another story, this one an oral tale of the sort that never has to be written down. It is simply passed mouth to mouth, usually around Boy Scout or Girl Scout campfires after the sun has gone down and marshmallows have been poked onto green sticks to roast above the coals. You've heard it, I guess, but instead of summarizing it, I'd like to tell it as I originally heard it, gapemouthed with terror, as the sun went down behind the vacant lot in Stratford where we used to play scratch baseball when there were enough guys around to make up two teams. Here is the most basic horror story I know "This guy and his girl go out on a date, you know? And they go parking up on Lover's Lane. So anyway, while they're driving up there, the radio breaks in with this bulletin. The guy says this dangerous homicidal maniac named The Hook has just escaped from the Sunnydale Asylum for the Criminally Insane. They call him The Hook because that's what he's got instead o f a right hand, this razorsharp hook, and he used to hang around these lover's lanes, you know, and he'd catch these people making out and cut their heads off with the hook. He could do that 'cause it was so sharp, you know, and when they caught him they found like about fifteen or twenty heads in his refrigerator. So the news guy says to be on the lookout for any guy with a hook instead o f a hand, and to stay away from any dark, lonely sots where people go to, you know, get it on. "So the girl says, Let's go home, okay? And the guyhe's this real big guy, you know, with muscles on his muscleshe says, I'm not scared of that guy, and he's probably miles from here anyway. So she goes, Come on, Louie, I'm scared, Sunnydale Asylum isn't that far from here. Let's go back to my house. I'll make popcorn and we can watch TV. "But the guy won't listen to her and pretty soon they're up on The Outlook, parked at the end o f the road, makin' out like bandidos. Bart she keeps sayin' she wants to go home because they're the only car there, you know. That stuff about The Hook scared away everybody else. But he keeps sayin', Come on, don't be such a chicken, there's nothin' to be afraid of, and if there was I'd protectcha, stuff like that. "So they keep makin' out for awhile and then she hears a noiselike a breakin' branch or something. Like someone is out there in the woods, creepin' up on them. So then she gets real upset, hysterical, trine and everything. like girls do. She's beggin' the guy to take her home. The guy keeps sayin' he doesn't hear anything at all, but she looks up in the rearview mirror and thinks she sees someone all hunkered down at the back o f the car, just peekin' in at them, and grinnin'. She says if he doesn't take her home she's never gonna go out parkin' with him again and all that happy crappy. So finally he starts up the car and really peels out cause he's so jackedoff at her. In fact, he just about cracks them up. "So anyway, they get home, you know, and the guy goes around to open her door for her, and when he gets there he just stands there, turnin' as white as a sheet, and his eyes are gettin' so big you'd think they was gonna fall out on his shoes. She says Louie, what's wrong? And he just faints dead away, right there on the sidewalk. "She gets out to see what's wrong, and when she slams the car door she hears this funny clinking sound and turns around to see what it is. And there, hanging from the doorhandle, is this razorsharp hook." The story of The Hook is a simple, brutal classic of horror. It offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty or try to summarize the times, the mind, or the human spirit. To find these things we must go to "literature"perhaps to Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which is very much like the story of The Hook in its plot and construction. No, the story of The Hook exists for one reason and one reason alone to scare the shit out of little kids after the sun goes down. One could jigger the story of The Hook to make himita creature from outer space, and you could attribute this creature's ability to travel across the parsecs to a photon drive or a warp drive; you could make it a creature from an alternate earth a la Clifford D. Simak. But none of these sf conventions would turn the story of The Hook into science fiction. It's a fleshcrawler pure and simple, and in its direct pointtopoint progress, its brevity, and its use of story only as a means to get to the effect in the last sentence, it is remarkably similar to John Carpenter's Halloween ( "It was the boogeyman," Jamie Lee Curtis says at the end of that film. "Yes," Donald Pleasance agrees softly. "As a matter of fact, it was.") or The Fog. Both of these movies are extremely frightening, but the story of The Hook was there first. The point seems to be that horror simply is, exclusive of definition or rationalization. In a Newsweek cover story titled "Hollywood's Scary Summer" (referring to the summer of 1979the summer of Phantasm, Prophecy, Dawn o f the Dead, Nightwing, and Alien) the writer said that, during Alien's big, scary scenes, the audience seemed more apt to moan with revulsion than to scream with terror. The truth of this can't be argued; it's bad enough to see a gelatinous crabthing spread over some fellow's face, but the infamous "chestburster" scene which follows is a quantum leap in grue . . . and it happens at the dinner table, yet. It's enough to put you off your popcorn. The closest I want to come to definition or rationalization is to suggest that the genre exists on three more or less separate levels, each one a little less fine than the one before it. The finest emotion is terror, that emotion which is called up in the tale of The Hook and also in that hoary old classic, "The Monkey's Paw." We actually see nothing outright nasty in either story; in one we have the hook and in the other there is the paw, which, dried and mummified, can surely be no worse than those plastic dogturds on sale at any novelty shop. It's what the mind sees that makes these stories such quintessential tales of terror. It is the unpleasant speculation called to mind when the knocking on the door begins in the latter story and the griefstricken old woman rushes to answer it. Nothing is there but the wind when she finally throws the door open . . . but what, the mind wonders, might have been there if her husband had been a little slower on the draw with that third wish? As a kid, I cut my teeth on William B. Gainer's horror comics Weird Science, Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Vaultplus all the Gaines imitators (but like a good Elvis record, the Gaines magazines were often imitated, never duplicated). These horror comics of the fifties still sum up for me the epitome of horror, that emotion of fear that underlies terror, an emotion which is slightly less fine, because it is not entirely of the mind. Horror also invites a physical reaction by showing us something which is physically wrong. One typical E.C. screamer goes like this The hero's wife and her boyfriend determine to do away with the hero so they can run away together and get married. In almost all the weird comics of the '50s, the women are seen as slightly overripe, enticingly fleshy and sexual, but ultimately evil castrating, murdering bitches who, like the trapdoor spider, feel an almost instinctual need to follow intercourse with cannibalism. These two heels, who might have stepped whole and breathing from a James M. Cain novel, take the poor slob of a husband for a ride and the boyfriend puts a bullet between his eyes. They wire a cement block to the corpse's leg and toss him over a bridge into the river. Two or three weeks later, our hero, a living corpse, emerges from the river, rotted and eaten by the fish. He shambles after wifey and her friend . . . and not to invite them back to his place for a few drinks, either, one feels. One piece of dialogue from this story which I've never forgotten is, "I am coming, Marie, but I have to come slowly . . . because little pieces of me keep falling off . . ." In "The Monkey's Paw," the imagination alone is stimulated. The reader does the job on himself. In the horror comics (as well as the horror pulps of the years 19301955) , the viscera are also engaged. As we have already pointed out, the old man in "The Monkey's Paw" is able to wish the dreadful apparition away before his frenzied wife can get the door open. In Tales from the Crypt, the Thing from Beyond the Grave is still there when the door is thrown wide, big as life and twice as ugly. Terror is the sound of the old man's continuing pulsebeat in "The TellTale Heart"a quick sound, "like a watch wrapped in cotton." Horror is the amorphous but very physical "thing" in Joseph Payne Brennan's wonderful novella "Slime" as it enfolds itself over the body of a screaming dog. No less a writer than Kate Wilhelm, the acclaimed mainstream and science fiction novelist (author of Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang and The Clewiston Test, among others), began her career with a short but gruesomely effective horror novela paperback original called The Clone, written in collaboration with Ted Thomas. In this story, an amorphous creature made of almost pure protein (more blob than clone, The Science Fiction Encyclopedia rightly points out) forms in the sewer system of a major city . . . around a nucleus of halfrotted hamburger, yet. It begins to grow, swallowing hundreds of people into its noxious self as it does. In one memorable scene, a little kid is yanked armfirst into the drain of the kitchen sink. But there is a third levelthat of revulsion. This seems to be where the "chestburster" from Alien fits. Better, let's take another example from the E.C. file as an example of the Revolting StoryJack Davis's "Foul Play" from The Crypt of Terror will serve nicely, I think. And if you're sitting in your living room right now, putting away some chips and dip or maybe some sliced pepperoni on crackers as you read this, maybe you'd just better put the munchies away for awhile, because this one makes the chestburster from Alien look like a scene from The Sound of Music, You'll note that the story lacks any real logic, motivation, or character development, but, as in the tale of The Hook, the story itself is little more than the means to an end, a way of getting to those last three panels. "Foul Play" is the story of Herbie Satten, pitcher for Bayville's minor league baseball team. Herbie is the apotheosis of the E.C. villain. He's a totally black character, with absolutely no redeeming qualities, the Compleat Monster. He's murderous, conceited, egocentric, willing to go to any lengths to win. He brings out the Mob Man or Mob Woman in each of us; we would gladly see Herbie lynched from the nearest apple tree, and never mind the Civil Liberties Union. With his team leading by a single run in the top of the ninth, Herbie gets first base by deliberately allowing himself to be hit by an inside pitch. Although he is big and lumbering, he takes off for second on the very next pitch. Covering second in Central City's saintly slugger, Jerry Deegan. Deegan, we are told, is "sure to win the game for the home team in the bottom of the ninth." The evil Herbie Satten slides into second with his spikes up, but saintly Jerry hangs in there and tags Satten out. Jerry is spiked, but his wounds are minor . . . or so they appear. In fact, Herbie has painted his spikes with a deadly, fastacting poison. In Central City's half of the ninth, Jerry comes to the plate with two out and a man in scoring position. It looks pretty good for the home team guys; unfortunately, Jerry drops dead at home plate even as the umpire calls strike three. Exit the malefic Herbie Satten, smirking. The Central City team doctor discovers that Jerry has been poisoned. One of the Central City players says grimly "This is a job for the police!" Another responds ominously, "No! Wait! Let's take care of him ourselves . . . our way." The team sends Herbie a letter, inviting him to the ballpark one night to be presented with a plaque honoring his achievements in baseball. Herbie, apparently as stupid as he is evil, falls for it, and in the next scene we see the Central City nine on the field. The team doctor is tricked out in umpire's regalia. He is whisking off home plate . . . which happens to be a human heart. The base paths are intestines. The bases are chunks of the unfortunate Herbie Satten's body. In the penultimate panel we see that the batter is standing in the box and that instead of a Louisville Slugger he is swinging one of Herbie's severed legs. The pitcher is holding a grotesquely mangled human head and preparing to throw it. The head, from which one eyeball dangles on its stalk, looks as though it's already been hit over the fence for a couple of home runs, although as Davis has drawn it ( "Jolly Jack Davis," as the fans of the day called him; he now sometimes does covers for TV Guide), one would not expect it to carry so far. It is, in the parlance of baseball players, "a dead ball." The Old Witch followed this helping of mayhem with her own conclusions, beginning with the immortal E. C. Chuckle "Heh, heh! So that's my yelpyarn for this issue, kiddies. Herbie, the pitcher, went to pieces that night and was taken out . . . of existence, that is . . . " As you can see, both "The Monkey's Paw" and "Foul Play" are horror stories, but their mode of attack and their ultimate effect are lightyears apart. You may also have an idea of why the comic publishers of America cleaned their own house in the early fifties . . . before the U.S. Senate decided to do it for them. So terror on top, horror below it, and lowest of all, the gag reflex of revulsion. My own philosophy as a sometime writer of horror fiction is to recognize these distinctions because they are sometimes useful, but to avoid any preference for one over the other on the grounds that one effect is somehow better than another. The problem with definitions is that they have a way of turning into critical toolsand this sort of criticism, which I would call criticismbyrote, seems to me needlessly restricting and even dangerous. I recognize terror as the finest emotion (used to almost quintessential effect in Robert Wises film The Haunting, where, as in "The Monkey's Paw," we are never allowed to see what is behind the door), and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify himher, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I'll go for the grossout. I'm not proud. When I conceived of the vampire novel which became 'Salem's Lot, I decided I Ranted to try to use the book partially as a form of literary homage (as Peter Straub has done in Ghost Story, working in the tradition of such "classical" ghost story writers as Henry James, M. R. James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne). So my novel bears an intentional similarity to Bram Stoker's Dracula, and after awhile it began to seem to me what I was doing was playing an interestingto me, at leastgame of literary racquetball 'Salem's Lot itself was the ball and Dracula was the wall I kept hitting it against, watching to see how and where it would bounce, so I could hit it again. As a matter of fact, it took some pretty interesting bounces, and I ascribe this mostly to the fact that, while my ball existed in the twentieth century, my wall was very much a product of the nineteenth. At the same time, because the vampire story was so much a staple of the E.C. comics I grew up with, I decided that I would also try to bring in that aspect of the horror story. The scene in 'Salem's Lot which works best in the E.C. traditionat least, as far as I'm concernedis when the bus driver, Charlie Rhodes (who is a typical E.C.type rotter in the best Herbie Satten tradition), awakes at midnight and hears someone blowing the horn of his bus. He discovers, after the bus doors have swung shut forever behind him, that his bus is loaded with children, as if for a school run . . . but they're all vampires. Charlie begins to scream, and perhaps the reader wonders why; after all, they only stopped by for a drink. Heh, heh. |
Some of the scenes from 'Salem's Lot which run parallel to scenes from Dracula are the staking of Susan Norton (corresponding to the staking of Lucy Westenra in Stoker's book), the drinking of the vampire's blood by the priest, Father Callahan (in Dracula it is Mina Murray Harker who is forced to take the Count's perverse communion as he croons those memorable, chilling lines, "My bountiful winepress for a little while . . ." ), the burning of Callahan's hand as he tries to enter his church to receive absolution (when, in Dracula, Van Helsing touches Mina's forehead with a piece of the Host to cleanse her of the Count's unclean touch, it flashes into fire, leaving a terrible scar), and, of course, the band of Fearless Vampire Hunters which forms in each book. The scenes from Dracula which I chose to retool for my own book were the ones which impressed me the most deeply, the ones Stoker seemed to have written at fever pitch. There are others, but the one "bounce" that never made it into the finished book was a play on Stoker's use of rats in Dracula. In Stoker's novel, the Fearless Vampire HuntersVan Helsing, Jonathan Harker, Dr. Seward, Lord Godalming, and Quincey Morrisenter the basement of Carfax, the Count's English house. The Count himself has long since split the scene, but he has left some of his traveling coffins (boxes full of his native earth), and another nasty surprise. Very shortly after the F.V.H.s enter, the basement is crawling with rats. According to the lore (and in his long novel, Stoker martials a formidable amount of vampire lore), a vampire has the ability to command the lesser animalscats, rats, weasels ( and possibly Republicans, haha). It is Dracula who has sent these rats to give our heroes a hard time. Lord Godalming is ready for this, however. He lets a couple of terriers out of a bag, and they make short work of the Count's rats. I decided I would let Barlowmy version of Count Draculaalso use the rats, and to that end I gave the town of Jerusalem's Lot an open dump, where there are lots of rats. I played on the presence of the rats there several times in the first couple of hundred pages of the novel, and to this day I sometimes get letters asking if I just forgot about the rats, or tried to use them to create atmosphere, or what. Actually, I used them to create a scene so revolting that my editor at Doubleday (the same Bill Thompson mentioned in the forenote to this volume) suggested strongly that I remove it and substitute something else. After some grousing, I complied with his wishes. In the DoubledayNew American Library editions of 'Salem's Lot, Jimmy Cody, a local doctor, and Mark Petrie, the boy accompanying him, discover that the king vampireto use Van Helsing's pungent termis almost certainly denning in the basement of a local boarding house. Jimmy begins to go downstairs, but the stairs have been cut away and the floor beneath littered with knives pounded through boards. Jimmy Cody dies impaled upon these knives in a scene of what I would call "horror"as opposed to "terror" or "revulsion," the scene is a middleoftheroader. In the first draft manuscript, however, I had Jimmy go down the stairs and discovertoo latethat Barlow had called all the rats from the dump to the cellar of Eva Miller's boarding house. There was a regular HoJo for rats down there, and Jimmy Cody became the main course. They attack Jimmy in their hundreds, and we are treated (if that is the word) to a picture of the good doctor struggling back up the stairs, covered with rats. They are down his shirt, crawling in his hair, biting his neck and arms. When he opens his mouth to yell Mark a warning, one of them runs into his mouth and lodges there, squirming. I was delighted with the scene as written because it gave me a chance to combine Draculalore and E.C.lore into one. My editor felt that it was, to put it frankly, out to lunch, and I was eventually persuaded to see it his way. Perhaps he was even right. Rats are nasty little buggers, aren't they? I wrote and published a rat story called "Graveyard Shift" in Cavalier magazine four years prior to 'Salem's Lotit was, in fact, the third short story I ever publishedand I was uneasy about the similarity between the rats under the old mill in "Graveyard Shift" and those in the basement of the boarding house in 'Salem's Lot. As writers near the end of a book, I suspect that they cope with weariness in all sorts of waysand my response as I neared the end of 'Salem's Lot was to indulge in this bit of selfplagiarism. And so, even though I suspect there's a disappointed ratfan or two out there, I've got to say I believe Bill Thompson's judgment that the rats in 'Salem's Lot should simply fade from the scene was the right one. I've tried here to delineate some of the differences between science fiction and horror, science fiction and fantasy, terror and horror, horror and revulsion, more by example than by definition. All of which is very well, but perhaps we ought to examine the emotion of horror a little more closelynot in terms of definition but in terms of effect. What does horror do? Why do people want to be horrified . . . why do they pay to be horrified? Why an Exorcist? A Jaws? An Alien? But before we talk about why people crave the effect, maybe we ought to spend a little time thinking about componentsand if we do not choose to define horror itself, we can at least examine the elements and perhaps draw some conclusions from them. 2 Horror movies and horror novels have always been popular, but every ten or twenty years they seem to enjoy a cycle of increased popularity and visibility. These periods almost always seem to coincide with periods of fairly serious economic andor political strain, and the books and films seem to reflect those freefloating anxieties (for want of a better term) which accompany such serious but not mortal dislocations. They have done less well in periods when the American people have been faced with outright examples of horror in their own lives. Horror went through a boom period in the 1930s, When people hardpressed by the Depression weren't ponying up at the box office to see a hundred Busby Berkeley girls dancing to the tune of "We're in the Money," they were perhaps releasing their anxieties in another wayby watching Boris Karloff shamble across the moors in Frankenstein or Bela Lugosi creep through the dark with his cape up over his mouth in Dracula. The '30s also marked the rise of the socalled "Shudder Pulps," which encompassed everything from Weird Tales to Black Mark. We find few horror movies or novels of note in the 1940s, and the one great magazine of fantasy which debuted in that decade, Unknown, did not survive for long. The great Universal Studios monsters of the Depression daysFrankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Countwere dying in that particularly messy and embarrassing way that the movies seem to reserve for the terminally ill; instead of being retired with honors and decently interred in the mouldy soil of their European churchyards, Hollywood decided to play them for laughs, squeezing every last quarter and dime admission possible out of the poor old things before letting them go. Hence, Abbott Costello met the monsters, as did the Bowery Boys, not to mention those lovable eyeboinkers and headknockers, the Three Stooges. In the '40s, the monsters themselves became stooges. Years later, in another postwar period, Mel Brooks would give us his version of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Young Frankensteinstarring Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman instead of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The eclipse of horror in fiction that began in 1940 lasted for twentyfive years. Oh, an occasional novel such as Richard Matheson's Shrinking Man or William Sloane's Edge of Running Water would pop up, reminding us that the genre was still there (although even Matheson's grim managainstgiantspider tale, a horror story if there ever was one, was touted as science fiction), but the idea of a bestselling horror novel would have been laughed out of court along Publisher's Row. As with the movies, the golden age of weird fiction had passed in the '30s, when Weird Tales was at the peak of its influence and quality ( not to mention its circulation), publishing the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, the young Robert Block, Dr. David H. Keller, and, of course, the twentiethcentury horror story's dark and baroque prince, H. P. Lovecraft. I will not offend those who have followed weird fiction over a span of fifty years by suggesting that horror disappeared in the 1940s; indeed it did not. Arkham House had then been founded by the late August Derleth, and Arkham published what I regard as its most important works in the period 19391950works including Lovecraft's The Outrider and Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Henry S. Whitehead's Jumbee, The Opener of the Way and Pleasant Dreams, by Robert Bloch . . . and Ray Bradbury's Dark Carnival, a marvelous and terrifying collection of a darker world just beyond the threshold of this one. But Lovecraft was dead before Pearl Harbor; Bradbury would turn his hand more and more often to his own lyric blend of science fiction and fantasy (and it was only after he did so that his work began to be accepted by such mainstream magazines as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post) ; Robert Bloch had begun to write his suspense stories, using what he had learned in his first two decades as a writer to create a powerful series of offbeat novels, which are only surpassed by the novels of Cornell Woolrich. During and after the war years, horror fiction was in decline. The age did not like it. It was a period of rapid scientific development and rationalismthey grow very well in a war atmosphere, thanks and it became a period which is now thought of by fans and writers alike as "the golden age of science fiction." While Weird Tales plugged grimly along, holding its own but hardly reaping millions (it would fold in the midfifties after a downsizing from its original gaudy pulp size to a digest form failed to effect a cure for its ailing circulation), the sf market boomed, spawning a dozen wellremembered pulps and making names such as Heinlein, Asimov, Campbell, and del Rey, if not household words, at least familiar and exciting to an evergrowing community of fans dedicated to the proposition of the rocket ship, the space station, and the everpopular death ray. So horror languished in the dungeon until 1955 or so, rattling its chains once in a while but causing no great stir. It was around that time that two men named Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson stumbled downstairs and discovered a money machine rusting away unnoticed in that particular dungeon. Originally film distributors, Arkoff and Nicholson decided that, since there was an acute shortage of Bpictures in the early fifties, they would make their own. Insiders predicted speedy economic ruin for the entrepreneurs. They were told they were setting to sea in a lead sailboat; this was the age of TV. The insiders had seen the future and it belonged to Dagmar and Richard Diamond, Private Detective. The consensus among those who cared at all ( and there weren't many) was that Arkoff and Nicholson would lose their shirts very quickly. But during the twentyfive years that the company they formed, AmericanInternational Pictures, has been around (it's now Arkoff alone; James Nicholson died several years ago), it has been the only major American film company to show a consistent profit, year in and year out. AIP has made a great variety of films, but all of them have taken dead aim on the youth market; the company's pictures include such dubious classics as Boxcar Bertha, Bloody Mama, Dragstrip Girl, The Trip, Dillinger, and the immortal Beach Blanket Bingo. But their greatest success was with horror films. What elements made these AIP films shlock classics? They were simple, shot in a hurry, and so amateurish that one can sometimes see the shadow of a boom mike in the shot or catch the gleam of an air tank inside the monster suit of an underwater creature ( as in The Attack o f the Giant Leeches). Arkoff himself recalls that they rarely began with a completed script or even a coherent screen treatment; often money was committed to projects on the basis of a title that sounded commercial, such as Terror from the Year 5000 or The Brain Eaters, something that would make an eyecatching poster. Whatever the elements were, they worked. 3 Well, let all that go for the moment. Let's talk monsters. Exactly what is a monster? Begin by assuming that the tale of horror, no matter how primitive, is allegorical by its very nature; that it is symbolic. Assume that it is talking to us, like a patient on a psychoanalyst's couch, about one thing while it means another. I am not saying that horror is consciously allegorical or symbolic; that is to suggest an artfulness that few writers of horror fiction or directors of horror films aspire to. There has recently been a retrospective of AIP movies in New York (1979), and the idea of a retrospective suggests art, but at most they are trash art. The pictures have great nostalgia value, but those searching for culture may look elsewhere. To suggest that Roger Corman was unconsciously creating art while on a twelveday shooting schedule and a budget of 80,000 is to suggest the absurd. The element of allegory is there only because it is builtin, a given, impossible to escape. Horror appeals to us because it says, in a symbolic way, things we would be afraid to say right out straight, with the bark still on; it offers us a chance to exercise (that's right; not exorcise but exercise) emotions which society demands we keep closely in hand. The horror film is an invitation to indulge in deviant, antisocial behavior by proxyto commit gratuitous acts of violence, indulge our puerile dreams of power, to give in to our most craven fears. Perhaps more than anything else, the horror story or horror movie says it's okay to join the mob, to become the total tribal being, to destroy the outsider. It has never been done better or more literally than in Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery," where the entire concept of the outsider is symbolic, created by nothing more than a black circle colored on a slip of paper. But there is no symbolism in the rain of stones which ends the story; the victim's own child pitches in as the mother dies, screaming "It's not fair! It's not fair!" Nor is it an accident that the horror story ends so often with an O. Henry twist that leads straight down a mine shaft. When we turn to the creepy movie or the crawly book, we are not wearing our "Everything works out for the best" hats. We're waiting to be told what we so often suspectthat everything is turning to shit. In most cases the horror story provides ample proof that such is indeed the case, and I don't believe, when Katharine Ross falls prey to the Stepford Men's Association at the conclusion of The Stepford Wives or when the heroic black man is shot dead by the numbnuts sheriff's posse at the end of Night of the Living Dead, that anyone is really surprised. It is, as they say, a part of the game. And monstrosity? What about that part of the game? What sort of handle can we get on that? If we don't define, can we at least exemplify? Here is a fairly explosive package, my friends. What about the freaks in the circus? The carny aberrations observed by the light of naked hundredwatt bulbs? What about Cheng and Eng, the famous Siamese twins? A majority of people considered them monstrous in their day, and an even greater number no doubt considered the fact that each had his own married life even more monstrous. America's most mordantand sometimes funniestcartoonist, a fellow named Rodrigues, has rung the changes on the Siamesetwin theme in his Aesop Brothers strip in the National Lampoon, where we have our noses rubbed in almost every possible bizarre exingency of life among the mortally attached the sex lives of, the bathroom functions of, the love lives, the sicknesses. Rodrigues provides everything you ever wondered about in regard to Siamese twins . . . and fulfills your darkest surmises. To say that all of this is in poor taste may be true, but it's still a futile and impotent criticismthe old National Enquirer used to run pictures of carwreck victims in pieces and dogs munching happily away at severed human heads, but it did a landoffice business in grue before lapsing back into a quieter current of the American mainstream. And yet there is life in the old Enquirer yet. I buy it if there's a juicy UFO story or something about Bigfoot, but mostly I only scan it rapidly while in a slow supermarket checkout lane, looking for such endearing lapses of taste as the notorious autopsy photo of Lee Harvey Oswald or their photo of Elvis Presley in his coffin. Still, it is a far cry froth the old mom COOKS PET DOG AND FEEDS IT TO KIDS days. What about the other carny freaks? Are they classifiable as monstrosities? Dwarves? Midgets? The bearded lady? The fat lady? The human skeleton? At one time or another most of us have been there, standing on the beaten, sawduststrewn dirt with a chilidog or a paper of sweet cotton candy in one hand while the barker hucksters us, usually with one sample of these human offshoots standing nearby as a specimenthe fat lady in her pink little girl's tutu, the tattooed man with the tail of a dragon curled around his burly neck like a fabulous hangman's noose, or the man who eats nails and scrap metal and light bulbs. Perhaps not so many of us have surrendered to the urge to cough up the two bits or four bits or six bits to go inside and see them, plus such alltime favorites as The TwoHeaded Cow or The Baby in a Bottle (I have been writing horror stories since I was eight, but have never yet attended a freak show), but most of us have surely felt the impulse. And at some carnivals, the most terrible freak of all is kept out back, kept in darkness like some damned thing from Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell, kept there because his performance was forbidden by law as long ago as 1910 kept in a pit and dressed in a rag. This is the geek, and for an extra buck or two you could stand at the edge of his pit and watch him bite off the head of a live chicken and then swallow it even as the decapitated bird fluttered in his hands. There is something so attractive about freaks, yet something so forbidden and appalling, that the one serious effort to use them as the mainspring of a horror picture resulted in the film's quick shelving. The picture was Freaks, a Tod Browning film made in 1932 for MGM. Freaks is the story of Cleopatra, the beautiful acrobat who marries a midget. In the best E.C. tradition (an E.C. that was almost twenty years unborn in 1932), she has a heart as black as midnight in a coal mine. It's not the midget she's interested in, it's his money. Like the mateeating human trapdoor spiders of those comicbook stories yet to come, Cleo soon takes up with another man; in this case it's Hercules, the show's strongman. Like Cleopatra herself, Hercules is at least nominally okay, although it is with the freaks that our sympathies lie. These two heels begin a systematic poisoning program on Cleo's tiny husband. The other freaks discover what is going on and take an almost unspeakable revenge on the pair. Hercules is killed ( there is a rumor that, as Browning originally conceived the film, the strongman was to be castrated) and the beautiful Cleopatra is turned into a birdwoman, feathered and legless. Browning made the mistake of using real freaks in his film. We may only feel really comfortable with horror as long as we can see the zipper running up the monster's hack, when we understand that we are not playing for keepsies. The climax of Freaks, as the Living Torso and the Armless Wonder and the Hilton SistersSiamese twinsamong others, slither and flop through the mud after the screaming Cleopatra, was simply too much. Even some of MGM's tame exhibitors flatly refused to show it, and Carlos Clarens reports in his Illustrated History of the Horror Pima (Capricorn Books 1968) that at its one preview in San Diego "a woman ran screaming up the aisle." The film was exhibitedafter a fashionin a version so radically cut that one film critic complained that he had no idea what he was watching. Clarens further reports that the film was banned for thirty years in the U.K., the country that has brought us, among other things, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, the Snivelling Shits, and the charming custom of "Pakibashing." Freaks is now sometimes exhibited on PTV stations and may at this writing have finally become available on videocassettes. But to this day it remains a source of heated discussion, comment, and conjecture among horror fansand although many have heard of it, surprisingly few have actually seen it. 4 Leaving freaks entirely out of it for the moment, what else do we consider horrible enough to label with what surely must be the world's oldest perjorative? Well, there were all those bizarre Dick Tracy villains, perhaps best epitomized by Flyface, and there was the archenemy of Don Window, The Scorpion, whose face was so horrible that he had to keep it constantly covered (although he would sometimes unveil it to minions who had failed him in some waysaid minions would immediately drop dead of heart attacks, literally scared to death). So far as I know, the horrible secret of The Scorpion's physiognomy was never uncovered ( pardon the pun, hehheh ) , but the intrepid Commander Winslow did once succeed in unmasking The Scorpion's daughter, who had the slack, dead face of a corpse. This information was delivered to the breathless reader in italics the slack, dead face of a corpse! for added emphasis. Perhaps the "new generation" of comic monsters is best epitomized by those created by Stan Lee's Marvel Comics, where for every superhero such as Spiderman or Captain America, there seem to be a dozen freakish aberrations Dr. Octopus (known to children all over the comicreading world as Doc Ock), whose arms have been replaced by what appear to be a waving forest of homicidal vacuumcleaner attachments; The Sandman, who is a sort of walking sand dune; The Vulture; Stegron; The Lizard; and most ominous of all, Dr. Doom, who has been so badly maimed in his Twisted Pursuit of Forbidden Science that he is now a great, clanking cyborg who wears a green cape, peers through eyeholes like the archers' slits in a medieval castle, and who appears to be literally sweating rivets. Superheroes with elements of monstrosity in their makeup seem less enduring. My own favorite, Plastic Man (always accompanied by his wonderfully screwball sidekick, Woozy Winks), just never made it. Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four is a Plastic Man lookalike, and his cohort Ben Grimm ( aka The Thing) looks like a hardened lava flow, but they are among the few exceptions to the rule. So far, we've talked about carny freaks and the caricatures we sometimes find in the funnies, but let's come a trifle closer to home. You might ask yourself what you consider monstrous or horrible in daily lifeyou're exempted from this if you're a doctor or a nurse; these people see all the aberrations they can handle, and much the same can be said for policemen and bartenders. But as for the rest of us? Take fat. How fat does a person have to be before he or she passes over the line and into a perversion of the human form severe enough to be called monstrosity? Surely it is not the woman who shops Lane Bryant or the fellow who buys his suits in that section of the menswear store reserved for the "husky build"or is it? Has the obese person reached the point of monstrosity when he or she can no longer go to the movies or to a concert because hisher buttocks will no longer fit between the fixed armrests of a single seat? You will understand that I am not talking about how fat is too fat here, either in the medical or aesthetic sense, nor anyone's "right to be fat"; I am not talking about the lady you glimpsed crossing a country road to get her mail on a summer day, her gigantic butt encased in black slacks, cheeks whacking and wobbling together, belly hanging out of an untucked white blouse like slack dough; I am talking of a point where simple overweight has passed through the outermost checkpoints of normality and has become something that, regardless of morality or immorality, attracts the helpless eye and overwhelms it. I am speculating on your reactionand my ownto those human beings so enormous that we wonder about how they may perform acts that we mostly take for granted going through a door, sitting down in a car, calling home from a telephone booth, bending over to tie our shoes, taking a shower. You may say to me, Steve, you're just talking carny againthe fat lady in her pink little girl's tutu; those humongous twins who have been immortalized in the Guinness Book of World Records riding away from the camera that clicked the picture on identical tiny motor scooters, their buttocks sticking out to either side like a dream of gravity in suspension. But in point of fact, I am not talking about such people, who, after all, exist in their own world where a different scale is applied to questions of normality; how freakish can you feel, even at five hundred pounds, in the company of dwarves, Living Torsos, and Siamese twins? Normality is a sociological concept. There's an old joke about two African leaders getting together with JFK for a state meeting and then going home on a plane together. One of them marvels, "Kennedy What a funny name!" In the same vein, there is the Twilight Zone episode, "Eye of the Beholder," about the horribly ugly woman whose plastic surgery has failed for the umpteenth time . . . and we only find out at the end of the program that she exists in a future where most people look like grotesquely humanoid pigs. The "ugly" woman is, by our standards, at least, extraordinarily beautiful. I am talking about the fat man or woman in our societythe fourhundredpound businessman, for examplewho routinely buys two seats in tourist when he flies and kicks up the armrest between them. I am talking about the woman who cooks herself four hamburgers for lunch, eats them between eight slices of bread, has a quart of potato salad on the side topped with sour cream, and follows this repast with half a gallon of Breyer's ice cream spread over the top of a Table Talk pie like frosting. On a business trip to New York in 1976, I observed a very fat man who had become trapped in a revolving door at the Doubleday Book Shop on Fifth Avenue. Gigantic and sweating in a blue pinstriped suit, he seemed to have been poured into his wedge of the door. The book shop's security guard was joined by a city policeman, and the two of them pushed and grunted until the door began to move again, jerk by jerk. At last it moved enough to let the gentleman out. I wondered then and wonder now if the crowd that gathered to watch this salvage operation was much different from those crowds that form when the carny barker begins his spiel . . . or when, in the original Universal film, Frankenstein's monster arose from its laboratory slab and walked. Are fat people monstrous? How about somebody with a harelip or a large facial birthmark? You couldn't get into any selfrespecting carny in the country with one of thosetoo common, so sorry. What about somebody with six fingers on one or both hands, or a total of six toes on both feet? There are a lot of those guys around, too. Or, getting down even further toward Your Block, U.S.A., what about someone with a really bad case of acne? Of course ordinary pimples are no big deal; even the prettiest cheerleader on the squad is apt to get one on her forehead or near one corner of her kissable mouth once in a while, but ordinary fat is no big deal, eitherI'm talking about the case of acne that has run absolutely apeshit, spreading like something out of a Japanese horror movie, pimples on pimples, and most of them red and suppurating. Like the chestburster in Alien, it's enough to put you off your popcorn . . . except this is real. Perhaps I've not touched your idea of monstrosity in real life even yet, and perhaps I won't, but for just a moment consider such an ordinary thing as lefthandedness. Of course, the discrimination against lefthanded people is obvious from the start. If you've attended a college or high school with the more modern desks, you know that most of them are built for inhabitants of an exclusively righthanded world. Most educational facilities will order a few lefthand desks as a token gesture, but that's all. And during testing or composition situations, lefties are usually segregated on one side of the lecture hall so they will not jog the elbows of their more normal counterparts. But it goes deeper than discrimination. The roots of discrimination spread wide, but the roots of monstrosity spread both wide and deep. Lefthanded baseball players are all considered screwballs, whether they are or not. The French for left, bastardized from the Latin, is la sinistre. Take for instance Bill Lee, now of the Montreal Expos, late of the Boston Red Sox. Lee was dubbed "The Spaceman" by his colleagues and is remembered fondly by Boston fans for exhorting those who attended a rally following the Sox's pennant win in 1976 to pick up their trash when they left. Perhaps the strongest proof of his "leftiness" came when he referred to Red Sox manager Don Zimmer as "the designated gerbil." Lee moved to Montreal soon after. from which comes our word sinister. According to the old superstition, your right side belongs to God, your left side to that other fellow. Southpaws have always been suspect. My mother was a leftie, and as a schoolgirl, so she told my brother and me, the teacher would rap her left hand smartly with a ruler to make her change her pen to her right hand. When the teacher left she would switch the pen back again, of course, because with her right hand she could make only large, childish scrawlsthe fate of most of us when we try to write with what New Englanders call "the dumb hand." A few of us, such as Branwell Bront (the gifted brother of Charlotte and Emily), can write clearly and well with either hand. Branwell Bront was in fact so ambidextrous that he could write two different letters to two different people at the same tine. We might reasonably wonder if such an ability qualifies as monstrosity . . . or genius. In fact, almost every physical and mental human aberration has been at some point in history, or is now, considered monstrousa complete list would include widows' peaks ( once considered a reliable sign that a man was a sorcerer), moles on the female body ( supposed to be witches' teats), and extreme schizophrenia, which on occasion has caused the afflicted to be canonized by one church or another. Monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative Republican in a threepiece suit who resides within all of us. We love and need the concept of monstrosity because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings . . . and let me further suggest that it is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which these aberrations seem to imply. The late John Wyndham, perhaps the best writer of science fiction that England has ever produced, summarized the idea in his novel The Chrysalids (published as Rebirth in America). It is a story that considers the ideas of mutation and deviation more brilliantly than any other novel written in English since World War II, I think. |
A series of plaques in the home of the novel's young protagonist offer stern counsel ONLY THE IMAGE OF GOD IS MAN; KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD; IN PURITY OUR SALVATION; BLESSED IS THE NORM; and most telling of all WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT! After all, when we discuss monstrosity, we are expressing our faith and belief in the norm and watching for the mutant. The writer of horror fiction is neither more nor less than an agent of the status quo. 5 Having said all that, let's now return to the AmericanInternational pictures of the 1950s. In a little while we'll tally about the allegorical qualities of these films (you there in the back row, stop laughing or leave the room), but for now let's stick to the idea of monstrosity . . . and if we touch allegory at all, we'll touch it only lightly, by suggesting some of the things films were not. Although they came along at the same time rock and roll broke the race barrier, and although they appealed to the same fledgling hoppers, it's interesting to notice the sort of things that are altogether absent . . . at least in terms of "real" monstrosity. We've noted already that the AIP pictures, and those of the other independent film companies that began to imitate AIP, gave the movie industry a muchneeded shot in the arm during the hohum fifties. They gave millions of young viewers something they couldn't get at home on TV, and it nave them a place where they could go and make out in relative comfort. And it was the "indies," as Variety calls them, that gave a whole generation of war babies an insatiable Jones for the movies, and perhaps prepared the way for the success of such disparate movies as Easy Rider, Jaws, Rocky, The Godfather, and The Exorcist. But where are the monsters? Oh, we've got fake ones by the score saucermen, giant leeches, werewolves, mole people ( in a Universal picture), and dozens more. But what AIP didn't show as they tested these interesting new waters was anything that smacked of real horror . . . at least as those war babies understood the term emotionally. That is an important qualification, and I hope you'll come to agree with me that it warrants its italics. These werewe werechildren who knew about the psychic distress that came with The Bomb, but who had never known any real physical want or deprivation. None of the kids who went to these movies were starving or dying of internal parasites. A few had lost fathers or uncles in the war. Not many. And in the movies themselves, there were no fat kids; no kids with warts or tics; no kids with pimples; no kids picking their noses and then wiping it on the sun visors of their hot rods; no kids with sexual problems; no kids with any visible physical deformity (not even such a minor one as vision that had been corrected by glassesall the kids in the AIP horror and beach pictures had 2020 vision). There might be an endearingly wacky teenager on viewof the sort often played by Nick Adamsa kid who was a bit shorter or did daring, kooky things such as wearing his hat backwards like a baseball catcher (and who had a name like Weirdo or Scooter or Crazy), but that was as far as it ever went. The setting for most of these films was smalltown America, the scene the audience could best identify with . . . but all of these Our Towns looked eerily as if a eugenics squad had gone by the day before production actually began, removing everyone with a lisp, birthmark, limp, or potbellyeveryone, in short, who did not look like Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Robert Young, or Jane Wyatt. Of course Elisha Cook, Jr., who appeared in a great many of these films, has always looked a bit weird, but he always got killed in the first reel, so I feel he really doesn't count. Although both rock and roll and the new youth movies ( everything from I Was a Teenage Werewolf to Rebel Without a Cause) burst upon an older generation, just beginning to relax enough to translate "their war" into myth, with all the unpleasant surprise of a mugger leaping out of a privet hedge, both the music and the movies were only preshocks of a genuine youthquake to come. Little Richard was certainly unsettling, and Michael Landonwho didn't even have enough school spirit to at least take off his high school jacket before turning into a manwolfwas also unsettling, but it would still be miles and years to the Fish Cheer at Woodstock and Old Leatherface doing impromptu surgery with his McCulloch in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was a decade when every parent trembled at the spectre of juvenile delinquency the mythic teenaged hood leaning in the doorway of the candy store there in Our Town, his hair bejeweled with Vitalis or Brylcreem, a pack of Luckies tucked under the epaulet of his motorcycle jacket, a fresh zit at one corner of his mouth and a brandnew switchblade in his back pocket, waiting for a kid to beat up, a parent to harass and embarrass, a girl to assault, or possibly a dog to rape and then kill . . . or maybe viceversa. It is a oncedread image which has now undergone its own mythmaking, homogenizing process; pop in James Dean andor Vic Morrow here, wait twenty years, and heypresto! out pops Arthur Fonzarelli. But during the period, the newspapers and magazines of the popular press saw young jd's everywhere, just as these same organs of the fourth estate had seen Commies everywhere a few years before. Their chaindecked engineer boots and pegged Levis could be seen or imagined on the streets of Oakdale and Pineview and Centerville; in Mundamian, Iowa, and in Lewiston, Maine. The shadow of the dreaded jd stretched long. Marlon Brando had been first to give this emptyheaded nihilist a voice, in a picture called The Wild One. "What are you rebelling against?" the pretty girl asks him. Answers Marlon "What have you got?" To some fellow in Asher Heights, North Carolina, who had somehow survived fortyone missions over Germany in the belly of a bomber and who now only wanted to sell a lot of Buicks with PowerFlite transmissions, that sounded like very bad news indeed; here was a fellow for whom the Jaycees held no charms. But as there turned out to be fewer Communists and fifth columnists than was at first suspected, the Shadow of the Dread JD also proved to be rather overrated. In the last analysis, the war babies wanted what their parents wanted. They wanted driver's licences; jobs in the cities and homes in the suburbs; wives and husbands; insurance; underarm protection; kids; time payments which they would meet; clean streets; clear consciences. They wanted to be good. Years and miles between Senior Glee Club and the SLA; years and miles between Our Town and the Mekong Delta; and the only known fuzztone guitar track in existence was a technical mistake on a Marty Robbins country and western record. They adhered happily to school dress codes. Long sideburns were laughed at in most quarters, and a guy wearing stacked heels or bikini briefs would have been hounded unmercifully as a faggot. Eddie Cochran could sing about "those crazy pink pegged slacks" and kids would buy the records . . , but not the pants themselves. For the war babies, the norm was blessed. They wanted to be good. They watched for the mutant. Only one aberration per picture was allowed in the early youthcult horror films of the fifties, one mutation. It was the parents who would never believe. It was the kidswho wanted to be goodwho stood watch (most often from those lonely bluffs which overlook Our Town from the ends of lovers' lanes); it was the kids who stamped the mutant out, once more making the world safe for country club dances and Hamilton Beach blenders. Horrors in the fifties, for the war babies, were mostlyexcept maybe for the psychic strain of waiting for The Bomb to fallmundane horrors. And perhaps a conception of real horror is impossible for people whose bellies are full. The horrors the war babies felt were scalemodel horrors, and in that light the movies that really caused AIP to take off, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, become mildly interesting. In Werewolf, Michael Landon plays an attractive but moody high school student with a quick temper. He's basically a good kid, but he's involved in one fight after another ( like David Banner, the Hulk's alterego on TV, the Landon character actually provokes none of these fights) until it looks as though he will be suspended from school. He goes to see a psychiatrist ( Whit Bissell, who also plays the mad descendant of Victor Frankenstein in Teenage Frankenstein) who turns out to be totally evil. Seeing Landon as a throwback to an earlier stage of human developmentlike back to the Alley Oop stageBissell uses hypnosis to regress Landon totally, in effect deliberately making the problem worse instead of trying to cure it. This plot twist seems cribbed from the thencurrent and fabulously successful Search for Bridey Murphy, the story (purportedly factual but later declared a hoax) of a woman who, under hypnosis, revealed memories of a previous life. Bissell's experiments succeed beyond his wildest dreamsor worst nightmaresand Landon becomes a ravening werewolf. For a 1957 high school or junior high school kid watching the transformation for the first time, this was baaad shit. Landon becomes the fascinating embodiment of everything you're not supposed to do if you want to be good . . . if you want to get along in school, join the National Honor Society, get your letter, and be accepted by a good college where you can join a frat and drink beer like your old man did. Landon grows hair all over his face, produces long fangs, and begins to drool a substance that looks suspiciously like BurmaShave. He peeks at a girl doing exercises on the balance beam all by herself in the gymnasium, and one imagines him smelling like a randy polecat who just rolled in a nice fresh pile of coyote shit. No buttondown Ivy League shirt with the fruit loop on the back here; here's a fellow who doesn't give a fart in a high wind for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests. He has gone absolutely, not apeshit, but wolfshit. Undoubtedly part of the reason for the movie's meteoric takeoff at the box office had to do with the liberating, vicarious feelings the movie allowed these war babies who wanted to be good. When Landon attacks the pretty gymnast in the leotard, he is making a social statement on behalf of those watching. But those watching also react in horror, because on the psychological level, the picture is a series of object lessons on how to get alongeverything from "shave before you go to school" to "never exercise in a deserted gym." After all, there are beasts everywhere. 6 If I Was a Teenage Werewolf is, psychologically, that old dream of having your pants fall down when you stand up during homeroom period to salute the flag, taken to its most nightmarish extremethe ultimate hirsute outsider menacing the peer groups at Our Town Highthen I Was a Teenage Frankenstein is a sick parable of total glandular breakdown. It is a movie for every fifteenyearold who ever stood in front of her or his mirror in the morning looking nervously at the fresh pimple that surfaced in the night and realizing glumly that even StriDex Medicated Pads weren't going to solve the whole problem no matter what Dick Clark said. I keep coming back to pimples, you may say. You are right. In many ways I see the horror films of the late fifties and early sixtiesup until Psycho, let us sayas paeans to the congested pore. I've suggested that it may be impossible for a people whose bellies are full to feel real horror. Similarly, Americans have had to severely limit their conceptions of physical deformityand that is why the pimple has played such an important part in the developing psyche of the American teenager. Of course, there's probably a guy out there, a guy born with a congenital birth defect, who's muttering to himself don't talk to me about deformity, you asshole . . . and it is certainly true that there are Americans with club feet, Americans without noses, amputee Americans, blind Americans ( I've always wondered if the blind of America felt discriminated against by that McDonald's jingle that goes, "Keep your eyes on your fries . . ."). Beside such cataclysmic physical fuckups of God, man, and nature, a few pimples look about as serious as a hangnail. But I should also point out that in America, cataclysmic physical fuckups are (so far, at least) the exception rather than the rule. Walk down any ordinary street in America and count the serious physical defects you see. If you can walk three miles and come up with more than half a dozen, you're beating the average by a good country mile. Look for people under forty whose teeth have rotted right down to the gum line, children with the bloated bellies of oncoming starvation, folks with smallpox scars, and you will look in vain. You'll not find folks in the A P with running sores on their faces or untreated ulcers on their arms and legs; if you set up a Head Inspection Station at the corner of Broad and Main, you could check a hundred heads and come up with only four or five really lively colonies of head lice. Incidence of these and other ailments rise in. white rural areas and in the inner cities, but in the towns and suburbs of America, most people are looking good. The proliferation of selfhelp courses, the growing cult of personal development "I'm going to be more assertive, if that's all right with you," as Erma Bombeck says), and the increasingly widespread hobby of navelcontemplation are all signs that, for the time being, great numbers of Americans have taken care of the nittygritty realities of life as it is for most of the worldthe survival trip. I can't imagine anyone with a severe nutritional deficiency caring much about I'm OKYou're OK, or anyone trying to scratch out a subsistencelevel existence for himself, his wife, and his eight kids giving much of a toot about Werner Erhard's est course or Rolfing. Such things are for rich folks. Recently Joan Didion wrote a book about her own odyssey through the sixties, The White Album. For rich folks, I suppose it's a pretty interesting book the story of a wealthy white woman who could afford to have her nervous breakdown in Hawaiithe seventies equivalent of worrying over pimples. When the horizons of human experience shrink to HO scale, perspective changes. For the war babies, secure (except for The Bomb) in a world of sixmonth checkups, penicillin, and eternal orthodontics, the pimple became the primary physical deformity with which you were seen on the street or in the halls of your school; most of the other deformities had been taken care of. And say, having mentioned orthodontics, I'll add that many kids who had to wear braces during dose years of heavy, almost suffocating peer pressure saw them as a kind of deformityevery now and then you would hear the cry of "Hey, metalmouth!" in the halls. But most people saw them only as a form of treatment, no more remarkable than a girl with her arm in a sling or a football player wearing an Ace bandage on his knee. But for the pimple there was no cure. And here comes I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. In this film, Whit Bissell assembles the creature, played by Gary Conway, from the bodies of dead hotrodders. The leftover pieces are fed to the alligators under the houseof course we have an idea early on that Bissell himself will end up being munched by the gators, and we are not disappointed. Bissell is a total fiend in this movie, reaching existential heights of villainy "He's crying, even the tear ducts work! . . . Answer me, you have a civil tongue in your head. I know, I sewed it there." But it is Quoted in An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, by Carlos Clarens (New York Capricorn Books, 1967). the unfortunate Conway who catches the eye and mainsprings the film. Like the villainy of Bissell, the physical deformity of Conway is so awful it becomes almost absurd . . . and he looks like nothing so much as a high school kid whose acne has run totally wild. His face is a lumpy basrelief map of mountainous terrain from which one shattered eye bugs madly. And yet . . . and yet . . . somehow this shambling creature still manages to dig rock and roll, so he can't be all bad, can he? We have met the monster, and, as Peter Straub points out in Ghost Story, he is us. We'll have more to say about monstrosity as we go along, and hopefully something of a more profound nature than is contained in the ore we can mine from I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, but I think it's important first to establish the fact that, even on their simplest level, these Tales of the Hook do a number of things without even trying to. Allegory and catharsis are both provided, but only because the creator of horror fiction is above all else an agent of the norm. This is true of horror's more physical side, and we'll find it's also true of works which are more consciously artistic, although when we turn our discussion to the mythic qualities of horror and terror, we may find some rather more disturbing and puzzling associations. But to reach that point, we need to turn our discussion away from film, at least for awhile, and to three novels which form most of the base on which the modern horror genre stands. CHAPTER III Tales of the Tarot ONE OF THE most common themes in fantastic literature is that of immortality. "The thing that would not die" has been a staple of the field from Beowulf to Poe's tales of M. Valdemar and of the telltale heart, to the works of Lovecraft (such as "Cool Air"), Blatty, and even, God save us, John Saul. The three novels I want to discuss in this chapter seem to have actually achieved that immortality, and I believe it's impossible to discuss horror in the years 19501980 with any real fullness of understanding unless we begin with these three books. All three live a kind of halflife outside the bright circle of English literature's acknowledged "classics," and perhaps with good reason. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written at white heat by Robert Louis Stevenson in three days. It so horrified his wife that Stevenson burned the manuscript in his fireplace . . . and then wrote it again from scratch in another three days. Dracula is a frankly palpitating melodrama couched in the frame of the epistolary novela convention that had been breathing its last gasps twenty years before when Wilkie Collins was writing the last of his great mysterysuspense novels. Frankenstein, the most notorious of the three, was penned by a nineteenyearold girl, and although it is the best written of the three, it is the least read, and its author would never again write so quickly, so well, so successfully . . . or so audaciously. In the most unkind of critical lights, all three can be seen as no more than popular novels of their day, with little to distinguish them from novels roughly similarThe Monk, by M. G. Lewis, for instance, or Collins's Armadalebooks largely forgotten except by teachers of Gothic fiction who occasionally pass them on to students, who approach them warily . . . and then gulp them down. But these three are something special. They stand at the foundation of a huge skyscraper of books and filmsthose twentiethcentury gothics which have become known as "the modern horror story." More than that, at the center of each stands (or slouches) a monster that has come to join and enlarge what Burt Hatlen calls "the mythpool"that body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and those who do not go to the films, have communally bathed. Like an almost perfect Tarot hand representing our lusher concepts of evil, they can be neatly laid out the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name. One great novel of supernatural terror, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, has been excluded from this Tarot hand, although it would complete the grouping by supplying the bestknown mythic figure of the supernatural, that of the Ghost. I have excluded it for two reasons first, because The Turn of the Screw, with its elegant drawingroom prose and its tightly woven psychological logic, has had very little influence on the mainstream of the American masscult. We would do better discussing Casper the Friendly Ghost in terms of the archetype. Secondly, the Ghost is an archetype (unlike those represented by Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, or Edward Hyde) which spreads across too broad an area to be limited to a single novel, no matter how great. The archetype of the Ghost is, after all, the Mississippi of supernatural fiction, and although we will discuss it when the time comes, we'll not limit its summingup to a single book. All of these books (including The Turn of the Screw) have certain things in common, and all of them deal with the very basis of the horror story secrets best left untold and things best left unsaid. And yet Stevenson, Shelley, and Stoker (James, too) all promise to tell us the secret. They do so with varying degrees of effect and success . . . and none of them can be said to have really failed. Maybe that's what's kept the novels alive and vital. At any rate, there they stand, and it seems to me impossible to write a book of this sort without doing something with them. It's a matter of roots. It may not do you any good to know that your grandfather liked to sit on the stoop of his building with his sleeves rolled up and smoke a pipe after supper, but it may help to know that he emigrated from Poland in 1888, that he came to New York and helped to build the subway system. If it does nothing else, it may give you a new perspective on your own morning subway ride. In the same way, it is hard to fully understand Christopher Lee as Dracula without talking about that redheaded Irishman Abraham Stoker. So . . . a few roots. 2 Frankenstein has probably been the subject of more films than any other literary work in history, including the Bible. The pictures include Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the WolfMan, The Revenge of Frankenstein, Blackenstein, and Frankenstein 1980, to name just a handful. In light of this, summary would seem almost unnecessary, but as previously pointed out, Frankenstein is not much read. Millions of Americans know the name (not as many as know the name of Ronald McDonald, granted; now there is a real culture hero), but most of them don't realize that Frankenstein is the name of the monster's creator, not the monster itself, a fact which enhances the idea that the book has become a part of Hatlen's American mythpool rather than detracting from it. It's like pointing out that Billy the Kid was in reality a tenderfoot from New York who wore a derby hat, had syphilis, and probably backshot most of his victims. People are interested in such facts, but understand intuitively that they aren't what's really important now . . . if indeed they ever were. One of the things that makes art a force to be reckoned with even by those who don't care for it is the regularity with which myth swallows truth . . . and without so much as a burp of indigestion. Mary Shelley's novel is a rather slow and talky melodrama, its theme drawn in large, careful, and rather crude strokes. It is developed the way a bright but naive debate student might develop his line of argument. Unlike the films based upon it, there are few scenes of violence, and unlike the inarticulate monster of the Universal days ("the Karloff films," as Forry Ackerman so charmingly calls them), Shelley's creature speaks with the orotund, balanced phrases of peer in the House of Lords or William F. Buckley disputing politely with Dick Cavett on a TV talk show. He is a cerebral creature, the direct opposite of Karloff's physically overbearing monster with the shovel forel,ead and the sunken, stupidly crafty eyes; and in all the book's pages there is nothing as chilling as Karloff's line in The Bride of Frankenstein, spoken in that dull, dead, and dragging tenor "Yes . . . dead . . . I love . . . dead." Ms. Shelley's novel is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus," and the Prometheus in question is Victor Frankenstein. He leaves hearth and home to go to university in Ingolstadt (and already we can hear the whirr of the author's grindstone as she prepares to sharpen one of the horror genre's most famous axes There Are Some Things Mankind Was Not Meant To Know), where he gets a lot of crazyand dangerousideas put into his head about galvanism and alchemy. The inevitable result, of course, is the creation of a monster with more parts than a J. C. Whitney automotive catalogue. Trankenstein accomplishes this creation in one long, delirious burst of activityand it is in these scenes that Shelley offers us her most vivid prose. On the grave robbery necessary to the task at hand Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance . . . . I collected bones from charnelhouses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame . . . . I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. On the dream which follows the completion of the experiment I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the street of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the graveworms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretchthe miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. Victor responds to this vision as any sane man would; he runs shrieking into the night. The remainder of Shelley's story is a Shakespearean tragedy, its classical unity broken only by Ms. Shelley's uncertainty as to where the fatal flaw liesis it in Victor's hubris (usurping a power that belongs only to God) or in his failure to take responsibility for his creation after endowing it with the lifespark? The monster begins its revenge against its creator by killing Frankenstein's little brother, William. We are not terribly sorry to see William go, by the way; when the monster tries to befriend the boy, William replies "Hideous monster! Let me go. My papa is a syndiche is M. Frankensteinhe will punish you. You dare not keep me." This piece of richkid snottiness is Willy's last; when the monster hears the name of its creator on the boy's lips, he wrings the kid's bratty little neck. A blameless servant in the Frankenstein household, Justine Moritz, is accused of the crime and is promptly hanged for itthus doubling the unfortunate Frankenstein's load of guilt. The monster approaches his creator soon after and tells him the story. The upshot of the matter is that he wants a mate. He tells Frankenstein that if his wish is granted, he will take his lady and the two of them will live out their span in some desolate wasteland (South America is suggested, as New Jersey had not yet been invented), removed from the eye and mind of man forever. The alternative, the monster threatens, is a reign of terror. He voices his existential credobetter to do evil than do nothing at allby saying, "I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you, my archenemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care; I will work at your destruction . . . . I will desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth." Much of the story is unintentionally hilarious. The monster hides in a shed adjacent to a peasant hut. One of the peasants, Felix, just happens to be teaching his girlfriend, a runaway Arabian noblewoman named Safie, his language; thus the monster learns how to talk. His reading primers are Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and The Sorrows of Werter sic, books he has discovered in a castoff trunk lying in a ditch. This baroque talewithinatale is only rivaled in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, when Crusoe strips naked, swims out to the foundering ship that has marooned him, and then, according to Defoe, fills his pockets with all sorts of goodies. My admiration for such invention knows no bounds. At length, Victor agrees, and actually does make the woman. He accomplishes this second act of creation on a desolate island in the Orkney chain, and in these pages Mary Shelley creates an intensity of mood and atmosphere that nearly rivals the creation of the original. Doubts assail Frankenstein moments before he is to imbue the creature with life. He imagines the world desolated by the pair of them. Even worse, he imagines them as a hideous Adam and Eve of an entire race of monsters. A child of her times, Shelley apparently never considered the idea that for a man capable of creating life from moldering spare parts, it would be child's play to create a woman without the capacity for conceiving a child. The monster turns up immediately after Frankenstein has destroyed its mate, of course; he has several words for Victor Frankenstein and none of them are "happy birthday." The reign of terror he has promised takes place like a chain of exploding firecrackers (although in Ms. Shelley's sedate prose they are more like a roll of caps). Frankenstein's boyhood friend, Henry Clerval, is strangled by the monster for openers. Shortly thereafter the monster utters the book's most horrible innuendo; he promises Frankenstein, "I will be with you on your wedding night." The implications of this threat, for readers of Mary Shelley's time as well as our own, go beyond murder. Frankenstein responds to this threat by almost immediately marrying his childhood sweetheart, Elizabethnot one of the book's more believable moments, although hardly in a class with the abandoned trunk in the ditch or the runaway Arabian noblewoman. On their wedding night, Victor goes out to confront the creature, having naively assumed that the monster's threat is against himself. Meanwhile, the monster has broken into the small but Victor and Elizabeth have taken for the night. Exit Elizabeth. Frankenstein's father goes next, a victim of shock and heartbreak. Frankenstein pursues his demon creation relentlessly north, into the Arctic wastes, where lie dies aboard the Polebound ship of Robert Walton, another scientist determined to crack open the mysteries of God and Nature . . . and the circle neatly closes. 3 So the question arises How did it happen that this modest gothic tale, which was only about a hundred pages long in its first draft (Ms. Shelley's husband, Percy, encouraged her to flesh it out), became caught in a kind of cultural echo chamber, amplifying through the years until, a hundred and sixtyfour years later, we have a cereal called Frankenberry (closely related to those two other favorites of the breakfast table, Count Chocula and Booberry) ; an old TV series called The Munsters, which has apparently gone into terminal syndication; Aurora Frankenstein model kits, which, when completed, delight the happy young modelmaker with a glowinthedark creature lurching through a glowinthedark graveyard; and a saying such as "He looked like Frankenstein" as a kind of apotheosis of ugly? The most obvious answer to this question is, the movies. The movies did it. |
And this is a true answer, as far as it goes. As has been pointed out in film books ad infinitum (and possibly ad nauseam), the movies have been very good at providing that cultural echo chamber . . . perhaps because, in terms of ideas as well as acoustics, the best place to create an echo is in a large empty space. In place of the ideas that books and novels give us, the movies often substitute large helpings of gut emotion. To this American movies have added a fierce sense of image, and the two together create a dazzling show. Take Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, for instance. In terms of ideas, the film is an idiotic mishmash. In terms of image and emotionthe young kidnap victim being pulled from the cistern at dawn, the bad guy terrorizing the busload of children, the granite face of Dirty Harry Callahan himselfthe film is brilliant. Even the best of liberals walk out of a film like Dirty Harry or Peckinpah's Straw Dogs looking as if they have been clopped over the head . . . or run over by a train. There are films of ideas, of course, ranging all the way from Birth of a Nation to Annie Hall. But until a few years ago these were largely the province of foreign filmmakers (the cinema "new wave" that broke in Europe from 1946 until about 1965 ), and these movies have always been chancy in America, playing at your neighborhood "art house" with subtitles, if they play at all. I think it's easy to misread the success of Woody Allen's later films in this regard. In America's urban areas, his filmsand films such as Cousin, Cousinegenerate long lines at the box office, and they certainly get what George (Night of the Lining Dead, Dawn of the Dead) Romero calls "good ink," but in the sticksthe quad cinema in Davenport, Iowa, or the twin in Portsmouth, New Hampshirethese pictures play a fast week or two and then disappear. It is Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit that Americans really seem to take to; when Americans go to the films, they seem to want billboards rather than ideas; they want to check their brains at the box office and watch car crashes, custard pies, and monsters on the prowl. Ironically, it took a foreign director, the Italian Sergio Leone, to somehow frame the archetypal American movie; to define and typify what most American filmgoers seem to want. What Leone did in A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and most grandiosely in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly cannot even properly be called satire. T.G.T.B.A.T.U. in particular is a huge and wonderfully vulgar overstatement of the already overstated archetypes of American film westerns. In this movie gunshots seem as loud as atomic blasts; closeups seem to go on for minutes at a stretch, gunfights for hours; and the streets of Leone's peculiar little Western towns all seem as wide as freeways. So when one asks who or what turned Mary Shelley's wellspoken monster with his education from The Sorrows of Young Werther and Paradise Lost into a pop archetype, the movies are a perfectly good answer. God knows the movies have turned unlikelier subjects into archetypesscuzzy mountainmen matted with dirt and crawling with lice become proud and handsome symbols of the frontier (Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson, or pick the Sunn International picture of your choice), halfwitted killers become representatives of American's dying free spirit (Beatty and Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde), and even incompetency becomes myth and archetype, as in the Blake EdwardsPeter Sellers pictures starring the late Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. Seen in the context of such archetypes, the American movies have created their own Tarot deck, and most of us are familiar with the cards, cards such as the War Hero (Audie Murphy, John Wayne), the Strong and Silent Peace Officer (Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood), the Whore with the Heart of Gold, the Crazed Hoodlum ("Top of the world, ma!"), the Ineffectual but Amusing Dad, the CanDo Mom, the Kid from the Gutter Who Is On His Way Up, and a dozen others. That all of these creations are stereotypes developed with varying degrees of cleverness goes without saying, but even in the most inept hands, that reverberation, that cultural echo, seems to be there. But we're not discussing the War Hero or the Strong, Silent Peace Officer here; we are discussing that everpopular archetype, the Thing Without a Name. For surely if any novel spans the entire period of bookintofilmintomyth, Frankenstein is that book. It was the subject of one of the first "story" films ever made, a onereeler starring Charles Ogle as the creature. Ogle's conception of the monster caused him to tease his hair and to apparently cover his face with partially dried Bisquick. That film was produced by Thomas Edison. The same archetype is on view today as the subject of the CBS television series The Incredible Hulk, which has managed to combine two of the archetypes we are discussing here . . . and to do so with a fair amount of success (The Incredible Hulk can be seen as a Werewolf story as well as a Thing story). Although I have to say that each transformation from David Banner into the Hulk leaves me wondering where the hell the guy's shoes go to and how he gets them back. "Ole greenskin is back," my sevenyearold son Joe is apt to say comfortably when David Banner begins his shirtripping, pantsshredding transformation. Joe quite rightly sees the Hulk not as a frightening agent of chaos but as a blind force of nature fated only to do good. Oddly enough, the comforting lesson that many horror movies seem to teach the young is that fate is kind. Not a bad lesson at all for the little people, who so rightly see themselves as hostages to forces larger than themselves. So we begin with the moviesbut what has turned Frankenstein into a movie not just once but again and again and again? One possibility is that the storyline, although constantly changed (perverted, one is tempted to say) by the filmmakers who have used (and abused) it, usually contains the wonderful dichotomy that Mary Shelley built into her story on one hand the horror writer is an agent of the norm, he or she wants us to watch for the mutant, and we feel Victor Frankenstein's horror and disgust at the relentless, charnel creature he has made. But on the other hand, we grasp the fact of the creature's innocence and the author's infatuation with the tabula rasa idea. The monster strangles Henry Clerval and promises Frankenstein he will "be with him on his wedding night," but the monster is also a creature of childlike pleasure and wonder, who beholds the "radiant form" of the moon rising above the trees; he brings wood to the poor peasant family like a good spirit in the night; he seizes the hand of the old blind man, falls on his knees, and begs him "Now is the time! Save and protect me! . . . Do not desert me in the hour of trial!" The creature who strangles snotty William is also the creature who saves a little girl from drowning . . . and is rewarded with a charge of buckshot in the ass for his pains. Mary Shelley islet us bite the bullet and tell the truthnot a particularly strong writer of emotional prose (which is why students who come to the book with great expectations of a fast, gory readexpectations formed by the moviesusually come away feeling puzzled and let down). She's at her best when Victor and his creation argue the pros and cons of the monster's request for a mate like Harvard debatersthat is to say, she is at her best in the realm of pure ideas. So it's perhaps ironic that the facet of the book which seems to have insured its long attractiveness to the movies is Shelley's splitting of the reader into two people of opposing minds the reader who wants to stone the mutation and the reader who feels the stones and cries out at the injustice of it. Even so, no moviemaker has gotten all of this idea; probably James Whale came the closest in his stylish Bride of Frankenstein, where the monster's more existential sorrows (young Werther with bolts through his neck) are boiled down to a more mundane but emotionally powerful specific Victor Frankenstein goes ahead and makes the female . . . but she doesn't like the original monster. Elsa Lanchester, looking like a latterday Studio 54 disco queen, screams when he tries to touch her, and we are in perfect sympathy with the monster when he rips the whole rotten laboratory to pieces. A fellow named Jack Pierce did Boris Karloff's makeup in the original sound version of Frankenstein, creating a face as familiar to most of us (if slightly more ugly) as the uncles and cousins in a family photograph albumsthe square head, the deadwhite, slightly concave brow, the scars, the bolts, the heavy eyelids. Universal Pictures copyrighted Pierce's makeup, and so when Britain's Hammer Films made their series of Frankenstein movies in the late fifties and early sixties, a different concept was used. It is probably not as inspired or as original as the Pierce makeup (in most cases the Hammer Frankenstein bears a closer resemblance to the unfortunate Gary Conway in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein), but the two have one thing in common although in both cases the monster is horrible to look at, there is also something so sad, so miserable there that our hearts actually go out to the creature even as they are shrinking away from it in fear and disgust. The greatest of the Hammer Frankenstein monsters was probably Christopher Lee, who went on to nearly eclipse Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. Lee, a great actor, is the only man to approach Karloff's interpretation of the role, although Karloff was far more fortunate in matters of script and direction. All in all, Christopher Lee fared better as a vampire. As I've said, most directors who have tried their hands at a Frankenstein film (with the exception of those played exclusively for laughs) have sensed this dichotomy and tried to use it. Breathes there a moviegoer with soul so dead who never wished the monster would jump down from that burning windmill and stuff those torches right down the throats of those ignorant slobs so dedicated to ending its life? I doubt if there is such a moviegoer, and if there is, he must be hardhearted indeed. But I don't believe any director has caught the full pathos of the situation, and there is no Frankenstein movie that will bring tears to the eyes as readily as the final reel of King Kong, where the big ape straddles the top of the Empire State Building and tries to fight off those machinegunequipped biplanes as if they were the prehistoric birds of his native island. Like Eastwood in Leone's spaghetti westerns, Kong is the archetype of the archetype. We see the horror of being a monster in the eyes of Boris Karloff and, later, in those of Christopher Lee; in King Kong it is spread across the ape's entire face, due to the marvelous special effects of Willis O'Brien. The result is almost a cartoon of the friendless, dying outsider. It is one of the great fusions of love and horror, innocence and terror, the emotional reality which Mary Shelley only suggests in her novel. Even so, I suspect she would have understood and agreed with Dino De Laurentiis's remark on the great attraction of that dichotomy. De Laurentiis was speaking of his own forgettable remake of King Kong, but he could have been speaking about the hapless monster itself when he said, "Nobody cry when jaws die." Well, we don't exactly cry when Frankenstein's monster diesnot the way audiences weep when Kong, that shanghaied hostage of a simpler, more romantic world, topples from his perch atop the Empire Statebut we are, perhaps, disgusted at our own sense of relief. 4 Although the gathering which ultimately resulted in Mary Shelley's writing of Frankenstein took place on the shores of Lake Geneva, miles from British soil, it must still qualify as one of the maddest British tea parties of all time. And in a funny way, the gathering may have been responsible not only for Frankenstein, published that same year, but for Dracula as well, a novel written by a man who would not be born for another thirtyone years. It was June of 1816, and the band of travelersPercy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidorihad been confined to quarters by two weeks of torrential rains. They began a joint reading of German ghost stories from a book called Fantasmagoria, and the gathering began to get decidedly weird. Things really culminated when Percy Shelley threw a kind of fit. Dr. Polidori noted in his diary "After tea, 12 o'clock, really began to talk ghosts. Lord Byron read some verses of Coleridge's 'Christabel,' (the part about) the witch's breast; when silence ensued, Shelley, suddenly shrieking, and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. [I] Threw water in his face and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. Shelley, and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples; which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him." Leave it to the English. An agreement was made that each member of the party would try his or her hand at creating a new ghost story. It was Mary Shelley, whose work as a result of the gathering would alone endure, who had the most trouble in setting to work. She had no ideas at all, and several nights passed before her imagination was fired by a nightmare in which "a pale student of unhallowed arts created the awful phantom of a man." It is the creation scene presented in chapers four and five of her novel (quoted from earlier). Percy Bysshe Shelly produced a fragment entitled "The Assassins." George Gordon Byron produced an interesting macabre tale titled "The Burial." But it is John Polidori, the good doctor, who is sometimes mentioned as a possible link to Bram Stoker and Dracula. His short story was later expanded to novel length and became a great success. It was called "The Vampyre." In point of fact, Polidori's novel isn't very good . . . and it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to "The Burial," the short story written by his immeasurably more talented patient, Lord Byron. There is perhaps a breath of plagiarism there. We do know that Byron and Polidori argued violently shortly after the interlude at Lake Geneva, and that their friendship ended. It is not entirely beyond supposition that the similarity between the two tales was the cause. Polidori, who was twentyone at the time he wrote "The Vampyre," came to an unhappy end. The success of the novel he developed from his story encouraged him to retire from the doctoring profession and to become a fulltime writer. He had little success at writing, although he was quite good at piling up gambling debts. When he felt his reputation had become irredeemably impugned, he behaved as we would expect of an English gentleman of the day and shot himself. Stoker's turnofthecentury horror novel Dracula bears only a slight resemblance to Polidori's The Vampyrethe field is a narrow one, as we will point out again and again, and exclusive of any willful imitation, the family resemblance is always therebut we can be sure that Stoker was aware of Polidori's novel. One believes, after reading Dracula, that Stoker left no stone unturned as he researched the project. Is it so farfetched to believe that he might have read Polidori's novel, have been excited by the subject matter, and determined to write a better book? I like to believe this might be so, much as I like to believe that Polidori really did crib his idea from Lord Byron. That would make Byron the literary grandfather of the legendary Count, who boasts early on to Jonathan Harker that he drove the Turks from Transylvania . . . and Byron himself died while aiding the Greek insurgents against the Turks in 1824, eight years after the gathering with the Shelleys and Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was a death of which the Count himself would have greatly approved. 5 All tales of horror can be divided into two groups those in which the horror results from an act of free and conscious willa conscious decision to do eviland those in which the horror is predestinate, coming from outside like a stroke of lightning. The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of job, who becomes the human AstroTurf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan. The stories of horror which are psychologicalthose which explore the terrain of the human heartalmost always revolve around the freewill concept; "inside evil," if you will, the sort we have no right laying off on God the Father. This is Victor Frankenstein creating a living being out of spare parts to satisfy his own hubris, and then compounding his sin by refusing to take the responsibility for what he has done. It is Dr. Henry Jekyll, who creates Mr. Hyde essentially out of Victorian hypocrisyhe wants to be able to carouse and partydown without anyone, even the lowliest Whitechapel drab, knowing that he is anything but saintly Dr. Jekyll whose feet are "ever treading the upward path." Perhaps the best tale of inside evil ever written is Poe's "The TellTale Heart," where murder is committed out of pure evil, with no mitigating circumstances whatever to tincture the brew. Poe suggests we will call his narrator mad because we must always believe that such perfect, motiveless evil is mad, for the sake of our own sanity. Novels and stories of horror which deal with "outside evil" are often harder to take seriously; they are apt to be no more than boys' adventure yarns in disguise, and in the end the nasty invaders from outer space are repelled; or at the last possible instant the Handsome Young Scientist comes up with the gimmick solution . . . as when, in Beginning of the End, Peter Graves creates a sonic gun which draws all the giant grasshoppers into Lake Michigan. And yet it is the concept of outside evil that is larger, more awesome. Lovecraft grasped this, and it is what makes his stories of stupendous, Cyclopean evil so effective when they are good. Many aren't, but when Lovecraft was on the moneyas in "The Dunwich Horror," "The Rats in the Walls," and best of all, "The Colour Out of Space"his stories packed an incredible wallop. The best of them make us feel the size of the universe we hang suspended in, and suggest shadowy forces that could destroy us all if they so much as grunted in their sleep. After all, what is the paltry inside evil of the Abomb when compared to Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, or YogSothoth, the Goat with a Thousand Young? Bram Stoker's Dracula seems a remarkable achievement to me because it humanizes the outside evil concept; we grasp it in a familiar way Lovecraft never allowed, and we can feel its texture. It is an adventure story, but it never degenerates to the level of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Varney the Vampyre. Stoker achieves the effect to a large degree by keeping the evil literally outside for most of his long story. The Count is onstage almost constantly during the first four chapters, dueling with Jonathan Harker, pressing him slowly to the wall ( "Later there will be kisses for all of you," Harker hears him tell the three weird sisters as he [Harker] lies in a semiswoon) . . . and then he disappears for most of the book's three hundred or so remaining pages. It is one of English literature's most remarkable and engaging tricks, a trompe l'oeil that has rarely been matched. Stoker creates his fearsome, immortal monster much the way a child can create the shadow of a giant rabbit on the wall simply by wiggling his fingers in front of a light. The Count appears onstage another halfdozen times, most splendidly in Mina Murray Harker's bedroom. The men in her life burst into her room following the death of Renfield and are greeted with a scene worthy of Bosch the Count clutching Mina, his face slathered with her blood. In an obscene parody of the marriage sacrament, he opens a vein in his own chest with one dirty fingernail and forces her to drink. Other glimpses of the Count are less powerful. We glimpse him once strolling along an avenue in a foppish straw hat, and once ogling a pretty girl like any runofthemill dirty old man. The Count's evil seems totally predestinate; the fact that he comes to London with its "teeming millions" does not proceed from any mortal being's evil act. Harker's ordeal at Castle Dracula is not the result of any inner sin or weakness; he winds up on the Count's doorstep because his boss asked him to go. Similarly, the death of Lucy Westenra is not a deserved death. Her encounter with Dracula in the Whitby churchyard is the moral equivalent of being struck by lightning while playing golf. There is nothing in her life to justify the end she comes to at the hands of Van Helsing and her fianc, Arthur Holmwoodher heart burst apart by a stake, her head chopped off, her mouth stuffed with garlic. It is not that Stoker is ignorant of inside evil or the Biblical concept of free will; in Dracula the concept is embodied by that most engaging of maniacs, Mr. Renfield, who also symbolizes the root source of vampirismcannibalism. Renfield, who is working his way up to the big leagues the hard way (lie begins by snacking on flies, progresses to munching on spiders, then to dining on birds), invites the Count into Dr. Seward's madhouse knowing perfectly well what he is doingbut to suggest he is a large enough character to take responsibility for all the terrors that follow is to suggest the absurd. His character, though engaging, is just not strong enough to take that weight. We assume that if Dracula hadn't gotten in by using Renfield, he would have gotten in another way. In a way it was the mores of Stoker's day which dictated that the Count's evil should come from outside, because much of the evil embodied in the Count is a perverse sexual evil. Stoker revitalized the vampire legend largely by writing a novel which fairly pants with sexual energy. The Count doesn't ever attack Jonathan Harker; in fact he is promised to the weird sisters who live in the castle with him. Harker's one brush with these voluptuous but lethal harpies is a sexual one, and it is presented in his diary in terms that were, for turnofthecentury England, pretty graphic The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the sharp white teeth . . . . Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck . . . . I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a langourous ecstacy and waitedwaited with beating heart. In the England of 1897, a girl who "went on her knees" was not the sort of girl you brought home to meet your mother; Harker is about to be orally raped. and he doesn't mind a bit. And it's all right, because he is not responsible. In matters of sex, a highly moralistic society can find a psychological escape valve in the concept of outside evil this thing is bigger than both of us, baby. Harker is a bit disappointed when the Count enters and breaks up this little ttette. Probably most of Stoker's wideeyed readers were, too. Similarly, the Count preys only on women first Lucy, then Mina. Lucy's reactions to the Count's bite are much the same as Jonathan's feelings about the weird sisters. To be perfectly vulgar, Stoker indicates in a fairly classy way that Lucy is coming her brains out. By day an evermorepallid but perfectly Apollonian Lucy conducts a proper and decorous courtship with her promised husband, Arthur Holmwood. By night she carouses in Dionysian abandon with her dark and bloody seducer. In real life at this same time, England was experiencing a mesmerism fad. Franz Mesmer, the father of what we now call hypnotism, was at that time giving demonstrations of the feat. Like the Count, Mesmer preferred young girls, and he would put them into a trance by stroking their bodies . . . all over. Many of his female subjects experienced "wonderful feelings that seemed to culminate in a burst of pleasure." It seems likely that these "culminating bursts of pleasure" were in fact orgasmsbut very few unmarried women of the day would have known an orgasm if it bit them on the nose, and the effect was simply seen as one of the pleasanter side effects of a scientific process. Many of these girls came to Mesmer and begged to be mesmerized again; "The men don't like it but the little girls understand," as the old rhythm and blues song goes. Anyway, the point made in regard to vampirism applies just as well to mesmerism the "culminating burst of pleasure" was all right because it came from outside; she experiencing the pleasure could not be held responsible. These strong sexual undertones are surely one reason why the movies have conducted such a long love affair with the Vampire, beginning with Max Schreck in Nosferatu, continuing through the Lugosi interpretation (1931), the Christopher Lee interpretation, right up to 'Salem's Lot (1979) , where Reggie Nalder's interpretation brings us full circle to Max Schreck's again. When all else is said and done, it's a chance to show women in scanty nightclothes, and guys giving the sleeping ladies some of the worst hickeys you ever saw, and to enact, over and over, a situation of which movie audiences never seem to tire the primal rape scene. But maybe there's even more going on here sexually than first meets the eye. Early on I mentioned my own. belief that much of the horror story's attraction for us is that it allows us to vicariously exercise those antisocial emotions and feelings which society demands we keep stoppered up under most circumstances, for society's good and our own. Anyway, Dracula sure isn't a book about "normal" sex; there's no Missionary Position going on here. Count Dracula (and the weird sisters as well) are apparently dead from the waist down; they make love with their mouths alone. The sexual basis of Dracula is an infantile oralism coupled with a strong interest in necrophilia (and pedophilia, some would say, considering Lucy in her role as the "bloofer lady"). It is also sex without responsibility, and in the unique and amusing term coined by Erica Jong, the sex in Dracula can be seen as the ultimate zipless fuck. This infantile, retentive attitude toward sex may be one reason why the vampire myth, which in Stoker's hands seems to say "I will rape you with my mouth and you will love it; instead of contributing potent fluid to your body, I will remove it," has always been so popular with adolescents still trying to come to grips with their own sexuality. The vampire appears to have found a shortcut through all the tribal mores of sex . . . and he lives forever, to boot. 6 There are other interesting elements in Stoker's book, all sorts of them, but it is the elements of outside evil and sexual invasion that seem to have powered the novel most strongly. We can see the legacy of Stoker's weird sisters in the wonderfully lush and voluptuous vampires in Hammer's 1960 film, Brides of Dracula (and also be assured in the best moralistic tradition of the horror movie that the wages of kinky sex are a stake through the heart while catching some z's in your coffin) and dozens of other movies both before and after. When I wrote my own vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot, I decided to largely jettison the sexual angle, feeling that in a society where homosexuality, group sex, oral sex, and even, God save us, water sports have become matters of public discussion (not to mention, if you believe the Forum column in Penthouse, sex with various fruits and vegetables), the sexual engine that powered much of Stoker's book might have run out of gas. To some degree that is probably true. Hazel Court constantly falling out of the top of her dress (well . . . almost) in AIP's The Raven (1963) looks nearly comic today, not to mention Bela Lugosi's corny Valentino imitation in Universal's Dracula, which even hardened horror aficionados and cinema buffs cannot help giggling over. But sex will almost certainly continue to be a driving force in the horror genre; sex that is sometimes presented in disguised, Freudian terms, such as Lovecraft's vaginal creation, Great Cthulhu. After viewing this manytentacled, slimy, gelid creature through Lovecraft's eyes, do we need to wonder why Lovecraft manifested "little interest" in sex? Much of the sex in horror fiction is deeply involved in power tripping; it's sex based upon relationships where one partner is largely under the control of the other; sex which almost inevitably leads to some bad end. I refer you, for instance, to Alien, where the two women crew members are presented in perfectly nonsexist terms until the climax, where Sigourney Weaver must battle the terrible interstellar hitchhiker that has even managed to board her tiny space lifeboat. During this final battle, Ms. Weaver is dressed in bikini panties and a thin Tshirt, every inch the woman, and at this point interchangeable with any of Dracula's victims in the Hammer cycle of films in the sixties. The point seems to be, "The girl was okay until she got undressed." I thought there was another extremely sexist interlude in Alien, one that disappoints on a plot level no matter how you feel about women's ability as compared to men's. The Sigourney Weaver character, who is presented as toughminded and heroic up to this point, causes the destruction of the mothership Nostromo (and perhaps helps to cause the deaths of the two other remaining crew members) by going after the ship's cat. Enabling the males in the audience, of course, to relax, roll their eyes at each other, and say either aloud or telepathically, "Isn't that just like a woman?" It is a plot twist which depends upon a sexist idea for its believability, and we might well answer the question asked above by asking in turn, "Isn't that just like a male chauvinist pig of a Hollywood scriptwriter?" This gratuitous little twist doesn't spoil the movie, but it's still sort of a bummer. The business of creating horror is much the same as the business of paralyzing an opponent with the martial artsit is the business of finding vulnerable points and then applying pressure there. The most obvious psychological pressure point is the fact of our own mortality. Certainly it is the most universal. But in a society that sets such a great store by physical beauty (in a society, that is, where a few pimples become the cause of psychic agony) and sexual potency, a deepseated uneasiness and ambivalence about sex becomes another natural pressure point, one that the writer of the horror story or film gropes for instinctively. In the barechested swordandsorcery epics of Robert E. Howard, for instance, the female "heavies" are presented as monsters of sexual depravity, indulging in exhibitionism and sadism. As previously pointed out, one of the most triedandtrue movie poster concepts of all time shows the monsterwhether it be a BEM (bugeyed monster) from This Island Earth or the mummy for Hammer's 1959 remake of the Universal filmstriding through the darkness or the smoking ruins of some city with the body of an unconscious lovely in its arms. Beauty and the beast. You are in my power. Hehhehheh. It's that primal rape scene again. And the primal, perverse rapist is the Vampire, stealing not only sexual favors but life itself. |
And best of all, perhaps, in the eyes of those millions of teenaged boys who have watched the Vampire take wing and then flutter down inside the bedroom of some sleeping young lady, is the fact that the Vampire doesn't even have to get it up to do it. What better news to those on the threshold of the sexual sphere, most of whom have been taught (as certainly they have been, not in the least by the movies themselves) that successful sexual relationships are based upon man's domination and woman's submission? The joker in this deck is that most fourteenyearold boys who have only recently discovered their own sexual potential feel capable of dominating only the centerfold in Playboy with total success. Sex makes young adolescent boys feel many things, but one of them, quite frankly, is scared. The horror film in general and the Vampire film in particular confirms the feeling. Yes, it says; sex is scary; sex is dangerous. And I can prove it to you right here and now. Siddown, kid. Grab your popcorn. I want to tell you a story . . . . 7 Enough of sexual portents, at least for the time being. Let's flip up the third card in this uneasy Tarot hand. Forget Michael Landon and AIP for the time being. Gaze, if you dare, on the face of the real Werewolf. His name, gentle reader, is Edward Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson conceived Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a shocker, pure and simple, a potboiler and, hopefully, a money machine. It so horrified his wife that Stevenson burned the first draft and rewrote it, injecting a little moral uplift to please his spouse. Of the three books under discussion here, Jekyll and Hyde is the shortest (it runs about seventy pages in close type) and undoubtedly the most stylish. If Bram Stoker serves us great whacks of horror in Dracula, leaving us, after Harker's confrontation with Dracula in Transylvania, the staking of Lucy Westenra, the death of Renfield and the branding of Mina, feeling as if we have been hit square in the chops by a twobyfour, then Stevenson's brief and cautionary tale is like the quick, mortal stab of an icepick. Like a policecourt trial (to which the critic G. K. Chesterton compared it), we get the narrative through a series of different voices, and it is through the testimony of those involved that Dr. Jekyll's unhappy tale unfolds. It begins as Jekyll's lawyer, Mr. Utterson, and a distant cousin, one Richard Enfield, stroll through London one morning. As they pass "a certain sinister block of building" with "a blind forehead of discoloured wall" and a door which is "blistered and distained," Enfield is moved to tell Utterson a story about that particular door. He was on the scene one early morning, he says, when he observed two people approaching the corner from opposite directionsa man and a little girl. They collide. The girl is knocked flat and the manEdward Hydesimply goes on walking, trampling the screaming child underfoot. A crowd gathers (what all of these people are doing abroad at three A.M. of a cold winter's morning is never explained; perhaps they were all discussing what Robinson Crusoe used for pockets when he swam out to the foundering ship), and Enfield collars Mr. Hyde. Hyde is a man of so loathsome a countenance that Enfield is actually obliged to protect him from the mob, which seems on the verge of tearing him apart "We were keeping the women off as best we could, for they were as wild as harpies," Enfield tells Utterson. Moreover, the doctor who was summoned "turn[ed] sick and white with desire to kill him." Once again we see the horror writer as an agent of the norm; the crowd that has gathered is watching faithfully for the mutant, and in the loathsome Mr. Hyde they seem to have found the genuine articlealthough Stevenson is quick to tell us, through Enfield, that outwardly there appears to be nothing much wrong with Hyde. Although he's no John Travolta, he's certainly no Michael Landon sporting a pelt above his high school jacket, either. Hyde, Enfield admits to Utterson, "carried it off like Satan." When Enfield demands compensation in the name of the little girl, Hyde disappears through the door under discussion and returns a short time later with a hundred pounds, ten in gold and a check for the balance. Although Enfield won't tell, we find out in due course that the signature on the check was that of Henry Jekyll. Enfield closes his account with one of the most telling descriptions of the Werewolf in all of horror fiction. Although it describes very little in the way we usually think of description, it says a great dealwe all know what Stevenson means, and he knew we would, because he knew, apparently, that all of us are old hands at watching for the mutant He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarcely know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary looking man, and yet I can really name nothing out of the way . . . . And it's not for want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment. It was Rudyard Kipling, years later and in another tale, who named what was bothering Enfield about Mr. Hyde. Wolfsbane and potions aside (and Stevenson himself dismissed the device of the smoking potion as "so much huggermugger"), it is very simple somewhere upon Mr. Hyde, Enfield sensed what Kipling called the Mark of the Beast. 8 Utterson has information of his own with which Enfield's tale neatly dovetails (God, the construction of Stevenson's novel is beautiful; it ticks smoothly away like a wellmade watch). He has custody of Jekyll's will and knows that Jekyll's heir is Edward Hyde. He also knows that the door Enfield has pointed out stands at the back of Jekyll's townhouse. A bit of a swerve off the main road here. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published a good three decades before the ideas of Sigmund Freud would begin to surface, but in the first two sections of Stevenson's novella the author gives us a startlingly apt metaphor for Freud's idea of the conscious and subconscious mindsor, to be more specific, the contrast between superego and id. Here is one large block of buildings. On Jekyll's side, the side presented to the public eye, it seems a lovely, graceful building, inhabited by one of London's most respected physicians. On the other sidebut still a part of the same buildingwe find rubbish and squalor, people abroad on questionable errands at three in the morning, and that "blistered and distained door" set in "a blind forehead of discoloured wall." On Jekyll's side, all things are in order and life goes its steady Apollonian round. On the other side, Dionysus prances unfettered. Enter Jekyll here, exit Hyde there. Even if you're an antiFreudian and won't grant Stevenson's insight into the human psyche, you'll perhaps grant that the building serves as a nice symbol for the duality of human nature. Well, back to business. The next witness of any real importance in the case is a maid who witnesses the murder which turns Hyde into a fugitive from the scaffold. It's the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, and as Stevenson sketches it for us we hear echoes of every nasty murder to hit the tabloids in our time Richard Speck and the student nurses, Juan Corona, even the unfortunate Dr. Herman Tarnower. Here is the beast caught in the act of pulling down its weak and unsuspecting prey, acting not with cunning and intelligence but only with stupid, nihilistic violence. Can anything be worse? Yes, apparently one thing his face is not so terribly different from the face you and I see in the bathroom mirror each morning. And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on . . . like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bonds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with apelike fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted. All that's really lacking here to make the tabloid picture complete is a scrawl of LITTLE PIGGIES or HELTER SKELTER on a nearby wall, written in the victim's blood. Stevenson further informs us that "The stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter . . . ." Stevenson, here and in other places, describes Hyde as "apelike." He suggests that Hyde, like Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, is a step backward along the evolutionary scale, something vicious in the human makeup that has not yet been bred out . . . and isn't that what really frightens us in the myth of the Werewolf? This is inside evil with a vengeance, and it is no wonder that clergymen of Stevenson's day hailed his story. They apparently knew a parable when they read one, and saw Hyde's vicious caning of Sir Danvers Carew as the old Adam coming out full blast. Stevenson suggests that the Werewolf's face is our face, and it takes some of the humor out of Lou Costello's famous comeback to Lon Chaney, Jr. in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Chaney, playing the persecuted skinchanging Larry Talbot, mourns to Costello "You don't understand. When the moon rises, I'll turn into a wolf." Costello replies "Yeah . . . you and about five million other guys." At any rate, Carew's murder leads the police to Hyde's Soho flat. The bird has flown the coop, but the Scotland Yard inspector in charge of the investigation is sure they'll get him, because Hyde has burned his checkbook. "Why, money's life to the man. We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get out the handbills." But Hyde, of course, has another identity he can turn to. Jekyll, at last frightened back to reason, determines never to use the potion again. Then he discovers to his horror that the change has begun to occur spontaneously. He has created Hyde to escape the strictures of propriety, but has discovered that evil has its own strictures; in the end he has become Hyde's prisoner. The clergy hailed Jekyll and Hyde because they believed the book showed the grim results of allowing man's "baser nature" more than the shortest possible tether; modern readers are more apt to sympathize with Jekyll as a man looking for an escape routeif only for short periodsfrom the straitjacket of Victorian prudery and morality. Either way, when Utterson and Jekyll's butler, Poole, break into Jekyll's laboratory, Jekyll is dead . . . and it is the body of Hyde which they find. The worst horror of all has occurred; the man has died thinking like Jekyll and looking like Hyde, the secret sin (or the Mark of the Beast, if you prefer) which he hoped to conceal (or to Hyde, if you prefer) stamped indelibly on his face. He concludes his confession with the words, "Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Dr. Jekyll to an end." It's easytoo easyto get caught up in the story of Jekyll and his ferocious alter ego as a religious parable told in pennydreadful terms. It's a moral tale, sure, but it seems to me that it's also a close study of hypocrisyits causes, its dangers, its damages to the spirit. Jekyll is the hypocrite who falls into the pit of secret sin; Utterson, the book's real hero, is Jekyll's exact opposite. Because this seems important, not only to Stevenson's book but to the whole idea of the Werewolf, let me take a minute of your time to quote from the book again. Here's how he introduces Utterson to us on page one of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty, and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. . . . He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theater, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. I must admit that, after reading Stevenson's description of Utterson, I found myself curious as to just how he was lovable! About the Ramones, an amusing punkrock band that surfaced some four years ago, Linda Ronstadt is on record as saying, "That music's so tight it's hemorrhoidal." You could say the same thing for Utterson, who fulfills the function of court stenographer in the book and still manages to come off as the story's most engaging character. He's a Victorian prig of the first water, of course, and one would fear for a son or daughter brought up by the old man, but Stevenson's point is that there is as little of the hypocrite in him as there is in any man living. ("We may sin in thought, word, or deed," the old Methodist credo goes, and I suppose that by thinking of fine vintages while he knocks off his ginandwater, we could say that Utterson is a hypocrite in thought . . . but here we're entering a fuzzy gray area where the concept of free will seems harder to grasp; "The mind is a monkey," Robert Stone's protagonist muses in Dog Soldiers, and he is so right.) The difference between Utterson and Jekyll is that Jekyll would only drink gin to mortify a taste for vintages in public. In the privacy of his own library he's the sort of man who might well drink an entire bottle of good port (and probably congratulate himself on not having to share it, or any of his fine Jamaican cigars, either). Perhaps he would not want to be caught dead attending a risqu play in the West End, but he is more than happy to go as Hyde. Jekyll does not want to mortify any of his tastes. He only wants to gratify them in secret. 9 All of that is very interesting, you may be saying, but the fact is there hasn't been a good Werewolf movie in ten or fifteen years (a couple of pretty dismal madeforTV movies, such as Moon of the Wolf, but they hardly count); and although there have been a good number of JekyllandHyde movies, I don't believe there has been a fullfledged remake (or ripoff ) of Stevenson's story since AmericanInternational's Daughter of Dr. Jekyll in the late fifties, and that was a sad comedown for one of the original Mad Doctors, a figure that most horror buffs view with a great deal of affection. Three great actors took the dual role John Barrymore (1920), Fredric March (1932), and Spencer Tracey (1941). March won an Academy Award for the role, earning him the distinction of being the only actor ever to win the award for Best Actor as a result of his efforts in a horror movie. But remember that what we're talking about here, at its most basic level, is the old conflict between id and superego, the free will to do evil or to deny it . . . or in Stevenson's own terms, the conflict between mortification and gratification. This old struggle is the cornerstone of Christianity, but if you want to put it in mythic terms, the twinning of Jekyll and Hyde suggests another duality the aforementioned split between the Apollonian (the creature of intellect, morality, and nobility, "always treading the upward path") and the Dionysian (god of partying and physical gratification; the getdownandboogie side of human nature). If you try to take it any further than the mythic, you come damn close to splitting the body and mind altogether . . . which is exactly the impression Jekyll wants to give his friends that he is a creature of pure mind, with no human tastes or needs at all. It's hard to picture the guy sitting on the fakes with a newspaper. If we look at the Jekyll and Hyde story as a pagan conflict between man's Apollonian potential and his Dionysian desires, we see that the Werewolf myth does indeed run through a great many modern horror novels and movies. Perhaps the best example of all is Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, although in all deference to the master, the idea was there for the taking in Robert Bloch's novel. Bloch, in fact, had been honing this particular vision of human nature in a number of previous books, including The Scarf (which begins with those wonderful, eerie lines "Fetish? You name it. All I know is that I've always had to have it with me . . ." ) and The Deadbeat. These books are not, at least technically, horror novels; there is nary a monster or supernatural occurrence on view. They are labeled "suspense novels." But if we look at them with that ApollonianDionysian conflict in mind, we see that they are very much horror novels; each of them deals with the Dionysian psychopath locked up behind the Apollonian facade of normality . . . but slowly, dreadfully emerging. In short, Bloch has written a number of Werewolf novels in which he has dispensed with the huggermugger of the potion or the wolfsbane. What happened with Bloch when lie ceased writing his Lovecraftian stories of the supernatural (and he never has, completely; see the recent Strange Eons) was not that he ceased being a horror writer; lie simply shifted his perspective from the outside (beyond the stars, under the sea, on the Plains of Leng, or in the deserted belfry of a Providence, Rhode Island, church) to the inside . . . to the place where the Werewolf is. It may be that someday these three novels, The Scarf, The Deadbeat, and Psycho, will be anthologized as a kind of unified triptych, as were James M. Cam's The Postman Alway Ring Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Piercefor in their own way, the novels that Robert Bloch wrote in the 1950s had every bit as much influence on the course of American fiction as did the Cain "heelwithaheart" novels of the 1930s. And although the method of attack is radically different in each case, both the novels of Cain and Bloch are great crime novels; the novels of both adopt a naturalistic view of American life; the novels of both explore the idea of protagonist as antihero; and the novels of both point up the central Apollonian Dionysian conflict and thus become Werewolf novels. Psycho, the best known of the three, deals with Norman Batesand as played by Anthony Perkins in the Hitchcock film, Norman is about as tightassed and hemorrhoidal as they come. To the observing world (or that small part of it that would care to observe the proprietor of a gonetoseed backwater motel), Norman is as normal as they come. Charles Whitman, the Apollonian Eagle Scout who went on a Dionysian rampage from the top of the Texas Tower, comes immediately to mind; Norman seems like such a nice fellow. Certainly Janet Leigh sees no reason to fear him in the closing moments of her life. But Norman is the Werewolf. Only instead of growing hair, his change is effected by donning his dead mother's panties, slip, and dressand hacking up the guests instead of biting them. As Dr. Jekyll keeps secret rooms in Soho and has his own "Mr. Hyde door" at home, so we discover that Norman has his own secret place where his two personae meet in this case it is a loophole behind a picture, which he uses to watch the ladies undress. Psycho is effective because it brings the Werewolf myth home. It is not outside evil, predestination; the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves. We know that Norman is only outwardly the Werewolf when he's wearing Mom's duds and speaking in Mom's voice; but we have the uneasy suspicion that inside he's the Werewolf all the time. Psycho spawned a score of imitators, most of them immediately recognizable by their titles, which suggested more than a few toys in the attic Straitjacket (Joan Crawford does the axwielding honors in this gritty if somewhat overplotted film, made from a Bloch script), Dementia13 (Francis Coppola's first feature film), Nightmare (a Hammer picture), Repulsion. These are only a few of the children of Hitchcock's film, which was adapted for the screen by Joseph Stefano. Stefano went on to pilot television's Outer Limits, which we will get to eventually. 10 It would be ridiculous for me to suggest that all modern horror fiction, both in print and on celluloid, can be boiled down to these three archetypes. It would simplify things enormously, but it would be a false simplification, even with the Tarot card of the Ghost thrown in for good measure. It doesn't end with the Thing, the Vampire, and the Werewolf; there are other bogeys out there in the shadows as well. But these three account for a large bloc of modern horror fiction. We can see the blurry shape of the Thing Without a Name in Howard Hawks's The Thing (it turns outrather disappointingly, I always thoughtto be big Jim Arness tricked out as a vegetable from space) ; the Werewolf raises its shaggy head as Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage and as Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; and we can see the shadow of the Vampire in such diverse films as Them! and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead . . . although in these latter two, the symbolic act of blooddrinking has been replaced by the act of cannibalism itself as the dead chomp into the flesh of their living victims. Romero's Martin is a classy and visually sensuous rendering of the Vampire myth, and one of the few examples of the myth consciously examined in film, as Romero contrasts the romantic assumptions so vital to the myth (as in the John Badham version of Dracula) with the grisly reality of actually drinking blood as it spurts from the veins of the vampire's chosen victim. It is also undeniable that filmmakers seem to return again and again to these three great monsters, and I think that in large part it's because they really are archetypes; which is to say, clay that can be easily molded in the hands of clever children, which is exactly what so many of the filmmakers who work in the genre seem to be. Before leaving these three novels behind, and any kind of indepth analysis of nineteenthcentury supernatural fiction with them (and if you'd like to pursue the subject further, may I recommend H. P. Lovecraft's long essay Supernatural Horror in Literature? It is available in a cheap but handsome and durable Dover paperback edition.), it might be wise to backtrack to the beginning and simply offer a tip of the hat to them for the virtues they possess as novels. There always has been a tendency to see the popular stories of yesterday as social documents, moral tracts, history lessons, or the precursors of more interesting fictions which follow (as Polidori's The Vampyre foreran Dracula, or Lewis's The Monk, which in a way sets the stage for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein)as anything, in fact, but novels standing on their own feet, each with its own tale to tell. When teachers and students turn to the discussion of novels such as Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula upon their own termsthat is, as sustained works of craft and imaginationthe discussion is often all too short. Teachers are more apt to focus on shortcomings, and students more apt to linger on such amusing antiquities as Dr. Seward's phonograph diary, Quincey P. Morris's hideously overdone drawl, or the monster's lucky grabbag of philosophic literature. It's true that none of these books approaches the great novels of the same period, and I will not argue that they do; you need only compare two books of roughly the same periodDracula and Jude the Obscure, let's sayto make the point pretty conclusively. But no novel survives solely on the strength of an ideanor on its diction or execution, as so many writers and critics of modern literature seem sincerely to believe . . . these salesmen and saleswomen of beautiful cars with no motors. While Dracula is no Jude, Stoker's novel of the Count continues to reverberate in the mind long after the more ghoulish and clamorous Varney the Vampyre has grown silent; the same is true of Mary Shelley's handling of the Thing Without a Name and Robert Louis Stevenson's handling of the Werewolf myth. What the wouldbe writer of "serious" fiction (who would relegate plot and story to a place at the end of a long line headed by diction and that smooth flow of language which most college writing instructors mistakenly equate with style) seems to forget is that novels are engines, just as cars are engines; a RollsRoyce without an engine might as well be the world's most luxurious begonia pot, and a novel in which there is no story becomes nothing but a curiosity, a little mental game. Novels are engines, and whatever we might say about these three, their creators stoked them with enough invention to run each fast and hot and clean. Oddly enough, only Stevenson was able to stoke the engine successfully more than once. His adventure novels continue to be read, but Stoker's later books, such as The jewel of Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm, are largely unheardof and unread except by the most rabid fantasy fans. Mary Shelley's later gothics have similarly fallen into almost total obscurity. In all fairness it must be added that Bram Stoker wrote some absolutely champion short stories"The Squaw" and "The Judge's House" may be the best known. Those who enjoy macabre short fiction could not do better than his collection Dracula's Guest, which is stupidly out of print but remains available in the stacks of most public libraries. Each of the three novels we've been discussing is remarkable in some way, not just as a horror tale or as a suspense yarn, but as an example of a much wider genre that of the novel itself. When Mary Shelley can leave off belaboring the philosophical implications of Victor Frankenstein's work, she gives us several powerful scenes of desolation and grim horrormost notably, perhaps, in the silent polar wastes as this mutual dance of revenge draws to its close. Of the three, Bram Stoker is perhaps the most energetic. His book may seem overlong to modern readers, and to modern critics who have decided that one should not be expected to devote any more time to a work of popular fiction than one might devote to a madeforTV movie (the belief seeming to be that the two are interchangeable), but during its course we are rewardedif that's the right wordwith scenes and images worthy of Dore Renfield spreading his sugar with all the unflagging patience of the damned; the staking of Lucy; the beheading of the weird sisters by Van Helsing; the Count's final end, which comes in a hail of gunfire and a scary race against darkness. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a masterpiece of concisionthe verdict of Henry James, not myself. In that indispensable little handbook by Wilfred Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, the thirteenth rule for good composition reads simply "Omit needless words." Along with Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Douglas Fairbairn's Shoot, Stevenson's economysized horror story could serve as a textbook example for young writers on how Strunk's Rule 13the three most important words in all of the textbooks ever written on the technique of compositionis best applied. Characterizations are quick but precise; Stevenson's people are sketched but never caricatured. Mood is implied rather than belabored. The narrative is as chopped and lowered as a kid's hot rod. We'll leave where we picked this up, with the wonder and terror these three great monsters continue to create in the minds of readers. The most overlooked facet of each may be that each succeeds in overleaping reality and entering a world of total fantasy. But we are not left behind in this leap; we are brought along and allowed to view these archetypes of Werewolf, Vampire, and Thing not as figures of myth but as figures of near realitywhich is to say, we are brought along for the ride of our lives. And this, at least, surpasses "good." Man . . . that's great. CHAPTER IV An Annoying Autobiographical Pause EARLY ON, I mentioned that trying to deal successfully with the phenomenon of terror and horror as a mediacultural event during the last thirty years would be impossible without a slice of autobiography. It seems to me that the time to make good on that threat has now arrived. What a drag. But you're stuck with it, if only because I cannot divorce myself from a field in which I am mortally involved. Readers who find themselves inclining toward some genre on a regular basiswestern, privateeye stories, drawingroom mysteries, science fiction, or flatout adventure yarnsseem rarely to feel the same desire to psychoanalyze their favorite writers' interests (and their own) as do the readers of horror fiction. Secretly or otherwise, there is the feeling that the taste for horror fiction is an abnormal one. I wrote a fairly long essay at the beginning of a book of mine ( Night Shift), trying to analyze some of the reasons why people read horror fiction and why I write it. I don't have any interest in reheating that hash here; if you're interested in pursuing that subject, I recommend the introduction to you; all my relatives loved it. The question here is a more esoteric one Why do people have such an interest in my interestand in their own? I believe that, more than anything else, it's because we all have a postulate buried deep in our minds that an interest in horror is unhealthy and aberrant. So when people say, "Why do you write that stuff?" they are really inviting me to lie down on the couch and explain about the time I was locked in the cellar for three weeks, or my toilet training, or possibly some abnormal sibling rivalry. Nobody wants to know if Arthur Hailey or Harold Robbins took an unusually long time learning to use the potty, because writing about banks and airports and How I Made My First Million are subjects which seem perfectly normal. There is something totally American in wanting to know how things work (which goes a long way toward explaining the phenomenal success of the Penthouse Forum, I think; what all those letters are really discussing is the rocketry of intercourse, the possible trajectories of oral sex and the howto of various exotic positionsall as American as apple pie; Forum is simply a sexual plumbing manual for the enthusiastic doityourselfer), but something unsettlingly alien about a taste for monsters, haunted houses, and the Thing that Crawled Out of the Crypt at Midnight. Questioners automatically turn into reasonable facsimiles of that amusing comicstrip psychiatrist Victor De Groot, ignoring the fact that making things up for moneywhich is what any writer of fiction doesis a pretty bizarre way to earn a living. In March of 1979, I was invited to be one of three speakers on a panel discussing horror at an event known as the Ides of Mohonk (a onceyearly gathering of mystery writers and fans sponsored by Murder Ink, a nifty mysteryanddetection bookshop in Manhattan). During the course of the panel discussion I told a story that my mother had told me about myselfthe event occurred when I was barely four, so perhaps I can be excused for remembering her story of it but not the actual event. According to Mom, I had gone off to play at a neighbor's housea house that was near a railroad line. About an hour after I left I came back (she said), as white as a ghost. I would not speak for the rest of that day; I would not tell her why I'd not waited to be picked up or phoned that I wanted to come home; I would not tell her why my chum's mom hadn't walked me back but had allowed me to come alone. It turned out that the kid I had been playing with had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks (years later, my mother told me they had picked up the pieces in a wicker basket). |
My mom never knew if I had been near him when it happened, if it had occurred before I even arrived, or if I had wandered away after it happened. Perhaps she had her own ideas on the subject. But as I've said, I have no memory of the incident at all; only of having been told about it some years after the fact. I told this story in response to a question from the floor. The questioner had asked, "Can you recall anything in your childhood that was particularly terrible?"in other words, step right in, Mr. King, the doctor will see you now. Robert Marasco, author of Burnt Offerings and Parlor Games, said he could not. I offered my train story mostly so the questioner wouldn't be totally disappointed, finishing just as I have here, by saying that I could not actually remember the incident. To which the third panel member, Janet Jeppson (who is a psychiatrist as well as a novelist), said "But you've been writing about it ever since." There was an approving murmur from the audience. Here was a pigeonhole where I could be filed . . . here was a byGod motive. I wrote 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, and destroyed the world by plague in The Stand because I saw this kid run over by a slow freight in the days of my impressionable youth. I believe this is a totally specious ideasuch shootfromthehip psychological judgments are little more than jumpedup astrology. Not that the past doesn't supply grist for the writer's mill; of course it does. One example the most vivid dream I can recall came to me when I was about eight. In this dream I saw the body of a hanged man dangling from the arm of a scaffold on a hill. Rooks perched on the shoulders of the corpse, and behind it was a noxious green sky, boiling with clouds. This corpse bore a sign ROBERT BURNS. But when the wind caused the corpse to turn in the air, I saw that it was my facerotted and picked by the birds, but obviously mine. And then the corpse opened its eyes and looked at me. I woke up screaming, sure that that dead face would be leaning over me in the dark. Sixteen years later, I was able to use the dream as one of the central images in my novel 'Salem' Lot. I just changed the name of the corpse to Hubie Marsten. In another dreamthis is one which has recurred at times of stress over the last ten yearsI am writing a novel in an old house where a homicidal madwoman is reputed to be on the prowl. I'm working in a thirdfloor room that's very hot. A door on the far side of the room communicates with the attic, and I knowI knowshe's in there, and that sooner or later the sound of my typewriter will cause her to come after me (perhaps she's a critic for the Times Book Review). At any rate, she finally comes through the door like a horrid jack from a child's box, all gray hair and crazed eyes, raving and wielding a meatax. And when I run, I discover that somehow the house has exploded outwardit's gotten ever so much biggerand I'm totally lost. On awakening from this dream, I promptly scoot over to my wife's side of the bed. But we all have our bad dreams, and we all use them as best we can. Yet it is one thing to use the dream and quite another to suggest the dream is the cause in and of itself. That is to suggest the ridiculous about an interesting subfunction of the human brain that has little or no practical application to the real world. Dreams are only mindmovies, the scraps and remnants of waking life woven into curious little subconscious quilts by the thrifty human mind, which is loath to throw anything out. Some of these mindmovies are of the Xrated variety; some are comedies; some are horror movies. I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood traumathat becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great forcea force so great that the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself . . . which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actorno artistis ever handed a sharp knife (although a few people are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is "genius"), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude. I'm suggesting that, to be successful, the artist in any field has to be in the right place at the right time. The right time is in the lap of the gods, but any mother's son or daughter can work hisher way to the right place and wait. But what is the right place? That is one of the great, amiable mysteries of human experience. I can remember going dowsing as a kid with my Uncle Clayton, a real old Mainer if one ever lived. We walked out, my Uncle Clayt and I, he in his redandblackchecked flannel shirt and his old green cap, me in my blue parka. I was about twelve; he might have been in his late forties or his late sixties. He had his dowsing rod under one arm, a wishboneshaped piece of applewood. Applewood was the best, he said, although birch would do in a pinch. There was also maple, but Uncle Clayt's scripture was that maple was the worst of the dowsing woods, because the grain wasn't true and it would lie if you let it. At twelve, I was old enough not to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or dowsing. One of the odd things about our culture is that many parents seem honorbound to lay all such lovely stories to rest in their The thought is not original with me, but I'll be damned if I can remember who said itso let me just credit that most prolific of writers, Mr. Author Unknown. children's minds as soon as possibleDad and Mom may not be able to find time enough to help their little ones with their homework or to read them a story in the evening (let them watch TV instead, TV's a great sitter, lotsa good stories, let 'em watch TV), but they go to great pains to discredit poor old Santa and such wonders as dowsing and stumpwaterwitchcraft. There's enough time for that. Somehow such parents find the fairy tales told on Gilligan's Island, The Odd Couple, and The Love Boa t more acceptable. God knows why so many adults have confused enlightenment with emotional and imaginational bank robbery, but they have; they cannot seem to rest content until the wonder has flickered and died out of their children's eyes. (He doesn't mean me, you're whispering to yourself right nowbut sir or madam, I just might.) Most parents quite rightly recognize the fact that children are mad, in the classic sense of that word. But I'm not altogether sure that killing Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is the same thing as "rationality." For children, the rationality of madness seems to work remarkably well. For one thing, it keeps the thing in the closet at bay. Uncle Clayt had lost very little of that sense of wonder. Among his other amazing talents (amazing to me, at least) was the ability to line beesthat is, to spot a honeybee bumbling at a flower and then follow it back to its hive, tramping through woods, splashing through bogs, scrambling over deadfallshis ability to roll his own cigarettes with one hand (always giving them that final eccentric twirl before sticking them into his mouth and lighting them with Diamond matches kept in a small waterproof cannister), and his seemingly endless fund of lore and tales . . . Indian stories, ghost stories, family stories, legends, you name it. On this day my mother had been complaining to Clayt and his wife, Ella, over dinner about how slowly the water was drawing in the sinks and the toilet tank. She was afraid the well was going dry again. In those days, along about 1959 or 1960, we had a shallow dug well, and it went dry every summer for a month or so. Then my brother and I and our cousin hauled water in a big old tank that another uncle (Uncle Oren, that one wasfor many years the best damn carpenter and contractor in southern Maine) had welded together in his workshop. We would perch the tank on the tailgate of an old station wagon and then lug it down to the well in a relay, using big galvanizedsteel milk cans. During that dry month or six weeks we drew our drinking water from the town pump. So Uncle Clayt grabbed me while the women were washing up and told me we were going to dowse my mother a new well. At twelve, it was an interesting enough way to spend some time, but I was skeptical; Uncle Clayt might as well have told me he was going to show me where a flying saucer had landed behind the Methodist meeting hall. He walked around, green cap tilted back on his head, one of his Bugler cigarettes jutting from the corner of his mouth, applewood stick held in both hands. He held it by the wishbone, wrists rotated outward, his big thumbs pressed firmly against the wood. We walked aimlessly around the back yard, the driveway, the hill,where the apple tree stood (and still stands today, although new people live in that little fiveroom house). And Clayt talked . . . stories about baseball, about an attempt to form a coppermining concern once upon a time in Kittery, of all places, about how Paul Bunyan was supposed to have turned the course of the Prestile Stream once upon a time to provide water for the logging camps. And every now and then he would pause, and the rod of that applewood dowser would tremble just a little. He would pause in his story and wait. The trembling might increase to a steady vibration, and then fade out. "You got somethin there, Stevie," he'd say. "Somethin. Not too much." And I would nod wisely, convinced he was doing it all himself. Like the way it's parents, not Santa Claus, who put the presents under the tree, don't you know, or the way they take away the tooth under your pillow after you're asleep and replace it with a dime. But I went along with him. I came from an age of children who wanted to be good, remember; we were taught to "speak when spoken to," and to humor their elders no matter how nutty their ideas might be. This is not a bad way of initiating children into the more exotic realms of human behavior and human belief, by the way; the quiet child (and I was one) is often given walking tours through some extremely bizarre tracts of mental countryside. I did not believe it possible to dowse water with an applewood stick, but I was quite interested in seeing how the trick would be performed. We walked around onto the front lawn, and the stick began to tremble again. Uncle Clayt brightened. "We got the real thing here," he said. "Look at this, Stevie! She's gonna dive, be damned if she ain't!" Three steps further along, the applewood rod doveit simply revolved in Uncle Clayt's hands and pointed straight down. It was a good trick, all right; I could actually hear the tendons in his wrists creak, and there was some strain on his face as he forced the straight part of the wishboneshaped stick skyward again. As soon as he released the pressure, the stick whipped down at the ground again. "Got plenty of water here," he said. "You could drink it until judgment Day and it'd still run. It's close, too." "Let me try it," I said. "Well, you got to back off a little first," he said, and we did. We went back to the edge of the driveway. He gave me the stick, showed me how to hold it with my thumbs cocked just so (wrists outward, thumbs pointing down"Otherwise, that son of a whore is gonna break your wrists tryin to point when you get over that water," Clayt said), and then he gave me a little push on the ass. "It don't feel like nothin' but a piece of wood right now, does it?" he asked. I agreed that this was so. "But when you start gettin' close to that water, you're gonna feel her come alive," he said. "I mean really alive, like it was still on the tree. Oh, applewood's good for dousing. Nothing beats applewood when you're huntin' wellwater." So some of what happened could well have been suggestion, and I'm not trying to convince you otherwise, although I've read enough since then to believe that dowsing really does work, at least at some times and for some people and for some crazy reason of its own. I will say that Uncle Clayt had lulled me into that same state that I have tried again and again to lull the readers of my stories intothat state of believability where the ossified shield of "rationality" has been temporarily laid aside, the suspension of disbelief is at hand, and the sense of wonder is again within reach. And if that's the power of suggestion, it seems okay to me; better than cocaine for the brain. I started walking toward the spot where Uncle Clayt had been when the rod dove, and I'll be damned if that applewood stick didn't seem to come alive in my hands. It got warm, and it began to move. At first it was a vibration that I could feel but not see, and then the tip of the rod began to jiggle around. "It's working!" I screamed at Uncle Clayt. "I can feel it!" Clayt got laughing. I got laughing, toonot a hysterical sort of laughter, but one of pure and utter delight. When I got over the spot One of the more plausible explanations of the phenomenon is that the stick doesn't dowse the water; the person holding the stick does, and then imputes the ability to the stick. Horses can smell water twelve miles away if the wind is right; why should not a person be able to sense water fifty or a hundred feet underground? where the dowsing rod dove for Uncle Clayt, it dove for me; at one moment it was upright, and at the next it was pointing straight down. I can remember two things very clearly about that moment. One was a sensation of weighthow heavy that wooden wishbone had become. It seemed I could barely hold it up. It was as if the water was inside the stick instead of in the ground; as if it were fairly bloated with water. Clayt had brought the stick up to its original position after it dove. I could not. He took it out of my hands, and as he did I felt the sensation of weight and magnetism break. It did not pass from me to him; it broke. It was there at one moment and at the next it was gone. The other thing I remember is a combined feeling of certainty and mystery. The water was there. Uncle Clayt knew it and I knew it, too. It was down there in the earth, a river caught in rock, for all we knew. It was that feeling of having come to the right place. There are lines of power in the world, you knowinvisible but thrumming with a tremendous, scary load of energy. Every now and then someone will stumble over one and get fried, or grasp one in the right way and set it to work. But you have to find one. Clayt drove a stake into the ground where we had felt the pull of the water. The well did indeed go dryin July instead of August, as a matter of factand as there was no money for a new well that year, the water tank made its yearly summer appearance on the tailgate of the station wagon, and my brother, my cousin, and I made our round trips down to the old well with the milk cans of water again. We did the same the following summer. But around 1963 or '64, we had the artesian well drilled. By then the stake Clayt had driven was long gone, but I remembered its location well enough. The welldrillers located their rig, that big red gadget that looked so much like some child's Erector Set vision of a praying mantis, within three feet of where the stake had been (and in my mind now I can still hear Mom moaning about the wet clay that was spewed all over our front lawn). They had to go down less than a hundred feetand as Clayt had said on that Sunday when he and I walked out with the applewood rod, there was plenty of water. We could have drunk it until judgment Day and it still would have kept running. 2 I'm working my way back to the main point, this main point being why it is useless to ask any writer what he writes about. You might as well ask the rose why it is red. Talent, like the water Uncle Clayt doused out under our lawn after dinner one Sunday afternoon, is there all alongexcept, instead of water, it's more like a big rude lump of ore. It can be refinedor honed, to return to an earlier imageand it can be set to work in an infinite number of ways. The honing and the settingtowork are simple operations, completely under the control of the fledgling writer. Refining talent is merely a matter of exercise. If you work out with weights for fifteen minutes a day over a course of ten years, you're gonna get muscles. If you write for an hour and a half a day for ten years, you're gonna turn into a good writer. But what's down there? That's the one great variable, the wild card in the deck. I don't think the writer has any control over that. When you drill a well and get the water, you send a sample to your state's Water Testing Agency and get back a readoutand the mineral content can vary amazingly. All H20 is not created equal. Similarly, while Joyce Carol Oates and Harold Robbins are both writing English, they are really not writing the same language at all. There is a certain fascination inherent in the discovery of talent (although it is a difficult thing to write well about, and something I will not attempt at all"Leave it to the poets!" he cried. "The poets know how to talk about that, or at least they think they do, and it comes to the same; so leave it to the poets!"), that magical moment when the dowsing rod turns downward and you know that it is here, right here. There's also a certain fascination in the actual drilling of the well, refining the ore, honing the knife (also a difficult thing to write well about; one saga of the Heroic Struggle of the Young and Virile Writer that has always struck me well is Herman Wouk's Youngblood Hawke), but what I really want to spend a couple of minutes talking about is another kind of dousingnot the actual discovery of talent, but that lightning stroke which occurs when you discover not talent itself, but the particular direction in which that talent will incline. It is the moment, if you will, when a Little Leaguer discovers, not that he or she can pitch (which heshe may have know for some time), but that she or he has a particular ability to throw the good live fastball or to pop a curve that rises But, I hasten to add, only if you have the talent there to begin with. You can spend ten years refining common earth and come out at the end with nothing but common earth, sifted fine. I have been playing guitar since the age of fourteen, and at the age of thirtythree I've not progressed much beyond where I was at sixteen, playing "Louie, Louie" and "Little Deuce Coupe" on rhythm guitar with a group called the MoonSpinners. I can play a little, and it sure cheers me up when I've got the blues, but I think Eric Clapton is still safe. or dips outrageously. This is also a particularly fine moment. And all of this, I hope, will justify the bit of autobiography that follows. It doesn't try to explain my own interest in the danse macabre, or justify it, or psychoanalyze it; it only tries to set the stage for an interest that has proved to be lifelong, profitable, and pleasant . . . except, of course, when the madwoman pops out of her attic in that unpleasant dreamhouse in which my subconscious places me every four months or so. 3 My mother's people were named Pillsbury, and came originally (or so she said) from the same family that produced the Pillsburys who now make cake mixes and flour. The difference between the two branches of the family, Mom said, was that the flourPillsburys moved west to make their fortune, while our people stayed shirttail but honest on the coast of Maine. My grandmother, Nellie Pillsbury (nee Fogg), was one of the first women ever to graduate from Gorham Normal Schoolthe class of 'oz, I think. She died at age eightyfive, blind and bedridden, but still able to decline Latin verbs and name all of the Presidents up to Truman. My maternal grandfather was a carpenter and, for a brief time, Winslow Homer's handyman. My father's people came from Peru, Indiana, and much further back, from Ireland. The Pillsburys, of good AngloSaxon stock, were levelheaded and practical. My father apparently came from a long line of eccentrics; his sister, my Aunt Betty, had mental fugues (my mother believed her to be a manicdepressive, but then, Mom never would have run for president of the Aunt Betty Fan Club), my paternal grandmother enjoyed frying half a loaf of bread in bacon fat for breakfast, and my paternal grandfather, who stood six feet six and weighed a cool three hundred and fifty pounds, dropped dead at the age of thirtytwo while running to catch a train. Or so the story goes. I've been saying that it's impossible to tell why one particular area strikes the mind with all the peculiar force of obsession, but that it's very possible to pinpoint that moment when the interest was discoveredthe moment, if you will, when the dowsing rod turns suddenly and emphatically down toward hidden water. Put another way, talent is only a compass, and we'll not discuss why it points toward magnetic north; instead we'll treat briefly of that moment when the needle actually swings toward that great point of attraction. It has always seemed peculiar to me that I owe that moment in my own life to my father, who left my mother when I was two and my brother, David, four. I don't remember him at all, but in the few pictures of him I've seen, he is a man of average height, handsome in a 1940s sort of way, a bit podgy, bespectacled. He was a merchant mariner during World War II, crossing the North Atlantic and playing German roulette with the Uboats. His worst fear, my mother said, was not of the submarines but of having his master's license revoked because of his poor eyesightwhile on land, he had a habit of driving over curbs and through stoplights. My own eyesight is similar; they look like glasses, but sometimes I think they're a couple of Cokebottle bottoms up there on my face. Don King was a man with an itchy foot. My brother was born in 1945, I was born in 1947, and in 1949 my father was seen no more . . . although in 1964, during the troubles in the Congo, my mother insisted that she had seen him in a newsclip of white mercenaries fighting for one side or the other. I suppose it is just barely possible. By then he would have been in his late forties or early fifties. If it was so, I sure hope he had his lenses corrected in the interim. After my father took off, my mother landed on her feet, scrambling. My brother and I didn't see a great deal of her over the next nine years. She worked at a succession of lowpaying jobs presser in a laundry, doughnutmaker on the night shift at a bakery, store clerk, housekeeper. She was a talented pianist and a woman with a great and sometimes eccentric sense of humor, and somehow she kept things together, as women before her have done and as other women are doing even now as we speak. We never had a car (nor a TV set until 1956), but we never missed any meals. We hopscotched our way across the country during those nine years, always returning to New England. In 1958 we returned to Maine for good. My grandfather and grandmother were into their eighties, and the family hired my mother to care for them in their declining years. This was in Durham, Maine, and while all these family ramblings may seem far from the point, we're getting near to it now. About a quarter of a mile away from the small house in Durham where my brother and I finished our growing up, there was a lovely brick house where my mother's sister, Ethelyn Pillsbury Flaws, and her husband, Oren, lived. Over the Flaws's garage was a lovely, long attic room with loose, rumbling boards and that entrancing attic smell. At that time the attic connected with a whole complex of outbuildings, which in turn finally led to a great old barnall of these buildings smelling intoxicatingly of sweet hay long departed. But there was a reminder of the days when animals had been kept in the barn. If one climbed to the third loft, one could observe the skeletons of several chickens that had apparently died of some strange disease up there. It was a pilgrimage I made often; there was something fascinating about those chicken skeletons, lying in a drift of feathers as ephemeral as moondust, some secret in the black sockets where their eyes had once been . . . . But the attic over the garage was a kind of family museum. Everyone on the Pillsbury side of the family had stored things up there from time to time, from furniture to photographs, and there was just room for a small boy to twist and turn his way along narrow aisles, ducking under the arm of a standing lamp or stepping over a crate of old wallpaper samples that someone had wanted saved for some forgotten reason. My brother and I were not actually forbidden the attic, but my Aunt Ethelyn frowned on our visits up there because the floorboards had only been laid, not nailed, and some were missing. It would have been easy enough, I suppose, to trip and go headfirst through a hole and down to the concrete floor belowor into the bed of my Uncle Oren's green Chevy pickup truck. For me, on a cold fall day in 1959 or 1960, the attic over my aunt and uncle's garage was the place where that interior dowsing rod suddenly turned over, where the compass needle swung emphatically toward some mental true north. That was the day I happened to come on a box of my father's books . . . paperbacks from the midforties. There was a lot of my mother and father's married life in the attic, and I can understand how, in the wake of his sudden disappearance from her life, she would want to take as many of his things as possible and put them away in a dark place. It was there, a year or two earlier, that my brother found a reel of movie film my father had taken on shipboard. Dave and I pooled some money we had saved (without my mother's knowledge) , rented a movie projector, and watched it over and over again in fascinated silence. My father turned the camera over to someone else at one point and there he is, Donald King of Peru, Indiana, standing against the rail. He raises his hand; smiles; unknowingly waves to sons who were then not even conceived. We rewound it, watched it, rewound it, watched it again. And again. Hi, Dad; wonder where you are now. In another box there were piles of his merchant marine manuals; in another, scrapbooks of stuff from foreign countries. My mother told me that while he would go around with a paperback western stuffed into his back pocket, his real interest was in science fiction and horror stories. He tried his own band at a number of tales of this type, submitting them to the popular men's magazines of the day, Bluebook and Argosy among them. He ultimately published nothing ("Your father didn't have a great deal of sticktoit in his nature," my mother once told me dryly, and that was about as close as she ever came to ranking him out) , but he did get several personal rejection notes; "Thiswon'tdobutsendusmore" notes I used to call them in my teens and early twenties, when I collected a good many of my own (during periods of depression I would sometimes wonder what it would be like to blow your nose on a rejection slip). The box I found that day was a treasure trove of old Avon paperbacks. Avon, in those days, was the one paperback publisher committed to fantasy and weird fiction. I remember those books with great affectionparticularly the shiny overcoating which all Avons bore, a material that was a cross between isinglass and Saran Wrap. When and if the story lagged, you could peel this shiny stuff off the cover in long strips. It made a perfectly wonderful noise. And although it wanders from the subject, I also remember the forties Dell paperbacks with lovethey were all mysteries back then, and on the back of each was a luxurious map showing the scene of the crime. One of those books was an Avon "sampler"the word anthology was apparently considered too esoteric for readers of this sort of material to grasp. It contained stories by Frank Belknap Long ("The Hounds of Tindalos"), Zelia Bishop ("The Curse of Yig"), and a host of other tales culled from the early days of Weird Tales magazine. Two of the others were novels by A. Merritt Burn, Witch, Burn (not to be confused with the later Fritz Leiber novel, Conjure Wife) and The Metal Monster. The pick of the litter, however, was an H. P. Lovecraft collection. I am no longer sure of the title, but I remember the picture on the cover very well a cemetery (somewhere near Providence, one assumes!) at night, and coming out from beneath a tombstone, a loathsome green thing with long fangs and burning red eyes. Behind it, suggested but not graphically drawn, was a tunnel leading down into the bowels of the earth. Since then I've seen literally hundreds of editions of Lovecraft, yet that remains the one which best sums up H.P.L.'s work for me . . . and I've no idea who the artist might have been. That box of books wasn't my first encounter with horror, of course. I think that in America you would have to be blind and deaf not to have come in contact with at least one creature or boogey by the age of ten or twelve. But it was my first encounter with serious fantasyhorror fiction. Lovecraft has been called a hack, a description I would dispute vigorously, but whether he was or wasn't, and whether he was a writer of popular fiction or a writer of socalled "literary fiction" (depending on your critical bent), really doesn't matter very much in this context, because either way, the man himself took his work seriously. And it showed. So that book, courtesy of my departed father, was my first taste of a world that went deeper than the Bpictures which played at the movies on Saturday afternoon or the boys' fiction of Carl Carmer and Roy Rockwell. When Lovecraft wrote "The Rats in the Walls" and "Pickman's Model," he wasn't simply kidding around or trying to pick up a few extra bucks; he meant it, and it was his seriousness as much as anything else which that interior dowsing rod responded to, I think. I took the books out of the attic with me. My aunt, who was a grammar school teacher and the soul of practicality down to her shoes, disapproved of them strenuously, but I held onto them. That day and the next, I visited the Plains of Leng for the first time; made my first acquaintance with that quaint preOPEC Arab, Abdul Alhazred (author of The Necronomicon, which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been offered to members of the BookoftheMonth Club or the Literary Guild, although a copy was reputed to have been kept for years under lock and key in the Special Collections vault at Miskatonic University); visited the towns of Dunwich and Arkham, Massachusetts; and was, most of all, transported by the bleak and creeping terror of "The Colour Out of Space." A week or two later all of those books disappeared, and I never saw them again. I've always suspected that my Aunt Ethelyn might have been an unindicted coconspirator in that case . . . not that it mattered in the long run. I was on my way. Lovecraftcourtesy of my fatheropened the way for me, as he had done for others before me Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them. |
And while Lovecraft, who died before the Second World War could fulfill many of his visions of unimaginable horror, does not figure largely in this book, the reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since. It is his eyes I remember best from the first photograph of him I ever saw . . . eyes like those in the old portraits which still hang in many New England houses, black eyes which seem to look inward as well as outward. Eyes that seem to follow you. 4 The first movie I can remember seeing as a kid was Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was at the drivein, and unless it was a secondrun job I must have been about seven, because the film, which starred Richard Carlson and Richard Denning, was released in 1954. It was also originally released in 3D, but I cannot remember wearing the glasses, so perhaps I did see a rerelease. I remember only one scene clearly from the movie, but it left a lasting impression. The hero (Carlson) and the heroine (Julia Adams, who looked absolutely spectacular in a onepiece white bathing suit) are on an expedition somewhere in the Amazon basin. They make their way up a swampy, narrow waterway and into a wide pond that seems an idyllic South American version of the Garden of Eden. But the creature is lurkingnaturally. It's a scaly, batrachian monster that is remarkably like Lovecraft's halfbreed, degenerate aberrationsthe crazed and blasphemous results of liaisons between gods and human women (I told you it's difficult to get away from Lovecraft). This monster is slowly and patiently barricading the mouth of the stream with sticks and branches, irrevocably sealing the party of anthropologists in. I was barely old enough to read at that time, the discovery of my father's box of weird fiction still years away. I have a vague memory of boyfriends in my mom's life during that periodfrom 1952 until 1958 or so; enough of a memory to be sure she had a social life, not enough to even guess if she had a sex life. There was Norville, who smoked Luckies and kept three fans going in his tworoom apartment during the summer; and there was Milt, who drove a Buick and wore gigantic blue shorts in the summertime; and another fellow, very small, who was, I believe, a cook in a French restaurant. So far as I know, my mother came close to marrying none of them. She'd gone that route once. Also, that was a time when a woman, once married, became a shadow figure in the process of decisionmaking and breadwinning. I think my mom, who could be stubborn, intractable, grimly persevering and nearly impossible to discourage, had gotten a taste for captaining her own life. And so she went out with guys, but none of them became permanent fixtures. It was Milt we were out with that night, he of the Buick and the large blue shorts. He seemed to genuinely like my brother and me, and to genuinely not mind having us along in the back seat from time to time (it may be that when you have reached the calmer waters of your early forties, the idea of necking at the drivein no longer appeals so strongly . . . even if you have a Buick as large as a cabin cruiser to do it in). By the time the Creature made his appearance, my brother had slithered down onto the floor of the back and had fallen asleep. My mother and Milt were talking, perhaps passing a Kool back and forth. They don't matter, at least not in this context; nothing matters except the big blackandwhite images up on the screen, where the unspeakable Thing is walling the handsome hero and the sexy heroine into . . . into . . . the Black Lagoon! I knew, watching, that the Creature had become my Creature; I had bought it. Even to a sevenyearold, it was not a terribly convincing Creature. I did not know then it was good old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a molded latex suit, but I surely knew it was some guy in some kind of a monster suit . . . just as I knew that, later on that night, lie would visit me in the black lagoon of my dreams, looking much more realistic. He might be waiting in the closet when we got back; he might be standing slumped in the blackness of the bathroom at the end of the hall, stinking of algae and swamp rot, all ready for a postmidnight snack of small boy. Seven isn't old, but it is old enough to know that you get what you pay for. You own it, you bought it, it's yours. It is old enough to feel the dowser suddenly come alive, grow heavy, and roll over in your hands, pointing at hidden water. My reaction to the Creature on that night was perhaps the perfect reaction, the one every writer of horror fiction or director who has worked in the field hopes for when he or she uncaps a pen or a lens total emotional involvement, pretty much undiluted by any real thinking processand you understand, don't you, that when it comes to horror movies, the only thought process really necessary to break the mood is for a friend to lean over and whisper, "See the zipper running down his back?" I think that only people who have worked in the field for some time truly understand how fragile this stuff really is, and what an amazing commitment it imposes on the reader or viewer of intellect and maturity. When Coleridge spoke of "the suspension of disbelief" in his essay on imaginative poetry, I believe he knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted with a clean and a jerk and held up by main force. Disbelief isn't light; it's heavy. The difference in sales between Arthur Hailey and H. P. Lovecraft may exist because everyone believes in cars and banks, but it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night. And whenever I run into someone who expresses a feeling along the lines of, "I don't read fantasy or go to any of those movies; none of it's real," I feel a kind of sympathy. They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak. In this sense, kids are the perfect audience for horror. The paradox is this children, who are physically quite weak, lift the weight of unbelief with ease. They are the jugglers of the invisible worlda perfectly understandable phenomenon when you consider the perspective they must view things from. Children deftly manipulate the logistics of Santa Claus's entry on Christmas Eve (lie can get down small chimneys by making himself small, and if there's no chimney there's the letter slot, and if there's no letter slot there's always the crack under the door), the Easter Bunny, God (big guy, sorta old, white beard, throne), Jesus ("How do you think lie turned the water into wine?" I asked my son Joe when heJoe, not Jesuswas five; Joe's idea was that he lead something "kinda like magic KoolAid, you get what I mean?"), the devil (big guy, red skin, horse feet, tail with an arrow on the end of it, Snidely Whiplash moustache), Ronald McDonald, the Burger King, the Keebler Elves, Dorothy and Toto, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, a thousand more. Most parents think they understand this openness better than, in many cases, they actually do, and try to keep their children away from anything that smacks too much of horror and terror"Rated PG (or G in the case of The Andromeda Strain), but may be too intense for younger children," the ads for Jaws readbelieving, I suppose, that to allow their kids to go to a real horror movie would be tantamount to rolling a live hand grenade into a nursery school. But one of the odd Doppler effects that seems to occur during the selective forgetting that is so much a part of "growing up" is the fact that almost everything has a scare potential. for the child under eight. Children are literally afraid of their own shadows at the right time and place. There is the story of the fouryearold who refused to go to bed at night without a light on in his closet. His parents at last discovered he was frightened of a creature he had heard his father speak of often; this creature, which had grown large and dreadful in the child's imagination, was the "twinight doubleheader." Seen in this light, even Disney movies are minefields of terror, and the animated caroons, which will apparently be released and rereleased even unto the end of the world, are usually the worst offenders. There are adults today, who, when questioned, will tell you that the most frightening thing they saw at the movies as children was Bambi's father shot by the hunter, or Bambi and his mother running before the forest fire. Other Disney memories which are right up there with the batrachian horror inhabiting the Black Lagoon include the marching brooms that have gone totally out of control in Fantasia (and for the small child, the real horror inherent in the situation is probably buried in the implied fatherson relationship between Mickey Mouse and the old sorcerer; those brooms are making a terrible mess, and when the sorcerer father gets home, there may be PUNISHMENT . . . . This sequence might well send the child of strict parents into an ecstasy of terror) ; the night on Bald Mountain from the same film; the witches in Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, one with her enticingly red poisoned apple (and what small child is not taught early to fear the idea of POISON?), the other with her deadly spinning wheel; this holds all the way up to the relatively innocuous One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which features the logical granddaughter of those Disney witches from the thirties and fortiesthe evil Cruella DeVille, with her scrawny, nasty face, her loud voice (grownups sometimes forget how terrified young children are of loud voices, which come from the giants of their world, the adults), and her plan to kill all the dalmatian puppies (read "children," if you're a little person) and turn them into dogskin coats. Yet it is the parents, of course, who continue to underwrite the Disney procedure of release and rerelease, often discovering goosebumps on their own arms as they rediscover what terrified them as children . . . because what the good horror film (or horror sequence in what may be billed a "comedy" or an "animated cartoon") does above all else is to knock the adult props out from under us and tumble us back down the slide info childhood. And there our own shadow may once again become that of a mean dog, a gaping mouth, or a beckoning dark figure. In one of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke stories, this actually happens. In this vignette, aliens from space land on earth after the Big One has finally gone down. As the story closes, the best brains of this alien culture are trying to figure out the meaning of a film they have found and learned how to play back. The film ends with the words A Walt Disney Production. I have moments when I really believe that there would be no better epitaph for the human race, or for a world where the only sentient being absolutely guaranteed of immortality is not Hitler, Charlemagne, Albert Schweitzer, or even Jesus Christbut is, instead, Richard M. Nixon, whose name is engraved on a plaque placed on the airless surface of the moon. Perhaps the supreme realization of this return to childhood comes in David Cronenberg's marvelous horror film The Brood, where a disturbed woman is literally producing "children of rage" who go out and murder the members of her family, one by one. About halfway through the film, her father sits dispiritedly on the bed in an upstairs room, drinking and mourning his wife, who has been the first to feel the wrath of the brood. We cut to the bed itself . . . and clawed hands suddenly reach out from beneath it and dig into the carpeting near the doomed father's shoes. And so Cronenberg pushes us down the slide; we are four again, and all of our worst surmises about what might be lurking under the bed have turned out to be true. The irony of all this is that children are better able to deal with fantasy and terror on its own terms than their elders are. You'll note I've italicized the phrase " on its own terms." An adult is able to deal with the cataclysmic terror of something like The Texa Chainsaw Massacre because he or she understands that it is all makebelieve, and that when the take is done the dead people will simply get up and wash off the stage blood. The child is not so able to make this distinction, and Chainsaw Massacre is quite rightly rated R. Little kids do not need this scene, any more than they need the one at the end of The Fury where John Cassavetes quite literally blows apart. But the point is, if you put a little kid of six in the front row at a screening of The Texa Chainsaw Massacre along with an adult who was temporarily unable to distinguish between makebelieve and "real things" (as Danny Torrance, the little boy in The Shining puts it)if, for instance, you had given the adult a hit of Yellow Sunshine LSD about two hours before the movie startedmy guess is that the kid would have maybe a week's worth of bad dreams. The adult might spend a year or so in a rubber room, writing home with Crayolas. A certain amount of fantasy and horror in a child's life seems to me a perfectly okay, useful sort of thing. Because of the size of their imaginative capacity, children are able to handle it, and because of their unique position in life, they are able to put such feelings to work. They understand their position very well, too. Even in such a relatively ordered society as our own, they understand that their survival is a matter almost totally out of their hands. Children are "dependents" up until the age of eight or so in every sense of the word; dependent on mother and father (or some reasonable facsimile thereof) not only for food, clothing, and shelter, but dependent on them not to crash the car into a bridge abutment, to meet the school bus on time, to walk them home from Cub Scouts or Brownies, to buy medicines with childproof caps, dependent on them to make sure they don't electrocute themselves while screwing around with the toaster or while trying to play with Barbie's Beauty Salon in the bathtub. Running directly counter to this necessary dependence is the survival directive built into all of us. The child realizes his or her essential lack of control, and I suspect it is this very realization which makes the child uneasy. It is the same sort of freefloating anxiety that many air travelers feel. They are not afraid because they believe air travel to be unsafe; they are afraid because they have surrendered control, and if something goes wrong all they can do is sit there clutching airsick bags or the inflight magazine. To surrender control runs counter to the survival directive. Conversely, while a thinking, informed person may understand intellectually that travel by car is much more dangerous than flying, he or she is still apt to feel much more comfortable behind the wheel, because shehe has control . . . or at least an illusion of it. This hidden hostility and anxiety toward the airline pilots of their lives may be one explanation why, like the Disney pictures which are released during school vacations in perpetuity, the old fairy tales also seem to go on forever. A parent who would raise his or her hands in horror at the thought of taking hisher child to see Dracula or The Changeling (with its pervasive imagery of the drowning child) would be unlikely to object to the baby sitter reading "Hansel and Gretel" to the child before bedtime. But consider the tale of Hansel and Gretel begins with deliberate abandonment (oh yes, the stepmother masterminds that one, but she is the symbolic mother all the same, and the father is a spaghettibrained nurd who goes along with everything she suggests even though he know it's wrongthus we can see her as amoral, him as actively evil in the Biblical and Miltonian sense), it progresses to kidnapping (the witch in the candy house), enslavement, illegal detention, and finally justifiable homicide and cremation. Most mothers and fathers would never take their children to see Survive, that quickly Mexican exploitation flick about the rugby players who survived the aftermath of a plane crash in the Andes by eating their dead teammates, but these same parents find little to object to in "Hansel and Gretel," where the witch is fattening the children up so she can eat them. We give this stuff to the kids almost instinctively, understanding on a deeper level, perhaps, that such fairy stories are the perfect points of crystallization for those fears and hostilities. Even anxietyridden air travelers have their own fairy talesall those Airport movies, which, like "Hansel and Gretel" and all those Disney cartoons, show every sign of going on forever . . . but which should only be viewed on Thanksgivings, since all of them feature a large cast of turkeys. My gut reaction to Creature from the Black Lagoon on that longago night was a kind of terrible, waking swoon. The nightmare was happening right in front of me; every hideous possibility that human flesh is heir to was being played out on that drivein screen. Approximately twentytwo years later, I had a chance to see Creature from the Black Lagoon againnot on TV, with any kind of dramatic build and mood broken up by adverts for used cars, KTel disco anthologies, and Underalls pantyhose, thank God, but intact, uncut . . . and even in 3D. Guys like me who wear glasses have a hell of a time with 3D, you know; ask anyone who wears specs how they like those nifty little cardboard glasses they give you when you walk in the door. If 3D ever comes back in a big way, I'm going to take myself down to the local Pearle Vision Center and invest seventy bucks in a special pair of prescription lenses one red, one blue. Annoying glasses aside, I should add that I took my son Joe with mehe was then five, about the age I had been myself, that night at the drivein (and imagine my surprisemy rueful surpriseto discover that the movie which had so terrified me on that longago night had been rated G by the MPAA . . . just like the Disney pictures). As a result, I had a chance to experience that weird doubling back in time that I believe most parents only experience at the Disney films with their children, or when reading them the Pooh books or perhaps taking them to the Shrine or the Barnum Bailey circus. A popular record is apt to create a particular "set" in a listener's mind, precisely because of its brief life of six weeks to three months, and "golden oldies" continue to be played because they are the emotional equivalent of freezedried coffee. When the Beach Boys come on the radio singing "Help Me, Rhonda," there is always that wonderful second or two when I can reexperience the wonderful, guilty joy of copping my first feel (and if you do the mental subtraction from my present age of thirtythree, you'll see that I was a little backward in that respect). Movies and books do the same thing, although I would argue that the mental set, its depth and texture, tends to be a little richer, a little more complex, when reexperiencing films, and a lot more complex when dealing with books. With Joe that day I experienced Creature from the Black Lagoon from the other end of the telescope, but this particular theory of set identification still applied; in fact, it prevailed. Time and age and experience have all left their marks on me, just as they have on you; time is not a river, as Einstein theorizedit's a big fucking buffalo herd that runs us down and eventually mashes us into the ground, dead and bleeding, with a hearingaid plugged into one ear and a colostomy bag instead of a .44 clapped on one leg. Twentytwo years later I knew that the Creature was really good old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a molded latex suit, and the suspension of disbelief, that mental cleanandjerk, had become a lot harder to accomplish. But I did it, which may mean nothing, or which may mean (I hope!) that the buffalo haven't got me yet. But when that weight of disbelief was finally up there, the old feelings came flooding in, as they flooded in some five years ago when I took Joe and my daughter Naomi to their first movie, a reissue of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. There is a scene in that film where, after Snow White has taken a bite from the poisoned apple, the dwarves take her into the forest, weeping copiously. Half the audience of little kids was also in tears; the lower lips of the other half were trembling. The set identification in that case was strong enough so that I was also surprised into tears. I hated myself for being so blatantly manipulated, but manipulated I was, and there I sat, blubbering into my beard over a bunch of cartoon characters. But it wasn't Disney that manipulated me; I did it myself. It was the kid inside who wept, surprised out of dormancy and into schmaltzy tears . . . but at least awake for awhile. During the final two reels of Creature from the Black Lagoon, the weight of disbelief is nicely balanced somewhere above my head, and once again director Jack Arnold places the symbols in front of me and produces the old equation of the fairy tales, each symbol as big and as easy to handle as a child's alphabet block. Watching, the child awakes again and knows that this is what dying is like. Dying is when the Creature from the Black Lagoon dams up the exit. Dying is when the monster gets you. In the end, of course, the hero and heroine, very much alive, not only survive but triumphas Hansel and Gretel do. As the drivein floodlights over the screen came on and the projector flashed its GOOD NIGHT, DRIVE SAFELY slide on that big white space (along with the virtuous suggestion that you ATTEND THE CHURCH OF YOUR CHOICE), there was a brief feeling of relief, almost of resurrection. But the feeling that stuck longest was the swooning sensation that good old Richard Carlson and good old Julia Adams were surely going down for the third time, and the image that remains forever after is of the creature slowly and patiently walling its victims into the Black Lagoon; even now I can see it peering over that growing wall of mud and sticks. Its eyes. Its ancient eyes. CHAPTER V Radio and the Set of Reality BOOKS AND MOVIES are all very well, and we'll come back to them before long, but before we do I'd like to talk a little about radio in the midfifties. I'll start with myself, and from me, we can hopefully progress to a more profitable general case. I am of the last quarter of the last generation that remembers radio drama as an active forcea dramatic art form with its own set of reality. This is a true statement as far as it goes, but of course it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. Radio's real golden age ended around 1950, the year at which this book's casual attempt at media history begins, the year I celebrated my third birthday and began my first full year of doing it in the potty. As a child of the media, I have been pleased to have attended the healthy birth of rock and roll, and to have seen it grow up fast and healthy . . . but I was also in attendance, during my younger years, at the deathbed of radio as a strong fictional medium. Drama is still to be found on the radio, God knows CBS Mystery Theater is a case in pointand there is even comedy, as every devoted follower of that abysmally inept superhero, Chickenman, knows. But the Mystery Theater seems oddly flat, oddly dead; a curiosity only. There is none of the heavy emotional zap that used to come out of the radio when Inner Sanctum's creaking door swung open each week, or during Dimension X, I Love a Mystery, or the early days of Suspense. Although I listen to Mystery Theater when I can (and happen to think that E. G. Marshall does a great job as host), I don't particularly recommend it; it is a fluke like a Studebaker that still runspoorlyor the last surviving auk. Even more than these, CBS Mystery Theater is like an electrical power cable through which a heavy, almost lethal, current used to run and which now lies inexplicably cold and harmless. The Adventures of Chickenman, a syndicated comedy program, works much better (but comedy, a naturally auditory as well as visual medium, often does), but the intrepid, klutzy Chickenman is still something of an acquired taste, like taking snuff or eating escargots. My own favorite moment in Chickenman's career occurs when he gets on the crosstown bus clad in boots, tights, and cape, only to discover that, since he has no pockets, he doesn't have a dime for the fare box. And still, endearing as Chickenman seems as he stumbles gamely from one abysmal situation to anotherwith his Jewish mother always close behind, bearing advice and chicken soup with matzoh ballshe is never quite in focus for me . . . except maybe for that one priceless moment as he stands slumped before the bus driver, cape between his legs. I smile at Chickenman; I have occasionally even chuckled; but there are never moments as gutbustingly funny as the moments when Fibber McGee, as unstoppable as Time itself, would approach his closet or when Chester A. Riley would engage in long and uneasy conversations with his nextdoor neighbor, a mortician named Digger O'Dell ("He sure is swell"). Of the radio programs I remember with the most clarity, the only one which properly belongs in the clause macabre was Suspense, also presented by the CBS Radio Network. My grandfather (the one who worked for Winslow Homer as a young man) and I really presided at the death rattle of radio together. He was fairly hale and fairly hearty at the age of eightytwo, but incomprehensible because he had a heavy beard and no teeth. He would talkvolubly at timesbut only my mother could really understand what he was saying. "Gizzengroppen fuzzwah grupp?" he might ask me as we sat listening to his old Philco table model. "That's right, Daddy Guy," I'd say, with not the slightest idea of what I'd agreed to. Nonetheless, we had the radio to unite us. At this timearound 1958my grandmother and grandfather lived together in a combination bedsitting room that was a converted parlor, the biggest room in a small New England house. He was ambulatory barelybut my grandmother was blind and bedridden and horribly corpulent, a victim of hypertension. Occasionally her mind would clear; mostly she would go into long, excited rants, telling us that the horse needed to be fed, the fires needed to be banked, that someone had to get her up so she could bake pies for the Elks supper. Sometimes she And for some people, Chickenman doesn't work at all. My good friend Mac McCutcheon once played an album of the Great Fowl's adventures to a group of friends who simply sat and listened with polite, blank expressions on their faces. No one even chuckled. As Steve Martin says in The jerk "Take those snails off her plate and bring her the toasted cheese sandwich like I told you in the first place!" talked to Flossie, one of my mother's sisters. Flossie had died of spinal meningitis forty years ago. So the situation in that room was this my grandfather was lucid but incomprehensible; my grandmother was comprehensible but far gone in senility. Somewhere in between was Daddy Guy's radio. On radio nights, I would bring in a chair and place it in my grandfather's corner of the room, and he would fire up one of his huge cigars. The gong would sound for Suspense, or Johnny Dollar would begin to spin that week's tale through the unique (so far as I know) device of itemizing his expense account, or the voice of Bill Conrad as Matt Dillon would come on, deep and somehow unutterably weary "It makes a man watchful . . . and a little lonely." For me, the smell of strong cigar smoke in a small room brings up its own set of ghost referents Sunday night radio with my grandfather. The creak of batwing doors, the jingle of spurs . . . or the scream at the end of that classic Suspense episode, "You Died Last Night." They died, all right, one by one, that last handful of radio programs. Johnny Dollar went first; he totted up his last expense account and drifted away into whatever limbo waits for retired insurance investigators. Gunsmoke went a year or two later. TV audiences had associated the face of Matt Dillon, only imagined for the previous ten years or so, with that of James Arness, Kitty's with Amanda Blake, Doc's with Milburn Stone, and Chester's, of course, with the face of Dennis Weaver. Their faces and their voices eclipsed the voices which came from the radio, and even now, twenty years later, it is the eager, slightly whining voice of Weaver that I associate with Chester Good as he comes hurrying up the Dodge City boardwalk with gimpy enthusiasm, calling, "Mr. Dillon! Mr. Dillon! There's trouble down t'the Longbranch!" It was Suspense, the last of the grisly old horrors, that held out the longest, but by then TV had demonstrated its ability to produce its own horrors; like Gunsmoke, Inner Sanctum had made the jump from radio to video, the swinging door finally visible. And visible, it certainly was horrible enoughslightly askew, festooned with cobwebsbut it was something of a relief, just the same. Nothing could have looked as horrible as that door sounded. I'm going to avoid any long dissertation on just why radio died, or in what ways it was superior to television in terms of the imaginational requirements it imposed on the listener (although we will touch briefly on some of this when we talk about the great Arch Oboler), because radio drama has been rather overanalyzed and certainly overeulogized. A little nostalgia is good for the soul, and I think I have already indulged in mine. But I do want to say something about imagination purely as a tool in the art and science of scaring the crap out of people. The idea isn't original with me; I heard it expressed by William F. Nolan at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention. Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door, Nolan said. You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as shehe (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a tenfoottall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. "A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible," the audience thinks, "but I can deal with a tenfoottall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall." Consider, if you will, the most frightening sequence in The Changeling. The heroine (Trish Van Devere) has rushed off to the haunted house her new friend (George C. Scott) has rented, thinking he may need help. Scott is not there at all, but a series of small, stealthy sounds leads her to believe that he is. The audience watches, mesmerized, as Trish climbs to the second floor; the third floor; and finally she negotiates the narrow, cobwebby steps leading to the attic room where a young boy has been murdered in particularly nasty fashion some eighty years before. When she reaches the room, the dead boy's wheelchair suddenly whirls around and pursues her, chasing her screaming down all three flights of stairs, racing along after her as she runs down the hall, to finally overturn near the front door. The audience screams as the empty wheelchair chases the lady, but the real scare has already happened; it comes as the camera dwells on those long, shadowy staircases, as we try to imagine walking up those stairs toward some asyetunseen horror waiting to happen. Bill Nolan was speaking as a screenwriter when he offered the example of the big b,g behind the door, but the point applies to all media. What's behind the door or lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening as the door or the staircase itself. |
And because of this, comes the paradox the artistic work of horror is almost always a disappointment. It is the classic nowin situation. You can scare people with the unknown for a long, long time (the classic example, as Bill Nolan also pointed out, is the Jacques Tourneur film with Dana Andrews, Curse of the Demon), but sooner or later, as in poker, you have to turn your down cards up. You have to open the door and show the audience what's behind it. And if what happens to be behind it is a bug, not ten but a hundred feet tall, the audience heaves a sigh of relief (or utters a scream of relief) and thinks, "A bug a hundred feet tall is pretty horrible, but I can deal with that. I was afraid it might be a thousand feet tall." The thing isand a pretty good thing for the human race, too, with such neatokeeno things to deal with as Dachau, Hiroshima, the Children's Crusade, mass starvation in Cambodia, and what happened in Jonestown, Guyanathe human consciousness can deal with almost anything . . which leaves the writer or director of the horror tale with a problem which is the psychological equivalent of inventing a fasterthanlight space drive in the face of EMC2. There is and always has been a school of horror writers (I am not among them) who believe that the way to beat this rap is to never open the door at all. The classic example of thisit even involves a dooris the Robert Wise version of Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House. The film and the book do not differ greatly in terms of plot, but they differ significantly, I think, in terms of thrust, point of view, and final effect. (We were talking about radio, weren't we? Well, we'll get back to it, I guess, sooner or later.) Later on we will have some converse of Ms. Jackson's excellent novel, but for now let's deal with the film. In it, an anthropologist (Richard Johnson) whose hobby is ghost hunting invites a party of three to summer with him at the infamous Hill House, where any number of nasty things have occurred in the past and where, from time to time, ghosts may (or may not) have been seen. The party includes two ladies who have' previously experienced aspects of the invisible world (Julie Harris and Claire Bloom) and the happygolucky nephew of the present owner (played by Russ Tamblyn, that old dancing fool from the film version of West Side Story). The housekeeper, Mrs. Dudley, offers each her simple, bonechilling catechism as they arrive "No one lives any closer than town; no one will come any closer than that. So no one will hear you if you scream. In the night. In the dark." Of course Mrs. Dudley is proved absolutely right, and that right early. The four of them experience a steadily escalating run of horrors, and happygolucky Luke ends by saying that the property he has so looked forward to inheriting should be burned flat . . . and the ground seeded with salt. For our purposes here, the interesting thing lies in the fact that we never actually see whatever it is that haunts Hill House. Something is there, all right. Something holds hands with the terrified Eleanor in the nightshe thinks it's Theo, but finds out the next day that Theo hasn't even been close to her. Something knocks on the wall with a sound like cannonfire. And most apropos to where we are now, this same something causes a door to bulge grotesquely inward until it looks like a great convex bubblea sight so unusual to the eye that the mind reacts with horror. In Nolan's terms, something is scratching at the door. In a very real way, in spite of fine acting, fine direction, and the marvelous black and white photography of David Boulton, what we have in the Wise film (title shortened to The Haunting) is one of the world's few radio horror movies. Something is scratching at that ornate, paneled door, something horrible . . . but it is a door Wise elects never to open. Lovecraft would open the door . . . but only a crack. Here is the final entry of Robert Blake's diary in the story "The Haunter of the Dark," which was dedicated to Robert Bloch Sense of distance gonefar is near and near is far. No lightno glasssee that steeplethat towerwindowcan hearRoderick Usheram mad or going madthe thing is stirring and fumbling in the towerI am it and it is II want to get out . . . must get out and unify the forces . . . It knows where I am . . . I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a monstrous odor . . . senses transfigured . . . boarding at that tower window cracking and giving way . . . I'd . . . ngai . . . ygg . . . I see itcoming herehellwindtitan blurblack wingsYogSothoth save methe threelobed burning eye . . . So the tale ends, leaving us with only the vaguest intimations of what Robert Blake's haunter may have been. "I cannot describe it," protagonist after protagonist tells us. "If I did, you would go mad with fear." But somehow I doubt that. I think both Wise and Lovecraft before him understood that to open the door, in ninetynine cases out of a hundred, is to destroy the unified, dreamlike effect of the best horror. "I can deal with that," the audience says to itself, settling back, and bang! you just lost the ballgame in the bottom of the ninth. My own disapproval of this methodwe'll let the door bulge but we'll never open itcomes fromthe belief that it is playing to tie rather than to win. There is (or may be), after all, that hundredth case, and there is the whole concept of suspension of disbelief. Consequently, I'd rather yank the door open at some point during the festivities; I'd rather turn my hole cards faceup. And if the audience screams with laughter rather than terror, if they see the zipper running up the monster's back, then you just gotta go back to the drawing board and try it again. The exciting thing about radio at its best was that it bypassed the whole question of whether to open the door or leave it closed. Radio, by the very nature of the medium, was exempt. For the listeners during the years 1930 to 1950 or so, there were no visual expectations to fulfill in their set of reality. What about this set of reality, then? Another example, for purposes of comparison and contrast, from the movies. One of the classic fright films that I consistently missed as a child was Val Lewton's Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur. Like Freaks, it is one of those movies that comes up when the conversation among fans turns to what makes a "great horror movieothers would include Curse of the Demon, Dead of Night, and The Creeping Unknown, I suppose, but for now let's stick with the Lewton film. It's one that a great many people remember with affection and respect from their childhoodsone that scared the crap out of them. Two specific sequences from the film are always brought up; both involve Jane Randolph, the "good" girl, menaced by Simone Simon, the "bad" girl (who is, let's be fair, no more willfully evil than is poor old Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man). In one, Ms. Randolph is trapped in a deserted basement swimming pool while, somewhere nearby and getting closer all the time, a great jungle cat menaces her. In the other sequence, she is walking through Central Park and the cat is getting closer and closer . . . getting ready to spring . . . we hear a hard, coughing roar . . . which turns out only to be the airbrakes of an arriving bus. Ms. Randolph steps onto it, leaving the audience limp with relief and with the feeling that a horrible disaster has been averted by inches. In terms of what it does psychologically, I wouldn't argue the thesis that The Cat People is a good, perhaps even a great, American film. It is almost certainly the best horror film of the forties. At the base of the myth of the cat peoplewerecats, if you likeis a deep sexual fear; Irena (Ms. Simon) has been convinced as a child that any outpouring of passion will cause her to change into a cat. Nevertheless, she marries Kent Smith, who is so smitten that he takes her to the altar even though we pretty much understand he'll be spending his wedding nightand many nights thereaftersleeping on the couch. No wonder the poor guy eventually turns to Jane Randolph. But to return to those two scenes the one in the swimming pool works quite well. Lewton, like Stanley Kubrick with The Shining, is the master of context here, lighting the scene to perfection and controlling every variable. We feel the truth of that scene everywhere, from the tiled walls, the lap of the water in the pool, to that slightly flat echo when Ms. Randolph speaks (to ask that timehonored horror movie question, "Who's there?"). And I am sure the Central Park scene worked for audiences of the forties, but today it simply will not wash; even out in the sticks, audiences would hoot and laugh at it. I finally saw the movie as an adult, and puzzled for some time over what all the shouting could have been about. I think I finally figured out why that Central Park stalking scene worked then but doesn't work now. It has something to do with what film technicians call "state of the art." But this is only the technician's way of referring to that thing I have called "visual set" or "the set of reality." If you should get a chance to see The Cat People on TV or at a revival house in or near your city, pay particular attention to that sequence where Irena stalks Jane Randolph as Ms. Randolph hurries to catch her bus. Take a moment to look at it closely and you'll see it is not Central Park at all. It's a set built on a soundstage. A little thought will suggest a reason why. Tourneur, who wanted to be in control of lighting at all times, didn't elect to shoot on set; he simply had no choice. "The state of the art" in 1942 did not allow for night shooting on location. So instead of shooting in daylight with a heavy filter, a technique that shows up as even more glaringly faked, Tourneur quite sensibly opted for the soundstageand it is interesting to me that, some forty years later, Stanley Kubrick did exactly the same thing with The Shining . . . and like Lewton and Tourneur before him, Kubrick is a director who shows an almost exquisite sensitivity to the nuances of light and shadow. To theatrical audiences of the time there was no false note in this; they were used to integrating movie sets into their imaginative processes. Sets were simply accepted, the way we might accept a single piece of scenery or two in a play that calls (as Thornton Wilder's Our Town does) for mostly "bare stage"this is an acceptance that the Victorian playgoer would simply have balked at. He or she might accept the principle of the bare stage, but emotionally the play would lose most of its effect and its charm. The Victorian playgoer would be apt to find Our Town outside her or his set of reality. For me, the scene in Central Park lost its believability for the same reason. As the camera moves with Ms. Randolph, everything surrounding her screams fake! fake! fake! to my eye. While I was supposed to be worrying about whether or not Jane Randolph was going to be attacked, I found myself worrying instead about that papiermache stone wall in the background. When the bus finally pulls up, the chuff of its air William F. Nolan, mentioning this film, said that the memory which remained with him most strongly from the Central Park sequence was the pattern of "lightshadowlightshadowlightshadow" as the camera moves with Ms. Randolphand it is indeed a fine, eerie effect. brakes miming the cat's cheated growl, I was wondering if it was hard getting that New York City bus onto a closed soundstage and if the bushes in the background were real or plastic. The set of reality changes, and the boundaries of that mental country where the imagination may be fruitfully employed (Rod Serling's apt phrase for it, now a part of the American idiom, was the Twilight Zone) are in nearconstant flux. By the 1960s, the decade when I saw more movies than I ever have since, the "state of the art" had advanced to a point where a set and soundstages had become nearly obsolete. New fast films had made availablelight shooting perfectly possible. In 1942 Val Lewton could not shoot in Central Park by night, but in Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick shot several scenes by candlelight. This is a quantum technical leap which has this paradoxical effect it robs the bank of imagination. Perhaps realizing the fact, Kubrick takes a giant step backward to the soundstage with his next film, The Shining. All of this may seem far afield from the subject of radio drama and the question of whether or not to open the door on the monster, but we're really standing right next to both subjects. As movie audiences of the forties and fifties believed Lewton's Central Park set, so radio listeners believed what the announcers, the actors, and the soundmen told them. The visual set was there, but it was plastic, bound by very few hard and fast expectations. When you made the monster in your mind, there was no zipper running down its back; it was a perfect monster. Audiences of today listening to old tapes don't accept the MakeBelieve Ballroom any more than I am able to accept Lewton's papiermache rock wall; we are simply hearing a 1940s deejay playing records in a studio. But to audiences of a different day, the MakeBelieve Ballroom was more real than makebelieve; you could imagine the men in their tuxedos, the women in their gowns and smooth elbowlength gloves, the flaring wall sconces, and Tommy Dorsey, resplendent in white dinner jacket, conducting. Or in the case of the infamous Orson Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds, a Mercury Theater Halloween presentation (and that was a trickortreat millions of Americans never forgot), you could broaden that country of the imagination Want more proof of how the set of reality changes, whether we want it to or not? Remember Bonanza, which ran on NBC for a thousand years or so? Check it out in syndication someday. Look at that Ponderosa setthe front yard, the big family roomand ask yourself how you ever believed it was "real." It seemed real because we were used to seeing TV series shot on soundstages up until 1965 or so; nowadays even TV producers don't use soundstages for exteriors. The state of the art has, for better or worse, moved on. enough to send people screaming into the streets. On TV it wouldn't have worked, but on the radio there were no zippers running down the Martians' backs. Radio avoided the opendoorcloseddoor question, I think, because radio deposited to that bank of imagination rather than making withdrawals in the name of "state of the art." Radio made it real. 2 My first experience with real horror came at the hands of Ray Bradburyit was an adaptation of his story "Mars Is Heaven!" on Dimension X. This would have been broadcast around 1951, which would have made me four at the time. I asked to listen, and was denied permission by my mother. "It's on too late," she said, "and it would be much too upsetting for a little boy your age." At some other time Mom told me that one of her sisters almost cut her wrists in the bathtub during the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast. My aunt was not going about it hastily; she could look out the bathroom window and had, she said later, no plans at all to make the cuts until she saw the Martian death machines looming on the horizon. I guess you could say my aunt had found the Welles broadcast too upsetting . . . and my mother's words echo down to me over the years like a voice in an uneasy dream that has never really ended "Too upsetting . . . upsetting . . . upsetting . . ." I crept down to the door to listen anyway, and she was right it was plenty upsetting. Space travelers land on Marsonly it isn't Mars at all. It's good old Greentown, Illinois, and it's inhabited by all the voyagers' dead friends and relatives. Their mothers are here, their sweethearts, good old Clancey the patrolman, Miss Henreys from the second grade. On Mars, Lou Gehrig is still pounding them over the fences for the Yankees. Mars is heaven, the space travelers decide. The locals take the crew of the spaceship into their homes, where they sleep the sleep of those perfectly at peace, full of hamburgers and hotdogs and Mom's apple pie. Only one member of the crew suspects the unspeakable obscenity, and he's right. Boy, is he right! And yet even he has awakened to the realization of this deadly illusion too late . . . because in the night, these wellloved faces begin to drip and run and change. Kind, wise eyes become black tar pits of murderous hate. The rosy apple cheeks of Grandma and Grandpa lengthen and turn yellow. Noses elongate into wrinkled trunks. Mouths become gaping maws. It is a night of creeping horror, a night of hopeless screams and belated terror, because Mars isn't heaven after all. Mars is a hell of hate and deception and murder. I didn't sleep in my bed that night; that night I slept in the doorway, where the real and rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine on my face. That was the power of radio at its height. The Shadow, we were assured at the beginning of each episode, had "the power to cloud men's minds." It strikes me that, when it comes to fiction in the media, it is television and movies which so often cloud that part of our minds where the imagination moves most fruitfully; they do so by imposing the dictatorship of the visual set. If you view imagination as a mental creature of a hundred different possible forms (imagine, if you will, Larry Talbot not just condemned to turn into a wolf man at the full of the moon but into an entire bestiary on successive nights; everything from a wereshark to a wereflea), then one of the forms is that of a rampaging gorilla, a creature that is dangerous and totally out of control. If this seems fanciful or melodramatic, think of your own children or the children of close friends (never mind your own childhood; you may remember events that took place then with some fidelity, but most of your memories of how the emotional weather was then will be utterly false), and of the times when they simply find themselves unable to turn off the secondfloor light or go down into the cellar or maybe even bring a coat from the closet because they saw or heard something that frightened themand not necessarily a movie or a TV program, either. I've mentioned the fearsome twinight doubleheader already; John D. MacDonald tells the story of how for weeks his son was terrified of something he called "the green ripper." MacDonald and his wife finally figured it outat a dinner party, a friend had mentioned the Grim Reaper. What their son had heard was green ripper, and later it became the title of one of MacDonald's Travis McGee stories. A child may be frightened by such a wide sweep of things that adults generally understand that to worry about this overmuch is to endanger all relations with the child; you begin to feel like a soldier in the middle of a minefield. Added to this is another complicating factor sometimes we frighten our kids on purpose. Someday, we say, a man in a black car may stop and offer you a sweet to take a ride with him. And that is a Bad Man (read the Boogeyman), and if he stops for you, you must never, never, never . . . Or Instead of giving that tooth to the Tooth Fairy, Ginny, let's put it in this glass of Coke. Tomorrow morning that tooth will be all gone. The Coke will dissolve it. So think about it the next time you have a quarter and . . . Or Little boys who play with matches wet the bed, they just can't help it, so don't you . . . Or that alltime favorite Don't put that in your mouth, you don't know where it's been. Most children deal with their fears quite well . . . most of the time, anyway. The shapechanging of their imaginations is so wide, so marvelously varied, that the gorilla pops out of the deck only infrequently. Besides worrying about what might be in the closet or under the bed, they have to imagine themselves as firefighters and policemen (imagination as the Very Gentle Perfect Knight), as mothers and nurses, as superheroes of various stripes and types, as their own parents, dressed up in attic clothes and giggling hand in hand before a mirror which shows them the future in the most unthreatening way. They need to experience a whole range of emotions from love to boredom, to try them out like new shoes. But every now and then the gorilla gets out. Children understand that this face of their imagination must be caged ("It's only a movie, that couldn't really happen, could it?" . . . Or as Judith Viorst writes in one of her fine children's books, "My mom says there are no ghosts, vampires, and zombies . . . but . . ." ) . But their cages are of necessity more flimsy than those their elders build. I do not believe there are people out there with no imagination at allalthough I have come to believe that there are a few who lack even the most rudimentary sense of humorbut it sometimes seems that way . . . perhaps because some people seem to build not just cages for the gorilla but Chase Manhattan Banktype safes. Complete with time locks. I remarked to an interviewer once that most great writers have a curious childish louk to their faces, and that this seems even more pronounced in the faces of those who write fantasy. It is perhaps most noticeable in the face of Ray Bradbury, who retains very strongly the look of the boy he was in Illinoishis face retains this indefinable look in spite of his sixtyplus years, his graying hair, his heavy glasses. Robert Bloch has the face of a sixthgrade cutup, the Klass Klown, don't you know, although he is past sixty (just how far past I would not venture to guess; he might send Norman Bates after me); it is the face of the kid who sits in the back of the classroomat least until the teacher assigns him a place up front, which usually doesn't take longand makes screeching sounds on the top of his desk with the palms of his hands. Harlan Ellison has the face of a tough innercity kid, confident enough in himself to be kind in most cases, but more than able to fuck you over royally if you give him any shit. But perhaps the look I'm trying to describe (or indicate; actual description is really impossible) is most visible on the face of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, while regarded as a "straight" writer of literature by the critical establishment, has nonetheless made the cataloguing of devils, angels, demons, and dybbuks a good part of his career. Grab a Singer book and take a good look at the author photo (you can read the book, too, when you're done looking at Singer's picture, okay?). It is the face of an old man, but that is a surface so thin you could read a newspaper through it. The boy is beneath, stamped very clearly on his features. It's in his eyes, mostly; they are young and clear. One of the reasons for these "young faces" may be that writers of fantasy rather like the gorilla. They have never taken the trouble to strengthen the cage, and as a result, part of them has never accomplished the imaginative goingaway that is so much a part of growing up, of establishing the tunnel vision so necessary for a successful career as an adult. One of the paradoxes of fantasyhorror is that the writer of this stuff is like the lazy pigs who built their houses of straw and sticksbut instead of learning their lesson and building sensible brick houses like their ohsoadult elder brother (memorialized in his engineer's cap forever in my memory by the Disney cartoon), the writer of fantasy horror simply rebuilds with sticks and straw again. Because, in a crazy kind of way, he or she likes it when the wolf comes and blows it all down, just as he or she sorta likes it when the gorilla escapes from its cage. Most people aren't fantasy writers, of course, but almost all of us recognize the need to feed the imagination some of the stuff from time to time. People seem to recognize that the imagination somehow needs a dose of it, like vitamins or iodized salt to avoid goiter. Fantasy is salt for the mind. Earlier on I talked about the suspension of disbelief, Coleridge's classic definition of what the reader must provide when seeking a hot shot from a fantasy story, novel, or poem. Another way of putting this is that the reader must agree to let the gorilla out of its cage for a while, and when we see the zipper running up the monster's back, the gorilla goes promptly back into its cage. After all, by the time we get to be forty or so, it's been in there for a long time, and perhaps it's developed a bit of the old "institutional mentality." Sometimes it has to be prodded out with a stick. And sometimes it won't go at all. Seen in these terms, the set of realitybecomes a very difficult thing to manipulate. Of course it leas been done in the movies; if it had not been, this book would be shorter by a third or more. But by detouring around the visual part of the set of reality, radio developed an awesome tool (perhaps even a dangerous one; the riot and national hysteria following The War of the Worlds broadcast suggests that it could have been so) for picking the lock on the gorilla's cage. But in spite of all the nostalgia we might want to feel, it is impossible to go back and reexperience the creative essence of radio terror; that particular lock pick has been broken by the simple fact that, for better or worse, ,ve now demand believable visual input as part of the set of reality. Like it or lump it, we seem to be stuck with it. 3 We're almost done with our brief discussion of radio nowI think that to do much more would be to risk droning along like one of those tiresome cinema buffs who want to spend the night telling you how Charlie Chaplin was the greatest screen actor who ever lived or that the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns stand at the apex of the ExistentialAbsurdist movementbut no discussion of the phenomenon of radio terror, no matter low brief, would be complete without some mention of the genre's prime auteurnot Orson Welles, but Arch Oboler, the first playright to have his own national radio series, the chilling Lights Out. Lights Out was actually broadcast in the forties, but enough of the programs were rebroadcast in the fifties (and even in the sixties) for me to feel I can justify their inclusion here. The one I remember most vividly from its rebroadcast on Dimension X was "The Chicken Heart that Ate the World." Oboler, like so many people in the horror fieldAlfred Hitchcock is another prime exampleare extremely alert to the humor implicit in horror, and this alertness was never on better view than in the Chicken Heart story, which made you giggle at its very absurdity even as the gooseflesh raced up and down your arms. "You remember that only a few days ago you asked me my opinion on how the world would end?" the scholarly scientist who has un Or what about Hitler? Most of us associate him now with newsreel footage and forget that in the pretelevision thirties, Hitler used radio with a kind of malevolent brilliance. My guess is that two or three appearances on Meet the Press or maybe one you'reonthegriddle 60 Minutes segment with Mike Wallace would have cooked Hitler's goose quite effectively. wittingly perpetrated the horror on an unsuspecting world solemnly tells his young protg as they fly at 5,000 feet in a light plane over the evergrowing chicken heart. "You remember my answer? Oh, such a scholarly prophecy! Mightysounding theories about cessation of earth rotation . . . entropy . . . but now, this is reality, Louis! The end has come for humanity! Not in the red of atomic fusion . . . not in the glory of interstellar combustion . . . not in the peace of white, cold silence . . . but with that! That creeping, grasping flesh below us. It is a joke, eh, Louis? The joke of the cosmos! The end of mankind . . . because of a chicken heart." "No," Louis gibbers. "No, I can't die. I'll find a safe landing place" But then, perfectly on cue, the comforting drone of the plane's engine in the background becomes a coughing stutter. "We're in a spin!" Louis screams. "The end of all mankind," the doctor proclaims in stentorian tones, and the two of them fall directly into the chicken heart. We hear its steady beat . . . louder . . . louder . . . and then the sickly splash that ends the play. Part of Oboler's real genius was that when "Chicken Heart" ended, you felt like laughing and throwing up at the same time. "Cue the bombers," an old ad for radio used to run (drone of bombers in the background; the mind's eye visualizes a sky black with Flying Forts). "Drop the ice cream into Puget Sound," the voice continues (whining, hydraulic sound of bomb bays opening, a rising whistle followed by a gigantic splash). "All right . . . cue the chocolate syrup . . . the whipped cream . . . and . . . drop the maraschino cherries! " We hear a great liquid squishing sound as the chocolate syrup goes, then a huge hissing as the whipped cream follows. These sounds are followed by a heavy plop . . . plop . . . plop in the background. And, absurd as it may be, the mind responds to these cues; that interior eye actually sees a series of gigantic ice cream sundaes rising out of Puget Sound like strange volcanic coneseach with a maraschino cherry the size of Seattle's Kingdome on top of it. In fact we see those disgustingly red cocktail cherries raining down, plopping into all that whipped cream and leaving craters nearly the size of Great Tycho. Thank the genius of Stan Freberg. Arch Oboler, a restlessly intelligent man who was also involved in the movies ( Five, one of the first films to deal with the survival of mankind after World War III, was Oboler's brainchild) and the legitimate theater, utilized two of radio's great strengths the first is the mind's innate obedience, its willingness to try to see whatever someone suggests it see, no matter how absurd; the second is the fact that fear and horror are blinding emotions that knock our adult pins from beneath us and leave us groping in the dark like children who cannot find the light switch. Radio is, of course, the "blind" medium, and only Oboler used it so well or so completely. Of course, our modern ears pick up the necessary conventions of the medium that have been outgrown (mostly due to our growing dependence on the visual in our set of reality), but these were standard practices which audiences of the day had no trouble accepting (like Tourneur's papiermch rock wall in Cat People). If these conventions seem jarring to listeners of the eighties, as the asides in a Shakespearean play seem jarring to a novice playgoer, then that is our problem, to work out as best we can. One of these conventions is the constant use of narration to move the story. A second is dialogueasdescription, a technique necessary to radio but one TV and the movies have rendered obsolete. Here, for instance, from "The Chicken Heart that Ate the World," is Dr. Alberts discussing the chicken heart itself with Louisread the passage and then ask yourself how true this speech rings to your TVand movietrained ears "Look at it down there . . . a great blanket of evil covering everything. See how the roads are black with men and women and their children, fleeing for their lives. See how the protoplasmic gray reaches out and engulfs' them." On TV, this would be laughed out of court as total corn; it is not hip, as they say. But heard in the darkness, coupled with the drone of the light plane's engine in the background, it works very well indeed. Willingly or unwillingly, the mind conjures up the image Oboler wants this great jellylike blob, beating rhythmically, swallowing up the refugees as they run . . . . Ironically, television and the early talkies both depended on the largely auditory conventions of radio until these new mediums found their own voicesand their own conventions. |
Most of us can remember the narrative "bridges" used in the early TV dramas (there was, for instance, that peculiarlooking individual Truman Bradley, who gave us a miniscience lesson at the beginning of each week's episode of Science Fiction Theater and a minimoral at the end of each episode; the last but perhaps the best example of the convention were the voiceovers done by the late Walter Winchell each week for The Untouchables). But if we look at those early talking pictures, we can also find these same dialogueasdescription and narration devices used. There is no real need for it, because we can see what's happening, but they remained for awhile just the same, a kind of useless appendix, present simply because evolution had not removed them. My favorite example of this comes from the otherwise innovative Max Fleischer Superman cartoons of the early forties. Each began with the narrator explaining solemnly to the audience that once there was a planet called Krypton "which glowed like a great green jewel in the heavens." And there it is, by George, glowing like a great green jewel in the heavens, right before our eyes. A moment later it blows to smithereens in a blinding flash of light. "Krypton exploded," the narrator informs us helpfully as the pieces fly away into space. Just in case we missed it. Oboler used a third mental trick in creating his radio dramas, and this goes back to Bill Nolan and his closed door. When it's thrown open, he says, we see a tenfoot bug, and the mind, whose capacity to visualize far outruns any state of the art, feels relief. The mind, although obedient (what is insanity conceived of by the sane, after all, if not a kind of mental disobedience?), is curiously pessimistic, and more often than not, downright morbid. Because he rarely overdid the dialogueasdescription device (as did the creators of The Shadow and Inner Sanctum), Oboler was able to use this natural turn of the mind toward the morbid and the pessimistic to create some of the most outrageous effects ever paraded before the quaking ears of a mass audience. Today, violence on television has been roundly condemned (and largely exterminated, at least by the Untouchables, Peter Gunn, and Thriller standards of the bad old sixties) "Staging" was another convention that both the early talkies and early TV leaned upon heavily until they found their own more fluid methods of storytelling. Check out some TV kinescopes from the fifties sometime, or an early talking film like It Happened One Night, The Jazz Singer, or Frankenstein, and notice how often the scenes are played out from one stationary camera location, as if the camera was in reality a representative playgoer with a frontrow seat. Speaking of the pioneering director of silents, Georges Mlis, in his fine book Caligari's Children, S. S. Prawer makes the same observation "The double exposures, jumpcuts, and other technical tricks which Mlis played with the shots he had taken from a fixed position corresponding to a fixed seat in the stalls of a theatrethese amused rather than frightened their audiences, and, in the end, wearied them sufficiently to ensure Mlis's bankruptcy." In regard to the early talkies, which came nearly forty years after Mlis pioneered the fantasy film and the idea of "special effects," audio limitations dictated the stationary camera to some extent; the camera made a loud clacking noise as it operated, and the only way to beat it was to put it in a soundproof room with a glass window. Moving the camera meant moving the room, and that was expensive in terms of time as well as money. But it was more than camera noise, a factor Mlis certainly didn't have to contend with. A lot of it was simply that mental set thing again. Bound by stage conventions, many early directors simply found themselves creatively unable to innovate. because so much of it is explicitwe see the blood flowing; that is the nature of the medium and part of the set of reality. Oboler used gore and violence by the bucketload, but a good deal of it was implicit; the real horror didn't come alive in front of a camera but on the screen of the mind. Perhaps the best example of this comes from an Oboler piece with the Don Martinlike title, "A Day at the Dentist's." As the story opens, the play's "hero," a dentist, is just closing up shop for the day. His nurse says he has one more patient, a man named Fred Houseman. "He says it's an emergency," she tells him. "Houseman?" the dentist barks. "Yes." "Fred?" "Yes. . . do you know him?" "No . . . oh, no," the dentist says casually. Houseman, it turns out, has come because Dr. Charles, the dentist who owned the practice previously, advertised himself as a "painless dentist"and Houseman, although an exwrestler and footballer, is terrified of the dentist (as so many of us are . . . and Oboler damned well knows it). Houseman's first uneasy moment comes when the doctor straps him into the dentist's chair. He protests. The dentist tells him in a low, perfectly reasonable voice (and oh, how we suspect the reason in that voice! After all, who sounds more sane than a dangerous lunatic?) that "In order to keep this painless, there must be absolutely no movement." There is a pause, and then the sound of straps being buckled. Tightly. "There," the dentist says soothingly. "Snug as a bug in a rug . . . that's a curious thin[, to call you, isn't it? You're no bug, are you? You're more the loverboy type . . . aren't you?" Ohoh, the morbid little guy inside speaks up. This looks bad for old Fred Houseman. Yes indeedy. It is bad indeed. The dentist, still speaking in that low, pleasant, and ohsorational voice, continues to call Houseman "loverboy." It turns out that Houseman ruined the girl who later became the dentist's wife; Houseman slandered her name from one end of town to the other. The dentist found out that Houseman's regular dentist was Dr. Charles, and so he bought out Charles's practice, figuring that sooner or later Houseman would come back . . . come back to "the painless dentist." And while he was waiting, the new dentist installed restraint straps on his chair. Just for Fred Houseman. All of this, of course, has parted company with any semblance of reality early on (but then, the same can be said of The Tempesthow's that for an impudent comparison?); yet the mind cares not a fig for that at this crucial juncture, and Oboler, of course, never cared at all; like the best writers of horror fiction, he is interested in effect above all else, preferably one that will wallop the listener like a twentypound chunk of slate. He achieves that quite nicely in "A Day at the Dentist's." "WWhat are you going to do?" Houseman asks fearfully, echoing the very question that has been troubling our own minds almost since the moment we were foolish enough to turn on this piece of coldblooded grue. The dentist's answer is simple and utterly terrifyingmore terrifying because of the unpleasant seminar it convenes in our own minds, a seminar in which Oboler ultimately refuses to take part, thus leaving the question to hang for as long as we want to consider it. Under the circumstances, we may not want to consider it long at all. "Nothing important," the dentist replies as he flicks a switch and the drill begins to whine. "Just going to drill a little hole . . . and let out some of loverboy." As Houseman gasps and slobbers with fear in the background, the sound of the drill comes up . . . and up . . . and up . . . and finally, out. The end. The question, of course, is where exactly did the demon dentist drill the hole to "let out some of loverboy"? It is a question that only radio, by the very nature of the medium, can pose really convincingly and leave unanswered so uneasily. We hate Oboler a little for not telling us, mostly because our minds are suggesting the most outrageously nasty possibilities. My first thought was that the dentist had almost surely used the drill on one of Houseman's temples, murdering him with a little impromptu brain surgery. But later, as I grew up and grew into a better comprehension of just what the nature of Houseman's crime had been, another possibility began to suggest itself. An even nastier one. Even today, as I write this, I wonder exactly where did that crazy man use his drill? 4 Well, enough is enough; it is time to move on from the ear to the eye. But before we go, I'd like to remind you of something that you probably already know. Many of the old radio programs, from Inner Sanctum to Gangbusters to the sudsy Our Gal Sal have been preserved on record and tape, and the quality of these recordings is actually better in most cases than the quality of the TV kinescopes that are broadcast on nostalgia programs from time to time. If you're interested in seeing how your own ability to suspend disbelief and to circumnavigate that visual set engendered by TV and the movies is holding up, you can get a start at almost any wellstocked record store. A Schwann's Catalogue of spokenword records can be even more helpful; what your friendly neighborhood Record Mart doesn't have, they'll be glad to order. And if your interest in Arch Oboler has been at all piqued by the foregoing, let me whisper a little secret in your ear Drop Dead! An Exercise in Horrorproduced, written, and directed by Arch Oboler, available for your delectation on Capitol Records (Capitol SM1763). Probably more of a summer cooler than a tall glass of iced tea . . . if you can get rid of that visual set for forty minutes or so. CHAPTER VI The Modern American Horror Movie Text and ,Subtext RIGHT NOW you could be thinking to yourself this guy must have one hell of a nerve if he thinks he's gonna cover all the horror movies released between 1950 and 1980everything from The Exorcist to the lessthanimmortal The Navy vs. the Night Monstersin a single chapter. Well, actually it's going to be two chapters, and no, I don't expect to be able to cover them all, as much as I would like to; but yes, I must have some kind of nerve to be tackling the subject at all. Luckily for me, there are several fairly traditional ways of handling the subject so that at least an illusion of order and coherence emerges. The path I've chosen is that of the horror movie as text and subtext. The place to start, I think, would be with a swift recap of those points already made on the subject of the horror movie as art. If we say "art" is any piece of creative work from which an audience receives more than it gives (a liberal definition of art, sure, but in this field it doesn't pay to be too picky), then I believe that the artistic value the horror movie most frequently offers is its ability to form a liaison between our fantasy fears and our real fears. I've said and will reemphasize here that few horror movies are conceived with "art" in mind; most are conceived only with "profit" in mind. The art is not consciously created but rather thrown off, as an atomic pile throws off radiation. I do not contend by saying the above that every exploitation horror flick is "art," however. You could walk down Fortysecond Street in Times Square on any given afternoon or evening and discover films with names like The Bloody Mutilators, The Female Butcher, or The Ghastly Onesa 1972 film we are treated to the charming sight of a woman being cut open with a twohanded bucksaw; the camera lingers as her intestines spew out onto the floor. These are squalid little films with no whiff of art in them, and only the most decadent filmgoer would try to argue otherwise. They are the staged equivalent of those 8and 16millimeter "snuff" movies which have reputedly oozed out of South America from time to time. Another point worth mentioning is the great risk a filmmaker takes when heshe decides to make a horror picture. In other creative fields, the only risk is failurewe can say, for instance, that the Mike Nichols film of The Day of the Dolphin "fails," but there is no public outcry, no mothers picketing the movie theaters. But when a horror movie fails, it often fails into painful absurdity or squalid pornoviolence. There are films which skate right up to the border where "art" ceases to exist in any form and exploitation begins, and these films are often the field's most striking successes. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of these; in the hands of Tobe Hooper, the film satisfies that definition of art which I have offered, and I would happily testify to its redeeming social merit in any court in the country. I would not do so for The Ghastly Ones. The difference is more than the difference between a chainsaw and a bucksaw; the difference is something like seventy million lightyears. Hooper works in Chainsaw Massacre, in his own queerly apt way, with taste and conscience. The Ghastly Ones is the work of morons with cameras. So, if I'm going to keep this discussion in order, I'll keep coming back to the concept of valueof art, of social merit. If horror movies have redeeming social merit, it is because of that ability to form liaisons between the real and unrealto provide subtexts. And because of their mass appeal, these subtexts are often culturewide. In many casesparticularly in the fifties and then again in the early seventiesthe fears expressed are sociopolitical in nature, a fact that gives such disparate pictures as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and William Friedkin's The Exorcist a crazily convincing documentary feel. When the horror movies wear their various sociopolitical hatsthe Bpicture as tabloid editorialthey often serve as an One success in skating over this thin ice does not necessarily guarantee that the filmmaker will be able to repeat such a success; while his innate talent saves Hooper's second film, Eaten Alive, from descending to The Bloody Mutilators category, it is still a disappointment. The only director I can think of who has explored this gray land between art and pornoexhibitionism successfullyeven brilliantlyagain and again with never a misstep is the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. extraordinarily accurate barometer of those things which trouble the nightthoughts of a whole society. But horror movies don't always wear a hat which identifies them as disguised comments on the social or political scene (as Cronenberg's The Brood comments on the disintegration of the generational family or as his They Came from Within treats of the more cannibalistic sideeffects of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck"). More often the horror movie points even further inward, looking for those deepseated personal fearsthose pressure pointswe all must cope with. This adds an element of universality to the proceedings, and may produce an even truer sort of art. It also explains, I think, why The Exorcist (a social horror film if there ever was one) did only soso business when it was released in West Germany, a country which had an entirely different set of social fears at the time (they were a lot more worried about bombthrowing radicals than about foultalking young people), and why Dawn of the Dead went through the roof there. This second sort of horror film has more in common with the Brothers Grimm than with the oped page in a tabloid paper. It Is the Bpicture as fairy tale. This sort of picture doesn't want to score political points but to scare the hell out of us by crossing certain taboo lines. So if my idea about art is correct (it giveth more than it receiveth), this sort of film is of value to the audience by helping it to better understand what those taboos and fears are, and why it feels so uneasy about them. A good example of this second type of horror picture is RKO's The Body Snatcher (1945) , liberally adaptedand that's putting it kindlyfrom a Robert Louis Stevenson story and starring Karloff and Lugosi. And by the way, the picture was produced by our friend Val Lewton. As an example of the art, The Body Snatcher is one of the forties' best. And as an example of this second artistic "purpose"that of breaking taboosit positively shines. I think we'd all agree that one of the great fears which all of us must deal with on a purely personal level is the fear of dying; without good old death to fall back on, the horror movies would be in bad shape. A corollary to this is that there are "good" deaths and "bad" deaths; most of us would like to die peacefully in our beds at age eighty (preferably after a good meal, a bottle of really fine vino, and a really super lay), but very few of us are interested in finding out how it might feel to get slowly crushed under an automobile lift while crankcase oil drips slowly onto our foreheads. Lots of horror films derive their best effects from this fear of the bad death (as in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, where Phibes dispatches his victims one at a time using the Twelve Plagues of Egypt, slightly updated, a gimmick worthy of the Batman comics during their palmiest days). Who can forget the lethal binoculars in Horrors of the Black Museum, for instance? They came equipped with springloaded sixinch prongs, so that when the victim put them to her eyes and then attempted to adjust the field of focus . . . Others derive their horror simply from the fact of death itself, and the decay which follows death. In a society where such a great store is placed in the fragile commodities of youth, health, and beauty (and the latter, it seems to me, is very often defined in terms of the former two), death and decay become inevitably horrible, and inevitably taboo. If you don't think so, ask yourself why the second grade doesn't get to tour the local mortuary along with the police department, the fire department, and the nearest McDonaldsone can imagine, or I can in my more morbid moments, the mortuary and McDonalds combined; the highlights of the tour, of course, would be a viewing of the McCorpse. No, the funeral parlor is taboo. Morticians are modern priests, working their arcane magic of cosmetics and preservation in rooms that are clearly marked "off limits." Who washes the corpse's hair? Are the fingernails and toenails of the dear departed clipped one final time? Is it true that the dead are encoffined sans shoes? Who dresses them for their final star turn in the mortuary viewing room? How is a bullet hole plugged and concealed? How are strangulation bruises hidden? The answers to all these questions are available, but they are not common knowledge. And if you try to make the answers part of your store of knowledge, people are going to think you a bit peculiar. I know; in the process of researching a forthcoming novel about a father who tries to bring his son back from the dead, I collected a stack of funeral literature a foot highand any number of peculiar glances from folks who wondered why I was reading The Funeral Vestige or Value? But this is not to say that people don't have a certain occasional interest in what lies behind the locked door in the basement of the mortuary, or what may transpire in the local graveyard after the mourners have left . . . or at the dark of the moon. The Body Snatcher is not really a tale of the supernatural, nor was it pitched that way to its audience; it was pitched as a film (as was that notorious sixties documentary Mondo Cane) that would take us "beyond the pale," over that line which marks the edge of taboo ground. "Cemeteries raided, children slain for bodies to dissect!" the movie poster drooled. "Unthinkable realities and unbelievable FACTS of the dark days of early surgical research EXPOSED in THE MOST DARING SHRIEKANDSHUDDER SHOCK SENSATION EVER BROUGHT TO THE SCREEN!" (All of this printed on a leaning tombstone.) But the poster does not stop there; it goes on very specifically to mark out the exact location of the taboo line and to suggest that not everyone may be adventurous enough to transgress this forbidden ground "If You Can 'Take It' See GRAVES RAIDED! COFFINS ROBBED! CORPSES CARVED! MIDNIGHT MURDER! BODY BLACKMAIL! STALKING GHOULS! MAD REVENGE! MACABRE MYSTERY! And Don't Say We Didn't Warn You!" All of it has sort of a pleasant, alliterative ring, doesn't it? 2 These "areas of unease"the politicalsocialcultural and those of the more mythic, fairytale varietyhave a tendency to overlap, of course; a good horror picture will put the pressure on at as many points as it can. They Came from Within, for instance, is about sexual promiscuity on one level; on another level it's asking you how you'd like to have a leech jump out of a letter slot and fasten itself onto your face. These are not the same areas of unease at all. But since we're on the subject of death and decay, we might look at a couple of films where this particular area of unease has been used well. The prime example, of course, is Night of the Living Dead, where our horror of these final states is exploited to a point where many audiences found the film wellnigh unbearable. Other taboos are also broken by the film at one point a little girl kills her mother with a garden trowel . . . and then begins to eat her. How's that for taboobreaking? Yet the film circles around to its startingpoint again and again, and the key word in the film's title is not living but dead. At an early point, the film's female lead, who has barely escaped being killed by a zombie in a graveyard where she and her brother have come to put flowers on their dead mother's grave (the brother is not so lucky), stumbles into a lonely farmhouse. As she explores, she hears something dripping . . . dripping . . . dripping. She goes upstairs, sees something, screams . . . and the camera zooms in on the rotting, weeksold head of a corpse. It is a shocking, memorable moment. Later, a government official tells the watching, beleaguered populace that, although they may not like it (i.e., they will have to cross that taboo line to do it), they must burn their dead; simply soak them with gasoline and light them up. Later still, a local sheriff expresses our own uneasy shock at having come so far over the taboo line. He answers a reporter's question by saying, "Ah, they're dead . . . they're all messed up." The good horror director must have a clear sense of where the taboo line lies, if he is not to lapse into unconscious absurdity, and a gut understanding of what the countryside is like on the far side of it. In Night of the Living Dead, George Romero plays a number of instruments, and he plays them like a virtuoso. A lot has been made of this film's graphic violence, but one of the film's most frightening moments comes near the climax, when the heroine's brother makes his reappearance, still wearing his driving gloves and clutching for his sister with the idiotic, implacable singlemindedness of the hungry dead. The film is violent, as is its sequel, Dawn of the Deadbut the violence has its own logic, and I submit to you that in the horror genre, logic goes a long way toward proving morality. The crowning horror in Hitchcock's Psycho comes when Vera Miles touches that chair in the cellar and it spins lazily around to reveal Norman's mother at lasta wizened, shriveled corpse from which hollow eyesockets stare up blankly. She is not only dead; she has been stuffed like one of the birds which decorate Norman's office. Norman's subsequent entrance in dress and makeup is almost an anticlimax. In AIP's The Pit and the Pendulum we see another facet of the bad deathperhaps the absolute worst. Vincent Price and his cohorts break into a tomb through its brickwork, using pick and shovel. They discover that the lady, his late wife, has indeed been buried alive; for just a moment the camera shows us her tortured face, frozen in a rictus of terror, her bulging eyes, her clawlike fingers, the skin stretched tight and gray. Following the Hammer films, this becomes, I think, the most important moment in the post1960 horror film, signaling a return to an allout effort to terrify the audience . . . and a willingness to use any means at hand to do it. Other examples abound. No vampire movie can be complete without a midnight creep through the tombstones and the jimmying of a crypt door. The John Badham remake of Dracula has disappointingly few fine moments, but one rather good sequence occurs when Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier) discovers his daughter Mina's grave empty . . . and an opening at its bottom leading deeper into the earth. This is English Van Helsing's daughter? I hear you saying with justifiable dismay. Yes indeed. Readers familiar with Stoker's novel will see that Badham's film (and the stage play from which it was drawn) has rung any number of changes on the novel. In terms of the tale's interior logic, these changes of plot and relationship seem to work, but to what purpose? The changes don't cause Badham to say anything new about either the Count or the vampire myth in general, and to my mind there was no coherent reason for them at all. As we have to far too often, we can only shrug and say, "That's showbiz." mining country, and we're told that the hillside where the cemetery has been laid out is honeycombed with old tunnels. Van Helsing nevertheless descends, and the movie's best passage followscrawling, claustrophobic, and reminiscent of that classic Henry Kuttner story, "The Graveyard Rats." Van Helsing pauses at a pool for a moment, and his daughter's voice comes from behind him, begging for a kiss. Her eyes glitter unnaturally; she is still dressed in the cerements of the grave. Her flesh has decayed to a sick green color and she stands, swaying, in this passage under the earth like something from a painting of the Apocalypse. In this one moment Badham has not merely asked us to cross the taboo line with him; he has quite literally pushed us across it and into the arms of this rotting corpsea corpse made more horrible because in life it conformed so perfectly to those conventional American standards of beauty youth and health. It's only a moment, and the movie holds no other moment comparable to it, but it is a fine effect while it lasts. 3 "Thou shall not read the Bible for its prose," W. H. Auden says in one of his own finer moments, and I hope I can avoid a similar flaw in this informal little discussion of horror movies. For the next little while, I intend to discuss several groups of films from the period 19501980, concentrating on some of those liaison points already discussed. We will discuss some of those movies which seem to speak in their subtexts to our more concrete fears (social, economic, cultural, political), and then some of those which seem to express universal fears which cut across all cultures, changing only slightly from place to place. Later we'll examine some books and stories in about the same way . . . but hopefully we can go on from there together and appreciate some of the books and movies in this wonderful genre just for themselvesfor what they are rather than for what they do. We'll try not to cut the goose open to see how it laid the golden eggs (a surgical crime which you can lay at the door of every high school English teacher and college English prof that ever put you to sleep in class) or to read the Bible for its prose. Analysis is a wonderful tool in matters of intellectual appreciation, but if I start talking about the cultural ethos of Roger Corman or the social implications of The Day Mars Invaded the Earth, you have my cheerful permission to pop this book into a mailer, return it to the publisher, and demand your money back. In other words, when the shit starts getting too deep, I intend to leave the area rather than perform in accepted Englishteacher fashion and pull on a pair of hipwaders. Onward. 4 There are any number of places where we could begin our discussion of "real" fears, but just for the fun of it, let's begin with something fairly off the wall the horror movie as economic nightmare. Fiction is full of economic horror stories, although very few of them are supernatural; The Crash of '79 comes to mind, as well as The Money Wolves, The Big Company Look, and the wonderful Frank Norris novel, McTeague. I only want to discuss one movie in this context, The Amityville Horror. There may be others, but this one example will serve, I think, to illustrate another idea that the horror genre is extremely limber, extremely adaptable, extremely useful; the author or filmmaker can use it as a crowbar to lever open locked doors or as a small, slim pick to tease the tumblers into giving. The genre can thus be used to open almost any lock on the fears which lie behind the door, and The Amityville Horror is a dollarsandcents case in point. There may be someone in some backwater of America who doesn't know that this film, starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder, is supposedly based on a true story (set down in a book of the same name by the late Jay Anson). I say "supposedly" because there have been several cries of "hoax!" in the news media since the book was published, and these cries have been renewed since the movie was releasedand almost unanimously panned by the critics. Despite the critics, The Amityville Horror went serenely on to become one of 1979's topgrossing movies. If it's all the same to you, I'd just as soon not go into the story's validity or nonvalidity here, although I hold definite views on the subject. Within the context of our discussion, whether the Lutzes' house was really haunted or whether the whole thing was a putup job matters very little. All movies, after all, are pure fiction, even the true ones. The fine film version of Joseph Wambaugh's The Onion Field begins with a title card which reads simply This is a True Story, but it's not; the very medium fictionalizes, and there is no way to stop this from happening. We know that a police officer named Ian Campbell really was killed in that onion field, and we know that his partner, Karl Hettinger, escaped; if we have doubts, let us look it up in the library and stare at the cold print there on the screen of the microfilm reader. Let us look at the police photographs of Campbell's body; let us talk to the witnesses. And yet we know there were no cameras there, grinding away, when those two smalltime hoods blew Ian Campbell away, nor was there a camera present when Hettinger began hooking things from department stores and removing them from the premises via armpit express. Movies produce fiction as a byproduct the same way that boiling water produces steam . . . or as horror movies produce art. If we were going to discuss the book version of The Amityville Horror (we're not, so relax) it would be important for us to first decide if we were talking about a fiction or a nonfiction work. But as far as the movie is concerned, it just doesn't matter; either way it's fiction. So let us see The Amityville Horror only as a story, unmodified either by "true" or "makebelieve." It is simple and straightforward, as most horror tales are. The Lutzes, a young married couple with two or three kids (Cathy Lutz's by a previous marriage), buy a house in Amityville. Previous to their tenancy, a young man has murdered his whole family at the direction of "voices." For this reason, the Lutzes get the house cheap. But it wouldn't have been cheap at half the price, they soon discover, because the house is haunted. Manifestations include black goop that comes bubbling out of the toilets (and before the festivities are over, it comes oozing out of the walls and the stairs as well), a roomful of flies, a rocking chair that rocks by itself, and something in the cellar that causes the dog to dig everlastingly at the wall. A window crashes on the little boy's fingers. The little girl develops an "invisible friend" who is apparently really there. Eyes glow outside the window at three in the morning. And so on. Worst of all, from the audience's standpoint, Lutz himself (James Brolin) apparently falls out of love with his wife (Margot Kidder) and begins to develop a meaningful relationship with his ax. |
Before things are done, we are drawn to the inescapable conclusion that he is tuning up for something more than splitting wood. It's probably bad form for a writer to recant something he's already written, but I'm going to nevertheless. I did an article on movies for Rolling Stone in late 1979, and I now think I was needlessly hard on The Amityville Horror in that piece. I called it a stupid sort of story, which it is; I called it simplistic and transparent, which it also is (David Chute, a film critic for The Boston Phoenix, quite rightly called it "The Amityville Nonsense"), but these canards really miss the point, and as a lifelong horror fan, I should have known it. Stupid, simplistic, and transparent are also perfectly good words to describe the tale of The Hook, but that doesn't change the fact that the story is an enduring classic of its kindin fact, those words probably go a long way toward explaining why it is a classic of its kind. Stripped of its distracting elements (a puking nun, Rod Steiger shamelessly overacting as a priest who is just discovering the devil after forty years or so as a man of the cloth, and Margot Kiddernot too tacky!doing calisthenics in a pair of bikini panties and one white stocking), The Amityville Horror is a perfect example of the Tale to be Told around the Campfire. All the teller really has to do is to keep the catalogue of inexplicable events in their correct order, so that unease escalates into outright fear. If this is done, the story will do its work . . . just as the bread will rise if the yeast is added at the right moment to ingredients which are at the correct temperature. I don't think I realized how well the film was working on this level until I saw it for the second time at a small theater in western Maine. There was little laughter during the film, no hooting . . . and not much screaming, either. The audience did not seem to be just watching this film; it seemed to be studying it. The audience simply sat there in a kind of absorbed silence, taking it all in. When the lights went on at the end of the film, I saw that the audience was a much older one than I am accustomed to see at horror films; I'd put the average age between thirtyeight and fortytwo. And there was a light on their facesan excitement, a glow. Leaving, they discussed the film animatedly with one another. It was this reactionwhich seemed to me markedly peculiar in terms of what the film had to offerthat started me thinking that a reevaluation of the film was in order. Two things apply here first, The Amityville Horror allows people to touch the unknown in a simple, uncomplicated way; it is as effective in this way as other "fads" have been before it, beginning, let us say, with the hypnosis reincarnation vogue that followed The Search for Bridey Murphy and encompassing the flyingsaucer flaps of the fifties, sixties, and seventies; Raymond Moody's Life After Life; and a lively interest in such wild talents as telepathy, precognition, and the various colorful pronouncements of Castenada's Don Juan. Simplicity may not always make great artistic sense, but it often makes the greatest impact on minds which have little imaginative capacity or upon minds in which the imaginative capability has been little exercised. The Amityville Horror is the primal haunted house story . . . and haunted houses are a concept which even the dullest mind has surely turned over at one time or another, if only around a childhood campfire or two. Before going on to the second point (and I promise not to belabor you much more with The Amityville Horror), let's look at a section of a review of a 1974 horror film, Phase IV. Phase IV was a modest Paramount release starring Nigel Davenport and Michael Murphy. It dealt with ants taking over the world following a burst of solar radiation that made them smartan idea perhaps inspired by science fiction writer Poul Anderson's short novel, Brain Wave, and then crosspollinated with the 1954 picture Them! Both Them! and Phase IV share the same desert setting, although Them! shifts to the storm drains of Los Angeles for its slambang climax. It should be added that, similar settings or not, the two movies are a million miles away from each other in matters of tone and mood. The review of Phase IV I want to quote from was written by Paul Roen and published in Castle of Frankenstein, 24. It's heartening to learn that Saul Bass, the imaginative graphics artist who designed the opening titles for Hitchcock's three greatest thrillers, has himself now taken to directing suspense movies. His initial enterprise is Phase IV, a blend of '50s scifi and '70s ecodisaster survival . . . . The narrative isn't always developed with logic and coherence, but Phase is, nevertheless, a grueling suspense exercise. Davenport is a delight to watch; his cool detachment crumbles by degrees, while his mellifluous British accent remains dignified throughout . . . . Bass's visuals are as sophisticated as one might expect, though often luridly colored; amber and green predominate [sic] the production. This was the sort of fairly sophisticated reviewing one learned to expect from Castle of Frankenstein, the best of the "monster mags" and one that died much too soon. The point the review makes is that here we have a horror movie which stands in direct contrast to The Amityville Horror. Bass's ants aren't even big. They're just little buggers who have all decided to pull together. The movie did no great boxoffice business, and I finally caught it at the drivein back in 1976, filling out the bottom half of a double bill with a picture that was much inferior to it. If you're a genuine horror fan, you develop the same sort of sophistication that a follower of the ballet develops; you get a feeling for the depth and texture of the genre. Your ear develops with your eye, and the sound of quality always comes through to the keen ear. There is fine Waterford crystal, which rings delicately when struck, no matter how thick and chunky it may look; and then there are Flintstone jelly glasses. You can drink your Dom Perignon out of either one, but friends, there is a difference. Anyway, Phase IV did poorly at the box office because for all those people out there who are not fans, who find it hard to suspend their disbelief, not much appears to be happening. There are no "big moments," such as Linda Blair puking pea soup on Max von Sydow in The Exorcist . . . or James Brolin dreaming that he is axing his family to death in The Amityville Horror. But as Roen points out, a person who loves the genre's genuine Waterford (and there isn't enough of it . . . but then, there never is enough of the good stuff in any field, is there?) find a great deal happening in Phase IVthat delicate ring of the real stuff is there, it can be perceived; it ranges from the music to the silent and eerie desert vistas to Bass's fluid camera and Michael Murphy's quiet, understated narration. The ear detects that true ringing sound . . . and the heart responds. I said all of that to say this the opposite also applies. The ear which is constantly attuned to the "fine" soundthe decorous strains of chamber music, for instancemay hear nothing but horrid cacophony when exposed to bluegrass fiddle . . . but bluegrass music is mighty fine all the same. The point is that the fan of movies in general and horror movies in particular may find it easytoo easyto overlook the crude charms of a film like The Amityville Horror after he or she has experienced films such as Repulsion, The Haunting, Fahrenheit 451 (which may have seemed to be science fiction to some, but which is nevertheless a reader's nightmare), or Phase IV. In a real appreciation of horror films, a taste for junk food applies . . . an idea we'll take up more fully in the next chapter. For now, let it suffice to say that the fan loses his taste for junk food at his or her own peril, and when I hear by way of the grapevine that New York film audiences are laughing at a horror movie, I rush out to see it. In most cases I am disappointed, but every now and then I hear me some mighty good bluegrass fiddle, eat me some pretty good fried chicken, and get so excited that I mix me some metaphors, as I've done here. All of which brings us around to the real watchspring of The Amityville Horror, and the reason it works as well as it does the picture's subtext is one of economic unease, and this is a theme that director Stuart Rosenberg plays on constantly. In terms of the times18percent inflation, mortgage rates out of sight, gasoline selling at a cool dollar forty a gallon The Amityville Horror, like The Exorcist, could not have come along at a more opportune moment. This comes out most clearly in a scene which is the film's only moment of true and honest drama; a brief little vignette that breaks through the clouds of hokum like a sunray on a drizzly afternoon. The Lutz family is preparing to go to the wedding of Cathy Lutz's younger brother (who looks, in the film, as if he might be all of seventeen). They are, of course, in the Bad House when the scene takes place. The younger brother has lost the fifteen hundred dollars that is due the caterer, and he is in an understandable agony of panic and embarrassment. Brolin says he'll write a covering check, which he does, and later he stands off the angry caterer, who has specified only cash, in a halfwhispered washroom argument while the wedding party whoops it up outside. After the wedding, Lutz turns the living room of the Bad House upside down looking for the lost money, which has now become his money, and the only way of backing up the bank paper he has issued the caterer. Brolin's check may not have been 100 percent Goodyear rubber, but in his sunken, purplepouched eyes we see a man who didn't really have the money any more than his hapless brotherinlaw did, regardless. Here is a man tottering on the brink of his own financial crash. He finds the only trace under the couch a bank moneyband with the numerals 500 stamped on it. The band lies there on the rug, tauntingly empty. " Where is it? " Brolin screams, his voice vibrating with anger, frustration, and fear. At that one moment we hear the ring of Waterford, clear and trueor, if you like, we hear that one quiet phrase of pure music in a film that is otherwise all crash and bash. Everything which The Amityville Horror does well is summed up in that scene. Its implications touch on everything about the Bad House's most obvious effectand also the only one which seems empirically undeniable little by little, it is ruining the Lutz family financially. The movie might as well have been subtitled The Horror of the Shrinking Bank Account. It's the more prosaic fallout of the place where so many hauntedhouse stories start. "It's on the market for a song," the realtor says with a big eggsucking grin. "It's supposed to be haunted." Well, the house that the Lutzes buy is indeed on the market for a song (and there's another good momentall too shortwhen Cathy tells her husband that she will be the first person in her large Catholic family to actually own her own home; "We've always been renters," she says), but it ends up costing them dear. At the conclusion, the house seems to literally tear itself apart. Windows crash in, black goop comes dribbling out of the walls, the cellar stairs cave in . . . and I found myself wondering not if the Lutz clan would get out alive but if they had adequate homeowner's insurance. Here is a movie for every woman who ever wept over a pluggedup toilet or a spreading water stain on the ceiling from the upstairs shower; for every man who ever did a slow burn when the weight of the snow caused his gutters to give way; for every child who ever jammed his fingers and felt that the door or window which did the jamming was out to get him. As horror goes, Amityville is pretty pedestrian. So's beer, but you can get drunk on it. "Think of the bills," a woman sitting behind me in the theater moaned at one point . . . but I suspect it was her own bills she was thinking about. It was impossible to make a silk purse out of this particular sow's ear, but Rosenberg at least manages to give us Qiana, and the main reason that people went to see it, I think, is that The Amityville Horror, beneath its ghoststory exterior, is really a financial demolition derby. Think of the bills, indeed. 5 The horror film as political polemic, then. We've mentioned a couple of films of this stripe already Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and the Siegel version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, both from the fifties. All the best films of this political type seem to come from that periodalthough we may be coming full circle again; The Changeling, which at this writing seems on its way to become the big "sleeper" of the spring of 1980, is an odd combination of ghosts and Watergate. If movies are the dreams of the mass cultureone film critic, in fact, has called watching a movie "dreaming with one's eyes open"and if horror movies are the nightmares of the mass culture, then many of these fifties horrors express America's comingtoterms with the possibility of nuclear annihilation over political differences. We ought to eliminate the horror movies of that period that sprang from technological unease (the socalled "big bug" movies are among these) and also those "nuclear showdown" movies such as FailSafe and Ray Milland's intermittently interesting Panic in the Year Zero. These movies are not political in the sense that Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is political; that was a film where you could see the political enemy of your choice around every corner, symbolized in those ominous pods from space. The political horror films of the period we're discussing here begin, I think, with The Thing (1951), directed by Christian Nyby and produced by Howard Hawks (who also had a hand in the direction, one suspects). It starred Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, and James Arness as the blooddrinking human carrot from Planet X. Briefly A polar encampment of soldiers and scientists discovers a strong magnetic field emanating from an area where there has been a recent meteor fall; the field is strong enough to throw all their electronic gadgets and gizmos off whack. Further, a camera designed to start shooting pictures when and if the normal radiation background count suddenly goes up has taken photos of an object which dips, swoops, and turns at high speedsstrange behavior for a meteor. An expedition is dispatched to the spot, and it discovers a flying saucer buried in the ice. The saucer, superhot on touchdown, melted its way into the ice, which then refroze, leaving only the tailfin sticking out (thus relieving the specialeffects corps of a potentially bigbudget item). The Army guys, who demonstrate frostbite of the brain throughout most of the film, promptly destroy the extraterrestrial ship while trying to burn it out of the ice with thermite. The occupant (Arness) is saved, however, and carted back to the experimental station in a block of ice. Heit is placed in a storage shed, under guard. One of the guards is so freaked out by the Thing that he throws a blanket over it. Unlucky man! Quite obviously all his good stars are in retrograde, his biorhythms low, and his mental magnetic poles temporarily reversed. The blanket he's used is of the electric variety, and it miraculously melts the ice without shorting out. The Thing escapes, and the fun begins. The fun ends about sixty minutes later with the creature being roasted mediumrare on an electric sidewalk sort of thing that the scientists have set up. A reporter on the scene reports the news of humankind's first victory over invaders from space to a presumably grateful world, and the film fades out, like The Blob seven years later, not with a THE END title card, but with a question mark. The Thing is a small movie (in An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, Carlos Clarens quite rightly calls it "intimate") done on a low budget and as obviously done "onset" as Lewton's The Cat People. Like Alien, which would come more than a quartercentury later, it achieves its best effects from feelings of claustrophobia and xenophobia, both of them feelings we're saving for those films with mythic, "fairytale" subtexts, but as pointed out before, the best horror movies will try to get at you on many different levels, and The Thing is also operating on a political level. It has grim things to say about eggheads (and kneejerk Some would say that feelings of xenophobia are in themselves political, and there's an argument there to be madebut I would rather discuss it as a universal feeling, which I believe it to be, and exclude it (for now, at least) from the sort of subliminal propaganda we're discussing here. liberals; in the early fifties you could have put an equals sign between the two) who would indulge in the crime of appeasement. The very presence of Kenneth Tobey and his squad of soldiers gives the film a militaristic, and thus political, patina. We're never under any illusions that this Arctic base has been set up just for the eggheads, who want to study such useless things as the aurora borealis and the formation of glaciers. No, this base is also spending the taxpayers' money in important ways it is a part of the Distant Early Warning line, part of America's Vigilant and Unceasing Etc., Etc., Etc. In the chain of command, the scientists are very much under Tobey. After all, the film whispers to the audience, we know what these ivorytower eggheads are like, don't we? Full of big ideas but not worth much in a situation calling for a practical man. Really, it says, when you get right down to it, those bigdome ideas make most scientists as responsible as a child with a box of matches. They may be great with their microscopes and telescopes, but it takes a man like Kenneth Tobey to understand about America's Vigilant and Unceasing Etc., Etc., Etc. The Thing is the first movie of the fifties to offer us the scientist in the role of the Appeaser, that creature who for reasons either craven or misguided, would open the gates to the Garden of Eden and let all the evils fly in (as opposed, let us say, to those Mad Labs proprietors of the thirties, who were more than willing to open Pandora's Box and let all the evils fly outa major distinction, although the end results are the same). That scientists should be so constantly vilified in the technohorror films of the fiftiesa decade that was apparently dedicated to the idea of turning out a whole marching corps of men and women in white lab coatsis perhaps not so surprising when we remember that it was science which opened those same gates so that the atomic bomb could be brought into Edenfirst by itself and then trundled on missile carriers. The average Jane or Joe on the street during those spooky eight or nine years that followed the surrender of Japan had extremely schizoid feelings about science and scientistsrecognizing the need for them and at the same time loathing the things they had let in forever. On the one hand, there was their pal, that neat little allaround guy, Reddy Kilowatt; on the other hand, before getting into the first reel of The Thing down at your local theater, you could watch newsreel footage as an Army mockup of a town just like yours was vaporized in a nuclear furnace. Robert Cornthwaite plays the Appeasing Scientist in The Thing, and we hear from his lips the first verse of a psalm that any filmgoer who grew up in the fifties and sixties became familiar with very quickly "We must preserve this creature for science." The second verse goes, "If it comes from a society more advanced than ours, it must come in peace. If we can only establish communications with it, and find out what it wants" Only scientists, Cornthwaite says, are capable of studying this creature from another world, and it must be studied; it must be debriefed; we gotta find out what heats up his rocket tubes. Never mind the fact that the creature has exhibited nothing but murderous tendencies, laying low a couple of huskies (it loses a hand in the process, but not to worry, it grows back) and living on blood instead of Green Thumb Plant Food. Twice, near the film's conclusion, Cornthwaite is hauled away by soldiers; at the climax, he breaks free of his guards and faces the creature with his hands open and empty. He begs it to communicate with him and to see that he means it no harm. The creature stares at him for a long, pregnant moment . . . and then bats him casually aside, as you or I might swat a mosquito. The mediumrare roasting on the electric sidewalk follows. Now I'm only a journeyman writer and I will not presume to teach history here (too much like trying to teach your grammy to suck eggs). I will point out that the Americans of that time were perhaps more paranoid about the idea of "appeasement" than at any other time before or since. The dreadful humiliation of Neville Chamberlain and England's resulting close squeak at the beginning of Hitler's war was still very much with those Americans, and why not? It had all happened only twelve years prior to The Thing's release, and even Americans who were just turning twentyone in 1951 could remember it all very clearly. The moral was simplesuch appeasement doesn't work; you gotta cut 'em if they stand and shoot 'em if they run. Otherwise, they'll take you over a bite at a time (and in the case of The Thing, you could take that literally). The Chamberlain lesson to Americans of the early fifties was that there can be no peace at any price, and never appeasement. Although the Korean police action would mark the beginning of the end for the idea, in 1951 the idea of America as world policeman (a kind of international Clancy growling. "Whaddye think yes doin' there, boyo?" at such geopolitical burglars as North Korea) was still quite respectable, and many Americans undoubtedly saw the idea in even stronger terms the United States not just as policeman, but as the gunslinger of the free world, the Texas Ranger who had pushed his way into the brawling saloon of AsianEuropean politics in 1941 and who had cleaned house in a mere three and a half years. So that moment comes in The Thing when Cornthwaite faces the creatureand is slammed roughly aside. It is a purely political moment, and audiences applauded the creature's destruction fervently when it came moments later. In the confrontation between Cornthwaite and the hulking Arness, there is a subtext which suggests Chamberlain and Hitler; in the destruction of the creature moments later by Tobey and his soldiers, audiences may have seen (and applauded) the quick, nononsense destruction of their favorite geopolitical villain North Korea perhaps; more likely the dastardly Russians, who had so quickly replaced Hitler as the man in the black hat. If all this seems much too heavy a cargo for a modest little fright flick like The Thing to bear, please remind yourself that a man's point of view is shaped by the events he experiences, and that a man's politics are shaped by his point of view. I am only suggesting that, given the political temper of the times and the cataclysmic world events which had occurred only a few years before, the viewpoint of this movie is almost preordained. What do you do with a blooddrinking carrot from outer space? Simple. Cut him if he stands and shoot him if he runs. And if you're an Appeasing Scientist like Robert Cornthwaite (with a yellow streak up your back as wide as the nopassing line on a highway, that subtext whispers), you simply get bulldozed under. Carlos Clarens points out how remarkably the creature of this film resembles Universal's Frankenstein monster from twenty years before, but there is really nothing so remarkable about it, surely; this particular card from the Tarot should be familiar to us by now, and if it's not, the title helpfully informs us that we're again dealing with the Thing Without a Name. It perhaps strikes more modern viewers as strange that a creature intelligent enough to conquer space should be presented in the film as an outandout monster (as opposed, let us say, to the saucerians in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, who speak English with a moderate warble but with the grammatical poise of an Oxford don; Hawks's Thing can only grunt like a pig getting its back scratched with a wire brush). One wonders why he came to Earth at all. My own suspicion is that heit got offcourse and that the original plan was for him to seed all of Nebraska or perhaps the Nile delta with little bits of himself. Just thinka homegrown invasion force (get in their way and they kill you, but smoke them and . . . real mellow, manoooh, the colors!). Yet even this is not much of an inconsistency when we put ourselves into the temper of the times again. The people of those times saw both Hitler and Stalin as creatures possessed of a certain low animal cunningHitler, after all, was first with the jet fighter and the offensive missile. But they were animals for all that, mouthing political ideas that were little more than grunts. Hitler grunted in German; Stalin in Russian, but a grunt is a grunt, for all that. And perhaps the creature in The Thing is saying something, after all, which is perfectly harmless "The people of my star system wish to know if the Get Out of Jail Free card may be sold to another player," perhapsbut it sounds bad. Real bad. By contrast, consider the other end of this telescope. The children of World War II produced The Thing; twentysix years later a child of Vietnam and the selfproclaimed Love Generation, Steven Spielberg, gives us a fitting balance weight to The Thing in a film called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In 1951, the soldier standing sentry duty (the one who has foolishly covered the block of ice in which the Thing has been entombed with an electric blanket, you will remember) empties his automatic into the alien when he hears it coming; in 1977, a young guy with a happy, spacedout smile holds up a sign reading STOP AND BE FRIENDLY. Somewhere in between the two, John Foster Dulles evolved into Henry Kissinger, and the pugnacious politics of confrontation became dtente. In The Thing, Kenneth Tobey occupies himself with building an electric boardwalk to kill the creature; in Close Encounters, Richard Dreyfuss occupies himself with building a mockup of Devil's Tower, the creatures' landing place, in his living room. And he would be just as happy, we feel, to run around up there placing those landing lights. The Thing is a big, hulking brute; the creatures from the stars in Spielberg's film are small, delicate, childlike. They do not speak, but their mothership plays lovely harmonic tonesthe music of the spheres, we assume. And Dreyfuss, far from wanting to murder these emissaries from space, goes with them. I'm not saying that Spielberg is or would think of himself as a member of the Love Generation simply because he came to his majority while students were putting daisies in the muzzles of M1's and while Hendrix and Joplin were playing the Fillmore West. Neither am I saying that Howard Hawks, Christian Nyby, Charles Lederer (who wrote the screenplay for The Thing), or John W. Campbell (whose novella formed the basis for the film) fought their way up the beaches of Anzio or helped to raise the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. But events determine point of view and point of view determines politics, and CE3K seems to me every bit as preordained as The Thing. We can understand that the latter's "let the military handle this" thesis was a perfectly acceptable one in 1951, because the military had handled the Japs and the Nazis perfectly well in Duke Wayne's "Big One," and we can also understand that the former's attitude of "don't let the military handle this" was a perfectly acceptable one in 1977, following the military's lessthanstartling record in Vietnam, or even in 1980 (when CE3K was rereleased with additional footage), the year when American military personnel lost the battle for our hostages to the Iranians following three hours of mechanical fuckups. Political horror films are by no means common, but other examples come to mind. The hawkish ones, like The Thing, usually extol the virtues of preparedness and deplore the vices of laxness, and achieve a goodly amount of their horror by positing a society which is politically antithetical to ours and yet possesses a great deal of powereither technological or magical, it matters not which; as Arthur C. Clarke has pointed out, when you reach a certain point, there is absolutely no difference between the two. There is a wonderful moment near the begining of George Pal's adaptation of The War of the Worlds when three men, one of whom is waving a white flag, approach the first of the alien spacecraft to land. Each of the three appears to come from a different class and a different race, but they are united, not just by their common humanity, but by a pervasive sense of Americanness which I don't believe was accidental. As they approach the smoking crater with their white flag, they evoke that Revolutionary War image we all grew up in school with the drummer, the fifer, the flagbearer. Thus their destruction by the Martians' heat ray becomes a symbolic act, calling up all the ideals Americans have ever fought for. The film 1984 makes a similar statement, only here (the film being largely stripped of the rich resonance George Orwell brought to his novel) Big Brother has replaced the Martians. In the Charlton Heston film The Omega Man (adapted from what David Chute calls "Richard Matheson's toughminded, peculiarly practical vampire novel I Am Legend"), we see exactly the same sort of thing; the vampires become almost cartoon Gestapo agents in their black clothes and their sunglasses. Ironically, an earlier film version of that same novel ( The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price in a rare nonvillain role as Matheson's Robert Neville) proposes a political idea which raises a different sort of horror. This film is more faithful to Matheson's novel, and as a result it offers a subtext which tells us that politics themselves are not immutable, that times change, and that Neville's very success as a vampirehunter (his peculiarly practical success, to paraphrase Chute), has turned him into the monster, the outlaw, the Gestapo agent who strikes at the helpless as they sleep. For a nation whose political nightmares perhaps still include visions of Kent State and My Lai, this is a particularly apt idea. The Last Man on Earth is perhaps an example of the ultimate political horror film, because it offers us the Walt Kelly thesis We have met the enemy and he is us. All of which brings us to an interesting borderline that I want to point out but not step overthis is the point at which the country of the horror film touches the country of the black comedy. Stanley Kubrick has been a resident of this borderline area for quite some time. A perfectly good case could be made for classing Stanley Kubrick's Dr. |
Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as a political horror film without monsters (a guy needs a dime to phone Washington and stop World War III before it can get started; Keenan Wynn grudgingly obliges by blowing a Coke machine to smithereens with his burpgun so our hero can get at the change; but he tells this wouldbe savior of the human race that "you're going to have to answer to the CocaCola Company of America for this"); for A Clockwork Orange as a political horror film with human monsters (Malcolm McDowell stomping a hapless passerby to the tune of "Singin' in the Rain"); and for 2001 A Space Odyssey as a political horror film with an inhuman monster ("Please don't turn me off," the murderous computer HAL 9000 begs as the Jupiter probe's one remaining crewman pulls its memory modules one by one) that ends its cybernetic life by singing "A Bicycle Built for Two." Kubrick has consistently been the only American film director to understand that stepping over the borderline into taboo country is as often apt to cause wild laughter as it is horror, but any tenyearold who ever laughed hysterically at a travelingsalesman joke would agree that it is so. Or it may simply be that only Kubrick has been smart enough (or brave enough) to go back to this country more than once. 6 "We have opened a door on an unimaginable power," the old scientists says gloomily at the conclusion of Them! , "and there will be no closing it now." At the end of D. F. Jones's novel Colossus (filmed as The Forbin Project), the computer which has taken over everything tells Forbin, its creator, that people will do more than learn to accept its rule; they will come to accept it as a god. "Never!" Forbin responds in ringing tones that would do the hero of a Robert Heinlein space opera proud. But it is Jones himself who has the final wordand it's not a reassuring one. "Never?" reads the final paragraph of his cautionary tale. In the Richard Egan film Gog (directed by Mr. Flipper himself, Ivan Toss), the equipment of an entire spaceresearch station seems to go mad. A solar mirror twirls erratically, pursuing the heroine with what amounts to a lethal heat ray; a centrifuge designed to test wouldbe astronauts for their responses to heavy gloads speeds up until the two test subjects are literally accelerated to death; and at the conclusion, the two BEMlike robots, Gog and Magog, go totally out of control, snapping their Waldolike pincers and making weird Geigercounterlike sounds as they roll forward on various errands of destruction ("I can control him," the coldfish scientist says confidently only moments before Magog crushes his neck with one of those pincers). "We grow them big out here," the old Indian in Prophecy says complacently to Robert Foxworth and Talia Shire as a tadpole as big as a D. F. Jones could hardly be classed as the Pollyanna of the science fiction world; in his followup to Colossus, a newly developed birth control pill that you only have to take once results in worldwide sterility and the slow death of the human race. Cheery stuff, but Jones is not alone in his gloomy distrust of a technological world; there is J. G. Ballard, author of such grim tales as Crash, Concrete Island, and HighRise; not to mention Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (whom my wife fondly calls "Father Kurt"), who has given us such novels as Cat's Cradle and Player Piano. salmon jumps out of a lake in northern Maine and flops around on the shore. Indeed they do; Foxworth also sees a salmon as big as a porpoise, and by the conclusion of the film, one is grateful that whales are not freshwater mammals. All of the foregoing are examples of the horror film with a technological subtext . . . sometimes referred to as the "nature run amok" sort of horror picture (not that there's much natural about Gog and Magog, with their tractor treads and their forests of radio aerials). In all of them, it is mankind and mankind's technology which must bear the blame; "You brought it on yourselves," they all say; a fitting epitaph for the mass grave of mankind, I think, when the big balloon finally goes up and the ICBMs start to fly. In Them! it is nuclear testing at White Sands that has produced the giant ants; the Cold War has spawned dat ole binary debbil Colossus; ditto the machines that have gone nuts in Gog; and it's mercury in the water, a sideeffect of a papermaking process, that has produced the giant tadpoles and the mutant monstrosities in the John Frankenheimer film Prophecy. It is here, in the technohorror film, that we really strike the mother lode. No more panning for the occasional nugget, as in the case of the economic horror film or the political horror film; pard, we could dig the gold right out of the ground with our bare hands here, if we wanted to. Here is a corner of the old horrorfilm corral where even such an abysmal little wet fart of a picture as The Horror of Party Beach will yield a technological aspect upon analysisyou see, all those beach blanket boppers in their bikinis and ballhuggers are being menaced by monsters that were created when drums of radioactive waste leaked. But not to worry; although a few girls get carved up, all comes right in the end in time for one last wiener roast before school starts again. Once more, these things happen only rarely because directors, writers, and producers want them to happen; they happen on their own. The producers of The Horror of Party Beach, for example, were two Connecticut drivein owners who saw a chance to turn a quick buck in the lowbudget horrormovie game (the reasoning seeming to be that if Nicholson and Arkoff of AIP could make X amount of dollars churning out Bpictures, then they might be able to make X2 amount of dollars by turning out Zpictures). The fact that they created a film which foresaw a problem that would become very real ten years down the road was only an accident . . . but an accident, like Three Mile Island, that perhaps had to happen, sooner or later. I find it quite amusing that this grainy, lowbudget rock 'n' roll horror picture arrived at ground zero with its Geiger counters clicking long before The China Syndrome was even a twinkle in anyone's eye. By now it must be obvious that all of these circles intersect, that sooner or later we always arrive back at the same terminusthe terminus which gives upon the land of the mass American nightmare. These are nightmares for profit, granted, but nightmares is nightmares, and in the last analysis it is the profit motive that becomes unimportant and the nightmare itself which remains of interest. The producers of The Horror of Party Beach never sat down, I'm sure (just as I'm sure the producers of The China Syndrome did), and said to each other "Lookwe're going to warn the people of America about the dangers of nuclear reactors, and we will sugarcoat the pill of this vital message with an entertaining story line." No, the line of discussion would have been more apt to go like this Because our target audience is young, we'll feature young people, and because our target audience is interested in sex, we'll site it on a sunandsurftype beach, which allows us to show all the flesh the censors will allow. And because our target audience likes grue, we'll give them these gross monsters. It must have looked like boffo boxoffice stuff a hybrid of AIP's most consistently lucrative genre picturesthe monster movie and the beachparty movie. But because any horror film (with the possible exception of the German expressionist films of the 1930s) has got to at least pay lip service to credibility, there had to be some reason for these monsters to suddenly come out of the ocean and start doing all these antisocial things (one of the film's highlightsmaybe lowlights would be bettercomes when the creatures invade a slumber party and kill ten or twenty nubile young things . . . talk about party poopers!). What the producers decided upon was nuclear waste, leaking from those dumped cannisters. I'm sure it was one of the least important points in their preproduction discussions, and for that very reason it becomes very important to our discussions here. The reason for the monsters most likely came about in a kind of freeassociation process, the sort of test psychiatrists use to discover points of anxiety in their patients. And although The Horror of Party Beach has long since been consigned to oblivion, that image of the canisters marked with radiation symbols sinking slowly to the bottom of the ocean lingers in the memory. What in Christ's name are we really doing with all that nuclear sludge? the mind enquires uneasilythe burnoff, the dreck, the used plutonium slugs, and the wornout parts that are as hot as a nickelplated revolver and apt to stay that way for the next six hundred years or so? Does anybody know what in Christ's name we're doing with those things? Any thoughtful consideration of technohorror filmsthose films whose subtexts suggest that we have been betrayed by our own machines and processes of mass productionreveals very quickly another face in that dark Tarot hand we dealt out earlier this time it's the face of the Werewolf. In talking about the Werewolf in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde I used the terms Apollonian (to suggest reason and the power of the mind) and Dionysian (to suggest emotion, sensuality, and chaotic action). Most films which express technological fears have a similar dual nature. Grasshoppers, Beginning of the End suggests, are Apollonian creatures, going about their business of hopping, eating, spitting tobacco juice, and making little grasshoppers. But following an infusion of nuclear wolfsbane, they grow to the size of Cadillacs, become Dionysian and disruptive, and attack Chicago. It is their very Dionysian tendenciesin this case, their sex drivethat spells the end for them. Peter Graves (as the Brave Young Scientist) rigs up a matingcall tape that is broadcast through loudspeakers from a number of boats circling on Lake Michigan, and the grasshoppers all rush to their deaths, believing themselves to be on their way to a really good fuck. A bit of a cautionary tale, you understand. I bet D. F. Jones loved it. Even Night of the Living Dead has a technohorror aspect, a fact that may be overlooked as the zombies move in on the lonely Pennsylvania farmhouse where the "good guys" are holed up. There is nothing really supernatural about all those dead folks getting up and walking; it happened because a space probe to Venus picked up some weird corpsereviving radiation on its way back home. One suspects that chunks of such a satellite would be eagerly soughtafter artifacts in Palm Springs and Fort Lauderdale. The barometer effect of the subtexts of technohorror films can be seen by comparing films of this type from the fifties, sixties, and seventies. In the fifties, the terror of the Bomb and of fallout was a real and terrifying thing, and it left a scar on those children who wanted to be good just as the depression of the thirties left a scar on their elders. A newer generationnow still teenagers, with no memory of either the Cuban missile crisis or of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, raised on the milk of dtentemay find it hard to comprehend the terror of these things, but they will undoubtedly have a chance to discover it in the years of tightening belts and heightening tensions which lie ahead . . . and the movies will be there to give their vague fears concrete focusing points in the horror movies yet to come. It may be that nothing in the world is so hard to comprehend as a terror whose time has come and gonewhich may be why parents can scold their children for their fear of the boogeyman, when as children themselves they had to cope with exactly the same fears (and the same sympathetic but uncomprehending parents). That may be why one generation's nightmare becomes the next generation's sociology, and even those who have walked through the fire have trouble remembering exactly what those burning coals felt like. I can remember, for instance, that in 1968, when I was twentyone, the issue of long hair was an extremely nasty, extremely explosive one. That seems as hard to believe now as the idea of people killing each other over whether the sun went around the earth or the earth went around the sun, but that happened, too. I was thrown out of a bar called the Stardust in Brewer, Maine, by a construction worker back in that happy year of 1968. The guy had muscles on his muscles and told me I could come back and finish my beer "after you get a haircut, you faggot fairy." There were the standard catcalls thrown from passing cars (usually old cars with fins and cancer of the rocker panels) Are you a boy or are you a girl? Do you give head, honey? When was the last time you had a bath? And so on, as Father Kurt so rightly says. I can remember such things in an intellectual, even analytical way, as I can remember having a dressing that had actually grown into the tissue yanked from the site of a cystremoval operation that occurred when I was twelve. I screamed from the pain and then fainted dead away. I can remember the pulling sensation as the gauze tore free of the new, healthy tissue (the dressing removal was performed by a nurse's aide who apparently had no idea what she was doing), I can remember the scream, and I can remember the faint. What I can't remember is the pain itself. It's the same with the hair thing, and in a larger sense, all the other pains associated with coming of age in the decade of napalm and the Nehru jacket. I've purposely avoided writing a novel with a 1960s' time setting because all of that seems, like the pulling of that surgical dressing, very distant to me nowalmost as if it had happened to another person. But those things did happen; the hate, paranoia, and fear on both sides were all too real. If we doubt it, we only need review that quintessential sixties counterculture horror film, Easy Rider, where Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper end up being blown away by a couple of rednecks in a pickup truck as Roger McGuinn sings Bob Dylan's "It's All Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) " on the soundtrack. Similarly, it is difficult to remember in any gut way the fears that came with those boom years of atomic technology twentyfive years ago. The technology itself was strictly Apollonian; as Apollonian as niceguy Larry Talbot, who "said his prayers at night." The atom was not split by a gibbering Colin Clive or Boris Karloff in some Eastern European Mad Lab; it was not done by alchemy and moonlight in the center of a runestruck circle; it was done by a lot of little guys at Oak Ridge and White Sands who wore tweed jackets and smoked Luckies, guys who worried about dandruff and psoriasis and whether or not they could afford a new car and how to get rid of the goddam crabgrass on the lawn. Splitting the atom, producing fission, opening that door on a new world that the old scientist speaks of at the end of Them! these things were accomplished on a businessasusual basis. People understood this and could live with it (fifties science books extolled the wonderful world the Friendly Atom would produce, a world refueled by nice safe nuclear reactors, and grammar school kids got free comic books produced by the power companies), but they suspected and feared the hairy, simian face on the other side of the coin as well they feared that the atom might be, for a number of reasons both technological and political, essentially uncontrollable. These feelings of deep unease came out in movies such as The Beginning of the End, Them!, Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man (where radiation combined with a pesticide causes a very personal horror for one man, Scott Carey), The HMen, and FourD Man. The entire cycle reaches its supreme pinnacle of absurdity in Night of the Lepus, where the world is menaced by sixtyfoot bunnies. The concerns of the technohorror films of the sixties and seventies change with the concerns of the people who lived through those times; the big bug movies give way to pictures such as The Forbin Project And a host of others, many of them Japanese imports, all linked by either longterm radiation or nuclear blast as first cause Godzilla, Gorgo, Rodan, Mothra, and Ghidrah, the ThreeHeaded Monster. The idea was even played for laughs once before Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, in an odd little fifties picture called The Atomic Kid, starring Mickey Rooney. (The Software that Conquered the World) and 2001, which both offer us the possibility of the computer as God, or the even nastier idea (ludicrously executed, I'll readily admit) of the computer as satyr, which is laboriously produced in Demon Seed and Saturn 3. In the sixties, horror proceeds from a vision of technology as an octopusperhaps sentientburying us alive in red tape and informationretrieval systems which are terrible when they work ( The Forbin Project) and even more terrible when they don't In The Andromeda Strain, for instance, a small scrap of paper gets caught in the striker of a teletype machine, keeps the bell from ringing, and thereby (in a fashion Rube Goldberg certainly would have approved of ) nearly causes the end of the world. Finally there are the seventies, culminating in Frankenheimer's notverygood but certainly wellmeant film Prophecy, which is so strikingly similar to those fifties big bug movies (only the first cause has changed), and The China Syndrome, a horror movie which synthesizes all three of these major technological fears fears of radiation, fears for the ecology, fears of the machinery gone out of control, run wild. Before leaving this all too brief look at pictures which depend on some mass unease over matters technological to provide the equivalent of The Hook (pictures which appeal to the Luddite hiding inside all of us), we should mention some of the films dealing with space travel which fall into this category . . . but we'll exclude such xenophobic pictures as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and The Mysterians from our view. Pictures which focus on the possible Dionysian side of space exploration (such as The Andromeda Strain and Night of the Living Dead, where satellites bring back dangerous but nonsentient organisms from the void) ought to be differentiated from those purely xenophobic movies dealing with invasion from outer spacefilms where the human race is viewed in an essentially passive role, attacked by the equivalent of muggers from the stars. In pictures of this type, technology is often seen as the savior (as it is in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, where Hugh Marlowe uses his sonic gun to interrupt the saucers' electromagnetic drive, or in The Thing, where Tobey and his men use electricity to barbecue the interstellar vegetable)Apollonian science vanquishing the Dionysian bad guys from Planet X. Although both The Andromeda Strain and Night of the Living Dead present space travel itself as an active danger, perhaps the best example of that idea combined with the brilliant mind dangerously hypnotized by the siren song of technology comes in The Creeping Unknown, a film that predates both of the former. In that film, the first of the critically acclaimed Quatermass series, the viewer is originally presented with one of the creepiest lockedroom mysteries ever posited three scientistastronauts are sent into space, but only one returns . . . and he is catatonic. Telemetry and the presence of all three spacesuits seem to prove that the two missing spacemen never left the ship. So where did they go? What happened, apparently, is that they picked up an interstellar hitchhiker, a plot device we see again in It.! The Terror from Beyond Space and, of course, in Alien. This hitchhiker has consumed the survivor's two mates, leaving only a mass of sludgy gray stuff behind . . . and, of course, the hitchhiker (a kind of space spore) is now busily at work in the body of the survivor, Victor Carune, who is played with skulllike, spooky believability by Richard Wordsworth. Poor Carune ends up degenerating into a spongy, manytentacled horror which is finally spotted clinging to a scaffolding in Westminster Abbey and dispatched (just in the nick of time; it is about to sporulate and create billions of these things) by a big jolt of electricity which sets it on fire. All of this is fairly standard monstermovie fare. What elevates The Creeping Unknown to levels undreamed of in the philosophies of the creators of The Horror of Party Beach is Val Guest's somber, atmospheric direction, and the character of Quatermass himself, played by Brian Donlevy (other actors have since played Quatermass in other films, softening the interpretation a bit). Quatermass is a scientist who may or may not be mad, depending on your own views of technology. Certainly if he is nuts, there is enough Apollonian method in his madness to make him every bit as scary (and every bit as dangerous) as that blob of tentaclewaving goo that was once Victor Carune. "I'm a scientist, not a fortuneteller," Quatermass grunts contemptuously at a timid doctor who asks him what he thinks might happen next; when a fellow scientist tells him that if he tries to open the hatch of the crashed rocket he will roast the space travelers inside, Quatermass storms at him "Don't tell me what I can and can't do!" His attitude toward Carune himself is the coldblooded attitude which a biologist might adopt toward a hamster or a Rhesus monkey. "He's coming along fine," Quatermass says of the catatonic Carune, who is sitting in something which vaguely resembles a dentist's chair and staring out at the world with eyes as black and dead as cinders coughed up from hell. "He knows we're trying to help him." Yet in the end it is Quatermass triumphantif only through blind luck. After the monster is destroyed, Quatermass brushes rudely by a police officer who is trying to tell him in a halting way that he prayed they would be successful. "One world at a time is enough for me," the policeman says; Quatermass ignores him. At the door, his young assistant finds his way to him. "I only just heard, sir," he says. "Is there anything I can do?" "Yes, Morris," Quatermass replies. "I'm going to need some help." "Help, sir?" "Going to start again," Quatermass amplifiesit is the film's last line of dialogue. It fades to a scene of yet another rocket blasting off into outer space. Guest seems ambivalent about his ending and about the character of Quatermass, and it's that ambivalence which gives this early Hammer film its resonance and real power. Quatermass seems somehow closer to those very real Oak Ridge scientists of the postwar period than he does to the gibbering Mad Labs scientists of the thirties; he is no Dr. Cyclops in a white lab coat, chuckling evilly as he stares through his bottlethick glasses at his creations. Au contraire, he is not only fairly goodlooking and fearsomely intelligent, he is charismatic and impossible to turn from his purpose. If you are an optimist, you can see the coda of The Creeping Unknown as a testament to the glorious stubbornness of the human spirit, its determination to advance the store of knowledge at any cost. If, on the other hand, you are a pessimist, then Quatermass becomes the ultimate symbol of mankind's builtin limiting factor, and the high priest of the technohorror film. The return of his first manned space probe has almost resulted in the end of the human race; Quatermass's response to this niggling little reversal is to launch another as quickly as he can. Footdragging politicians are apparently no match for the man's charisma, and as we see that rocket going up at the end of the picture, we're left with a question What will this one bring back? Even such a muchloved American institution as the motor vehicle has not entirely escaped the troubled dreams of Hollywood; a few years before being run out of his mortgaged house in Amityville, James Brolin had to face the terrors of The Car (1977) , a customized somethingorother that looked like a squatty airport limo from one of hell's used car lots. The movie degenerates into a hohum piece of hackwork before the end of the second reel (the sort of movie where you can safely go out for a popcorn refill at certain intervals because you know the car isn't going to strike again for ten minutes or so), but there is a marvelous opening sequence where the car chases two bicyclists through Utah's Zion State Park, its horn blatting arrhythmically as it gains on them and finally runs them down. There's something working in that opening sequence, something that calls up a deep, almost primitive unease about the cars we zip ourselves up in, thereby becoming anonymous . . . and perhaps homicidal. A better film is the Steven Spielberg adaptation of Richard Matheson's short story Duel, a film which originally appeared as part of ABC's Movie of the Week series and went on to become something of a cult film. In this film, a psychotic trucker in a big tenwheeler pursues Dennis Weaver over what seems to be at least a million miles of California highways. We never actually see the trucker (although we do see a beefy arm cocked out of the cab window once, and at another point we see a pair of pointytoed cowboy boots on the far side of the truck), and ultimately it is the truck itself, with its huge wheels, its dirty windshield like an idiot's stare, and its somehow hungry bumpers, which becomes the monsterand when Weaver is finally able to lead it to an embankment and lure it over the edge, the noise of its "death" becomes a series of chilling Jurassic roars . . . the sound, we think, a tyrannosaurus rex would make going slowly down into a tar pit. And Weaver's response is that of any selfrespecting caveman he screams, shrieks, cuts capers, literally dances for joy. Duel is a gripping, almost painfully suspenseful rocket ride of a movie; perhaps not Spielberg's best workthat must almost certainly wait for the eighties and ninetiesbut surely one of the half dozen best movies ever made for TV. We could uncover other interesting tales of automotive horror, but they would be stories and novels, mostly; such turkeys as Death Race 2000 and Mad Max hardly count. Modern Hollywood has apparently decided that, as the day of the privately owned gasoline vehicle enters its late afternoon, the automobile in most cases must be reserved for funny car chases (as in Foul Play and the cheerfully mindcroggling Grand Theft Auto) or a kind of sappy reverence ( The Driver). The interested reader might enjoy an anthology (now available in paperback) edited by Bill Pronzini and titled Car Sinister. Fritz Leiber's contribution alone, a funnysinister tale of Car Future titled "X Marks the Pedwalk," is worth the price of admission. 7 Social horror films. We've already discussed a few films with social implicationspimples and the heartbreak of psoriasis in the fifties, not to mention Michael Landon drooling shaving cream all over his high school jacket. But there have been other films which tackle more serious social subjects. In some cases ( Rollerball, Wild in the Streets), these films feature a logical or satirical extrapolation of current social trends and thus become science fiction. We'll restrict these, if you don't mind, on the grounds that they constitute another dancea bit different from this dark cotillion we're currently engaged in. There have been a few films which have tried to walk the borderline between horror and social satire; one of those which seems to me to tread this borderline most successfully is The Stepford Wives. The film is based on the novel by Ira Levin, and Levin has actually been able to pull this difficult trick off twice, the other case being that of Rosemary's Baby, which we'll talk about in some depth when we finally arrive at our discussion of the horror novel. For now we'll stick to The Stepford Wives, which has some witty things to say about Women's Liberation, and some disquieting things to say about the American male's response to it. I spent some time trying to decide if the film, directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss, really belonged in this book. It is as satiric as the best of Kubrick's work (although a good deal less elegant), and I defy an audience not to laugh when Ross and Prentiss step into the home of a neighbor (he's the local druggist, and a Walter Mitty type if ever there was one) and hear his wife moaning upstairs "Oh, Frank, you're the greatest . . . Frank, you're the best . . . you're the champ . . . The original Levin story avoided the label "horror novel" (something like the label "pariah dog" in the more exalted circles of literary criticism) because most critics saw it as Levin's sly poke at the Women's Movement. But the scarier implications of Levin's jape are not directed at women at all; they are aimed unerringly at those men who consider it only their due to leave for the golf course on Saturday morning after breakfast has been served them and to reappear (loaded, more likely than not) in time for their dinner to be served them. I'm including it hereas social horror rather than social satirebecause the film, after some uneasy backing and filling where it seems unsure of just what it does want to bebecomes just that a social horror story. But the credit for this particular scene belongs to neither Forbes nor Levin, but with the film's screenwriter, William Goldman, who is a very funny fellow. If you doubt, see his wonderful sendup of fantasy and fairy tales, The Princess Bride. I can think of no other satire, with the possible exception of Alice in Wonderland, which is so clearly an expression of love and humor and good temper. Katharine Ross and her husband (played by Peter Masterson) move from New York City to Stepford, a Connecticut suburb, because they feel it will be better for the children, and themselves as well. Stepford is a perfect little village where kids wait goodhumoredly for the school bus, where you can see two or three fellows washing their cars on any given day, where (you feel) the yearly United Fund quota is not only met but exceeded. Yet there's a strangeness in Stepford. A lot of the wives seem a little . . . well, spacey. Pretty, always attired in flowing dresses that are almost gowns (a place where the movie slips, I think; as a labeling device, it's pretty crude. These women might as well be wearing stickers pasted to their foreheads which read I AM ONE OF THE WEIRD STEPFORD WIVES), they all drive station wagons, discuss housework with an inordinate degree of enthusiasm, and seem to spend any spare time at the supermarket. One of the Stepford wives (one of the weird ones) cracks her head in a minor parking lot fenderbender; later we see her at a lawn party, repeating over and over again "I simply must get that recipe . . . I simply must get that recipe . . . I simply must . . ." The secret of Stepford comes clear immediately. Freud, in a tone which sounds suspiciously like despair, asked "Woman . . . what does she want?" Forbes and company ask the opposite question, and come up with a stinging answer. Men, the film says, do not want women; they want robots with sex organs. There are several funny scenes in the movie (besides the aforementioned "Frank, you're the champ" sequence); my own favorite comes when, at a women's "bitch session" Ross and Prentiss have arranged, the weird Stepford wives begin discussing cleaning products and laundry soaps with a slow and yet earnest intensity; everyone seems to have walked right out of one of those commercials male Madison Avenue execs sometimes refer to as "Two C's in a K"meaning two cunts in a kitchen. But the movie waltzes slowly out of this brightly lit room of social satire and into a darker chamber by far. We feel the ring closing, first around Paula Prentiss, then around Katharine Ross. |
There is an uncomfortable passage when the artist who apparently creates the features for the robots sits sketching Ross, his eyes looking up from the sketch pad at her and then back down again; there is the smirking expression on the face of Tina Louise's husband as the bulldozer rips up the surface of her tennis court in preparation for the pool he always wanted; there is Ross discovering her husband sitting alone in the living room of their new house, a drink in his hand, weeping. She is deeply concerned, but we know that his shallow tears mean only that he has sold her out for a dummy with microchips in her head. Very soon she will lose all her interest in photography. The movie reserves its ultimate horror and its most telling social shot for the closing moments of the film, when the "new" Katharine Ross walks in on the old one . . . perhaps, we think, to murder her. Under her flowing neglige which might have come from Frederick's of Hollywood, we see Ms. Ross's rather small breasts built up to the size of what men discussing women over beers sometimes refer to as "knockers." And of course, they are no longer the woman's breasts at all; they now belong solely to her husband. The dummy is not quite complete, however; there are two horrible black pools where the eyes should be. Bad enough, and more spectacular, probably, but it was the import of those siliconeswollen breasts that chilled me. The best social horror movies achieve their effect by implication, and The Stepford Wives, by showing us only the surface of things and never troubling to explain exactly how these things are done, implies plenty. I'll not bore you by rehashing the plot of William Friedkin's The Exorcist, another film which relies on the unease generated by changing mores; I'll simply assume that if your interest in the genre has been sufficient to sustain you this far, then you've probably seen it. If the late fifties and early sixties were the curtainraiser on the generation gap ("Is it a boy or a girl?" etc., etc., etc.), then the seven years from 1966 to 1972 were the play itself. Little Richard, who had horrified parents in 1957 when he leaped atop his piano and began boogeying on it in his lizardskin loafers, looked tame next to John Lennon, who was proclaiming that the Beatles were more popular than Jesusa statement that set off a rash of fundamentalist recordburnings. The Brylcreem look was replaced by those long locks already discussed. Parents began to find strange herbs in their sons' and daughters' bureau drawers. The images in rock music had become increasingly distressing Mr. Tambourine Man seemed to be about drugs; with the Byrds' Eight Miles High there could be no question. Radio stations continued to play discs by one group even after two male band members announced they were in love with each other. Elton John proclaimed his ACDC sexual proclivities and continued successful; yet less than twenty years before, wildman Jerry Lee Lewis was blackballed from AM airplay when he married his fourteenyearold cousin. Then there was the war in Vietnam. Messrs. Johnson and Nixon spread it out like a great big rancid picnic lunch over there in Asia. Many of the young elected not to attend. "I got no quarrel with them Congs," Muhammed All announced, and was stripped of his boxing title for declining to take off his gloves and pick up an M1. Kids began burning their draft cards, running away to Canada or Sweden, and marching with Viet Cong flags. In Bangor, where I hung out in my college days, a young man was arrested and incarcerated for replacing the seat of his Levis with an American flag. Some fun, huh, kid. It was more than a generation gap. The two generations seemed, like the San Andreas fault, to be moving along opposing plates of social and cultural conscience, commitment, and definitions of civilized behavior itself. The result was not so much an earthquake as it was a timequake. And with all of this young vs. old nuttiness as a backdrop, Friedkin's film of The Exorcist appeared and became a social phenomenon in itself. Lines stretched around the block in every major city where it played, and even in towns which normally rolled up their sidewalks promptly at 730 P.M., midnight shows were scheduled. Church groups picketed; sociologists with pipes pontificated; newscasters did "back of the book" segments for their programs on slow nights. The country, in fact, went on a twomonth possession jag. The movie (and the novel) is nominally about the attempts of two priests to cast a demon out of young Regan MacNeil, a pretty little subteen played by Linda Blair (who later went on to a High Noon showdown with a bathroom plunger in the infamous NBC movie Born Innocent). Substantatively, however, it is a film about explosive social change, a finely honed focusing point for that entire youth explosion that took place in the late sixties and early seventies. It was a movie for all those parents who felt, in a kind of agony and terror, that they were losing their children and could not understand why or how it was happening. It's the face of the Werewolf again, a JekyllandHyde tale in which sweet, lovely and loving Regan turns into a foultalking monster strapped into her bed and croaking (in the voice of Mercedes McCambridge ) such charming homilies as "You're going to let Jesus fuck you, fuck you, fuck you." Religious trappings aside, every adult in America understood what the film's powerful subtext was saying; they understood that the demon in Regan MacNeil would have responded enthusiastically to the Fish Cheer at Woodstock. A Warner Brothers executive told me recently that movie surveys show the average filmgoer to be fifteen years of age, which may be the biggest reason why the movies so often seem afflicted with a terminal case of arrested development. For every film like Julia or The Turning Point, there are a dozen like Roller Boogie and If You Don't Stop It, You'll Go Blind. But it is worth noting that when the infrequent blockbusters which every film producer hopes for finally come alongpictures like Star Wars, Jaws, American Graffiti, The Godfather, Gone With the Wind, and of course The Exorcistthey always break the demographic hammerlock which is the enemy of intelligent filmmaking. It is comparatively rare for horror movies to do this, but The Exorcist is a case in point (and we have already spoken of The Amityville Horror, another film which has enjoyed a surprisingly old audience). A film which appealed directly to the fifteenyearolds that provide the spike point for moviegoing audiencesand one with a subtext tailored to matchwas the Brian De Palma adaptation of my novel Carrie. While I believe that both the book and the film depend on largely the same social situations to provide a text and subtext of horror, there's maybe enough difference to make a few interesting observations on De Palma's film version. Both novel and movie have a pleasant High School Confidential feel, and while there are some superficial changes from the book in the film (Carrie's mother, for instance, seems to be presented in the film as a kind of weird renegade Roman Catholic), the basic story skeleton is pretty much the same. The story deals with a girl named Carrie White, the browbeaten daughter of a religious fanatic. Because of her strange clothes and shy mannerisms, Carrie is the butt of every class joke; the social outsider in every situation. She also has a mild telekinetic ability which intensifies after her first menstrual period, and she finally uses this power to "bring down the house" following a terrible social disaster at her high school prom. De Palma's approach to the material was lighter and more deft than my ownand a good deal more artistic; the book tries to deal with the loneliness of one girl, her desperate effort to become a part of the peer society in which she must exist, and how her effort fails. If it had any thesis to offer, this deliberate updating of High School Confidential, it was that high school is a place of almost bottomless conservatism and bigotry, a place where the adolescents who attend are no more allowed to rise "above their station" than a Hindu would be allowed to rise above his or her caste. But there's a little more subtext to the book than that, I thinkat least, I hope so. If The Stepford Wives concerns itself with what men want from women, then Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, and what men fear about women and women's sexuality . . . which is only to say that, writing the book in 1973 and only out of college three years, I was fully aware of what Women's Liberation implied for me and others of my sex. The book is, in its more adult implications, an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality. For me, Carrie White is a sadly misused teenager, an example of the sort of person whose spirit is so often broken for good in that pit of manand womaneaters that is your normal suburban high school. But she's also Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book. Heavy, turgid stuffbut in the novel, it's only there if you want to take it. If you don't, that's okay with me. A subtext only works well if it's unobtrusive (in that I perhaps succeeded too well; in her review of De Palma's film, Pauline Kael dismissed my novel as "an unassuming potboiler"as depressing a description as one could imagine, but not completely inaccurate). De Palma's film is up to more ambitious things. As in The Stepford Wives, humor and horror exist side by side in Carrie, playing off one another, and it is only as the film nears its conclusion that horror takes over completely. We see Billy Nolan (well played by John Travolta) giving the cops a big awshucks grin as he hides a beer against his crotch early on; it is a moment reminiscent of American Graffiti. Not long after, however, we see him swinging a sledgehammer at the head of a pig in a stockyardthe awshucks grin has crossed the line into madness, somehow, and that linecrossing is what the film as a whole is about. We see three boys (one of them the film's nominal hero, played by William Katt) trying on tuxedos for the Prom in a kind of Gas House Kids routine that includes Donald Duck talk and speededup action. We see the girls who have humiliated Carrie in the shower room by throwing tampons and sanitary napkins at her doing penance on the exercise field to tootling, lumbering music which is reminiscent of "Baby Elephant Walk." And yet beyond all these sophomoric and mildly amusing high school cutups, we sense a vacuous, almost unfocused hate, the almost unplanned revenge upon a girl who is trying to rise above her station. Much of De Palma's film is surprisingly jolly, but we sense his jocoseness is dangerous; behind it lurks the awshucks grin becoming a frozen rictus, and the girls laboring over their calisthenics were the same girls shouting, "Plug it up, plug it up, plug it up!" at Carrie not long before. Most of all, there is that bucket of pig's blood poised on the beam above the place where Carrie and Tommy (Katt) will eventually be crowned . . . only waiting its time. De Palma is sly, and extremely adept at handling his mostly female cast. In writing the novel, I found myself slogging grimly toward the conclusion, trying to do the best job I could with what I knew about women (which was not a great deal). The strain shows in the finished book. It's a fast and entertaining read, I think, and (for me at least) quite gripping. But there's a certain heaviness there that a really good popular novel sshould not have, a feeling of Sturm and Drang that I could not get rid of no matter how hard I tried. The book seems clear enough and truthful enough in terms of the characters and their actions, but it lacks the style of De Palma's film. The book attempts to look at the ant farm of high school society dead on; De Palma's examination of this High School Confidential world is more oblique . . . and more cutting. The film came along at a time when movie critics were bewailing the fact that there were no movies being made with good, meaty roles for women in them . . . but none of these critics seem to have noticed that in its film incarnation, Carrie belongs almost entirely to the ladies. Billy Nolan, a majorand frighteningcharacter in the book, has been reduced to a semisupporting role in the movie. Tommy, the boy who takes Carrie to the Prom, is presented in the novel as a boy who is honestly trying to do something manlyin his own way he is trying to opt out of the caste system. In the film he becomes little more than his girlfriend's cat'spaw, her tool of atonement for her part in the shower room scene where Carrie is pelted with sanitary napkins. "I don't go around with anyone I don't want to," Tommy said patiently. "I'm asking because I want to ask you." Ultimately, he knew this to be the truth. In the film, however, when Carrie asks Tommy why he is favoring her with an invitation to the Prom, he offers her a dizzy sun 'n' surf grin and says, "Because you liked my poem." Which, by the way, his girlfriend wrote. The novel views high school in a fairly common way as that pit of manand womaneaters already mentioned. De Palma's social stance is more original; he sees this suburban white kids' high school as a kind of matriarchy. No matter where you look, there are girls behind the scenes, pulling invisible wires, rigging elections, using their boyfriends as stalking horses. Against such a backdrop, Carrie becomes doubly pitiful, because she is unable to do any of these thingsshe can only wait to be saved or damned by the actions of others. Her only power is her telekinetic ability, and both book and movie eventually arrive at the same point Carrie uses her "wild talent" to pull down the whole rotten society. And one reason for the success of the story in both print and film, I think, lies in this Carrie's revenge is something that any student who ever had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys Ed or his glasses thumbrubbed in study hall could approve of. In Carrie's destruction of the gym (and her destructive walk back home in the book, a sequence left out of the movie because of tight budgeting) we see a dream revolution of the socially downtrodden. 8 Once upon a time there dwelt on the outskirts of a large forest a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children; the boy was called Hansel and the girl Grettel. He had always had little enough to live on, and once, when there was a great famine in the land, he couldn't even provide them with daily bread. One night, as he was tossing about in his bed, full of cares and worry, he sighed and said to his wife "What's to become of us? how are we to support our poor children, now that we have nothing more for ourselves?" "I'll tell you what, husband," answered the woman, "early tomorrow morning we'll take the children into the thickest part of the wood; there we shall light a fire for them and give them each a piece of bread; then we'll go on to our work and leave them alone. They won't be able to find their way home and we shall thus be rid of them . . ." Previous to now, we have been discussing horror movies with subtexts which try to link real (if sometimes freefloating) anxieties to the nightmare fears of the horror film. But now, with this invocation from "Hansel and Grettel," that most cautionary of nursery tales, let us put out even this dim light of rationality and discuss a few of those films whose effects go considerably deeper, past the rational and into those fears which seem universal. From The Andrew Lang Fairy Tale Treasury, edited by Cary Wilkins (New York Avenel Books, 1979), p. 91. Here is where we cross into the taboo lands for sure, and it's best that I be frank with you up front. I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little betterand maybe not all that much better, after all. We've all known people who talk to themselves; people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is watching; people who have some hysterical fearof snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long drop . . . and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently underground to play their part in the great Thanksgiving table of life what once ate must eventually be eaten. When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenthrow center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare. Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists through a complete threesixty or ploughs through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been the special province of the young; by the time one turns forty or fifty, one's appetite for doubletwists or 360 loops may be considerably depleted. As pointed out, we also go to reestablish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in Die, Monster, Die! confirms for us that, no matter how far vie may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still lightyears from true ugliness. And we go to have fun. Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn't it? Because this is a very peculiar sort of fun indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menacedsometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro football has become the voyeur's version of combat, then the horror film has become the modern version of the public lynching. It is true that the mythic, "fairytale" horror film intends to take away the shades of gray (which is one reason why When a Stranger Calls doesn't work; the psycho, well and honestly played by Tony Beckley, is a poor shmuck beset by the miseries of his own psychoses; our unwilling sympathy for him dilutes the film's success as surely as water dilutes Scotch); it urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and pure whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we may allow our emotions a free rein . . . or no rein at all. If we are all insane, then all insanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (except neither of those two amateurnight surgeons were ever caught, hehhehheh) ; if, on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you're under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your business . . . although it's doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties. The potential lyncher is in almost all of us (I exclude saints, past and present, but then, most or all saints have been crazy in their own ways), and every now and then he has to be let loose to scream and roll around on the grass . . . . By God, I do believe I'm talking Werewolf again. Our emotions and our fears form their own body, and we recognize that it demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of these emotional "muscles" are acceptedeven exalted in civilized society; they are, of course, the emotions which tend to maintain the status quo of civilization itself. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindnessthese are all the emotions which we applaud, emotions which have been immortalized in the bad couplets of Hallmark Cards and in the verses (I don't dare call it poetry) of Leonard Nimoy. When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement; we learn this even before we get out of diapers. When, as children, we hug our rotten little puke of a sister and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, "Isn't he the sweetest little thing?" Such coveted treats as chocolatecovered graham crackers often follow. But if we deliberately slam the rotton little puke of a sister's fingers in the door, sanctions followangry remonstrance from parents, aunts, and uncles; instead of a chocolatecovered graham cracker, a spanking. But anticivilization emotions don't go away, and they demand periodic exercise. We have such "sick" jokes as, "What's the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies?" (You can't unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork . . . a joke, by the way, which I heard originally from a tenyearold.) Such a joke may surprise a laugh or a grin out of us even as we recoil, a possibility which confirms the thesis if we share a Brotherhood of Man, then we also share an Insanity of Man. None of which is intended as a defense of either the sick joke or insanity, but merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time. My agent, Kirby McCauley, likes to relate a scene from Andy Warhol's film Badand he relates it in the fond tones of the confirmed horror movie buff. A mother throws her baby from the window of a skyscraper; we cut away to the crowd below and hear a loud splat. Another mother leads her son through the crowd and up to the mess (which is obviously a watermelon with the seeds removed), points to it, and says, to the effect, "That's what will happen to you if you're bad!" It's a sick joke, like the one about the truckload of dead babiesor the one about the babes in the woods, which we call "Hansel and Gretel." The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized . . . and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For these reasons, good liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them Dawn of the Dead, for instanceas lifting a trapdoor in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed. 9 And now this word from the poet Kenneth Patchen. It comes from his small, clever book But Even So Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very dar kest part of the forest? This is the mood which the best films of mythic "fairytale horror" summon up in us, and it also suggests that, below the level of simple aggression and simple morbidity, there is a final level where the horror movie does its most powerful work. And that is well for us, because without more, the human imagination would be a poor, degraded thing, in need of no more in the way of horror than such things as Last House on the Left and Friday the 13th. The horror movie is planning to harm us, all right, and that is exactly why it is lurking here in the very darkest part of the forest. At this most basic level, the horror film isn't fooling around it wants to get you. Once it has reduced you to a level of childlike expectation and point of view, it will begin playing one or more of a very few simple harmonic melodiesthe greatest limitation (and therefore the greatest challenge) of the horror form is its very strictness. The things that really scare people on a gut level can be reduced like fractions to an irreducible handful. And when that has finally happened, analyses such as those I've given in the foregoing pages become impossible . . . and even if analysis were possible, it would be irrelevant. One can point out effect, and that must be the end of the matter. To try and go any further is as useless as trying to divide a prime number by two and come out even. But effect may be enough; there are films, like Browning's Freaks, that have the power to reduce us to jelly, to make us mutter (or whimper) to ourselves, "Please let it stop"; they are those films which hold their spell over us in spite of all we can do, even including the recitation of that most magic spellbreaking incantation "It's only a movie." And they can all be invoked with that wonderful fairy tale dooropener, "Once upon a time." So, before we proceed any further, here's a little quiz for you. Get a scrap of paper and something to write with and jot down your answers. Twenty questions; give yourself five points per question. And if you score below 70, you need to go back and do some postgraduate work in the real fright films . . . the ones that scare us just because they scare us. Ready? Okay. Name these films 1. Once upon a time, the husband, of the world's champion blind lady had to go away for awhile (to slay a dragon, or something of that sort) and a wicked man named Harry Roat, who came from Scarsdale, came by to see her while her husband was gone. 2. Once upon a time, three babysitters went out on Halloween night, and only one of them was still alive come All Saints Day. 3. Once upon a time a lady who stole some money spent a notso enchanted evening at an outoftheway motel. Everything seemed pretty much okay until the motel owner's mother came by; mother did something very naughty. 4. Once upon a time some bad people tampered with the oxygen line in one operating room of a major hospital and a lot of people went to sleep for a long, long timejust like Snow White. Only these people never woke up. 5. Once upon a time there was a sad girl who picked up men in bars, because when the men came home with her, she didn't feel so sad. Except one night she picked up a man who was wearing a mask. Underneath the mask he was the boogeyman. 6. Once upon a time some brave explorers landed on another planet to see if someone needed help. Nobody did, but by the time they got going again, they discovered that they had picked up the boogeyman. 7. Once upon a time a sad lady named Eleanor went on an adventure in an enchanted castle. In the enchanted castle, Lady Eleanor was not so sad, because she found some new friends. Except that the friends left, and she stayed . . . forever. 8. Once upon a time a young man tried to bring some magic dust from another country to his own aboard a magic flying carpet. But he was caught before he could get on his magic carpet, and the bad people took away his magic white powder and locked him in an evil dungeon. 9. Once upon a time there was a little girl who looked sweet, but she was really very wicked. She locked the janitor up in his room and set his highly flammable bed of woodchips and excelsior on fire because he was mean to her. 10. Once upon a time there were two little children, very much like Hansel and Gretel, in fact, and when their father died, their mommy married a wicked man who pretended to be very good. This wicked man had LOVE tattooed on the fingers of one hand and HATE tattooed on the fingers of the other. 11. Once upon a time there was an American lady living in London whose sanity was under some question. She thought she saw a murder in the old boardedup house next door. 12. Once upon a time a lady and her brother went to put flowers on their mother's grave and the brother, who liked to play mean tricks, scared her by saying, "They're coming to get you, Barbara." Except that it turned out they really were coming to get her . . . but they got him, first. 13. Once upon a time all the birds in the world got mad at the people and started to kill the people because the birds were under an evil spell. 14. Once upon a time a crazyman with an ax started to chop up his family, one by one, in an old Irish house. When he chopped off the groundskeeper's head, it rolled right down into the family poolwasn't that funny? 15. Once upon a time two sisters grew old together in an enchanted castle in the Kingdom of Hollywood. Once one of them had been famous in the Kingdom of Hollywood, but that was long, long ago. The other one was stuck in a wheelchair. And do you know what happened? The sister who could walk served her paralyzed sister a dead rat for dinner! Wasn't that funny? 16. Once upon a time there was a cemetery caretaker who discovered that if he put black pins into the vacant plots on his cemetery map, the people who owned those plots would die. But when he took out the black pins and put in white pins, do you know what happened? The movie turned into a big pile of shit! Wasn't that funny? 17. Once upon a time a bad man stole the little princess and buried her alive . . . or at least, he said he did. 18. Once upon a time there was a man who invented some magic eyedrops, and he could use them to see through people's cards in Las Vegas and make lots of money. He could also see through girls' clothes at cocktail parties, which was maybe not such a nice thing to do, but wait a minute. This man kept seeing more . . . and more . . . and more . . . 19. Once upon a time there was a lady who was saddled with Satan's child, and he knocked her over a gallery railing with his trike. What a mean thing to do! But lucky mommy! Because she died soon after, she didn't have to do the sequel! 20. Once upon a time some friends went on a canoe trip down a magic river, and some bad men saw that they were having fun and decided to fix them for it. That was because the bad men didn't want those other fellows, who came from the city, to have a good time in their woods. Okay, did you write down all of your answers? If you find you have four or more blanksnot even an educated guess to plug in thereyou have been spending far too much time seeing "quality" films like Julia, Manhattan, and Breaking Away. And while you've been watching Woody Allen give his imitation of an ingrown hair (a liberal ingrown hair, of course), you missed some of the scariest films ever made. For the record, the answers are 1.Wait Until Dark 2.Halloween 3. Psycho 4.Coma 5. Looking for Mr. Goodbar 6. Alien 7. The Haunting 8. Midnight Express 9. The Bad Seed 10. The Night of the Hunter 11. Night Watch 12. Night of the Living Dead 13. The Birds 14. Dementia13 15. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 16. I Bury the Living 17. Macabre 18. Xthe Man with the XRay Eyes 19. The Omen 20. Deliverance The first thing we can note about this list of films is that, of the twenty (which I would call the basic coursework in films of gutlevel horror in the period we're discussing here), fully fourteen have nothing supernatural going on in them . . . fifteen if you count Alien, which is at least nominally science fiction (I do count it as a supernatural tale, however; I think of it as Lovecraft in outer space, mankind finally going to the Elder Gods rather than they coming to us). So we might be able to say, paradox or not, that movies of fairytale horror demand a heavy dose of reality to get them rolling. Such reality frees the imagination of excess baggage and makes the weight of unbelief easier to lift. The audience is propelled into the movie by the feeling that, under the right set of circumstances, this could happen. The second thing we could note is that a quarter of them bear a reference either to "night" or "the dark" in their titles. The dark, it goes almost without saying, provides the basis for our most primordial fears. |
As spiritual as we may believe our natures to be, our physiology is similar to that of all the rest of the mammals that creep, crawl, trot, or walk; we must make do with the same five senses. There are many mammals whose eyesight is keen, but we are not among them. This William Castle featurehis first, but unfortunately not his lastwas perhaps the bigest "gottasee" picture of my grammar school days. Its title was pronounced by my friends in Stratford, Connecticut as McBare. "Gottasee" or not, very few of our parents would let us go because of the grisly ad campaign. I, however, exercised the inventiveness of the true aficionado and got to see it by telling my mother I was going to Davy Crockett, a Disney film which I felt I could summarize safely because I had most of the bubblegum cards. are mammalsdogs, for instancewhich have even lousier eyesight than we do, but their lack of brainpower has forced them to develop other senses to a keenness we cannot even imagine (although we may think we can). With dogs, the overdeveloped senses are those of hearing and smell. Socalled psychics like to prate of a "sixth sense," a vague term which sometimes means telepathy, sometimes precognition, sometimes God knows what, but if we have a sixth sense, it is probably just (some just!) the keenness of our reasoning facilities. Fido may be able to follow a hundred scents of which we are completely unaware, but the little bugger is never going to be any good at checkers, or even Go Fish. This reasoning power has made it unnecessary for us to breed keener senses into the gene pool; in fact, a large part of the population has sensory equipment which is actually substandard even by human standards hence eyeglasses and hearing aids. But we are able to make do because of our Boeing747 brains. All of which is very fine when you're doing a deal in a welllit executive boardroom or ironing the laundry in the living room on a sunny afternoon; but when the lights fail during a thunderstorm and we're left to creep around from place to place, trying to remember where we left the goddamn candles, the situation changes. Even a 747, sophisticated onboard radar and all, can't land in a heavy fog bank. When the lights go out and we find ourselves stranded in a shoal of darkness, reality itself has an unpleasant way of fogging in. When we cut off one avenue of sensory input, that sense simply shuts down (although it never shuts down 100 percent, of course; even in a dark room, we will see a trace pattern in front of our eyes, and in the most perfect silence we will hear a faint hum . . . such "phantom input" only means that the circuits are open and standing by). The same does not happen with our brainsfortunately or unfortunately, depending on the situation. It's fortunate if you happen to be stuck in a boring situation; you can use your sixth sense to plan the next day's work, to wonder what life might be like if you won the grand prize in the state lottery or the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes, or to speculate on what that sexy Miss Hepplewaite doesor doesn'twear under those tight dresses of hers. On the other hand, the brain's constant function can be a mixed blessing. Ask anyone who is a victim of chronic insomnia. I tell people who say that horror movies don't scare them to make this simple experiment. Go see a film like Night of the Living Dead all alone (have you ever noticed how many people go to horror movies, not just in pairs or groups, but in actual packs?). Afterwards, get in your car, drive to an old, deserted, crumbling houseevery town has at least one (except maybe Stepford, Connecticut, but they have their own problems there). Let yourself in. Mount to the attic. Sit down up there. Listen to the house groan and creak around you. Notice how much those creaks sound like someoneor some thingmounting the stairs. Smell the must. The rot. The decay. Think about the film you have just seen. Consider it as you sit there in the dark, unable to see what might be creeping up . . . what might be just about to place its dirty, twisted claw on your shoulder . . . or around your neck . . . This sort of thing can prove, by its very darkness, to be an enlightening experience. Fear of the dark is the most childlike fear. Tales of terror are customarily told "around the campfire" or at least after sundown, because what is laughable in the sunshine is often tougher to smile at by starlight. This is a fact that every maker of horror films and writer of horror tales recognizes and usesit is one of those unfailing pressure points where the grip of horror fiction is surest. This is particularly true of the filmmakers, of course, and of all the tools that the filmmaker can bring to bear, it is perhaps this fear of the dark that seems the most natural, since movies must, by their very nature, be viewed in the dark. It was Michael Cantalupo, an assistant editor at Everest House (whose imprint you will find on the spine of this very volume) who reminded me of a gimmick used in the firstrun engagements of Wait Until Dark, and in this context it bears an affectionate mention. The last fifteen or twenty minutes of that film are utterly terrifying, partially due to virtuoso performances turned in by Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin (and in my view, Arkin's performance as Harry Roat, Jr., from Scarsdale may be the greatest evocation of screen villainy ever, rivalling and perhaps surpassing Peter Lorre's in M), partially due to the brilliant gimmick on which Frederick Knott's story turns. Hepburn, in a final desperate effort to save her life, breaks every damned lightbulb in the apartment and hallway, so that she and the sighted Arkin will be on even terms. Trouble is, she forgets one light . . . but you and I probably would have forgotten it, too. It's the bulb inside the refrigerator. Anyway, the intheater gimmick was to turn out every damn light in the auditorium except for the EXIT lights over the doors. I never realized Now and then someone will run brilliantly counter to the tradition and produce a piece of what is sometimes called "sunlit horror." Ramsey Campbell does this particularly well; see his aptly named collection of short stories Demons by Daylight, for instance. until the last ten minutes of Wait Until Dark how much light there is in most theaters, even when the movie's playing. There are those tiny "dimbulbs" set into the ceiling if the theater is one of the new breed, those gauche but somehow lovely electric flambeaux glowing along the walls in the older ones. In a pinch, you can always find your way back to your seat after using the bathroom by the light being thrown from the screen itself. Except that the climactic few minutes of Wait Until Dark are set entirely in that black apartment. You have only your ears, and what they hearMiss Hepburn screaming, Arkin's tortured breathing (he's been stabbed a bit earlier on, and we're allowed to relax a little, to think he might even be dead, when he pops out again like a malefic jackinthebox)isn't very comforting. So there you sit. Your big old Boeing747 brain is cranked up like a kid's jalopy with the pedal to the metal, and it has very little concrete input to work on. So you sit. there, sweating it out, hoping the lights will eventually come on again . . . and sooner or later, they do. Mike Cantalupo told me he saw Wait Until Dark in a theater so sleazy that even the EXIT lights were broken. Man, that must have been bad. Mike's recollection of that took me fondly back to another filmWilliam Castle's The Tingler, which had a similar (if, in the Castle style, infinitely more crass) gimmick. Castle, whom I've already mentioned in connection with Macabreknown to all us WASPy little kids as McBare, you'll rememberwas the king of the gimmicks; he originated the 100,000 "fright insurance" policy, for instance; if you dropped dead during the film, your heirs got the money. Then there was the great "Nurse on Duty at All Performances" gimmick; there was the "You Must Have Your Blood Pressure Taken in the Lobby Before Viewing This Horrifying Film" gimmick (that one was used as part of The House on Haunted Hill promo), and all sorts of other gimmicks. The exact plot specifics of The Tingler, a film so exquisitely low budget that it probably made back its production costs after a thousand people had seen it, now escape me, but there was this monster (the Tingler, natch) that lived on fear. When its victims were so scared they couldn't even scream, it attached itself to their spines and sorta . . . well . . . tingled them to death. I know that must sound pretty fucking stupid, but in the film, it worked (although it probably helped to be eleven years old when you saw it). As I remember, one sexy miss got it in the bathtub. Bad news. But never mind the plot; let's get on to the gimmick. At one point the Tingler got into a movie theater, killed the projectionist, and somehow shorted out the electricity. At that moment in the theater where you were watching the movie, all the lights went out and the screen went dark. Now as it happened, the only thing that could get the Tingler to let go of your spine once it had attached itself was a good loud scream, which changed the quality of the adrenaline it fed on. And at this point, a narrator on the soundtrack cried out, "The Tingler is now in this theater! It may be under your seat! So scream! Scream! Scream for your lives!! " The audience was of course happy to oblige, and in the next scene we see the Tingler fleeing for its life, vanquished for the time being by all those screaming people. Besides the movies which raise the scary concept of the dark in their titles, almost every other film listed in the little quiz I gave you uses that fear of the dark heavily. All but approximately eighteen minutes of John Carpenter's Halloween are set after nightfall. The major scare scenes in Psycho all take place after dark. In Looking for Mr. Goodbar, the final horrible sequence (my wife ran for the women's room, believing she was going to toss her cookies), where Tom Berenger stabs Diane Keaton to death, is shot in her dark apartment, with only a flickering strobelight for illumination. In Alien, that constant motif of the dark barely needs mentioning. "In space, no one can hear you scream," the ad copy read; it also could have said, "In space, it is always one minute after midnight." Dawn never comes in that Lovecraftian gulf between the stars. Hill House is always spooky, but it saves its really big effectsthe face in the wall, the bulging doors, the booming noises, the thing that held Eleanor's hand (she thought it was Theo, butgulp!it wasn't)for well past sunset. It was another Everest House editor, Bill Thompson (who has been my editor for about a thousand years; perhaps in a previous life I was his editor and now he's having his revenge), who reminded me of The Night of the Hunterand mea culpa that I should have needed remindingand told me that one of the scenes of horror God, it's fun to think about some of the desperate gimmicks that have been used to sell bad horror movieslike those Dish Nights and Bank Nights used to lure people into the movie houses dring the thirties, they linger pleasantly in the memory. During one imported Italian turkey, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (nifty title!), the theaters advertised "bloodcorn," which was ordinary popcorn with a red food dye added. During Jack the Ripper, a 1960 example of "Hammer horror" written by Jimmy Sangster, the black and white film turned to gruesome color during the last five minutes, when the Ripper, who has unwisely chosen to hide in an elevator shaft, is squished under a descending car. which has remained with him over the years was the sight of Shelley Winters's hair floating in the water after the homicidal preacher has disposed of her in the river. It happens, naturally, after dark. There is an interesting similarity between the scene in which the little girl kills her mother with a garden trowel in Night of the Living Dead and the climactic scene in The Birds, where Tippi Hedren is trapped in the attic and attacked by crows, sparrows, and gulls. Both of these scenes are classic examples of how dark and light can be used selectively. We will remember, most of us, from our own childhoods that a lot of light had the power to vanquish imagined evils and fears, but sometimes a little light only made them worse. It was the streetlight outside that made the branches of a nearby tree look like witch fingers, or it was the moonlight streaming in the window that made the jumble of toys pushed away in the closet take on the aspect of a crouching. Thing ready to shamble in and attack at any moment. During the matricide scene in Night of the Living Dead (which, like the shower scene in Psycho, seems almost endless to our shocked eyes the first time we see it), the little girl's arm strikes a hanging lightbulb, and the cellar becomes a nightmare dreamscape of shifting, swinging shadowsrevealing, concealing, revealing again. During the attack of the birds in the attic, it is the big flashlight Ms. Hedren carries which provides this strobe effect (also mentioned in connection with Looking for Mr. Goodbar and used againmore irritatingly and pointlesslyduring Marlon Brando's incoherent monologue near the end of Apocalypse Now) and also provides the scene with a pulse, a beatat first the flashlight beam moves rapidly as Ms. Hedren uses the light to ward off the birds . . . but as she is gradually sapped of strength and lapses first into shock and then into unconsciousness, the light moves more and more slowly, sinking to the floor. Until there is only dark . . . and in that dark, the tenebrous, whirring flutter of many wings. I'll not belabor the point by analyzing the "darkness quotient" in all these films, but will close this aspect of the discussion by pointing out that even in those few movies that achieve that feeling of "sunlit horror," there are often feary moments in the darkGenevieve Bujold's climb up the service ladder and over the operating room in Coma takes place in the dark, as does Ed's (Jon Voight) climb up the bluff near the end of Deliverance . . . not to mention digging up the grave containing the jackal bones in The Omen, and Luana Anders's creepy discovery of the underwater "memorial" to the longdead little sister in Francis Coppola's first feature film (made for AIP), Dementia13. Still, before leaving the subject entirely, here's a further sampling Night Must Fall, Night of the Lepus, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, The Black Pit of Dr. M., The Black Sleep, Black Sunday, The Black Room, Black Sabbath, Dark Eyes of London, The Dark, Dead of Night, Night of Terror, Night of the Demon, Nightwing, Night of the Eagle . . . Well, you get it. If there had been no such thing as darkness, the makers of horror movies would have needed to invent it. 10 I have held out mention of one of the films from the quiz, partially because it's the antithesis of many of those we've already discussedit depends for its horror not upon darkness but upon lightand also because it leads naturally into a brief discussion of something else that the mythic, or "fairytale" horror movie will do to us if it can. We all understand about the "grossout," which is fairly easy to achieve, but it is only in the horror movies that the grossoutthat most childish of emotional impulsessometimes achieves the level of art. Now, I can hear some of you say that there is nothing artistic about grossing somebody outall you really have to do is chew your food and then hang your open mouth in your tablemate's facebut what about the works of Goya? Or Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes and soup cans, for that matter? Even the very worst horror movies sometimes achieve a moment or two of success on this level. Dennis Etchison, a fine writer in the genre, reminisced fondly with me on the phone one day not too long ago about a brief sequence in The Giant Spider Invasion where a lady drinks her morning hipotency vitamin cocktail, all unknowing that a rather plump spider fell into the blender just before she turned it on. Yum yum. In the eminently forgettable film Squirm, there is that one unforgettable moment (for all two hundred of us who saw the picture) when the lady taking a shower looks up to see why the water stopped coming and sees a showerhead clogged with dangling nightcrawlers. In Dario Argento's Suspiria, a bunch of schoolgirls are subjected to a rain of maggots . . . while sitting at the dinner table, no less. All of it has nothing to do with the film's plot, but it is vaguely interesting, in a repulsive sort of way. In Maniac, directed by former softcore filmmaker William Lustig, there is the incredible moment when the homicidal dingdung (Joe Spinell) carefully scalps one of his victims; I can remember, as a kid, one of my fellow kids asking me to imagine sliding down a long, polished bannister which suddenly and without warning turns into a razorblade. Man, I was days getting over that. the camera does not even leer at thisit merely stares at it with a kind of dead, contemplative eye that makes the scene wellnigh impossible to watch. As noted previously, good horror movies often operate most powerfully on this "wannalookatmychewedupfood?" levela primitive, childish level. I would call it the "YUCH factor" . . . sometimes also known as the "Oh my God, was that gross! " factor. This is the point at which most good liberal film critics and most good reactionary film critics part company on the subject of the horror film (see, for instance, the difference between Lynn Minton's review of Dawn of the Dead in McCall'sshe left after two reels or soand the cover story in the Arts section of The Boston Phoenix on the same film). Like punk rock music, the horror movie capable of delivering the good grossout wallop finds its art in childish acts of anarchythe moment in The Omen where the photographer is decapitated by a falling pane of glass is art of the most peculiar sort, and one cannot blame critics who find it easier to respond to Jane Fonda as a wholly unbelievable screen incarnation of Lillian Hellman in Julia than to stuff like this. But the grossout is art, and it is important that we have an understanding of this. Blood can fly everywhere and the audience will remain largely unimpressed. If, on the other hand, the audience has come to like and understandor even just to appreciatethe characters they are watching as real people, if some artistic link has been formed there, blood can fly everywhere and the audience cannot remain unimpressed. I can't remember, for instance, anyone who walked out of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde or Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch who didn't look as if he or she had been hit on the head with a very large board. Yet people walk out of other Peckinpah films Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Cross of Ironyawning. That vital linkage just never happens. That's all fine, and there is little argument about the virtues of Bonnie and Clyde as art, but let us return momentarily to the pureed arachnid in The Giant Spider Invasion. This doesn't qualify as art in respect to that idea of linkage between audience and character at all. Believe me, we don't care very much about the lady who drinks the spider (or anyone else in this movie, for that matter), but all the same there is that moment of frisson, that one moment when the groping fingers of the filmmaker find a chink in our defenses, shoot through it, and squeeze down on one of those psychic pressure points. We identify with the woman who is unknowingly drinking the spider on a level that has nothing to do with her character; we identify with her solely as a human being in a situation which has suddenly turned rottenin other words, the grossout serves as the means of a lastditch sort of identification when the more conventional and noble means of characterization have failed. When she drinks the drink, we shudderand reaffirm our own humanity. Having said all that, let's turn to XThe Man with the XRay Eyes, one of the most interesting and offbeat little horror movies ever made, and one that ends with one of the most shuddery grossout scenes ever filmed. This 1963 movie was produced and directed by Roger Corman, who at that time was in the process of metamorphosing from the dull caterpillar who had produced such meatloaf movies as Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Little Shop of Horror (not even notable for what may have been Jack Nicholson's screen debut) and into the butterfly who was responsible for such interesting and rather beautiful horror films as The Masque of the Red Death and The Terror. The Man with the XRay Eyes marks the point where this strange twostep creature came out of its cocoon, I think. The screenplay was written by Ray Russell, the author of Sardonicus and a number of other novelsamong them the rather overripe Incubus and the much more successful Princess Pamela. In The Man with the XRay Eyes, Ray Milland plays a scientist who develops eyedrops which enable him to see through walls, clothing, playingcards, you name it; a kind of superMurine, if you will. But once the process begins, there is no slowing it down. Milland's eyes begin to undergo a physical change, first becoming thickly bloodshot and then taking on a queer yellow cast. It is at this point that we begin to feel rather nervousperhaps we sense the grossout coming, and in a very real sense it's already arrived. Our eyes are one of those vulnerable chinks in the armor, one of those places where we can be had. Imagine, for instance, jamming your thumb into someone's wideopen eye, feeling the squish, seeing it sorta squirt out at you. Nasty, right? Immoral to even consider such a thing. But surely you remember that This might lead to the accusation that my definition of the horror movie as art is much too widethat I just let in everything. That is not true at allmovies like Massacre at Central High and Bloody Mutilators work on no level. And if my ideas concerning the boundaries of art seem rather lenient, that's too bad. I'm no snob. and if you are, that's your problem. In my business, if you lose your taste for good baloney, it's time you got into some other line of work. timehonored Halloween party game Dead Man, where peeled grapes are passed from hand to hand to hand in the dark, to the solemn intonation of "These are the dead man's eyes"? Ulp, right? Yuck, right? Or as my kids say, GuhROSS! Like our other facial equipment, eyes are something we all have in commoneven that old poop the Ayatullah Khomeini has a pair. But to the best of my knowledge, no horror movie has ever been made about a nose out of control, and while there has never been a film called The Crawling Ear, there was one called The Crawling Eye. We all understand that eyes are the most vulnerable of our sensory organs, the most vulnerable of our facial accessories, and they are (ick!) soft. Maybe that's the worst . . . So when Milland dons shades for the second half of the movie, we become increasingly nervous about what might be going on behind those shades. In addition, something else is happeningsomething that elevates The Man with the XRay Eyes to a rather higher plateau of art. It becomes a kind of Lovecraftian horror movie, but in a sense that is differentand somehow purerthan the sort of Lovecraftiness used in Alien. The Elder Gods, Lovecraft told us, are out there, and their one desire is to somehow get back inand there are lines of power accessible to them, Lovecraft intimates, which are so powerful that one look at the sources of these lines of power would drive mortal men to madness; forces so powerful that a whole galaxy aflame could not equal its thousandth part. It is one of these power sources, I think, that Ray Milland begins to glimpse as his sight continues to improve at a steady, inexorable pace. He sees it first as a prismatic, shifting light somewhere out in the darknessthe trippy sort of thing you might see at the top of an LSD high. Corman, you'll remember, also gave us Peter Fonda in The Trip (cowritten by Jack Nicholson), not to mention The Wild Angels, which contains that wonderful moment when a dying Bruce Dern croaks out, "Somebody gimme a straight cigarette." Anyway, this bright core of light Milland sometimes sees gradually grows larger and clearer. Worse still, it may be alive . . . and aware it's being watched. Milland has seen through everything to the very edges of the universe and beyond, and what he has found there is driving him crazy. This force eventually becomes so clear to him that it fills the whole screen during the pointofview shots a bright, shifting, monstrous thing that won't quite come into focus. At last Milland can stand it no longer. He drives his car to a deserted spot (that bright Presence hanging before his eyes all the time) and whips off his shades to reveal eyes which have gone an utter, glistening black. He pauses for a moment . . . and then rips his own eyes out. Corman freezes the frame on those staring, bloody sockets. But I have heard rumorsthey may or may not be truethat the final line of dialogue was cut from the film as too horrifying. If true, it was the only possible capper for what has already happened. According to the rumor, Milland screams I can still see! 11 This is only to dip our fingers in that deep, deep pool of common human experience and fears which form the mythpool. It would be possible to go on with dozens of other specifics; with phobias such as the fear of heights (Vertigo), fear of snakes (Sssssss) , of cats (Eye of the Cat), of rats (Willard, Ben) and all those movies which depend on the grossout for their ultimate effect. Beyond these there are even wider vistas of myth . . . but we have to save something for later, right? And no matter how many specifics we cover, we'll always find ourselves returning to that idea of phobic pressure points . . . just as the most lovely waltz relies, at bottom, on the simplicity of the boxstep. The horror movie is a closed box with a crank on the side, and in the last analysis it all comes back to turning that crank until Jack jumps out into our faces, holding his ax and grinning his murderous grin. Like sex, the experience is infinitely desirable, but a discussion of specific effect takes on a certain sameness. Rather than going on and on over what is essentially the same plot of ground, let's close our brief discussion of the horror movie as myth and fairy tale with what is, after all, the Big Cassino death itself. Here is the trump card which all horror movies hold. But they do not hold this card as a veteran bridgeplayer would hold it, understanding all its implications and possibilities for gain; they hold it, rather, as a child would hold the card which will make the winning pair in a game of Old Maid. In that fact lies both the limiting factor of the horror movie as art and its endless, morbidly captivating charm. "Death," the boy Mark Petrie thinks at one point in 'Salem's Lot, "is when the monsters get you." And if I had to restrict everything I have ever said or written about the horror genre to one statement (and many critics will say I should have done, haha), it would be that one. It is not the way adults look at death; it is a crude metaphor which leaves little room for the possibility of heaven, hell, Nirvana, or that old wheeze about how the great wheel of Karma turns and we'll get 'em next life, gang. It is a view whichlike most horror moviesaddresses itself not to any philosophical speculation about "the afterlife" but which speaks only of the moment when we finally have to shine off this mortal coil. That instant of death is the only truly universal rite of passage, and the only one for which we have no psychological or sociological input to explain what changes we may expect as a result of having passed through. All we know is that we go; and while we have some rules ofetiquette, would it be called?which bear on the subject, that actual moment has a way of catching folks unprepared. People pass away while making love, while standing in elevators, while putting dimes in parking meters. Some go in midsneeze. Some die in restaurants, some in cheap onenight hotels, and a few while sitting on the john. We cannot count on dying in bed or with our boots on. So it would be remarkable indeed if we did not fear death a little. It's just sort of there, isn't it, the great irreducible xfactor of our lives, faceless father of a hundred religions, so seamless and ungraspable that it usually isn't even discussed at cocktail parties. Death becomes myth in the horror movies, but let's be clear on the fact that horror movies mythicize death on the simplest level death in the horror movies is when the monsters get you. We fans of the horror movies have seen people clubbed, burned at the stake (Vincent Price, as the Witchfinder General in AIP's The Conqueror Worm, surely one of the most revolting horror pictures to be released by a major studio in the sixties, had a regular cookout at the climax of this one), shot, crucified, stabbed through the eyes with needles, eaten alive by grasshoppers, by ants, by dinosaurs, and even by cockroaches; we have seen people beheaded ( The Omen, Friday the 13th, Maniac), sucked dry of their blood, gobbled up by sharks (who could forget the little kid's torn and bloodstained rubber float nudging gently against the shoreline in Jaws?) and pirahna fish; we have seen bad guys go down screaming in pools of quicksand and pools of acid; we have seen our fellow humans squashed, stretched, and bloated to death; at the end of Brian De Palma's The Fury, John Cassavetes literally explodes. Again, liberal critics, whose concepts of civilization, life, and death are usually more complex, are apt to frown on this sort of gratuitous slaughter, to see it (at best) as the moral equivalent of pulling wings off flies, and, at worst, as that symbolic lynch mob in action. But there is something in that wingpulling simile that bears examination. There are few children who have not pulled the wings off a few flies at some point in their development, or squatted patiently on the sidewalk to see how a bug dies. In the opening scene of The Wild Bunch a group of happy, giggling children burn a scorpion to deatha scene indicative of what people who care little (or know little) about children often erroneously call "the cruelty of childhood." Children are rarely cruel on purpose, and they even more rarely torture, as they understand the concept; they may, however, kill in the spirit of experimentation, watching the death struggles of the bug on the sidewalk in the same clinical way that a biologist would watch a guinea pig die after inhaling a whiff of nerve gas. Tom Sawyer, we'll remember, just about broke his neck in his hurry to get a look at Huck's dead cat, and one of the payments he accepts for the "privilege" of whitewashing his fence is a dead rat "and a string to swing it on." Or consider this Now, don't get me wrong or misinterpret what I'm saying. Kids can be mean and unlovely, and when you see them at their worst, they can make you think black thoughts about the future of the human race. But meanness and cruelty, although related, are not the same thing at all. A cruel action is a studied action; it requires a bit of thought. Meanness, on the other hand, is unpremeditated and unthinking. The results may be similar for the personusually another childwho gets the butt end, but it seems to me that in a moral society, intent or lack of it is pretty important. Bing Crosby is said to have told a story about one of his sons at the age of six or so who was inconsolable when his pet turtle died. To distract the boy, Bing suggested that they have a funeral, and his son, seeming only slightly consoled, agreed. |
The two took a cigar box, lined it carefully with silk, painted the outside black, and then dug a hole in the back yard. Bing carefully lowered the "coffin" into the grave, said a long, heartfelt prayer, and sang a hymn. At the end of the service, the boy's eyes were shining with sorrow and excitement. Then Bing asked if he would like to have one last look as his pet before they covered the coffin with earth. The boy said he would, and Bing raised the cigarbox lid. The two gazed down reverently, and suddenly the turtle moved. The boy stared at it for a long time, then looked up at his father and said, "Let's kill it." Kids are endlessly, voraciously curious, not only about death but about everythingand why not? They are like people who just came in and sat down during a good movie that's been on for thousands of years. They want to know what the story is, who the characters are, and most of all, what the interior logic of the play may beis it a drama? a tragedy? a comedy? perhaps an outandout farce? They don't know because they have not (as yet) had Socrates, Plato, Kant, or Erich Segal to instruct them. When you're five, your big gurus are Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald; life's burning questions include whether or not you can eat crackers upside down and if that stuff in the middle of the golfball really is a deadly poison. When you're five, you seek knowledge down those avenues that are open to you. Pursuant to this, I'll tell you my own dead cat story. When I was nine and living in Stratford, Connecticut, two friends of minebrothersfrom down the street discovered the stiffening body of a dead cat in the gutter near Burrets' Building Materials, which was across the street from the vacant lot where we played baseball. I was called into consultation to add my thoughts to the problem of the dead cat. The very interesting problem of the dead cat. It was a gray cat, quite obviously mashed by a passing car. Its eyes were halfopen, and we all noticed that there seemed to be dust and road grit gathering on them. First deduction You don't care if dust gets in your eyes when you're dead (all our deductions assumed that if it was true for cats, then it must be true for kids) . We examined it for maggots. No maggots. "Maybe there's maggots inside it," Charlie said hopefully (Charlie From Kids Day in and Day Out, edited by Elisabeth Scharlatt (New York Simon and Schuster, 1979) ; this particular story related by Walter Jerrold. was one of the fellows who referred to the William Castle film as McBare, and on rainy days he was apt to call me up and ask me if I wanted to come down the street to his house and read "comet bwoots"). We examined the dead cat for maggots, turning it from one side to the otherusing a stick, of course; no telling what germs you might get from a dead cat. There were no maggots that we could see. "Maybe there's maggots in its brain," Charlie's brother Nicky said, his eyes glowing. "Maybe there's maggots inside it, eating up its braiiiin." "That's impossible," I said. "Your brains are, like, airtight. Nothin' can get inside there." They absorbed this. We stood around the dead cat in a circle. Then Nicky said suddenly "If we drop a brick on its heinie, will it shit?" This question of postmortem biology was absorbed and discussed. It was finally agreed that the test should be made. A brick was found. There was a discussion of who should get to bombsaway the brick on the dead cat. The problem was solved in timehonored fashion we put our feet in. The rites of eeniemeeniemineymoe were invoked. Foot after foot left the circle until only Nicky's was left. The brick was dropped. The dead cat did not shit. Deduction number two After you're dead, you won't shit if someone drops a brick on your ass. Soon after, a baseball game started up, and the dead cat was left. As the days passed, an ongoing investigation of the cat continued, and it is always the dead cat in the gutter out in front of Burrets' Building Materials that I think of when I read Richard Wilbur's fine poem "The Groundhog." The maggots put in their appearance a couple of days later, and we watched their feverboil with horrified, revolted interest. "They're eatin 'his eyes," Tommy Erbter from up the street pointed out hoarsely. "Look at that, you guys, they're even eatin' his eyes." Eventually the maggots moved out, leaving the dead cat looking considerably thinner, its fur now faded to a dull, uninteresting color, sparse and knotted. We came less frequently. The cat's decay had entered a less gaudy stage. Still, it was my habit to check the cat on my mile's walk to school each morning; it was just another stop on the way, part of the morning's rituallike running a stick over the picket fence in front of the empty house or skipping a couple of stones across the pond in the park. In late September the tagend of a hurricane hit Stratford. There was a minor flood, and when the waters went down a couple of days later, the dead cat was goneit had been washed away. I remember it well now, and I suppose I will all my life, as my first intimate experience with death. That cat may be gone from the charts, but not from my heart. Sophisticated movies demand sophisticated reactions from their audiencesthat is, they demand that we react to them as adults. Horror movies are not sophisticated, and because they are not, they allow us to regain our childish perspective on deathperhaps not such a bad thing. I'll not descend to the romantic oversimplification that suggests we see things more clearly as children, but I will suggest that children see more intensely. The greens of lawns are, to the child's eye, the color of lost emeralds in H. Rider Haggard's conception of King Solomon's Mines, the blue of the winter sky is as sharp as an icepick, the white of new snow is a dreamblast of energy. And black . . . is blacker. Much blacker indeed. Here is the final truth of horror movies They do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celebrate deformity but by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. They are the barber's leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety . . . for a little while, anyway. The horror movie asks you if you want to take a good close look at the dead cat (or the shape under the sheet, to use a metaphor from the introduction to my short story collection) . . . but not as an adult would look at it. Never mind the philosophical implications of death or the religious possibilities inherent in the idea of survival; the horror film suggests we just have a good close look at the physical artifact of death. Let us be children masquerading as pathologists. We will, perhaps, link hands like children in a circle, and sing the song we all know in our hearts time is short, no one is really okay, life is quick and dead is dead. Omega, the horror film sings in those children's voices. Here is the end. Yet the ultimate subtext that underlies all good horror films is, But not yet. Not this time. Because in the final sense, the horror movie is the celebration of those who feel they can examine death because it does not yet live in their own hearts. CHAPTER VII The Horror Movie as Junk Food BY NOW, serious horror fans may be wondering uneasily if I have lost my witsalways assuming I had any to begin with. I've found a few (very few, it's true, but still a few) good things to say about The Amityville Horror, and have even mentioned Prophecy, generally agreed to be a terrible horror movie, in a light not exactly unfavorable. If you are one of these uneasy ones, I must add to your feelings by telling you that I intend to say a great many good things about the Englishman James Herbert, author of The Rat, The Fog, and The Survivor in a later chapterbut that is a different case, because Herbert is not a bad novelist; he is simply regarded as one by fantasy fans who've not read his work. I am no apologist for bad filmmaking, but once you've spent twenty years or so going to horror movies, searching for diamonds (or diamondchips) in the dreck of the Bpics, you realize that if you don't keep your sense of humor, you're done for. You also begin to seek the patterns and appreciate them when you find them. There's something else that needs saying here, too, and I might as well give it to you straight from the shoulder once you've seen enough horror films, you begin to get a taste for really shitty movies. Films that are just bad (like The Comeback, Jack Jones's illadvised foray into the field of the horror film) can be dismissed impatiently, with never a backward glance. But real fans of the genre look back on a film like The Brain from Planet Arous (It Came From Another World WITH AN INSATIABLE LUST FOR EARTH WOMEN) with something like real love. It is the love one spares for an idiot child, true, but love is love, right? Right. In this spirit, let me quotein its marvelous entiretya review from The Castle of Frankenstein's TV Movieguide. The Movieguide was published in the magazine at irregular intervals right up until the day when Calvin Beck's remarkable journal ceased publication. This review is, in fact, from the Movieguide which appeared in the last issue of CofF, 24. Here is what an uncredited reviewer (Beck himself, perhaps) had to say about the 1953 movie Robot Monster It is a handful of flicks like this that makes all these listing chores [i.e., The Movieguide feature] something to look forward to. Certainly among the finest terrible movies ever made, this ridiculous gem presents as economical a space invasion as ever committed to film one (r) RoMan invader consisting of (a) a gorilla suit, (b) a diving helmet with a set of antennae. Hiding out in one of the more familiar Hollywood caves with his extraterrestrial bubble machine (no, we're not being facetious it actually is a 2way "alien" radioTV thing, consisting of an old warsurplus shortwave set resting on a small kitchen table, that emits Lawrence Welklike bubbles), RoMan's trying to wipe out the last six humans left on earth and thus make the planet safe for colonization by RoMen (from the planet RoMan, where else?). This early 3D effort has attained legendary (and richly deserved) status as one of the most laughable of all poverty row quickies, although the pic does make some scatterbrained sense when viewed as a child's eye monster fantasy (it's all a dream experienced by a scificrazed '50s tyke). Rousing musical score by Elmer Bernstein is great and keeps it all moving. Directed in three frenzied days by Phil Tucker, who also did the littleknown and equally hysterical Lenny Bruce vehicle, DANCE HALL RACKET. Stars George Nader, Claudia Barrett, John Mylong, Selena Royle. Ah, Selena, where are you now? I have seen the film discussed in this review, and will personally testify that every word is true. A bit further on in this chapter we will listen to what CofF had to say about two other legendary bad movies, The Blob and Invasion of the Saucer Men, but I don't believe my heart can stand it right now. Let me just add that I made a grave mistake concerning Robot Monster (and RoMan can be seen, in a mad sort of way, as the forerunner of the evil Cylons in Battlestar Galactica) about ten years ago. It came on the Saturday night Creature Feature, and I prepared for the occasion by smoking some pretty good reefer. I don't smoke dope often, because when stoned everything strikes me funny. That night I almost laughed myself into a hernia. Tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was literally on the floor for most of the movie. Luckily, the movie only runs sixtythree minutes; another twenty minutes of watching RoMan tune his warsurplus shortwave bubble machine in "one of the more familiar Hollywood caves" and I think I would have laughed myself to death. Since any affectionate discussion of really horrible movies (as opposed to horror movies) is in the nature of a breast baring, I must admit here that I not only liked John Frankenheimer's Prophecy, I actually saw it three times. The only bad movie to equal this score in my personal pantheon is the William Friedkin movie Sorcerer. I liked that one because there were a lot of closeups in it of sweaty people working hard and laboring machines; truck engines and huge wheels spinning in soupy mud and frayed fanbelts in Panavision70. Great stuff. I thought Sorcerer was marvelous fun. But never mind Friedkin; onward into the Maine woods with John Frankenheimer. Except that the film was really shot on location in Washington State . . . and looks it. This film concerns a public health I wasn't able to have any fun with Friedkin's more recent film, Cruising, although it fascinated me because I suspect it indicates the wave of the future for the bad film which has a big budget; it has a sparkly look that is still somehow cheesyit's like a dead rat in a Lucite block. officer (Robert Foxworth) and his wife (Talia Shire) who come to Maine to investigate possible water pollution infractions on the part of a paper mill. The movie is apparently supposed to be set somewhere in northern Maineperhaps in the Allagashbut David Seltzer's screenplay has somehow transferred an entire southern Maine county a hundred and fifty miles north. Just another example of the magic of Hollywood, I guess. In the TV version of 'Salem's Lot, Paul Monash's screenplay has the little town of Salem's Lot located on the outskirts of Portland . . . but the young lovers, Ben and Susan, blithely go off to the movies in Bangor at one pointa threehour drive. Hiho. Foxworth is a figure that any dedicated horrormovie buff has seen a hundred times before the Dedicated Young Scientist with just a Touch of Gray in His Hair. His wife wants a baby, but Foxworth refuses to bring a kid into a world where rats sometimes eat babies and the technological society keeps dumping radioactive waste into the oceans. He jumps at the trip to Maine to get away from patching up ratbites for awhile. His wife jumps at it because she's pregnant and wants to break it to him gently. As dedicated to the idea of zero population growth as he may be, Foxworth has apparently left all the responsibility for actually preventing the baby to his wife, who, played by Ms. Shire, succeeds in looking extremely tired throughout the film. We can readily believe she may be whoopsing her cookies every morning. But once in Maine, this slightly odd couple finds a lot of other stuff going on as well. The Indians and the paper company are at swords' points over the alleged pollution issue; early on, one of the company men nearly opens up the leader of the Indian protestors with a Steihl chainsaw. Nasty. Nastier still are the evidences of pollution. Foxworth notices that the old Indian wallah (one dares not call him Chief) is regularly burning his hands with his cigarettes because he feels no paina classic sign of mercury poisoning, Foxworth tells Shire gravely. A tadpole the size of a salmon jumps up on the bank of the lake, and while fishing Foxworth sees a salmon roughly the size of Flipper. Unfortunately for his pregnant wife, Foxworth catches some fish and they eat them. Very bad for the baby, as it turns out . . . although the question of exactly what Ms. Shire may deliver a few months down the road is left to our imaginations. By the time we finish the movie, the question seems less than burning. Mutated babies are discovered in a net placed in a streamhorrible, rugose things with black eyes and malformed bodies, things that mewl and cry in almost human voices. These "children" are the movie's one startling effect. Mother is out there someplace . . . and she makes her appearance soon enough, looking sort of like a skinned pig and sort of like a bear turned insideout. It pursues Foxworth, Shire, and the motley band they are a part of. A helicopter pilot has his head crunched off (but it is a discreet crunch; this is a PG movie) and the Bad Old Executive Who Has Told Lies at Every Turn is similarly gobbled up. At one point the monstermother wades across a lake that looks like it might be a child's wading pool shot from tabletop level (bringing back fond memories of such Japanese triumphs of specialeffects technology as Ghidrah, the ThreeHeaded Monster and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster) and crashes its way into a cabin where the dwindling band of refugees has taken refuge. Although he is presented to us as a city boy from the word go, Foxworth manages to dispatch the monster with a bow and arrow. And as Foxworth and Shire fly out of the wilderness, another monster rears its shaggy head to stare after their departing light plane. George Romero's film Dawn of the Dead came out at about the same time as Prophecy (JuneJuly 1979) and I found it remarkable (and amusing) that Romero had made a horror film for about two million dollars that managed to look like six million, while Frankenheimer made a twelvemilliondollar movie that managed to look like about two. Lots of stuff is wrong with the Frankenheimer film. None of the major Indian parts are played by real Indians; the old Indian wallah has a teepee in a northern New England area which was populated by lodgebuilding Indians; the science, while not completely wrong, is used in an opportunistic way that is not really fair considering the fact that the movie's makers purported to have made a movie of "social conscience"; the characters are stock; the special effects (with the exception of those weird baby mutants) are bad. All of that I will cheerfully agree to. But I come stubbornly, helplessly back to the fact that I liked Prophecy, and just writing about it has made me long to rush out and see it a fourth (and maybe a fifth) time. I mentioned that you begin to see and appreciate patterns in horror movies, and to love them. These patterns are sometimes as stylized as the movements in a Japanese noh play or the passages in a John Ford western. And Prophecy is a throwback to the fifties horror films as surely as the Sex Pistols and the Ramones are throwbacks to the "dirty white boys" of the rockabilly explosion in 19561959. For me, settling into Prophecy is as comfortable as settling into an old easychair and visiting with good friends. All the components are there; Robert Foxworth could as easily be Hugh Marlowe from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers or Richard Carlson in It Came from Outer Space or Richard Denning in The Black Scorpion. Talia Shire could as easily be Barbara Rush or Mara Corday or one of half a dozen other monstermovie heroines from that same Big Bug era (although I would be lying if I didn't admit to some disappointment in Ms. Shire, who was brilliant as Rocky Balboa's shy and hesitant amour Adrian; she's not as pretty as I remember Mara Corday being, and she never appears in a white onepiece swimsuit, when everyone knows that this particular type of horror movie demands that at one point the heroine must appearand be menacedwhile wearing a white onepiece swimsuit). The monster is pretty hokeylooking, too. But I loved that old monster, spiritual sister to Godzilla, Mighty Joe Young, Gorgo, and all the dinosaurs that were ever embedded in icefloes and managed to get out so they could go thundering slowly down Fifth Avenue, squashing electronics shops and eating policemen; the monster in Prophecy gave me back a splendid part of my misspent youth, a part which included such irascible friends as the Venusian Ymir and the Deadly Mantis (who knocks over a city bus on which, for one splendid moment, the word TONKA can be clearly read). She's a pretty fine monster all the same. The mercury pollution causing all those monsters is pretty good, tooan updating of the old radiationcausedtheseBigBugs plot device. Then there's the fact that the monster gets all the bad guys. At one point she kills a little kid, but the kid, who is on a hiking trip with his parents, really deserves to go. He has brought along his suitcase radio and is Defiling the Wilderness with Rock 'N Roll. All that is missing from Prophecy (and its omission may have only been an oversight) is a sequence where the monster stomps the rotten old paper mill flat. The Giant Spider Invasion also comes equipped with a plot straight out of the fifties, and there were even a lot of fifties actors and actresses on view in it, including Barbara Hale and Bill Williams . . . halfway through it, I had the feeling that what I had really stumbled on was a crazed episode of the old Perry Mason series. In spite of the title, there is really only one giant spider, but we don't feel cheated because it's a dilly. It appears to be a Volkswagen covered with half a dozen bearskin rugs. Four spider legs, operated by people crammed inside this VW spider, one assumes, have been attached to each side. The taillights double neatly as blinking red spider eyes. It is impossible to see such a budgetconscious special effect without feeling a wave of admiration. Other bad movies abound; each fan has his or her favorite. Who could forget the large canvas bag that was supposed to be Caltiki, the Immortal Monster in the 1959 Italian movie? Or the Japanese version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. HydeThe Manster? Other favorites of mine include the flaming Winston cigarette filter that was supposed to be a crashlanding alien spaceship in Teenage Monster and Allison Hayes as a refugee from a pro basketball team in The Attack of the FiftyFoot Woman. (If only she could have wandered across into Bert I. Gordon's The Amazing Colossal Man . . . . Think of the children if they had clicked!) Then there was the wonderful moment in the 1978 film Ruby, a routine terror job about a haunted drivein, when one of the characters punches a button on the Coke machine and gets a cup of blood. Inside the machine, you see, all of the tubes have been hooked up to a severed human head. In Children of Cain, a Western horror picture (almost, but not quite, up to the level of Billy the Kid Meets Dracula), John Carradine goes West with barrels of salt water instead of fresh strapped to the sides of his Conestoga wagon. All the better to preserve his collection of severed heads (maybe because the historical period would have made the Coke machine an anachronism). In one of those lostcontinenttype picturesthis one starring Cesar Romeroall the dinosaurs were cartoons. Nor should we forget Irwin Allen's The Swarm, with its unbelievable matte jobs and its cast of Familiar Faces. Here is a picture that manages to even better Prophecy's time; it is a twelvemilliondollar picture that manages to look like a buckninetyeight. 2 From Castle of Frankenstein The Blob This sfhorror comes out as a slightly flat imitation of both "Rebel Without a Cause" and "The Creeping Unknown." Oozing outofspace horror consumes humans until destroyed in ridiculous ending. This uncharacteristically outofpatience review of a film which was the first starring vehicle for an actor who then billed himself as "Steven McQueen" ignores several fine touches the theme song, for instance, by a group that sounds suspiciously like the Chords doing outtakes from "ShBoom," is played over a happy little cartoon of expanding blobs. The real blob, which arrives on earth inside a hollow meteor, looks at first like a melted blueberry Popsicle and later quite a bit like a giant jujube. This film has its genuine moments of unease and horror it smoothly engulfs the arm of a farmer who has been unwise enough to touch it and the blob turns a sinister red as the farmer screams in agony; later, after McQueen and his girl friend discover the farmer and take him to the local doctor, there is a scary moment when McQueen can't locate the blob in the darkened examining room. When he sees it at last, he throws a bottle of acid over the thing, which flashes briefly yellow and then returns to its former ominous red. Also, the CofF review is uncharacteristically wrong about the film's conclusion the blob proved immortal. It was frozen and flown up to the Arctic to await the sequel, Beware the Blob (also released as Son of the Blob). Perhaps the film's finest moment for those of us who consider ourselves connoisseurs of bad special effects comes when the blob swallows a small diner whole. We see the blob oozing slowly across a color photograph of the diner's interior. Admirable. Must have made Bert I. Gordon envious. Concerning Invasion of the SaucerMen, a 1957 AmericanInternational picture, CofF regained some of its more customary savoir faire Ludicrous sf quickie, on lowest teenage level. Space invaders are cute little saucermen who inject alcohol into victims' veins. The ending is quite funny (hic!). Invasion of the SaucerMen comes from AIP's Brass Age (it really can't be called AIP's Golden Age; that came later, during the spate of films loosely based on the works of Edgar Allen Poemost of those were pretty stupid, wandering far afield from the source material, but at least they were pretty to look at). The picture was shot in seven days, and in the conclusion, the Heroic Teenagers use their hotrod headlights to "light" the monsters to death. The movie is also notable for the fact that Elisha Cook, Jr., is killed in the first reel, as he was so often, and Nick Adams can be seen in the background wearing his hat backwardswhat a crazy kid, right? The monsters are like, all wasted, so let's go down to the malt shop, daddyO! In a later example of AIP lowbudget mania, Invasion of the Star Creatures (1962) , a group of Army men stranded in the trackless desert encounter a group of female invaders from space. All of these female invaders have beehive hairdos and look like Jacqueline Kennedy. Much is made of the fact that these fellows are totally cut off from the outside world and must deal with the problem themselves, but there are jeep tracks all over the place (not to mention a lot of foam rocks and, in several scenes, the shadow of the boom mike used to record the sound). One suspects that the film's utterly sleazy look may have come about because the producers overspent on star power; the cast list included such wellloved lights of the American cinema as Bob Ball, Frankie Ray, and Gloria Victor. CofF had this to say about I Married a Monster from Outer Space, a 1958 Paramount release which formed the lower half of "summer shocker" double bills along with either The Blob or the hilarious Pat Boone film Journey to the Center of the Earth Kiddyoriented sf programmer. Gloria Talbot marries a monster from outer space which is disguised to look like Tom Tryon. Good argument against hasty marriages, but not much of a movie. Still, this one was a lot of fun, if only for the onceinalifetime chance it offered to see Tom Tryon with a snout. And before leaving this one and proceeding on to what (sadly) may be the worst of the GradeZ movies, I'd like to say something a little more serious about the peculiar relationship which obtains between terrible horror movies (of which there are a dozen for each good one, as this chapter testifies) and the genuine fan of the genre. The relationship is not entirely masochistic, as the foregoing may make it seem. A film like Alien or Jaws is, for either the true fan or simply the ordinary moviegoer who has a sometime interest in the macabre, like a wide, deep vein of gold that doesn't even have to be mined; it can simply be dug out of the hillside. But that isn't mining, remember; it's just digging. The true horror film aficionado is more like a prospector with his panning equipment or his washwheel, spending long periods going patiently through common dirt, looking for the bright blink of gold dust or possibly even a small nugget or two. Such a working miner is not looking for the big strike, which may come tomorrow or the day after or never; he has put those illusions behind him. He's only looking for a livin' wage, something to keep him going yet awhile longer. As a result, horrormovie fans communicate their likes to each other by a kind of grapevine which is part word of mouth, part fanzine reviews, part conventionhall chatter at such meetings as the World Fantasy Convention, the Kubla Khan Ate, or the IguanaCon. Word gets around. Long before David Cronenberg made something of a splash with They Came from Within, fans were muttering that he was someone to watch on the basis of an earlier filman extremely lowbudget flick called Rabid, starring Xrated queen Marilyn ( Behind the Green Door) Chambersand Cronenberg got a bravura performance out of her, by the way. My agent, Kirby McCauley, raves about a small picture called Ritual, filmed in Canada and starring Hal Holbrook. These films don't get wide American release, but if you watch the papers faithfully, you may see one of them playing at the drivein as a pickup second feature below some overrated major studio flick. Similarly, I heard about a littleknown early John Carpenter film called Assault on Precinct 13 from Peter Straub, the author of Ghost Story and If You Could See Me Now. Done on a shoestring (and Carpenter's first feature, Dark Star, is reputed to have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 a sum that makes even George Romero look like Dino DeLaurentiis), Carpenter's talent as a director onetheless shines through, and Carpenter went on to do Halloween and The Fog. These are the nuggets, the horrorfilm fan's reward for sifting through films like Planet of the Vampires and The Monster from Green Hell. My own "discovery" (if you don't object to the word) is a little film called Tourist Trap, starring Chuck Connors. Connors himself isn't very good in the filmhe tries gamely, but he's simply miscast. Yet the film wields an eerie, spooky power. Wax figures begin to move and come to life in a ruined, outoftheway tourist resort; there are a number of effective, atmospheric shots of the dummies' blank eyes and reaching hands, and the special effects are effective. As a film that deals with the queer power that inanimate dummies, mannequins, and human replicas can sometimes cast over us, it is a more effective film than the expensive and illadvised film made from William Goldman's bestseller, Magic. But to get back to I Married a Monster from Outer Space bad as it is, there is one absolutely chilling moment in the movie. I won't say that it's worth the price of admission, but it works . . . boy, does it work! Tryon has married his girl friend (Gloria Talbot) and they are on their honeymoon. While she stretches out on the bed, dressed in the obligatory filmy white nightgown and waiting for the consummation of all those steamy clinches on the beach, Tryon, who is still a goodlooking man and who was even better looking twenty years ago, goes out on the balcony of their hotel room for a cigarette. A thunderstorm is brewing, and a sharp stroke of lightning abruptly renders that handsome face transparent for a moment. We see the horrible alien face beneathrunnelled and knotted and warty. It is a "seatjumper" for sure, and during the fadeout we perhaps have time to think about the consummation to follow . . . and gulp. If movies such as Tourist Trap and Rituals are the nuggets fans sometimes find by sticking around for the B picture (and no one is so optimistic as the dyedinthewool fan), a moment such as this one is the equivalent of the gold dust that can sometimes be panned out by the faithful toiler. Or to put it another way, there is that marvelous Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," where the Christmas goose, when slit open, yields up the beautiful and priceless stone that has been lodged in its gullet. You sit through a lot of shlock, and maybejust maybethere is that frisson that makes it at least partially worthwhile. |
Home Box Office, in its endless quest for primetime filler, is now making many of these "little" films available in a way that such spotty distributors as New World Pictures have never been able to do. Of course, there's no shortage of dreck on HBO either, as any subscriber will tell you; still, there is an occasional prize in the payTV box, which is usually full of such mouldy cinematic Cracker jacks as Guyana Cult of the Damned and Moment by Moment. In the last year or so HBO has offered Croenenberg's The Brood and an interesting AIP picture called The Evictors (starring Vic Morrow and Michael Parks), which got no American theatrical distribution . . . and Tourist Trap. There is no such frisson in Plan 9 from Outer Space, unfortunately, to which I reluctantly award the boobyprize as the worst horror film ever made. Yet there is nothing funny about this one, no matter how many times it has been laughed at in those mostly witless compendiums which celebrate the worst of everything. There's nothing funny about watching a Bela Lugosi (who may actually have been a standin) wracked with pain, a morphine monkey on his back, creeping around a southern California development with his Dracula cape pulled up over his nose. Lugosi died shortly after this abysmal, exploitative, misbegotten piece of trash was released, and I've always wondered in my heart if maybe poor old Bela didn't die as much of shame as of the many illnesses that were overwhelming him. It was a sad and squalid coda to a great career. Lugosi was buried (at his own request) in his Dracula cape, and one like to thinkor hopethat it served him better in death than it did in the miserable waste of celluloid that marked his last screen appearance. 3 Before we move on to horror on TV, where failures in the genre have been every bit as common (but somehow less spectacular), it seems appropriate to finish here by asking a question Why have there been so many bad horror movies? Before trying to answer that, let's be honest and say that a great many movies are very badnot all the turkeys are gobbling in the horror pen, if you take my meaning. Consider Myra Breckinridge. Valley of the Dolls, The Adventurers, and Bloodline . . . to mention just a few. Even Alfred Hitchcock produced one of those Thanksgiving birds, and unfortunately, it was his last picture Family Plot, with Bruce Dern and Karen Black. And these pictures only scratch the surface of a list that could continue on for a hundred pages or more. Probably more. There's an impulse to say something's wrong here. There may well be. If another businessUnited Airlines, let us say, or IBMran their affairs the way 20th CenturyFox ran the making of Cleopatra, their boards of directors would soon be down at the local 711 store, buying pizza mix with foodstampsor maybe the stockholders would just break down the door and wheel in the guillotine. It seems almost incredible to believe that any major studio could even approach the brink of bankruptcy in a country that loves the movies as much as this one does; one might as well try to imagine, you might think, Caesar's Palace or the Dunes wiped out by a single crapshooter. But in fact there is not one major American film studio which has not at least once during the thirtyyear period under discussion here tottered on the brink. MGM is perhaps the most infamous case, and for a period of seven years the MGM lion ceased to roar almost entirely. Perhaps significantly, during this period when MGM was leaving the unreal world of the movies and pinning its hopes for corporate survival upon the unreal gambling world (the MGM Grand in Vegas, surely one of the world's more vulgar pleasure domes), their one major success was a horror movieMichael Crichton's Westworld, in which a disintegrating Yul Brynner, dressed in black and looking like a nightmare revenant from The Magnificent Seven, intones again and again "Draw. Draw. Draw." They draw . . . and lose. Yul is pretty fast, even with his circuits showing. Is this, you ask me, any way to run a railroad? My own answer is no . . . but the failure of so many films released by "the majors" seems more explicable to me than the failure of so many of the horror films released by what Variety calls "the indies." At this writing, three of my novels have been released as films Carrie (United Artiststheatrical1976) 'Salem's Lot (Warnerstelevision 1979), and The Shining (Warnerstheatrical1980), and in all three cases I feel that I have been fairly treated . . . and yet the clearest emotion in my mind is not pleasure but a mental sigh of relief. When dealing with the American cinema, you feel like you won if you just broke even. Once you've seen the film industry's workings from the inside, you realize that it is a creative nightmare. It becomes difficult to understand how anything of qualityan Alien, a Place in the Sun, a Breaking Awaycan be made. As in the Army, the first rule of studio filmmaking is CYA Cover Your Ass. On any critical decision, it is well to consult at least half a dozen people, so that someone else's butt will go up in that fabled sling if the film drops dead and twenty million dollars goes swirling down the toilet. And if your butt must go up, it then becomes possible to make sure it doesn't go up alone. There are, of course, filmmakers who either don't know this kind of fear or whose particular visions are so clear and fierce that such fear of failure never becomes a factor in the equation. Brian De Palma comes to mind, and Francis Coppola (who teetered on the edge of being fired from The Godfather shoot for months, and yet persisted in his own particular vision of the film), Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, Steven Spielberg. This factor of vision is so real and apparent that even when a director such as Stanley Kubrick makes such a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film as The Shining, it somehow retains a brilliance that is inarguable; it is simply there. The real danger inherent in studio films is mediocrity. A clinker like Myra Breckinridge has its own horrid fascinationit is like watching slowmotion footage of a headon collision between a Cadillac and a Lincoln Continental. But what are we to make of films like Nightwing, Capricorn One, Players, or The Cassandra Crossing? These are not bad filmsnot the way that Robot Monster or Teenage Monster are bad, certainlybut they are mediocre. They're blah. You leave the theater after one of these films with no taste in your mouth but the popcorn you ate. They are films where, halfway through the second reel, you begin wishing for a cigarette. As the cost of production balloons up and up, the risks of going for all of it become greater and greater, and even a Roger Maris looked pretty stupid when he was badly fooled, totally overswung the ball, and fell on his ass. The same obtains in films, and I would predictwith some hesitation, because the film industry is such a crazy placethat we will never again see such a colossal risk as the one Coppola took with Apocalypse Now or the one Cimino was allowed to take with Heaven's Gate. If anyone tries, that dry, dusty snapping sound you'll hear coming from the West Coast will be the accountants of every major studio out there snapping the corporate checkbooks closed. But the indies . . . what about the indies? There is less to lose here, certainly; in fact Chris Steinbrunner, an amusing guy and an astute follower of the films, likes to call many of these flicks "backyard movies." By his definition, The Horror of Party Beach was a backyard film; so were The Flesh Eaters and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. ( Night of the Living Dead, which was made by an existing film company with access to TV studio facilities in Pittsburgh, doesn't qualify as "backyard.") It's a good term for those films made by amateurs, gifted or otherwise, on a shoestring budget with no major distribution guaranteedthese films are the much more expensive equivalent of the unsolicited manuscript. These are guys who are shooting with nothing to lose, shooting for the moon. And yet most of these films are just awful. Compare, for instance, the single and unified vision which powers Spielberg's Jaws to the sequel, which was produced by committee and directed by the unfortunate Jeannot Szwarc, who was brought in from the bullpen in the late innings to mop up, and who deserved better. Why? Exploitation, that's why. It was exploitation that caused Lugosi to put finish to his career by creeping around a suburban tract development in his Dracula cape; it was exploitation that prompted the making of Invasion of the Star Creatures and Don't Look in the Basement (and believe me, I didn't have to keep telling myself it was only a movie; I knew what it wasin a word, wretched). After sex, lowbudget moviemakers are attracted to horror because it seems to be a genre which is easily exploitedan easy lay, like the sort of girl every guy wanted to date (at least once) in high school. Even good horror can sometimes have a tawdry carnival freakshow feel . . . but it's a feel that can be deceptive. And if it is courtesy of the indies that we have seen the greatest failures (the RoMan's warsurplus shortwave bubble machine), then it is also courtesy of them that we have seen some of the most unlikely triumphs. The Horror of Party Beach and Night of the Living Dead were made on similar budgets; the difference is George Romero and his vision of what the horror movie is and what the horror movie is supposed to do. In the former we have the monsters attacking a slumber party in a scene which becomes hilarious; in the latter we have an old woman peering nearsightedly at a bug on a tree and then munching it up. You hear your mouth trying to laugh and scream at the same time, and that is Romero's remarkable achievement. Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory and Dementia13 were made on similar nothing budgets; here the difference is Francis Coppola, who created an almost unbearable atmosphere of mounting menace in the latter, a blackandwhite, rapidly shot suspense movie (which was made on location in Ireland, for tax purposes). It is, perhaps, too easy to become enamoured of bad films as "camp"; the great success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show may point to nothing so much as the degeneration of the average moviegoer's critical capacity. It might be well to go back to the basics and remember that the difference between bad movies and good (or between bad artor nonartand good or great art) is talent, and the inventive utilization of that talent. The worst movie sends its own message, which is simply to stay away from other movies done by these people; if you have seen one film by Wes Craven, for instance, it is safe enough, I think, to skip the others. The genre labors under enough critical disapproval and outright dislike; one need not make a bad situation worse by underwriting films of pornoviolence and those which want to plunder our pocketbooks and no more. And there is no need to do it, because even in the movies there is no real pricetag on quality . . . not when Brian De Palma found it possible to make a fine, scary film like Sisters for something like 800,000. The reason for seeing bad movies, I suppose, is that you don't know it's going to be bad until you've seen it for yourselfas previously pointed out, most movie critics cannot be trusted here. Pauline Kael writes well, and Gene Shalit demonstrates a certain rather tiresome surface wit, but when these twoand other criticsgo to see a horror movie, they don't know what they are seeing. The true fan does; he or she has developed his or her basis for comparison over a long and sometimes painful span of time. The real movie freak is as much an appreciator as the regular visitor to art galleries or museums, and this basis for comparison is the bedrock upon whatever theses or point (s) of view he or she may develop must stand. For the horror fan, films such as Exorcist II form the setting for the occasional bright gemstone that is discovered in the darkness of a sleazy secondrun moviehouse Kirby McCauley's Rituals or my own lowbudget favorite, Tourist Trap. You don't appreciate cream unless you've drunk a lot of milk, and maybe you don't even appreciate milk unless you've drunk some that's gone sour. Bad films may sometimes be amusing, sometimes even successful, but their only real usefulness is to form that basis of comparison to define positive values in terms of their own negative charm. They show us what to look for because it is missing in themselves. After that has been determined, it becomes, I think, actively dangerous to hold on to these bad films . . . and they must be discarded. The one exception is Judith Crist, who seems to genuinely like horror movies and who is often able to look past a povertyrow budget to whatever is working thereI've always wondered what she made of Night of the Living Dead. If you are interested in my own determination of the best horror movies of the last thirty years, see Appendix I. CHAPTER VIII The Glass Teat, or, This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburgers ALL THOSE OF YOU out there among the great unwashed who ever believed that TV sucks were dead wrong, you see; as Harlan Ellison pointed out in his sometimes amusing, sometimes scathing essays on television, TV does not suck; it is sucked. Ellison called his twovolume diatribe on the subject The Glass Teat, and if you've not read it, be aware that it comes recommended as a kind of compass with this particular stretch of the territory. I read the book with amazed absorption three years ago, the fact that Ellison had devoted valuable time and space to such forgettable series of yesteryear as Alias Smith and Jones barely obtruding on a total volcanic effect that made me suspect I was experiencing something roughly similar to a sixhour rant delivered by Fidel Castro. Always assuming that Fidel was really on that day. Ellison circles back and back to television in his work, like a man held in thrall by a snake he knows to be ultimately deadly. For no apparent reason, the longish introduction to Strange Wine (a book we'll discuss at some length next chapter), Ellison's 1978 collection of short stories, is a diatribe on TV titled "Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself." When you strip Ellison's TVrap to its core, it is simple enough and not blazingly original (for blazing originality, you have to read how he says it) TV is a spoiler, Ellison says. It spoils story; it spoils those who make the stories; eventually it spoils those who watch the stories; the milk from this particular teat is poisoned. This is a thesis I would agree with completely, but let me point out two facts. Harlan has a TV. A big one. I have a TV which is even bigger than Harlan's. It is, in fact, a Panasonic CinemaVision which dominates one whole corner of my living room. Mea culpa, all right. I can rationalize Harlan's TV and my own monster, although I cannot completely excuse either of usand I should add that Ellison is a bachelor, and he can watch the thing twenty hours a day if he wants and hurt nobody but himself. I, on the other hand, have three young children in the houseten, eight, and fourwho are exposed to this gadget; to its possible radiation, its untrue colors, and its magic window on a vulgar, tawdry world where cameras ogle the butts of Playboy bunnies and linger over endless visions of an upperupperuppermiddleclass materialism that, for most Americans, has never existed and never will. Mass starvation is a way of life in Biafra; in Cambodia, dying children are shitting out their own collapsed intestines; in the Middle East a kind of messianic madness is in danger of swallowing up all rationality; and here at home we sit mesmerized by Richard Dawson on Family Feud and watch Buddy Ebsen as Barnaby Jones. I think my own three kids have a better fix on the reality of Gilligan, the Skipper, and Mr. Howell than they do on the reality of what happened at Three Mile Island in March of 1979. In fact, I know they do. Horror has not fared particularly well on TV, if you except something like the six o'clock news, where footage of black GIs with their legs blown off, villages and kids on fire, bodies in trenches, and whole swatches of jungle being coated with good old Agent Orange sent kids into the streets, where they would march and light candles and say dopey, talismanic "in" things to each other until we withdrew, the North Vietnamese took over, and more starvation on mass levels resultednot to mention opening the way for such really upstanding, humanitarian personages as Cambodia's Pol Pot. The whole sour stew sure wasn't much like a TV show, was it? Just ask yourself if any chain of events so ridiculous could ever have happened on Hawaii FiveO. The answer is of course not. If Steve McGarrett had been President from 1968 to 1976, the whole abortion could have been avoided. Steve, Danny, and Chin Ho would have cleared the mess up. The sort of horrors we have been discussing in this book labor under the very fact of their unreality (a fact which Harlan Ellison himself recognizes well; he refuses to allow the word fantasy to be printed on book covers as a descriptive term for the stories inside). We have treated the question "Why do you want to write horror stories in a world that is so full of real horrors?"; I am now suggesting that the reason horror has done so poorly, by and large, on TV, is a statement which is closely related to that question, to wit "It is very difficult to write a successful horror story in a world which is so full of real horrors." A ghost in the turret room of a Scottish castle just cannot compete with thousandmegaton warheads, CBW bugs, or nuclear power plants that have apparently been put together from Aurora model kits by tenyearolds with poor eyehand coordination. Even Old Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre pales beside those dead sheep in Utah, killed by one of Our Finer Nerve Gases. If the wind had been blowing the other way when that happened, Salt Lake City might have gotten a really good dose of what killed the sheep. And, my good friends, someday the wind is not going to be blowing the right way. You may count on it; tell your Congressman I said so. Sooner or later the wind always changes. Well, horror can be done. That emotion can still be triggered by people who are dedicated to doing it, and there's something optimistic in the fact that people can still, in spite of all the world's real horrors, be brought to the point of the scream by something that is patently impossible. It can be done by the writer or the director . . . if their hands are untied. For the writer, the most galling thing about TV must be that he or she is forbidden from bringing all of his or her powers to bear; the predicament of the TV writer is strikingly similar to the predicament of the human race as envisioned in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," where bright people are fitted with electroshock caps to disrupt their thinking periodically, agile people are fitted with weights, and people with great artistic talent are forced to wear heavy, distorting glasses to destroy their clearer perception of the world around them. As a result, a perfect state of equality has been achieved . . . but at what a price. The ideal writer for the TV medium is a fella or a gal with a smidgen of talent, a lot of gall, and the soul of a drone. In Hollywood's current and exquisitely vulgar parlance, he or she must "give good meeting." Let any of these qualifications be tampered with, and the writer is apt to start feeling like poor old Harrison Bergeron. It has made Ellison, who wrote for Star Trek, The Outer Limits, and The Young Lawyers, to name just a few, a little bit crazy, I think. But if he weren't, it would be impossible to respect him. His craziness is a kind of Purple Heart, like Joseph ( Police Story) Wambaugh's ulcers. There is no reason why a writer cannot make a living doing TV on a constant weekinweekout basis; all that writer really needs is a low Alphawave pattern and a perception of writing as the mental equivalent of bucking crates of soda up onto a CocaCola truck. Part of this is the result of federal regulation and part of it is proof of the maxim which states that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. TV is in almost every American home, and the financial stakes are enormous. As a result, television has become more and more cautious over the years. It has become like a fat old spayed tomcat dedicated to the preservation of the status quo and to the concept of LOPLeast Objectionable Programming. Television is, in fact, like that fat, wimpy kid who most of us can remember from our childhood neighborhoods, the big, slack kid who would cry if you gave him twoforflinching, the kid who always looked guilty when the teacher asked who put the mouse in her drawer, the kid who was always picked on because he was always afraid of being picked on. Now the simple fact of horror fiction in whatever medium you choose . . . the bedrock of horror fiction, we might say, is simply this you gotta scare the audience. Sooner or later you gotta put on the gruesome mask and go boogabooga. I can remember an official in the fledgling New York Mets organization worrying about the improbable crowds that gang of happygolucky schmucks was drawing. "Sooner or later we're going to have to sell these people some steak along with the sizzle," was how this fellow expressed it. The same is true with horror. The reader will not feed forever on innuendo and vapors; sooner or later even the great H. P. Lovecraft had to produce whatever was lurking in the crypt or in the steeple. Most of the great film directors in the field have chosen to get the horror up front; to cram a large block of it down the viewer's throat until he almost chokes on it and then lead the viewer on, teasing him, drawing every cent of the psychological interest due on that original scare. The primer that every wouldbe horror director studies in this matter is, of course, the definitive horror film of the period we're discussingAlfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Here is a movie where blood was kept to a minimum and terror was kept to a maximum. In the famous shower scene we see Janet Leigh; we see the knife; but we never see the knife in Janet Leigh. You may think you saw it, but you did not. Your imagination saw it, and that is Hitchcock's great triumph. All the blood we see in the shower is swirling down the drain. Psycho has never been shown during prime time as a network movie, but once that fortyfive seconds in the shower has been removed, the film could almost be a madeforTV movie (in content, anyway; in terms of style, it is lightyears from the runofthetube TV flick). In effect, what Hitchcock does is serve us a big raw steak of terror not even a quarter of the way through his film. The rest, even the climax, is really only sizzle. And without that fortyfive seconds, the film becomes nearly humdrum. In spite of its reputation, Psycho is an admirably restrained horror movie; Hitchcock even elected to shoot in black and white so that the blood in the shower scene would not look like blood at all, and one ofttold talealmost surely apocryphalis that Hitch toyed with I would date the more overtly violent horror movies not from Psycho but from two nonhorror movies, shot in living, bloody color Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. shooting the movie in colorexcept for the shower scene, which would be in black and white. As we enter upon our discussion of horror on television, always keep this fact somewhere near to hand television has really asked the impossible of its handful of horror programsto terrify without really terrifying, to horrify without really horrifying, to sell audiences a lot of sizzle and no steak. Earlier on I said I could rationalize if not excuse the fact of Ellison's TV and my own, and the rationalization goes back to what I've already said about really awful movies. Of course, TV is far too homogenized to cough up anything as charmingly awful as The Giant Spider Invasion with its furcovered Volkswagen, but every now and then talent shines through and something good turns up . . . and even if the something is not outandout good, like Spielberg's Duel or John Carpenter's Someone's Watching Me, the viewer may find at least some cause for hope. More child than adult in pursuit of his particular taste, hope springs eternal in the breast of the fantasyhorror fan. You tune in, knowing almost certainly that it's going to be bad yet hoping against hopeirrationallythat it is going to be good. Excellence occurs rarely, but every now and then a program will come along which at least bucks the odds enough to produce something interesting, such as the late1979 NBCTV movie The Aliens Are Coming. Every now and then we are given some cause for hope. And with that hope to guard us against the dreck like a magic talisman, let us go and make our visit. Just close your eyes while we dance through the cathode tube here; it has a bad habit of first hypnotizing and then anesthetizing. Just ask Harlan. 2 Probably the best horror series ever put on TV was Thriller, which ran on NBC from September of 1960 until the summer of 1962really only two seasons plus reruns. It was a period before television began to face up to an increasing barrage of criticism about its depiction of violence, a barrage that really began with the JFK assassination, grew heavier following the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King, and finally caused the medium to dissolve into a sticky syrup of situation comedieshistory may record that dramatic television finally gave up the ghost and slid down the tubes with a hearty cry of "Nanoo, nanoo!" The contemporaries of Thriller were also weekly bloodbaths; it was the time of The Untouchables, starring Robert Stack as the unflappable Eliot Ness and featuring the gruesome deaths of hoodlums without number (19591963) ; Peter Gunn (19581961) ; and Cain's Hundred (19611962), to name just a few. It was TV's violent era. As a result, after a slow first thirteen weeks, Thriller was able to become something more than the stock imitation of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that it was apparently meant to be (early episodes dealt with cheating husbands trying to hypnotize their wives into walking over high cliffs, poisoning Aunt Martha to inherit her fortune so that the gambling debts could be paid off, and all that tiresome sort of thing) and took on a tenebrous life of its own. For the brief period of its run between January of 1961 and April of 1962perhaps fiftysix of its seventyeight total episodesit really was one of a kind, and its like was never seen on TV again. Thriller was an anthologyformat show (as all of the supernaturalterror TV programs which have enjoyed even a modicum of success have been) hosted by Boris Karloff. Karloff had appeared on TV before, shortly after the Universal horror wave of the early to midthirties finally ran weakly out in that series of comedies in the late forties. This earlier program, telecast on the fledgling ABCTV network, had a brief run in the autumn of 1949. It was originally titled Starring Boris Karloff, fared no better following a title change to Mystery Playhouse Starring Boris Karloff, and was canceled. In feeling and tone, however, it was startlingly similar to Thriller, which came along eleven years later. Here is the summary of one plot from Starring Boris Karloff; it might as well be a Thriller episode An English hangman unduly enjoys his work, which brings him payment of five guineas per hanging. He revels in the snap of the victim's neck, and the dangling arms. When his pregnant wife discovers his true occupation she leaves him. Twenty years later the hangman is called upon to execute a young man, which he does with pleasure, despite the fact that he has secret evidence (of the youth's innocence) . . . . Only then is he confronted by his exwife, who tells him he has just hung his own son. Enraged, he strangles his wife and is subsequently sent to the gallows himself. Another hangman collects five golden guineas. The plot is kissing cousin to an episode from Thriller's second season. In that one, the executioner was French, in charge of the guillotine instead of the gallows, and was presented as a sympathetic character From The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, 1946Present, edited by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh (New York Ballantine Books, 1979). P. 586. (although his work has apparently not affected his appetite; he's a mountain of a man). He is due to execute a particularly foul murderer the next day at dawn. The killer has not given up hope, however; his girl friend has wormed her way into the lonely headsman's affections, and the two of them hope to take advantage of an old loophole in the law (and I should say here that I have no idea if the loophole is a genuine one, like the American concept of double jeopardy, or simply the plot device of Cornell Woolrich, who wrote the story) which holds that if the executioner croaks on the day he is to do business, that day's condemned prisoner walks free. The lady serves the executioner a huge breakfast laced with strong poison. He eats heartily, as usual, and then sets off for the prison. He's halfway there when the first agonizing pains strike. The rest of the episode is a chilly exercise in suspense as the camera cuts back and forth between the cell of the condemned man and the executioner's agonized walk through the streets of Paris. The executioner, obviously a typeA personality, is determined to do his duty. He reaches the prison, collapses halfway across the courtyard . . . and then begins to crawl toward the guillotine. The prisoner is brought out, dressed in the proper opencollared white shirt (the screenwriter had obviously read his Tale of Two Cities) and the two of them converge at the guillotine. Now at the end of his rope (haha), the executioner nevertheless manages to get the screaming prisoner's head in the stock and positioned over the basket before collapsing, stone dead. The condemned prisoner, on his knees with his butt poking uplooking a bit like a turkey caught in a shakepole fencebegins screaming that he's free! Free, do you hear? Ahhahhahhah! The doctor who was to pronounce the condemned dead now finds himself called upon to perform that duty upon the erstwhile executioner. He tries for a pulse and finds nonebut when he drops the executioner's wrist, it falls on the guillotine's lever. The blade swishes down thud! We fade out, knowing that rough justice has been done. Karloff was sixtyfour at the beginning of Thriller's twoyear run, and not in the best of health; he suffered from a chronically bad back and had to wear weights to stand upright. Some of these infirmities dated back to his original film appearance as Frankenstein's monster in 1932. He no longer starred in all the programsmany of the guest stars on the Thriller program were nonentities who went on to become fullfledged nobodies (one of those guest stars, Reggie Nalder, went on to play the vampire Barlow in the CBSTV film version of 'Salem's Lot) but fans will remember a few memorable occasions when he did ("The Strange Door," for instance). The old magic was still there, still intact. Lugosi might have finished his career in misery and poverty, but Karloff, despite a few embarrassments like Frankenstein 1970, went out as he came in as a gentleman. Produced by William Frye, Thriller was the first television program to discover the goldmine in those back issues of Weird Tales, the memory of which had been kept alive up until then mostly in the hearts of fans, a few quickie paperback anthologies, and, of course, in those limitededition Arkham House anthologies. |
One of the most significant things about the Thriller series from the standpoint of the horror fan was that it began to depend more and more upon the work of writers who had published in those "shudder pulps" . . . the writers who, in the period of the twenties, thirties, and forties, had begun to guide horror out of the VictorianEdwardian ghoststory channel it had been in for so long, and toward our modern perception of what the horror story is and what it should do. Robert Bloch was represented by "The Hungry Glass," a story in which the mirrors of an old house harbor a grisly secret; Robert E. Howard's "Pigeons from Hell," one of the finest horror stories of our century, was adapted, and remains the favorite of many who remember Thriller with fondness. Other episodes include "A Wig for Miss DeVore," in which a red wig keeps an actress magically young . . . until the final five minutes of the program, when she loses itand everything else. Miss DeVore's lined, sunken face; the young man staggering blindly down the stairs of the decaying bayou mansion with a hatchet buried in his head ("Pigeons from Hell"); the fellow who sees the faces of his fellow men and women turned into hideous monstrosities when he puts on a special pair of glasses ("The Cheaters," from another Bloch story)these may not have constituted fine art, but in Thriller's run, we find those qualities above all others by fans of the genre a literate story coupled with the genuine desire to frighten the viewer into spasms. Years after Thriller, a production company associated with NBCthe network upon which Thriller was telecastoptioned three stories And some say it was the single most frightening story ever done on TV. I would disagree with that. My own nominee for that honor would be the final episode of a littleremembered program called Bus Stop (adapted from the William Inge play and film). The series, a straight drama show, was canceled following the furor over an episode starring then rock star Fabian Forte as a psychopathic rapistthe episode was based on a Tom Wicker novel. The final episode, however, deviated wildly into the supernatural, and for me, Robert Bloch's adaptation of his own short story "I Kiss Your Shadow" has never been beaten on TVand rarely anywhere elsefor eerie, mounting horror. from my 1978 collection, Night Shift, and invited me to do the screenplay. One of these stories was a piece called "Strawberry Spring," about a psychopathic JacktheRippertype killer who is roaming a fogbound college campus. About a month after turning the script in, I got a call from an NBC munchkin at Standards and Practices (read The Department of Censorship). The knife my killer used to commit his murders had to go, the munchkin said. The killer could stay, but the knife had to go. Knives were too phallic. I suggested we turn the killer into a strangler. The munchkin evinced great enthusiasm. I hung up, feeling like a very brilliant fellow, and turned the stabber into, a strangler. The script was finally coughed out of the network's large and voracious gullet by Standards and Practices, however, strangler and all. Too gruesome and intense was the final verdict. I guess none of them remembered Patricia Barry in "A Wig for Miss DeVore." 3 Blackness on the TV screen. Then there's a picture theresome kind of picturebut it's rolling helplessly at first, then losing horizontal resolution. Black again, broken by a single wavy white line, oscillating hypnotically. The voice accompanying all this is quiet, reasonable. " There it nothing wrong with your TV set. We are controlling transmission, We can control the vertical. We can control the horizontal. For the next hour we will control all you see and hear and think. You are watching a drama which reaches from the inner mind to . . . the Outer Limits." Nominally science fiction, more actually a horror program, The Outer Limits was, perhaps, after Thriller, the best program of its type ever to run on network TV. Purists will scream nonsense and blasphemy; that not even Thriller could compete with the immortal Twilight Zone. That The Twilight Zone is damn near immortal is something I will not argue with; in big city markets like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco it seems to run eternally, hallelujah, world without end, sandwiched into its own twilight zone just after the late evening news and just before the PTL Club. Perhaps only such ancient sitcoms as I Love Lucy and My Little Margie can compete with The Twilight Zone for that sort of fuzzy, blackandwhite, vampiristic life which syndication allows. But, with a dozen or so notable exceptions, The Twilight Zone had very little to do with the sort of horror fiction we're dealing with here. It was a program which specialized in moral tales, many of them smarmy (such as the one where Barry Morse buys a player piano which causes his guests to reveal their true selves; the piano ends up causing him to admit that he is a selfish little sonofabitch) ; many others well meant but simplistic and almost painfully corny (as in the one where the sun does not rise because the atmosphere of human injustice has just gotten too black, folks, too blackthe radio announcer gravely reports that things are particularly black over Dallas and Selma, Alabama . . . . Get it, guys? Get it?). Other episodes of The Twilight Zone were really little more than sentimental riffs on old supernatural themes Art Carney discovers he really is Santa Claus after all; the tired commuter (James Daly) finds peace in an idyllic, bucolic little town called Willoughby. The Twilight Zone did occasionally strike notes of horrorthe best of these vibrate in the back teeth years laterand we will discuss some of these before we finish with the Magic Box. But for sheer hardedged clarity of concept, The Twilight Zone really could not match The Outer Limits, which ran from September of 1963 until January of 1965. The program's executive producer was Leslie Stevens; its lineproducer was Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Psycho and an eerie little exercise in terror called Eye of the Cat a year or two later. Stefano's vision of what the program was about was an extraordinarily clear one. Each episode, he insisted, had to have a "bear"some sort of monstrous creature that would make an appearance before the station break at the halfhour. In some cases the bear was not harmful in and of itself, but you could bet that before the end of the show, some outside forceusually a villainous mad scientistwould cause it to go on a rampage. My favorite Outer Limits "bear" literally came out of the woodwork (in an episode titled, surprisingly enough, "It Came Out of the Woodwork") and was sucked into a housewife's vacuum cleaner, where it began to grow . . . and grow . . . and grow. Other "bears" included a Welsh coal miner (played by David McCallum) who is given an evolutionary "trip" forward in time some two million years. He comes back with a huge bald head which dwarfs his pallid, sickly looking face, and Lays Waste to the Neighborhood. Harry Guardino was menaced by a huge "ice creature"; the first astronauts on Mars, in an episode written by Jerry Sohl (a science fiction novelist perhaps best known for Costigan's Needle), were menaced by a gigantic sand snake. In the pilot episode, "The Galaxy Being," a creature of pure energy is accidentally absorbed into a radio telescope on earth and is finally dispatched by being overfed (shades of that old Richard Carlson meller, The Magnetic Monster!) Harlan Ellison wrote two episodes, "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand," the latter considered by the editor of The Science Fiction Encyclopedia and others to be perhaps the finest episode of the series, which also included many scripts by Stefano and one by a young man named Robert Towne, who would go on to write Chinatown. The cancellation of The Outer Limits was more due to stupid programming on the part of its parent network, ABC, than to any real lack of interest, even though the show had become slightly flabby in the second season following Stefano's departure. To some extent it could be said that when Stefano left, he took all the good bears with him. The series was never quite the same. Still, a good many programs have been able to endure a flabby stretch without cancellation (TV is, after all, a pretty flabby medium). But when ABC switched The Outer Limits from its Mondaynight time slot, where it was up against two fading game shows, to Saturday nighta night when the younger audience The Outer Limits was aimed at was either at the movies or just out cruisingit faded quietly from the scene. We have mentioned syndication briefly, but the only fantasy program which can be seen regularly on the independent TV stations is The Twilight Zone, which was, by and large, nonviolent. Thriller can be seen late at night in certain bigcity markets that have one or more of those independent stations, but a run of The Outer Limits is a much rarer catch. Although it was presented, during its first run, in what is now considered "the family hour," a change in mores has made it one of those "iffy" programs for the independents, who feel safer running sitcoms, game shows, and movies (not to mention the old putyourhandsonyourTVsetbrotherandyouwillbe healed! bit). And by the way, if you get it in your area, warm up the old Betamax and send me the complete catalogue by way of the publisher. On second thought, you better not. It's probably illegal. But treasure the run while you've got it; like Thriller, the like of The Outer Limits will not be seen again. Even The Wonderful World of Disney is going off the air after a twentysixyear run. For much of this material I am indebted to the entry on The Outer Limits in The Science Fiction Handbook, published by Doubleday (New York 1979). The entry (p. 441 of this huge volume) was written by John Brosnan and Peter Nicholls. 4 We'll not say from the sublime to the ridiculous, because TV rarely produces the sublime, and series TV has never produced it; let us instead say from the workmanlike to the atrocious. The Night Stalker. Earlier on in this chapter I said that television was too homogenized to cough up anything that was really charmingly awful; ABCTV's The Night Stalker series is the exception that proves the rule. It's not the movie that I'm talking about, remember. The film of The Night Stalker was one of the best movies ever made for TV. It was based on an abysmal horror novel, The Kolchak Tapes, by Jeff Ricethe novel was issued as a paperback after the unpublished manuscript landed on producer Dan Curtis's desk and became the basis of the film. A short side trip here, if you don't mind too much. Dan Curtis became associated with the horror field as producer of what must have been the strangest soap opera ever to run on the tube; it was called Dark Shadows. Shadows became something of a ninedays' wonder during the last two years of its run. Originally conceived as a softfocus ladies' gothic of the type then so popular in paperback (they have now been largely replaced by those sweetsavage love stories a la Rosemary Rogers, Katherine Woodiwiss, and Laurie McBain), it eventually mutatedlike Thrillerinto something quite different from what had first been intended. Dark Shadows, under Curtis's inspired hand, became a kind of supernatural mad hatters' tea party (it even came on the air at the traditional hour for tea, four in the afternoon), and hypnotized viewers were treated to a seriocomic panorama of hella weirdly evocative combination of Dante's ninth circle and Spike Jones. One member of the putupon Collins family, Barnabas Collins, was a vampire. He was played by Jonathan Frid, who became an overnight celebrity. His celebrity, unfortunately, was every bit as lasting as Vaughan Meader's (and if you don't remember Vaughan Meader, send me a stamped, selfaddressed postcard and I will enlighten you). One turned in to Dark Shadows every day, convinced that things could become no more lunatic . . . and yet somehow they did. At one point the entire cast of characters was transported back into the seventeenth century for a six week turn in fancy dress. Barnabas had a cousin who was a werewolf. Another cousin was a combination witchsuccubus. Other soap operas have always, of course, practiced their own bemusing forms of madness; my own favorite has always been the Kid Trick. The way the Kid Trick works is this one of the characters on a soap opera will have a baby in March. By July it will be two; in November it will be six; the following February it will be lying in the hospital, comatose, after being hit by a car while returning home from the sixth, grade; and by the March following its birth, the child will be eighteen and ready to begin really joining in the fun by getting the girl next door pregnant, or turning suicidal, or possibly by announcing to his horrified parents that he's a homosexual. The Kid Trick is worthy of a Robert Sheckley alternateworld story, but at least the characters on most soap operas stay dead once their lifesupport machinery is turned off (following which there will be a fourmonth trial with the turneroffer in the dock for mercy killing). The actors and actresses who "died" picked up their final checks and went job hunting again. Not so on Dark Shadows. The dead simply came back as ghosts. It was better than the Kid Trick. Dan Curtis went on to make two theatrical films based on the Dark Shadows plot and using its cast of undead characterssuch a jump from TV to the movies is not unheardof ( The Lone Ranger is a case where it also happened), but it's rare, and the films, while not great, were certainly viewable. They were done with style, wit, and all those buckets of gore Curtis couldn't use on TV. They were also made with tremendous energy . . . a trait which helped to make The Night Stalker film the highestrated madeforTV movie ever telecast up until that time. (It has since been surpassed in the ratings eight or nine times, and one of the films that has outpointed it was the pilot film forchoke! The Love Boat.) Curtis himself is a remarkable, almost hypnotic man, friendly in a brusque, almost abrasive way, apt to hog the credit for his enterprises, but in such an engaging way that nobody really seems to mind. A throwback to an older and perhaps tougher breed of Hollywood filmmakers, Curtis has never had any noticable problems in deciding where to plant his feet. If he likes you, he stands up for you. If he doesn't, you're a "notalent sonofabitch" (a phrase that has always pleased me a great deal, and after reading this passage, Curtis may well call me up and use it on me). He would be notable if for no other reason than he may be the only producer in Hollywood effectively able to make a picture as frankly scary as The Night Stalker. The film was scripted by Richard Matheson, who has written for TV with better pace and more dramatic flair than anyone since Reginald Rose, perhaps. Curtis went on to make another picture with Matheson and William F. Nolan which fans still talk about Trilogy of Terror, with Karen Black. The segment of this trio of stories most frequently mentioned was the final one, based on Matheson's short story "Prey." In it, Ms. Black gives a tourdeforce solo performance as a woman pursued by a tiny devildoll with a spear. It is a bloody, gripping, scary fifteen minutes, and it perhaps most clearly sums up what I'm trying to say about Dan Curtis he has an unerring, crude talent for finding the terror place inside you and squeezing it with a cold hand. The Night Stalker dealt with a pragmatic reporter named Carl Kolchak who works the Las Vegas beat. Played by Darren McGavin, his face somehow simultaneously tired, awed, cynical, and wiseacre beneath his battered straw fedora, Kolchak is a believable enough character, more Lew Archer than Clark Kent, dedicated above all else to making a buck in Casino City. He stumbles upon a string of murders that have apparently been committed by a vampire, and follows a series of leads deeper and deeper into the supernatural, engaging at the same time in a war of words with the Powers That Be in Vegas. In the end he tracks the vampire to the old house which has become its abode and drives a stake through its heart. The final twist is predictable but nonetheless satisfying Kolchak is discredited and fired, cut loose from an establishment that has no room for vampires in either its philosophy or its public relations; he is able to dispatch the bloodsucker (Barry Atwater), but the final victor is Las Vegas boosterism. McGavin, a talented actor, has rarely been as goodas believableas he was in The Night Stalker movie. It is his very pragmatism that enables us to believe in the vampire; if a hardnose like Carl Kolchak can believe it, the film suggests convincingly, then it must be so. The success of The Night Stalker did not go unnoticed at ABC, which was perennially hithungry in those days before Mork, the Fonz, and all those other great characters made their way into the lineup. So a sequel, The Night Strangler, quickly followed. This time the murders were being committed by a doctor who had discovered the secret of eternal lifealways provided he could slay five victims every five years or so to make up a new batch of elixir. In this one (set in Seattle), pathologists were covering up the fact that bits of decayed human flesh had been found on the necks of the strangulation victimsthe doctor, you see, always began to get a little ripe as his fiveyear cycle neared its end. The part is really only a refinement of the part of David Ross, a private eye McGavin played in a wonderful (if shortlived) NBC series called The Outsider. Probably only the late David Janssen as Harry Orwell and Brian Keith as Lew Archer (in a series that only lasted three weeksif you blinked, you missed it) can compare with McGavin's performance as a private eye. Kolchak uncovered the coverup and tracked the monster to its lair in Seattle's socalled "secret city," an underground section of old Seattle which Matheson visited on a vacation trip in 1970. And, needless to say, Kolchak managed to dispatch the zombie medico. ABC decided it wanted to make a series out of Kolchak's continuing adventures, and such a series, predictably titled Kolchak The Night Stalker, premiered on Friday, September 13th, 1974. The series limped through one season, and it was an abysmal flop. There were production problems from the beginning; Dan Curtis, who had been the guiding force behind the two successful TVmovies, had nothing to do with the series (no one I queried seems to really know why). Matheson, who had written the two original movies, never turned in a single script for the series. Paul Playden, the original producer, resigned his post before the series began its run and was replaced by Cy Chermak. Most of the For much of the material on The Night Stalker, I am indebted to Berthe Roeger's comprehensive analysis of both the two movies and the series, published in Fangoria magazine (issue 3, December 1979). The same issue contains an invaluable episodebyepisode chronology of the series' run. directors were forgettable; special effects were done on a shoestring. One of my favorite effects, which at least comes close to the furcovered VW in The Giant Spider Invasion, was on view in an episode entitled "The Spanish Moss Murders." In this one, Richard Kielwho would become famous as jaws in the last two James Bond picturescavorted through a number of Chicago back alleys with a notverywellconcealed zipper running up the back of his Swamp Monster suit. But the basic problem with the Night Stalker series was the problem which dogs any nonanthology series dealing with the supernatural or the occult a complete breakdown in the ability to suspend disbelief. We could believe Kolchak once, as he tracked the vampire down in Vegas; with some added effort we could even believe in him twice, tracking down the undead doc in Seattle. Once the series got going, it was harder. Kolchak goes out to cover the last cruise of a fine old luxury liner and discovers that one of his fellow passengers is a werewolf. He sets out to cover an upandcoming politician's campaign for the Senate and discovers the candidate has sold his soul to the devil (and considering Watergate and Abscam, I hardly find this supernatural or unusual). Kolchak also stumbles across a prehistoric reptile in Chicago's sewer system ("The Sentry"); a succubus ("Legacy of Terror") ; a coven of witches ("The Trevi Collection"); and in one of the most tasteless programs ever done for network TV, a headless motorcyclist ("Chopper" ) . Eventually, suspension of disbelief becomes utterly impossibleeven, one suspects, for the production staff, which began to play poor Kolchak more and more for laughs. In a sense, what we saw in this series was a speededup version of the Universal Syndrome from horror to humor. But it took the Universal Pictures monsters some eighteen years to get from one state to the other; it only took The Night Stalker twenty episodes. As Berthe Roeger points out, Kolchak The Night Stalker enjoyed a brief and quite successful revival when the series was rerun as part of CBS's latenight program of oldies. Roeger's conclusion, however, that its success was due to any merit in the series itself seems off the mark to me. If the tunein was large, I suspect it was for the same reason that the theater always fills up at midnight for Reefer Madness. I've mentioned the siren song of crap before, and here it is again. I suspect that people tuned in once, couldn't believe how bad this thing was, and kept tuning in on successive nights to make sure that their eyes had not deceived them. They hadn't; perhaps only Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the launching pad for that apostle of disaster, Irwin Allen, can compete with Kolchak for total collapse. Yet we should remember that not even Seabury Quinn, with his Jules de Grandin series in Weird Tales, was able to keep the continuingcharacter format rolling very successfully, and Quinn was one of the most talented writers of the pulp era. Kolchak The Night Stalker (which became known during its run to some pundits as Kolchak's Monster of the Week) nonetheless holds a certain warm spot in my hearta small warm spot, it is trueand in the hearts of a great many fans. There is something childlike and unsophisticated in its very awfulness. 5 " There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. It is the dimension of the imagination. It is an area we call . . . The Twilight Zone." With this rather purple invocationwhich did not sound purple at all in Rod Serling's measured and almost matteroffact deliveryviewers were invited to enter a queerly boundless other world . . . and enter they did. The Twilight Zone ran on CBS from October of 1959 through the summer of 1965from the torpor of the Eisenhower administration to LBJ's escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, the first of the long hot summers in American cities, and the advent of the Beatles. Of all the dramatic programs which have ever run on American TV, it is the one which comes closest to defying any overall analysis. It was not a western or a cop show (although some of the stories had western formats or featured cops 'n' robbers); it was not really a science fiction show (although The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows categorizes it as such); not a sitcom (although some of the episodes were funny) ; not really occult (although it did occult stories frequentlyin its own peculiar fashion), not really supernatural. It was its own thing, and in a large part that fact alone seems to account for the fact that a whole generation is able to associate the Serling program with the budding of the sixties . . . at least, as the sixties are remembered. Rod Serling, the program's creator, came to prominence in what has been referred to as television's "golden age"although those who have termed it so because they remember fondly such anthology programs as Studio One, Playhouse 90, and Climax have somehow managed to forget such chestnuts as Mr. Arsenic, Hands of Mystery, Doorway to Danger, and Doodle Weaverprograms which ran during the same period, and which by comparison make such current TV programs as Vega and That's Incredible! look like great American theater. Television never really has had a golden age; only successive seasons of sounding brass which vary slightly as to the trueness of the tone. Nevertheless, television has produced isolated spasms of quality, and three of Serling's early teleplays Patterns, The Comedian, and Requiem for a Heavyweightform a large part of what television viewers mean when they speak of a "golden age" . . . although Serling was by no means alone. There were others, including Paddy Chayefsky ( Marty) and Reginald Rose ( Twelve Angry Men) who contributed to that illusion of gold. Serling was the son of a Binghamton, New York, butcher, a Golden Gloves champ (at approximately five feet four, Serling's class was flyweight), and a paratrooper during World War II. He began to write (unsuccessfully) in college and went on to write (unsuccessfully) for a radio station in Cincinnati. "That experience proved frustrating," Ed Naha relates in his fond reprise of Serling's career. "His introspective characters came under attack by . . . executives who wanted their people to get their teeth into the soil'! Serling recalled the period years later What those guys wanted wasn't a writer, but a plow.' " Serling quit radio and began to freelance. His first success came in 1955 ( Patterns, starring Van Heflin and Everett Sloane, the story of a dirty corporate power play and the resulting moral squeeze on one executivethe teleplay won Serling his first Emmy), and he never looked back . . . but he somehow never really moved on, either. He wrote a number of feature filmsAssault on a Queen was maybe the worst of them; Planet of the Apes and Seven Day in May were two of the good onesbut television was his home, and Serling never really outgrew it, as did Chayefsky ( Hospital, Network). Television was his home, where he lived most comfortably, and after a fiveyear hiatus following the cancellation of The Twilight Zone, he turned up on the tube again, this time as the host of Night Gallery. Serling himself expressed feelings of doubt and depression about his deep involvement in this mediocre medium. "But God knows," he said in his last interview, "when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I'm hardpressed to come up with anything that's important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important." Serling apparently saw The Twilight Zone as a way of going underground and keeping his ideals alive in television following the cancellation of the prestige drama programs in the late fifties and early sixties. And to an extent, I suppose he succeeded. Under the comforting guise of "it's only makebelieve," The Twilight Zone was able to deal with questions of fascism ("He Lives," starring Dennis Hopper as a young neoNazi guided by the shadowy figure of Adolf Hitler), ugly mass hysteria ("The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"), and even Joseph Conrad's heart of darknessrarely has any television program dared to present human nature in such an ugly, revealing light as that used in "The Shelter," in which a number of suburban neighbors along Your Street, U.S.A., are reduced to animals squabbling over a fallout shelter during a nuclear crisis. For this and much of the material on Serling and The Twilight Zone, I'm indebted to "Rod Serling's Dream," by Ed Naha, published in Starlog 15 (August 1978), and to Gary Gerani, who compiled the complete episode guide in the same issue. Quoted in an interview conducted by Linda Brevelle shortly before Serling's death and published under the title, "Rod Serling's Last Interview" (a rather ghoulish title, I think, but then, what do I know?), in the 1976 Writer' Yearbook. Other episodes generated a kind of existential weirdness that no other series has been able to match. There was, for instance, "Time Enough at Last," starring Burgess Meredith as a myopic bank clerk who can never find time enough to read. He survives an Hbomb attack, in fact, because he is reading in the vault when the bombs fall. Meredith is delighted with the holocaust; he finally has all the time to read that a man could want. Unfortunately, he breaks his glasses shortly after reaching the library. One of the guiding moral precepts of The Twilight Zone seems to have been that a little irony is good for your blood. If The Twilight Zone had bowed on TV as we have found it in the period 19761980, it would have undoubtedly disappeared after an initial run of six to nine episodes. Its ratings were low to begin with . . . like in the cellar. It was up against a fairly popular Robert Taylor cops 'n' robbers meller, The Detectives, on ABC, and the immensely popular Gillette Cavalcade of Sports on NBCthis was the show that invited you to put your feet up and watch such fighters as Carmen Basilio and Sugar Ray Robinson get their faces changed. But television moved more slowly in those days, and scheduling was less anarchistic. The Twilight Zone's first season consisted of thirtysix halfhour episodes, and by the season's midpoint the ratings had begun to pick up, helped by good wordofmouth and glowing reviews. The reviews played their part by helping CBS decide that they had that potentially valuable commodity, a "prestige program." Nevertheless, problems continued. The program had problems finding a steady sponsor (this was back in the days, you must remember, when dinosaurs walked the earth and TV time was cheap enough to allow a single sponsor to pay for an entire programhence GE Theater, Alcoa Playhouse, The Voice of Firestone, The Lux Show, Coke Time, and a host of others; to this writer's knowledge, the last program to be wholly sponsored by one company was Bonanza, sponsored by GM), and CBS Meredith became perhaps the most familiar face of all to Twilight Zone fans, save for Serling's own. Probably his bestremembered role came in "Printer's Devil," where he plays a newspaper owner who is really Satan . . . complete with a jutting, crooked cigar that was somehow diabolical. In 1972 CBS discovered another "prestige program" The Waltons, created by Earl Hamner, Jr., who wrote a good many Twilight Zones . . . including, coincidentally, "The Bewitchin' Pool," the last original Twilight Zone episode to be telecast on the network. Placed against brutal competitionNBC's The Flip Wilson Show and ABC's own version of The Church of What's Happening Now, The Mod SquadCBS stuck with Hamner's creation in spite of the low ratings because of the prestige factor. The Waltons went on to outlive its competition and at this writing has run seven seasons. began to wake up to the fact that Sterling had put none of his cudgels away but was now wielding them in the name of fantasy. During that first season, The Twilight Zone presented "Perchance to Dream," the late Charles Beaumont's first contribution to the series, and "Third from the Sun," by Richard Matheson. The gimmick of the latterthat the group of protagonists is fleeing not from Earth but to itis one that has been utterly beaten to death by now (most notably by that deepspace turkey Battlestar Galactica), but most viewers can remember the snap of that ending to this day. It was the episode which marks the point at which many occasional tunersin became addicts. Here, for once, was something Completely New and Different. |
During its third season, The Twilight Zone was either canceled (Serling's version) or squeezed out by insoluble scheduling problems (the CBS version). In either case, it returned the following year as an hourlong program. In his article "Rod Serling's Dream," Ed Naha says "The 'something different' the elongated ( Twilight Zone) came up with turned out to be boredom. After thirteen publicly shunned episodes, the 60minute Twilight Zone was canceled." It was indeed canceledonly to return for a final, mostly dull, season as a halfhour show againbut because of boredom? In my own view, the hourlong episodes of The Twilight Zone included some of the best of the entire run. There was "The ThirtyFathom Grave," in which the crew of a Navy destroyer hears ghosts tapping inside a sunken submarine; "Printer's Devil"; "The New Exhibit" (one of The Twilight Zone's few excursions into outright horror, this dealt with a wax museum janitor played by Martin Balsam who discovers that the Murderers' Row exhibit has come to life); and "Miniature," which starred Robert Duvall in a Charles Beaumont script about a man who escapes back into the gay nineties. As Naha points out, by its final season "no one at CBS really cared about the series." He goes on to say that ABC, which had had some success with The Outer Limits, extended feelers to Serling about doing a sixth season with them. Serling refused. "I think ABC wanted to make a trip to the graveyard every week," he said. For Serling, life was never quite the same. The angry young man who had written Patterns began doing television commercialsthat unmistakable voice could be heard huckstering tires and cold remedies in a bizarre turn that recalls the broken fighter in Requiem for a Heavyweight who ends up performing in fixed wrestling matches. And in 1970 lie began making that "trip to the graveyard every week," not on ABC but on NBC, as host and sometime writer of Night Gallery. The series was inevitably compared to The Twilight Zone in spite of the fact that Gallery was really a watereddown Thriller with Serling doing the Boris Karloff hosting job. Serling had none of the creative control he had enjoyed while doing The Twilight Zone. (He complained at one point that the studio was trying to turn Night Gallery "into Mannix with a shroud.") Nonetheless, Night Gallery produced a number of interesting episodes, including adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft's "Cool Air" and "Pickman's Model." It also presented an episode which must rate as one of the most frightening ever telecast on TV. "Boomerang," based on a story by Oscar Cook, dealt with a little bug called an earwig. The earwig is placed in the villain's ear and began toulp!chew its way through his brain, leaving the man in an excruciating, sweaty state of agony (the physiological reason for this, since the brain has no nerves, is never explained). He is told there's only one chance in a billion that the pesky little beast will actually chew on a straight course across to his other ear and thus find the exit; much more likely is the possibility that it will just continue chewing its way around in there until the fellow goes mad . . . or commits suicide. The viewer is immensely relieved when the nearimpossible happens and the earwig actually does come out the other side . . . and then, the kicker comes the earwig was female. And it laid eggs in there. Millions of them. Most Night Gallery episodes were nowhere near as chilling, and the series was canceled after limping along in one form or another for three labored years. It was Serling's last star turn. "On his fortieth birthday," Naha says, "Serling made his first parachute jump since World War II." Serling's reason? "I did it," he said, "to prove that I wasn't old." But he looked old; a comparison of his early Twilight Zone publicity photos and those taken on the Night Gallery set before those mostly idiotic paintings shows a change which is nearly shocking. Serling's face had become lined, his neck wattled; it is the face of a man who has been partially dissolved in television's vitriol. In 7972 he received an interviewer in his study, which was lined with framed reviews of Requiem, Patterns, and other teleplays from the early days. "Sometimes I come in here just to look," he said. "I haven't had reviews like that in years. Now I know why people keep scrapbooksjust to prove to themselves it really happened." The man who jumped from a plane on his fortieth birthday to prove to himself that he wasn't old refers to himself constantly as old in the Linda Brevelle interview some nine years later; she characterizes him as "vibrant and alive" during their meeting at La Taverna, Serling's favorite L.A. watering hole, but again and again those disquieting phrases crop up; at one point he says, "I'm not an old man yet, but I'm not a young man, either"; at another he says he is an old man. Why didn't he get out of the creative demo derby? At the end of Requiem for a Heavyweight, Jack Palance says he must go back into the ringeven though the whole thing is fixedbecause the ring is all he knows. It's as good an answer as any. Serling, a fierce workaholic who sometimes smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, suffered a crippling heart attack in 1975 and died following openheart surgery. His legacy consisted of a few fine early plays and The Twilight Zone, a series which has become one of those peculiar TV legends, like The Fugitive and Wanted Dead or Alive. What are we to make of this program which is so revered (by people who were mostly children when they originally viewed it) ? "I guess a third of the shows were pretty damned good," Serling told an interviewer. "Another third would have been passable. Another third are dogs." The fact is that Serling himself wrote sixtytwo of the first ninetytwo Twilight Zones typing them, dictating them to a secretary, talking them into a dictaphoneand, of course, smoking nonstop. Fantasy fans will recognize the names of almost all the other writers, those who contributed the other thirty episodes Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, Earl Hamner, Jr., Robert Presnell, E. Jack Neuman, Montgomery Pittman, and Ray Bradbury. The simple fact is that most of the bowwows which escaped the kennel had Serling's name on them. They include "Mr. Denton on Doomsday," "The SixteenMillimeter Shrine," "Judgment Night," "The Big Tall Wish" (a shameless tearjerker about a kid who helps a brokendown pug win his last match), and too many others for me to want to mention. Even the recollection most people seem to have of The Twilight Zone has always bothered me; it is the concluding "twists" that most people seem to remember, but the show's actual success seemed to be based on more solid concepts, concepts which form a vital link between the old pulp fiction predating the fifties (or those Thriller programs which used the pulps as the basis of their best stories) and the "new" literature of horror and fantasy. Week after week, The Twilight Zone presented ordinary people in extraordinary situations, people who had somehow turned sideways and slipped through a crack in reality . . . and thus Bradbury adapted his own short story, "I Sing the Body Electric," for the program. It is, to the best of my knowledge, Bradbury's only screen credit following an odd but rather magnificent adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick for the John Huston film. into Serling's "zone." It is a powerful concept, and surely the clearest road into the land of fantasy for viewers and readers who do not ordinarily care to visit that land. But the concept was by no means original with Serling; Ray Bradbury had begun putting the ordinary and the horrible cheekbyjowl in the forties, and when he began to move on into more arcane lands and to use the language in more and more novel ways, Jack Finney came upon the scene and began refining the same extraordinaryintheordinary themes. In a benchmark collection of short stories called The Third Level, the literary equivalent of those startling Magritte paintings where railroad trains are roaring out of fireplaces or those Dali paintings where clocks are lying limply over the branches of trees, Finney actually defined the boundaries of Serling's Twilight Zone. In the lead story, Finney tells of a man who finds a mythical third level to Grand Central Station (which only has two concourse levels, for those of you who aren't familiar with that neat old building). The third level is a kind of way station in time, giving egress on a happier, simpler time (those same late 1800's which so many putupon Twilight Zone heroes escaped into, and essentially the same period Finney himself returns to in his celebrated novel, Time and Again). In many ways, Finney's third level satisfies all the definitions of Serling's Twilight Zone, and in many ways it was Finney's concept that made Serling's concept possible. One of Finney's great abilities as a writer has been his talent for allowing his stories to slip unobtrusively, almost casually, across the line and into another world . . . as when a character, picking through his change, happens upon a dime which bears not the likeness of FDR but of Woodrow Wilson, or when another Finney character begins on a journey to the idyllic planet Verna as a passenger aboard a rickety old charter bus that is eventually parked in a tumbledown country barn ("Of Missing Persons"). Finney's most important accomplishment, which the best episodes of The Twilight Zone echo (and which the best of the post Zone writers of fantasy have also echoed), is that Daliesque ability to create the fantasy . . . and then not apologize for it or explain it. It simply hangs there, fascinating and a little sickening, a mirage too real to dismiss a brick floating over a refrigerator, a man eating a TV dinner full of eyeballs, kids on a toylittered floor playing with their pet dinosaur. If the fantasy seems real enough, Finney insisted, and Serling after him, we don't need any wires or mirrors. It was, in a large part, Finney and Serling who finally answered H. P. Lovecraft, who showed a new direction. For me and those of my generation, the answer was like a thunderclap of revelation, opening a million entrancing possibilities. And yet Finney, who perhaps understood Serling's concept of "that middle ground between light and shadow" better than anyone else, was never represented on The Twilight Zonenot as a scriptwriter, not as a source. Serling later adapted Assault on a Queen (1966) , a work which can most humanely be characterized as unfortunate. It contains all the preachy, talkingheads stuff that brought so many of his Twilight Zone scripts low. It's one of the minor tragedies of the field that what might have been an inspired meeting of two like minds should have turned out so poorly. But if you feel disappointed with my analysis of The Twilight Zone (and some, I suspect, may feel that I have spat on an icon), I urge you to find a copy of Finney's The Third Level, which will show you what The Twilight Zone could have been. And still, the program left us with a number of powerful memories, and Serling's analysis that a third of the shows were pretty damn good may not have been far from the mark. Anyone who watched the show regularly can remember William Shatner, held in thrall by a penny fortunetelling machine in a cheesy restaurant located in a onestoplight town ("Nick of Time"); Everett Sloane succumbing to gambling mania in "The Fever," and the hoarse, metallic cry of the coins ("Fraaaaanklin!") calling him back to do battle with the diabolical slotmachine; the beautiful woman who is reviled for her ugliness in a world of piglike humanoids (Donna Douglas of The Beverly Hillbillies in "Eye of the Beholder"). And, of course, those two classics by Richard Matheson, "The Invaders" (starring a grimly brilliant Agnes Moorhead as a country woman fighting off tiny invaders from space, a story which foreshadows Matheson's later treatment of a similar subject in "Prey") and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which William Shatner plays a newly recovered mental patient who sees an evillooking gremlin pulling at the housing of an airliner's motor. The Twilight Zone also showcased a wide range of performers (Ed Wynn, Kennan Wynn, Buster Keaton, Jack Klugman, Franchot Tone, Art Carney, Pippa Scott, Robert Redford, and Cloris Leachman among others), writers, and directors (Buzz Kulik, Stuart Rosenberg, and Ted Post, to name a few). It frequently featured startling and exciting music by the late Bernard Herrmann; the best special effects were done by William Tuttle, probably only second to Dick Smith (or the new makeup genius, Tom Savini) in wizardry. It was a pretty good show, the way the most fondly remembered TV series are pretty good shows . . . but ultimately, no better. TV is the endless gobbler of talent, something new and poisonous under the sun, and if Zone is ultimately weaker than our fond memories of it would like to allow, the fault lies not with Serling but with TV itselfthe hungry maw, the bottomless pit of shit. Serling wrote a total of eightyfour episodes, something like 2,200 pages of script according to the screenwriter's rule of thumb that one page of script equals one minute of video. This is a staggering pile of work, and it really isn't surprising that the alltoooccasional clunker like "I Am the NightColor Me Black" got through. Rod Serling was only able to do so much in the name of KimberlyClark and Chesterfield Kings. Then television ate him up. 6 And as far as TV is concerned, I guess it's time for everybody to get out of the pool. I don't have enough John Simon in me to really enjoy shooting TV's creative cripples as they crawl and squirm around in the great TV Cancellation Corral. I've even tried to treat Kolchak The Night Stalker with affection, because I certainly feel a degree of affection for it. Bad as it was, it wasn't any worse than some of the Saturday matinee creaturefeatures that enlivened my life as a kid The Black Scorpion or The Beast of Hollow Mountain, for instance. Individual TV programs have produced brilliant or nearbrilliant excursions into the supernatural Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for instance, gave us adaptations of several Ray Bradbury stories (the best of them was probably "The Jar"), one terrifying William Hope Hodgson story, "The Thing in the Weeds," a nonsupernatural bonefreezer from the pen of John D. MacDonald ("The Morning After"), and fans of the bizarre will remember the episode where the cops ate the murder weapona leg of lamb . . . . that one based on a story by Roald Dahl. There was "They're Coming," the original hourlong pilot for The Twilight Zone, and the short French film "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," which appeared on American television for the first time as a Twilight Zone episode (this adaptation of the Bierce story cannot be seen during syndication runs of The Twilight Zone). Another Bierce story, "One of the Missing," ran on PBS in the winter of 1979. And speaking of PBS, there was also an interesting adaptation of Dracula done there. Originally telecast in 1977, it featured Louis Jourdan as the legendary Count. This videotaped drama is both moody and romantic; Jourdan gives a more effective performance than Frank Langella in the John Badham film, and the scenes of Dracula crawling down the wall of his castle are marvelous. The Jourdan version also comes closer to the heart of the vampire's sexuality, presenting to us in Lucy, the three weird sisters, and in Dracula himself creatures who possess a loveless sexualityone which kills. It is more powerful than the hohum romance of the Badham version, in spite of Langella's energetic job in the title role. Jack Palance has also played Dracula on television (in another Matheson screenplay and another Dan Curtis production) and did quite well by the Count . . . although I prefer Jourdan's performance. Other oneshot TV movies and specials run from the merely forgettable (NBC's illadvised adaptation of Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home, for instance) to some really hideous pieces of work Cornel Wilde in Gargoyles (Bernie Casey plays the head gargoyle as a kind of fivethousandyearold Ayatollah Khomeini) and Michael Sarrazin is the mistitledand misbegotten Frankenstein The True Story. The risk rate is so high that when my own novel 'Salem's Lot was adapted for television after Warners had tried fruitlessly to get it off the ground as a theatrical film for three years, my feeling at its generally favorable reception was mostly relief. For awhile it seemed that NBC might turn it into a weekly series, and when that rather numbing prospect passed by the boards, I felt relief again. Most television series have ranged from the ludicrous ( Land of the Giants) to the utterly inane ( The Munsters, Struck by Lightning). The anthology series of the last ten years have meant well, by and large, but have been emasculated by pressure groups both without and within; they have been sacrificed on the altar of television's apparent belief that both drama and melodrama are best appreciated while in a semidoze. There was Journey to the Unknown, a British import (from the Hammer studios). Some of the stories were engrossing, but ABC made it clear rather quickly that it had no real interest in frightening anyone, and the series died quickly. Tales of the Unexpected, produced by Quinn Martin ( The FBI, The Fugitive, The Invaders, The New Breed, and God knows how many others), was more interesting, concentrating on psychological horrors (in one episode, reminiscent of Anne Rivers Siddons's The House Next Door, a murderer sees his victim rise from the dead on his television set), but low ratings killed the program after a short run . . . a fate that might have been The Twilight Zone's, had not the network stuck by it. In fine, the history of horror and fantasy on television is a short and tacky one. Let's turn the magic eye off and turn to the bookshelf; I want us to talk about some stories where all the artificial boundaries are removedboth those of visual set and of network restrictionand the author is free to "get you" in any way he can. An uneasy concept, and some of these books scared the hell out of me even as they were delighting me. Maybe you've had the same experience . . . or maybe you will. Just take my arm and step this way. CHAPTER IX Horror Fiction IT MIGHT NOT BE IMPOSSIBLE to present an overview of American horror and fantasy fiction during the last thirty years, but it wouldn't be just a chapter in this book; it would be a book in itself, and probably a dull one (maybe even a text, that apotheosis of the Dull Book species). For our purposes, I can't imagine why we would want to deal with all the books published in the genre anyway; most of them are just downright bad, and as with TV, I have no taste for the job of beating the field's most spectacular violators with their shortcomings. If you want to read John Saul and Frank de Felitta, go right ahead. It's your threefifty. But I'm not going to discuss them here. My plan is to discuss ten books that seem representative of everything in the genre that is fine the horror story as both literature and entertainment, a living part of twentiethcentury literature, and worthy successors to such books as Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and Chalmers's The King in Yellow. They are books and stories which seem to me to fulfill the primary duty of literatureto tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed. Some of the books discussed here have been "best sellers"; some have been written by members of the socalled "fantasy community"; some have been written by people with no interest in fantasy or the supernatural for its own sake, but who have seen it as a particularly useful tool to be used once and then perhaps put aside forever (although many have also found that the use of this tool is apt to become habitforming). Most of themeven those which cannot be neatly pigeonholed as "best sellers"have been steady sellers across the years, probably because the horror tale, which is regarded by most serious critics in about the same light that Dr. Johnson regarded women preachers and dancing dogs, manages to consistently satisfy as entertainment even when it's only good. When it's great, it can deliver a megaton wallop (as it does in Lord of the Flies) that other forms of literature can rarely equal. Story has always been the abiding virtue of the horror tale, from "The Monkey's Paw" to T. E. D. Klein's utterly flabbergasting novella of monsters (from Costa Rica, yet!) under the streets of New York, "Children of the Kingdom." That being so, one only wishes that those great writers among us who have also succeeded in becoming our greatest bores in recent years would attempt something in the genre and stop poking around in their navels for intellectual fluff. I hope that by discussing these ten books, I can dilate upon those virtues of story and entertainment and perhaps even indicate some of the themes which seems to run through most good horror stories. I should be able to do this if I'm doing my job, because there just aren't that many thematic trails to go down. For all of their mythic hold over us, the field of the supernatural is a narrow one in the greater spread of general literature. We can depend on the reappearance of the Vampire, and our furry friend (who sometimes wears its fur on the inside) the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name. But the time has also come to bring on that fourth archetype the Ghost. We may also find ourselves returning to the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian, since this tension exists in all horror fiction, the bad as well as the good, leading back to that endlessly fascinating question of who's okay and who isn't. That's really the taproot, isn't it? And we may also find that narcissism is the major difference between the old horror fiction and the new; that the monsters are no longer just due on Maple Street, but may pop up in our own mirrorsat any time. 2 Probably Ghost Story by Peter Straub is the best of the supernatural novels to be published in the wake of the three books that kicked off a new horror "wave" in the seventiesthose three, of course, being Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other. The fact that these three books, all published within five years of each other, enjoyed such wide popularity, helped to convince (or reconvince) publishers that horror fiction had a commercial potential much wider than the readership of such defunct magazines as Weird Tales and Unknown or the paperback reissues of Arkham House books. A word about Arkham House. There is probably no dedicated fantasy fan in America who doesn't have at least one of those distinctive blackbound volumes upon his or her shelf . . . and probably in a high place of honor. August Derleth, the founder of this small Wisconsinbased publishing house, was a rather uninspired novelist of the Sinclair Lewis school and an editor of pure genius Arkham was first to publish H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert Bloch in book form . . . and these are only a few of Derleth's legion. He published his books in limited editions ranging from five hundred to twentyfive hundred copies, and some of themLovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep and Bradbury's Dark Carnival, for instanceare now highly soughtafter collectors' items. The resulting scrambling to get the next "big" shiverandshake novel produced some really terrible books. As a further result, the wave had begun to withdraw by the midseventies, and more traditional bestsellers began to reappear stories of sex, big business, sex, spies, gay sex, doctors in trouble, kinky sex, historical romances, sexy celebrities, war stories, and sex. That isn't to say that publishers stopped looking for occulthorror novels or stopped publishing them; the mills of the publishing world grind slowly but exceedingly fine (which is one reason that such an amazing river of gruel streams forth every spring and fall from the larger New York publishing houses), and the socalled "mainstream horror novel" will probably be with us yet awhile. But that first heady rush is over, and editors in New York no longer automatically scramble for the Standard Contract Form and fill in a meaty advance as soon as something in the story comes out of the woodwork . . . . Aspiring writers please take note. Against this background, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan published Peter Straub's Julia in 1975. It was not his first novel; he had published a novel called Marriagesa nonsupernatural "thisisthewaywelivenow" sort of storytwo years previous. Although Straub is an American, he and his wife lived in England and Ireland for ten years, and in both execution and intent, Julia is an English ghost story. The setting is English, most of the characters are English, and most importantly, the novel's diction is Englishcool, rational, almost disconnected from any kind of emotional base. There is no sense of the Grand Guignol in the book, although the book's most vital situation certainly suggests it Kate, the daughter of Julia and Magnus, has choked on a piece of meat and Julia kills her daughter while trying to perform a tracheotomy with a kitchen knife. The girl, it would appear, then returns as a malevolent spirit. We aren't given the tracheotomy in any detailthe blood splashing the walls and the mother's hand, the terror and the cries. This is the past; we see it in reflected light. Much later, Julia sees the girl who may or may not be Kate's ghost burying something in the sand. When the girl leaves, Julia digs up the hole, discovering first a knife and then the mutilated corpse of a turtle. This reflection back upon the botched tracheotomy is elegant, but it has little heat. Two years later Straub published a second supernatural novel, If You Could See Me Now. Like Julia, If You Could See Me Now is a novel occupied with the idea of the revenant, that vengeful spirit from an undead past. All of Straub's supernatural novels work effectively when dealing with these old ghosts; they are stories of the past continuing to work on the present in a malevolent way. It has been suggested that Ross McDonald is writing gothics rather than private eye novels; it could be said that Peter Straub is writing gothics rather than horror novels. What distinguishes his work in Julia, If You Could See Me Now, and, most splendidly, in Ghost Story is his refusal to view the gothic conventions as static ones. All three of these books have much in common with the classic gothics of the genre The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer, even Frankenstein (although in terms of its telling, Frankenstein is actually less a gothic and more a modern novel than Ghost Story)they are all books where the past eventually becomes more important than the present. This would seem a valid enough course for the novel to follow to any people who see uses in the study of history, you would think, but the gothic novel has always been considered something of a curiosity, a widget on the great machine of Englishspeaking fiction. Straub's first two novels seem to me to be mostly unconscious attempts to do something with this widget; what distinguishes Ghost Story and makes it such a success is that with this book, Straub seems to have grasped exactlyconsciouslywhat the gothic romance is about, and how it relates to the rest of literature. Put another way, he has discovered what the widget was supposed to do, and Ghost Story is a vastly entertaining manual of operation. "[ Ghost Story] started as a result of my having just read all the American supernatural fiction I could find," Straub says. "I reread Hawthorne and James, and went out and got all of Lovecraft and a lot of books by his 'set'this was because I wanted to find out what my tradition was, since I was by then pretty firmly in the fieldI also read Bierce, Edith Wharton's ghost stories, and a lot of Europeans . . . . The first thing I thought of was having a bunch of old men tell stories to each otherand then I hoped I could think of some device that would link all the stories. I very much like the idea of stories set down in novelsa lot of my life seems to have been spent listening to older people tell me stories about their families, their youth, all the rest. And it seemed like a formal challenge. After that I thought of cannibalizing certain old classic stories, and plugging them into the Chowder Society. This idea excited me. It seemed very audacious, and I thought that was very good. So I went ahead, after I got to that point in the book, and wrote junkedup versions of "My Kinsman, Major Molyneux," The Turn of the Screw, and started on "The Fall of the House of Usher." But by then the leadin threatened to become the whole book. So I dropped the Poe story (the Hawthorne story came out when I edited the first draft). I was thinking at the time that the Chowder Society would follow these with their own storiesLewis's monologue about the death of his wife, Sears and Ricky splitting a monologue (trading fours, in a way) about the death of Eva Galli." The first striking thing about Ghost Story is its resemblance to Julia. That book begins with a woman who has lost a child; Ghost Story begins with a man who has found one. But these two children are eerily similar, and there is an atmosphere of evil about both of them. From Julia Almost immediately, she saw the blonde girl again. The child was sitting on the ground at some distance from a group of other children, boys and girls who were carefully watching her . . . . The blonde girl was working intently at something with her hands, wholly concentrated on it. Her face was sweetly serious . . . . This was what gave the scene the aspect of a performance . . . . The girl was seated, her legs straight out before her, in the sandy overspill from one of the sandboxes . . . . She was speaking softly now to her audience, ranged on the scrubby grass before her in groups of three and four . . . . They were certainly unnaturally quiet, completely taken up by the girl's theatrics. Is it this little girl, who is holding her audience spellbound by cutting up a turtle before their eyes, the same little girl who accompanies Don Wanderley on his strange trip south from Milburn, New York, to Panama City, Florida? This is the little girl as Don first sees her. You decide. And that was how he found her. At first, he was doubtful, watching the girl who had appeared in the playground one afternoon. She was not beautiful, not even attractiveshe was dark and intense, and her clothes never seemed to be clean. The other children avoided her . . . perhaps children were quicker at seeing real differences than adults . . . . Don had only one real clue that she was not the ordinary child she appeared to be, and he clung to it with a fanatic's desperation. The first time he had seen her, he had gone cold. Julia, in the book of the same name, speaks to a small black child about the unnamed girl who has mutilated the turtle. The black girl wanders over to Julia and begins the conversation by asking "What's your name?" "Julia." The girl's mouth opened a fraction wider. "Doolya?" Julia raised her hand for a moment to the child's springy ruff of hair. "What's your name?" "Mona." "Do you know the girl who was just playing in here? The girl with the blonde hair who was sitting and talking?" Mona nodded. "Do you know her name?" Mona nodded again. "Doolya." "Julia?" "Mona. Take me with you." "Mona, what was that girl doing? Was she telling a story?" "She does. Things." The girl blinked. In Ghost Story, Don Wanderley similarly speaks with another child about the child who so disturbs him "What's the name of that girl?" He asked, pointing. The boy shuffled his feet, blinked and said "Angie. |
" "Angie what?" "Don't know." "Why doesn't anybody ever play with her?" The boy squinted at him, cocking his head; then, deciding he could be trusted, leaned forward charmingly, cupped his hands beside his mouth to tell a dark secret. "Because she's awful." Another theme which runs through both novelsa very Henry Jamesian themeis the idea that ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them. If they are malevolent, their malevolence comes from us. Even in their terror, Straub's characters recognize the kinship. In their appearance, his ghosts, like the ghosts James, Wharton, and M. R. James conjure up, are Freudian. Only in their final exorcism do Straub's ghosts become truly inhumanemissaries from the world of "outside evil." When Julia asks Mona the name of the turtlekilling little girl, Mona gives back her own name ("Doolya," she says). And when, in Ghost Story, Don Wanderley tries to ascertain who this eerie little girl is, this disquieting exchange follows "Okay, let's try again," he said. "What are you?" For the first time since he had taken her into the car, she really smiled. It was a transformation, but not of a kind to make him feel easier; she did not look any less adult. "You know," she said. He insisted. "What are you?" She smiled all through her amazing response. "I am you." "No. I am me. You are you." "I am you." Ghost Story is at first glance an extravagant mishmash of every horror and gothic convention ever yarned in all those Bpictures we've just finished talking about. There are animal mutilations. There's demon possession (Gregory Bate, a secondary villain, battens upon his younger sister, who escapes, and his younger brother . . . who doesn't). There's vampirism, ghoulishness (in the literal sense of that word; Gregory dines on his victims after they're dead), and werewolvery of a most singular and frightening sort. Yet all of these fearsome legends are really only the outer shell of the novel's real heart, where there stands a woman who may be Eva Galli . . . or Alma Mobley . . . or Anna Mostyn . . . or possibly a little girl in a dirty pink dress whose name, supposedly, is Angie Maule. What are you? Don asks. I am you, she responds. And that is where the heartbeat of this extraordinary book seems the strongest. What is the ghost, after all, that it should frighten us so, but our own face? When we observe it we become like Narcissus, who was so struck by the beauty of his own reflection that he lost his life. We fear the Ghost for much the same reason we fear the Werewolf it is the deep part of us that need not be bound by piffling Apollonian restrictions. It can walk through walls, disappear, speak in the voices of strangers. It is the Dionysian part of us . . . but it is still us. Straub seems aware that he is carrying a basket dangerously overloaded with horrors, and turns the fact splendidly to his own advantage. The characters themselves feel that they have entered a horror story; the protangonist, Don Wanderley, is a writer of horror stories, and within the town of Milburn, New York, which becomes the world of this novel, there is the smaller world of Clark Mulligan's Rialto Theater, which is showing a horrormovie festival during the book's progress a microcosm within the macrocosm. In one of the book's key scenes Gregory Bate throws one of the book's good guys, young Peter Barnes, through the movie screen while Night of the Living Dead is showing in the empty theater. The town of Milburn has become snowed in and overrun with the living dead, and at this point Barnes is literally thrown into the movie. It shouldn't work; it should be overt and cute. But Straub's firm prose maker it work. It preserves Straub's hallofmirrors approach (three of the book's epigrams are Straub's own free rendering of the Narcissus story), which keeps us constantly aware that the face looking out of all those mirrors is also the face looking in; the book suggests we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts. Is this really such a difficult or paradoxical idea when you consider how short our lives are in a wider lifescheme where redwoods live two thousand years and the Galapagos sea turtles may live for a thousand? Most of Ghost Story's power comes from the fact that of the four archetypes we have discussed, the Ghost is the most potent. The concept of the Ghost is to the good novel of the supernatural what the concept of the Mississippi is to Twain's Huckleberry Finnreally more than symbol or archetype, it is a major part of that mythpool in which we all must bathe. "Don't you want to hear about the manifestations of the different spirits in her?" the younger priest asks the older before they go up to Regan MacNeil before the final confrontation in The Exorcist. He begins to enumerate them, and Father Merrin cuts him off curtly "There is only one." And although Ghost Story clanks and roars with the trappings of vampirism and werewolvery and flesheating ghouls, there is really only AlmaAnnaAnnVeronica . . . and little Angie Maule. She is described by Don Wanderley as a shapechanger (what the Indians called a manitou), but even this is a branch rather than the taproot; all of these manifestations are like the up cards in a hand of stud poker. When we turn over the hole card, the one that makes the hand, we find the central card of our Tarot hand the Ghost. We know that ghosts aren't inherently evilin fact, most of us have heard or read of a case or cases where ghosts have been rather helpful; the shade who told Auntie Clarissa not to take that plane or who warned Grampy Vic to go home fast because the house was catching on fire. My mother told me that after suffering a near fatal heart attack, a close friend of hers had a visit from Jesus Christ in his hospital room. Jesus At one point, while under strain, Don gives a long, rambling lecture to an undergraduate class on the subject of Stephen Crane. In the course of his talk he describes The Red Badge of Courage as "a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears." Considering the book's moody approach to the subjects of cowardice and bravery, it is an oddly apt description of that novel. just opened the door of Emil's I.C. room and asked him how he was doing. Emil allowed as how he was afraid he was a goner, and asked Jesus if He had come to take him. "Not yet," Jesus said, leaning casually against the door. "You've got another six years in you. Relax." He then left. Emil recovered. That was in 1953; I heard the story from my mother around 1957. Emil died in 1959six years after his heart attack. I have even had some truckle with "good ghosts" in my own work; near the end of The Stand, Nick Andros, a character who has been killed earlier in an explosion, returns to tell halfwitted but goodhearted Tom Cullen how to care for the novel's hero, Stu Redman, after Stu has fallen gravely ill with pneumonia. But for the purposes of the horror novel the ghosts must be evil, and as a result we find ourselves back in a familiar place examining the Apollonian Dionysian conflict and watching for the mutant. In Ghost Story, Don Wanderley is summoned by four old men who call themselves the Chowder Society. Don's uncle, the fifth member, died of an apparent heart attack the year before while attending a party thrown for the mysterious actress AnnVeronica Moore. As with all good gothics, a summary of the plot beyond this basic situation would be unfairnot because the veteran reader of this material will find much that is new in the plot (it would be surprising if he, she, or we did, in light of Straub's intention to fuse as many of the classic ghost story elements as possible), but because a bare summary of any gothic makes the book look absurdly complex and labored. Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood. Straub succeeds winningly at this, and the novel's machinery runs well (although it is extremely loud machinery; as already pointed out, that is also one of the great attractions of the gothicit's PRETTY GODDAM LOUD!). The writing itself is beautifully tuned and balanced. The bare situation is enough to delineate the conflict in Ghost Story; in its way it is as clearly a conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian as Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and its moral stance, like that of most horror fiction, is firmly reactionary. Its politics are the politics of the four old men who make up the Chowder SocietySears James and John Jaffrey are staunch Republicans, Lewis Benedikt owns what amounts to a medieval fiefdom in the woods, and while we are told that Ricky Hawthorne was at one time a socialist, he may be the only socialist in history who is so entranced by new ties that he feels an urge, we are told, to wear them to bed. All of these menas well as Don Wanderley and young Peter Barnesare perceived by Straub as beings of courage and love and generosity (and as Straub himself has pointed out in a later letter to me, none of these qualities run counter to the idea of reactionism; in fact, they way well define it). In contrast, the female revenant (all of Straub's evil ghosts are female) is cold and destructive, living only for revenge. When Don makes love to this creature in its Alma Mobley incarnation, he touches her in the night and feels "a shock of concentrated feeling, a shock of revulsionas though I had touched a slug." And during a weekend spent with her, Don wakes up and sees Alma standing at the window and looking blankly out at the fog. He asks her if anything is wrong, and she replies. At first he persuades himself that her reply has been "I saw a ghost." A later truth forces him to admit she may have said "I am a ghost." A final act of memory retrieval convinces him that she has said something far more telling "You are a ghost." The battle for Milburn, New Yorkand for the lives of the last three members of the Chowder Societycommences. The lines are clearly and simply drawn for all the complexities of plot and the novel's shifting voices. We have three old men, one young man, and one teenage boy watching for the mutant. The mutant arrives. In the end, a victor emerges. This is standard enough stuff. What distinguishes itwhat "brings it up"is Straub's mirroring effect. Which Alma is the real Alma? Which evil is the real evil? As previously noted, it is usually easy to divide horror novels in another waythose that deal with "inside evil" (as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and those that deal with "outside" or predestinate evil (as in Dracula). But occasionally a book comes along where it is impossible to discover exactly where that line is. The Haunting of Hill House is such a book; Ghost Story is another. A great many writers who have attempted the horror story have also realized that it is exactly this blurring about where the evil is coming from that differentiates the good or the merely effective from the great, but realization and execution are two different things, and in attempting to produce the paradox, most succeed only in producing a muddle . . . . Lovers Living, Lovers Dead by Richard Lutz is one example. This is a case where you either hit the target deadbang or miss it altogether. Straub hits it. "I really wanted to expand things much more than I ever had before," Straub says. "I wanted to work on a large canvas. 'Salem's Lot showed me how to do this without getting lost among a lot of minor characters. Besides the large canvas, I also wanted a certain largeness of effect . . . I had been imbued with the notion that horror stories are best when they are ambiguous and low key and restrained. Reading [ 'Salem's Lot ], I realized that idea was selfdefeating. Horror stories were best when they were big and gaudy, when the natural operatic quality in them was let loose. So part of the 'expansion' was an expansion of effectI wanted to work up to big climaxes, create more tension than I ever had, build in big big scares. What all this means is that my ambition was geared up very high. Very much on my mind was doing something which would be very literary, and at the same time take on every kind of ghost situation I could think of. Also I wanted to play around with reality, to make the characters confused about what was actually real. So I built in situations in which they feel they are 1.) acting out roles in a book; 2.) watching a film; 3.) hallucinating; 4. ) dreaming; 5.) transported into a private fantasy. This kind of thing, I think, is what our kind of book can do very well, what it is naturally suited to do. The material is sort of naturally absurd and unbelievable, and therefore suits a narrative in which the characters are bounced around a whole set of situations, some of which they know rationally to be false. And it seemed fitting to me that this kind of plot would emerge from a group of men telling storiesit was selfreferring, which always pleases me very deeply in novels. If the structure had a relationship to the events, the book has more resonance." He offers a final anecdote about writing the book "There was one very happy accident . . . . Just when I was going to start the second part, two Jehovah's Witnesses showed up on the doorstep, and I bought three or four pamphlets from them. One . . . had a headline about Dr. Rabbitfootthis was for a story written by a trombonist named Trummy Young, who once played with Louis Armstrong. Dr. Rabbitfoot was a minstrel trombonist he saw as a child. So I immediately fastened on the name, and started Book Two with the character." In the course of the novel, young Peter Barnes is picked up either by Alma Mobley or another socalled "nightwatcher" while hitching a ride. In this shape, the supernatural creature is a small, tubby man in a blue cara Jehovah's Witness. He gives Peter a copy of The Watchtower, which is forgotten by the reader in the explosive course of events over the next forty pages or so. Straub has not forgotten, though. Later, after telling his story to Don Wanderley, Peter is able to produce the pamphlet the Jehovah's Witness has given him. The headline reads DR. RABBITFOOT LED ME TO SIN. One wonders if this was the headline of the actual copy of The Watchtower which the Jehovah's Witness sold to Straub in his London home as he worked out the first draft of Ghost Story. The best of these occurs when Lewis Benedikt goes to his death. He sees a bedroom door formed by an interlocking spray of pine needles while hunting in the woods. He goes through the door and into a deadly fantasyland. 3 Let us move now from ghosts to the natural (or unnatural, if you prefer) habitat of ghosts the haunted house. There are hauntedhouse stories beyond numbering, most of them not very good ( The Cellar, by Richard Laymon, is one example of the less successful breed). But this little subgenre has also produced a number of excellent books. I'll not credit the haunted house as a genuine card in the Tarot hand of the supernatural myth, but I will suggest that we might widen our field of enquiry a bit and find that we have discovered another of those springs which feed the mythpool. For want of a better name, we might call this particular archetype the Bad Place, a term which encompasses much more than the fallendown house at the end of Maple Street with the weedy lawn, the broken windows, and the moldering FOR SALE sign. It is neither my purpose nor my place here to discuss my own work, but readers of it will know that I've dealt with the archetype of the Bad Place at least twice, once obliquely (in 'Salem's Lot) and once directly (in The Shining). My interest in the subject began when a friend and I took it into our heads to explore the local "haunted house"a decrepit manse on the Deep Cut Road in my home town of Durham, Maine. This place, in the manner of deserted dwellings, was called after the name of the last residents. So in town it was just the Marsten House. This ramshackle abode stood on a hill high enough to overlook a good part of our section of towna section known as Methodist Corners. It was full of fascinating junkmedicine bottles with no labels which still had odd and vile smelling liquids in them, stacks of moldy magazines (JAPS COME OUT OF THEIR RATHOLES ON IWO! proclaimed the blurb on one yellowed issue of Argosy), a piano with at least twentyfive dead keys, paintings of longdead people whose eyes seemed to follow you, rusty silverware, a few pieces of furniture. The door was locked and there was a No TRESPASSING sign nailed to it (so old and faded it was barely legible), but this did not stop us; such signs rarely stop selfrespecting tenyearolds. We simply went in through an unlocked window. After having explored the downstairs thoroughly (and ascertained to our satisfaction that the oldfashioned sulphur matches we had found in the kitchen would no longer light but only produce a foul smell), we went upstairs. Unknown to us, my brother and cousin, two and four years older than my friend and I, had crept in after us. As the two of us poked through the upstairs bedrooms, they began to play horrible, jagged chords on the piano down in the living room. My buddy and I screamed and clutched each otherfor a moment the terror was complete. Then we heard those two dorks laughing downstairs and we grinned at each other shamefacedly. Nothing really of which to be afraid; just a couple of older boys scaring the old Irish bejaysus out of a couple of younger ones. No, nothing really of which to be afraid, but I don't recall that we ever returned there. Certainly not after dark. There might have been . . . things. And that was not even a really Bad Place. Years later I read a speculative article which suggested that socalled "haunted houses" might actually be psychic batteries, absorbing the emotions that had been spent there, absorbing them much as a car battery will store an electric charge. Thus, the article went on, the psychic phenomena we call "hauntings" might really be a kind of paranormal movie showthe broadcasting back of old voices and images which might be parts of old events. And the fact that many haunted houses are shunned and get the reputation of being Bad Places might be due to the fact that the strongest emotions are the primitive onesrage and hate and fear. I did not accept the ideas in this article as gospel truthit seems to me that the writer who deals with psychic phenomena in his or her fiction has a responsibility to deal with such phenomena respectfully but not in a state of utter, worshipful beliefbut I did find the idea interesting, both for the idea itself and because it suggested a vague but intriguing referent in my own experience that the past is a ghost which haunts our present lives constantly. And with my rigorous Methodist upbringing, I began to wonder if the haunted house could not be turned into a kind of symbol of unexpiated sin . . . an idea which turned out to be pivotal in the novel The Shining. I guess I liked the idea itselfas divorced from any symbolism or moral referencebecause it's always been difficult for me to understand why the dead would want to hang around old deserted houses, clanking chains and groaning spectrally to frighten the passerby . . . if they could go elsewhere. It sounds like a drag to me. The theory suggested that the inhabitants might indeed have gone on, leaving only a psychic residue behind. But even so (as Kenneth Patchen says), that did not rule out the possibility that the residue might be extremely harmful, as leadbased paint can be harmful to children who eat flakes of it years after it has been applied. My experience in the Marsten House with my friend crosspatched with this article and with a third elementteaching Stoker's Draculacreate the fictional Marsten House, which stands overlooking the little town of Jerusalem's Lot from its eminence not far from the Harmony Hill Cemetery. But 'Salem's Lot is a book about vampires, not hauntings; the Marsten House is really only a curlicue, the gothic equivalent of an appendix. It was there, but it wasn't doing much except lending atmosphere (it becomes a little more important in Tobe Hooper's TVfilm version, but its major function still seems to be to stand up there on that hill and look broody). So I went back to the houseaspsychicbattery idea and tried to write a story in which that concept would take center stage. The Shining is set in the apotheosis of the Bad Place not a haunted house but a haunted hotel, with a different "real" horror movie playing in almost every one of its guest room and suites. I needn't point out that the list of possible Bad Places does not begin with haunted houses and end with haunted hotels; there have been horror stories written about haunted railroad stations, automobiles, meadows, office buildings. The list is endless, and probably all of it goes back to the caveman who had to move out of his hole in the rock because he heard what sounded like voices back there in the shadows. Whether they were actual voices or the voices of the wind is a question we still ask ourselves on dark nights. I want to talk here about two stories dealing with the archetype of the Bad Place, one good, one great. As it happens, both deal with haunted houses. Fair enough, I think; haunted cars and railway stations are nasty, but your house is the place where you're supposed to be able to unbutton your armor and put your shield away. Our homes are the places where we allow ourselves the ultimate vulnerability they are the places where we take off our clothes and go to sleep with no guard on watch (except perhaps for those ever more popular drones of modern society, the smokedetector and the burglar alarm). Robert Frost said home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. The old aphorisms say that home is where the heart is, there's no place like home, that a heap of lovin' can make a house a home. We are abjured to keep the home fires burning, and when fighter pilots finish their missions they radio that they are "coming home." And even if you are a stranger in a strange land, you can usually find a restaurant that will temporarily assuage your homesickness as well as your hunger with a big plate of homecooked home fries. It doesn't hurt to emphasize again that horror fiction is a cold touch in the midst of the familiar, and good horror fiction applies this cold touch with sudden, unexpected pressure. When we go home and shoot the bolt on the door, we like to think we're locking trouble out. The good horror story about the Bad Place whispers that we are not locking the world out; we are locking ourselves in . . . with them. Both of these tales adhere quite stringently to the conventional hauntedhouse formula; we are allowed to see a chain of hauntings, working together to reinforce the concept of the house as a Bad Place. One might even say that the truest definition of the haunted house would be "a house with an unsavory history." The author must do more than simply bring on a repertory company of ghosts, complete with clanking chains, doors that bang open or shut in the middle of the night, and strange noises in the attic or the cellar (the attic's especially good for a bit of low, throbbing terrorwhen was the last time you explored yours with a candle during a power failure while a strong autumn wind blew outside?); the hauntedhouse tale demands a historical context. Both The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978), and The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (1959) , provide this historical context. Jackson establishes it immediately in the first paragraph of her novel, stating her tale's argument in lovely, dreamlike prose No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. I think there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are any finer than this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for words that somehow transcend words, words which add up to a total greater than the sum of the parts. Analysis of such a paragraph is a mean and shoddy trick, and should almost always be left to college and university professors, those lepidopterists of literature who, when they see a lovely butterfly, feel that they should immediately run into the field with a net, catch it, kill it with a drop of chloroform, and mount it on a white board and put it in a glass case, where it will still be beautiful . . . and just as dead as horseshit. Having said that, let us analyze this paragraph a bit. I promise not to kill it or mount it, however; I have neither the skill nor the inclination (but show me any graduate thesis in the field of English American lit, and I will show you a mess of dead butterflies, most of them killed messily and mounted inexpertly). We'll just stun it for a moment or two and then let it fly on. All I really want to do is point out how many things this single paragraph does. It begins by suggesting that Hill House is a live organism; tells us that this live organism does not exist under conditions of absolute reality; that because (although here I should add that I may be making an induction Mrs. Jackson did not intend) it does not dream, it is not sane. The paragraph tells us how long its history has been, immediately establishing that historical context that is so important to the hauntedhouse story, and it concludes by telling us that something walks in the rooms and halls of Hill House. All of this in two sentences. Jackson introduces an even more unsettling idea by implication. She suggests that Hill House looks all right on the surface. It is not the creepy old Marsten place from 'Salem's Lot with its boardedup windows, mangy roof, and peeling walls. It's not the tumbledown brooding place at the ends of all those deadend streets, those places where children throw rocks by daylight and fear to venture after dark. Hill House is looking pretty good. But then, Norman Bates was looking pretty good, too, at least on the surface. There are no drafts in Hill House, but it (and those foolish enough to go there, we presume) does not exist under conditions of absolute reality; therefore, it does not dream; therefore, it is not sane. And, apparently, it kills. If Shirley Jackson presents us with a historya sort of supernatural provenanceas a starting point, then Anne Rivers Siddons gives us the provenance itself. The House Next Door is a novel only in terms of its firstperson narrator, Colquitt Kennedy, who lives with her husband, Walter, next to the haunted house. We see Their lives and their way of thinking change as a result of their proximity to the house, and the novel establishes itself, finally, when Colquitt and Walter feel impelled to "step into the story." This happens quite satisfyingly in the book's closing fifty pages, but during much of the book Colquitt and Walter are very much sideline characters. The book is compartmentalized into three longish sections, and each is really a story in itself. We are given the story of the Harralsons, the Sheehans, and the Greenes, and we see the house next door mainly through their experiences. In other words, while The Haunting of Hill House provides us with a supernatural provenancethe bride whose carriage overturned, killing her seconds before she was to get her first glimpse of Hill House, for examplemerely as background stuff, The House Next Door could have been subtitled "The Making of a Haunted House." This approach works well for Ms. Siddons, who does not write prose with the beautiful simplicity of Mrs. Jackson, but who nevertheless acquits herself well and honorably here. The book is well planned and brilliantly cast ("People like us don't appear in People magazine," the first sentence of the book reads, and Colquitt goes on to tell us just how she and her husband, two private people, ended up not only in People magazine, but ostracized by their neighbors, hated by city realtors, and ready to burn the house next door to the ground). This is no gothic manse covered with drifting tatters of fog off the moor; there are no battlements, no moats, not even a widow's walk . . . . Whoever heard of such things in suburban Atlanta, anyway? When the story opens, the haunted house hasn't even been built. Colquitt and Walter live in a rich and comfortable section of suburban Atlanta. The machinery of social intercourse in this suburba suburb of a New South city where many of the Old South virtues still hold, Colquitt tells usis smoothly running and almost silent, well oiled with u.m.c. money. Next to their home is a wooded lot which has never been developed because of the difficult topography. Enter Kim Dougherty, young hotshot architect; he builds a contemporary home on the lot that fits the land like a glove. In fact . . . it looks almost alive. Colquitee writes of her first look at the house plans I drew my breath at it. It was magnificent. I do not as a rule care for contemporary architecture, [but] . . This house was different. It commanded you, somehow, yet soothed you. It grew out of the penciled earth like an elemental spirit that had lain, locked and yearning for the light, through endless deeps of time, waiting to be released . . . . I could hardly imagine the hands and machinery that would form it. I thought of something that had started with a seed, put down deep roots, grown in the sun and rains of many years into the upper air. In the sketches, at least, the woods pressed untouched around it like companions. The creek enfolded its mass and seemed to nourish its roots. It lookedinevitable. Events follow in ordained fashion. Dionysian change is coming to this Apollonian suburb where hitherto there has been a place for everything and everything is in its place. That night, when Colquitt hears an owl hooting in the woodlot where Dougherty's house will soon go up, she finds herself tying a knot in the corner of her bedsheet to ward off bad luck, as her grandmother did. Dougherty is building the house for a young couple, the Harralsons (but he would have been just as happy building it for Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, he tells the Kennedys over drinks; it's the house that interests him, not the owners). Buddy Harralson is an upandcoming young lawyer. His littlegirlChiOmegaJuniorLeaguer wife, hideocomically known as Pie (as in Punkin Pie, her daddy's nickname), loses first her baby to the house in a miscarriage which occurs there when she's four months pregnant, then her dog, and finally, on the evening of her housewarming, everything else. Exit Harralsons, enter Sheehans. Buck and his wife, Anita, are trying to recover from the loss of their only child, who went down in a flaming helicopter while serving in Vietnam. Anita, who is recovering from a mental breakdown as a result of the loss (which dovetails a little too neatly with the loss of her father and brother years before in a similar accident), begins to see movies of her son's horrible death on the television in the house. A neighbor who is helping out also catches part of this lethal film. Other stuff happens . . . there is a climax . . . and exit Sheehans. Then, last but hardly least in terms of the grand guignol, comes the Greenes. If all this sounds familiar, it comes as no surprise to either of us. The House Next Door is a frame story, the sort of thing one likes to speculate, that Chaucer might have done if he had written for Weird Tales. |
It is a form of horror tale that the movies have tried more often than novelists or shortstory writers. In fact, the movemakers seem to have tried a good many times to put a dictum that critics of the genre have handed down for years into actual practice that the horror tale works best when it is brief and comes directly to the point (most people associate that dictum with Poe, but Coleridge stated it before him, and in fact Poe was offering a guideline for the writer of all short stories, not just those dealing with the supernatural and the occult). Interestingly enough, the dictum seems to fail in actual practice. Most horror movies employing the framestory device to tell three or four short tales work unevenly or not at all. But there are exceptions to every rule, obviously. While two adaptations of old ECcomics horror yarns, Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, are miserable failures, Robert Bloch did two "framestory" films for the British Amicus production company, The House that Dripped Blood and Asylum. The stories in both of these were adapted from Bloch's own short stories, and both are good fun. Of course, the champ is still Dead of Night, the 1946 British film starring Michael Redgrave and directed by Robert Hamer, Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, and Basil Dearden. Does The House Next Door work? I think it does. It doesn't work as well as it could work, and the reader is left with what may be the wrong set of ambiguities about Walter and Colquitt Kennedy, but still, it works. "[ The House Next Door] came about, I suspect," Ms. Siddons writes, "because I have always been fond of the horror or occult genre, or whatever you may call it. It seemed to me that most of my favorite writers had tackled the ghost story at one time or another Henry James, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dickens, et al., and I have enjoyed the more contemporary writers in the genre as much as I have the old classicists. Shirley Jackson's Hill House is as nearly perfect a hauntedhouse tale as I have ever read . . . and my favorite of all time, I think is M. F. K. Fisher's enchanting little The Lost, Strayed, Stolen. "The point would seem to be that, as every foreword to every anthology of horror stories you ever read assures you, the ghost story is timeless; it cuts across all lines of culture and class and all levels of sophistication; it communicates immediately somewhere in the vicinity of the base of your spine, and touches that crouching thing in all of us that still peers in abject terror past the fire into the dark beyond the cave door. If all cats are gray in the dark, so, basically, are all people afraid of it. "The haunted house has always spoken specially and directly to me as the emblem of particular horror. Maybe it's because, to a woman, her house is so much more than that it is kingdom, responsibility, comfort, total world to her . . . to most of us, anyway, whether or not we are aware of it. It is an extension of ourselves; it tolls in answer to one of the most basic chords mankind will ever hear. My shelter. My earth. My second skin. Mine. So basic is it that the desecration of it, the corruption, as it were, by something alien takes on a peculiar and bonedeep horror and disgust. It is both frightening and . . . violating, like a sly, terrible burglar. A house askew is one of the notrightest things in the world, and is terrible out of all proportion to its actual visitant .... "I came to write of a new house that was . . . let's say malignant . . . for the very simple reason that I wanted to see if I could write a good ghost story . . . . I was tired and rather simpleminded from a twoyear stint of heavy, serious, 'writery' writing, yet I wanted to be at work, and thought the ghost story would be fun . . . and as I was casting about in my mind for a good hook, or handle, a young architect bought the lovely, wooded lot next to our house and began to build a contemporary house on it. My writing room, upstairs under the eaves of our old house, looks right into the lot next door, and I would sit and stare dreamily out my window and watch the wild woods and hills go down and the house go up, and one day the inevitable 'What if' that starts all writers writing bloomed in my mind, and we were off. 'What if,' I thought, 'instead of an ancient haunted priory on the coast of Cornwall or a preRevolutionary farmhouse in Bucks County with a visitant or two, or even the ruins of an antebellum plantation house with a hoopskirted spectre wailing around the desecrated chimney for her lost world, you had a brandnew contemporary going up in an affluent suburb of a large city? You'd expect the priory and the farmhouse and the plantation to be haunted. But the contemporary? Wouldn't that give it an even meaner, nastier, little fillip? Serve to emphasize by contrast and horror? I thought it would . . . . "I'm still not sure how I arrived at the idea that the house would use its sheer loveliness to attract people, and then begin to turn their own deepest weaknesses, their soft spots, against them. It seemed to me that in this day of pragmatists and materialists, a conventional spectre would be almost laughable; in the suburb that I envisioned, the people do not believe in that sort of thing; it is almost improper. A traditional ghoulie would be laughed out of the neighborhood. So what would get to my quasisophisticated suburbanite? What would break relationships and crumble defenses and penetrate suburban armors? It would have to be different in each case. Each person has his own builtin horror button. Let's have a house that can isolate and push it, and then you've really got a case of the suburban willies. "The plot of the book emerged in one typewriter sitting almost whole and in infinite detail, as though it had been there all along just waiting o be uncovered . . . . The House Next Door was plotted and whole in a day. From there it looked to be great fun, and I set off on it with a light heart, because I thought it would be an easy book to write. And in a sense, it was these are my people. I am of this world. I know them from the skin out. They were of course, caricatures in most cases; most of the people I know are, thankfully, far more eccentric and not so determinedly suburban as this set of folks. But I needed them to be the way they were to make a point. And I found the limning of them went like greased lightning. "Because the whole point of this book, of course, is not so much the house and its peculiar, terrible power, but what effect it has on the neighborhood, and on the relationships between neighbors and friends, and between families, when they are forced to confront and believe the unbelievable. This has always been the power of the supernatural to me . . . that it blasts and breaks relationships between people and other people and between people and their world and, in a way, between people and the very essences of themselves. And the blasting and breaking leaves them defenseless and alone, howling in terror before the thing that they have been forced to believe. For belief is everything; belief is all. Without belief, there is no terror. And I think it is even more terrible when a modern man or woman, girded round with privilege and education and all the trappings of the socalled good life and all the freight of the clever, pragmatic, visionhungry modern mind, is forced to confront utter, alien, and elemental evil and terror. What does he know of this, what has it to do with him? What has the unspeakable and the unbelievable got to do with second homes and tax shelters and private schools for the kids and a pt in every terrine and a BMW in every garage? Primitive man might howl before his returning dead and point; his neighbor would see, and howl along with him . . . . The resident of Fox Run Chase who meets a ghoulie out by the hot tub is going to be frozen dead in his or her Nikes on the tennis courts the next day if he or she persists in gabbling about it. And there he is, alone with the horror and ostracized on all sides. It's a double turn of the screw, and I thought it would make a good story. "I still think it did . . . I think it holds up well . . . . But it is only now that I am able to read the book with any equanimity. About a third of the way through it, the writing ceased to be fun and became something as oppressive to me as it was obsessive; I realized I was into something vast and terrible and not at all funny; I was hurting and destroying people or allowing them to be hurt and destroyed, which amounts to the same thing. There is in me . . . some leftover streak of Puritan ethic, or squintyeyed Calvinistic morality, that insists that THINGS MUST HAVE A POINT. I dislike anything gratuitous. Evil must not be allowed to get away unpunished, even though I know that it does, every day. Ultimately . . . there must be a day of reckoning for the Bad Thing, and I still have no idea if this is a strength or weakness . . . . It certainly does not lend itself to subtleties, but I do not see myself as a 'clever' writer. And so The House Next Door became very serious business indeed to me; I knew that Colquitt and Walter Kennedy, whom I really liked very much indeed, would be destroyed by the house they in turn destroyed at the end of the book, but to me there was very real gallantry in the fact that they knew this themselves, and went ahead anyway . . . I was glad they did not run away . . . I would hope that, faced with something as overwhelmingly vast and terrible and left with so few options, I would have the grace and courage to do as they did. I speak of them as though they were outside my control because I feel as if they are, and most of the way through the book I felt this . . . . There is an inevitability about the outcome . . . that, to me, was inherent even on the first page of the book. It happened this way because this is the way it would have happened in this time and this place to these people. That is a satisfying feeling to me, and it is not one that I have had about all my books. And so in that sense, I feel that it succeeds . . . . "On its simplest level, I think it works well as a piece of horror fiction that depends on the juxtaposition of the unimaginably terrible with the utterly ordinary . . . the wonderful Henry James terror in sunlight' syndrome. Rosemary's Baby is the absolute master of this particular device, and it was that quality, in part, that I strove for. I also feel good about the fact that, to me, all the characters are still extremely sympathetic people, even this long after writing and after this many rereadings. I cared very much what happened to them as I unveiled them on the pages, and I still care about them. "Maybe it succeeds, too, in being an utterly contemporary horror tale. Maybe this is the wave of the future. It isn't the thing that goes bump in your house in the night that is going to do you in in this brave new world; it's your house itself. In a world where the very furniture of your life, the basic bones of your existence, turn terrible and strange, perhaps the only thing we're going to have to fall back on is whatever innate decency we can find deep within ourselves. In a way, I do not think this is a bad thing." A phrase that stands out in Siddon's analysis of her own workat least it stands out to meis this one ". . . to me there was very real gallantry," she says, "in the fact that they knew this themselves, and went ahead anyway . . ." We might think of this as a uniquely Southern sentiment, and as ladylike as she is, Anne Rivers Siddons is squarely in a Southern tradition of gothic writers. She tells us she has jettisoned the ruins of the antebellum plantation, and so she has, but in a wider sense, The House Next Door is very much the same spooky, tumbledown plantation home where writers as seemingly disparate but as essentially similar as William Faulkner, Harry Crews, and Flannery O'Connorprobably the greatest American shortstory writer of the postwar erahave lived before her. It is a home where even such a really gruesomely bad writer as William Bradford Huie has rented space from time to time. If the Southern experience were to be viewed as untilled soil, then we would have to say that almost any writer, no matter how good or bad, who deeply feels that Southern experience could plant a seed and have it growas an example I recommend Thomas Cullinan's novel The Beguiled (made into a good Clint Eastwood film, directed by Don Siegel). Here is a novel which is "written pretty good," as a friend of mine likes to put itmeaning, of course, nuthin' special. No Saul Bellow, no Bernard Malamud, but at least not down there in steerage with people like Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon, who apparently wouldn't know the difference between a balanced line of prose and a shitandanchovy pizza. If Cullinan had elected to write a more conventional novel, it would stick out in no one's mind. Instead, he came up with this mad gothic tale about a Union soldier who loses his legs and then his life to the deadly angels of mercy who dwell in a ruined girls' school that has been left behind in Sherman's march to the sea. This is Cullinan's little acre of that patch of untilled soil, soil which has always been amazingly rich. One is tempted to believe that outside of the South, such an idea wouldn't raise much more than ragweed. But in this soil, it grows a vine of potent, crazed beautythe reader is mesmerized with horror by what goes on in that forgotten school for young ladies. On the other hand, William Faulkner did more than drop a few seeds; he planted the whole damn garden . . . and everything he turned his hand to after 1930, when he really discovered the gothic form for fair, seemed to come up. The essence of the Southern gothic in Faulkner's work comes, for me, in Sanctuary, when Popeye stands on the scaffold, about to be hung. He has combed his hair neatly for the occasion, but now, with the rope around his neck and his hands tied behind his back, his hair has fallen lankly across his forehead. He begins to jerk his head, trying to flip his hair back into place. "I'll fix that for you," the executioner tells him, and pulls the trigger on the scaffold's trapdoor. Exit Popeye, with hair in his face. I believe with all my heart that no one brought up north of the MasonDixon Line could have thought of that scene, or written it right if he or she had done. Ditto the long, lurid, and excruciating scene in the doctor's waiting room which opens Flannery O'Connor's novella "Revelation." There are no doctor's waiting rooms like that outside the Southern imagination; holy Jesus, what a crew. My point is that there is something frighteningly lush and fertile in the Southern imagination, and this seems particularly so when it turns into the gothic channel. The case of the Harralsons, the first family to inhabit the Bad Place in Siddons's novel shows quite clearly how the author has put her own Southern gothic imagination to work. Pie Harralson, the girlwifeChiOmegaJuniorLeaguer, wields an unhealthy sort of attraction over her father, a beefy, choleric man from the "wire grass south." Pie seems quite aware that her husband, Buddy, makes a triangle with her at the apex and daddy at one of the lower corners. She plays the two of them off one another. The house itself is only another pawn in the lovehatelove affairs she seems to be having with her father ("That weird thing she has with him," one character says dismissively). Near the end of her first conversation with Colquitt and Walter, Pie says gleefully "Oh, Daddy's just going to hate this house! Oh, he's going to be fit to be tied!" Buddy, meanwhile, has been taken under the wing of Lucas Abbott, a new arrival at the law office where Buddy works. Abbott is a Northerner, and we hear passingly that Abbott left New York as the result of a scandal ". . . something about a law clerk." The house next door, which turns people's own deepest weaknesses against them, as Siddons says, fuses these elements neatly and horribly. Near the end of the housewarming party, Pie begins to scream. The guests rush to see what has happened to her. They find Buddy Harralson and Lucas Abbott embracing, naked, in the bedroom where the coats have been left. Pie's Daddy has found them first, and he is in the process of expiring of a stroke on the floor while his Punkin Pie screams on . . . and on . . . and on. Now if that isn't Southern gothic, what is? The essence of the horror in this scene (which for some reason reminds me strongly of that heartstopping moment in Rebecca where the nameless narrator stops the party cold by floating down the stairs in the costume also worn by Maxim's dreadful first wife) lies in the fact that social codes have not merely been breached; they have been exploded in our shocked faces. Siddons pulls this particular dynamite blast off perfectly. It is a case of everything going just about as totally wrong as things can go; lives and careers are ruined irrevocably in a passage of seconds. We need not analyze the psyche of the horror writer; nothing is so boring or so annoying as people who ask things like. "Why are you so weird?" or "Was your mother scared by a twoheaded dog while you were in utero?' Nor am I going to do that here, but I'll point out that much of the walloping effect of The House Next Door comes from its author's nice grasp of social boundaries. Any writer of the horror tale has a clearperhaps even a morbidly overdevelopedconception of where the country of the socially (or morally, or psychologically) acceptable ends and that great white space of Taboo begins. Siddons is better at marking the edges of the socially acceptable from the socially nightmarish than most (although Daphne Du Maurier comes to mind again), and I'll bet that she was taught young that you don't eat with your elbows on the table . . . or make abnormal love in the coatroom. She returns to the breach of social codes again and again (as she does in an earlier, nonsupernatural novel about the south, Heartbreak Hotel), and on its most rational, symbolic level, The House Next Door can be read as a funnyhorrible sociological treatise on the mores and folkways of the Modestly Suburban Rich. But beneath this, the heart of the Southern gothic beats strongly. Colquitt tells us she could not bear to tell her closest friend what she saw on the day when Anita Sheehan finally and irrevocably lost her mind, but she is able to tell us in vivid, shocking detail. Horrified or not, Colquitt saw it all. She herself makes a "New SouthOld South" comparisons near the beginning of the novel, and the novel taken as a whole is another. On the surface we see "the obligatory tobaccobrown Mercedeses," vacations at Ocho Rios, Bloody Marys sprinkled thickly with fresh dill at Rinaldi's. But the stuff underneath, the stuff which makes the heart of this novel pulse with such a tremendous crude strength, is the Old Souththe Southern gothic stuff. Underneath, The House Next Door is not situated in a tony Atlanta suburb at all; it is located in that grimly grotty country of the heart that Flannery O'Connor mapped so well. Scratch Colquitt Kennedy deeply enough and we find O'Connor's Mrs. Turpin, standing in her pigpen and waiting for a revelation. If the book has a serious problem, it lies in our perception of Walter, Colquitt, and the third major character, Virginia Guthrie. Our feelings about these characters are not particularly sympathetic, and while it is not a rule that they should be, the reader may find it hard to understand why Siddons likes them, as she says she does. Through most of the book, Colquitt herself is particularly unappetizing vain, classconscious, moneyconscious, sexually priggish, and vaguely exhibitionistic at the same time. "We like our lives and our possessions to run smoothly," she tells the reader with a maddening complacency early on. "Chaos, violence, disorder, mindlessness all upset us. They do not frighten us, precisely, because we are aware of them. We watch the news, we are active in our own brand of rather liberal politics. We know we have built a shell for ourselves, but we have worked hard for the means to do it; we have chosen it. Surely we have the right to do that." In all fairness, part of this is meant to set us up for the changes that Colquitt and Walter undergo as a result of the supernatural didoes next doorthat damned house is doing what Bob Dylan called bringing it all back home. Siddons undoubtedly means to tell us that the Kennedys eventually arrive at a new plateau of social consciousness; after the episode with the Sheehans, Colquitt tells her husband "You know, Walter, we've never stuck our necks out. We've never put ourselves or anything we really value on the line. We've taken the best life has to give . . . and we really haven't given anything back." If this is so, then Siddons succeeds. The Kennedys pay with their lives. The novel's problem may be that the reader is apt to feel that the dues paid were fair ones. Siddons's own view on just what the Kennedys' rising social consciousness means is also muddier than I would like. If it is a victory, it seems to be of the Pyrrhic variety; their world has been destroyed by their conviction that they must warn the world against the house next door, but their conviction seems to have given them remarkably little inner peace in returnand the book's kicker seems to indicate that their victory has a decidedly hollow ring. Colquitt does not just put on her sunhat when she goes out to do the garden; she puts on her Mexican sunhat. She is justly proud of her job, but the reader may feel a bit more uneasy about her serene confidence in her own looks "I have what I want and do not need the adulation of very young men, even though, I modestly admit, there have been some around my agency who have offered it." We know that she looks good in tight jeans; Colquitt herself helpfully points this out. We have the feeling that if the book had been written a year or two later, Colquitt would be pointing out that she looks good in her Calvin Klein jeans. The point of all this is that she's not a character most people will be able to hope for easily, and whether or not her personal tics help or hinder in the book's steady, downturning funnel toward disaster is something that the reader will have to decide for herself or himself. Equally problematic is the book's dialogue. At one point Colquitt hugs the newly arrived Anita Sheehan and tells her, "Welcome to the neighborhood once again, Anita Sheehan. Because you're a whole new lady and one I like immensely, and I hope you're going to be very, very happy here." I don't quibble with the sentiment; I just wonder if people, even in the South, really talk like this. Let's say this the major problem with The House Next Door is the muddiness of character development. A lesser problem is one of actual executiona problem that crops up mostly in the dialogue, as the narration is adequate and the imagery often oddly beautiful. But as a gothic, the book succeeds admirably. Now let me suggest that, in addition to being a Southern gothic novel, Anne Rivers Siddons's The House Next Door, whatever its shortcomings in terms of characterization or execution, succeeds on far more important ground; it is a prime example of what Irving Malin calls "the new American gothic"so is Straub's Ghost Story, for that matter, although Straub seems much more clearly aware of the species of fish he has netted (the clearest indication of this is his use of the Narcissus myth and the spooky use of the lethal mirror). John G. Park employed Malin's idea of the new American gothic in an article for Critique Studies in Modern Fiction. Park's article is on Shirley Jackson's novel The Sundial, but what he says about that book is equally applicable to a whole slew of American ghost and horror stories, including several of my own. Here is Malin's "list of ingredients" for the modern gothic, as explained by Park in his article. First, a microcosm serves as the arena where universal forces collide. In the case of the Siddons book, the house next door serves as this microcosm. Second, the gothic house functions as an image of authoritarianism, of imprisonment, or of "confining narcissism." By narcissism, Park and Malin seem to mean a growing obsession with one's own problems; a turning inward instead of a growing outward. The new American gothic provides a closed loop of character, and in what might be termed a psychological pathetic fallacy, the physical surroundings often mimic the inwardturning of the characters themselvesas they do in The Sundial. This is an exciting, even fundamental change in the intent of the gothic. Once upon a time the Bad Place was seen by critics as symbolic of the womba primarily sexual symbol which perhaps allowed the gothic to become a safe way of talking about sexual fears. Park and Malin are suggesting that the new American gothic, created primarily in the twenty or so years since Shirley Jackson published The Haunting of Hill House, uses the Bad Place to symbolize sexual interests and fear of sex but interest in the self and fear of the self . . . and if anyone should ever ask you why there has been such a bulge in the popularity of horror fiction and horror films over the last five years or so, you might point out to your questioner that the rise of the horror film in the seventies and early eighties and the rise of such things as Rolfing, primal screaming, and hottubbing run pretty much in tandem, and that most of the really popular examples of the horror genre, from The Exorcist to Cronenberg's They Came from Within, are fine examples of the new The article is "Waiting for the End Shirley Jackson's The Sundial," by John G. Park, Critique, Vol. XIX, No. 3, 1978. Or in The Shining, which was written with The Sundial very much in mind. In The Shining, the characters are snowbound and isolated in an old hotel miles from any help. Their world has shrunk and turned inward; the Overlook Hotel becomes the microcosm where universal forces collide, and the inner weather mimics the outer weather. Critics of Stanley Kubrick's film version would do well to remember that it was these elements, consciously or unconsciously, which Kubrick chose to accentuate. American gothic, where we have, instead of a symbolic womb, a symbolic mirror. This may sound like a lot of academic bullshit, but it's really not. The purpose of horror fiction is not only to explore taboo lands but to confirm our own good feelings about the status quo by showing us extravagant visions of what the alternative might be. Like the scariest bad dreams, the good creepshow often does its work by turning the status quo inside outwhat scares us the most about Mr. Hyde, perhaps, is the fact that he was a part of Dr. Jekyll all along. And in an American society that has become more and more entranced by the cult of meism, it should not be surprising that the horror genre has turned more and more to trying to show us a reflection we won't likeour own. While looking at The House Next Door, we find we can lay the Tarot card of the Ghost asidethere are no ghosts per se in the house which is owned by the Harralsons, the Sheehans, and the Greenes. The card which seems to fit better here is the card that always seems to come up when we deal with narcissism the card of the Werewolf. More traditional werewolf stories almost alwaysknowingly or unknowinglymimic the classic story of Narcissus; in the Lon Chaney, Jr., version, we observe Chaney observing himself in the EverPopular Pool of Water as he undergoes the transformation back from monster to Larry Talbot. We see the exact same scene occur in the original TV film of The Incredible Hulk as the Hulk returns to his David Banner form. In Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf, the scene is repeated yet again, only this time it's Oliver Reed who's watching himself undergo the change. The real problem with the house next door, we see, is that it changes people into the very things they most abhor. The real secret of the house next door is that it is a dressingroom for werewolves. "Nearly all the characters of the new American gothic are narcissistic," Park sums up, "in one form or another, weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality." This sums up Colquitt Kennedy, I think; and it also sums up Eleanor, the protagonist of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House; and Eleanor Vance is surely the finest character to come out of this new American gothic tradition. "The inspiration to write a ghost story," Lenemaja Friedman writes in her study of Jackson's work, "came to Miss Jackson . . . as she was reading a book about a group of nineteenthcentury psychic researchers who rented a haunted house in order to study it and record their impressions of what they had seen and heard for the purpose of presenting a treatise to the Society for Psychic Research. As she recalls 'They thought they were being terribly scientific and proving all kinds of things, and yet the story that kept coming through their dry reports was not at all the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and backgrounds.' The story so excited her that she could hardly wait to create her own haunted house and her own people to study it. "Shortly thereafter, she states, on a trip to New York, she saw at the 125th Street station, a grotesque houseone so evillooking, one that made such a somber impression, that she had nightmares about it long afterward. In response to her curiosity, a New York friend investigated and found that the house, intact from the front, was merely a shell since a fire had gutted the structure . . . . In the meantime, she was searching newspapers, magazines, and books for pictures of suitably hauntedlooking houses; and at last she discovered a magazine picture of a house that seemed just right. It looked very much like the hideous building she had seen in New York . . . it had the same air of disease and decay, and if ever a house looked like a candidate for a ghost, it was this one.' The picture identified the house as being in a California town; consequently, hoping her mother in California might be able to acquire some information about the house, she wrote asking for help. As it happened, her mother was not only familiar with the house but provided the startling information that Miss Jackson's greatgrandfather had built it." Hehhehheh, as the Old Witch used to say. On its simplest level, Hill House follows the plan of those Psychic Society investigators of whom Miss Jackson had read it is a tale of four ghostbusters who gather in a house of ill repute. It recounts their adventures there, and culminates with a scary, mystifying climax. The ghostbustersEleanor, Theo, and Lukehave come together under the auspices of one Dr. Montague, an anthropologist whose hobby is investigating psychic phenomena. Luke, a young wiseguy type of fellow (memorably played by Russ Tamblyn in Robert Wise's sensitive film version of the book), is there as a representative of the owner, his aunt; he regards the whole thing as a lark . . . at least at first. Eleanor and Theo have been invited for different reasons. Montague has combed the back files of several psychic societies, and has sent invitations to a fairly large number of people who have been involved with From Shirley Jackson, by Lenemaja Friedman (Boston Twayne Publishers, 1975), p. 121. Ms. Friedman quotes directly from Shirley Jackson's account of how the book came to be; Miss Jackson's account was published in an article entitled "Experience and Fiction." "abnormal" events in the pastthe invitations, of course, suggest that these "special" people might enjoy summering with Montague at Hill House. |
Eleanor and Theo are the only two to respond, each for her own reasons. Theo, who has demonstrated a fairly convincing ability with the Rhine cards, is on the outs with her current lover (in the film, Theoplayed by Claire Bloomis presented as a lesbian with a letch for Eleanor; in Jackson's novel there is the barest whiff that Theo's sexual preferences may not be 100 percent AC). But it is Eleanor, on whose house stones fell when she was a little girl, that the novel is vitally concerned with, and it is the character of Eleanor and Shirley Jackson's depiction of it that elevates The Haunting of Hill House into the ranks of the great supernatural novelsindeed, it seems to me that it and James's The Turn of the Screw are the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years (although we might add two long novellas Machen's "The Great God Pan" and Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness"). "Nearly all the characters of the new American gothic are narcissistic. . . weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality." Try this shoe on Eleanor, and we find it fits perfectly. She is obsessively concerned with herself, and in Hill House she finds a huge and monstrous mirror reflecting back her own distorted face. She is a woman who has been profoundly stunted by her upbringing and her family life. When we are inside her mind (which is almost constantly, with the exception of the first chapter and the last), we may find ourselves thinking of that old Oriental custom of foot bindingonly it is not Eleanor's feet that have been bound; it is that part of her mind where the ability to live any sort of independent life must begin. "It is true that Eleanor's characterization is one of the finest in Miss Jackson's works," Lenemaja Friedman writes. "It is second only to that of Merricat in the later novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There are many facets to Eleanor's personality she can be gay, charming, and witty when she feels wanted; she is generous and willing to give of herself. At the same time, she resents Theo's selfishness and is ready to accuse Theo of trickery when they discover the sign on the wall. For many years, Eleanor has been filled with frustration and hate she has come to hate her mother and then finally her sister and brotherinlaw for taking advantage of her more submissive and passive nature. She struggles to overcome the guilt she feels for the death of her mother. "Although one comes to know her quite well, she remains mysterious. The mystery is a product of Eleanor's uncertainty and her mental and emotional changes, which are difficult to fathom. She is insecure and, therefore, unstable in her relationships with others and her relationship to the house. She feels the irresistible force of the spirits and longs, finally, to submit to them. When she does decide not to leave Hill House, one must assume she is slipping into madness." Hill House, then, is the microcosm where universal forces collide, and in his piece on The Sundial (published in 1958, a year before The Haunting of Hill House), John G. Park goes on to speak of "the voyage . . . the attempt to flee . . . an attempt to escape . . . cloying authoritarianism . . . This is, in fact, the place where Eleanor's own voyage begins, and also the motive for that voyage. She is shy, withdrawn, and submissive. The mother has died, and Eleanor has judged and found herself guilty of negligenceperhaps even murder. She has remained firmly under the thumb of her married sister following her mother's death, and early on Friedman, Shirley Jackson, p. 133. there's a bitter argument over whether Eleanor will be allowed to go to Hill House at all. And Eleanor, who is thirtytwo, habitually claims to be two years older. She does manage to get out, practically stealing the car which she has helped to purchase. The jailbreak is on, Eleanor's attempt to escape what Park calls "cloying authoritarianism." The journey will lead her to Hill House, and as Eleanor herself thinkswith a growing, feverish intensity as the story progresses"journeys end in lovers meeting." Her narcissism is perhaps most strikingly established by a fantasy she indulges in while still on the way to Hill House. She stops the car, full of "disbelief and wonder" at the sight of a gate flanked by ruined stone pillars in the middle of a long line of oleanders. Eleanor recalls that oleanders are poisonous . . . and then Will I, she thought, will I get out of my car and go between the ruined gates and then, once I am in the magic oleander square, find that I have wandered into a fairyland, protected poisonously from the eyes of people passing? Once I have stepped between the magic gateposts, will I find myself through the protective barrier, the spell broken? I will go into a sweet garden, with fountains and low benches and roses trained over arbors, and find one pathjeweled, perhaps, with rubies and emeralds, soft enough for a king's daughter to walk upon with her little sandaled feetand it will lead me directly to the palace which lies under a spell. I will walk up low stone steps past stone lions guarding and into a courtyard where a fountain plays and the queen waits, weeping, for the princess to return . . . And we shall live happily ever after. The depth of this sudden fantasy is meant to startle us, and it does. It suggests a personality to which fantasizing has become a way of life . . . and what happens to Eleanor at Hill House comes uncomfortably close to fulfilling this strange fantasydream. Perhaps even the happilyeverafter part, although I suspect Shirley Jackson would doubt that. More than anything, the passage indicates the unsettling, perhaps mad depths of Eleanor's narcissismweird home movies play constantly inside her head, movies of which she is the star and the sole moving forcemovies which are the exact opposite of her real life, in fact. Her imagination is restless, fertile . . . and perhaps dangerous. Later, the stone lions she has imagined in the passage quoted turn up as ornamental bookends in the totally fictional apartment she has imagined for Theo's benefit. In Eleanor's life, that turninginward which Park and Malin associate with the new American gothic is a constant thing. Shortly after the enchanted castle fantasy, Eleanor stops for lunch and overhears a mother explaining to a waitress why her little girl will not drink her milk. "She wants her cup of stars," the mother says. "It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk." Eleanor immediately turns this into herself "Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course." Like Narcissus himself, she is quite unable to deal with the outside world in any other way than as a reflection of her inner world. The weather in both places is always the same. But leave Eleanor for the time being, making her way toward Hill House "which always waits at the end of the day." We'll beat her there, if that's okay with you. I said that The House Next Door forms a provenance in its entirety; the provenance of Hill House is established in classic ghoststory fashion by Dr. Montague in just eleven pages. The story is told (of course!) by the fire with drinks in hand. The salient points Hill House was built by an unreconstructed Puritan named Hugh Crain. His young wife died moments before she would have seen Hill House for the first time. His second wife died of a fallcause unknown. His two little girls remained in Hill House until the death of Crain's third wife (nothing therethat wife died in Europe), and were then sent to a cousin. They spent the rest of their lives quarreling over ownership of the mansion. Later, the older sister returns to Hill House with a companion, a young girl from the village. The companion becomes particularly important because it is in her that Hill House seems most specifically to mirror Eleanor's own life. Eleanor too was a companion, during her mother's long terminal illness. Following the death of old Miss Crain, there are stories of neglect; "of a doctor called too late," Montague says, "of the old lady lying neglected upstairs while the younger woman dallied in the garden with some village lout . . ." More bitter feeling followed the death of the old Miss Crain. There was a court case over ownership between the companion and the young Miss Crain. The companion finally wins . . . and shortly after commits suicide by hanging herself in the turret. Later tenants have been . . . well, uncomfortable in Hill House. We have hints that some have been more than uncomfortable; that some of them may actually have fled from Hill House, screaming in terror. "Essentially," Montague says, "the evil is in the house itself, I think. It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, and it is a place of contained ill will." And the central question that The Haunting of Hill House poses for the reader is whether or not Montague is right. He prefaces his story with several classical references to what we've been calling the Bad Placethe Hebraic for haunted, as in haunted house, tsaraas, meaning "leprous"; Homer's phrase for it, aidao domos, meaning a house of Hades. "I need not remind you," Montague says, ". . . that the concept of certain houses as unclean or forbiddenperhaps sacredis as old as the mind of man." As in The House Next Door, the one thing we can be sure of is that there are no actual ghosts in Hill House. None of the four characters come upon the shade of the companion flapping up the hall with a rope burn around her ectoplasmic neck. This is well enough, howeverMontague himself says that in all the records of psychic phenomena, one cannot find any case where a ghost actually hurt a person. What they do if they are malign, he suggests, is work on the mind. One thing we do know about Hill House is that it is all wrong. It is no one thing we can put our finger on; it's everything. Stepping into Hill House is like stepping into the mind of a madman; it isn't long before you weird out yourself. No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair . . . . The face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. And even more chilling, more to the point Eleanor shook herself, turning to see the room complete. It had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest tolerable length; this is where they want me to sleep, Eleanor thought incredulously; what nightmares are waiting, shadowed, in those high cornerswhat breath of mindless fear will drift across my mouth . . . and shook herself again. Really, she told herself, really, Eleanor. We see a horror story developing here that Lovecraft would have embraced enthusiastically, had he lived long enough to read it. It might even have taught the Old Providence Spook a thing or two. H.P.L. was struck by the horror of wrong geometry; he wrote frequently of nonEuclidian angles that tortured the eye and hurt the mind, and suggested other dimensions where the sum of a triangle's three corners might equal more or less than 180. Contemplating such things, he suggested, might be enough in itself to drive a man crazy. Nor was he far wrong; we know from various psychological experiments that when you tamper with a man or woman's perspective on their physical world, you tamper with what may actually be the fulcrum of the human mind. Other writers have dealt with this fascinating idea of perspective gone haywire; my own favorite is Joseph Payne Brennan's short story "Canavan's Back Yard," where an antiquarian bookdealer discovers that his weedy, ordinary back yard is much longer than it seemsit runs, in fact, all the way to the portholes of hell. In Charles L. Grant's The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, one of the main characters discovers he can no longer find the borders of the town where he has lived all his life. We see him crawling along the verge of the highway, looking for the way back in. Unsettling stuff. But Jackson handled the concept better than anyone, I thinkcertainly better than Lovecraft, who understood it but apparently couldn't show it. Theo enters the bedroom she will share with Eleanor looking incredulously at a stainedglass window, a decorative urn, the pattern in the carpet. There is nothing wrong with these things taken one by one; it is just that when we add up the perceptual equivalent of their angles, we come out with a triangle where the sum of the corners equals a bit more (or a bit less) than 180. As Anne Rivers Siddons points out, everything in Hill House is skewed. There is nothing which is perfectly straight or perfectly levelwhich may be why doors keep swinging open or shut. And this idea of skew is important to Jackson's concept of the Bad Place because it heightens those feelings of altered perception. Being in Hill House is like tripping on a lowwatt dosage of LSD, where everything seems strange and you feel you will begin to hallucinate at any time. But you never quite do. You just look incredulously at a stainedglass window . . . or a decorative urn . . . or the pattern on the carpet. Being in Hill House is like looking into one of those trick rooms where folks look big at one end and small at the other. Being in Hill House is like lying in bed in the dark on the night you went three drinks beyond your capacity . . . and feeling the bed begin to spin slowly around and around . . . . Jackson suggests (always in her low, insinuating voicethis, along with The Turn of the Screw, may very well be where Peter Straub got the idea that the horror story works best when it is "ambiguous and lowkey and restrained") these things quietly and rationally; she is never strident. It is just, she says, that being in Hill House does something fundamental and unpleasant to the screen of perception. This is what, she suggests, being in telepathic contact with a lunatic would be like. Hill House is evil; we'll accept Montague's postulate. But how responsible is Hill House for the phenomena which follow? There are knockings in the nighthuge thunderings, rather, which terrify both Theo and Eleanor. Luke and Professor Montague attempt to track down a barking dog and get lost within a stone's throw of the houseshades of Canavan the bookdealer (Brennan's story predates The Haunting of Hill House) and Charles Grant's strange little town of Oxrun, Connecticut. Theo's clothes are splattered with some foul red substance ("red paint," Eleanor says . . . but her terror suggests a more sinister substance) that later disappears. And written in the same red substance, first in the hall and then over the wardrobe where the ruined clothes have been hung are these words COME HOME, ELEANOR . . . HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR. Here, in this writing, is where the lives of Eleanor and of this evil house, this Bad Place, become inextricably entwined. The house has singled her out. The house has chosen her . . . or is it the other way around? Either way, Eleanor's idea that "journeys end in lovers meeting" becomes ever more ominous. Theo, who has some telepathic ability, begins to suspect more and more that Eleanor herself is responsible for most of the manifestations. A kind of lowkey tension has built up between the two women, ostensibly over Luke, with whom Eleanor has begun to fall in love, but it probably springs more deeply from Theo's intuition that not everything which is happening in Hill House is of Hill House. We know there has been an incident of telekinesis in Eleanor's past; at the age of twelve, stones fell from the ceilings "and pattered madly on the roof." She denieshysterically deniesthat she had anything at all to do with the incident of the stones, focusing instead on the embarrassment it caused her, the unwanted (she says it was unwanted, anyway) attention that it brought upon her. Her denials have an odd effect upon the reader, one of increasing weight in light of the fact that most of the afferent phenomena which the four of them experience in Hill House could be ascribed either to poltergeists or to telekinetic phenomena. "They never even told me what was going on," Eleanor says urgently even after the conversation has moved on from the episode of the stonesno one is even really listening to her, but in the closed circle of her own narcissistic world, it seems to her that this strange, longago phenomenon must be all they can think of (as it is all she can think ofthe outer weather must reflect the inner weather). "My mother said it was the neighbors, they were always against us because she wouldn't mix with them. My mother" Luke interrupts her to say, "I think all we want here is the facts." But for Eleanor, the facts of her own life are all she can cope with. How responsible is Eleanor for the tragedy which ensues? Let's look again at the peculiar words the ghostbusters find written in the hall HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR. The Haunting of Hill House; submerged as' it is in the twin ambiguities of Eleanor's personality and those of Hill House itself, becomes a novel that can be read in many different ways, a novel which suggests almost endless paths and a wide range of conclusions. HELP ELEANOR, for instance. If Eleanor herself is responsible for the writing, is she asking for help? If the house is responsible, is it asking her for help? Is Eleanor creating the ghost of her own mother? Is it mother who is calling for help? Or has Hill House probed Eleanor's mind and written something which will play on her gnawing sense of guilt? That longago companion whom Eleanor so resembles hung herself after the house became hers, and guilt may well have been her motive. Is the house trying to do the same to Eleanor? In The House Next Door, this is exactly how the contemporary Kim Dougherty has built works on the minds of its tenantsprobing for the weak points and preying on them. Hill House may be doing this alone . . . it may be doing it with Eleanor's help . . . or Eleanor may be doing it alone. The book is subtle, and the reader is left in large part to work these questions out to his or her own satisfaction. What about the rest of the phraseCOME HOME ELEANOR? Again we may hear the voice of Eleanor's dead mother in this imperative, or the voice of her own central self, crying out against this new independence, this attempt to escape Park's "cloying authoritarianism" and into an exhilarating but existentially scary state of personal freedom. I see this as the most logical possibility. As Merricat tells us in Jackson's final novel that "we have always lived in the castle," so Eleanor Vance has always lived in her own closed and suffocating world. It is not Hill House which frightens her, we feel; Hill House is another closed and suffocating world, walled in, cupped by hills, secure behind locked gates when the dark of night has fallen. The real threat she seems to feel comes from Montague, even more from Luke, and most of all from Theo. "You've got foolishness and wickedness all mixed up," Theo tells Eleanor after Eleanor has voiced her unease at painting her toenails red like Theo's. She simply tosses the line off, but such an idea strikes very close to the basis of Eleanor's most closely held life concepts. These people pose to Eleanor the possibility of another way of life, one which is largely antiauthoritarian and antinarcissistic. Eleanor is attracted and yet repelled by the prospectthis is a woman who, at thirty two, feels daring when buying two pairs of slacks, after all. And it is not very daring of me to suggest that COME HOME ELEANOR is an imperative Eleanor has delivered to herself; that she is Narcissus unable to leave the pool. There is a third implication here, however, one which I find almost too horrifying to contemplate, and it is central to my own belief that this is one of the finest books ever to come out of the genre. Quite simply stated, COME HOME ELEANOR may be Hill House's invitation for Eleanor to join it. Journeys end in lovers meeting is Eleanor's phrase for it, and as her end approaches, this old children's rime occurs to her Go in and out the windows, Go in and out the windows, Go in and out the windows, As we have done before. Go forth and face your lover, Go forth and face your lover, Go forth and face your lover, As we have done before. Either wayHill House or Eleanor as the central cause of the hauntingthe ideas Park and Malin set forth hold up. Either Eleanor has succeeded, through her telekinetic ability, in turning Hill House into a giant mirror reflecting her own subconscious, or Hill House is a chameleon, able to convince her that she had finally found her place, her own cup of stars caught in these brooding hills. I believe that Shirley Jackson would like us to come away from her novel with the ultimate belief that it was Hill House all along. That first paragraph suggests "outside evil" very stronglya primitive force like that which inhabits Anne River Siddons's house next door, a force which is divorced from humankind. In Eleanor's end we may feel that there are three layers of "truth" here Eleanor's belief that the house is haunted; Eleanor's belief that the house is her place, that it has just been waiting for someone like her; Eleanor's final realization that she has been used by a monstrous organismthat she has, in fact, been manipulated on the subconscious level into believing that she has been pulling the strings. But it has all been done with mirrors, as the magicians say, and poor Eleanor is murdered by the ultimate falsehood of her own reflection in the brick and stone and glass of Hill House I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel to send the car directly at the great tree at the curve of the driveway. I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last this is me. I am really really really doing it by myself. In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree, she thought clearly, Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me? "I am doing this all by myself now, at last this is me," Eleanor thinksbut of course it is impossible for her to believe otherwise in the context of the new American gothic. Her last thought before her death is not of Hill House, but of herself. The novel ends with a reprise of the first paragraph, closing the loop and completing the circuit . . . and leaving us with an unpleasant surmise if Hill House was not haunted before, it certainly is now. Jackson finishes by telling us that whatever walked in Hill House walked alone. For Eleanor Vance, that would be business as usual. 4 A novel that makes a neat bridge away from the Bad Place (and perhaps it's time we got away from these haunted houses before we come down with a terminal case of the creeps) is Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967). I used to be fond of telling people, at the time Roman Polanski's film version came out, that it was one of those rare cases where if you had read the book you didn't have to see the movie, and if you had seen the movie, you didn't have to read the book. That is not really the truth (it never is), but Polanski's film version is remarkably true to Levin's novel, and both men seem to share an ironic turn of humor. I don't believe anyone else could have made Levin's remarkable little novel quite so well . . . and by the way, while it is remarkable for Hollywood to remain so faithful to a novel (one sometimes thinks that major movie companies pay staggering sums for books just so they can tell their authors all the parts of them that don't worksurely some of the most expensive egotripping in the history of American arts and letters), it is not remarkable in Levin's case. Every novel he has was ever written has been a marvel of plotting. He is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel; in terms of plot, he makes what the rest of us do look like those fivedollar watches you can buy in the discount drugstores. This fact alone has made Levin almost invulnerable to the depredations of the storychangers, those subvertors who are more concerned with visual effect than with a coherent storyline. Levin's books are constructed as neatly as an elegant house of cards; pull one plot twist, and everything comes tumbling down. As a result, moviemakers have been pretty much forced to show us what Levin built. About the film Levin himself says, "I've always felt that the film of Rosemary's Baby is the single most faithful adaptation of a novel ever to come out of Hollywood. Not only does it incorporate whole chunks of the book's dialogue, it even follows the colors of clothing (where I mentioned them) and the layout of the apartment. And perhaps more importantly, Polanski's directorial style of not aiming the camera squarely at the horror but rather letting the audience spot it for themselves off at the side of the screen coincides happily, I think, with my own writing style. "There was a reason for his fidelity to the book, incidentally . . . . His screenplay was the first adaptation he had written of someone else's material; his earlier films had all been originals. I think he didn't know it was permittednay, almost mandatoryto make changes. I remember him calling me from Hollywood to ask in which issue of the New Yorker Guy had seen the shirt advertised. To my chagrin I had to admit I'd faked it; I had assumed any issue of the New Yorker would have a handsome shirt advertised in it. But the correct issue for the time of the scene didn't." Levin has written two horror novels Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wlives and while both shine with the exquisite plotting that is Levin's trademark, probably neither is quite as effective as his first book, which is unfortunately not much read these days. A Kiss Before Dying is a gritty suspense story told with great lanrarity enough, but what is even more rare is that the book (written while Levin was in his early twenties) contains surprises which really surprise . . . and it is rela In case you're one of the five or six readers of popular fiction in America who has missed them, they are A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary's Baby, This Perfect Day, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil. He has written two Broadway plays, Veronica' Room and the immensely successful Deathtrap. Less known is a modest but chillingly effective madeforTV movie called Dr. Cook's Garden, starring Bing Crosby in a wonderfully adroit performance. Postively impervious to that awful, dreadful goblin of a reader, he or she WHO TURNS TO THE LAST THREE PAGES TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT. Do you do this nasty, unworthy trick? Yes, you! I'm talking to you! Don't slink away and grin into your hand! Own up to it! Have you ever stood in a bookshop, glanced furtively around, and turned to the end of an Agatha Christie to see who did it, and how? Have you ever turned to the end of a horror novel to see if the hero made it out of the darkness and into the light? If you have ever done this, I have three simple words which I feel it is my duty to convey SHAME ON YOU! It is low to mark your place in a book by folding down the corner of the page where you left Off; TURNING TO THE END TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT is even lower. If you have this habit, I urge you to break it . . . break it at once! Well, enough of this digression. All I intended to say about A Kiss Before Dying is that the book's biggest surprisethe real screeching bombshellis neatly tucked away about one hundred pages into the story. If you should happen upon this moment while thumbing randomly through the book, it means nothing to you. If you have read everything faithfully up to that point, it means . . . everything. The only other writer I can think of offhand who had that wonderful ability to totally ambush the reader was the late Cornell Woolrich (who also wrote under the name of William Irish), but Woolrich did not have Levin's dry wit. Levin speaks affectionately of Woolrich as an influence on his own career, mentioning Phantom Lady and The Bride Wore Black as particular favorites. Levin's wit is probably a better place to start with Rosemary's Baby than his ability to plot a story. His output of novels has been relatively smallit averages out to one every five years or sobut it's interesting to note that one of the five, The Stepford Wives, works best as outright satire (William Goldman, the novelistscreenwriter who adapted that book for the screen, knew it; you will remember that earlier on we mentioned "Oh Frank, you're the best, you're the champ"), almost as farce, and Rosemary's Baby is a kind of socioreligious satire. We might also mention The Boys from Brazil, Levin's most recent novel, when we speak of his wit. The title itself is a pun, and although the book deals (even if only peripherally) with subjects such as the German death I have always wanted to publish a novel with the last thirty pages simply left out. The reader would be mailed these final pages by the publisher upon receipt of a satisfactory summary of everything that had happened in the story up to that point. That would certainly put a spoke in the wheels of those people who TURN TO THE END TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT. camps and the socalled "scientific experiments" that were carried out there (some of the "scientific experiments," we will recall, included trying to impregnate women with the sperm of dogs and administering lethal doses of poison to identical twins in order to see if they would expire in a similar span of time), it vibrates with its own nervous wit and seems to parody those MartinBormannisaliveandwellandlivinginParaguay books that are apparently going to be with us even unto the end of the world. I am not suggesting that Ira Levin is either Jackie Vernon or George Orwell masquerading in a fright wignothing so simple or simplistic. I am suggesting that the books he has written achieve suspense without turning into humorless thudding tracts (two novels of the Humorless, Thudding Tract School of horror writing are Damon, by C. Terry Cline, and The Exorcist, by William Peter BlattyCline has since improved as a writer, and Blatty has fallen silent . . . forever, if we are lucky). Levin is one of the few writers who has returned more than once to the field of horror and the supernatural and who seems unafraid of the fact that much of the material the genre deals with is utterly foolishand at that, he has done better than many critics, who visit the genre the way rich white ladies once visited the children of New England factory slaves on Thanksgiving with food baskets and on Easter with chocolate eggs and bunnies. These slumming critics, unaware both of their own infuriating elitism and their total ignorance of what popular fiction does and what it is about, are able to see the foolishness spawned as a byproduct of the bubbling potions, the pointy black hats, and all the other clanking huggermugger trappings of the supernatural tale, but are unable to seeor refuse to seethe strong and universal archetypes that underlie the best of them. The foolishness is there, all right; this is Rosemary's first look at the child she has given birth to His eyes were goldenyellow, all goldenyellow, with neither whites nor irises; all goldenyellow, with vertical blackslit pupils. She looked at him. He looked at her, goldenyellowly, and then at the swaying upsidedown crucifix. |
She looked at them watching her and knifeinhand screamed at them, " What have you done to his eyes? " They stirred and looked to Roman. "He has His Father's eyes," he said. We have lived and suffered with Rosemary Woodhouse for two hundred and nine pages up to this point, and Roman Castevet's response to her question seems almost like the punchline of a long, involved shaggydog storyone of the ones that ends with something like, "My, that's a long way to tip a Rari," or "Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear." Besides yellow eyes, Rosemary's baby turns out to have claws ("They're very nice," Roman tells Rosemary, ". . . very tiny and pearly. The mitts are only so He doesn't scratch Himself . . ."), and a tail, and the buds of horns. While I was teaching the book at the University of Maine to an undergraduate class entitled Themes in Horror and the Supernatural, one of my students mused that ten years later Rosemary's baby would be the only kid on his Little League team who needed a customtailored baseball cap. Basically, Rosemary has given birth to the comicbook version of Satan, the L'il Imp we were all familiar with as children and who sometimes put in an appearance in the motion picture cartoons, arguing with a L'il Angel over the main character's head. Levin broadens the satire by giving us a Satanist coven comprised almost entirely of old people; they argue constantly in their waspy voices about how the baby should be cared for. The fact that LauraLouise and Minnie Castevet are much too old to care for a baby somehow adds the final macabre touch, and Rosemary's first tentative bonding to her baby comes when she tells LauraLouise that she is rocking "Andy" much too fast, and that the wheels of his bassinette need to be oiled. Levin's accomplishment is that such satire does not deflate the horror of his story but actually enhances it. Rosemary's Baby is a splendid confirmation of the idea that humor and horror lie side by side, and that to deny one is to deny the other. It is a fact Joseph Heller makes splendid use of in Catch22 and which Stanley Elkin used in The Living End (which might have been subtitled "Job in the Afterlife"). Besides satire, Levin laces his novel with veins of irony ("It's good for your blood, dearie," the Old Witch in the E.C. comics used to say). Early on, the Castevets invite Guy and Rosemary over for dinner; Rosemary accepts, on the condition that it won't be too much trouble. "Honey, if it was trouble I wouldn't ask you," Mrs. Castevet said. "Believe me, I'm as selfish as the day is long." Rosemary smiled. "That isn't what Terry told me," she said. "Well," Mrs. Castevet said with a pleased smile, "Terry didn't know what she was talking about." The irony is that everything Minnie Castevet says here is the literal truth; she really is as selfish as the day is long, and Terrywho ends up either being murdered or committing suicide when she discovers that she is to be or has been used as an incubator for Satan's childreally didn't know what she was talking about. But she found out. Oh yes. Hehhehheh. My wife, raised in the Catholic church, claims that the book is also a religious comedy with its own shaggydog punchline. Rosemary's Baby, she claims, only proves what the Catholic church has said about mixed marriages all alongthey just don't work. This particular bit of comedy grows richer, perhaps, when we add the fact of Levin's own Jewishness against the Christian backdrop of custom used by the Satanist coven. Seen in this light, the book becomes a kind of youdon'thavetobeJewishtoloveLevy's view of the battle of good and evil. Before leaving the idea of religion and talking a bit about the feelings of paranoia which really seem to lie central to the book, let me suggest that while Levin's tongue is in his cheek part of the time, that is no reason for us to expect it to be there all of the time. Rosemary's Baby was written and published at the time the Godisdead tempest was whirling around in the teapot of the sixties, and the book deals with questions of faith in an unpretentious but thoughtful and intriguing way. We might say that the major theme of Rosemary's Baby deals with urban paranoia (as opposed to the smalltown or rural paranoia we will see in Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers), but that an important minor theme could be stated along these lines The weakening of religious conviction is an opening wedge for the devil, both in the macrocosm (questions of world faith) and in the microcosm (the cycle of Rosemary's faith as she goes from belief as Rosemary Reilly, to unbelief as Rosemary Woodhouse, to belief again as the mother of her infernal Child). I'm not suggesting that Ira Levin believes this Puritanical thesisalthough he may, for all I know. I am suggesting, however, that it makes a nice fulcrum on which to turn his plot, and that he plays fair with the idea and explores most of its implications. In the religious pilgrim's progress that Rosemary goes through, Levin gives us a seriocomic allegory of faith. Rosemary and Guy begin as typical young marrieds; Rosemary is practicing birth control as a matter of course in spite of her rigid Catholic upbringing, and both of them have decided they will have children only when theynot Goddecide they are ready. After Terry's suicide (or was it murder?), Rosemary has a dream in which she is being scolded by an old parochial school teacher, Sister Agnes, for bricking up the school windows and getting them disqualified from a beautifulschool contest. But mingling with the dream are real voices from the Castevet apartment next door, and it is Minnie Castevet, speaking through the mouth of Sister Agnes in Rosemary's dream, that we are listening to "Anybody! Anybody!" Sister Agnes said. "All she has to be is young, healthy, and not a virgin. She doesn't have to be a nogood drugaddict whore out of the gutter. Didn't I say that in the beginning? Anybody. As long as she's young and healthy and not a virgin." This dream sequence does several useful things. It amuses us in a nervous, edgy sort of way; it lets us in on the fact that the Castevets were in some way involved in the death of Terry; it allows us to see shoaling waters ahead for Rosemary. Perhaps this is stuff that only interests another writerit's more like two mechanics inspecting a nifty fourbarrel carburetor than it is like classical analysisbut Levin does his job so unobtrusively that maybe it doesn't hurt for me to take the pointer and say, "Here! This is where he's starting to get close to you; this is the point of entry, and now he will begin working inward toward your heart." Yet the most significant thing about the passage is that Rosemary has woven a dream of Catholic intent around the words her lightly sleeping mind has overheard. She casts Minnie Castevet as a nun . . . and so she is, although she is a nun of a rather blacker persuasion than that longago Sister Agnes. My wife also says that one of the basic tenets of the Catholic church she grew up with was, "Give us your children and they will be ours forever." The shoe fits here, and Rosemary wears it. And ironically enough, it is the superficial weakening of her faith which allows the devil a doorway into her life . . . but it is the immutable bedrock of that same faith that allows her to accept "Andy," horns and all. This is Levin's handling of religious views in the microcosmon the surface, Rosemary is a typical young modern who could have stepped whole and breathing from Wallace Stevens's poem "Sunday Morning"the churchbells mean nothing to her as she sits peeling her oranges. But beneath, that parochial schoolgirl Rosemary Reilly is very much there. His handling of the macrocosm is similarjust bigger. At the dinner party the Castevets have for the Woodhouses, conversation turns to the impending visit of the Pope to New York. "I tried to keep [the book's] unbelievabilities believable," Levin remarks, "by incorporating bits of real life' happenings along the way. I kept stacks of newspapers, and writing about a month or two after the fact, worked in events such as the transit strike and Lindsay's election as mayor. When, having decided for obvious reasons that the baby should be born on June 25th, I checked back to see what had been happening on the night Rosemary would have to conceive, you know what I found the Pope's visit, and the Mass on television. Talk about serendipity! From then on I felt the book was Meant To Be." The conversation between Guy Woodhouse and the Castevets concerning the Pope seems predictable, even banal, but it expresses the very view which Levin gently suggests is responsible for the whole thing "I heard on TV that he's going to postpone and wait until (the newspaper strike) is over," Mrs. Castevet said. Guy smiled. "Well," he said, "that's show biz." Mr. and Mrs. Castevet laughed, and Guy along with them. Rosemary smiled and cut her steak . . . . Still laughing, Mr. Castevet said, "It is, you know That's just what it is show biz!" "You can say that again," Guy said. "The costumes, the rituals," Mr. Castevet said; "every religion, not only Catholicism. Pageants for the ignorant." Mrs. Castevet said, "I think we're offending Rosemary." "No, not at all," Rosemary said. "You aren't religious, my dear, are you?" Mr. Castevet asked. "I was brought up to be," Rosemary said, "but now I'm an agnostic. I wasn't offended. Really I wasn't." We don't doubt the truth of Rosemary Woodhouse's statement, but underneath that surface there is a little parochial schoolgirl named Rosemary Reilly who is very offended, and who probably regards such talk as blasphemy. The Castevets are conducting a bizarre sort of job interview here, testing Rosemary and Guy for the depth and direction of their commitments and beliefs; they are revealing their own contempt for the church and things sacred; but, Levin suggests, they are also expressing views which are commonly held . . . and not just by Satanists. Yet faith must exist beneath, he suggests; it is the surface weakening that allows the devil in, but beneath, even the Castevets are in vital need of Christianity, because without the sacred there is no profane. The Castevets seem to sense Rosemary Reilly existing beneath Rosemary Woodhouse, and it is her husband, Guy, an authentic pagan, that they use as a gobetween. And Guy lowers himself admirably to the occasion. We are not allowed to doubt that it is the softening of Rosemary's faith that has given the devil a door into her life. Her sister Margaret, a good Catholic, calls Rosemary long distance not long after the Castevets' plot has begun to move. "I've had the funniest feeling all day long, Rosemary. That something happened to you. Like an accident or something." Rosemary isn't favored with such a premonition (the closest she gets is her dream of Sister Agnes speaking in Minnie Castevet's voice) because she isn't worthy of it. Good Catholics, Levin saysand we may not sense his tongue creeping back into his cheekget the good premonitions. The religious motif stretches through the book, and Levin does some clever things with it, but perhaps we could close off our discussion of it with some thoughts about Rosemary's remarkable "conception dream." First, it is significant that the time chosen for the devil to impregnate Rosemary coincides with the Pope's visit. Rosemary's mousse is drugged, but she eats only a little of it. As a result, she has a dreamlike memory of her sexual encounter with the devil, but it is one her subconscious couches in symbolic terms. Reality flickers in and out as Guy prepares her for her confrontation with Satan. In her dream, Rosemary finds herself on a yacht with the assassinated President Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy, Pat Lawford, and Sarah Churchill are also in attendance. Rosemary asks JFK if her good friend Hutch (who becomes Rosemary's protector until he is struck down by the coven; he is the one who warns Rosemary and Guy early on that the Bramford is a Bad Place) is coming; Kennedy smiles and tells her the cruise is "for Catholics only." This is one qualification Minnie has not mentioned earlier, but it helps confirm the idea that the person the coven is really interested in is Rosemary Reilly. Again, it seems to be the blasphemy that they are mostly concerned with; the spiritual lineage of Christ must be perverted to allow them to accomplish a successful birth. Guy removes Rosemary's wedding ring, symbolically ending their marriage, but also becoming a kind of bestmaninreverse; Rosemary's friend Hutch comes with weather warnings (and what is a hutch anyway but a safe place for rabbits?). During intercourse, Guy actually becomes the devil, and closing the dream out we see Terry again, this time not as a failed bride of Satan but as a sacrificial opener of the way. In less expert hands such a dream scene might have become tiresome and didactic, but Levin carries it off lightly and quickly, compressing the entire sequence into just five pages. But the strongest watchspring of Rosemary's Baby isn't the religious subtheme but the book's use of urban paranoia. The conflict between Rosemary Reilly and Rosemary Woodhouse enriches the story, but if the book achieves horrorand I think it doesit does so because Levin is able to play upon these innate feelings of paranoia so skillfully. Horror is a groping for pressure points, and where are we any more vulnerable than in our feelings of paranoia? In many ways, Rosemary's Baby is like a sinister Woody Allen film, and the Woodhouse Reilly dichotomy is useful here, too. Besides being a Catholic forever beneath her agnostic veneer, Rosemary is, beneath her carefully acquired cosmopolitan varnish, a smalltown girl . . . and you can take the girl out of the country, but et cetera, et cetera. There is a sayingand I would be happy to attribute it if I could remember who to attribute it tothat perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. In a crazy sort of way, Rosemary's story is of a coming to that sort of awareness. We become paranoid before she does (Minnie, for instance, being purposely slow with the dishes so Roman can talk to Guyor make him a pitchin the other room), but following her dreamlike encounter with the devil and her subsequent pregnancy, her own paranoia follows along. When she wakes up the next morning, she finds scratchesas if from clawsall over her body. "Don't yell," Guy says, showing her his fingernails; "I already filed them down." Before long, Minnie and Roman have begun a campaign to get Rosemary to use their obstetricianthe famous Abe Sapirsteininstead of the young guy she had been going to. Don't do that, Rosemary, we want to tell her; he's one of them. Modern psychiatry teaches that there is no difference between us and the paranoidschizophrenic in Bedlam except that we somehow manage to keep our crazier suspicions under control while theirs have slipped their tethers; a story like Rosemary's Baby or Finney's The Body Snatchers seems to confirm the idea. We have discussed the horror story as a tale which derives its effect from our terror of things which depart the norm; we have looked at it as a taboo land which we enter with fear and trembling, and also as a Dionysian force which may invade our comfy Apollonian status quo without warning. Maybe all horror stories are really about disorder and the fear of change, and in Rosemary's Baby we have the feeling that everything is beginning to bulge at oncewe can't see all the changes, but we sense them. Our dread for Rosemary springs from the fact that she seems the only normal person in a whole city of dangerous maniacs. Before we have reached the midpoint of Levin's tale, we suspect everybodyand in nine cases out of ten we have been right to do so. We are allowed to indulge our paranoia on Rosemary's behalf to the utmost, and all our nightmares come true. On my first reading of the book, I remember even suspecting Dr. Hill, the nice young obstetrician Rosemary has given up in favor of Dr. Sapirstein. Of course, Hill is not a Satanist . . . he just gives Rosemary back to them when she comes to him for protection. If horror novels do serve as catharsis for more mundane fears, then Levin's Rosemary's Baby seems to reflect back and effectively use the city dweller's very real feelings of urban paranoia. In this book there really are no nice people next door, and the worst things you ever imagined about that dotty old lady down in 9B turn out to be true. The real victory of the book is that it allows us to be crazy for a while. 5 From urban paranoia to smalltown paranoia Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers. Finney himself has the following things to say about his book which was originally published as a Dell paperback original in 1955 "The book . . . was written in the early 1950s, and I don't really remember a lot about it. I do recall that I simply felt in the mood to write something about a strange event or a series of them in a small town; something inexplicable. And that my first thought was that a dog would be injured or killed by a car, and it would be discovered that a part of the animal's skeleton was of stainless steel; bone and steel intermingled, that is, a thread of steel running into bone and bone into steel so that it was clear the two had grown together. But this idea led to nothing in my mind . . . . I remember that I wrote the first chapterpretty much as it appeared, if I am recalling correctlyin which people complained that someone close to them was in actuality an imposter. But I didn't know where this was to lead, either. However, during the As previously noted, the lateseventies remake of the Finney novel resets the story in San Francisco, opting for an urban paranoia which results in a number of sequences strikingly like those which open Polanski's film version of Rosemary's Baby. But Philip Kaufman lost more than he gained, I think, by taking Finney's story out of its natural smalltownwithabandstandinthepark setting. course of fooling around with this, trying to make it work out, I came across a reputable scientific theory that objects might in fact be pushed through space by the pressure of light, and that dormant life of some sort might conceivably drift through space . . . and [this] eventually worked the book out. "I was never satisfied with my own explanation of how these dry leaflike objects came to resemble the people they imitated; it seemed, and seems, weak, but it was the best I could do. "I have read explanations of the 'meaning' of this story, which amuse me, because there is no meaning at all; it was just a story meant to entertain, and with no more meaning than that. The first movie version of the book followed the book with great faithfulness, except for the foolish ending; and I've always been amused by the contentions of people connected with the picture that they had a message of some sort in mind. If so, it's a lot more than I ever did, and since they followed my story very closely, it's hard to see how this message crept in. And when the message has been defined, it has always sounded a little simpleminded to me. The idea of writing a whole book in order to say that it's not really a good thing for us all to be alike, and that individuality is a good thing, makes me laugh." Nevertheless, Jack Finney has written a great deal of fiction about the idea that individuality is a good thing and that conformity can start to get pretty scary after it passes a certain point. His comments (in a letter to me dated December 24, 1979) about the first film version of The Body Snatchers raised a grin on my own face as well. As Pauline Kael, Penelope Gilliatt, and all of those sobersided film critics so often prove, no one is so humorless as a bigtime film critic or so apt to read deep meanings into simple doings ("In The Fury," Pauline Kael intoned, apparently in all seriousness, "Brian De Palma has found the junk heart of America.")it is as if these critics feel it necessary to prove and reprove their own literary; they are like teenage boys who feel obliged to demonstrate and redemonstrate their macho . . . perhaps most of all to themselves. This may be because they are working on the fringes of a field which deals entirely with pictures and the spoken word; they must surely be aware that while it requires at least a highschool education to understand and appreciate all the facets of even such an accessible book as The Body Snatchers, any illiterate with four dollars in his or her pocket can go to a movie and find the junk heart of America. Movies are merely picture books that talk, and this seems to have left many literate movie critics with acute feelings of inferiority. Filmmakers themselves are often happy to participate in this grotesque critical overkill, and I applauded Sam Peckinpah in my heart when he made this laconic reply to a critic who asked him why he had really made such a violent picture as The Wild Bunch "I like shootemups." Or so he was reputed to have said, and if it ain't true, gang, it oughtta be. The Don Siegel version of The Body Snatchers is an amusing case where the film critics tried to have it both ways. They began by saying that both Finney's novel and Siegel's film were allegories about the witchhunt atmosphere that accompanied the McCarthy hearings. Then Siegel himself spoke up and said that his film was really about the Red Menace. He did not go so far as to say that there was a Commie under every American's bed, but there can be little doubt that Siegel at least believed he was making a movie about a creeping fifth column. It is the ultimate in paranoia, we might say they're out there and they look just like us! In the end it's Finney who comes away sounding the most right; The Body Snatchers is just a good story, one to be read and savored for its own unique satisfactions. In the quartercentury since its original publication as a humble paperback original (a shorter version appeared in Collier's, one of those good old magazines that fell by the wayside in order to make space on the newstands of America for such intellectual publications as Hustler, Screw, and Big Butts), the book has been rarely out of print. It reached its nadir as a Fotonovel in the wake of the Philip Kaufman remake; if there is a lower, slimier, more antibook concept than the Fotonovel, I don't know what it would be. I think I'd rather see my kids reading a stack of Beeline Books than one of those photocomics. It reached its apogee as a Gregg Press hardcover in 1976. Gregg Press is a small company which has reissued some fifty or sixty science fiction and fantasy booksnovels, collections, and anthologiesoriginally published as paperbacks, in hardcover. The editors of the Gregg series (David Hartwell and L. W. Currey) have chosen wisely and well, and in the library of any reader who cares honestly about science fictionand about books themselves as lovely artifactsyou're apt to find one or more of these distinctive green volumes with the redgold stamping on the spines. Oh dear God, we're off on another tangent. Well, never mind; I believe that what I started to say was simply that I think Finney's contention that The Body Snatchers is just a story is both right and wrong. My own belief about fiction, long and deeply held, is that story must be paramount over all other considerations in fiction; that story defines fiction, and that all other considerationstheme, mood, tone, symbol, style, even characterizationare expendable. There are critics who take the strongest possible exception to this view of fiction, and I really believe that they are the critics who would feel vastly more comfortable if MobyDick were a doctoral thesis on cetology rather than an account of what happened on the Pequod's final voyage. A doctoral thesis is what a million student papers have reduced this tale to, but the story still remains"This is what happened to Ishmael." As story still remains in Macbeth, The Faerie Queen, Pride and Prejudice, Jude the Obscure, The Great Gatsby . . . and Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers. And story, thank God, after a certain point becomes irreducible, mysterious, impervious to analysis. You will find no English master's thesis in any college library titled "The StoryElements of Melville's Moby Dick." And if you do find such a thesis, send it to me. I'll eat it. With A1 Steak Sauce. All very fine. And yet I don't think Finney would argue with the idea that story values are determined by the mind through which they are filtered, and that the mind of any writer is a product of his outer world and inner temper. It is just the fact of this filter that has set the table for all those wouldbe English M.A.'s, and I certainly would not want you to think that I begrudge them their degreesGod knows that as an English major I slung enough bullshit to fertilize most of east Texasbut a great number of the people who are sitting at the long and groaning table of Graduate Studies in English are cutting a lot of invisible steaks and roasts . . . not to mention trading the Emperor's new clothes briskly back and forth in what may be the largest academic yard sale the world has ever seen. Still, what we have here is a Jack Finney novel, and we can say certain things about it simply because it is a Jack Finney novel. First, we can say that it will be grounded in absolute realitya prosy reality that is almost humdrum, at least to begin with. When we first meet the book's hero (and here I think Finney probably would object if I used the more formal word protagonist . . . so I won't), Dr. Miles Bennell, he is letting his last patient of the day out; a sprained thumb. Becky Driscoll entersand how is that for the perfect allAmerican name?with the first offkey note her cousin Wilma has somehow gotten the idea that her Uncle Ira really isn't her uncle anymore. But this note is faint and barely audible under the simple melodies of smalltown life that Finney plays so well in the book's opening chapters . . . and Finney's rendering of the smalltown archetype in this book may be the best to come out of the 1950s. The keynote that Finney sounds again and again in these first few chapters is so lowkey pleasant that in less sure hands it would become insipid nice. Again and again Finney returns to that word; things in Santa Mira, he tells us, are not great, not wild and crazy, not terrible, not boring. Things in Santa Mira are nice. No one here is laboring under that old Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times." "For the first time I really saw her face again. I saw it was the same nice face . . ." This from page nine. A few pages later "It was nice out, temperature around sixtyfive, and the light was good; . . . still plenty of sun." Cousin Wilma is also nice, if rather plain. Miles thinks she would have made a good wife and mother, but she just never married. "That's how it goes," Miles philosophizes, innocently unaware of any banality. 'He tells us he wouldn't have believed her the type of woman to have mental problems, "but still, you never know." This stuff shouldn't work, and yet somehow it does; we feel that Miles has somehow stepped through the firstperson convention and is actually talking to us, just as it seems that Tom Sawyer is actually talking to us in the Twain novel . . . and Santa Mira, California, as Finney presents it to us, is exactly the sort of town where we would almost expect to see Tom whitewashing a fence (there would be no Huck around, sleeping in a hogshead, though; not in Santa Mira). The Body Snatchers is the only Finney book which can rightly be called a horror novel, but Santa Mirawhich is a typical "nice" Finney settingis the perfect locale for such a tale. Perhaps one horror novel is all that Finney had to write; certainly it was enough to set the mold for what we now call "the modern horror novel." If there is such a thing, there can be no doubt at all that Finney had a large hand in inventing it. I have used the phrase "offkey note" earlier on, and that is Finney's actual method in The Body Snatchers, I think; one offkey note, then two, then a ripple, then a run of them. Finally the jagged, discordant music of horror overwhelms the melody entirely. But Finney understands that there is no horror without beauty; no discord without a prior sense of melody; no nasty without nice. There are no Plains of Leng here; no Cyclopean ruins under the earth; no shambling monsters in the subway tunnels under New York. At about the same time Jack Finney was writing The Body Snatchers, Richard Matheson was writing his classic short story "Born of Man and Woman," the story that begins "today my mother called me retch. you retch she said." Between the two of them, they made the break from the Lovecraftian fantasy that had held sway over serious American writers of horror for two decades or more. Matheson's short story was published well before Weird Tales went broke; Finney's novel was published by Dell a year after. Although Matheson published two early short stories in Weird Tales, neither writer is associated with this icon of American fantasy horror magazines; they represent the birth of an almost entirely new breed of American fantasist, just as, in the years 19771980, the emergence of Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman in England may represent another significant turn of the wheel. I have mentioned that Finney's short story "The Third Level" predates Rod Serling's Twilight Zone series; in exactly the same fashion, Finney's little town of Santa Mira predates and points the way toward Peter Straub's fictional town of Milburn, New York; Thomas Tryon's Cornwall Coombe, Connecticut; and my own little town of 'Salem's Lot, Maine. It is even possible to see Finney's influence in Blatty's The Exorcist, where foul doings become fouler when set against the backdrop of Georgetown, a suburb which is quite, graciously rich . . . and nice. Finney concentrates on sewing a seam between the prosaic reality of his little youcanseeitbeforeyoureyes town and the outright fantasy of the pods which will follow. He sews the seam with such fine stitchwork that when we cross over from the world that really is and into a world of utter makebelieve, we are hardly aware of any change. This is a major feat, and like the magician who can make the cards walk effortlessly over the tips of his fingers in apparent defiance of gravity, it looks so easy that you'd be tempted to believe anyone could do it. You see the trick, but not the long hours of practice that went into creating the effect. We have spoken briefly of paranoia in Rosemary's Baby; in The Body Snatchers, the paranoia becomes full, rounded, and complete. If we are all incipient paranoidsif we all take a quick glance down at ourselves when laughter erupts at the cocktail party, just to make sure we're zipped up and it isn't us they're laughing atthen I'd suggest that Finney uses this incipient paranoia quite deliberately to manipulate our emotions in favor of Miles, Becky, and Miles's friends, the Belicecs. At the same time Finney and Matheson began administering their own particular brands of shock treatment to the American imagination. Ray Bradbury began to be noticed in the fantasy community, and during the fifties and sixties, Bradbury's name would become the one most readily identified with the genre in the mind of the general reading public. But for me, Bradbury lives and works alone in his own country, and his remarkable, iconoclastic style has never been successfully imitated. Vulgarly put, when God made Ray Bradbury He broke the mold. Wilma, for instance, can present no proof that her Uncle Ira is no longer her Uncle Ira, but she impresses us with her strong conviction and with a deep, freefloating anxiety as pervasive as a migraine headache. |
Here is a kind of paranoid dream, as seamless and as perfect as anything out of a Paul Bowies novel or a Joyce Carol Oates tale of the uncanny Wilma sat staring at me, eyes intense. "I've been waiting for today," she whispered. "Waiting till he'd get a haircut, and he finally did." Again she leaned toward me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper. "There's a little scar on the back of Ira's neck; he had a boil there once, and your father lanced it. You can't see the scar," she whispered, "when he needs a haircut. But when his neck is shaved, you can. Well, todayI've been waiting for this!today he got a haircut" I sat forward, suddenly excited. "And the scar's gone? You mean" "No!" she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing. "It's therethe scarexactly like Uncle Ira's!" So Finney serves notice that we are working here in a world of utter subjectivity . . . and utter paranoia. Of course we believe Wilma at once, even though we have no real proof; if for no other reason, we know from the title of the book that the "body snatchers" are out there somewhere. By putting us on Wilma's side from the start, Finney has turned us into equivalents of John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness. It is easy enough to see why the book was eagerly seized upon by those who felt, in the early fifties, that there was either a Communist conspiracy afoot, or perhaps a fascist conspiracy that was operating in the name of antiCommunism. Because, either way or neither way, this is a book about conspiracy with strong paranoid overtones . . . in other words, exactly the sort of story to be claimed as political allegory by political loonies of every stripe. Earlier on, I mentioned the idea that perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. To that we could add that paranoia may be the last defense of the overstrained mind. Much of the literature of the twentieth century, from such diverse sources as Bertolt Brecht, JeanPaul Sartre, Edward Albee, Thomas Hardy, even F. Scott Fitzgerald, has suggested that we live in an existential sort of world, a planless insane asylum where things just happen. IS GOD DEAD? asks the Time magazine cover in the waiting room of Rosemary Woodhouse's Satanic obstetrician. In such a world it is perfectly credible that a mental defective should sit on the upper floor of a littleused building, wearing a Hanes tshirt, eating takeout chicken, and waiting to use his mailorder rifle to blow out the brains of an American president; perfectly possible that another mental defective should be able to stand around in a hotel kitchen a few years later waiting to do exactly the same thing to that defunct president's younger brother; perfectly understandable that nice American boys from Iowa and California and Delaware should have spent their tours in Vietnam collecting ears, many of them extremely tiny; that the world should begin to move once more toward the brink of an apocalyptic war because of the preachings of an eightyyearold Moslem holy man who is probably foggy on what he had for breakfast by the time sunset rolls around. All of these things are mentally acceptable if we accept the idea that God has abdicated for a long vacation, or has perchance really expired. They are mentally acceptable, but our emotions, our spirits, and most of all our passion for orderthese powerful elements of our human makeupall rebel. If we suggest that there was no reason for the deaths of six million Jews in the camps during World War II, no reason for poets bludgeoned, old women raped, children turned into soap, that it just happened and nobody was really responsiblethings just got a little out of control here, haha, so sorrythen the mind begins to totter. I saw this happen at firsthand in the sixties, at the height of the generational shudder that began with our involvement in Vietnam and went on to encompass everything from parietal hours on college campuses and the voting franchise at eighteen to corporate responsibility for environmental pollution. I was in college at the time, attending the University of Maine, and while I began college with political leanings too far to the right to actually become radicalized, by 1968 my mind had been changed forever about a number of fundamental questions. The hero of Jack Finney's later novel, Time and Again, says it better than I could I was . . . an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than most of the rest of us." For me, it was a nearly overwhelming discoveryone that really began to happen, perhaps, on that day in the Stratford Theater when the announcement that the Russians had orbited a space satellite was made to me and my contemporaries by a theater manager who looked like he had been gutshot at close range. But for all of that, I found it impossible to embrace the mushrooming paranoia of the last four years of the sixties completely. In 1968, during my junior year at college, three Black Panthers from Boston came to my school and talked ( under the auspices of the Public Lecture Series) about how the American business establishment, mostly under the guidance of the Rockefellers and ATT, was responsible for creating the neofascist political state of Amerika, encouraging the war in Vietnam because it was good for business, and also encouraging an ever more virulent climate of racism, stateism, and sexism. Johnson was their puppet; Humphrey and Nixon were also their puppets; it was a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," as the Who would say a year or two later; the only solution was to take it into the streets. They finished with the Panther slogan, "all power comes out of the barrel of a gun," and adjured us to remember Fred Hampton. Now, I did not and do not believe that the hands of the Rockefellers were utterly clean during that period, nor those of ATT; I did and do believe that companies like Sikorsky and Douglas Aircraft and Dow Chemical and even the Bank of America subscribed more or less to the idea that war is good business (but never invest your son as long as you can slug the draft board in favor of the right kind of people; when at all possible, feed the war machine the spies and the niggers and the poor white trash from Appalachia, but not our boys, oh no, never our boys!); I did and do believe that the death of Fred Hampton was a case of police manslaughter at the very least. But these Black Panthers were suggesting a huge umbrella of conscious conspiracy that was laughable . . . except the audience wasn't laughing. During the QandA period, they were asking sober, concerned questions about just how the conspiracy was working, who was in charge, how they got their orders out, et cetera. Finally I got up and said something like, "Are you really suggesting that there is an actual Board of Fascist Conspiracy in this country? That the conspiratorsthe president of GM and Exxon, plus David and Nelson Rockefellerare maybe meeting in a big underground chamber beneath the Bonneville Salt Flats with agendas containing items on how more blacks can be drafted and the war in Southeast Asia prolonged?" I was finishing with the suggestion that perhaps these executives were arriving at their underground fortress in flying saucersthus handily accounting for the upswing in UFO sightings as well as for the war in Vietnamwhen the audience began to shout angrily for me to sit down and shut up. Which I did posthaste, blushing furiously, knowing how those eccentrics who mount their soapboxes in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons must feel. I did not much relish the feeling. The Panther who spoke did not respond to my question (which, to be fair, wasn't a question at all, really) ; he merely said softly, " You got a surprise, didn't you, man?" This was greeted with a burst of applause and laughter from the audience. I did get a surpriseand a pretty unpleasant one, at that. But some thought has convinced me that it was impossible for those of my generation, propelled harumscarum through the sixties, hair flying back from our foreheads, eyes bugging out with a mixture of delight and terror, from the Kingsmen doing "Louie Louie" to the blasting fuzztones of the Jefferson Airplane, to get from point A to point Z without a belief that someoneeven Nelson Rockefellerwas pulling the strings. In various ways throughout this book I've tried to suggest that the horror story is in many ways an optimistic, upbeat experience; that it is often the tough mind's way of coping with terrible problems which may not be supernatural at all but perfectly real. Paranoia may be the last and strongest bastion of such an optimistic viewit is the mind crying out, " Something rational and understandable is going on here! These things do not just happen! " So we look at a shadow and say there was a man on the grassy knoll at Dallas; we say that James Earl Ray was in the pay of certain big Southern business interests, or maybe the CIA; we ignore the fact that American business interests exist in complex circles of power, often revolving in direct opposition to one another, and suggest that our stupid but mostly wellmeant involvement in Vietnam was a conspiracy hatched by the militaryindustrial complex; or that, as a recent rash of badly spelled and printed posters in New York suggested, that the Ayatollah Khomeini is a puppet ofyeah, you guessed itDavid Rockefeller. We suggest, in our endless inventiveness, that Captain Mantell did not die of oxygen starvation back there in 1947 while chasing that odd daytime reflection of Venus which veteran pilots call a sundog; no, he was chasing a ship from another world which exploded his plane with a death ray when he got too close. It would be wrong of me to leave you with any impression that I am inviting the two of us to have a good laugh at these things together; I am not. These things are not the beliefs of madmen but the beliefs of sane men and women trying desperately, not to preserve the status quo, but just to find the fucking thing. And when Becky Driscoll's cousin Wilma says her Uncle Ira isn't her Uncle Ira, we believe her instinctively and immediately. If we don't believe her, all we've got is a spinster going quietly dotty in a small California town. The idea does not appeal; in a sane world, nice middleaged ladies like Wilma aren't s'posed to go bookers. It isn't right. There's a whisper of chaos in it that's somehow more scary than believing she might be right about Uncle Ira. We believe because belief affirms the lady's sanity. We believe her because . . . because . . . because something is going on! All those paranoid fantasies are really not fantasies at all. Weand Cousin Wilmaare right; it's the world that's gone haywire. The idea that the world has gone haywire is pretty bad, but as we can cope with Bill Nolan's fiftyfoot bug once we see what it really is, so we can cope with a haywire world if we just know where our feet are planted. Bob Dylan speaks to the existentialist in us when he tells us that "Something is going on hereBut you don't know what it isDo you, Mr. Jones?" Finneyin the guise of Miles Bennelltakes us firmly by the arm and tells us that he knows exactly what's going on here it's those goddamn pods from space! They're responsible! It's fun to trace the classic threads of paranoia Finney weaves into his story. While Miles and Becky are at a movie, Miles's writer friend Jack Belicec asks Miles to come and take a look at something he's found in his basement. The something turns out to be the body of a naked man on a pool table, a body which seems to Miles, Becky, Jack, and Jack's wife, Theodora, somehow unformednot yet quite shaped. It's a pod, of course, and the shape it is taking is Jack's own. Shortly we have concrete proof that something is terribly wrong Becky actually moaned when we saw the [finger] prints, and I think we all felt sick. Because it's one thing to speculate about a body that's never been alive, a blank. But it's something very different, something that touches whatever is primitive deep in your brain, to have that speculation proved. There were no prints; there were five absolutely smooth, solidly black circles. These fournow aware of the pod conspiracyagree not to call the police immediately but to see how the pods develop. Miles takes Becky home and then goes home himself, leaving the Belicecs to stand watch over the thing on the pool table. But in the middle of the night Theodora Belicec freaks out and the two of them show up on Miles's doorstep. Miles calls a psychiatrist friend, Mannie Kaufman (a shrink? we are immediately suspicious; we don't need a shrink here, we want to shout at Miles; call out the Army!), to come and sit with the Belicecs while he goes after Becky . . . who earlier has confessed to feeling that her father is no longer her father. On the bottom shelf of a cupboard in the Driscoll basement, Miles finds a blank which is developing into a pseudoBecky. Finney does a brilliant job of describing what this comingtobeing would look like. He compares it to finestamping medallions; to developing a photograph; and later to those eerie, lifelike South American dolls. But in our current state of high nervousness, what really impresses us is how neatly the thing has been tucked away, hidden behind a closed door in a dusty basement, biding its time. Becky has been drugged by her "father," and in a scene simply charged with romance, Miles spirits her out of the house and carries her through the sleeping streets of Santa Mira in his arms; it is no trick to imagine the gauzy stuff of her nightgown nearly glowing in the moonlight. And the fallout of all this? When Mannie Kaufman arrives, the men return to the Belicec house to investigate the basement There was no body on the table. Under the bright, shadowless light from the overhead lay the brilliant green felt, and on the felt, except at the corners and along the sides, lay a sort of thick gray fluff that might have fallen, or been jarred loose, I supposed, from the open rafters. For an instant, his mouth hanging open, Jack stared at the table. Then he swung to Mannie, and his voice protesting, asking for belief, he said, "It was there on the table! Mannie, it was! " Mannie smiled, nodding quickly. "I believe you, Jack . . . But we know that's what all of these shrinks say . . . just before they call for the men in the white coats. We know that fluff isn't just fluff from the overhead rafters; the damned thing has gone to seed. But nobody else knows it, and Jack is quickly reduced to the final plea of the helpless paranoiac You gotta believe me, doc! Mannie Kaufman's rationalization for the increasing number of people in Santa Mira who no longer believe their relatives are their relatives is that Santa Mirans are undergoing a case of lowkey mass hysteria, the sort of thing that may have been behind the Salem witch trials, the mass suicides in Guyana, even the dancing sickness of the middle ages. But below this rationalistic approach, existentialism lurks unpleasantly. These things happen, he seems to suggest, just because they happen. Sooner or later they will work themselves out. They do, too. Mrs. Seeley, who believed her husband wasn't her husband, comes in to tell Miles that everything is fine now. Ditto the girls who were scared of their English instructor for awhile. And ditto Cousin Wilma, who calls up Miles to tell him how embarrassed she is at having caused such a fuss; of course Uncle Ira is Uncle Ira. And in every case, one other facta namestands out Mannie Kaufman was there, helping them all. Something is wrong here, all right, but we know very well what it is, thank you, Mr. Jones. We have noticed the way Kaufman's name keeps cropping up. We're not stupid, right? Damn right we're not! And it's pretty obvious that Mannie Kaufman is now playing for the visiting team. And one more thing. At Jack Belicec's insistence, Miles finally decides to call a friend in the Pentagon and spill the whole incredible story. About his long distance call to Washington, Miles tells us It isn't easy explaining a long, complicated story over the telephone .... And we had bad luck with the connection. At first I heard Ben and he heard me, as clearly as though we were next door to each other. But when I began telling him what had been happening here, the connection faded. Ben had to keep asking me to repeat, and I almost had to shout to make him understand me. You can't talk well, you can't even think properly, when you have to repeat every other phrase, and I signaled the operator and asked for a better connection . . . I'd hardly resumed when a sort of buzzing sound started in the receiver in my ear, and then I had to try to talk over that . . . "They," of course, are now in charge of communications coming into and going out of Santa Mira ( "We are controlling transmission," that somehow frightening voice which introduced The Outer Limits each week used to say; " We will control the horizontal . . . we will control the vertical . . . we can roll the image, make it flutter . . . we can change the focus . . ." ) . Such a passage will also strike a responsive chord in any old antiwar protester, SDS member, or activist who ever believed his or her phone was tapped or that the guy with the Nikon on the edge of the demonstration was taking his or her picture for a dossier someplace. They are everywhere; they are watching; they are listening. Surely it is no wonder that Siegel believed that Finney's novel was about aRedundereverybed or that others believed it was about the creeping fascist menace. As we descend deeper and deeper into the whirlpool of this nightmare it might even become possible to believe it was the pod people who were on the grassy knoll in Dallas, or that it was the podpeople who obediently swallowed their poisoned KoolAid at Jonestown and then spritzed it down the throats of their squalling infants. It would be such a relief to be able to believe that. Miles's conversation with his Army friend is the book's clearest delineation of the paranoid mind at work. Even when you know the whole story, you aren't allowed to communicate it to those in authority . . . and it's hard to think with that buzzing in your head! Linked to this is the strong sense of xenophobia Finney's major characters feel. The pods really are "a threat to our way of life," as Joe McCarthy used to say. "They'll have to declare martial law," Jack tells Miles, "a state of siege, or somethinganything! And then do whatever has to be done. Root this thing out, smash it, crush it, kill it." Later, during their brief flight from Santa Mira, Miles and Jack discover two pods in the trunk of the car. This is how Miles describes what happens next And there they lay, in the advancing, retreating waves of flickering red light two enormous pods already burst open in one or two places, and I reached in with both hands, and tumbled them out onto the dirt. They were weightless as children's balloons, harsh and dry on my palms and fingers. At the feel of them on my skin, I lost my mind completely, and then I was trampling them, smashing and crushing them under my plunging feet and legs, not even knowing that I was uttering a sort of hoarse, meaningless cry"Unhh! Unhh! Unhh!"of fright and animal disgust. No friendly, stonedout hippies holding up signs reading STOP AND BE FRIENDLY here; here we have Miles and Jack, mostly out of their minds, doing the funky chicken over these weird and insensate invaders from space. There is no discussion (visvis The Thing) of what we could learn from these things to the benefit of modern science. There is no white flag here, no parley; Finney's aliens are as strange and as ugly as those bloated leeches you sometimes find clinging to your skin after swimming in still ponds. There is no reasoning here, nor any effort to reason; only Miles's blind and primitive reaction to the alien outsider. The book which most closely resembles Finney's is Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters; like Finney's novel, it is perhaps nominally sf but is in fact a horror novel. In this one, invaders from Saturn's largest moon, Titan, arrive on Earth, ready, willing, and able to do business. Heinlein's creatures are not pods; they are the leeches in actuality. They are sluglike creatures that ride on the backs of their hosts' necks the way that you or I might ride a horse. The two books are similarstrikingly soin many ways. Heinlein's narrator begins by wondering aloud if "they" were truly intelligent. He ends after the menace has been defeated. The narrator is one of those building and manning rocketships aimed at Titan; now that the tree has been chopped down, they will burn the roots. "Death and destruction!" the narrator exults, thus ending the book. But what exactly is the threat which the pods in Finney's novel pose? For Finney, the fact that they will mean the end of the human race seems almost secondary (pod people have no interest in what an old acquaintance of mine likes to refer to as "doing the trick"). The real horror, for Jack Finney, seems to be that they threaten all that "nice"and I think this is where we came in. On his way to his office not too long after the pod invasion is well launched, Miles describes the scenery this way . . . the look of Throckmorton Street depressed me. It seemed littered and shabby in the morning sun, a city trash basket stood heaped and unemptied from the day before, the globe of an overhead streetlight was broken, and a few doors down . . . a shop stood empty. The windows were whitened, and a clumsily painted For Rent sign stood leaning against the glass. It didn't say where to apply, though, and I had a feeling no one cared whether the store was ever rented again. A smashed wine bottle lay in the entranceway of my building, and the brass nameplate set in the gray stone of the building was mottled and unpolished. From Jack Finney's fiercely individualistic point of view, the worst thing about the Body Snatchers is that they will allow the nice little town of Santa Mira to turn into something resembling a subway station on Fortysecond Street in New York. Humans, Finney asserts, have a natural drive to create order out of chaos (which fits well enough with the book's paranoid themes). Humans want to improve the universe. These are oldfashioned ideas, perhaps, but Finney is a traditionalist, as Richard Gid Powers points out in his introduction to the Gregg Press edition of the novel. From where Finney stands, the scariest thing about the pod people is that chaos doesn't bother them a bit and they have absolutely no sense of aesthetics this is not an invasion of roses from outer space but rather an infestation of ragweed. The pod people are going to mow their lawns for awhile and then give it up. They don't give a shit about the crabgrass. They aren't going to be making any trips down to the Santa Mira True Value Hardware so they can turn that musty old basement annex into a rec room in the best doityourself tradition. A salesman who blows into town complains about the state of the roads. If they aren't patched soon, he says, Santa Mira will be cut off from the world. But do you think the pod people are going to lose any sleep over a little thing like that? Here's what Richard Gid Powers says in his introduction about Finney's outlook With the hindsight afforded by Finney's later books, it is easy to see what the critics overlooked [when they] interpreted both the book and the movie . . . simply as products of the antiCommunist hysteria of the McCarthyite fifties, a knownothing outburst against "alien ways of life" . . . that threatened the American way. Miles Bennell is a precursor of all the other traditionalist heroes of Jack Finney's later books, but in The Body Snatchers, Miles's town of Santa Mira, Marin County, California still is the unspoiled mythical gemeinschaft community that later heroes have had to travel through time to recapture. When Miles begins to suspect that his neighbors are no longer real human beings and are no longer capable of sincere human feelings, he is encountering the beginning of the insidious modernization and dehumanization that faces later Finney heroes as an accomplished fact. Miles Bennell's victory over the pods is fully consistent with the adventures of subsequent Finney characters his resistance to depersonalization is so fierce that the pods finally give up on their plans for planetary colonization and mosey off to another planet where the inhabitants' hold on their selfintegrity is not so strong. Further on, Powers has this to say about the archetypical Finney hero in general and the purposes of this book in particular Finney's heroes, particularly Miles Bennell, are all innerdirected individualists in an increasingly otherdirected world. Their adventures could be used as classroom illustrations of Tocqueville's theory about the plight of a free individual in a mass democracy . . . . The Body Snatchers is a raw and direct massmarket version of the despair over cultural dehumanization that fills T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland" and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Finney adroitly uses the classic science fiction situation of an invasion from outer space to symbolize the annihilation of the free personality in contemporary society . . . he succeeded in creating the most memorable of all pop cultural images of what jean Sheperd was describing on latenight radio as "creeping meatballism" fields of pods that hatch into identical, spiritless, emotional vacuous zombieswho look so damned much just like you and me! Finally, when we examine The Body Snatchers in light of the Tarot hand we have dealt ourselves, we find in Finney's novel almost every damned card. There is the Vampire, for surely those whom the pods have attacked and drained of life have become a modern, cultural version of the undead, as Richard Gid Powers points out; there is the Werewolf, for certainly these people are not really people at all, and have undergone a terrible sea change; the pods from space, a totally alien invasion of creatures who need no spaceships, can certainly also fit under the heading of the Thing Without a Name . . . and you might even say (if you wanted to stretch a point, and why the hell not?) that citizens of Santa Mira are no more than Ghosts of their former selves these days. Not bad legs for a book which is "just a story." 6 Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes defies any neat and easy categorization or analysis . . . and so far, at least, it has also defied the moviemakers, in spite of any number of options and scenarios, including Bradbury's own. This novel, originally published in 1962 and promptly given a critical pasting by critics in both the science fiction and fantasy genres, has gone on through two dozen printings since its original publication. For all of that, it has not been Bradbury's most successful book, or his bestknown one; The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and Dandelion Wine have probably all outsold it, and are certainly better known to the general reading public. But I believe that Something Wicked This Way Comes, a darkly poetic tall tale set in the halfreal, halfmythical community of Green Town, Illinois, is probably Bradbury's best worka shadowy descendant from that tradition that has brought us stories about Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, Pecos Bill, and Davy Crockett. It is not a perfect book; at times Bradbury lapses into the purple overwriting that has characterized too much of his work in the seventies. Some passages are selfimitative and embarrassingly fulsome. But that is a small part of the total work; in most cases Bradbury carries his story off with guts and beauty and panache. And it might be worth remembering that Theodore Dreiser, the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, was, like Bradbury, sometimes his own worst enemy . . . mostly because Dreiser never knew when to stop. "When you open your mouth, Stevie," my grandfather once said to me in despair, "all your guts fall out." I had no reply to that then, but I suppose if he were alive today, I would reply That's 'cause I want to be Theodore Dreiser when I grow up. Well, Dreiser was a great writer, and Bradbury seems to be the fantasy genre's version of Dreiser, although Bradbury's linebyline writing is better and his touch is lighter. Still, the two of them share a remarkable commonality. On the minus side, both show a tendency to not so much write about a subject as to bulldoze it into the ground . . . and once so bulldozed, Not much new in this. Writers in the fantasy and science fiction genres moan about the critical coverage they get from mainstream criticssometimes with justification, sometimes withoutbut the fact is most critics inside the genre are intellectual corks. The genre magazines have a long and ignoble history of roasting novels which are too large for the genres from which they've come; Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land took a similar pasting. both have a tendency to bludgeon the subject until all signs of movement have ceased. On the plus side, both Dreiser and Bradbury are American naturalists of a dark persuasion, and in a crazy sort of way they seem to bookend Sherwood Anderson, the American champ of naturalism. Both of them wrote of American people living in the heartland ( although Dreiser's heartland people come to the city while Bradbury's stay to home), of innocence coming heartbreakingly to experience ( although Dreiser's people usually break, while Bradbury's people remain, although changed, whole), and both speak in voices which are uniquely, even startlingly American. Both narrate in a clear English which remains informal while mostly eschewing idiomwhen Bradbury lapses occasionally into slang it startles us so much that he seems almost vulgar. Their voices are unmistakably American voices. The easiest difference to point out, and maybe the most unimportant, is that Dreiser is called a realist while Bradbury is known as a fantasist. Even worse, Bradbury's paperback publisher insists tiresomely on calling him "The World's Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer" (making him sound like one of the freaks in the shows he writes about so often) , when Bradbury has never written anything but the most nominal science fiction. Even in his space stories, he is not interested in negativeion drives or relativity converters. There are rockets, he says in the connected stories which form The Martian Chronicler, R Is for Rocket, and S Is for Space. That is all you need to know and is, therefore, all I am going to tell you. To this I would add that if you want to know how the rockets are going to work in any hypothetical future, turn to Larry Niven or Robert Heinlein; if you want literature stories, to use Jack Finney's wordabout what the future might hold, you must go to Ray Bradbury or perhaps to Kurt Vonnegut. What powers the rockets is Popular Mechanics stuff. The province of the writer is what powers the people. All that said, it is impossible to talk of Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is most certainly not science fiction, without putting Bradbury's lifework in some sort of perspective. His best work, from the beginning, has been his fantasy . . . and his best fantasy has been his horror stories. As previously mentioned, the best of the early Bradbury was collected in tile marvelous Arkham House collection Dark Carnival. No easily obtainable edition of this work, the Dubliners of American fantasy fiction, is available. |
Many of the stories originally published in Dark Carnival can be found in a later collection, The October Country, which is available in paper. Included are such short Bradbury classics of gutchilling horror as "The Jar," "The Crowd," and the unforgettable "Small Assassin." Other Bradbury stories published in the forties were so horrible that the author now repudiates them (some were adapted as comics stories and published, with a younger Bradbury's permission, in E.C.'s The Crypt of Terror). One of these involves an undertaker who performs hideous but curiously moral atrocities upon his "clients"for instance, when three old biddies who loved to gossip maliciously are killed in an accident, the undertaker chops off their heads and buries these three heads together, mouth to ear and ear to mouth, so they can enjoy a hideous kaffeeklatsch throughout eternity. Of how his own life influenced the writing of Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury says "[ Something Wicked This Way Comes] sums up my entire life of loving Lon Chaney and the magicians and grotesques he played in the twenties films. My mom took me to see Hunchback in 1923 when I was three. It marked me forever. Phantom [ of the Opera] when I was six. Same thing. East of Zanzibar when I was about eight. Magician turns himself into a skeleton in front of black natives! Incredible! The Unholy Three ditto! Chaney took over my life. I was a raving film maniac long before I hit my eighth year. I became a fulltime magician after seeing Blackstone on stage in Waukegan, my home town in upper Illinois, when I was nine. When I was twelve, MR. ELECTRICO arid 1115 traveling Electric Chair arrived with the Dill Brothers Sideshows and Carnival. That was his real' name. I got to know him. Sat by the lakeshore and talked grand philosophies . . . he his small ones, me my grandiose supersized ones about futures and magic. We corresponded several times. He lived in Cairo, Illinois, and was, he said, a defrocked Presbyterian minister. I wish I could remember his Christian name. But his letters have long since been lost in the years, though small magic tricks he gave me I still have. Anyway, magic and magicians and Chaney and libraries have filled my life. Libraries are the real birthing places of the universe for me. I lived in my hometown library more than I did at home. I loved it at night, prowling the stacks on my fat panther feet. All of that went into Something Wicked, which began as a short story in Weird Tales called "Black Ferris" in May, 1948, and just grew like Topsy . . . Bradbury has continued to publish fantasy throughout his career, and although the Christian Science Monitor called Something Wicked This Way Comes a "nightmarish allegory," Bradbury really settles for allegory only in his science fiction. In his fantasy, his preoccupation has been with theme, character, symbol . . . and that fantastic rush that comes to the writer of fantasy when he puts the pedal to the metal, yanks back on the steering wheel, and drives his jalopy straight up into the black night of unreality. Bradbury relates it this way "[Black Ferris' became] a screenplay in 1958 the night I saw Gene Kelly's Invitation to the Dance and so much wanted to work for and with him [that] I rushed home, finished up an outline of Dark Carnival ( its then title) and ran it over to his house. Kelly flipped, said he would direct it, went off to Europe to find money, never found any, came back discouraged, gave me back my screen treatment, some eighty pages or more, and told me Good Luck. I said to hell with it and sat down and spent two years, off and on, finishing Something Wicked. Along the way, I said all and everything, just about, that I would ever want to say about my younger self and how I felt about that terrifying thing Life, and that other terror Death, and the exhilaration of both. "But, above all, I did a loving thing without knowing it. I wrote a paean to my father. I didn't realize it until one night in 1965, a few years after the novel had been published. Sleepless, I got up and prowled my library, found the novel, reread certain portions, burst into tears. My father was locked into the novel, forever, as the father in the book! I wish he had lived to read himself there and be proud of his bravery in behalf of his loving son. "Even writing this, I am touched again to remember with what a burst of joy and agony I found that my Dad was there, forever, forever for me anyway, locked on paper, kept in print, and beautiful to behold. "I don't know what else to say. I loved every minutes of writing it. I took six months off between drafts. I never tire myself. I just let my subconscious throw up when it feels like it. "I love the book best of all the things I have ever written. I will love it, and the people in it, Dad and Mr. Electrico, and Will and Jim, the two halves of myself sorely tired and tempted, until the end of my days." Maybe the first thing we notice in Something Wicked This Way Comes is Bradbury's splitting of those two halves of himself. Will Halloway, the "good" boy (well, both of them are good, but Will's friend Jim goes astray for awhile), is born on October 30, a minute before midnight. Jim Nightshade is born two minutes later . . . a minute past midnight on Halloween morning. Will is Apollonian, a creature of reason and plan, a believer (mostly) in the status quo and the norm. Jim Nightshade, as his name implies, is the Dionysian half, a creature of emotion, something of a nihilist, hellbent for destruction, ready to spit in the devil's face just to see if the spittle will steam and sizzle running down the Dark Lord's cheek. When the lightning rod salesman comes to town at the beginning of Bradbury's fabulous tale ( "running just ahead of the storm") and tells the boys that lightning will strike Jim's house, Will has to persuade Jim to put the lightning rod up. Jim's initial reaction is "Why spoil the fun?" The symbolism of the times of birth is large, crude, and apparent; so is the symbolism of the lightning rod salesman, who arrives as a harbinger of bad times. Bradbury pulls it off nonetheless, mostly out of sheer fearlessness. He deals his archetypes large, like those bridgesized cards. In Bradbury's story an ancient carnival, marvelously named Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, arrives in Green Town, bringing misery and horror under the guise of pleasure and wonder. Will Halloway and Jim Nightshadeand later, Will's father, Charles, as wellwise up to exactly what this particular carnival is all about. The tale eventually narrows down to the struggle for a single soul, that of Jim Nightshade. To call it an allegory would be wrong, but to call it a moral horror talemuch in the manner of those E.C. horror tales which foreran itwould be exactly right. In effect, what happens to Jim and Will is not so much different from Pinocchio's scary encounter on Pleasure Island, where boys who indulge their baser desires ( smoking cigars and shooting snooker, for instance) are turned into donkeys. Bradbury in writing here of carnal enticementsnot just sexual carnality, but carnality in its broadest forms and manifestationsthe pleasures of the flesh run as wild as the tattooed illustrations which cover Mr. Dark's body. The one reference to sexual carnality here occurs during the business of the Theater, which Bradbury declined to discuss in his letter to me, although I asked him if he would be so kind as to elaborate a bit. It remains one of the book's most tantalizing episodes. Jim and Will discover the Theater, Bradbury says, on the upper floor of a house "while they were monkeyclimbing for the sourest apples." Bradbury tells us that looking into the Theater changed everything, including the taste of the fruit, and while I have a tendency to bolt at the first stench of graduateschool analysis like a horse smelling good water polluted with alkali, the appleandEden metaphor here is too strong to be denied. What exactly is going on in this secondor thirdfloor room, this "Theater" that changed the taste of the apples, that so fascinates Jim of the dark name and his friend, whose Christian name is so associated with our supposed ability (our supposed Christian ability) to consciously command goodness in any given situation? Bradbury suggests that the Theater is one room in a whorehouse. The people inside are naked; they "let fall clothes to the rug, stood raw and animalcrazy, naked, like shivering horses . . ." If so, it is the book's most telling foreshadowing of the carnal deviation from the norm which so strongly attracts Jim Nightshade as he stands on the threshold of adolescence. What saves Bradbury's novel from being merely a "nightmarish allegory" or a simplistic fairy story is its grasp of story and style. Bradbury's style, so attractive to me as an adolescent, now seems a bit oversweet. But it still wields a considerable power. Here is one of the passages which seems oversweet to me And Will? Why, he's the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dimestore pencilsharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? and one that seems just right The wails of a lifetime were gathered in [that trainwhistle] from other nights in other slumbering years; the howls of moondreamed dogs, the sleep of rivercold winds through January porch screens which stopped the blood, a thousand firesirens weeping, or worse! the outgone shreds of breath, the protests of a billion people dead or dying, not wanting to be dead, their groans, their sighing, burst over the earth! Man, that's a train whistle! I want to tell you! More clearly than any other book discussed here, Something Wicked This Way Comes reflects the differences between the Apollonian life and the Dionysian. Bradbury's carnival, which creeps inside the town limits and sets up shop in a meadow at three o'clock in the morning ( Fitzgerald's dark night of the soul, if you like), is a symbol of everything that is abnormal, mutated, monstrous . . . Dionysian. I've always wondered if the appeal of the vampire myth for children doesn't lie partly in the simple fact that vampires get to sleep all day and stay up all night ( vampires never have to miss Creature Features at midnight because of school the next day). Similarly, we know that part of this carnival's attraction for Jim and Will (sure, Will feels its pull too, although not as strongly as his friend Jim feels it; even Will's father is not entirely immune from its deadly siren song) is that there will be no set bedtimes, no rules and regulations, no dull and boring small town day after day, no "eat your broccoli, think of the people starving in China," no school. The carnival is chaos, it is the taboo land made magically portable, traveling from place to place and even from time to time with its freight of freaks and its glamorous attractions. The boys (sure, Jim too) represent just the opposite. They are normal, not mutated, not monstrous. They live their lives by the rules of the sunlit world, Will willingly, Jim impatiently. Which is exactly why the carnival wants them. The essence of evil, Bradbury suggests, is its need to compromise and corrupt that delicate passage from innocence to experience that all children must make. In the rigid moral world of Bradbury's fiction, the freaks who populate the carnival have taken on the outward shapes of their inward vices. Mr. Cooger, who has lived for thousands of years, pays for his life of dark degeneracy by becoming a Thing even more ancient, ancient almost beyond our ability to comprehend, kept alive by a steady flow of electricity. The Human Skeleton is paying for miserliness of feeling; the fat lady for physical or emotional gluttony; the dust witch for her gossipy meddling in the lives of others. The carnival has done to them what the undertaker in that old Bradbury horror story did to his victims after they had died. On its Apollonian side, the book asks us to recall and reexamine the facts and myths of our own childhoods, most specifically our smalltown American childhoods. Written in a semipoetic style that seems to suit such concerns perfectly, Bradbury examines these childhood concerns and comes to the conclusion that only children are equipped to deal with childhood's myths and terrors and exhalations. In his midfifties story "The Playground," a man who returns magically to childhood is propelled into a world of lunatic horror which is only, after all, the corner playground with its sandboxes and its slippery slide. In Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury interconnects this smalltown American boyhood motif with most of the ideas of the new American gothic which we have already discussed to some extent. Will and Jim are essentially okay, essentially Apollonian, riding easy in their childhoods and used to looking at the world from their shorter height. But when their teacher, Miss Foley, returns .to childhoodthe first of the carnival's Green Town victimsshe enters a world of monotonous, unending horror which is not much different from that experienced by the protagonist of "The Playground." The boys discover Miss Foleyor what remains of herunder a tree . . . . and there was the little girl, crouched, face buried in her hands, weeping as if the town were gone and the people in it and herself lost in a terrible woods. And at last Jim came edging up and stood at the edge of the shadow and said, "Who is it?" "I don't know." But Will felt tears start to his eyes, as if some part of him guessed. "It's not jenny Holdridge, is it?" "No." "Jane Franklin?" "No." His mouth felt full of novocaine, his tongue merely stirred in his numb lips. ". . . no . . ." The little girl wept feeling them near, but not looking up yet. . . . me . . . help me . . . nobody'll help me . . . me . . . me . . . I don't like this . . . somebody must help me . . . someone must help her . . ." she mourned as for one dead, ". . . someone must help her . . . nobody will . . . nobody has . . . terrible . . . terrible . . . The carnival "attraction" which has accomplished this malign trick is one that both Narcissus and Eleanor Vance could relate to Miss Foley has been trapped in the carnival's mirror maze, imprisoned by her own reflection. Forty or fifty years have been jerked out from under her and she has been tumbled back into her own childhood . . . just what she thought she wanted. She had not considered the possibility of the nameless little girl weeping under the tree. Jim and Will avoid this fatebarelyand even manage to rescue Miss Foley on her first foray into the mirror maze. One supposes it is not the maze itself but the carousel that has actually accomplished her doubling back in time; the mirrors in the maze show you a time of life you think you'd like to have again, and the carousel actually accomplishes it. The carousel can add a year to your age each time you go around forward or make you a year younger for every circle you make on it going backward. The carousel is Bradbury's interesting and workable metaphor for all of life's passages, and the fact that he darkens this ride, which is often associated with the sunniest pleasure we know as children, to fit the motif of this particular black carnival, causes other uneasy associations to come to mind. When we see the innocent merrygoround with its prancing horses in this nether light, it may suggest to us that if time's passages are to be compared to a merrygoround ride, then we see that each year's revolution is essentially the same as the last; it perhaps causes us to remember how fleeting and ephemeral such a ride is; and most of all it reminds us that the brass ring, which we have all tried so hard and fruitlessly to catch, is kept deliberately, tauntingly, out of reach. In terms of the new American gothic, we can see that the mirror maze is the catchtrap, the place where too much selfexamination and morbid introspection persuades Miss Foley to step over the line into abnormality. In Bradbury's worldthe world of Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Showthere are no options first caught in the glass of Narcissus, you then find yourself riding a dangerous carousel charger backwards into an untenable past or forward into an untenable future. Shirley Jackson uses the conventions of the new American gothic to examine character under extreme psychologicalor perhaps occultpressure; Peter Straub uses them to examine the effects of an evil past upon the present; Anne Rivers Siddons uses them to examine social codes and social pressures; Bradbury uses these selfsame conventions in order to offer us a moral judgment. In describing Miss Foley's terror and grief in attaining the childhood she so desired, Bradbury goes far toward defusing the potential flood of stickysweet romanticism that might have destroyed his tale . . . and I think this defusing reinforces the moral judgments he makes. In spite of imagery that sometimes swamps us instead of uplifting us, he manages to retain his own clear point of view. This isn't to say Bradbury doesn't make a romantic myth of childhood, because he sure does. Childhood itself is a myth for almost all of us. We think we remember what happened to us when we were kids, but we don't. The reason is simple we were crazy then. Looking back into this well of insanity as adults who are, if not totally insane, then at least neurotic instead of outandout psychotic, we attempt to make sense of things which made no sense, read importance into things which had no importance, and remember motivations which simply didn't exist. This is where the process of myth making begins. Rather than trying to row against this strong current (as Golding and Hughes do), Bradbury uses it in Something Wicked This Way Comes; blending the myth of childhood with the myth of the dreamfather, whose part is played here by Will's dad, Charles Halloway . . . and, if Bradbury himself is to be believed, who is also played by that Illinois powerlinesman who was Ray Bradbury's Dad. Halloway is a librarian who lives his own life of dreams, who is enough boy to understand Will and Jim, but who is also enough adult to provide, in the end, what the boys cannot provide for themselves, that final ingredient in our perception of Apollonian morality, normality, and rectitude simple accountability. The only novels I can think of that avoid making childhood into a myth or a fairy tale and still succeed wonderfully as stories are William Golding's Lord of the Flier and A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. Someone will write me a letter and suggest that I should have added either Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden or Beryl Bainbridge's Harriet Said, but I think that, in their differing ways (but uniquely British outlook), both of these short novels romanticize childhood as thoroughly as Bradbury ever did. Childhood is the time, Bradbury insists, when you are still able to believe in things you know cannot be true "It's not true anyway," Will gasped. "Carnivals don't come this late in the year. Silly darnsounding thing. Who'd go to it?" "Me." Jim stood quiet in the dark. Me, thought Will, seeing the guillotine flash, the Egyptian mirrors unfold accordions of light, and the sulphurskinned devilman sipping lava, like gunpowder tea. They simply believe; their hearts are still capable of overruling their heads. They are still sure that they will be able to sell enough boxes of greeting cards or tins of Cloverine Salve to get a bike or a stereo, that the toy will really do all the things you saw it do on TV and that "you can put it together in just a matter of minutes with a few simple tools," or that the monster picture going on inside the theater will be as scary and wonderful as the posters and stills outside. That's okay; in Bradbury's world the myth is ultimately stronger than the reality, and the heart stronger than the head. Will and Jim stand revealed, not as the sordid, dirty, frightened boys of Lord of the Flies, but as creatures built almost entirely of myth, a dream of childhood which becomes more believable than reality in Bradbury's hand. Through noon after noon, they had screamed up half the rides, knocked over dirty milk bottles, smashed kewpiedollwinning plates, smelling, listening, looking their way through the autumn crowd trampling the leafy sawdust . . . Where did they come by the wherewithal for their day at the fair? Most kids in a similar situation have to count their finances and then go through an agonizing process of picking and choosing; Jim and Will apparently do everything. But once again, it's okay. They are our representatives in the forgotten land of childhood, and their apparently endless supply of cash (plus their deadeye aim at the china plates and pyramids of milk bottles) are accepted with delight and little or no rational hesitation. We believe as we once believed that Pecos Bill dug the Grand Canyon one day when he came home tired, thus dragging his pick and shovel behind him instead of carrying them over his shoulder. They are in terror, but it is the unique ability of these mythchildren to enjoy their terror. "They both stopped to enjoy the swift pound of each other's heart," Bradbury relates. Cooger and Dark become Bradbury's myth of evil, threatening these children not as gangsters or kidnappers or any realistic bad guys; Cooger is more like Old Pew returned from Treasure Island, his blindness exchanged for a hideous fall of years that has been dropped upon him when the carousel goes wild. When he hisses at Will and Jim, "A . . . sssshort . . . sad life . . . for you both!" we feel the sort of comfortable chill we felt when the Black Spot was first passed at the Admiral Benbow. Their hiding from the emissaries of the carnival, who come into town looking for them under the pretense of a free parade, becomes Bradbury's best summation of this childhood remembered in myth; the childhood that might really have existed in short bursts between long stretches of boredom and such cheesy chores as carrying wood, doing dishes, putting out the trash, or sitting baby brother or sister ( and it's probably significant to this idea of the dreamchild that both Jim and Will are only children). They . . . hid in old garages, they . . . hid in old barns . . . in the highest trees they could climb and got bored and boredom was worse than fear so they came down and reported in to the Police Chief and had a fine chat which gave them twenty safe minutes right in the station and Will got the idea of touring churches and they climbed all the steeples in town and scared pigeons off the belfries . . . . But there again they began to get starchy with boredom and fatigued with sameness, and were almost on the point of giving themselves up to the carnival in order to have something to do, when quite fortunately the sun went down. The only effective foil for Bradbury's dreamchildren is Charles Halloway, the dreamfather. In the character of Charles Halloway we find attractions which only fantasy, with its strong mythmaking abilities, can give us. Three points about him are worth mentioning, I think. First, Charles Halloway understands the myth of childhood the two boys are living; for all of us who grew up and parted with some bitterness from our parents because we felt they didn't understand our youth, Bradbury gives us a portrait of the sort of parent we felt we deserved. His reactions are those which few real parents can ever afford to have. His parenting instincts are apparently supernaturally alert. Early on, he sees the boys running home from watching the carnival set up, and calls their names softly under his breath . . . but does no more. Nor does he mention it to Will later, although the two boys have been out at three o'clock in the morning. He's not worried that they've been out scoring dope or mugging old ladies or shtupping their girl friends. He knows they have been out on boys' business, walking the night as boys sometimes will . . . and he lets it go. Second, Charles Halloway comes by his understanding legitimately; he is still living the myth himself. Your father cannot be your pal very successfully, the psychology texts tell us, but there are few fathers, I think, who have not longed to be buddies with their sons, and few sons who have not wished for a buddy in their fathers. When Charles Halloway discovers that Jim and Will have nailed rungs under the climbing ivy on their respective houses so they can escape and reenter their bedrooms after bedtime, he does not demand that the rungs be torn down; his response is admiring laughter and an admonition that the boys not use the rungs unless they really have to. When Will tells his father in agony that no one will believe them if they try to explain what really happened in Miss Foley's house, where the evil nephew Robert (who is really Mr. Cooger, looking much younger since he has been reissued) framed them for a robbery, Halloway says simply, "I'll believe." He will believe because he is really just one of the boys and the sense of wonder has not died within him. Much later, while rummaging through his pockets, Charles Halloway almost seems like the world's oldest Tom Sawyer And Will's father stood up, stuffed his pipe with tobacco, rummaged his pockets for matches, brought out a battered harmonica, a penknife, a cigarette lighter that wouldn't work, and a memo pad he had always meant to write great thoughts down on but had never got around to . . . . Almost everything, in fact, except a dead rat and a string to swing it on. Third, Charles Halloway is the dreamfather because he is, in the end, accountable. He can switch hats, in the blink of an eye, from that of the child to that of the adult. He proves his accountability and responsibility by a simple symbolic act when Mr. Dark asks, Halloway gives him his name. "A fine day to you, sir!" No, Dad ! thought Will. The Illustrated Man came back. "Your name, sir?" he asked directly. Don't tell him! thought Will. Will's father debated a moment, took the cigar from his mouth, tapped ash and said quietly "Halloway. Work in the library. Drop by sometime." "You can be sure, Mr. Halloway. I will." . . . [Halloway] was also gazing with surprise at himself, accepting the surprise, the new purpose, which was half despair, half serenity, now that the incredible deed was done. Let no one ask why he had given his true name; even he could not assay and give its real weight . . . . But isn't it most likely that he has given his true name because the boys cannot? He must front for themwhich he does admirably. And when Jim's dark wishes finally lead him into what seems utter ruin, it is Halloway who emerges, first destroying the fearsome Dust Witch, then Mr. Dark himself, and finally leading the fight for Jim's life and soul. Something Wicked This Way Comes is probably not Bradbury's best work overallI believe he has always found the novel a difficult form to work inbut its mythic interests are so well suited to Bradbury's dreamy, semipoetic prose that it succeeds wonderfully and becomes one of those books about childhood (like Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, Stevenson's Treasure Island, Cormier's The Chocolate War, and Thomas Williams's Tsuga's Children, to name just a few) that adults should take down once in awhile . . . not just to give to their own children, but in order to touch base again themselves with childhood's brighter perspectives and darker dreams. Bradbury has introduced his novel with a quotation from Yeats "Man is in love, and loves what vanishes." He adds others, but we will perhaps agree that the line from Yeats is text enough . . . but let Bradbury himself have the final word, concerning one of Green Town's fascinations for the two dreamchildren of whom he has written; "As for my gravestone? I would like to borrow that great barberpole from out front of the town shoppe, and have it run at midnight if you happened to drop by my mound to say hello. And there the old barberpole would be, lit, its bright ribbons twining up out of mystery, turning, and twining away up into further mysteries, forever. And if you come to visit, leave an apple for the ghosts." An apple . . . or maybe a dead rat and a string to swing it on. 7 Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man (1956) is another case of a fantasy novel packaged as science fiction in a rationalistic decade when even dreams had to have some sort of basis in realityand this mislabeling of the book has continued right up to the present, for no good reason other than this is how publishers do things. "One of the most incredible Science Fiction classics of all time!" booms the cover of the recent Berkley reissue, ignoring the fact that a story in which a man shrinks at the steady rate of oneseventh of an inch a day has really gone beyond even the furthest realms of science fiction. Matheson, like Bradbury, has no real interest in hard science fiction. He brings forth an obligatory amount of mumbojumbo (my favorite is when a doctor exclaims over Scott Carey's "incredible catabolism") and then drops it. We know that the process which eventually results in Scott Carey's being chased through his own basement by a black widow spider begins when he is doused by a curtain of sparkling radioactive spray; the radioactivity interacts with some bug spray he had ingested into his system a few days earlier. It is this double play that has caused the shrinking process to begin. It is the most minimal nod at rationality, a midtwentiethcentury version of pentagrams, mystic passes, and evil spells. Luckily for us, Matheson, like Bradbury, is more interested in Scott Carey's heart and mind than in his incredible catabolism. It's worth noting that in The Shrinking Man we're back to the old radioactive blues again, and to the idea that horror fiction helps us to externalize in symbolic form whatever is really troubling us. It is impossible to see The Shrinking Man separated from its background of Abomb tests, ICBMs, the "missile gap," and strontiumgo in the milk. If we look at it this way, Matheson's novel (his second published book, according to John Brosnan and John Clute, who collaborated on Matheson's entry in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, citing Matheson's I Am Legend as the first; I believe they may have overlooked an earlier Richard Matheson novel, a war story titled The Beardless Warriors) is no more science fiction than such Big Bug movies as The Deadly Mantis or Beginning of the End. But Matheson is doing more in The Shrinking Man than having radioactive nightmares; the title of Matheson's novel alone suggests bad dreams of a more Freudian nature. Concerning The Body Snatchers, we'll remember Richard Gid Powers saying that Miles Bennell's victory over the pods is a direct result of Miles's resistance against depersonalization, his fierce individualism, and his defense of more traditional American values. These same things can be said about the Matheson novel, with one important variation. It seems to me that Nor is this the only time that these two very different writers have taken up a similar theme. Both have written timetravel stories of men who are driven to escape a terrible present for a friendlier past Finney's Time and Again (1970), in which the hero returns to turnofthecentury times on America's east coast, and Matheson's Bid Time Return (1975), in which the hero returns to turnofthe century times on America's west coast. In both cases, their desire to escape what Powers calls "cultural depersonalization" is a factor, but more different treatments of the ideaand different outcomescannot be imagined. |
while Powers is right in suggesting that The Body Snatchers is in large part about the depersonalization, even the annihilation of the free personality in our society, The Shrinking Man is a story about the free personality's loss of power and growing impotency in a world increasingly controlled by machines, red tape, and a balance of terror where future wars are planned with one eye always cocked toward an "acceptable kill ratio." In Scott Carey we see one of the most inspired and original symbols of this modern devaluation of human currency ever created. Carey muses at one point that he is not shrinking at all; that instead, the world is growing larger. But seen either waydevaluation of the individual or inflation of the environmentthe result is the same as Scott shrinks, he retains his essential individuality but gradually loses more and more control over his world anyway. Also like Finney, Matheson sees his work as "just a story," and one he is not even particularly in touch with anymore. His comments "I started working on the book in 1955. It was the only book I ever wrote back eastif you exclude a novel I wrote when I was sixteen and living in Brooklyn. Things had been going badly out here [in California] and I though it might be a good idea to be back east and close to editors for the sake of my career; I had given up on the idea of getting into movies. Actually, there was nothing rational in the move. I was just fed up out here on the coast and talked myself into going back east. My family was there. My brother had a business there and I knew I could get some work for us to live on if I couldn't sell any writing. So we went. We were renting a house at Sound Beach on Long Island when I wrote the book. I had gotten the idea several years earlier while attending a movie in a Redondo Beach theater. It was a silly comedy with Ray Milland and Jane Wyman and Aldo Ray and, in this particular scene, Ray Milland, leaving Jane's apartment in a huff, accidentally put on Aldo Ray's hat, which sank down around his ears. Something in me asked, What would happen if a man put on a hat which he knew was his and the same thing happened?' Thus the notion came. "The entire novel was written in the cellar of the rented house on Long Island. I did a shrewd thing in that. I didn't alter the cellar at all. In The Shrinking Man, Scott Carey's life becomes an everlouder, ever more discordant medley of anxieties; one of the greatest is the shrinking money supply and his inability to support his family as he always has. I won't say that Matheson has done anything so simple as transferring his own feelings at the time to his character, but I will suggest that perhaps Matheson's own frustrations at the time enabled him to write Carey's character that much more convincingly. There was a rocking chair down there and, every morning, I would go down into the cellar with my pad and pencil and I would imagine what my hero was up to that day. I didn't have to keep the environment in my mind or keep notes. I had it ail there, frozen. It was intriguing, when I watched them shoot the film, to see the cellar set because it reminded me a good deal of the cellar in Sound Beach and I had a momentary, enjoyable sense of dj vu. "It took me about two and a half months to write the novel. I originally used the structure the movie did, starting with the beginning of the shrinking process. This didn't work as it took too long to get to 'the good stuff.' So I recast the storyline to get the reader into the cellar immediately. Recently, when I thought they were going to do a remake of the film and I thought they wanted me to do it, I decided I would revert to the original structure because, in [the film], as in my original manuscript, 'the good stuff' took awhile to get to. But it turned out they were going to make it into a comedy with Lily Tomlin and I wasn't going to write it anyway. John Landis was going to direct it at the time and he wanted all the sciencefantasy people out here to play minor parts in the film. He wanted me to play a pharmacist who . . . won't give a prescription to Lily Tomlin who is so small at the time that she is sitting on the shoulder of an intelligent gorilla (shows you how they changed the original idea). I demurred. As a matter of fact, the opening of the script is almost like my original one to the point of actual dialogue. Later, it deviates wildly . . . . "I don't think the book means anything to me at this time. None of my work does from this distant past. I think I prefer I Am Legend if I had to choose but they are both too far from me to have any significance in particular . . . . Accordingly, I wouldn't change anything about The Shrinking Man. It is a part of my history. I have no reason to change it, only to look at it without much interest and be pleased at whatever stir it made. I just read the first story I ever sold the other day'Born of Man and Woman'[and] I cannot relate to the story at all. I remember writing certain phrases but it was someone else who wrote them. I'm sure you feel that way about the early stuff you wrote. Matheson's hero, Scott Carey, also goes down into the cellar every day with his pad and pencil; he too is writing a book (these days, isn't everybody?). Scott's book is about his experiences as the world's only shrinking man, and it provides for his family quite adequately . . . as Matheson's own book and the subsequent film made from it did for Matheson's own family, one supposes. As a matter of fact, I do. My first novel, Carrie, was written under difficult personal circumstances, and the book dealt with characters so unpleasant and so alien to my own outlook as to seem almost like Martians. When I pick up the book nowwhich is seldomit does not seem as if someone else had written it, but I do get a peculiar sort of feeling from it . . . as if I had written it while suffering from a bad case of mental and emotional flu. " The Shrinking Man only recently had a hardcover edition. Now it is being printed by the Science Fiction Book Club too. Up to then it was strictly softcover . . . . Actually, I Am Legend is much more science fiction than The Shrinking Man. It has a lot of research in it. The science in The Shrinking Man is strictly gobbledegook. Well, I did .come asking around and reading but I hardly had a great rationale for Scott Carey's shrinking. And I wince daily . . . that I made him shrink 17" a day instead of geometrically and that I had him worry about falling from heights when it wouldn't have hurt him. Well, to hell with it. I wouldn't have written Born of Man and Woman' a few years later either because it is so illogical. What difference does it make really? "As I said, I enjoyed writing the book . . . because I was like Scott Carey's Boswell, watching him each day as he made his way around the cellar. I had a piece of cake with my coffee the first few days of writing and I laid it on the shelf and soon it became a part of the story. I think that some of the incidents during his shrinking period are pretty goodthe man who picks him up when he hitchhikes, the midget, the boys chasing him, his deteriorating marriage relationship." A summary of The Shrinking Man is easy to render if we view it in the linear fashion Matheson suggests. After going through the sparkling cloud of radioactivity, Carey begins to lose a seventh of an inch a day, or roughly one foot per season. As Matheson suggests, this smacks of expediency, but as he also suggests, what does it matter as long as we realize that this is not hard science fiction and that it bears no resemblance to novels and stories by writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, or Larry Niven? It is not exactly sensible that the children in the C. S. Lewis tale should be able to reach another world by going through a bedroom closet, either, but that is exactly what happens in the Narnia stories. It is not the technicalities of shrinking that we are interested in, and the inchperweek pattern at least enables us to keep our own mental yardstick on Scott Carey. We are given Scott's adventures in flashbacks as his shrinks; the main action takes place in what Scott assumes is his last week of life, as he shrinks from one inch down to nothing. He has gotten trapped in the cellar while trying to escape his own housecat and a garden sparrow. There's something particularly chilling in Scott's desperate duel with Puss; does anyone have the slightest doubt about what would happen if we were suddenly changed to a height of seven inches tall by malign magic and yon kitty curled up by the fire woke up and happened to see us skittering across the floor? Cats, those amoral gunslingers of the animal world, are maybe the scariest mammals going. I wouldn't want to be up against one in a situation like that. Perhaps above all else, Matheson excels at the depiction of one man alone, locked in a desperate struggle against a force or forces bigger than himself. Here is the conclusion of Scott's battle with the bird that knocks him into his cellar prison He stood up, flinging more snow at the bird, seeing the snow splatter off its dark, flaring beak. The bird flapped back. Scott turned and struggled a few more strides, then the bird was on him again, wet wings pounding at his head. He slapped wildly at it and felt his hands strike the bony sides of its beak. It flew off again . . . . Until, finally, cold and dripping, he stood with his back to the cellar window, hurling snow at the bird in the desperate hope that it would give up and he wouldn't have to jump into the imprisoning cellar. But the bird kept coming, diving at him, hovering before him, the sound of its wings like wet sheets flapping in a heavy wind. Suddenly the jabbing beak was hammering at his skull, slashing skin, knocking him back against the house . . . . He picked up snow and threw it, missing. The wings were still beating at his face; the beak gashed his face again. With a stricken cry, Scott whirled and leaped for the open square. He crawled across it dizzily. The leaping bird knocked him through. When the bird knocks Scott into the cellar, the man is seven inches tall. Matheson has made it clear that the novel is, to a large extent, a simple comparison of the macrocosm and the microcosm, and his hero's seven weeks in this lower world are a tiny capsule of experience which exactly mimes what he has already been through in a larger world. When he falls into the cellar, he is its king; he is able to exert his own human power over the environment with no real trouble. But as he continues to shrink, his power begins to wane once again . . . and the Nemesis appears. The spider rushed at him across the shadowed sands, scrabbling wildly on its stalklike legs. Its body was a giant, glossy egg that trembled blackly as it charged across the windless mounds, its wake a score of sandtrickling scratches . . . the spider was gaining on him, its pulsing egg of a body perched on running legsan egg whose yolk swam with killing poisons. He raced on, breathless, terror in his veins. In Matheson's view, macrocosm and microcosm are terms which are ultimately interchangeable, and all of Scott's problems throughout the shrinking process become symbolized in the black widow spider which also shares Scott's cellar world. When Scott discovers the one thing in his life which has not shrunk, his ability to think and plan, he also discovers a source of power which is immutable no matter which cosm it happens to exist in. His escape from a cellar, which Matheson succeeds in making as strange and frightening as any alien world, follows . . . and his final heartening discovery "that to nature there was no zero," and that there is a place where the macrocosm and the microcosm eventually meet. The Shrinking Man can be read simply enough as a great adventure storyit is certainly one of that select handful that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading ( others would include Bloch's The Scarf, Tolkien's The Hobbit, Berton Rouch's Feral). But there's more going on in Matheson's novel than just adventure, a kind of surreal Outward Bound program for little people. On a more thoughtful level, it is a short novel which deals in a thoughtprovoking way with concepts of powerpower lost and power found. Let me pull back from the Matheson book brieflylike Douglas MacArthur, I shall returnand make the following wild statement all fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it. Mediocre fantasy fiction generally appeals to people who feel a decided shortage of power in their own lives and obtain a vicarious shot of it by reading stories of strongthewed barbarians whose extraordinary prowess at fighting is only excelled by their extraordinary prowess at fucking; in these stories we are apt to encounter a sevenfoottall hero fighting his way up the alabaster stairs of some ruined temple, a flashing sword in one hand and a scantily clad beauty lolling over his free arm. This sort of fiction, commonly called "sword and sorcery" by its fans, is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a pretty tacky feel; mostly it's the Hardy Boys dressed up in animal skins and rated R ( and with cover art by Jeff Jones, as likely as not). Sword and sorcery novels and stories are tales of power for the powerless. The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his potbelly miraculously gone, his slack muscles magically transmuted into those "iron thews" which have been sung and storied in the pulps for the last fifty years. The only writer who really got away with this sort of stuff was Robert E. Howard, a peculiar genius who lived and died in rural Texas ( Howard committed suicide as his mother lay comatose and terminally ill, apparently unable to face life without her). Howard overcame the limitations of his puerile material by the force and fury of his writing and by his imagination, which was powerful beyond his hero Conan's wildest dreams of power. In his best work, Howard's writing seems so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks. Stories such as "The People of the Black Circle" glow with the fierce and eldritch light of his frenzied intensity. At his best, Howard was the Thomas Wolfe of fantasy, and most of his Conan tales seem to almost fall over themselves in their need to get out. Yet his other work was either unremarkable or just abysmal . . . . The word will hurt and anger his legion of fans, but I don't believe any other word fits. Robert Bloch, one of Howard's contemporaries, suggested in his first letter to Weird Tales that even Conan wasn't that much shakes. Bloch's idea was that Conan should be banished to the outer darkness where he could use his sword to cut out paper dolls. Needless to say, this suggestion did not go over well with the marching hordes of Conan fans; they probably would have lynched poor Bob Bloch on the spot, had they caught up with him back there in Milwaukee. Even below the sword and sorcery stories are the superheroes who populate the comic magazines of the only two remaining giants in the fieldalthough "giants" is almost too strong a word; according to a survey published in a 1978 issue of Warren's Creepy magazine, comic readership has gone into what may be an irrecoverable skid. These characters ( traditionally called "longunderwear heroes" by the bullpen artists who draw them) are invincible. Blood never flows from their magical bodies; they are somehow able to bring such colorful villains as Lex Luthor and the Sandman to justice without ever having to remove their masks and testify against them in open court; they are sometimes down but never out. One reason for the success of Marvel's Spiderman when he burst on the comics scene in the late fifties may have been his vulnerability; he was and is an engaging exception to the standard comicbook formula. There is something winning in his vulnerability as Peter Parker and in his frequent klutziness as Spiderman. After being bitten by that radioactive spider, Peter originally felt no holy desire to fight crime; he decided instead to make a bundle in showbiz. Before long, however, he discovers a truth which is bitter to him and amusing to the reader no matter how great you looked on the Sullivan show, Marine Midland Bank still won't cash a check made out to The Amazing Spiderman. Such touches of realism laced with rue can be traced to Stan Lee, Spiderman's creator and the man probably most responsible for keeping the comic book from going the way of the pulps and the dime novels in the sixties and seventies. At the other end of the spectrum are the characters of fantasy who are either powerless and discover power within themselves ( as Thomas Covenant discovers it in Stephen Donaldson's remarkable Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever trilogy, or as Frodo discovers it in Tolkien's epic tale of the Rings), or characters who lose power and then find it again, as Scott Carey does in The Shrinking Man. Horror fiction, as we've said before, is one small circular area in the larger circle of fantasy, and what is fantasy fiction but tales of magic? And what are tales of magic but stories of power? One word nearly defines the other. Power is magic; power is potency. The opposite of potency is impotence, and impotence is the loss of the magic. There is no impotence in the stories of the sword and sorcery genre, nor in those stories of Batman and Superman and Captain Marvel which we read as children and thenhopefullygave up as we moved on to more challenging literature and wider views of what the life experience really is. The great theme of fantasy fiction is not holding the magic and wielding it ( if so, Sauron, not Frodo, would have been the hero of Tolkien's Rings cycle); it isor so it seems to mefinding the magic and discovering how it works. And getting back to the Matheson novel, shrinking itself is an oddly arresting concept, isn't it? Tons of symbolism come immediately to mind, most of it revolving around the potencyimpotency thing . . . sexual and otherwise. In Matheson's book, shrinking is most important because Scott Carey begins by perceiving size as power, size as potency . . . size as magic. When he begins to shrink, he begins to lose all threeor so he believes until his perceptions change. His reaction to his loss of power, potency, and magic is most commonly a blind, bellowing rage "What do you think I'm going to do?" he burst out. "Go on letting them play with me? Oh, you haven't been there, you haven't seen. They're like kids with a new toy. A shrinking man. Godawmighty, a shrinking man! It makes their damn eyes light up . . . Like Thomas Covenant's constant cries of "By hell!" in the Donaldson trilogy, Scott's rage does not hide his impotency but highlights it, and it is Scott's fury which in a large part makes him such an interesting, believable character. He is not Conan or Superman ( Scott bleeds plenty before escaping his cellar prison, and as we watch him go ever more frantically about the task of trying to escape, we suspect at times that he is more than halfmad) or Doc Savage. Scott doesn't always know what to do. He fumbles the ball frequently, and when he does, he goes on to do what most of us would probably do under the circumstances he has the adult equivalent of a tantrum. In fact, if we regard Scott's shrinking as a symbol for any incurable disease (and the progress of any incurable disease entails a kind of power loss which is analogous to shrinking), we see a pattern which psychologists would outline pretty much as Matheson wrote it . . . only the outline came years later. Scott follows this course, from disbelief to rage to depression to final acceptance, almost exactly. As with cancer patients, the final trick seems to be to accept the inevitable, perhaps to find fresh lines of power leading back into the magic. In Scott's case, in the case of many terminal patients, the final outward sign of this is an admission of the inevitable, followed by a kind of euphoria. We can understand Matheson's decision to use flashbacks in order to get to "the good stuff" early on, but one wonders what might have happened if he had given us the story in a straight line. We see Scott's loss of power in several widely spaced episodes he is chased by teenagers at one pointthey think, and why not, that he is just a little kidand at another he hitches a ride with a man who turns out to be a homosexual. He begins to feel an increasing disrespect from his daughter Beth, partly because of the "might makes right" idea that works unobtrusively but powerfully in even the most enlightened parentchild relationships ( or, we could say, might makes power . . . or might makes magic), but perhaps mostly because his steady shrinking causes Beth to have to constantly restructure her feelings about her father, who ends up living in a dollhouse before his fall into the cellar. We can even blackly visualize Beth, who doesn't really understand what's happening, inviting her friends in on a rainy day to play with her daddy. But Scott's most painful problems are with Lou, his wife. They are both personal and sexual, and I think that most men, even today, tend to identify the magic most strongly with sexual potency. A woman may not want to but she can; a man may want to and find he cannot. Bad news. And when Scott is 4'1" tall, he comes home from the medical center where he has been undergoing tests and walks straight into a situation where the loss of sexual magic becomes painfully evident Louise looked up, smiling. "You look so nice and clean," she said. It was not the words or the look on her face; but suddenly he was terribly conscious of his size. Lips twitching into the semblance of a smile, he walked over to the couch and sat down beside her, instantly sorry that he had. She sniffed. "Mmmmm, you smell nice," she said . . . "You look nice," he said. "Beautiful." "Beautiful!" She scoffed. "Not me." He leaned over abruptly and kissed her warm throat. She raised her left hand and stroked his cheek slowly. "So nice and smooth," she murmured. He swallowed . . . was she actually talking to him as if he were a boy? And a few minutes later He let breath trickle slowly from his nostrils. "I guess it . . . would be rather grotesque anyway . . . . It'd be like . . ." "Honey, please." She wouldn't let him finish. "You're making it worse than it is." "Look at me," he said. "How much worse can it get?" Later on, in another flashback, we see Scott as voyeur, spying on the babysitter Louise has hired to care for Beth. In a series of comichorrible scenes, Scott turns the pimply, overweight babysitter into a kind of masterbatory dream goddess. In his doubling back to powerless early adolescence, Matheson is able to show us just how much of the sexual magic Scott has lost. But at a carnival some weeks laterScott is a foot and a half tall at this pointhe meets Clarice, a sideshow midget. And in his encounter with Clarice, we have our clearest indication of Matheson's belief that the lost magic can be found again; that the magic exists on many levels and thus becomes the unifying force that makes macrocosm and microcosm one and the same. When he first meets Clarice, Scott is a bit taller than she, and in her trailer he finds a world which is once more in perspective. It is an environment where he can reassert his own power Breath stopped. It was his world, his very own worldchairs and a couch he could sit on without being engulfed; tables he could stand beside and reach across instead of walk under; lamps he could switch on and off, not stand futilely beneath as if they were trees. Andalmost needless to relatehe also rediscovers the sexual magic with Clarice in an episode which is both pathetic and touching. We understand he will lose this magic as well, sinking away from Clarice's level until she is also a giant to him, and while these episodes are somewhat softened by the flashback form, the point is nevertheless made what can be found once can be found again, and the incident of Clarice most clearly justifies the novel's odd but strangely powerful ending . . . he thought If nature existed on endless levels, so also might intelligence . . . Scott Carey ran into his new world, searching." Not, we devoutly hope, to be eaten by the first garden slug or amoeba to cross his path. In the movie version, which Matheson also wrote, Scott's final line is a triumphant "I still exist!" accompanied by shots of nebulae and exploding galaxies. I asked him if this had religious connotations, or perhaps reflected an early interest in life after death (a subject which has become more and more important in Matheson's later work; see Hell House and What Dreams May Come). Matheson comments "Scott Carey's 'I still exist,' I think, only implied a continuum between macroscopic and microscopic, not between life and life after death. Interestingly, I was on the verge of doing a rewrite on The Fantastic Voyage, which Columbia is supposed to be making. I couldn't get involved in it because it was so technical and I would rather be involved with character now, but it was like a small continuation of the end of The Shrinking Maninto the microscopic world with rod and gun." Overall, we can say that The Shrinking Man is a classic survival story; there is really only one character, and the questions here are elemental food, shelter, survival, destruction of the Nemesis (the Dionysian force in Scott's mostly Apollonian cellar world). It is by no means a tremendously sexy book, but sex is at least dealt with on a level more thoughtful than the Shell Scott whambamthankyouma'am level that was the common one for paperback originals in the fifties. Matheson was an important figure in pioneering the right of science fiction and fantasy writers to deal with sexual problems in a realistic and sensitive way; others involved in the same struggle ( and it was a struggle) would have included Philip Jos Farmer, Harlan Ellison, and, perhaps most importantly of all, Theodore Sturgeon. It is hard to believe now what a furor was caused by the concluding pages of Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood, when it is revealed exactly how the vampire has been obtaining his supply ( "The moon is full," he writes both wistfully and chillingly to his girl friend in the book's final paragraph, "and I wish I had some of your blood."), but the furor happened. We may wish that Matheson had dealt with the sexual angle a little less solemnly, but in light of the times, I think we can applaud the fact that he dealt with the sexual angle at all. And as a fable of losing power and finding it, The Shrinking Man ranks as one of the finest fantasies of the period we've been discussing. And I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm only talking here about sexual power and sexual potency. There are tiresome criticsthe halfbaked Freudians, mostlywho want to relate all of fantasy and horror fiction back to sex; one explanation for the conclusion of The Shrinking Man which I heard at a party in the fall of 1978I'll not mention the name of the woman whose theory this was, but if you read science fiction, you'd know the namemaybe bears repeating, since we're on this. In symbolic terms, this woman said, spiders represent the vagina. Scott finally kills his Nemesis, the black widow ( the most vaginal of all spiders) by impaling it on a pin ( the phallic symbol, get it, get it?). Thus, this critic went on, after failing at sex with his wife, succeeding at first with the carnival midget Clarice and then losing her, Scott symbolically kills his own sex drive by impaling the spider. This is his last sexual act before escaping the cellar and achieving a wider freedom. All of this was wellmeaning bullshit, but bullshit is still bullshit and will never be mistaken for McDonald's Secret Sauce. I bring it up only to point out that it is the sort of bullshit that a lot of fantasy and horror writers have had to labor under . . . most of it spread by people who believe either secretly or openly that the horror writer must be suffering from madness to a greater or a lesser degree. The further view of such folks is that the writer's books are Rorschach inkblots that will eventually reveal the author's anal, oral, or genital fixation. In writing about the largely scoffing reaction that Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel received when it was published in 1960, Wilfrid Sheed adds, "Freudian interpretations [are] always greeted by guffaws." Not much bad news at that, when you remember that even the most staid novelists are regarded as a bit peculiar by their neighbors . . . but the horror novelist is always going to have to face what I think of as the couch questions, I guess. And most of us are perfectly normal. Hehhehheh. Freudian huggermugger set aside, The Shrinking Man can be seen as just a pretty good story which happens to deal with the interior politics of power . . . or, if you like (and I do), the interior politics of magic. And Scott's killing of the spider is meant to show us that the magic is not dependent on size but upon mind and heart. If it stands considerably taller than other books in the genre ( small pun much intended), and far above other books where tiny people battle beetles and praying mantises and such ( Lindsay Gutteridge's Cold War in a Country Garden comes to mind), it is because Matheson couches his story in such intimate and riveting termsand because he is ultimately so persuasive. This examination of lives in microcosm continues to hold a fascination for writers and readers; early this year, Macmillan published Small World by Tabitha King, a malign comedy of manners revolving around a fabulously expensive presidential dollhouse, a nymphomaniacal presidential daughter, and an overweight mad scientist who is as pitiable as he is frightening. Published in 1981, it lies outside the temporal borders of this book, which is probably just as well; the lady is my wife, and my view would be prejudiced. So I'll only add that my prejudiced view is that Small World is a wonderful addition to this HOscale subgenre. 8 It wouldn't be right to wind up even so brief a discussion of the modern horror novel as this one without mentioning two young British writers, Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert. They are a part of a whole new generation of British fantasy writers who seem to be revitalizing the genre by crossfertilization much as British poets helped to revitalize American poetry during the early sixties. Besides Campbell and Herbert, the two who are perhaps best known over here, there is Robert Aickman (who could hardly be called a young Turkbut since such books as Cold Hand in Mine have brought him to a wider American audience, it seems fair enough to classify him as part of the British new wave), Nick Sharman, Thomas Tessier, an American living in London, who has recently published a novel called The Nightwalker, perhaps the finest werewolf novel of the last twenty years, and a score of others. As Paul Therouxanother expatriate American living in Londonhas pointed out, there is something uniquely British about the tale of horror ( perhaps particularly those which deal with the archetype of the Ghost). Theroux, who has written his own lowkey horror tale, The Black House, favors the mannered but grisly tales of M. R. James, and they do seem to summarize everything that is best in the classic British horror story. |
Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert are both modernists, and while this family is really too small to avoid a certain resemblance even in cousins twice removed, it seems to me that both of these men, who are worlds apart in terms of style, point of view, and method of attack, are doing things that are exciting and worthy of mention. Campbell, a Liverpudlian ( "You talk just like one of the Beatles," a woman marvels to a writer from Liverpool in Campbell's new novel, The Parasite), writes a cool, almost icy prose line, and his perspective on his native Liverpool is always a trifle offbeat, a trifle unsettling. In a Campbell novel or story, one seems to view the world through the thin and shifting perceptual haze of an LSD trip that is just ending . . . or just beginning. The polish of his writing and his mannered turns of phrase and image make him seem something like the genre's Joyce Carol Oates (and like Oates, he is prolific, turning out good short stories, novels, and essays at an amazing clip), and there is also something Oatesian in the way his characters view the worldas when one is journeying on mild LSD, there is something chilly and faintly schizophrenic in the way his characters see things . . . and in the things they see. These are the perceptions of Rose as she shops in a Liverpool department store in The Parasite A group of toddlers watched her pass, their eyes painted into their sockets. On the ground floor, red and pink and yellow hands on stalks reached for her from the glove counter. Blind mauve faces craned on necks as long as arms; wigs roosted on their heads . . . . The bald man was still staring at her. His head, which looked perched on top of a bookcase, shone like plastic beneath the fluorescent lights. His eyes were bright, flat, expressionless as glass; she thought of a display head stripped of its wig. When a fat pink tongue squeezed out between his lips, it was as if a plastic head had come to life. Good stuff. But strange; so uniquely Campbell that it might as well be trademarked. Good horror novels are not a dime a dozenby no meansbut there never seems to be any serious shortage of good ones, either. And by that I mean that you seem to be able to count on a really good novel of horror andor the supernatural ( or at least a really interesting one) every year or soand much the same could be said for the horror films. A vintage year may produce as many as three amid the paperbackoriginal dreck about hateful, paranormal children and presidential candidates from hell and the toolarge collection of hardcover boners, such as the recent Virgin, by James Petersen. But, maybe paradoxically, maybe not, good horror writers are quite rare . . . and Campbell is better than just good. That's one reason fans of the genre will greet The Parasite with such pleasure and relief; it is even better than his first novel, of which I want to treat briefly here. Campbell has been turning out his own patented brand of short horror tale for some years now ( like Bradbury and Robert Bloch, Arkham House published Ramsey Campbell's first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake, which was a Lovecraft clone). Several collections of his stories are available, the best of them probably being The Height of the Scream. A story you will not find in that book, unfortunately, is "The Companion," in which a lonely roan who tours "funfairs" on his holidays encounters a horror beyond my ability to describe while riding a Ghost Train into its tunnel. "The Companion" may be the best horror tale to be written in English in the last thirty years; it is surely one of half a dozen or so which will still be in print and commonly read a hundred years from now. Campbell is literate in a field which has attracted too many comicbook intellects, cool in a field where too many writersmyself includedtend toward panting melodrama, fluid in a field where many of the best practitioners often fall prey to cant and stupid "rules" of fantasy composition. But not all good shortstory writers in this field are able to make the jump to the novel (Poe tried with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and made a conditional success of the job; Lovecraft failed ambitiously twice, with The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward and the rather more interesting At the Mountains of Madness, whose plot is remarkably Pymlike ) . Campbell made the jump almost effortlessly, with a novel as good as its title was offputting The Doll Who Ate His Mother. The book was published with absolutely no fanfare in 1977 in hardcover, and then with an even greater lack of fanfare a year later in paperback . . . one of those cases that make a writer wonder if publishers don't practice their own sort of voodoo, singling certain books out to be ritually slaughtered in the marketplace. Well, never mind that. Concerning the jump from the short story to the novelwriting the latter is much like longdistance running, and you can almost feel some wouldbe novelists getting tired. You sense they're starting to breathe a trifle hard by page one hundred, to puff and blow by page two hundred, and to finally limp over the finish line with little to recommend them beyond the bare fact that they have finished. But Campbell runs well. He is personally an amusing, even a jolly man (at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention he presented Stephen R. Donaldson with the British Fantasy Award, a modernistic little statuette, for his Thomas Covenant trilogy; Campbell, in that marvelously broad and calm Liverpool accent, referred to it as "the skeletal dildo." The audience broke up, and someone at my table marveled, "He sounds just like one of the Beatles."). As with Robert Bloch, the last thing you would suspect is that he is a writer of horror fiction, particularly of the grim brand he turns out. Of The Doll Who Ate His Mother he has this to saysome of it bearing directly on the difference in the amount of endurance needed to do a novel "What I wanted to do with The Doll was to invent a new monster, if that is possible, but perhaps the big thing was to actually write the novel, since previously I'd been doing short stories. In 1961 or '6i I made notes for a story about a black magician who was going to take revenge on his town or village for some real or imagined wrong it had done him. He was going to do this by using voodoo dolls to deform the babiesyou'd have the standard pulpmagazine scene of the whitefaced doctor coming out of the delivery room saying, 'My God, it's not human . . . !' And the twist was going to be that, after all these deformed infants had died, the black magician would use the voodoo dolls to bring them back to life. An amazingly tasteless idea. At about the same time the Thalidomide tragedy occurred, making the story idea a little too topically tasteless' for me, and I dropped it. "It resurfaced, I suppose, in The Doll Who Ate His Mother, which eats its way out of its mother's womb. "How does writing novels differ from writing short stories? I think a novel gathers its own impetus. I have to creep up on it unawares, thinking to myself, Maybe I'll start it next week, maybe I'll start it next month.' Then one day I sat down, began to write, and looked up at noon, thinking My God! I've started a novel! I don't believe it! "Kirby [McCauley] said, when I asked him how long the novel should be, that 70,000 words or so would be about right, and I took him almost literally. When I got up around the 63,000 word mark, I thought nly 7000 words lefttime to wrap this up.' That's why many of the later chapters seems terse." Campbell's novel begins with Clare Frayn's brother Rob losing an arm and his life in a Liverpool car accident. The arm, torn off in the accident, is important because somebody makes off with it . . . and eats it. This muncher of arms, we are led to suppose, is a shadowy young man named Chris Kelly. Clarewho embodies many of the ideas already labeled as "new American gothic" (sure, Campbell is British, but many of his influencesboth literary and cinematicare American)meets a crime reporter named Edmund Hall who believes that the man who caused Rob Frayn's death was the grownup version of a boy he knew in school, a boy fascinated with death and cannibalism. In dealing with archetypes, I've not suggested that we deal out a Tarot card for the Ghoul, one of the more grisly creatures in monsterdom, believing that the eating of dead flesh and the drinking of blood are really parts of the same archetype. Is there really such a thing as a "new monster"? In light of the genre's strictness, I think not, and Campbell must be content instead with a fresh perspective . . . no mean feat in itself. In Chris Kelly I believe the face we see is that of our old friend the Vampire . . . as we see it in a movie which resembles Campbell's novel by turns, the brilliant Canadian director David Cronenberg's They Came from Within. Clare, Edmund Hall, and George Pugh, a cinema owner whose elderly mother has also been victimized by Kelly, join together in a strange and reluctant threeway partnership to track this supernatural cannibal down. Here again we feel echoes of the classic tale of the Vampire, Stoker's Dracula. And perhaps we never feel the changes of the nearly eighty years which lie between the two books so strongly as we do in the contrast between the group of six which forms to track down Count Dracula and the group of three which forms to track down "Chris Kelly." There is no sense of selfrighteousness in Clare, Edmund, and Georgethey are truly little people, afraid, confused, often depressed; they turn inward to themselves rather than outward toward each other, and while we sense their fright very strongly, there is no feeling about the book that Clare, Edmund, and George must prevail because their cause is just. They somehow symbolize the glum and rather drab place England has become in the second half of the twentieth century, and we feel that if some or all of them do muddle through, it will be due more to impersonal luck than to any action of their own. And the three of them do track Kelly down . . . after a fashion. The climax of the hunt takes place in the rotting cellar of a slum building marked for demolition, and here Campbell has created one of the dreamiest and effective sequences in all of modern horror fiction. In Stories of ghouls and cannibalism venture into genuine taboo territory, I thinkwitness the strong public reactions to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Something rather more important than a harmless rollercoaster ride is going on here, I think; here's a chance to really grab people by the gag reflex and throttle them. I wrote a story four years ago called "Survivor Type," which I still have not been able to sell (gee, and people told me that when I got successful I'd be able to sell my laundry list if I wanted to!). It deals with a surgeon who is washed up on an uninhabited islandlittle more than a scratch of coral above the surface of the Pacificand eats himself, a piece at a time, to stay alive. "I did everything according to Hoyle," he writes in his diary after amputating his foot. "I washed it before I ate it." Not even the men's magazines would consider that one, and it sits in my file cabinet to this day, waiting for a good home. It will probably never find one, though. its surreal and nightmarish evocation of ancient evil, in the glimpses it gives us of "absolute power," it is finally a voice from the latter part of the twentieth century which speaks powerfully in the language which Lovecraft can be said to have invented. Here is nothing so pallid or so imitative as a Lovecraft "pastiche," but a viable, believable version of those Lovecraftian Elder Gods that so haunted Dunwich, Arkham, Providence, Central Falls . . . and the pages of Weird Tales magazine. Campbell is good, if rather unsympathetic, with character (his lack of emotion has the effect of chilling his prose even further, and some readers will be put off by the tone of this novel; they may feel that Campbell has not so much written a novel as grown one in a Petrie dish) Clare Frayn with her stumpy legs and her dreams of grace, Edmund with his baleful thoughts of glory yet to come, and best of all, because here Campbell does seem to kindle real feelings of emotion and kindliness, George Pugh holding on to the last of his cinemas and scolding two teenage girls who walk out before the playing of the National Anthem has finished. But perhaps the central character here is Liverpool itself, with its orange sodium lights, its slums and docks, its cinemas converted into HALF A MILE OF FURNITURE. Campbell's short stories live and breathe Liverpool in what seems to be equal amounts of attraction and repulsion, and that sense of place is one of the most remarkable things about The Doll as well. This locale is as richly textured as Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles of the forties and fifties or Larry McMurtry's Houston of the sixties. "Children were playing ball against the church," Campbell writes. "Christ held up His arms for a catch." It is a small line, understated and almost thrown away ( like all those creepy, reaching gloves in The Parasite), but this sort of thing is cumulative, and at least suggests Campbell's commitment to the idea that horror exists in point of view as well as in incident. The Doll Who Ate His Mother is not the greatest of the novels discussed hereI suppose that would have to be either The Haunting of Hill House or Straub's Ghost Storyand it is not as good as Campbell's The Parasite . . . but it is remarkably good. Campbell keeps a tight rein on his potentially tabloidstyle material, even playing off it occasionally ( a dull and almost viciously insensitive teacher sits in the faculty room of his school reading a paper with a headline which blares HE CUT UP YOUNG VIRGINS AND LAUGHEDthe story's blackly hilarious subhead informs us that His Potency Came From Not Having Orgasms). He carries us inexorably past levels of abnormal psychology into something that is much, much worse. Campbell is extremely conscious of his literary rootshe mentions Lovecraft (adding "of course" almost unconsciously), Robert Bloch (he compares The Doll's climax in the abandoned cellar to the climax of Psycho, where Lila Crane must face Norman Bates's "mother" in a similar basement), and Fritz Leiber's stories of urban horror ( such as "Smoke Ghost") and more notably, Leiber's eerie novel of San Francisco, Our Lady of Darkness (winner of the Best Novel award at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention). In Our Lady of Darkness, Leiber adopts as his thesis the idea that when a city becomes complex enough, it may take on a tenebrous life of its own, quite apart from the lives of the people who live and work therean evil sentience linked, in some unstated way, to the Elder Ones of Lovecraft and, more importantly in terms of the Leiber novel, Clark Ashton Smith. Amusingly, one of the characters in Our Lady of Darkness suggests that San Francisco did not become truly sentient until the Transamerica Pyramid was finished and occupied. While Campbell's Liverpool does not have this kind of conscious evil life, the picture he draws of it gives the reader the feeling that he is observing a slumbering, semisentient monster that might awake at any moment. His debt to Leiber seems clearer here than that to Lovecraft, in fact. Either way, Ramsey Campbell has succeeded in forging something uniquely his own in The Doll Who Ate His Mother. James Herbert, on the other hand, comes from an older traditionthe same sort of pulp horrorfiction that we associate with writers such as Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, the early Sturgeon, the early Henry Kuttner, and, on the English side of the Atlantic, Guy N. Smith. Smith, the author of paperback originals beyond counting, has written a novel whose title is my nominee for the alltime pulp horror classic The Sucking Pit. This sounds as if I were getting ready to knock Herbert, but this isn't the case. It's true that he is held in remarkably low esteem by writers in the genre of both sides of the Atlantic; when I've mentioned his name in the past, noses have automatically wrinkled ( it's little like ringing a bell in order to watch conditioned dogs salivate), but when you enquire more closely, you find that remarkably few people in the field have actually read Herbertand the fact is that James Herbert is probably the best writer of pulp horror to come along since the death of Robert E. Howard, and I believe that Conan's creator would have responded to Herbert's work with immediate enthusiasm, although the two men were opposites in many ways. Howard was big and broad shouldered; the face in those pictures which remain to us is expressionless with, we might think, undertones of either shyness or suspicion. James Herbert is of medium height, slim, quick to smile or frown, open and frank. Of course the biggest difference may be that Howard is dead and Herbert ain't, haha. Howard's best workhis stories of Conan the Barbarianare in the mythic country of Cimmeria, far in a similarly mythic past inhabited by monsters and beautiful, sexy maidens in need of rescue. And Conan will be happy to effect said rescue . . . if the price is right. Herbert's work is set firmly in England's present, most commonly against the backdrop of London or the southern counties which surround it. Howard was brought up in rural circumstances ( he lived and died in a small sagebrush town called Cross Plains, Texas); Herbert was born in London's East End, the son of street traders, and his work reflects a checkered career as a rock and roll singer, artist, and ad executive. It is in the elusive matter of stylea confusing word that may be most accurately defined as "plan or method of attack"that Herbert strongly recalls the Howard that was. In his novels of horror The Rats, The Fog, The Survivor, The Spear, The Lair, and The DarkHerbert does not just write; as Robert E. Howard did, he puts on his combat boots and goes out to assault the reader with horror. Let me also take a moment to point out one similarity that James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell do share, simply by virtue of their Englishness they both write that clear, lucid, grammatical prose that only those educated in England seem able to produce. You'd think that the ability to write lucid prose would be the bottom line for any publishing novelist, but it is not so. If you don't believe me, go check out the paperback originals rack at your local bookstore. I promise you such a carnival of dangling participles, misplaced modifiers, and even lack of agreement between subject and verb that your hair may turn white. You would expect that proofreaders and copy editors would pick this sort of stuff up even if the writers of such embarrassing English do not, but many of them seem as illiterate as the writers they are trying to bail out. Worse than the mechanical errors, many writers of fiction seem totally unable to explain simple operations or actions clearly enough for the reader to be able to see them in his or her mind's eye. Some of this is a failure on the writer's part to visualize well and completely; his or her own mind's eye seems bleared halfshut. More of it is a simple failure of that most basic writer's tool, the working vocabulary. If you're writing a hauntedhouse story and you don't know the difference between a gable and a gambrel, a cupola and a turret, paneling and wainscotting, you, sir or madam, are in trouble. Now don't get me wrong here; I thought Edwin Newman's book on the degeneration of the English language was moderately entertaining but also often tiresome and amazingly prissy, the book of a man who would like to put language inside a hermetically sealed belljar (like a carefully groomed corpse inside a glass coffin) instead of sending it out into the streets to jive with the people. But language has its own point and reason for being. Parapsychologists may argue over extrasensory perception; psychologists and neurologists may claim there is no such thing; but those who love books and love the language know that the printed word really is a kind of telepathy. In most cases the writer does her or his work silently, couching thoughts in symbols composed of letters in groups set off one from the next by white space, and in most cases the reader does her or his work silently, reading the symbols and reintegrating them as thoughts and images. Louis Zukofsky, the poet (A, among other books), claimed that even the look of words on the pagethe indents, the punctuation, the place on the line where the paragraph endshas its own story to tell. "Prose," Zukofsky said, "is poetry." It's probably true that the writer's thoughts and the reader's thoughts never tally exactly, that the image the writer sees and the image the reader sees are never 100 percent the same. We are, after all, not angels but were made a little less than the angels, and our language is maddeningly hobbled, a fact to which any poet or novelist will attest. There is no creative writer, I think, who has not suffered that frustrating crash off the walls which stand at the limits of language, who has not cursed the word that just doesn't exist. Emotions such as grief and romantic love are particularly hard to deal with, but even such a simple operation as starting up a car with a manual transmission and driving it to the end of the block can present nearly insurmountable problems if you try to write the process down instead of simply doing it. And if you don't believe this is so, write down such instructions and try them on a nondriving friend . . . but check your auto insurance policy first. Different languages seem particularly suited to different purposes; the French may have gotten a reputation for being great lovers because the French language seems particularly well suited to the expression of emotion (there is no nicer way to say it than Je t'aime . . . and no better language in which to sound really lacked off at someone). German is the language of explanation and clarification ( but it is a cold language for all that; the sound of many people speaking German is the sound of large machines running in a factory). English serves very well to express thought and moderately well to express image, but there is nothing inherently lovely about it (although as someone has pointed out, it has its queerly perverse moments; think of the lovely and euphonious sound of the words "proctological examination" ) . It has always seemed to me ill suited to the expression of feeling, though. Neither "Why don't we go to bed together" or the cheerful but undeniably crude "Baby, let's fuck" can touch " Voulezvous coucher avec moi c'est soir?" But we must do the best we can with what we have . . . and as readers of Shakespeare and Faulkner will attest, the best we can do is often remarkably good. American writers are more apt to mangle the language than our British cousins (although I'd argue with anyone that English English is much more bloodless than American Englishmany British writers have the unhappy habit of droning; droning in perfectly grammatical English, but a drone is still a drone for a' that and a' that), often because they were subjected to poor or erratic teaching methods as children, but the best American work is striking in a way that British prose and poetry rarely is anymore see, for instance, such disparate writers as James Dickey, Harry Crews, Joan Didion, Ross MacDonald, John Irving. Both Campbell and Herbert write that unmistakable, impeccable English line; their stories go out into the world with their pants buttoned, their zippers zipped, and their braces in their placesbut to what a different ultimate effect! James Herbert comes at us with both hands, not willing to simply engage our attention; he seizes us by the lapels and begins to scream in our faces. It is not a tremendously artistic method of attack, and no one is ever going to compare him to Doris Lessing or V. S. Naipaul . . . but it works. The Fog (no relation to the film of the same name by John Carpenter) is a multipleviewpoint story about what happens when an underground explosion breaches a steel cannister that has been buried by the British Ministry of Defense. The cannister contains a living organism called a mycoplasma ( an ominous protoplasm that may remind readers of an obscure Japanese horror film from the fifties titled The HMen) which resembles a smoggy yellowgreen mist. Like rabies, it attacks the brains of the humans and animals it envelops, turning them into raving maniacs. Some of the incidents involving animals are particularly grisly; a farmer is trampled to death by his own cows in a foggy pasture, and a drunken shopkeeper who seems to loathe everything but his racing pigeons ( and one battered old campaigner in particular, a pigeon named Claude) has his eyes pecked out by his birds, who have flown back to their London coop through the fog. The shopkeeper, clutching the remains of his face, staggers off the rooftop where the birds are quartered and falls to his death. Herbert rarely finesses and never pulls back from the crunch; instead he seems to race eagerly, zestfully, toward each new horror. In one scene a crazed bus driver castrates the teacher who has been his nemesis with a pair of garden shears; in another, an elderly poacher who has been previously caught and "thrashed" by the local large landowner suffers the effects of the fog, goes after the landowner, and nails him to his own dining room table before finishing him off with an ax. A snotty bank manager is locked in his own vault, a gym teacher is beaten to death by his phys ed students, and in the book's most effective scene, almost a hundred and fifty thousand residents and holidaymakers at Bournemouth walk into the ocean in a massive, lemminglike group suicide. The Fog was published in 1975, three years before the gruesome events at Jonestown, Guyana, and in many of the book's episodesparticularly in the Bournemouth episodeHerbert seems to have forecast it. We see the event through the eyes of a young woman named Mavis Evers. Her lesbian lover has just left her, having discovered the joys of going hetero, and Mavis has gone to Bournemouth to commit suicide . . . a little irony worthy of E.C. comics at their best. She wades breastdeep into the water, becomes frightened, and decides she will try living a little longer. The undertow nearly gets her, but following a short, tense struggle, she is able to get to shallow water again. Turning to face the shore, Mavis is greeted by this nightmare There were hundredscould it be thousandsof people climbing down the steps to the beach and walking toward her, toward the sea! Was she dreaming? . . . The people of the town were marching in a solid wall out to the sea, making no sound, staring toward the horizon as though something was beckoning to them. Their faces were white, trancelike, barely human. And there were children among them; some walked along on their own, seeming to belong to no one; those that couldn't walk were being carried. Most of the people were in their nightclothes, some were naked, having risen from their beds as though answering a call that Mavis neither heard nor saw . . . . This was written before the Jonestown tragedy, remember. In the aftermath of that, I recall one commentator intoning with dark and solemn sonorousness, "It was an event that not even the most darkly fertile imagination could have envisioned." I flashed on the Bournemouth scene from The Fog and thought, "You're wrong. James Herbert envisioned it." . . . still they came on, oblivious to her cries, unseeing. She realized her danger and ran toward them in a vain attempt to break through, but they forced her back, heedless of her pleas as she strained against them. She managed to push a short path through them, but the great numbers before her were unconquerable, pushing her back, back into the waiting sea . . . . Well, as you've probably guessed, poor old Mavis gets her suicide whether she wants it or not. And in point of fact, it is explicit scenes of horror and violence like the one just described which have made Herbert the focus of a great deal of criticism in his native England. He told me that he finally got sick enough of the "Do you write violence for the sake of violence?" question to finally blow up at a reporter. "That's right," he said. "I write violence for the sake of violence, just as Harold Robbins writes sex for the sake of sex, and Robert Heinlein writes science fiction for the sake of science fiction, and Margaret Drabble writes literature for the sake of literature. Except no one ever asks them, do they?" As to how Herbert came to write The Fog, he replies "It's about impossible to remember where any idea comes fromI mean a single idea may come from many sources. But as clearly as I can recall, the kernel came during a business meeting. I was with an advertising firm then, and sitting in the office of my creative director, who was a rather dull man. And all of a sudden it occurred to me What would happen if this man just turned, walked to the window, opened it, and stepped out?' " Herbert turned the idea over in his mind for some time and finally sat down to do the novel, spending about eight months' worth of weekends and late nights getting it together. "The thing I like best about it," he says, "is that it had no limits of structure or place. It could simply go on and on until the thing resolved itself. I liked working with my main characters, but I also liked the vignettes because when I got tired of what my heroes were up to, I could go off on just about any tangent I liked. My feeling throughout the writing was, 'm just going to enjoy myself. I'm going to try to go over the top; to see how much I can get away with.' " In its construction, The Fog shows the effect of those apocalyptic Big Bug movies of the late fifties and early sixties. All the ingredients are there we have a mad scientist who was screwing around with something he didn't understand and was killed by the mycoplasma he invented; the military testing secret weapons and unleashing the horror; the "young scientist" hero, John Holman, who we first meet bravely rescuing a little girl from the fissure that has Unleashed the Fog on an Unsuspecting World; the beautiful girlfriend, Casey; the obligatory gathering of scientists, who natter about "the F100 method of fog dispersion" and lament the fact that carbon dioxide can't be used to disperse the fog because "the organism thrives on it" and who inform us that the fog is really "a pleuropneumonialike organism." We will recognize these obligatory trappings of science fiction from such movies as Tarantula, The Deadly Mantis, Them! , and a dozen others; yet we will also recognize that trappings are all they are, and the heart of Herbert's novel lies not in the fog's origin or composition but in its decidedly Dionysian effectsmurder, suicide, sexual aberrations, and all manner of deviant behavior. Holman, the hero, is our representative from a saner Apollonian world, and to do Herbert full justice, he manages to make Holman a good deal more interesting than the zeroheroes played by William Hopper, Craig Stevens, and Peter Graves in various of the Big Bug films . . . or consider, if you will, poor old Hugh Marlowe in Earth vs. |
the Flying Saucers, whose entire set of lines during the last third of the movie seems to consist of, "Keep firing at saucer!" and "Fire at saucer until it crashes!" Nonetheless, our interest in Holman's adventures and whether or not his girlfriend Casey will recover from the effects of her own bout with the fog ( and what will be her reaction to the information that she plunged a scissors into her father's stomach while under the influence?) seems pallid when compared to our morbid let'sslowdownandlookattheaccident interest in the old lady who is eaten alive by her pet cats or the crazed pilot who crashes his loaded jumbo jet into the London skyscraper where his wife's lover works. I suppose that popular fiction divides itself quite naturally into two halves what we call "mainstream fiction" and that which I would call "pulp fiction." The pulps, including the socalled "shudderpulps," of which Weird Tales was the finest exponent, have been long gone from the scene, but they live on in the novel and do a brisk business on paperback racks everywhere. Many of these modern pulps would have been printed as multipart serials in the pulp magazines that existed roughly from 1910 until about 1950, had they been written during that period. But I wouldn't restrict the label "pulp" simply to genre works of horror, fantasy, science fiction, detective, and western; Arthur Hailey, for instance, seems to me to be writing modernday pulp. The ingredients are all there, from the inevitable violence to the inevitable maiden in distress. The critics who have regularly toasted Hailey over the coals are the same critics whoinfuriatingly enoughsee the novel as divisible only into two categories "literature," which may either succeed or fail upon its merits, and "popular fiction," which always fails, no matter how good it may be ( every now and then a writer such as John D. MacDonald may be elevated in the critical mind from a writer of "popular fiction" to a writer of "literature," at which point his body of work may be safely reevaluated). My own idea is that fiction actually falls into three main categories literature, mainstream fiction, and pulp fictionand that to categorize does not end the critic's job but only gives him or her a place to set his or her feet. To label a novel "pulp" is not the same as saying it's a bad novel, or will give the reader no pleasure. Of course we will readily accept that most pulp fiction is indeed bad; there is not a great deal one can say in defense of such brass oldies from the pulp era as William Shelton's "Seven Heads of Bushongo" or "Satan's Virgin," by Ray Cummings. On the other hand, though, Dashiell Hammett published extensively in the pulps (most notably in the highly regarded Black Mask, where contemporaries Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Cornell Woolrich also published); Tennessee Williams's first published work, a vaguely Lovecraftian tale titled "The Vengeance of Nitocris," appeared in an early issue of Weird Tales; Bradbury broke in by way of the same market; so did MacKinlay Kantor, who would go on to write Andersonville. To condemn pulp writing out of hand is like condemning a girl as loose simply because she comes from unpleasant family circumstances. The fact that supposedly reputable critics both in the genre and outside it continue to do so makes me both sad and angry. James Herbert is not a nascent Tennessee Williams only waiting for the right time to spin a cocoon and emerge as a great figure of modern literature; he is what he is and that's all that he is, as Popeye would say. My point is simply that what he is, is good enough. I loved John Jakes's comment on his And there's a wonderful story about Erle Stanley Gardner's days in what Frank Gruber used to call the pulp jungle. At that time the Depression was in full swing and Gardner was writing westerns for a penny a word, selling to such publications as Western RoundUp, West Weekly, and Western Tales (whose slogan was "Fifteen Stories, Fifteen Cents"). Gardner admitted that he made a habit of stretching the final shootout as far as it would go. Of course the bad guy finally bit the dust and the good guy strode into the saloon, .44s smoking and spurs jingling, for a cold sarsaparilla before moving on, but in the meantime, each time Gardner wrote "Bang!" he made another penny . . . and in those days, two bangs would buy you the daily newspaper. Bicentennial Kent Family saga some years back. He said that Gore Vidal was the RollsRoyce of historical novelists; that he himself was more in the Chevrolet Vega class. What Jakes so modestly left unstated was that both vehicles will get you where you want to go quite adequately; how you feel about style is between you and you. James Herbert is the only writer discussed in these pages who is squarely in the pulp tradition. He specializes in violent death, bloody confrontation, explicit and in some cases kinky sex, strong and virile young heroes possessed of beautiful girlfriends. The problem which needs to be solved is in most cases apparent, and the story's emphasis is put squarely on solving that problem. But Herbert works effectively within his chosen genre. He has consistently refused, from the very first, to be satisfied with characters who are nothing more than cardboard cutouts which he moves around the playingfield of his novel; in most cases we are given motivations we can identify with and believe in, as in the case of poor, suicidebound Mavis. Mavis reflects with a kind of pitiful, deranged defiance that "She wanted them to know she had taken her own life; her death, unlike her life, had to have some meaning. Even if it was only Ronnie who fully understood that reason." This is hardly stunning character insight, but it is fully adequate to Herbert's purposes, and if the ironic outcome is similar to the ironic outcome of the tales in E.C.'s series of horror comics, we are able to see more and thus believe more, a victory for Herbert which the reader can share. Further, Herbert has continued to improve. The Fog is his second novel; those that follow show a gratifying development in the writer, culminating perhaps in The Spear, which shows us a writer who has stepped out of the pulp arena altogether and has entered the wider field of the mainstream novel. 9 Which brings us to Harlan Ellison . . . and all kinds of problems. Because here it is impossible to separate the man from the work. I've decided to close this brief review of some of the elements in modern horror fiction by discussing Ellison's work because, although he repudiates the label "horror writer," he sums up, for me, the finest elements of the term. Closing with Ellison is perhaps almost mandatory because in his short stories of fantasy and horror, he strikes closest to all those things which horrify and amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives. Ellison is haunted by the death of Kitty Genovesea murder that comes up in his "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" and in several of his essaysthe mass suicides in Jonestown; and he is convinced that Iran's Ayatollah has created a senile dream of power in which we are now all living (like men and women in a fantasy tale who ultimately come to realize they are living in a psychotic's hallucinations). Most of all, it seems to me that Ellison's work is the proper place to conclude because he never looks back; he has been the field's pointman for fifteen years now, and if there is such a thing as a fantasist for the 1980s (always assuming there are a 1980s, haha), then Harlan Ellison is almost surely that writer. He has quite deliberately provoked a storm of controversy over his own workone writer in the field whom I know considers him to be a modern incarnation of Jonathan Swift, and another regularly refers to him as "that notalent son of a bitch." It is a storm that Ellison lives in quite contentedly. "You're not a writer at all," an interviewer once told me in slightly wounded tones. "You're a goddam industry. How do you ever expect serious people to take you seriously if you keep turning out a book a year?" Well, in point of fact, I'm not "a goddam industry" ( unless it's a cottage industry); I work steadily, that's all. Any writer who only produces a book every seven years is not thinking Deep Thoughts; even a long book takes at most three years to think and write. No, a writer who only produces one book every seven years is simply clicking off. But my own fecundityhowever fecund that may bepales before Ellison's, who has written at a ferocious clip; at this point he has published just over one thousand short stories. In addition to all the stories published under his own name, Ellison has written as Nalrah Nosille, Sley Harson, Landon Ellis, Derry Tiger, Price Curtis, Paul Merchant, Lee Archer, E. K. Jarvis, Ivar Jorgensen, Clyde Mitchell, Ellis Hart, Jay Solo, Jay Charby, Wallace Edmondsonand Cordwainer Bird. The Cordwainer Bird name is a good example of Ellison's restless wit and his anger at work he feels to be substandard dreck. Since the All quoted in the Ellison entry by John Clute and Peter Nicholls in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. To point out the obvious, "Nalrah Nosille" is Harlan Ellison spelled backwards. Other names Ellison usedE. K. Jarvis, Ivar Jorgensen, and Clyde Mitchellwere socalled house names. In pulp terminology, a "house name" was the name of a totally fictional writer who was, nevertheless, extremely prolific . . . mostly because several (sometimes dozens) of writers published works under that name when they had another story in the same magazine. Thus. "Ivar Jorgensen" wrote Ellisonstyle fantasy when he was Ellison and sexy, pulpstyle horror, as in the Jorgensen novel Rest in Agony, when he was someone else (in this case, Paul Fairman). To this should be added that Ellison has since acknowledged all of his pseudonomous work, and has published only under his own name since 1965. He has, he says, a "lemminglike urge to be up front." early sixties he has done many TV scripts, including produced scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. , The Young Lawyers, The Outer Limits, and what many fans feel may have been the best Star Trek episode of them all, "The City on the Edge of Forever." At the same time he was writing these scripts for television This may be the longest footnote in history, but I really must pause and tell two more Harlan stories, one apocryphal, the other Harlan's version of the same incident. The apocryphal, which I first heard at a science fiction bookstore, and later at several different fantasy and science fiction conventions It was told that Paramount Pictures had a preproduction conference of Big Name Science Fiction Writers prior to shooting on StarTrek The Movie. The purpose of the conference was to toss around ideas for a mission that would be big enough to fly the Starship Enterprise from the cathode tube to the Silver Screen . . . and BIG was the word that the exec in charge of the conference kept emphasizing. One writer suggested that the Enterprise might be sucked into a black hole (the Disney people scoffed that idea up about three months later). The Paramount exec didn't think that was big enough. Another suggested that Kirk, Speck, and company might discover a pulsar that was in fact a living organism. Still not big enough, the writer was admonished; the writers were again reminded that they should think BIG. According to the tale, Ellison sat silent, doing a slow burn . . . only with Harlan, a slow burn lasts only about five seconds. Finally, he spoke up. "The Enterprise," he said, "goes through an interstellar warp, the greatgranddaddy of all interstellar warps. It's transported over a googol of lightyears in the space of seconds and comes out at a huge gray wall. The wall marks the edge of the entire universe. Scotty rigs fullcharge ion Masters which breach the wall so they can see what's beyond the edge of everything. Peering through at them, bathed in an incredible white light, is the face of God Himself." A brief period of silence followed this. Then the exec said, "It's not big enough. Didn't I just tell you guys to think really BIG?" In response, Ellison is supposed to have flipped the guy the bird (the Cordwainer Bird, one assumes) and walked out. Here is Harlan Ellison's recitation of the True Facts "Paramount had been trying to get a Star Trek film in work for some time. Roddenberry was determined that his name would be on the writing credits somehow . . . . The trouble is, he can't write for sour owl poop. His one idea, done six or seven times in the series and again in the feature film, is that the crew of the Enterprise goes into deepest space, finds God, and God turns out to be insane, or a child, or both. I'd been called in twice, prior to 1975, to discuss the story. Other writers had also been milked. Paramount couldn't make up their minds and had even kicked Gene off the project a few times, until he brought in lawyers. Then the palace guard changed again at Paramount and Diller and Eisner came over from ABC and brought a cadre of their . . . buddies. One of them was an exset designer . . . named APark Trabulus. "Roddenberry suggested me as the scenarist for the film with this Trabulus, the latest . . . of the knownothing duds Paramount had assigned to the troublesome project. I had a talk with Gene . . . about a storyline. He told me they kept wanting bigger and bigger stories and no matter what was suggested, it wasn't big enough. I devised a storyline and Gene liked it, and set up a meeting with Trabulus for ii December (1975). That meeting was canceled . . . but we finally got together on 15 December. It was just Gene (Roddenberry) and Trabulus and me in Gene's office on the Paramount lot. "I told them the story. It involved going to the end of the known universe to slip back through time to the Pleistocene period when Man first emerged. I postulated a parallel development of reptile life that might have developed into the dominant species on Earth had not mammals prevailed. I postulated an alien intelligence from a far galaxy where the snakes had become the dominant life form, and a snakecreature who had come to Earth in the Star Trek future, had seen its ancestors wiped out, and who had gone back into the far past of Earth to set up distortions in the timeflow so the reptiles could beat the humans. The Enterprise goes back to set time right, finds the snakealien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to insure its own territorial imperative in our present and future. The story, in short, spanned all of time and all of space, with a moral and ethical problem. "Trabulus listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes. Then he said, You know, I was reading this book by a guy named Von Daniken and he proved that the Maya calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?' "I looked at Gene; Gene looked at me; he said nothing. I looked at Trabulus and said, There weren't any Mayans at the dawn of time.' And he said, Well, who's to know the difference?' And I said, " I'm to know the difference. It's a dumb suggestion.' So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked Mayans a lot and why didn't I do it if I wanted to write this picture. So I said, "I'm a writer. I don't know what the fuck you are!' And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the Star Trek movie." Which leaves the rest of us mortals, who can never find exactly the right word at exactly the right time, with nothing to say but "Right on, Harlan!" and winning an unprecedented three Writers Guild of America awards for best dramatic television scripts in the processEllison was engaging in a bitter running battle, a kind of creative guerilla warfare, with other TV producers over what he regarded as a deliberate effort to degrade his work and to degrade the medium itself ( "to Cuisinart it," in Ellison's own words). In cases where he felt his work had become so watered down that he no longer wanted his name on the credits, he would substitute the name of Cordwainer Birda name that comes up again in "The New York Review of Bird" in Strange Wine, a madly amusing story that might well be subtitled "The Chicago Seven Visit Brentano's." Cordwainer is an archaic English word for "shoemaker"; so the literal meaning of Ellison's pen name for scripts which he feels have been perverted beyond any kind of useful life is "one who makes shoes for birds." It is, I think, as good an explanation as any for the work that television is engaged in, and suggests quite well the nature of its usefulness. It is not the purpose of this book to talk about people per se, nor is it the purpose of this chapter on horror fiction to fulfill a "personal glimpse of the writer" sort of function; that is the job of the Out of the Pages section in People magazine (which my youngest son, with unknowing critical acuity, insists on calling Pimple). But in the case of Harlan Ellison, the man and his work have become so entwined that it is impossible to pull them completely apart. The book I want to talk about here is Ellison's collection of short fiction, Strange Wine (1978). But each Ellison collection seems built on the collections which have preceded iteach seems to be Ellison's report to the outside world on the subject This Is Where Harlan Is Now. And so it becomes necessary to discuss this book in a more personal way. He demands it of himself, and while that doesn't specially matter, his work also demands it . . . and that does matter. Ellison's fiction is and always has been a nervous bundle of contradictions. He's not a novelist, he says, but he has written at least two novels, and one of them, Rockabilly (later retitled Spider Kiss), remains one of the two or three best novels ever to be published about the cannibalistic world of rock and roll music. He says he's not a fantasist, but nearly all of his stories are fantasies. In the course of Strange Wine, for instance, we meet a writer whose work is done for him by gremlins after the writer himself has gone dry; we also meet a nice Jewish boy who is haunted by his mother after she dies ( "Mom, why don't you get off my case?" Lance, the nice Jewish boy in question, asks the ghost desperately at one point; "I saw you playing with yourself last night," the shade of Mom returns sadly). In the introduction to the book's most frightening story, "Croatoan," Ellison says he is prochoice when it comes to abortion, just as he has said in both his fiction and in his essays over the last twenty years that he is an affirmed liberal and freethinker, but "Croatoan"and most of Ellison's short storiesare as sternly moralistic as the words of an Old Ellison Anecdote 2 My wife and I attended a lecture that Harlan gave at the University of Colorado in the fall of 1974. He had at that time just finished "Croatoan," the skinfreezer which leads off Strange Wine, and he'd had a vasectomy two days before. "I'm still bleeding," he told the audience, "and my lady can attest that I'm telling the truth." The lady did so attest, and an elderly couple began to make their way out of the auditorium, looking a bit shocked. Harlan waved a cheery goodbye to them from the podium. "Night, folks," he called. "Sorry it wasn't what you wanted." Testament prophet. In many of the outandout horror tales there is more than a whiff of those Tales from the CryptVault of Horror ghastlies where the climax so often involves the evildoer having his crimes revisited upon himself . . . only raised to the tenth power. But the irony cuts with a keener blade in Ellison's work, and we have less feeling that rough justice has been meted out and the balance restored. In Ell' son's stories, we have little sense of winners and losers. Sometimes there are survivors. Sometimes there are no survivors. "Croatoan" uses that myth of alligators under the streets of New York as its starting pointsee also Thomas Pynchon's U. and a funnyhorrible novel called Death Tour by David J. Michael; this is an oddly pervasive urban nightmare. But Ellison's story is really about abortion. He may not be antiabortion (nowhere in his intro to this story does he say he's proabortion, however), but the story is certainly more sharply honed and unsettling than that tattered piece of yellow journalism which all righttolifers apparently keep in their wallets or purses so they can wave it under your nose at the drop of an opinionthis is the one which purports to have been written by a baby while in utero. "I can't wait to see the sun and the flowers," the fetus gushes. "I can't wait to see my mother's face, smiling down at me . . ." It ends, of course, with the fetus saying, "Last night my mother killed me." "Croatoan" begins with the protagonist flushing the aborted fetus down the toilet. The ladies who have done the deed to the protagonist's girl friend have packed their d c tools and left. Carol, the woman who has had the abortion, flips out and demands that the protagonist go and find the fetus. Trying to placate her, he goes out into the street with a crowbar, levers up a manhole cover . . . and descends into a different world. The alligator story began, of course, as a result of the giveakidababyalligatoraren'ttheyjustthe cutestlittlethings craze of the midfifties. The kid who got the Bator would keep it for a few weeks, then the tiny alligator would all of a sudden not be so tiny anymore. It would nip, perhaps draw blood, and down the toilet it went. It was not so farfetched to believe that they might all be down there on the black underside of our society, feeding, growing bigger, waiting to gobble up the first unwary sewer repairman to come sloshing along in his hipwaders. As David Michael points out in Death Tour, the problem is that most sewers are much too cold to sustain life in fully grown alligators, let alone in those still small enough to flush away. Such a dull fact, however, is hardly enough to kill such a powerful image . . . and I understand that a movie which takes this image as its text is on the way. Ellison has always been a sociological sort of writer, and we can almost feel him seizing upon the symbolic possibilities of such an idea, and when the protagonist descends deep enough into this purgatorial world, he discovers a mystery of cryptic, Lovecraftian proportions At the entrance to their land someonenot the children, they couldn't have done itlong ago built a road sign. It is a rotted log on which has been placed, carved from fine cherrywood, a book and a hand. The book is open, and the hand rests on the book, one finger touching the single word carved in the open pages. The word is CROATOAN. Further along, the secret is revealed. Like the alligators of the myth, the fetuses have not died. The sin is not so easily gotten rid of. Used to swimming in placental waters, in their own way as primitive and reptilian as alligators themselves, the fetuses have survived the flush and live here in the dark, symbolically existing in the filth and the shit dropped down on them from the society of our overworld. They are the embodiment of such Old Testament maxims as "Sin never dies" and "Be sure your sin will find you out." Down here in this land beneath the city live the children. They live easily and in strange ways. I am only now coming to know the incredible manner of their existence. How they eat, what they eat, how they manage to survive, and have managed for hundreds of years, these are all things I learn day by day, with wonder surmounting wonder. I am the only adult here. They have been waiting for me. They call me father. At its simplest, "Croatoan" is a tale of the just Revenge. The protagonist is a rotter who has casually impregnated a number of women; the abortion on Carol is not the first one his friends Denise and Joanna have performed for this irresponsible Don Juan ( although they swear it will be the last). The Just Revenge is that he finds his dodged responsibilities have been waiting for him all along, as implacable as the rotting corpse which so often returned from the dead to hunt down its killer in the archetypical Haunt of Fear story ( the Graham Ingles classic "Horror We? How's Bayou?" for instance) . But Ellison's prose style is arresting, his grasp of this mythimage of the lost alligators seems solid and complete, and his evocation of this unsuspected underworld is marvelous. Most of all, we sense outrage and angeras with the best Ellison stories, we sense personal involvement, and have a feeling that Ellison is not so much telling the tale as he is jabbing it viciously out of its hiding place. It is the feeling that we are walking over a lot of jagged glass in thin shoes, or running across a minefield in the company of a lunatic. Accompanying these feelings is the feeling that Ellison is preaching to us . . . not in any lackluster, hohum way, but in a large, bellowing voice that may make us think of Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." His best stories seem strong enough to contain morals as well as themes, and the most surprising and gratifying thing about his short fiction is that he gets away with the moralizing; we find he rarely sells his birthright for a plot of message. It should not be so, but in his fury, Ellison manages to carry everything, not at a stagger but at a sprint. In "Hitler Painted Roses," we have Margaret Thrushwood, whose sufferings make job's look like a bad case of athlete's foot. In this fantasy, Ellison supposesmuch as Stanley Elkin does in The Living Endthat the reality we experience in the afterlife depends on politics namely, on what people back here think of us. Further, it posits a universe where God (a multiple God here, referred to as They) is an imageconscious poseur with no real interest in right or wrong. Margaret's lover, a Mr. Milquetoast veterinarian named Doc Thomas, murders the entire Ramsdell family in 1935 when he discovers that the hypocritical Ramsdell ( "I'll have no whores in my house," Ramsdell says when he catches Margaret in the kip with Doc) has been helping himself to a bit of Margaret every now and then; Ramsdell's definition of "whore" apparently begins when Margaret's sex partner stops being him. Only Margaret survives Doc's berserk rage, and when she is discovered alive by the townspeople, she is immediately assumed guilty, carried to the Ramsdell well naked, and pitched in. Margaret is sent to hell for the crime she is presumed to have committed, while Doc Thomas, who dies peacefully in bed twentysix years later, goes to heaven. Ellison's vision of heaven also resembles Stanley Elkin's in The Living End. "Paradise," Elkin tells us, resembles "a small themepark." Ellison sees it as a place where moderate beauty balances offbut just barelymoderate tackiness. There are other similarities; in both cases goodnay, saintly! people are sent to hell because of what amounts to a clerical error, and in this desperate view of the modern condition, even the gods are existential. The only horror we are spared is a vision of the Almighty in Adidas sneakers with a Head tennis racket over His shoulder and a golden cokespoon around His neck. All of this comes next year, no doubt. Before we leave the comparison entirely, let me point out that while Elkin's novel was heavily and for the most part favorably reviewed, Ellison's story, originally published in Penthouse (a magazine not regularly purchased by seekers after literary excellence), is almost unknown. Strange Wine itself is almost unknown, in fact. Most critics ignore fantasy fiction because they don't know what to do with it unless it is outandout allegory. "I do not choose to review fantasy," a sometimecritic for no less an organ that the New York Times Book Review once told me. "I have no interest in the hallucinations of the mad." It's always good to be in contact with such an open mind. It broadens one. Margaret Thrushwood escapes hell through a fluke, and in his heroically overblown description of the auguries which foreshadow this supernatural belch, Ellison has an amusing whack at rewriting Act I of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Humor and horror are the original Chang and Eng of literature, and Ellison knows it. We laugh . . . but there is still that undercurrent of unease. As the smoldering sun passed the celestial equator going north to south, numberless portents revealed themselves a twoheaded calf was born in Dorset near the little town of Blandford; wrecked ships rose from the depths of the Marianas Trench; everywhere, children's eyes grew old and very wise; over the Indian state of Maharashtra clouds assumed the shapes of warring armies; leprous moss quickly grew on the south side of Celtic megaliths and then died away in minutes; in Greece the pretty little gillyflowers began to bleed and the earth around their clusters gave off a putrescent smell; all sixteen of the ominous dirae designated by Julius Caesar in the first century B.C., including the spilling of salt and wine, stumbling, sneezing, and the creaking of chairs, made themselves apparent; the aurora australis appeared to the Maori; a horned horse was seen by Basques as it ran through the streets of Vizcaya. Numberless other auguries. And the doorway to Hell opened. The best thing about the passage quoted above is that we can feel Ellison taking off, pleased with the effect and balance of the language and the particulars described, pushing it, having fun with it. Among those who escape hell during the brief period that the door stands open are Jack the Ripper, Caligula, Charlotte Corday, Edward Teach ( "beard still bristling but with the ribbons therein charred and colorless . . . laughing hideously"), Burke and Hare, and George Armstrong Custer. All are sucked back except for Ellison's Lizzie Borden lookalike, Margaret Thrushwood. She makes her way to heaven, confronts Doc . . . and is sent back by God when her realization of the hypocrisy at work causes heaven to begin cracking and peeling around the edges. The pool of water Doc is soaking leis feet in when Margaret drags her blackened, blistered body over to him begins to fill up with lava. Margaret returns to hell, realizing that she can take it, while poor Doc, who she still manages somehow to love, could not. "There are some people who just shouldn't be allowed to fool around with love," she tells God in the story's best line. Hitler, meanwhile, is still painting his roses just inside the portal to hell (he has been too absorbed to even think about escape when the door opened). God takes one look, Ellison tells us, and "could not wait to get back to find Michelangelo, to tell him about the grandeur They had beheld, there in that most unlikely of places." The grandeur Ellison wants us to see, of course, is not Hitler's roses but Margaret's ability to love and to go on believing ( if only in herself) in a world where the innocent are punished and the guilty rewarded. As in most of Ellison's fiction, the horror revolves around some smelly injustice; its antidote lies most frequently in the human ability of his protagonists to surmount the unfair situation, or, lacking that, at least to reach a modus vivendi with it. Most of these stories are fablesan uneasy word in a period of literature when the concept of literature is seen to be a simplistic oneand Ellison uses the word frankly in several of his introductions to individual stories. In a letter to me, dated December 28, 1979, lie discusses the use of the fable in fantasy fiction that has been deliberately laid against the backdrop of the modern world " Strange Wine continuesas I see it in retrospectmy perception that reality and fantasy have exchanged positions in contemporary society. |
If there is a unified theme in the stories, it is that. Continued from the work I have done in the previous two books, Approaching Oblivion (1974) and Deathbird Stories (1975) , it tries to provide a kind of superimposed precontinuum by the use and understanding of which the reader who leads even a lightly examined existence can grasp hold of hisher life and transcend hisher fate by understanding it. "That's all pretty highflown stuff; but what I mean, simply put, is that the workaday events that command our attention are so big, so fantastic, so improbable that no one who isn't walking the parapet of madness can cope with what's coming down. Which reminds me of something that happened at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention. A UPI reporter asked me the eternal question "Why do people read this horror stuff?" My reply was essentially Harlan's; you try to catch the madness in a belljar so you can cope with it a little better. People who read horror fiction are warped, I told the reporter; but if you don't have a few warps in your record, you're going to find it impossible to cope with life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The headline on the UPI squib that came down the wire and into newspapers coast to coast was predictable enough, I suppose, and exactly what I deserved for presuming to speak metaphorically to a newspaperman KING SAYS HIS FANS ARE WARPED. Open mouth; Insert foot; Close mouth. "The Tehran hostages, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Howard Hughes fake biography and subsequent death, the Entebbe raid, the murder of Kitty Genovese, the Jonestown massacre, the Hbomb alert in Los Angeles several years ago, Watergate, the Hillside Strangler, the Manson Family, the oil conspiracy all of them are melodramatic and excessive beyond the ability of a writer of mimetic fiction to capture in fiction without being ridiculous. Yet all of them happened. If you or I were to attempt writing a novel about such things, before the fact, we'd be laughed out of the critical esteem of even the lowliest reviewer. "I'm not paraphrasing the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction, because I don't see any of these events as mirroring truth' or reality.' Twenty years ago the very idea of international terrorism would have been inconceivable. Today it's a given. So commonplace that we're unmanned and helpless in the face of Khomeini's audacity. In one fell swoop the man has become the most important public figure of our time. In short, he has manipulated reality simply by being bold. How precise a paradigm he has become for the copelessness of our times. In this madman we have an example of one who understandseven if subcutaneouslythat the real world is infinitely manipulable. He has dreamed, and forced the rest of the world to live in that dream. That it is a nightmare for the rest of us is of no concern to the dreamer. Cane man's Utopia . . . "But his example, I suppose, in cathexian terms, is endlessly replicable. And what he has done is what I try to do in my stories. To alter everyday existence in a stretch of fiction . . . . And by the altering, by an insertion of a paradigmatic fantasy element, to permit the reader to perceive what shehe takes for granted in the surrounding precept in a slightly altered way. My hope is that the frisson the tiny shock of new awareness, the little spark of seeing the accepted from an uncomfortable angle, will convince them that there is room enough and time enough, if one only has courage enough, to alter one's existence. "My message is always the same we are the finest, most ingenious, potentially the most godlike construct the Universe has ever created. And every man or woman has the ability within him or her to reorder the perceived universe to his or her own design. My stories all speak of courage and ethic and friendship and toughness. Sometimes they do it with love, sometimes with violence sometimes with pain or sorrow or joy. But they all present the same message the more you know, the more you can do. Or as Pasteur put it, Chance favors the prepared mind.' "I am antientropy. My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket. My stories go out from here and raise hell. From time to time some denigrator or critic with umbrage will say of my work, He only wrote that to shock.' "I smile and nod. Precisely." So we find that Ellison's effort to "see" the world through a glass of fantasy is not really much different from Kurt Vonnegut's efforts to "see" it through a glass of satire, semisciencefiction, and a kind of existential vapidity ( "Hiho . . . so it goes . . . how about that"); or Heller's efforts to "see" it as an endless tragicomedy played out in an openair madhouse; or Pynchon's effort to "see" it as the longestrunning Absurdist play in creation (the epigram heading the second section of Gravity's Rainbow is from The Wizard of Oz I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto . . ."; and I think that Harlan Ellison would agree that this sums up postwar life in America as well as anything else). The essential similarity of these writers is that they are all writing fables. In spite of varying styles and points of view, the point in all cases is that these are moral tales. In the late fifties Richard Matheson wrote a terrifying and utterly convincing tale of a modernday succubus ( a female sexual vampire). In terms of shock and effect, it is one of the best tales I've ever read. There is also a succubus tale in Strange Wine, but in "Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time," the succubus is more than a sexual vampire; she is an agent of moral forces, come to set things back in balance by stealing the selfconfidence of a wretched man who likes to pick up lonely women in singles bars because they're easy lays. She exchanges her own loneliness for Mitch's potency and when the sexual encounter is done, she tells him "Get up and get dressed and get out of here." The story cannot even be described as sociological, although it has a patina of sociology; it is a moral tale, pure and simple. In "Emissary from Hamelin," a child piper returns on the booth anniversary of the abduction of the children from that medieval town and pipes finis for all of mankind. Here Ellison's basic idea, that progress is progressing in an immoral way, seems a bit shrill and tiresome, an unsurprising mating of the Twilight Zone moral stance with that of the Woodstock Nation (we can almost hear PA systems blaring, "And don't forget to pick up the garbage."). The child's explanation for his return is simple and direct "We want everyone to stop what they are doing to make this a bad place, or we mill take this place away from you." But the words Ellison puts into his newspapermannarrator's mouth to amplify the thought smacks a little bit too much of Woodsy Owl for me "Stop paving over the green lands with plastic, stop fighting, stop killing friendship, have courage, don't lie, stop brutalizing each other . . ." These are Ellison's own thoughts, and fine thoughts they are, but I like my stories without billboards. I suppose this sort of misstepa story with a commercial embedded in its centeris the risk that all "fable fiction" runs. And perhaps the writer of short stories runs a higher risk of falling into the pit than the novelist (although when a novel falls into this pit, the results are even more awful; go down to your local library sometime, get a stack permit, and look up some of the reporter Tom Wicker's novels from the fifties and sixtiesyour hair will turn white). In most cases Ellison goes around the pit, jumps over it . . . or jumps right into it, on purpose, avoiding major injury either by his own talent, the grace of God, or a combination of the two. Some of the stories in Strange Wine don't fit so comfortably into the fable category, and Ellison is perhaps at his best when he is simply goofing with the language, not playing whole songs but simply producing runs of melody and feeling. "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet" is such a story (except it is not really a story at all; it is a series of fragments, some narrative, some not, that reads more like beat poetry). It was written in the window of the Change of Hobbit bookstore in Los Angeles, under circumstances so confusing that Ellison's introduction to the piece does not even really do it justice. The individual pieces produce individual little ripples of feeling, as good short poems do, and reveal an inspired playfulness with the language that is as good a place to conclude all of this as anywhere else, I suppose. Language is play to most writers, thoughts are play. Stories are fun, the equivalent of a child's tugmepushme car that makes such an entrancing sound when you roll it across the floor. So, to close, "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet," Harlan Ellison's version of the sound of one hand clapping . . . a sound which only the best fantasy horror fiction can provide. And set against it, a little something from the work of Clark Ashton Smith, contemporary of Lovecraft and something much closer to a true poet than Lovecraft could ever hope to be; although Lovecraft desperately wanted to be a poet, I think the best we can say about his poetry is that he was a competent enough versifier, and no one would ever mistake one of his moody staves for the work of Rod McKuen. George F. Haas, Smith's biographer, suggests that Smith's finest work may have been Ebony and Crystal, and this general reader is inclined to agree, although few readers of modern poetry will find much to like in Smith's conventional treatment of his unconventional subject matter. I suspect, though, that Clark Ashton Smith would have liked what Ellison is doing in "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet." Here, preceding two selections from the Ellison piece, is a selection from Smith's idea notebook, published by Arkham House two years ago as The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith The Face from Infinity A man who fears the sky for some indefinable reason, and tries to avoid the open as much as possible. Dying at last in a room with short, curtained windows, he finds himself suddenly on a vast, bare plain beneath . . . a void heaven. Into this heaven, slowly, there arises a dreadful, infinite face, from which he can find no refuge, since all his senses have apparently been merged in the one sense of sight. Death, for him, is the eternal moment in which he confronts the face, and knows why he has always feared the sky. Now, the ominous jocularity of Harlan Ellison E is for ELEVATOR PEOPLE They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. There are five hundred buildings in the United States whose elevators go deeper than the basement. When you have pressed the basement button and reached the bottom, you must press the basement button twice more. The elevator doors will close and you will hear the sound of special relays being thrown, and the elevator will descend. Into the caverns. Chance has not looked favorably on occasional voyagers in those five hundred cages. They have pressed the wrong button, too many times. They have been seized by those who shuffle through the caverns, and they have been . . . treated. Now they ride the cages. They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. They stare up at the numbers as they light and then go off, riding up and down even after night has fallen. Their clothes are clean. There is a special dry cleaner who does the work. Once you saw one of them, and her eyes were filled with screams. London is a city filled with narrow, secure stairways. And, finally H is for HAMADRYAD The Oxford English Dictionary has three definitions of hamadryad. The first is a wood nymph that lives and dies in her tree. The second is a venemous, hooded serpent of India. The third definition is improbable. None of them mentions the mythic origins of the word. The tree in which the Serpent lived was the hamadryad. Eve was poisoned. The wood of which the cross was made was the hamadryad. Jesus did not rise, he never died. The ark was composed of cubits of lumber cut from the hamadryad. You will find no sign of the vessel on top of Mt. Ararat. It sank. Toothpicks in Chinese restaurants should be avoided at all costs. So now . . . tell me. Did you hear it? The sound of one hand clapping in thin air? 10 I began this chapterone hundred and twentyfour manuscript pages and two months agoby saying that it would be impossible to effect an overview of horror fiction during the last thirty years without writing a whole book on the subject, and that is as true now as it was two months and all those pages ago. All I've been able to do here is to mention some books in the genre that I like, and hopefully draw short arrows in the direction these novels and stories seem to point. I haven't discussed I Am Legend, but if you should be intrigued enough to read The Shrinking Man as a result of what I've said here, you'll probably get to it, and find Matheson's unmistakable trademarks on that book as well his interest in restricting character to a single person under pressure so that character can be fully examined, his emphasis on courage in adversity, his mastery of terror against what appears to be a normal, everyday backdrop. I haven't discussed the work of Roald Dahl or John Collier or Jorge Luis Borges, but if you exhaust Harlan Ellison's current stock of offbeat, jivey fantasy, you will find these others, and in them you will find many of Ellison's interests repeated, particularly his examination of man at his worst, most venal . . . and his best, most courageous and true. To read Anne Rivers Siddons's novel of domicile possession may lead you to my novel on the same subject, The Shining, or Robert Marasco's brilliant Burnt Offerings. But a few short arrows is all I can possibly draw. To enter the world of horror fiction is to venture, small as a hobbit, through certain mountain passes ( where the only trees which will grow are undoubtedly hamadryads ) and into the equivalent of the Land of Mordor. This is the fuming, volcanic country of the Dark Lord, and if the critics who have seen it firsthand are few, the cartographers are fewer. This Land is mostly white space on the map . . . which is how it should be; I'll leave more detailed map making to those graduate students and English teachers who feel that every goose which lays gold must be dissected so that all of its quite ordinary guts can be labelled; to those figurative engineers of the imagination who cannot feel comfortable with the comfortably overgrown ( and possibly dangerous) literary wilderness until they have built a freeway composed of Cliff's Notes through itand listen to me, you people every English teacher who ever did a Monarch or Cliff's Notes ought to be dragged out to his or her quad, drawn and quartered, then cut up into tiny pieces, said pieces to be dried and shrunk in the sun and then sold in the college bookstore as bookmarks. I'll leave the longer arrows to those pharmacists of creativity who cannot feel totally at ease until each tale, created to hold some reader spellbound as each of us was at one time held spellbound by the story of Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, or The Hook, has been neatly dehydrated and poured into a gel capsule to be swallowed. That is their jobthe job of dissectors, engineers, and pharmacistsand I leave it to them, along with the fervent wish that Shelob may catch them and eat them as they enter the Dark Lord's land, or that the faces in the Marsh of the Dead will first hypnotize them and then drive them mad by quoting Cleanth Brooks to them eternally in mudchoked voices, or that the Dark Lord himself will take them up to his Tower forever or cast them into the Cracks of Doom, where crocodiles of living obsidian wait to crunch up their bodies and silence their quacking, droning voices forever. And if they avoid all that, I hope they catch poison oak. My job is done, I think. My grandfather told me once that the best map is one that points to which way is north and shows you how much water is in your way. That's the sort of map I've tried to provide here. Literary criticism and rhetoric aren't forms I'm comfortable with, but I'd just as soon talk books for . . . well, for two months at a time is the way it looks. Somewhere in the middle of "Alice's Restaurant," Arlo Guthrie tells his audience, "I could play all night. I'm not proud . . . or tired . . ." I could say much the same thing. I haven't talked about Charles Grant's Oxrun Station books, or Manley Wade Wellman's Appalachian bard John, he of the silverstringed guitar. I've had only a chance to touch briefly on Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness (but gentle reader, there is a pale brown thing in that book that will haunt your dreams). There are dozens of others. No, I take that back. There are hundreds. If you need a slightly longer arrowor if you're just not tired of talking about books yetglance at Appendix II, where there is a list of roughly one hundred books issued during the thirty years we've been jawing over here, all of them horror, all of them excellent in one way or another. If you're new to the field, you'll find enough stuff to keep you quaking in your boots for the next year and a half. If you're not, you'll find you've read many of them already . . . but they'll give you my own hazy conception of where north lies, at least. CHAPTER X The Last WaltzHorror and Morality, Horror and Magic 1 "YES, BUT HOW do you justify earning a living by feeding off people's worst fears?" 2 The police have been summoned by a neighbor who has heard a commotion of some kind. What they find is a bloodbathand something worse. The young man admits, quite calmly, that he has murdered his grandmother with a pipe, and then cut her throat. "I needed her blood," the young man tells the police calmly. "I'm a vampire. Without her blood, I would have died." In his room the police find magazine articles about vampires, vampire comic books, stories, novels. 3 We'd been having a pretty nice lunch, this reporter from the Washington Post and I, something I was grateful for. I'd just started a twelvecity tour for my novel The Dead Zone the day before in New York with a kickoff party thrown by the Viking Press at Tavern on the Green, a huge, rococo eating and drinking establishment on the edge of Central Park. I had tried to take it easy at the party, but I still managed to put away about eight beers there, and another six or so at a smaller, more relaxed party with some friends from Maine later on. Nevertheless I was up the next morning at quarter of five to make the six o'clock Eastern shuttle to Washington so I could, in turn, make a seven o'clock TV appearance to plug my novel. Welcome to touring, friends and neighbors. I made the shuttle handily, telling invisible beads as it took off in a pouring rainstorm (sitting next to an, overweight businessman who read the Wall Street Journal through the entire flight and ate Turns one after another, deliberately and reflectively, as if enjoying them) and made A.M. Washington with at least ten minutes to spare. The television lights intensified the mild hangover I'd gotten up with, and I was grateful for what had been a fairly laidback lunch with the Post reporter, whose questions had been interesting and relatively unthreatening. Then this spitball about feeding off people's fears comes out of nowhere. The reporter, a young, lanky guy, was looking at me over his sandwich, eyes bright. 4 It's 1960, and a lonely Ohio youth has left the movie theater where he has just seen Psycho for the fifth time. This young man goes home and stabs his grandmother to death. The pathologist would later count over forty separate stab wounds. Why? the police asked. Voices, the young man replies. Voices told me to do it. 5 "Look," I said, putting my own sandwich down. "You take any bigcity psychiatrist. He's got a marvelous home in the suburbs, a hundred thousand dollars' worth of house at the very least. He drives a MercedesBenz, either tobaccobrown or silvergray. His wife has got a Country Squire wagon. His kids go to private schools during the academic year and to good summer camps in New England or in the northwest every summer. Sonny has got Harvard if he can make the gradesmoney is certainly no problemand his daughter can go to some reet and compleet girls' school where the sorority motto is We don't conjugate, we decline.' And how is he making the money that produces all of these wonders? He is listening to women weep over their frigidity, he is listening to men with suicidal impulses, he is dealing with paranoia both high and low, he's maybe striking on the occasional true schizophrenic. He's dealing with people who most of all are scared shitless that their lives have somehow gotten out of control and that things are falling apart . . . and if that isn't earning a living by feeding off people's fears, I don't know what is." I picked up my sandwich again and bit into it, convinced that if I hadn't hit the spitter he had thrown me, I'd at least managed to foul it back and stay alive at the plate. When I looked up from my Reuben, the little halfsmile on the reporter's face was gone. "I," he said softly, "happen to be in analysis." 6 January of 1980. The woman and her mother are having a worried conference over the woman's threemonthold baby. The baby won't .stop crying. It always crier. They agree on the source of the problem the baby ha been possessed by a demon, like that little girl in The Exorcist. They pour gasoline on the baby as it lies crying in its crib and then light the child on fire to drive the demon out. The baby lingers in a burn ward for three days. Then it dies. 7 The reporter's article was clean and fair for all of that; he was unkind about my physical appearance and I suppose he had some causeI was in the slobbiest shape I've been in for ten years during that late summer of 1979but other than that, I felt I got a pretty square shake. But even in the piece he wrote, you can feel the place where his path and mine diverged; there is that quiet snap which is the sound of ideas suddenly going off in two completely different directions. "You get the impression that King likes this sort of sparring," he wrote. 8 Boston, 1977. A woman is killed by a young man who uses a number of kitchen implements to affect the murder. Police speculate that he might have gotten the idea from a movieBrian De Palma's Carrie, from the novel by Stephen King. In the film version, Carrie kills her mother by causing all sorts of kitchen implementsincluding a corkscrew and a potatopeelerto fly across the room and literally nail the woman to the wall. 9 Primetime television survived the call by pressure groups to end the excessive, graphic depiction of violence on the tube for over ten years and House and Senate subcommittees almost without number which were convened to discuss the subject. Private eyes went on shooting bad guys and getting clopped over the head after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King; you could order up a dose of carnage at the twist of the channel selector on any night of the week, including Sundays. The undeclared war in Vietnam was heating up quite nicely, thank you; body counts were spiralling into the stratosphere. Child psychologists testified that after watching two hours of violent primetime TV, groups of children in the test group showed a marked increase in play aggressivenessbeating the toy truck against the floor rather than rolling it back and forth, for instance. 10 Los Angeles, 1969. Janis Joplin, who will later die of a drug overdose, it belting out "Ball and Chain." Jim Morrison, who will die of a heart attack in a bathtub, is chanting "Kill, kill, kill, kill" at the end of song titled "The End"Francis Ford Coppola will use the song ten years later to fade in the prologue of Apocalypse Now. Newsweek publishes a picture of a shylysmiling U.S. soldier holding up a revered human ear. And in a Los Angeles suburb, a young boy puts out his brother's eyes with his fingers. He was, he explained, only trying to imitate the old Three Stooges twofingered boinnng! When they do it on TV, the weeping child explains, no one gets hurt. 11 Television's makebelieve violence rolled on nevertheless, through the sixties, past Charles Whitman up on the Texas Tower ("There was a rumorabout a tumor," Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys sang gleefully, "nestled at the base of his braiyyyyn . . .") , and what finally killed it and ushered in the Sitcom Seventies was a seemingly unimportant event when compared to the deaths of a President, a Senator, a great civil rights leader. Television execs were finally forced to rethink their position because a young girl ran out of gas in Roxbury. She had a gas can in her trunk, unfortunately. She got it filled at a gas station, and while walking back to her beached car, she was set upon by a gang of black youths who took her gas can away from her, doused her with the gas, and thenlike the woman and her mother trying to drive the demon out of the babylit her on fire. Days later she died. The youths were caught, and someone finally asked them the sixtyfourdollar question Where did you get such a horrible idea? From TV, came the response. From The ABC Movie of the Week. Near the end of the sixties, Ed McBain (in reality novelist Evan Hunter) wrote one of his finest 87th Precinct novels of the policeman's lot. It was called Fuzz, and dealt in part with a gang of teenagers who went around dousing winos with gasoline and lighting them up. The film version, which is described by Steven Scheuer in his invaluable tubeside companion Movies on TV as a "scatterbrained comedy," starring Burt Reynolds and Raquel Welch. The biggest yocks in the movie come when several cops on stakeout dress up as nuns and then chase after a suspect, holding their habits up to reveal big, clunky workshoes. Pretty funny, right, gang? A real gutbuster. McBain's novel isn't a gutbuster. It's grim and almost beautiful. Certainly he has never come any closer to defining exactly what the policeman's lot may be than near the end of the novel when Steve Carella, masquerading as a wino, is lit on fire himself. The producers of the movie apparently saw something between MASH and Naked City in this, and the misbegotten result is in most respects as forgettable as a Tracy Stallard fastball . . . except that one of Stallard's fastballs went out of Fenway Park to become Roger Maris's recordbreaking sixtyfirst home run. And Fuzz, a poorly executed comedydrama, effectively ended TV violence. The message? You are responsible. And network TV accepted the message. 12 "How do you justify the violence of the shower scene in Psycho?" A critic once asked Sir Alfred Hitchcock. "How do you Justify the opening scene in Hiroshima, Mon Amour?" Hitchcock is reputed to have replied. In that opening scene, which was certainly scandalous by American standards in 1959, we see Emmanuele Riva and Eliji Okada in a naked embrace. "The opening scene was necessary to the integrity of the film," the critic answered. "So was the shower scene in Psycho," Hitchcock said. 13 What sort of burden does the writerparticularly the writer of horror fictionhave to bear in all of this? Certainly there has never been a writer in the field (with the possible exception of Shirley Jackson) who has not been regarded with more than a degree of critical caution. The morality of horror fiction has been called into question for a hundred years. One of the bloodspattered forerunners of Dracula, Varney the Vampyre, was referred to as a "penny dreadful." Later on, inflation turned the penny dreadfuls into dime dreadfuls. In the 1930s there were cries that pulps such as Weird Tales and Spicy Stories (which regularly served up lipsmacking S M covers on which lovely ladies were tied down, always in their "small clothes," and menaced by some beastlybut identifiably malecreature of the night) were ruining the morals of the youth of America. Similarly in the fifties, the comics industry choked off such outlaw growths as E.C.'s Tales from the Crypt and instituted a Comics Code when it became clear that Congress intended to clean their house for them if they would not clean it for themselves. There would be no more tales of dismemberment, corpses come back from the dead, and premature burialsor at least not for the next ten years. The return was signalled by the unpretentious birth of Creepy, a Warren Group magazine which was a complete throwback to the salad days of Bill Gaines's E.C. horror comics. Uncle Creepy, and his buddy Cousin Eerie, who came along two years or so later, were really interchangeable with the Old Witch and the CryptKeeper. Even some of the old artists were backJoe Orlando, who made his debut as an E.C. artist, was also represented in the premiere issue of Creepy, if memory serves. I would suggest that there has always been a great tendency, particularly when it comes to such popular forms as movies, television, and mainstream fiction, to kill the messenger for the message. I do not now and never have doubted that the youths who burned the lady in Roxbury got the idea from the telecast of Fuzz one Sunday night on ABC; if it had not been shown, stupidity and lack of imagination might well have reduced them to murdering her in some more mundane way. The same holds true with many of the other cases mentioned here. The danse macabre is a waltz with death. This is a truth we cannot afford to shy away from. Like the rides in the amusement park which mimic violent death, the tale of horror is a chance to examine what's going on behind doors which we usually keep doublelocked. Yet the human imagination is not content with locked doors. Somewhere there is another dancing partner, the imagination whispers in the nighta partner in a rotting ball gown, a partner with empty eyesockets, green mold growing on her elbowlength gloves, maggots squirming in the thin remains of her hair. To hold such a creature in our arms? Who, you ask me, would be so mad? Well . . . ? "You will not want to open this door," Bluebeard tells his wife in that most horrible of all horror stories, "because your husband has forbidden it." But this, of course, only makes her all the more curious . . . . and at last, her curiosity is satisfied. "You may go anywhere you wish in the castle," Count Dracula tells Jonathan Harker, "except where the doors are locked, where of course you will not wish to go." But Harker goes soon enough. And so do we all. Perhaps we go to the forbidden door or window willingly because we understand that a time comes when we must go whether we want to or not . . . and not just to look, but to be pushed through. Forever. 14 Baltimore, 1980. The woman is reading a book and waiting for her bus to arrive. The demobbed soldier who approaches her is a Vietnam vet, a sometime dope addict. He has a history of mental problems which seem to date from his period of service. The woman has noticed him on the bus before, sometimes weaving, sometimes staggering, sometimes calling loudly and wildly to people who are not there. "That's right, Captain!" she has heard him say. "That's right, that's right!" He attacks the woman as she waits for her bus; later, the police will theorize he was after drug money. No matter. He will be just as dead, no matter what he was after. The neighborhood is a tough one. The woman has a knife secreted upon her person. In the struggle, she uses it. When the bus comer, the black exsoldier lies dying in the gutter. What were you reading? a reporter asks her later; she shows him The Stand , by Stephen King. |
15 With its disguise of semantics carefully removed and laid aside, what those who criticize the tale of horror (or who simply feel uneasy about it and their liking for it) seem to be saying is this you are selling death and disfigurement and monstrosity; you are trading upon hate and violence, morbidity and loathing; you are just another representative of those forces of chaos which so endanger the world today. You are, in short, immoral. A critic asked George Romero, following the release of Dawn of the Dead, if he felt such a movie, with its scenes of gore, cannibalism, and gaudy pop violence, was a sign of a healthy society. Romero's reply, worthy of the Hitchcock anecdote related earlier, was to ask the critic if he felt the DC10 enginemount assembly was a healthy thing for society. His response was dismissed as a quibble ("You get the impression Romero likes this kind of sparring," I can almost hear the critic thinking). Well, lets see if the quibble really is a quibbleand lets go one layer deeper than we have yet gone. The hour has grown late, the last waltz is playing, and if we don't say certain things now, I suppose we never will. I've tried to suggest throughout this book that the horror story, beneath its fangs and fright wig, is really as conservative as an Illinois Republican in a threepiece pinstriped suit; that its main purpose is to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands. Within the framework of most horror tales we find a moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smile. In the old E.C. comics, adulterers inevitably came to bad ends and murderers suffered fates that would make the rack and the boot look like kiddy rides at the carnival. Modern horror stories are not much different from the morality plays of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when we get right down to it. The horror story most generally not only stands foursquare for the Ten Commandments, it blows them up to tabloid size. We have the comforting knowledge when the lights go down in the theater or when we open the book that the evildoers will almost certainly be punished, and measure will be returned for measure. Further, I've used one pompously academic metaphor, suggesting that the horror tale generally details the outbreak of some Dionysian madness in an Apollonian existence, and that the horror will continue until the Dionysian forces have been repelled and the Apollonian norm restored again. Excluding a powerful if puzzling prologue set in Iraq, William Friedkin's film The Exorcist actually begins in Georgetown, an Apollonian suburb if ever there was one. In the first scene, Ellen Burstyn is awakened by a crashing, roaring sound in the atticit sounds like maybe someone let a lion loose up there. It is the first crack in the Apollonian world; soon everything else will pour through in a night My alltime favorite (he said affectionately) A crazed husband stuffs the hose of an air compressor down his skinny wife's throat and blows her up like a balloon until she bursts. "Fat at last," he tells her happily just moments before the pop. But later on the husband, who is roughly the size of Jackie Gleason, trips a boobytrap she has set for him and is squashed to a shadow when a huge safe falls on him. This ingenious reworking of the old story of Jack Sprat and his wife is not only gruesomely funny; it offers us a delicious example of the Old Testament eyeforaneye theory. Or, as the Spanish say, revenge is a dish best eaten cold. mare torrent. But this disturbing crack between our normal world and a chaos where demons are allowed to prey on innocent children is finally closed again at the end of the film. When Burstyn leads the pallid but obviously okay Linda Blair to the car in the film's final scene, we understand that the nightmare is over. Steady state has been restored. We have watched for the mutant and repulsed it. Equilibrium never felt so good. Those are some of the things we've talked about in this book . . . but suppose all of that is only a sham and a false front? I don't say that it is, but perhaps (since this is the last dance) we ought to discuss the possibility, at least. In our discussion of archetypes, we've had occasion to discuss the Werewolf, that fellow who is sometimes hairy and who is sometimes deceptively smooth. Suppose there was a double werewolf? Suppose that the creator of the horror story was, under hisher fright wig and plastic fangs, a Republican in a threebutton suit, as we have said . . . ah, but suppose below that there is a real monster, with real fangs and a squirming Medusatangle of snakes for hair? Suppose it's all a selfserving lie and that when the creator of horror is finally stripped all the way to his or her core of being we find not an agent of the norm but a frienda capering, gleeful, redeyed agent of chaos? What about that possibility, friends and neighbors? 16 About five years ago I finished The Shining, took a month off, and then set about writing a new novel, the working title of which was The House on Value Street. It was going to be a roman clef about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, her brainwashing (or her sociopolitical awakening, depending on your point of view, I guess), her participation in the bank robbery, the shootout at the SLA hideout in Los Angelesin my book, the hideout was on Value Street, natchthe fugitive run across the country, the whole ball of wax. It seemed to me to be a highly potent subject, and while I was aware that lots of nonfiction books were sure to be written on the subject, it seemed to me that only a novel might really succeed in explaining all the contradictions. The novelist is, after all, God's liar, and if he does his job well, keeps his head and his courage, he can sometimes find the truth that lives at the center of the lie. Well, I never wrote that book. I gathered my research materials, such as they were, to hand (Patty was still at large then, which was another attraction the idea had for me; I could make up my own ending), and then I attacked the novel. I attacked it from one side and nothing happened. I tried it from another side and felt it was going pretty well until I discovered all my characters sounded as if they had just stepped whole and sweaty from the dance marathon in Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? I tried it in medias res. I tried to imagine it as a stage play, a trick that sometimes works for me when I'm badly stuck. It didn't work this time. In his marvelous novel The Hair of Harold Roux, Thomas Williams tells us that writing a long work of fiction is like gathering characters together on a great black plain. They stand around the small fire of the writer's invention, warming their hands at the blaze, hoping the fire will grow into a blaze which will provide light as well as heat. But often it goes out, all light is extinguished, and the characters are smothered in black. It's a lovely metaphor for the fictionmaking process, but it's not mine . . . maybe it's too gentle to be mine. I've always seen the novel as a large black castle to be attacked, a bastion to be taken by force or by trick. The thing about this castle is, it appears to be open. It doesn't look buttoned up for siege at all. The drawbridge is down. The gates are open. There are no bowmen on the turrets. Trouble is, there's really only one safe way in; every other attempt at entry results in sudden annihilation from some hidden source. With my Patty Hearst book, I never found the right way in . . . and during that entire sixweek period, something else was nagging very quietly at the back of my mind. It was a news story I had read about an accidental CBW spill in Utah. All the bad nasty bugs got out of their cannister and killed a bunch of sheep. But, the news article stated, if the wind had been blowing the other way, the good people of Salt Lake City might have gotten a very nasty surprise. This article called up memories of a novel called Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. In Stewart's book, a plague wipes out most of mankind, and the protagonist, who has been made immune by virtue of a welltimed snakebite, witnesses the ecological changes which the passing of man causes. The first half of Stewart's long book is riveting; the second half is more of an uphill pushtoo much ecology, not enough story. We were living in Boulder, Colorado, at the time, and I used to listen to the Biblethumping station which broadcast out of Arvada quite regularly. One day I heard a preacher dilating upon the text "Once in every generation the plague will fall among them." I liked the sound of the phrasewhich sounds like a Biblical quotation but is notso well that I wrote it down and tacked it over my typewriter Once in every generation the plague will fall among them. This phrase and the story about the CBW spill in Utah and my memories of Stewart's fine book all became entwined in my thoughts about Patty Hearst and the SLA, and one day while sitting at my typewriter, my eyes traveling back and forth between that creepy homily on the wall to the maddeningly blank sheet of paper in the machine, I wrotejust to write something The world comes to an end but everybody in the SLA is somehow immune. Snake bit them. I looked at that for a while and then typed No more gas shortages. That was sort of cheerful, in a horrible sort of way. No more people, no more gas lines. Below No more gas shortages I wrote in rapid order No more cold war. No more pollution. No more alligator handbags. No more crime. A season of rest. I liked that last; it sounded like something that should be written down. I underlined it. I sat there for another fifteen minutes or so, listening to the Eagles on my little cassette player, and then I wrote Donald DeFreeze is a dark man. I did not mean that DeFreeze was black; it had suddenly occurred to me that, in the photos taken during the bank robbery in which Patty Hearst participated, you could barely see DeFreeze's face. He was wearing a big badass hat, and what he looked like was mostly guesswork. I wrote A dark man with no face and then glanced up and saw that grisly little motto again Once in every generation the plague will fall among them. And that was that. I spent the next two years writing an apparently endless book called The Stand. It got to the point where I began describing it to friends as my own little Vietnam, because I kept telling myself that in another hundred pages or so I would begin to see light at the end of the tunnel. The finished manuscript was over twelve hundred pages long and weighed twelve pounds, the same weight as the sort of bowling ball I favor. I carried it thirty blocks from the U.N. Plaza Hotel to my editor's apartment one warm night in July. My wife had wrapped the entire block of pages in Saran Wrap for some reason known only to her, and after I'd switched it from one arm to the other for the third or fourth time, I had a sudden premonition I was going to die, right there on Third Avenue. The Rescue Unit would find me sprawled in the gutter, dead of a heart attack, my monster manuscript, triumphantly encased in Saran Wrap, resting by my outstretched hands, the victor. There were times when I actively hated The Stand, but there was never a time when I did not feel compelled to go on with it. Even when things were going bad with my guys in Boulder, there was a crazy, joyful feeling about the book. I couldn't wait to sit down in front of the typewriter every morning and slip back into that world where Randy Flagg could sometimes become a crow, sometimes a wolf, and where the big battle was not for gasoline allocations but for human souls. There was a feelingI must admit itthat I was doing a fast, happy tapdance on the grave of the whole world. Its writing came during a troubled period for the world in general and America in particular; we were suffering from our first gas pains in history, we had just witnessed the sorry end of the Nixon administration and the first presidential resignation in history, we had been resoundingly defeated in Southeast Asia, and we were grappling with a host of domestic problems, from the troubling question of abortionondemand to an inflation rate that was beginning to spiral upward in a positively scary way. Me? I was suffering from a really good case of career jet lag. Four years before, I had been running sheets in an industrial laundry for 1.60 an hour and writing Carrie in the furnaceroom of a trailer. My daughter, who was then almost a year old, was dressed mostly in scrounged clothes. The year before that, I had married my wife Tabitha in a borrowed suit that was too big for me. I left the laundry when a teaching position opened up at a nearby school, Hampden Academy, and my wife Tabby and I were dismayed to learn that my firstyear salary of 6400 was not going to take us much further than my laundry salaryand pretty soon I'd secured my laundry job back for the following summer. Then Carrie sold to Doubleday, and Doubleday sold the reprint rights for a staggering sum of money which was, in those days, nearly a recordbreaker. Life began to move at Concorde speed. Carrie was bought for films; Salem's Lot was bought for a huge sum of money and then also bought for films; The Shining likewise. Suddenly all of my friends thought I was rich. That was bad enough, scary enough; what was worse was the fact that maybe I was. People began to talk to me about investments, about tax shelters, about moving to California. These were changes enough to try and cope with, but on top of them, the America I had grown up in seemed to be crumbling beneath my feet . . . it began to seem like an elaborate castle of sand unfortunately built well below the hightide line. The first wave to touch that castle (or the first one that I perceived) was that longago announcement that the Russians had beaten us into space . . . but now the tide was coming in for fair. And so here, I think, is the face of the double werewolf, revealed at last. On the surface, The Stand pretty much conforms to those conventions we have already discussed an Apollonian society is disrupted by a Dionysian force (in this case a deadly strain of superflu that kills almost everybody). Further, the survivors of this plague discover themselves in two camps one, located in Boulder, Colorado, mimics the Apollonian society just destroyed (with a few significant changes) ; the other, located in Las Vegas, Nevada, is violently Dionysian. The first Dionysian incursion in The Exorcist comes when Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) hears that lionlike roar in the attic. In The Stand, Dionysus announces himself with the crash of an old Chevy into the pumps of an outoftheway gas station in Texas. In The Exorcist, the Apollonian steady state is restored when we see a pallid Regan MacNeil being led to her mother's MercedesBenz; in The Stand I believe that this moment comes when the book's two main characters, Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith, look through a plateglass window in the Boulder hospital at Frannie's obviously normal baby. As with The Exorcist, the return of equilibrium never felt so good. But below all of this, hidden by the moral conventions of the horror tale (but perhaps not all that hidden), the face of the real Werewolf can be dimly seen. Much of the compulsion I felt while writing The Stand obviously came from envisioning an entire entrenched societal process destroyed at a stroke. I felt a bit like Alexander, lifting his sword over the Gordian knot and growling, " Fuck untying it; I've got a better way." And I felt a bit the way Johnny Rotten sounds at the beginning of that classic and electrifying Sex Pistols song, "Anarchy for the U.K." He utters a low, throaty chuckle that might have come from Randall Flagg's own throat and then intones, "Right . . . NOW!" we hear that voice, and our reaction is one of intense relief. The worst is now known; we are in the hands of an authentic madman. In this frame of mind, the destruction of THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT became an actual relief. No more Ronald McDonald! No more Gong Show or Soap on TVjust soothing snow! No more terrorists! No more bullshit.' Only the Gordian knot unwinding there in the dust. I am suggesting that below the writer of the moral horror tale (whose feet, like those of Henry Jekyll, are "always treading the upward path") there lies another creature altogether. He lives, let us say, down there on Jack Finney's third level, arid he is a capering nihilist who, to extend the JekyllHyde metaphor, is not content to tread over the tender bones of one screaming little girl but in this case feels it necessary to do the funky chicken over the whole world. Yes, folks, in The Stand I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and it was fun! So where is morality now? Well, I'll give you my idea. I think it lies where it has always lain in the hearts and minds of men and women of good will. In the case of the writer, this may mean beginning with a nihilistic premise and gradually relearning old lessons of human values and human conduct. In the case of The Stand, this meant beginning with the glum premise that the human race carries a kind of germ with itI began by seeing this germ symbolically visualized in the SLA, and ended by seeing it visualized in the superflu germwhich grows more and more virulent as technology grows in power. The superflu is unleashed by a single technological misstep (not such a farfetched presumption, either, when you consider what happened at Three Mile Island last year or the fact that Loring AFB in my own state scrambled bombers and fighters ready to head over the pole toward Russia as the result of an amusing little computer foulup which suggested that the Russians had launched their missiles and the Big Hot One was on). By simple agreement with myself to allow a few survivorsno survivors, no story, am I right?I was able to envision a world in which all the nuclear stockpiles would simply rust away and some kind of normal moral, political, and ecological balance would return to the mad universe we call home. But I don't think anyone knows what they really thinkor perhaps even what they really knowuntil it's written down, and I came to realize that the survivors would be very likely to first take up all the old quarrels and then all the old weapons. Worse, all those deadly toys would be available to them, and things might well become a sprint to see which group of loonies could figure out how to launch them first. My own lesson in writing The Stand was that cutting the Gordian Knot simply destroys the riddle instead of solving it, and the book's last line is an admission that the riddle still remains. The book also tries to celebrate brighter aspects of our lives simple human courage, friendship, and love in a world which so often seems mostly loveless. In spite of its apocalyptic theme, The Stand is mostly a hopeful book that echoes Albert Camus's remark that "happiness, too, is inevitable." More prosaically, my mother used to tell my brother David and I to "hope for the best and expect the worst," and that expresses the book I remember writing as well as anything. So, in short, we hope for a fourth level (a triple Werewolf?), one that will bring us full circle again to the horror writer not just as writer but as human being, mortal man or woman, just another passenger in the boat, another pilgrim on the way to whatever there is. And we hope that if he sees another pilgrim fall down that he will write about itbut not before he or she has helped the fallen one of his or her feet, brushed off his or her clothes, and seen if he or she is all right, and able to go on. If such behavior is to be, it cannot be as a result of an intellectual moral stance; it is because there is such a thing as love, merely a practical fact, a practical force in human affairs. Morality is, after all, a codification of those things which the heart understands to be true and those things which the heart understands to be the demands of a life lived among others . . . civilization, in a word. And if we remove the label "horror story" or "fantasy genre" or whatever, and replace it with "literature" or more simply still, "fiction," we may realize more easily that no such blanket accusations of immorality can be made. If we say that morality proceeds simply from a good heartwhich has little to do with ridiculous posturings and happilyeverafteringsand immorality proceeds from a lack of care, from shoddy observation, and from the prostitution of drama or melodrama for some sort of gain, monetary or otherwise, then we may realize that we have arrived at a critical stance which is both workable and humane. Fiction is the truth inside the lie, and in the tale of horror as in any other tale, the same rule applies now as when Aristophanes told his horror tale of the frogs morality is telling the truth as your heart knows it. When asked if he was not ashamed of the rawness and sordidness of his turnofthecentury novel McTeague, Frank Norris replied "Why should I be? I did not lie. I did not truckle. I told them the truth." Seen in that light, I think the horror tale may more often be adjudged innocent than guilty. 17 My, look at this . . . I do believe the sun is coming up. We have danced the night away, like lovers in some old MGM musical. But now the band has packed their melodies back inside their cases and has quitted the stage. The dancers have left, all but you and I, and I suppose we must go, as well. I cannot tell you how much I've enjoyed the evening, and if you sometimes found me a clumsy partner (or if I occasionally stepped on your toes), I do apologize. I feel as I suppose all lovers feel when the dance has finally ended, tired . . . but still gay. As I walk you to the door, may I tell you one more thing? We'll stand here in the vestibule as they unroll the rug again and douse the lights. Let me help you with your coat; I'll not keep you long. Questions of morality in the pursuit of horror may be begging the actual question. The Russians have a phrase, "the scream of the woodcock." The phrase is derisory because the woodcock is nature's ventriloquist, and if you fire your shotgun at tile place where the sound came from, you'll go hungry. Shoot the woodcock, not the scream, the Russians say. So let's see if we can't find a woodcockjust onein all these screaming thickets. It might just be hiding in this item, truth rather than fiction, from The Book of Lists, the WallaceWallechinsky clan's attic full of fascinating rickrack and useful junk. As you get ready to leave, think about this . . . or brood upon it THE MYSTERY OF LITTLE MISS NOBODY On July 6, 1944, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey circus was giving a performance in Hartford, Connecticut, before 7,000 paid customers. A fire broke out; 168 persons died in the blaze and 487 were injured. One of the dead, a small girl thought to be six years old, was unidentified. Since no one cattle to claim her, and since her face was unmarred, a photograph was taken of her and distributed locally and then throughout the U.S. Days passed, weeks and months passed, but no relative, no playmate, no one in the nation came forward to identify her. She remains unknown to this day. My idea of growing up is that the process consists mainly of developing a good case of mental tunnel vision and a gradual ossification of the imaginative faculty (what about Little Miss Nobody, you ask mewell, hang on; we'll get there). Children see everything, consider everything; the typical expression of the baby which is full, dry, and awake is a videeyed goggle at everything. Hello, pleased to meet you, freaked to be here. A child has not yet developed the obsessional behavior patterns which we approvingly call "good work habits." He or she has not yet internalized the idea that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. All of that comes later. Children believe in Santa Claus. It's no big deal; just a piece of stored information. They likewise believe in the boogeyman, the Trix Rabbit, McDonaldland (where hamburgers grow on trees and moderate thievery is approved behaviorwitness the lovable Hamburglar), the Tooth Fairy who takes ivory and leaves silver . . . all of these things are taken as a matter of course. These are some of the popular myths; there are others which, while more specialized, seem just as outr. Grampa leas gone to live with the angels. The stuff in the middle of the golf ball is the worst poison in the world. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. If you walk through holly bushes, your shadow can get caught and it will be left there forever, flapping on the sharp leaves. The changes come gradually, as logic and rationalism assert themselves. The child begins to wonder how Santa can be at the Value House, on a downtown corner ringing a bell over a Salvation Army pot, and up at the North Pole generaling his troop of elves all at the same time. The child maybe realizes that although lie's stepped on a hell of a lot of cracks, his or her mother's back is yet all right. Age begins to settle into that child's face. "Don't be a baby!" lie or she is told impatiently. "Your head is always in the clouds!" And the kicker, of course "Aren't you ever going to grow up?" After awhile, tile song says, Puff the magic dragon stopped trundling his way up the Cherry Lane to see his old goodbuddy Jackie Paper. Wendy and her brothers finally left Peter Pan and the Wild Boys to their fate. No more Magic Dust and only an occasional Happy Thought . . . but there was always something a little dangerous about Peter Pan, wasn't there? Something just a little too woodsyv,ild? Something in his eyes that was . . . well, downright Dionysian. Oh, the gods of childhood are immortal; tile big kids don't really sacrifice them; they just pass them on to their bratty kid brothers and kid sisters. It's childhood itself that's mortal man is in love, and loves what passes. And it's not just Puff and Tink and Peter Pan that are left behind in that rush for the driver's license, the high school and college diploma, in that mostly eager training to achieve "good work habits." We have each exiled the Tooth Fairy (or perhaps he exiles us when we are no longer able to provide the product he requires), murdered Santa Claus (only to reanimate the corpse for our own children), killed the giant that chased Jack down the beanstalk. And the poor old boogeyman! Laughed to death again and again, like Mr. Dark at the conclusion of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Listen to me now At eighteen or twenty or twentyone, whatever the legal drinking age may be in your state, "getting carded" is something of an embarrassment. You have to fumble around for a driver's license or your State Liquor Card or maybe even a photostat of your birth certificate so you can get a simple fa' Chrissakes glass of beer. But you let ten years go past, get so you are looking the big threeo right in the eye, and there is something absurdly flattering about getting carded. It means you still look like you might not be old enough to buy a drink over the bar. You still look a little wet behind the ears. You still look young. This got into my head a few years ago when I was in a bar called Benjaman's in Bangor, getting pleasantly loaded. I began to study the faces of entering patrons. The guy standing unobtrusively by the door let this one pass . . . and that one . . . and the next one. Then, bang! He stopped a guy in a U of M jacket and carded him. And I'll be damned if that guy didn't do a quick fade. The drinking age in Maine was then eighteen (boozerelated accidents on the highways have since caused the lawmakers to move the age up to twenty), and all of those people had looked about eighteen to me. So I got up and asked the bouncer how he knew that last guy was underage. He shrugged. "You just know," he said. "It's mostly in their eyes." For weeks after, my hobby was looking at the faces of adults and trying to decide exactly what it was that made them "adult faces." The face of a thirty yearold is healthy, unwrinkled, and no bigger than the face of a seventeenyearold. Yet you know that's no kid; you know. There seems to be some hidden yet overriding characteristic that makes what we all agree is the Adult Face. It isn't just the clothes or the stance, it isn't the fact that the thirty yearold is toting a briefcase and the seventeenyearold is toting a knapsack; if you put the head of each in one of those carnival cutouts which show the body of a capering sailor or a prizefighter, you could still pick out the adult ten tries out of ten. I came to believe that the bouncer was right. It's in the eyes. Not something that's there; something, rather, that has left. Kids are bent. They think around corners. But starting at roughly age eight, when childhood's second great era begins, the kinks begin to straighten out, one by one. The boundaries of thought and vision begin to close down to a tunnel as we gear up to get along. At last, unable to grapple to any profit with NeverNever Land anymore, we may settle for the minorleague version available at the local disco . . . or for a trip to Disney World one February or March. The imagination is an eye, a marvelous third eye that floats free. As children, that eye sees with 2020 clarity. As we grow older, its vision begins to dim . . . and one day the guy at the door lets you into the bar without asking to see any ID and that's it for you, Cholly; your hat is over the windmill. It's in your eyes. Something in your eyes. Check them out in the mirror and tell me if I'm wrong. The job of the fantasy writer, or the horror writer, is to bust the walls of that tunnel vision wide for a little while; to provide a single powerful spectacle for that third eye. The job of the fantasyhorror writer is to make you, for a little while, a child again. And the horror writer himself herself? Someone else looks at that item about Little Miss Nobody (toldja we'd get back to her, and here she is, still unidentified, as mysterious as the Wolf Boy of Paris) and says, "Jeez, you never can tell, can you?" and goes on to something else. But the fantasist begins to play with it as a child would, speculating about children from other dimensions, about dopplegangers, about God knows what. It's a child's toy, something bright and shiny and strange. Let us pull a lever and see what it does, let us push it across the floor and see if it goes RumRumRum or wackawackawacka. Let us turn it over and see if it will magically right itself again. In short, let us have our Fortian rains of frogs and people who have mysteriously burned to death while sitting at home in their easy chairs; let us have our vampires and our werewolves. Let us have Little Nobody, who perhaps slipped sideways through a crack in reality, only to be trampled to death in the rush from a burning circus tent. And something of this is reflected in the eyes of those who write horror stories. Ray Bradbury has the dreamy eyes of a child. So, behind his thick glasses, does Jack Finney. The same look is in Lovecraft's eyesthey startle with their simple dark directness, especially in that narrow, pinched, and somehow eternal New England face. Harlan Ellison, in spite of his rapid jivetalking shootfromthehip NervousNorvus mode of conversation (talking with Harlan can sometimes be like talking with an apocalyptic Saladmaster salesman who has just taken three large bennies), has those eyes. Every now and then he'll pause, looking away, looking at something else, and you know that it's true Harlan is bent, and he just thought his way around a corner. Peter Straub, who dresses impeccably and who always seems to project the aura of some big company success, also has that look in his eyes. It is an indefinable look, but it's there. |
"It's the best set of electric trains a boy ever had," Orson Welles once said of making movies; the same can be said of making books and stories. Here is a chance to bust that tunnel vision wide open, bricks flying everywhere so that, for a moment at least, a dreamscape of wonders and horrors stands forth as clearly and with all the magic reality of the first Ferris wheel you ever saw as a kid, turning and turning against the sky. Someone's dead son is on the late movie. Somewhere a foul manboogeyman!is slouching through the snowy night with shining yellow eyes. Boys are thundering through autumn leaves on their way home past the library at four in the morning, and somewhere else, in some other world, even as I write this, Frodo and Sam are making their way toward Mordor, where the shadows lie. I am quite sure of it. Ready to go? Fine. I'll just grab my coat. It's not a dance of death at all, not really. There is a third level here, as well. It is, at bottom, a dance of dreams. It's a way of awakening the child inside, who never dies but only sleeps ever more deeply. If the horror story is our rehearsal for death, then its strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imaginationjust one more pipeline to the infinite. In his epic poem of a stewardess falling to her death from high above the fields of Kansas, James Dickey suggests a metaphor for the life of the rational being, who must grapple as best heshe can with the fact of hisher own mortality. We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other . . . except through faith. That we retain our sanity in the face of these simple yet blinding mysteries is nearly divine. That we may turn the powerful intuition of our imaginations upon them and regard them in this glass of dreamsthat we may, however timidly, place our hands within the hole which opens at the center of the column of truththat is . . . . . . well, it's magic, isn't it? Yeah. I think maybe that's,what I want to leave you,with, in lieu of a goodnight kiss, that Nvord which children respect instinctively, that word whose truth we only rediscover as adults in our stories . . . and in our dreams Magic. Afterword IN JULY OF 1977, my wife and I hosted a gathering of my wife's entire familya giant collection of sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, and millions of kids. My wife spent most of that week cooking and of course what always happens at family gatherings happened at this one everybody brought a casserole. Much food was eaten on the shores of Long Lake that sunny summer day; many cans of beer were consumed. And when the crowd of Spruces and Atwoods and LaBrees and Graveses and everyone else had departed, we were left with enough food to feed an army regiment. So we ate leftovers. Day in, day out, we ate leftovers. And when Tabby brought out the remains of the turkey for the fifth or sixth time (we had eaten turkey soup, turkey surprise, and turkey with noodles; this day it was something simpler, nice, nourishing turkey sandwiches), my son Joe, who was then five, looked at it and screamed "Do we have to eat this shit again?" I didn't know whether to laugh or clout him upside the head. As I recall, I did both. I told you that story because people who have read a lot of my work will realize that they have eaten a few leftovers here. I have used material from my introduction to Night Shift, from my introduction to the New American Library's omnibus edition of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide, from an article entitled "The Fright Report," originally published in Oui magazine, from an article called "The Third Eye" in The Writer; much of the material on Ramsey Campbell originally appeared in Stuart Schiff's Whispers magagine. Now before you decide to clout me upside the lead or to scream "Do we have to eat this shit again?" let me point out to you what my wife pointed out to my son on the day of the turkey sandwiches there are hundreds of different recipes for turkey, but they all taste like turkey. And coupled with that, she said, it is a shame to waste good things. This is not to say that my article in Oui was so paralyzingly great or that my thoughts on Ramsey Campbell were so deathless that they deserved to be preserved in a book; it is only to say that, while my thoughts and feelings on the genre I've spent most of my life working in may have evolved or shifted somewhat in perspective, they haven't really changed. That change may come, but since there has only been a passage of four years since I originally stated many of my feelings about horror and terror in the Night Shift introduction, it would be surprisingeven suspectif I were to suddenly deny everything I had written previous to this book. In my own defense, I'll add that Danse Macabre gave me the space to develop some of these ideas in more detail than I had ever been given before, and for that I must thank Bill Thompson and Everest House. In no case did I simply reheat something I had written before; I tried as hard as I could to develop each idea as fully as possible without beating it into the ground. In some cases, I may have done just that, though, and all I can do in such cases is to beg your indulgence. And I think that really is the end. Thank you again for coming with me, and rest you well. But, being who I am and what I am, I cannot find it in my heart to wish you pleasant dreams . . . APPENDICES AND INDEX APPENDIX I THE FILMS Below is a list of roughly one hundred fantasyhorror films tied together by their time and their excellence. All were released during the period 19501980, and all of them seem to me to be particularly interesting in one way or another; if I may say so without sounding like an Academy Awards presenter, all of them have contributed something of value to the genre. You will find my own personal favorites marked with an asterisk ( ). Special thanks are due to Kirby McCauley, who provided invaluable help with the list. TITLE DIRECTOR YEAR The Abominable Dr. Phibes Robert Fuest 1971 Alien Ridley Scott 1979 Asylum Roy Ward Baker 1972 The Bad Seed Mervyn LeRoy 1956 The Birds Alfred Hitchcock 1963 The Bird with the Crystal Plumage Dario Argento 1969 Black Sunday Mario Bava 1961 The Brood David Cronentberg 1979 Burnt Offerings Dan Curtis 1976 Burn Witch Burn Sidney Hayers 1962 The Cage Walter Graumann 1961 Carrie Brian De Palma 1976 The Conqueror Worm Michael Reeves 1968 Creature from the Black Lagoon Jack Arnold 1954 The Creeping Unknown Val Guest 1955 Curse of the Demon Jacques Tourneur 1957 The Day of the Triiffids Steve Sekely 1963 Dawn of the Dead George A. Romero 1979 The Deadly Beer Freddie Francis 1967 Deep Red Dario Argento ? Deliverance John Boorman 1972 dementia13 Francis Coppola 1963 Diabolique HenriGeorges Clouzot1955 Doctor Terror's House of Horrors Freddie Francis 1965 Don't Look Now Nicholas Roeg 1973 Duel Steven Spielberg 1971 Enemy from Space Val Guest 1957 Eraserhead David Lynch 1978 The Exorcist William Friedkin 1973 The Exterminating Angel Luis Bunuel 1963 Eye of the Cat David Lowell Rich 1969 The Fly Kurt Neumann 1958 Frenzy Alfred Hitchcock 1972 The Fury Brian De Palma 1978 Gorgo Eugene Lourie 1961 Halloween John Carpenter 1978 The Haunting Robert Wise 1963 The HMan Inoshiro Honda 1958 Horrors of the Black Museum Arthur Crabtree 1959 Hour of the Wolf Ingmar Bergman 1967 The House that Dripped Blood Peter Duffell 1970 Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte Robert Aldrich 1965 I Bury the Living Albert Band 1958 The Incredible Shrinking Man Jack Arnold 1957 Invasion of the Body Snatchers Don Siegel 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers Philip Kaufman 1978 I Saw What You Did William Castle 1965 It Came from Outer Space Jack Arnold 1953 It! The Terror from Beyond Space Edward L. Cahn 1958 Jaws Steven Spielberg 1975 The Killer Shrews Ken Curtis 1959 Last Summer Frank Perry 1969 Let's Scare Jessica to Death John Hancock 1971 Macabre William Castle 1958 Martin George A. Romero 1977 The Masque of the Red Death Roger Corman 1964 Night Must Fall Karel Reisz 1964 The Night of the Hunter Charles Laughton 1955 Night of the Living Dead George A. Romero 1968 Not of This Earth Roger Corman 1956 No Way to Treat a Lady Jack Smight 1968 Panic in the Year Zero Ray Milland 1962 Picnic at Hanging Rock Peter Weir 1978 The Pit and the Pendulum Roger Corman 1961 Psycho Alfred Hitchcock 1960 Rabid David Cronenberg 1976 Race with the Devil Jack Starrett 1975 Repulsion Roman Polanski 1965 Rituals ? 1978 Rosemary's Baby Roman Polanski 1968 Salem's Lot Tobe Hooper 1979 Seance on a Wet Afternoon Bryan Forties 1964 Seizure Oliver Stone 1975 The Seventh Seal Ingmar Bergman 1956 Sisters Brian De Palma 1973 The Shining Stanley Kubrick 1980 The Shout Jerzy Skolimowski 1979 Someone's Watching Me John Carpenter 1978 The Stepford Wives Bryan Forties 1975 StraitJacket William Castle 1964 Suddenly Last Summer Joseph L. Mankiewicz 1960 Suspiria Dario Argento 1977 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Tobe Hooper 1974 Them! Gordon Douglas 1954 They Came from Within David Cronenberg 1975 The Thing Christian Nyby 1951 The Tomb of Ligeia Roger Corman 1965 Trilogy of Terror Dan Curtis 1975 Village of the Damned Wolf Rilla 1960 Wait Until Dark Terence Young 1967 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Robert Aldrich 1961 When Michael Calls Philip Leacock 1971 The Wicker Man Robin Hardy 1973 Willard Daniel Mann 1971 Xthe Man with the XRay Eyes Roger Corman 1963 X the Unknown Leslie Norman 1956 APPENDIX 2 THE BOOKS Below is a list of roughly one hundred booksnovels and collectionswhich span the period we have been discussing. They are listed alphabetically according to author. As with my list of films, you may not find all of these to your taste, but all seemto me, at leastimportant to the genre we have been discussing. Thanks again to Kirby McCauley, who helped with the list, and a special tip of the hat to "Fast Eddie" Melder, who owns a pub in North Lovell and who put up with our wild talk until well past closing time. Once again, I've marked with an asterisk ( ) books which I felt were particularly important. Richard Adams. The Plague Dogs; Watership Down Robert Aickman. Cold Hand in Mine; Painted Devils Marcel Ayme. The Walker through Walls Beryl Bainbridge. Harriet Said J. G. Ballard. Concrete Island; High Rise Charles Beaumont. Hunger; The Magic Man Robert Bloch. Pleasant Dreams; Psycho Ray Bradbury. Dandelion Wine; Something Wicked This Way Comes; The October Country Joseph Payne Brennan. The Shapes of Midnight Frederic Brown. Nightmares and Geezenstacks Edward Bryant. Among the Dead Janet Caird. The Loch Ramsey Campbell. Demons By Daylight; The Doll Who Ate His Mother; The Parasite Suzy McKee Charnas. The Vampire Tapestry Julio Cortazar. The End of the Game and Other Stories Harry Crews. A Feast of Snakes Roald Dahl. Kiss Kiss; Someone Like You Les Daniels. The Black Castle Stephen R. Donaldson. The Thomas Covenant Trilogy (3 vols.) Daphne Du Maurier. Don't Look Now Harlan Ellison . Deathbird Stories; Strange Wine John Farris . All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By Charles G. Finney. The Ghosts of Manacle Jack Finney. The Body Snatchers; I Love Galesburg in the Springtime; The Third Level; Time and Again William Golding. Lord of the Flies Edward Gorey. Amphigorey; Amphigorey Too Charles L. Grant. The Hour of the Oxrun Dead; The Sound of Midnight Davis Grubb. Twelve Tales of Horror William H. Hallahan. The Keeper of the Children; The Search for Joseph Tully James Herbert. The Fog; The Spear; The Survivor William Hjortsberg. Falling Angel Shirley Jackson. The Haunting of Hill House; The Lottery and Others; The Sundial Gerald Kersh. Men Without Bones Russell Kirk. The Princess of All Lands Nigel Kneale. Tomato Caine William Kotzwinkle. Dr. Rat Jerry Kozinski. The Painted Bird Fritz Leiber. Our Lady of Darkness Ursula LeGuin. The Lathe of Heaven; Orsinian Tales Ira Levin. Rosemary's Baby; The Stepford Wives John D. MacDonald. The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything Bernard Malamud. The Magic Barrel; The Natural Robert Marasco. Burnt Offerings Gabriel Maria Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude Richard Matheson. Hell House; I Am Legend; Shock II; The Shrinking Man; A Stir of Echoes Michael McDowell. The Amulet; Cold Moon Over Babylon Ian McEwen. The Cement Garden John Metcalf. The Feasting Dead Iris Murdoch. The Unicorn Joyce Carol Oates. Nightside Flannery O'Connor. A Good Man Is Hard to Find Mervyn Peake. The Gormenghast Trilogy (3 volumes) Thomas Pynchon. V. Edogawa Rampo. Tales of Mystery and Imagination Jean Ray. Ghouls in My Grave Anne Rice. Interview with the Vampire Philip Roth. The Breast Ray Russell. Sardonicus Joan Samson. The Auctioneer William Sansom. The Collected Stories of William Sansom Sarban. Ringstones; The Sound of His Horn Anne Rivers Siddons. The House Next Door Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Seance and Other Stories Martin Cruz Smith. Nightwing Peter Straub. Ghost Story; If You Could See Me Now; Julia; Shadowland Theodore Sturgeon. Caviar; The Dreaming jewels; Some of Your Blood Thomas Tessier. The Nightwalker Paul Theroux. The Black House Thomas Tryon. The Other Les Whitten. Progeny of the Adder Thomas Williams. Tsuga's Children Gahan Wilson. I Paint What I See T. M. Wright. Strange Seed John Wyndham. The Chrysalids; The Day of the Triffids Table of Contents Cover DANSE MACABRE Dedication CONTENTS Forenote Epigraph CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X THE MYSTERY OF LITTLE MISS NOBODY APPENDICES AND INDEX |
SCRIBNER 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Copyright 2004 by Stewart ONan, Stephen King All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon Schuster, the publisher of this work. DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING Text set in Adobe Garamond Library of Congress Control Number 2004063398 ISBN13 9780743272445 ISBN10 0743272447 Dirty Water Words and music by Ed Cobb. Copyright 1965 (Renewed) by Embassy Music Corporation (BMI). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. I Put a Spell on You Words and music by JAY HAWKINS. Copyright 1956 (Renewed 1984) EMI UNART CATALOG INC. All rights controlled by EMI UNART CATALOG INC. and WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida 33014. Visit us on the World Wide Web httpwww.SimonSays.com For Victoria Snelgrove, Red Sox fan Contents Introduction by Stewart ONan Spring Training Welcome to Next Year AprilMay Who Are These Guys? June The June Swoon July Turn the Page August The Hottest August on Record SeptemberOctober Hangin Tough The ALDS Somebody Gotta Pay The ALCS Beyond Thunderdome The World Series The Possible Dream Acknowledgments Boston Red Sox 2004 STATS Down by the river, down by the banks of the River Charles. Thats where youll find me, along with muggers, lovers and thieves. THE STANDELLS I put a spell on you, cause youre mine. SCREAMIN JAY HAWKINS Introduction I wasnt always like this. I was born a World Champion, a thirdgeneration Pirates fan, in early 1961. A few short months before, the Bucs had taken the heavily favored Yankees to Game 7 in Forbes Field. The Yanks seemed to have the series in hand, up 74 in the eighth when Bill Virdon hit a simple doubleplay ball to short. As Tony Kubek charged, the ball took a bad hop off the alabaster plaster, hitting him in the Adams apple, and both runners were safe. Two singles later, it was 76. The next batter, backup catcher Hal Smith, caught up to a Bobby Shantz fastball and parked it over the leftfield wall for a 97 lead. But the Pirates couldnt close it out, surrendering two in the next frame. With the game tied at nine, second baseman Bill Mazeroski led off the bottom of the ninth. He took the first pitch from Ralph Terry for a ball, and then, as every Pirates and Yankees fan knows, Maz cranked a high fastball over Yogi Berra and everything in left, and the fans stormed the field. As a longtime Red Sox fan, I appreciate this history even more now, but, as a kid then, my perspective was limited. Living so close to the reallife setting of the legend (our library was right across the parking lot, and wed walk over and touch the brick wall the ball cleared), I grew up pitying the Yankees as hardluck losers. As the 60s turned into the 70s, nothing happened to refute this. We won it all again in 71, beating an Orioles team with four 20game winners, and made the playoffs nearly every year before succumbing to the Dodgers or the Big Red Machine. Roberto Clemente, tragically, was gone, but his spirit lingered over the Lumber Company, a colorful and monstrous offensive club that included hitters like Willie Stargell, Dave Parker, Al Oliver, Richie Zisk, Rennie Stennett and Manny Sanguillen. Earl Weavers Os and Charlie Finleys As ruled the AL. The bumbling Yankees, like the Brooklyn Dodgers or New York Giants, belonged to a flannel, whitebread past, hopelessly square. About the time George Steinbrenner took them over, I traded my interest in baseball for cooler high school pursuits music and cars, girls and cigarettes. I noticed with an offhand disgust that the Yankees had bought the heart of the As dynasty to win two cheapies, but it didnt mean much to me. I was too busy messing around to bother with a kids game. That probably wouldnt have changed if the Pirates didnt go and win it all again in 79. I was going to school in Boston, lost in engineering problems and partying, but one of my best friends was an Orioles fan. Game 7 was excruciating for him. Just like in 71, they were playing in Baltimore, and just like in 71, the threerun homer the Os were waiting for never showed up. Rather than rub it in, I did my best to console my friend. Thats just how it went with the Pirates in Game 7like the Steelers in the Super Bowl. By Opening Day of 1980, the glow from winning it all hadnt worn off, and, living two blocks from Kenmore Square, I decided to take advantage of the neighborhood and visit Fenway Park for the first time. I didnt expect much. AL ball back then seemed boring to me, a slow, lowscoring game like soccer (since then, the leagues have swapped styles, maybe due to the DH, or the AL teams new, smaller parks), but bleacher seats were only three dollars. The park reminded me of longgone Forbes Field, with its green girders and cramped wooden seats and oddball dimensions. And that wall, the top hung with saillike nets to catch home run balls. It made me think of the wire screen in right and the way Clemente anticipated every weird carom off it, gunning down runners chugging into second. And the Sox surprised me. They played like an NL cluball hitting, no pitching. No speed or defense either. The stars of the great 75 and 78 teams were gone, sacrificed to free agency by the oldschool Yawkeys. The only survivors were Jim Rice, Dwight Evans and the fastaging Yaz, anchoring a lineup of journeymen. They were a slower, less talented version of the old Pirates, a Lumbering Company, just hoping to outslug the other team. They werent good but they werent really bad either. They were entertaining, and Fenway provided me with the amenities of an actual parka green space in the middle of the city where I could pass the hours reading and doing my homework. I watched the games and I liked the team enough, but I didnt kid myself that they were contenders. And that was okay. Between championships the Pirates went through long stretches in the cellar. This was better, skirting .500. The farm system was in good shape, and eventually wed develop some pitchers. You could say I didnt know what I was getting myself into, but game after game I happily shelled out my three bucks at the barred ticket window outside Gate C and staked my claim to Section 34 in straight center, right beside Channel 38s camera, where you could call balls and strikes and let the opposing center fielder know he was on the road. The Sox werent a tough ticket then, and I was surrounded by a scruffy tribe of regulars. My favorite was the General, a scrawny, grizzled guy in his late twenties with rotten teeth who wore a squashed Civil War cap and challenged all comers with his portable Othello board. And then there was the husky dude with receding hair who always came late with his dinner in a Tupperware bowl and bellowed, WAAAAAAAAAAAAADE! After the 84 season, I left for a job on Long Island, and was living there when Roger Clemens and the 86 club made the playoffs. I was there for Game 6 of the World Series, deep in the heart of Mets country. I remember us being one strike away again and again. I was ready to jump up from my chair and dance. It was late, and I was watching by myself, the TV turned down so it wouldnt wake the baby. When the ball rolled through Billy Bucks legs, I heard the cheers of my neighbors. One pitchsay, one of Pedros changeupsand I wouldnt be writing this. But no, we placed our faith in Calvin Schiraldi (who blew leads in both the eighth and the tenth in Game 6). Ive been to disappointing games since thena string of playoff losses to Cleveland, the phantomtag game in the 99 ALCS, last years PedroZimmer brawlbut none of those teams, no matter how far they went, even last years overachievers, were true contenders. We were always at least two players away, and one of those was usually a closer. Even in 86, the odds were on the Mets (who, if you remember, were touted as one of the greatest teams of all time, a claim that now seems like the New York hype it was). This year was different. With the addition of Curt Schilling and Keith Foulke, it looked like we had the horses. Months before pitchers and catchers were scheduled to report, the pressure on the team was already intense. Anything short of a World Championship would be considered a failure, and with the new owners trying to juggle too many highpriced contracts (including Nomar and Pedro in the last year of their deals), it appeared this was the only shot the Sox would have for a long time. Add to that a new, largely unproven manager, Terry Francona, whose previous experience with the Phillies had been less than successful. After last years Game 7 debacle, the front office (led by whiz kid and Bill James disciple Theo Epstein) canned the Chauncey Gardnerlike Grady Little, the latest in a parade of weak field managers with no input into personnel moves. Francona inherited a team with several notorious prima donnas, a brutal local media and a demanding fan base. He had a threeyear contract, but if he didnt produce a winner immediately, he knew he might as well pack his bags. Along with those overarching dramas, there were questions about how the failed ARod deal would play out with Nomar and Manny Ramirez. The Yankees also picked up former Sox closer Tom Gordon, who they hoped would be the missing setup man theyd needed since promoting Mariano Rivera to closer. The Sox were still hoping Ramiro Mendoza would come around, and submariner ByungHyun Kim, but, emotionally, Sox fans were pulling harder for prodigal sons Brian Daubach and Ellis Burks. (Daubachs drama started early he was a nonroster invitee to training camp, and, as has been the case his entire career, had to scrap to stay in the majors.) And of course there was the question of Pedro and his shoulder, Pedro and his back, Pedro and his mouth. Plus whatever controversy came up. This Sox clubhouse, like the Yankees back when they had personality, was known for soap opera. It would be an interesting year, whichever way it went. If the Sox contended, all of New England would catch pennant fever. If they tanked, the carnage would be spectacular. Either way, Steve and I would be following them, watching them, listening to them, taking in games at Fenway, reading the box scores, checking the website, discussing them endlessly with friends and family and total strangers. Like any devoted Sox fans, wed been waiting for this season since the end of Game 7, and our hopes were both impossibly high and cautiously guarded. Because as much as we love them, the Sox had broken our hearts over and over, and that probably wouldnt change. But what if? No one expected the Patriots to ever win a Super Bowl, let alone two. Our rotation was the best in the majors, and we actually had a closer now. Last years offense had outslugged the 27 Yankees. More than any team wed fielded since 78 (that wonderful, terrible season), this squad had a bona fide shot. In February, before a single pitch had been thrown, millions of us believed this would be the year. This book should reflect the depth of our obsession as well as how quickly the tone of a season changes. To get the emotions while they were fresh, the book is in double diary form. We didnt chase the team like journalists, looking for total coverage. We just did our best to have a regular Soxfilled summer. For each day or game that we naturally came in contact with the Sox and found something remarkablefrom spring training to the very last outwe wrote separate entries or reflections. Besides the diary entries, for games or streaks that especially thrilled us or pissed us off (and with the Sox, we didnt lack for those), weve attached spurofthemoment email exchanges that show us firmly in the grip of the beast, feeding it. In baring our relationship with the Sox, we hope to illuminate readers feelings for their own favorite teams. We also hope theres something funny about owning up to the silliness of obsession yet being unable to break free of itlike Woody Allen or David Foster Wallace being painfully aware of their neuroses even as they navigate situations bound to freak them out. Sox fans are like any anxious sports fans, except we have good reason to be paranoid, so that even an 81 laugher against Tampa Bay can turnin a matter of a couple of base runners, a couple of knuckleheaded pitching changesinto pure torture. And like hardcore followers of any sport, Sox fans are expert at taking a game apart and examining its most intricate components, especially when the worst happens. We knew all of this coming into the 2004 season, and yet, for all the heartbreak, there we were again, psyched that Tommy Brady and the Pats might show up on Opening Day the way they did in 2002. Fenway was sold out for the season, and ticket prices on eBay were through the roof. The Sox and Yanks were both stocked and talking smack, from the front office down to the scalpers. The waiting was overfinally, it was next year. Stewart ONan, February 29th, 2004 Spring Training Welcome to Next Year February 21st After the Schilling acquisition, and during the ARod negotiations, I felt distinctly weirdout of kilter as a Red Sox fan. I started to think, Im going to come back to a team of superhero strangers wearing Red Sox uniforms. Who are these guys? It was a dreamlike feeling, both pleasant and unpleasantlike getting gas at the dentist and knowing its going to hurt like almighty hell later on. Then the ARod deal fell throughthe same old Red Sox problem lots of cash, just not quite enough cash. And the Yankees got him. And the tabloids gloated. And even the New York Times, that supposedly staid gray lady, got in a crack; the Yankees, one of their columnists said, continued to show the Red Sox how to win, winter and summer. That was when the unpleasant dreamlike feeling burst, and I woke up to real life, smelling not the coffee but the peanuts and Cracker Jacks Ah yes, screwed again. Hello, world, Im a Red Sox fan. For better or worse, Im a Red Sox fan, and Ive just been screwed again. Same as it ever was. So bring on the Yankees, and may Alex Rodriguez bat .240. Were going to spring training, the whole family. Its a surprise, my birthday present, a long weekend in Fort Myers. Ive always wanted to go, ever since I was a kid in Pittsburgh listening to the Bucs warm up in sunny Bradenton. Trudy says shes sick of listening to me yap about it, so here it is, a folder with the plane tickets, the hotel reservations, the rentalcar agreement. We cant afford it, but I cant say that. And theres the envelope with the game tickets and the diagram of City of Palms Park. Were going to see the Sox play their traditional game against Boston College on Friday, then the first game of the year against the Yankees Sunday and finally a Monday game against the Twins, who also train in Fort Myers. I forget about the money for a second and check out where were sitting. I hit the Sox website to find out more about the training complex. I figure my son Steph and I can hang out and watch the players while Trudy and Caitlin beach it. I check the schedule, thinking the BC game is the very first of the spring. Its not. Were playing the Twins at their place on Thursday. I go to their website and buy four tickets for it. Were also playing Northeastern at home on Friday night. I buy four more. February 23rd My brother John calls from Pittsburgh and asks me who he should draft from the Sox for his AL fantasy team. Hes a Pirates fan and doesnt follow the junior circuit closely. Personally, I dont like fantasy leagues, the way they make you root for individual players over team performance, but I do my best for him. Keith Foulke should get forty saves no matter how badly he pitches. Last year you told me Mendoza. Bronson Arroyo. Hes no good. At least he wasnt when he was with us. Who else? Pokey Reese. We had him. Hes always injured. I hang up feeling unhelpful, all of my arcane knowledge useless. Second base is the one big question mark this season, besides not having a lefty starter. Pokey Reese has missed the better part of the last two seasons with leg and thumb injuries. Hes a little guy, a speedster who played option QB in high school, but suddenly hes become delicate. He could be the Gold Glover he was a few years back and hit a respectable .260, or he could tank. Already the Sox are looking at Mark Bellhorn, Tony Womack and Terry Shumpert as insurance policies. Nomar says hes excited about playing beside such a slick fielder. Every spring it seems he says the same thing, because its been ten years since weve had the same Opening Day second baseman in consecutive seasons. We let playoff hero Todd Walker walk. Rey Sanchez got the boot after a decent year. Before that we had Jose Offerman, exgeneral manager Dan Duquettes laughable answer to losing Mo Vaughn. Duquette, youll remember, is the genius who said Roger Clemens was in the twilight of his career and let him go off to Toronto, where he won backtoback Cy Youngs. In the 80s there was continuity at second. Jerry Remy, Marty Barrett and Jody Reed all enjoyed long stays, and were fan favorites (Jerry still is, doing color for NESN). Duquette, trading our top prospects yearly in his attempt to build an instant champion, stripped the farm system, and now our second basemanlike our closeris a replacement player. February 25th Im trying to get tix for Stewart (and Stewarts wife Trudy) and me to the annual game pitting the Red Sox Bteam (invitee Brian Dauber Daubach should be starting for the Sox) against the Boston College baseball team. Ordinarily these would be a slam dunkprime real estate up in Owners Country at City of Palms Park, and maybe a couple of spots among the Escalades and Navigators in the players parking lotbut my main man, Kevin Shea, has moved on, and so its nervousmaking time. How about the satellite connection? Can I get New England Sports Network (aka NESN, aka The Home of the Free and Land of the Eck) down here? Yes. Thank God. But my subscription from last year has lapsed. Oh shit. And how many spring training games will they carry, anyway? Oh shit, maybe Joe Castiglione can help me with tix to the SoxBC gamebut he wanted me to blurb his book, and it deserves a blurb, but I havent done it yet Its nervous time. Oh God, I wish Curt Schilling was only thirtytwo. February 27th Ive been trying to nail down tickets to the home opener for months now. Its been sold out since five minutes after seats went on sale, but Ive got an in. Last year I managed to score some lastminute seatsfield boxes ten rows behind home plate. Took the kids out of school, only to sit in the freezing rain for three hours before the game was called. I figured wed get the same seats, but when the replacements came they were grandstands. I sent them back, but the ticket office never got back to me. At the end of the season, I called and asked what the deal was, and Naomi there said theyd give me two field boxes for this years opener and a chance to buy two more. But so far Ive been having trouble getting through to Naomi. My great fear is that shes changed jobs and well be stuck watching the game on TV. February 28th I vet the depth chart on the website as if Im Theo, trying to figure out who to keep, who to cut, who to ship to Pawtucket. Weve brought the expanded fortyman roster to camp, along with twelve nonroster invitees. By Opening Day, management will whittle these fiftytwo down to twentyfive, and of the twentyfive spots, twenty are already filled. Essentially, thirtytwo players, most with big league experience, are fighting for five spots reserved for middle relievers and backup position players. One guy who I hope makes it is Brian Daubach. Even though hes a millionaire, fans still see him as a scrappy bluecollar player. He paid his dues in the minors with the Marlins and Devil Rays before getting his chance with the Sox, and played well as a platoon guy before getting demoted for Tony Clark (who he outplayed to win his job back), then dumped for the awful Jeremy Giambi. We want Dauber! wed shout after Giambi struck out looking again. Now hes back, and his main competition is David McCarty, a good defensive first baseman we picked up from Oakland at the end of last season. As a lefty hitter with power, Dauber has the edge, but since David Ortiz already fills that bill, McCartys glove might be more valuable in the late innings. McCarty, weirdly, also plans on trying to pitch, and were so desperate for lefties that Franconas going to let him. SK Dauber was a real oldtime Red Sox player. Like he was born to play for the Red Sox. Millar is that way; and Varitek, of course. And you know, Pedro Martinez wasnt born a Red Sox guy, but has become one. He finished his becoming in the seventh game of the ALCS last year, dont you think? Came out covered in mud and blood and shit, soul brother to Pumpsie Green. Man, I root for the Dauberbut I dont give him a dogs chance. Sure wish I had my DAUBACH IS MY DADDY shirt. Id wear it to the SoxBC game. God, no one ever tried harder in the clutch. SO And, like Fisk, he always took it out on his old clubs. He wore out Tampa Bay, and last year when he beat us he was smiling for Tom Caron [NESNs roving onfield reporter] like a new dad. No doubt Pedros paid his dues. Manny, well, its close. Johnny Ds still too new, and Bill Mueller (pronounced Miller), and David Ortiz. The Sox need more Sox! SK Some of what happens to Daubach is down to pure luckwho gets hurt and who stays healthy. But you know hes on the edge of being back in civvies. Or a minor league uni. Hope he made some good investments over the years. February 29th Reporters following ByungHyun Kim say he stays till 1 A.M. working out, but that he naps at all times. I wonder if BKs regimen is like the Japanese, who throw two hundred pitches a day. Hes young and talented, with that weird submarine delivery, but hes never thrown a full season as a starter. If he can give us two hundred innings and twenty quality starts, we should win the East. The worry is that hes a head case. He gave Fenway the finger when we booed him during the introductions before the ALCS, and in the offseason he smashed a photographers camera. I guess hes this years Oil Can Boyd or Cowboy Carl Everett. March 1st Steve calls as Trudys microwaving her lunch. I can barely hear him through the Geigerlike static. For the BC game, were parking in the players lot and sitting in the owners booth. As a bleacher rat, Im a little nervous. What do you say to an ownerWay to own? March 2nd OopsYankees Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield received steroids from Barry Bondss trainer, according to the ongoing federal probe. Giambi showed up at camp looking shrunken. Sheffield says hell pee in a cup anytime anyplace, but when a reporter produces a cup, Sheff backs down. Makes me wonder if Steinbrenner went out and got ARod and Travis Lee in case the league suspends the BALCO Boys. March 3rd All day an unreal, nearly paralyzing feeling. It seems so impossible that were blowing off work and school that we have to keep repeating the news to each other like lottery winners Were going to Florida! In the Charlotte airport, waiting for our connection to Fort Myers, I look around the gate for fellow pilgrims, but the one kid wearing a cap is a Brewers fan. Its only when were on board that the hard core begin dribbling infour single guys in their twenties, all big enough to be players, in various Sox hats. We get in after midnight and the airports crazy. In the long line at the rentalcar center, half the people are in Boston garb. Fort Myers is an endless grid of strip malls and stoplights, and everyone drives like theyre either having a heart attack or trying to find an emergency room for someone who is. We fly past Mattress World, Bath World, Rug World. Its Hicksville, Long Island, with palm trees and pelicans. Our hotel has personalityunfortunately its the personality of a lunch lady turned crack whore. Bikers and twentysomethings early for spring break wander the parking lot, knocking back Coronas and margaritas to the thumping of a ragged cover band. The hotels assurance on their website that they dont rent to anyone under twentyone seems less a defensive measure now than an admission of a longstanding problem. Its onethirty and the music is thundering up from the stage, one floor below our balcony. The song ends and the drunk girls scream. The drunk guys go Wooooo! March 4th I want to get up and be at the practice fields by nine. I expect itll be just me and Steph, but Trudy comes too, driving while I navigate. We peel off the Tamiami Trail and in a few blocks we see City of Palms Park. According to the website, the training complex is two and a half miles straight down Edison, but theres no parking. Youre supposed to park here and ride a shuttle bus to the practice fields. City of Palms Park is understated and classic from the outside, a plain white concrete facade three stories tall, with flags for all the AL teams flying atop the roof, and one windowsized Sox logo over the green main gates. Theres no one on the plaza in front, just the stalky palm trees. I dont see anywhere to park, so I tell Trudy to go ahead and cruise the practice fields. We get luckythe lot for the practice facility is halfempty. The clearcoated monster trucks and chromewheeled Escalades are obviously the players. We park in a far corner and head for the nearest gate. AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY, a sign says. As we walk through, I look for other fans, but only see a few people who might be players relatives. There are five fields and, closest to us, a roofed arcade. Someones in there smacking balls, but its too dim to see who, and were trying to act cool. We head for a field where the players are stretching. No one challenges us. When we reach the team, we see whyits not the big club but the rookie and minor league invitees, guys with no shot this year, but who may develop and move up through the system. The pitchers run bunt drills. The outfielders handle linedrive singles silently fired from a rubberwheeled machine. Former players Luis Alicea and U L Washington coach the infielders, tossing shorthops the players have to backhand barehanded. The range of skill is evident. Some never miss while others are lucky to pick one cleanly. Summers, we see a lot of the tripleA PawSox over in Pawtucket and the doubleA Portland Sea Dogs when they visit New Britain, but the only player I recognize is Hanley Ramirez. Hes the number one prospect in our farm system, a shortstop with speed and power. Hes only twenty, and rumor is he might be promoted from singleA Augusta to Portland, with an eye towards taking Nomars place in 2005. One problem is he made 36 errors last year and hit only .275 after batting over .330 at lower levels. Another is that hes a hothead, earning a tengame suspension for making an obscene gesture to the crowd. Here, in practice, he moves like hes already a superstar, cool and loose and slouchy. There are three seniors watching with us, a woman and two men, one of whom is wearing a Springfield Elks cap. The woman has a camera, a couple signed balls and a handful of minor league cards. She wants to get Jamie Brown to sign his. She knows all the players taking batting practice. This is what they do, she says. Theyre mad at the Sox for forcing them to buy ticket packages that include three crummy games to get the one good one against the Yanks, so now they just come to the complex and watch the kids. BP wraps, so we ramble along the road beyond the last field. Its hot, and Stephs cheeks are red. Weve circled the entire complex, and walk through the lot just as two women in a 69 Firebird convertible pull up. Theyre older than any of the guys here, but beachtanned and gymtight. I dont think Stephs seen Bull Durham or knows what a Baseball Annie is, but he probably wouldnt be interested anyway. We come back in the players entrance, which has a Boston Globe honor box beside it. The batting alleys are full of guys getting extra swings in. By the backstop, the old lady is getting Jamie Brown to sign. Weve only been here a few hours, but its enough. Its only our first day and were already wilting. After putting in some beach time, we get caught in traffic and are nearly late for the night game. Hammond Stadium holds only 7,500, but it seems theyve all brought their cars. The Twins have elected to park the overflow on the outfields of their practice facility. We just shrug and follow the soft ruts in front of us and nose it in against the 330 sign by the foul pole. The temperature at game time here in Fort Myers is seventynine degrees, the PA announcer informs us, to applause. In Minneapolis, its thirtyfour with a mix of rain and snow. Besides the ailing Johnny Damon and Trot Nixon sitting out, the starting lineup is most decidedly the Ateam. Gabe Kapler, a solid backup outfielder, leads off, followed by last years surprise batting champ Bill Mueller, Manny, Nomar, David Ortiz, Kevin Millar, Jason Varitek, PawSock Adam Hyzdu subbing in right for Trot, and in the ninespot, Pokey Reese. The Twins roll out their postseason lineup, including outfielders Shannon Stewart and Torii Hunter, and first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz, as well as phenom Joe Mauer at catcher. Its the first inning of the first exhibition game, but when Bill Mueller launches one to deep center, Torii Hunter gets on his horse and runs it down, diving at full extension like its the playoffs. The intensity only lasts a couple of innings. By the fourth the substitutions are wholesale and the game takes on a doubleA flavor. The Sox win on a brokenbat bleeder by prospect Jeremy Owens, and we leave happy, picking up our free grapefruit, two each in a yellow mesh bag. In the lot I spy an old orange VW bus with RED SOX NATION handpainted in red across the back window. Three guys in their early twenties are piling in the side door, and for a second I envy them the trip. Then I remember that Im on it too. March 5th Its sunny and eightyfour in Fort Myers, the sort of faux summer day that fills Floridas west coast with tourists in the month of March and makes driving a pain in the assoften a dangerous pain in the ass, as many of the people with whom one is sharing the road are old, bewildered, and heavily medicated. All the same, Im in a chipper mood as I stash my car among the Hummers and Escalades in the players parking lot (I have a special dispensation from Kerri Moore, the new Public Relations gal). Its a perfect day for my first game of the year. Well, okay, so its not really a game; more of a seveninning scrimmage against the Boston College baseball team, which is down to take its annual pasting from the experienced teams along the Sun Coast and Alligator Alley (Florida college teams get to play and practice yearround, which hardly seems fair) before swinging north to play under usually cloudy skies and in cutting winds that make fifty degrees feel like thirty. But they are naturally juiced to be playing against the big boys, and in front of an audience that numbers in the thousands instead of the hundreds orsometimes, early onthe mere dozens. City of Palms Park in Fort Myers is Fenways sunniertempered little brother. The aisles are wider, the concession lines are shorter, the prices are saner, the pace is slower, and the mood is laidback. One hears the occasional cry of You suck!these are Boston fans after allbut they are isolated, and often draw disapproving looks. This is a mellow crowd, and hey, why not? Were still in first placealong with the Yankees, and the Orioles, and even the Devil Rays, who dwell in their somehow dingy dome up the road in Tampaand all things are possible. Curse? What curse? As if to underline this, a grinning bald guy holds up a sign for Pokey Reese. |
OKEY DOKEY, POKEY, it reads. Its an afternoon for saying hello to old friends from previous springs going backcan it be?six years, now; everyone from the parkinglot attendant and the elderly security guard outside the elevator going up to the offices and the press boxes to a laidback Larry Lucchino, who wants to know if Im over my bout of pneumonia. And Stewart ONan is here, looking exactly as he did last October during the American League Championship Series against the Yankees. Maybe a little more gray in the goateebeing a Red Sox fan will do that to youbut otherwise helooks like the same old Stew. He could even be munching from the same bag of peanuts. The wonderful Kerri Moore (who I still havent met, although I did leave her a signed copy of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon as a thankyou) has gotten us seats directly behind the screen, and the grass is so green it almost looks painted on. Tim Wakefield starts for Boston and gets a solid round of applause these people remember the games he won in postseason, not the catastrophic seasonending home run he gave up to Aaron Boone. He throws more hard stuff than Im used to seeing, but Wakes breadandbutter pitch is the knuckleball, and to him the really hard stuff is a heater that clocks in at 81 miles an hour (the scoreboard down here gives no radargun readout, so we just have to guess). The top of the BC lineup hits him pretty well, and after half an inning theyve put up a twospot on four hits. This is a pretty typical earlyspring outing for Wakefield, who just throws the one inning. At thirtyseven hes not only the dean of the Red Sox pitching staff, but the player whos been with the club longest. A lot of the guys who see action in the SoxBC scrimmage (which the Sox eventually win, 93, big surprise there) are a lot less familiar. Theres Jesus Medrano, for instance, and career minor leaguer Andy Dominique; theres Tony Schrager, who is wearing the highest number Ive ever seen 95. Holy shit, I think, that could almost be his temperature. These guys and plenty of others will undoubtedly be on their way back to the Pawtucket Red Sox, the Portland Sea Dogs, and the Lowell Spinners (where the team mascot, Stew informs me, is the worldfamous Canalligator) when the fortyman roster starts to shrink. For others, socalled invitees like Terry Shumpert, Tony Womack, and the worldfamous Dauber, things are more serious. If it doesnt work here for them, it may not work anywhere. The career of a pro baseball player is longer than that of the average pro basketball or football player, but it is still short compared to that of your average account executive or ad salesman, and although the pay is better, the end can come with shocking suddenness. But no one worries too much about stuff like that on a day like this. Its only the second gameday of the short spring season, the weathers beautiful, and everyones loose. Around the fourth inning, Red Sox radio broadcaster Joe Castiglione comes down and sits with Stewart and me for a little while. Like the players, Joe looks trim, tanned and relaxed. He has his own book coming out in a month or so, a wonderful, anecdotecrammed tripdown memory lane called Broadcast Rites and Sites, subtitled I Saw It on the Radio with the Boston Red Sox. (One of the best is about the grand slam Boston catcher Rich Gedman hit off Detroit screwballer Willie Hernandez back in 86.) He tells us more stories as he sits on the step at the end of the aisle, watching Boston College bat in the top of the fifth. Baseball is a leisurely game, and those of us who love it fill its pauses with stories of other games and other years. When I mention how hard Im pulling for Brian Daubach to find a home with the 04 Red Sox, Joe tells us how he set Dauber up with the woman who became his wife. She said she didnt like ballplayers because they were always hitting on her, Joe says, smiling in the warm afternoon sun. I told her she ought to meet this guy. I told her he was really different. Really nice. Joes smile widens into a grin. Then I sent Dauber in to get his hair cut, he finishes. Case closed. Stew and I look at each other and say the same thing at exactly the same moment What hair? The Daubers got a quarter of an inch, at most. And we all laugh. Its good to be laughing at a baseball game again. God knows the laughs were hard to come by last October. I ask Joe if the college kids get excited about these games with the pros (Im thinking of the BC pitcher who struck out big David Ortiz in the third, and wondering if hell still be telling people about it when hes fortyfive and paunchy). Oh, like you wouldnt believe, Joe says, and then goes on to tell us the Red Sox player the college kids liked the most was the much maligned Carl Everett, who was dubbed Jurassic Carl by Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy (for his temper as much as his fundamentalist Christian beliefs), and who has since been traded to the Montreal Expos. He was great to the [college players], Joe says. Hed spend lots of time talking to them and give them all kinds of equipment. He pauses, then adds, I bet he prospers in Montreal, because theres no media coverage. People wont be watching him so closely. By now its the bottom of the sixth, and Joe excuses himself. He and his broadcast partner, Jerry Trupiano (Troop), are doing the evening game (another slomo scrimmage, this time against Northeastern, with a fellow named Schilling starting for the Sox), and he has to prepare. But, like everything else that happens this day, the preparations will be leisurely, more pleasure than business. Joe knows a lot of people back home in New England will be listening, but not exactly paying attentionits the Soxversus Northeastern, after allbut its also baseball, Schilling on the mound, Garciaparra at short, and Varitek behind the plate (at least for a while, then maybe Kelly Shoppach, another guy with a high number). Its the fact of it that matters, like that first robin you see on your stillsnowy front lawn. Its too early to play really hard, and too early to wax really lyrical, either (God knows theres too much labored lyricism in baseball writing these days; its even crept into the newspapers, which used to be bastions of statistics and hardnosed realitywhat sports reporters used to call the agate). But it cant hurt to say that being hereespecially after a serious bout of pneumoniafeels pretty goddamn wonderful. Its like putting your hand out and touching a live thinganother season when great things may happen. Miracles, even. And if that isnt touching grace, its pretty close. Oh, shit, thats too close to lyrical for comfort, but its been a good day. There was baseball. So let it stand. March 6th After a sloppy loss at the Twins place, we run into Dauber by the players lot. Everyone pushes toward him; its not a surge, more of a controlled approach, lots of jockeying. Theres a space of two feet around him that we seem to agree is forbidden. You can reach a ball or a card into it, but anything more would be a violation. No one tries to shake his hand or put an arm around him for a picture, as if that would be too personal. Im lucky enough to be in the front, in the middle. Welcome back, I tell him. Thank you. Hes surprisingly softspoken, you might even say shy. Have you noticed everyones been cheering the loudest for you, even here on the road. It means a lot. I back off after he signs my ball, and see a Navigator with Illinois plates rolling up. I know Daubers the pride of Belleville, Illinois (along with Wilcos Jeff Tweedy), so I call, Your rides here. Thanks, he says, and hes off. When we get back to the hotel, Im unwinding on the balcony when I see a woman on the beach in an old Lou Merloni shirt. Loooooooo ooooooooouuuuuu! I hoot, and she turns around but doesnt see me. For years Lou Merlonithe Pride of Framingham, Massachusettswas our regular schlub and native son. He could play anywhere in the infield or outfield, and was a reliable pinch hitter. Someone would get hurt, and hed end up starting, hit .330, and then sit when the guy came back. He was Nomars best friend, yet Sox management seemed to delight in shipping him down to Pawtucket and calling him back up, a crazy yoyo motion. Two years ago we shipped him to San Diego, only to get him back in midseason. Lous gone, off to Cleveland. Lou, who last year Ben Affleck (postDogma, preGigli) called a joke during a visit to the Sox broadcast booth. Daubers our Lou now. March 7th Theres no point trying to beat the crowd today. People will be camping out for this one. Scalpers line Edison like hitchhikers, holding up signs I NEED TICKETS. The lots almost full two hours before game time. People are tailgating, barbecuing on hibachis. A few rows closer to the park, four cottonheaded grandmothers in full Yankee regalia have their lawn chairs arranged under a shade tree. Inside, its a miniinvasion. The Yanks have brought their Ateam Jeters at short and ARod, weirdly, is at third. It seems crazy to pay a guy that kind of money to play a corner. It must be ego ARods got better range, a better glove, a better arm. Jeter seems to have lost his concentration the last few years. ARod lets a grounder skip under his glove into left, and the crowd cheers. I notice the Yanks have a 22Clemenss old number. After all Rogers talk of wanting to go into the Hall wearing a Yankee cap, it seems a calculated insult. While the Sox havent officially retired his 21, its one of the few numbers that hasnt been assigned. I dont see Giambi or Sheffield, and wonder if the Yankees are protecting them from us. Our seats are down the rightfield line, and Id been looking forward to listening to the fans peppering Sheffield and waving signs like JUICIN JASON. Theres a commotion down by the Sox dugout, and a cheer. Nomars come out to shake hands with ARod. I only see their heads for an instant before the photographers swamp them. A few minutes later the scene repeats when Nomar greets Jeter. The Yanks finish hittingunimpressive except for this huge lefty I dont recognize. No Giambi or Sheffield. Maybe theyre replacing their blood somewhere like Keith Richards did. And no sign of former Sox closer Tom Gordon, who would be sure to elicit a mixed reaction. Ive got to ask Steve Does that girl still love him? Our lineups disappointing Nomars sitting, so are Johnny D, Yankee killer David Ortiz and Dauber, and Trots still out. Bronson Arroyo, who threw a perfect game for Pawtucket, is our starter. He may not be Pedro or Schilling but he looks good in the first, getting Kenny Lofton, Jeter and ARod in order. Kapler leads off with an easy grounder to Jeter, who throws it away. ARods smiling, a guy behind me says. Kapler steals on Contreras and scores on a single by Bill Mueller. Contreras slows the pace down to Cuban National Team speed, hoping to take away our momentum, but Ellis Burks smacks a single, Kevin Millar whomps a double and were up 30. Theres a lot of taunting in the stands, and a Yankee fan snaps back, Yeah, you guys are great in March. What do Yankee fans use for birth control? one guy asks, then answers, Their personalities. In the bottom of the second, Pokey Reese, subbing for Nomar, takes Contreras deep. The Yanks bring in Rivera to stop the bleeding, as if this is Game 7. The Sox counter with minor leaguer Jason Shiell, who melts down. Francona makes no concessions to the rivalry, or even the game. This is spring training, and he leaves Shiell in to see if he can fight his way out. The big lefty who was blasting them in batting practice turns out to be veteran Tony Clark, who golfs a threerun shot. Lets go Mets! someone yells. Lets go Tigers! Lets go Sox! The Yankees are still worried, it seems, because they bring in Felix Heredia to pitch the seventh and eighth. McCarty, whos played the whole game, hits into a 463 double play in the eighth, making him 0 for 4. In the top of the ninth he blocks a hot smash at first, then kicks the ball away. Hows the weather in Pawtucket? someone yells. Hyzdu strikes out to end it. The finals 117. Unsatisfying, but we did win the A game, knocking Contreras around, and Arroyo looked good. Outside, we walk by the players lot, ogling a classic tomatored GTO convertible. Someone says its Nomars, except hes already left with Mia Hamm in her car. A Jeep Cherokee with BK in it flies by us. Youre making friends, someone shouts after him. Several people confirm a new trade rumor BK and Trot for Randy Johnson. Most of the big names are long gone, but firstbase coach Lynn Jones rolls down his window and signs, as does Cesar Crespo, driving a pimpedout Integra with Konig rims. Terry Francona doesnt stopAnother bad decision! A young guy pulls up in a Taurus. No one can place him. He stops and rolls down his window, but no one approaches. Im only a rookie, he says. You probably wouldnt want my autograph. Hes right, but we cant say that to his face. Sure we do. A couple of parents push their kids forward. Its Josh Stevens, a pitcher for the PawSox. There are only four people left when we take off. Its almost five. Driving back to the hotel, I say, I wonder if the Twins are playing tonight. You want a divorce? Trudy asks. March 9th Were home, its snowing, and summer seems a long way off. Maybe its the weather, but that connection to the Sox that felt so strong just yesterday feels tenuous. I tell Steve its like getting a taste of high summer and then having it snatched away. By seasons end, I imagine it will seem Edenic, all possibility and perfect weather. That night while were watching TV, Dunkin Donuts runs a commercial starring Curt Schilling. Schilling sits by his locker, eating a breakfast sandwich and listening to a language tape teaching him Bostonspeak. Wicked hahd, he repeats between bites. Pahk. Play wicked hahd when I go to the pahk. For several years now the spokesperson for Dunkin Donuts has been Nomar. Another sign hes leaving? March 12th I catch an interview with PawSock third baseman Kevin Youkilis at the practice fields. In Michael Lewiss Moneyball, As general manager Billy Beane champions Youkilis as The Greek God of Walks. Hes the kind of player Beane loves average glove, soso wheels, but a great eye, quick bat and astonishing onbase percentage. Likewise, Bill James, the Soxs statistical guru, is high on the guys numbers. The interviewer is optimistic about Youkiliss chances of making the team, which I think is crazy. Hes fourth on the depth chart behind Shump, and Shumps probably not going to make it. Youkilis is positive but realistic. Hopefully Ill make it up to Fenway this yearmeaning a cup of coffee in September when they expand the roster. Clips roll of the Monster seats and Pedro going up the ladder on a flailing Devil Ray, and again Im ready for the season to start. March 13th Mr. Kim has a sore shoulder. Im not surprised, with that goofy motion. Bronson Arroyo may take his slot, though the Courant says that during the first few weeks of the season the schedules spread out enough that we can go with a fourman rotation. Steves not upset. He says Kim looked lost out there in the playoffs, as if he didnt know where the ball was going. Hes only twentyfive, I say, and hes already pitched in a lot of big games. Thats part of his problem. Stat maven Bill James found that the more innings pitchers threw before the age of twentythree, the more problems they had later in their careers. What about Clemens? James doesnt count college. Clemens is actually one of the guys he uses to make his case. And Clemens is an exception, hes a workhorse. Dan Duquette found that out when he looked at his stats and said his career was over. I dont see how James can have it both waysan example and an exceptionand it seems notable that the only championship Clemens ever really led his team to was the College World Series, but even the devil can quote Scripture for his purposes. In bed, in the dark, I match last years rotation to this years. Schillings a major upgrade from John Burkett, but who is Kimnow Arroyoreplacing? It takes me a minute to recall Casey Fossumor Blade, as we called him, since he weighed about 140 pounds, his front literally concave. He was the guy we wouldnt trade last spring to get Bartolo Colon, hoping hed develop into a steady lefty starter. He was in and out all year with injuries and never got it going. Kim is an improvement on him, but Arroyo is in pretty much the same place Blade was two years ago, a tripleA player trying to earn that number five slot. Well be stronger, but therell still be a weak spot other managers can attack, stealing series by feeding their weaker pitchers to our aces, matching their ace against Lowe and then throwing their number two and three guys against Wake and Arroyo. Should I be worrying about this now? Terry Francona better be. March 14th In the Sunday sports section are two pictures of Jason Giambi, a before and after comparison that makes me go, Whoa. In the one from last year hes pudgycheeked, a pad of fat under his chin, his biceps filling his sleeves. The one from a couple weeks ago shows a drawn, scrawny guy, rockstar thin, as if hes been hit by some wasting disease. My immediate reaction isnt partisan but humane God, I hope hes okay. I dont catch the final of todays game until the late news. Pedro had control problems and walked in a run, but Johnny D homered and we beat the Os 52. Im glad we won, but it doesnt really matter. Im more concerned with Pedros walk total from last year, and the trouble he had finding the plate in the playoffs. Its been three years since hes been consistently dominant, and I wonder if hell ever get back to that level. Because back then, there was no doubt. In 2001, we went to a game he was supposed to throw against Seattle, when Seattle was the hottest team in the majors. The game was delayed by rain about two hours, and we were worried that Pedro wouldnt start because of the cold. He came out in the first and got Ichiro on three pitches, then John Olerud on three pitches, and then Edgar Martinez on three pitches. Nine pitches, nine strikes. I looked at Steph like, what did we just see? It was a strange realization, witnessing him strike out seventeen or spin a onehitter. Then, when you were watching Pedro, you knew you were watching the best pitcherout of the millions of people to pick up a baseball and try to throw it past a batterin the entire world. But that was three years ago. March 17th Tonight the high school dedicates Caitlins choral concert to a beloved custodian who died suddenly of a heart attack. The teacher reading a speech about him confesses that they bonded as Sox fans, and that the morning after the Sox had blown another sure thing, we knew not to talk about the game until wed had our coffees. An easel at the front of the auditorium holds a picture of him. He couldnt be more than fiftyfive, and I think how unfair it is that he never got to experience the Sox winning it alllike Trudys uncle Vernon, who died last year in his sixties. Whenever I saw him, we talked Sox. It was our one point of connection, a joshing, bitching camaraderie shared over beers. This summers going to be different without him, emptier. I think of the millions of Sox fans who rooted their entire lives and never felt that giddy vindication the Pats have given us twice now. There has to be a tremendous psychic charge built up from those faithful generations. This year, if we do it, well be doing it for them too. I dont want to spend a long time maundering over mortality, but you know, when I was eighteen and Lonnie was pitching for the Sox, I knew Id be around to see them win the Series. You know how it is when youre eighteen and bulletproof. Now, holy shit, Im fiftyseven, Ive been hit by a car, I had a lung practically go up in smoke this winter, and I realize maybe it really wont happen. And still I look at our team and sometimes wonderWho are these guys? Oh well. I used to joke, you know, about having a tombstone that read STEPHEN KING with the dates, and then, below that, a single sock, and below that NOT IN MY LIFETIME. And below that NOT IN YOURS, EITHER. Not a bad tagline, huh? March 18th Im shocked to read in the paper that Nomar is 0 for spring0 for 8, reallyand has missed four straight games with that bruised heel. Cesar Crespos seizing the opportunity, hitting .435. Maybe he can take that extra roster spot. March 19th Trot flies out to L.A. to get checked by a specialist and looks doubtful for Opening Day. Kapler, who took a pay cut to stay with the Sox, must be cursing his agent. Nomar shows up at the clubhouse with a boot on his foot. The trainers diagnosed him with Achilles tendinitis, but an MRI shows no structural damage. And Manny, I discover, is hitting .172. Now Im glad weve got a few weeks to get things together. The lottery for Green Monster seats begins, one entry per email address. After getting aced out of regular tickets, Im resigned, punching in our two entries. Then I get an idea. I have dozens of friends who have no interest in Monster seats. I can use their names, and if by some chance they win, I can pay them face value for the tickets. I imagine scalpers are using dozens, even hundreds, of email addresses. The comparisons unavoidable. Now Im like them, bending the rules in my greed for the seats. It feels decidedly squirmy, and yet for the next few hours I span the continent, tapping Oklahoma and the Rockies and San Francisco and Edmonton for names, addresses, phone numbers and birthdays donated by pitying friends. March 20th The team dwindles as Theo assigns seven players to the minors, including optioning Kevin Youkilis to Pawtucket. Steves worried about Trot, and brings up Tim Naehring, our illfated third baseman of the nineties. Naehring was that agonizing player whos vastly talented but always hurt. At 62, 205, he wasnt delicate, but he broke his wrist, he broke his ankle, he had a bad back. He was on the DL so much that he came to seem like a platoon player. When he finally retired at age thirty, it seemed possible that he was just hurt again. Thats not how Trot wants to go out. March 21st This morning Philadelphia blew up the Vet. While Phillies fans remembered their one World Series win, Eagles fans hoped it would change their luck. Back when our old owners were planning to build a new Fenway, I heard the same kind of superstitious talk out of stalwarts like Ted Williams (who always hated the Monsters effect on Sox pitchers). So, if we win, do we have to keep it as a goodluck charm? The Vet, like Three Rivers Stadium or the Kingdome, bit the dust not because it was unlucky or falling down, but because it just wasnt a fun place to watch a ball game. Thats not true of Fenway, unless youre stuck behind a pole or in line for the bathroom. The true test of a ballpark, and maybe a ball club, is percent capacityhow many butts versus how many seatsand Fenways aced that test every year since 1967. Steve couldnt even scrounge a ticket to the SoxJays game yesterdayat their place. SO I can see you in the parking lot, wagging a finger, waylaying strangersNeed one. SK The Sox are a hot ticket everywhere they go in Florida. Folks think they are a gennawine Team of Destiny. They banged out Ed Wood Stadium, or whatever they call the place here in Sarasota where Cincy plays; first time in two years. And were turning them away at the door. All that and AirCast Nomar didnt even play. It will be interesting to see if the phenomenon carries over into the regular season. Remember the year the Orioles were relatively stacked and started 021? Or was it 022? Go you big David Ortiz. I call up the website and find weve shipped Tony Womack to the Cards. With Womack gone, we dont have a designated lateinning basestealer, unless Shump is showing flashes of his old speed. I feel bad for Womack, his salary and Lamborghini notwithstanding. He bunted and ran better than anyone on the team this spring, but not being able to play the field, he never had a chance. Shump takes advantage of this break by straining a hamstring in the night game. So after finally outlasting Womack, he essentially hands McCarty the twentyfifth spot. March 24th The drawing for Monster seats was yesterday. All morning I avoid opening my email, not wanting to jinx our shot. Its noon when I finally check, expecting dozens of forwards from my coconspirators. Theres a piece of spam from priceline.com, thats it. At five theres still nothing, good or bad. The Sox are playing the Yanks on NESN. Trudy says I can watch it, but theres an interesting documentary on, and I say, Thats okay. Its just preseason. The documentarys short, and we catch up to the game late. Were behind 85, but when we rally in the bottom of the ninth, there arent enough Yankee fans left to overcome a hearty Lets go, Red Sox! chant. Its a classic Red Sox moment, that refusal to give in, even with Lowell Spinner Iggy Suarez stepping to the plate as our last hope. Iggy, feeling it, singles. With two on and two out, Dauber hits a flare to left, and its 86 with men on second and third and Hyzdu coming up. The chanting grows frantic, like we might actually pull it out. Hyzdus batting .173. He shows us why, taking three late, waving swings, and for the second time this spring we lose to the Yankees. I turn the channel. I know its only exhibition, and that its classier not to chase after meaningless wins, but its irritating. By midnight I still havent gotten any email about Monster tickets. I think that cant be good, but, like losing to the Yanks, theres nothing I can do but eat it. March 25th Im hopingexpecting to shove all the work off my desk and get down to City of Palms to see the Sox on Saturday. Ive got an invite to watch the game with Dan Curse of the Bambino Shaughnessy, the writer most New England fans (at least those who read the Boston Globe) most readily associate with the Olde Towne Team. And this Curse thing has really entered the New England stream of consciousness, as Im sure you knowits right up there with the Salem witch trials and Maine lobstah, up there to the point where some wit with a spray can (or tortured sports fanartist, take your choice) has turned a traffic sign reading REVERSE CURVE on Storrow Drive into one reading REVERSE THE CURSE. Ofcourse you and I know the socalled Curse of the Bambino is about as real as the socalled Books of Mormon, supposedly discovered in a cave and read with the help of magic peekin stones (true!), but like all those Mormons, I kind of believe in spite of the things patent absurdity. March 27th At three the remaining Green Monster seats go on sale. Considering we went 0 for 34 during the online lottery, I cant imagine there are any left, but at 257 Im watching the seconds tick off on the Weather Channel. Ive enlisted Trudy, against her will, to take the other phone, and at exactly three we bombard the old info line. Forty minutes into it, Trudy breaks through and hands over the phone. I did my duty. I wait through Hot Fun in the Summertime, and Boz Scaggss Its Over, and (Na Na Hey Hey) Kiss Him Goodbye. When I finally get a human, he says there are actual seats left, which I think is wrong. Anything for the Yankees? I can get you second row for April eighteenth. Ill take em, I say, thinking Im getting away with something. March 28th Now theyre saying Nomar probably wont make the opener. Francona, trying to play it down, says Nomar would be starting if it were Septemberas if he doesnt know all the games count the same. March 30th The Yomiuri (Tokyo) Giants, who Matsui played for, are Japans answer to the Yankeesbased in the largest city, with dozens of championships. My friend Phil in Tokyo has told me the Hanshin Tigers from OsakaKyoto are their Sox, a hardluck club with fans who are devoted beyond all reason. Last year they won the Central League, beating the Giants, then lost a heartbreaker of a Series to the Daiei Hawks. For a couple weeks, people all over Japan were wearing their Hanshin Tigers gear, even in Tokyo. It makes senseOsakaKyoto is like Boston, a proud, much smaller city in the shadow of a megalopolis, and like the Yankees, the Giants have the most money and generate the most media coverage. Yesterday the Hanshin Tigers pounded Donovan Osborne and the Yanks, 117. Their first baseman, with the unJapanesesounding name of Arias, has a sweet line in the box score 4 2 3 5. Go Tigers! Today the Yanks open the regular season therein fact, with the time difference, theyre losing to Lou Piniellas Devil Rays as I read the morning paper. SK I got down to the game yesterday and saw my man Tim Wakefield go a strong six. We won, 83. He gave up two long balls, but the second was a popfly type of deal that just kind of got up in the slipstream and carried over the wall. It would have been caught by Trot (in Fenway). I spent a lot of time in the booth with Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano. Troop told me a really terrible joke. Janet Jackson decides to rehab her tattered reputation by becoming the first woman to play major league baseball, right? But it doesnt work. Her first atbat in Kansas Cityshe pops out again. BOOO! In between halfinnings in the sixththis could only happen to a writerI was proofing some copy for the final Dark Tower book and working out with my eraser. The Sox come up just as Im finishing. The first pitch produces a line foul that missed my nose by less than an inch. I swear this is a true thing Im telling you. I saw it go between my nose and the little pile of manuscript I had in my hands, also heard the baleful whiz of the ball, which hit an old guy behind me pretty hard. My seatmates are going, Did you see that? Pokey Reese almost nailed Stephen King! Etc, etc. Well, the lady next to me was into her third or fourth beerenough so she was willing to be disapproving no matter who I was. She said, Were sitting right behind the dugout, in case you didnt notice. You should be paying attention. I repliedand I really believe this to be truethat if I had been watching, I would have involuntarily jerked right into it and gotten my friggin face rearranged (some would say that might be an improvement). I mean, that thing was a rocket. Im back for more abuse tomorrow. Thats the last spring training tilt. Then things get serious. SO Glad youre okay, and congratulations on finishing. Now the important question Who got the ball? March 31st Before Ive eaten breakfast, the Yanks have crushed the DRays 121, and the divisions knotted at .500 again. We play the Twins at Hammond tomorrow, then head to Atlanta for two against the Braves before opening in Baltimore. By Sunday, the club has to make eleven more cuts to get down to the final twentyfiveman roster. On the bubble Dauber, McCarty, Crespo, Hyzdu and Shump. Three of the bubble guys and one lucky pitcher (maybe a second lefty to go with Embree) should make the team, at least for the next month. The trouble is, were short on outfielders. Theo and Francona may have to keep Hyzdu, whos had the worst spring of any Red Sock, and send down Shump and Crespo, whos had the best. April 1st On the very last day he could, Shump exercises an out clause in his contract and is free to sign with another club (eventually the Pirates), meaning Cesar Crespo, hitting .361, has earned a spot on the roster. Met vet Bobby Jones and Tim Hamulack will fight for the final bullpen spot. Theyll both travel to Atlantaas will Adam Hyzdu, whos already been told by Francona hell start the year in Pawtucket. Hes the twentysixth man, the last one cut, and knows he could have made the team if hed only hit the ball. With Trot out and Kapler starting, our backup outfielders are the thirtyeightyearold, leginjuryprone Ellis Burks, first basemanaspiring pitcher David McCarty and fullbacks Brian Daubach and Kevin Millar. The rosters set, if not the lineup. The bench may not be as deep as the Yankees, but its a good club, a 95100 win club. |
My only worry now is health, with Nomar, Trot and BK already out. If we lose anyone else important, this could quickly turn into a lost season, like the Angels last year. April 2nd I drive to Boston to meet my friend Lowrys lit class at Simmons College, right down Brookline Ave from Fenway. All the way up, I wrestle with the question of whether to drop in on Naomi. I dont want to freak her out, but she hasnt returned my calls, and were a week away from the home opener. Im early, theres a parking spot, and I cant resist. From the sidewalk, the office looks dark, but thats just the tinted windows. The big tally board with all the games broken down by sections is covered with Xs. Everythings soldout except some August games against Tampa Bay and Toronto. A young guy at a desk is on the phone with someone who got aced out of the Monster seats. Im sorry, sir, the guy says, but it did say firstcome firstserve. Im loitering, and he looks up from the phone in midconversation. Is Naomi expecting you? He calls her, then explains that shes all the way on the other side of the park (there is no other side of the parkthat would be where the batting cages are, under the centerfield bleachers). She says not to worry, its going to happen. Its going to be a dayofgame thing, Ill have to pick them up at the Will Call window. Outside, a crew is fixing pennants over Gate A. The one theyre working on as I pass says 1918 WORLD CHAMPIONS. I go down Lansdowne and look up at the Monster seats. Green metal stools perch upsidedown on the counters, like a bar after closing. I try to imagine sitting up there, but the winds so cold its hard to believe the seasons only two days away. Its after dinner when I finally catch up to yesterdays game. We beat the Twins 43, taking three out of five from them to win Fort Myerss Mayors Cup. The hero, ironically, was Adam Hyzdu, who homered to break the tie in the ninth. Too little, too late. April 3rd Last night we beat the Braves 73. Exhibition results mean even less the day before the opener, but Im glad to see Manny pick up his first homer of the spring. Today the Braves shut us out, 50, with Foulke giving up two runs in a third of an inning. I tell myself it means nothing, but neither does our 1712 Grapefruit League record (a half game, Im sorry to report, behind the Yanks). In the last meaningful action of the spring, lefty Bobby Joness slider and 1.74 ERA win him the final roster spot over the less experienced Tim Hamulack. The Weather Channels predicting snow here tomorrow night. In Baltimore, for the first pitch, its supposed to be thirtynine degrees. AprilMay Who Are These Guys? April 4th Opening Day Notes on Addiction Ive written about substance abuse a good many times, and see no need to rehash all that in a book about baseballbut because this also happens to be a book about rooting, the subject at least has to be mentioned, it seems to me. These are a fans notes, after all, and when used in the context of rooting, the word fan aint short for fantastic. I dont booze it up anymore, and I dont take the mind or moodaltering drugs, but over a good many years of staying away from those things one day at a time, Ive come to a more global view of addiction. Sometimes I think of it as the Lump in the Sofa Cushion Theory of Addiction. This theory states that addiction to booze or dope is like a lump in a sofa cushion. You can push it downbut it will only pop up somewhere else. Thus a woman who quits drinking may start smoking again. A guy who quits the glass pipe may rediscover his sex drive and become a serial womanizer. A gal who quits drinking and drugging may put Twinkies and strawberry ice cream in their place, thus adding forty or fifty pounds before putting on the brakes. Hey, Ive been lucky. No sex issues, no gambling issues, moderate food issues. I do, however, have a serious problem with the Boston Red Sox, and have ever since they came so damned close to winning the whole thing in 67. Before then, I was what you might call a recreational Red Sox user. Since then Ive been a fullblown junkie, wearing my hat with the scarlet B on the front for six months straight and suffering a serious case of hathead while I obsess over the box scores. I check the Boston Red Sox official website, and all the unofficial ones as well (most of them fucking dire); I scoff at the socalled Curse of the Bambino, believing completely in myheart even though I know it is the bullshit creation of one talented and ambitious sportswriter. Worst of all, during the season I become as much a slave to my TV and radio as any addict ever was to his spike. I have been asked by several people if working on this book is a hardship, given the fact that I have two other books coming out this year (the final novels in the Dark Tower cycle), a television series still in production (that would be Kingdom Hospital on ABC, the Detroit Tigers of network broadcasting), and a halffinished new novel sitting on my desk. The answer is noits not a hardship but a relief. I would either be sitting at Fenway or in my living room with the TV tuned to NESN (the New England Sports Network, the regional pusher that services addicts like me) in any case; this book legitimizes my obsession and allows me to indulge it to an even greater degree. In the language of addiction, the books publisher has become my enabler and my colleague, Stewart ONan, is my codependent. Now, nine hours before Sidney Ponson of the Orioles throws his first pitch to the first Red Sox batter of the season, I can look at my situation coldly and clearly I am a baseball junkie, pure and simple. Or perhaps its even more specific than that. Perhaps Im a Red Sox junkie, pure and simple. Im hoping its choice B, actually. If it is, and the Sox win the World Series this year, this nearly fortyyear obsession of mine may break like a longterm (very longterm) malarial fever. Certainly this team has the tools, but Red Sox fans do not need the bad mojo of some false curse to appreciate the odd clouds of bad luck that often gather around teams that seem statistically blessed. Outfitted in the offseason with strong pitching and defense to go with their formidable hitting, the Sox suddenly find themselves short two of their most capable players Nomar Garciaparra and Trot Nixon. 2003 batting champ Bill Mueller, suffering supposed elbow problems (from swinging a leaded bat in the ondeck circle?I wonder), has seen little spring training action. And Cadillac closer Keith Foulke has been, lets face it, nothing short of horrible. But for the true junkieer, fan, I mean, true fansuch perverse clouds of darkness do not matter. The idea of starting 0 and 22, for instance (as the Orioles once did), is pushed firmly to the back of the mind.There will be no Sopranos tonight at 9 P.M., even if the Sox trail byfive in the seventh inning; there will be no Deadwood tonight at 10 P.M. even if Keith Foulke comes on in the eighth, blows a threerun Sox lead, and then gives up an extra three for good measure. Tonight, barring a stroke or a heart attack, I expect to be in until the end, be it bitter or sweet. And the same could be said for the season as a whole. Im going to do pretty much what I did last year, in other words (only this year I expect to get paid for it). Which is pretty much addiction in a nutshell doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. Right now its only 10 A.M., though, and the house is quiet. No ones playing baseball yet. Im feverfree for another nine hours, and Im enjoying it. Dont get me wrong, Ill enjoy the baseball game, too. The first ones always a thrill. I think thats true even if youre a Tigers or Devil Rays fan (a team that looks much improved this year, by the way). But by August, in the heat of a pennant race, I always start to resent the evenings spent following baseball and to envy the people who can take it or just turn it off and read a good book. Myself, Ive never been that way. Im an addict, you see. And Im a fan. And if theres a difference, I dont see it. Opening on the road sucks. You cant feel the perfect newness of the season up close. A true home openers a pearl, smooth and untouched. Not this year. By the time the team gets to Fenway, whether were 40 or 04, the season will have been rubbed up, scuffed, cut. And itll still be cold. Its fortythree and breezy in Baltimore. Hot dog wrappers and plastic bags drift by behind the homeplate ump. Im at home, digging the game on NESN from my cozy couch. Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy talk about Opening Day jitters, and to prove them right, in the first Bill Mueller throws one wide of Millar. Melvin Mora lets him off the hook by trying to take third on a bloop single, and Manny easily guns him down. In the top of the next inning, Mora lifts his glove and lets a grounder go through his legs. The heart of the Os lineup is made of their big offseason free agentsformer MVP Miguel Tejada and All Stars Rafael Palmeiro and Javy Lopez. In the second, Lopez, seeing his first pitch as an O, plants a high fastball from Pedro in the leftfield seats, and the crowd chants, Javy, Javy. Don points out that the fastball was clocked at 89. Pedros missing the plate, pulling his hard curve a good two feet outside on righties. Gibbons singles, then Pedro plunks David Segui. There are no outs. Bigbie hits an excuseme roller to Pedro, who checks second and goes to first. The throws to the home side of the bag, and looks like Millar can handle it, but it tips off his glove and skips away. Gibbons scores and the runners move up. Payyyydrooooo, Payyyydrooooo, the crowd taunts. He leaves a changeup up to Matos, who singles in Segui. Matos steals second. In the bullpen Bronson Arroyo is warming. Don and Jerry debate the possibility that somethings physically wrong with Pedro; maybe hes having trouble gripping the ball in the cold. Pedro quiets them (and the crowd) by striking out Roberts and Mora, bringing up Tejada, who looks thicker around the middle, positively husky for a shortstop. He hits one deep to rightcenter that Johnny Damon tracks down, and were out of it. Jerry says were lucky to be down only three runs, and while hes right, I dont feel lucky. Two innings into the opener and the seasons turning to shit. We get a run back in the top of the third when Manny rips a single off Ponsons back leg. In the bottom, Bellhorn and Pokey turn a nifty two to end the inning and touch gloves on their way to the dugout. So some things are working. In the fourth, on a ball to the rightfield corner with two down and the number nine hitter coming up, Dale Sveum holds Kapler at third, though the throw goes into second without a cutoff man. Dont be stupid, I plead, too late. And then Pokey, for no reason I can see, tries to sneak a bunt past Ponson and is an easy third out. Pedros settled down, giving up only two hits since the second. Its still only 31 in the seventh when David Ortiz launches one down the rightfield linefoul. In the seventh, Timlin comes in and walks two, gives up a bloop to Tejada and a Palmeiro single through a shifted infield, and its 41. Dave Wallace makes a visit to the mound but doesnt take Timlin out. The next batter, Javy Lopez, hits a long fly to rightcenter that hangs up. Johnny D tracks it as the wind takes it away from him. Kaplers angling in from right to back up the play. Johnny looks up, then looks over at Kapler. Kapler looks at Johnny. The ball lands between them. With two outs, everyones running, and Palmeiro hoofs it all the way around from first. This is when everyone leaves, including Trudy. Its eleven oclock on a Sunday, and the game has been plain ugly. It continues that way. The reliever for the Os walks the bases loaded and gives up a run on a fielders choice. Later, Cesar Crespo makes a throw in the dirt that Millar should scoop but doesnt, letting in another run. In the top of the ninth its 72 and thirty degrees and Camden Yards is empty, yet the fans I see behind the dugoutthis is so typical it makes me laughare all Red Sox fans. And here I am, the only one left awake in the house, watching to the bitter end. Tom Caron and Dennis Eckersley break it down on Extra Innings, but really, what can you say about a game like this? The most obvious stat is 14 men left on base. Johnny D went 0 for 5 in the leadoff spot, Tek went 0 for 4. Timlin gave up three earned runs in twothirds of an inning (and one of those outs was Tek cutting down a runner on a risky pitchout). They pick on Pokey, showing the bunt attempt. Eck says he understands the strategy but, If it doesnt work, it looks horrible. They also examine Millars footwork on the throwing error charged to Pedro that kept the Os rally going. Instead of posting up at the front corner of the bag with his right foot so he can stretch towards Pedro with his left (and his glove), Millar is facing the bag with his left foot in the center so that he has to reach across his body to handle the throw. Basically, he nonchalanted it and cost us a couple of runs. I turn it off. Whats demoralizing isnt losingwell lose 6070 games this year (knock wood)its playing badly. If this had been the first week of the NFL season, the announcers would have said this team has a lot of work to do. April 5th I cant help running a quick postmortem, scanning the story in the morning paper. Francona stands by his man Sveum, saying Kapler would have been meat if hed gone. I hope this kind of denial isnt indicative of the new emperor. SK The bad news this morning is that the Red Sox lost their opener and Pedro looked very mortal. The good news is that there was baseball. SO Pedro had a bad inning, helped along by Millar. Still, he settled down after the second, and we were in the game till Timlin let it get away. Think Pokey bunted on his own? Is he going to be like Steve Psycho Lyons? SK Yeah, I think Pokey Reese bunted on his own, and I think it was the break point in the game for the Red Sox. You can say there are a lot of games left and I would agree, but Gil Hodges (I think it was Hodges) said, First games are big games, and if he meant they set the tone, I agree. And I know, I know, twoout rallies are always chancy. All the more reason to play it straight, right? Heres your situation Millar, who really only hits middle relievers with reliability, opens the fourth by flying out to center. Kapler singles. TekmoneyTeksmallchange in Aprilhits a batbusting pop to short. Two out. Bellhorn doubles. Runners at second and third, that sets the stage for Mr. Reese, who can tie the game with a righteous single. Instead, he buntshardand is out easily, pitcher to first. Easy to read his thinking Ponsons a porker, if I place it right, I get on to load em up for Johnny Damon, or maybe Kapler scores. But even if Kapler does score, were still behind, and that early in the game, youd think hed be swinging away. So yeahI think it was a plan he hatched in his own head, and a classic case of a baseball player taking dumb pills. Which leads me to something my elder son said this afternoon Dad, I dont envy you this bookyou could have picked the wrong year. A team this highoctane could stall with the wrong manager and be out of it in the first month. I dont say it will happen, but hes got a point, and I hope the Pokester got a stern talkingto about that bunt. I dont intend to deconstruct every gameor even most of thembut that bunt made me a lot more uneasy than the way Pedro Martinez threw on a cold night. Its Opening Day for the rest of the league, and ESPN has walltowall coverage. I catch pieces of the CubsReds game (Sean Casey, a Pittsburgh native, blasts a tworun double off of Kerry Wood); a rare TV appearance by the Pirates taking on Kevin Millwood and the Phils (my brothers somewhere in the freezing centerfield bleachers); and the Astros with Nolan Ryan in the dugout hosting Barry Bonds, Willie Mays and the Giants (lots of home run talk but not a word about steroids from Joe Morgan). I watch the games with mild interest, but cant commit to any of them. I wish the Sox were playing today so we could get back on the winning track and ditch this bad morningafter feeling. Its just impatience. Ive waited all winter for Schilling. I can wait one more day. April 6th I have to do a reading over in Bristol, Rhode Island. Its a gig I set up months ago, hoping it wouldnt interfere with Opening Day. It wont, but todays game in Baltimore starts at 305, and Im meeting a class then, and dining with the faculty at 530. My host, Adam, says we could have a beer in between and catch a few innings. We find a bar down by the water with the sun flooding through the windows. The place must have six TVs. None of them is showing the game. We start some chatter about Schilling making his debut, and a pair of regulars join the chorus. The barmaid finds NESN for the bigscreen on the wall. Beside it is a printout of a picture Ive seen on eBay a little towheaded boy about three years old in a Sox shirt on someones shoulders. Hes leaning toward the field, screaming and giving someone a tiny finger. Theres Schilling, sitting on the bench, going over something on a clipboard. Its 31 Sox in the seventh, and Embrees in. The Os only have six hits, so I assume Schilling threw well. The two locals at the bar next to us start grousing about Pedro leaving Sundays game before it was over. When are they gonna do something about him? In the eighth, Melvin Mora hits a mediumdeep fly to rightcenter. Johnny D drifts over. Its his ball, obviously, but Millar, unaccustomed to playing right, keeps coming. The memory of the pop falling between Johnny and Kapler Sunday night is still fresh, and neither takes his eyes off the ball. Johnny gets there first. As he makes the catch, his shoulder catches Millar flush in the face, knocking him on his ass like a vicious blindside on a kick return. Millar stays down. The guys in the truck roll the collision between Johnny and Damian Jackson in last years playoffs, Johnnys head snapping back and then the ambulance idling on the outfield grass. They show it twice, both times getting a vocal reaction from the whole bar. Then they show todays collision two more times. Millar spits a little blood, but he looks more dazed than anything, blinking and squeezing the bridge of his nose. He comes out and Cesar Crespo makes his debut as a right fielder. The next batter, Tejada, hits a fly to deep rightcenter. This time Johnny waves his throwing hand high above his head to call off Crespo, and thats the inning. Foulke is warming, but we have to go to dinnerwere already twenty minutes late. They look like theyre in good shape, Adam says as we head to the restaurant. Never say that, I say. SK Nice game today. It went almost exactly the way the BoSox geneticists would like them to go. You get six innings from Schilling, who gives up a single run. One inning from Embree (no runs), one inning from Timlin (no runs), and one from Foulke, who gets the save. Also on the plus side is my BOSOX CLUB hat, which seems to be quite lucky. I plan to wear it until the lining falls out. P.S. More questions about Francona (1) Was Pedro consciously testing the new managers authority by leaving when he did during the first game? (2) Was F. wrong to pull Manny from the field when he did, thus denying Manny the chance to bat in the ninth inning? (3) Whats up with his unwillingness to sacrifice the runners to the next base(s)? SO (1) Dunno whats up with Pedro, but it seems early to be riding the guy. (2) Yes, definitely a mistake to pull Manny when Millars the nonoutfielder out there (see what happened?). (3) His distaste for the sac bunt is straight from the Bill James bible dont give up any outs, even what we might think are necessary ones. SK Also, the guy just doesnt look like a manager to me. Yon Francona has a lean and stupid look. SO Well, Grady didnt exactly strike me as a Stephen Hawking figure. April 7th Not only did the Sox win, but the Yanks lost. The DRays beat on Mussina again, so theyre on top of the division. Go, you crazy Lou! Schilling threw 109 pitches yesterday, topping out at 98 mph. I know the gun down there is fast, because it clocked Ponson at 97, but still, knowing Schillings strong makes me optimistic about the season. While I was out yesterday, Matt from my agents office called and left a message with Steph that says he wants to talk about Opening Day. Im thinking it has to do with tickets, but its about Opening Day in Baltimore. He went. A friend came up with tickets at the last minute, and he put everything aside and hopped on a cheap flight. He says the wind was crazy; the two big oriole weather vanes on top of the scoreboard in center were spinning in opposite directions. He was surprised at the venom of the Os fans. After Pedro hit Segui, they were chanting Pedro Sucks. Im not surprised. Pedro can come off as arrogant, and after dominating for so long, hes earned some payback. The same with the Sox lately. Theyre a highpaid, highprofile club, and the seconddivision teams have a right to dislike them. Tonights game is a pitching mismatch, DLowe versus the young Kurt Ainsworth. This is one main strength of the 2004 Sox. Over the last two years, Lowes won more games that any AL pitcher except the Jays Roy Halladay. Part of the reason last year he led the league in run support, with over 7 runs a start. Ainsworth looks okay through the first, getting Ortiz and Manny (batting cleanup again). In the second he has runners on first and second with two out when Pokey hits a hopper to the hole. Tejada nabs it cleanly. Hes moving toward third, and looks to Mora for the force, but Moranot having the instincts of a third basemanis lagging behind the runner, and Tejada has to plant and throw across his body to first. After hesitating, theres no way hes getting Pokey, so now the bases are loaded. Johnny D slaps a single to left. Sveum, bizarrely, sends Bellhorn. The throw beats him by twenty feet, but comes in on a shorthop and Javy Lopez cant get a handle on it. 20, second and third. Bill Mueller hits a single to center. This time the trailing runner is Johnny, and he scores easily. Ainsworths upset and cant find the plate now, walking Ortiz. He goes 31 on Manny before Manny flies to center. Its well hit but should be caught. Ainsworth takes a few steps toward the dugout, watching Matos, who holds up both arms as if beseeching the sky. Hes lost it in the twilight. It hits the track by the base of the wall and bounces high, giving Ortiz more than enough time to chug around. 60. Millar rips a single to center. Matos has a shot at Manny, but his throw is offline. And thats it, thats more than enough. Johnny goes 5 for 5 and makes a spectacular grab, going over the fence in front of the Os bullpen to take a threerun homer away from David Segui; David Ortiz cranks a threerun shot down the line in right; Lowe throws well, and Pokey and Bellhorn do a nice job behind him; even Mendoza gets some work in; but really its a oneinning game. Its the kind of win that makes you complacentthat makes you see the Os as a bad club. Its not true. Like the opener, its just one game. We still have to beat them tomorrow with Wake to take the series. April 8th SK How about Damons catch last night? I saw it on tape. That was my game to miss, except for the eighth and ninth. Dinner with friends. Isnt it annoying, the way life keeps intruding on baseball? SO Besides Johnny having a big night, you didnt miss much. I think Baltimore needs to rethink trying to change Melvin Mora into a third baseman. Hes just lost out therelike Todd Walker, no instincts. Then after Lee Mazzilli and the media ream him out, he gets to go home to his wife and their twoyearold quints. No wonder he looks like hes going to break into tears any second. You want to hear life intruding on baseball? Ive been planning for months to take T to Chicago for our twentieth anniversarygot the plane tickets, hotel reservations, everything. Our first day there is the first game of the World Series. I say, Hey, maybe well be playing the Cubs. She says, Were not going there for the World Series. Im not playing second fiddle to the Red Sox. SK Oh God, does that ever sound familiar. Theyre playing our song. Theres an official tally of the Opening Day payrolls. Once again, the Yankees top the majors at 183 million. The Sox are second at 125, the Angels third at 101. By three Im getting antsy, and call Naomi. I call five times before I get her machine and leave a message. Before I pack the family in the car and drive a hundred miles, I want to know the tickets are going to be there. At a quarter to five, Naomi calls. Shes still not sure of the exact location, and the seats may be piggybackedtwo in front, two behindbut theyll be there. Thank you, Naomi; you came through like Tommy Brady. Im sorry I ever doubted you. Its sprinkling at Camden Yards and the stands are halfempty. Wakes going against a young lefty named Matt Riley whos coming off Tommy John surgery. Ortiz sits, Millar plays right, Burks DHs and McCarty gets a start at first. Mirabelli, who usually handles Wake, is behind the plate. Along with Bellhorn and Pokey, its not the most powerpacked lineup, so Im hoping Riley doesnt have much. He doesnt need much. Through eight, our five through nine guys are 0 for 10. The starters leave with the score tied 22, and then its the game that wont end. By the twelfth, only Dauber and Mendoza havent seen action (they show Dauber in the dugout in a Sox watch cap, bent over, his chin propped on the knob of his bat like the one kid who wasnt picked). Its been four hours now; everyone else has long since turned off ER and gone to bed, and with the Sox not scoring in the top of the innings, the bottoms are like a death watch, just waiting for the bad thing to happen. The twentyfifth man, Bobby Jones, is on for us, and gives up a leadoff single to Bigbie. Mazzilli chooses to play by the book and has Roberts bunt him over. With two outs and Jones behind 20 on Tejada, we walk him intentionally and then get Palmeiro to ground out on a nice charging play by Bellhorn that Todd Walker wouldnt have made. We do nothing in the thirteenth. Its raining again, and its past 1130. Jones, whos been going deep in the count to every batter, walks Lopez to start the inning. Bautista tries to bunt him across only once, then strikes out. The umps noticeably squeezing the zone on Jones on righties, where, in the tenth, he called two pitches well up and in strikes to lefties Tek and Bill Mueller. On 31, Segui swings but steals a walk by running down to first. On 32, Matos takes an agonizingly close pitch. The ump gives him the home call, and with one out the bases are loaded. Bigbies up. Jones has him struck out on a 12 pitchdown the pipe, not a nibble jobbut, again, the ump doesnt call it. Part of its the lateness of the hour, part of its the weather, and part has to be just a lack of respect. Jones dips his head and walks in a circle behind the mound. Ortiz visits from first to calm him down. A borderline pitch and its 32. And then the payoff pitch is up and out, and the games over. The camera follows Jones off, expecting hell say something in the direction of the ump. To his credit, he doesnt. I only watch Extra Innings for a minute, just long enough to hear Eck say, Not pretty. As I get ready for bed, I keep replaying the game in my mind, running over the whatifs, worrying that well need this game somewhere down the road. And it was winnable. There was no good reason we lost it, just a terrible ump. I make a note to find his name in the paper tomorrow. April 9th His name is Alfonso Marquez. Its said an umpires done a good job when no one notices him or her. Hey, Marquez, I got my eye on you. The paper says Nomar, though hes still on the DL, will be in uniform for the opener today, as if that will placate the crowd. We get going a half hour late, but still arrive a good hour before game time. Parking is horrific. The main lot by the hospital is full, and we cruise Beacon Street down to Coolidge Corner, then try the side streets. We find a spot in a quiet neighborhood about a half mile away and hump it in. Anyone sellin? the scalpers call, but no one is. The Will Call windows are mobbed, and incredibly slow. I wait in line for half an hour, and fear were going to miss the first pitch. As we cut in to get to our section, I realize were right at Canvas Alley, where the grounds crew hangs out. Up the stairs, and theres the green of the field and the Monster and the jammed bleachers with the scoreboard on top. Our seats are right on the alley, about ten rows back. Weve missed the first pitch from Arroyo, but hes still working on the first batter. The milk bottles gone, Trudy says, and I look up to the roof in right field. The light stanchion there is bare, looming above three tiers of new tables squeezed in beneath a long BUDWEISER sign. The Hood milk bottle used to flash whenever a Sox pitcher struck someone out, and Hood would donate money in the pitchers name to the Jimmy Fund. I guess milk and beer dont mix. Also new are Torontos black road uniforms, which I dont like. They look exactly like the DRays. Arroyo gets through the first, but makes his own trouble in the second by walking two. The bases are loaded when Reed Johnson doubles off the Monster. 20 Jays. Behind us are four guys in the brewpub business. One of them is constantly on the phone, trying to cut a deal, hollering as if he doesnt believe the signal will reach. We can bring a hundred thousand to start, he says. I want to say we can go oneten, onetwenty if we have to. He has this conversation with a dozen people, as if hes clearing the deal with his partners. Buddy, its Opening Day. TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE. In the third Bellhorns on second with two down when Johnny comes up. Save us, Jebus! a girl beside us yells, a nifty Simpsons reference. Johnny fouls one off his knee that puts him on the ground. He cant be hurt, we cant afford it, and everyone cheers when he stands in again and bloops one down toward us that drops, making it 21. The next batter, Bill Mueller, hits another bloop toward us, spinning foul. Delgados got no shot at it, but Orlando Hudson sprints all the way from second to the line and dives. I see the ball land in his glove just as he disappears, thumping into the padded wall. I have to check the firstbase ump shadowing the play he clenches his fist in the out sign. Hudsons still not up, we cant see him at all, and then Delgado pulls him to his feet. His whole left side including his hat is covered with dirt, and we give him a standing O. That is some major league baseball. I hope I catch the replay on ESPN to see how he did it. By now the crowds settled and Trudy and Steph make a run to the concession stand. Theres a new 3D cup this year with the four starters on it, along with Fenway, a flag and an eagle left over from the 2002 model. The company hasnt proofread the thing Schilling is spelled SHILLING. And will be all season long. In the fourth, Arroyo lets in two more. Hes just not sharp. But in the bottom of the inning Manny turns on an inside pitch and rips one off of Hinske at third (the ball rolling into the dugout, giving him secondits not an error for Hinske, just a hard chance and a bruise), Ortiz doubles to knock him in, and with two gone we load the bases for Pokey. He hits a floating liner to left. It looks like it should be caught, but it sails over Frank Catalanottos head to the base of the wall, and the games tied at 4. When the inning ends, I head for the restroom and the concession stand. Everyone else has the same idea, and after Ive tracked down some commemorative Opening Day balls, a Cuban sandwich for Trudy and a bag of Swedish fish for Caitlin, Im walking across the big concourse behind right field when a roar goes up from the crowd, and then a roar on top of that that makes everyone turn. |
I hustle with my arms full to a TV monitor in time to see Tek jog across the plate. Hes homered to put us on top, 54. To preserve the lead in the seventh, Francona brings in lefty Mark Malaska, who didnt even make the club, but who weve brought up from Pawtucket because we went through the entire pen last night. Malaska is asked to get the goodhitting Catalanotto and then last years 2 and 1 RBI guys, Vernon Wells and Carlos Delgado. And he does, onetwothree. Mystery Malaska! In the Toronto eighth, righty Josh Phelps leads off, so Francona opts to go with Mike Timlin, who only threw twothirds of an inning last night. Timlin Ks Phelps, but then has to face lefty Eric Hinske, who singles, and the switchhitting Hudson, who doubles to the leftcenter gap, tying the game. Timlin gets pinch hitter Simon Bond, but number nine hitter Kevin Cash doubles to the exact same spot, and the crowd boos. Theres nobody warmingagain, the effect of last night. Timlin hits Johnson with a pitch, and people are screaming. Catalanotto lines one over Millars head. Millar turns and does his impression of running, giving a blind wave of his glove. Were luckythe ball hops into the stands for a groundrule double, and Johnson has to go back to third. When Timlin finally gets Wells to pop up for the third out, its 75 Toronto. We do nothing with our half of the eighth. Embree comes on in the ninth and gives up a rocket of a homer to Delgado. Phelps flies deep to right, and then Embree walks Hinske. Francona, I suppose to prove he has a sense of humor (and to test ours), brings in McCarty. You should have brought him in for Timlin! someone yells. McCarty actually doesnt look bad, throwing in the midtohigh eighties and going to his curve. He gets Hudson to ground one to him, moving Hinske over. Two down. When he goes to a full count on Chris Gomez, the crowd rises, cheering the absurdity of it. McCarty reaches back and throws one by Varitek all the way to the backstop, walking Gomez and giving Hinske third. The crowd subsides, and then groans when Cash blasts a double to the triangle in center, scoring both runners. Its 105, and the casual fans head for the exits, while the diehards sneak down to steal their seats. The good news is that theyve changed the numbers on the scoreboard for the YankeesWhite Sox game. Chicagos up 51 in the fifth. In the bottom of the ninth, with one down and Bellhorn up, Brian Daubach comes out and walks over to the ondeck circle. Bellhorn flies out, and the crowd rises for Dauber (Eminems on the PA Guess whos back, back again), hoping hell give us something to cheer about. He grounds weakly to second, and weve lost the home opener. The walk to the car seems long. At least its nice out. We mutter about Timlin, and laugh at how I missed the one great moment of the game. Its still a good day. On the Mass Pike, we pass a car with a bumper sticker that says JOB WAS THE FIRST RED SOX FAN, and its early enough in the year that its still funny. We tune into the PawSox playing Buffalo and catch the final of the Yankee game White Sox 9, Yankees 3. Its the Buffalo station were pulling in, and as we head west into the night and traffic thins, the signal grows stronger. The PawSox are leading 54, and mile after mile we get to catch up with Kevin Youkilis. Today was the first game I missed from beginning to end I even dipped into last nights Late Show, catching the tenth and eleventh of the game versus Baltimore the Sox ended up dropping in thirteen. My younger son Owen called me with an update on this one in the fourth, with the Sox down 41 (Whoa, make that 42, he said in the middle of the call, adding that Manny had hit the hardest line shot heOwenhad ever seen; claimed it even looked like a bullet in slomo). Red Sox ended up losing 105, according to the Fox New England Sports Network ticker, which I for some reason get down here in Florida (ubiquitous Fox!). Man, Stewart! Ill wait for the highlights (lowlights? deadlights?), but that doesnt sound like Moneyball, that sounds like Uglyball. Ill bet you anything that whatshisface, the converted fielder, pitched at least two innings. And the Yankees lost again. The AL East is looking MyTSofTee, at least in the early going. If I can get the game tomorrow, I intendto be there for the whole deal. Its pretty important, I think, that Pedro be able to play the stopper and get us back to .500 early. Cant wait for the standings tomorrow; .500 should be good enough to lead this fools parade. April 10th While we were waiting in the Will Call line, we missed Nomar and Yaz and Dewey and Tommy Brady. Damn you, unwieldy ticketing process! The paper says that Mendoza was moved to the DL, and that Johnny will be out for a few days with a golf ballsized lump on his knee. Yesterday before his first atbat, they played Ironman for him, and here a foul ball takes him out. It also says the plane the Sox were supposed to take from Baltimore after the thirteeninning game had mechanical problems, and with the delays, the team bus didnt get to Fenway until 730 yesterday morning, which might account for their sleepwalking performance. Because we spent all day at the park yesterday, I cant persuade anyone to go to tonights game, even with the PedroRoy Halladay matchup. It frees me to leave early. I rocket across the Mass Pike and get there a full two and a half hours before game time. Im the first one in the lot (now twentyfive bucks, though the attendant assures me they raised the price last August). I score my Will Call tickets and head for Lansdowne, thinking I might shag some home runs. Like a little kid, Im lugging my glove. On Brookline Ave a billboard with a big picture of Nomar asks us to KEEP THE FAITH. Before I turn the corner, I find a scalper leaning against a wall, muttering, Anyone buyin, anyone sellin. I tell him I have one, and we haggle. Even though its hours before game time, its PedroHalladay, and I want at least face value. He lowballs so I walk, but theres a young Korean tourist lurking behind him who steps forward and offers to trade me a Yankee ticket for itthe Patriots Day game, which starts at 11 A.M., way too early for us to get here. I jump on the trade, then turn and sell the 20 bleacher seat to the scalper for well more than the face value of todays ticket, and walk away grinning. Its rare that you scalp a scalper. On Lansdowne the Sausage King and the souvenir guys by Gate E are setting up. A band of college kids wearing long dark wigs and beards walks by; their shirts say DAMONS DISCIPLES. I stake my claim to a pillar by the entrance to the elevated parking lot, leaning against it to hide my glove behind my back, and watch the Monster. Im almost under the Coke bottles, between them and Fisks foul pole, the perfect spot for deadpull hitters. But nothings coming over. Its too early; theyre still running the tour groups through. A father and son join me. Theyve got standing rooms on the Monster and theyre hoping to catch a ball. I wish them luck and post up by Gate E, hoping to be the first one in so I can grab my favorite corner spot down the leftfield line. After a nervous five minutes waiting for them to roll open the corrugatedsteel doors, Im the second one through the turnstiles and the first into the grandstand. The Sox are already batting. As I make my way down to the empty corner, I see Johnny Pesky walking out toward left field with a fungo bat and hail him. Johnny joined the club as a shortstop in 1942. Hes eightyfive and still putting on the uniform. He waves back, a Fenway benediction. Bending over the low wall and reaching with my glove, I can just touch the plastic leftfield foul line (yeah, weird, not chalk but a permanent strip of plastic). I wait for a hot grounder into the corner, pounding my glove. Nothing comes. The Sox finish and the Jays take the field. A liner hooks over us for Section 33Heads up!and bangs into the seats. A few balls off the wall end up in the corner, but these the outfielders toss up or hand to little kids. Out in left, 27 for the Jays has been shagging flies. As he comes in for his turn in the cage, I see he has a ball in his mitt. Hey, twoseven, I holler, and he looks around and tosses it to me. Its Frank Catalanotto, their left fielder and number two hitter, whose triple started them off yesterday. Still nothing down the line. A lot of balls are banging off the Monster or reaching the seats. One arcs down into the front row, where a big guy in a windbreaker catches it barehanded against his chest and gets a hand. Its the dad from Lansdowne. The kids all excited. Later, on his way back out to left, Catalanotto picks up a ball from the grass behind third andamazinglytosses it to me. When he comes off, I ask if hell sign one, and he does. Its the only autograph he gives, and while hes not a star, I feel lucky, singled out. BPs finished, and I wander over to Steves seats behind the Sox ondeck circle. Theyre dream seats, so close that, say, Manny swinging his tapedup piece of rebar intrudes on your view of Ortiz at the plate. Julie, the assistant whos babysitting Steves tickets, might be there, and I need to talk to her. I plant myself in his seat and admire the balls and Catalanottos illegible signature. As game time nears, I wonder if Julies coming. If not, fine. Ill just sit here. Before the game starts, theres already good news on the scoreboard CWS 7 NYY 3 Pedro comes out throwing 8990. Catalanotto singles sharply to center, but thats it in the first. Halladays up at 93, 95. Hes 64 with a patchy beard, and on the mound he looks Randy Johnson tall. Crespo leads off, and Halladay blows two by him, then freezes him with a backdoor curve. Bill Mueller and Ortiz barely get wood on the ball. Looks like its going to be a quick game. Josh Phelps leads off the top of the second with a drive down the rightfield line. It looks like its going to drop, but Kapler digs hard and dives, tumbles in the dust and comes up with it. Its even bigger when the next batter, Hinske, rips a single. Theres some muttering in the seats, but Pedro bears down and gets Hudson, then gets a borderline call on Woodward, and the Faithful stand and cheer him off. When Kapler stands on deck that inning, I call, Great catch, Gabe, and he turns in profile and nods. Im so close I can read the writing on his Tshirt under his white home jersey. Its a new tradition with the club; last year with Grady, the players wore all kinds of inside motivational slogans. Backwards across Gabes shoulders, it says ZAGGIN LAER. When he pops to third to end the inning, the ump inspects the scuffed ball and gives it to the Sox batboy (batman, really, because hes a pro) Andrew. As Andrews coming back toward the circle, I call his name and hold up my glove, and he hits me. Thanks, Andrew. Ortiz is wearing a slogan too. ARE YOU GONNAThats all I can get. Both pitchers settle in. There are no rallies, no tight spots, just solo base runners stranded at first, and lots of strikeouts. In the bottom of the sixth, Crespo leads off with a slow roller to short. He busts it down the line and dives headfirst for the bagsafe. Its a spark. Bill Mueller rolls one to Delgado, who makes the right decision and goes to second to get Crespo. David Ortiz comes up (El Jefe!) and after seeing a few pitches blasts one deep to right that makes us all rise. It carries the wall and caroms off the roof of the Sox bullpen. In the stands were highfiving. David touches the plate, lifts his eyes and points with both hands to God. First pitch, Manny lines one for a single. Maybe Halladays tired. Hes thrown 80 pitches120 Canadian. He blows away Kapler to end the inning. Pedros having a quick top of the seventh when, with two down, he gets behind Hudson 21. Hudsons the number seven hitter, a second baseman and not a big guy, so Pedro goes after him. He cant get his 90 mph fastball past him, and Hudson parks it in the Jays bullpen. Its only 21 for one batter, as Bellhorn leads off the bottom with a slicing Pesky Pole homer. Pedro Ks the first batter in the top of the eighth. Its his last inning, and as he sometimes does, hes going to sign the win by striking out the side. Except after Catalanotto takes a backdoor curve for strike three, here comes Francona from the dugout. Pedro looks around, surprised. He glances out to the bullpen where Foulke is warming, as if he had no idea. Francona chucks Pedro on the shoulder as if to say good job and takes the ball from him. Boooooo! Pedro highfives everyone in conference at the mound, then, as hes walking off, before crossing the firstbase line, touches his heart, kisses his pitching hand and points to God. Huge standing O. At the top of the dugout steps he stops and points to God again, holding the pose a little too long, but hey, thats Pedro. (This is the kind of showboating that gets him booed in other parks, but here, after taking on Halladay, its okay.) Peteys thrown 106 pitches, but I wonder if its more of a power move on Franconas part, taking an early opportunity to show the media and the talkradio fans that this is his club and he can make Pedro do something he doesnt want to do (as opposed to Grady, who couldnt take the ball from him when it was clear he needed to come out). Foulke gets Vernon Wells on a roller, so its a good move, or at least not a bad one. Manager Carlos Tosca decides to close the Mike Scioscia way, bringing in a lefty to get Ortiz, then pulling him for a righty to face Manny. Manny uncharacteristically swings at the first pitch, and greets Aquilino Lopez with a bomb to center that just keeps going. Its hit into the wind but ends up a few rows deep in Section 36, somewhere around 450 feet. 41 Sox. After that, Tosca says the hell with it and leaves Lopez in to finish. As we start the ninth, the crowds singing Sweet Caroline a cappella long after Neil Diamonds finished. Its a party, and when the folks in the front row take off to beat the traffic, I move up and stand at the wall with my hands on the bunting (real cloth, not plastic, as you might expect) as Foulke closes. Its only 930. Its been the fast, clean game youd expect from two Cy Youngs, all the scoring on longballs. The high floats me home. Traffics light, and Im entirely satisfied. Theres nothing to nitpick or secondguess, no needling whatifs. Pedro wasnt dominant, but he was very, very good. Ortiz delivered the big blow, Manny was 3 for 4, Kapler made that great diving catch. Andthis is silly, since its not even Easter yetwith Baltimore whipping up on Tampa Bay, I do believe we own a share of first place. SK Well, well, good game. Petey looked like Petey and Roy Halladay surely looked like he was saying FUCK! SHIT!! after the Ortiz home run in the sixth. On the replay, too. So the Red Sox climb to .500 for the third time in the young season. Now, for the really interesting questionsince most of us watch these things on TV (hell, Im 1000 miles from Fenway, give or take a few), who pays the freight? Mostly Dadoriented companies, as you might guess, but one of the heavyrotation sponsors, McDonalds, features hungry ladies leaving a baby shower and booking straight for Mickey Ds, where they gobble turkey clubs on pita bread. And maybe thats not so strange; I watched tonight with my eightyyearold motherinlaw, who went directly from the BoSox game upstairs to MaineDenver Frozen Four hockey downstairs. Also, for your consideration, the following bigleague sponsors Tweeter (Just sit back and enjoy) Dunkin Donuts (Curt Schilling with a Walkman, learning to speak New England) Foxwoods Casino (The wonder of it all) Geico Insurance (Good news, your rap sucks but I saved a bundle) Xtra Mart (Fuel up on Brewboy coffee) SBC Phone Service (Old farts, please phone home) Friendlys Restaurants (Sorry, Dad, no sports car for you) TD Waterhouse (Know your investment risk) Cool TV (i.e., Watch more Boston Bruins hockey) Funny Bears Drink Pepsi Cola Volvo (Official car of the Boston Red Sox) Camry, the Car of Caring Dads Ricoh Color Printers (Because, face it, black and white sucks) Dunkin Donuts again (Curt again Wicked haaaaaaad) Albert Pujols for DirecTV (Mah bat iss alwaysss talkun to me Seek help, Albert, seek help) AFLAC, the Anthrax Duck Interestingly enough, no beer ads until after 9 P.M., when they come in a sudser, flood. And goodness, are they ever suggesting young men should drink a lot, especially the Coors Light ads. Also, Foxwoods advertises a lot. The strong suggestion of the ads being that the wonder of it all involves pulling a great many chromeplated handles a great many times. I thought youand possibly TVwatching fans everywhereshould know these things. Now, all together AAAAAFFFFLACK! P.S. Did you see Johnnys Cavemen? Are they the perfect Bleacher Creatures or what? SO Speaking of advertising, for the first time the dugouts are plastered with Ford ovalslike the Jays wallpapered with Canadian Tire ads. I saw Damons Disciples before, during and after the game. A shame Johnny didnt play. Crespo hustled (two infield hits) and played center passably. Lets hope Millars days roaming Trots yard are over. April 11th Poor ol Dauber. Because weve been eating up the pen, we need fresh arms, and ship him to Pawtucket to bring up a ghostFrank Castillo, who we dumped last year and then resigned this February. Dauber will have to clear waivers before reporting. The odds are slim that anyone will claim him, but why take the chance if hes really part of the team? Johnny says he saw his disciples as he was coming out of the players lot. They have shirts that said, We have Jesus on our side. Its Schillings Fenway debut, and Im not going. For the first time in my life Im going to be a noshow, eating a pair of grandstands along with Easter dinner. I tell Steph that Schilling better not throw a nohitter. A perfect game, he says. Instead, its an extrainning nailbiter that takes all day. Mystery Malaska battles again, taking us into the thirteenth. So who do we bring in next, Steph asks, Williamson? We wont have to, I say. Were doing it here. To seal the oath, we highfive around the room. Its Aquilino Lopezs game. He walks Bill Mueller, bringing up David Ortiz. With Manny next, Lopez has to throw to him. He tries to nibble, then gives in and puts one over the plate. Ortiz hits a rainbow that brings us to our feet. Get out! Its headed for deep leftcenter. Its going to make the wall, and now its clear its going to carry it. The ball lands in the second row of the Monster seats, in the aisle between M7 and M8, ricocheting off a fan who scrambles after the magical souvenir. The Sox win 64, and the whole club gathers at home to pound David on the helmet and bounce up and down as a team. Too bad Dauber missed this one. Now I wish Id gonea walkoff jobs rarebut were celebrating here too, hooting and running to the kitchen to mob Trudy as if she hit it. Now it is officially a happy Easter, I say. The temptation is to see this as a defining moment, proof that were in for a wild year. Its a win, thats all, but a very satisfying one. Though its only April, with one swing, emotionally, weve made up for blowing both openers. April 12th In the mail theres a promotional postcard for Steph, a handsomely designed riff on a fight poster that says SHOWDOWN IN BEANTOWN, touting Fridays Yankee game on Foxthe networks first regularseason game in prime time in years. Weve got Monster seats for Sundays Yankee game, and Im hoping to cadge two field boxes from Steve for Fridays showdown. Francona says hes not going to use the off day to give Pedro an extra day of rest, meaning well skip Arroyo and Petey will go in his normal slot Thursday night against the Os (maybe a revenge game for him?). This way, Schilling stays on track for thirtyfive starts rather than thirtythree, and Pedro sees the Yanks down in the Stadium the weekend after next. So Schilling will go this Friday, as hes planned since February. Steph and I figure out well see Wake on Sunday, and then, on Thursday against Tampa Bay, Wake again. (Its a good thing Steph likes Timmay. Last year we went through a goofy stretch where he saw five straight home starts of his.) But thats only if the weather holds. Its spring, Steph reminds me. Were probably going to have some rainouts. April 13th A dark, cold day. It pours all afternoon, and the Sox cancel tonights game early. Theres no reschedule date, and no rush, since Baltimore comes through again in July and September. The rainout itself is depressing, as if a partys been called off, and makes the day that much gloomier. SK It was an insult that they shipped Dauber. The injury was that they shipped him for Frank. SO Funny how Crespos turned into our utility everything. Had a big spring, beating out Shump and Tony Wo, and now hes playing infield and outfield and getting four or five atbats a game, while Daubers rotting in Pawtucket. You cant teach speed. April 14th My 2004 Media Guide arrives, with a picture of DLowe on the cover, celebrating the Game 5 win over Oakland, except the background isnt from that game, but from the wildcard clincher at Fenway, with the fans on their feet and the whole bench bolting from the dugout. Matted in below this are pressconference shots of Schilling, Francona and Foulke holding up their new Sox unis, the symbolism unmistakable, as if adding these three elements together will produce a championship. Just for fun, the text of the guide is printed in blue and red ink this year, 627 pages of stats and oddball facts like last year with the White Sox, Dauber stole home; in college Mark Malaska was a slugging outfielder; Cesar Crespos brother Felipe played for the Giants, and homered twice in the same game in which Cesar hit his first major league homer with the Padres. Among the career highlights and personal trivia, I recognize dozens of lines Ive already heard from Don and Jerry. As if 627 pages arent enough, I hit the local bookstore and pick up Jerry Remys Watching Baseball, just out. As a color analyst, hes usually pretty good with strategy, and Im always willing to learn. Im not disappointed. While a lot of it is basic, he also talks a fair amount about setting the defense according to the batter, the count and the pitch, and how important it is not to give your position away. He also lays out the toughest plays for each position, and the slight advantages base runners can take of pitchers and outfielders. Im psyched to use some of my new knowledge watching the game, but the website says its been cancelled due to inclement weather and unplayable field conditions. Its a letdown, as if I was supposed to play. After Sundays walkoff homer, Im feeling a little withdrawal. April 15th Its raining when I wake up, but by midmorning the suns out, so I think were okay. Even better in the mail are Steves dream seats for tomorrow nights game, along with a parking pass. Look for me on Fox. (Last year, for one nationally televised game, we noticed that Todd Walker was miked, a transmitter tucked in his back pocket. Every time he was on deck, we yelled Rupert Murdoch sucks!) Sundays game is OnField Photo Day. I call up Sox customer service to find out more, but the woman there doesnt know when it starts or what gate you need to go in or where the line will form. In the paper, the Yanks asked UConn mens hoops coach Jim Calhoun if hed throw out the first ball at one of their games. Coach Calhouns a serious Sox fan; after his squad won it all in 99 (beating a Yankeelike Duke team), he threw out the first pitch up at Fenway. No chance, he tells the Yanks. Sixty years of torment is enough. The confusion the Yanks had is natural. The monied southwestern corner of Connecticut drains toward New York, and historically supports the more established Gotham teams. For a couple years, before moving to Jersey, the football Giants played in the Yale Bowl. The northern and eastern edges of the state, butted up against Massachusetts and Rhode Island, are country, decidedly New England. The suburban middle, where I live, is disputed territory. On the Sox website, theres a petition for Connecticut residents to sign, pledging their loyalty based on traditional New England values of hard work and fair play, and denouncing the encroachment of, yes, the evil empire. Ive signed, though what good it does against Georges bounty hunters and clone army, I have no idea. The game goes on as scheduled. Ben Afflecks in the front row beside the Sox dugout (he emceed the Sox Welcome Back luncheon the other day), and I expect hell be there tomorrow against the Yanks. With the rainouts, neither pitchers seen action for a while. Pedro gives up a leadoff home run to Roberts. Hes missing spots, walking people, giving up another run in the second, but Ponson loads the bases and Johnny singles to right, and then Bill Mueller breaks an 0for20 drought with a Pesky Pole wraparound, and were up 52. Its early, but the game seems in hand, and the home folks have shows they want to watch, so we switch over to Survivor and then The Apprentice (dont worry, Steve, were taping Kingdom Hospital), clicking back to NESN every so often. Its 54 Sox in the fourth when we check in, just in time to see Johnny knock in Bellhorn. Ponsons struggling, and Tejada doesnt help him by dropping the transfer on a sure DP. Ortiz grounds to the right side and Pokey scores. 74. When we check in again, its 77 in the top of the fifth and Pedros still in there. What the hell? (Palmeiro hit a threerun shot into the Sox bullpen.) Hes given up 8 hits and 4 walks. Yank him already! Ponsons gone after four, and Malaska comes on for us in the top of the sixth. Its the big finale of The Apprentice, and for two hours we play peekaboo with the relievers Lopez, Williamson, Timlin, Ryan, Foulke, Embree. The Apprentice ends just in time for us to catch the biggest play of the game. Its the bottom of the tenth, bases loaded and two out for Bill Mueller. He lifts one high and deep to leftcenter that looks like itll scrape the Monster. Im up, cheering, thinking this is the gamethat well have a little cushion going into the Yankee seriesbut the wind knocks the ball down. Bigbie is coming over from left, and Matos from center, on a collision course. Bigbie cuts in front, Matos behind, making the grab on the track in front of the scoreboard, and thats the inning. Arroyo starts the top of the eleventh against Tejada. He hangs a curve, and Tejada hits it off the foot of the light tower on the Monster for his first homer of the year. 87 Os. In a long and ugly sequence, they pile on four more. We go onetwothree, and thats the game, a painful, bullpenclearing, fourandahalfhour extrainning loss very much like last weeks in Baltimore. Not the way we wanted to go into tomorrows opener against the Yanks, and not how I wanted to go to bedlate and pissedoff. April 16th The Sox are unveiling a statue of Ted Williams today outside Gate Bthe gate no one uses, way back on Van Ness Street, behind the rightfield concourse. The statues part of an ongoing beautification effort. Weve already widened the sidewalks and planted trees to try to disguise the fact that Van Ness is essentially a gritty little backstreet with more than its share of broken glass. Im surprised theres not a statue of Williams already, the way the Faithful venerate him. During the PedroHalladay game, I chanced across a rolling wooden podium with a bronze plaque inlaid on top honoring Ted; it looked like something from the sixties, coated with antique green milk paint. It was pushed against a wall in the hallway inside Gate A next to the old electric organ no one ever plays. Id never seen it before, and wondered why it was shoved to the side. In Pittsburgh there was a statue of Honus Wagner by the entrance of Forbes Field, and when the Bucs moved to Three Rivers, it moved with them, to be joined by a statue of Clemente, and now, at PNC Park, one of Willie Stargell. I wonder how long it will take the Sox to commission one of Yaz. Because the games on Fox, the start times been pushed back to 805, giving me some extra time to deal with Friday rush hour. All the way up 84 and across the Mass Pike I see a lot of New York and New Jersey plates. When I pull into the lot behind Harvard Med Center a good hour before the gates open, its already halffilled. I head for Lansdowne, but BP hasnt started yet. There are some Yankee fans outside the Cask n Flagon having their pictures takenskinny college girls in pink Yankee Tshirts and hats with a hefty dude in an ARod jersey. I pass a woman wearing a Tshirt that says THIS IS YOUR BRAIN (above a Red Sox logo), THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS (and a Yankees logo). TV crews are wandering around doing standups, shooting Broll of people eating by the Sausage Guy. Above, banner planes and helicopters crisscross. I walk down Lansdowne past the nightclubs, figuring Ill go around the long way and check out the statue. Fuel is playing the Avalon Ballroom; their fans are sitting against the wall to be the first in, and seem disgusted that their good time has been hijacked by a bunch of dumb jocks. When I turn the corner onto Ipswich, I find another line of young people waiting at the entrance of a parking lot. Everyone has an ID on a necklace, as if theyre all part of a tour group. Then I notice the yellow Aramark shirts hidden under their jackets. Its the vendors, queuing up so they can get ready for a big night. Its already cold in the shadows, and I pity the guys trying to move ice cream. I expect the Williams statue to be ringed by fans taking pictures or touching it for luck, the way they do in Pittsburgh with Clemente and Stargell (if you reach up you can balance a lucky penny on Willies elbow), but its just standing there alone while a line waits about thirty feet away for dayofgame tickets. Its uninspired and uninspiring, a tall man stooping to set his oversized cap on a little bronze kids head. Its not that Ted didnt love kids (his work with the Jimmy Fund is a great legacy), its just that I expected something more dynamic for the greatest hitter that ever lived. In Pittsburgh, Clementes just finished his swing and is about to toss the bat away and dig for first; hes on his toes, caught in motion, and theres a paradoxical lightness to the giant structure that conveys Clementes speed and grace. Stargells cocked and waiting for his pitch, his bat held high; you can almost see him waggling the barrel back and forth behind his head. This Williams is static and dull and carries none of The Kids personality. He could be any Norman Rockwell shmoo making nice with the little tyke. I take a couple of pictures anyway, then head back to Gate E to wait for my friend Lowry. Before a big game like this, people are handing out all sorts of crummy free stuff, and I accept a Globe just to have something to read (okay, and for the poster of Nomar). I buy a bag of peanuts and lurk at the corrugated door, and when Lowry comes, were first in line and then the first in and the first to get a ball, tossed to me by David McCarty in left. I snag a grounder by Kapler, and later an errant warmup throw by Yanks coach (and former Pirate prospect) Willie Randolphpicking the neat shorthop out of sheer reflex. ARod comes out to warm, and the fans boo. Some migrate over from other sections just to holler at him while he plays long toss, chucking the ball from the thirdbase line out to deep rightcenter. Hey, lend me a hundred bucks, huh? How you liking third? Hey, ARod, break a leg, and I mean that. We boo Jeter when he steps in to hit. And Giambi (Balco) and Sheffield (Ballllcoooo). The rest of the Yanks are friendly enough. Jose Contreras and Kevin Brown banter with the fans; even hothead Jorge Posada jokes with us. When Mussina comes by and chats and smiles, someone calls, Youre the good Yankee, Mike. Miguel Cairo, one of the last Yankees to bat, smokes a grounder down the line. Its mine. |
I catch it offcenter, and it bends the fingers of my mitt back. The ball knocks off the wall and rolls away, out of reach, gone forever. Its a play Ill make 99 times out of 100, even if it was hit hard. Hey, Lowry says, youve got three. Yeah, I say, I know, but its always the one that gets away that you remember. We stop by El Tiantes for an autographed picture, saying hey to Luis and picking up some Cuban sandwiches, then fight the crowd to reach our seats. The choke points right behind home, where the concourse narrows to feed the first ramp to the stands. The crush is worse than Opening Day, and I think theyve got to fix it somehow before something very bad happens. The tide of people separates us. I find Lowry at our seats just as the anthem begins. As always, Im overwhelmed by how good these seats are. One section over, one row in front of us, is the governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney. The Yanks send Kenny Lofton, Jeter and ARod to face Wake in the first. The boos grow louder with each atbat, peaking with ARod, who gets a standing excoriationsomething only Clemens has managed over the years. GayRod, some wags are chanting. When Tims first pitch is a strike, the crowd explodes, as if weve won. Johnny opens with a hopper to first that hits Giambi in the middle and gets through him for an E. Balco! Vazquez has Bill Mueller 02, but gets impatient, aiming a fastball that Billy cranks into the Sox bullpen, and were up 20. Manny hits a slicing liner down the rightfield line that disappears from view. The ump signals fair, then twirls one finger in the air for a homer. Somehow the Yanks are able to relay the ball intheyre arguing that it never went out. We dont get a replay. (Later, I hear that the ball hit the top of the wall and caromed back in off Sheffield, so it wasnt a homer.) With two down and Ellis Burks on second, Doug Mirabelli grounds one to Jeter. Its an easy play, but Jeter comes up and lets it through the fivehole and into left, and with two outs Burks scores easily. Posada gets one back with a solo homer in the second. In the fourth, Mirabelliwho, like Wake, is only making his second starttakes Vazquez deep on the first pitch. 51. A great moment in the sixth when the Yanks try a double steal (or is it a blown hitandrun?). Sheffield doesnt make contact, and ARods meat at third. The crowd taunts him into the dugout. Its 62 with two out in the eighth when Giambi lofts a fly to Manny in left. Good inning, I holler to Doug Mirabelli, heading off, and then I see the ball glance off Mannys glove and bounce in the grass. He Charlie Browned it! I look around to verify that this has actually happened. No one else can believe it either. Things get a little shaky when Sheffield and Posada both work walks to load the bases. A home run here and the games tied, a neighbor says. I know where this is coming from, but come on, were up 62 with four outs to go. Have some faith. Embree gets Matsui, and the Yanks never threaten again, and when Jeter makes the last out and the PA plays Dirty Water, all the different TV crews hustle to set up their tall directors chairs for the postgame shows. April 17th Steve and I have been going back and forth about the Yankees place in our cosmos. Ive been trying to argue that theyve only gotten in our way a few times across our overall history. In the fifties and sixties (besides the Impossible Dream year), we were so bad that it didnt matter. 78s a fluke, and people forget that after our big fold in August we came back and won our last eight to gain the tie for the division. The WinfieldMattingly Yanks never gave us any problems; were, in fact, massive chokers, consistently finishing second to Toronto, Baltimore and us. In 86 we stood in our own way (or Calvin Schiraldi did). In 99, we were lucky to get by Cleveland, and last year we pulled a rabbit out of our hat to beat Oakland, and were playing on the road the whole time. Plus we took enough out of the Yanks that they had nothing left for the Marlins. We were their stumbling block, beating them twice at the Stadium, putting their weaknesses on display. All the Marlins had to do was mop them up. SK Your rationalizations cant stand up to the killer graphics Fox put up on the screen last night. Ill get the facts for my little YankeesSox piece (and no, it hasnt always been the Yankees, just the Dent home run, the Boston Massacre, and last yearplus the BostonYankees alltime numbers, which are all New York). But while weve been starving, New York has been feasting. How many consecutive years have they gone to the postseason now? Twelve? Come on, ya gotta hate em! Fear em and hate em! SO You forgetmy roots are in Pittsburgh, and Mazs homer is our Excalibur. We not only slew the beast, we broke their damn hearts, and the Sox can do it too. Shoot, if we really wanted to win one, we could go the 97 Marlins route, or the 2001 DBacks. Were almost there but not quite. But thats not an honorable way. Thats why all the Steinbrenner titles dont count. The last time the Yanks really won anything was 1962. SK Mazs homer is our Excalibur. Mine too. I LOVED that series. Remember that Baltimore chop that hit Tony Kubek in the Adams apple? Of course you do, you devil, you. SO As Bob Prince used to say, We had em all the way! SK The game last night was the perfect antidote (except for Scott Williamson in the eighthPRETTY SCARY, HALLOWEEN MARY). A measure of payback for TimMAY Wakefield after the heartbreaking home run to Aaron Boone. One game down, eighteen to go. One luxury of having two bona fide aces is the constant possibility of a marquee matchup. Last Saturday it was PedroHalladay, this Saturday its SchillingMussina. With the watering down of pitching talent around the league, these games are rare, and Id be at Fenway except that I have to tape an interview for Canadian TV. Moose is rocky from the start, and Schillings solid. Bill Mueller goes deep, and Manny. Its 41 in the seventh when Schillings 121st pitch freezes Jeter for the first outand suddenly here comes Francona from the dugout. Like Pedro against Toronto, Schilling looks around, surprised someone is warming. He turns his head and swears, but gives up the ball and gets a big hand. A few minutes later the camera shows him in the dugout, going over his charts. Another power move by Francona? Or just notice that he wont be like Grady? I think its no coincidence that he pulled both aces at home during highprofile wins. Johnny doubles in an insurance run in the eighth, and the Yanks get a cheapie in the ninth, but this ones over. Schilling beats Moose and weve taken the first two. On Extra Innings, Tom Caron says, So the worst we can do is split. Why think of the worst, especially right now? Weve got DLowe going against Contreras tomorrow. Its this kind of fatalismfrom the Soxs own network!that drives me crazy. You never hear this kind of hedging from the Yankees YESmen. April 18th We get going early so we can be the first ones on the Monster, but as were driving up I read in the Sunday paper that theres no BP today. While it doesnt mention it anywhere, and even the Sox ticket office and the guys who let us in through Gate C arent sure where were supposed to go, its OnField Photo Day. We take a right toward the stairs up to the Monster and notice the garage door to centers open. We fall in behind a staff member escorting two kids and then were on the warning track in the bright sunshine. A yellow rope cordons off the grass, but we can walk all the way around to the dugout, where Schilling is sitting, being interviewed by a writer. The PA tells us the plan. The Sox will come out and walk all the way around so we can take photos. Each player has a handler to make sure they dont sign autographs. Still, Ive got to try. No, Ill get in trouble, Bill Mueller says, like a little kid. The guys are nice, shaking hands and posing. I get Steph with hitting coach Ron Papa Jack Jackson and Keith Foulke. Trudys being crowded and cant get clean shots, so she moves out to the warning track in right where its empty. Johnny Peskys sitting in the dugout with Andrew, and I toss him a ball to sign. I notice Manny on the other end of the dugout, signing, and make my way over there, scissoring over the wall and then highstepping over the railings between sections. The mob around him is packed tight, but I finally get through and have him sign my ball. The Monster seats are a dreama counter for your stuff, a swiveling barstool and room behind it to stand or lean against the wall. Were in the second row. In the first row, there are new signs that read WARNING FOR YOUR SAFETY PLEASE DO NOT REACH OVER WALL. The one drawback is that were a long way from the plate. Its a little breezy, but when the wind is blowing right you can smell the burgers grilling. The suns out, Lowrys with us, and when Kevin Millar doubles into the corner in the first, scoring Bill Mueller, the day seems ideal. The pitching matchups in our favor, or should be. Contreras is their fourth starter, and a weak link. The worry is that Lowe, working on ten days rest, will be too strong and leave the ball up. In the third thats exactly what happens. After he walks ARod, he gives up a single to Giambi, a double to Sheffield, a single to Matsui and a double to Posadaall of them down the line in left. Lowe strikes out Travis Lee, but Enrique Wilson singles to right, scoring Matsui to make it 41. Jeter grounds out, scoring Posada, then Bernie Williams doubles down the leftfield line. Thats it for Lowe 223 innings, 8 hits, 7 runs. The Sox get two back in the bottom of the inning, chasing Contreras. We should have more except for a blown call. With two on and two out, Tek slaps one down the firstbase line that Travis Lee has to dive to spear. Reliever and exSock Paul Quantrill beats Tek to the bag, but Lee has trouble getting the ball out of his glove, and by the time the throw arrives, Quantrills well past the base. The ump punches Tek out to end the inning, bringing Francona from the dugout to argue, though by then its pointless. Also during this inning, the Yanks haul out their Cuban National Team tactics, slowing down the pace of the game in the middle of our rally to quiet the crowd and throw off the hitters timing. Posada visits the mound. They send the trainer out in midcount, as if the pitcher has some injury. He doesnt, but because the trainer accompanies Torre, the visit doesnt count as a visit by the manager. They send the pitching coach. They change pitchers. They have an infield conference. They send the pitching coach again in midcount. The pitcher himself wanders behind the mound to stall. They change pitchers again. Technically its only semilegal, a judgment call with the leagues new rules requiring umps to pick up the pace of the game. A good crew chief wouldnt put up with this nonsense. It stays 73. Theres not much action, and the crowds grumpy and distracted. From time to time the bleachers rise and roar, signaling a fight. The cops haul some Yankee fans away, and everyone cheers, Yankees suck! Yankees suck! In the seventh, Tom Gordon comes in to some moderate boos, but its hard to get too excited, down by four runs. The sole highlight of the late innings is an awkward sliding catch by Sheffield along the rightfield line. The crowd salutes him with the old Atlanta tomahawk chop, with the finger attached. We lose 73. It was basically a oneinning game, over after the third. The loss cant ruin the daywalking on the field, seeing the guys, sitting on the Monsterbut it makes for a quiet ride home. And tomorrows their matchup Kevin Brown against Bronson Arroyo. Okay, now whos the fatalist? SK Not quite sgood tday, and with KBrown tomorrow, the Yanks look good for the split, curse them. SO It was a dull game, even up on the Monster. The wind was blowing in hard, and knocked down two balls from Manny that would have been gone any other day. Saw the new Williams statue by Gate Bpure schmaltz. He deserves better. SK Yep. Putting his hat on the little kiddies head. Cute. And, out of the side of his mouth Now get outta my way, you little ratbastard. SO Hey, imagine what Steinbrenners statuell be doing. SK Cast in bronze with his wallet out. The RivalryApril 18th The Yankees have never beaten the Red Sox in the World Series; with both teams in the American League, that, of course, is impossible. Nevertheless, the Yankees (who are playing the Red Sox in the third game of their first fourgame set of 2004 as I write this) have become the Soxs principal rival over the last fifty or sixty years, and as someone who has written a great many scary stories during his career, I almost have to write about them. For Red Sox fans, the Yankees are the thing under the bed, the boogeyman in the closet. When they come to us, we expect bad luck on horseback; when we go to them, we expect, in our hearts, not to return alive. The rivalry has captured hearts in both Boston and New York, with fans crosspollinating freely (and sometimes fistily) at the games. On April 16th, the New York Posts front page showed a pinstriped Darth Vader with a Yankees logo on his helmet and a bat on his shoulder. It quoted Red Sox president Larry Lucchino, who in 2002 called the Yankees the Evil Empire, and trumpeted MAY THE CURSE BE WITH YOU. On the Fox Game of the Week that night (of course it was the Game of the Week, are you kidding), the announcers displayed a souvenir Tshirt proclaiming SHOWDOWN IN BEANTOWN. That one must have been officially sanctioned by Red Sox management. In the bleachers, the ones reading JETER SUCKS are much more popular. I understand theres one featuring ARod with an even more obscene sentiment, but I havent seen that one yet (Im sure I will). And how many fightin fans have been ejected by the security people over the years? I have no idea, but as Ole Casey used to say, You could look it up. When there are fights, the first blows are usually thrown by Red Sox fans; the jeers and epithets chiefly come from Sox fans, too. Maybe Billy Herman, who managed the club from 1964 to 1966 (not stellar years), explained it best For Red Sox fans, there are only two seasons August and winter. Losing makes us sadexcept when it doesnt. Then itmakes us pissed. The attitude of your average pinstripe fan, on the other handunless and until directly attackedtends to be one of indulgent, slightly patronizing good nature. Arguing with a Yankee fan is like arguing with a real estate agent who voted for Ronald Reagan. I date the SoxYanks rivalry of the Modern Age from October 3rd, 1948, a day on which the Red Sox actually beat the Yankees, 105. Whats wrong with that, you say? Well, it got us into a onegame playoff game with the Cleveland Indians, one we lost, 83. Thats Heartbreak Number One. Fastforward past 1951 (Mickey Mantle makes his major league debut versus the Red Sox, Yanks win 40), and 195253 (the Red Sox lose thirteen in a row to the Yankees), and 1956 (Ted Williams fined for spitting at Boston fans after misplaying a Mickey Mantle fly ball, an incident Williams will never live down). Let us forget 1960, when the Yankees set the record for team home runs (192)against Boston. And let us by all means wince past Roger Mariss 61st home run, which came against Tracy Stallardwho pitched for Boston. No, lets move directly to 1978. Nothing compares, says Dan Shaughnessy in The Curse of the Bambino. The mind calcifies. This was the apocalyptic, cataclysmic fold by which all others must be measured. Yeah, and it was pretty bad, too. On July 20th of that year, the Red Sox led the Yankees by fourteen games.Then came the infamous Boston Massacre, in which the Red Sox were sweptnot at Yankee Stadium but at Fenwayby the Bombers in a fourgame series. The Sox ended the season in a flatfooted tie with the Yankees, and lost the playoff game on Monsieur Dents PunchandBucky home run, the pop fly heard round the world. Thats Heartbreak Number Two. In 1999, the Red Sox went into postseason as the wildcard team and once again faced the Yankees. The Yanks won both of the first two games in the Stadium, both by one run; they qualify as Heartbreaks Number ThreeA and ThreeB. (Game 1 of this series, you may remember, wasthe one in which Chuck Knoblauch dropped a throw from Scott Brosius; the ump then ruled hed dropped the ball while transferring it from his glove to his hand.) The third game, the first played at Fenway in the 99 series, offered some small measure of revenge. In that game, Sox batters pummeled first Roger Clemens and then a parade of relievers, Pedro Martinez fanned twelve, and the Red Sox won, 131. It was the most lopsided loss in the Yankees postseason history, but in the end it made no difference; you cant carry any of those runs over to later games, can you? In the following game, the Red Sox were victimized by another bad call, this time by Tim Tschida,and the Red Sox ended up losing, 92. The Yankees won the final game, 61. Thats Heartbreak Number ThreeC. Whenever the eye of Red Sox management falls on a likely player, it seems that the Eye of Steinbrenner (like the Eye of Sauron in his tower) has also fallen there. It was very likely frustration as much as anything else that prompted Larry Lucchinos Evil Empire comment following the signing of Jose Contrerasin 2002; there was even more frustration following the signing of Alex Rodriguez. ARod was willing to come to Boston; it was the Players Union that balked, citing a 15 million shortfall in Bostons offer and claiming it would set a disastrous precedent (bullshitballplayers are even more egregiously overpaid than bestselling novelists). The fans understand the truth George Steinbrenners your basic fatcat owner. His pockets are deeper because his fan base is deeper. Current capacity at Fenway is about 35,000; at Yankee Stadium, its 58,000. And thats only the tip of the iceberg. The differences carry over to all the ancillary goodies, from Tshirts to the big casino, TV telecast rights. Hummmm, babyand while youre at it, gimme that cable deal, sweetheart. But enough dallying. Weve reached Heartbreak Number Four, the one Ive been putting off but can put off no longer. Worse than the Boston Massacre? Yes. Worse than the ground ball through Bill Buckners wickets? Yes. Worse, even, than the Bucky Dent cheap home run? Yes, because more recent. The wound is fresher; still bleeding, in fact. Part of me just wants to say, If you dont know what happened, look it up or go rent avideotape somewhere. It hurts to even think about it, let alone write about it. Because, I think, we did more than come back; we were ahead. We were five outs away from beating the hated, feared Yankees (in their own house!) in the American League Championship Series and going back to the World Series for the first time since 1986. We had our fingers around that puppy, and it justslippedaway. The smart money had the Yankees winning that series, but the Red Sox took the first and fourth games behind Tim Wakefield, who simply bamboozled the Yankee hitters with his knuckleballand who would issue the Final Heartbreak in the eleventh inning of Game 7. In between was the famous Game 3 rhubarbmore bad blood between two teams that have had it in for each other for what seems like a thousand years. The trouble started when Pedro Martinez hit Karim Garcia in the back (narrowly missing his head). After Garcia was forced at second (taking Red Sox second baseman Todd Walker out with an ugly spikesup slide), Yankee catcher Jorge Posada yelled at Martinez from the dugout. Martinez reputedly responded in charming fashion. Ill hit your head, too, smartass! cried he. In frame number four, Roger Clemensnever a gentlemanthrew at Manny Ramirez, who responded by telling the Rocket he could go fuck himself. Roger responded by telling Manny that no, Manny could go fuck him self. A real meeting of the minds, you see. The benches erupted. Don Zimmer, the aging Yankee coach,ended up rolling around on the ground, courtesy of Pedro Martinez. Later, Zim made a tearful apologybehavior which cost fellow New Englander Edmund Muskie his shot at the presidency, but maybe thats neither here nor there. In any case, the Yankees won the game. They also won Game 5 behind David (Bostonians Are Psycho) Wells. The 2003 ALCS returned to Yankee Stadium with the Bronx Bombers needing only one more win to go on to the World Series. But the Sox won ugly in Game 6, 96. So, Game 7. The Red Sox got off to a 40 lead behind Pedro, the ace of the staff. Jason Giambi then hit a pair of solo home runs for the Yanks; David Ortiz hit one for the Sox. It was 52 Red Sox in the eighth inning. Mayor Rudy Giuliani thought the Red Sox were finally going towin it.Martinez got the first batter (Nick Johnson) he faced in that inning, and the Red Sox were five outs away from the World Series. For we Red Sox fans, that was the 2003 equivalent of Picketts Charge as close as we ever got. Jeter (Jeter the Horrible, to Sox fans) doubled to right. Bernie Williams singled, driving in Jeter. Matsui hit a groundrule double after Grady conferred with the tiring but game Martinez and decided to leave him in (hell, it had worked once or twice during the regular season). And still left him in to face Posada, who dumped one over second base to tie the game. The Red Sox manager finally came with the hookbut Red Sox Nation would pretty much agree it was too Little, too late. In the bottom of the eleventh inning, Mayor Giuliani told his wife and daughter, Youre going to see your first walkoff home run.The batter was Aaron Boone, and he made the mayor a prophet. Tim Wakefield, the man who was arguably the most responsible for getting the Red Sox as far as they were able to go, served up the fatal pitch, but had nothing to hang his head about. The real damage was done with one out in the eighth. And is there a reason to drag all this history into a book about the 2004 Red Sox? There sure is. More than one, actually. First, baseball is a game of history, and those who dont learn from it are condemned to get drubbed by it. Second, even in a much improved American League East, the Yankees and Red Sox still seem, at this point in the young season, like the two dominant teams.The tradition and history will hang over each of these matches like grandstand shadows over the infield at 5 P.M. The Red Sox half of the tradition, unfortunately, is one of losing the big games. The history half is one of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, as on the night of October 17th, 2003. Looking the other way, into the future (into the outfield, where the shadows have not yet reached, if you will), is the simple fact that the landscape of the American League East has changed since 2003; even two weeks into the season, that seems apparent. The lowly Tampa Bay Devil Rays (thepreviously lowly DRays) are at .500, and the previously lowly Baltimore Orioles are in first place. Those things will very likely change, but I think its likely that the Blue Jays, also improved, wont finish thirty games below .500, as they would if they continued along at their current pace. What all this means to the SoxYanks rivalry is that one team is apt to be called when the postseason bell rings, but probably not both. And that makes the knees of every Red Sox fan tremble, no matter what they may tell you, no matter what sentiments they wear on their Tshirts, no matter what vile canards they may call down upon Yankee outfielders from the Monster seats high above. There is no calculus here; the math is simple. We all hate what we fear, and sensible Red Sox fans fear the Yankees. Now, on the eighteenth of April, the Red Sox lead the nineteengame regularseason series two games to one. A great many other games will be played with a great many other clubs before the dust settles and the 2004 season is in the record booksbut in my heart, I believe the American League East will come down to Them, or to Us. And because we fear what we hate, in my heart I always dread it when they come to us. The only thing I dread more is when we must go to them. I suppose it would be different if I could play, but of course I cant; Im helpless, doomed to only watch. To believe in the Curse of the Bambino even though I dont believe in it. And to think of the late Stephen Jay Gould, who somehow rooted for both teams (maybe in the end that was what killed him, not the cancer), and who once said, The deepest possible anguish[is] running a long hard course again and again to the very end, and then selfdestructing one inch from the finish line. PostscriptApril 19th This is Patriots Day, which is a holiday only in Maine, where it chiefly means no mail delivery, and Massachusetts, where it means the Boston Marathon and an 11 A.M. Red Sox game at Fenway. Today the Red Sox spotted the Yankees leads of 30 and 41, but Bronson Arroyo settled down and pitched a good game, in ESPN SportsCenter argot, and the Red Sox won it by a final score of 54.Im happy to report that ARodswoes continue; he went 1 for 17 in the fourgame series (heehee), the one hit was a meaningless single, and he made a throwing error in todays tilt that basically cost the Yankees the game. So now were 31 with the Yanks, and can get back to the more normal business of playing baseball. Whew. April 20th I read in the paper that in his first home game Dauber hit two homers, leading the PawSox to a 32 victory over Rochester. And to replace Frank Castillo, the Red Sox have activated lefty Lenny DiNardo, giving us four lefties in the pen for the first time I can remember. Must be setting up for this weekends series in the Bronx, that short porch in right. I hope these PawSox can get it done. Id start resting Embree now. The crowd in the Skydome tonight is around 6,000, despite the PedroHalladay rematch. The Maple Leafs are playing the Ottawa Senators in Game 7 of their playoff series, and at one point Eric Frede, NESNs new maninthestands, says there are more people in the concourse watching hockey than there are in the seats. Oh, Canada. Pedro throws well and we win easily, but theres a little bad blood in the ninth when reliever Terry Adams goes up and in on Manny. Manny ducks away, tossing his helmet aside, and stands squared with the mound, arms out, calling, What do you want? Earlier, reliever Valerio de los Santos knocked Ortiz on his ass with a pitch aimed at his face, so its not an overreaction on Mannys part, as Jerry claims. When their noname pitchers throw at your big three and four guys, its on. The benches clear, and while there are no punches thrown, its a signal that were not going to take that shit. Expect newbie Lenny DiNardo to dust someone like Delgado tomorrow, or Timlin to plunk Wells or Phelps. SK Petey looked a lot better than Doc, didnt he? Are the Yankees playing tonight? I tried to get em on the satellite, and they were playing some weepy old Thurman Munson short instead of the ChiSox. Red Sox win, Martinez goes 21. Time for Tom Caron and Bob Tewksbury, aka The Talking Board. SO Rain delay. The Yanks scored 7 in the first, so maybe thatll get erased. Tewks! Youll notice he changed his hair from that 50s style to something from the midtolate 70s. And where the hell is Bob Rodgers? Do they have him in a cage under Car Talk Plaza? SK I think Ill Google the sumbitch. SO Google away, dude, but I think Carmen Sandiego is working him over in a dank room with a DieHard and some piano wire. Long live TC and the new maninthestands who looks like Ross Perots love child. SK According to the Globe (March 2nd, 2004), Rodgers left Fort Myers to coach a WhitmanHanson boys basketball game in the MIAA Tournament. He left a recorded SportsDesk segment but did not get permission to do this. Both NESN and Red Sox management werent happy, and although the public word is that Bobby the Serial Killer has left NESN to pursue other opportunities (Sean McGrail), the fact is they canned his ass. According to Globe writer Bill Griffith, Red Sox management has sent a message that there are new sheriffs in town. In a totally unrelated development, you should know that exRed Soxer Mo Vaughn is going to be the Grand Marshal of the fifteenth annual Hot Dog Safari on May 16th, at Suffolk Downs. Its being billed The Hit Dog and the Hot Dog. How the mighty have fallen. By the way, Stew, Google also reports that a Bob Rodgers is reffing college soccer in the Boston area, but that may not be the same one. SO So hes just out there somewhere, like Michael Myers. SK Dude! Thats it! Or Jason, only with a wimpmask, sorta. April 21st A package arrives from the Souvenir Store (which is in fact Twins Enterprises now; the Sox have made it their official store) with the glossy 2004 yearbook, a blue windbreaker made in Korea and a Tshirt made in Uzbekistan. Now Im outfitted for the summer. The yearbook must have been put to bed in late March, because there, sharing the same page, are Shump and Tony Wo. UPS brings another present, a rough cut of a future episode of Kingdom Hospital called Butterfingers. The story line is familiar to Sox fans Earl Candleton, the first baseman for the longsuffering New England Robins, drops a popup that would have won them the 87 World Series. From then on hes hounded by fans who call him Butterfingers and pelt him with balls. He descends into alcoholism, living in a fleabag of a mission in Lewiston. When the Robins go to Game 7 of the Series, with the game on the line in the bottom of the ninth, Earl holds a revolver to his temple. If the Robins win, he lives; if they fold, he dies. Of course, they fold and he pulls the trigger and drops into a cobwebby purgatory as the doctors and kinder spirits of Kingdom Hospital try to save him. (The FX havent been matted in yet, so there are scenes where a grip follows the waif ghost Mary around with the head of the benevolent beast Antubis on a stick.) In the end, the spirits, with the help of Peter, the artist in a carcrashinduced coma, allow Earl to go back to that moment in 87 and make the catch, changing himself and the world. The two Down syndrome dishwashers who serve as oracles have the last word Baseballs not always a sad game. Sometimes the good guys win. Tonight the matchup is Wake versus Ted Lilly, who beat us on Opening Day. Wakes sharp and Doug Mirabelli, happy to be starting, wallops two homers to give us a 30 lead, but the Jays chip away. SK 32 in the sixth. This is turning into a nailbiter. Damn, I hate seeing all those .250 hitters in the lineup. Thank God for Douglas Miracle Mirabelli. Speaking of hockey, did you see his shot off the glass? SO Doug also came through bigtime Friday night against the Yanks. Amazing that he can be this hot when he sits four days between starts. And Teks hot too. But Pokey, oh my, hes just struggling. Its still 32 in the eighth when Tosca brings in Valerio de los Santos once more to face David Ortiz. Last night de los Santos put David on his ass; tonight he hangs a breaking ball that David stings down the rightfield line. It bounces fair and caroms off the stands right to the right fielder Reed Johnson, and David has to sprint for second. Hes a big man, and looks silly running way up on his toes, arms pumping. He slides headfirst, bouncing off the dirt, and hes in there. We shouldnt laugh but cant help it. Part of it is how sweet his revenge is. De los Santos is scowling as Tosca comes to take the ball from him. David hustles over to third on a long sac fly by Manny (only a great leaping catch against the wall by Johnson saves extra bases), then, on a wild pitch, scoots for home, sliding feetfirst this time, safe, adding an earned run to de los Santoss stats (the camera finds him brooding in the dugout). We win 42. After the postgame show, Steve and I are still debating hope and fatalism. SO I think its neat how our attitudes are so different. After 86, last year didnt feel that drastic to me. |
I mean, sure, it hurt, but Id been through worse, and we werent even supposed to get that far (we were at least three players away), so I thought everything after Trots shot was gravy and just dug the ride. This year I have higher hopes because of Schilling and Foulke. And heres some history the Angels, prior to 2001, were alltime chokers. Remember? No, you cant, at least not emotionally, because their win has forever changed the way we see the club and its past. Its a line you cross, and when the Sox cross it, our hindsight will be softened, and all these close calls will lose their power to wound us. Like the Pats, well no longer be hapless. Ask the old hardluck UConn Huskies of Jim Calhoun, the 1980 Phillies, the last two Elway Bronco squads, etc., etc. So goodbye, Tony Eason, goodbye, Donnie Moore. SK Donnie Moore. Now theres a horror story. Ive been thinking about this, and Ive decided that the age difference makes a difference here. What is it, fourteen years between us? Which means I remember Williams and you dont. I remember Maz leaping joyously around the bases when he hit that home run and youve only seen the kinescopes. Im not trying to pull rank or make you feel like a kid, Im just trying to get a focus on how we can approach this so differently. Maybe Ive got it. Ive been suffering fourteen more years. Why, thats almost a generation! SO I see it as partly geographicalthat winning Pittsburgh experiencebut part of its also that I waited for both the Oakland Raiders and New York Rangers to finally win their championships after years and years of their great (and heavily favored) teams choking, and for two truly hapless clubs, the Pats and Penguins, to win theirs (only to have lightning strike not once but twice). All four of these teams put a shitload of history behind them with one big cleansing win, and thats what the Sox will do too. SK But dont you see? Your very argument proves what a striking anomaly the Red Sox are. All the clubs youve mentionedin all the various sportsin this and in previous emails have won it all at least once in the last eighty or so years. Do I need to finish this thought? I mean, hello? One of these things is not like the others One of these things just doesnt belong One of these things is not like the others Tell me while I sing this song. SO By the same token, all of these teams were in our strikingly anomalous position (which we share with the Cubs, White Sox, Brewers, Mariners, Astros, Rangers, DRays, Padres, Expos, Rockies, not to mention dozens of NFL clubs (the St. LouisArizona Cards have never won one, or the Saints, or the Bills, the Minny Vikes, etc., etc.), dozens of NBA and NHL franchises, whole boatloads of NCAA Division I schools, etc.) up until t 0, when all their troubled histories were redeemed by the one resource the world can count on time. Its inevitable. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but that just means our faith has to be strong. Which is one reason why I dug Butterfingers so muchhow you framed Earl Candletons life (and error) in terms of salvation or damnation. Take Me Out to the BallgameShall We Gather at the River. HailMarymotherofgraceI thought I was in Hell. You really made us feel for the guy, so when the dishwashing kids came out after youd used the old rewind to redeem 11 and said, Sometimes the good guys win, damned if I didnt get a little teary for Billy Buck and for all of us. And Billy Buck, you know we dont blame you. It was that lousy Schiraldi. SK I think Schiraldi might have been in some form of analysis or therapy following that seasonIm almost sure of this. And he was my daughters first crusha young man, and fair. SO He shoulda gone into analysis before the Angels series. And McNamara should have had his head examined for using him in both. I guess some young girls just dig troubled guys. SK Brewers, Mariners, Astros, Rangers, DRays, Padres, Expos, Rockies. Johnnycomelatelies. But Pokey, oh my, hes just struggling. Yeah, but hes a PR Mastuh! SO Ill cop to the Rocks and Rays being latecomers, but the Pods and Spos are looking at 30 years of futility, the Stros at 40, and the Rangers (as the Senators) have to go back to 1924 for their sole crown (compared to our five during that era). Yknow, I just flatout LIKE Pokey, despite him hitting .182 (67 points higher than Ellis Burks). Hes got a major league glove, and we havent seen much of that over the years. SK So do Iyou just cant NOT like him, can you? And hes been steadyEddie with the glove. April 22nd The Yanks won, but the Os lost, so guess whos all alone in first? So far Doug Mirabelli has 3 homers in 9 atbats. He sees his success as a product of his extra preparation. Playing once every five days, I can put all my focus into that pitcher and watch video or whatever for four days and try to get a little edge for myself to feel confident going in there. Which at least partially explains why over his career hes a .270 hitter as a Sock and .213 as a Giant and Ranger. The matchup tonight is in our favor againSchillingBatistaand the game goes as planned early on. Ortiz hits a tworun shot in the first and we hang on through six, when Toronto goes to their pen. Franconas said that hell close with Williamson instead of Foulke, whos thrown three straight days now, and maybe hes worried about conserving the pen for this weekend in New York, because he leaves Schilling in too long in the seventh, and the Jays tie the game with four straight hits. Take him out! were screaming at the set. In the eighth, Schilling comes back out. We just look at each other. Would Francona have done this at Fenway? Mystery Malaskas the only one warming as the Jays load the bases. Schillings pitch counts above 120, and hes consistently leaving the ball up. Number nine hitter Chris Gomez makes the decision for Francona, hooking a grand slam over the leftfield fence, and Toronto wins their first home game, 73. Put this one on the list of games we should have won. When Schill struggles in the seventh, go to a stopper like Embree, then use any of your setup guys in the eighth and close with Williamson. Whats the point of carrying extra arms if you dont use them? At least the Yankees lost. The ChiSox got to Moose early and hung on, 43. Its slight consolation. Im so disgusted I dont even watch the postgame, just turn the channel, as if I can make the loss go away. SO Captain, Im detecting high levels of Gradium. SK Boy, you got that right. April 23rd The Os beat the DRays, so theyre in first again. The Courants all excited about the SoxYanks rivalry. Because Hartfords halfway between the two cities, the paper has a beat writer for both teams. The Yankee guys a total homer, while the Red Sox guy, as befits the tradition, is a skeptic. Both dwell on Aaron Boone and Game 7, as if thats the only thing that happened last year. Were headed down to New York to spend the weekend with Trudys parents before they leave from the West Side piers for the transatlantic cruise theyve always talked about. Trudys sister and her boys will be there. Well go to a few museums, take in a show, wander around Chinatown, but one thing we wont be doing is going to the games. Tonight its Red SoxYankees, Round 2, Game 1. So far the advantage goes to the Red Soxtheyre up 60 in the fifth inning, courtesy of home runs by Millar, Bellhorn, and a threerun job by Bill Mueller. Do I need to bother with all this ingame detail? Probably not; ONan will have it. In fact Im starting to suspect that ONan is going to finish the season with roughly seven hundred pages of manuscript. That man takes his baseball seriously. The question Ive been asking myself is whether or not I need to bother with a diary at all. I can hear my mother asking me, Do you have to jump in the lake just because Stewart ONan does? No, Ma. And certainly I dont expect to be scrivening away at this on every game day, but it seems to me that I do have to add something from time to time. Call it a kind of balance. Stewarts the brains of the operation, no doubt. He knows where all the fielders are playing at any given time, and wholl be covering second, Bellhorn or Reese (Garciaparra soon, if God is good), in any given situation. Im more of a fromthegut guy. Also a superstitious guy. I dont necessarily know where the fielders are, but I do know enough to hit the MUTE button on the remote control when the opposing teams up, because everyone knows its unlucky to listen to the announcers when the opposing teams at bat. They always score when fans do that. You should know that Ill be doing the MUTE thing for the Sox all season long, so relax. Ill also be turning my cap around when were a run or two down in the late innings, and charting pitches when the opposing guy is really goodits a helluva jinx. I got Moose Mussina that way, and expect to get Victor Zambrano (Devil Rays ace, currently 31) in the same fashion when he pitches against us. And okay, quite often when the Red Sox are only up by a run or so in the late innings, I simply turn the idiot box off for a few minutes. Every superstitious fan knows that not watching for a while can also be good mojo, but basically I do it because Im too scared to watch. Especially if there are men from the opposing team on base. I made it through Nightof the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but baseballespecially stretchrun baseballshreds my nerves. Now, though, its 60 Red Sox in the fifth, and Derek Lowe doesnt look too bad (dont worry, I knocked on wood when I said it). Oh yeahand when Alex Rodriguez grounded out weakly, pitcher to first, in the fourth, the disgruntled fans in Yankee Stadium actually booed their preseason darling. Music to my ears. Im also an emotional guy, at least when it comes to The Game. Theres really nothing like baseball, especially when you dont have to freeze your ass off on a cold, rainy night in the Bronx. And a postscript. Today the New York Post had fun comparing Johnny Damon, with his new beard and extralong hair, to a CroMagnon caveman. Johnny just scored Bostons seventh run of the night. We take the Cross Bronx, driving by the Yankee Stadium exit right around game time. I dont turn on the radio. Ill let this one be a surpriselike opening a present or a door (the lady or the tiger?). Theres so much chatter in New York, I figure Ill pick up bits of the game on the street, like a pulse underriding the city. Our first hint is in the hotel barwhere I notice Steph is bravely wearing his Wake shirt. As we pass the bar, a TV tells us its 60, but Im not sure in whose favor. I see Billy Mueller make a nice offbalance throw to close an inning, and Lowe making a fist, so Im hopeful. Were sitting so far in the dark back of the lounge that we cant see the TV, but when we come back out, its 60 Sox and Donovan Osbornes in for the Yanks. We make some noise, attracting the attention of a drunk Mets fan. Red Sox, huh? All I gotta say is Bill Buckner, okay? Bill, Buckner. I hope you guys have a better year this year, I say. Downstairs, the doormans shaking his head at how bad the Yanks have been so far. Theyll be all right, he says. George will pay. A billboard for an investment firm in Times Square says BRAVE AS A RED SOX FAN IN THE BRONX. But all around me Im seeing people in Sox caps and shirts laughing and giving each other the thumbsupsomething Ive never experienced before in New York. Were finishing dinner when Trudys sister and her boys arrive with a new score 102. The two were on a homer by Matsui, their only clutch guy. We stop at a liquor store on the way back to the hotel for some champagne, and I cant resist asking the guy behind the counter in a Yanks hat whos winning the game. As I write this, its 112 in the eighth, and the only reason it isnt 110 is because Derek got a little tired there. I think were gonna go up on em 41, which would be very swede. Knock on wood. Uhoh, whos Lenny DiNardo? Still worrying even with one out. Red Sox win, 112and Eckersleys on Extra Innings! Whee! Down in the city I dont get Eck, but at one in the morning I do get WCBS replaying the entire game, so here I am, halfbuzzed and headachy from champagne, watching a game thats already long over in a darkened hotel room while everyone else sleeps, just for the sheer pleasure of seeing how we did it. Bill Mueller with a threerun shot, and, basically, they didnt throw a quality pitcher at us all night. Looks like Torre wrote this one off, knowing hes got the matchup tomorrow and hoping Vazquez can get Sundays game to the pen. April 24th In the hotel, as Im getting on the elevator to go down to Times Square, a woman in a Sox hat and shirt gets outobviously going to todays game. And in the Guggenheim, as I wind my way down, I pass two boys in Sox hats, and their dad wearing a cherry red COWBOY UP Tshirt. In the taxi on the way to Chinatown, the radios on low, but I can still hear that the Sox are up 21. Go ahead, Bronson (named, yes, after Charles Bronson). Hours later, back at the hotel, two deckedout Jets fans get on the elevator. Id completely forgotten that todays the NFL draft. Ive been seeing lots of Pats hats, but I just expect that now. Its almost five when we get back to the room. The game should be over, so I pop on the TV for the score. Its in extra innings, 22, and Foulkes on. There are two down in the eleventh and Sheffields on first. Im supposed to get dressed for dinner and the theater tonight, then jump a cab out to the airport to pick up Caitlin, and times tight, but I sit on the edge of the bed with the boys and watch Tek gun down Sheff trying to get in scoring position for Bernie, with a nice slap tag by Crespo at second. In the top of the twelfth, Manny doubles to the base of the wall in rightcenter. Tek fights off three or four outside pitches from Quantrill before he gets one he can pull to the right side, moving Manny over with a ground out. Quantrill just nicks Millars shirtfront with a pitch, and the double plays in order, but Bellhorn drives one medium deep to center, and Bernie, with his weak arm, has been playing in and has to go back to get it. Manny scores easily, 32 Sox. Timlin comes on to close, but weve got to go. We call up from the lobby because weve forgotten Caitlins flight information, and there are two outs, nobody on and a 12 count on Jeter, and then, in the cab, we hear that the Yanks have just lost to the Sox. This is the kind of demoralizing game weve already lost two of to Baltimore, and its sweet to win one, especially in someone elses house. Its even sweeter because were in New York, as if the citys ours now. The local news at eleven has found a way to soften the blow. They open the sports with a long segment on the Giants trading for 1 pick Eli Manning, then show ARod making a nice backhand and getting Millar, then ARod homering, before showing Bellhorns sac fly and the final score. The homer was the only hit Bronson Arroyo gave up in six innings, but youd never know that. Holy moly, the BoSox did it again. It took them twelve innings today, but they beat the Yankees 32. Keith Foulke got the win in relief (vultured the win is the term baseball players use for this type of win, I believe; Timlin pitched the bottom of the twelfth and got the save). If it were possible to feel sorry for the Yankees, who are now four full games out of first placealthough whether behind us or Baltimore I dont at this moment knowI would feel almost sorry for them. Life being what it is, I dont feel a bit sorry. Derek Jeterknown in my household as Great Satan Jeteris now 0 for his last thousand or so. The fans dont boo him, though. Jeter seems truly beyond the boobirds. But the Yankees, manI mean, how long can you go on saying, Dont worry, its only April? Another six days, actually. Meanwhile, were throwing Pedro at them tomorrow, and going for the sweep. Were only five wins away from taking the seriesthats the series for the year. Man, I cant believe this. Somethings gotta go wrong. Unless dead or insane, I will be writing about tomorrows game. April 25th Its the last game of Round 2, with the BoSox going for the sweep over the Yankees. In the top of the first inning, the young Yankee pitcher, Javier Vazquez, looked terrificdetermined to be the stopper. Ortiz touched him for a single, but that was it. Now Pedro Martinez is on the mound for us, and the real question is which Pedro is going to show up the moundwise sharpie who pitched in Toronto last time, or the mediocre ragarm who started the season against Baltimore at Camden Yards (and then left the park early, sparking a minor media flurry). Hes 32 to Jeter to start with; Jeter, 0 for his last 21, strikes out to make that 0 for his last 22. Its the worst streak of Jeters career, and given that sort of funk, tells us very little about the state of Pedro. But even as I write the words, there goes Bernie Williams, 3 to 1. That looks a little better, and has silenced the massive chant (another sellout today at the Stadium) of Pedro sucks. And Kevin Millar just made an incredible sliding catch on ARod to finish the first no runs and no runners for the Yankees. The Yanks are, I should add, something of an anomaly the only team against which I actively root (it was true for a while of Cleveland in the early nineties, but no more). And it seems to me that the Yankees almost have to have this third game, not to keep from falling five games off the pace early (although five really is quite a few, at any point in the season), but because its the hated Red Sox and they are at home. In the third inning, the story still seems to be young Vazquez, who gets six of the first nine outs by way of the K. Then, in the top of the fourth, Mark Bellhorn, batting today in the twohole, walks (because thats what Mark Bellhorn does). After Ortiz strikes out lookingnumber seven for VazquezManny Ramirez comes up. After getting ahead of Manny 02, Vazquez attempts to waste a curveball. He wastes it out over the plate, andsee ya. Over the Yankee bullpen and into the Bleacher Zone. Were up 20 in the middle innings. Bottom of the fifth, Yankees threatening with runners on second and third, two out and Jeter (0 for 23) at the plate. Takes called strike one, outside corner; chases a fastball way up and out of the zone for strike two. Pedro sets, fires, teases Jeter outside, 12. Pedros ready to go again but Jeter steps out, commanding right hand up to the ump in the old familiar gesture. Now hes back in, and Pedro immediately strikes him outlooking with high, hard cheese. Jeter is 0 for 24, and the Yankees once more fail with two in scoring position (before Jeter, Enrique Wilson, who usually beats Pedro like a drum, popped out to Pokey). Sweet! In the sixth, ARod doubles with one out and goes to third on a Giambi groundout (Cesar Crespo in short right fieldan almost comical overshiftmakes the play on Giambi). Rodriguez, at least, has begun to come around (his average has crept up to something like .252), but it does the Yankees no good; Gary Sheffield fouls out to Varitek, and its still 20 Sox, going into the lates. Pedros done after seven his game to win, the bullpens to lose. The bullpen hasnt given up a run in twentysome innings, but now Williamsons on, and hes a scary guy. Heres Jeter again. He tries to bunt; no joy. Fouls one away, and its 02, a place Derek has gotten all too familiar with just lately. Lets see how Williamson plays this. He throws a low fastball, a true waste pitch, but Jeter goes fishing and strikes out. This time the crowd does boo, and even the resolutely upbeat Yankee announcers finally take notice. Like booing Santa Claus, one of them remarks reprovingly. Its the bottom of the ninth and last call for the Yankees. Heres Alex Rodriguez, and its still Williamson to face himno Keith Foulke, a little surprising. Williamson runs the count full on ARod, who has 7 of the last 22 Yankee hits; so much for that slump. Rodriguez, after fouling off one 32 pitch, grounds out, third to first. Now Jason Giambi grounds to Pokey Reese. Two out. Heres Gary Sheffield, who has one of the Yankees four hits today. This time he strikes out, and suddenlyincrediblythe Red Sox have taken six of seven from the AL champs. The camera sneaks a look into their dugout, and the look on Jeters face is one of pure amazement. And its justified; this is the first time the Red Sox have beaten the Yankees six out of the first seven since 1913. Sweet! SK I saw all the games and got six pages on the sweep in my newly inaugurated Sox diarygloatgloat. What it boils down to for the Yankees is that if they dont start playing pretty soon, its gonna get late early and be litesout in August. Remember when I said I liked them for third place? SO Gloating is such an ugly word for this creamy and delicious feeling. I think the Yanks swoon will just make George bust out the wallet earlier for a starter or two. Liebers still a ways away from filling the five slot, and Contreras looks terrible. Using Vazquez on three days resteven though he threw wellis a desperate move on ol Joes part. And after the day off tomorrow, theyve got to face the As three big aces. Whos going to throw that Thursday gameVazquez on three days again? Theyre screwed. We trusted Bronson with the ball twice against them and he came through. And BKs not far from being ready. Your thirdplace pick looks entirely possible. As expected, were getting quality starts and our pens much better, and those Os are pounding the ball. The Yanks right now are suffering from the revenge of Pettitte, Clemboy and Boomer. April 26th Tonights the premiere of the Red Sox movie Still, We Believe. Alyssa, my former student, has lined up a press pass for me, and while Ive put together a short list of questions and fitted fresh batteries in the minicassette recorder, Ive still got mixed feelings about crossing the line between fan and journalist. We get to the Loews on the Common right on time, check in at the press table and claim a spot behind the velvet rope next to the red carpet. Ive never had a press pass before, and I have no idea what secret powers it gives me. Outside, WEEI is doing a live feed from the street. Its raining and cold out, and the crowds thin. As more people filter in, were boxed and jostled by TV cameras. NESNs well represented, ESPN2, NECN, all the Boston channels. Nothings happening, but theres some serious jockeying for position. Johnny Damon and Kevin Millar are definites, but those are the only two names mentioned. Im hoping for Eck, maybe Yaz, Tim Wakefield, Pokey Reese. Wally the Green Monster shows up in a tux, mugging for the cameras. Hey Wally, who are you wearing? The fans featured in the film arrive, and the cameramen blind them with their lights, the sports anchors do their standups. Im not really interested in the fanstars. I know Ill get their stories from the movie anyway. Tom Caron stops at the press table, and Dan Shaughnessy. Big Sam Horn signs a ball for mesomething a real journalist would never ever ask him to doand theres Tom Werner and John Henry and Larry Lucchino, and Luis Tiant. Everyone but the players. Outside, rented searchlights twirl across the night sky. Its nearly showtime when Kevin Millar arrives in a vintage Western print shirt, jeans and shiny black cowboy boots. He smiles as he shakes hands and signs, doing standup after standup as he inches down the red carpet. I bypass the clot of reporters and set up at an open spot a little farther down. I catch him just as hes bouncing out. Hes trailed by a guy my age dressed head to toe in Sox paraphernalia, with his huge, naked beer gut bulging out and painted with the Red Sox logo and STILL WE BELIEVE. WEEI has judged him the most outrageous fan and given him a ticket to the show. He shakes Millars hand, pleased to meet him. Kevin, I sayand he talks to me just because Ive got this recorder; it has power, like a gunwhat were you like as a fan, when you were younger? Like this guy. Youre kind of the official fan of the Sox with the Cowboy Up, but who was your team? Dodgers. Grew up in Los Angeles. Dodgers were my team. Favorite player? Steve Garvey. You wear the jersey? Never had a jersey, but I was a big fan of the Dodgers. Id go to a lot of games. Listen a lot on the radio? Vin Scully. Ever get the autographs? Went and got the autographs, did it all. Are you still a fan now? Can you be a fan now that youre a player? No doubt about it. Are you still a Dodger fan? Still a Dodger fan, still a fan of baseball. You check their box score every morning? No, I dont check em, but I pull for em when I see em. So you hope to see em this fall? Thatd be nice. And thats it, I thank him and hes gone to the next mike, the next camera. Ive definitely crossed the line with my impersonation of a journalist, but, as a fan, its my duty to take advantage of whatever access I can get, for the sheer thrill of it. Johnny Damons not here yet, but theyre going to start the movie, so we crowd into the theater with Kevin Millar and the owners and everyone else. Down front, a radio team introduces all the Sox VIPs, who stand in turn to receive their applause. When they call Johnny Damons name, Big Sam stands up as a joke. Finally the filmmaker, Paul Doyle, thanks everyone who helped and says, The fans are the Red Sox, a sentiment which seems true even before he presents his evidence. When I was talking to a real journalist earlier, I mentioned that Ive only been a Sox fan for twentyfive years, so Im new. I was here before Clemens, and Ill be here long after Pedro. Ive got a nocut contract. Steves in the filmbriefly, a shot of him chatting with John Henry before the illfated season opener in Tampa Bay. That was the one Chad Fox blew, and while the movie doesnt have the time to tell the rest of the story, after we dumped Fox he went on, along with former Sox closer Ugie Urbina, to defeat the Yanks and become a World Champion. In trying to squeeze the whole season (and eight very different fans lives) into two hours, the film cant connect all the dots. What strikes me most are all the Sox from last years squad who are gone Shea Hillenbrand, Todd Walker, Brandon Lyon, Damian Jackson, John Burkett, Jeff Suppan, Scott Sauerbeck and of course manager Grady Little, who, since were in a room with the people who fired him, gets laughed at more than I find necessary. We witness Theo informing our number one prospect Freddy Sanchez that hes being traded to Pittsburgh (for Suppan and Sauerbeck, neither of whom panned out). The main tension and source of comedy in the movie is the tugofwar between hope and pessimism. Angry Bill, a diehard whos become a fixture on local callin shows, vows that hell never believe in the Sox again, and sees disaster everywhereuntil we take the As. Fireman Steve Craven is more laidback. Well get em tomorrow, he says, and caps the film, after the disaster of Game 7, with his observation that all the losing will make finally winning it all that much sweeter, dont you think? Its a fun film, but theres so much missing. Wheres Bill James and his ridiculous bullpenbycommittee idea? Wheres BK giving us the finger? Wheres Rogers last win in Fenway? Wheres Todd Walkers 2out, 2strike shot against Baltimore? Even the intricacies of the playoff games are glossed over, so while it gets some of the emotion of being a Sox fan, it still just skims the surface, and being a Sox fan is about total immersion. The afterparty at Felt is crowded and loud, but theres free Sam Adams, good hors doeuvres, and, for the brave, Fenway Franks served out of actual vendors steamers. Beside us, Luis Tiant is chowing down. I want to talk to Larry Lucchino, maybe interview him about growing up a Pirates fan in Pittsburgh, but hes lost in the crowd, and then when I see him, hes on his way out. Weve got to get going too. Tomorrows a school day, its raining like hell and weve got a long drive. On the way home, Trudy says she was disappointed that only Kevin Millar showed. I am too, but big props to Mr. Millar, who did it all cheerfully. In his business a night offs a cherished rarity. I know I get on him for his lack of speed in the outfield, but, as with that difficult assignment, tonight he stepped up when no one else did. April 27th Ellis Burkss knee is hurting him, and his .133 batting average is hurting us, so hes on the DL and the Daubers coming up from Pawtucket. In ten games there, he hit .350 with 5 homers and 11 RBIs, including a walkoff shot. In baseball, youve got to keep plugginguntil forever, I guess. Is there any wonder why we love this guy? A strange front must be moving over New England, because its been sunny all day here, but up in Boston its pouring. To cheer us up during the rain delay, NESN shows clips of Nomar and BK working out at Fenway earlier today. Nomars in shorts, taking grounders at halfspeed and then talking with Mia Hamm over the low wall along third. BKs also in shorts, playing catch in the outfield grass; you think of him as this whip of a kid, but his thighs are massive and cut like early Arnold. Don and Jerry make it sound like hell be our number five guy and Arroyo will go to the pen. A good hour and a half after game time, the Sox call it. April 28th The teams so excited about BKs rehab that hes going to skip his last minor league start and pitch the first game of tomorrows daynight doubleheader. Schilling will still go tonight, and Lowe tomorrow night, meaning Wake is sacrificing his start, something hes done throughout his long tenure with us, unselfish of him, and extremely valuable, giving his manager more flexibility. Though hes running and taking infield, the team says Nomars still at least two weeks away. April 29th After a rainout on the 27th, Schilling (and the bullpen) tossed another gem last night, beating Tampa Bay, 60. Tampa Bay only got a single runner as far as third base, and while I like the DRays (I sometimes think of the Red Sox as my baseball wife and NotSoSweet Lou Piniellas Devil Rays as my baseball mistress), I have to admit they are reverting to type after a hopeful start. But of course the Red Soxs 136 start is also part of a pattern I have observed over the years; call it BoSox Happy Hoop Days. The way it works is simple enough the Red Sox have a tendency to tear up the American League until the NBA playoffs wrap up; after that, more often than not they sputter. And leave us face it, a twogame lead over Baltimore and a fourgame lead over the Yankees, while better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, really aint all that much. Of course it beats being behind, but I think Ill wait until after July Fourth to decide whether or not Schilling and Company are for real. Footnote A on todays entry Our Mr. Kim, he of the restless middle finger, is back from soreshoulder woes (and a stint in Pawtucket) today. Hes supposed to be limited to seventyfive pitches, after which Tim Wakefield will come in to relieve. Damn! Its a daynight doubleheader, and I was kind of hoping Timmy would pull a Wilbur Wood and start both games (nor am I joking). Footnote B on todays entry Although Derek Jeters hitless streak has now reached 0 for 32, tying a Yankee record (the immortal Jimmy Wynn, in 1977), the Bombers beat the Oakland As for the second straight night. Theyve only picked up half a game on Boston (because of that rainout), but the wins suggest that Bostons weekend sweep in the Bronx mayhave had more to do with Red Sox pitching, defense, and the bat of Manny Ramirez than it did with any Yankee funk. It may be too early to declare the Red Sox the class of the AL East, but it may not be too early to at least suspect that this year they out class the New York Yankees. I check the standings to see how many games up we are on the Os (2) and discover weve got the best record in baseball. I think thats got to be wrong, since we opened 34, but no, only the Twins and the pitchingrich Marlins are anywhere near us. |
Game 1 is BK versus Victor Zambrano, whos had some success against us. Daubers starting at first base, and on the first play of the game lets a grounder slip under his glove for an E. Welcome back, Dauber. Its a brilliant spring day, sunny, in the midseventies. Because this is a rainout of a night game, the Sox have to let ticketholders sit in Sections 34 and 35 in dead center, which normally for day games are sealed off with a black tarp for the hitters backdrop. The Sox have solved the problem by giving everyone sitting in the sections a Tshirt the same forest green as the seats. Both pitchers are throwing well, but the defenses behind them are scuffling, as if the idea of playing an extra game today doesnt agree with either team. Bill Mueller and Doug Mirabelli lose a foul pop in the sun; it drops not between them but ten feet to the side. Later, Billy and Cesar Crespo go back for a short fly in left; Manny comes racing in, calling them off, almost collides with Crespo and drops the ball. A play you rarely see in the second Jose Cruz Jr.s leading off first when Tino Martinez hits a screamer right at him. Cruz doesnt have time to go right or left, he just ducks. The liner skims off his back, barely nicking him, but Dauber points to let the ump know. The firstbase ump says it never touched him, bringing Francona out to argueat which time, without consulting anyone, the secondbase ump calls Cruz out. Go Blue! Kim looks sharp, getting groundouts with the ball down, then climbing the ladder with a good rising fastball. I saw his first start for the Sox last year in Pittsburgh, an efficient win, and he looks much the same. Hes up to 70 pitches after five, and finishes the inning with a strikeout. As he walks off, the fans standremarkable, since this is the first time hes pitched since giving us the finger. Five innings, one hit, no runs. Come home, ByungHyun, all is forgiven. Zambranos cruising too, striking out the side in the fourth, but in the fifth, with a man on, he gets behind David Ortiz 30. Zambrano obviously hasnt read the scouting report, because Davids always got the green light. He plants a meatball in the sea of green shirts in Section 35. Its all we need, as Wake comes on to baffle the DRays for two more innings, then Timlin, then Embree. The finals 40, our third straight shutout. The pen hasnt been scored on in over 30 innings. We get on the road to Game 2 just as Game 1s ending. Weve got a table up in the new rightfield roof terrace, and Steves dugout seats. Trudy has papers to grade, so Caitlin and her friend Lindsay will take the good seats first and well switch after the fourth. Its turned into a warm evening, and Yawkey Way is a carnival. A guy on stilts in a Sox uniform tosses a puffy ball to random people in the crowd. People are having their pictures taken with Wally in the big red chair on the sidewalk. The guys at Cambridge Soundworks are handing out their Sox bumper stickersI BELIEVE and TURN IT UPand we take a minute to gawk at the highdefinition TVs in their little alcove. Then its the long walk out to the big concourse in right field. The stairs we take up to the roof are new, concrete and steep. The elevator shaft is in place, but theres no elevator in it yet. The views of Back Bay and the park at every turning are spectacular. Im puffing by the time we make it to the top, and the low sun in the west is blinding. We get to our homeplateshaped table in the second row and test the swiveling seats, the same as on the Monster. But theres not as much room as on the Monsterthe wire fence digs into my knees when I try to turn toward homeand were much farther from the action. On the way up, we passed the very last row of the bleachers in Section 43, joking that the corner seat there was probably the worst seat in Fenway. Were a good two stories higher, above the retired numbers attached to the roofs facing, nearly eye level with the top of the Pesky Pole. The view is the one youd have if they built a second deck, as they were threatening to with the New Fenway. Its as far away as Ive ever sat at a Red Sox game. Its also windy, a breeze coming over the back of the deck whipping napkins off the tables and out over the front railing, where an updraft floats them high into the air. Im glad its warm now, because its going to be cold later. Lowes going against lefty Damian Moss, a recent retread, so I think weve got the advantage. The first batter Lowe faces, speedburner Carl Crawford, bonks a double off the wall. Julio Lugo, known best for banging his exwifes head off the hood of a car (Hey, Lugo, restrain yourself!), bunts, and Lowe misplays it. A grounder by Woonsockets own Rocco Baldelli scores Crawford, ending our scoreless streak, and the crowds not happy. Were even less happy when Robert Fick doubles to right, scoring Lugo. Steph shakes his head; its just like the Yankee game we saw Lowe throw here. I overhear that Jeters homered in the first at the Stadium, breaking his hitless streak. All good things must come to an end. We come up to bat down 20. I realize the girls have forgotten to take my glovefor protection, seriouslyand hustle down there. Im underneath the grandstand when I hear the crowd cheer for Johnny. I guess that hes on base. Another cheer, this time for Bill Mueller. So probably a single. A bigger cheer (its a long way), and I catch a monitor by a concession stand in time to see Johnny scoot home with our first run. I reach the seats as Mannys batting. The girls think Im nuts, bringing down the glove, but I insist. Lindsay, I say, youre getting a ball tonight. Moss is all over the place. He throws one to the backstop, moving Bill Mueller and Ortiz over. Watch the ball, I tell the girls, because its scuffed. The ump tosses it to Andrew, who looks back and sees me and the girls. Lindsay stands and Andrew throws it right to heronly to have this linebackersized guy in a muscle shirt in the front row reach back and snatch it away from her. The section boos, and the poacher realizes what hes done and dumps it in Caitlins lap. So Lindsay gets her ball. And Manny singles, scoring Bill Mueller to tie the game. Tek rocks a threerun shot. McCarty singles, Kapler doubles. Thats it for Moss7 earned runs in onethird of an inning. For a guy trying to make a comeback, thats got to hurt. In the top of the third, Rocco Baldelli stings a tailing liner to right that Gabe Kapler makes a great diving catch on. When Kapler comes up with two down in the bottom of the inning, he must still be pumped, because he bunts for a base hit, digging hard and diving headfirst to beat the throw. I dont know, I say, and explain to Steph that with a big lead its generally a sign of disrespect for the other club to bunt for a hit. Then Kapler steals second. Well see if they throw at one of our guys, I say. Lowes done after seven. Not a great start, but hell get a W, thanks to good run support. Foulke closes, striking out Crawford and Lugo to finish it. Its a 73 final, a relatively uneventful game, and a sweep of the DRays. The Yanks have swept Oakland, who should be seriously worried. But no ones worried about the Yanks here, not tonight. Weve won six in a row, and the crowd leaves the park happy. Even the talk radio guys on WEEI cant gripeand whom should we hear but Angry Bill, who says, Smooth sailingthats what the captain of the Titanic said. SK Last time I looked in on the nightcap, the Sox were up 73, and Lowe was throwing in that queerly careless way he sometimes has, as though only a quarter of his mind is on the game. If were going to lose one we should win, this would be my candidate. Second half of a doubleheader? DRays feeling embarrassed (by Gabe Kapler, for one)? Sure. SO So you caught Kaplers bunt and steal too. At first I thought it was unsporting, but hell, it was only the third. He didnt get plunked, but late in the game the ump rang him up on three pitches, only one of which was decidedly a strike. I guess the game polices itself. April 30th Thinking of Kapler last night, I wonderwith Trot due back soonif he was trying to remind management of his special abilities. With Ellis Burks on the DL, he may be safe for a while, but there are no guarantees. So far Franconas shown hes willing to start Millar, Crespo and McCarty in the outfield, and I imagine well see Dauber out there eventually. In the mail is a stack of scoresheets from the Remy Report. Now, instead of having to buy the same 4 program all month, I can just flip a single sheet over and fold it into my pocket when Im done. Also in the mail, a talisman a ball signed by Sox playoff and World Series hero (how often do you hear those words together?) Dave Henderson. I add Hendu to the ball case like the crucial ingredient in a witchs brew. Were still in a rain delay with Charlie Moore, NESNs Mad Fisherman, when the Yankee final crawls bythey beat KC for their fourth straight. And ten minutes before midnight, when the Rangers finally call it (after the crowds waited through a threehour delay), the Yanks pick up a half game on us. The games rescheduled for tomorrow at five Central time, meaning well be playing our second doubleheader in three days. Good thing our starting pitchings deep. May 1st SK Good pitching lots of wins. Also short losing streaks, and hopefully postseason. Nomah in thirteen days and counting. Speaking of days, Ill be out of touch for the next five or so as I drive back to Gods country. SO Really, Nomie in thirteen days? That would be sweet. I expected Trot back first. Last night after the game was called, Pedro mouthed off to reporters about his lack of a contract. Hes pissed at the Red Sox for spreading rumors about his shoulder to drive his price down around the league. He says that hes decided to go free agent after the season, and that, if the situations right, he could see signing with the Yankees. (All this I pick up from the Courant; later, when I see him making comments at his locker on TV, he says, I want the fans to know my heart is here in Boston. I want to finish in Boston. He shrugs. But I have to make a living. None of this is in the paper.) He also makes reference to Larry Lucchinos tenure with the Orioles, when they went from being a contender to a secondrate club. Who was behind the Orioles? he asks. Im not going to mention any names. Its bad timing, with the Sox riding so high. Usually Ill stick up for Petey, but in this case all a fan has to do is look at Dauber or McCarty or Crespo. There are a lot of guys on this team who are just glad to be here, and rightfully so. Jon Liebers glad to be back pitching for the Yanks. Hes the one wearing Roger Clemenss 22. Maybe its an act of faith on the Yankees part. Its unnecessary today; Lieber gets tons of run support and the Bombers whomp Tony Penas struggling Royals 124. I only catch the first inning of Game 1 against Texas before we go out to see Kill Bill, Vol. 2. By the time we get back, Game 1s over, and weve lost 43. Arroyo threw well, but the pen finally gave up some runs (it was just a matter of time; you cant throw scoreless ball forever). Williamson gave up the big hits, but its Mystery Malaska, who faced only one batter, who gets the L. Manny, suddenly going cold, Kd four times. I figure well get the split, with Pedro taking on green Joaquin Benoit, but Peteys awful from the start, giving up an oppositefield job to Hank Blalock in the first, then melting down in a 5run third. Every pitch is up, nothings working, as if he jinxed himself with last nights hissy fit. Payyydro, the sparse crowd taunts. Hes gone after four, and DiNardos on for some garbage time. The finals 85, but it was never that close. May 2nd After the sweep yesterday, Im ready for a solid win. Tonights game is ESPNs Sunday Night Baseball feature, and starts an hour later than usual to make prime time. Once again, the pitching matchups in our favor, Wake vs. R. A. Dickey, a junkballing righty. His offspeed stuff looks hittable but isnt. Our whole lineup (except Bellhorn, who adds to his leagueleading walk total) chases it. Dickey even throws a low knuckler called The Thing, the seams never turning. Wake, throwing his high, floating knuckler, matches him till the fourth, when Johnny misplays a liner into a triple, giving them a cheap run. Its 10 most of the game, with few base runners. Wake tires in the seventh, giving up several foulball home runs. Francona wants him to finish the inning, and with two out and two strikes (including another foulball homer), David Dellucci straightens one out, and were down 20. In the eighth Embree comes on and promptly gives up two runs. In the ninth, the crowd chants, Sweep, sweep, waving brooms. Buck Showalter leaves Dickey in to get the completegame shutout, even though hes visibly tired. With one down, Manny hits a bloop single, Dauber crushes a liner right at the right fielder, Millar walks, and thats it for Dickey, no complete game. For the third time in two days, on comes Francisco Cordero. Bellhorn works the count deep, turns on a fastball and sticks it in the upper deckfoulthen walks to load the bases. The crowds edgy now, and theyre as pissed as Dickey when Cordero walks Tek to blow the shutout. 41, bases still loaded for Crespo, who, despite ample playing time, has yet to drive in a run. Our thin bench is showing, because Francona literally has no one to go to, and Crespo flies to center to end it. A weak game, and that includes the Yankeestyle rally in the ninth, groveling for walks. Ortiz and Bill Mueller arent hitting, and Mannys in a rare cold spell. Last year the bottom of the order could pick us up, but thats when Bill Mueller was batting eighth and Trot ninth. Now were trying to get run production out of Kapler, Crespo and Pokey, and its not happening. May 3rd In anticipation of Saturdays frontrow Monster seats, I drive around town in the rain trying to find a fishing net so we can haul in shots just short of the Wall. I go to Sears, figuring they might have a Ted Williams model in his fishing line. The floor associate there tells me they no longer carry fishing gearor baseball gear, for that matter. All they have is home fitness equipment. I find a net with a telescoping arm at the Sports Authority. Its big, and I doubt the gate attendants will let me in with it, but what the hell. Worst case, I take it back to the car. At home, the dogs are afraid of it. Trudy shakes her head. How much? Its cold in Cleveland, and Lou Merlonis in the wrong dugout. Schillings just getting warm in the first when he grooves one to cleanup man Victor Martinez, who cranks it into the rightfield seats for a 20 lead. Schilling settles down after that, but were just not hitting. The Indians pitcher is Jake Westbrook, a kid who didnt make their rotation until last week. Ortiz ends two innings with men on; Bellhorn hits into a basesloaded double play to kill a rally. Im tired of being behind and wanting something good to happen. We dont score till the seventh, and then its on two walks given up by the aptly named David Riske and a blast to center by David Ortiz off retread reliever Rick White. The balls deep, but it looks like center fielder Alex Escobars going to make a great leaping catch against the wall. Hes worried about the wall and jumps too early, and the ball bounces off him. The runners have to wait, and only Johnny scores. Even though weve had trouble scoring runs, Sveums right not to send Bill Mueller. Ortiz ended up at second, and with first base open, its a nobrainer to walk Manny and go after Dauber and Tek. Whites a righty, but hes got a big twelvetosix curve. Thats all he throws to Dauber, and gets him easily. He quickly goes 02 on Tek, who at least fouls a few off for drama before striking out on one in the dirt. Embree throws a scoreless eighth, and we try to tie it in the ninth against former Sox farmhand Rafael Betancourt. Johnny slaps one through the left side. Bill Mueller Ks, but Johnnys running, and the throw from Martinez sails into center. Johnny at third with one down and Ortiz and Manny coming up. I think weve got a real chance to steal one here when Betancourt goes 20 on David. Heres where a hitter cuts his strike zone in half and only swings at a ball he knows he can drive. A fly balls a run, and Davids the guy we want up in this situation. He chases one at his knees and grounds out to second. Two down, and its up to Manny. Cleveland fans will never forgive him for taking the money and slouching off to Boston, and theyre on their feet, cheering for some poetic justice. Betancourt (and manager Eric Wedge) foolishly pitch to him. Down 12, Manny fights back and finally walks. So theres no delicious revenge. First and third, two down. Dauber steps in and skies the first pitch to center, and the games over. You guys suck! I say, and change the channel. I dont want to hear the recapI dont need to. Were 0 and 4 on the road trip, and have squandered that cushion from sweeping the Yanks. Its not that were not hitting with men in scoring position, were not hitting at all. Bill Muellers not getting it done in the two slot, Ortiz and Millar are struggling, and theres no one to protect Manny. At least Francona acknowledged how desperate we are, running Pokey and Johnny to get something going in the late innings, but he may need to shake up the lineup. Trot and Nomar are still a long ways away. May 4th My brother Johns visiting, and my friend Phils flying in from Tokyo. His brother, Adam, has scored tickets to the only major league game within five hundred miles, the Mets and Giants at Shea. None of us is a Mets or Giants fan, but baseballs a fun way to spend time togethera tonic, Phil calls it, and hes right. Watching baseball is the only way I naturally relax. If I care about the teams playing, Im anxious, but the rest of my worries vanish. The paper promises that Barry Bonds will play, but he has a sinus infection and sits. The only star on the field is Mike Piazza, but hes catching, and he can no longer play the position, hes just there until he breaks Fisks home run record. Everyone knows it too, and in the second inning were treated to some classic National League action as the Giants bunt three times, scoring an unearned run when Piazza throws wild down the firstbase line. Its a dull game, and a quiet crowdvery unFenwaylike. Half the seats are empty, half the concession stands shuttered. Worse, the crowd expects nothing from the team. The biggest cheer is for the girls shooting bundled Tshirts into the stands with a CO2 bazooka. On the small scoreboard, between innings, they run todays Wall Street ticker. The one Met who impresses me is shortstop and Japanese import Kazuo Matsui, who has a coterie of fans right in front of us eating homemade rice balls. Kaz is 2 for 2 and makes a slick play in the hole. When he comes up next, Phil, a veteran of the Tokyodome, shouts, Ganbatte!meaning Persevere! or Do your best! Ganbatte, Kaz! we yell. For me Sheas a break from the grind of the Soxs losing streak, but right beside us is the scoreboard. Clevelands beating Lowe 20 in the second. 21 in the fourth. 31 in the fourth, 51, 61, 71and Lowes still in there. The way weve been hitting, I dont hold out much hope. Here its 62 Mets in the seventh, and the stadiums clearing out. By the middle of the eighth, there cant be more than 10,000 people, and its not even ten oclock. In Cleveland the Sox rally in the ninth. Suddenly its 76, and the Indians have changed pitchers. A couple minutes later they change again, to 63, Betancourt. I let the Mets distract me from the scoreboard. I keep thinking Ill look up and find us winning, but then the red light beside BOS goes out, the 9 turns into an F, and weve lost five in a row. Ganbatte! May 4th SK I got back to Maine this afternoon around 2 P.M. Spent the other night in a desperate little Quality Inn about five hundred yards off Route 84 in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, where every droning semi sounded like it was coming right through the bathroom wall, stacks blowing smoke and headlights glaring. But the first thing I did was to seize the little laminated channel card on top of the TV, and yes! Sho nuff! NESN on channel 37! Talk about your welcome back to New England! And a Red Sox welcome it was, as our guys managed to drop their fourth straight, this one by a score of 21. A real heartbreaker for Curt Schilling, who pitched like a hero after giving up that dinger. Now a little editorial about Theo Epstein and his Moneyballinspired gospel of the onbase percentage. I dont know how much or how little of his teamstaffing strategy comes from that book, but I do know you only have to look at the roster and listen to the chatter from the sportswriters to know that onbase percentage is very important this year. In the last four games (and, to some extent, in the Oakland Athletics postseason misadventures) you can see the strengths and weaknesses of the philosophy. God knows weve put enough men on base in this little skid; I count a total of twentyseven left on in the four losses. Because, see, a players onbase percentage will never guarantee that players ability to get a key hit at a key moment. You saw it again and again in the game against Cleveland last night. Ortiz got it done once, with a double (I think on a warm summer night that balls a home run), but he wasnt able to get Damon in with the tying run in the ninth. And who followed him? Was it Millar? Whoever it was just popped out, and theres your ball game. You can argue that this fivegame skid is just one blip in a long season and I would tend to agreeworking on this book really makes it clear what a long march a season of baseball is; the first pitch already seems a year gonebut all those men left on base is an interesting statistic, isnt it? Its like cooking enough to feed a family reunion and then only actually serving three people. Meanwhile, the Yanks are winning again. Guess Derek Jeter wont have to hang up his spikes after allbut then, I never really thought he would. But we live in hope. Chilly up here in Gods country, but stillgreat to be home. SO Welcome back to the land of boulders and cold water. You look at a guy like Bellhorn, and hes all about onbase percentage, working the walk early, middle and late, and he can still get the bat off his shoulder to knock a run in with a sac fly or a single. Hes the guy they hoped Jeremy Giambi would be. But youre right, we need our big guys to be knocking these runners in. Ortiz is leaving lots of guys on. The problem is, once you get past Manny (by walking him or just not throwing him anything to hit), our fivethrunine guys are struggling mightily. I dont expect Pokey to carry that weight, or Kapler or Bellhorn, but Tek, Millar and Dauber (who popped up firstpitch hitting to end that game) have to produce out of the 5 and 6 spots. And Bill Muellerwho got shoved down in the order last nightjust hasnt been getting it done in the 2 hole. Lots of blame to go round. Our cushion over the Yanks is gone. Essentially, its a brandnew season. Dammit. May 5th Mr. Kims going tonight, his second start of the season. Hes shaky, but Big David hits a solo homer and then a threerun shot to give him some breathing room. Which we immediately give back when, on three consecutive plays, Kim uncorks a wild pickoff throw, Bellhorn lets an easy grounder through his legs, and Millar kicks a single around right field. Its 55 and time for Mystery Malaska, who shuts Cleveland down. Bronson Arroyos next out of the pen. Hes in direct competition for the number 5 spot with Kim, and makes a statement by throwing two scoreless innings while risky David Riske comes in for Cleveland and surrenders a firstpitch threerun rainbow to Bill Mueller. In the middle of the game, we switch to ESPN to check on the Pirates, who are facing Clemens, and find out that Piazzas hit the homer hes been waiting for so long, finally overtaking Pudge. The commentator says hes now the greatest homerunhitting catcher in history. No, I correct him, he just has the most homers. Each time Manny comes to the plate, everyone in Jacobs Field boos except for a womans tiny voice picked up by the microphone We love you, Manny. With two down and two strikes on him in the ninth, the crowd rises, hoping for some payback, and Manny hits a screwyou double off the wall in rightcenter. When Tek singles, Sveumup three runsgets aggressive and sends Manny. Manny doesnt expect it; he hasnt been running hard from second and has to turn it on. The throw from Jody Geruts a twohopper, in time, but Victor Martinez is too worried about Manny and drops it. 95 Sox, and a very quiet crowd. SK So the fivegame skid is history, Bronson Arroyo gets a W, and David Ortiz gets a couple of dingers. One more milepost on the long, long road. The important thingthe thing that absolutely should go in the bookis that I happened to watch one of those ads for Foxwoods Casino with the sound turned off and had a revelation all of the people in the adgamblers, entertainers, cooks, waiters, and waitresseslook like utter lunatics. We must go there, Stewart. We must go there soon. SO If you really wanna go, lets go when we can catch a Norwich Navigators game (maybe against Portland); theyre right up the road, and their little doubleA parks nice. Great cheeseburgers too. May 6th When I went to bed last night, the Yanks were losing late in Oakland to Barry Zito. The first thing I do when I wake up is hit ESPN, and, perfect timing, theyre showing the highlights. Both BALCO boys went deep for the Yanks. Theyre down 32 in the ninth when ARods up with no outs and no one on. He swings, and just the way the camera pans toward the stands, zooming on the crowd, lets me know the balls gone. Then with two down and two on, Tony Clark hits a quail toward the gap in left that the As outfielder cant quite get to. 43 Yanks. And then theres Mariano Rivera dealing with two on and two out, and the As last hope pops to second. Not the way I wanted to start the day. So the Yanks are playing like the regular season means something. And the As, for all of Billy Beanes genius, still havent figured out that great starters are useless without a decent pen. SK Meet me at Foxwoods. Meanwhile, as for Bronson versus BK, all I can say is that I have rarely seen any pitcher in my life who looked as uncomfortable on the mound as Mr. Kim did last night. Memo to Theo Epstein Its time to rent that video, FINDING NOMO. And the Yankees are apparently not going to lose again this season. Or so it looks now. I still think this years Yankee tootsies are made of clay. SO They scored on Mr. Kim every inning he was out there. If Theo doesnt get FINDING NOMO, he might be calling Bronson on the TELEFON. The great Criswell predicts The Yanks lose tonite. Let it be so. And thats clay and steroids. A nice matchup for the final game of the Cleveland set Pedro, whos undefeated lifetime in Jacobs Field, against their young ace C. C. Sabathia. Sabathia comes out blazing, while Matt Lawton puts Pedros first pitch over the wall in dead center. Two hits and a grounder later, were down 20. Its a fast game, with both aces going right after batters. Oldtime hockey, eh? Lou Merlonis playing third for them, which is just weird. Pokey triples, but we strand him. In the sixth, Bellhorn doubles. Kapler singles, and Sveum, down two runs with nobody out, holds Bellhorn. Ortiz grounds into a DP, but Bellhorn scores, and then Manny, who owns Sabathia, plants one in the rightfield stands to tie the game. Meanwhile, Pedros only given up one hit since the first inning. In the seventh, McCartys on first with two down and Pokey at the plate. I tell Steph that Pokeys going to hit a double to the gap and well get to see big, gangly McCarty come wheeling all the way around. Unlike most of my hipshot predictions, this one comes trueMcCarty pumping his arms like a crazed windmilland weve got the lead. Bellhorn comes up and doubles down the line in right, and Pokey scores easily. 42. Pedros been waiting awhile and struggles in the bottom of the inning, putting two on with one out, and who should step in but Lou. Ive always had a soft spot for Lou, but we need a win here. He grounds one to Pokeytailormade doubleplay balland Im pissed when Bellhorn loses his grip on the transfer. Millar, of all people, bails him out with the glove, making a tough catch in foul ground down the rightfield line. We add a run in the eighth, and on comes Embree to set up and Foulke to close. May 7th As the great Criswell predicted, the Yankees did indeed lose. Vazquez faltered in the middle innings, so were a game up on them. The buzz is just temporary, since it appears now that Nomar wont be back till June, and Trot has problems with his left quad and is sitting. We need those guys, David Ortiz says, like a human being needs to be fed every day. Last night Steph noticed that Ron Jackson was coaching first. The paper has the answer Lynn Jones hurt his eye at home in northwestern Pennsylvania. It sounds serious, because Francona says, Theres a chance they can save some of his eyesight. Our leaguebest record is long gone, obviously, but Im shocked to find that distinction now belongs to the Angels, with the surprising White Sox right behind them. The seasons so young that one hot streak puts you on top. Tomorrow weve got Monster seats, front row, and I call the Sox customer service line to see if I can bring my fishing net for BP. The woman who answers doesnt know. She asks around the office; the consensus is that security will probably not let it in, but theres no set policy. I tell her Ill try. Got to make them make the play, right? Tonight its Wake and his 2.25 ERA against Jeremy Affeldt, whos yet to win a game. Im thinking we should score a bunch of runs, but its Wake who struggles. Its a windy nightusually good for a knucklerbut his ball looks awful straight. It also doesnt help that in the third we have Carlos Beltran picked off first but Bellhornmaybe distracted by Desi Relaford trying to score from thirddrops Millars toss. Its 20, but not for long. In our half, Johnny answers with a leadoff shot over the Royals pen. Bellhorn singles, Manny singles for the second time, Millar doubles. Tie game. Between innings, the camera finds Trot in the dugouta nice surpriseand theres Prince Nomar. Neithers close to being ready; its more of a token appearance to raise morale. Word on Lynn Jones is that somehow he gouged his eye with a screwdriver. Theyre still not sure if hell regain sight in it. While hes out, former Sox catcher Bill Haselman, who played with the PawSox last year, will coach first. In the sixth, Wake gives up five hits and Bill Mueller rushes a throw on a chopper, sailing it into the stands. The Royals score four runs before the creaky Benito Santiago grounds into a roundthehorn double play. By the eighth Affeldts pitch count is pushing 110. Hes a young guy but hes never gone this deep in a game before. Tony Pena must want to conserve his pen for the rest of the series, because he leaves him in. Manny singles for the third time. Kapler hits a short fly to left that the wind takes away from Matt Stairs; it falls, and weve got first and second for Mirabelli, who lines one into the leftfield corner. Stairs fires the ball in to second, but its wide and gets by Relaford, and Kapler scoots in to make it 64. Timlin throws a perfect top of the ninth. Before Johnny can lead off the bottom, two fans run out on the field, delighting the crowd. When Johnny finally gets up, hes laughing and loose, and walks on a pitch thats really too close to take. MacDougal, the Royals young closer, stares in at veteran ump Joe West; West whips off his mask and stares back. A passed ball puts Johnny at second, so we dont have to worry about the double play. With Bellhorn up, I expect were in for a long atbat, but he gets a pitch belthigh and yanks it deep to right. |
Juan Gonzalez runs a few steps toward the corner, then pulls up as the ball lands a dozen rows in. The games tied at 6 and Fenways on its feet. Here in Avon, were hollering and trading high fives. They dont want to pitch to Manny with the game on the line, but they dont intentionally walk him either, just nibble a little and then stay away on 32. MacDougals gone and righty Scott Sullivans on. With two down, Francona pinchhits the switchhitting Tek for the righty Kapler. Tek rips Sullivans first pitch down the rightfield line for a sure double. Mannys running on contact. The ball skims along the wall instead of kicking out. Dont touch it! I coach the fans past the Pesky Pole. I see other fans along the wall doing the same with their neighbors, holding their arms out wide as if to prove theyre not fouling anyone. Gonzalez scoops the ball and fires to Relaford, whose relay to Santiago is just enough off the plate to the firstbase side to let Manny tiptoe in standing up. He leaps into the arms of Kevin Millar and the Sox win 76. Here at home, Steph and I are jumping and highfiving, slapping at each other like firstgraders. Its a huge wina steal, really. Two in the eighth, then three in the ninth off a cold closer. Manny ran hard all the way and Sveum sent him inclassic strategy at home play for the win and make them throw you out. I watch Extra Innings, wallowing in the highlights and lockerroom interviews. Sox win, Sox win! SO Man, what a wild one. Im still short of breath from screaming. Its amazing how loud you have to yell at the TV so the players can hear you. SKso it was spoken, and so it was. My God, Bellhorns starting to look like the deal of the century, isnt he? (BELLHORN, BOOK, AND CANDLE, starring Spencer Tracy). He cranks one to get us even, and then Manny (MANNY THE TORPEDOES, starring Randolph Scott) struts across home plate three minutes later, arms raised like a ref signaling the extra points good. And all at once weve got a little breathing room between us and the Yankees. Have you noticed, by the way, that on Extra Innings they now play Darth Vader music before giving the Yankees score? And call them the Evil Empire? Hee! Hating the Yankees is very much in vogue, but since we were doing it long before Yankeehating was cool (outside of New England, that is), Im sending you your own YANKEES HATER hat, with the spiffy yh intertwined logo on the front. Also, the Coen Brothers remake MUELLERS CROSSING. And the Hammer Horror remake CURSE OF THE DAMON, titled JOHNNY EVIL for DVD release. The artfilm classic LEAVING NOMAR. That gritty piece of 50s realism I TROTTED ALL THE WAY HOME. The softcore classic PLEASE ME ORTIZ ME. Nor can we forget the hardcore STROKE ME POKEY. Bottom line? Baseballs a wonderful game. Theres no greater thrill than when your team pulls one out. And you cant get that from a newspaper story. TVs better, but theres really nothing on Gods earth like being at the ballpark and getting on your feet in the bottom of the ninth, hot dog still in hand, when the Sox pull one out. If Heavens that good, I guess I wanna go. Born Again in New England. SO Was at a game last year against Clemboy and the Yanks where John Williams threw out the first ball (I think he bounced it), and when Clem jogged out to the pen, the PA played Lord Vaders Marchperfect for a guy who started out as a headstrong young Jedi apprentice from a dusty, forlorn planet, then felt betrayed and hurt, grew powermad and crossed over to the dark side. May 8th Whats better than the Sox winning? The Sox winning and the Yanks losing. Last night the Mariners rocked Jon Lieber, so were two games up. And we cant forget the Os, just a half game behind them. Torontos under .500, and Tampa Bays already in a death spiral. Thats the kind of year a fan fearsout of the chase by May (like the Pirates, who got onehit last night). As Sox fans, we need to remember how lucky we are. And were damn lucky today, with frontrow seats on the Monster. All along Lansdowne, people stare at the net; Trudy pretends shes not with me. The guy at the turnstile asks me what I think Im going to do with it, but just laughs and lets me through. Trudy and the kids cant believe Im getting away with this. The Royals are hitting, clumps of players spread around the outfield. Its a bright cool day up on the Monster, and the winds in our faces, perfect for home runs. Were in M9, next to the second light standard, but thats too far toward center. I stake my claim to an empty spot in M5 above the power alley. Ive just started to extend the handle when a ball comes right at me. Its going to be short. I reach out and down. Id have it if the handle were fully extended. Hey, no fair! Trudy calls from M9. Thats cheating. With the handle fully extended, the nets about ten feet long, giving me incredible range. It really is unfair. Mike Sweeneys taking his cuts. He sends one directly over my head. I raise the net straight up and even jump, but the ball carries over it, banging off the thirdrow facade and then back past us and down to the field again. A few swings later, Sweeney hits one just to my right. Its going to be close. I scoot a few steps and swing the net over. The ball clanks off the handle and drops at my feet. Inelegant, but hell, its a ball, and Sweeneys as good a player as theyve got. Im not sure who hits me the next one. Its right at me, and a few feet out from the lip, so Im not taking it away from anyone, but I misjudge it and it bangs off the handle a good foot from the head of the net, and falls back to the field. The boos and laughs shower down, and I slump back in a stool and hang my head. Nice going, Netman. Netguy, you suck! The guy beside me points out a dent in the handle. Its a goodsized ding, the metal buckled inward. I cant close the handle all the way anymore. Juan Gonzalez puts a bunch out by the Coke bottles, and then some guy in a blue fleece sweatshirt hits another right at me. It rises past the solid background of the roof and up into the blue sky, then falls fast. Its going to be short, and I dip the net out and down. I dont think Ive got enough reach, but I must, because its a swish, just a gentle tug on my arms and then the ball swinging in the mesh, caught. The crowd goes wild. Yeah, go ahead, Netman! Hey, gimme oneisnt it catch and release? The ball has a pink stamp on the sweet spot KCR enclosed by a thin circle, like something on special at CVS. The hitter was Benito Santiagothe BEN from his batheads imprinted backwards across the cowhide. Like Mark Bellhorn, I had a chance to redeem myself. And just in time too, because thats it for BP. Packing up, Im visited by two people. A burly security dude who tells me Ill have to surrender the net to him before game time (so I dont interfere with play), and a reporter for the Greenfield, Mass, paper who saw the catch and wants to interview me. I get to use my Bellhorn analogy. Youre down one minute and the next youre up again. Thats baseball. And, canned and corny as that sounds, it is as long as you keep at itstubbornly, dumblysomething good might happen. Its a beautiful day, were in the front row, and Schillings on the mound. Hes throwing 9293, with great location. KCs throwing another kid, Jimmy Gobble, and Im proud of the Faithful for not making turkey noises at him. Hes throwing well too, mostly soft breaking stuff. We get a run off him in the third, Bellhorn doubling in Johnny. The Royals get it back in the fifth when Santiago homers to the exact spot in M5 where I was fishing. Its 11 in the fifth and the games not even an hour old. In the bottom of the fifth Pokey stings one down the rightfield line. Gonzalez gets over to the wall by the Pesky Pole in time to cut the ball offtrying to hold Pokey to a singlebut the ball slips through, bouncing past him along the wall and curling into the corner. Pokeys rounding third as the ball comes in to cutoff man Desi Relaford. The crowds upSveums sending him. Pokeys chugging now, and the throws on the mark. Santiago lunges with the tag as Pokey dives flatout and slides a hand across the platesafe! The place goes insane, a good threeminute celebration that lasts halfway through Johnnys atbat, and while we dont score again that inning, were on our feet to salute Pokey when he trots out to short. Ive never seen an insidethepark home run live, Steph says. Neither have I. Schill is cruising, really stretching his arm out, throwing 94 and 95 now. Hes only given up three hits. In our sixth, Gobbles breaking stuff stays up. Millar doubles, Manny doubles, Tek singles, Bill Mueller singles. Its 51, and Mr. Gobble is cooked. For the second straight game former Yankee Jason Grimsley provides little relief. With two down and Kapler on, he leaves one in Pokeys wheelhouse (its a very small wheelhouse, but it still works), and Pokey turns on it and sticks it in M3. POKey, POKey! He comes back out of the dugout and tips his cap. Two homers in two inningsit looks awesome on the scorecard. In the eighth, McCarty hits a tworun shot that keeps the party going, but the real ovation is reserved for Pokey. When he comes to bat the last time, the entire park rises. Hes never had a twohomer game in his career, but hes been such a great defensive player, filling in for Nomar. Pokey pauses outside the batters box, soaking in the moment, and I think its a day hell always keepthe way we will. May 9th Another matchup to love DLowe against weak lefty Darrell May. After a brief rain delay, Bill Mueller gets us on the board in the second, driving a high changeup into M3 with Tek on base. 20 and all the mothers in the stands are happy. The next inning, after Desi Relaford walks, David DeJesus hits a chopper to McCarty, who spins and fires to Pokey. DeJesus runs well, so the chances for two are slim, but its a good play, cutting down the lead runner. The throws perfect. Pokey comes off the bag for a look at first (theres no one there), and though the ball beat Relaford by a good five feet and the neighborhood plays in order, umpire Joe West calls him safe. Pokey cant believe it. Francona comes out to argue, but its pointless. The replay shows that Pokey did indeed slidestep off the bag an instant before receiving the ball, so technically the runner would be safe, but in practice its an out 99 of the time. Lowe battles and gets two outs, but then Sweeney pulls a grounder down the line past Bill Mueller for a gametying double. On the replay, broken down, it makes no sense Sweeneys a dead pull hitter and Lowes been working him down and in, yet Bill Mills playing him well off the line. Why isnt someone in the dugout waving him over? The next inning, Pokey makes a leaping snag of a Joe Randa laser they have to show two or three times. In slowmo its even more impressive; Pokey heads back on contact and does a little stutterstep before going up for it like hes timing an alleyoop, leaps and snares it backhanded. The momentum of the ball sends him twisting around so he lands facing the Monster. Its like watching The Matrix, Steph says. Its a sedate game otherwise. May is spacing out the hits and Lowes struggling with his control but seems to get a ground ball whenever he needs one. That changes in the sixth. Joe Randa singles, and with two down, Lowe walks their eight and nine guys to load the bases. After Dave Wallace pays Lowe a visit, Angel Berroa, their leadoff man, hits a smash that Bill Mueller has to dive to stop. With Berroas wheels, theres no chance at first, so he goes to Bellhorn for the force, but DeJesus is hustling and ties the throw. 32 Royals. Lowes gone and Mystery Malaskas on to face the dangerous Carlos Beltran, now batting righty. He gets behind 30 and on 32 throws a fat pitch that Beltran pulls past Bill Mueller into the corner, clearing the bases. 62 Royals. Its 83 in the bottom of the ninth and Steph and I are playing catch in the backyard, listening to the dregs of the game on the radio when Johnny knocks in Pokey. With two outs and Johnny on, Tony Penain a move I can only call paranoid, since hes up four runschanges pitchers. It worksderand the winning streak is over. We turn it off and keep tossing, dropping balls and making plays, banging throws off the downspout, off the porch railing, off the shed. Whats worse than the Red Sox losing? The Red Sox losing and the Yankees winning, which they do, coming back from a 60 deficit to nip the Mariners 76. Back to a onegame lead. Baltimore won as well. If this threeteam race keeps up, were in for a wild summer. Its kind of strange, knowing we wont see the Yanks again till the end of June, or the Os till late July. Im ready now. May 10th Brighams ice cream is coming out with a new flavor, Reverse the Curse. Vanilla with fudge sauce, caramel, chocolate and peanuts, the product looks suspiciously like their Big Dig, but I appreciate the sentiment. They say that after the Sox win this October, theyll have a contest to rename it. The paper says Nomar took batting practice in the cage yesterday, another hopeful sign, but theres still no schedule for his return. Trots headed back to Florida for more rehab on the quad. Also headed to Florida is Manny, to Miami, to become an American citizen. Hell miss tonights game against Cleveland. Hes lucky. This ones a mess from the very beginning. Besides Lou Merlonis return to Fenway, theres not much to cheer about. Kims ineffective, and the Indians can hit. They bang on the Monster three times in the first, giving Dauber a crash course in left field. He looks terrible on the first onegetting caught too close to the wall so Johnny has to come over and back him upbut on the last one he throws Ben Broussard out at second to end the inning. Dauber provides some offensive highlights as well, lining a tworun double off the wall and later homering into the Indians bullpen; he even backs up Johnny nicely on a double off the Bobs sign, but the story of the game is Kim. Hes topping out at 86 and cant find the plate. He and Tek get their signs mixed up, and an elusive passed ball scores two more. When Kim leaves with one out in the top of the fourth, hes thrown 80 pitches, 46 for strikes, and its 44 with the bases loaded. The sellout crowd boos. Lefty Lenny DiNardo comes in and gives up a single to outfielder Coco Crisp. Cleveland leads the rest of the way, and the rest of the way is mighty ugly, a parade of relievers for both teams. DiNardo gives up a run of his own, Embree gives up a pair (thanks to Timlin, who walks the first guy he sees and cant wriggle out of the jam), Malaska lets one in. Foulke, at least, throws a clean inning. Its a long game, lots of base runners. Clevelands line score says it all 2 2 0 2 0 1 2 0 1. The finals 106. No alibis, no one play to point to, we just plain stunk. The whole KimArroyo debates sure to heat up. I try not to overreact. Its just one game, and tomorrow weve got Pedro going. May 11th Theo and Francona dont waste any time Kims out of the rotation, Arroyos in. They must have made the decision after the game, since its in the morning paper. SO I really thought Mr. Kim would be an upgrade from John Burkett, but it sure doesnt look that way. As a manager, how do you rebuild his confidence? As a general manager, how do you showcase him so other teams dont quit on him? SK Im really, really glad Kim is out of the starting ro. SO Me too, but I had such high hopes for him. 190 innings, 15 wins. All shot to hell. Tonight its Cleveland at the Fens, and a rematch of Pedro versus C. C. Sabathia, who has to be the pimpest pitcher in the American League (maybe in all of baseball) big, baggy uni, hat worn cocked arrogantly to one side. Were not off to a good start. After striking out the first batter, Pedro has allowed three straight hits (the second one tainted, a bouncer from Omar Vizquel off first baseman David Ortizs glove) and Cleveland leads, 20. At least its a decent night for baseball. I may have said this before, but it bears repeating spring baseball in New England is usually rotten for the fans and sometimes dangerous for the players (especially the pitchers). I mean, night baseball in April? In Boston? Where the temperatures fortysix degrees and the wind blowing in off the Back Bay makes it feel like twentyseven? Id say youve got to be kidding me, but we all know Im not, just as we know its all about the money. Baseball is a lazy game, meant to be played on long, lazy summer afternoons and into the purple twilightwhen fans so inclined can exchange their iced tea or Cokes for cold beerbut money has changed all that. Tonight at least we have a foretaste of summer eighty degrees at game time, according to Joe Castiglione inthe radio booth, and coincidentally or not, its also Bostons eightieth straight home sellout. Stewart ONans there tonight, I think. Lucky dog. This older dog will be there a little later on this month, when the warmth may be a little more reliable. Meantime, I have to look back on my own preseason musings about how much the AL East has improvedOrioles, Jays, DRays, blahblahblahand smile a little bit. Because now, as the Red Sox play into the second inning of their thirtysecond contest of the season, its starting to look like a case of same as it ever was Red Sox and Yankees, duking it out for first, with the long, hot summer stretching ahead. The Sox had a fivegame bulge over the Yanks not long ago, but its been years since Boston seemed comfortable with anything like a real lead; they went into tonights game with just a halfgame pad over the secondplace Yankees and first place on the line. Baltimore is still in it, too, a game and a half back. My motherinlaw, meanwhile, with whom I watched a good many games in Florida, is now in the hospital with respiratory problems, but I know shell be watching on NESN. Theyre watching all over New England, tonight and every other night, in the hospitals, nursing homes, rehabs, and hospices. Its what we do, what weve done for going on a century now. Theyre hitting Pedro pretty well tonight, and were down 20 in the second, Cleveland with two more in scoring position, but Pedro has also struck out the side in the first inning, and two more in the second. I pause in front of this keyboard every time he throws. I want him to get those six Ks. So does my motherinlaw, Sarah Jane, over in St. Joes, not to mention Leo the shortorder cook at Nickys Diner down on Union Street, and Keith Jacubois at the Texaco station over in Montpelier. This is what we do, and weve finally got a decent night to do it on, and we may be behind, but there are no damn blackflies yet, and for the time being, were still in first place. Pedro walked Jody Miller, but now hes 02 on Red Sox killer Victor Martinez. He comes to the beltand strikes Victor out swinging. And all over New England theyre cheering in the hospitals, hospices, and roadside restaurants. When the Sox finally win this one two hours later, Pedro Martinez doesnt get the W; that goes to Alan Embree, who gives up a goahead gopher ball and then vultures the victory when the Sox come back in the bottom of the eighth. The win allows the Sox to stay in first, because the Yankees beat the Angelsfinally, after two rain delays, in front of approximately sixteen remaining fansin the Bronx, in ten. The final score is high and Kevin Brown doesnt get the win. The Yankees have finally started to roll, but their pitching remains suspect as evera good sign. And a rather endearing postscript having to do with our other Ramirez to wit, one Manny. In Cleveland, he was usually silent and often viewed as sullen even when he was clearly enjoying the game. In Bostona town where the sports reporters are often compared to the shark in Jawshe has become more expansive with each passing year; not even managements efforts in the offseason to trade him for ARod seem to have fazed him in the slightest, and by the kickoff of the 2004 festivities, Manny was downright chatty. Not stupid, though. Asked for a comment following the Sox fivegame massacre of the Yankees, Mannys deference was both charming and diplomatic They got all the World Series rings, man, he said. We got nothing. He has been the one completely dependable hitter in the Red Sox lineup this year, at this date in May batting roughly eighty points higher than Alex Rodriguez, the man for whom Theo Epstein hoped to trade him. He has played in every game of the season except for this Mondays (May 10th) trouncing by Cleveland, his old team. Manny was unavailable to play on that day because he was taking the U.S. citizenship testwhich he passed. At the start of tonights game he ran out to his position in left field with a big grin on his face and a small American flag in his right hand. Mannys People in left gave him a standing O. Way to go, Manny Ramirezwelcome to the real big leagues. May 12th Mr. Kims headed for Pawtucket, where they say hell throw only two innings at a time. Supposedly this will help him get back his velocity faster. Theo says BKs shown he can dominate major league hitters, and that that quality doesnt just go away, but its hard to tell if he truly believes this. A note in the Courants Sox column says that Trot took BP yesterday and hit some out, and that Nomar knocked a couple over the Monster. Its possible, since the Sox were batting a little before the gates opened. I didnt see Trot until after the game, congratulating the line of guys coming off, but I saw Nomar take around thirty swings, and nothing was close to going out. The website says righthanded reliever Jamie Brown will be taking Mr. Kims spot on the roster, making him something like our twentieth pitcher this season. Whatever happened to Bobby Jones? Instead of all these kid relievers, Id rather see them bring up a big righty stick like perennial tripleA prospect Andy Dominique for lateinning situations. Twelve pitchers seems like a luxury, and Im not sure were getting anything out of it. Theres such a traffic jam in the pen that Williamson hasnt thrown in six days. Tonight its Wake versus Cliff Lee, a young lefthander whos 30 with a nifty ERA. It seems every time the Indians have someone on, they take advantage of Wakes slow delivery and steal. Twice Bellhorn lets throws from Mirabelli skip by him into center. The Indians get a run in the second, and the third, and the fifth, and two in the sixth on a Monster shot by Tim Laker. Wakes just not sharp, and Lee is. In the ninth, down four, the crowd rallies. Its louder than its been all night when Daubers pinch double scores Bill Mueller. Johnny hits a hopper up the middle; Vizquel and Belliard look at each other, and it rolls into center, scoring Dauber. Its 64, and up to the plate steps the tying run in the form of Mark Bellhorn. The count goes 20, David Ortiz is on deck and Betancourt is sweating like Calvin Schiraldi. Just last week, Bellhorn hit that tworun shot in the ninth to tie the game against KCat the same score too, 66. He must be thinking the same thing, because he goes fishing for a couple balls well off the plate and Ks to end the game. So Cleveland takes two out of three from us, and we go 33 on the home stand. Now its off to Toronto for four gamesall against righties, mercifully. Please, please, let the Yankees lose. May 13th In the mail, a phantom piece a pennant with the Sox logo and printed signatures of all the players surrounding WORLD CHAMPIONS 1986. Earlier this week I received a phantom soda cup that would have been sold at Wrigley during the much anticipated SoxCubs World Series last year. Theyre not fakes, just survivors of large runs, the majority of which were destroyed by reality. On eBay Ive seen phantom tickets for playoffs and World Series dating back to the sixties, including some years in which we never even came close (say, 1970, 1987). Theres a twinge of pain attached to these nolongerpossible futures, but also, by the pieces existence, a validation of what should have happened. Unless something weird happens, were done for the season with Cleveland, and considering that we finished 34, thats probably a good thing. Looks like Wakefields carriage turned back into a pumpkin, Dad, my son Owen said during last nights postgame call. (Not so fast, kidWakes been down before, but hes never been out.) Now were on to Toronto, and what my other son likes to call the CreepyDome, because its been so empty over the last three or four yearsand especially now, while playoff hockey is still wending its slow way through the lower intestine of biggatime sport.Schilling is starting for us tonight, and since Toronto beat him last time when Schill insisted on holding on to the ball in the late innings, this should be a game worth watching. But first I have to watch Jeopardy. This is Political Gasbag Week, and I have to root for Keith Olbermann, himself a recent migr from the Land of BiggaTime Sport. Later This ones no masterpiece, Jerry Remy of the TV crew opines in the seventh inning of tonights tilt, and thats an understatement. Every pitcher seems to have one team he just cant seem to beat, and for Curt Schilling, its the Jays. He went into this game with only one victory against them in something like half a dozen tries (that one win came in his Diamondback days), and hes not going to improve on that record tonight. The final score is 126. Schill struggled, and hell probably get tagged with the loss, but thats not the real story of this game; he only gave up three runs, and the Sox have already scored twice that many as we play into the eighth. The story of the game isnt even the Red Sox defense, which has been horriblea Johnny Damon error in center let in two runs, and Mark Bellhorns failure to snag Frank Catalanottos foul pop cost another two (Catalanotto singled on the next pitch). No, the real problem, it seems to me, is that the Sox have turned lackluster in their last five games, playing catchup in four of them and only successfully in one of those. The Yankeeswon earlier today, beating the Angels (Mariano Rivera was shaky, but had just enough gas to survive a basesloaded jam in the ninth), and if things dont turn around, the Red Sox are going to find themselves with a 59 mark for the month of Mayand in second place. They need a shakeup. This may be where our new manager really starts earning his paycheckassuming he can, of course. Two final notes (unless the Sox pull it out, that is) Orlando Hudson has scored five of the Jays runs, tying a team record. (Ask me if I give a shit.) And on the radio, color commentator Jerry Trupiano has been reduced to wondering how the sitcom Frasier, which finishes its run tonight, turned out. Its been that kind of game. May 14th 740 A.M. Ordinarily I tune in to NESNs morning sports show, which runs on a constant fifteenminute loop from 5 A.M. to 9 A.M. seven days a week, while I do my pushups and crunches, but not today. Not even the thought of Jayme Parker, whos blond and very goodlooking, can motivate me into picking up the remote this morning. The Yankee win and the Red Sox sloppy D, combining to put the Bombers back into first (thank God I didnt have to look at the New York Post today), is bad enough; that look of lackluster, whocares sloppiness over the last few games is worse. Last night it even seemed to have gotten to Curt Schilling; I fancied I could read it in his dispirited dugout sprawl after he was lifted. Dammit, dont you guys know that ONan and I are counting on you to win the pennant? I want to shout, Wake up! It gets late early in this game so wake the hell up! Grumbling in the paper about Francona going to DiNardo and Malaska with games on the line. Why, Courant beat writer David Heuschkel asks, are we relying on our number eleven and twelve pitchers when weve got a stocked pen? The answers obvious, and goes back to the offseason. For several years weve been short on lefties, and we havent had a reliable middle guy since Rich GarcesEl Guapohurt his elbow. Theo never went out and dealt for a lefty, so in spring training we saw a logjam for the last bullpen spot, won, finally, by retread Bobby Jones, who lasted all of a week. The guy right behind him, Tim Hamulack, hasnt made it up yet, while DiNardo, Malaska and Phil Seibel have all seen work. Theo probably thought the middle relief was covered by Arroyo and Mendoza. Mendozas on the DL (as always); Arroyos now part of the starting rotation. Our only major league lefty, Embree, is a situational and setup guy who throws best when going an inning or less. So when Francona needs a lefty in the sixth to hold a game, he has to go with the kids. 950 P.M. Once upon a time (and it doesnt seem so long ago), there were no Eastern, Western, and Central Divisions; there was just the American League and the National League, with eight or nine teams each. The bottom four or five of these were known as the second division, and the bottom couple of teams were the cellardwellers. (Red Sox fans from the late fifties and early sixties came to know these terms well.) Last night and tonight, the Red Sox and the Blue Jays have played like seconddivision teams from 1959Boston and Washington, lets say, battling it out for a sloppy nine in front of a few thousand dozy afternoon fans (many of them more interested in their newspapers than the game unfolding in front of them) while the Yankees cruised the stratosphere twenty or so games above them both in the standings. Tonight the Red Sox are leading 93 as we go to the bottom of the ninth, but Derek Lowe was once more miles from sharp (its Alan Embrees game to win, he of the bright blue eyes, scruffy beard, and amazing cheekful o chaw), and the Sox scored most of their runs in one inning during which the hapless Jays chucked the pill everywhere, including into the stands. The best things you can say about tonights performance are that well keep pace with the Yankees, who are also winning, and that better days are coming, both defensively and on the mound. Meantime, at least its a win at SkyDome. May 15th Its eightynine degrees, a record, and my old car, which I just got back from the shop, breaks down on the commercial strip in townmaybe vapor lock? While Im outside Party City waiting for the wrecker, a guy pulls up with the game on and waits while his wife runs inside. Whos winning? I just turned it on, he says. I know McCarty has an RBI. He sees my Fenway 1912 shirt, I see hisfrom last years ALCSand he gets out to talk. In February he went down to the Civic Center to see the Sox Winter Caravan and got autographs from Kevin Millar and Bill Mueller. I was worried it would be weird, you know, the bigkid thing, but once I got up to the table, I got this smile on my face, and the guys were cool. We weigh our chances for the season. Now theres a rumor Nomar might have a tear, he says, not just a strain like theyve been saying. He also wonders why Trots taking so long to come back from a hamstring, and we bat around the possibility of him being on steroids (or off them now). His wife returns, and theyve got to run. Go Sox! she calls, and theyre gone. The tow truck comes, finally, and Trudy, to drive me home. Its too hot upstairs, so I go down to the cool basement and watch the rest of the game on her parents old TV. Its 40 Sox, and Arroyos only given up three hits. Hes going after guys with his fastball, dropping his sweeping curve in for strikes. Torontos a goodhitting club, and the SkyDomes a launching pad, but hes putting down Wells, Delgado and Hinske in order. Theres a grounder to third, and to my surprise, Kevin Youkilis fields it. Bill Muellers knee is aching, so Francona doesnt want him playing on Torontos hard turf. When Youkilis comes up to bat, they show him earlier in the game, hitting his first major league home run and then trotting back to the dugout, where the guys give him the silent treatmenta tradition with rookies. Youkilis gets it, giving phantom high fives. Only after he sits down do the guys break up and congratulate him. |
Arroyos making his case to be the number five starter. Yesterday, in Pawtucket, in the first inning of his first start, Kim gave up a threerun homer. Trade rumors are cropping up, the most notable, Kim and Johnny D to Seattle for Freddy Garcia, who we then ship to KC for Carlos Beltran. Beltrans a serious fivetool player, but Id hate to lose Johnnys laidback personality. Hes a fan favorite, especially with the ladies, and great for the clubhouse. Though Id love to see Beltran in right and Johnny in center. But look at the team we have on the field right now Arroyo and Mirabelli, Youkilis, Crespo, Bellhorn and Ortiz, McCarty, Damon and Millar. And were winningon the road. Arroyo goes eight, giving up 3 hits, walking none and striking out 6. Foulke closes easily (something Im getting accustomed to), and though my car broke down and Ive gotten nothing done today, Im happy. In the Bronx, the Yanks are in extra innings against Seattle, tied 77. I watch for a couple innings, but not a lots happening, and theres yardwork to be done. After dinner, when I check ESPN, the finals a lopsided 137, Seattle. Once Rivera was gone, the Mariners feasted on Gabe White. So were in first again, barely. SO And it will forever be known as The Day of the Youkilis. SK The Revenge of Moneyball. May 16th And the Os lost again, so we gained ground on them too. I know its pointless to be scoreboardwatching in May, but I cant help it, just as I cant help looking for the Pirates score (we beat the Giants again) and seeing if were still in the cellar. In their search for a number five starter, the Yankees pick up former Devil Ray Tanyon Sturtze from the Dodgers for a player to be named later. Sturtzes 30 for tripleA Las Vegas, but is that really the best Brian Cashman and George can do? Wait till July and the trade deadline. In Toronto, its PedroHalladay III, a series Im growing fond of. Pedro won the first two, and Manny gives him a 10 lead with an RBI single in the first. Both aces look good, setting the sides down quickly. In the bottom of the fourth, Youkilis misplays a carpet hopper from Vernon Wells. You cant do that in a close game, I tell him through the TV. Especially with Carlos up next. Delgado makes my fears a reality, taking a high fastball over the rightfield fence. 21 Toronto. Besides that one mistake to a quality hitter, Pedro looks good. In the sixth, he gives up another run on a blooper by Reed Johnson that Johnny gets a late jump on. Halladays over 120 pitches and finished after seven. Likewise, Pedros over 100 and done. We have two full innings to go after their relievers. With one out in the eighth, Ortiz doubles. Rather than let Manny tie the game with one swing, Carlos Tosca decides to put him on. Its an easy decision. Dauber goes down looking, Tek goes 02 before popping to first, and thats our best chance. Terry Adams works a scoreless ninth and Doc Halladay finally beats us. Its not disappointing. Im sure Pedros not happy, but Roy Boy threw well. It was a good, tight game with Hall of Fame matchups like HalladayManny and PedroDelgado. Major League Baseball, and you cant gripe about that. The Yanks play a similar game, but get it done, Kevin Brown going to 50 as they beat the Ms 21 and move back into first. After a brief return to first place (one daya cup of coffee, really) the Red Sox gently subside once more to second, half a game behind the Yankees. The most notable event of our final two games in the CreepyDomewhich was actually pretty full for the weekend gameswas the major league debut of Kevin Youkilis, subbing for Bill Mueller (sore knee). Youkilis hit a home run in his first atbat and will bear watching if only because he personifies the Moneyball mindset and strategy, which can be defined as a way of thinking that both arises from and revolves around onbase percentage. Youkilis, the socalled Greek God of Walks, tied a minorleague record, reaching base in seventyone straight games,and its sort of a wonder its taken him as long as it has to reach the bigs, especially under the umbrella of Major Theo. It will be interesting to see how he develops, and how much PT he gets as the season heats up. May 18th In the mail, a box from Steve with a YANKEES HATER cap in Sox colors. The logo, yh, is designed so it looks the same upsidedown. Cool hat, Steph says, and once he puts it on, its his. Driving him to his sax lesson, I tell him about another YANKEES HATER cap I saw Steve wearing earlier in the year. It was black with an orange logo, like a Giants cap. Do the Giants hate the Yankees? he asks. I try to remember if the Yanks ever beat those great early Mays teams (just once, in 51, when they were still the New York Giants). It takes me a minute to recall the 62 World Series, when Bobby Richardson snagged Willie McCoveys liner. It was the Yanks last preSteinbrenner championship. No, I say, theyre too busy hating the Dodgers. And then I realize that, though you never hear them bandied about as a cursed or hardluck club, the San Francisco Giants have never won a World Series. Although it might have just been my imagination (Ive been accused of having an overactive one), I thought I heard cries of Dead team walking! tonight in the hollow airconditioned confines of Tropicana Field. How avidly Lou Piniella, fiery competitor that he is, must be dining upon his own liver these days! The Devil Rays (until further notice to be called the hapless Devil Rays in this fans notes) looked much improved on paper, but as one wit or another has surely pointed out, baseball games arent played on paper, and the DRaysexcusezmoi, the hapless DRayshave the worst record in the majors, just 10 wins against 27 losses after tonights contest, which the Red Sox won, 73. In a game last week, new citizen Manny Ramirez trotted out to his position carrying a small American flag. Tim Wakefield declined to go out to his tonight with a burprag over his shoulder, but maybe he should have; it was his first game as a new dad, and what better place to celebrate than the Trop, where hes never been beaten? As for the Yankees, theyre on the West Coast, so I can go to bed safe in the knowledge that were at least tied for first place. May 19th First thing in the morning, I walk down the driveway to the road for the paper, pull it out of the box and unfold the front page. The headers in redPERFECT GAME FOR RANDY JOHNSON; YANKS LOSE IN 11. I laugh and head back to the house. Its already a good day. Tonight its Schilling versus Rob Bell, just brought up from tripleA. Bells all over the place and Schillings solid. Its tied 11 in the third when Johnny goes deep, and a fan makes a nice barehanded catch of it in the rightfield stands. Of course, theres no one near him to interfere. Later Don will announce the paid attendance as 13,690, but the Trop looks even emptier than last night. Two batters later, Bell is 30 to Ortiz and throws too nice of a strike. David has the big green light and doubles, adding to his leagueleading total. Bell falls behind Manny with two down and first base open, but Lou decides to pitch to him, even though Manny hit a 390foot fly to dead center his first time up. After Bell throws one to the backstop on the fly, Manny hits a 420foot homer to dead center, and its 41. After seven, Schilling gives way to Embree, who gets an out and then a Rocco Baldelli grounder to Bellhorn that should be the second out. Bellhorn bobbles it and throws to first. Its a close play, but the ump calls Baldelli safe. Bellhorns puzzled; he thought he got him. Its not until were well into the count on Aubrey Huff that a second replay shows that he did indeed get him. Huff then hits a nubber to the right side that Embree thinks he has a shot at. He doesnt. Ortiz fields it and turns to throw the ball to Embree, but Embrees brain has shortcircuited, and hes stopped. Bellhorn races over to cover but its too late. Tino Martinez flies to center, advancing Baldelli to third, and with runners on the corners and two out, Francona goes to Foulke. Its one of Bill Jamess pet theorems that the most important atbat often isnt in the ninth, so theres no reason to hold off bringing in your closer. In this case, its a nobrainer Foulkes a better pitcher than Embree, and all were asking him for are four outs. On a 32 count, Robert Fick hits a smash off Ortizs chest that ricochets into foul ground. Ortiz scrambles after it, and, unlike Embree, Foulke hustles over to cover and makes the play to end the inning. Foulke throws a onetwothree ninth, and thats the game, another uneventful win. Besides the two homers, the only play to savor was Pokey ranging to the rightfield side of second to steal a hit from Geoff Blum, and Pokeys played so well that were almost used to that kind of highlight. And used to winning this kind of game a quality start, just enough hitting for a cushion, then a shaky setup and a solid close. I suppose I shouldnt complain about the lack of drama. Later, checking my email, I come across a story that says the Yankees are dropping Cracker Jack from their concession stands, going instead with Crunch N Munch, which they say tastes better (and still comes in a box). George, youre insane. May 20th Yanks won, Os won, so the East remains the same. Lieber looked good, which is a worry. Contreras is iffy, so the Yanks still dont have a real number five guy, but if Brown and Vazquez and Lieber throw as well as they have, theyll stick around. At some point the Os hitters are going to fall into a slump, and their pitching wont carry them. More injury woes. Williamson, whos been complaining of soreness in his elbow for a few weeks, finally gets it checked out. Bill Muellers knee was hurting him again last night, so hes flown back to Boston for an MRI. And Mannys at DH again because of a tender groin. This is turning into the photo negative of last year, when everybody was healthy. The Sox won last night and so, out on the Left Coast, did the Yankees, so Boston maintains its halfgame fingerhold on the top spot. Its far too early to worry about whos in first (although never too early to worry about whos on first), but its important to keep pace, and so far were doing that. I stand by my beliefor maybe its an intuitionthat the wildcard team wont come out of the AL East this year, but if the race were over today, the Yankees would be that team, beating the White Sox in the Central Division for the spot by a mere half a game. Anaheimthe team the Yankees beat last night, and one the Sox have yet to playhas the best record in baseball, at 2613. The Red Sox, not far behind at 2416, have cobbled together a winning teamand, perhaps just as important, a winning chemistryout of what amounts to spare parts, and I have to wonder what happens when Trot and Nomar come back (in last nights pregame show, Theo Epstein said they were both getting close). The question isnt whether or not theyre good enough to play for the Red Sox; thats a nobrainer. The real question is how quickly they can get up to speed, and who goes where once they do. I think that the original plan was for Pokey Reese to play second and Mark Bellhorn to ride the bench, but Bellhorn has been clutch for the Sox during the first seven weeks of the season. Not spectacular, like Manny Ramirez, whos currently batting something like one point for every day of the year, but clutch just the same. So who rides the pine when Nomar comes back? Probably it will be Bellhorn, but I hate to lose his bat (and his discerning eye at the plate). And while I wont miss Kevin Millara bit in right fieldhe made another one of those absurd shoestring attempts last night, during Schillings rocky first inningI am anxious about how quickly Trot and Nomar can ramp up their bats. No matter. On to the important stuff. Baseball is a great game because you can multitask in so many ways and never miss a single pitch. I find I can read two pages of a book during each commercial break, for instance, which adds up to four an inningmore if theres a pitching change. Thus its sometimes possible to read as many as forty pages a game, although its usually less, because there are always bathroom breaks and fridge runs. Then theres the Face Game. I play this by keeping an eye on the faces of the spectators behind home plate. Some nights Ill run a tenpoint NosePicking Competition, which can be played solitaire or with a friend (you get the odd innings, your friend the even ones). Ten is a good number to play to in this game, Ive found, but when playing Cell Phone, you have to play to at least twentyone, because these days almost everyone has one of those annoying little puppies. (Hi, hon, Im at the ballpark. What? Oh, not much, Rays are down by threeI hear people whispering Dead team walking under their breathits a little spookyBring home a quart of milk?sure, okay, call you latergotta pick my nose on national TV firstokay, love you toobye.) And last nightremember, I never lost the thread of the game during this, thats the beauty of baseballI had this wonderful idea for a story. What if a guy watches a lot of baseball games on TV, maybe because hes a shutin or an invalid (or maybe because hes doing a book on the subject, poor schmuck), and one night he sees his best friend from childhood, who was killed in a car crash, sitting in one of the seats behind the backstop? Yow! And the kid is still ten! He never claps or cheers (never picks his nose or talks on his cell phone, for that matter), just sits there and watches the gameor maybe hes watching the main character of the story, right through the TV. After that the protagonist sees him every night at every game, sometimes at Fenway, sometimes at Camden Yards, sometimes at the CreepyDome up in Toronto, but every time there are more people the poor freakedout guy knew, sitting all around him this guys dead friends and relatives, all sitting in the background at the ballpark. I could call the story Spectators. I think its a very nasty little idea. Meanwhile, Derek Lowe goes for us tonight, and here is an interesting little factoid the hapless Devil Rays are almost forty games into the baseballseason and havent yet won two games in a row. Lou Piniella must be finished with his liver and thinking of moving on to his kidneys. Its a shame, but weve got a job to do here, and hopefully DeeLowe will do his part. For the final game in Tampa its Lowe versus Victor Zambrano, a decent matchup, at least until they take the mound. Zambrano has a weird first, alternately walking and striking out hitters, finally getting Tek looking to leave the bases loaded. Lowe responds by giving up a single through the middle to former option QB Carl Crawford, then letting him steal second and third. With one out, the infields back, and another grounder scores him. Both pitchers settle down in the second, but in the third, with one down, Lowe gives up a single to Brook Fordyce. Then, on 02, he leaves a pitch up to Crawford, who doubles down the line. With the infield in, Baldelli bounces one through the middle. 30 Tampa Bay. Huff nearly skulls Lowe with a line single, then Tino singles on a pitch above the waist. 40. Dave Wallace visits, meaning were going to leave him in. Its a mistake. Jose Cruz Jr., whos hitting under .200, doubles to leftcenter. 60. Lenny DiNardos warming, but Francona cant get him in quick enough, as little Julio Lugo takes Lowe off the wall in left for the seventh straight hit. 70 DRays, and thats it for DLowe. Zambrano follows with his own nightmare inning, loading the bases with nobody out and giving up three runs. In the fifth, Tek puts one on a catwalk and Johnny doubles in two more. Thats as close as we get. Timlin and Jamie Brown conspire to give up two runs, putting it out of reach. The DRays pitchers walked 10, but they also struck out 15, including Manny four times, while the only pitcher of ours who had any success was DiNardo. A complete mess, cancelling out Schillings easy win last night. A bigger worry Lowe, supposedly the best number three starter in baseball, hasnt won this month. May 21st Its the revenge of the header MUSSINA LEADS YANKS PAST ANGELS, 62. We lose ugly to a lastplace club while they beat the team with the best record in baseball (and on top of that, beat their ace, Colon). At least the Os lost; otherwise it would be a total wipeout. Im trying to be optimistic and look ahead, but tonight its Arroyo versus Halladay. Our travel day knocked the two rotations out of sync, so Pedros facing the lefty Lilly tomorrow. On Sunday, the game well be at, we get the far less interesting Wake versus Miguel Batista. We need two out of three from these guys, but right now the pitching matchups are in Torontos favor. Halladays stronger than Arroyo, and we have trouble against lefties and historically dont give Pedro much run support. WakeBatistas a tossup. Maybe its just last nights game thats bothering me. If Arroyo can match Halladay and get us to their pen, we should win, and Pedros flatout better than Lilly. Batistas ERAs around 5 and, like Zambrano, he walks a lot of batters. If we hit and Wake has the knuckler fluttering, we could sweep. The offfield news is that Johnnys shaving his beard for a literacy program at the Boston Public Library. Gillettes sponsoring the event to kick off their new line of razors. A crowd gathers on the plaza by the Prudential Center to watch some hot models lather him up. He sits still while they take the blades to his face, but in the end he finishes the tricky spots himself. He looks younger, babyfaced, and with his long mane hes got the ElvisasIndianbrave thing going on. DeeLowe was deereadful, but tonight the Red Sox are back at the Fens, and for the first time this year Im in the house. Its a beautiful night for baseball, too, sixtynine degrees at game time. Ray Slyman, who works for Commonwealth Limousine and has been driving me and my family to Red Sox games ever since the kids were small, is usually an optimist about Bostons chances, so Im surprisedno, Im shockedto find him sounding downbeat tonight, even though last nights loss coupled with the Yankees win on the West Coast has left us only half a game out of first. It makes me uneasy, too. Partly because Rays in the car all day and listens to all the radio sports shows (discounting the crazies who call in as a matter of course); thus hes hip to all the current gossip. Mostly because Rays one smart cookie. Its from Ray that I first hear the idea that Nomar should be back right now, and DHing. Its also from Ray that I hear a lot of fans are beginning to lose patience with Nomar; once the season begins, major league baseball quickly becomes a game of whathaveyoudoneformelately, and in Boston, cries of Play him or trade him! are beginning to be heard. Coming into the ballpark, lots of folks tell me hi. Most call me Steve.One woman tells her boyfriend, Look, theres Steven Spielberg! This is more common than you might think, and I sometimes wonder if people point at the famous director and tell each other that its Stephen King. The guy selling programs just outside Gate A pauses just long enough in his spiel to ask me how Im feeling. I tell him Im feeling fine. He says, Do you thank God? I tell him, Every day. He says, Right on, brutha, and goes back to telling people how much they need a program, how much they need a scorecard, just two dollars unless youre a Yankee fan, then you pay four. Do you thank God? Every day. Yes indeed I do. Im blessed to be alive at all, and have the sense to know it. Its especially easy to give thanks walking into Fenway Park under my own power on a beautiful spring night in May. (Were inside the TV, I once heard a wondering child say after getting his first look at all that green.) Im still considering the novel idea of Nomar Garciaparra as the designated hitter when a woman cardiologist throws out the first pitch. She may be a hell of a doc, but she still throws like a girl. We all give her a big hand, and we give the Red Sox a bigger one when they hit the field in their fine white home uniforms. I feel the same thrill I did when I saw them go out there for the first time, at the age of eleven or twelve, on an afternoon when the Tigers were their opponents and Al Kaline was still playing for them, and my arms prickle when John Fogerty starts singing Centerfield over the PA. They prickle again at the end when the Red Sox put away the Jays, 115, and the crowd starts out with the Standells singing Dirty Water. Every ballpark has its eccentricities. One of my Fenway favesmany fans hate itis the lateinning playing of Neil Diamonds Sweet Caroline. I have no idea when this started or why fans took it to their hearts (its such a forgettable song), but there you are; its just a Fenway Thing, like The Wave.The first notes of this song cause great excitement.When Neil sings Sweeeeet Caroline! in the chorus, thirty thousand people respond at once (and with no apparent prompting), WHOAHOHO! at the top of their voices. And when he adds, Good times never seemed so good! the crowd responds, So good! So good! So good! How do these things get started? Theres simply no telling, but such thingswhich occur when the TVwatching world is stuck with yet another Meet me at Foxwoods jingleare very much a part of not just the ballpark experience but your ballpark experience what makes home home. Man, I had a great time tonight. Manny Ramirez hit a moonshot, Mike The Hardest Workin Man in Showbiz Timlin got the win, and I was there to see it all with my friend Ray. Oh, and Kevin Youkilis, aka The Greek God of Walks, was up to his old tricks. In the bottom of the second inning, after getting behind 02, he fouled off a bunch of pitches from Roy Halladay, last years Cy Young winner, and finally worked a walk. He scored. Later, in the eighth, he walked and scored again. Its an OBPC thing onbase per centage. May 22nd When they dont announce the gametime temperature at Fenway, you know youre in trouble, and tonight they didnt. It was overcast and raw at 705 P.M., when the game started; raw and downright coldwhen it ended at about ten past ten. I still havent warmed up. At 1045, Im typing this with hands that feel like clubs. Tingly clubs. Still, its all good. We won, the Yankees lost down in Texas, and all at once theres a tiny bit of daylight (a game and a half) between us and second place. Ted Lilly pitched extremely well for the Blue Jays tonight, and had a tworun lead going into the sixth inning. That was when Manny Ramirez launched his second home run in the last two games over the leftfield wall and into the night. Its the big dinger thatll get the ink in the newspapers tomorrow, but the key hit of the inningand probably the key to the whole gamewas Mark Bellhorns infield single in the sixth, which caromed off Lillys shin, hurried him from the game, and thus got us into Torontos less than reliable bullpen. Without Bellhorn on first, no chance for Manny to tie things up; QED. And an inning later, Youkilis, the rookiewith the big onbaseaverage reputation, led off with a single and scored what proved to be the winning run. Keith Foulke was once more lightsout in the ninthnine saves in nine opportunitiesand Im two for two this year at Fenway Park. And my hands are finally starting to warm up. See? Its all good. May 23rd Its Vermont Day at Fenway, and were the first ones in Gate E. Last time out I was discouraged by my net play, and the usher in Section 163 told me not to give up. Hes glad to see me back, and Im glad for the support. Steph thinks Im nuts. We get the good spot on the corner, but theres a portable screen set up at third base so only a hooking liner can reach us. And the security guy says I cant go after any balls in fair territory, a rule which seems arbitrary to me. The only balls Ill have a shot at will be liners that bounce off the Monster and back along the wall, and about ten minutes in, thats exactly what Nomar hits. The ball rolls to a stop twenty feet behind us. No one can reach it from the high wall there, but I should be able to drag it closer and scoop it. I climb over the seats and section dividers until Im in position above it. I cant quite reach it, and stretch as far as I can with one hand, just nudging and then covering the balland drop the net. It lies ten feet below me across the foul line. What an idiot. Steph, Im sure, is pretending he doesnt know me. I figure the security guy will come out and confiscate it; at best, hell give me a lecture. Gabe Kaplers witnessed my embarrassment, and saunters over, shaking his head. I think hes going to take the ball from under the net and toss it to someone more deserving to teach me a lesson, but he throws it right to me. Then he takes the net and jogs back out to left with it. He could have used it last night, someone says. For a while Gabe keeps his glove on and holds the net with one hand, but then he says the hell with it and tosses the glove. Manny and Nomar are up, spraying the ball around. When a Manny liner bounces to the side of him, he stabs at it and misses cleanly. See, its not as easy as it looks. After about five minutes of just standing there with the net, he brings it back over. I get a picture of himproof for Trudy. Another guy comes by and asks if that was me he saw up on the Monster a few weeks ago, and I find that I like this minor celebrity. Steph says a Sox photographer just took a picture of me. Were also visited by Chip Ainsworth, the reporter who interviewed me the first time I brought the net. He says we should see a game together from the press box. I worry a little about that blurry line between journalist and fan, but then I think man, the press box! Steve arrives in his YANKEES HATER cap, and I go over to hang out with him and Steph. On the endpages of the John Sandford novel hes reading, hes scored the last two games. Its been a while, and we fall to talking, interrupted from time to time by folks who want to take a picture of him. Were sitting there discussing Mannys hot streak and Wakes last few starts when one of the Sox comes out and signs along the wall two sections down. From the inchhigh brush cut, it can only be Tek. Its his day off, with Mirabelli catching Wake. I excuse myself and climb over the section dividers and then wait in the crush. Go ahead and take the sweet spot, I tell him. Its all yours. Teks signature is neat and readable. Thanks to eBay, Ive seen it dozens of times, both authentic versions and fakes. He never finishes the final kick of the k, so it reads J Varitel, 33. On the pearl it looks superclean, and I thank him and carry it by the seams like some weird breaking ball, making sure not to smudge the ink. I got a shot of you, Steph says. Yeah, Steve says, we got a picture of you pushing those little kids out of the way. Hey, they were pushing me. Wake looks good in the first, striking out his first two batters. Batista looks awful, walking Johnny on four pitches around his ankles. Orlando Hudson doesnt help him, booting Bellhorns easy grounder, and David Ortiz scorches a groundrule double into the seats just past the Pesky Pole. 10 Sox. Manny Ks chasing a 32 pitch, Dauber walks, then Millar walks in a run. Batistas thrown 25 pitches, only 7 for strikes. After Youkilis strikes out, Mirabelli comes up with bases loaded and fouls one behind him, high off the facade of the .406 Club. Last year, a ball hit in that same spot ricocheted off the glass at an angle and landed in the row behind us. I turn, keeping my eye on it, and here it comes, right at me (Steph thinks I think this about every ball). The sun is blinding, and Im not wearing shades, so all I see as it falls is a tiny black dot surrounded by white light. Its going to be just short, and I reach above everyone. I feel it hit, then feel nothing, and I think its gone, that Ive missed itthen look down, and there it is in my glove. Maybe because its the first inning, or because it was a crazy angle, or because the bases are loaded and were up two runs, but the crowd goes nuts. I hold my glove up and take in the applauseunexpected and exhilaratingand slap hands with Steph and Steve. When I sit down, my hearts pounding and Im shivery inside my skin. I thought Id missed it, so its a guilty thrilla freak accomplishment I doubt even now. I dont have time to think about it, because Mirabelli fouls off the next pitch the exact same waycaroming off the same pane of glass and dropping two rows behind Steve. Im up and ready in case it bounces my way, but its smothered and picked up. Batista gets Mirabelli and gets out of it. In the second he has to strike out Dauber to leave them loaded again. This guys terrible, I say. We should be up at least four nothing. Were not hitting with men on, Steve complains, and Mason, a neighbor in the front row, shows us a thirtypage stat sheet that has the season completely broken down. So far with the bases loaded, weve hit two doubles and twelve singles. Johnny and Pokey have the doubles. Johnny and Pokey also have the most hits with bases loaded, three each. Kapler and Bill Mueller are 04, Ortiz, Dauber and Crespo 03. Wake throws an easy third, and we finally cash in on Batista, scoring four. Ortiz has the big hit, a twoout, tworun double, making him 3 for 3 with 3 RBIs. Its 60 and Batistas thrown 90 pitches. Now that Wake has a big lead, he gets sloppy, loading the bases with no outs and going 30 on Delgado. Delgado singles, bringing in two, before Timmy gets a doubleplay ball from Phelps and a firstpitch flyout from Hinske. A sudden roar and wave of applause from the thirdbase side. Its someone famous climbing the stairs between two grandstand sections. Because its Vermont Day, I think maybe its Fisk, a Vermont native, but the tall grayhaired mans surrounded by so much security that I know without even seeing his face that its John Kerry. As if to prove his loyalty, hes wearing a Sox warmup jacket. Later, when he comes back from the concession stand, I see hes in the second row, and I think our seats are better. We pick up another run in the seventh to make it 72, and Timlin and Embree close it with little difficulty, but two things happen that are worth noting. In the eighth, Cesar Crespo, whos turned three double plays today, and missed a fourth only because Bellhorns throw pulled Ortiz off the bag, makes an error and is loudly booed. Then in the ninth, when Francona puts in the hands team and Pokeys name is announced, the crowd gives him a sustained ovation. Its taken Pokey three years to get here, but now that he is, hes a favorite. Even among skeptics like Steph and Steve and myself, whenever a ball skips through the middle or drops in short center, we say, Pokey woulda had it. We win, but on the outoftown scoreboard, the Yanks are up 73 on the Rangers. In the car, its a final, 83 Yanks, so were still only a game and a half up. When we get home, I find out that Bill Mueller wasnt even there today. He was out in Arizona, getting a second opinion on his knee. Regardless of the result, its bad news. Youkilis better take some extra grounders. My third straight game at Fenway and my third straight win. Im starting to feel like if Id been here from the start of the season, wed be ten games in first (God will get me for saying that). Stewart came with his son, Steph, both of them equipped with gloves. Doug Mirabelli banged a foul off the glass facing of the .406 Club in the first inning; Stew turned, stretched and caught it neatly just as the sun came out. The crowd up the firstbase line gave him a spirited ovation. Stew had class enoughand wit enoughto tip his cap. It was a nice moment, and Im glad his son was there to see it. So Wakefield gets the win, the Red Sox sweep the Blue Jays, and our bullpen was pretty much untouchable throughout. Kevin Youkilis? Glad you asked. The Greek God of Walks reached base three times (one fielders choice, two bases on balls) and scored once. |
May 24th Seems like we always have a day off just when were getting hot. It gives me time to prepare for tomorrows first meeting with Oakland since last years Division Seriesbound to be loud. Its a sweet matchup Schilling versus Tim Hudson, whos 51 with a 2.90 ERA. Its Foulkes first game against his old club, and Terry Franconas, and of course Scott Hatteberg will get a couple of hits, and maybe Johnny Damon. Mark Bellhorn was also an A once, though a lowprofile one. With all the turnover lately (and Dan Duquettes endless fire sale of our best prospects), its hard to find a club that doesnt have some Sox connection. Tonights the Nomar Bowl in Malden, where dozens of Boston sports celebrities and their fans get together at Town Lanes and roll a couple of strings for charity. My friend Pauls wife Lisa is taking some balls for Nomie to sign, and one of thems for me. May 25th Its eighty degrees in Hartford; in Boston its fifty. I thought Id be warm enough in a corduroy shirt, but Im not. Waiting with me outside Gate E is a guy with a giant black wig. I think hes one of Damons Disciples, but its a MannyasBuckwheat wig, a wild, lopsided fro. He and a friend are sitting on the Monster; tomorrow theyre in the .406 Clubthey shelled out for the very tickets Id seen on eBay and seriously contemplated buying, just cause Ive never sat there. The .406 Club has rules no jeans, and you have to bring a credit card to buy drinks (theres a free buffet). During the standard tour of Fenway, the guide says when they finished construction, they realized that because of the thickness of the glass, the room is virtually soundproof. They had to install speakers so customers could hear the game. Any other day, Id say the .406 Club is no place to watch the Sox, but tonight the idea of being inside is tempting. The gates roll open and I hoof it down to the corner in left. I nab a couple of balls in BP and report my haul to my favorite usher Bob, then stop by Autograph Alley to see whos signing. Its Rich Gale, a pitcher who was with us briefly in 84, then came back to coach in the early nineties. I remember that he pitched in Japan, and ask him to sign his picture with Ganbatte! You mean Ganbatte mas! he says. It turns out he pitched for the Hanshin Tigers. The Red Sox of Japan! Thats rightand I was there in 85, the first year we won it. That must have been pretty wild. Oh yeah, he says, and stops writing, as if he hasnt thought of that time in a while, and his expression is both ecstatic and guilty, as if hes recalling infinite, ultimate pleasures. I have him add HANSHIN TIGERS 8586 and leave him with a loud Ganbatte! Over at the seats, Steves reading a suspense novel. Our neighbor Mason delivers the bad news Bill Muellers having arthroscopic knee surgery and will be out at least six weeks. Its another blow, but Youkilis has done such a good job offensively that theres no panic. If Nomar gets back soon, we can put Pokey at second, as planned, slide Bellhorn over to third, and still have a solid backup. Again, were all thinking of that magical day when Trot and Nomar come back, when right now were playing fine without them. Temperature at game time, Carl Beane announces, fortyeight degrees. It makes me think of spring training, and how happy those Minnesotans were to escape their weather. Here were proud of it. Fortyeight? Itll get down to fortytwo by games end. Tack on the windchill and were talking midthirties. Its overcast and very chilly tonightshit, call a spade a spade, its cold. My colleague Stewart ONan is undaunted. He shows up applecheeked and grinning, toting a bag of scuffed balls he shagged in BP. (Proudest acquisition a David Ortiz swat.) The Weston High School Chorusall nine thousand of them, apparentlyline the first and thirdbase lines to sing the national anthem, and the sound, which comes bouncing back from the Green Monster in perfect echoes that double each line, is spooky and wonderful. Stewart, meanwhile, is off trying to give Gabe Kapler a photo of Kapler holding Stews custom flyshagging netwhich, some wits might argue, Kapler could put to good use during his tours of duty in right field. The Red Sox (who will go on to romp in this one) put up just a single run in the bottom of the firstnot much, considering that they once again send seven men to the plate. The Sox stats this year with bases loaded and two out are pretty paralyzing just 12 for 54, only two of those for extra bases (both doubles), all the rest mere singles. This time Kevin Cowboy Up Millar is the goat, grounding weakly to first. He leaves two more on base in the third, and leaves em loaded again in the fourth. The Sox score three that frame, but Millar has stranded eight men all by himself, and the game isnt half over. I bet his agent wont be bringing that stat up at contract time. Even without Millar doing much (anything, really), its 91 after five, Tim Hudsons gone, Oaklands baked, and Im on my way to my fourthstraight Fenway win. Mark Bellhorn gets 5 RBIs, Manny Ramirez hits another home run, and Kevin Youkilis reaches base four times in five atbats, scoring twice. There are lots of things to like about this game in spite of the cold. But maybe the besttheres this little kid, okay? Ten, maybe twelve years old. And late in the game, after a lot of people have taken off, he grabs one of the frontrow seats, and I spot him and Stewart deep in conversation, cap visor to cap visor. They dont know each other from Adam, and theres got to be thirty years between them, but baseball has turned them into instant old cronies. Anyone looking over their way would take them for father and son. And whats wrong with that? May 26th Two number fives on the downward slide Mr. Kim returns to Korea for unspecified treatment of his back and hip, while the Yankees give Donovan Osborne his outright release. Its late May, and the Yankees havent figured out their rotation. Having Bronson Arroyo definitely gives us the edge. Tonight its the struggling Derek Lowe against Mark Redman, 32 with a 3.60 ERA. By comparison, Lowes ERA is 6.02. We have Stephs sax recital and then dinner after, and get back in the As fifth. Its 62 Sox with two down and no one on. I figure Lowe must be throwing okay. Kotsay doubles, Byrnes singles him in. Chavez homers off the wall behind Section 34, and its 65. I wonder if its meif I should turn the TV off and come back later. Im glad I dont. In our sixth, Johnnys on third with one down. Ortiz cant deliver him, and with two down and first open, Macha has Redman walk Manny. At this point, Redmans thrown 120 pitches. The switchhitting Tek is coming up, so with his relievers up and warm, Macha can choose which side of the plate he hits from. He lets Redman pitch to him. Tek hits one onto Lansdowne Street and weve got a fourrun cushion again. Anastacio Martinez relieves Lowe, giving up three straight hits and a run before Embree comes on and gets out of it with a doubleplay ball. In the As eighth, they have two on and one out when Billy McMillon stings one down the firstbase line. McCarty gloves it behind the bag in foul territory; his momentum takes him halfway to the tarp before he spins and throws to Timlin covering. McMillon slides and gets tangled up with Timlinhes out! The replays crazy Ive never seen anyone make that play so far in foul ground, and perfectly. Thats exactly why McCartys on the team. It makes me wish I could send him back to 1986 to spell Billy Buck for an inning. In the ninth, McCarty shines again, with a sweeping snatch of a bounced throw by Bellhorn, helping Foulke to a onetwothree inning for his tenth straight save. On the postgame show, Eck tries to figure out Lowes problem. Of the fifth, Eck says, Its a mystical inning, and we crack up. Groovy Eck with his Farrah Fawcett wings. But hes right too (right on, Eck!) When you win a game and your ERA goes up, you know you didnt pitch too good. May 27th 9 A.M. Neither Stew nor I made it to the ballyard last night. I had a PEN dinner in Bostons Back Bay and Stewart had his sons saxophone recitalwhich, he assured me, is nonnegotiable. The Red Sox did not miss us. Derek Lowe was once more far from perfect, but the Sox bats stayed hot and in his start against Oakland, Lowe was just good enough to go six and eke out the win. The Red Sox rolled to their fifth straight, their seventh in their last eight games. But I watch SportsDesk this morning musing on my Yankees essaythe one where I talked about how we hate what we fearand looking at my new hat, which was sent to me from yankeeshater.com. Because the Yankees have also been winning, and while weve been doing it at home, theyve been doing it on the road, which is a tougher proposition. They came from behind last night at Camden Yards not just once but twice, finally putting the Orioles away 129. So in spite of this nifty streak of ours, were still only a game and a half in front. Two Sox losses combined with just two Yankee wins, and were back in second place. This is what the Yankees do. They hang around. Those suckers lurk. 1030 P.M. The summers disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, opens this weekend, but disaster struck tonight at Fenway Park, as Bostons brave little fivegame winning streak went byebye in a big way. Oakland beat the Red Sox like a drum, pounding out 17 hits on their way to a 152 win. Me, I knew it was going to happen. I went to the game with my nephew, Jon, who goes to school in Boston. He came over to my hotel room before the game and tossed my hat on the bed, which everyoneknows is just about the worst luck in the worldtalk about bad mojo! But I dont blame him; the kid just didnt know. Also, most (or maybe all) major league teams now insist on a fiveman pitching rotation, and our fifth man, Bronson Arroyo, while promising, is still very much a work in progress. That fifth man in the rotation is about streetching the starting pitchingand that, of course, is all about the money. Weve been there before in this book, and will undoubtedly be there again. But I can remember a time, childrenI believe it was 1959when the White Sox went to the World Series with what was essentially a threeman rotation. Of course, those were the days when a good pitcher still got paid in five figures and a man could take his whole family to the ballyard for twenty bucks, parking included (and smoke a White Owl in the grandstand, if he was so inclined). Im not saying those were better baseball daysbut Im not saying they werent, either. In the midst of all this, Kevin Youkilis drew a walk in his last atbat. He still hasnt played in a major league game where hes failed to reach base. A final note before I pack it in for the night I took myself off this afternoon to see Still, We Believe, an entertaining documentary which chronicles the starcrossed Red Sox team of 2003, the one that voyaged so far only to tear out its hull (not to mention the hearts of its fans) on those cruel Yankee reefs in the seventh game of the American League Championship Series. This film is currently playing in theaters all over New England, plus a few New York venues (where it is attended largely by sadists in Yankee caps, one would suppose), and probably nowhere else. Its a charming, funny, sweetly poignant film. Its token efforts to explore the Mind of Managementalways supposing Management has a Mind, a hypothesis with little evidence to support itarent very interesting, but when it focuses on the fortunes of four fans, its a lot more successful. One is a young man who is wheelchairbound due to an accident; two are semidaffy (but very endearing) young women I kept thinking of as Laverne and Shirley; the fourth is Angry Bill. Angry Bill is a piece of work overweight, hypertensive (he suffers persistent nosebleeds during the 03 postseason), full of nervous energy, bursting with cynical pronouncements that barely cover his bruised baseball fans heart. This guy has lived and died with the Sox for so long (mostly the latter), that he sums up an entire New England mindset when hestates, in effect, that the Sox are always gonna lose, he knows theyre gonna pull an el foldo in August just as sure as he knows the suns gonna come up over Boston Haaabaaa in the east, and if they dont pull an el foldo in August theyll pull a tank job in September, just as sure as the suns gonna go down over Attleboro in the west. And yet, with Boston ahead during the early going of that climactic Game 7 in October of 2003, Angry Bill briefly allows himself to become Hopeful Billbecause the Red Sox do this to us, too every year at some point they turn into Lucy holding the football, and against all our best intentions (and our knowing that those who do not learn from history are condemnedfucking CONDEMNED!to repeat it) we turn into Charlie Brown running once more to kick it, only to have it snatched away again at the last moment so we land flat on our backs, screaming AUGGGH! at the top of our lungs. And when, after Grady Little leaves Pedro in long after even the most casual baseball fan knows he is toastyfried, broiled, baked, cooked to a turn, stick a fork in im, hes donewhen the coup de grce is delivered by Aaron Boone long after Pedro has trudged to the shower, Angry Bill stares with a kind of wondering disbelief into the documentarians camera (at us in the audience, seven months later, seven weeks into a new season later, us with our tickets to tonights shellacking by the Oakland As in our pockets) and delivers what is for me the absolute capper, the jilted Red Sox fans Final Word Dont let your kids grow up to be sports fans, Angry Bill advises, and at this point the movie leaves himmercifullyto contemplate the Patriots, who will undoubtedly improve matters for his battered psyche by winning the Super Bowlbut Im sure Angry Bill would admit (if not right out loud then in his heart) that winning the Super Bowl isnt the same as winning the World Series. Not even in the same universe as winning the World Series. Meanwhile, the Yankeesthe Evil Empire, our old nemesishave come from behind to beat Baltimore once again, and our lead in the AL East is down to a mere half game. Im off to bed knowing that the boogeyman has inched a little bit closer to the closet door. May 28th Its the big holiday weekend. Once the kids get home from school, weve got to drive down to the Rhode Island shore and help my inlaws open up the beach house, so after lunch I run around town trying to fit in my last errands. Im at the Stop n Shop when I remember the new Reverse the Curse ice cream, and there it is in the freezer section. The carton is boring and generic. Id hoped for more interesting packaging, maybe a nod to the Monster that I could use for a penny bank. Still, the ice cream should be good. We poke along I95 with all the other Memorial Day traffic. Trudy and her parents have been lifting and cleaning all day, and dont feel like cooking, so we go out for dinner. By the time we make it back, the Sox are down 41 to Seattle in the fifth. Ichiros just driven in a run, and steals third on Pedro, who has that dull, longsuffering look he gets when things arent going right. Theres only one out, and Edgar Martinez is up. Pedro gets him swinging, then gets the next guy to pop up. In our fifth, Millar and Youkilis tag Joel (pronounced JoeEl, as if hes from Krypton) Pineiro for backtoback doubles, making it 42. See, all the Sox needed was us watching. Pokey Ks, but with two gone Pineiro walks Johnny and Mark Bellhorn to load them for Big David. On the first pitch, Ortiz lofts a long fly to right. Ichiro goes back sideways, and keeps going, all the way to the wall, where he leaps. He hangs there, folded over the low wall, only his legs showing. We cant see the ball, but the fans behind the bullpen fence are jumping up and downits gone, a grand slam, and were up 64. In St. Pete, the Yanks have beaten the DRays, so we need to hold on to stay in first. Pedro settles down. In the eighth he gives way to Embree, who throws a scoreless inning. J. J. Putz comes on for the Ms and gives up a smoked single through the middle to Manny (it makes Putz riverdance) and then, after a long atbat, a double to Dauber off the bullpen wall. Bob Melvin decides to walk Tek to set up the double play, which Kapler foils by popping up. Putz goes 20 on Youkilis and has to come in with a strike; Youkilis slaps it down the rightfield line for a double and two more insurance runs, and the PA plays the corny old Hartford Whalers theme, Brass Bonanza. Foulke closes, but its a battle. He throws 30 pitches and leaves runners on second and third for an 84 final. A tougher game than expected from the lastplace Ms, but El Jefe (Big Papi, D.O., David as Goliath) brought us back. May 29th Its Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, but Ive had all of Boston and Fenway Park I can take for a whileseven games in eight days is plenty, especially given the uniformly shitty quality of the weather.And thats not all. Hotel living gets creepy after a while, even when you can afford room service (maybe especially if you can afford room service). Also, my wife headed back to Maine after the PEN dinner on Wednesday, and I miss her. But as I run north under sunshiny, breezy skies, I keep an eye on the dashboard clock, and when 1 P.M. rolls around, I hit the radios SEEK button until I find the voices of Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano, comfort food for the ear. Listening to a baseball game on the radio may be outmoded in this age of computers and satellite television, but it hath its own particular pleasures; with each inning you build your own Fenway of the mind from scrapheap memories and pure imagination. Today the wind is playing tricks, Wakefields knuckleball is staying up in the zone, and the usually lackluster Mariner hitters pounce on it right from the git. In the second inning a Seattle batter hits a towering fly foul of first, but the wind pushes it back into fair territory. Mark Bellhorn, today playing second, tries to stay with it, cant. The ball bonks him on the wrist and falls for a double. I see all this quite vividly (along with Manny Ramirezs homer to left, hit so hard it leaves a vapor trail, Troop assures me) as I drive north between Yarmouth and Freeport with that same wind pushing my own car. Since I cant read a page of my current book between innings (the galley of Chuck Hogans Prince of Thieves is now tucked away in my green 1999 AllStar Game souvenir carrybag), I punch the CD button after each third out and listen to two minutestimed on my wristwatchof Larry McMurtrys The Wandering Hill, volume two of the Berrybender Narratives. I have found that two minutes gets me back to the game just in time for the first pitch of the next inning. In this fashion, the 240mile trip to Bangor passes agreeably enough. One wishes the Red Sox could have won, but its hard to root against Freddy Garcia, a great pitcher who is this year laboring for a bad ball clubin the Mariners. And the worst the Sox can do on the current home stand is 64; one may reasonably hope for 82. One may even hope the hapless Devil Rays will beat the Yankees tonight, and we will retain our halfgame hold on the top spot a little longer. Waiting at home in the mail is the Nomar ball from the Nomar Bowl, a nice souvenir of his lost season. My email inbox is sluggish, filled with pictures of Lisa at the Town Lanes with Nomar, with Dauber, with David Ortiz, with Mike Timlin, with Alan Embree, even with Danny Ainge. Everyones smiling, though I dont see any players actually bowling. The Yanks beat the Rays 53, so theyre in first place. I smother my sorrows in a bowl of Reverse the Curse and read the sports page. My Pirates, amazingly, are at .500, thanks to a pair of walkoff homers to take a twin bill from the Cubs. And it says Nomars scheduled to start his rehab stint at Pawtucket tomorrowthe best news I could hope for. 950 P.M. I take my wife to the crazyweather movie, which we both enjoy. I walk the dog as soon as we get back, then hit the TV remote and click on Headline News. Weekends, the ticker at the bottom of the screen runs continuous sports scores, and ohhhh, shit, the Yankees won again. Theyve regained the top spot in the AL East, one theyve held for almost five consecutive seasons, leaving me to wonder how in the name of Cobb and Williams you pound a stake through this teams heart and make them lie still. Or if its even possible. May 30th Weve got Monster seats and get going early. Im taking the kids while Trudys bringing her parents from the shore. The weathers clear, traffics light on I84, and a cop stops me for speeding. So the morning, which started so promising, turns bitter even before we hit the Mass Pike. I worry that the feeling will linger and ruin the whole day, but there are enough miles to put it behind us. We hit Lansdowne Street, where the sausage vendors are open early for the family crowd. A woman Trudys mothers age has a sweatshirt that says FOULKE THE YANKEES. Im sure that Stew was at the ballpark today for what turned out to be an extraordinary game, and probably in the prime real estate of my secondrow seats next to the Red Sox dugout, but I enjoyed it fine at home in my living room with my wife close by, propped up on the couch with the computer on her lap and the dog by her side. Ive come down with a fairly heavy cold as a result of my week of chilly carousal at Fenway, and there is something especially satisfyingakin to the pleasures of selfpity, I supposeabout watching a baseball game with the box of Kleenex near one hand and the box of Sucrets near the other, coughing and sneezing your way through the innings as the shadows on both the infield and your living room carpet gradually creep longer. This game had a little bit of everything. Curt Schilling flirted with perfection into the sixth; Keith Foulke blew his first save of the season (his first blown save in his last twentyfour attempts, it turns out) when Raul Ibanez hit a dramatic threerun home run, putting the Mariners up 75 in the eighth inning; the Red Sox came right back to tie it in the bottom of the eighth. Then, in the bottom of the twelfth, Sox sub David McCarty crushed a 30 fastball to what is the deepest part of the park to give the Red Sox the win. And at the risk of sounding like Angry Bill in Still, We Believe, I called the shot. Yeah! Me! Id claim my wife as a witness to this feat of prediction, except she was pretty heavy into the computer solitaire by then and I doubt like hell that she was listening. The Mariners fourth pitcher of the afternoon, a young man with the unfortunate name of J. J. Putz, entered the game with a reputation for wildness, but was into his third inning of exceptional relief work (he struck out both David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez in the eleventh) when the roof fell in. After getting the first out in the twelfth, he hit Jason Varitek with a soft breaking pitch.Enter McCarty, inserted into the lineup mostly as a defensive replacement. The count ran to 30. Most batters are taking all the way on such a count, but Terry Francona gives most of his guys the automatic green light on 30. (I like this strategy as much as I loathe his refusal to bunt runners along in key situations.) I saidmostly to the dog, since my wife was paying elzilcho attention, Watch this. Putz is gonna throw it down the middle and McCarty is gonna send everyone home in time for supper. Which is just what happened, and thank God the camera did not linger long on the headhanging misery of young Mr. J. J. Putz as McCarty went into his home run trot. These are the kind of games you either win or feel really bad about losing, especially at home. I feel badly for Putz (pronounced Pootz, thank you very much), but the bottom line? We won it. And the bonus? The Yankees lost to Tampa Bay (who just barely held on), which means were back in first place. There are three major milestones in a baseball season Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day. The first of these milestones in the 2004 season comes tomorrow, when we play a makeup game with Baltimore, and for a team with so many quality players on the disabled list, were doing pretty damned well going into the first turn. Especially when we can look forward to two of thoseNomar Garciaparra and Trot Nixoncoming back between Memorial Day and the Fourth. A third, Bill Mueller, may return to the club between the Fourth and Labor Day. That brings us back to Kevin Youkilis, Muellers replacement, who has now begun to attract so much notice that Terry Francona has had to publicly state that no, Youkilis will not be keeping the job at third once Muellers fit and ready to play no matter how well the GGOWdoes between now and the happy day of Muellers return. A piece in the Portland Sunday Telegram today by Kevin Thomas (who knows Youkilis from Youkiliss days with the Portland Sea Dogs, the BoSox doubleA affiliate) points out that Youkiliss locker is on the far wall of the clubhouse, the traditional place for players who are just up for a cup of coffee in the bigsas is undoubtedly the case with Andy Dominique, who delivered todays gametying hit in the bottom of the eighth. Thomas also points to previous Red Sox minor leaguers such as Wilton Veras, who came up to play third with high hopes, only to fade into obscurity. Obscurity would not seem to be in young Mr. Youkiliss future, however. I know Im going to be playing, he told Kevin Thomas in todays interview, speaking with quiet certainty, and with every passing game his onbase percentage seems simultaneously harder to believe for a rookie and less like a fluke. Moved up to the twohole today, all Youkilis did was gothree for five, with three runs scored. His batting average is .317, and his OBP is hovering right around .425. The fans know that Bill Mueller may have to battle for his old spot back, no matter what Terry Francona has to say on the subject. It sounds like theyre booing the kid when he walks to the plate, but the grin on Youkiliss face says he knows better; that sound sweeping around the ballpark like a soft wind is the first syllable of his last name YoukYoukYouk Two weeks ago he was playing tripleA ball in Pawtucket; tomorrow, on Memorial Day, hes going to be playing the Orioles before a packed house, for the firstplace Boston Red Sox. And I dont want to jinx the kid, but do you know what I think, after having watched him in almost all of those games? I think a star is born. After the McCarty walkoff job, Netman learns from fan services that the Sox have decided to ban his net from Fenway. Like the speeding ticket, it could taint the day, but I wont let it. Ive had a great run with the net, and it was a wild game todayhalf a nohitter topped by a lateinning comeback and then the tension of extra innings released with McCartys gamewinner. The Yanks lost at the Trop, so were in first place. Happy birthday, Manny. Hell, Im better with the glove anyway. May 31st In response to flooding on the border of Haiti and the Dominican, David Ortiz, Manny and Pedro are joining with the Sox to collect donations for aid. I send a check, and while this book wont be out for another six months, Im sure the victims down there will still need the support then. The address is Dominican Relief Effort, Red Sox Foundation, Fenway Park, Boston, MA 02215. Of Bostons four established starting pitchersthe other three being Pedro Martinez, Tim Wakefield and Curt SchillingDerek Lowe has been the most obviously troubled. In his last three winning starts, all at home and all shaky, his teammates have been wearing their red jerseys instead of the usual white ones, so its no surprise that those were the onesthey were wearing when they took the field for their makeup game against the Orioles. It was Lowes best start in weeks, but this time the red tops didnt help. The real problem today wasnt Lowe so much as it was the middle relief. Like most teams in the wretchedly overstocked major leagues, Boston cant boast a lot in that regard. Yes, theres Timlin and Embree, but Francona doesnt like to throw them in when the Sox are down by more than a couple, and both of them have worked a lot lately and needed the day off. So it was the PawSox Pitching Corps, mostly, and no way were they equal to the task. The Sox were down 90 before you could say Lansdowne Street. Weve played from behind a lot on this home stand, and have come from behind a lotbut not from this far behind. Not against Oakland, not against Seattle, and not against Baltimore today. So now were off to the West Coast, Nomars almost ready to come back (always supposing his rehabbed ankle stays rehabbed after some actual game action with the tripleA club, where he went 0 for 3 last night), and the first third of the season is over. The biggest surpriseat least to mehas been how quickly, after the initial scramble, the teams aligned themselves just as they have in previous years. Pick of the first fifty the Sox taking six of seven from the Bronx Bombers. And in spite of that, weve reached the Memorial Day marker fiftyone games into the season in a dead tie for first with them. Who woulda thunk it? Steve calls, and we dissect the game. They came out flat, we agree. But, overall so far, Steve says, were playing way over our heads. Look at these guys whove been getting it done for us Youkilis, McCarty, Bellhorn. Nomars not too far away, and Trot. Sure, were headed out West and the Yankees are coming home, but historically we do okay out there. Hes more optimistic than I ama raritybut hes right too. And yet, after I hang up, Im still worried about Lowe, whose ERA must be pushing 7.00, and who hasnt made it out of the sixth inning in over a month. The Boston Globes Dan Shaughnessy. Where it festers. In the first two meetings of this year, we beat them by scores of 62 and 52, and the Yankees big offseason acquisition, Alex Rodriguez (who Red Sox fans see, rightly or wrongly, as a player stolen out from under our very noses by George Ill Spend Anything Steinbrenner) went 0 for 8. Well enough. In the third game, however, The Team That Will Not Die is leading the Sox 73 in the fourth inning. Shaughnessy again only three collapses approximate this one the 1915 Giants led the Boston Braves by fifteen games on the Fourth of July and finished ten and a half behind; the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers led the Giants by thirteen games August 11, got tied on the final day of the season, then lost the playoff; and the 1964 Phillies led the Cardinals by six and a half games with twelve to play, then lost ten straight. The Giants, Dodgers and Phillies eventually won championships. The Red Sox Well, do we need to finish that? Fuck, no, wes fans. Who went to the unusual length of issuing an apology after the gamefat lot of good it did us. Who will not be eligible for the win today, Im happy to report. When Zim was the Red Sox field general, Sox pitcher Bill Lee once called him the designated gerbil. Harvey Frommer and Frederic J. Frommer, Red Sox vs. Yankees The Great Rivalry (Sports PublishingBoston Baseball, 2004). This is a Bostonbiased book, but most of the color photographs show celebrating Yankees and downcast Red Soxwonder why. Ibid. The Yankees won todays game, 73. The final game of the series will be played tomorrow at 11 A.M. (its the annual Patriots Day game in Boston), and with todays win and tomorrows matchupBostons Bronson Arroyo versus the Yankees Kevin Brownthe Yankees have an excellent chance of earning a splitcurse them. The loser, Im very sorry to say, happened to be exRed Sox closer Tom Gordon, the star of a book I wroteand in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Flash will be the Red Sox closer forever. Sorry, Mr. Steinbrenner, but theres not a thing you can do about that one. Heres what I understand about hockey Bulky men wearing helmets and carrying sticks in their gauntleted hands skate around for a while on my TV; then some guy comes on and sells trucks. |
Sometimes chicks come on and sell beer. The record he shares, perhaps not so coincidentally, with fellow former Portland Sea Dog Kevin Millar. SO There was a time when you could see The Wave going around at almost all baseball parks and football stadiums; to my knowledge, only at Fenway does it survive. Survive? Nay, sir or madam, it thrives! Tonight it went around and around in the eighth, when the Sox sent eleven men to the dish and scored six times. I myself refuse to wave unless I am also allowed to scream Sieg heil! at the top of my lungs. 48 degrees, according to Channel 4 weather when I got back to my hotel. The start of last nights game was held up for an hour and a half in anticipation of rain showers that never came. In truth, Tekfor some reason only known to himself, Stewart ONan always calls him Tek Moneydid not try very hard to avoid this pitch; it was a classic case of taking one for the team if I ever saw one. And, as a man who got to watch Don Baylor play, Ive seen my share. Greek God of Walksbut you knew that. June The June Swoon June 1st Last night in Louisville Nomar went 2 for 3 with a walk, a reason for some optimism. I know hes not going to solve all our problems when he comes back, but having a live righty bat wont hurt. Were playing late in Anaheim, a 1005 start. I catch some of the pregameJerry the former Angel back where he startedbut by game time Im so busy finishing up everything I didnt get done during the day that I miss the first couple of innings. When I tune in, its bedtime, 1130, and its only the top of the third. Were up 21 and Colon has runners on first and second with one out. Millar singles to left, and Sveum sends Manny, but Manny decides not to go. Good thing, because the throw from Jose Guillen is a strike. Youkilis steps up, and I think were going to break the game open, but the firstbase ump calls an obvious check swing a strike and then the homeplate ump rings him up on a pitch well outside. Youkilis swears, and Jerry says the rookies got to be careful not to get tossed. Colon goes 31 on Pokey before unleashing his good stuff, and we come away with nothing. Through three weve left seven men on base. Id love to stay up and see how it turns out, but its almost midnight. Its a defeat, in a way, voluntarily leaving an interesting game in progress. Ill feel disconnected and behind until I read the score in the paper tomorrow morning. For now, I just have to trust Arroyo will hold them and that our big guys will get to Colon. June 2nd We lost, 76, though only a ninthinning tworun shot by Dauber off Troy Percival made it look that close. We had a threerun lead at one point, but Arroyo didnt make it out of the sixth. With the score tied, Vladimir Guerrero ripped a tworun double, and we never really threatened after that. And the Yanks beat the Orioles again, running their record against Baltimore to 1,0000 over the last couple years, so were a full game back. And while the paper agrees that Nomar could join the big club as early as Tuesday against the Padres, it also says that Trots had yet another setback with his quad and will sit out several extended springtraining games. Fifty games into the season, its hard to imagine there are that many guys still stuck down in Fort Myers. The facility must be a ghost town, lots of empty parking spots. Even while hes sitting out, Trot will take batting practice; one of the pitchers hell be facingRamiro Mendoza. SK Were on the West Coast, graveyard of many great Red Sox teams, and we blew a lead last night while the Yankees were holding on to one. Also holding sole possession of first place. I think that in the steamy depths of July, we may look back on May, when the Yankees kept pace, and shake our heads, and say, Sheesh, wont anything stop them? SO Hey, dont ascribe them any superpowers. Thats what theyre going to be saying about us. Already around the league people are wondering how were doing it with all these supersubs. Since I missed last nights game, I make a point of staying up for tonights, even scoring it on a Remy Report sheet. Johnnys not playing; Id heard his knee is still bothering him from the ball he fouled off itand that had to have been a month ago. On the mound for the Angels is lefty Jarrod Washburn, who was Cy Young material two years back but hasnt thrown well since. Weve got Pedro going. Hes said he hasnt been able to throw his curve much because of the cold weather (the grip, I suppose), so Im discouraged in the first when Vladimir Guerrero yokes a hanging curve over the wall in left for a tworun shot. Don Orsillo takes this opportunity to inform us that the Yanks have come from being down 50 to beat the Os 65. I dont know who I hate more, the Yankees for being the Yankees or the Os for rolling over. Manny gets one back in the second with a solo blast to dead center, and in the third an Ortiz sac fly brings in Bellhorn to tie the game (to a healthy Lets go, Red Sox chant). But in the bottom of the inning Guerrero puts the Angels in the lead again with a tworun double. Neither starter has anything. The Sox chase Washburn in the fourth with six straight hits, scoring five. Wed have more, but Ramon Ortiz comes on and gets Millar to bounce into an easy 643 DP. Still, weve come back to take a 74 lead on the road, and Im happy I stayed up to watch this one. In the bottom of the inning, Guerrero hits a sac fly to score Bengie Molina, making it 75. Vladi has all five of their RBIs. Its midnight, past the Soxs bedtime, and their bats go the way of Cinderellas coach. The rest of the game, they manage just one twoout single. Pedros done after David Ecksteins fourth single of the night (the former Sox prospect will go 5 for 5, the Angels first three batters a preposterous 12 for 13) and a fourpitch walk to Chone (pronounced Shawn) Figgins. Im glassy, a little pissed off but dull and punchy, fatalistic. Timlin comes on to face Guerrero and ends up facing the leftfield fence, watching a threerun shot knock around the rocks out there. Its 87 and Guerrero has all eight RBIs. He pops out of the dugout for a wellearned tip of the cap. The Angels add two more in the seventh, when Foulke, coming in early in hopes of keeping it close, lets two of Timlins runners score. Guerreros in the middle of the rally again, knocking in his ninth run of the night. Sitting there by myself in the dark house, facing the screen, I have nothing to distract myself from the terrible baseball Im seeing. Theres no one to commiserate with or to help absorb the loss; its all mine. Weve hit the ball well enough, and while our outfield isnt close to their cannonarmed trio of Jose Guillen, Raul Mondesi and Vladi Guerrero, weve fielded decently, but our pitching has been horrendous. All three pitchers we ran out there tonight got their butts whipped. By the ninth inning, as Francisco KRod Rodriguez strikes out David Ortiz and then Manny, Im in a sour mood, blaming the Sox for my own impatience and irritability. The finals 107, the third time in a week weve given up double digitsand we came in with the leagues best ERA. Its one oclock, only a threehour game, though with all the scoring it feels like four, four and a half. I feel crappy and blue. I feel like Ive earned the day off tomorrow. June 3rd Bostons on the West Coast, and I hate it. We always seem to do poorly out there during the regular season, and the pennant hopes of more than oneRed Sox team have been buried in places like Anaheim and Oakland. This year is looking like no exception. The Angels have now beaten us twice in a row, and in both cases weve come from behind only to blow the lead again. Youch. And when they go out there, I always feel as if the Olde Town Team (Boston Globe writer Dan Shaughnessys term) has voyaged over the curve of the earth and clean out of sight. News travels faster than it used to, grantedI can get game highlights on NESN instead of just a bareass score on the morning radiobut details are still pretty thin unless you actually stay up and watch the game, as ONan was threatening to do last night (and gosh, he must have gone to bed grumpy in the wee hours, if he did). What I want most of all is a box score, dammit, and there wont be one until tomorrow, by which time last nights game will already be old and cold. Or maybe Bostons West Coast swing and current threegame losing streak are only cover stories for a deeper malaise. Later, in August and September, Ill dumbly drop my neck and accept the yoke of fancitizenship in Red Sox Nation, but in June and July I resist a rather distasteful truth as summer deepens, I find that instead of me gripping the baseballapologies to Jim Boutonthe baseball is gripping me. This morning is a perfect case in point. The alarm is set for 730 A.M., because I dont really have to get up until quarter of eight. But I find myself wideawake at 615, staring at the ceiling and wondering if the Red Sox managed to come back from a 42 deficit, which was where I left them. Im also wondering if the Yankees, who were playing Baltimore at home, managed to win yet again. Im thinking that the Orioles, with good hitting and fair pitching, must have managed to beat the Yanks at least once. Im also wondering what Nomar Garciaparras status is, and if theres any update on Trot Nixon. By 630 I can stand it no longer. I get out of bed (still cursing my own obsessive nature) and switch off the alarm. It will not be needed today. I go to the TV and have only to punch the ON button; its already on NESN, NESN is right where I left off seven hours ago, NESN is where the electronic Cyclops in my study is gonna be for most of the summer. Just like last summer. (And the summer before.) A moment later Im sitting there on the rug in my ratty Red Sox workout shorts, hair standing up all over my head (Your hair is excited, my wife says when its this way in themorning), looking at Jayme Parker, who is for some incomprehensible reason doing the sports today on location from Foxwoods Casino, and although shes as goodlooking as ever (in her pink suit Jayme looks as cool as peppermint ice cream), all the news is buttugly the Sox blew their lead and lost, the Yankees came from behind and won. The Evil Empire now leads the AL East by two games. Even Roger Clemens, the pitcher thenSox general manager Dan Duquette proclaimed all but washedup and then traded away, won last night; hes 80 for the Astros. The Red Sox continue their West Coast swing tomorrow night. Its way too early to liken this particular tour of duty to the Bataan Death March (although that simile has done more than cross my mind in other years, on other nightmare visits to Anaheim, Oakland, Seattle, and yes, even Kansas City, where we go next), but not too early to restate my original scripture on the whole, Id rather be at Foxwoods. Franconas talking like Nomar will be back on Tuesday and that hell be used as a DH for a while, letting Pokey, Marky Mark and Youk stay on the field and in the lineup. Ultimately though, hell have to sit someone. Pokeys the glove and the glue, Bellhorns the tablesetter, but its hard to pull Youk after how well hes played. For his .318 average and .446 OBP, hes been named Mays AL Rookie of the Month. A stray stat in the paper since 2001, the Yankees are 4417 against the Os. Make that 4517, as the Os succumb once again. Theyre under .500 now. The problem, I think, is that the Os are basically a cheaper version of the Yankssoso pitching backed by lots of freeagent bats. Like the Yanks, theyre designed to overwhelm mediocre clubs, a wise enough strategy in this postexpansion era (the same strategy the Yanks used in the 50s, when their ace was the lackluster Whitey Ford and they feasted on the second division), but no guarantee of success in the playoffs. As the DBacks, Angels and Marlins (and 1960 Pirates) have proven, to beat a club that grossly outspends you, you have to bring a whole different style of ball. Theres no way the Os can match Georges payroll, so theyll always be a few bats short. Were two and a half back for the first time all year. Its not a hole, but it will take a streak to get us back even. At the high school senior awards assembly, Caitlins friend Ryan, who weve been giving grief about his Yankees since April, says, Have you seen the standings? Hey, I say, you guysll do fine if you only have to play the Os. June 5th Its time to admit it this is the dreaded Red Sox losing streak. Worse, its the dreaded Red Sox losing streak combined with the even more dreaded (and apparently endless) Yankee winning streak. No Jayme Parker on NESNs SportsDesk this morning to ease the pain; its Saturday and Mike Perlow is subbing. And although I tune in at 712 A.M., near the end of the shows fifteenminute loop and during a story about the Olympic Torch reaching Australia (huh?), I already know the worst. Perlow is one of those latetwenty or earlythirtysomethings who look about fourteen, and this morning there is no sparkle in the Perlow eye, no lift in the Perlow shoulders. We lost. Im sure we lost. But of course I hang in there to be sure and of course we did. The unsparkling eye does not lie. Our pitching staff is having the week from hell. Derek Lowe lost to Baltimore in the Memorial Day makeup game; Bronson Arroyo and Pedro Martinez lost to the Angels; last night Tim Wakefield lost to the Kansas City Royals and Jimmy Gobble (a name at least as unfortunate as that of J. J. Putz). The Yankees again won by a single runI dont know how many onerun victories theyve rung up so far this year, but it seems like a lotand we once more got halfbucked to death as KC put up a run here and a run there until the game was out of reach. Its the kind of slow bleed that drives managers crazy. Mark Bellhorn did not help the cause any by running into an out between third and home, killing a potential rally. I think that for serious Sox fans, this sort of losing streak is exacerbated by the fact that the Yankees arent losing RIGHT NOW combined with the sinking feeling that they will NEVER LOSE AGAIN. For serious controlfreak fans (sighthat would be me), its exacerbated even more by the fact that I CANT DO A FUCKING THING ABOUT IT; all I can do is stand by and watch. Oh, and two other things. One is to remind myself that we owned first place less than a week ago, and are now three games out of it. The other is to try and find that Stephen Crane poem where theguy says he likes what hes eating because its bitter, and because it is his heart. Stop that and stay upbeat, I tell myself. This is not impossible or even that hard to do on a beautiful June morning with the grandchildren on the way. Its a long season, after all, and September is the only month where a losing streak can absolutely kill you, and only then if its combined with the wrong teams winning streak. Besides, I have to think of Stewart, who stayed up until maybe two in the morning to watch one of those awful games with the Angels where we blew the lead in the late innings. Man, I havent even dared email him about that. As for tonight, I have my choice the new Harry Potter movie, or the Red Sox. If my older son actually does make the scene with the grandkids, I think Ill let him decide. Who says Im a control freak? Later The headline of this mornings Sox story in the Lewiston Daily Sun reads GOBBLE FEASTS ON SOX. Hours later, while Peggy Noonan is getting all misty about the passing of Ronald Reagan on CNBC, I think, GOBBLE FEASTS ON SOX, and I crack up all over again. When youre losing, you take your chuckles wherever you can get them. As Im cutting the grass, my nextdoor neighbor Dave waves me over to the fence. Daves a big Bruins and Sox fan, and we have the occasional bitchfest about the sorry state of the two teams. Dave says the thinness of the roster is starting to showthat weve gone too long playing secondstringers. I say weve got to find a way to protect Manny; Tek and Dauber have struggled, and Millars been nonexistent. And wheres our friend Mr. Kim? Dave asks. I havent seen hide nor hair of him. I wonder where Mystery Malaska is, whether hes in Pawtucket or on the DL. In the end, I tell Dave that its early and that well turn it around. But really, do we need to turn it around? Are we really stumbling that badly? Even with this second streak, were still up there with the leagues elite. Its a luxury, worrying about being three and a half back. A lot of clubs are already well out of it. June 6th 730 A.M. The Red Sox won last night. Schilling (now 73, God bless him) stopped the bleeding at four games and the Yankees lost, so for the timebeing, alls well as it can be.Its funny, though, how being a fan takes over your life. Ronald Reagan died at 1 P.M. yesterday. At the time he left for that great Oval Office in the sky, he was ninetythreethe oldest living expresident. And, I realize, he would have been seven the last time the Red Sox won the World Series. Hmmm, I think. Thats old enough to have a rooting interest. Wonder if The Gipper was a fan? You know what Ole Case would have said, dontcha? Right. You could look it up. The latest Pedro worry is that he showed up at the clubhouse yesterday wearing a wrist brace on his pitching arm. When asked why he had it on, he told reporters, Because it looks good. Lately he hasnt been able to throw his curveball, so this just sets off a wave of speculation that somethings physically wrong. Well find out Tuesday, when hes scheduled to take on David Wells and the Padres. Nomar should be back for that game. Last night in Toledo he went 2 for 4 with a homer and a tworun double. I expect to be on Lansdowne Street Tuesday afternoon, trying to catch one of his batting practice home runs. 530 P.M. This was a good afternoon for we the faithful. First, the team Nomar Garciaparra is likely to rejoin on June 8th will be ten games over .500, thanks to todays win. Second, Lowe went five respectable innings and then lucked into the win when his teammates scored five runs in the top of the sixth (the only inning in which they managed to score any runs). Third, and maybe most important, I finally saw signs that, yes, Derek Lowe cares. After giving up a tworun gopher ball to KC Royals batter Mike Sweeney in the first (A ball that just screamed hit me, commentator Sam Horn said in the postgame show), the camera caught a look of weary disgust on Lowes face that summed up all of his feelings about what must seem a nightmare season to a bigmoney player in his walk year. What have I got to do to get out of this? that look said. Or maybe What have I got to do to make it stop? Work is the answer to both questions, of course, and following the Sweeney home run, Derek Lowe worked quite hard. Hes clearly got along way to goand at 55, hes not looking like the answer to any teams 2005 prayersbut at least he now looks like hes awake, and thats an improvement. Then theres Mike Timlin, whos oldtime tough and has the looks to match, with his red socks pulled up almost to his knees and his nononsense low legkick and stride delivery. Timlin is, in my humble opinion, worth a Lowe and a half. He came on in relief of Derek, pitching a perfect three innings before turning the ball over to Keith Foulke. And if Mr. Mike wants to give all the credit to the Lord, more power to him. Oh, and by the waydid I happen to mention that Kevin Youkilis was last weeks Pepsi Rookie of the Week? Yep. Yesterday he hit his second home run. Today the Greek God of Walks justwalked. Hey, its good enough for me. June 9th I had a big day yesterday. The sixth of my Dark Tower novels, Song of Susannah, was officially published, and I was in New York to do promotion (mostly those morningradio drivetime showsnot glamorous, and grueling as hell when you pile them up, but they seem to work). The original idea was to fly in from Maine on the evening of the 7th, get a nights sleep, get up early, do my thing, and fly back late the next afternoon. Instead, I rearranged things on the spur of the moment so I could go to Boston instead. The attraction wasnt so much the opening night of interleague playthis year the San Diego Padres are in Fenway for the first timeor Pedro Martinez, who has been less than stellar this year, as it was the bruited return of Nomar Garciaparra. Funny thing about that bruiting. Not only was Nomar not in the Red Sox lineup, he wasnt even in Boston. He was in Rhode Island, where he played six innings for the PawSox and went 0 for 3. And no one seemed sure just how everyone got so sure he was going to make his major league debut last night in the first place. As I settled into my seat on the thirdbase linecall last nights locale halfway between Kevin Youkilis and Manny RamirezI couldnt even remember where I had gotten the idea. I even played with the notion of skipping the game altogether. Im really, really glad I didnt. Last nights tilt would certainly have to go on my list of Steves Top Ten Games at Fenway Ever. The thing is, you never know when youre going to be reminded whyyou love this game, why it turns all your dials so vigorously to the right. Ive been at Fenway for three 10 shutouts, and the Red Sox have won all three. Wes Gardner, an otherwise forgettable Sox righty, pitched the first under a gorgeous full summer moon one night in the eighties; Roger Clemens pitched the second on a sweltering weekend afternoon in the early nineties; Pedro Martinez and Keith Foulke (who worked a onetwothree ninth) combined on the third last night. The Pods, as they are called (as in Podpeople, from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers? one wonders), may be strangers to Fenway, but their starter, David Wells, knows it welland we, the Fenway Faithful, know him. Never inarticulate, Boomer has often expressed his distaste for pitching in the Beantown venue. And with good reason. Until last night, fresh off the DL, Id never seen him pitch well there. He made up for that in his first start as a Pod Person, giving up just four hits, all singles, and working ahead of virtually every batter. This years Red Sox hitters are a patient bunch, and they usually wear pitchers out. Not Wells, last night; most of our guys just ended up getting in the hole 02 or 12, and slapping harmless grounders in consequence. If Wells hadnt been lifted so as not to overuse him in his return, the game might still be going on. I think he was better than Pedro over the first five, and given Pedros postgame comments (I want to build on this), Pedro may have thought so too.Martinez certainly got great defensive backing from his teammates, who have at times this season been decidedlyshall we say iffy?in the field. Johnny Damon made a leaping catch in center, and Mark Bellhorn made a diving, dirteating stop between first and second. The stop was good, but what reminded me againforciblyof what makes these guys pros was how quickly he was back on his feet again. Quick as a cat aint in it, dear; if you blinked you missed it is more like it. But the defensive play of the night once again belonged to Pokey Reese,who has flashed divine leather all season long. I wont bother describing it, other than saying he went to his left at a perfectly absurd speed, and maybemaybegot a helpful lastsecond bounce. I will tell you that I believe no other infielder except Ozzie Smith could have made the play, and relate two overheard comments from behind me, Charlestown accents and all Do you think Nomah could play right field? was the first. Nomah who? was the second. And today I complete the experience by driving out of Boston on the first bona fide day of summer, temperatures in the midnineties, me in a Hertz RentACar I picked up at Logan Airport, driving up Route 1 as I have after so many games at Fenway Park, since my first one in 1959. Theres something just totally ballstothewall about driving north past Kappys Liquors unhungover at 945 in the morning under a gunmetal sky; youve got that almost flawless twohit, 10 win under your belt, and there are almost four more months of baseball to look forward to. Ive got a cold Pepsi between my legs, the radios turned up all the way, theres a U2 rockblock going on, and Angel of Harlem is pouring out of the speakers of my little Mercury SomethingorOther. Call me a dope if you want, but I think this is as good as it gets with your clothes on. June 10th Last night was 5 Night at Fenway Park; the Return of Nomar. The crowd gave him a vast roar of a standing O, and Nomar, obviously moved, saluted them right back. He took the first baseball to come his way flawlessly, starting a 643 double play. In his first atbat, he singled smartly into left field, to the crowds vast delight. The only problem was the Red Sox lost and the Yankees won, coming back from an early 40 deficit in their game with the Colorado Rockies. The Sox are now down three and a half games. I find this out this morning, having given up on the Sox at 11 P.M., when a rain delay (it eventually clocked in at two hours and fifty minutes) progressed from the merely interminable to the outright absurd. The loss wasnt entirely unexpected, as the Red Sox were down a bunch when the rains came, but the fact that the Yankees won yet again came as a rather nasty shock. They are starting to look more and more like those monolithic Yankee teams from the midtolate fifties that inspired the late DouglasWallop (a Washington Senators fan) to write The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which became the musical Damn Yankees. A final note. In a move that may make sense to manager Terry Francona but seems incomprehensible to lowly fans like me, the Red Sox have sent Brian Daubach down to Pawtucket. Andy Dominique started for the Sox last night at first base. After blanking the Padres for four innings, a provisionally rejuvenated Bronson Arroyo found himself with two men on and two out. Brian Giles hit a grounder deep in the hole, which Garciaparra fielded, going to his right. He then made one of those patented acrossthebody throws that have nailed so many surprised runners at first. Not last night. The throw was accurate enough, but a little short. The ball bounced first off the dirt, then off the heel of Dominiques glove. My opinion? Maybe Ortiz doesnt make that play, but David McCarty almost certainly doesand so does The Dauber. My question? Whats the guy with Show experience doing in the minors when were in a pennant race? With all the network Thursdaynight shows over, its easy to claim the good TV. Ive got revisions to do, and settle in. The Yanks have already won, completing their sweep of the Rockies this afternoon, so once again we need to keep pace. Schillings pitching, and Im shocked when leadoff batter Sean Burroughs doubles and scores in the first. Ismael Valdez (a seaworthy name if I ever heard one) throws blanks till he meets Pokey Reese in the bottom of the third. In BP, Pokey has to work to reach the wall, but Valdez finds the perfect spot up and in and Pokey loops it into the first row of M7. The next inning, Valdez hangs a curve to Manny with David on first, and Manny goes over everything and into the parking lot. Meanwhile, Schillings throwing 94 with authority, striking out a bunch. In the fifth, Youks RBI double off the scoreboard chases Valdez. CUT TO crazy handheld zooms of heavyset goateed man in familiar Western shirt gorging on bucket of KFC to raucous music. Its Millar, in the same shirt he wore to the movie premiere. EXTREME CLOSEUP of bucket with SFX of chicken pieces disappearing one by one. Going, going Millar says. When we return, reliever Brandon Puffer intentionally walks Manny to load the bases. Nomar steps in to a standing O and knocks one off the Monster for a 61 lead. Millar follows with a double to the leftcenter gapChickenman! me and Steph yell. Its 81, and the rest of the ways uneventful, save a woman being ejected below Don and Jerry. While the cameras not allowed to watch her, the crowd is. She must flash them, because theres a roar, and for the next three minutes Don and Jerry cant stop laughing. I wonder how that looked on highdefinition, Jerry says. In the ninth, a momentary scare when Nomar bangs his bad foot off second base as he comes across to make a play, but he seems fine. McCarty lets us forget it by making a brilliant diving stop on a hopper down the line, reaching high to snag a bounce that should get over him. Lenny DiNardos frozen on the mound, so the runners safe, but its the kind of play (after Andy Dominique last night) that makes me want to see McCarty play more. June 11th In his first two games back, Nomah is batting in the fivehole. In last nights game, the Padres elected to intentionally walk Manny Ramirez with one out in order to face Garciaparra with the bases loaded and the forceatanybase situation in effect. 5 rewarded this strategy (which, the Padres manager would probably argue this morning, made sense at the time, with Garciaparra having been on the DL for the entire first third of the season) with a double rocketed off the leftfield wall. That baseballbattered Monster giveth and taketh away, as Fenway fans well know. Last night it tooketh from Nomar Garciaparra in parks with lower walls, that ball surely would have carried out for a grand slam. Oh well, we beat the Pods, 93. The Yankees won again, of course. They have now won thirteen straight in interleague play. Damn Yankees is damn right. June 12th Baseballs most delicious paradox although the game never changes, youve never seen everything. Last nights tilt between the Red Sox and the Dodgers is a perfect case in point. With two out in the top of the ninth, it looked as though the Sox were going to win their second 10 shutout in the same week. Derek Lowe was superb. Even better, he was lucky. He gave way to Timlin in the eighth, and Timlin gave way to Foulke in the ninth, all just the way its spozed to be. Foulke got the first two batters hefaced, and then Cora snuck a groundball single past Mark Bellhorn. Still no problem, or so youd think. Thats when Olmedo Saenz came up and lifted a lazy fly ball toward Manny Ramirez in left field. Saenz flipped his bat in disgust. Cora, meanwhile, was motoring for all he was worth, because thats what they teach youif the balls in play, anything can happen. This time it did. Manny Ramirez hesitated, glanced toward the infield, saw no help there, and began to run rapidly in no particular direction. He circled, backpedaled, reachedand the ball returned gently to earth more or less behind him. Cora scored, tying the score and costing Derek Lowe the victory in the best game hes pitched this year. David Big Papi Ortiz eventually sent the crowd home happy in the bottom of the ninth, but what about that horrible error by Manny? How could he flub such a routine fly? Here is the Red Sox center fielder, with the ominous explanation I was the one person closest to the action, Johnny Damon said after the game, and I saw all these weird birds flying around. I think they definitely distracted Mannys attention when he needed it most. That really wasnt an error at all. It was a freak of nature. As one of the postgame announcers pointed out, this may have been the first use of the Alfred Hitchcock Defense in a baseball game. Manny was even more succinct. There goes my Gold Glove, he said. June 13th A worrisome article in the Sunday paper Schill has a bone bruise on his right ankle (his pushoff foot) and is starttostart. Hes been taking Marcaine shots before throwing and wears a brace on days off. What else can go wrong? June 14th Interleague play, my asswhy not call it a marketing ploy, which is what it really is? It fills the stadiums, and I suppose thats a good thing (even the somehow dingy Tropicana Dome was almost filled yesterday, as the temporarilynotsohapless Devil Rays won for the eighth time in their last ten games), but lets tell the truth here fans are paying to see uniforms theyre not used to. |
Many of the players inside of those exotic unis (Shawn Green, for instance, a Blue Jays alum who now plays for L.A.) are very familiar. Or hows this for double vision In last nights contest (an805 EDTESPNfriendly start), you had Pedro Martinez starting for the Red Sox. He used to pitch for the Dodgers. And for the Dodgers, you had Hideo Nomo, who used to pitch for the Red Sox (only before the Red Sox, he used to pitch for the Dodgers). Im not saying life was better for the players before Curt Floodit wasntbut rooting was both simpler and a lot less about the uniform. One of the reasons Im such a confirmed Tim Wakefield fan (and am sorry his last couple of starts have been disasters) is because hes been with the Sox for ten years now, and has done everything management has asked of himstarting, middle relief, closingto stay with the Sox. Meanwhile, we won yesterday evenings game, 41. Pedro (the one who used to be with the Dodgers and probably wont be with the Red Sox next year) got the win, with a little defensive helpa lot of defensive help, actuallyfrom Pokey Reese, who made a jawdropping leap to snare a line drive in the seventh inning and save at least one run. Play of the week aint in it, dear; that was a Top Ten Web Gem of the season. Today we have off. We ended up taking two of three from the Pod People and two of three from the Dodgers, and still the Yankees mock us. Yesterday the Padres led the Yanks 20 going into the bottom of the ninth and blew that lead. Led them 52 going into the bottom of the twelfth and blew that lead, as well. The Yankees ended up winning, 65, to maintain their threeandahalfgame edge. I looked at that this morning and reacted not with awe but a species of superstitious dread. Because that kind of thing tends to feed on itself. The rest of the AL East, meanwhile, is bunching up behind the Red Sox in interesting fashion. Baltimores in third and Tampa Bays in the cellar; both to be expected. Whats not to be expectedexcept maybe I did, sortais that at this point, approaching the seasons halfway mark, those two teams are only two games apart, Baltimore 11.5 out and Tampa Bay 13.5. June 16th When I turned in last night at 1115, the Red Sox were down a run to Colorado, 43, but I had a good feeling about the game, and why not? The Rockies have been horrible this year. Besides, Id gotten a call from my publisher saying that Song of Susannah was going straight to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and thats the sort of day thatssupposed to end with your team winningits practically a national law. I wake up this morning at 645 and turn on SportsDesk, feeling like a kid about to open his Christmas stocking. Unfortunately, what I get in mine is a lump of coal. Red Sox lost; Yankees won. The Christing Yankees won again. I can hardly believe it. Jayme Parker is telling me these bozos now have the best record in baseball, which is no news to me. Im thinking they must have the best record in the entire universe. The Red Sox arent doing badly; by my calculations, we would have won the wildcard spot by two full games, had the season ended yesterday. But I am just so sick of looking at the Yankees collective pinstriped butt in the standings each and every day, so sick of realizing that well still be in second place even if we sweep them when we see them later this month. Theres nothing better than waking up to find your team won and the other guys lost. Conversely, theres no worse way to start the day than finding out your team lost and the other guys won. Its like taking a big swig of the orange juice straight from the carton and discovering that its gone over. June 17th The Red Sox are now back to full strength, or almost (Pokey Reese is daytoday with a jammed toe, as a result of that spectacular catch on the thirteenth). Trot Nixon returned to the lineup with a bang last night, stroking a home run to whats almost the deepest part of Coors Field. So alls right with the world, right? Wrong. The Sox got behind early again and couldnt quite come back, Schilling lost (television viewers were treated to the less than lovely sight of Father Curt, the staffs supposed anchor, pounding the shit out of a defenseless Gatorade cooler after giving up a key twoout hit), and the Yankees won for the 730th time in their last 732 games. Consequently, weve fallen five and a half games out of first place. These will be hard games to make up, assuming they can be made up at all (probably they can), and what hurts the most is that the last two losses have come at the hands of the Rockies, currently major league baseballs worst team. But the Red Sox have a talent for making bad teams look good, I sometimes think; we have done some almighty awful franchises the favor of making themlook terrific for their fans, especially during the two or three weeks after Memorial Day. For this is almost certainly the beginning of that yearly Red Sox rite known as the June Swoon. Longtime fans know it so well they can set their calendars by it, if not their watches; it begins when the NBA finals end. During this years LakersPistons finals,the Sox were busy taking two out of three from both the Padres and the Dodgers, who are vying for the top spot in the NL West. Now that the finals are over, they are busy getting their shit handed to them by the lowly Rockies and their lead in the wildcard raceyes, even thathas melted away to a mere single game. If it is the Swoon, I dont think I can bring myself to write about itbut Ill be watching it happen. Have to do it, man. Its my duty, and not because of this book, either. Its because thats the difference between being a mere fairweather fan and being faithful. Besides, Julys coming, and the Red Sox always turn it around in July. Usually always. I take the Fenway tour in the morning, hoping to catch BK working out. Hes not. The grounds crew is doing something to the track in left; theyve dug up the corner and pulled some padded panels off the wall. We cant go down to field levela drag, since I wanted to walk the track and peek in the scoreboard. We hit the press box, then the .406 Club. While were listening to the guides spiel, I notice two members of our tour being escorted to the mound far below. A man and a woman. The man goes to one knee. KELLI, WILL YOU MARRY ME? the scoreboard flashes. She kisses him, and the tour applauds. We cross the Monster for the big view. Im surprised by how many tours are running at once, and how much activity there is. There are several school groups circling the top of the park the opposite way. Under the bleachers, a crew is setting up a catered job fair; in the rightfield grandstand, workmen are replacing old wooden seats. The last stop is the rightfield roof tables, an anticlimax, and we walk back down the ramp to Gate D, looking down on the players lot. The guard there says BK should be in any minute. Back home, the schedule makers sneak todays game by me. Its a 305 start, 105 mountain time, and when I tune in to NESN at nine oclock theyre showing Canadian football, complete with the 55yard line and Labatts ads painted on the astroturf. I check the website 110 Sox. Lowe threw seven strong, getting 17 groundball outs. Ortiz put it out of reach in the sixth with a threerun shot. It figuresthe one game I miss. June 18th ESPN notes that Lowes shutout was only the second of the Rockies at Coors in their last four hundred games. And the Yanks lost to the Dbacks, so we gained ground. Francona kept Wake out of the Colorado series, citing knuckleballers poor history there, so Wake opens against the Giants at Pac Bell (SBC, if you want to be a stickler). As in his start against the Dodgers last Saturday, hes got nothing. The Giants run on him at will, and Marquis Grissom takes him deep twice for a 72 lead in the fourth. Im at the beach, watching with my nephew Charlie. Why dont they take him out? Charlie asks. Because we dont have anyone else. And theres Malaska warming. With the 1005 start and all the offense, its late, and we dont want to keep the rest of the cottage up. My fatherinlaw, stumping to the bathroom in his skivvies, asks how were doing. Ah, were getting crushed, I say. June 19th The local edition of the Providence Journal only stayed up as late as I did. They have the score 72 in the fifthas if that helps anyone. They won, Charlie says, shrugging. The score was something like eleven to eight. No one can verify it, so I get on my fatherinlaws laptop and hit the website. 149 was the final. Ortiz and Manny went backtoback and Millar had a pinchhit threerun shot over Barry Bondsall in the top of the fifth. Son of a bitch. All we had to do was stay up another ten minutes. Fairweather fans, Trudy says. No, I say. Its the opposite. When I watch them, they lose. I turn it off and they win. June 20th 745 A.M. Todays game against the San Francisco Giants will mark the end of interleague play for the nonce, and Im glad. I dont like it because I think its a marketing stunt, but thats secondary. A New England team has no business on the West Coast, thats what I really think. Still, it should be an interesting contestthe rubber game in a threegame series the Red Sox would dearly love to win. For one thing, it would send them home with a .500 record for the trip. For another, theyd go back to Boston four and a half behind the Yankees, only three and a half if the Dodgers can beat the Yankees again today. And Sox pitching has pretty well muzzled Barry Bonds, who strikes meadmittedly an outsider, but sometimes outsiders see with clearer eyesas one of the games more arrogant and conceited players. His fans in left field hang rubber chickens when Bonds is intentionally walked, but they havent hung many in this series. Oh, and by the Raythe Devil Ray, that isthose Tampa Bay bad boys have now won a franchisebest ten straight. And you know what that makes them, dont you? Right. Hapless no more. SO So where was Foulke yesterday when Alfonzo came to the plate? I know our pen threw five Friday night (tanks, Wake), and that Williamson just got off the DL, but Franconas use of the bullpens been a real mess lately. Weve been behind a fair amount this road trip (just like the last two), but DLowes 110 laugher should have given us a breather. Does Theo need to go and get a middle guy to replace Mendoza and Arroyo, or are Mendoza and Kim actually going to come back and contribute? The AllStar breaks three weeks away, and all weve gotten out of those two is a single quality start from BK. Meanwhile, Dauber languishes in Pawtucket, the forgotten Sock. Yesterday he jacked a foul ball out of McCoy Stadium into the middle of the football field next doorthing must have gone 475 feet. SK Wheres Francona been lately? He could have cost us the game on Friday night, playing Bellhorn at third. Wuz just luck it worked out. The rubbah game today should be good. Did you see the Harvardprof piece in the NY Times about how teams that pitch to Bonds instead of walking him (tentionally or un) do better than those who dont? The Giants score .9 runs an inning when hes walked with none on and no outs, and .6 an inning when hes pitched to in that situation. We pitched to him yesterday, and altho I didnt see the whole game, I think he went 0fer. Oh, and by the wayhow bout those THIRD PLACE Devil Rays? SO That just ties in with the Bill JamesMoneyball OBP philosophy. Get men on and you get men in. And yeah, Barry was 0for yesterday and looked asleep out in left. 10 in a row for the DRaysLou must be pumped. And the Os fans must be pissed. 400 P.M. Its Fathers Day, and Im right where I belong, with a blue westernMaine lake just to my left and the Red Sox ready to start on TV in front of me. Ive got my booka really excellent novel by Greg Bear called Dead Linesto read between innings, and all is okeyfine by me. Its Jason Schmidt against Bronson Arroyo, a mismatch on paper, but as pointed out both on ESPN and in these pages, baseball games arent played on paper but inside TV sets. So well see. One of these things well see is whether or not Schmidt can strike out ten or more (he struck out twelve Blue Jays in his last start), and whether or not Arroyo (currently 25) can keep the ball around the plate. 430 P.M. Bronson Arroyo (whose goatee unfortunately does make him look a bit goatlike) finds his way out of a basesloaded jam in the first, partly by inducing Barry Bonds to pop up. Bonds continues to be an offensive zerofactor in the series. By the way, you have to give it to the people who designed SBC Park; the only ugly thing about it is the name. 500 P.M. Arroyo settles down, but the Red Sox still dont have a hit. Kevin Millar took Schmidt deep, but Bonds snared that one, flipping it backhand into the crowd in almost the same motion. The gesture is gracefuland arrogant at the same time. Watching Barry Bonds play makes me remember the late Billy Martin muttering about some rookie, Ill take the steam out of that hot dog. Bonds is no rookie, but I think the principle is the same. 530 P.M. Kevin Youkilis breaks up Jason Schmidts nohit bid with a hard double. Arroyo fails to bunt him over, but then Giants catcher A. J. Pierzynski drops strike three. Its just a little dribbler, but Pierzynski forgets to throw down to first. A couple of batters later, the Sox find themselves with runners at the corners, two out, and Ortiz at the plate. Big Papi, who leads the AL in runs batted in, stings the ball, but first baseman Damon Minor (whos even bigger than Ortiz) makes a runsaving stab, and Ortiz is out to end the inning. 620 P.M. After a disputed call at third base that goes against the Sox (and gets Terry Francona thrown out for the first time this year), the Giants win the game, 40. Edgardo Alfonzo won it yesterday with a tworun shot off Alan Embree; today he gets the grand salami off Mike Timlin. On the whole, I sort of wish Signor Alfonzo had stayed with the Mets. Them we dont play this year. In any case, Bronson Arroyos best performance of the season was wasted and the Red Sox can finally go home after a disappointing 24 road trip. But heyits Fathers Day, the first day of summer, and Im by the lake with my family. Also, there was baseball. Aint nothing wrong with that. June 22nd I only have to see three atbats of this one. Caitlins birthday dinner eats up the first six innings; its the bottom of the seventh when I tune in. Were up 31, so Schilling must have thrown well. Johnnys on second, Bellhorns on first, one out, with David Ortiz at the plate. He lines a double off the centerfield wall even Torii Hunter cant get to, scoring Johnny. With first open, Ron Gardenhire goes by the book, intentionally walking Manny, except now the number five guy isnt Tek or Dauber or Millar, its Nomar. Reliever Joe Roa dawdles on the mound, and Nomar steps out. He steps back in. Roa delivers, and Nomar blasts one to center that bounces off the roof of the camera platform and ricochets into Section 34. 81 Sox, and Nomars got his first homer of the season and only our second granny. 92s the final, with Foulke leaving them loaded. And Theo finally picks up some middle relief help, former Royal Curtis Leskanic, a thirtysixyearold righty with arm problems. He was 03 with an 8.04 ERA this year before KC cut him. Okay, now tell me the good news. June 23rd The Sox, clearly happy to be back from the West Coast, put a hurtin on the Minnesota Twins last night. The newly returned Nomar Garciaparra hit a grand salami of his own to dead center field. And NESN, in slavish imitation of its bigger brother, Fox Sports (even the name of the features the sameSounds of the Game), decided to mike a player and pick up some ambient audio. The player they picked was the also newly returned Trot Nixon, a wise choice, since Trot, like Mike Timlin, is long on Praise Jesus and short on Youghta knock is fucking head off for that. It was a noble experiment, but a failure, I think. When Nomars home run brought the capacity Fenway crowd to its feet, cheering at the top of its lungs, the TV audience was treated to the sound of a laconic Trot Nixon Go, ball. Go on, now. Ats right. And, greeting 5 as he crossed the plate, these immortal words Good job, Nomie. Nomie? Well, everyone has his walk in life, or so tis saidthe sportswriters have one, the ballplayers another. Maybe thats the point.And we kept pace with the Yankees. That might also be the point. And the haplessnomore DRays won their twelfth straight. And Kevin Youkilis sat last nights out while Mark Bellhorn did not do too much at third base. And Brian Daubach is still hitting meaningless home runs for the tripleA PawSox. Those things might also be the point. Multiple points are, after all, a possibility; even a probability in this increasingly complex world, but Git out, ball? Caitlins graduation takes place on the high schools baseball field. The stage is just beyond first base, and were sitting in shallow right. Ive brought a pocket radio the Pirates gave away in the early 80s with a single sneaky earbud, and as the speeches drag on, Minnesota loads the bases with no outs in the first. Lowe gets two ground balls, but again, we cant turn either double play, and the Twins go up 20 without hitting the ball out of the infield. Later, at the graduation party at our house, I tune in to find the Twins up 42 in the eighth. Pokey hurt his thumb and left the game early. Its a worry because its the same thumb that put him out nearly all of last season. The Twins hold on to win. I catch the highlights Torii Hunter hit a tworun shot in the fifth to put them up 40. We got solo shots from Trot and Bellhorn, that was it. Miraculously, the Os beat the Yanks, so were still four and a half back. June 24th Were the first in Gate E for todays businessmans special, and nab the spot in the corner, hauling in five balls during BP. Pokey doesnt hit, but Bill Muellers here, joking and taking grounders at third. One gets by him and rolls right to me. Thanks, Billy! I hang around the dugout and get Manny to sign my glove, and Gabe Kapler and new guy Curtis Leskanic to sign my allpurpose pearl. I notice Pokeys wearing a brace on his wrist and handanother bad sign. Wake looks better today. He doesnt have that scuffling first inning, and David Ortiz gives us a lead in the bottom with a towering homer down the rightfield line that goes over the Pesky Pole. Ive poached a seat at the far end of the Sox dugout, right behind the camera well, and I have to look to the firstbase ump for a fair call; behind him, Twins first baseman Matthew LeCroy is signaling foul. The Twins get two on a strikeout and passed ball and a pair of wallball doubles to go up 21. In the sixth I snag a foul ball from Bellhorn, a twohop chopper that clears the NESN camera in front of me. Its the easiest play Ive made all day, a chesthigh backhander, so Im in an even better mood when David Ortiz brings us back in the seventh, singling in Youk and Johnny. For some reason, Francona leaves Wake in to pitch the eighth. He gets in trouble, giving up yet another wall double, but Scott Williamson comes on to shut the Twins down. Foulke throws a clean ninth, but we do nothing with our half, and go to extras. Leading off the tenth, speedy Cristian Guzman hits a roller far to Nomars left. Nomar gloves it behind second, then spins to get more on his throw. Its wide. Millar lays out but cant keep it from going in the dugout. Jose Offerman bunts Guzman over to third, giving Lew Ford the chance to knock him in with a soft sac fly. In our half weve got David Ortiz, Manny and Nomar. David flies to right, Manny waves at a third strike a foot outside, Nomar pops foul to the catcher, and we lose 43 on an unearned run. Pokey and McCarty make that play. At the very least, the throw doesnt end up in the dugout. Millar also went a very badlooking 0 for 4. I have no idea what hes doing out there instead of McCarty after the seventh. June 25th 750 A.M. The Red Sox have won exactly one game in each of their last three series, making them three for their last nine. Pokey Reese is injured. The pitching staff is struggling. Our position visvis the Yankees has for a second time sunk to a seasonworst five and a half games out of first place, only this time weve lost our lead in the wildcard race (the Red Sox are currently tied with Oakland for that dubious honor). At the general store where I do my trading during the summer and fall months, people have started asking me whats wrong with the Red Sox. (Because I have been interviewed on NESN, I am supposed to know.) I am also asked when Im going to go on down there and whip those boys into shape. I guess Id better do it this weekend. Ill write for a couple of hours, then throw some clothes and a fresh can of WhipAss in a bag, and leave at 1 P.M. this afternoon. From the lake over here in western Maine, Fenways a threeandahalfhour drive. The weather looks murky, but what the hell; the way the Sox have been playing, a rainout would be almost as good as a win. Besides, Michael Moores polemic Fahrenheit 911 opens tonight. If all else fails, I can go see that. The Carlos Beltran trade finally goes down, a threeway deal that sends him to Houston and Astros closer Octavio Dotel to the As while the Royals pick up three prospects. Its a bad deal for the Sox. Dotels a hard thrower, and the way things are going we may end up battling Oakland for the wild card. Friday night and were in a local pizza place. I see the game all the way across the restaurant on a TV above the bar. I can barely make out the score 20 Sox in the fifth, and Pedros working. I figure were in good shape, since hes gotten past the first. Were talking, and when I look up again, Manny tags one to deep right. It looks out, but Bobby Abreu goes back hard and leaps at the wall, banging into it as the ball lands in his glove. He falls, hanging on to the wall with one armhes got it. Manny just smiles and jogs back to the dugout. I notice its 30 now, so Ive missed something. Trot walks, Millar singles. New pitcher. Tek singles, knocking in another run. Its 40 and were paying the check. Driving home, its still the sixth inning. Youk sends a double off the wall in leftcenter and takes third on the throw home. 60. Bellhorn legs out an infield hit, scoring Youk. New pitcher. We get home and I click on NESN and its still the sixth. The new pitcher has walked Ortiz (who I discover led off the inning with a solo shot) to load the bases for Manny (who has a home run and an RBI double besides being robbed). Manny slices a liner to right that carries over Abreu into the corner. It takes a hop toward a fan at the wall who whiffs on it with both hands, knocking over his beer in the process. The ball caroms off the wall, still live, and all three runners come in. 100 Sox, and this ones done, except for a brilliant diving catch by Manny in the seventh that has Pedro pointing with both hands, giving him props. Pedro goes seven, giving up two hits. Curtis Leskanic throws his first inning as a Sock, and then in the bottom of the eighth the rains come, and the ump calls it. In the Bronx, the same rain wiped out the Mets and Yanks, so we pick up a half game to make it five even. June 26th Its still wet when the gates open, so theres no batting practice today. I hang around the firstbase line and watch the grounds crew roll the tarp off. Mike Timlin signs, and Lenny DiNardo, and just before game time Nomar walks over. Im in the first row, and the crush is enormous. Little boys scream and plead for an autographrock star Nomar. Im a foot away from him, and think hell actually sign the pearl Ive brought, but he only does a couple before scooting down about twenty feet. I poach the corner seat at the end of the camera pita great spot for foul ballsand am immediately rewarded by David Ortiz, tossing me a warmup ball. I get the boot early, and go over and join Steve and Owen. Bronson Arroyos pitched way better than his 26 record, but today hes consistently behind hitters. Youk misses a foul pop by the visitors ondeck circle, then cant handle a throw by Johnny; he chases it down, only to gun it too high for Tek to put a tag on the runner. Jim Thome hits a monster oppositefield shot. Arroyo muffs an easy grounder. Later in the same inning Millar kicks a doubleplay ball into right field. The Phils score five runs, making it 71, and the Phillies fans chant. The Sox are putting the leadoff man on nearly every inning, then stranding him. Late in the game, the stands are halfempty. Its not just that theyre bad, Owen says. Theyre boring. June 27th So I cued up some good CDs and made the threeandahalfhour run from our little town in western Maine to Boston, pumping up for the drive into the city by playing Elviss Baby, Lets Play House and Mystery Train at top volume about nine times, and do I succeed in spraying my fresh can of WhipAss on the Red Sox? I do. Sort of. We lose the middle game, 92 (the Sox commit a numbing four errors), but Pedro wins on Friday night and Schilling wins on Sunday when the Red Sox bounce back from a 30 deficit. Pedros eighth win; Curts tenth. The former was a totally righteous 121 drubbing shortened by thunder and lightning in the eighth inning. The best thing about the weekend is that my youngest son came up from New York to share the Sox with me. These were his first Red Sox games of 2004, his first regularseason games in two years. It was great to be with him, swapping the scorebook back and forth just like old times, catching up on what weve been doing. Stewart ONan joined us on Saturday and that was good, tooit made an essentially boring game funbut there was something especially magical about just the two of us. One of the things baseball is made for, I think, is catching up with the people you used to see all the time, the ones you love and now dont see quite enough. In our family, baseball and swapping scorecardssometimes bought from a vendor outside the park, sometimes from one in the concourse, sometimes a homemade job scrawled on a legal padhave always been a constant. Ive got a drawer with almost thirty years worth of those things saved up, and I could tell you what they mean, but if youve got kids, you probably know what Im talking about. When it comes to family, not all the bases you touch are on the field. The Yankees, thrifty baseball housekeepers for sure, are busily sweeping up the Mets in a Sunday daynight doubleheader, which means well go into our final series of the month with the Bombers five and a half games back. Not an enviable position, but one weve been in before. A gorgeous Sunday afternoon. Its Visor Day, and theyre giving out posters with Tek and Wally promoting reading. Pokey takes BP, a reason for optimism. Im in my favorite spot for BP, hauling in balls, when Placido Polanco rips a hooking liner our way. Heads UP! I bellow, because its going to be a few rows into the crowd behind me. I expect it to bang into a plastic seatback, like most screamers, but this one hits skinand not the fat smack of a thigh or biceps, but a spongy, fungolike sound, unmistakable it nailed somebody in the head. The ball ricochets at a right angle another ten rows into the stands, and a bald guy in his late fifties who was coming down the aisle reels sideways into the seats, still holding his two beers. He wobbles like a fighter trying to stay upright until people take him under the arms and sit him down. He looks dazed, mumbling that hes all right. Im already waving to security to get a trainer out here, medical staff, somebody. Former Sox pitching coach Joe Kerrigan has been pacing the wall all BP, warning kids to keep their eyes on the batters. He gets a ball for the guy, and is standing there talking to me about how dangerous this place ishow Yankee Stadiums the same way down thirdwhen Polanco stings one right at us. It skips once on the track, Joe backs off a step, and I glove it. When BP ends, I check on the bald guy. Hes sitting down, surrounded by security and a couple firstaid guys. On the side of his dome hes got a purplish knot the size of a fried egg. I think he should go to a hospitalat the very least hes got a concussionbut hes talking with them, giving them his information. He wants to stay for the game. Trudys over at Steves seats. She saw all the hubbub; people around her thought it might be a heart attack. She shows me that the souvenircup makers have fixed the SHILLING. He must have a good agent, she says. The pregame ceremonies pay tribute to all the middleaged guys who took part in the Soxs pricey fantasy camp. They fill the baselines, stepping forward and doffing their caps as Carl Beane announces their names. No one except their families is paying attention until two guys on the thirdbase line unfurl a messily spraypainted bedsheet that says YANKEES SUCK. It gets a big hand, but, in typical Fenway fashion, when the guys walk by us on their way off, someone behind me hollers, Is that the best you could do with the sign? June 28th Both the Sox and Yanks wanted Freddy Garcia, but the White Sox got him, for a secondstring catcher and a pair of prospects. Like the As, even if they dont take their division, theyll be in the wildcard hunt, and theyve made themselves stronger. Theos got another month to cut a deal. One more solid starter would solve a lot of problems. Jeff Suppan, who we let walk after last year, is 65 with a 3.75 ERA for the firstplace Cards. (And Tony Womack, one of our springtraining invitees, is hitting .300 for them and running all over the place.) Tomorrow we start a threegame set with the Yankees in the Bronx. Short of a sweep by either team (unlikely), it wont change the standings much, but it could set the tone of the AllStar break. Looking back at the first half of the season, Id say weve played well with a bangedup club. Ten games over .500 isnt great but it isnt bad either, given the team were putting out there. And yet they do seem like the same old Sox a couple of great hitters surrounded by mediocre guys, zero defense, inconsistent pitching, and the usual June swoon. It could be 1987 or 1996 or 2001. June 29th Both Lowe and Vazquez have thrown well lately, so the openers an even matchup. To show how big of a game it is, Vice President Dick Cheneys crawled out of his hideyhole and is sitting in the front row. Johnny D sets the tone, leading off with a home run. The Ghost of Tony Clark gets it back in the second with a twoout RBI single. To prove it wasnt a fluke, Johnny hits another out in the third, and were up 21. In the bottom, Lofton leads off with a ground ball to Millars right. He drops it, and by the time he recovers, Kennys beaten Lowe to the bag. Jeter singles, and Lofton scoots to third. On the first pitch, Sheffield flies deep enough to leftcenter to tie the game. Jeter steals second easily. ARod singles off the thirdbase bag, the ball popping straight up so that Bellhorn has to wait for it, and Jeter holds at second. With Matsui up, Jeter and ARod pull the double steal on 22unforgiveable, with a lefty batting. On a full count, Matsui knocks a curveball thats down and in (terrible pitch selection to any lefty, but especially this guy, who cut his teeth on breaking stuff in Japan) into right. Its 42, and the rare weeknight sellout crowd is on its feet. In the Yanks fourth, with one down, Lowe walks former Cardinal Miguel Cairo, who, on the very next pitch, steals Teks sign for a curve and swipes second. Does Varitek throw any runners out? my fatherinlaw asks, and I have to defend him. Like Wakes knuckler, Lowes sinker is a tough pitch to dig out. With two down, Nomar kicks a grounder from Jeter that should end the inning, and Sheffield takes Lowe out to leftcenter for a 72 lead. The next inning, Pokey (Pokey!) muffs a doubleplay ball, and Tony Clark goes long. Its 92, and all the runs have come from hired guns Sheffield, Matsui, Clark. Lenny DiNardo is warming, and short of a miracle, this ones done. |
Ortiz homers, and the Yanks tack on a pair for an 113 final. Its hard to blame Lowe entirely, when he got enough ground balls to at least keep things close. By now I expect the occasional error by Millar (wherever you put him), and Pokeys got a splint on his thumb, but Nomars got to do better. And, with credit to Vazquez (another new hire), three runs dont cut it in Yankee Stadium. Its just one game (just one of those games, like the one against the As, or the Dodgers, or the Phils), but were six and a half back and playing badly, and being embarrassed there annoys me even more. SO Getting beat by a horse like Matsui is one thing, getting beat by a BALCO Boy and the Ghost of Tony Clark is another. June 30th I didnt want to write this down, but after last nights crushing loss to the Yankees, I suppose I really ought to. About five days agojust before my trip to Boston, anywayI discovered a nearly perfect crowshit Yankees logo on the windshield of my truck. This is a true thing Im telling you. Youre asking do I have photographic proof? Are you crazy? What the windshield washer wouldnt take care of immediately, I got rid of with a fillingstation squeegee just as fast as I could (and it took a distressing amount of elbow grease; those big woods crows shit hard). Itold myself it wasnt an omen, but look at last night. Dick Cheney shows up in a Yankees hat, the Red Sox commit three more errors, the Yankees hitters are patient, the Red Sox hitters arent. Derek Lowe, who has lately shown signs of his old craftiness, last night looked like an escapee from that old Spielberg film The Goonies. Any halfway knowledgeable baseball fan will tell you there are three aspects to the game you have to be able to throw the ball, catch the ball, and hit the ball. Last night, the Red Sox did a bad job on all three. And the Yankees have changed since April; this is Frankenteam. But there is good news, and it isnt that I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. The crowshit Yankees logo is no longer on my windshield, and at midnight tonight, June is officially over. Im expecting the Swoon to be over with it. This team is just too good to keep playing as it has over the last dozen games. I hope. Thats right, I hope. Because thats what Red Sox fans do. Gloom and doom from Sean McAdam in the Providence Journal. I cant imagine how hard the Globe is riding the team. The Sox need to demonstrate some character, the Sox need to show why they have the secondhighest payroll in baseball, you can judge a team by the way it responds to adversity, etc. Hey, Sean, maybe youve forgotten, but weve had our adversity, and we responded by leading the division for a couple months. Its a case of whathaveyoudoneformelately, which for the beat reporter means a couple hours ago. Were 62 against the Yanks so far, and weve played a big chunk of the season without Nomar, Trot and now Bill Mueller. As long as we stay close, we can pick it up in the second half like we did last year and make the playoffs, and in a short series, with Petey and Mr. Schill and Foulke to close, weve got a shot. Tonights WakeLieber matchup is in our favor, considering how Timmys pitched in the Stadium. It goes that way through six, 20 Sox on a David Ortiz homer and RBI single. We hit Lieber but leave a lot of men on, while the Yanks cant touch the knuckler. In the top of the seventh, we load the bases with no outs, and Torre goes to his middle guy, Felix Heredia. Hes not a topoftheline pitcher, and weve got the top of the order up. With the infield drawn in, Johnny grounds to Tony Clark, who goes home to cut down the runKapler, running for Millar. Now, with one down, our man on third is Doug Mirabelli, the slowest guy on the team. Francona must want three more outs from Wake, because he doesnt pinchrun, and Bellhorns fly to short left does nothing. On 22, David Ortiz takes an outside pitch and the ump rings him up. Its a terrible call, and Ortiz stays at the plate, taking off his helmet and batting gloves, muttering, Motherfucker, while the ump walks away. When Ortiz takes the field, hes still jawing at him. Im wondering where Francona is. Managers cant argue balls and strikes, but theres nothing more important, and we just got robbed. I dont care if he gets tossed, hes got to protect his players. Wake hits Sheffield with his first pitch. After ARod Ks, BALCO Boy steals second. On 32, Wake walks Matsui on a borderline pitch that gets past Mirabelli. Francona goes to Williamson to get Bernie Williams, and he does, on a splitter down. Posadaso typicalworks the walk, loading the bases for the switchhitting Tony Clark. Clarks a hundred points better lefty. We should have Embree warm, but hes just getting upand now Williamsons complaining of arm pain, and trainer Jim Rowe, Dave Wallace and Francona converge on the mound. Either its ridiculous coincidence, or Williamson is acting. Its ruled an injury, so our reliever can take as long as he wants to warm up. I think its going to be Embree, but when we come back from commercial its Timlin. He gets Clark to hit a onehopper to Ortiz, who stumbles as he bends to glove it, and the ball goes through him into right, and all I can think is, He pulled a Billy Buck. Two runs score, and were tied. Wheres McCarty? I ask the TV. Ortiz gets a new glove, as if that was the problem. Cairo grounds out to end the inning, but they get two runs without a hit. Tom Gordon throws a perfect eighth against Manny, Nomar and Trot, reaching 96 mph. Lofton leads off their eighth with a grounder to the hole that Nomar backhands. He leaps, twisting, and throws. Its short and to the rightfield side, but well in time. Ortiz misses the pick and it ricochets off his arm and into the stands. Where is McCarty? I yell. Jeter bunts Lofton over to third, then Sheffield fouls off seven fastballs on 02 (later Eck will say, I might think about mixing in a breaking ball thereyou know, thats just me) before pulling one past Bellhorn for a 32 lead. Embree comes on to face Matsui, even though Matsuis 3 for 8 lifetime against him. Make that 4 for 9, and were down 42. Mo takes care of the ninthironically, McCartys the last batter, and never puts on his gloveand we lose one we should have won. The loss is on Ortiz, but also on Francona for not having his hands team out there late in a close game. You can always stick David at DH. Instead, he had the hobbling Trot at DH (obviously that quads still bothering him), Millar in right and Youk on the bench. His use of Timlin and Embree seemed a little whacky, and after Wake left the game, Timlin and Mirabelli had trouble communicating during Sheffields atbat, shaking each other off several times before the last pitch. Why not go to Tek, who usually catches Timlin? And what about the philosophy of using your closer for the most important atbat of the game? We didnt even see Foulke warming. Terrible. If yesterdays loss was embarrassing, this ones humiliating. They didnt win, we actively lost. Now Peteys got to be tough if were going to avoid the sweep. That were 63 against them is no consolation, seven and a half back. Its true that Smarty Jones lost the Belmont Stakes in the final hundred yards yesterday, but he cant bat cleanup or go to his left on a ground ball hit deep in the hole, so fuck him. Todays newspapers described Wellss latest stint on the DL only as resulting from an offfield incident. A guy I know who follows the game closely says Wells injured his wrist when he fell off a barstool. I assume that was a joke, but given Wellss declared proclivities, one cannot be entirely sure. Although he was clearly pleased (at one point during his postgame comments, Pedro called it a dream game), and given the outcomeno runs and just two hits in eight innings pitchedhe had every right to be. Go, you Pistons! Stick it to em! Booya, Shaq! Doublebooya, Kobe! And maybe that giant skeletal Coke bottle in left field. So what the heck does that make me and ONan? July Turn the Page July 1st Why did football bring me so to life? I cant say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it; I chose to believe that it was not unlike the jobs which all men, in some sunnier past, had been called upon to do. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge. It had that kind of power over me, drawing me back with the force of something known, scarcely remembered, elusive as integrityperhaps it was no more than the force of a forgotten childhood. Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive. Frederick Exley, A Fans Notes Now, if you substitute baseball for football and Red Sox for Giants, you have a very fair picture of my rooting geography. Francona must be feeling the heat, because Ortiz is DHing and McCarty starts at first. Nomars not playingto give him a night off, as ridiculous as that sounds. Youk plays, Trot sits, so essentially were fielding the team we had in May, minus Bill Mueller. Peteys feisty, plunking Sheffield and then glaring back at him when he takes exception. In the second, he walks Posada, and that damn Tony Clark waits on a change and puts it out. Meanwhile, rookie lefty Brad Halsey is setting us down. In the fifth, Posada takes five straight pitches before fouling off the payoff pitch, then lifts one into the upper deck. 30 Yankees, and things look bad. In the top of the sixth, Ortiz leads off with a slicing fly to left. With the shift on, Matsui cant get there, and the ball hops sideways into the stands for a groundrule double. Manny steps in and crushes one to dead centerhe pauses to admire it a second, watching Halsey as the rookie turns away. Its 32 and the Yanks have to go to their middle guys. In the seventh, Quantrill gives up a deep leadoff fly to rightcenter by McCarty. Lofton gets there, just short of the track, but onehands it, and the ball pops out. Youk singles to left, so weve got first and third with no outs, and a big innings brewing. Pokey hits into an easy 463 DP, but McCarty scores to tie the game. Pedro finishes the seventh, and they go to Tom Gordon, whos solid. Foulke throws two innings for us, sneaking out of a oneout basesloaded jam in the bottom of the ninth. Mo gets us onetwothree in the tenth, while Embree has to battle Bernie with first and third to reach the eleventh. We load them with no outs. Millars due up, but weve got Nomar and Trot available. Francona sticks with Millar, who hits into a 52 double play. McCarty flies out, and I think this ones over, but Embree gets them onetwothree. The Yanks go to Tanyon Sturtze, who puts runners on first and third with one out, but Bellhorn pops up (he popped up last night in a similar situation). With two gone, Francona decides to pinchhit Trot, who flares one to left that Jeter snags on the run, thenweirdlytakes two strides and dives into the seats, banging up his face. On the replay, hes got room to swerve or slide, but there he goes into the stands like a bad stuntman. In Japan they call that a hotu dogu. Were down to Curtis Leskanic, who gives up a leadoff triple to Enrique Wilson when Johnny misplays a hop off the wall. Giambi strikes out, looking bad on three splitters, but Leskanic hits Sheffield (Torre comes out to bitch), and we intentionally walk ARod to set up the DP. Were in the top of the twelfth right now and scratching like mad to salvage one game. The ESPN boys are saying that if we get skunked, were dunked. I dont believe that, but a win would be nicesalvage a little of the ole selfrespect. Garciaparra has been dogbit in the field, and I really think Francona has been a bad choice as manager. Not in Daddy Butchs league (at least not yet), but hes not doing much to turn it around, is he? And if hes looking for a team leader, who is he going to look to? The guyswhove been out all season and just came waltzing back in like they had a free pass? Manny? Dont make me laugh. And Ortiz last nightBuckner all over again. Sign me, Just Plain Glum. Meanwhile, in the game, runners at first and third, one out. As the old gypsy says, I see handsome men on horseback. If it has to be anybody, let it be Tony Clark. And if it has to be anybody else, let it be good old Tom Gordon. With Millar as a fifth infielder, Bubba Crosby, who pinchran for Matsui, takes the count full before grounding to Pokey, who goes home for the force. Bernie Williams falls behind 02, and Leskanic gets him with a splitter and we worm out of it. Manny leads off the thirteenth with a rocket off the camera platform in leftcenter, and suddenly were up 43. All we have to do is hang on. Leskanic looks strong, striking out Posada, then making a nice play on a dribbler to the thirdbase side by Clark. I want him to finish off Ruben Sierraa guy who strikes out a tonbut Sierra bounces a single up the middle. Now with two out, the outfielders have to play deep so nothing gets through to score the runner. Leskanic gets ahead of Cairo 02. His next pitch is on the corner, and I yell, Got him! but the ump blows the call. I hold my arms out wide, beseeching the TV. On the next pitch, Cairo hits a fly toward the rightcenter gap. Millar heads over. He may not have a shot at catching it, but at the last second he veers away from it and toward the wall, trailing it as it hops across the track. Sierras chugging around third; hes going to score easily. What the fuck is Millar doing out there? Once again, Franconas fucked up. He pinchran Kapler but didnt pull the double switch. Kapler gets to that ballat the very least he cuts it off. John Flaherty, a backup catcher who played for us in the 80s, pinchhits. Hes hitting .150, but he lofts a double into the leftfield corner, and the games over. So we go from embarrassing to humiliating to painful, finding a new, more wrenching way to lose each night. I should have never mentioned the word sweep. Were eight and a half back, and the tone of the break is definitely set. In bed, still pissed off, I revisit the question of what the fuck Millar is doing out there in the thirteenth inning. The answer goes back to spring training, and the last man cut from the squad. Rather than keep Adam Hyzdu as a bona fide backup outfielder, Theo and Francona made the decision to go with Burks, Dauber, McCarty and Millar, understanding that Trot wouldnt be back for a couple of months. None of those four gets to that ball. Hyzdu does. And why is Kapler watching the play from the bench? Its like Francona has to learn the same lesson game after gameand its common sense to protect a late lead you want your best defense on the field. Its just fundamental baseball. Numbnut. July 2nd SO Not Tony the Tiger or Flash. It was Miguel Cairo, who kicked Tek on the force at home in the twelfth. In Little League he would have been tossed. SK Hate to give you the news, but this is the bigs. SO The big leagues, where you can gobble down steroids and not even get suspended. Would you buy a used car from Bud Selig? SK You got a point there. Where money talks and bullshit takes a walk on Boardwalk. Shit. The Yankees took all three games at the Stadiumswept us out, sent us packing, dropped us eight and a half games back in the AL East, and the secondtolast thing in the world I want to do this morning is write about baseball. The last thing I want to do is write about the Boston Red Sox. Since I have to, maybe the best thing to do is get it out of the way in a hurry. It was clear from the Yankees jubilation that they really wanted the sweep, probably as payback for the humiliation of being beaten six of seven earlier in the season. For Boston fans, the series was a quickanddirty refresher course on how hard being a Red Sox fan can be. Its not the sweep that hurts so much as the fact that we should have won last nightsgame (the Yankees took that one by a score of 54 in thirteen innings), we could have won the June 30th game, and I would argue that we might even have won the first game of the series, in which we were blown out, if not for the errors (the Sox committed three, two by Garciaparra, who committed three overall in the serieshe didnt play last night). Being a Red Sox fan, particularly when playing the Yankees at crucial junctures of the season, can be such a filthy job. Two nights ago, with the Sox leading 20 but in a jam, Tony Clark hit a hard ground ball down to first. It should have been the third out. In the dugout, Tim Wakefielddown for the win, if the Sox could hold onraised his hands joyfully. But instead of being an out, the ball squirted through David Ortizs glove and into right field.Ortiz blamed his glove, claiming the webbing was defective. Boston fans, knowing where God and the Fates stand in regard to our benighted club, did not doubt it. In last nights game, Manny Ramirez hit a home run in the top of the thirteenth to put the Sox up, 43. In the bottom of the inning, the first two Yankees to bat went harmlessly. Then Sierra singled, Cairo doubled, and Flaherty doubled. Ball game. The loss doesnt hurt so much as coming so close to winning. Twice during that nightmare inning we were only a strike away. And so I found myself doing what I have done after so many Red Sox closebutnocigar losses in my lifetime lying in my bed wideawake until maybe two or twothirty in the morning, seeing the key base hit that opened the door skip past the pitchers mound, then past the shortstop (Pokey Reese in this case) and into center field; seeing the celebrating Yankees; seeing our manager (Terry Francona in this case) hustling out of the dugout and into the clubhouse just as fast as his little legs could possibly carry him. Only this time I lay there also thinking that when I got up again after a night of bad rest, I was actually going to have to write about this fuckaree, thanks to my friend Stewart ONan, who got me into this. Thanks, Stewart. But theres one very good thing about July 2nd. The Red Sox are on toAtlanta. Atlanta usually kills us, but theyre having a down year, and at least I dont need to write about the damn Yankees for a while. After blowing two we should have won in the Bronx, we head south to take on the Dixie equivalent of the Evil Empire, the Braves. Theyre not that good this year, having lost most of that nibblethecorners staff of the 90s, but they play in the worst division in baseball, the NL East, so theyre still scrapping. Bill Muellers back, and to make room for him, the Sox put Crespo on waivers, with an eye toward assigning him to Pawtucket. Arroyo throws well, as does former Cleveland phenom Jaret Wright. Ortiz goes deep in the first, and Bill Mueller knocks in a run in his first atbat, but the Braves get solo shots from Chipper Jones and J. D. Drew to tie it at 2. In the middle of the sixth, Steve calls. Hes watching up in Maine. The Sox are playing like old people fuck. Hes worried about the season going down the tubes. Hey, I say, we almost have our starting lineup out there for the first time all year. Bill Mill at third, Nomar at short, Trot in right. The only one missing is Pokey. Is that a good thing, though, Stewart? Wouldnt you rather have the other guys playing the way they were playing in April or May? Pokeys not the one who hit .225 and made three errors this week. Nomar cost us a game. (As he says this, Bellhorn whiffs, and a caption says that his 90 strikeouts lead the league.) And Francona cost us at least one. I hate looking into the dugout and seeing him rocking back and forth. Like Danny in The Shining. I keep looking for drool. Redrum! Redrum! Steve says he couldnt sleep after last nights game, that he lay in bed, seeing Sierras ground ball up the middle. I confess to lying awake as well, as if were joined by a sickness, and we are. When he hangs up, I feel like Ive lost someone on the suicide hotline. I think I should have been able to cheer him up, but I cant lie; weve looked awful lately. Just have to ride it out. Its 22 in the eighth when the starters give way to a roll call of relievers. Its almost a replay of last nights game, with each team putting runners on and then not being able to drive them in. In the tenth Manny finally breaks the tie, knocking a single up the middle to score Johnny. In comes Foulke to close, even though he threw two innings last night. Rafael Furcal, whos the second fastest person in the stadium, doubles to leftcenter, then takes third on what the replay shows to be a foul ball (Francona stands blankly at the dugout rail). Little Nick Green hits a sac fly, and were tied. We do nothing in the eleventh or twelfth, and trust the game to Anastacio Martinez, recalled today to fill the spot left by Williamson, back on the DL. Anastacio looks good in the eleventh, but in the twelfth he gets no one out, giving up a single, a single and then a threerun homer to end it. 63, and we suck. At least the Mets beat the crap out of the Yanks, 112. Go Mets! July 3rd SK Im not writing in the baseball book until after the AllStar break. After last nights 12inning heartwrecker, I just cant. The team has clearly closed up shop until after the break. They need to take a few deep breaths and then just focus on winning gamebygame. The wild card is still possible, but right now losing it looks all too likely. I dont read the newspaper sports pages when were losingtoo depressingbut the screams for Franconas head have surely begun. Yes? SO You are correct, sir. Much secondguessing, though Ive yet to hear anyone ask for the head of hitting coach Ron Jackson, and its Papa Jacks boys who are stringing out the pen and making every defensive out crucial. Weve scored four or less runs in all of these losses, against decidedly borderline pitching (save for Vazquez, the sole quality arm; last night Jaret Fat Elvis Wright was mowing us down like alfalfa). That dont cut it, even in the NL. Bellhorn is stonecold, and when we do get runners on, were not moving them around. Tell Theo, and tell John Henry too its time to kick some ass. SK Theyve got the bats, theyd argue; where are the hits in those bats? SO Papa Jacks slogan last year was Somebody gotta pay. This year, if we dont start rippin, it could be him. Walking on the beach this morning, we pass a couple on a towel. The guy spies our Sox hats and says, How bout those Yankees? How bout those Marlins? I ask. Later, driving on I95, Im cheered by the sheer number of Red Sox stickers and licenseplate holders, even an official Mass license plate like Trot hawks on NESN. I pass a car that has one of the free BELIEVE stickers Cambridge Soundworks gives out by Autograph Alley, and I think yes, its that simple. We may be down now, but this is my team, and Im going to believe in them, whatever happens. Fuck the Yankees, and fuck their noshowing, frontrunning, fairweather fans. We all have our little strategies for dealing with loss, and right now Im using all of mine. The Red Sox, who seem to be imploding, lost another heartwrecker last night, this time in twelve innings, in Atlanta. Thats four straight, the last three close ones. Strategies for dealing? One Stop reading the sports pages. Right now I wont even read about Wimbledon, lest my eye should stray to a baseball story, or, worse, the standings, on the facing page. Two Kill the sound. I watch the game every night on TV, but now with the MUTE function engaged, because I have conceived an active horror of what the announcers may be saying. MUTE doesnt work when the games on ESPN, because their closed captioning kicks in, and in those cases, I have to turn the volume all the way down to 0. Three Change the station when the game is over. Just as soon as the final out is recorded I punch in Channel 262, better known as Soapnet. No way am I waking up to NESNs SportsDesk these days, even though I know I may be missing the always fascinating Jayme Parker. No, for the foreseeable future, Ill be catching up on All My Children while I shave and do my morning exercises. Meantime, good newsand it has nothing at all to do with me saving a bunch on my car insurance. It looks like the current BoSox skid is going to end at fourits the top of the ninth, and Bostons leading Atlanta 61. Curt Schillings on the hill for the Sox, looking for number eleven. Hesbeen our most reliable pitcher, because that suckers not just good, hes lucky. Tonight Doug Mirabelli came up with two outs and the bases juiced, and although the Sox have been horrible all year in that situation, tonight was Mirabellis nighthe put one over the fence to dead center, and that should be lights out for this lighthitting Braves team. Mr. Tripp, who owns the local general store, gave me a Tshirt today that says RED SOX on the front and I SUPPORT TWO TEAMS, THE RED SOX AND WHOEVER BEATS THE YANKEES on the back. I wore it for tonights game, and I intend to wear it again tomorrow. And every day until they lose. (I also intend to keep on watching All My Children on Soapnet instead of SportsDesk on NESN for the foreseeable future. Less stress.) July 4th After losing the other night, Anastacio Martinez is shipped back to Pawtucket, making room for Theos newest acquisition, former Pirate Jimmy Anderson, a finesse lefty who last pitched for the Iowa Cubs. Hes not the solution to our middlerelief problems, and I think Theos pulling a Dan Duquette, trying to get away with cutrate bandaids. If he really wants a quality arm, hes going to have to give up something. Im reading on the beach when my nephew Charlie says the Sox are winning 41. I wander into the house to see for myself and watch as Lowe gives up a walk, an infield single, another walk, a groundout by pitcher Mike Hampton that scores a run, a single, a double, a single. Weve all seen how quickly Lowe can melt down, and throughout this sequence were begging Francona to lift him, yet for most of it theres no one warming up. Francona lets him throw to lefty Chipper Jones, who predictably sticks one in the bleachers. Its 84, and everyone around the set is swearing. Francona finally calls on new guy Jimmy Anderson, who walks his first batter on four pitches, then gives up a double to Andruw Jones and a triple to Charles Thomas. Ive only been watching for ten minutes and Atlantas sent ten guys to the plate. Can they fire a manager in the middle of the season? Charlie asks. SK Sox getting roasted 104. When I snoozed off, it was 41 good guyz. This be bad. Another day, another shellacking by a sub.500 club; another series lost to same. Its time for Terry to go while theres still a season to save. Bring back Tollway Joe. SO Francona the Terryble. Bet the Globe and Herald scribes are sharpening their instruments. At least the Mets sweep the Yankees (their fans chanting, Were not Boston)and on a horrible call. Late in a close game, Cairo hits one to the right side that Piazza cant reach. It gets by him and hits Posada. The first base ump rules him safe; the crew chief overturns it. Torre comes out to argue, to no avail. The rule is that if a fielders had a chance to handle the ball, then the runners safe. The crew chief decided that Piazza hadnt had a chance in the official sense, and that the second baseman might, and was therefore deprived of the chance to put Cairo out by the ball hitting Posada. Torre protests the game. And while the Yanks were the recipients of dozens of homer calls from the umps during our last series (including the noncall on that 02 count to Cairo that would have ended Wednesday nights game), I cant help but be annoyed at the incompetence. Get it right, Blue. July 5th The AllStar teams are announced. Schilling, Manny and David Ortiz made itno surprise. What is shocking is that the three players implicated in the BALCO scandalBonds, Giambi and Sheffieldare all starting. Nice job, fans. Way to clean up the game. Is life simpler, as Americans like to believe, down on the farm? Were hoping, driving through a monsoon to see the PawSox, whose ticket office assures us the weather will clear up and theyll get the game in. They almost do. At one point the grounds crew has the tarp off and is raking sawdust into the infield dirt, and Anastacio Martinez and Ramiro Mendoza and Frank Castillo and Mystery Malaska warm up down the thirdbase line. But by the time we have the ceremonial pitches (its Latino Day) and Dauber and Adam Hyzdu and Big Andy Dominique come out to stretch, its misting again, then straightout raining, and two hours after game time, they call it, to halfhearted boos. So it really is a day off no baseball at all. July 6th Tonight the Sox open a threegame series with Oakland, one of their chief wildcard opponents, and for the time being, at least, Bostons postseason hopes are all about the wild card. Tonight will also be Bostons eightyfirst game of the year, which puts them almost exactly at the halfway point of the season. Any real analysis of the first half will have to wait until the AllStar break, but I think its fair to say that I have rarely seen the feeling in my little corner of New England turn so quickly, so decisively, and so almost poisonously against our only major league club. Who knows, by the time the AllStar break comes around, I may be willing to drop the almost. This sea change isnt that hard to understand. What we have here is a team filled with highpriced talent, much of which started the season on the disabled list. The team did well out of the gate nevertheless, contending in rather spectacular fashion in large part with the scrappy hitnfield skills of guys like Bellhorn, Youkilis and Reese to complement the booming bats of Ramirez and Ortiz.Then, just as the big boys started getting well, the team got sick. If its going to get better again, the convalescence must begin soon. How bad is it right now in what sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy has dubbed Red Sox Nation? I peeped in at NESNs SportsDesk this morning (I felt I could do this without too much fear of damaging my fragile sports superego because the Sox were idle yesterday) and was horrified to hear Soxapproved commentator Mike Perlow bandying Red SoxMarlins trade rumors concerning Nomar Garciaparra and Derek Lowe. Of course there will be trade gossip as long as theres pro baseball, but because NESN is a quasiofficial arm of the Red Sox organization, one is tempted to sense palsied fingers (perhaps on the hand of Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein) creeping toward that red button marked PANIC. My decision to tune in NESN (Channel 623 on my satellite hookup) was clearly foolhardiness masquerading as bravery. The thought of Nomar in a Florida Marlins uniform is dismaying, almost nauseating. After no more than five minutes, I made haste to Soapnet and All My Children, where Erica is currently enduring the worlds longest alcohol intervention,Babe is in the hospital recovering from something her boyfriend JR (with a nickname like that you know hes a rat) put in her drink, and no one, so far as I can tell, is in danger of getting traded to General Hospital. Right now that makes it a safer, comfier world. Wake versus Barry Zito doesnt sound fair, but in the second, Billy Mueller launches a threerun Monster shot. Zito loads the bases in the fourth and walks in two runs, then, after a smoked liner to third by Nomar, Millar doubles down the leftfield line, scoring two more. Its 70 and Zitos thrown over 100 pitches. As reliever Justin Lehr gives up four more in the fifth, and its a laugher. SK Maybe the worst part of the current Red Sox woes is that theres this wearyass old paperdelivery dude up here who drops off the Globe and the New York Times to the general store. Hes worse about the Red Sox than Angry Bill in Still, We Believe. Those damn Red Sox! he says one day. |
And this morning its That damn Nomah! And every day its I been chasin those bums my whole life! You know, like hes the only fucking sailor on the Pequod. Well, its 110 Red Sox tonight in the sixth, and unless things go horribly wrongand after that last game in Atlanta, I guess anything is possibleI can face the wearyass old paper dude tomorrow with equaminity (sic). The problem is, its only one game. People are asking me about our chances in the wild card already. I mean, its come to that. Im telling them Hold the phone, theres still a division race going on here. But weve got to get the old Magic Streak going, like with the formerly hapless DRays. Could this be the magical night it starts to happen???!!!? Hold de fone! And git yo FREEK on!!! SO Naysayers everywhere. Its too easy. You could damn the chances of every team in the majors and at the end of the year youd be 291. Havent the Pats taught him anything? Dare to believe. Speaking of streaks, dja see my Bucs reeled off ten straight before losing to the Marlins last night? So it can happen to anybody. July 7th Tonight Mark Belllhorn takes Mark Redman deep in the first for a 10 lead. Like Zito, Redman struggles. In the second he gives up a solo shot to Nomar, and then a batch of hits, including a big double by Tek and a twoout RBI single by Johnny, and were up 60 and on our way to a rare blowout behind Pedro. July 8th Its Game 83, two past the halfway mark, and for the very first time (including spring training) we field our real starting lineup Schill and Tek; Millar, Pokey, Nomah and Bill Mueller; and Manny, Johnny and Trot, with Big David at DH. The SchillingHarden matchups in our favor, and goes that way early. Ortiz busts out of his slump with a tater over the Sox bullpen in the first, and Harden throws one at Mannys head. In the third, Manny retaliates with a threerun oppositefield shot. By the fifth its 71 and this one looks in the bag. But the As dont roll over. Schillings had a twentyfiveminute wait before the sixth, and they get a pair off him. In the seventh, Timlin gives up a twoout double to Erubiel Durazo and an RBI single to Bobby Crosby, and its 74. Francoma (as the press has been calling him) leaves him in in the eighth; he gives up another run, and with one out, we have to go to Foulke. He gets Byrnes with a changeup for the second out, but on 02, Scott Hatteberg slaps another change off the chalk behind third and its a onerun game. Jermaine Dye, 0 for his last 15, skies one to leftcenter. Johnny goes back toward the corner where the Monster meets the centerfield wall and leaps, but its off the Monster and bounces across center toward Trot. Hatteberg scores to tie the game. Dyes into third standing up, and Fenways grumbling. Durazo chases strike three to end the inning, but our sixrun leads history. Foulke throws a onetwothree ninth. Octavio Dotel looks tough, getting them to the tenth, but the As pen has thrown too many innings this series. They go to Justin Lehr, who gave up four runs in a single inning Tuesday. He gets Tek and pinch hitter Mark Bellhorn, but Johnny singles to left. The As move their outfield back so nothing gets through. Its a shrewd move, as Bill Mueller lines one to the leftcenter gap. Kotsay ranges over from center to cut it off in front of the scoreboard, but bobbles it. Johnnys going to try to score anywayat home you make them make the play. The crowds up and loud. The relays good, Crosby to catcher Damian Miller, but Johnny belly flops and slides a hand across the plate, and David Ortiz is there to call him safe and wrap him in a bear hug. The dugout rushes the field, mobbing Johnny and Bill Mueller, and its a sweep. Were 4637 and tied with Oakland for the wild card, and on Extra Innings, Eck is pumped. Oaklands not going to do it, he says. Theyre showing me nothing. Theyre done. Remember, I was the one that said it. July 9th Although things are heating up on All My Children, I was able to forego Babes struggles with the evil JR and JRs equally evil (and wellheeled) daddy to relish the highlights of last nights 87 Red Sox win over the As, completing the Sox sweep and returning Boston to a tie in the wildcard race. More important to me at this stage of the season, one threegame series away from the AllStar break, is the fact that weve managed to make up some ground against the Yankees, who have lost five of their last seven. The papers made much this morning about Oaklands surge in the late innings of last nights game (they pounded out 17 hits, most of them against the bullpen and the key ones against Keith Foulke, who blew the save opportunity), but my take on it is more optimistic. Heres a good Oakland team that gets blown out in the first two contests of a key series, their pitching touched up for 22 runs. Trailing by six runs in the final game, they do what good teams do fight and scratch and claw their way back into contention, trying to come away with something. But in the bottom of the tenth, Johnny Damon singled to left, then scored when As center fielder Mark Kotsay bobbled Bill Muellers line shot. It was only the smallest of bobblesonly a steps worth, surelybut Damon was running for all he was worth and that one extra step (and a hard slide across home) was just enough to win the game. It was a thrilling play, bringing the crowd at Fenway (and yours truly at home) to their feet, cheering. In the end, it was the good twin of the game Boston tried so hard to win against the Yankees and lost in thirteen innings. So thats three. Thats your little streak. Tonight were back to Arroyo. Its up to you, Bronson keep me away from All My Children. SO What do you think of the resurgence in Randy Johnson rumors? Could we get him for, say, Arroyo and BK, or is now the time to ship Lowe, before he walks? And on a lesser note, did you see Ellis Burks had to go back and have surgery on that knee a second time? Hell be out till September. So, since he has three singles and a homer so far, were paying him roughly two hundred thou a hit. SK A lot of talk about blowing that lead, but what really happened was Oakland struggling desperately to take one of threeand we held em off! Now we gotta keep going. As for the Ellis Burks thingwell, this is an old Red Sox trick. Next thing you know, well be bringing the Hawk out of retirement. Or the Eck. SO Why stop with one Hawk? Bring back Andre Dawson too. Speaking of knees. Tonight its Bronson Arroyo versus the Rangers Joaquin Benoit at Fenway, yet another sellout crowd. In the dugout, the Sox are goofing with an oversized bobblehead doll of Pedro. The controversy is that Franconas given him permission to go home to the DR, since he doesnt pitch until after the break. I bet a lot of guys would like to go home early, Jerry grouses, and hes right. To start, Arroyo gives up a double to Soriano, but Kevin Millar makes a great snag of a liner at first to turn two and bail his pitcher out. SK God, but ole Bronson looked shaky in the first inning, didnt he? Ive seen tonights plate umpire before. He played the World Champion Blind Lady in a revival of WAIT UNTIL DARK. Oh well, 10 Sox [Johnny scoring on a Manny sac fly in the bottom of the first]. Go Bronson. But shave that goat. That umpire is a serious CheezDog. Hasnt given pore ole Bronson one single corner. The Aman wont live long against a hardhitting club like this getting calls like that. Hes got 3 Ks through 3 23; with the same stuff (and the same ump), Pedro would have 7. Benoits thrown okay as well, but in the fifth Johnny hooks one around the Pesky Pole, and while Benoit gets the next three guys, they all hit the ball hard. In the sixth, he loads the bases with no outs. Tek Ks on three pitches before Bill Mueller hits a sac fly, and heres Johnny again, poking a wall double to score two more. SK Arroyo looks like the real deal tonight, dont he? At least through 7. SO Make that 8. [As Im typing, Johnny hits one into the Rangers pen.] And Johnny is just smoking. 4 for 5 with 2 dingers, 4 RBIs and 3 runs. I dont know what Papa Jack did before the Oakland series, but it stuck. Come on, DRays! (Theyre finishing the first half with the Yanks, of course.) We win 70, and its a fast game, as quick as Pedros twohitter against the Pods. SO And there you have it, a nifty threehitter, with Curtis the Mechanic throwing a lean and clean ninth. So, you think were really going to try for Randy Jo? SK I think wed be fools not to try for him. Hey, what harm? Throw all the lettuce into the Saladmaster, and lets have some World Series coleslaw. We got four, I want some more SO Hey, if John Henrys buying And in a briefly noted roster move, we send nice kid Lenny DiNardo down to Pawtucket and bring up veteran righty Joe Nelson, who didnt pitch at all last year due to injuries. Hes the twentysecond pitcher weve tried in the first half. July 10th Were driving the kids to camp in Ohio, a ninehour jaunt. As darkness falls, were on I90 west of Erie when Trudys cell phone plinks. Its her father, excited about the game Mannys hit two out and were up 116 in the third. Bellhorns made two errors behind Lowe, but atoned with a homer of his own. Later, during the OaklandCleveland game, we hear an update Sox 146 over Texas in the eighth. Teks gone deep, and Nomar. Looks like five in a row, our secondlongest streak of the season. July 11th Coming home, the only game we can pull in on the radio is the Buffalo Bisons and Durham Bulls, and all the way across the Southern Tier we listen to the Indians and DRays minor leaguers (including old Sock Midre Cummings) pay their dues. During a pitching change, the announcers dump the outoftown scoreboard on us. Up at Fenway, it was Texas beating the Red Sox six to five. Shit, I say. Notice that the first stage is anger, not denialthat comes later. The Yankees outlasted Tampa Bay Dammit. I sag back in my seat, defeated. I really thought theyd pay the Rangers back with a sweep, maybe even pick up a game, but no, we win two out of three from a firstplace team and lose ground. July 12th The recap in the paper is weirdly cheery, the writer giving us credit for fighting back, as if that proves the character of the team. We were down 52 in the bottom of the seventh when Doug Mirabelli hit a tworun shot and then Johnny D soloed to tie it. In the eighth, Foulke gave up a run, then in the ninth, Pokey, pinchrunning, got picked off first. Everyone agrees that the ump blew the call, but they also agree that the ball beat him there, it was just a high tag. Shades of Damian Jackson pinchrunning against the Yanks last year and getting picked off second. Its great that we came back, sure, but that makes Foulkes blown hold that much worse. Hes been shaky lately, one reason why the only games we win seem to be blowouts. And Manny, listed on Franconas lineup card, begged off at the last minute, saying his left hamstring felt tight, giving the columnists something to gnaw on. In the wildcard race were still a game up on Oakland, with the Angels and Twins only a half back of them. The Randy Johnson sweepstakes is on. The Dbacks have the worst record in the majors, and Randy Jos forty years old and cant wait for them to retool. The Sox and Yanks are interested, and possibly the Angels. The Unit seems to be having fun with all the attention, saying he cant decide which chowder he likes best, New England or Manhattan. Really, its a nobrainer; Mr. Schill could tell him that. The guys who bring a title to Fenway will be folk heroes. In New York, hed be just another hired gun. I mean, seriously, wholl remember Jon Lieber? Tonights the AllStar Home Run Derby, and Mannys stepped aside to give David Ortiz his spot. El Jefes taken battingpractice pitcher Ino Guerrero with him to Houston as his secret weapon, but cant find his groove. He hits a girder beneath the roof, a titanic shot, but it doesnt count. Hes got five outs on him before he sticks one into the upper deck and ends up with three, not enough to make the semis. Manny jogs over and sticks a Yankee cap on Ino. July 13th Tonight is the AllStar Game, and I find that working on this book has turned me into a kind of ex officio ballplayer in at least one way because my team isnt playing, I have almost no interest in which show horse wins the makebelieve contest.Like the less stellar ballplayers, Im just kicking back, watching some VH1 (also some All My Children reruns on Soapnet) and enjoying my three nights off. Chillin. I had intended to write some sort of midseason summary, and find I have little to write. Thats a good thing. Boston ended the first half winning five out of six and putting all trade rumors (except for that sweetly wistfulone that has Randy Johnson in a Red Sox uniform) to rest. Their wonlost record is almost exactly what it was at the break a year ago, when they went into postseason as the AL wildcard team, and indeed they lead the wildcard race this year by a game (over the Oakland Moneyball boys). But stillthe gloom. Why? Because that Reverend DimmesdaleHester Prynne jazz in The Scarlet Letter isnt just romantic bullshit, thats why. There is a very real streak of dour pessimism in the New England character, and it runs right down into the bedrock. We buy new cars expecting them to be lemons. We put in new heating systems and expect them not just to go titsup but to do it stealthily, thereby suffocating the kiddies in their beds (but leaving us, their parents, to grieve and blame ourselves for at least fifty years). We understand were never going to win the lottery, we know well get that unpassable and exquisitely painful gallstone on a hunting or snowmobiling trip far from medical help, and that Robert Frost was fuckingA right when he said that good fences make good neighbors. We expect the snow to turn to freezing rain, rich relatives to die leaving us nothing, and the kids (assuming they escape the Black Furnace Death) to get refused by the college of their choice. And we expect the Red Sox to lose. Its the curse, all right, but it has nothing to do with the Bambino; its the curse of living here, in New England, just up that Christing potholed I84 deathroad from the goddamn New York Yankees. With all that at work, its hard for the head to convince the heart how good this current Red Sox team isthe front three pitchers are solid, the hitting is fearsome from one to seven (I hate that Youkilis, an onbase machine, is sitting on the bench so much, though), and on a good night the defense is adequate. Terry Francona has shown mediocre managerial skills at best in the first half, but hes also shown a willingness to learn. Sure, the Yankees are the elephant in the living room; at 5531, they are the best team in major league baseball (given their incredible payroll, they better be). But lets brush aside a little of our natural Red SoxNew England gloom here long enough to point that at 4838, the Red Sox are ten games over .500, and that other than the Yankees, only Texas in the AL and St. Louis in the NL have better recordsplus we just beat Texastwo out of three. Now that we have our big guys back and starting to hit the ball, I think well be in it till the very end, be it bitter or sweet. Thats as far as Im willing to go right now, but I think in midJuly, thats quite far enough. When I get the glooms, I just tell myself things could be a lot worse. I could be writing a book about Seattle (3254), for example. Case closed. Its 10 AL in the first inning of the AllStar Game, and Clemens is struggling (Jason Schmidt should have started for the NL, but politics is all). With one aboard, he gets two strikes on Manny. Yankee groupie and chucklehead blabbermouth Tim McCarver hasnt brought up the fact that it was Clemenss high fastball to Manny in the ALCS last year that sparked the PedroZimmer brawl. He doesnt have time now, as Clemens misses his location, serving Manny a thighhigh fastball on the inside of the plate, and Manny lines it into the leftfield seats for a tworun shot. And while this is only a silly exhibition game, its a measure of vindication and revenge. Not a word from McCarver, as if his memory banks have been wiped clean. Clemens gives up 6 runs in the first, and I wonder if batterymate Mike Piazza is telling the hitters whats coming. Speaking of revenge. Later, when the AL lead is 74, David Ortiz outdoes his amigo, going upper deck on former Sox prospect Carl Pavano for a tworun job, sealing the win. Its the first time AL teammates have gone deep since Clevelands Al Lopez and Larry Doby in 1954. Not Mantle and Berra or McGwire and Canseco or even Lynn and Rice, but Ramirez and Ortiz. Im thinking maybe theyll give Manny and David a joint MVP award, but the games being played in Houston (at old Enron Field, with the elder Bush in the front row), and they give it to Texass Alfonso Soriano for his threerun shot, which was just padding at the time. Still, Im proud that we represented, even with Mr. Schill not throwing. And, as I email Steve, after playing on the road throughout the playoffs last year, we can sure use the homefield advantage. SK Yep. Otherwise, I dont care. Whats the comparison between the Red Sox wonlost record for last year versus this year at the AllStar break? SO Last year we were 5538 at the break and only two games back (compared with 4838 and 7 back this year). According to the archives on redsox.com, folks were stoked about our surprising offense (and especially impressed with Theos pickups like Ortiz, Millar, Todd Walker and Bill Mill, and the explosive debut of justacquired Gabe Kapler), though still worried about our pen. We may have blown some lateinning heartbreakers, but the swoon waited until after we pulled within a game of the Yanks in late July. July 15th The newest Randy Johnson rumor has Theo shipping Nomar to Arizona. Its too much, even if we dont think we can resign him. The ideas weird Nomar reunited with his freeswinging pal Shea. Meanwhile, due to league rules, Mendoza has to be promoted to the big club or released, so to make room for him, Theo and Terry send Kevin Youkilis down to Pawtucketunfair. Since Bill Muellers been back, theres no position for him, but it seems a shame not to carry him as a pinch hitter. Tonight its Lowe versus Jarrod Washburn out in Anaheim, a 1005 start. Ive been jonesing for some ball since last Friday, and plan on staying up for it. Last time I did this, Vladimir Guerrero had nine RBIs; I figure this has got to be better. The Yanks have already beaten Detroit, soagainwe need this one. From the start there are problems. Mannys hamstrings bothering him again, so Franconas moved him to DH, Ortiz to first (scratching McCarty) and Millar to lefta shift that leaves us weaker at two positions. Unless his quads still iffy, Trots sitting because Washburns a lefty (weak, since even Dauber was allowed to hit against lefties in 2002), so weve got slightly better defense in right. Kapler proves it in the third, cutting off a ball toward the line, then spinning and gunning speedy Chone Figgins at second. But Millar just cant cover the territory in left. A pop fly down the line falls between him, Bill Mueller and Nomarjust foul. The batter singles on the next pitch, and even though he doesnt score, it means Lowe has to get four outs, and his pitch count is climbing. Hes throwing well, though, not walking people, fighting to the end of every atbat. In the fourth, with first and second and two down, at the end of a long battle on a full count, Figgins lofts a similar popup down the line. Bill Mueller goes hard, Nomar trailing him. Billy realizes hes not going to get there and looks to Millar, whos pulled up, running at halfspeed, and by the time Kevin realizes its his ball, he cant get there. The ball drops a foot inside the line, and Bengie Molina, whos been jogging home out of sheer habit, crosses the plate, and the runners end up on second and third. The TV shows Millar back at his position. Ive been pacing the room, stopping in front of the set for each pitch. Now I lean down and jab at the screen like Lewis Black. Why do you suck so much? Shaken, on the next batter Lowe steps off the back of the rubber with the wrong foot, balking. Mike Scioscias up and out of the dugout, pointing. It should bring in a run, but the ump doesnt call it, and we sneak out of a jam. In the top of the fifth, we get the run right back, but in the bottom of the inning, Lowe tires. With Darin Erstad on second, Molina singles to left. Millar has the ball in his glove before Erstad rounds third, and Erstads just coming off a leg injury, but Millars a first baseman, and his throw is weak and low, bouncing three times as Erstad slips past Tek. Embrees been up for a while, and Lowes over 100 pitches, so hes done. He pitched well enough for a quality start. If he has a real left fielder, the games still 11. Embree should be well rested, but cant muscle a fastball by Adam Kennedy, who singles. Little David Eckstein, who has no home runs, misses one by five feet, doubling off the wall in leftcenter, scoring Molina. Figgins singles to center, and soon its 61. Its midnight, and I think about going to bed, but hang in, only to see Curtis Leskanic groove one to Erstad for a tworun shot. Were down seven runs and dredging the bottom of the bullpen, while the Angels can always call on twin closers KRod and Troy Percival, so good night, nurse. In bed Im still pissed off. Its a demoralizing loss, with little good to point to, and against a club thatif were really contenderswe need to beat. Were now 03 against them, and were plainly a sub.500 club on the road. Were eight back. I try not to overreact. Part of it is that Id been waiting so long to see them play, and they played badly. Its just one game, and its a fourgame set. Pedros going tomorrow. The seasons long. Breathe. July 16th I must admit the second half of the season got off to an inauspicious start last night in Anaheim. The Red Sox, who rarely do well on the West Coast (at least during the regular season), put on a particularly vileshow against the Angels, losing 81. Derek Lowe, although victimized by poor defense behind him (not for the first time this year, either), did not exactly cover himself with glory, either. In other news, the Sox sent down the onbase machine known as the Greek God of Walks in favor of a middle reliever whose last name is Martinez. Any resemblance to the Sox starter of the same name simply does not exist. This could be a long road trip. SK And heres how we start the second half by losing to the Angels (big) and sending onbase machine Kevin Youkilis back to tripleA to make room for a mediocre pitcher. The conventional wisdom once more clamps down. You build an expensive multimilliondollar racing machine and give it to a clodhopping middle manager with a cheek full o chaw. This is dopeyball, not moneyball. Disgusted in Maine, Steve SO I feared the vengeance of the disappointed fiend.Franconastein Now the papers have Nomar going to the Cubs for prospects we then ship to Arizona for Randy Jo. Seeing as were eight games out, all this talk seems frivolous and offtarget. We just need to play better. Now. But the AllStar break is a good time to panic. Houston, right at .500 despite signing Clemens, Pettitte, Jeff Kent and Carlos Beltran, fires exSox skipper Jimy Williams. Seattle, dead last in the West, continues its fire sale of highpriced veterans, tagging John Olerud, one of the best hitters of the era, for reassignmentmeaning, essentially, theyre cutting him, hoping a contender like the Sox will want his stick (and Gold Glove at first) and pick up his salary. Tonights another 1005 start, and despite my history, I decide to stay up and watch this one to the end. The Yanks have already lost to Detroit, Mike Maroth onehitting them, so we have a chance to make up a game. Mannys not starting, andone day too lateFranconas figured out the right lineup Trot in right, Kapler in left, Ortiz DHing, Millar at first, Pokey at second. Its the same lineup Trudy proposed last night before quitting on the game. How much is he getting paid? she asks. Kelvim Escobars throwing 95, Pedro 94. Homeplate ump Matt Hollowell is squeezing both of them, and Nomar takes advantage of it, leading off the second with a firstpitch homer to leftcenter when Escobar tries to get ahead with a fastball down the pipe. Heres how much Hollowells squeezing them in the bottom of the inning, Pedro issues backtoback walks to their number six and seven hitters. With the tight strike zone, both pitchers counts are rising. In the bottom of the fourth, Pedro has Guillen 02 with two down and decides to challenge him. Guillen catches up to the fastball and sends it to deepest center. Johnny goes back to the wall and leaps. Jerry thinks he has the ball when he comes down, but Johnny takes off his glove and flips it to show its empty. Pedro looks tough, despite the umpiring. In one stretch through the middle innings, he strikes out six of his last seven batters (in one cruel atbat, he throws five straight changes to Jeff DaVanon, then gets him on a 32 fastball down Broadway), but with two down in the sixth he walks Guillen, who steals second (thats smallball, running with two out and a decent hitter at the plate) so Erstads single brings him in. Its a onerun game and Pedros thrown 115 pitches. This ones down to the pen. In the top of the seventh, Scot Shields gets a gift thirdstrike call against David Ortiz on a pitch up and in thats been a ball all night. Ortiz turns on Hollowellhes not the first to have words with himand by the time Francona can run out and get between them, Hollowells tossed him. Ortiz wants a piece of him, and Sveum, bench coach Brad Mills and Papa Jack have to help Francona restrain him. Hes still mad when they bull him over to the dugout. He yanks two of his bats out of the rack and flings them in the direction of home plate. They nearly hit two other umps standing on the firstbase line. Its a dumb movehell probably end up getting suspended, and we need his bat. At the same time, Jerry and Sean agree that Hollowells been so bad that it was just a matter of who was going to blow up on him. Curtis Leskanic gets two quick outs in the seventh on two hardhit balls, then gives up a single to Eckstein before being pulled for Embree. Like last night, Embree gives up a hit to the first guy he sees. Its first and third for Garret Anderson, and Im having flashbacks. Hes 1 for 10 lifetime against Embree, but that doesnt comfort me. He grounds to the hole between first and second, a tough play for a mortal second basemanan adventure for a Todd Walkerbut Pokey makes it look routine, and once again Im glad we have him. He could go 0 for 200 and Id still want him out there. Its a fourgame series, and Scioscia wants two innings out of Shields. Shields has his fastball popping, but for some reason tries a curve on 32 to Kapler. It hangs belthigh, and Gabe puts it into the third row in left for his second of the season, and weve got some breathing room. Timlin sets up, with McCarty at first, and gets a brilliant play from Pokey on a chopper, snagging a shorthop a foot from the bag at second and gunning Guillen. Foulkes the recipient of a tumbling shoestring grab by Kapler on his way to a onetwothree ninth. We win, and look good doing it. Im surprised to see its 117 its been a tight game all night, well played if poorly umpired, definitely worth staying up for. The Angels are a good club; it took everything we had to win this one, and thats satisfying. Lets come back and play this way tomorrow. July 17th Saturday night, and by the time we switch over from the hilariously stiff They Are Among Us on the SciFi channel, the resurrected El Duque and the Yanks have beaten Detroit and Wakes given up three runs in the first. Colon walks the bases loaded in the second, but Johnny flies out. Vladimir Guerrero, looking like an MVP candidate, bombs a high knuckler onto the rocks, and its 40. Not only is Manny not playing, Bill Mueller is nowhere to be seen, and because its Wake throwing, Mirabellis catching, meaning (with the shift of Bellhorn to third) weve added Kapler, Pokey and Doug to a lineup already struggling to score runs. A scary play in the fourth, when hefty Jose Molina lines one at Wakes head. He ducks, and it nails him in the back, just above the 9 in 49, and ricochetsstill playablehigh into the air. Nomar snares it coming across the bag for a pop out, but Tims still down. On the replay it catches him solidly, and I think hes got to leave the game, but he takes some warmup tosses and stays in. On his first pitch, Adam Kennedy cranks a flat knuckler into the rightfield seats. In the fifth, Johnny gets one back with a linedrive homer down the short rightfield line, but thats it. New guy Joe Nelson relieves. 57, he features The Vulcan, a breaking ball gripped between his middle and ring fingers so his hand is split like Spocks livelongandprosper sign. In the sixth, Nelson loads them, and Francona, considering this one finished, calls on Jimmy Anderson, who throws two straight wild pitches, then gives up a single to Garret Anderson. Its 81 and 1230, and Im done. July 18th The final last night was 83. All I missed was a pair of solo shots by Johnny and Big Papi. Todays a 105 Pacific time start, meaning I wont have to stay up till onethirty. And Mr. Schills on the hill, though I must say Im getting a little grumpy with the club only winning his and Pedros starts (theyre a combined 131 since midMay). Wake and Lowe have been shaky, sure, but weve also given up 40 unearned runs behind them. Mannys sitting again, with Kapler filling in in left, McCarty at first and Bellhorn at second. Good news, though the Tigers have beaten the Yanks, so we can get back to seven with a win. As the game gets under way, the TV presents us with a mystery. Anaheims a fine team, were a marquee club with a large following, and its a beautiful Sunday afternoon, yet the outfield sections are halffilled and there are empty rows all around the ballpark. Do the Angels fans deserve this team (this day, this game)? In the first, David Ortiz powers one off the wall in leftcenter. Mike Scioscias resting everyday left fielder Jose Guillen, and veteran Tim Salmon cant get over quick enough to back up the carom, giving David a gift triple. Righthander John Lackey, a number four starter at best, strikes out the side, and comes back in the second to strike out two more. Schillings cruising too, and then in the third he hangs a curve to hefty Bengie Molina, who puts it into the leftfield stands for a 10 lead. Lackey bears down, snapping off a curve that gets lefties like Tek and Trot and Bill Mueller; by the fifth hes struck out a seasonhigh 7. Entering the sixth, both pitchers have given up two hits, but Schillings pitch count is rising. With one down, Johnny works a walk. Bellhorn follows with a single through the right side. Maybe Lackeys tired, because his fastball to David Ortiz is kneehigh and in, right where David likes them, and Big Papi golfs it over the fence in right. With his next pitch, Lackey drills Nomar in the elbow. The ump warns both benches, and Scioscia hustles out to argue. Its stupid, since the warning hurts us more than them. Now if Schilling retaliates, he gets tossed. The ump should wait till we even things up, then say, Okay, boys, thats enough. Lackey flags. He loads the bases and gets out of it only because McCarty hits a bullet to Figgins at third. For some reason Scioscia leaves him in, and Kapler greets him in the seventh with a leadoff homer on another kneehigh, 90 mph fastball. Johnny doubles down the line, and, too late, Scioscia goes to Scot Shields. Ortiz singles Johnny in for his third hit and fourth RBI of the day, then scores when Nomar triples off the scoreboard in right. With a 61 lead, Schilling goes after Guerrero in the seventh, blowing him away with a 94 mph fastball down the pipe. |
He strikes out the side, like Pedro signing a win. Hes up to 100 pitches, so Im surprised when he comes out in the eighth. He Ks Salmon, then plunks Molina (who hit the home run earlier) right in the ass. Molina looks out at him with both hands openwhats up? Schillings had great control all day, and theres no doubt this ones payback. With the warning in place, the ump should toss him, but, inexplicably, doesnt. Scioscia storms out of the dugout and plants himself in front of the ump, one hand on his hip, the other jabbing the air as he unleashes a stream of profanity we can easily lipread. The ump tosses him, and while its unfairmaybe because its so unfairwe laugh. Timlin closespoorly, opening the ninth by giving up backtoback singles to Figgins and Garret Anderson and a run on a sac fly by Guerrero (about thirty feet short of the rocks), but finally gets out of it with a pair of ground balls, and were off to Seattle to face the terrible Mariners. Manny Ramirez is daytoday with sore hamstrings (any number of sportswriters seem to think hes malingering, but lets see some of those overweight juiceheads get out there and run around left field for a few days) and Tim Wakefield took a fearsome line drive in the back last night, but we split four with Anaheim in their house, and to me thats a great escape. We may even have picked up a game on the Yankees, who continue to strugglego figureagainst the Tigers. Still, the Red Sox look maddeningly lackadaisical, a befogged team of grizzled male Alices in baseball Wonderland. But Schilling was great again today. As my younger son would no doubt say, hes so money he doesnt know hes money. Two more like him and never mind the World Series; the Red Sox would be ready for the Super Bowl. July 19th Another 1005 start, another sleepless night. The Yanks have already lost to Tampa Bay, and when Tek breaks a 11 tie with a threerun bomb off J. J. Putz in the eighth, it looks like well be six back. Arroyos thrown brilliantly, striking out 12 (including 11 straight outs by strikeout at one point), and the only run Seattle scored was due to some typical sloppy fielding. Because Schilling went so deep yesterday, the pen is rested. Embree and Timlin set up and combine to let in a cheapie, abetted by Bill Mueller winging a doubleplay ball past Bellhorn into right field, but Timlin gets a big strikeout with two in scoring position to end the inning. Foulke comes in to close. With one down, he gives up a solo shot to Miguel Olivo. They sure dont make it easy on us, I tell Steph and my nephews. All the other adults have long since gone to bed. Edgar Martinez is next. At fortyone, he cant run, so all Foulke has to do is throw him three low changes and hes meat. Instead, Foulke throws him an 88 mph fastball over the heart of the plate. Edgars been killing this pitch since he was fifteen, and doesnt miss. Johnny and Kapler both leap at the wall in rightcenter, but its gone, the Ms have gone backtoback, and the games tied. Unbelievable, I say. The boys are angry and want Francona to take him out, but we dont have anyone else. Embree, Timlin, Foulkethis is our Ateam. Foulke gets the last out on a long fly to right, then struggles so much in the tenth that the boys quit. Its 115 in the morning and we have to get up early tomorrow. Overall, Foulke throws 41 pitches. After starting the year 10 for 10 in save opportunities, hes 4 for his next 9, and that shaky streak started against Seattle, that Sunday game when Raul Ibanez took him into the pen and McCarty bailed him out in extras with a walkoff job. In the eleventh, McCarty, leading off, gets on on an error. Kapler bunts too hard down third, and they get the force at second. Again, weve got no smallball. Kapler takes second anyway on a wild pitch, but Bellhorn looks at a very wide strike three, and Johnny flies to left. Since Foulkes gone two, we have to bring in Leskanic. He gets behind Olivo 31, and Olivo singles through the hole. Dave Hansen wants to bunt him across. Curtis does the job for him, walking him. Then, in what must be seen as team play in Japan, on the very first pitch Ichiro bunts them over. Francona intentionally walks Randy Winn and pulls the infield in for Bret Boone. On 01, Boone hits a fly to leftcenter. Its deep enough to score the run, so the fielders ignore it and jog in as the ball clears the wall for a walkoff grand slam. Its 145, and Im so pissed off that Im glad they lost, because they suck. (Seeits not we now, its they; the loss is so deranging that for a few minutes I have to separate myself from the team.) They didnt hit or field for Arroyo. The threerun shot by Tek was a gift. All they needed was six outs, against the worst team in the league. I want to blame someone, and the obvious target is Foulke. But I know that closers blow games. Even Eric Gagne blew one the other day. And while its true that the pen hasnt looked good lately, Theo hasnt helped matters by picking up retreads like Anderson, Nelson and Leskanic. Mendoza, who should be covering some of these middle innings, is taking up a roster spot but may never pitch another meaningful atbat in the majors. But Theo didnt give up backtoback jacks. Its just a loss, a brutal, latenight, extrainning loss of a game we should have won, a game we needed (since we need all of them now), and theres nothing to do but eat it and go on. July 20th Its also the kind of loss that makes you nervous the next time the games on the line, and tonight we get a nightmarish rerun of last night when Lowe has to leave early with a blister and Seattle chips away at our 81 lead until its 97 in the ninth, with two on and no out and Foulke sweating buckets. Seattle has 18 hits, including 4 from Ichiro (along with 4 stolen bases), but has left 14 on. Because of last night, I dont believe in Foulke at all. He could give up another walkoff job to Boone here, and Id just shrug. Because Im still pissed off at him (at them). The Yanks have already won, so a loss would drop us 8 back, and I think, fuck it. 7, 8, 9it doesnt matter. If we keep losing on the road like this, we dont deserve to be in any race. Foulke doesnt try to nibble like last night. He leads with his fastball to get ahead, then goes exclusively to the change. He strikes out Boone. Strikes out Edgar. Strikes out Bucky Jacobsen for the game. For an instant, as the ump rings up Jacobsen, Im excited, but I cool off just as quickly. We barely squeaked this one out, and it should have been a laugher, after an eightrun fourth (David Ortiz with a threerun bomb, then Manny going backtoback). Same problem as always no middle relief. Leskanic let two of Lowes runners score. In his one inning, Timlin gave up a run. Nelson allowed two runs and only retired one man. Mendoza sat on the bench and watched. Kim was in Columbus with the PawSox. I have no idea where Theo was. July 21st SO Thanks for the tickets for tomorrow and the weekend. This sixgame home stand is crucial, after the ugly road trip. A bad time to stumble, since the Yanks are faltering as well. Kevin Brown pitched against the PawSox last night and looked good, so he may be back sooner than we might wish. SK Last nights win was just about as ugly as they get. Ill take .500 on the road, especially on the West Coast, but we had a chance to come back 42, and in much better shape. Im reading Moneyball now, and its really a jawdropping book. Lewis asserts, with no reservations whatever, that Art Howe is no more than the ventriloquists dummy on Billy Beanes knee. Which leads me to wonder if that is now true in Bostoni.e., if Terry Francona is the dummy on Theo Epsteins knee. And, if Epstein is following the Beane paradigm, then our team is in middling good shape assuming Theo is planning trades before the deadline. Beane feels good if he can go into the second half of the season six or less back. Still, I dont buy into everything the book suggests, either from the standpoint of strategy, and certainly not from the standpoint of business morality. SO My main argument with Moneyball is that the modest success of the As is based on Mulder, Hudson and Zito, and its pretty much a matter of luck that they came up at the same time and fulfilled the scouts expectations. So many prospects dont, but these three did. Otherwise, the norunning, nofielding, big OBP club has trouble scoring when it doesnt hit threerun home runshey, just like us! Billy Beanes always crowing about his genius, but look at the Twins, whove put together a better, steadier club with even less money. Theyve lost core guys like Eric Milton and A. J. Pierzynski, yet they keep on keepin on. And for a solid club that knows how to play the game, Ill take the smallball Angels any day, even with their terrible starters. SK I disagree. They were a certain type of ballplayer, picked for talent and affordability. And in the case of Zito, the scouts hated him. He was Beanes pick. All that aside, this years Red Sox team is a sick entity right now, and I hate it. I keep going back in my mind to one of those games versus the Angels. Were down by at least three runs, and maybe five. There are two out, and the Angels pitcher is struck wild. There are two on for us and Pokey at the plate. He puts on a heroic atbat, finally drawing a walk to load them for Johnny Damon, who swings at the first pitch he seesthe first motherfucking pitch he sees!and lines out to center. The fielder didnt even have to take a step. Thats just deerintheheadlights baseball. Something going on around here, what it is aint precisely clearbut Im not lovin it. SO Its the twentyfirst, meaning Theos got ten days to close his deals. I think weve got to land a quality arm, probably a starter who lets Arroyo be the middlerelief ace (a huge advantage, since no one out there has a Mendozatype guy, and Nelson and Anderson are firestarters). But Im not holding my breath. Firstpitch hitting is a killer, but Johnny obviously thought the guy was going to groove one to try to get ahead (like Foulke last nightany of those guys swings at that 88 mph doubleAquality fastball and its See ya!). SK I thought of that, but its still a bonehead move. One of the things Lewis points out in Moneyballcourtesy of Bill James and the sabermetrics guysis that batting average goes up seventyfive points if a batter takes the first pitch and that pitch is a ball. He also reminds the reader of Boggs, who always took the first pitch, and Hatteberg, who mostly does. SO What hurts is watching all these opportunities go by, and thats also a product of the OBP thing. Speaking of guys who always took one Roberto Clemente. The AntiNomar. [Nomar is a notorious firstpitch hitter, regardless of the game situation, just as the Great One never swung at a first pitch.] Do you believe were tied for the wild card? Seems impossible, the way weve been playing. Almost wish the DRays would reel off another eleven straight to shake things up. Somnambulism, baby, thats where were at. At least tonight I wont have to stay up till 145 to watch us tank. No, only till the sixth inning, when Tejada breaks a 33 tie with a basesloaded single to left. Pedro, whos been missing his spots all night, nearly gets out of it, but Johnnys throw on Javy Lopezs short sac fly is weak and up the firstbase line, and its 63. Earlier, Johnny misjudged a Tejada liner into a triple, leading to their first three runs, and later, in a whacky play, he relays a David Newhan shot to the wall in center toward Bill Mueller (who started, bizarrely, at second, with Youk at third), but Mannyin another classic Manny moveintercepts it, diving, then relays it to Bellhorn (who started at short), and by the time Mark guns it to Tek, Newhans in with the easiest insidethepark homer youll ever see. Its 84 and the Faithful boo. Melvin Mora follows with a single, and Peteys done. Mendoza throws a third of an inning and gives up two hits, and Malaska has to save him. Then Jimmy Im the Boss Anderson comes on and gives up his usual two runs before recording an out. Its a 104 final, and with the Yanks stomping Toronto, we drop to 8 back. The only Sock who comes out of this one looking good is Gabe Kapler, who made a tumbling catch in right in the fourth, then hit a threerun shot onto the Monster to tie it at 3. The rest of the team looked like theyd gotten about three hours of sleep, which they did, since their plane got in at three in the morning (shades of Opening Day). Meanwhile, lots of roster moves right before game time. Pokey to the DL with a pulled ribcage muscle, Youkilis up from Pawtucket. Joe Nelson down, Malaska up. And to have a backup for Nomar, Theo picked up journeyman shortstop Ricky Gutierrez from the Iowa Cubs. Ladies and gentlemen, your 2004 Iowa Red Sox! July 22nd SK Im off to Los Angeles. Im leaving this crucial home stand to your guidance, and probably a good thing. They looked so mizzable last night, didnt they? Its a daynight doubleheader today, and since Wakes scheduled to start and the Yanks are coming in tomorrow, we cant shift the rotation to cover the extra game. We dont announce a starter till late morning Abe Alvarez, a lefty from doubleA Portland (Jimmy Im the Boss Anderson is designated for assignment). 59, Abes pipecleaner skinny and looks about seventeen. He wears his cap cocked to the side like C. C. Sabathia, but throws softfastball topping out at 88, slow curve, change. He has trouble finding the plate in the first and gives up three runs, two on a Monster shot by Tejada, who is just murdering us this series. Its hotsweaty hot, heatstroke hotand were in the sun. Over the course of the game I buy ten bottles of water for Steph and the nephews. We squirt them in our hats and down our collars and at each other. Hey, frozen lemonade! Hey, sports bah! Ortiz hits two triples, a kind of miracle, but doesnt score either time. Melvin Mora lofts a shot toward the Sox bullpen that Trot has the angle on, but at the last second he gets alligator arms and shies away from the wall, and it goes over. The Faithful boo himvery rare. We also boo villain Karim Garcia every time he steps in. Its his first visit to Fenway since he jumped the bullpen wall during last years ALCS to punch and kick a groundskeeper his buddy Jeff Nelson was already assaulting. Youre a goon, Garcia! we holler. When he strikes out midway through the game, the crowd behind the Os dugout stands and jeers at himmaybe the most satisfying moment of the day. Abe Alvarez leaves with the score 51. He hasnt pitched well, but hes battled, and for a doubleA guy the beefedup Os are a tough assignment. Francona goes to a tripleA guy, Mystery Malaska, who gives up a run. Millar, whos been booed every atbat since he hit into an early rallykilling DP, crushes a tworun shot to bring us within three, but in the ninth Francona goes to Mendoza (our washedup guy), and Mora pounds a tworun bomb to put the game out of reach. All afternoon weve been watching the New YorkToronto score, 00 in the third, the fourth, the sixth. Its been stuck in the eighth for more than an hour, as if theyre purposely withholding it. Now that weve lost, it changes to a 10 Yankees final. Were nine back, the deepest hole weve been in all year, and 26 against the Os. After the game, as were fighting traffic on Storrow Drive and then 93 and 95, the Sox option Abe to Portland, making room for Ricky Gutierrez. Trudy wonders how much they paid him for the guest spot. Between games, Bill Mueller, who went 0 for 5, decides to shave his head for luck like Trot and Tek and Gabe. And the league office informs David Ortiz that hes received a fivegame suspension for throwing his bats the other night in Anaheim. For the nightcap, the Os roll out their kid pitcher with a high number, 61, Dave Borkowski. Gutierrez gets the start at short, Youk at third, McCarty in left. McCartys a revelation. We know hes got a great glove as a first baseman, and an arm that can top 90 mph. In the first, he puts those together, snagging what ought to be an easy sac fly and nailing speedy leadoff man Brian Roberts at home with a perfect onehop peg. It kills what could be a big inning, and in our half, with two down, he slices a basesloaded single to right to give us a 30 lead. Wakes crafty tonight, or maybe the Os are tired. Both teams are listless, and its a quick one. Youk hits a solo shot into the second row of M5. Timlin sets up with a onetwothree eighth, then Embree gets a doubleplay ball in the ninth, and a strikeout to close it. A neat 40 final, and its only 930. Its a win, but losing two of three to the Os before the Yanks roll in is disheartening. Like Steve said, theyre miserable, and Im miserable, and the rumors that well trade Nomar while we can still get something for him are more miserable still. July 23rd The crowd around Fenway before game time is typical of a YankeeRed Sox game more loudmouth drunks, more shutterbugs and gawkers, more shills handing out free stuff, but at eight and a half back its hard to muster any showdown spirit. Call this one a grudge match, with the Sox trying to save some face. WEEIs K posters say SCHILLING IS THRILLING, and we hope he has enough to beat retread Jon Lieber. Outside Gate E, a guys wearing a Tshirt that says DAVID ORTIZ FAN CLUB with a picture not of Big Papi but of Esther Rolle as Florida in Good Times. On the back it has what I hope is a fictional quote from him This is not hot sauce, this is not barbecue sauce, this is the Boston Red Sauce. Steph and I are the first in and man the corner for BP. A lot of the Sox have their kids with them in the outfield, wearing miniature versions of their uniforms. Jeter and ARod throw, and Jeter backs up till hes right beside me. Hes wearing Nike spikes with the logo of the leaping Michael Jordan. Now, the way Michael Jordan hit, I ask, isnt it bad luck to wear his spikes? I wouldnt know, Jeter says dully, as if he doesnt care. After BP, we roll around to the Sox dugout. It takes a while, since the aisles are clogged with newbies and Yankee fans who cant find their seats. They stop and stare at their expensive eBay tickets and then up at the poles of the grandstands, as if having difficulty reading numbers. Keep it moving, we say. We make it to Steves seats in time for the anthem, which is live and not Memorex (as it has been in the past), the proof being the guest Irish tenor botching the wordsthe last twilights gleaming, the rockets red glares. Nice job, Dermot. As the game starts, again I have this sense of letdown. Its Friday night, a packed house, Schilling on the mound against the Yanks, but weve played so poorly lately that its sapped the drama out of the matchup. We still chant BALCO when Sheffield steps in, but halfheartedly. When he takes Schilling out, hooking a Monster shot, all of that changes. Maybe its a sense of fair play, honest outrage at Sheffield getting away with his steroid use, or maybe its just hurt, but for the rest of the game, whenever Sheffield or Giambi come up, we greet them with LIFETIME BAN, LIFETIME BAN and Marion Joones! Marrrriooonnn! Liebers hittable, and in the second Trot doubles in Nomar, then Bill Mueller launches one into the bullpen, and were up 31. Millar tacks on a solo shot in the fourth, and with Schilling only up to 54 pitches, were looking good. In the fifth, Mr. Schill gives up a leadoff single to Posada, then another to Matsui. Enrique Wilson flies one to left that looks like trouble, but it quails and Manny hauls it in on the track. Kenny Lofton follows with a ripped single to right. It should score the runner, except the runners Posada. Trot fires a onehopper to Tek. Posada beats the throw, but Teks got the plate blocked. We can hear the plastic clack as Posada knocks into his shin guards. Tek spins and tags Posadas shoulder, and hes out. No, hes safeump Tim Timmons is calling him safe. Tek looks down at the plate openmouthed with shock. Schilling races from his backup position, pointing. Francona trots over from the dugout. The crowds been booing the whole time, but the arguments quick and civil, Timmons laughing, as if theres no way he could be wrong. Our neighbor Mason later sees the replay upstairs. He was out, he says, but it was a tough call. Yeah, I concede, youd have to be a professional umpire to make it. The run throws Schilling off, and he loads them before overpowering Jeter (who looks lost at the plate) and getting a force on Sheffield. In the sixth, ARod takes Schilling to 32 and then fouls off a few fastballs before singling up the middle. Giambi goes to 32 and fouls a few over the second deck, then walks on a curveball that stays upterrible pitch selection. Posada goes 32, fouls off a couple, then singles through the right side. Bases loaded, nobody out, and Schills pitch count is in the high 80s. He works deliberately to Matsui and gets a hard hopper to Millar at first. It should be a double play, but Millars throw to Nomar is high and off the bag to the infield side, and Schilling doesnt get over to first fast enough. Nomar holds the ball rather than risk throwing it away. 43 Sox, runners at the corners. Formerly washedup Ruben Sierra pinchhits for Enrique Wilson. Schilling has him 02 quickly, and Sierra has to fend off a good inside pitch with a protective swing. Its a nubber down first, a swinging bunt. Millar fields it on the run. It looks like hes got a play right in front of him at home on Giambi, but he glances back at firstSchillings assumed hell go home and hasnt coveredand has to eat the ball. The Faithful boo. When Lofton sneaks a soft double past Millar that McCarty would have stopped, we boo harder. Thats it for Schilling, a frustrating end to a promising start. Usually our defense backs him up better than this, but if he cant get a fastball past the intestinal parasiteweakened Giambi, then he didnt have it anyway. Timlin comes on, and washedup Bernie Williams rips a double into the rightfield corner, scoring two. 74 Yankees, and more booing, curses, then a disappointed (disapproving) silence. When Millar comes up in our sixth, the crowd boos him lustily. He hit a home run his last atbat, Steph points out. You can see Millars pissed off in the ondeck circle, focused, his teeth clenched. He rocks a Paul Quantrill fastball onto the Monster for his second solo shot, and when he crosses the plate, though the kids in the front row do the werenotworthy salaam, his expression hasnt changed. In the seventh, Johnny singles, then scores on Teks double to leftcenter when Matsui boots the ball. Ortiz walks, and weve got first and second, nobody out, and Manny up. So far Mannys 0 for 3 with 2 Ks, but we rise and chant his name, expecting deliverance. He grounds into an easy 643 DP, and the crowd mutters. Formerly washedup Tom Gordon then hits Nomar in the shoulder, but Trot flies to center. Curtis Leskanic comes on in the eighth, causing some consternation, and throws a onetwothree inning. Then Millar (cheered now) leads off with a blast onto the Monster to tie the game, his third homer of the night, and the place is louder than its been since the playoffs. Were watching a great game, fuck the Yankees, fuck the standings. We stand and cheer through half of Bill Muellers atbat, but Millarjustifiablydoesnt come out for a curtain call. Billy singles, and since hed be the goahead run, Kapler pinchruns for him. With nobody out Bellhorn needs to bunt him over. Is there anyone on the bench who can bunt better? No, not with Ricky already done and Pokey on the DL. Bellhorn fouls off two, then hits a weak grounder and has to hustle to avoid being doubled up. Simple fundamental baseball, I say. Little League baseball, Mason says. Johnny doubles. Instead of Kapler scoring, Bellhorn is held at third. We still have two shots at getting him in, but Tekbatting second for some crazy reasonchases a slider from Gordon in the dirt on 32, as does Ortiz, and we go to the ninth tied at 7. Foulkes in to hold it. After several questionable ball calls by Timmons (and no argument at all by Francona), Sheffield arcs one toward the Monster that looks gone. A couple fans in the front row reach down, and it hits ten feet from the top for a double. ARod singles him inits that simple, a poor pitch by Foulke, a good swing by the Mariner shortstopI mean the Texas shortstopyou know what I mean. Its 87 for Mariano Rivera in the ninth. Timmonss blown call at home has been big all game, but its massive now. Mo has no problem getting Manny, Nomar and Trot, leaving Kevin Millar in the ondeck circle. As he stalks back to the dugout with his bat, I call, Great game, Kev, but his face is still clenched and he ignores me. Were nine and a half back and behind the White Sox in the wild card. Thats not drama, thats desperation. July 24th Together the Sox and Yanks have spent over 300 million dollars on their rosters. Is Bronson Arroyo versus Tanyon Sturtze really the best they can do? Todays the family picnic, and its raining at the beach, so all of Trudys aunts and uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews are crammed into the one main room of the cottage to watch the game. Theyre lifelong New Englanders from Woonsocket and Westerly, and watching the Sox is like watching home moviesit gives them a chance to remember how Uncle Vernon rooted (optimistic all the way to the last out) or Trudys grandfather Leonard (watching TV with the sound down because he hated the announcers, a transistor radio pressed to his ear, and he would never go to the games). We watch Arroyo get behind hitters, and get behind twozip. I go out to shoot some hoops, and as Im dribbling around, a shout comes up from the house next door Fight! Fight! My nephew Sam comes tearing out. Uncle Stew, theres a benchclearing brawl! We run inside just in time to see the replay. Arroyo hits ARod on the elbow with a pitch insidenothing new Arroyos second in the league in hit batsmen. ARod jaws at him right out of the box, though the pitch wasnt up or behind him; in fact, it hit him on the elbow pad. Tek says something to ARod. ARod says, Come on, and Tek shoves him twohanded in the face, then ducks and grabs ARod around the upper thigh and lifts him, bulling him backwards. The whole room cheers and laughs. What kind of idiot challenges a guy in a mask and shin pads to a fight? Obviously hes never played hockey. The benches clear. Its a harmless scrum except for Sturtze getting Gabe Kapler in a headlock from behinda bad move when youre on the opposing teams side of the scrum. No idea how their starting pitcher ended up by our ondeck circle, but David Ortiz is nearby and wont see his teammate treated this way. He grabs Sturtze and flings him to the ground. In the replay, as they fall, gravity gives Kapler some revenge as his knee lands in Sturtzes crotch. Trot piles on, but by then things have settled, and theyre pulled apart. Teks ejected, as is ARod, and Kapler. Sturtze has a bloody scratch near his ear, but stays in the game. In the dugout, Kaplers pissed. He grabbed me! he shouts, demonstrating. (Later I discover that Kenny Loftons been tossed, though only he and the ump know what he did.) The games on Fox, and the idiots in the booth say that maybe this will change New Yorkers minds about ARods lack of toughness. I keep looking for evidence in the replays (because they show it ten times), but all I see is Tek shoving him in the face and lifting him off the ground. They also say this is a case of the Red Soxs frustrations boiling over, except ARod started it. They run a montage of SoxYanks brawls going back to Fisk slugging Munson after their collision at home. In every clip, the Sox are whipping their asses. When orders restored, the Sox come back over the next couple innings to take a 43 lead. Sturtzes gone and Juan Padilla is on. In the fifth, theres a terrible call on Johnny at second when Enrique Wilson drops a popup in short right and throws late to second for the force. Johnny, whos always a gentleman, says, No! and hes right. Francona comes out to argue, and no doubt hes arguing about last nights blown call at home too, and Timmonss awful work behind the plate. Francona actually gets excited for once, swearing and spitting at the umps feet, and gets tossed. Hes in the clubhouse to watch the Yanks come back in the sixth. Wilson slices a spinning Texas leaguer over third. Posada pokes a low wallball and is meat at second on a perfect throw by Manny, except Bellhorn sets up too far behind second (not expecting Posada to try it) and waves at the inbetween hop. Matsui doubles to put them ahead. Arroyo battles for two outs, but Cairo hits a quail off the end of the bat that floats over Bellhorn, and its 64. Dave Wallace visits the mound. Bernie Williams singles. Brad Mills, as acting manager, pulls Arroyo for Leskanic. Curtis threw well last night. Today he cant find the plate. He walks Jeter (0 for his last million and groveling for a walk) to load them, then walks Sheffield to bring in a run. He goes full on Wilson, who singles to right, scoring two more. 94. He walks Posada, and thats it, hes gone (0 IP, 1 H, 1 R, 3 BB), and Mystery Malaskas on to face Matsui. On 32 Matsui takes a strike down the middle for the third out. Before this, I considered Matsui the most professional of the Yankees, but what is anyone doing taking a pitch on 32 with a fiverun lead? Thats bush, and even in the bush leagues will earn you some lumps. Nomar leads off the Sox sixth with a ripped single. When Padilla goes 20 on Trot, pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre goes to the mound to calm him down (and stall). Padillas way off the plate, as if hes afraid of lefties, and walks Trot. On a 11 count to Millar, Torre interrupts the flow of the game by bringing in Quantrill. Its the old Cuban slowdown, but even in the PanAmerican games, where the umps let you do anything, I cant remember two mound visits on consecutive batters in midcount. After a fiveminute delay for warmups and commercials, Millar singles to load them. On 31 Bill Mueller has a fat pitch to hit but skies it to center for an unsatisfying sac fly. Bellhorn strokes a wallball double, and its 96. Johnny singles to left97. Because Tek got ejected, Mirabellis batting second, and we dont have a backup catcher, so we cant pinchhit Youkilis for him. Mirabelli Ks, and Torre brings in Felix Heredia, who walks Ortiz to load the bases for Manny. Stottlemyre visits the mound again (their fourth visit this halfinning). Heredia goes 32 on Manny, whos hit like crap this series, then misses with a pitch a good foot up and out. 98, and Nomars up, but look, whats this, its Joe Torre plodding out to the mound. Another fiveminute delay while Scott Proctor of the Columbus Clippers warms. Homeplate ump Bruce Froemming, whos built like Violet in Willy Wonka after she turns violet and the OompahLoompahs roll her away, makes it easy for Proctor, giving him a first strike call on a ball nowhere near the zone, and after all the waiting and screwing around, Nomars pissed and just swings at anything (hey Joe, the tactic worked!) and strikes out to end what has to be the longest inning Ive ever seen. One hour and seven minutes, according to Foxs clock. While I think the YankeeCuban National Team stuff is crap, and definitely unsporting, its legal. But its also the homeplate umps responsibility to control the game, and in the rule book theres a powerful clause that says the umpire can penalize any behavior that he independently deems makes a mockery of the game. The classic example is running the bases backwards. I would submit to the league office that the slowdown not only makes a mockery of the game, it makes for bad TV, since thats the only thing the league office seems to care about. Steroids, what steroids? (In other sports, not only are players banned, but their teams victories are retroactively forfeited and their championships taken away, their records expunged. Just a warning, Sheff, in case we ever have a real commissioner again. |
) Ruben Sierra (career, what career?) leads off the seventh with a Monster shot off Malaska to make it 108. The crowd in the humid room groans. I go out to the beach, where theres a little kid in a Red Sox Tshirt with a Wiffle bat hitting stones into the ocean in the rain. Stone after stone clack, clack, clack. Finally, some perspective. The games not about the slowdown, or the TV contract, or the groan, its about how fun it is to swing a bat and make contact. That clean ping. Embree, who worked out of a jam in the seventh, is angry in the dugout because Mills pulled him for Mendoza. Im horrified to see Mendoza myself, since he hasnt thrown a clutch inning since last June, including his seasonlong stint in the minors. Somehowphysics wont explain ithe does today, and not just one, but two of them. We go to the ninth down 108, facing Mo, as always. Hes converted 23 straight save opportunities, the Yanks are 560 when leading, blah blah blah. With two strikes, Nomar doubles on a particularly flat cutter. Rivera goes 31 on Trot, who crushes the next pitch to right. Get OUT! we yell, rising from our chairs. Sheffield goes back sideways, then backwards, crablike, and hauls it in on the track. In any other park its a gametying home run. Fenway givethNomar moves over, and while were still talking about Riveras ineffectiveness, Millar bloops one to right, making it a onerun game. Mos not Mo. Hes missing high, missing wide, all over the place. He goes 31 on Bill Mueller, then gives him the same flat pitch he threw Trot, and Billy gets it. Thats gone! I say, and Sheffield knows it too, turning to show us his number as the ball lands in the glove of Sox bullpen catcher Dana LaVangie. The Sox jump up and down at home, slapping Billy on his shaved head (for some reason he pulls his helmet off just before he touches the platemaybe he wants to really feel it to remember it forever). In the room, were all up and shouting, trading high fives and hugging. I told you! Steph says. You did, I admit, because hes been behind Billy all the way, even when he hit into a rallykilling DP early on. So its a double win, a TKO by Tek and a walkoff shot by Bill Mueller, enormously satisfying, and just. And weird, the way Mendoza was suddenly unhittable (where in Pawtucket the Rochester Red Wings were wearing him out), and Mo so hittableand wild, very much unlike him. The fights great for ratings too, and reinvigorates the rivalry, after being down nine and a half games. As a novelist, Id say the plots too pat, designed for the big finish, like some of the NFL playoff games the last couple years. The more I think of it, the less I like it. SO Now I know what youre doing out there writing scripts for Fox Baseball, a division of the International Roller Derby Association. Todays walkoff sure looked cookedthe same bad pitch to Trot and Bill Mill? Talk about a groovy situation. I swear when Trot stepped in he looked out at Rivera apologetically, as if this wasnt his idea (Thou shalt not lie, Christopher Trotman Nixon). But were so desperate that well gladly take it and be thankful. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. July 25th ESPNs showing the rubber game of the series, meaning its an 805 start. It also means ESPNs built a temporary stage just past the thirdbase dugout, and the screen thats usually at third has been moved to protect Peter Gammons, Harold Reynolds and John Kruk. When Miguel Cairo smokes a rope right at me in BP, I realize why the screen is there. The balls hit so onthenose that it knuckles, and I have to follow it all the way into my glove. I actually catch it in the pocket with a satisfying smack, getting a hand from the crowd and a few glances from the Yankees gathered at short, but its hit so hard that my index fingerwhich sticks through the Holdster opening and is cushioned by at least three layers of leatheris numb and then tingly. Hows it feel? a guy behind me jokes. Good, I say, and in a way it does. Ive played a fair amount at goalie and at third base, and its the hardest shot Ive ever stopped. Heres how big the game is instead of the Hood blimp cruising low over us like Friday night, its the Met Life blimp. Weve gone from regional to national. I get a ball that ARod kicks taking grounders, then Im off to Autograph Alley where Oil Can Boyd is signing, accompanied by a beefy, bleachedblond guy with a bright Hawaiian shirt and ten pounds of gold jewelry, like a wrestlers manager. The Can is gaunt but stylish, fringes of gray in his closecropped hair. Nineteen eightysix, I say as hes signing my ball, ALCS Game Six. You were here, I was here. Thanks, Dennis. The concourse is gridlocked, and I miss the Marine honor guard unfurling a massive American flag that covers the Monster, and then John Kerry throwing out the first pitch. (KerryEdwards campaign aides are handing out SOX FANS FOR KERRY signs throughout the parka byproduct of owner Tom Werners support of the Democrats.) I reach my seat in time for Derek Lowes first pitch. Right from the beginning, the umps squeezing him. Lowe has Kenny Lofton struck out, but theres no call. Lofton grounds a single to left that somehow makes it to the wall and becomes a double. Lofton takes third when Jeterin a Zoolanderstupid movebunts him over. Sheffield hits a fly to center thats short enough for an interesting play at the plate, but Johnny waves both arms as if he doesnt see it. Bellhorns going out, Kaplers streaking in from right. Kapler dives, an instant too late. Lofton scores; Sheffield, jogging, ends up at first. ARod nubs one that Bill Mueller has no play on, then Lowe bounces one that just nicks Posada on the foot (Andrew tosses me the traitorous ball). Matsui hits a fly deep enough to get Sheffield home. Bernie Williams flies to Mannya nice running catch in the cornerbut its 20 Yanks, and Lowe is redcheeked and unhappy. Jose Contrerass ERA at Fenway this year is over 20.00, and he shows us why. Johnny legs out an infield single, then moves to second when a pickoff throw gets past Tony Clark. Contreras quickly walks Bellhorn and Ortiz, bringing up Manny with bases loaded and no out. Manny rips a grounder to third, and Johnnys off. ARod thinks he has a play at home, but he rushes the throw, yanking it to the infield side, and Posada has to lay out to get it, his foot coming off the plate. Johnnys in therebut ump Hunter Wendelstedt punches him out. What? Im out of my seat and screaming at him, trying to keep my language clean so I dont get kicked out. Trudys embarrassed but amused too. Our neighbor Mason laughs, shaking his head. Thats the third horrible call thats gone against us this series. And two were for runs! Bases are still loaded for Nomar. He jumps all over a Contreras fastball and lines a bullet to Matsui in left, too short to score Bellhorn. Two down, and it looks like were going to blow another opportunity, but Millar, whos been blazing lately, dumps one into center that Lofton cant quite get to. They should have a play on Manny, but it never materializes, and the games tied. Lowe has no problem with the bottom of their order (Bernie, Tony Clark and Enrique Wilson will go a combined 1 for 10), and in our half of the second, Contreras hits Mirabelli, gives up a smoked single to Kapler and then serves up a pretty Pesky Pole shot to Johnny, the ball rising into the night, then hitting the woven metal skirt of the pole and dropping straight down. Were still celebrating when Bellhorn takes one out. Its 62 and only the second inning. Contreras picks up his second hit batsman of the inning when he throws behind Millar. The crowd is pissed and loud. After Friday nights game, and how blatant the pitch was, I expect hell be heaved to keep order, but no, Wendelstedt just issues a warning to both clubs. So the Yanks get two free ones. When a pitch gets through Mirabelli and knocks Wendelstedts mask off, sending him to one knee, theres a sense of frontier justice. Torre decides to save the pen and let Contreras hang, and it works for the most part. The unstoppable Millar hits a Coke bottle shot in the fifth, and the two runs we tack on in the sixth are partly reliever Felix Heredias fault, and partly Matsuis, when he gets fooled by a fly to left. Earlier in the series, he got caught too close to the wall and a ball hopped over his head; now he plays too far off it and David Ortizs slicing fly hits the padding about five feet off the ground, and a catchable ball becomes a runscoring double. Millar singles Ortiz in for his fourth RBI. Its 92, and the games turning into a party. John Kerrys sitting two sections over from us, right by the end of the Sox dugout, along with John Glenn, Joe Biden, Tom Brokaw, Tim Russert, and a gaggle of other Democratic National Convention celebrities. Between innings, the teenage guys sitting in front of us gesture to him with a ball they want signed. Kerry waves it on. The kids throw is short, hitting Katie Couric. Kerry signs it, and since Im the only one with a glove, he throws it back to me. When the next halfinnings over, I catch Kerrys eye with the ball I snagged from Miguel Cairo and toss it to himthe right distance, but wide. I think its going to bounce onto the field, but Kerry reaches over the wall, stretches and makes a sweet onehanded grab. I point to him, surprised; he points back and nods. After he signs, his toss is perfect, headhigh, and again we point at each other. Oil Can Boyd and John Kerry in one day! In the top of the seventh Bellhorn pulls up on a grounder by Kenny Lofton. Lowe gets Jeter (Zooooooooolanderrrrr!) and Sheffield (Juice! Juice! Juice!), but Lofton steals second and ARod walks. Lowes pitch count is around 120, so Francona goes to Timlin, and I go to the bathroom, figuring a sixrun lead is safe. Its quiet in the bathroom, too quiet, I think, and then theres a cheer. Then nothing. When I get out of the stall, there are maybe five guys at the long line of urinals, and I know somethings wrong. When I sidle my way up the ramp, I check the scoreboard Sox 9 Yanks 6. What happened? I ask Trudy. I go away for five seconds and everything goes to hell. Timlin happened, she says. Matsui hit a grand slam. So its a game again, and the newly acquired Terry Adams (yikes) makes it even more torturous in the eighth by walking number nine hitter Enrique Wilson (now batting .215). Lofton spanks a double down the rightfield line, and they have second and third with one out. Foulke comes in to face Jeter, who rips the first pitch off Foulkes shin, and in a very unRedSoxlike sequence, the ball ricochets directly to the one man who can throw Jeter out catcher Doug Mirabelli. Mirabelli even has time to glance at third, then guns it to first. The ball hits Jeter in the shoulder and rolls into right. Wendelstedt is on the play immediately, waving both arms to one side, like a football ref signaling a fieldgoal try wide right. Its interference Jeters out for running to the infield side of the baseline, purposely trying to block the throw. The runners have to return to their bases. Its the Ghost of Ed Armbrister, I say, conjuring up another demon to be exorcised. Joe Torre pads out to argue, but its pointless. Jeter the Cheater finally got busted; the Sox finally got a call, and just in time too. Sheffields up next, and smokes a hooking line driveright to Manny, and were out of it. Foulke throws a quick onetwothree ninth, the crowd on its feet for every pitch. Its another big win, and after last night, maybe the start of the turnaround weve been waiting for. Were 84 against the Yanks on the year and back in front in the wild card, with Pedro going tomorrow. Lets go Sox! July 26th I rarely in my life wanted to be at Fenway as much as I wanted to be there for the threegame series between the Red Sox and the Yankees that just concluded. Not because John Kerry threw out the ceremonial first pitch in prime time last night; not because theres always a chance the two teams will go at it (as they did, and fullbore, on Saturday); not even because the atmosphere when these two teams play is always crazyscaryelectric, like Victor Frankensteins lab about twenty seconds before the monster on the slab opens its eyes. I wanted to be there because it was an absolutely crucial series for the Red Sox, if they are to maintain any thin chance of winning the AL East. Lose two, I thought, and the players can probably forget about that part of it; get swept, and the fans can start questioning the teams commitment to winning anything. Well, wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up firstI think Mahatma Gandhi said that. Instead of being in Boston, I found myself on the West Coast, three thousand miles from Fenway Park, speaking to a bunch of doctors about how it feels to get hit by a small van (not good) and how long it takes to get over it (quite a while). Still, Red Sox fans cant escape the Red Sox; that is the basic fact of our existence. Even in L.A., I went to bed sick at the 87 loss on the night of the 23rd. Distance didnt lessen the pain; it made it worse. With no NESN, I was reduced to the coverage in the Saturday Los Angeles Timeswhich, due to their ridiculous infatuation with the Dodgers, was skimpy. Still, there was enough to make it clear that Curt Schilling and Keith Foulkeour supposed Yankeekillersboth played a part in the loss. Its hard to blame Schilling, who all season has worked like a railway yardman in need of overtime and has been consistently effective. Its also hard to blame Foulke, but easy to be exasperated with him. I think that goes with the role of closer. And of course it had to be Alex Rodriguez, The One Who Got Away, who delivered the gamewinning hit. Ironically, it was also Rodriguez who seems to have galvanized the Red Sox since, and all because he couldnt just put his head down and trot to first. Nope, he had to jaw at Bronson Arroyo, who plunked him on theshoulder pad. Jason Varitek got between pitcher and batter, telling ARod in a few choice words (Variteks version) to take his base.Rodriguez told Tek where he could stick his base, Tek pushed ARods pretty face, and the rumble was on. By the time it was over, Yankee pitcher Tanyon Sturtze had sustained a healthy cut on the side of his face (David Ortiz might have had something to do with that), four or five players had been ejected, and Varitek ended up sitting out Sundays game. Probably just as well, from a catching standpoint; John Kerry threw out the first pitch, and while he may be a helluva politician, his slider needs serious work. (Can you even trust a politician with a good slider?just asking.) Following the rhubarb, the donnybrook, and the ejections, the Sox finally woke from their stupor, winning one of the most thrilling games of the year in the bottom of the ninth on a Bill Mueller walkoff home run. They won Sundays game 96, and are schooling the Orioles tonight behind Pedro the score is 125 in the bottom of the seventh. If this is the place where the season turns aroundand stranger things have happenedthen you can give Jason Varitek the MVP for getting in Alex Rodriguezs face. July 27th Trots on the DL, I discover, having aggravated the quad. The team makes it sound like a brief stay, just to let him rest, and to make room on whats now a crowded roster. Yesterday in Pawtucket I watched Cesar Crespo play badly, and I wonder if its the effect of us signing Ricky Gutierrez, knocking Cesar that much further down the depth chart. My neighbor Dave was at the Saturday brawl game and says one reason why the fight started wasnt shown on TV after ARod started barking, Bronson Arroyo walked toward home plate, tugging at his crotch. Ay, I got ya 252 million right here. July 28th Three days from the trading deadline, the papers say the Yanks are close to finalizing a deal for Randy Johnson, and the Twins and Pirates are ready to swap former Rock Cat Doug Mientkiewicz and Kris Benson. Theo so far has been quiet. Whether that means hes being secretly effective or coming up empty remains to be seen, but it would not bode well if our big midseason acquisition was Terry Adams. At 4554, the Orioles are sleepwalking through another disapponting season. You wouldnt know it by the way theyve played against the Red Sox, though. Behind Pedro, and still pumped up from beating the Yankees two out of three, we shellacked them two nights ago, but the Os batters had touched Tim Wakefield for four quick runs last night before the game was washed out. Tonight they got four more against Curt Schilling, and sorry, no rain. We are 47 so far against Baltimore this year, and Id love to be able to comfort myself by saying we just play lousy against the Birds, but it aint so, Joe. The fact of the matter is that the Birds play lousy against the rest of the league and like World Champions against us. Schilling (124) against Dave Borkowski (12) was a mismatch on paper, but for the last time, baseball games arent played on paper and tonight Borkowskiwho wed already beaten once this yearpitched like Steve Carlton in his prime, setting down the first thirteen Red Sox batters to face him before giving up a single to Nomar in the fifth. He pitched seven strong and left the game with a twohit shutout. The only Boston run came on an Ortiz dinger with two out in the ninth, and Javy Lopeza Red Sox nemesis from his Atlanta Braves dayshit a pair off Schilling, getting three of the four Baltimore RBIs. So were a game behind Oakland in the wildcard race, and we have the unpleasing prospect of three games against the redhot Minnesota Twins in the immediate future and eight more against the Os before the season is over. And if we finish the season series with them at something like 712, and lose the wild card by two games, we can blame the Birds. Hell, it beats blaming the Bambino. July 29th Now the papers say Theo might try to piggyback that TwinsPirates deal, shipping Youkilis to Pittsburgh for Mientkiewicz. Just the idea makes me queasy. Trading Lowe or Nomar would be bad enough, even if we have no intention of signing them, but Youks the future. After what happened with Freddy Sanchez (though hes been hurt the last year or so), they ought to know better. The Sox have a travel day, so to get my daily dose I take Steph and the boys over to Norwich for a doubleheader against the Trenton Thunder. Like New Britain, Norwich has a pretty little park that holds around six thousand, but the food is better here. I get a ball during warmups and have former Sox closer and current Norwich pitching coach Bob The Steamer Stanley and his former batterymate and current firstbase coach Roger LaFrancois sign it. The Thunder are the Yanks doubleA club. They used to be ours before we acquired Portland from the Marlins, and the Navigators used to be the Yankees, so for longterm fans there are some mixed (if not to say confused) feelings. But its Camp Day, so most of the fans are too young to care. Its a brilliant blue afternoon, everyone receives a coupon for free ice cream, and as we leave, the ushers hand out flyers telling us Willie Mays is coming next week. Makes me wish I could be here for it. July 30th Its the big party for Trudys parents fiftieth anniversary, a real production, and I cant get away with the sneaky Pirates radio and earphone. A good half of the guests are New Englanders and diehard Sox fansthe men mostly, with memories of the 46 club, and the old Braves. To a man, they think Franconas just another patsy. The last manager we had with any spine was Dick Williams. You saw, everywhere he went he was a winner. The women roll their eyes. After the bands packed up, we have a nightcap downstairs in the bar. The TVs silently playing Extra Innings, and Eric Friede and Sam Horn and Jayme Parker are all smiling, so my guess is we won. The Yanks did too, and the Rangers, so were behind the As again. They also list a pair of big trades. The Mets have won the Benson sweepstakes. Not only that, but in a fiveteam deal, somehow they also picked up Tampa Bay ace Victor Zambrano and put themselves in a position to win the wimpy NL East. The other trade is an eightplayer swap between the Marlins and Dodgers, the principals being Brad Penny and Charles Johnson, Guillermo Mota and Paul Lo Duca. No news from Theo. July 31st The Yankees have reversed themselves on Giambis intestinal parasite and are now saying he has a benign tumor and may be out for the season. Also, during Foxs Yankee Game of the Week, an announcer says that Trot will miss the rest of the year (instead of the week or two the Sox originally reported). If thats true, were screwed. All the friends who came to last nights party are here for a day at the beach, and theres a revolving audience for the YankeesOs game. ARod takes home on the back end of a double steal that the Orioles fall for, and for the rest of the day the announcers crow about how ARod stole home as if hes Jackie Robinson. Im just watching the game for any late trade news, since the deadlines almost upon us. Soon its past fourno newsand the Yanks are winning, so I go pack my things to drive Steph home for a friends birthday party. I get the news from my daughterinlaw, a onceuponatime Yankee fan (like onceuponatime Protestants who convert to Catholicism, lapsed Yankee fans who become Red Sox partisans are the ones who REALLY MEAN BUSINESS), and she sounds the way I feel shocked but somehow not all that surprised. The player most commonly identified with the Boston Red Sox, the one whose number most fans probably expected to see someday up on the wall along with Williamss, Peskys, and Yazs, is no longer with the Red Sox. Number Five has been traded, and probably the only consolation to be taken by fans who place tradition and heart above salary and statistics is that hes been traded to the one other team in baseball whose long World Series drought has become not just the stuff of history but that of myth. Thats right folks; at game time tomorrow, Nomar GarciaparraBostons surviving marquee player from the days of Dan Duquettewill take the field as a Cubbie. Does the deal make sense? I dont think so; I think that two years from now it will look like a panic move made by a young GM who saw his highpriced (and supposedly highpowered) baseball team treading water eight or nine games behind the monolithic Yankees in the AL East and a game or two behind the Oakland As in the wild card (but still more advantageouslyplaced than their closest competition). In other words, I think that Theo Epstein probably pulled the pin on a big deal at the trading deadline mostly because everyone in Bostons howling ohGodmyassholesonfire sports community was yelling for it to happen !!OH JEEZ!! !!BEFORE ITS TOO LATE!! What exactly did we get for our usually dependable, sometimes brilliant, and (I admit it) at times erratic shortstop, who was batting .321 at the time of the trade? We got two Gold Glove infielders, one with a name that can be both pronounced and spelledthat would be Orlando Cabreraand the other with a name that can at least be pronounced Doug Mientkiewicz (manKAYvitch). Putting the bat on the little white ball has seemed a little harder than catching it for these gentlemen, at least so far this season. Both are hitting around .250. According to Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, the fact that Cabrera and Mientkiewicz currently have batting averages seventy points below Garciaparras doesnt matter. As a disciple of Billy Beane and a follower of Bill James, he likes these men for their defense and their on base per centage (OBP).He also likes them because Nomar Garciaparra is in the last year of a contract currently paying him 11 million a year, and resigning him probably would have been trs expensive. Stories about how Nomars feelings were hurt during the failed ARod deal are probably no more than the usual baseball bullshit, but heres something that isnt both Nomar and his agent know that baseball is a business. They also know that an athletes period of top earning ability is severely limited when compared to, say, that of a corporate CEO (or a bestselling novelist), and I have no doubt that Nomar and his man of business were determined to Make Em Pay this fall, whoever em turned out to be. Theo Epstein just decided em wasnt going to be us. Does that make sense? Im sure it does to Theo Epstein, and it probably does to those of the Billy Beane bent. It does, in other words, if you see big league baseball as a businessand nothing else. Who it does not make sense to is my fiveyearold grandson, who was watching ESPN when SportsCenter announced the trade. Ethan is a big Nomar fan. He always pretends to be Nomar when hes hitting in the backyard, when hes throwing, when hes running the bases. So its Ethan Im thinking about as I write thisnot his mother (the converted Yankee fan), not Nomar himself, not even the Red Sox, the putative subject of this book. Nope, Im just thinking about Ethan. Nomars a Cub, he said, then watched the TV for a while. Then, very softly, he said I guess I like the Cubs. Good call, Ethan. Very good call. Ive just finished my goodbyes when my sisterinlaw says Ive got a phone call. Its Steve. They traded Nomar, he says. Aw shit, I say, partly because they fooled me. Its almost five oclock. I thought I was safe. To the Cubs. I think we got their shortstop and maybe a pitcher. Alex Gonzalez is a decent shortstop, and weve been looking at starter Matt Clement, maybe to take Arroyos place or to assume the middle role. I relay the news to the boys, and they switch back to the game. Steph runs in. We got Cabrera and Mientkiewicz. So it was a threeteam deal. So Nomars gone to Red Sox West, Steve says. My fiveyearold grandsons been in tears. But I still like Nomar, he says. I guess Im a Cubs fan now. I think we must have gotten Clement, since our real need is middle relief, but Steve cant find anything on the website. Nomar for Mientkiewicz and Orlando Cabrera of the Expos (so its a fourteam deal). It doesnt seem like enoughand weve already got three first basemen and three journeyman shortstops. It must have been a panic move on Theos part, dumping Nomar before he could walk (its just like the Yawkeys not wanting to pay a star top dollar and getting nothing for him). While Im still on the phone, Steph tells me the Yanks have gotten last years Cy Young runnerup Esteban Loaiza from the White Sox for Jose Contreras. Its a steal, even with Georges three million thrown ina panic move on Chicagos part that doubly benefits the Yanks. So we got hosed on both deals. Steves off to see The Village, Im off to drive a hundred miles. After I hang up, I feel like the seasons over, like weve given up. On the road we tune into ESPN radio and hear that we got speedster Dave Roberts from the Dodgers for outfielder Henri Stanley, who just signed balls for us in Pawtucket on Monday. Its a good deal, but not large enough to make up for the loss of Nomar. The Sox without Nomar. It seems like a defeat, whoevers fault it is. During the pregame, Theo talks about how we needed to fix our defense, as if thats what drove the deal. Then, because we have nowhere else to put him, we start Millar in right even though Kaplers been hot. (Steph notes that the music behind his highlights from last night is Tenacious Ds Wonderboy.) The game is anticlimactic after the video of Nomar leaving the clubhouse for the airport. The announcersall of them paid by the Soxput the best face on the deal they can, picking at Nomars attitude and his heel. Wheres Eck when you need him? (Cooperstown, being inducted.) Lowe throws okay, so does Radke. The biggest moment is when Doug Mientkiewicz steps to the plate for the first time in a Red Sox uniform. Mientkiewicz is a lifelong Twin, and the Metrodome rises and gives him a noisemeterworthy ovation. He has to step out to collect himself, and I realize we never had a chance to say goodbye to Nomar (we didnt know it, but that Sundaynight game against the Yanks was his last home game). Its a close game late, tied in the eighth when Embree comes in with one down and the bases empty to face lefty Jacque Jones. He gets behind him, then aims a fastball. Jones cranks it, flipping his bat away. The ball lands ten rows back. Joe Nathan, throwing 98, closes with the help of Francona. Mientkiewicz singles to open the inning; Kapler pinchruns. Millar, who should be bunting, swings away. On an 01 count, Kapler goes and Henry Blanco guns him by ten feet. Millar flies out. Its a terrible atbat on all counts, an embarrassment. Bill Mueller then steps in and pulls a long shot down the linefoul. He singles (it would have easily scored Kapler), then takes second on a wild pitch before Youkilis strikes out. Overall, just a tough day to be a Red Sox fan. Seems like everywhere we turned we did something stupid and got our asses kicked. There are sixty games left, and were pretty much where we were last year. Its time to put a stretch drive together. Or else. Everyone except Warren Oates has played first base for the Red Sox this year. Manager Francona had Oates down for it one night, but had to scratch him when he found out that Oates had died some time ago. Nor has it hurt that Johnny Damon is off to what may be a career year at the plate. The almost qualification is easily explained. Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz are playing tonight. I dont want either of them hurt, as Pedro Martinez almost certainly hurt his arm by throwing too hard in the 1999 AllStar Game. The Los Angeles Dodgers were also 4838 at the break, good enough to lead the NL West by half a game. On the replay Varitek appears to be saying either Take your fucking base or Get the fuck to first base. Mientkiewicz did his best to make Epstein look like a genius in his first game as a Red Sox, going 2 for 4, both singles. The second hit came in the top of the ninth against Minnesotathe only pro baseball team hed ever played for until this eveningin a game which the Twins led by a score of 54. He got to second baseinto scoring position, in other wordsbefore Kevin Youkilis struck out to end the game. The other new Boston players should join the club tomorrow. August The Hottest August on Record August 1st Let the juggling begin. Cabrera reports; to make room we send down Andy Dominique. Since well see four lefties over the next five games, David Ortiz drops his appeal and begins serving his suspension for the batthrowing incident in Anaheim. Millars at DH, McCarty at first and Kapler in rightor would be, except Johnny tells Francona during BP that hes having trouble picking up the ball because of the afternoon sun further lightening the Metrodomes translucent white roof. So Johnny is the least DHlike DH in Sox history, Kaplers in center and Millars in right. Cabreras batting third, which I think is a mistake, but in the first, in his first atbat as a Red Sock, he takes Johan Santana deep. Then in the bottom of the inning he cant handle a chop over Pedros head. Its a tight game, like last nights. Kapler guns Corey Koskie at home, but Tek bobbles the throw and Koskie steamrolls him. Torii Hunter goes back to the wall and casually robs McCarty of a home run. The next inning, McCarty makes a diving stab of a Hunter shot down the line. Manny hits a solo blast to give us the lead again, but the Twins use smallball to scratch back even. To lead off the seventh, Santana hits Tek. To get more pop in their lineup, Matthew LeCroy is catching instead of Blanco, and Tek steals on him. LeCroy wings the ball into centerTek to third. Millar then hits a high, medium fly to right. Center fielder Torii Hunter races over to take it from Jones, since hes got the better arm. Hes in position behind him, but somehow they dont communicate, because Jones never yields. He takes it flatfooted and his throw is up the firstbase line, and Tek scores standing up. Pedros brilliant through seven, striking out 11. Santana goes eight, ringing up 12. |
Though Pedros thrown only 101 pitches, Francona goes by the book, bringing in Timlin to set up. Timlin gives up backtoback singles and doesnt record an out. On Embrees first batter, the young slugger Justin Morneau, the Twins pull a double steal. Morneau then skies one to deep rightcenter. Itll tie the game, no doubt. Kapler has to go a long way to make the catch, then fires a nolook throw back toward the infield. It sails over the cutoff man, Bellhorn, and Cabrera runs over from second to corral it. He must look up to check the runner, or maybe he nonchalants it, figuring the plays over, because the ball knocks off his glove, and he kicks itliterally kicks ittoward first base. On a real field, the grass stops the ball, but since were in the Homerdome, it rolls away across the carpet, and by the time Cabrera chases it down and throws home, Lew Fords sliding in safely, and were down 43. Welcome to the Red Sox. Joe Nathan gives us an opening in the ninth, hitting Bellhorn, but we dont bother to bunt him over (hey, why change now). Cabrera strikes out, lunging. Manny hits into an easy 643 turf job, and we lose a carbon copy of last nights game, wasting another quality start. On The Simpsons, Comic Book Guya true loserhas a Red Sox pennant hanging in his shop. I channel him now worst weekend ever. August 2nd When I entered in this diary on July 2nd, wed just been swept out of the Bronx and had fallen eight and a half games back in the AL East. Now, a month later, were nine and a half behind the Yankees, who continue on cruise control. The Yanks dont have much in the way of pitching, but it doesnt seem to matter; they simply whale the tar out of almost every team they go against. The Red Sox are one of the rare exceptions, but they can afford to ignore us, at least for the time being. Who knows, they may not have to worry about us even in October. For the first time this season one teamits the Oakland Athleticsseems to have a solid hold on the wild card. Weve lost both of the games weve played since the big Garciaparra trade, but I actually dont feel too badly about that, even though both wereof the toothrattling onerun variety. For one thing, both of our new players contributed to the offensive effort (okay, okay, so Cabrerawho hit a home run in his first Red Sox atbatalso cost us yesterdays game with an error in the bottom of the eighth). For another, the Twins are very good this year, and Id expect them to take two out of three in their house, just as Id expect us to take two out of three from them in ours. But now we finish the years longest roadtrip playing teams that are either sub.500 or close to .500, and here I agree with the conventional wisdom this is probably the seasons last decisive turningpoint, and Ill be watching these games very, very closely. For the next two weeks its not going to do to just play .500 baseball on the road. Im hoping we can win eight of the next dozen, and from now until the middle of the month, I suspect this diary will be hearing from me often. August 3rd Mark Bellhorn goes on the DL with a thumb fracture after taking that pitch on the hand, joining Pokey, meaning Francona has more platooning to do. The press is on him about the logjam at first. How is he going to keep all of his players happy? I may not have much confidence in Francona, but at least he has the right answer Thats not what were here to do. Last night Wake won on his birthday, a quiet indoor affair with less than 10,000 guests. For tonights game with the DRays Francona pencils in the most alien infield yet Youk at third, Cabrera at short, Bill Mueller at second and Mientkiewicz at first. Dave Roberts starts in right for only the fourth time in his life, and leads off, followed by Cabrera and Johnny. The new speed lineup does nothing, but Tek hits a tworun shot and Bill Mueller knocks in three more from the sixspot. Schilling (a new guy himself, not so long ago) goes the distance, but the posttrade face of the Sox is just weird. August 4th I didnt know how brave I was, asking the Red Sox to win eight of their next twelve, until Jayme Parker (looking cool and beautiful this morning in offtheshoulder black) tells me that the Sox havent won backtoback road games since June. But they managed the trick last night, and now, instead of needing to win eight out of twelve, they only (only!) need to win six out of their next ten. That means playing .600 ball instead of .666, if youre of a statistical bent. Although I havent kept an exact count (You could look it up, I hear Ole Case whispering), Id guess weve got in the neighborhood of fiftyfive games left to play. Eleven of them are with the formerly hapless Devil Rays, and this makes me happy, because the DRays, after running off a gaudy string of wins (almost entirely against National League teams) before the AllStar break, seem to be subsiding into their former state of haplessness, and fast. Manager Lou Piniella rode his horses hard during the streak (ran their dung to water, my wife would say), and now they seem punchless and reeling. Tampa Bay management has done its part to destroy team morale by trading DRays ace and chief workhorse Victor Zambrano to the contending Mets. All of which makes me sorry for them, but not too sorry to take pleasure in Tim Wakefields win two nights ago and Curt Schillings completegame victory last night. Not too sorry to hope that Bronson Arroyo can complete the sweep tonight, either, although I doubt the Rays will let that happen. They aint quite that hapless. SK Two in a row! For the first time since June! Schill gets the completegame win! Manny crashes into the leftfield wall! Plays dead! Arises and hugs the reincarnation of the Lizard King! Film at 11! Go, you old Red Sox! Lou Piniella blew his hosses out in June and July, and we get to ride them spavined old nags eleven more times before the end of the season! Im hoping (praying, actually) that we can take six of the next ten, to make it eight out of twelve after putting the Twins in our rearview mirror. GO, YOU OLD RED SOX! SO After the June Swoon and the July DriveBy, Im a little leery. Who are these guys anyway? I was just getting used to Ricky Gutierrez at short and here comes Cabrera. I almost feel bad for Francona, having to glue together a lineup from these bits and pieces. Thank God for the Devil Rays. But eventually were going to have to beat the Twins. And the Angels. And the White Sox. SK Franconas a dork. And thats true, but first were gonna see the Tigers, who are currently 5056. Id like to finish these six games at 42 and would LOVE to be 51. Wouldnt it be great to get like fourteen or fifteen games over .500? SO The Tigers have been revitalized of late. Dmitri Youngs back from that broken leg, and their young pitchers have turned in some hellacious games, so we better be ready for a scrap. Lets not look past tonight, though. Francona may not know it, but they all count the same. SK I just went to check the game. When I sat down to write this email, everything was okay; we had a threerun lead and Arroyo was cruising. Now were down 54, thanks to a Youkilis error (more damn errors) and a Toby Hall granny. Stewart and Stephen, said the old psychic dwarflady, your nightmare continues. SO And now Dave Roberts just got pegged at home in the ninth with NOBODY OUT, and we lose by a run. Congratulations, Dave, you made the Hall of Sveum on your first try. August 5th Still, we almost got the sweep. Leading 41 in the seventhand cruisingBronson Arroyo gave up a single and a walk. A Kevin Youkilis error loaded the bases for Tampa Bay with no outs. Then catcher Toby Hall, 0 for his last 18, parked one. Make that score 54 Rays, and it stood up. In the Boston half of the ninth, newly acquired Sox speed merchant Dave Roberts, running for Kevin Millar and egged on by thirdbase coach Dale Sveum, tried to tie the score from second on a Doug Mientkiewicz single.The allornothing dash for home is always a thrilling play, but this time it went Tampa Bays way. Center fielder Rocco Baldelli threw a bullet to catcher (and homerun hitter) Toby Hall, who made it easy for the umpire, not letting the willowy Roberts anywhere near the dish. Mientkiewicz got as far as third, then died there when Johnny Damon poppedup to end the game. It was another toothrattling loss (especially since both the Yankees and the Rangers, our current wildcard competition, won their games), but Tampa Bay hasnt been swept at home all year, so all you can do is tip your cap to them and move on. In this case to Motown, where the Tigers wait. Were 21 in the current twelvegame stretch, and Im still hoping to take six of the next nine. I know that sounds steep, but at some point this team just has to start setting some steep goals. And meeting them. SK I couldnt tell from the paper (or the game) if Sveum sent him. I guess he did. (My son Owen sez the same.) SO Sveum sent him, then said afterward that Rocco Baldelli hasnt made a lot of good throws. Only enough to lead the league in outfield assists last year, Dale. SK It was a move reminiscent of Wendell Send Em In Kim. A moment of desperation? A brain cramp? I mean, we could have had guys on first and third with none out! By the way, how many games has this team lost by one run this year? What we have here is a team thats so agonizingly close to being good enoughbut not quite. You heard it here first I dont think were going anywhere but home come October. How I hope they prove me wrong. SO I think he blankedentirely spaced on the situation. And it wasnt like he was sending Ortiz or the Dauber. Even Robertss wheels couldnt make up for it. Were pretty much where we were last year. Just hope the bats come alive, the teams out West knock each other off, and the ChiSox pull their usual swoon. August 6th SO What the hell happened with John Olerud? Seattle was in the cellar and figured theyd dump him and go with a youth movement, I understand that, but I thought they dropped him so they could dangle him in front of teams like the Yanks, hoping George or some other nut would pick up his big salary. Then I read in the paper that the Yanks grabbed him and are paying him the minimum 300K while the Ms are eating 7 mil. Wha? Huh? And Theoin his Defense Is Good modehas been crowing over Mientkiewiczs old Gold Gloves. Oleruds got a closetful of em, plus hes one of the purest hitters to ever play the game. So, if we had to have a fourth first baseman (Dauber being condemned to the fifth circle, called Pawtucket), instead of the crummy Nomar deal we swung, we could have had Olerud for 300K and the time it took to sign him, and then could have maybe gotten a middle relieversetup guy to spell Embree and Timlin, who look tired and beaten out there. SK Ah, but Olerud wouldnt have looked as good to the cannibal Boston press, which will never speak to me again after they read the August portion of my diary. AND I DONT CARE. I mean, do you doubt a bit that Mientkiewicz and Cabrera were, to some extent, PR gestures? SO Butand this is where my forehead starts to pulse like Scannersdidnt we already have a great defensive first baseman in McCarty? And doesnt getting Mientkiewicz now make him totally expendable? I just dont get it. Unless were putting together some weird MGM production number where every utility shortstop on the team fields a grounder and throws to a matching first baseman for a grand, ceremonial 63. SK Amen, brother. Ive been thinking this for two weeks. When we get Varitek playing first, itll be the fooking hattrick. Orlando Cabrera is actually Cesar Crespo by way of Stepford. Yours ever, Ira Levin. Ted Williams disliked and distrusted the Boston sportswriters. His appellation for themThe Knights of the Keyboardwas sarcastic and contemptuous. This doesnt make the Splendid Splinter an aberration but rather the first in a tradition. In the current era, Carl Everett was sent hence from Boston with his ass on fire and the tag Jurassic Carl hanging from his neck. Manager Butch Hobson (never one of my faves, believe me) became knownsarcasticallyas Daddy Butch. Pedro Martinez, a proud and emotional man as well as a wildly talented pitcher, has felt so disrespected by Bostons Knights of the Keyboard that he has on at least two occasions vowed never to speak to the media again (luckily for fans, his natural gregariousness has overcome these resolutions). Dozens of Red Sox players, past and present, could tell horror stories about how theyve been treated by Bostons sportswriters, who now serve just two papers (if you exclude such peripheral rags as the Phoenix and Diehard, that is) the Globe and the Herald. The Globe is the more influential, and by far the more vitriolic. Its most recent acidbath victim has been Nomar Garciaparra. The story being disseminated by the writersDan Shaughnessy leading the packgoes something like this Nomar was never a team player; Nomar was a downer even at the best of times; Nomar had a line in front of his locker to keep the media from getting too close; Nomar told multiple stories about his conversations with Red Sox management before the trade that sent him to the Cubs; Nomar expressed doubts about how much of the regular season hed be able to play because of the injury to his Achilles tendon. (This last is supposed to help we poor benighted fans understand how Theo Epstein could have traded one of baseballs five premier infielders for what boils down to a pair of journeymen with good defensive skills.) And yesterday, more dirt According to the Globe, Nomar may have lied about how he came by that sore foot in the first place. In spring training we were toldby Nomarthat the injury was the result of a batted ball. Now, according to the Globe, Nomar is supposed to have told somebody or other that the injury cropped up on its own. If so, yesterdays story went on to speculate, he may have confabulated the whole battedball story in order to keep his market value from going down in his walk year. Because you can heal from an injury, right? But if your body starts to give out on youthats a different deal altogether. And the source or sources of thisstory? Do you even have to ask? Not named. Little more than backfence gossip, in other words, just one more yap of the fox who wants to believe that, oh yeah, those grapes were sour anywayand by the way, that bigdeal shortstop all the kids love? What a hoser! What a busher! And if Nomar Garciaparra tells his Chicago teammates not to okay a trade to Boston if they can possibly prevent it, no way, under no circumstances, because in Boston the sportswriters eat the local heroes in print and then shit out the bones on cable TV, who could blame them? Ill bet right now Mr. Garciaparra is feeling especially wellchewed. And why are the Boston sportswriters this way during baseball seasonso angry, so downright catdirt meanwhen they are, by and large, pretty normal during the other three seasons of the sports year (football, basketball, hockey)? I think it goes back to the basic subtext of this book, that the Red Soxlike the Cubsare the derelicts of major league baseball, ghost ships adrift and winless in the mythic horse latitudes of sports legend. That may sound sweet to the poets and to writers like John lyric little bandbox Updike,but sportswriters want winners, sportswriters want their bylines under headlines like SOX TAKE SERIES IN 6, and this eightysixyear dry spell justmakesthemFURIOUS. They wont admit it, not hardheaded Damon Runyon archetypes such as they, but underneath it all theyre hurt little boys who have been eating loserdust for much of their professional lives and they justfuckingHATE IT. Can they take it out on management? On Theo Epstein and mildmannered, bespectacled John Henry? They cannot. Those fellows do not put on uniforms and swing the lumber. Alsoand more importantlythose fellows are responsible for who gets pressbox credentials, field credentials, and who gets to belly up to the postgame buffet. So, by and large, management gets a pass.Except, of course, for the poor unfortunate middlemanagement schmucks who fill out the lineup cards, guys like Terry Francona, Grady Little, Jimy (family so poor they could only afford a single m in his first name) Williams, Daddy Butch Hobson, and Tollway Joe Morgan. And Nomar. Him, too. That selfish guy. That downer. That liar. That guy who took the money, ran off to Chicago, and left the kids crying. Its all bullshit, of course, and in their inksmudged hearts, the Knights of the Keyboard know it. But Boston sportswriters are for the most part mangy, distempered, sunstruck dogs that can do nothing but bite and bite and bite. In a way you cant even blame them. They are as much at the mercy of the long losing streak as the fans who buy their tickets at the window or pony up for NESN on cable TV. Sooner or latermaybe even this year, I havent given up hope, even yet I am still faithfulthe Sox will win it all, and this infected boil will burst. I think all of us will be happier when it does. Certainly we will be more rational. Later, after a quiet 43 loss to the Tigers SK I admit it after the third Detroit base runner reached with none out, I left the room. Simply could no longer bear to watch. Andbetween me and you?a lot of this really is just daffyhorrible luck. Derek Lowe hasnt been the only recipient, but he has surely gotten the biggest helping. Last year, the second two batters are harmless ground outs, and were up 10, Detroit batting with a runner on first and two out. Oh, this is maddening. Why why why did I ever let you talk me into this? SO I watched every dribbling, seeingeye single. That third base runner was a ball Cabrera couldnt get a handle on. Thank you, Defense Minister Theo. I also have no idea why Franconas got OCab batting third. Hes hitting something like .100. Youve got to have some luck to win the close ones (and some defense, some speed, a bullpen). In answer to your earlier query as to how weve done in onerun games were now 715. Wasted a great game from Tekan honest triple, a mammoth tater and then gunning down Carlos Pena to bail out new guy Mike Myers (really, thats his name) in the eighth. Three runs against Detroit? Thats anemic. Come back, Big Papi! Its worse than maddening, and I apologize for dragging you to the death prom. My lament, as a citizen of the Nationlike an injured loveris why why WHY are they doing this to us? August 7th Ive suggested that the team needed to play .750 ball in its twelvegame stretch against losing opponents; Boston is playing the same old soso wakemewhenitsover road baseball instead. After three matches in Tampa Bay and one in Detroit, the Yankees have sailed over the horizon and even the wild card lookswell, it still looks perfectly possible, but we look less deserving of it, okay? We look about a run short, and Im not talking about the run we lost by last night, or not just that one. Im talking about the game we lost to Tampa Bay by a run, and the two we lost to the Twinseach also by a single run. Thats four onerun losses in a row. This team has played an amazing number of games this season that have been decided by one run twentytwo so far. The only number more amazing is the number of them weve lost fifteen. Let me write that in bold strokes so we can both be sure of it 15 GAMES LOST BY A SINGLE RUN. At least two of those onerun losses were to the leagueleading Yankees. And we had another one of those basesloadedwithtwoout nightmares last night. Again and again this year the Red Sox have failed to produce in that situation. Versus the Tigers, Kevin Youkilis did manage to snare a walk (he is, after all, the Greekaw, never mind), temporarily tying the score for the tragickal Mr. Lowe. That brought up Orlando Cabrera, onehalf of Theo Epsteins replacement for Nomar Garciaparra. Cabrera, who is pressing at the plate and looking more and more like a Stepford Cesar Crespo clone, struck out on three pitches, two of them well out of the strike zone, and that was the end of our one big chance. The Sox went meekly in the top of the ninth, as they have all too often this year, and now taking eight out of twelve means taking six out of eight. It can be done, but I doubt it can be done by this team. SK The game is looking very shaky into the seventh. I hate the way this season is going. SO We did finally pull away from the Tigers tonight, but youre right. The way the seasons going seems to be lose, Pedro, lose, Schill, lose. Except when Timmay throws in the Trop or Arroyo faces the Yanks. Or Lowes every third start. When are we going to put together a decent streak? At least El Jefes back (and dont you know, Manny comes down with the flu). August 9th It was a good weekend for the Faithful. Pedro Martinez won pretty on Saturday and Tim Wakefield won ugly on Sunday.In their current important twelvegame stretch against underachieving clubs, Boston now stands at 42. Only a churl would point out that they could be 60. (I am, of course, that churl.) We have moved into a threeway tie for the wild card with two of the AL Western Division clubs (the Angels and the Rangers), and that is a marked improvement over where we were a week ago. Ill take it. But any longtime follower of the Red Sox will tell you that when the teams cheek grows rosy, the almost automatic response is for someone, either in the media or in the organization itself, to slap a leech on it. In this case the leeching has to do with Kevin Millars comments about his playing time and the constantly shifting nature of the teams makeup. Millars pique over not being in the lineup for the August 7th game against the Tigers (Here I am, riding the old benchola) is just silly, especially since he ended up being a lastminute add to Franconas card. But pro athletes arent known for their statesmanlike qualities, and in other baseball markets such comments usually go unpublished. If they are published, theyre apt to becan you believe this?snickered at. Not inBoston, though; in Boston, Millars pregame grousing was treated by postgame commentators Tom Caron and Sam Horn as grave news, indeed; the preachments of Osama Ben Millar. The part of Millars comments which was not addressedeither on the Red Soxauthorized NESN broadcast or in the predictably antiplayer Boston Globewas his perfectly correct and uncomfortably astute assertion that this years Red Sox team has no identity, and its that lack which has so slowed the teams quest for a postseason berth, one we all thought would be a slam dunk at the start of the season. (To be ten and a half games behind the Yankees with a team this talented is just flatout ridiculous.) The 2004 Boston Red Sox has no face. And its not Nomar Garciaparra I miss in this context. Oddly enoughor perhaps not so oddly at allits Trot Nixon I miss, Nixon whose intensity can be seen even in the dogdumb ads he does for Red SoxNESN license plates. Every time he stares into the camera with those burning eyes and says, We think of it as a tagandrelease programso we can keep an eyeon YOU, I wish to God he wasnt on the DL. Never mind Red Ryder; when ya comin back, Trotter? We may need you to pull our irons out of the fire yet. August 10th The key to every sportto every endeavor in life, maybeis consistency, and nowhere is that more apparent than in team defense. Football, soccer, baseball, hockey, basketballall team defense is based on the premise that each player knows where his or her fellow players are, and can rely on teammates to cover either territory or opposing players he or she cant. In the major leagues this assumes that each player knows his teammates capabilities and habits, a familiarity that can only come from playing side by side game after game until this knowledge becomes second nature and can be acted on with the speed of reflex. Example pop fly down the rightfield line. First baseman fades straight back, second baseman angles in from the left, right fielder comes on hard. If the balls high and deep enough, its the right fielders, since the plays in front of him. If its low and shallow, the first baseman has to make an overtheshoulder catch running away from the plate. If its medium, in nomansland, usually the second baseman, having the most speed and the best glove (as well as quarterbacking the inbetween play), has to flash across and get it. Ideally, each fielder has played with the other two enough to know both what theyre capable of and what theyll do. One right fielder may have difficulty getting in on a ball (Millar, the injured Trot) that another (Kapler, Roberts) should catch easily. Likewise, one second baseman may have no problem making a play in foul ground (Pokey) that another has no shot at (Mark Bellhorn, Bill Mueller), while yet another has maybe a 50 chance (Ricky Gutierrez). Some first basemen dont go back well (Ortiz, Millar) and some do (Mientkiewicz, McCarty); with Andy Dominique, its hard to say, since hes only played a handful of innings at first, the same way Dauber only played a couple games at first or in the outfield, or Cesar Crespo at second and short, or in right, center, or left. And beyond simple ability, theres the confusing factor of personality. Some fielders are aggressive and dash after every inbetween ball whether they can make the play or not (Manny, weirdly), while others hang back till the last second, letting others take charge (Kapler, sadly). Does Doug Mientkiewicz have a good feel for the combination of Bill Mueller and Gabe Kapler as they converge on a dying quail with men on late in a close game? For Ricky Gutierrez and David McCarty? Ricky Gutierrez and Dave Roberts? Bill Mueller and Kevin Millar? Bill Mueller and Dave Roberts? Impossible, considering how little theyve played together. Mientkiewicz is still feeling his way into the defense, the same way Bill Muellers doing his best to acclimate at second base. At best its guesswork. Multiply that uncertainty by the number of odd and new combinations in the field (McCarty in left, Youkilis at third and Orlando Cabrera at short all vying for a ball down the line in Fenway where the stands jut out; or Cabrera and Bill Mueller going back on a flare with Roberts, Johnny or Kapler racing in from center) and add in the memory of the seldomused Damian Jackson ranging back farther than last years regular second baseman Todd Walker ever could and knocking Johnny out, and youve got a patchwork defense that lets balls drop. Part of the problem is injuries, obviously, and part is the pre and midseason missteps by upper management (never getting a serious replacement for Trot, loading up on platoon first basemen and shortstops to no apparent purpose), but Francona has to take all of that into account and at least try to put a defense out on the field that can work towards becoming comfortable with each other. Until he does, well continue to be inconsistent, and to hurt pitchers like Wake and Lowe, who have to rely on competent glovework behind them to win. August 11th The Red Sox and the Devil Rays have split in Bostons first two games back at Fenway, and were now 53 in the twelvegame stretch Ive elected to put under the microscopethe twelve games leading up to the stretch drive. Boston hasnt made it easy on itself, losing the first game of the final road series against Detroit and the first game of the home stand against Tampa Bay, but the Sox have managed to win their last two series, and they won again last night. Bronson Arroyo looks more and more comfortable in his role as a starter (and thank Christ he finally shaved off that horrible sandcolored thing on his chin). Tampa Bays Toby Hall beat Arroyo with an improbable grand slam in his last start, but in last nights game Arroyo mixed his pitches better and got more ground balls. Also, Terry Francona, who is right every once in a while,lifted him while he was merely toasty instead of completely baked. There is a difference. Today theres a threeway tie for the wild card (Texas, Anaheim, Boston), and tonight the tragickal Mr. Lowe will lug his topheavy 5.50 ERA to the mound against Tampa Bays Dewon Brazelton, with a tidy little ERA of 2.56. This may be one of those gutcheck games that seem to mean hardly anything at the time and actually mean more when you look for the point where a team either started to kick it into gearor didnt. August 12th Boston kicked it into gear, all right. Especially Kevin Millar. Millar seems to have decided that if the Red Sox need identity, hell supply it. In last nights game against the Devil Rays, he went 4 for 4, with two singles, a double, and a threerun shot into the Monster seats, setting the pace as Boston pounded out 15 hits and routed Tampa Bay 144. The man who gave the 2003 Red Sox their lateseason sloganCowboy upis battingsomething ridiculous like .470 for the month of August31 for his last 66. With numbers like that, he can perhaps be excused for bitching about having to ride the old benchola. We have one more game against the tasty Devil Raystoday at one oclockbefore tougher meat comes to town the Chicago White Sox, currently a game above .500. Boston stands at 63 in the current twelvegame stretch, and if we could beat Tampa Bay behind Pedro this afternoon, wed only have to top the ChiSox once to finish 84, as I had hoped we would. Meantime, in the wildcard racechillun, we have sole possession. For today, at least. Later After writing that, I shut down the computer and head for southern New Hampshire to visit old friends (hes the physicians assistant who has helped me with medical stuff in a dozen books, most notably The Stand and Pet Sematary, shes a retired nurse who has reached a hardwon truce in her war with cancer). We have lunch on the patio, a lot of good food and good talk (maybe only horror writers and medical people can reminisce fondly about heart attack patients they have known). We promise well stay in closer touch, and maybe we even will. Starting the 140mile drive back to western Maine, I remember that the Sox are playing the rare weekday afternoon game. I cant find it on the FM; nothing there but rock music and what a friend of mine calls macrobiotic talk shows. On the AM, however, I find it crackling through the static on WEEI, the selfproclaimed Red Sox flagship station, and am delighted to discover that Boston is winning handily. My man Kevin Youkilis kicked off the days festivities, swatting one over everything and into the Manny Zone, aka Lansdowne Street. At the one end of the East Coast, TampaSt. Pete is girding its loins for the arrival of tropical storm Bonnie and the more dangerous Hurricane Charlie. At this end, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have run into Hurricane Pedro. He almost always pitches well against the DRays, but he hasnt thrown this well inwhat? Three years? Four? Its a hot, muggy afternoon in what Mainers sometimes call New Hamster. Due to road construction, the two eastbound lanes of Highway 101 are down to one, and the traffic is bumpertobumper. A roadworker points at me, shakes his head, and draws a thumb across his throat. It takes me a minute to realize its almost certainly my truck hes pointing atspecifically to the bumper sticker on the tailgate readingSOMEWHERE IN TEXAS A VILLAGE IS MISSING ITS IDIOT. All of this should conspire to put me in a foul mood, but Im as happy as a kitten in a catnip factory. Pedro goes nine innings and strikes out 10 (in the postgame he admits to Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano that in his old age hes come to appreciate quick groundball outs and tenpitch innings as much as the Ks). Were now 73 over the last ten games, we need only to split the next two with Chicago to finish the Dirty Dozen at 84, and as of today theres a games worth of sunshine between us and the Anaheim Angels in the wildcard race. |
Best of all, though, the last few innings of the game lightened what otherwise would have been a very tiresome drive through heavy traffic, and I think thats really what baseball is for, especially baseball on the radiowhich is, as Joe Castiglione says in his book Broadcast Rites and Sites, the last bastion of the spoken image. Or something like that. As Ole Case used to say, You could look it up. August 14th The Red Sox didnt make it easy (that has never been a part of the deal with them), but they managed to finish the twelvegame stretch that began on August 2nd at exactly 84. The opener in the current series against the White Sox was another onerun loss, and tonights game began badly, with Curt Schilling giving up consecutive solo home runs to Timo Perez and Carlos Lee almost before the last notes of the national anthem had died away. But in this game the Red Sox played flawless defense (the highlight was a sliding, twisting, skidding catch in foul territory by Kevin Youkilis, who almost ended up in the White Sox dugout), and you have to admire Curt Schilling, a pitcher whose facealong with those of Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, maybeought to grace the cover of the Old School Baseball Encyclopedia. Following the home runs, he surrendered only one more hit until the sixth. By then the Red Sox had tied the game on backtoback solo home runs of their own, one by Manny Ramirez and one by David Big Papi Ortiz. Papi came up again in the bottom of the eighth, after Ramirez had struck out looking on three pitches. By then Schilling was done for the evening, but still eligible for the win if the Red Sox could pull ahead. Ortiztook care of his pitcher, dumping one into the fourth or fifth row of seats beyond the bullpen in right center. It wasnt quite as mighty as his earlier rocket, but there was still no doubt when it left the bat. I have never seen such a big man who is able to generate such sudden power, not even Mo Vaughn. God knows how long it will last, but Red Sox fans have been blessed to watch it over the last two seasons, and Ortiz may be having an MVP year. Keith Foulke came on in the top of the ninth. My wife had gone to bed by then, and that was probably just as well; when Foulke walked Chicagos leadoff hitter on five pitches, my state of jangled nerves approached real terror. It was all too easy to see this one slipping away. Foulke took the mound with 18 saves, not a lot for a club thats now approaching the 65win mark, and very few of those saves have come in onerun situations. Tonight, however, just enough of Schillings toughman air seemed to linger on the mound to carry Foulke through. After the walk came a popup, after the popup came two strikeouts, the last on a faltering halfswing at a changeup by Juan Uribe, and presto, Dirty Water was playing over the PA system. Pedro Martinez was first out of the dugout, giving high fives with what appeared to be a fungo bat. One final note the Yankees beat the Mariners this afternoon, maintaining their bonecrushing tenandahalfgame lead in the AL East and winning their 75th game of the year with August not yet half over. They are on a pace to win 110 games, perhaps more. This is more than unreal; this is surreal. August 16th Ten in the morning and I have no idea who won the game last night. Were at camp, away from TV and computers and even the newspaper. The director usually posts the barebones scores on a wall in the dining hall (often with a synopsis of the Pirate game), but today hes bumped them for the Olympics. Yesterday, anticipating this, I shelled out five bucks for the modern equivalent of a transistor radio and listened to the Indians and Twins afternoon game from the Jake, but last night at bedtime I couldnt catch a roundtheleague wrapup. Weve been gone a week now, and this is the first time I havent naturally run across a score. While we were at my dads cottage on Lake Chautauqua, Wakes sixhomer win over the DRays made the Jamestown paper, complete with a photo of Timmay. The Buffalo TV news at eleven featured our next game, since a local family threw out the first pitch in memory of their son, a high school star and Sox fan, dead of cancer, whod dreamed of playing at Fenway. Most nights Id get just a score and then have to wait for the morning paper to fill me in, though during one newscast after the Bisons beat Pawtucket, we were treated to the Real Deal Player of the Game going deep twice against a skinny submariner wearing number 15the elusive Mr. Kim. A straight score, lumped with others from around the league, is flat and paralyzing. If we win, its great for about twenty seconds, then Im pissed that I dont know how we won, or why. A loss is awfulirrefutable, infuriatingand terrible for about a minute, until I realize that I dont know anything about the game, not even who pitched. Its a mindless, uninvolved way to follow baseball, almost zero content, as if the game is just about winning or losing. We dont watch a lot of TV at Chautauqua (getting only two snowy channels will do that), so inevitably I fell a day behind, picking up the paper and dissecting last nights box score, looking for signs. Manny was finally back; Trot and Pokey and Bellhorn werent. Cabrera continued to struggle at the plate. Bill Mueller, still playing out of position, made another error. Terrible Terry Adams put men on and Mendoza let them in, while Takatsu, the White Sox reliever, inherited three runners and stranded them. Even uglier, their seven and eight hitters combined for 7 RBIs. Sometimes its fun to puzzle out backwards what happened, but even a box score is cold matter, a map to treasure already dug up. Stanley Kubrick, insulated in his compound in the English countryside, used to have an assistant here in the States tape the playoffs and World Series so he could devour them at his leisure, and while I admire Kubricks taste (and appetite), watching a game thats long been over, and watching alone, seems to leach the immediacy from what is essentially a shared experience. Ideally, I want to be at the game, reacting to every pitch and situation as part of the loud, honesttoGod crowd; short of that Ill join the farflung (and far from imaginary) audience all across New England watching Don and Jerry or listening to Joe and Troop or Uri Berenguer and J. P. Villaman, knowing that when David Ortiz cranks one, citizens of the Nationfrom the capital of Fenway to the borderlands of the Northeast Kingdom and the Dominicanare hollering like idiots the same as I am. A box score or even a decent recap cant show me what kind of location Lowe has, or how much of a lead Dave Roberts is getting. I need to see it now, before what happens happens. So this is limbo, not knowing anything until its already over (and even then not knowing the results from Anaheim or Oakland). All I can say, today, is that in midAugust were solidly in the wildcard race, and possibly in the lead, and that, from all evidence, as a team were having the exact same problems we had two months agothe same problems, really, we had last year. August 17th I need to go back to the Garciaparra trade again, and it probably wont be for the last time. Its going to be one of the big Red Sox stories of the year, certainly the big story if this wounded, limping, patchedtogether teamdoesnt make postseason (or even if it does but doesnt advance). When we got Doug Mientkiewicz and Orlando Cabrera in return for Nomar, we were assured by management that this was a lot more than trademania, the equivalent of the crazy buying that goes on at the annual Filenes Wedding Sale. We were plugging defensive holes. In addition to that, Cabreras .246 batting average was deceiving; he was a doubles machine. Right, and we won in Vietnam; mission accomplished in Iraq. Mientkiewicz, although not used as an everyday player by Terry Francona, has played solid, unflashy baseball for Boston, and no surprise there; as a Minnesota Twin hes played on plenty of contending teams, and hes used to the pressure. Cabrera is a different story. Players who come from forgotten teams (and surely the Montreal Expos are the forgotten team) either blossom or shrivel when they come to contending teams and pressurecooker venues like Boston; Cabrera has so far done the latter. The press has been patient with him, but youd expect that; in Boston most of those guys shill for management, and while they have no problem making Nomar look bad, theyd love his replacement to look good so they can say, See? Hes great. Toldja. More interesting to mealso more surprising and endearinghas been the fans patience with Cabrerawho probably helped himself enormously by hitting a home run in his first atbat in the Red Sox uniform. None since, though, and his Montreal batting average of .246 has shrunk to something like .225. Worse, he hasnt looked like anyones idea of a Gold Glover at shortstop. Last night, in Bostons game against Torontothe first of a threegame setCabrera racked up a pair of RBIs, one on a base hit and one on a sac fly. Then, in an agonizing, rainsoaked seventh inning that seemed to go on forever, he gave them both back plus one to grow on with two boxscore errors and a third, mental, error that allowed a run which should have been kept right where it was, at third base. Cabreras hitting in the clutch has been nonexistent. In the game previous to last nightsthe final game of the Red SoxWhite Sox seriesCabrera ended things by grounding softly back to the pitcher, leaving the tying run stranded at third after the Red Sox had battled back from a multirun deficit. So in last nights game I was a little saddened but not really surprised to hear the first scattered boos in the raindepleted crowd when Cabrera came up following his seventhinning follies, which turned a 51 Red Sox cruise into a 54 nailbiter against the American Leagues bottom dogs. The crowd wants him to be good, and I have no doubt that he isno doubt that Terry Francona is exactly right when he says that Cabrera (who, unlike Mientkiewicz, plays every day) is pressing at the platebut I also have no doubt that the Nomar trade has already cost this Red Sox team at least three games it could ill afford to lose, and that it will quite likely cost them more unless Orlando Cabrera quickly finds his stride. Im not man enough to predict that the Sox will win eight of the current twelve, but they could, with half of the next dozen coming against the abysmal Blue Jays and two more against the only slightly better Tigers. And they should, if they are to retain their position as the team to beat in the wildcard race, and perhaps even put some distance between themselves and the other contending teams. But the injury situation continues to grow worse rather than better; with Youkilis down, we were last night treated to the bizarre sight of Doug Mientkiewicz playing second base for the first time in his life. And, aside from getting knocked down once by Carlos Delgado, he did a damned good job. One final note as the season wears on, I find it easier and easier to spell Mientkiewicz. People can adjust to just adamnbout anything, cant they? August 18th Having said all that, let me tell you that no one in all of Red Sox Nation was any happier than I was when Orlando Cabrera finally did come through in the clutch, turning on an 86 mph Justin Speier changeup and clanging it off the scoreboard in the bottom of the ninth inning last night, chasing Johnny Damon home with the winning run in the second game of Bostons current series against the Toronto Blue Jays. Fenway giveth and Fenway taketh away. In the first game of the series, it tooketh away bigtime from Mr. Cabrera. Last night, that funky justright bounce gaveth back, and I went dancing around my living room, singing the Gospel According to K.C. and the Sunshine Band Thats the way (uhhuh, uhhuh) I like it. Does this mean I think the Garciaparra trade is suddenly, magically okay? No. But I was rooting for Cabrera to come throughnot just for the Red Sox but for Cabrera as a Red Sock? You bet your tintype. Because, no matter what I or any other fan might think of the trade, the deal is done and Cabreras one of us now; he wears the red and white. So, sure, I root for him. Thus, hooray, Orlando. May you clang a hundred more off that funky old scoreboard. Welcome to Fenway Park. Welcome home. August 21st SO Guess whos back, back again SK Considering that the Red Sox have won 11 of their last 16, maybe you ought to go back where you were, and I mean find the EXACT SPOT. It was especially great to see Cabrera connect on that crazy wallball carom doublelike something out of a psychedelic Pong gameto win the game Monday night. And then there was Big Papi hulking down on Lil Massa Lily White [Toronto starter Ted Lilly, who plunked Ortiz on the hand]. Too much fun! SO Ive missed so much. A friend tells me that in one game Francona started Mientkiewicz at second. Is he shittin me? SK Nope. And Dougie played genius. It hasnt been Bostons best week (I firmly believe that this seasons best weeks are still ahead of them), but were riding our fifth fourgame winning streak of the season, and if we win again this afternoon, the Red Sox will be proud possessors of their fourth fivegame winning streak of the season. Theres better news Ive lost track of All My Children almost completely, and am hoping that when my viewing habits once more regularize on that front, the child of Babe and the odious JR will be in middle school and developing problems of his own (kids on soap operas grow up fast). August has certainly been the best month of the season for the Red Sox, and the team couldnt have picked a better time to get hot. There isnt a lot of wildcard competition on the horizon in the Central Division, but with the exception of the Mariners (now better than twenty games off the pace), the West is a shark tank. For the last week or so, all the sharksOakland, Anaheim, and Texashave been feeding on their weaker Midwestern brothers, and all of them have been winning.One of these clubs will win the division. The other twoalong with the Red Soxare swimming fulltilt at a door only big enough to admit one of them. I comfort myself with thoughts of the schedule, which will eventually force the sleek sharks of the Western Division to begin dining upon each other. The Yankees, in the meantime, have finally begun to falter a bit as their pitching arms become more and more suspect (may I noteand not without gleethat their trade for Esteban Loaiza is looking especially doubtful; there are already trade rumors floating around). Theyve lost three out of their last fourthe one win an almost miraculous comefrombehinder against the Twinsand while I dont think anyone among the Red Sox Faithful are counting on a total Yankee el floppo (but how sweet it wouldbe), Id guess that few among us are unaware that the New York lead, which was ten and a half ten days ago, has now shrunk to seven and a half. Still a lot, but on August 21st, seven and a half games doesnt seem like an insurmountable lead. August 22nd Im addicted to the Little League World Series the way a college hoop junkie craves March Madness. Every game is high drama, and you never know what to expect. Tonight we switch back and forth between the Sox and the Lincoln, Rhode Island, team, and after a while, like the end of Animal Farm, its hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Both survive late scares. The kids defense falls apart in the sixth. In Chicago, the Sox are up a run in the eighth, thanks to backtoback jacks by Manny and David, when Manny goes to plant himself under an easy fly, slips on the wet grass, recovers, then slips again, and the ball falls behind him. Timlin gets us out of it and Foulke closes, looking sharp. The Angels have swept the Yanks, and the Rangers finally lost, so were five and a half back in the East and a game up in the wild card. And the New England kids win. This is terrificwe beat the White Sox again, making us 51 in our last six games. The Rangers also won, but the tradeoff is that the Yankees took another drubbing from the Angels (and at the Stadium, heehee), meaning that the New York lead is down another full game. Knowing that their team has lost almost half their seemingly insurmountable lead in the space of a week cannot make Yankee fans happy. (That lead probably is insurmountable, but north of Hartford the only thing we love more than seeing the pinstripers have a bad week is seeing them have two bad weeks.) The Red Sox have scored 20 runs against the White Sox in the last two games. Varitek is thumping the ball, and so is Millar, but I think the big offensive story in Chicago has been Manny Ramirez. Hes been sluggish at the plate since the AllStar break, but in the last two games hes shown a return to the batting brilliance that made him such a catch for us in the first place. He hit the 16th grand slam of his career in the second inning of the Friday night game (August 20th) and added a threerun job yesterday. He has a total of 9 RBIs in the two games. To this you should add in Mannys glovework, especially back home in Boston, where he has become more and more comfortable with the eccentricitiesof left field at Fenway, a position that has made strong baseball players cry. Manny has gotten a reputation as a bad defensive baseball player and will almost certainly carry it with him for his entire career (the only people less likely than baseball fans to change their minds about a player are other players, coaches and, of course, Ted Williamss Knights of the Keyboard), but he has mastered the knack of playing the carom off the Green Monster in such a way as to hold runners at first (the worldfamous wallball single), and he has made some brilliant, fearless catches, especially going to his right, into the Twilight Zone territory beyond third base where the wall is hard and foul territory is measured in mere inches. Hes no Yaz, but is he at least the equal of Mike Greenwell, and maybe a little better? Our survey says yes. And damn, aint he a likable cuss! That wasnt always the case in Cleveland, where Manny had a reputation for taciturnity (he rarely did interviews), standoffishness and laziness. In Boston, Manny always seems to be smiling, and it is a beautiful smile, boyish and somehow innocent. He hustles, and the camera frequently catches him goofing with his teammates in the dugout (in one beautifully existential contrast, the viewer sees Curt Schilling studiously poring over paperwork while Manny mugs crazily over his shoulder). He has even done a shoe commercial which has its own brand of goofy Manny Ramirez charm. Some of the change from Growly Manny to Dont Worry, Be Happy Manny may have to do with the Dominican Mafia that, simply by chance, now surrounds him cheerybynature players like Pedro Martinez and David Ortiz. Some of it may be a kind of weird alchemy in Mannys lungs he pulls in the baleful, mediapoisoned air of Boston and exhales his own brand of nonchalant good cheer in its place. I actually sort of buy this, because not even the trade rumors that swirled around him in the offseason changed Manny as we have come to know him he comes to work, he does his job, and if the Red Sox win, he gives a postgame interview in which he shakes his head and says, We gotta jus keep goin, man, you know? We got another sees wees in the season and we gotta jus keep goin. One of the reasons Id like the Red Sox to win the World Series is so I can see if Manny would say We gotta jus keep goin, man in his postgameinterview, if hes that much on cruise control. Probably not, but Im sure hed smile, and that smile is worth a thousand dollars. SK Admit it You stole The Scream. It reminded you of how you felt in Game 7 versus the Yankees in last years ALCS. SO I stole it and shipped it to Billy Buck, whos staring at it right now, nailed up on the wall of his shack in deepest Aryan Idaho. Edvard Munch was a Sox fana ChiSox fan. Talk about tanking they were in first on July 26th; since then theyve gone 819. Its not that the Twins have played great ball, its just a flatout collapse. Whens the last time we swept them in Comiskey? SK Been quite a few years. Its nice to feel happy again about the Red Sox, isnt it? If only for a while. SO You were dead right about how nice it would be getting 15 games over .500, but I sure didnt count on the As, Rangers and Angels ALL streaking alongside of us. Theres four cars and the tunnels only two lanes. SK All is well as can be here, and Manny is stroking the shit out of the ball. Check out Chip McGraths Lost Cause piece in todays New York Times Magazine. Good for a giggle, I think. Or a snort of disgust. SO I expect its about the Yanks el foldo act the last three (make it four) years running. SK Can you believe the Yankees lost five games in one week??? I went to bed thinking, If I was Joe Torre, Id say, This is why you like the big leadyou can go through a tough stretch like this and still be on top. I got up this morning and damned if that wasnt just what the Skip said. What our Skip said was that when Manny dropped the pop, he swallered half his plug of tobacco. Served him right. SO Ol Joes got the luxury of a sixman rotation and all the bench support George can buy, so he doesnt have to sweat September. October, thoughIf they choke again, there are going to be some changes. Imagine if the heavily favored Sox blew three consecutive postseasons. Why, thered be talk of a curse. Id like to see a reel with all of Mannys wildlights. Hes like Charlie Brown out thereor Pig Pen. And I aint gonna say it, but you know what that plug o chaw resembles, halfin and halfout of Terrys mouth? Ayuh. SK My last bit in the August section is about MannyManny at the bat and Manny in the field, and how his bad fielding is a misperception. I think youll be amused. SO Im sure itll be a hoot. Wonder if well agree. Mannys about style, and I can dig that, but sometimes that feigned nonchalance leads to real goofs, like not running out pops down the line that end up falling fair, or forgetting how many outs there are. Hes got a good arm, but he loves to do that cool nolook throw from the corner so much that often he doesnt get enough zip on the ball and ends up rainbowing one in. And of course my favorite was when he forgot to call time after a double, stepped off second and got tagged out. But hey, its all part of being Manny. August 23rd SK In the Times piece about the Yankees lost weekend, there is, so help me God, this line Meanwhile, the Red Sox loom. So take that, Chip McGrath. Curt Schilling calls the Lincoln, Rhode Island, Little League team to give them a pep talk before their game tonight. The kids and their coaches are gathered around a speakerphone on a table. Everyones pumped. Are you gonna win it? Schill asks. Yeah! everyone says. And then one kida skinny little jokerleans over the phone and asks, Are you? Just as the room busts up (theres no more explosive laughter than nervous laughterVincent Price Masque of the Red Death laughter), the ESPN crawl at the bottom of the screen reads GARCIAPARRA (CHINL) OUT WITH STRAINED WRIST. The advantage we have in the wild card is that with the unbalanced schedule the teams in the West will be facing one another while we feast on scrubs like the Jays and DRays. Tonight we plan to cash in, throwing Pedro against Ted Lilly in the mostly empty SkyDome. Reed Johnson leads off the Toronto first with a home run. Orlando Hudson follows with a triple. Again, Pedros come out like his brother Ramon, as if hes not warmed up to game speed. He settles down after that and throws a great game, only giving up two more hits, but Lillys on, and with our lack of righty power (and Tek serving his suspension for shoving ARod), he shuts us down, 30, a threehit complete gameonly the second shutout against us (Jason Schmidts is the other). The Yanks beat Cleveland on a Sterry Sheffield home run, and the Angels won to pull even with us. And the kids from Rhode Island lost. August 24th This is a true adventure in surrealism Im in Boston (exploring possibilities for a musical play with John Mellencamp) and the Red Sox are in Toronto (exploring possibilities for extending their season into October). Tim Wakefield, the pitcher whos closest to the center of this Red Sox fans heart, is on the hill, and I keep running out to check with Ray, my longtime limo driver, whos parked in a loading zone and listening to the game on the radio. At first things dont go well; for most of the season Wakefields had problems with the gopher ball, and he gives up another in the first. The Jays keep pecking and are leading 30 when the Red Sox begin to crawl back, courtesy of Manny We gotta jus keep goin, man Ramirez, who plates a couple with a base hit to center. Then Doug Mirabelli, who regularly catches Wakefield (and will be standing in for Jason Varitek this week while Tek finishes serving his fourgame suspensionfor the brawl with Alex Rodriguez), hits a monster threerun homer to left center, putting the Sox up, 53. Im headed back to my hotel with Ray when Wake leaves the game. At that point the Red Sox still lead by two, but the Blue Jays have loaded the bases with nobody out. Enter Mike Timlin, who strikes out twoand then we lose WEEIs AM signal amid the tall buildings. Ray and I sit, not speaking, at a seemingly endless red light, listening to static. When we get rolling again and the static finally clears, I hear the merry voices of the Giant Glass singers (Who do you call when your windshields busted?), and know that Timlin either gave up a disastrous multibase hit and is being replacedthe barn door securely locked by Terry Francona after the horse has been stolenor he actually wriggled out of it. When the game comes back on, the Red Sox are batting. It turns out that Timlin coaxed Alex Rios, the third batter to face him, into hitting a mild ground ball. Ray and I slap hands, and were back at the Boston Harbor Hotel before the Red Sox have finished batting. I rush upstairs, ready to watch the final inning of what turns out to be another onerun nailbiter on TVonly to discover that the Boston Harbor may be the only hotel in the Boston metro area that doesnt carry NESN. No Red Sox on TV, in other words. I try the radio. Nothing on the FM but opera and Aerosmith, nothing on the AM band but one constant blat of static. I do the only reasonable thing, under the circumstances; I call my son in New Hampshire and have him call the final three batters Joe Castiglionestyle over the phone. It feels like bad mojothe Red Sox always seem to lose when I watch or listen with my kidsbut this time the Sox hold on, and I go to bed happy even though the Yankees have turned relentless again. Were now 72 over the last nine games, and its hard to be unhappy with that. Top of the sixth, down 32 with two on and one out for Doug Mirabelli against a tiring Miguel Batista. Dougs the slowest guy on the team, a real doubleplay threat. The book here is to pinchhit a lefty, and weve got a whole bench full. Problem is, with Tek still out, and Theo and Francona not wanting to waste a roster spot on Andy Dominique, our backup catcher is Doug Mientkiewicz. Mirabelli stands in and crashes a threerun bomb off the scoreboard in leftcenter. How does that proverb go some have greatness thrust upon them? Same thing in the bottom of the inning, when the Jays load the bases with none out. Embrees arm is dead from overwork, and Leskanic and Adams have had control problems. Mike Timlins thrown way too many innings lately, but Franconas got no one else. Timlin goes to the slider and whiffs Reed Johnson and Orlando Hudson, then gets Alex Rios on a forceout. He gives one back in the seventh, but Mendoza (another unlikely hero) gets two outs in the eighth, and Foulke handles things from there. So, thanks to some clutch play from the shallow end of the depth chart, we keep pace. August 25th With Nomar gone and Trot possibly lost for the season, we dont have a true number five hitter to protect Manny and David. Franconas tried a number of guys there latelyjust as he tried Dauber and Tek early in the season. When he posts the lineup for our nineteenth and final game of the season against Toronto, Bellhorn sees that Bill Muellers in the number five slot and jokes, Are we trying tonight? Dave Wallace likes to say that if your eight best pitchers throw 80 of your innings, youll be in good shape. Thats great if you have eight good pitchers. Toronto has two. Kid righty Josh Towers implodes in the fifth, giving up backtoback jobs to Manny and David, and then, two batters later, a tworun shot to Cabrera on a hanging curve. Schilling goes 6 13 and leaves with the score a comfortable 101, giving Francona a chance to use some of our worst arms (Terry Adams, Mike Myers, Mendozawho actually throws well) and rest the real pen for one night. The Yanks and Rangers lose, but the Angels put up 21 runs against the Royals to stay even in the wild card. Next Tuesday we start a ninegame stretch against the Angels, Rangers and As. If we can go 63 or better, were looking at the playoffs. August 26th You never take the field expecting to lose, but when your number five starter is on the mound, you know youve got to work a little harder. Number five guys can be kids on their way up (Clemens, early on; Aaron Sele; Casey Fossum), vets on the way down (the execrable Matt Young; the puzzling Ramon Martinez; the scuffling Frank Castillo; the iffy John Burkett), or guys in the middle just trying to hold on (usually junkballers like Al Nipper or Wake). The recent number five fad is the converted closer (Derek Lowe, Anaheims Kelvim Escobar), which makes more sense, giving a shot to a guy who actually has good stuffas opposed to the normal borderline number five guy stuffand hoping he develops into a number two or three. All number five guys have promise, otherwise they wouldnt be in the majors, but its rare to see one over the age of thirty bloom into a solid starter, the way exSock Jamie Moyer did in Seattle. More often, the number five who exceeds expectations isnt the vet or the phenom (hes already a number one or two, like the Cubs Kerry Wood or Mark Prior) but a guy in his midtolate twenties getting his second shot and putting it all together, the way Bronson Arroyo does tonight. Arroyos skinny as a stick, but hes no kid. At twentyseven, hes been a pro for ten years, signing with Pittsburgh out of high school and rising through their farm system, seeing limited action with the big club for parts of three seasons until they waived him before spring training last year. He pitched brilliantly for Pawtucket, earning a September callup, and threw so wellespecially against the Yankeesthat we made room for him on our playoff roster. This year, with Kim out, by default he became our number five guy, and though his records only 79 (partly due to lack of run support, partly to our weak middle relievers), his ERA is 4.07, a full run better than Lowes, just .29 behind Pedrobetter, in fact, than all the Yankee starters except Kevin Brown. Tonight he has his curve working and shuts down the Tigers for 7 13, giving up only an unearned run in a clutch 41 win. On the mound hes contained but assured, then almost cocky, sauntering off after striking out the side, as slow as Pedro. Its the kind of performance that makes you wonder if hell turn into a number one someday. August 27th As previously noted, the Boston baseball writers are masters of the bad vibe, maestros of dark karma. If cast away on a cannibal isle, I have no doubt they would soon be kingsat least until reduced to dining upon each other. Hardly anything seems to knock them offstridehow could it, when they cover a team which has been denied the ultimate brass ring for eightysix years?but one thing that does give them pause is a protracted winning streak. |
When Bronson Arroyo notched last nights win over the Detroit Tigers, he helped make the Boston Red Sox nine for their last ten, and the Hub sports pages were flooded with sunshine, most of it thin enough towell, thin enough to read a newspaper through. Leave it to Dan Shaughnessy to find a reassuring dark spot; just the right familiar note of negativity. In todays Globe column (untrustworthily titled Dark Days Appear to Be Long Gone), Shaughnessy says, in effect Does all this winning upset you? Does it leave you with a feeling of vertigo to get up in the morning and discover the Sox have won yet again? BLAME NOMAR! Thats right; blame Number 5, now living it up in Chicago under a different number. Shaughnessy dates the current roll of distressing good times (ooh, my tummy hurts, somebody pass the Dramamine) from July 31st, the day of the Big Trade. Never mind the two horrible losses that followed on its heels, or Orlando Cabreras terrible struggle to find his feet in the field and his stroke at the plate as he plays for the first time in years in front of a live audience. No, its Garciaparras fault, and why? Two reasons. First, because management pulled the trigger and management has to be right. Second, because we have just got to find the dark lining inside this silver cloud. How else can we define ourselves as Cursed, for Gods sake? I think George Orwell said it best in his classic allegory, Baseball Animal Farm Team Orlando good, Nomar bad. Nowhave all you little piggies got that straight? SO You know how fantasists talk about the willing suspension of disbelief? After tonights win over the Tigers (the 10th in our last 11 games, the 16th out of the last 20), Im experiencing an INVOLUNTARY suspension of disbelief. Knock wood. And yet, the Angels won their ninth straight to stay a half game back. Seems like we never have room to catch our breath. SK Yow! Given the first four months of the season, and the continuing injuries, who would have BELIEVED the August this team has turned in? It is unfuckingreal. September could be a fade, but we at least have a tame sked in the second half. Meanwhile, the series with the Angels (dont touch em, youll blister your frogging fingers) is shaping up to be miniArmageddon. I repeat Yow!! Stewdo you believe this shit? It is TOO FUCKING GOOD TO LAST and TOO FUCKING GOOD NOT TO. SO I was thinking yesterday that the team has shown a lot of character, and I cant remember when there was as sweet and wild a chase as the one shaping up. Some real scoreboardwatching. Way its been going, I just assume the other three are winning out West. The As are just as hot as the Angels. Damn you, Billy Beane! August 29th I recently read an interesting note from a sports psychologistcant remember who or where, or Id be happy to attribute it. Anyway, this guy said that when the local team wins, theyre we, as in we beat the Tigers last night for the third time straight. When the locals lose, theyre they, as in can you believe how lousy they were in July? You can call Bostons recent spectacular runeleven Ws in the last thirteen games, if my math is rightas a lesson in just how great the disparity is between the haves and the havenots in the American League, but that would ignore the soso way they played against the same clubs earlier in the season.It also ignores the fact that were doing it now with many players either on the DL or going out there hurt. Its a great run, and probably Stewarts and my emails show this best. I hope hell lay a couple of those daffy suckers in here. (Waabawaabawaaba, do you beleeeve this shit, Steve? and Im back with Waaackawaaackawaaacka, no fuckin WAY!) And, to top things off, Anaheim finally lost a game yesterday. That means that when the Red SoxAngels showdownminiArmageddonstarts on Tuesday at the Fens, were guaranteed the wildcard lead, and if things go the way Ive got them planned, that lead will be up to two and a half games. Even the folks at Scribner, who commissioned this book (at no small cost, either, heehee), have stopped crying doom. For the time being, at least. SO You going for the sweep today? Wakeywakey, eggs and bakey. SK Shhhh, no Wakeywakey. Just TimMAY. No wakey them Tigers. We won again yesterday behind a strong outing by Pedro, and this afternoon theres a carnival mood around Fenway. Manny, who fouled a ball off his knee and missed last nights game, comes out for batting practice wearing coach Ino Guerreros 65. In the field Mannys manic, flashing how many outs there are to Johnny, to the family section, to the Monster. In the fifth, down 10, he comes up with bases loaded and two out, and the crowd rises, chanting, MANNy, MANNy. First pitch, he drills a single to give us the lead. Ortiz rips another, then Millar. Wake throws eight strong, and the party doesnt stop. Its strange, this high from winninga straight drug, uncut. Faithful as the Faithful are, we tend to nitpick, even after a win. Not today. Everythings clicking, and, sure, its only Detroit, but weve won 20 games this month. The underachieving Red Sox have become overachievers, and no one is happier than the Faithful. SO It was good and breezy and Wake had his knuckler dancing. Just like yesterday, the Tigers hung in till the fifth, when their starter faltered, and then their reliever totally imploded. Yanks were losing last I heard. Could we be only four and a half back? SK Indeed we could! And 1.5 ahead in the wild card! SO Supersweet. Now, I dont want to throw cold water on the party, but the Yanks have a cake schedule the rest of the way. Theyre home 20 of their last 32, and were the only winning team they face (okay, and three against the Twins, but by then Minnesota will be resting starters for the playoffs). In any case, its time to square off with the Angels. Some very large games. August 30th The last time Tim Wakefield pitched against the Tigers, he gave up six home runs and still got the win, a feat only accomplished once since the days when most bigleague teams rode to their away contests on trains.Yesterday, though, on a day so hot the pitchers in the bullpen used a groundskeepers hose to spray the fans in the lower rightfield bleachers to keep them cool, Wakefield beat the Tigers again, this time more tidily, going eight strong innings and giving up only three hits. No one was any happier than me. I hate to sound like Annie Wilkes here, but Ive got to be one of Wakes biggest fans. And why not? Look at all we have in common. Wakefield stands 62; I stand 63. Wakefield weighs 210; I weigh 195 (and used to weigh 210). Wakefields middle name is Stephen; my first name is Stephen. Wakefield got hit by a car while jogging in 1997; I got hit by a van while walking in 1999. When Wakefield started against the Braves in the 1992 National League Championship Series, he was the first rookie to do so in nine years. When I started for the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 ALCS, I was the first rookie to do so in ten years. More importantly, Wakefield is the sort of player George Will was talking about in his overidealized booklength essay Men at Work, one who really is a man at work. There iswell, I was going to write theres little startime ego about him, but in fact there seems to be no startime ego at all about him. He comes to the ballpark not full of primetime flash like Jose Canseco did, not wearing the ostentatious earring like Barry Bonds does, or with the panhandlesized chip on his shoulder as Roger Clemens still seems to do (the Rocket still wants everyone to know they climb when he walks, by God). Tim Wakefield comes almost the way a man would come to a factory, not plodding but not strutting, just walking steady, with his shirt tucked in all the way around, his belt buckled neatly in front, his hair (whats leftof it) trimmed close, his time card in his hand. You almost expect to see him deposit his lunch pail on the bench before going out to the mound. He is the egoless workhorsewho signed with Boston in 1995, after being let go by the Pirates, and promptly won sixteen straight for the Sox. He gave them innings, innings, inningsincluding one harrowing stint as the clubs closer. (He was successful in the roleas he has been in almost all of his rolesbut he was also almost impossible to watch.) He became a free agent in November of 2000 and resigned with Boston a month later, taking a 1.5 million pay cut to stay with the big club (following his heroics in the 2003 postseason, when he came within five outs of being named the League Championship Series MVP, his salary went back to where it had been in 2002). Since then he has again given the big club innings and more innings, keeping his mouth shut while he does it. Now, after various stints in long relief and that one scary two or threeweek turn as the closer a couple of years ago, Wake is back where he belongs, starting games for the team of which he is the longeststanding member. Hes run his 04 record to a respectable 117, seems to be rounding into stretchdrive form, and if he doesnt garner the sort of fan adulation the Pedro Martinezes and Curt Schillings receive (not too many people come to the ballpark with 49 WAKEFIELD on their backs), thats probably to be expected. Working joesguys who keep their heads down and their mouths shut, guys who just do the jobrarely do. In fact, some guy once quipped, No great thing was ever done by a man named Tim. Our Tim could prove himself the exception to that rule. August 31st My wifes gone to see her parents for the night and she even took the dog cause Im going to Boston, so I feel its perfectly okay to give a yell of triumph when the Sox close out the month at 1007 P.M. with their twentyfirst win and their seventh straight, beating the Angels 107. The end ofthis one wasnt pretty, with Sox reliever Mike Myers giving up four straight hitsthe last a grand slam by a lategame subbut in the end we prevail (tonight the Sox can be we), and even if Anaheim should get up off the mat and take the next two, theyd still leave trailing in the wildcard race. And what puts the icing on the cake, the absolute perfect cherry on the banana split? The Yankees lost. Oh, waitdid I say lost? With a final score of 220, I think it would be fair to say that Cleveland administered a pantsdown buttwhuppin. Pricey midseason acquisition Esteban Loaiza gave up not one but two threerun homers in the ninth inning. The question, of course, is where the Yankees go from here. When the Houston Astros nohit them by committee a year ago, it served as a wakeup callbut that was earlier in the season, before their bullpen had taken such a severe pounding (Yankee starters have recorded just one win in the teams last sixteen victories). Baseball has seen plenty of amazing lateseason chokes; this could be the beginning of yet another. But the Red Sox players would undoubtedly say they can do nothing about the Yankees. They have thirtytwo more games of their own to play, and the next eight are going to be very tough. I hope to be at Fenway for as many of them as I can. But the great thing about the wild cardwhat I absolutely love about itis that it is, by its very nature, a slippery beast. If Oakland slides into first place in the AL Westhey, presto!the Red Sox are wildcardcompetitive again, only against a different team. There are baseball purists who hate the innovation for this very reason, but they would be folks who, for the most part, havent been stuck with George Steinbrenners bloated wallet for the last twelve years or so. The decision to wave Roberts home seemed out of character for the usually cautious Sveum and more like his predecessor, Wendell Kim, known to the Fenway Faithful as Send Em In Kim. Havent seen him at Fenway all year. In this context it does not hurt to remind ourselves that Globe ownership, New York Times ownership, and Red Sox ownership all overlap. In other words, theyre all in it together. Time to put the tinfoil on the windows, line our baseball caps with lead, and check our phones for radioactive bugs. How ugly? He was the first pitcher in seventy years to surrender six home runs and still get the win. The Tigers hit seven long taters in all, the last coming off reliever Mike Timlin. The Red Sox hit three, one from David Ortiz and two from Kevin Youkilis. If the more analytical (and amusing) Dennis Eckersley had been teamed with Caron, he probably would have given this part of the Millar fatwa the horselaugh it deserved. A trait he shares with stopped clocks. Latest victim of the injury bug is Kevin Youkilis, who suffered a jammed ankle at home plate after being waved in from second by Dale Sveum in the final game of the Red SoxWhite Sox series two days ago (Youkilis was out). The Texas Rangers have won six in a row and show no sign of their usual August heat prostration. In it, a dreamy Manny fantasizes about becoming the World Series MVP. Back then, of course, it was Nomars fault; even while on the DL he was sticking pins in his Terry Francona voodoo doll. The last time it happened was September 1940, to George Caster of the Philadelphia Athletics, who beat us despite six dingers. For reasons he probably could not explain (its a fan thing), Stewart ONan calls the Red Sox knuckler not Wake but TimMAY. Hey, I dont make the news, I just report it. Call this a lie if you want to; I prefer to think of it as a part of my rich and continuing fantasy life. In a 1993 game against Atlanta, Wakefield went ten innings for the Pirates and threw 172 pitches. In 1996, while pitching for the Red Sox, he threw 162 pitches in a game against the White Sox. Dont dismiss these numbers by saying, Yeah, but hes just a knuckleball pitcher, until you yourself have tried to throw 150 or so pitches, even soft tosses, the regulation distance of sixty feet and six inches from the pitchers rubber to home plate on a hot afternoon. I think by number 90 or so, your shoulders going to be feeling like a turkey drumstick on Thanksgiving day. SeptemberOctober Hangin Tough September 1st SK The Yanks have a cake schedule the rest of the way And they start off by getting beat by Cleveland, 220. Thats some cake. SO There aint no steroids in humble pie (and that was a BIG pie). I havent been to Fenway since this terrific Red Sox run began (eight in a row now; 217 for the month of August), and Im astonished by how radically the atmosphere of the old park has changed. The glums and glooms of July are gone, replaced by a giddy nervousness thats not quite a playoff atmosphere. Seconds before Bronson Arroyo throws his first pitch, the PA announcer informs the sellout crowd that its seventyseven degreesthe exact temperature of perfect childhood summer evenings, if I remember correctly. New Englands First Church of the Baseball Unfulfilled is once more ready to rock, my son and threeyearold grandson are with me (the latter more fascinated by the Hood blimp cruising overhead than anything happening on the field), and the Yankees are now almost close enough to touch. For the second night in a row I wait for Anaheims pitching, which has been largely responsible for taking them to eighteen games over .500 in the fiercely competitive AL West, to show up, and for the second night in a row it never does. For the second night in a row Boston puts a fourspot on the board in its half of the first. The difference is that weve got Bronson Arroyo going instead of Curt Schilling, and Arroyo is still years away from Curt Schillings craftiness. Also, for some reason the kid justdoesnt pitch well in Fenway. Tonight the Angels come back from what sportscasters like to call the early deficit and briefly make a game of it; after three innings the score is tied 55 and Arroyo is gone. In the end, it makes no difference; the final score is 127 Boston, and my scorecard suggests there are going to be some very tired Anaheim outfielders tomorrow. I see fourteen flyball outs and five strikeouts through eight innings. Add in the sixteen or eighteen hits that had to be chased down, and thats an awful lot of running for the, ahem, Angels in the outfield. Anaheim came into Fenway on fire. After two consecutive poundings, Id have to guess that the fire is out, and that when Bartolo Colon takes the mound tomorrow, hed better have his best stuff working if he wants to help his team avoid a clean sweep. As for the Red Sox, its now a nice balance the team is three and a half back in the division and three and a half ahead in the wild card. The stretch drive has begun, and right now it looks as if we could go either way. Of course, I know what Id like to see the Yankees scrambling madly for that wildcard berth. And losing it on the last day of the season. I am a Red Sox fan, after all. Tonight were on the Monster, switching between two single seats and two standing rooms. The matchup of Arroyo versus former Sock Aaron Sele seems to be in the Angels favor, but Sele comes out shaky and slow. Our guys are hacking at every pitch, and banjo hitters like Bellhorn are swinging for the fences. We score four in the first. The ump is squeezing Arroyo, and he gives two back in the second. We add another in our second, but the Angels tie it at five in the third, and Arroyos history. Francona calls on Mike Myers to get lefty Darin Erstad. The crowd groans; the PA plays the theme from Halloween. Myers comes inand gets it done. Mike Scioscia gives Sele an extra inning to find his bearings. Instead, he gives up three straight hits and we take the lead. Like Mike Myers, Terry Adams has had his problems, but, like Myers, he comes in with two down and gets his man, then settles in for two scoreless innings of work (one, I must say, belongs to Tek, who throws out two runners in the fifth). Scot Shields is their crummy middle reliever. We beat him like a rock, Millar sealing the win with a threerun Cokebottle shot. And to cap it, after Johnny catches the last out on the warning track directly beneath us, he throws the ball up to me. The games on ESPN, and when we get home Ive got emails from people who saw it. There I was, filling the screen, pointing and hollering thankyou, letting Johnny knowonce morethat he is still The Man. September 2nd Improbable or not, the Sox Express keeps rolling alongthis makes nine in a row and we are rapidly leaving the land of the unusual and entering that of the outandout, pleasepassthehappygas unreal. No question tonights game is the toughest of the lot, with Bartolo Colon throwing in the midnineties and the Angels offense struggling hard to salvage at least one game of the three. It is important that they do, of course, because of the swing that comes into play when the clubs in first and second play each other;theres a hell of a big difference between leaving Fenway two and a half games out and leaving it four and a half out. The Halos end up leaving it four and a half out mostly because baseball is also a game of luck and Bostons still running. It would have to be, wouldnt you say, for the Sox to go 2 for 14 with runners in scoring positionand still manage to eke out the win? The tragickal Mr. Lowe, who has been snakebit most of the year (there have been innings when hes been forced to get not just four outs but sometimes even six), only has to endure a couple of miscues tonight, and Adam Kennedy is the beneficiary of both. One is an error by right fielder Dave Roberts; the other is a triple that center fielder Johnny Damon should have caught, and in neither case does the speedy Kennedy end up scoring. Lowe settles down after giving up single runs in each of the first three. The Red Sox are only able to touch up Colon for four, also in the first three (tonight the Angel bullpen is superb), but four is enough. Between the first of April and the end of July the Red Sox made losing onerun games an art, but now they have turned that around. By the time Keith Foulke faces the last Anaheim batter of the series, thirtyfive thousand or so of the Fenway FaithfulStewart ONan and myself among themare on their feet, screaming, SWEEP! SWEEP! SWEEP! Foulke induces a harmless fly ball to Orlando Cabrera at shortstop and the Standells launch into Dirty Water. Stewart and I (not to mentionthe rest of the Faithful) have what we came for. Its unbelievable, but we have swept the Angels. Bring on Texas. And can I say we? I think I can, and in a wider context than just my Fenway friends on this clear and slightly fallishfeeling Boston night. According to the New England Sports Network (NESN), the first of the threegame series against the Angels drew the biggest ratings of any regularseason baseball game in the networks history. Seen in 18.5 million homes from Canada to Connecticut, it blew away all the bignetwork competition. Said color commentator Jerry Remy, I dont even know how to think about numbers like that. (Only Remy, a Massachusetts native, cannot seem to say numbers; he says numbizz.)In any case, the numbizz only underline the meaning of the ninthinning Fenway Thunder Ive now heard at the ballpark two nights in a row. This team has caught the imagination of New England. This year it took a while to happen, but it finally did. And the team has caught mine, as well. This time theyand wecould go all the way. Not saying they will; the odds are still against it. But some team will become the 2004 World Champions, and yes, this could be that team. They certainly have the tools. Christ, I hope I havent jinxed them, saying that. Weve won eight in a row and tonight were going for the sweep against the Angels, a very good club, yet when Derek Lowe stumbles out of the gate, the Faithful grumble. Not this Lowe, not again. The Lowe who just misses his location and gets frustrated, puts runners on and gets distracted, gets ahead of batters and then throws too nice of a strike. The Lowe who kicks absently at the air like a bummed Little Leaguer after an RBI single. Colon is having an even worse night. It seems we have two on or bases loaded every inning, but he slows the pace of the game (doing a whole lot of yardwork on the mound), and manages to weasel out of what should be big innings. After three, its 43 Sox, and at the rate the games going, well be here till midnight. With one down in the Angels fourth, Adam Kennedy flies one to Dave Roberts in right. Roberts isnt a right fielder by trade, and he tracks this one awkwardly, as if he doesnt quite see it, freezing and then waving at the ball as if its suddenly reappeared out of the lights. It hits his glove, then his leg, then the grass. Booooooooo! Its tough to hear, since Roberts is an eloquent and genuinely nice guy and a recent addition, and hes playing out of position, but its an important game, and the ball should have been caught. Still, I cant help reflecting that, even in the best of times, the Faithful are a hanging jury. Lowe walks the next guy. Hes struggling, and in even more trouble when Chone Figgins pokes a shallow liner to rightcenter that should drop. The one real tool Roberts has is speed. He reads this ball perfectly, flashing in and diving, picking it cleanly with a nifty backhand. The runner on second is halfway home, and Roberts doubles him up easily to end the threat. A huge, deafening standing O, and gratifying as hell to see a good guy go from goat to hero in a matter of a few pitches. Lowe seems to take the lesson to heart, and battles into the eighth, when he leaves to a standing O from the same folks (including me) who were shaking their heads a couple hours ago. We hang on for the sweep, knocking the Angels to four and a half back. The turnarounds complete. Like Dave Roberts and Derek Lowe, with the August its had, this team has redeemed itself, and the Faithful are more than grateful, were wild with hope. September 3rd Tonights starter for Texas once pitched for Boston. Red Sox fans remember him well, and not with affection; because of all the home runs he gave up, mostly in a relief role, he became known as John Way Back Wasdin. Since then hes been around, and hes improved. Not a lot, mind you, but enough to return to the show after a stint in tripleA and land a starting gig with the Rangers, who have performed above expectations all season long and are only now beginning to fade a little in the wildcard race. We have Pedro Martinez on the mound, and on paper this game looks like a ridiculous mismatch, but I enter Fenway feeling really nervous for the first time since getting here for the second game of the Angels series. Yes, Wasdin is only 22, and yes, his current ERA is an unremarkable 7.01, but he remembers perfectly well what the fans here used to call him and hed really like to be the guy who ends the Red Sox streak. Also, Texas has a formidable hitting lineup. Guys like Michael Young, Kevin Mench, Hank Blalock, and Alfonso Soriano (who came to Texas in the ARod trade and has lit it up at Arlington) seem made for Fenway. All my worries about Way Back Wasdin turn out to be justified, and it doesnt help that two more Red Sox players are sitting wounded on the bench David Ortiz (shoulder) and Johnny Damon (ankle). Wasdin is throwing some kind of heavy shitthat has our makeshift lineup popping up all night, and when Wasdin finally departs, he has given up less than a handful of hits. Luckily for us, one is a home run to Manny and another is a home run to Bill Mueller. Pedro strikes out nine, and faces only one serious threat, in the seventh. With runners on first and third and two out, Gary Matthews Jr. tests Jason Variteks arm by trying to steal second. Varitek passes the test. Orlando Cabrera slaps the tag on Matthews, and that takes care of that. Timlin and Embree tagteampitch the eighth and Foulke closes out the ninth. The Standells are singing Dirty Water no later than ten past ten and the crowd goes insane. The Sox have won their tenth straight, and I find myself doing the Funky Chicken in the aisle with a seventysomething woman I dont know from the Lady Eve. Shes wearing a Curt Schilling Tshirt, and thats good enough for me. Did I say the crowd goes insane? Thats wrong. They already went. It happened at approximately 950 P.M., when the scoreboard showed the Orioles beat the Yankees in the Bronx by a score of 31, reducing the Yankees lead in the AL East to a mere two and a half games. Weve gained eight in the East since the middle of August, a stretch of less than three weeks. Later, in my hotel room, I learn that Kevin Brown, who started that game for the Yankees, broke his hand after being pulled. He punched the clubhouse wall in frustration. As so often happens in such battles, he fought the wall and the wall won. At least it was his nonpitching hand, and hes vowed not to miss a start, but I wonder. For one thing, hows he gonna wear a glove on that baby? I never expected to see John Wasdin starting again in Fenway, but with the expanded roster, he gets another chance. And as the Sox complete their fifteenth shutout of the season, and their tenth straight win, Adam Hyzdu, the twentysixth man, the last one cut in spring training, makes his 2004 debut as a replacement right fielder. Like Wasdin, hes made his way back to the show, and if its only for a short stay, still, hes here, playing under the bright lights. September 4th Sarah McKenna, a Red Sox media rep, calls me while Im still doing my morning workout and flummoxes me by asking if Ill throw out the first pitch before this afternoons game. The Farrelly brothers, she says, creators of such amusing (if not quite familyfriendly) movies as Dumb and Dumber and Theres Something About Mary, are making a romantic comedy called Fever Pitch with a Red Sox background, and they want to recreate Opening Day, complete with sellout crowd and giant flag unfurling across the Green Monster.I guess neither Ben Affleck nor Matt Damon is in town, and of course native son John Kerry is otherwise occupied this Labor Day weekend. I want to do ithell yesbut Im still slow about agreeing. Some of my reasons are purely superstitious. Some, although pragmatic, are about superstition. The purely superstitious reasons stem from having thrown out the first pitch at Fenway once before, around the time I published a book called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. That was a work of fiction, but in 1998, the year before it was published, Gordon was brilliantthat was a fact. We lost the game at which I threw out that ceremonial first pitch, and not long after (my memory wants me to believe it was at that very game, but surely that cant be right), we lost Gordon to an arm injury for the rest of the season. When the 2004 version of Tom Gordon shows up in these pages, he is, of course, wearing the uniform of the hated New York Yankees. And, only a month later, I was struck by a van while walking at the side of the road and badly hurt. Certainly if I had been a baseball player instead of a writer, my career would have been over. So the last time I threw out a first pitch, bad things happenedfor theteam, for my favorite player on the team, and for me. Those are the superstitious reasons Im slow about agreeing to Sarah McKennas proposal. The pragmatic reasons about superstition? Well, look. I know how superstitious the ballplayers themselves are, and the fans put them to shame. I mean, some guy actually risked his life to change that Storrow Drive overpass sign from REVERSE CURVE to REVERSE THE CURSE. And the press only eggs them on. Lately theres been a story on several TV stations about a local Massachusetts teenager who got two of his front teeth knocked out by a foul line drive off the bat of Manny Ramirez. Because this kid just happens to live in the house where Babe Ruth once lived, the curse is now supposed to be broken. Broken teeth, broken curse. Geddit? This is the sort of numbnuts story you kind of expect from the local If it bleeds it leads TV in the doldrums of summerbut then, holy shit, the local papers pick it up too. So of course some people actually believe it. Why not? There are still people out there who think Fidel Castro had JFK shot and that cell phones cause brain cancer. So one thing I know if I throw out the first pitch and the Red Sox lose, if their tengame streak ends this afternoon, I will get some of the blame. Because Im not only a Red Sox fan, Im (creepy music here) NEW ENGLANDS HORRORMEISTER!!! And worsewhat if someone gets hurt (someone else to go along with Trot, Pokey, and Johnny Damon), or the game ends with a bum call, orGod forbidtheres some sort of accident in the stands? Or what if the Red Sox go on to lose ten straight, end up nine back of the Yankees again, and four behind Anaheim in the wild card? Nor is this an entirely unbelievable scenario, with three coming up against Oakland (on their turf) and then three more in Seattle, who has suddenly gotten hot. ILL GET BLAMED FOR THAT TOO! THEYLL SAY IT ALL STARTED WHEN THAT BASTARD KING THREW OUT THE FIRST PITCH ON SEPTEMBER 4TH! So of course I say yes. 1 P.M. Its stifling hot behind the gigantic American flag, and Im scared out of my mind. I cant believe Ive agreed to do this. On my previous pitching adventure, I only had to walk from the Red Sox dugout to the mound, a matter of twentyfive or thirty steps. Now Ill be walking in from the deepest part of the park. I am, in fact, positioned just beneath CLE in the outoftown section of the leftfield scoreboard. My introduction finishes. Marty, my Red Sox minder, lifts the flag forme. I step out into brilliant sunshine and off the warning track, onto green grass. The crowd roars, and I have to remind myself that the PA announcer has cued them to go batshit, has told them that the cameras are rolling, and that they should make as much noise as possible. |
Still, that fortysecond walk is a remarkable period of time for me, every second crystal clear, and as I approach the rusty red dirt of the infield, the exact color of old bricks in a factory wall (I cross at shortstop, where Orlando Cabrera will soon be standing and where Nomar Garciaparra stood for so many years before him), I remember that I promised my daughterinlaw that Id give the crowd the Manny Salute. I do so without delay, cocking my free hand and glove hand like guns, and the crowd roars louder, laughing and delighted, giving me a verbal high five. Its probably the best moment, even better than toeing the blinding white strip of the pitchers rubber and looking in at Jason Varitek, squatting behind home plate. Except maybe the moment before I throw is the best moment, because I can see him so clearly (theres no batter, of course, and hes not wearing the mask). His face is grave, as if he actually expects me to throw a sixtyfoot strike in front of thirtyfive thousand peopleme, who does his best work in an empty room with a cup of lukewarm tea for company. And I almost do. My pitch dips at the last second and hits that redbrick dirt just in front of home plate. Varitek catches the ball easily and trots out to give it to me (its beside me as I write this, a little red scuff on one curve) as the crowd roars its approval. Varitek is kind, calling it first a sinker, then a Hideo Nomo strike three. Too cool. I try to shake his hand with my glove. Thats how dazed I am. 345 P.M. The good times have rolled and now my darker fears are coming true. Tim Wakefieldmy current favorite Red Sox playeris on the mound, and hes getting lit up. When Terry Francona finally comes out and takes the ball, the score is 81, Texas. 425 P.M. The Sox make a game of it, at leastMark Bellhorn hits a grand slam, and David Ortiz follows with a basesempty roundtripperbut in the end Boston falls two runs short. There is even that bum call I obsessed about, a phantom tag on Dave Roberts the secondbase ump sees as onehalf of the gameending double play. Manny Ramirez is left in the ondeck circle, and the Sox streak ends at ten. I am 02 in games where I throw out the first pitch, and tomorrow the newspapers will blame me. I just know it. SK I got a LARGE charge out of throwing the first pitch today. Broke off a slider that hit the dirt in front of home plate. Varitek, laughing, called it a Nomo strike three. And then we lost. Shit. But still a great game. SO Saw you on the tube joking with Tekv.v. cool. Taped it if you want it. Wake looked awful. Whats his record in day games? Because Ive seen him at least twice get shelled on beautiful Saturday afternoons. I called the Bellhorn granny, and had a feeling Big Papi would solo right after that. If Bill Mills shot up the middle gets through in the eighth, Tek pinchhits with one out, but that galoot made a skate save. Least the Yanks lost. One more and The Stands over. Be sweet to bury the Rangers right here right now. Mr. Schill on the hill. September 5th Bob Hohlers Boston Globe piece on yesterdays game leads like this Searching for scapegoats? Try horrormeister Stephen King, who tossed out a ceremonial first pitch. Blame the horrormeister. What did I tell you? Please, baseball gods, let Curt Schilling win today. A weird, glancing Sox experience today. We drive the two hours from Avon to Boston, and around game time we deliver Caitlin and all her stuff to her dorm at B.U., then go over to Beacon Street for a farewell lunch. Fenways less than a block from us, and fans headed for the rubber game against Texas stream past, decked out in their Red Sox best. So not only do we feel lost, losing Caitlin, it feels like were going the wrong way, or doing the wrong thing, as in some unsettling, ominous dream. On the way home, three now instead of four, we listen to the game unfolding farther and farther behind us. Schilling throws well, and we hold a 41 lead until the seventh, when Gabe Kapler adds two more with a basesloaded single. It turns out that we need them, as Francona unwisely gives Schilling a chance at a complete game. Michael Youngagain!hits a Monster shot, and its 63 with one down when Foulke comes in. He gets an out with his first pitch, then gives up a single, a double, a single that makes it 65, until, finally, as were just pulling into the driveway, Bellhorn snares a kneehigh bullet to save the game. Yi yi yi. 945 P.M. It was closer than it should have beenthe Rangers turned a 61 laugher into a 65 nailbiter in the top of the ninthbut in the end, Father Curt and the Red Sox prevailed. The Yankees also won (on a basesloaded walk), and the Angels are winning, but for tonight, at least, I dont care about the other guys. My personal curse has been lifted. Of course all that superstition stuff is the bunk, anyway, and we all know it. And with that said, I can take off my lucky shirt, turn my pillow lucky side up, and go to bed. SK Dja see todays Globe? I took the hit for the lossI knew I would. Superstitious ijits. Thats twice Ive tossed out the first pitch and twice they lost. Think Ill get the call in Game 7 of the World Series? Steve Just Call Me Hideo King SO Hey, Hideo, YOU didnt give up the threerun dinger to Michael Young. And Bellhorns comeback granny was some kind of magic. For a game we were basically out of, it was damn close. The way todays was for Texas. Yeesh! Foulke had absolutely nothing. Well take the W and plant it on their grave. On to Chokeland! September 6th While some of the Faithful grouse that weve become more and more like the Yankeessigning free agents rather than developing our prospectsthe team we most consciously resemble is Oakland. Theo and Bill James tend to follow the tenets of Moneyball, valuing onbase percentage above other indicators, and in our two seasons under their reign, weve approached the playoff chase like the As, staying close until the AllStar break, making a few deals and then charging. Beyond absorbing Billy Beanes philosophy, we also appear to be importing players hes already poached from other teams. Mark Bellhorn, Johnny Damon, David McCarty and Keith Foulke are all recent As, as is manager Terry Francona, Oaklands bench coach in 2003. So its no surprise that the As are our constant competition, and that the games we play with them are tighta situation that ironically does not benefit a Moneyball club (since defense, speed and a closer are less highly prized in Billy Beanes universe), but a smallball team like the Angels or a more traditional slugging club like the Yankees. Tonight out by the East Bay, Mark Kotsay (who lost the last SoxAs game with his bobble of a Bill Mueller double on the track) solos twice off Arroyo early, but Bronson settles down, retiring eleven in a row. In the fourth Manny and David go backtoback against Barry Zito to tie it. The game stays that way till the seventh, when Bill Mueller and Dave Roberts hit RBI doubles. The As rally to make it 43 after a terrible call in the eighthManny clearly traps a line drive by Kotsay, yet the ump calls him outbut in the ninth their lack of a pen shows, as Chad Bradford and the everunreliable Arthur Rhodes combine to give up four runs, three of them on a David Ortiz basesclearing double, and we win 83. Thank you, Moneyball! The Yankees, meanwhile, were scheduled to play a doubleheader against Tampa Bay in the Bronx, but due to Hurricane Frances the DRays were late getting to the Stadium and missed the first game. Yanks general manager Brian Cashman immediately lobbied the league office for a forfeit (the league turned him down, Id hope with a look of disbelief). So while in Florida the storm has torn peoples homes and lives apart, the Yankees only thought was to use it to pick up an unearned win. Now thats class. September 7th It wasnt that long agoat the end of this seasons fantasy August, in factthat Red Sox writers and commentators (not to mention your runofthemill bleacher creatures) were saying that Bostons postseason chances might hinge on how well they could do in the upcoming ninegame stretch against the big fish of the AL West, before leaving those sharks to swimand hopefully to bite one another as seriously as possiblein their own tank. Most hoped for six wins at most, two against the Angels, two against the Rangers, and maybe two against the Oakland Athletics. Many partisans would have been satisfied with five. Few, I think, would have guessed at our current position six wins and one loss with two of the ninegame set left to play. When the Red Sox last visited Oakland, during the playoff seriesagainst the Athletics in the fall of 2003, they left a bunch of pissedoff As and As fans behind. The same was true following last nights rematch, the only difference being that we have to play them again tonight instead of next year, and tonight the chief object of the As ire will be on the mound. That would be the tragickal Mr. Lowe, who supposedly made an obscene gesture toward the Oakland bench after striking out the final player of the game. The animus of last nights Oakland Coliseum attendees was directed not at any Red Sox player so much as it was at the ump who ruled Mark Kotsay out after Manny Ramirez appearedfrom the umps perspectiveto have made a rolling, tumbling catch of Kotsays dyingquail line drive. Manny actually caught it on whats known as the traphop, a fact his diving body obscured from the umpire, who fearlessly made the call, anyway. Manny himself acknowledged this in the locker room, after the game. I knew I din catch the ball, he said, but the umpire say I catch the ball, so the guys out. He then shrugged, as if to add, Tough luck, Markbut we gotta jus keep goin. To add insult to injury, Kotsay made almost exactly the same play on a Red Sox dying quail of a liner later on in the game, only this time the ump saw the ball hit the ground and ruled the batter safe. Kotsay raised his arms in frustrated body English even a baby could read Aw, come on! Gimme a makeup call here, Blue! No makeup calls for Oakland (not last night, anyway), and it probably wouldnt have helped; in the end, the game just wasnt that close. That didnt stop the angry Oakland fans from hurling their trash into the outfield, however. It was a sight that filled meI admit itwith childish glee. I had zero sympathy for their outrage, given the umps honest effort to make an honest call; not so soon after the blown call on Dave Roberts that ended our game against Texas three days ago, and probably, if Im to be honest, in no case.Blown calls are, after all, a part of the game, and the fans rage somehow made this one even tastier. Thats right, ya babies! I thought, watching the hotdog cartons and empty beer cups rain down. The umps are relaxing in the Officials Room, probably soakingtheir tired feet, so take it out on your grounds crew! Go on and chuck that shit, why not? Are Oakland fans coming to hate us the way we hate the Yankees? Theres an interesting thought. Trot comes off the DL today, and Pokey, and Johnny, whos been out with a strained pinkie (when in doubt, pinkie out), is back in the lineup. Scott Williamson, whos been gone a long time, throws batting practice to Trot and may be ready soon. Mr. Kim, however, appears done for the year. The PawSox finished their season yesterday (as did Cesar Crespo and Brian Daubach, who both contributed to the big club early on), and Theo says theyre putting together a conditioning program so the 10 million man (and his eleven innings of work this year) will be ready in the spring. Of course, theres nowhere to put all these guys. The roster, like the dugout, is overflowing. Youk hasnt seen action in weeks, or McCarty, or Ricky Gutierrez. No ones going to rock the boat, though. The teams doing too well. Tonight Johnny celebrates being back in action by leading off the game with a home run. Its Derek Lowes first appearance in Oakland since his alleged crotchtugging in the direction of the As bench after clinching last years divisional playoffs, and the crowd lets him know it. He scuffles early (as usual), but Gabe Kapler clocks a tworun shot for a 30 cushion, Billy Mueller makes three highlightreel stops at third, and once again we bulldoze their number four starter Mark Redman for a 71 win, making us 71 in our gutcheck stretch against Anaheim, Texas and Oakland. September 8th Im primed to stay up late and watch the PedroTim Hudson series finale, hoping for the sweep, but Hudson cant find the plate, and after three its 70 Sox and hes gone, and we havent really even hit the ball yet. What do you do when the one strength of your club fails you? You lose. We sweep the As at home after sweeping them in Fenway in July. Even better, the Angels lose, so were five up in the wild card. And the rain left over from Hurricane Francesin a fitting revengewipes out the YanksDRays doubleheader, so were only two back in the East, and with the makeups, their rotations a mess. September 9th The Red Sox offense didnt beat Tim Hudson last night, and Pedro Martinez cant exactly take credit, either. After walking the first three batters of the game (four in the first inning) and giving up a double to David Ortiz and a single to Jason Varitek, Hudson pretty much did the job on himself. Meanwhile, the Yankees current series with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays,a seemingly endless exercise in baseball existentialism during which the DRays never win and the Yankees never seem to gain ground in the standings, is continuing this afternoon, with the New Yorkers leading in the first game of a doubleheader by a score of quite a bunch to one. I could check and get an exact score, but it hardly seems worth it. Based on my last peek I can tell you that a.) theres hardly anyone in the stands at the Stadium, and b.) Rocco Baldelli looks like he wishes he were playing for the Tokyo Sunflowers, assuming there is such a team. After last nights rainout and the Red Sox win in Oakland, the gap in the AL East shrank to a mere two games for the first time since early June, and reading the sports pages of the New York tabs has become a wonderfully cheering pastime for Red Sox fans; the Post and Daily News baseball columnists, used to a steady diet of Yankee triumphs down the stretch, have started to sound like holyrolling revivalshow ministers, warning that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are on the horizon Behold, I saw a pale horse, and on him was Manny, and he spake, saying, Hey man, we gotta jus keep goin. Meanwhile, on other fronts The hapless Devil Rays will be more hapless still if Ivan, third and worst hurricane to menace Florida in the last thirty days, blows away their JuiceDome down there in Tampa; like a certain unlucky Jew, they may be doomed to simply wander, dragging their dusty equipment bags behind them, playing everywhere and always batting in the top of the first. We once had a home, theyll tell those who will listen. It wasnt very full, and most of the folks who showed up were old, many equipped with shunts and pee bags, but by God it was ours. In Foxboro, the New England Patriots, proud winner of exactly one preseason game, prepare to defend their Super Bowl title. And on I95, just north of Augusta, Maine, at a little past noon and in a driving downpour (the remains of Hurricane Frances, or so the radio assured me), I saw an oak tree blazing with orange leaves. Football, autumn colors, hurricanes omens of the end. Hurry up and finish your four games with Seattle, Red Sox. Hurry up and come home. Its almost time to deal with the Yankees. SO Maybe because all this is happening late at night way out West there isnt the crazy celebrating like last week, but it almost seems too easy, too calm. Its quiettoo quiet. SK Its like people are getting used to it. If so, bad people. Bad people. Ungrateful, BAD people. Or maybe, who knows, theyre just not as crazy as we are. Also, they ARE away. And some people DO have to get up and go to work. Not us, I mean, but SOME people. Tonight in the topleft corner of the country, Seattle throws a rookie lefty Ive never heard ofBobby Madritsch, whose route to the bigs included time in the independent leagues, the outlaws of the minorswhile Tim Wakefield takes the hill for us. Wake came out flat in his last start (our last loss), so hes due for a solid game. Wrong. The Mariners score early and often, and when a fly to the track goes off Mannys glove in the fifth for a tworun error, this ones done. We lose 71 while the Yanks sweep a doubleheader from the DRays, the first game of which has an officially reported attendance of zero. Zero, as in no one. Zero, as in one less than the guy sitting at his desk writing this. If the Yankees win and no one sees it, does it still count? September 10th SO Im definitely making the Tuesday game next week versus Tampa, and if youre not using the tix, I could see myself there Wednesday and Thursday too. There just arent that many games left. Here on Monday I went to the Rock Cats last game of the year; after they won, the players tossed their hats and batting gloves and all the balls in the dugout and even the leftover bubble gum to the crowd, and I realized that once the seasons over, thats it, its fall and then winter. I didnt like the feeling one bit, and I guess Im doing what I can to stave it off. SK Youre so right. Winters coming. I felt a change in the weather the day after Labor Day. Losing two straight to the lastplace Ms, with Schilling going, isnt likely, and Im uncharacteristically certain of this one from the start. Seattle keeps it close till the fifth, when David Ortiz sneaks a linedrive homer over the wall, and then, after an error by backup second baseman Jose Lopez, with two outs, Bill Mueller singles, Dave Roberts doubles, Johnny Damon triples and Mark Bellhorn singles. The next inning, Manny, who started our scoring with a solo shot, piles it on with his 17th career grand slam, and Schilling cruises to become the majors first 19gamewinner. Meanwhile in Baltimore, Javier Vazquez melts down, walking and hitting batters with the bases loaded, and the Yanks go down hard, so were two and a half back. Anaheim wins and the As lose again, so the Angels are a mere game off the pace in the West. With the unbalanced schedule, the Angels have six games remaining against the As and a chance to make them our wildcard rivals. September 11th Manny Ramirez hit home runs 39 and 40 last night to amble past Bostons Dwight Evans on the alltime list and further enhance his MVP chances (although for that to happen Boston will almost certainly have towin the American League flag). Boston didnt look particularly good against Seattles collection of battered veterans and freshly calledup farmhands in the first of the teams fourgame series and Tim Wakefield suffered for it, but the whole team appeared to be ambling in that game, probably a natural enough result of having just finished an 81 tour of duty against Oakland, Texas, and Anaheim. Father Curt took matters in hand last night, thank God (he righted the ship, as the Sports Cannibals like to say), and bagged his 19th win in the process. The Angels, currently five back in the wildcard race, are now the only other contender for that ticket to the postseason dance.They have nineteen games left, two against the soso ChiSox, seven against the shlubby Seattle Mariners, and ten against good teams, including six against Oakland. We, on the other hand, have six games left against the Yankees, and eight against Baltimore, who has played us tough all year. The moral of this story is simplewe gotta jus keep goin, man. SK We kicked their ass, all rightanother granny for Manny, and it was one inning after I went to bed. As for Being There, Owen has talked me into going down to at least one game and then driving back afterward. Meantime, another day off the schedule, another day closer to the Yankees. SO If youre going to catch just one game, make it Thursdays, Curts first crack at 20 wins. Arroyo threw well against the Mariners in his other start against them and got screwed out of a W when the pen fell apart. Tonight hes wearing some of the ugliest dirtyblond whiteboy cornrows Ive ever seen, but he pitches beautifully, that hard curve of his dropping off the outside corner, making hitters lunge. Manny homers again, and Mark Bellhorn. Kevin Youkilis starts at third to give Bill Mueller a breather, and by the late innings Pokey Reese, David McCarty and Ricky Gutierrez all get some playing time. In the ninth were up 70 when Adam Hyzdu sees his first atbat as a Red Sock. He looks anxiousand awful, chasing pitches away. Hes down 12, and I think how much that would suck, striking out in your one atbat all year. Hyzdu lines a double to the wall in left, knocking in a run. So hes batting a thousand and slugging two. When the Sox have to declare their playoff roster (knock wood), some of these guys arent going to be on it. We keep having to make room on the expanded roster for people coming off the DLlike Scott Williamson last nightand with all the guys we added in midseason, I wonder if guys like McCarty and Pokey wont be going to the party. And can we keep Dave Roberts, Trot and Kapler as backups? Someones going to be left out the way Dauber and Cesar Crespo have already been left behind. September 12th SO Did I tell you my theory that Napoleon Dynamite is about the Sox pitching staff? Eck is Uncle Rico, wanting to timetravel back to 1982, while Napoleon is the lost and tragickal Derek Lowe. SK Who is the nerdy older brother? Bronson Arroyo would be my guess. Peace out, Napoleon. Cornrows, indeed. SO I was actually thinking of Wake for the brother, but youre right, Arroyos cornrows might win him the role (who did emManny? Pokey?). And I did see a VOTE FOR PEDRO Tshirt at the park the other day. Speaking of voting Mr. Schill should have the inside track on the Cy Young, and Manny sure as heck looks like the MVP. My too quiet prediction comes true, as righty Gil Meche scatters five Red Sox hits for a completegame 20 shutout. Manny sabotages our best scoring chance in the first with one out and two on, he forgets how many outs there are and gets doubled up off second on what should be an easy sac fly. Derek Lowes only mistake is a tworun shot to Raul Ibanez. Time of game two hours, twentytwo minutes. SK What can you say? Guy pitched a great game and Manny ran us out of an inning. Oh, that crazy Manny. At least itll take more than this one game to cost us our dream. But 3.5 back of the Yankees. And hows by the Angels? White Hot Colon (as per the Angels website) over Chicago, 110. Back to five up in the WC. And do you know what? I think the DRays might put a hurtin on us. SO DLowe deserved better (and be sure the GM of the Os has taken note of his last seven starts). So were where we were on Friday, just two games closer to the finish line. With Petey and Mr. Schill slated to go against the DRays, Im optimistic. Just gotta hit. I wonder how much Mannys little fugue states will hurt his MVP chances. What a weird series he had. He clouts a bunch of big dingers, including that granny, makes a great flying karatekick, giveupthebody grab in the corner, then muffs that can of corn on the track, and today he forgets how many outs there are. Its like Sun Ra said space is the place. Somewhere Im missing a gameour record says we have 20 left but I only count 19 on the sked. Must be a rain date in there somewhere. Ah, found it weve got a doubleheader in Baltimore on the nexttolast day of the season. So that means of the 20 games we have left, 8 are with the painintheass Os. And 6 are with the Yanks. So we had better beat the DRays. SK I doan like the sound of tha, man. Too easy to see the headline ANGELS IN AS WILD CARD, TEJADA SINKS SOX. You think? Say Nahhh SO Nahhh. Theyll be meaningless. Our starters will be Abe Alvarez and Frank Castillo. Or whoever needs the innings for his bonus. But youre right, Tejada will hit four homers. (Talk about some fans who should (continue to) be pissedthe new and improved Os didnt even make .500.) Plus Im looking for the Angels to knock off the As. Be nice to see a team with real fundamentals overcome their injuries and eliminate the Moneyball guys. September 13th In the mail, a gift from Steve The Year of the Gerbil, by Con Chapman, a chronicle of the 1978 pennant race. The Gerbil, of course, was just part of Bill Spaceman Lees nickname for then Sox manager Don Zimmer. The whole name was The Mad Gerbil. On the cover is a shot from the TV feed from the onegame playoff, the centerfield camera keying on Bucky Dent just after his fateful swing, Mike Torrez starting to follow the ball up and to his right. Torrez, Im surprised to see, is wearing Roger Clemenss 21. Another good reason to retire it. SO Thanks, man. The title alone had me laughing (though you know by the end Ill be grimlipped, bumming once again at Mike F Torrez and Bucky F Dent). And this year sure looks like a photo negative of 78. We just have to catch the Yanks at the wire and let Mark Bellhorn do the rest. SK I saw the cover of this weeks Sports Illustrated and my heart sank into my boots. If you dont know whyand Im sure you doGoogle Sports Illustrated Curse. SO I believe Tommy Brady and the Pats survived it, so maybe Mr. Schill can too. At least its not the Chunky Soup curse; thats a careerender (Terrell Davis, Kurt Warner). Keep your eye on Donovan McNabb! If we gather all these curses (Titanic, Bambino, SI) and STILL win, will folks shut up about them already? And will we get extra points for degree of difficulty (like overcoming all our injuries)? September 14th The Yankees got roughed up again last night, roughed up bad, this time by lowly Kansas City. The final score of that game was 178, and this morning the New York sportswriters will once more be eating their gizzards out about the pinstripes lack of pitchinglovely. The Red Sox, meanwhile, only split with cellardwelling Seattle, which is a long way from wonderful, but the road trip is over, four more games are off the schedule, and were coming back to Fenway Park almost exactly where we were in the standings when we left three games behind the Yankees in the East, four and a half ahead of the Angels in the wild card. Furthermore, were looking at three with the hapless Devil Rays, and the Sox have been strong against them this year. So, at least until we meet the Yankees on the seventeenth, alls okay with the world, right? Wrong. Theres a problem. A big one. Father Curt is on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week, thats the problem. Hes standing on the mound at Fenway with his arms spread and every letter on the front of his uniform clearly visible. How could they? With all the other stuff we have to worry about, how damn could they? Because while theres no evidence of the Curse of the Bambino other than the failure of the Red Sox to win the World Series since 1918 (and they are not alone in that), theres plenty of evidence that the Sports Illustrated Curse actually exists. Two games after his cover appearance on SI, Kurt Warner suffered an injury that sidelined him for five games (although in Warners case Im at least willing to admit the possibility that Campbells Soup may have been a contributing factor). One day after Anna Kournikova appeared on the SI cover, she was bounced from the French Open, her earliest exit from a Grand Slam event in three years. In his first Monday Night Football game after his cover shot, Howard Cosell went from hero to zero by referring to a Redskins wide receiver as that little monkey. After Dale Murphy of the Atlanta Braves appeared on the cover, the Braves dropped fourteen of theirnext fifteen games. Other sufferers of the SI Jinx have included Tom Watson, Kirk Gibson, George Brett, Pedro Martinezs brother, Ramonand exRed Sox franchise player Nomar Garciaparra. After Nomar, stripped to the waist and looking most righteously buff, appeared on the cover, he went down with a popped wrist tendon and played hardly at all during the first half of the season. And now, in addition to all our injuries and our farfromsecure lead in the wild card, in addition to a threegame bulge for the Yankees that wont seem to shrink any lower than two games, I have to cope with the near certainty that Curt Schilling will not manage to win twenty games in the regular season, but will remain stuck on nineteen instead. Martinez, Wakefield, Arroyo, and the tragickal Mr. Lowe will have to take up the slack. Thanks, Sports Illustrated. Thanks a pantload. You guys suck. Behind Fenway, at the corner of Yawkey Way and Van Ness Street, sits the players parking lot. Four hours before game time the Sox take over Van Ness, barricading both ends and evicting any parked cars. By then a sizable clump of autograph hunters is already waiting. Theres no way you can get close enough to the players Mercedeses and Volvos and Range Rovers as they pull in (or Gabe Kaplers and Kevin Millars chromedout hogs), and the tall fence surrounding the lot is lined with a heavy green tarp so you cant see in, but a hundred feet down Van Ness there are three horizontal slots cut into the fence about thighhigh, and as the players walk from their rides to the clubhouse entrance, some will stop to sign. The slots are uncomfortably close to glory holes, with all that that implies. The only way to tell whos coming is to kneel on the concrete, press your cheek against the metal edge and peer sideways through the slot like the opening of a pillbox. Today Im the first one there, and stake out a spot at the end of the first slot. Position is everything some guys will sign just a few and then break off, leaving fans at slots two and three grumbling. Ive also chosen a weekday for my hunting because weekends people are packed six and seven deep, and Id feel like a heel claiming a spot before some little kid (little kids also have no qualms about stepping on you or crawling over your back). As the other hunters show up, I realize that compared to them, I am a little kid, a rank amateur. Theyre mostly pros, dealers who owe each other money and merchandise. They bring batbags full of Big Sticks, boxes of balls, albums of eightbyten glossieshighticket items they can sell on eBay. As we stand there waiting for the Sox to arrive, theyre cutting deals and boasting of recent acquisitions, trading information about upcoming shows. What are you working there? one asks me. Hat? Couple a balls? I try explaining that the hats for meto wearbut its impossible for him to understand that Im just a fan. The coaches arrive first, together. No one wants them but me. No one seems to know who Ino Guerrero is, or care. Im psyched to get Adam Hyzdus autograph on his PawSox card, while they just shrug. Likewise, when the middling Devil Rays players come walking right past us on Van Ness, the pros let them pass (Damian Rhodes, one calls Damian Rolls, used to play for Baltimoremixing him up with old closer Arthur Rhodes). When Jason Varitek signs, everyone behind me mobs the slot, crushing me down against the fence, reaching their merchandise over my shoulders and past my ears. Because all Tek can see of us are our hands, the pros get a first autograph, bounce out and grab a second bat or ball from their arsenal, shove in again and snag another. Doubledipping, its called, and while frowned upon (especially when not everyone gets even one autograph), its the pros bread and butter. How many Variteks you get? Three. Ha, I got four. I get one and Im happy. Thanks, Tek. Johnny Damon signs for a long time. Like Tek, he always tries to sign for everyone, and is always polite and nice. For a guy who looks like a wild man, hes surprisingly softspoken, and has impeccable manners, even with the pushiest fans; his parents should be proud. Pokey signs (he doesnt always), and Mark Bellhorn. |
The pros gripe about some other players who blow us offSchilling and Wake especially (though Wake, Ive heard, only signs for charities, and you have to respect that). They say Pedro and Manny are almost impossible to get out here, and that they hardly ever even see Orlando Cabrera. Doug Mientkiewicz takes the time to sign, and Doug Mirabelli, Dave McCarty, Ricky Gutierrez, Billy Mueller, Dave Roberts. The hat looks greatsilver Sharpie on black. By four oclock Ive got half the club. If I came tomorrow and Thursday as well, Id be able to get most everyone. And even after three hours of being squashed and elbowed and having to listen to the dealers brag and haggle, I know Ill be coming back. Because while most of these guys are pros, and hustling hard, theres still something kidlike and hopeful about them. The rumor is that next year when the team enlarges the clubhouse the slots in the fence will be no more. I hope thats not true, because for a fan like me, this is as close to the players as Ill ever get. September 15th Pedro Martinez has pretty much owned Tampa Bay, the Red Sox have pretty much owned everyone while at Fenway Park, and the hapless Devil Rays were sending a twentyyearold rookie named Scott Kazmir to the mound last night. The result, of course, was a comfy Tampa Bay win. At one point Kazmir struck out five in a row, and the only bright spot for the Faithful was an eighthinning home run from the newly returned Trot Nixon. We have fallen a game further behind the Yankees (the Mariners beat the Angels, at least, there is that much joy in Mudville), and I find myself doing two things this morning to start the day. One is marking another game off the schedule. The other is wondering why, why, why Father Curt ever agreed to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated. SO Thanks for the use of the seats. Let me just warn you when the sun goes down, its fall. Couldnt have been more than fifty degrees out there. I had to buy a pricey sweatshirt to keep from shivering. The offense didnt create much heat either. Mason says its the return of the preJuly 31st Sox. I think its the usual wedonthavetohitforPedro virus. Funny how that works. We didnt hit for Clemens either; he was always leaving in the seventh tied 22. SK 1) It is a return to the July Sox. 2) It is the Curse of Sports Illustrated at work. 3) It was Cabrera (not Nomah) who ended the game firstpitch swinging in the bottom of the ninth. Sign me, ToldjaSo Boy SO Hey, if were expecting to win that game down three with two gone in the ninth, we truly are some cockeyed optimists. Aint no curse when you lose and deserve to, and we did. The only reliever who stopped the bleeding was Leskanic, and by then it was too late. Its not just saves were missing, its HOLDS. Our middle guys, like the Yanks the last three years, are our biggest weakness, and have been since spring training. SK Not WIN it, TIE it. SO True play for the tie at home. Still, we were losing from the very first batter. Tim Wakefield has struggledto be generousin his last few starts. Tonight he gives up a run right out of the gate. Mark Bellhorns tworun shot off DRays starter Dewon Brazelton in the bottom of the first gives us the lead, only to have Wake give it back. In the fourth we scrap for two more, but Wake immediately surrenders a pair. Its not that theyre shelling him, its just the usual fallout from the knuckler some walks, a wild pitch, five stolen bases. Thats it when Kevin Millars tworun Monster shot gives us a 64 lead in the fifth, Francona turns to Curtis Leskanic (he threw okay last night, right?). Three batters later, Tampa tripleA callup Jorge Cantu ties the game with a blast high off the Sports Authority sign. Not to be outdone, in the bottom of the inning Lou Piniella counters by using four pitchers to worm out of a basesloaded noout jam. It almost worksall we get is one on a Manny sac fly. We tack on another in the seventh when Trots grounder goes through shortstop Julio Lugos legs and pinch runner Dave Roberts motors around. Were leaving men on all over the place, but Timlin sets up and Foulke closes neatly, and we bag a long, ugly 86 win. Since the streak weve been playing terrible ball, splitting the last six with cellar dwellers, and yet, with the Angels and As losing once again, were now five and a half up in the wild card, our biggest lead yet, with only eighteen games to go. In other words were closer to the postseason than weve been all year. September 16th SK Theyre talking about taking Tim out of the postseason rotation. Thats okay. If we keep playing this way, postseason wont be a problem. I have neverNEVERgone to bed feeling so depressed after a win. They hit everything we threw at them. And they ran our Sox off. Blah. SO Maybe thisll cheer you up before this year, Timmay was 52 lifetime in the Metrodome, 52 at the Coliseum, and 53 with a 3.32 ERA at Angel Stadium. I wouldnt pull him just yet. You know how streaky he can be. If he gets unhittable after October 1, we could be wearing some big rings. Have hope. Tonights the kind of game weve overlooked in the past the last home game with a patsy before heading down to the Stadium. Before the advent of Curt Schilling, wed be scrambling to get our rotation in order for the Yanks, try to throw a number four or five guy and get burned. With Schilling going tonight, were confident of a quality start and can rest assured that Petey will be going Sunday. So this ones the mismatch we want (the one weve paid for). We jump on DRays starter Mark Hendrickson for three quick runs. Lous going to play us tough though with one down in the first hes got a guy warming. Its pointless; Schill wants his 20th. His splitters nasty and his location is spoton. Were up 60 when Kevin Millar hits a Monster shot to spark a fiverun seventh, and were set for the big (but probably hurricanerainy) weekend in the Bronx. September 17th Two more games off the schedule. Bostons threegame series with the hapless Devil Raysthe last time the Red Sox will see them at home this yearis concluded. The Sox won games two and three. Father Curt stoodup to the Curse of Sports Illustrated last night by remaining in the game until the eighth (with a threehit shutout until a Rocco Baldelli home run in the sixth) and becoming the first pitcher in the majors this year to win twenty games. The man is a horse, no doubt about it, but hes also had the kind of run support he almost never saw in his Diamondback days, and theres no doubt about that, either. His teammates, who have provided him with a staggering number of runs per start,last night staked him to three in the first and eight more by the time he left to a standing O. Wakefields start two nights ago was a smellier kettle of fish. I purposely stayed away from this manuscript when it was over, because any words I wrote would have begun harshly This team is almost ready for postseason, where they will become some better clubs steppingstone. Tim Wakefield did not figure in the decision, and looked terrible for the third outing in a row. The talking heads have begun to speculate that Terry Francona may go to a fourman rotation in postseason, and that if he does, Wake will be the odd man out. This may or may not happen, but the simple fact of Bostons 86 win over Tampa Bay on the evening of September 15th was that almost every pitcher Francona sent to the mound in Wakefields wake (with the sole exception of Keith Foulke, who pitched a onetwothree ninth) looked terrible. There may not be a Curse of Sports Illustrated (Ill wait and see on that one), but there certainly is a Curse of Middle Relief in the big leagues, and once you get past Mike Timlin (andmaybeAlan Embree), the Red Sox also suffer from the disease. Ive rarely gone to bed after a win feeling as unhappy and unsettled as I did after that game on the fifteenth. Usually when I cant sleep, what I see are key plays that went against my team (Jorge Posadas flare of a single against Pedro in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, for instance). What I kept seeing after that second game against Tampa Baya game we probably deserved to losewas Curtis The Mechanic Leskanic shaking his head after giving up the tworun dinger that allowed the hapless DRays to pull even, 66, late in the game. Why are you shaking your head? I wanted to scream at him. This is a team filled with weak hitters, Punch and Judy hitters, but theyre still major league hitters, my friend, andif you hang one, its going out of the yard. Whats so hard to figure out about that? Never mind, I tell myself; that nights ugly piece of work and Father Curts thing of beauty last night are both going to look the same in the win column at the end of the year. Meanwhile, were just three and a half games out of first, and tonight its YankeesRed Sox. I really dont expect to get this one in, with the train of Hurricane Ivan due, but theres been such hype (and that rarityan actual capacity crowd at the Stadium, not just a paper sellout, thanks to us) that George will do whatever it takes to play it. In the third theres a rain delay. From their cozy NESN studios, Tom Caron and Eck gush over highlights from the last Yankee series in Fenway. Heres the TekARod tiff, and Bill Muellers walkoff shot against Motape weve seen hundreds of times already. In fifteen minutes were back, though it still seems to be spitting. And then a few outs later, its pouring, and here comes the tarp. TC and Eck babble for a good twenty minutes before resorting to canned stuff. And what canned stuff should they run first but Steve himself, dispelling the curse and telling us where he was in 78 and 86 and 03 when the roof caved in. In 86 hes in his car outside his place in western Maine because thats the only reception he can get; hes sitting there with the door open and an unopened bottle of champagne on the seat beside him. Now thats a storyteller, putting you right there with just the right details. You know its a serious rain delay when NESN cuts to the nature shows. At least its not Canadian football. And so, like Yeatss great rough beast, The Rivalry has once more come round at last.The Red Sox are in New York for three. Im here for the middle game, and so is Stewart ONan. Between publicity for Faithful (not to mention work on the book itself, which I am now doing) and more publicity for the childrens version of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Iexpect to be immured in hardball until I go back to Maine on Monday night. With that in mind, I decided I would take Friday night off entirely, and give my nerves a rest. I decided to go to a moviesomething with subtitles, the sort of thing that never plays at the North Conway Sixplex or the Bethel Station Fourplex back homeand then return to my hotel, where Id go straight to bed without even checking the score, lest I be sucked in. I thought the Sox would probably lose the opener, anyway (with the exception of the August streak, they have made a career of losing openers this season, it seems) and I could read about it in the New York Times the following daynot the Post, the Post is simply too gloaty when the hometown teams win. Well, I didnt exactly give my nerves a rest; I saw an extremely nervousmaking French suspenser called Red Lights, but my plan remained on course until I got back to my hotel at around 10 P.M. Then everything fell down. And why, you ask? Because the YankeesRed Sox rivalry is simply in the air if you happen to be in one of those two cities, and especially if you happen to be in the one where the games are being played. Oh, its maybe not a big deal among the sort of people who flock to see French suspense movies (with white subtitles that are almost impossible to read when superimposed on white backgrounds, as at least 60 percent of these seemed to be), but when I got back to the hotel, the doorman took a look at my Tshirt (a gift from Stewart ONan, it features a picture of David Ortiz and reads I LOVE IT WHEN YOU CALL ME BIG PAPI) and greeted me with Hey, Mr. King! Welcome back! Your Sox are up onezip in the third! One of the carpark guys joined us at that moment, favored me with a rather loathsome smileif it was supposed to project sympathy, it failed miserablyand said, Nah, its tied, one to one. Then the house detective, for whom Id signed a book earlier, came out through the revolving doors. Nope, he said. Its two to one, Yanks. Olerud just homered. So much for my resolution. Five minutes laterno, threeI was sitting in my room with my Red Sox cap out of my suitcase and on my head, watching the game. Now, the playerssome of them, at leastwill try to tell you that a match like this is just another game, and that if it is more important, itsbecause of the lateness of the season and the swingfirst playing second. Few if any of them actually believe such nonsense. You can see it in their eyes during their lockerroom interviews, and you can certainly see it in the level of play they bring to the field.YankeesRed Sox is a classic rivalry, last nights game was one of the best in it Ive ever seenand I only saw it from the fifth inning on! If not for two rain delays totaling almost an hour and a half (almost exactly the length of my foreign film), I probably would have missed the whole damned thing, and Im so glad I didnt miss all the excitement in an effort to spare my nerves another jolt of what I was sure they would have to endure Rivera successful, Yankees triumphant. The part I did miss was Johnny Damons upperdeck shot to put the Red Sox ahead 10 (I also missed chortling gleefully over how George Steinbrenner must hate all that hair flying gaily in the wind as Damon rounds the bases) and the Ramirez Show first the Shakespearian nonhomer (fair was foul after all) and then the sensational Air Manny catch that robbed Miguel Cairo of his own home run. The fun of that one, of course, every bit as good on the replays, was watching Cairo run the bases in absolute surety that hed hit the ball out, and his blank look of amazement when he was informedafter slapping the bemused thirdbase coachs hand on his way homethat hed been out during his whole tour of the base paths. I was there, however, by then in my underwear (but still wearing my David Ortiz Tshirt and my Red Sox hat) when Mariano Rivera came in to seal the deal with the Yankees leading, 21, in the top of the ninth. That hes one of the great ones there can be no doubt (Johnny Damon says flatly that Rivera is the greatest closer of all time), but he has problems with the Red Sox. Bill Mueller touched himhardfor a tworun walkoff home run in the July rhubarb game at Fenway, and last night Rivera blew the save with one out and then blew the game with two out. You didnt have to be a lipreader to see what he was yelling at center fielder Kenny Lofton when Damons brokenbat flare (another of those dyingquail shots that seem to have decided so many games between these two clubs) dropped ten or twelve feet in front of Lofton on the wet grassCatch the ball! But in fact, Rivera had no one to blame but himselfor the Red Sox, who simply wouldnt quit and let Rivera pick up his fiftieth save in peace. The Yankee closer walked Trot Nixon, who was replaced by the speedy Dave Roberts. Then he hit Kevin Millar, who was replaced by the fairly speedy Gabe Kapler. With two on and one out, I expected a gameending double play. Instead, Orlando Cabrera singled through the hole into right. Kevin Youkilis followed with a strikeout (I love Youk, but he was simply overmatched in the ninth last night). Then came Damon, andball game. You would say that tomorrows gameassuming the remains of Hurricane Ivan dont wash it outcouldnt possibly measure up. But with these two teams, Im afraid to say anything but this its going to be another game off the schedule, and last night we maintained our good hold on the wild card. The gap between us and the Yankees for the top spot in the AL East has, meanwhile, once more shrunk to a mere two and a half games. Like happy families, all blown saves are alike. You overthrow and leave the ball up and out and walk the leadoff guy. Get behind the second guy and hit him. Miss your location and a .260 hitter goes the other way on you, and your right fielder with the best arm on the team throws one up the line so their speedy pinch runner scores. Next guy bloops one that your center fielder usually gets, but this timefor no other reason than things are going to hellhe pulls up and the ball drops, another run scores, and youve just blown another save. Closers blow saves; thats just a fact of baseball. Yankee fans will say that Mariano Rivera doesnt, but heres proofagainthat it doesnt matter if youre Mo or John Way Back Wasdin or the old Derek Lowe or Eric Gagne or Eck in his prime. Closers blow saves. You just hope they arent important ones. Like Game 7 of the World Series. Oh, sorry, Mo. September 18th For our publicity mission to Yankee Stadium (where the only sellouts are the players), I wear my Bill Mazeroski jersey. On the train down, I sit beside an older Yankee fan wearing a Yogi Berra cap. As youll remember, Yogi was playing left that fateful October day in Forbes Field and watched the Yanks hopes fly over his head and over the wall. The guy next to me doesnt recognize the jersey, and I thinkperhaps uncharitablythat being oblivious of history is a luxury we, as Sox fans, cant afford. Later, at the Stadium, in response to the chant Nineteen eighteen, I turn around and bellow Nineteen sixty. AndI swear to Godone kid says, What happened in 1960? September 19th The first game of this series was a pulsepounder which the Red Sox won in their last atbat. In yesterdays, played under swagbellied gray skies and in a drizzle that had become a steady rain by the seventh, the Yankees really won it in the first, when they tacked a fivespot on the tragickal Mr. Lowe, to the joy of the notquitefull Stadium. (Not to say the relief.) They added four more in the second and were off to the races. By then Mr. Lowe was gone, suffering from a tragickal blowe to the ankle, inflicted by ye olde horsehide sphere. It was, we are told, his earliest exit from a game in five years. I wasnt terribly surprised at how poorly he performed. Mr. Lowe is simply having one of Those Years. As for the Yankeeswell, they seem to be making a kind of goalline stand This close and no closer, with the this close part being two games. At one point in yesterdays game it was 130 bad guys, and the mostly unremarkable Yankee hurler Jon Lieber took a nono deep into the game, before David I Love It When You Call Me Big Papi Ortiz hit a home run to break up that nonsense. Worst of all, Scribner, who plans to publish this book, had set up an interview with Bob Minzesheimer of USA Today at the ballpark, along with a photographer who took pictures of Stewart and me until every Yankee fan in our immediate vicinityhad gotten a good gawk and a chance to boo. I have decided that hell is probably an endless photo op at an opposing teams ballpark where your club is getting its fudge packed most righteously, to the great glee of the sellout crowd where you are not being allowed to hide like the microbe you would dearly love to be. At last we were allowed to escape, and could I have written all that yesterday? Technically, yes. It was a Saturdayafternoon game, and I had plenty of time later on to jot these fans notes. Emotionally, no. I was toobummed out. And the bottom line? The ironic bottom line? After all the emotional highs and lows of the last two games, the Boston Red Sox are exactly where they were before coming to New York. Yes! Were three and a half behind in the AL East, and thanks to an Angels loss to Texas yesterday, we are five and a half ahead in the wild card. So in the end, its just two more games off the everdiminishing schedule. Ah, but this afternoon comes the cherry on the banana split Martinez versus Mussina. 105 P.M., at the Stadium. Wonder if I could scalp myself a little ticket to that game? Hmmmm. Later I did, and Pedro was awful. The Red Sox were awful. The New York fans were loathsomely jubilant. I paid 350 for a box seat and watched the Yanks put an 111 pounding on my Sox. This afternoon, even the sunshine was awful. It was, in many ways, the apotheosis of the Dark Side Red Sox fan experience the Red Sox fan not as Fearless Booster of the Underdog but as Beaten Loser, slinking from the park with his head down, eager to put the sound of those cheering fans behind him and clinging to the twin tenets of the Manny Ramirez Credo for comfort Turn the page and We gotta jus keep goin, man. Tomorrow, Wakefield faces the Birds at Fenway Park. I hope, because I am faithful. I fear, because I know that when youre going bad, you usually get more of the same. The best news is quiet news from the West Coast the Angels are also weekend losers, and were still five and a half games up in the wildcard race. On that side of the dance card, its just two more games off the schedule. But yes, I fear the Orioles, with whom we have gone 14 so far this season at Fenway, where we have won so many against other teams. Today we get our asses kicked again, 111, with most of the damage done in an eightrun fifth, as the Yanks chase Pedro. Its humiliating, the kind of loss your friends at school will taunt you about tomorrow. Its also strangely unreal. The Yankees arent this good (even with performanceenhancing drugs), and were not this bad, and I have a creeping suspicion that this is payback for Friday night. WeSox fans, I meanget the thrilling comeback win, and their fans get the revenge blowouts. Looking back at how Mo blew the save Friday night (walk, hit batsman, missed location (and Sheffields bad throw), bloop that Lofton for some reason pulls up on), I suspect (at the risk of being labeled paranoid) this is all being orchestrated to ramp up interest on both sides. When a team does nothing to win and still wins, you have to wonder. Of course, 1986s Game 6 is a classic example of that walk, hit batsman, muffed grounder. Mo also blew the TekARod game with a gopher ball to Bill Mueller after throwing one to Trot that he just missed. And Mo blew Game 7 of the 2001 series. This fans got to wonder. The goal would be the dullest but most important of goalsfinancial security. Obscene TV ratings lead to obscene TV contracts. And who could blame the league? TV money floats the whole show. Just look at the NHL (if you can find them) for the flip side. September 20th Wake tonight against Baltimore, and theres a sense of letdown, as if these games mean less. Its not true, of course; its just a byproduct of all the hype, and the fact that its Monday. (Its no coincidence that of the six series we play against the Yanks, all but one straddle a weekend.) Wakes lost three straight and has looked awful. Tonight hes sharp until the fourth, when he walks a batter, gives up a groundball single, hits a guy, walks a run in, then surrenders a grand slam to B. J. Surhoff. The Os add three more in the fifth, walking and stealing bases, taking advantage of a passed ball and a blown rundown, and while we chip away late to make the final 86, this one was in reach only for one or two atbats. The Angels win so theyre four and a half back. Most of the Faithful think the wild cards in the bag, but we have problems with the Os, and face them seven times in our last thirteen games. Honestly, Id rather play the Yankees. September 21st SK My son Joe says that Derek Lowe (and a number of other Red Sox) were out partying hearty on Friday night (and into the wee hours of Saturday morning) under the assumption that the Saturday game (i.e., our game) would be a rainout. Have you heard this? Is it a Sons of Sam Horn thing? SO That Lowe rumor (stumbling in at 4 A.M. from the China Club)true or notpoints to how unprepared and spacey he looked in the first. I can see the logic only someone still halfdrunk would have made that throw to third behind Bernie. But look how we played last night after a good nights sleep. That hot streak seems long ago and faraway. Dear Red Sox, Its my birthday, and Id like you to give me a present. After three straight losses, Id like a win tonight, and with Father Curt on the mound, I think I have a chance of getting one. Even more than a win, Id like you guys to take stock of your current situationdo you think you could do that for me? First, since the splendid (and cattily crafty) win over the Yankees on the 17th, when Red Sox pitching gave up just two runs, the Boston staff has given up an average of eleven runs per game. The starters, so good during the August run, have been horrible. Second, Baltimore continues their absolute dominance of the Red Sox, and this had better change. The regular season has now dwindled to a mere thirteen games, and seven of themthe majority, in other wordsare with these perennial Red Sox killers. Third, the Angels show signs of snapping out of their funk. They won last night, shaving a full game off your wildcard lead. You guys had better realize that wildcard deal isnt sealed yet. Yes, the Angels have six games left against the Asbut we have three left against the Yanks. Its time to start winning some damn games against Baltimore. Its been a long time since a sellout Fenway crowd was as quiet as the one last night (especially with the Yankees losing). I think they sense you guys going bad and are waiting, hoping, for you to shake it off. So am I. So start tonight with a win, okay? Because, after the glory of the last six weeks, a September choke would be dismal, indeed. Thanking you in advance, Stephen King 1035 P.M. Baseballs a funny damn game. I got my birthday present, but it was Red Sox second baseman Mark Bellhorn who gave it to me after thehomeplate umpire tried to snatch it away (and after he did snatch away Curt Schillings twentyfirst win of the season). After seven and a half innings of scoreless baseball, during which Father Curt bagged fourteen Birds by way of the K, the Red Soxwho have had to struggle far too hard for the five or so wins theyve managed against the Os this yearmanufactured a single skinny run. On came Keith Foulke, the Boston closer. He got the first two guys, then surrendered a base hit. This brought Soxwrecker Javy Lopez to the plate. Foulke, who had never surrendered a hit to Mr. Lopez before tonight, massaged the count to 02. Then, twice, he threw clear strikeswhich the umpire called balls. Finally Foulke hung a 22 slider that Lopez lost, high and gone, into the night. In the bottom of the ninth, Boston put runners on second and third with nobody out (my man Kevin Youkilis led the inning with a walk). Then David McCarty popped up and Johnny Damon struck out. Just when I was absolutely convinced that the Sox were going to scuffle to their fourth loss in as many games, this time squandering a brilliant pitching performance in the process, Bellhorn laced a double to right, winning the game and bringing the Sox out of the dugout in a joyous mob of redandwhite uniforms while the Standells played and the crowd went bonkers a little touch of Fenway magic on my birthday, not bad. And even a little something extra tonight we have a magic number in the wildcard race. Its eight. Any combination of Boston wins and Anaheim losses adding up to that number puts us in the postseason. September 22nd NESN, in a strange lateseason move, changes the format of their morning SportsDesk to thirty minutes and replaces beloved girlnextdoor anchor Jayme Parker with heavily coiffed and tailored Hazel Mae, formerly a postgame analyst (read talking head) with the Toronto Blue Jays. In an introductory guest spot between innings with Don and Jerry, she lays down a swinging patter, trying to be chummy and knowledgeable, but comes off as slick and insincere as a gameshow host, without a touch of irony. Shes a pro, no doubt, but her style is wrong for dumpy, lowbudget NESN we New Englanders distrust fasttalking outsiders. And shes talking mighty fast now, flying out ahead of herself as if shes nervousas if she suddenly realizes what shes gotten herself into. I can smell the flop sweat through the TV. Don tries to help, feeding her cues to lighten and redirect her spiel. Jerry just stands there, giving her enough rope. SO What have they done with our Jayme? And with our 15minute quickrepeating SportsDesk? Is nothing sacred? SK Hazel Mae? What kind of name is that? And, to misquote Bob Dylan, Hazel, you look so HARD!! Foulked again. For the second straight night, he gives up a bomb in the ninth to tie the game, this time to the literally hobbling Rafael Palmeiro. We go to extras, where Curtis Leskanic makes us hold our breath before getting out of a basesloaded jam with an improbable 324 DP (Pokey alertly covering first), and then Orlando Cabrera, who had a chance to win it in the ninth but ducked a pitch that would have hit him with bases juiced, knocks one onto the Monster for a walkoff and another bouncing celebration at home. SO Yi yi yi. SK Alls welle that endes welle. September 23rd The Birds are making it outrageously hard, and Keith Foulke has blown a pair of saves (one with the help of outrageously bad homeplate umpiring, tis true), but the Red Sox pulled out another one last night (walkoff home run in the bottom of the twelfth, advantage Mr. Cabrera), and the Angels dropped another one. The magic number thus drops to five, and with the Yankees loss to Toronto and New Yorks impending weekend visitto our house, even the AL East gold ring seems within our reach. This September still aint a patch on Augustbut Id have to say its improving. SK 5 This magic number brought to you courtesy of the Seattle Ms. And by the way, have you checked dem crazy Tejas Rangers lately? SO Baby, can you dig your Rangers? Dead and buried last week, but after winning four straight (and going for the sweep of the As tonight), theyre a mere three back in the West, and the As and Angels still have to tangle six times. It would be sweet to see the one truly surprising club of this season sneak in on the final weekend. And Im sure you noticed the milestones last night El Jefes 40th homer and Bellhorns 163rd K. Just numbers. Like 5. Grady Little is no longer the Red Sox manager, ostensibly for his mistrust of the bullpen in an important game. Tonight new manager Terry Francona shows his faith by resting the hardridden Mike Timlin and Keith Foulke and letting lefty specialist and submariner Mike Myers pitch to a righthanded hitter with bases loaded and the score tied in the eighth. Then in the ninth, he lets righty specialist and submariner ByungHyun Kim (no, thats not a typo) pitch to a lefthanded batter with two on. Bill Jameshell, any StratOMatic junkiecould have told you these were lowpercentage moves. Franconas trust in his idiotic luck costs us four runs, and, when Manny gets two of those back in the ninth and David Ortizs twoout, twostrike blast to right settles into David Newhans glove, proves to cost us the game. Wake up the talkradio cranks, its Grady time! (A side note Ellis Burks, wholl be retiring after the season, pinchhits in the ninth for what may be his last major league atbat. When he first came up from Pawtucket in 1987, he was a reedy outfielder just beginning to develop power. Since then hes ripped over 2,000 hits and 350 home runs (nifty trivia hes homered against every club in the majors). This year he was hurt and wasnt really part of the onfield effort, but hes a clubhouse presence and sentimental favorite. After receiving a warm standing O, Ellis fights B. J. Ryan deep into the count before blooping a single to center. At forty, on creaky knees, hes still a professional hitter. We applaud long and loud as hes lifted for a pinch runner, and he goes into the dugout with a smile. Thanks, Ellis.) SK We almost took three of four. Papi came up four yards short. Mr. Kim still with the bad karma. |
My daughterinlaw calls me to ask if it would be all right for her to have ORLANDO tattooed on her ass (I said sure). And consider, S2 THEY COULDA SWEPT US! Baltimores the only team in the AL with the nuts to leave Fenway feeling bad about just a split. Holy shit, Im so glad to see the Birds hoppin somewhere else, and I feel so bad about having to finish the season back where we started. The Great Wheel of Ka turns SO If Francoma uses the pen by the book tonight we probably win and take three of four. Seems like he wrote this one off in the seventh with the score tied at 5. What good is the fortyman roster if you dont take advantage of it? Rangers sweep the As and weve got a wildass race in the West. The Magic Number remains Nomar. September 25th Was there the slightest hitch in Terry Franconas walk last night in the eighth inning when he finally went out to take the ball from Pedro Martinezs hand, and the boos began raining down from the Fenway Faithful? I was sitting in my usual place, just a row up from foul territory between home and first on the Sox side of the fieldjust about the best seat in the houseand I say there was. If so, such a hitch would indicate surprise. And if Francona was surprised, it would indicate that not even a full season at the helm of this team has taught him the most fundamental thing about the clientele it and he serves this is no ordinary hardball fanbase. The New Englanders who follow the Red Sox are as deeply scarred by loss, particularly loss to the Yankees, as they are loyal to their club. But its more specific than that. They are especially scarredtraumatized would not betoo strong a wordby loss to the Yankees in the late innings, with Pedro Martinez, long regarded as the teams ace, on the hill. If Francona cannot grasp that, he cannot succeed in Boston. The Red Sox lost to New York last night 64, in spite of home runs by Manny Ramirez, Johnny Damon, and the fiery, nottobedenied Trot Nixon. That they played otherwise with remarkable dullness for a team facing its archrival in a lastditch effort to capture the divisional flag hardly matters, even when you add in the fact that they did it in front of the fans that have loved them so long and so well (if fruitlessly). Love is blind, and most of them will either be back in the park (that would include me and Stewart) or in front of their televisions tonight, rooting for David Ortiz to hit a couple of bombs, and for Orlando Cabrera to make a few more sparkling plays (my scorebook says he made a sixpack of them last night, although he went only 1 for 4 at the plate). Well find something to cheer, you may depend on it. To a lover, even a smallpox scar is a beauty mark. What we wont forgetand what the newspapers are full of this morningis Terry Francona leaving Pedro Martinez too long at the fair, in a gruesome replay of the 2003 ALCS Game 7. We came into the eighth leading the Yankees, 43. I think everyone in the park, including Yankee skipper Joe Torre, expected to see Timlin and Embree tagteam that frame while Pedro took his wellearned rest on the bench. But Francona, who apparently never read that thing about how the coach who doesnt learn from the past is condemned to repeat Remedial Baseball, sent Martinez trudging back out, although the little guys pitch count was well over a hundred by then. The result was what everybody who wasnt asleep expected. Hideki Matsui lost the second pitch he saw, tying the game. Francona, then giving a perfect demonstration of why we stayed in Vietnam as long as we did, left Martinez in to prove he had not made the mistake he had in fact made. Williams doubled. Francona still left Martinez in, taking him out only after he had fanned Posada and then given up the goahead RBI single to Ruben Sierra. My theory is that if Martinez hadnt gotten at least one out to prove Terry Francona hadnt made a mistake, Martinez might still be in there at 1030 A.M. the following day, with the score Yanks 949, Sox 4, and blood trickling down from Pedros burst biceps. But in my fury I jest. I have serious doubts about Terry Franconas thinking processes and have all year (there are times when Ive thought theres nothing but a bowling alley up there between his ears), but Pedro Martinez is as brilliant as he is brave. After the game he said, in effect, I can only tip my cap to the Yankees. Theyve proved theyre my Daddy. Meaning, in baseball vernacular, theyre better than me; they have my number. Martinez knows the chances are quite good that he may not be done with the Yankees even yet, and that if he sees them again, the next game will be exponentially more important than this one. His remark was a way of resetting all the dials to zero. If he does have to face them again, hes lifted a lot of the internal pressure by publicly stating that they can somehow get over, under, or around the best he can do. When (and if) he takes the mound against the Yankees in postseasonprobably in the Bronxhe will be able to tell himself that, based on what hes told the world, he is not the one with something to prove; they are. None of which solves the riddle of why a manager would deliberately go out and replicate a course of action which has already visited defeat and unhappiness on so many in the very recent past. When you think about it, being a Red Sox fan may have quite a lot to teach about what were doing in Iraq. At Starfleet Academy, every cadet has to confront the problem of the Kobayashi Maru. The Maru is a freighter caught in a gravitic rift in the Neutral Zone. Cadets naturally respond to its distress calls, but once their starship enters the Neutral Zone, three Klingon cruisers surround and attack it. The Klingons have overwhelming resources and show no mercy, and the cadet needs to realize he or she is in a nowin situationthat, as Kirk says, there are times when a commander doesnt have the luxury of winning. Red Sox fans dont want to hear that. For all our gloomanddoom reputation, we expect to win, and we expect our manager to make the right moves to make that happen. And because were knowledgeable fans, we know what those moves are before they should take place. Last night Terry Francona took the Grady testthe Red Sox version of the Kobayashi Maruand from his solution, it appears he was peeking at Gradys paper. Since the mideighties, the standard sequence has been get seven strong from your starter, setup, close. Simple stuff, and the night before Francona sacrificed a tie game to rest his setup guy and his closer. So theres no excuse for Pedro starting the eighth, or continuing to pitch after Matsuis home run, and we all know it. Once again, the only one who didnt pass the test was the Red Sox manager. And the Angels and Rangers both won, so our magic number remains 5its the Curse of Nomar! September 26th When Yankee starting pitching goes south, as Roger Clemens replacement Javier Vazquez did last night in the fifth inning, Joe Torre now has essentially two choices in the matter of middle relief Tom Gordon (whose loss from the Red Sox I understand and accept but still lament in my heart) and the Bronx Delicatessen Brigade. Having used Gordon to get to Rivera in the first game of this lateseason YanksSox series, Torre was stuck with the Deli Brigade last night. After Vazquez came Tanyon Sturtze; after Sturtze came Heredia. And lo, Heredia begat Quantrill and Quantrill begat Nitkowski; so too did Nitkowski begat Proctor, also called Scott. By that time the Yankees were pretty well baked, and the usually crafty Quantrillleft in far too long last nighttook the loss by default. This was a good night to be at the ballpark and a good game for the Red Sox to win. Although the Angels and the Rangers, now tied for wildcard runnersup (and nipping at the heels of the Athletics in the AL West), both won their games, we reduced our magic number for clinching a playoff berth to three. Better yet, we have made it impossible for the Yankees to clinch this years AL East flag on ground taxed by the State of Massachusetts. Best of all, at least for the head sitting beneath the bright red YANKEES HATER hat I see in the mirror, is this no matter how we do against our longtime nemesis this Sunday afternoon, in 2004s last regularseason game at Fenway Park, we will have won the nineteengame season series. The worst we can do is 109, and if Father Curt is on his game, it will be 118. This isnt as good as it could have beenespecially for a team that was at one point 61 against the pinstripersbut when it comes to the Yankees, we take our satisfactions where we can get them. 700 P.M. Its by no means a sure thing that the Red Sox and Yankeeswill meet in the ALCS for the second year in a rowI am sure that baseball stat wizards like Bill James will tell you its odds against, given the fact that the opening postseason series are nasty, brutish, and shortbut given the level of competition between the two clubs this season, I have to believe that such an American League Championship Series would be a boon to that larger faithful that loves not just the Red Sox or the Yankees but the game itself. Last weekend at Yankee Stadium, the Sox won a close one Friday night and then endured two shellackings, to the glee of packed Stadium crowds. At the Fens this weekend, it was the Yankees winning a close one Friday night and the Red Sox winning the two weekend games by lopsided scores, todays final being 114, with a woefully unreadyforprimetime Kevin Brown taking the loss (and not escaping the first inning). At Yankee Stadium, the joint resounded to sarcastic choral cries of PEDRO! PEDRO! as Martinez left his game on the mound; today at Fenway Park, the cry was JEETER! JEETER! as the New York shortstop flubbed a potential double play and then made way for a pinch hitter in the eighth after going one for a dozen (.083) over the three games. In the end, Boston took the season, 118, but in the crucial runsscored category, there was in the end almost no difference 106 for the Sox, 104 for the Yanks. When you think about 171 innings of baseball (excluding games that may have gone beyond the regulation nine), thats an amazingly small margin; hardly more than a coat of paint. In terms of playing into October, the teams job is now clearcut (if slightly complicated by Jeanne, the fourth hurricane to strike Florida in the last five weeks). Of the seven games remaining on the regularseason schedule, the Red Sox need to win only a pair to assure themselves of a postseason berth. Another (and more meaningful) meeting with the Yankees may or may not lie ahead; in the meantime, let Trot Nixon, Bostons rejuvenated right fielder, have the final word on this exhaustive (and exhausting) regularseason slate of Red SoxYankees matchups. Nineteen is too many, he said flatly in a postgame interview this afternoon. Weve seen everything theyve got, and theyve seen what weve got. I dont mind playing thembut nineteen is just too many. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome once again to Super Pro Wrestling! For no other reason than he doesnt like the way Doug Mientkiewicz is standing on the bag at first (or might it have something to do with Loftons mysterious ejection during the TekARod brawl?), Kenny Lofton deliberately elbows him as he goes byon a play that isnt close, in a game thats a runaway. Maybe Kennys frustrated, or just dumb, because he seems surprisednay, outragedwhen reliever Pedro Astacio throws behind him late in the game. The next inning, the Yanks kid reliever throws at Dave Robertss head. Uncool, and Roberts is justifiably pissed. Theres a huge difference between throwing behind a guy and throwing at his head, and everyone in the game knows it. Likewise, if you purposely elbow someone, you had better expect to be thrown at. In both cases, the Yankees broke the unwritten code. If theres any justice (and wrestling is all about poetic justice), the game will make them pay. Side note Todays sellout was our 81st of the year. Only three other clubs in the history of baseball have sold out their entire home season. All three were playing in brandnew stadiums. September 27th Hurricane Jeanne has knocked out the electricity in the Tampa Bay area, and for a while it looks as if the game may not be played. The juice is restored, but someone seems to have neglected to tell the Boston bats. Or maybe its just young Scott Kazmir, exerting the sort of limited but malign influence certain pitchers seem able to cast over certain teams. When Kazmir faced Martinez two weeks ago, youll recall, he won easily. He seems well on his way to a second win tonight, striking out batter after batter (Kevin Millar on egregiously high cheese), so when my youngest sonup on a wonderful extended visit from New Yorksuggests we turn off the game and go to a movie, I agree at once, even though the Sox technically have a chance to clinch a playoff berth. I now believe they will clinch; I just dont believe it will be tonight. The code is absolute, and beyond partisanship. Tonight Bronson Arroyo hits Aubrey Huff unintentionally with a curve that breaks down and in too sharply. No big deal, even though it puts Huff out of the game with a bruised shin, but then, a batter later, with men on second and third and first base open, Bronson drills Tino Martinez in the back, and Tino rightfully has some things to say. Former Mets phenom Scott Kazmir, who has yet to give up a hit, retaliates, hitting Manny low. And Mannys cool, Manny understands, and hoofs it down to first without a word. Now that things are evened up, the ump warns both dugouts. Any more of this and both the pitcher and the manager are going. But Kazmirmaybe on Lou Piniellas ordersisnt done. He hits the very next batter, Millar, in the ribs. Millar takes exception and the benches clear briefly. Goodbye, unhittable Kazmir. Goodbye, Lou. Its a foolish move. We jump all over reliever Jorge Sosa for five runs, including a drive to dead center by Manny that lands on the roof of the fancy restaurant out there, and go on to win 73 and clinch the wild card. See? Thats what happens when you go against the code. And, ironically, since being on the same team overrides the code, during the lockerroom celebration Manny hugs Terry Adams, who he came close to charging back in April after a little chin music. Its the late show of The Forgotten we go to, and in Bethel Station on a Monday night, my son and I are two of just six attendees. As were leaving, the guy cleaning up behind the candy counter tells mecasuallythat the Red Sox were leading Tampa Bay by a score of 72 and he thinks that might be a final. Owen and I look at each other in delighted amazement, then hurry to his car and tune the radio to WOXO, NorwaySouth Paris (which advertises itself as Everybodys Countrywhen, that is, theyre not broadcasting NASCAR racing, Boston Red Sox baseball, or Oxford Hills High School football). We discover that the game has indeed ended, and that the final score was 73. Bronson Arroyo hit a couple of batters (he leads the American League in that category), and Scott Kazmir retaliated. The umpires let him get away with drilling Manny Ramirez in the knee, but when Kazmir whacked Kevin I Brake for High Cheese Millar in the ribs, the kid was gone, taking an incipient nohitter with him.Three or four home runs later (Manny hit number 43), the 2004 Red SoxParty Boys are in a clubhouse so wrapped in plastic it looks like a condom, laughing and shouting and pouring beer on each other. They all acknowledge that the regular season isnt over as long as catching the Yankees remains a technical possibility (by winning, the Red Sox cut the lead of the idle Yanks to three games, and in that light the two we lost to the awful El Birdos during the last home stand look bigger than ever), but in their raucous celebrating, there is an undeniable sense that they feel the real work is now done. Given their lackluster level of play in June and July, that is understandable. In some ways, they are lucky to be here at all. SO The Sox are sudsing Manny with champagne. Im toasting them with ginger ale. Ive got a bottle of bubbly downstairs, but Im saving it for something bigger. Still, to make the playoffs with the injuries weve had, Im proud of this club. They gave us a great summer. (The punch line now for a great fall.) Looks like Minnesota and the great Santana. Id match him up with Schilling, just go after him. Too bad those games will be on the road. SK Mathematically, it was the weirdest clinch ever. [What Steve means is that we didnt whittle our magic number down to zero. Were still at 1, but because our competition for the wild card is Anaheim, that 1 assumes they win the rest of their games, three of which are against Oakland, who theyre only one game behind now, and if they do that, they win the West and Oakland becomes our alreadydefeated competition. So our wish from a few months ago has come true the As and Angels knock each other off without even playing the games. Thank you, unbalanced schedule (and unbalanced schedulemakers).] SO The rest of our games are most likely meaningless, butits like Jim Carrey says in Dumb Dumber when Lauren Holly tells him the odds of them being together are more like a million to one So youre telling me theres a chance. Start carving your playoff roster, were going to the show! September 28th Tonights game against Tampa Bay is an audition for pitchers on the bubble. Derek Lowe pitches dreadfully, scuttling his chance to be the number three starter in the playoffs (Bronson Arroyo seems to have won that spot with his strong second half). Terry Adams throws twoplus ugly innings, so count him out. By the time Alan Embree comes in to throw one shutout inning, its 88. Scott Williamson, whos been injured, walks one guy in his stint, but his velocity is still down around 89, so I doubt hell make the roster. Pedro Astacios just getting some work in before he starts half of Saturdays doubleheader in Baltimore. Ramiro Mendoza, though, nails his assignment, pitching a perfect ninth and tenth, striking out two and giving us a chance to win it when Kevin Millar cranks a tworun shot off fireballing closer Danys Baez, who Lou has left out there throwing 96 (and then 94, 93, 92) for three innings. Foulke crafts a onetwothree eleventh and were two and a half back of the Yanks with five to go. Much more exciting is the West, where the Angels and As are now in a dead heat with a threegame showdown looming on the seasons final weekend, the results of which will determine the playoff matchups. Right now the Central champs the Twins have a better record (by a mere one win) than Oakland and Anaheim, meaning theyd play us and have homefield advantage, and the Yankees would host whoever won the West (an easier task, given the Twins brilliant lefty Johan Santana). The Yanks have some control over the situation tomorrow they start a threegame series against the Twins. They can avoid Santana by rolling over for them, but thats a risk if they lose too many, we have a shot at catching them. Slim, sure, but a shot. September 29th SK Today is a big day. If we win and Minnesota sweeps It could happen. One chance in four. Meet me at Foxwoods. SO I know, Im thinking the same way, but I read in the paper this morning that Francona and Wallace have decided not to change the playoff rotation to go after the division (that is, theyll still throw Astacio versus the Os in that doubleheader). The Coma himself At the chance of sounding like I dont care, because I do, Im sort of going to be stubborn about screwing our pitching up. I love the idea of having homefield advantage. I also think that you win with pitching. Were going to somewhat try to remember that. And as things shape up, it appears Pedros slated for Game 1 (and therefore Game 5) and Schill for Game 2 (and thus Game 1 of the ALCS). So forget that dream matchup of SchillingSantana. I guess Terry thinks we can split with Santana and take Schills start, or maybe hes hoping well outslug them at home for our 3 and 4? Call me the tumbalin dieeiice. SK I guess Terry thinksYoure giving him too much credit. Your news is unbelievable. The scenario you describe is idiotic. All I can hope is that Francona will change his mind and see reason if Minnesota sweeps New York (they lead in the first game, 31, in the middle innings) and we beat Tampa Bay again. Given the last couple of weeks, his plan to start Pedro in Game 1 is also foolish. His inexperience is showing. Not to mention a certain ocher tinge running up the center of his back. Im disgustipated, to quote Sylvester the Cat. Could these be orders from Above?SighProbably not. SO Since were two and a half back with five to go, I can almost understand the thinking. Almost. Last year we could have run the table if wed had home advantage. And did you see whos sitting behind home plate at Yankee Stadium right now, scouting both the Yanks and Twins for the Cubbies? Thats right Mr. Grady Little. Im back in Maine rather than at Fenway Park or at Yankee Stadium, where a sparse crowd is watching the rare afternoon game, but Im once more wearing my bright red YANKEES HATER cap, and for a perfectly good reason the sparse Stadium crowd is in attendance at the first of this years last three really important games, two between theTwins and the Yankees, one between the hapless Devil Rays and the Red Sox. The Minnesota Twins, represented on the mound in the first of these crucial tilts by Johan Santana, who will almost certainly win this years Cy Young Award in the American League, are leading 31 in the fifth inning. If the Twins go on to win this game (Santana hasnt lost since the AllStar break) plus the nightcap of this hurricaneinduced doubleheader, and if the Red Sox can win tonight in Tampa,the Yankees lead in the AL East would drop to a single scrawny game. Im not saying this will happen, but if it did, considering the fact that Boston and New York have a combined total of eight games left to playwell, in a case like that, all bets would be off. Maybe it doesnt matter. Probably it doesnt matter, in terms of what comes next; once you get to postseason, all the matchups are tough. But I want that homefield advantage. Even more, Id like to see the Yankees humbled. So come on, you Twins! Go, you Johan! Its weird here we have the Yanks ace Moose against Johan Santana in a rematch of last years ALDS, in a game with playoff implications, yet when I tune in during the second inning I discover the Stadium is a sea of blue seats. There cant be more than two thousand people thereless than the number of folks who turn out for BP at Fenway. Later, the Yankees will list the official attendance as NAnot available. Hey George, I hear Montreals looking for a team. 1015 P.M. One doesnt like to believe God is a Yankees fanits a terrifying ideabut days like this make me wonder. I thought that, with New York playing two against a strong Minnesota team and the Red Sox playing one against the hapless Rays, we really had a chance to pull within a breath of first place. At worst, I thought, New York would split their twin bill with Santana taking the opener. But no. Santana left after five with a 31 lead, pulled by the Twins skipper, who quite naturally wants to protect his young ace with the playoffs looming. The Yankees then scored a bazillion runs and the cameracaught the aforementioned young ace in the dugout, hucking helmets at the cement floor. Getting quite a bounce, too. The Yankees went on to win the second game, 54. In Tampa, Tino Martinez hit a threerun bomb to put the game out of reach in the eighth, but the really disturbing development was how mortal Pedro Martinez looked in his last start of the regular seasonhow downright lousy. The hapless DRays won that one, 94, and instead of picking up a game and a half, we lost a game and a half. The Yankees margin is now four games, and given that the Red Sox have just four to play, I think that pretty well cooks us in the AL East, dont you? The bottom line is simply that when the pressure got really intense, the Yankees refused to buckle. The Red Soxaided by the Baltimore Orioles and at times by Terry Francona, who has a tendency to freeze at critical moments like Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutinydid. Now we turn our eyesever hopeful, ever faithfulto the playoffs, where we can only hope the script will change. SK Santana comes out of the game, the Yanks score four and win. And I saw Santana in the dugout, heaving helmets. It aint nothing to Gardenhire; hes got a lock. If we finish second, I have no problem with Titos doubleheader pitching roster. But whats with this playoff sked? Are we conceding the games Santana pitches, or what? Saving Curt for winnable games? Give me your thinking on this. What am I not seeing here? SO I thought the Yanks might tank it to make sure wed get the Twins, but now it appears the Twins tanked it, pulling Santana after five. The playoffs dont start for another six days, so its not like a starter should be on a pitch count around 70. Boo! I have no idea whats up with T Francs playoff rotation. It sounds like hes going with a fourman squad, meaning Curt will start only Game 2 of the ALDS. I guess hes assuming thats a W, and hell have his 3 and 4 guys set for Games 3 and 4 at Fenway. If the 3 and 4 guys and the home bats cant get it done, then hes hopingsomeday, some wayfor a split between Pedro and Santana. Problem is, Arroyo, who should be our 3, has thrown far better on the road, and at this point we dont have a reliable 4. I think its cavalier of Francona to assume we dont need two from Father Curt in the first round. Sure, it would be nice to start the ALCS with a fresh ace, but theres not much margin for error in this plan. Minnesotas a good team thats been there before. September 30th SO So was the Comas initial rotation just smoke? Because now Pedros saying hes starting Game 2 and Schills taking Games 1 and 5. And the Angels, now leading the West by one, have the exact same record as the Twins. I have to wonder, is the switch due to the possibility of missing Santana? Its all up in the air for now, and probably will be until the outcome of that juicy AngelsatAs series this weekend. SK I dont know about the rotation. All I know for sure is that Im considering a petition to the Great High Ayatollah, suggesting a fatwa on the Yankees would be a good idea. October 1st As a Red Sox fan, I am of course aware that there is another baseball league, but my grasp of it is vague, like a Europeans grasp of the New World in the seventeenth century or an Americans grasp of the solar system in the nineteenth. Yes, somewhere in the American Midwest there lives a fearsome wandwielding wizard named Pujols, and I know that in California there be Giants, for my Red Sox did truly visit them once in the season which is now almost over. But like most Red Sox fans, my focus will remain fiercely fixed on what is sometimes called the junior circuit untiland ifwe have to play one of those quasimythological Others in the World Series. And thats okay, because in this final weekend of regularseasonbaseball, I find plenty to occupy me within the familiar geography of the American League. Three of the four AL postseason teams have now been decided the Yankees (AL East champs), the Twins (AL Central champs) and the Red Sox (AL wild card). The winner in the AL West will be decided this weekend, in Oakland, when the As and Angels, with identical 9069 records, go headtohead. It will be, in effect, a miniplayoff, one the Red Sox and their fans will be watching with great interest. Well play the team out of our division with the best record, but as I write this on Friday afternoon, Minnesotas record is also 9069. That means we could wind up facing any one of those three. All I know for sure is that Im hoping Cleveland will put a hurtin on Minnesota this weekend, because we have to start by playing two away games no matter who our opponent is. Given that, I would prefer to steer clear of the Metrodome as long as possible. Not to mention young Mr. Santana. The Sox had last night off, ceding center stage (at least here in the East) to the Yankees, who clinched the division with their 100th win (so thats what16 against Tampa, 15 against Baltimore, 14 against Toronto), beating the Twins secondline relievers late after Ron Gardenhire pulled starter Brad Radke in the fifth. By resting, in effect the Twins rolled over this whole series, handing the Yanks the sweep. With the Angels losing and the As winning, the West is knotted again, and the Twins, Angels and As all share the same record. Because the Angels and As play each other this weekend, the winner of the West will have at least 92 wins. The Twins lost their season series with both clubs, so to face the Sox they have to sweep their last three. I have to wonder By losing this series, are the Twins purposely shooting for a rematch with the Yanks? October 2nd Last night the Angels humbled the As 100 at home, and today they come back late against setup guy Ricardo Rincon and new closer Octavio Dotel to win the West. Chokeland has done it again. Billy Beane, you are not a genius. With no defense, no smallball and no pen, and ace Mark Mulder denying an obvious hip problem, the As went into a Septemberlongs woon that their fans will taste for the entire offseason. The Angels, missing Adam Kennedy with a knee injury, and suspending Jose Guillen for throwing his helmet and dissing manager Mike Scioscia, overcame everything to beat their rivals at the wire. The Cubs, who had a twogame lead in the NL wild card a week ago, eliminate themselves by losing their sixth in seven games (including three blown saves by highpriced freeagent closer LaTroy Hawkins and crucial home losses to cellar dwellers the Mets and the Reds). On the home front, the Sox sweep a meaningless doubleheader from the Ossomething we could never do when the games really counted. Mr. Kim picks up a garbage win. Ellis Burks plays in his 2,000th and most likely last game, adding a single to his career stats. Afterward, Terry Francona announces that Arroyo and Wake will start in the playoffs and that Lowe wont. Lowe leaves the clubhouse without a comment, and in the postgame, Eck says, Will Derek Lowe be back next year? Who cares? And we still dont know who were playing in the division series. I continue to believe that it was our play against Baltimoreidentified in my game notes from July on as the LEBsthat cost us the AL East. Now that that little matter has been decided, were doing all right against the LEBs, having already guaranteed ourselves at least a split in the seasons final, meaningless fourgame series (please note that they has once again become we, and will now likely stay that way, for better or worse, until the season ends). On the West Coast, the Athletics have suddenlyand rather shockinglycome unglued. Anaheim beat them last night, 100, and came from behind to beat them again today, 54. So the Angels win the West, and all the AL postseason teams are now decided. The only remaining question is who the Red Sox will draw in the first roundthe Angels or the Twins. Todays game between Minnesota and Cleveland would have settled that issue if Cleveland had won, but the game was suspended in the eleventh with the score tied, 55, so the groundskeepers could prepare the field for a University of Minnesota football game. Say what? SK Regular seasons most surreal touch MinnesotaCleveland game, which would have nailed down the final playoff locale, suspended for a college football game. Beautiful. SO Go Golden Gophers! Shades of last years AllStar Game. Imagine if you were in the crowd at the Metrodome. Come back tomorrow? Hell no. October 3rd Its the last day of the regular season, and in the majors, the last few games are being played out by the subs, scrubs, andin a few casesthe stars of tomorrow. |
In Chicago, disconsolate Cubs fans are telling each otherwithout much real hopethat next season may be better (on the South Side, the ChiSox fans gave up on this season long ago). In Tampa, Lou Piniella has packed away his horrible snotgreen pullover for another season and bid his hapless Devil Rays adieu. In Baltimore, the baseball writers have already begun beating the MVP tomtom on behalf of Miguel Tejada, but given what Gary Sheffields done for the Yankees and what Manny Ramirez has done for the Red Sox, I dont give them much of a chance. In Texas, the plotting has already begun to turn this years AL West dark horse into next years favorite. In Oakland, wunderkind Billy Beane may, like Lucy Arnaz, have some splainin to do. In Toronto, the wunderkind disciples of Billy Beane have probably left their offices for the year only after dropping their cell phones into their shredders. And in Minnesota, the last playoff question was answered late this afternoon, when the Indians came up with two insurance runs in the top of the ninth and beat the Twins, 52. Thus its Minnesota opening against New York on the East Coast and Boston opening against Anaheim on the West,both the day after tomorrow. Ill be at Fenway for the third game of the SoxAngels series, and for the fourth, if needed (it probably will be). My heart beats a little faster, just writing that. At this point everything gets magnified, because when the second season ends, it does so either with shocking suddenness orcould it be?with the sort of success of which Red Sox fans hardly dare dream. The Twins win the resumption of their suspended game, but then lose to the Indians, making the last AngelsAs game meaningless (though no less painful to those As fans who bothered to show up). We lose our last game to the Os (McCarty throws two scoreless, striking out three) and finish 9864, our best record since 1978. Manny wins the home run and slugging crowns, Schilling has the best wonloss, though it appears the MVP will now go to Vladimir Guerrero for his big September, while Santana should take the Cy Young. Ichiro breaks George Sislers alltime record for hits in a season, but, coming for a lastplace club, and most of them being singles, it doesnt wow serious fans; hes just the new Rod Carew. And the Astros win their final game, snatching the NL wild card from Barry Bonds and the Giants. Its still possible well see Roger Clemens in the World Series. SO So weve got Anaheim, and the Twins get their wish. I really think they orchestrated the last week (tanking all three to the Yanks, losing to Cleveland today) to get a rematch with the Yanks in the short series, figuring its easier to get them here than in the ALCS. Gardenhires no dummy. October 4th SK If we can get past the Angels, I think the world (series) may be ours. SO Im having the same grandiose, bubblesintheblood thoughts, and rightfully its a whole new season. Hope springs eternal. So whos going to be left off the playoff roster? Its like spring trainingall these guys vying for the very last spots. For the pitchers, Id take Mendoza over Leskanic, Williamson and Adams; hes been more consistent, Leskanic can get wild, Williamsons not 100 and Adams stinks. And who gets the nod for the last position player, McCarty or Mientkiewicz? Im for McCarty more pop, just as good a glove, and hes got the arm to play the outfield in a pinch. I think weve got to keep Kapler, Roberts and Pokey for D and speed, and Youk for a stick off the bench, but management might surprise me. As a Rock Cats fan, I want to believe in the Twins. I like that theyre going right after them, but if the Yanks can beat Santana just once (or closer Joe Nathan in one of those starts), theyre cooked. My hope is they split in the Stadium, then turn on that Metrodome jetstream airconditioning and let thermodynamics do the rest. SK Im for Mientkiewicz, mostly because Ive finally learned how to spell his name (actually because hes just gotten hot at the plate). I like Curtis The Mechanic because I think hes clutch and I dont think Mendoza isand in the end, in the pen, its gonna come down to the tragickal Mr. Lowe. I hope we dont have to depend on him too much! The guy I really want to see on that rosterbut may notis the Greek God of Walks. SO Yup, as in last years division series, our fate may rest in the shaky hands of Mr. Lowe. But thats the playoffs maximum stress finding the weakest link. In this case, first and second place in the wildcard standings. And to Jerry the Detroit Tigers are always the Tigizz. A technical baseball term. Fever Pitch, based on a nonfiction book by Nick Hornby, describes a romantic triangle in which a young man must choose between his girl and his baseball team. He loves both madly, deeply, truly. That the baseball team turns out to be the Red Sox should come as no surprise. As pointed out elsewhere in these pages, the Red Sox is the team of choice for romantics. Can you imagine a poet writing an ode to the Yankees? As for lovers and the Yankeesgood God, you might as well plight your troth in the lobby of the Marine Midland Bank as at Yankee Stadium, that symbol of baseball commerce. No, when it comes to romance and baseball, you pretty much have to have Fenway Park. Wrigley Field has its ivied outfield wall and a certain rusty exterior charm, but I think Fenway remains Americas true Field of Dreams. With this one utterly unforgivable exception dont ever let me hear of an official (or a player) who takes money to tip a game in which millions have invested their hopes and the energy of their collective imagination. The once more hapless Devil Rays, and please God may they (or the troublesome El BirdOs) not poke a stick in our spokes as we race down this seasons home stretch. That could change if Oakland loses its hold on first place in Outer Weird Pacifica, but even if the As do drop to second, our position visvis the wild card wont change much. For the record, I think Oakland will hold on and win the West. Unlike, let us say, the supposed Campbells Chunky Soup Curse, where I can only find four football playersTerrell Davis, Kurt Warner, Jerome Bettis and Donovan McNabbwho actually suffered injuries after appearing in the ads, despite all the rumors. Nine is the number that comes to mind, but you know what Ole Case said You could look it up. I am allowed to say stuff like this, because according to John Cheever, the belles lettres version of Ole Case, all literary men must be Red Sox fans. My reputation as a literary man is actually in some dispute, but I am a man, a Red Sox fan and a writer, sofuggit. I think Norman Mailer said that, in The Naked and the Dead. Tanyon Sturtze, for instance, lately miserable in middle relief for the Yankees (he went twothirds of an inning in his last appearance), was utterly brilliant last night. That would be roughly seventyfive hundred, most of them equipped with Yankee hats, Derek Jeter Tshirts, and upturned middle fingers for people wearing Red Sox gear. Sorry, Blue, but that slomo replay has no mercy. Ah, but under the circumstances, the always crafty Joe Torre really had little choice; by then it was a fools mate. Three out of five rather than four out of seven. The Indians at Jacobs Field, the Rockies at Coors, and the Giants at Pac Bell. For the record, I think that hitting Millar was an accident. But, accident or on purpose, Kazmir did the Boston batters one hell of a favor by dealing himself out. It would be their fifth win in a row. Loathsome El Birdos. NAHits just a common sports malady choking disease. SK The ALDS Somebody Gotta Pay October 5thALDS Game 1 Twenty minutes before game time, the Sox announce their ALDS roster. Youk, Mientkiewicz and Leskanic made the squad. Mendoza and McCarty didnt. I try to take a nap before the 409 EDT start of the first Division Series game out in Anaheim and cant do it. Im not really surprised. Too many butterflies. That may sound stupid, but Id argue theres nothing stupid about it at all. The hell of spectatinga thing Ive had to rediscover during several Octobers (although never enough)is that when it comes to baseball, spectating is all I can do. The script is out of my hands. Instead of a nap I settle for a brisk walk. Ive got a bad hip as a result of an accident, but I ignore its protests of this unwonted lateafternoon exercise. My youngest son rescues me before it can really start to bellow, picking me up in his Jetta and taking me back to the house, where we settle with sodas, pizza, cookies and a homemade scorecard. Owen also has a crossword puzzle in which he tries (with varying degrees of success) to bury himself, admitting he can barely bring himself to watch the Angels bat, especially after the Red Sox secure a slim onerun lead on a suspect Manny Ramirez double (an E5 Figgins on my pizzabesmirched scorecard) followed by a scratch David Ortiz single. As it turned out, Owen and I didnt have to worry,although the game remained close until the top of the fourth, and twice in the early going the Angels jockeyed the tying run into scoring position. Then, in the aforementioned fourth inning, Boston staged one of those multirun outbursts that characterized so many of their wins in August and September.Ortiz walked; Millar hit him home with a moonshot to left; Varitek singled; Orlando I Know Every Team Handshake in the Universe Cabrera walked; after Bill Mueller struck out, Gabe Kapler hit a single to short left field. Bases juiced, one out, Johnny Damon at the plate. And heres your play of the game, brought to you by Charles Scribners, the publisher that made New York famous. Johnny Damon, who hits Angels starter Jarrod Washburn about as well as toads do algebra, directs a seemingly harmless ground ball to Chone Figgins, a utility fielder today playing third for the Halos. Figgins doublepumps, then throws the ball to a location somewhere between home plate and the guy selling Sports Bars in the box seats to the left of the Angels dugout. Varitek and Cabrera score. One batter later, Manny Ramirez goes pega luna for the first time in the Series (but not, one hopes, for the last). Its great, but by then the game is essentially over. Father Curt was far from his best today, but the Angelspretty much stuck with Washburn as a result of having clinched on the secondtolast day of the seasonwere not able to steal Game 1, as Im sure they hoped to. The question, I think, is whether they are now blown out from their gallop to the divisional title, or if they will bounce back with Bartolo (as in Colon) tomorrow night. My son says theyll bounce. If theyre going to, they had better get to Pedro fast or hope Terry Francona repeats the past and leaves him in too long. If neither of those things happen, thento quote my collaborator, Mr. ONanthe Anaheim Angels are very likely going to be gone like Enron, toast on the coast. SO So were guaranteed the split. And if Petey takes care of business, we could be sitting pretty. Whens the last time you saw the Sox squeeze in a run? Nice timing by Mientkiewicz (though McCarty, with his wingspan, might snag that errant toss by Mr. Schill). Is Curts ankle okay? When he grabbed for it after that play, I thought, Oh man, theres our season. SK Schilling will bull through. Hes the kind of guy whos gonna think, I got all winter to heal this ankle up. And nowwith any luckwe wont need him until the ALCS. I knocked wood when I said it, and the Twins are just three outs away. Accourse against the Yankees that means nada. SO Thats a final Twins 20 over the Yanks. Looks like the Santana gambits workingso far. SK Hopefully the trend of the last few years, where the eventual winners lose the first (or first and second) game, will be reversed. God knows its time for a statistical correction in that matter. SO I hear the Yanks will start Kevin Brown in Game 3. So they had better win tomorrow night. October 6th They do, though its as fishy as Jonahs old clothesto my nose. The Twins are leading by one in the bottom of the twelfth with one out and closer Joe Nathan toiling through his unheardof third inning of work. Nathan throws ten straight balls to put men on first and second, then grooves one to ARod. Its hit deep to the leftcenter gap, and the whole Yankee dugout leaps upexcept ARods missed it, and the ball barely makes the track (so why leap up when youve seen hundreds of flies to the track there and never moved an inch before?). Left fielder Shannon Stewart, playing back so nothing can get through, should have a bead on it but is uncharacteristically slow getting over and then doesnt even make an attempt. It hits the track, and should win the game anyway, but bounces over the wall for a ground rule double, meaning the trail runner, Jeter, has to go back to third. So with a tie game and one out, Matsui steps in. Hes not patient, and ends up hitting a soft liner to right. Jacque Jones is playing in to cut down the run at the plate, and right field in Yankee Stadium is the smallest in all of baseball. Jones, with a decent if not spectacular arm, should have an excellent shot at getting Jeter. Its a situation an outfielder dreams of theres no other play, no contingency. It cant be more than 180 feet, and hes got time to make sure he gets it there in the air so his catcher doesnt have to deal with a hop. As long as hes not way offline to the firstbase side, he should have Jeter by five steps, easy. Instead, he flips the ball flatfooted to first baseman Matthew LeCroy, who relays it, late, and the Yankees win. ESPNs commentators make no comment on this, which is just as bizarre. So the Yankees split. SO Man, I could have thrown out Jeter from there. What the hell was Jacque Jones thinking? Fix! Fix! SK Say it aint so, Stew! Next youll be telling me Jacque Jones was on the grassy knoll. October 7th The stuff between my ears feels more like peanut butter than brains this morning, and with good reason; the Red SoxAngels contest that started last night at 10 P.M. East Coast time didnt go final until five to two in the morning. Thats just shy of a fourhour baseball game. A nineinning baseball game. Part of the reason is national TV coveragethe breaks between halfinnings are longer to allow for a few more of those allimportant beer commercialsbut in truth that isnt the largest part. Ill bet you could count the number of postseason games under three hours during the last seven years on the fingers of your hands, not because of the extra ads but because the style of baseball changes radically once the regular season is over. It becomes more about the pitching, because most managers believe the aphorism which states that in seven games out of every ten, good pitching will beat good hitting.Games about the pitching become games about the defense. And games about defense and pitching in the field often become, for the offense, games about what is now called by the needlessly deprecating name of smallball. Few twentyfirst century baseball teams are good at smallball, and their efforts to bunt the runner over are often painful to watch (although Doug Mientkiewicz of the Soxput down a beauty in Game 1, and it resulted in a run), but smallball certainly does burn up the hours. I bet they sold a sea of beer in Anaheim last night, and the hopeful fans had plenty of time to twirl their Rally Monkeys and beat their annoying Thunder Sticks, but in the end neither the monkeys or the sticks did any good. The Angels must now come to our park down 02, and their fans have only this consolation for them, the game was over before 11 P.M., and they wont have to spend much of this lovely fall day feeling like what Ed Sanders of the Fugs so memorably called homemade shit. Pedro Martinez got the win in last nightsthis mornings game, leaving with a 43 lead after seven innings, mostly thanks to a tworun Jason Varitek dinger and a scratch run provided by Johnny Damon. The invaluable Damon stole second after reaching on a fielders choice, took third when loser Francisco KRod Rodriguez (who bears a weird resemblance to movielands Napoleon Dynamite) uncorked a wild pitch, then scored on a Manny Ramirez sac fly. It turned out to be the winning run, because a relay of Boston relieversTimlin to Myers, Myers to Foulkewere lightsout. My reward for staying up long past my usual bedtime was watching Orlando Cabrera make the Angels pay for disrespecting him. With two on and two out in the top of the ninth, Brendan Donnelly, the final Angels pitcher of the night, walked Jason Varitek, loading the bases in order to get to Cabrera, who came to the Red Sox touted not only as a Gold Glove but as a doubles machine. He cranked one of those to leftcenter in the wee hours of the morning, taking third on a throw home that didnt come close to nailing Varitek. And essentially, that was your ball game. Foulke ended it by striking out Curtis Pride approximately one hour after the Yankees came up off the mat to put Minnesota away in the twelfth, and now the Red Sox come back to Fenway, hoping to hear Dirty Water tomorrow night. And finally, from our Department of the Late Night Surreal, we have Angels manager Mike Scioscia, on the umpiring in last nights game (by Jerry I Aint Missed Many Meals) I think as far as the strike zone, you know, if you are a good team, if you are a good team, you, is that my throat or is it a thing, I know I am hoarse, but you know, when you go through aif you are ateam and you are a good team, then you absorb things like maybe a break bad, a line drive and doesnt fall in or an umpire strike zone. Thus spake Zarathustra. SO You said exactly what Im feeling today. Im getting too old to be staying up that late. Lets hope thats the last time well have to (barring a Dodger resurgence, which Id accept). October 8th Its a brilliant day and the leaves are turning along the Mass Pike, a New England idyll worthy of a coffeetable book. It doesnt hurt that were up two games to none and Ive got tickets to Game 3. It would be our first playoff clincher at home since 86 against these same Angels, and our first sweep since taking the As in the 75 ALCS. Both years are good omens, and the fact that we have Bronson Arroyo going is even more comforting. In his last nine starts were 90. In Kenmore Square, the Globe comes with a GO SOX poster and red and blue Mardi Gras beads. On Lansdowne, Puma is handing out posters of Johnny sitting on the ground by home plate, flashing a smile and a peace sign. Back at the players lot, the mood is loose and goofy. Manny shows up in a Michael Vick jersey, which we give him grief for, and then El Jefe arrives in his badass Cadillac roadster with the retractable roof (El Monstro is its name) and is wearingincrediblya Tennessee Titans cap. Lets go Pats! we holler. In BP, David usually spoons the first few pitches down the line in left before pulling a bunch of rainbows over the bullpens or hooking them around the Pesky Pole. Today he keeps working on going the other way, poking shots to the hole between third and short, dropping doubles into the garagedoor corner. The scouting report must say the Angels will try to work him away, the same way weve worked Guerrero. As closer Troy Percival saunters out to warm up, I say we havent seen much of him. I know, he says. I wish I was in there. You guys are a better team than youve shown the first two games, but much respect for beating Oakland. Maybe well see you tonight, huh? I hope so, he says. A nice guy, and Im also thinking ahead to the offseason, when he becomes a free agent. His 96 mph cheese would be a nice complement to Foulkies 74 mph change. Our scalped seats are in back of the Sox bullpen, giving me and Caitlin a prime view of Bronson warming up. Dave Wallace stands behind him, clicking off each pitch on a handheld counter. Bronson works from the windup, with that high leg kick. He throws his two pitches, his fastball and his curve, until sweats dripping off his chin. He stops and towels off, then works from the stretch, popping Teks glove. Hes still throwing when the Dropkick Murphys take the portable stage right behind him to play the anthem. When they finish and start in on their Red Sox anthem, Tessie, he takes a couple more, and thats it, hes ready. And he is. Hes got the curve working, and the umps giving him a nice wide zone. We pick up some runs early, then some more. The only mistake Bronson makes is trying to sneak a fastball by Troy Glaus, who sticks it on the Monster, but by then were up 51, 61. Its a party. And then, in the seventh, Bronson walks the leadoff guy. Myers relieves and walks the only guy he faces. Timlin comes in and gives up a single to Eckstein, then with bases loaded nibbles at Darin Erstad and ends up walking in a run, bringing upVladimir Guerrero. In batting practice, Guerrero hits the ball so hard that everybody stops to watch him. Today before the game, he blasted one high off the Volvo sign on the Monster, hitting the very top so that the steel beam behind it chimed like a bell and the ball ricocheted back past the outfielders shagging flies in leftcenter. Timlin nibbled at Erstad. Now on 01 he throws Guerrero a fastball up in the zone, and Vladi jumps on it, driving the ball toward rightcenter. It arcs through the darkness above the .406 Club straight for us like a crashing satellite. No doubt about it, its going to make the bullpen easily. Trots angling over, trailing the play. Trots an active Christianhe has a cross hanging from the rearview mirror of his Mini Cooperbut as the ball clears the wall, he loudly mouths God dammit! You can almost hear it except for the overwhelming groan. Grand slam. Its 66. The partys over. Not again. With the shaky Wake going tomorrow, this could be crucial. We dont want to go back to Anaheim. Now comes the nailbiting. Johnny has to flash back to the track in deepest center to make a great leaping catch. Foulke works through basesloaded jams in the eighth and ninth, and then Lowe has to battle with men on first and third in the tenth. Were standing and screaming with every pitch, hoping, wishing. KRod is on for the Angels, with Troy Percival warming. This is their one great strength. With apologies to Eric Gagne and Darren Dreifort of the Dodgers, Anaheims the only team in the majors with two bona fide closers. It looks like its going to be a long night. The Red Sox won 86 in ten, and this series is over. The Angels are done for the season, and the 2004 baseball version of Woodstock Nation is going to play for the American League pennant. Is it great? Yes. Is it wonderful? You bet. Is it pretty suhveet, as William H. Macys car salesman character in Fargo was wont to say? That is such a big tenfour. There are all sorts of reasons why this sweep feels so good. Being able to rest Schilling and Martinez, the big pitching arms, is only a strategic reason, valid but cold. The fact that the Red Sox hadnt clinched any postseason series in their home park since 1986 (when they beat these same Angels and then went on to play the Mets) is warmer, a soothing of the psyche. For me, the emotional payoff is that, although I wasnt able to bring my motheran ardent Red Sox fan who died in 1974I was able to bring my motherinlaw, who is now eightyone and not in the best of health. A Red Sox Customer Service rep met us at Gate D with a wheelchair and escorted usalong with Sarah Janes oxygen bottle and a backupto our seats, just to the left of the Red Sox dugout and only a row from the field, a perfect location for a lady whos no longer up to much jumping around. I checked her oxy level before the game started, and the dial on top of the tank said threequarters, deep in the green, very cool. She was good to go right through the eighth, but as the game neared the fourhour mark (we have discussed the grinding, defensive nature of postseason baseball games) and extra innings loomed, it seemed wise to switchher over to the spare tank, and she agreed to my suggestion that we leave after the tenth, if the score was still tied. With t he fireballing KRod on the mound, that seemed likely, especially after he got Manny on a called strike three, with Pokey Reese (running for Bellhorn) still languishing on first. Instead of leaving Rodriguez in to face David Ortiz, Scioscia elected to go with Jarrod Washburn, setting up the leftylefty match of which the conventional wisdom so approves. What followed was, quite simply, baseball history. I cant report it here to any readers satisfaction because, although I saw it, my forebrain still doesnt really believe I saw it. Part of this is because Big Papi so rarely hits with power to left; right field is usually his porch. Most of it, though, is simply that the mans swing was so damn quick. The ball seemed to be off his bat and gone into the night before my ears even registered the crack of wood on horsehide. The place went absolutely giddybonkers. Dirty Water was playing, but you could hear nothing but the bass line pumping out of the speakers. The rest was lost in the delirious chant of the crowd, not Papi, Papi but DaVEED! DaVEED! The cops in their riot gear, who came out to protect the sanctity of the field from marauding fans in their YANKEES SUCK Tshirts, tried to hold on to their stern donttreadonme frowns, but most of them couldnt do it for long; they broke into delighted winner grins, smothered them, then had to do the smothering all over again as fresh grins broke out. Best of all, I turned around and saw the woman whos been my mom since my own mom died, hands clasped below her chin, beaming like an eightyoneyearold cherub. I had some doubts about taking her and her oxygen tanks to a potential clinch game with thirtyfive thousand rabid Red Sox fans in attendance (and when I checked that second tank later, I saw that she used as much oxygen in the half an hour following Big Davids home run as she had during the entire previous four hours of the game), but now, an hour later, theres not a doubt in my mind that tonight I did her a mitzvah. And she did me one. And the team did one for both of us and all of Red Sox Nation. Theres more work to do, but tonight there are plenty of mitzvahs to go around. After El Jefes walkoff we hang around, dancing on our seats, singing along with Shout and Joy to the World and Glory Days as the lockerroom celebration plays on the JumboTron. WHY NOT US? Pedros Tshirt reads. Euky Rojas empties the bullpen ballbag, tossing its contents to our suddenly lucky section. Thanks, Euky! Down at the dugout, Ellis Burks does the same. Weve moved to the tarp along the firstbase line to get closer to the celebration. Dave McCarty (not even on the roster!) comes out and sprays us with beer. Gabe The Babe Kapler gives us some skin. Manny and Kevin Millar jog past, slapping hands, and Mike Myers, in a Dominican flag dorag. Johnny sits in the passenger seat of a groundskeepers cart while David Ortiz rides in back, kicking his legs and waving to us as they go all the way around the track to the garage door in left. Its a good hour since the game ended, and there are only a couple hundred of us diehards. Unforgettable. In quiet counterpoint, the Angels, in their street clothes, walk in broken single file across the grass behind short, across right field and out a gate beside their bullpen, headed for the team bus and their hotel, maybe even the airport. We wave to Vladi and David Eckstein, and give them a polite hand. Its true what I told Percival theyre a much better club than they showed in this series, and deserving of much respect. Outside, at the players lot, an even rowdier crowd presses against the barriers to watch the Sox leave. With each car, a new wave of screaming, pushing, a galaxy of cameras flashing. There are riot cops in helmets everywhere, and people literally falling down drunk. Pedro comes out and shoots us Mannys gunslinger fingers, and we go nuts. After he leaves, a man holding a baby on his shoulder shoves by me, then sets the baby down, and the baby stands and walks away. Its a little person with the wizened face of Scatman Crothers in The Shiningits Pedros goodluck buddy Nelson de la Rosa, two feet tall and waddling up Yawkey Way like a hobbit. But the best is Tek. He comes out in his uniform, carrying a plate of food from the postgame spread. Some relatives of his are leaving in an SUV, and he wants to catch them to say a final goodbye. VARitek, VARi tek! we cheer. Security stops them and Jason gives the woman driver (maybe his aunt?) a kiss on the cheek to Jerry Springer cheers (Kiss her! Kiss her!), then pads back towards the clubhouse with his plate, and I think, its just like Little League when wed go to the Dairy Queen, still wearing our cleats. Its the same game. October 9th SO Jefe say Somebody gotta pay. Thats why hes the chief. Im hoarse, my hands are swollen from clapping, and my mitt smells like beer. Im a most happy fella. SK It was a great game. And yes, were getting a shot at redemption, because the Yankees beat the Twins, though beat is maybe too strong a word. In Game 4, down 21, Ron Gardenhire throws Santana on three days rest. With the score 51 Twins after five, he inexplicably pulls Santana, meaninglike in that last regularseason series in the Bronxthe Yanks have four innings to get to the Twins pen. Its totally incoherent, given Gardenhires nowornever strategy. Santanas around 85 pitches and has been sharp, and the Twins pen is thin and tired. Predictably, the Yanks come back against instant goat Juan Rincon and then win in extras, ensuring Major League Baseball and Fox of their greatest ratings ever. Is it a tank job? I sure get a whiff, but who except a Twins (or Rock Cats) fan would complain? Finally weve got our cage match, our Thunderdome. Two teams enter, one team leaves. But of course, as Red Sox fans, we can no more not worryeven with a six or sevenrun leadthan we could not blink if you were suddenly to jab your fingers at our open eyes. For the record, so do II grew up watching Bob Gibson pitch in the World Series, and listening to Sandy Koufax on my transistor radio earphone. Those were the days when the games were still played in the afternoon and pitching the batter high and tight was considered standard operating procedure. Earlier in the season she threatened to write the team a letter saying, You better do it this year, or I cant promise to be around. I dont know if she carried through on that or not. The ALCS Beyond Thunderdome October 10th SK My feeling about having to face the Yankees is extremely conflicted. I heard twenty fat cats (not to mention a very grizzled tolltaker on the N.H. turnpike today) say Ayyy, Stevie! We got the Yankees, just like we wanted! Did we want them? The fan in me sort of wanted Minnesota, especially after Santana had been bent, folded, stapled and mutilated by the patient Yankee hitters. The sibyl in me says the Yankees have been our Daddy and will continue to be our Daddy; that we are the Pequod, they the great white whale. The commercial writer in me says this is just the matchup we need to sell the book; that after this, the World Series would be so much wavy gravy. SO All weve got to do is go 86. Can Mr. Schill, Petey and Byo with the curve working go 86? I dare say they can, with some run support. Will they? Only the baseball tiki gods know for sure. Santana had very little trouble with the Yanks 1 earned run in 12 innings, with 12 Ks. No idea why Gardenhire removed him yesterday after only 85 pitches and still looking fine like cherry wine. The commercial writer in you is right its the matchup MLB needs, and they got it. Its like Hollywoodyou need stars to sell a picture, and, sorry, Jacque Jones and Corey Koskie, but you Rock Cats grads just dont have the wattage (or the superagents). |
And if you look closely at our series, there are some wild hairs there too Figginss glove leading to six runs in Game 1; the absolutely horrible plate umpire in Game 2; and the sudden appearance (and disappearance) of Jarrod Washburn to end Game 3, when alltime Angels save leader Troy Percival was rested and ready. Ill hold the league to the same rules I apply to Hollywood its cool as long as its entertaining and believable. So far its been entertaining. The 2004 numbers say we do better against the Yanks than against the Twins (or the Os, Cleveland, Texas), but you cant go by thatjust by himself, Santana warps the curve. Thats how tough he was. One chance in four. One chance in two would be more than wavy gravy. Itd be Destiny. October 11th Its like dj vu all over again. Yogi said thatnot the one from Jellystone National Park, but the one who hung out in New York and swung a productive bat at many bad pitches back in the good old days when men were men and baseball players still smoked Camels.Once more the Red Sox have entered postseason via the wild card. Once more they have faced the West Coast team and beaten them (this time quite a bit more tidily, tis true). Once more it was Mr. Lowemagickal rather than tragickalwho was the Last Pitcher Standing, this time notching the win instead of the save. And once more the Yankees have beaten the Minnesota Twins after spotting them the opening victory. It is our ancient enemynow routinely called the Evil Empire almost everywhere north of Hartfordthat we will have to face, and vanquish, if we are to go to the World Series. I spent most of the weekend in Boston, although this book did not precisely demand it; the BostonAnaheim series was over, and the BostonNew York series wouldnt start for another four days. Mostly what I wanted was to sample the atmosphere, and what I found myself breathing in wasdisturbing, bad for sleep.I would describe it as a kind of nervy bravadothink of all the old gangster movies youve seen where the badguy hero is driven into a final blind alley, draws both automatics from the waistband of his gabardine pants, and then screams, Come and get me coppers! But Im gonna take a buncha youse wit me! Doormen, taxi drivers, a guy from Boston Public Works, a driver on the Boston Duck Tour, a clerk at Brentanos, two homeys at the mall with their hats turned around backwards (Homey A in a METALLICA RULES Tshirt, Homey B wearing one showing Albert Einstein in the audience at a Ramones concert), a woman on the Boston Common walking her little white furball, even a grizzled old twotooth tolltaker on New Hampshires Spaulding Turnpikeall these hailed me with variations on the same theme Yo, Stevie! We got just who we wanted, right? Im back with a sick smile and a little wave, like Whatever, dude. Because Im thinking of that old saying, the one that goes Be careful what you wish for. And when you get right down to where the rubber hits the road, does it even matter? When you get right down to where the rubber meets the road, the Yankees just seem to be our fate, our ka, our name written on the bottom of the stone. Or maybe thats just so much literary bullshit. Probably is. God knows the Boston Red Sox have generated enough to fill two or three hundred Mass Pike PortoSans. Its dj vu all over again, that much is a pure fact. We can only hope that this time Act II will be different, allowing us still to be onstage, and in uniform, when the curtain goes up on Act III. Odd news two relatives of Yanks closer Mariano Rivera were killed over the weekend in a freak accident at his house and he has to fly down to Panama for the funeral, meaning hell have to jet back just in time for Game 1. And former NL MVP Ken Caminiti, who admitted his steroid use and became a baseball pariah, dies of heart failure at age fortyone (a cautionary tale for anyone on the juice, not just Gary Sheffield). We also declare our ALCS roster, making only one change. SO So Youks out and Mendozas in. I guess were hoping he has the book on his old club. And that Billy Mueller doesnt need a breather at third. And dunno if youve looked this far ahead, but do you know what night Game 7 of the World Series falls on? Thats right Halloween. October 12thALCS Game 1 The hype leading up to Game 1 is typical and idiotic. The games on Fox, and theyve prepared a fiveminute Star Wars intro, complete with Johnny as Chewbacca. If thats not enough, they play the theme from The Odd Couple over and over. The announcers are desperate to tell us what the story lines are, and the personal dramas. This is one reason I hate playoff baseballthe national networks think the viewers have just tuned in. On NESN, Jerry and Don have no need to fill us in on The Rivalry, they just call the game. They also dont call Bronson Arroyo Brandon (McCarverthe true inspiration behind the mute button) or compare ARods and Jeters mediocre years to Mannys and Davids MVPtype seasons. The game itself is dull and disappointing from the very first. Schilling cant push off on the ankle and gives up runs in bunches (later, Dr. Bill Morgan will describe the injury as a tear in a sheath covering a tendonshades of Nomar!), while the Orioles Mike Mussina is spoton. After three, its 60 Yanks, through six, 80, and the only drama is whether Moose will keep his nohitter. And then, just as news time is rolling around, and viewers naturally think of bailing, the Sox explode for seven runs, and who should be called in to save the game but plucky Mariano Rivera, who just arrived in the fourth inning from the funeral of blah blah blah native Panama. What an astonishing twist! Why, who could have foreseen such etc., etc.! The announcers play it up for all its worth, and if theres a more egregious use of a humaninterest story in sports, please, dont show it to me. Rivera even gets to start the gameending DP against his nemesis Bill Mueller. Its like watching a cheesy movie, every step feels utterly false and plotted. I mean, come on, who writes this stuff? October 13th Last nights game against the Yankees was a goodnewsbadnews kind of thing. You know, like in all the jokes youve heard. Doctor comes bopping into his patients examination room and says, Mr. Shlub, Ive got some good news and Ive got some bad news. Which do you want first? Gimme the bad news first, Mr. Shlub says. Save the good news. The bad news is that youre going to die of a horribly painful disease in six weeks or so, your bloods going to boil and your skins going to creep right off your body, and theres nothing we can do to stop it, the doctor says. Now do you want the good news? Mr. Shlub starts to blubber. What good news can there be after something like that? he asks the doctor, when he can speak coherently. Well, the doctor says in a confidential tone of voice, Im dating a nurse from Pediatrics, and she is so hot! The worst news to come out of last nights ALCS Game 1 is, of course, that we lost it. The good news is that the Red Sox made a game of it after being nohit by Mike Mussina into the seventh. Starting with Mark Bellhorns oneout double in the top of that inning, Boston smacked a total of 10 hits and scored 7 runs, coming back from what was an 80 deficit (with the tying run on third in the eighth, the camera caught fatherson Yankee fans exchanging caps in some arcane but endearing goodluck ritual). The Sox gave the Yankees a scare; the Sox silenced the Yankee fans; the Sox even gave their own fans something to go to bed at quarter to midnight feeling good about. The good news about Curt Schillings head is that its on straight. Father Curt says he doesnt believe in the socalled Curse of the Bambino. Im a Christian, he says fearlessly. The bad news about Father Curts ankle is that its not on straight. He couldnt push off on his right foot last night, threw only two fastballs at speeds greater than 90 mph, and the Yankees made him pay, pounding out 6 hits and 6 runs over three innings. The bad news is that this ankle injury happened at a cursedly bad time. The good news is that Father Curtwho doesnt believe in that publicitystunt curse, anywaythrew only 58 pitches in last nights mortar attack, and if the ankle gets better, he should be more than ready for Game 5, always assuming there is one. The bad news is that the Yankees scored 6 of their 10 runs after two were out. The good news is that the Red Sox scored all 7 of their runs after two were out, and stranded only two runners all night. The bad news is that the Red Sox dont win when Johnny Damon doesnt hit2004 baseball history pretty well proves thisand last night Johnny wore that fabled golden sombrero, striking out four times and looking more lost each time. The good news is that Jason Varitek socked a tworun dinger over the centerfield wall, ending a personal 0for36 drought at Yankee Stadium, and followed the dinger with a single against Mariano Rivera to open the ninth when the Red Sox once againsplendidly, against all probabilitybrought the tying run to the plate. Before the game, Curt Schilling said he couldnt think of anything better than making fifty thousand or so Yankee fans shut up. He wasnt able to do that, but in the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings last night, Boston batters were. The bad news is that if this series goes more than four games, Moose Mussina will be back. The good news is that the Boston batters who brought the lateinning thunder last night will also be back, and in each and every remaining game. The bad news is that Boston is a game in the hole. The good news is that at this point in the season they dont make you turn in your uniform and condemn you to spend the winter playing golf unless you lose three more. And finally, theres the most fascinating badnewsgoodnews matchup of them all, and the best reason I know to tune in to baseball rather than to the third presidential debate tonight Pedro will be starting for the Red Sox. The Yankees have hammered him this year, and Pedro has publicly proclaimed them his Daddy. Thats the bad news. But no one has more heart than Pedro Martinez, and no one will try any harder to send the Red Sox back to Fenway Park with a split. Thats the good news. Lets see what news they lead with on the sports page tomorrow. SO What a horribly convoluted endgame to get Rivera a save and exorcise the Ghost of Billy Mueller. At 80 theres no reason for him to come in, so in the seventh Matsui has two balls go off his glove, Bernie commits the worst error on a groundball single Ive ever seen, and Tek hits a homer, something he hasnt done in the Stadium in years. In the ninth, down three, I knew we couldnt go in order so I wasnt surprised that we got the two guys on to reach Mueller. And wasnt surprised by the doubleplay ending. The only consolation is that the powers that be have to give us a win to make up for this train wreck. Youll notice, though, that in all the hubbub they made sure Moose kept his win. SK Hey, I thought Moose deserved that win. And when the hurlyburlys done, when the game is lost and won, who gets the blame? Wakefield, for serving up a pair? Timlin, for serving it up to Bernie? Meanwhile, I think Father Curts done for the year. Maybe there really is a curse. Looks like the tragickal Mr. Lowe in Game 5 (if there is a Game 5; I presume there will be, and the way the weather looks, itll be about October 25th). Meanwhile, whos your Daddy? Jon Lieber or Pedro Martinez? Or is itHideous Hideki? Is he your Daddy? Go Sox! Wear that hair! SO No blame, just an ugly game. But look at it this way weve already got half of the split (just the wrong halfahuh ahuh). Lets see what the tiki gods decree tonite. Pedros got to have it, and weve got to hit early. Jon Lieber Pittsburgh Pirate. Bronson Arroyo Pittsburgh Pirate. Yeah, the weathers going to test usscattered showers all weekend, and were talking three night games, with the temp down around fortyfive. Add a little wind and wetness and well be sitting in deck chairs on the SS Fenway. October 14thALCS Game 2 I could continue with the goodnewsbadnews thing, theres plenty of material for it,but with the Sox headed back to Boston down two games to none, I dont have the heart for it. Its been thirteen years since a team has climbed out of an 02 hole in an LCS, and the Red Sox have never done so. I blame some of this on numb bad luck. I think most Red Sox fans (certainly this Red Sox fan) were counting on Father Curt to bring the team back from Yankee Stadium with a split. Now it turns out that Schillings ankle problem is not a mere tweak, not even a strain, but (oh shit) a probable seasonending injury that will need surgery. We all know both from gospel music and basic firstyear anatomy that the kneebone connected to the legbone and the legbone connected to the anklebone. The problem here, as I understand it, has to do with the peroneal tendon, where the anklebone connected to the footbone, can you give me hallelujah. In Schillings case, this tendon has come free of its sheath. When pushing off on his right leg during Game 1, Father Curt said he could actually hear the tendon snapping as it rubbed against the bone. Later, when speaking to the press, Sox doc Bill Morgan said additional pitching wouldnt put Schillings leg at risk, and Im thinking He can hear that thing snapping like a garter every time he hucks the pill and you say hes not risking his leg? Jeezis, Doctor Bill, Im sorta glad you dont make house calls in my neighborhood. Well, let it pass. What it boiled down to was a piece of rotten luck (not a curseI may not be a conventional Christian, but I was raised a Methodist) for the appetizer. The main course was a mostly excellent pitching performance by Pedro Martinez in which his teammates provided exactly two hits (the second by David Ortiz, who was promptly erased on a double play). After the game, Pedro shrugged and said If my team doesnt get the hits, I cant do nothing. He said it softly, without rancor. I thought he showed remarkable restraint, considering the fact thathe has been in this position in most of the games hes pitched this year. Schillingeven in the ALCS game he left trailing 60gets run support. For some reason Martinez does not. A downcast Johnny Damon echoed the erstwhile Dominican Dominator in a lockerroom interview, saying that Red Sox pitching hasnt been the problem in the ALCS; the problem has been lack of offense. No one is better qualified to speak to this issue than Johnny D, who has gone 0 for 8 in the two games. In my mind it is at this point the crucial difference between the two clubs. And two points have to be made about the Yankees. First, their much maligned pitching has so far been exceptional. Second, their hitting has been as advertisedor perhaps I should say as expected. The Yanks could almost be renicknamed The American League Hoodoo. National League teams are less impressed by their mystique (witness the success of the Florida Marlins against them last year), but while they remain on their own little patch, the Yankees are awesome in the month of October. What impresses me most is how balanced their attack is. Of the thirteen runs the Yankees have scored (playing exactly the same lineup both nights), Jeter has two, ARod has two, Sheffield has four, Matsui has two, Posada has one, Olerud has one (his tworun bomb last night won the game), and Lofton has one. Only Miguel Cairo and Bernie Williams have failed to score for the Yankeesthis is just two games. Its true that all but two of the Red Sox players (Cabrera and Damon) have also scored, but Bellhorn, Ortiz, Millar, Varitek and Mueller have each only scored once, and in a single runthrough of the batting order (during innings seven and eight of Game 1). Only Trot Nixon, who always seems to step his game up to Yankee levels during the postseason, scored for the Sox in both games. Meantime, were done with Yankee Stadium for a while,and we have the day off to regroup. Compared to those things, there is no bad news. Yep, Pedro made a quality start (on the fortyfourth anniversary of Mazs home run). He had some Ramonlike struggles early, but wriggled out of them and settled down nicely. The highpriced, steroidpumped, formerAllStar, MVP, Japanese national hero heart of the Yankee order did as much as our own vaunted Mark Bellhorn, Kevin Millar and Orlando Cabrera, which was nothing. The home run Pedro gave up was to borderline Hall of Famer John Olerud (yet another midseason pickup, not truly a Yankee at all), with his pitch count above 100, to the short part of a shrunken ballpark. We just didnt hit. Score one run in the AL, youre going to lose; it doesnt matter if youre playing the Yanks or the DRays. So we didnt get the split. It may be demoralizing, but it shouldnt be a huge surprise. George paid dearly for the Yankees to have the best home record in all of baseball. But guess who had the second best? Well have to win throwing Bronson, Wake and Lowe, but we havent taken the easy way all yearand that includes overcoming injuries to key players. We just have to stay hopeful and throw everything weve got at them Friday night (weather permitting), win that, battle on Saturday, and even the series. We could even lose a game up at Fenway and win this thing, weve just got to hit. Keep the Faith. SK Poor Father Curt. Go you Lowe! SO Down 20 to our evil nemesis, with our best arms gone, I feel like were Batman and Robin stuck in that giant snow cone, with the Joker (George) and his dumbasmud henchmen in their striped shirts (Yankee fans) laughing their asses off and then leaving us for dead. But you know what happens thenthats right, Batman goes to his superutility belt. Its time for us to pull something out. October 15thALCS Game 3 Stewart and I meet for dinner before the game, and although he agrees to split a BLT pizza on honey wheat crust, he expresses strong doubts about a pizza that comes with a topping of mayonnaisedressed lettuce. Still, he eats his share. I guess that after some fifty games at Fenway between us, weve had our fill of hot dogs. As we munch, we talk aboutwhat else?baseball. Of that we have not had our fill. Specifically we discusswhich team will be most apt to benefit from a rainout, which seems likely; the Massachusetts weather on this October evening is pretty awful. We agree, reluctantly, that the Yankees would probably be better served by an extra day of rest, because they could bring Mussina back sooner. The stars seem to be aligning themselves, and the horoscope doesnt look favorable if you happen to be a Sox fan. When we walk into California Pizza at 545 P.M., a light mist is hanging in the air. When we walk back out again at 645, the mist has thickened to a drizzle. By the time weve raised our arms to be frisked and have given our game bags over for examination outside Fenway Parks Gate D (its just how things are done in twentyfirstcentury America, where the citizenry now live on Osama Mean Time), the drizzle has become a light rain. Before clearing around midnight, the forecast calls for heavy downpours accompanied by strong winds. During the regular season, the fate of the game would be in the hands of the Red Sox up until the instant play started, and with the umps thereafter. In postseason, however, these contests are in the hands of Major League Baseball, an organization that seems to care a great deal more about TV revenue (witness the 8 P.M. starts, which ace out millions of little kids who have to get up for school on weekdays) than they do the fans, the players or the game itself. Last night, in the HoustonSt. Louis game, play went on through a steady downpour. Base hits spun up wheels of water as they rolled into the outfield. I dont mind getting wet, but I really dont want to see Manny Ramirez, Trot Nixon or Bernie Williams leave his career on the outfield grass of Fenway Park. I dont have to worry about that for long. An usher I know is leaning nonchalantly against the counter of the Legal Seafood kiosk, chattering away into his walkietalkie, as Stew and I walk by. He drops it into the pocket of his yellow rainslicker and waves us over. Go on home, you guys, he says. Games gonna be called at seven thirty. I ask him if hes sure. He says he is. We hang in a little while, anywaylong enough to soak up the rainy atmosphere of Fenway Park (soak it up, geddit?), where the game still hasnt been officially called. The tarp remains on the infield at 758 P.M., however, and that pretty much tells the tale. The news and TV guys arehuddled under canvas minipavilions, reduced to taking pictures of and doing interviews with each other. Peter Gammons comes bopping busily along, looking like some strange but amiable human crow in his black trousers and long black raincoat. Stewart and I pass a few words with him, mostly about the possibility of Father Curt pitching again this year (unlikely but not impossible, given Schillings fierce competitive drive), and then we leave. I am actually back in my hotel room, drying my hair, before Major League Baseball can finally bring itself to unloose its clenched and rainpuckered fingers enough to let this one go. October 16th I open the curtains at 8 A.M. on cloudless blue skies. Tonight the Yankees and Red Sox will play baseball. Im bringing the whole famn damily to this one, so I have to buy tickets from a broker, and end up paying through the nose so we can watch what turns out to be the worst game of the year, maybe of my lifeworse even than Mr. Lowes rainy debacle at Yankee Stadium. Its fifty degrees, but the wind is gusting up to 40 mph, and were sitting in the very last row of the grandstand. Gales blow through the wire fence, around the mercifully insulating standingroom crowds at our backs and into our collars. Caitlins shivering, so I break down and sign up for a credit card just to get a free MLB blanket. Bronsons got nothing, but Kevin Browns equally ineffective. Kevin, we chant. Jeter makes an error that leads to a run, and its Jeeeeeter, Jeeeeeter. (Hes been terrible in the field, just as distracted as last year, fodder for critics who say ARod should play short; but Jeter doesnt have the reactions or the gun for third, and probably wont accept a demotion to second.) After Bronson we throw the dregs of our pen, as if the Coma is conceding the gameas if hes okay with being down 03. Weird. Matsui drives in five. After Sheffield powers out a steroid shot, the standingroom crowd disperses and the wind cuts through us. In Little League, theres a tenrun mercy rule, but not here, and to save our real pen, Wake volunteers to soak up some innings, meaning Lowe will be starting tomorrow (far better, I think, considering how Wake has thrown this season). But instead of holding the Yanks so we can get back in the game, Wake lets a runner inherited from Leskanic score, then gives up five runs of his own, putting the game way out of reach. Embree looks bad, and then Francona leaves poor Mike Myers out there to face righties in the ninth, something that should never happen. Myers sucks it up and ultimately gets it done, but by then its 198. Its ugly, and humbling, but the worst thing that happens is that the Faithful (if these really are the Faithful) turn on Mark Bellhorn, booing him mercilessly when he makes an error that leads to a run, and then with each successive strikeout. Its as if they dont remember the Marky Mark who stepped up and kept us in first place through April and May. Its wrong, and it pisses me off even more than the Yankees taking walks late in the game, or Matsui swinging for the fences with a tenrun lead. October 17th The Yankees played. The Sox got shelled. I slouched into my hotel room well after midnight and jotted only a brief gamerelated note in my journal (Red Sox lost. Horrible) before falling into bed, where I got roughly six hours of shallow, dreaminfested sleep.I got up at 7 A.M. this morning, pulled on a pair of exercise shorts and my new Kevin Youkilis shirt (a gift from Stewart ONan, bless him) and went around to Au Bon Pain for orange juice and a croissant. I did not buy a Boston Globe in the hotel newsstand, and I certainly did not turn on SportsDesk when I got back to my room. I turned on the headline news program with the ticker across the bottom of the screen instead, and only long enough to confirm the final score of last nights abortion. Then I shut the damned thing off and did my morning exercises for once without the benefit of media no scores, no polls, no reports of suicide bombings in Baghdad. 198. That was the final score. Replace the hyphen with a 1 and you have the last year the Red Sox won the World Series. Maybe theres a curse after all. Or a Curse, if you prefer. Until the third inning of this train wreck, there was actually some semblance of a game. After that, the Yankees simply piled it on. Jason Varitek had a good offensive night for the Red Sox; Hideki Matsui, unfortunately, had a sublime night for the Yankees, thekind of night baseball players dream about and have maybe once, and only then if theyre lucky. 198, and Im sure that Dan Shaughnessy, Bostons Number One Cursemonger, will make hay of that in todays unread newspaper, but the fault, dear Brutus, has lain not in our stars but our statsespecially those of our mediocre relief corps, which this series against the Yankees has mercilessly exposed. Arroyo didnt have much, but Arroyo can only be held responsible for the first half dozen runs or so (ow, it hurts to write that). Leskanic came on and gave up a threerun homer to Gary Sheffield; Wakefield lasted three and a third largely ineffective innings; Embree followed Wakefield and was worse; then came Mike Myers and the song remains the same. There may have been others. You could look it up, Ole Case used to say, and he was right, but for that Id have to buy a Boston Globe, and while I might be able to avoid Dan Shaughnessys cursemongering, my eye would surely fall on the hairy, downcast mugs of the Red Sox players. Coming back from New York, already down two games to none thanks to Schillings bad ankle and Oleruds home run, the Sox players kept telling reporters they were loose. And so they were; last night they were so loose all four wheels fell off their little red wagon. Its true that Ramirez, Mueller, Cabrera and especially Jason Varitek found their offensive strokes, but putting eight runs on the board means little when you could double that and still lose by three. Yet still we are faithful; to steal the title of the movie that played in New England this past spring (a spring that now seems impossibly distant and hopeful), still we believe. Tonight well once again fill the old green church of baseball on Lansdowne Street, in some part because its the only church of baseball we have; in large part becauseeven on mornings like this, when the cleanshaven Yankee Corporate Creed seems to rule the hardball universeits still the only church of baseball we can really love. No baseball team has ever come back from a threegamestonone deficit to win a postseason series, but a couple of hockey teams have done it, and we tell ourselves it has to happen sooner or later for a baseball team, it just has to. We tell ourselves Derek Lowe has one more chance to turn 2004 from tragickal to magickal. We tell ourselves its just one game at a time. We tell ourselves the impossible can start tonight. During BP, a liner dings off the photographers well in front of me and bounces out into the shallow outfield grass. Don Mattinglys walking back from the cages under the centerfield bleachers with a balding guy in a champagnecolored suit, and as they near the ball, I realize its Reggie Jackson. Reggie, I holler, hit the mitt, and hold out my glove, and he doesmaybe for the first time as an outfielder. I hustle over to Steve to show him the ball. I can rationalize my excitement because Reggie, in my mind, will always be an Aand one of those hairy, wild As from a team much like this years Sox, kind of goofy and out of control, full of personality. Im jazzed, just watching the parade of celebrity sportscasters when Steve hands the ball back. On it, hes written The curse is off, and then on the sweet spot has signed it Babe Ruth. Later, another piece of luck in the tenth inning, in an incredibly tight and great game, Bernie Williams fouls one high off the roof facing, and the ball plummets directly toward me. All I have to do is raise my arm and the ball hits dead center in the pocket of my glove. The next inning Im on the JumboTron with my mitt, and my particles are beamed out across the nation to friends and relatives everywhereand I have enough sense left (or maybe Im just too tired) not to point at myself and go, Look, Im on the JumboTron! And this is just the beginning. From here the night just gets better. October 18thALCS Game 4 It turned out that Mr. Lowe was pretty magickal, and so we live to fight another day. Today, in fact. This afternoon, at 510 P.M., when Pedro Martinez and Mike Mussina match up in the years last American League game at Fenway Park. Last nights twelveinning tilt was the longest game in postseason history, clocking in at five hours and two minutes. I went with my daughterinlaw, and we finally left when Boston failed to score in the bottom of the eleventh. My reasoning was simple enough if Boston won, Id be back the next day (make that the same day; it was ten past one when we finally made our way out of the park). If Boston lost, I didnt want to be there to see the Yankees dancing on the carefully manicured pair of green sox decorating the infield. As things turned out, our final (and winning) pitcher of the nightCurtisThe Mechanic Leskanicwas superb in relief after being just one more slice of bullpen salami in the Game 3 blowout. He gave up one of those dyingquail singles to Posada to open the twelfth (this we heard on the radio, heading back to the hotel on eerily deserted streets), then got Ruben Sierra to ground out and Tony Clark to fly out.Miguel Cairo fanned, setting the stage for the dramatic Red Sox finish, which I arrived back in my hotel room just in time to see. By then Paul Quantrill was pitching for the Yankees. Joe Torre rolled the dice by bringing Mo Rivera on to pitch two innings and try to close out the series. Rivera is the games premier closer, but he has occasional problems with the Red Sox, and last night he blew the Yankees onerun lead in the ninth, giving up a single to Bill Mueller with speedy Dave Roberts, pinchrunning for Kevin Millar, on second.Gordon replaced Rivera and went two scoreless. Quantrillnot exactly chopped liverwas what was left. He never got an out. After yielding a single to Manny Ramirez, he threw David Ortiz what looked to me like either a fastball or a slider. Whatever it was, it was in Ortizs wheelhouse, and Big Papi crushed it. Like every other Red Sox fan, Im delighted that this isnt going to be a sweep, like most postseason series that start off 30. As a contributor to this book, Im even more delighted to have a victory to write about before the ultimate signoff. But one who loves the Boston Red Sox is also one who loathes the New York Yankees; its as true as saying night follows day. So it pleases me most of all to point out we are now 1211 overall this year against George Steinbrenners team of limousine longballers, and that last nights victory, combined with the ALCS bestofseven format, ensures an odd and wistfully wonderful statistical certainty the Yankees cant beat us this year. Not overall. They can go on to the World Series (and probablywill, although I still harbor faint hopes we can prevent that), but the best they can do against us for the season is a tieand they can only do that by winning today. That will not matter a single whit to them, of course, but when youre a Red Sox fan, you take consolation wherever it is available. |
Last night after the game, I hung around the dugout to shout Jefeeeeeeeeeeee! to David Ortiz and chant Whos your Papi? with the rest of the diehard Faithful. When I finally got out onto Yawkey Way it was two oclock, and most of the players had left. On Brookline Ave, the riot cops were standing in close formation on the bridge to Kenmore Square, forcing us stragglers to walk down Lansdowne and then along the scuzzy streets bordering the Mass Pike. I didnt mind. There were a couple other fans in sight, and we were all ditzy from the win and just how very late it was. The street I was on curved up to Boylston, and as I reached the intersection, a motorcycle cop came wailing up on his Electra Glide and stopped in the middle of the street. He hopped off and started pointing to the oncoming cars, waving them to the side of the road, and as it dawned on me what was happening, here came the Yankees team busappropriately from Yankee Bus Lines, and appropriately yellowand my legs found a strength and a spring I thought Id lost back in the fifth inning, carrying me to the exact spot I needed to be in, the right place at the right time. I watched heads inside turn toward me, bleary faces puzzled by this apparition in black in a PawSox hat standing in the vacant other lane, lit like a devil by the red stoplight, proudly holding up his middle finger. Today the guys show up at the parking lot before Game 5 wearing their very best suits and wheeling luggage like its any other travel daya good sign, I think. Yesterday when Mark Bellhorn walked by, a few people booed, and he didnt look over. Today I holler, Hey Mahk, dont let the bastards get you down! and he smiles and nods. Johnnys had an adhesive Ace bandage on the meaty flat of his right hand (his lead hand) for a couple of weeks now, and I wonder if he can grip the bat correctly. Every day I ask, Hows the hand, John? and he says its okay, but without conviction, as if its still bothering him. These are the guys we need to set the table for Manny and David. If they dont pick it up, were going nowhere. Just before game time, I visit with Bob the usher over in Section 32. We chat and then say goodbye, shake hands. Its our last home game of the ALCS, and theres a fall feeling of the season being over, things being packed away, but I cant let it stand. Ill see you for the Series, I say. I hope so, he says. I know so, I say, full of false bravado. Right here, baby. October 19thALCS Game 5 It probably wasnt the greatest game in postseason historyId still pick Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, the one where Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk waved his extrainning walkoff home run fair, for that honorbut it was almost certainly the greatest game to be played since the major leagues went to the League Championship format. At five hours fortynine minutes it was the longest, and the teams who engaged in the struggle were surely the most evenly matched. When it ended, the Red Sox had scored one more run (five to the Yankees four) and managed one more hit (thirteen to the Yankees twelve). Each team used seven pitchers, and each committed a single error. The game, which began in broad daylight at 520 in the afternoon, ended just an hour shy of midnight, in the bottom of the fourteenth. I have never been so simultaneously drained and exalted at the conclusion of a sporting event; would have believed, prior to last night, the two states of emotional being were mutually exclusive. According to this mornings box score, there were 35,120 in attendance, but if the Red Sox pull off the ultimate miracle of St. Fenway and go on to the World Seriesunlikely, especially with the ALCS now returning to Yankee Stadium,but no longer wildly improbableten years from now therell be a million New Englanders, most of them from Massachusetts, telling their children, grandchildren, bar buddies and anyone else who will listen that they were there on the night the Sox beat the Yanks in fourteen. Both managers used up almost every damned reliever they had once the starters (Martinez for Boston, Mussina for New York) were gone. Boston finished up with Tim Wakefield, the goat in last years ALCS Game 7 (the Boone home run), the hero last nightin spite of Jason Variteks miseries with the knuckleball behind the plate. The Yankees finished with EstebanLoaiza, who barely made the New York playoff roster. Loaiza, nothing short of horrible for the Yankees during the regular season, was terrific last night until the fourteenthand even then he did not beat himself. David Ortiz, who has pretty much carried the Red Sox offensively this postseason, beat Loaiza and necessitated Game 6; if the Yankees win the ALCS and then lose the World Series, it may be Ortiz who they will blame. Mark Bellhorn led the bottom of the fourteenth doing what he has, unfortunately, done best offensively for his team in the postseason he struck out. Then Johnny Damon, who had a good ALDS and is having a hideous ALCS (in his previous atbat, he popped out weakly to Jorge Posada while trying to bunt, effectively killing what might have been a gamewinning rally in the eleventh), worked Loaiza for a walk. Cabrera struck out. Manny Ramirez coaxed a second walk from Loaiza, and that set the stage for Papi. Ortiz, who won Game 3 against the Angels with a walkoff home run and beat the Yankees in the twelfth the same way two nights ago, has been little short of Jacksonian this October (that would be Reggie, not Andrew). All he did last night was get the first RBI of the game, scoring Cabrera with a single, and then plated the second run himself (basesloaded walk to Varitek). In the eighth, he struck a solo home run to leftcenter, meaning that of the four runs Boston scored in the first nine innings, Ortiz was involved in three. What I remember most clearly about his last atbat are the fans to the right of the backstop as I looked toward home plate. They were leaning over the low railing and pounding on the padded face of the backstop, screaming for a hit. Everyone in the park was on their feet. The kids in front of me were wearing their hats on backwards, and turned insideout for good measure. For the first time since Ive known him, Stewart ONan turned his hat around backwards and insideout. I dont do that; for me, the rallycap thing has never worked. I took mine off instead and held it with the bowl up to the sky, shaking it in that ancient rainmaking gesture. Two guys in the row behind me started doing the same thing. Ortiz put on an incredible tenpitch atbat. Loaiza must have made a couple of bad pitches in there, because the count eventually ran to 22, but I barely remember them. What I remember are those people to the right of the backstop, leaning over and pounding, pounding, pounding on the green. What I remember is Stew in his rally cap, looking weirdly like someLe Mans racecar driver from 1937. What I remember is thirtyfive thousand people screaming and screaming under the lights as Big Papi fouled off pitch after pitch, one to the backstop, one to the glass of the .406 Club, one up the leftfield foul line, one screaming down the rightfield line, just on the wrong side of the Pesky Pole. Finally, on the tenth pitch of the atbat, he hit one fair. The sound of the bat was spongy rather than sharp, not the authoritative crack of good wood, but Ortiz still got all of his broad back into it. The ball flew between Derek Jeter and Miguel Cairo, and well out of reach of either man. Damon was off and running at contact, and the mob was waiting for him at home plate. I thought I was gonna be the first one to get to [Ortiz], Doug Mientkiewicz is quoted as saying in todays paper, but Johnny Damons hair was already in my face. So tonight Father Curt Schilling will get what he probably never thought he would a second chance to shut up those fifty thousand Yankee fans. Hes got a special boot, they tell us, and several million faithful Red Sox fansin New England and scattered all across the countrywill be praying for that boot. Not to mention the ankle inside it. The big chant last night was Gary Sheffields Whos your dealer? The big pitch was Pedro going up and in and putting Matsuiwhos been lunging across the plate all series and hitting .500on his big Ultraman ass. The big runbesides the gamewinnerwas pinch runner Dave Roberts (once again) scoring on a sac fly to tie the game in the eighth. The big hit could have easily been Tony Clarks. In the ninth, with the score tied at 4, two out, and Ruben Sierra on first, he fought off Keith Foulke with two strikes and laced a ball down the rightfield line. It hopped off the track, struck the top of the low wall along the corner and popped almost straight up, into the very first row of the stands, for a ground rule double. Sierra, who would have scored easily, had to go back to third, giving Foulke one more chance to work out of the jam, which he did, getting number nine hitter Miguel Cairo on a popup. So the Yanks lost this one, literally, by an inch. Its the kind of breaklike El Jefes humpback singlewe never get, and the kind of break the Yankees always seem to, and I gotta say, it feels good. And the big stats our pen threw eight scoreless, and the Yanks left 18 on base. So dont feel too bad for them, they had every chance to win. Driving home late this rainy morning, I flash on a usually blank Mass Pike message board on an overpass just before the tollbooths at Newton. There, for every westbound traveler to appreciate, including the several hundred New York fans whod hoped to drink champagne in our ballpark, instead of a construction or accident report, is a simple message, easily decipherable by our wouldbe alien invaders RED SOX 5 YANKEES 4 No team in major league history has ever come back from an 03 hole to win a postseason series (no team in an 03 hole has even forced a Game 7), but its been done twice in the NHL. The last time it was done, it was done to my team. I was a Pittsburgh Penguins fan in 1975 (Im still a Penguins fan, dammit) when the New York Islanders came roaring back from 03 to shame us, winning by the slimmest of margins game after game, several of those in overtime. I was at Game 6 at the Civic Arena, and there was a dispiriting sense in the crowd that we were doomed to lose even though we had a 32 lead in games and were playing the last two on home ice. It was like a nightmare, knowing the horrible thing was going to happen but being powerless to stop it. Once wed lost Game 6, there was hardly any point in playing Game 7, and everyone knew it. We were cooked, broken, useless. We barely showed up, and the Isles pushbroomed us into the dustbin of history. Now, granted, the New York Yankees arent the Pittsburgh Penguins, but I must say that these Red Sox are as hungry as those young Islandersa team, you might remember, that matured and went on to win four straight Stanley Cups. SK Almost game time. Will they play? I think maybe they will. And Mr. Schill? Father Curt? I think maybe he will. And if the Red Sox do instead of die, Ive made arrangements to be in Yanqui Stadium tomorrow night for the kill. Drive those banderillas home, boys! One from Arroyo! Two more from the magickal Mr. Lowe! And one morein the ninththe killerfrom Pedro, the Closer from Hell. SO Its on. Gotta hit, and gotta field behind whoevers on the hill. Weve overcome big injuries all year, so why change now? I hope to hell you are there tomorrow, and the boys bring it home. And if not, we made em sweat blood. Billy Mueller in the 2 slotgood move. Bellhorn and Cabrera werent getting it done. Billy Mueller, Yankee Killer! October 20thALCS Game 6 At Fenway Park this morning, the groundskeepers will continue their little fieldgrooming chores instead of embarking on the larger chores that go with making a major league baseball field ready for winter. The concessionaires remain on standby, and the spectator gates will still be up on Yawkey Way. Incredibly, long after the baseball pundits on ESPNs SportsCenter and the sports cannibals in the Boston media had given them up for dead, the Boston Red Sox remain alive; in the words of the immortal Huey Lewis, the heart of rock n roll is still beating. Terry Francona kept Mark Bellhorn on the field and in the lineup even though the abovementioned pundits and cannibalswere by yesterday morning all but screaming for the manager to slot Reese in at second base, and Bellhorn responded with a threerun home run in the fourth inning. The rest of the night belonged to Father Curt, who dominated the Yankees for seven innings (his only mistake was a fat 31 pitch to Bernie Williams, who made him pay by stroking his 22nd postseason home run), and to Red Sox relievers Bronson Arroyo and Keith Foulke. The former ran into trouble when he gave up a double to Miguel Cairo and a single to Derek Jeter; the latter nearly gave me heart failure by walking Matsui and Sierra in the bottom of the ninth. In the end, however, Tony Clark ended the game by doing what he did so many times for the Red Sox in clutch situationshe struck out. Last night, and in the seasons most crucial situation, the Yankees stranded their comeback on first base. The worst moment for Sox fans came during ARods atbat in the eighth, following the Jeter single. Rodriguez hit a squibber between the pitchers mound and first. Arroyo fielded it, saw that his first baseman (Mientkiewicz, at that point) was out of position, and went to put the tag on ARod himself. Rodriguezslapped the ball from Arroyos mitt, and Jeter raced all the way around to make it 43. After Sox manager Terry Francona came out to protest, the umpires put their heads together and reversed the original decision, which had Rodriguez safe at first, and ruled him out on interference, instead. A sulky Derek Jeter (who slapped a phantom tag on David Ortiz and got an out call in Game 5 at Fenway) was forced to return to first base. He was still there when Gary Sheffield fouled out, ending the inning. Fans pelted the field with various objects; police in riot gear lined the foul lines in the top of the ninth; eventually the Red Sox did what no team has ever done before, which is to come back from a 30 deficit to tie a postseason bestofseven series. Whether or not they can go all the way and win Game 7 tonight is very much in question, but I intend to be there and see for myselfI called around and wangled a ticket to the game. Yankee Stadium is a horrible place for a Red Sox fan to be at the very best of times, if not Hell itself, then surely the very lowest cellar of purgatory, but I think it must still beat television. After three cold nights at Fenway and one warm one in front of Harlan Ellisons glass teat (when the Bronx fans were clearly freezing), I am prepared to testify in any court of law that being there is better. I think that if Fox had shown me one more shot of Curt Schillings bloody ankle last night I would have screamednot in horror or pity, but in rage. And anyone with a lick of sense watches such bigmoney games only with the volume turned all the way down. Listening to the endlessly blathering announcers always makes me think of what my mother used to say about the village idiot when she was growing up in Prouts Neck back in the late 1920s Hed talk about moonlight on a sunny afternoon. But never mind. That sounds bilious, and Im not in a bilious mood this morning. Far from it. Now that the Red Sox have come so far, I find it nearly impossible to believe they will come all the wayyet notcompletely impossible. I know this much if theres to be a miracle, I intend to see it with my own eyes. Time to hit save, eject the disc, and shut this machine down. Ruth Kings boy is going to New York City. SO Marky Mark made those boobirds from the other night eat their words. ARod slapping Bronsons glove off was a weird counterpoint to Byo hitting him to start the brawl in July. What a baldfaced cheater. And, man, Joe West has to be the worst umpire in the leaguethe 21 to Sierra was down the pipe. But the person at Yankee Stadium I feel sorriest for is the fan who had Bellhorns homer in his hands and dropped it. Come on, dude! Nice that the umps finally got that one right. Overfuckingjoyed, Stew SK Thank God Tony Clark still owed us a couple of Special Ks. Off to NYC. SO The rule book calls what ARod did an unsportsmanlike act. Fans everywhere are calling it an unmanlike act. So our 340K pitcher once again beat their 252M hitter. Justice prevailsfor now. Just remember the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. And cheaters never win. ALCS Game 7 Im not planning on going to Game 7. I dont have a ticket, Im exhausted from four straight late nights and rockhard hotel beds, and the last time I was at Yankee Stadium we didnt do so well. I figure Ill watch Steve on TV from my warm comfy couch. Then at three our Fenway neighbor Mason calls. If he can swing me a ticket, do I want to go? Because he just might be able to, but he needs to know right now. Im thoroughly burnt from the weekend. I mean, Ive got nothing leftno voice, no energy. But if were going to win tonight, Im going to be there. I dont care if we loseI do, but I think the way weve battled, weve got nothing to be ashamed of one way or the other. And if the guys dont do it, Id like to be there to applaud them for the great run theyve given us, and the great year. I dont want them to hear nothing but silence or, worse, ugly catcalls. Yeah, I tell Mason. Come on, how can I not go? Ive got a good feeling, he says. I do too. We really do have nothing to lose. If we lose, so what? Could it be as bad as 1986? I dont think so. But if we winIf we win it will be one of the greatest wins in Red Sox history. In baseball history. And those are the only two possible outcomes win or lose. Ill take those odds. Let me check and Ill call you back, Mason says, and then when he does, its a go. I toss my stuff in a plastic bag, kiss Trudy goodbye (Be careful! she urges, sure the Yankee fans will beat me senseless), hop in the car and zoom off to the Bronx. Last year I didnt go to Game 7, and I was glad. This year, one way or the other, Im not going to miss history. I get into the Stadium a half hour before game time, and its oddly quiet. I expected a seething full house, but here and there are empy seats, and the Yankee fansthough decked out in some of the ugliest team gear Ive ever seenare muttering to each other. Wheres the crude, inyourface stupidity? The 1918 banners? The guys with paint all over them? The crowd seems wary, tight. I see far more Sox hats and shirts than I did last month. Its like were taking over. David, the Yankee fan I sit beside, is incredibly polite and wellversed in the gamehes a baseball fan first, and only then a Yankee fan (he began as a Giants fan, and still owes some allegiance to them). Its an unexpected pleasure to sit with him and swap lore. The Yanks call on Bucky Fucking Dent to throw out the first pitch, hoping to stir up old ghosts. Yogi Berra, who watched Mazs homer go over the wall in Forbes Field, catches for him. Maybe they should have let Bucky start, because Kevin Brown has nothing. In the first, after Johnny is thrown out at the plate on a Manny singleon the very next pitch!Brown tries to sneak an 88 mph fastball past David Ortiz. Never happen. El Jefe lines it into the short porch (in Fenway it either falls for a single or Sheffield catches it racing in) for a 20 lead, and the Yanks never dig themselves out of that hole. With bases juiced in the second, Johnny Damon greets Javier Vazquez with a linedrive grand slam into the same short porch that has padded so many Yankees power stats over the years, and the thousand or so Faithful drown out the rest of the Stadium. And thats basically it. Tonight Derek Lowe, who was supposed to be the best number three pitcher in the majors, is just that. He gives up one hit in six innings. Ill say that again he gives up one hit in six innings. As in Game 4, DLowe rhymes with hero. Johnny hits a second dinger off Vazquez, just like he did on June 29th, and were up 81 and chanting Reggie Damon! The crowd is totally poleaxed, as if theyve shown up on the wrong night. They revive only when Pedro comes on for a vanity appearance in the seventh and gives up two runs, one of which Mark Bellhorn (from now until eternity Mark Fucking Bellhorn to Yankee fans) immediately gets back with a towering blast off the rightfield foul pole. Another garbage run on a sac fly, and yes, finally, that is it. Im behind home with Steve as we nail down the last outs. We dont even need our closer. Its 103, and no one can hit a sevenrun homer. Jeter looks sick. ARod and Sheffield have both gone 0forcomplete and total justice. Its as if the Sox have walked through the Stadium driving stakes through every single ghosts, vampires and Yankee fans rotten, cobwebby heart. Its quiet and the upper deck is halfempty. The Yankees are cooked, and their fans cant believe it. In the biggest game ever played in this rivalry, the Red Sox have beaten the Yankees at home, by a touchdown, on Mickey Mantles birthday. At one minute after midnight, the start of a new day, when Sierra grounds weakly to Pokey Reese, and Pokey flips to Doug Mientkiewicz (so simple!), the most expensive baseball team in history is history. And were sorry, George, but thats more than half a billion dollars youve spentfor nothing. Come on now Whos your Daddy? Diamondbacks. Angels. Marlins. Red Sox. Its like Papa Jack says aint nuthin for free. SOMEBODY gotta pay. And, Yankee fans, the one you just bought has a lifetime guarantee. October 21st Last night, in a game that was never supposed to happen, the Boston Red Sox completed the greatest comeback in the history of American professional sports. In light of that accomplishment, an inningbyinning postmortem would be pretty anticlimactic stuff, and not very helpful in understanding the magnitude of the event. You might as well try to describe a camel by describing a camels eyeball. Is winning the American League pennant an event of magnitude? We are, after all, fighting some kind of screwedup war in Iraq where over eleven hundred American soldiers have already died, not to mention at least two hundred American civilians. We are fighting (or trying to fight) a war on terrorism. We are electing a president in less than two weeks, and the dialogue between the candidates has never been hotter. In light of those things, does winning the pennant even matter? My answer you bet your sweet ass it does. One of the eeriest things about this years justconcluded BostonNew York baseball tussle is the way it mimicked this years ongoing political contest. John Kerry, a Massachusetts resident, was nominated in Boston and threw out the first pitch at a crucial Red SoxYankees game. George Bush was nominated in New York City, and Dick Cheney attended a YankeeRed Sox game, wearing a Yankees cap over the old solar sexpanel while snipers stood posted high above the fans. As with the Red Sox in the ALCS, Kerry started far behind, then pulled even in the polls. (Whether or not he can win his own Game 7 remains very much open to question, and even if he does, it probably wont be by the electoral college equivalent of seven runs.) The four playoff games in New York transcended mere sport for another reason. Except for the Irish tenor warbling his way through God Bless America during the seventhinning stretchnow a tradition at most or all parks, I thinkthere was little or no sign of 911 trauma at Yankee Stadium. The Yanks have had their trials and travails this year (poor pitching chief among them), but the need to provide therapy for their hurt and grieving city by winning the American League pennant was thankfully not one of them. Yet a comfy tradition of winning leaves onewhether that one be an individual or a sociological overset combined of several million fansunprepared for loss, especially when the loss is so shocking and unexpected. The headlines in this mornings three New York papers express that shock better than any man or womanonthestreet interview ever could. From the New York Times RED SOX TO YANKEES WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR and MONUMENTAL COLLAPSE. From the Daily News THE CHOKES ON US and (this is a classic, I think) HELL FREEZES OVER. Accompanying the latter is a picture of Pedro with his hands upraised and the caption Pedro Martinez celebrates in his daddys house. From the New York Post, sad and succinct DAMNED YANKEES. After the game, out by the gigantic bat in front of Gate 4, most Yankee fans were downcast but magnanimous, considering the fact that the Red Sox fansthere were plenty of themwere delirious with joy, pounding each other on the back, giving and receiving high fives, pogoing up and down. One large, hairy man grabbed me around the waist and whirled me around thrice, screaming, Stephen! Stephen! We won, ya scary sonofabitch! I LOVE YA! GO, RED SOX! I screamed back. It seemed safe enough, and besides, it was what I felt. GO, RED SOX! the large, hairy man screamed. GO, JOHNNY DAMON! GO, MANNY! GO, YOU LONGHAIRED SONSABITCHES! Then he was gone. From behind me there came a dissenting notethree Yankee fans, teenagers by the sound (I did not turn around to see), who wanted me to know that Red Sox suck, and you suck too, Steve. A mounted cop clopped by, leaned down, and said, Tell em to blow it out their asses. Tell em you been waitin eighteen years. I might just have done that little thing, but he clopped on, magnificent on his steed and in his riot gear. Such memories are like raisins in some fabulous dream cake. There are othersthe churlish, childish failure of the Yankees to congratulate the Red Sox on their electronic scoreboard; the downcast Yankee fan who hugged me and said he hoped the Red Sox would go all the way this time;two crying children, a boy and a girl, slowly mounting the steps and draggingtheir big foam Number One fingers disconsolately behind them on the concrete, headed out of Yankee Stadium hand in handbut mostly what I remember this morning are the lights, the noise, the sheer unreality of watching Johnny Damons grand slam going into the rightfield stands, and being wrapped in a big Stewart ONan bear hug while he screamed, Were going to the World Series! in my ear. And thats a fact we are indeed going to the World Series. Right now, after coming back from the dead to beat the Yankees four straight, it almost seems like a postscriptbut yes. Were going to the World Series. It starts in Boston. And it matters. Its part of an American life, and that matters a lot. SO We DID IT! And it was great to be there with you to see it. Its a win no one can ever take away from us. History, baby. The starting pitchers in tonights NLCS Game 7 are both products of the Red Sox Roger Clemens and Jeff Suppan, who started with the PawSox tenplus years ago and then returned for the last half of last season. In this one Suppan outpitches and outhits Clemens, executing a beautiful suicide squeeze that scoresof all peopleRed Sock spring training hopeful Tony Womack. SO So its gonna be the Cards. Welcome to 1967. Except this time its the Possible Dream. SK Somebody play me the Lullaby of Birdland. We got fucked over by the Orioles. We did okay against the Jays. How you feeling about the Cardinals? SO Dont bring the Os into this. Just dont. Miguel Tehater. And Im glad its the Cards, winners of 105 games and by far the best and most consistent team in the majors this year. If were going to finally win it all, I dont want it to be against a patsy like the Braves or Padres or Mets. Degree of difficulty counts, and whatever we achieve (or fail to achieve) the Cards will make us earn it. Within hours of last nights win, our email inbox began filling with satirical Yankeebashing pages. The classic was an advisory from the Red Cross informing us that the international signal for choking (a man holding his throat with both hands) would now be replaced by this more recognizable symbol (the intertwined N and Y). Marky Marks head was cutandpasted into a cast picture of Saved by the Bellhorn, and a shot of Derek Jeter and ARod glumly watching from the dugout rail bore the caption Not Going Anywhere for a While? and a Snickers logo. And, God help me, until they started repeating, I laughed at every single one. October 22nd There will be baseball tomorrow night under the lights at Fenway Park. In the meantime, these intermission notes OneDan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe columnist and author of The Curse of the Bambino, has been in full damagecontrol mode since Boston did its Rocky Balboa thing to win the pennant. Shaughnessys trying to convince joyful New Englanders that the Curse of the Bambino (largely created by Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who has book royalties to protect) is still in full force; beating the Yankees is not enough. Now Wait Just a Minute Series Still Must Be Won is the heading of todays column, which begins, Lets get one thing straight the Curse of the Bambino has not been lifted. The job is not yet done. I happened to catch Shaughnessy on one of the cable news channels last night not long after I arrived home from New York, spinning pretty much the same line. He was on the phone; Red SoxYankees highlights were playing on the screen. When he paused for breath, the newscaster asked him what he and Boston baseball fans would talk about visvis the Red Sox next year if Boston did happen to win the World Series. Either the query or the concept behind it seemed to catch Shaughnessy by surprise. There was an uncharacteristic pause, and then he said, You know, thats an interesting question. Which to my mind is always aninteresting response, meaning the person to whom the question has been directed has no freakin idea. Sure enough, Shaughnessy never did really respond to the newscasters question. Without the curse to fall back on (or the Curse, if you prefer), they might have to actually write about the games? You think? I know some of the Boston sports cannibals would find that a daunting proposition at the outset, but most of them (their taste for the golden flesh of athletes to one side) are pretty damned good writers, and Im sure theyd rise to the challenge in short order. TwoDuring the weehours postgame celebration outside Fenway Park, a twentyoneyearold Emerson College student named Victoria Snelgrove was killed when she was struck by a plastic ball filled with pepper spray. Boston police commissioner Kathleen OToole accepted responsibility for the young womans death (handsome, and no doubt of great comfort to her family), and in the next breath condemned the punks who seized upon the Red Sox victory over the Yankees as an opportunity for violence and destruction. Running beside this story is a picture of the late Ms. Snelgrove, looking not like a punk but a Madonna. Boston mayor Thomas Menino says the city is considering a ban of liquor sales during the World Series (think how proud his Puritan predecessors would be of that), and also of banning live TV coverage of the games in bars and restaurants, because it incites fans.This is causing the predictable howls of outrage from bar and restaurant owners, and they may have a point, especially since Menino failed to mention the sale of beer within Fenway Park itself while the games are going on. ThreeIts going to be St. Louis rather than Houston when the Series convenes tomorrow for another of those hateful (perhaps even beerless?) night games. The Rocket gave it his best shot last night in Game 7 of the NLCS, and the Astros even led for a while, but in the end the Roger Clemens tradition of just not being able to win the big game again held true. Red Sox rooters looking for additional reasons to believeand surely any would come in handy, considering that the 2004 Cardinals won more games than any other pro baseball teammight consider this in theNLCS, the home team won every game. |
And in this World Series, the Red Sox have the home field advantage. And have it thanks to Manny Ramirezs firstinning home run in the AllStar Game off ofRoger Clemens. Yogi Berra was a Yankee, but how could you not love a man who said, When you come to a fork in the road, take it? My favorite Yogi Berra story features Hank Aaron. Yogi was a catcher, of course, and when he was crouched behind the plate, hed always talk to distract the hitter. During the 1958 World Series, he kept telling Henry Aaron to hit with the label up, Hank, you dont want to do it that way, hit with the label up. Finally Hammerin Hank looked back over his shoulder and saidnot unkindlyI came up here to hit, not to read. On the night after the final game against Anaheim, I dreamed that Johnny Damon and I were digging through mounds of discarded equipmentgloves, pads, shin guardsin some filthy, forgotten equipment shed, looking for a magic pitching machine. I think that hitting a few balls thrown by this machine turned you into Mark McGwire. We never found it. It needs to be pointed out that, due to Bostons ferocious lateinning assault, not even those 6 runs were enough to assure the Yankees of the win. Due to the baseball scoring systemand we could argue about whether or not its fair to Father Curt in this case; there are points to be made either waySchilling takes the loss, but the runs which really sank us were the two driven in by Bernie Williams, against Mike Timlin, with two out in the bottom of the eighth. The good news by the bottom of the fourth inning, all but the most abysmally drunk Yankee fansthe twentyyearold nakedtothewaist males with large blueblack entwined NYs painted on their chests, in other wordshad given up on the mocking Whos your Daddy? chant. The bad news Pedro was behind 10 from the first inning (Derek Jeter, the first batter he faced, scored), left trailing 30, and eventually took the loss, 31. The fact that we had to open there at all is something I blame on the LEBsLoathsome El Birdos. In the only one I can remember, I was trying to work some kind of trade with George Steinbrenner, who was laughing at me and telling methis is probably the only interesting part, and surely the most significantthat I needed a haircut. Clark, a Red Sox castoff who specialized in strikeouts and earnest postgame interviews while with Bostonwhich sounds snottier than Clark, one of the games truly nice guys, probably deservesplayed first for John Olerud last night. Olerud was struck by a bat during the Saturday Night Massacre and showed up at the park Sunday on crutches. On second because Roberts flat out stole it off Rivera and Posada, both of whom knew he was going but could do nothing to stop him from getting into scoring position. Without this steal, our seasons over, and Roberts made it look easy. Theos very last trade before the deadlineRoberts straightup for PawSock outfielder Henri Stanleymay have been his best of the year. SO Thanks a pantload, Baltimore. Not to mention one cannibalette. That would be Jackie MacMullan of the Boston Globe, who spanked Manny Ramirez for keeping the bat on his shoulder too much after Bostons twelveinning 64 victory in Game 4. In that game all Manny did was reach base five times in six atbats, including the walk which preceded Big Papis walkoff. I have an acquaintance from Brooklyn who says that he and his friends call Rodriguez Show Pony, because of the seemingly ostentatious way he runs. And for all of you Hanshin Tigers fans out there, a measure of revenge Johnnys granny, like Jefes tworun shot, goes over a sign on the wall touting the Yomiuri Corporation. Ganbatte! And monster props to Terry Francona for engineering this matchup. Its like Bill Belichick drawing up a play that isolates our hot receiver on their weakest corner. Its a flatout mismatch, and at an absolutely crucial time. After Game 3, Franconas consistently outmanaged Joe Torre, whether its using the pen, changing the lineup around, or bringing in pinch runners and defensive replacements. Every move seems to have worked out for Tito, while Joe, with a deeper bench and pen, keeps fucking up. George, are you watching? Are you taking notes? No word yet on whether or not Menino is considering a ban on peppersprayfilled plastic balls, which seem to incite Boston police. The World Series The Possible Dream October 23rdWorld Series Game 1 SK I think Wake is a GREAT choice for Game 1. Sure hes a risk, but hed be MY choice; he might tie those big thumpas in knots. Even if he doesnt, I give Francona kudos for giving Timmy the ball. And for Gods sake, hes gonna put Mirabelli behind the plate, right? Right. Seeya 530, Steve I Still Believe King Id violently disagree with SteveWake is his boy as much as Dave McCarty is mine, and Wakes been plain awful this year, besides the few usual wins in Tampa; the best thing he did was volunteer to mop up in Game 3 against the Yanks and give Lowe his spot in the rotationbut Im out the door and sailing across I84 before Steves email reaches me. Its been a long time since Ive been to a World Series, and I aim to get my fill. The souvenir shops around the park dont open until noon. At eleventhirty, lines of eager buyers stretch far down the block. The amount of free junk people are handing out is astoundingpapers, posters, buttons, stickers, pictures, temporary tattoos, Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Fans are staggering around with bags of the crap, in total material overload. When the stores open, barkers with bullhorns herd customers into switchbacked ropesThis line only for World Series and AL Champion merchandisethis line only! Hanging out by the parking lot eight hours before game time, the autograph hunters are treated to an impromptu concert by Steven Tyler as he runs his sound check for tonights anthem. Steven doesnt actually sing the song, he just blows an A on his harmonica and runs through an ascending series of bluesy scales, and sounds greata cool reminder that Aerosmith started out as an electric blues band influenced by the early Stones, the Yardbirds and Muddy Waters. After that, PA announcer Carl Beane warms his pipes, rumbling Ladies and gentlemen, please welcomethe National League Champion, St. Louis Cardinals, over and over, as if he might have trouble with it later. He goes through a fantastical lineup Batting first, number oneCarlBeane. A minute later, Batting fourth, number nineTedWilliams, and the crowd outside applauds. Batting fifth, number sixStanMusial. And speaking of oldtimers, rumor is that Yaz is throwing out the first pitch, a sentimental touch, and overdue, since its said that Yaz and the club havent had the best of relationships since he retired. The new owners may be trying to patch things over. We also witnesswell in advancethe return of Lenny DiNardo and Adam Hyzdu, two guys who spent time with the club early in the year. Its nice to see the Sox are giving them a taste of the big show (though, of course, the guy we really want to see is Dauber). Two other early arrivals of note team physician Dr. Bill Morgan and, fifteen minutes later, wearing a brace on his right leg and no shoe in the cold, Curt Schilling. Before Game 6, Dr. Morgan sutured Schills tendon to his skin, a procedure he practiced first on a cadaver. Rumor (again, rumor, the outsiders substitute for information) is that hes going to stitch him up again for tomorrows start in Game 2. On those few threads, our whole season may depend. Inside, there are more banners than Ive seen all yeara lifting of the normal ban, for TVs sake, I expect. Its cold, with a wind whipping in from straight center, which should give Wakes knuckler more flutter. Even the stiff wind isnt enough to keep David Ortiz in the park tonight. In the first, in his very first World Series atbat, El Jefe busts out with a threerun golf shot OVER the Pesky Pole. We chase Woody Williams early, giving Wake a 72 lead going into the fourth. Beside me, Steve is smiling. Kevin, the usher who comes down between innings with a camp chair to keep people off the wall, is overjoyed with how things are going. No, I say, glum, just watch Wakell start walking people. He always does when we give him a big lead. And I dont say this to jinx anything, I say it because Ive seen Wake all year long, and thats just what he does. And thats just what he doeswalking four in the fourth to break a World Series record, and soon after hes gone its 77. Its like they used to say about Fenway when it was a launching pad no lead is safe here. Man, that was ogly, Orlando Cabrera said in a postgame interview. He paused, then added, But we won. Ogly pretty well sums up the first game of this years World Series, which ended with a thing of beauty Keith Foulke striking out Roger Cedeno a few minutes after midnight. Speaking of ogly, Orlando wasnt looking so good himself in that interview, and he seemed uncharacteristically solemn. A Woody Williams pitch hit him on the shoulder in the first inning, then bounced up into his face, leaving him with a bruised chin, a fat lip, and a temporary inability to smilewhich, under ordinary circumstances, Mr. Garciaparras replacement does often. Pain or no pain, Cabrera must have been at least tempted to test that smile when the Red Sox finally escaped with an ogly but serviceable 119 win in spite of four errors (one by Bronson Arroyostarter Tim Wakefields fourthinning reliefone by Kevin Millar, and two by Manny Ramirez). Every one of those errors led to runs, leading me to wonder if any of the Red Sox players felt tempted to visit the Cardinals clubhouse after the game and assure them on behalf of the home team that Boston doesnt play that way every night. Cabrera might have been even more tempted to test his swollen lip if informed of this statistic in World Series history, the team drawing first blood has gone on to win the Fall Classic 60 percent of the time. Still, theres that other 40 percentand the fact that the Cards have yet to lose during this postseason on their home field. Butfingers crossed, nowyouve got to like the Red Sox going into Game 2. Theyre nice and loose (what could be looser than four errors and four walks issued by Red Sox pitching?), their demonic archrivals are behind them and theyre riding a nifty fivegame winning streak. Last nights game began with a moment of silence for Victoria Snelgrove, the young woman killed by a peppergas ball during riotcontrol operations outside Fenway following Bostons final victory over New York,and while it was both decent and brave of the current ownership to remember her (one is tempted to believe that the previous bunch of caretakers would have swept Ms. Snelgrove under the rug as fast and as far as possible), it was also a reminder of what is truly ogly in our brave new world, where all game bags are searched and the clocks tick on Osama Mean Time. There were lines of Boston police, looking like puffy Michelin Men in their riot gear, watching impassively as the happy and largely wellbehaved crowd left the old green First New England Church of Baseball with the strains of Dirty Water still ringing in their ears and the memory of Mark Bellhorns gamewinning, foulpolebanging home run still vivid in their minds. To me those dark lines of armed men outside such a place of ancient and innocent pleasure are a lot harder to look at than the mark on Orlando Cabreras face, or his swelled lower lip. 119 is a crazy score for a World Series game; so is a total of 24 hits and 5 errors. But the bottom line is that we won, Father Curt takes the mound tomorrow night on home turf with his freshly restitched ankle, and thats a beautiful thing. (A remarkable one, anyway.) I only wish Torie Snelgrove was around to see it. The most surprising thing to me about Game 1 was how the Faithful booed Dale Sveum during the pregame introductions. I suppose its a delayed (or should I say sustained?) reaction to Johnny being thrown out at home in the first inning of Game 7 of the ALCS. Whatever it is, I dont like it. And despite the win, I dont like the way Kevin Millar played, leaving ten men on, making essentially two errors on the same play (doubleclutching that cutoff, then throwing the ball into the dugout), and later not getting anywhere near a ball hit down the line that both Mientkiewicz and McCarty handle easily. By contrast, the Cards Larry Walker took to the big stage in a big way, making two great catches in right (a Manny liner down into the corner with men on, and a windblown pop he had to run a long way and then lunge for at the last second), and hitting a double, a homer, a single and another double. This is Walkers first World Series, after a long and brilliant career in the hinterlands of Montreal and Colorado, and it was heartening to see him show the world his A game. If Pujols, Rolen and Edmonds had done anything to help him out, wed be down 01. Mark Bellhorn, meanwhile, seems determined to enforce the curse of the exCubs (that is, the team with more exCubs is bound to lose the Seriesthe Cards have five while we only have two, Marky Mark and Billy Mueller). Before his home run off Julian Tavarez, he was 2 for 3 against him lifetime, so his success didnt surprise me, only the magnitude of it. It was no fluke. Tavarez didnt fool him at all. Marky Mark ripped the pitch before his Pesky Pole shot high and deep down the line in right, but foul. All he had to do was reload and straighten it out, making him one of a very rarefied clubplayers whove homered in three straight postseason games. October 24thWorld Series Game 2 On the street outside the players lot I run into Andrew on his way out to buy some salads for the guys. Were surrounded by a crowd of tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars. Camera crews, cops. Andrew still cant believe this is all happeninga common reaction among the Nation, even those deep inside it. I ask him about Schills ankle, and tell him about seeing Dr. Morgan yesterday. Yeah, he says, they had him on the table, but he tried to stay away from there. Hows he look? I ask. Andrew just shrugs. Well have to see. Inside, I catch Tony Womack along the leftfield wall, joking with an old friend in the stands about beating him at golf next week. When he gets a break, I ask him how his collarbone feels after taking that David Ortiz smash off it last night. Im fine, he says, and I tell him how much Id been rooting for him in spring training. You ran great, bunted great, stole bases. I wish you could have played the field. Man, he says, shaking his head, they didnt want me. We shake hands, and a minute later he calls Larry Walker over. Walker looks puzzled until he sees Tonys friend. You know this guy? Tony asks. Know this guy? Walker says. This guy owes me eight grand! Its Sunday, and in the concourse crowds are gathered around the wallmounted TVs watching the Patriots beat the Jets for their twentyfirst consecutive win. If the Pats can win twentyone straight, the logic goes, why cant we win eight? Our seats are down in the corner where I normally post up for BPbetter seats than Im used to. How good? Above us in the Monster seats is Jimmy Fallon, and two rows in front of us, so close I could lean forward and tap his shoulder, is Eagles QB Donovan McNabb. He played an outstanding game today in Cleveland, his long scramble setting up an overtime win. He must have showered and gotten right on the plane. Hes so tired that the only time he stands up during the game is to go to the restroom, but, like us, he stays for every drizzly, windswept pitch. October 25th One summer night in the mid1960s, right around the time the Beatles were ruling the American music charts, a young music producer named Ed Cobb happened to be walking with his girlfriend beside the Charles River in the quaint old city of Boston, Massachusettsor so the story goes. Out of the shadows came a thief who tried to mug him out of his wallet (or maybe it was out of her purse; on that the story is not entirely clear). In any case, the musically inclined Mr. Cobb foiled the thief and got an idea for a song as a bonus. The song, Dirty Water, was eventually recorded by a group of Boston protopunks called the Standells and released by Capitol, who wanted a record Cobb had produced for Ketty (Anyone Who Had a Heart) Lester. No one expected much from the raw and raunchyDirty Water, but it went to 11 on the Billboard pop charts and has remained a standard on the Boston club scene ever since. It was revived by the new Red Sox management and has become the goodtime signature of Boston wins. For the Fenway Faithful, theres nothing better than seeing the final out go up on the scoreboard and hearing that sixnote intro with the familiar firstnote slide leading into the verse Down by the riiiiverAnd so it seemed a particularly good omen to see the resurrected Standells in deep center field before the game last night, a lot grayer and a little thinner on top but still loud and proud, singing about that dirty water down by the banks of the River Charles. A great many things about baseball in general and the Red Sox in particular are about the bridges between past and presentthis was just one more provided by a current Yawkey Way administration that seems pleasantlyaware of tradition without becoming enslaved to it. And when the Red Sox had put this one away in the cold mists of a late Sunday evening, the sounds of Dirty Water rang out again, this time with the tempo a little faster and the tones a little truer. And why not? This was the one recorded when the Standells were young. This is the version that hit the charts four months before Curt Schilling was born. He was awesome last night. The word is tired, clappedout from overuse, but Ive had a 170mile drive to try and think of a better one, and I cannot. The crowd of just over thirtyfive thousand in the old green Church of Baseball knew what it was seeing; many of them may have been in Fenway Park for the first time last night (these Seriesonly fans are what Globe writer Dan Shaughnessy so rightly calls the Nouveau Nation), but even they knew. The galaxy of flashbulbs that went off in the stadium, from the plum dugout seats to the skyviews to the distant bleachers to those now perched atop the Green Monster, was chilling in its cold and commemorative brilliance, declaring by silent light that the men and women who came to the ballpark last night had never seen anything quite like it for sheer guts and never expected to see anything quite like it again. Not, certainly, with their own eyes. Edgar Renteria, the Cardinals leadoff hitter, battled Schilling fiercelyfirst six pitches, then ten, then a dozen, running the count full and then spilling off foul after foul.He might have been the games key batter, and not the ones Schilling had to face following more Boston miscues (another four) that allowed the Cardinals extra chances upon which they could not capitalize. Before finally hitting sharply to shortstop (and the oftenmaligned Kevin Millar made a fine pick at first to complete the play), Renteria tried every trick in the book. Every trick, that is, save one. He never attempted to lay down a bunt. In three starts on his bad pegtwo against the Yankees and now one against the Cardinalsno one has tried to make Curt Schilling field his position. Im sure the Red Sox infielders have discussed this possibility and know exactly how they would handle itbut it has simply never come up. And when this thing is over, when the hurlyburlys done, all the battles lost and won, someone needs to ask the Yankee andCardinal hitters why they did not bunt. Of course I can imagine the boos that would rain down on a successful bunter against Father Curt at Fenway, but is it beyond the scope of belief to think that even Yankee or Cardinal fans might find it hard to cheer such a ploy for reaching first (wellmaybe not Yankee fans)? Could it have beendont laughactual sportsmanship? Whatever the reason, the Cards played him straight up last nightI salute them for itand for the most part, Father Curt mowed them right down. Tony Womack and Mike Matheny had singles; Albert Pujols had a pair of doubles. And, as far as hits against Schilling went, that was it. He finished his nights work by striking out the side in the sixth. For the Red Sox, it was a continuing case of tworun, twoout thunder. Two runs scored after two were out in the first; two more after two were out in the fourth; two more in the sixth, the same way.By the end of the game (Mike Matheny, groundout), the deep green grass of the field and the bright white of the Red Sox home uniforms had grown slightly diffuse in the thickening mizzle. The departing fans, damp but hardly dampened, were all but delirious with joy. One held up a poster depicting a Christlike Johnny Damon walking on water with the words JOHNNY SAVES beneath his sandaled feet. I heard one fansurely part of Mr. Shaughnessys Nouveau Nationactually saying he hoped the Red Sox would lose a couple in St. Louis, so the team could clinch back on its home soil (yes, Beavis, he actually said home soil). I had to restrain myself from laying hands on this fellow and asking him if he remembered 1986, when we also won the first two, only to lose four of the next five. And when a team is going this well (RED HOT RED SOX, trumpets this mornings USA Today), one loss can lead to others. Winning two at home, within a sniff of the River Charles, may have been vital, considering the fact that the Cardinals have yet to lose a single postseason game in their own house. Tomorrow night, Pedro Martinez will face the Cards near the dirty water of a much larger river, in a much larger stadium. It will be his first World Series start, and given that no team has ever climbed out of an03 World Series hole (and surely that sort of thing cant happen twice in the same postseasoncan it?), I think its going to be the most important start by a Red Sox pitcher in a long, long time. Certainly since 1986. October 26thWorld Series Game 3 SK Dear StewartUndertheArch Heres my idea of the doomsday scenario, also known as the Novelists Ending. The BoSox win one game in SaintLoo. Come back to Boston up three games to two. Lose Game 6. Andhave to start Father Curt for all the marbles in Game 7. Stewart, this could actually happen. SO Im hoping we can steal one out there, and hey, if we get two, I wont be crying about eating my Game 6 tickets. Its just like the Yankee series we just have to win one gamethe game were playing. SK All lookin good. Now, if Pedro can only do his part. You know, I think he will. SO Pedro remains inscrutable. We cant hit like its a regular Pedro game; we have to pretend its John Burkett out there. Think seven or eight runs. Go Sox! The Sox are up 40 as the game rolls into the ninth, and I find I cant sit down. As Foulke comes in, Im muttering the lyrics to his Fenway entrance music, Danzigs Mother (And if you want to find Hell with me, I can show you what its like). He gets Edgar Renteria, then has Larry Walker 02 when he just lays a fastball in there, and Walker golfs it out. I watch Johnny turn and watch it, then Im out of the room, swearing and pacing through the house. Its okay, weve got a threerun lead and theres no one on. Foulkie just has to go after hitters and not walk anybody. Pujols gets behind and jaws at the ump after a borderline call, then skies one deep to left (oh crap) that Manny settles under (whew)thats two. Scott Rolen, 0 for the series, is taking, gets behind, then inexplicably takes the 12 pitch, which, while slightly in, is clearly a strike, and the ump punches him out to end the game. Were up 30 and Im jumping around the room. Petey came through so big, and Manny, and Billy Mueller hitting with two down. Were a game away. Ive been a strike away before, so Im already trying to play it down, but, damn, I didnt expect us to ever be up 30 on the Cards. The idea of winning it all sends me romping through the house, bellowing the Dropkick Murphys Tessie, even though I dont know all the words Up from third base to Huntington, theyd sing another victry sooooooongtwo, three, four! Boston has now won seven in a row (tying a postseason record), pushing the Cards to the brink where the Red Sox themselves stood only a week ago. The most amazing thing about the World Series part of the Red Sox run is that the Cardinals have yet to lead in a single game. Their manager, Tony La Russa, certainly knows this, and while his part of the postgame news conference seemed long to me, it must have seemed interminable to him. He looked more like a middlelevel racketeer being questioned in front of a grand jury than a successful baseball manager. Part of the reason for La Russas long face may have had to do with the games key play, which came in the third inning, when Cardinals base runner (and starting pitcher) Jeff Suppan was thrown out at third. Suppan led off the inning with a slow roller to third. Mueller handled it cleanly, but not in time to get Suppan at first. Edgar Renteria followed with a double to right that had Trot Nixon falling on his ass because of the wet conditions in the outfield.Suppan probably could have scored right there, tying the game, but perhaps he was held up by the thirdbase coach. (Well give him the benefit of the doubt, anyway.) So with runners at second and third and nobody out, up came Larry Walker, a gent who is absolutely no slouch with the stick. He hit a ground ball to Mark Bellhorn. At that point the Boston infield was playing back, conceding Suppans run, which would have tied the score, 11. But Suppan didnt score when Walker made contact, nor did he when Bellhorn threw Walker out.Instead he broke toward home, broke back toward third base, then broke toward home a second time. Meanwhile, Bostons new kid on the block at first base, David Ortiz, in the lineup because the designated hitter doesnt exist in National League parks, was observing all this. From Ortizs side of the diamond, Suppan must have looked as frantic and disoriented as a bird trapped in a garage. He fired across the diamond to Bill Mueller just as Suppan darted back toward third base a second time. Suppan dove for the bag, but Mueller was able to put the tag on him easily. The result of this beerleague baserunning was that instead of tying the score against one of the American Leagues craftiest power pitchers with only one out, the Cardinals found themselves with two outs and no runs scored. Albert Pujols followed Walker, grounding out harmlessly to end the inning. The Cards would not score until the bottom of the ninth, and by then it was too late. The irony (La Russas long postgame face suggested he did not need this pointed out to him) was that the National League team had been screwed by the very rules that were supposed to tip the scales in their favor. It was their pitcher who made the baserunning blunder, and our erstwhile designated hitter who saw it happening and gunned him down. Although Boston got a pair of insurance runs in the fifth, more twoout thunder from Manny Ramirez in the firstand Bill Mueller (batted home by Trot Nixon) in the fourth were all the run support Pedro Martinez needed; he, Mike Timlin and Keith Foulke spun a gem. Following Edgar Renterias double in the third inning, Red Sox pitching retired eighteen Cards in a row. Larry Walker broke up the string with one out in the ninth, turning around a Keith Foulke fastball to deep left center for a home run. So now the St. Louis deficit is 03. One would like to say that lightning cannot strike twice on the same patch of ground, and certainly not so soon, but in truth, one cannot say that. Especially not if one happens to have been a Red Sox fan for the last fifty years and has had the cup snatchedaway from his lips so many times just before that first deep and satisfying drink. I dont think Ive ever been so aware of the limitations of this narratives necessary diary form until today. You sitting there with the finished book in your hand are like an astronaut who can see the entire shape of the earth where every sea ends and every coastline begins again. I just go sailing along from day to day, hoping to avoid the storms and writing in this log when seas are calm. And now I think I can smell land up ahead. I hope Im not jinxing things by saying that, but I really think I can. Not just any land, either, but the sweet Promised Land Ive been dreaming of ever since my Uncle Oren bought me my first Red Sox cap and stuck it on my head in the summer of 1954. There, Stevie, he said, blowing the scent of Narragansett beer into the face of the bigeyed sevenyearold looking up at him. They aint much, but theyre the best we got. Now, fifty long years later, theyre on the verge of being the best of all. One more game and we can put all this curse stuff, all this Babe stuff, all this 1918 stuff, behind us. Please, baseball gods, just one more game. SK Ah, but I begin to smell exotic spices and strange nerdser, nardscould these be the scents of the Promised Land? I can only hope they are not scents sent by false sirens on hidden stones beyond a mirage of yon beckoning shore But I digress. We rocked tonight, dude. SO Its good to be up 30 instead of down 03, but the jobs the same win the game were playing. The guys have to stay on top of it. SK You must have been eating the postgame spread with Tito. ) October 27thWorld Series Game 4 Its Trudys and my twentieth anniversary today. We were supposed to be in Chicago last weekend, eating at Charlie Trotters and the Billy Goat Tavern (the honesttoGod home of the Cubs curse as well as the cheeburger, cheeburger skit from SNL), but those plans dissolved in the face of Games 1 and 2. Tonight, at Trudys insistence, I call and cancel our longstanding dinner reservations at the best restaurant in town. I dont tell the maitre d why. Enjoy the game, he says. Signs and portents everywhere. Tonights the eighteenth anniversary of our last World Series lossGame 7 to the 86 Mets. Not only is there a full moon, but right around game time theres a total lunar eclipse. By the time I go outside to see the lip of the earths shadow cross the Sea of Tranquility, Johnny has us up 10 with a leadoff home run. Later, when Trot doubles on a basesjuiced 30 green light to give us a 30 lead, the eclipse is well under way, casting a decidedly red stainblood on the moon, or is it a cosmic nod to the Sox? For the third game in a row, Lowe pitches brilliantly, giving up just three hits in seven innings. Arroyo looks shaky in the eighth, but Embree relieves him and is perfect for the second straight outing. As Foulke closes, Im standing behind the couch, shifting with every pitch as if Im guarding the line. At this point, for no other reason it seems than to torture us, Fox decides to show a montage combining all the horrible moments in Red Sox postseason history, beginning with Enos Slaughter, moving through Bucky Dent and Buckner, and finishing with Aaron Boone. I hold a hand up to block it out (to eclipse it!). At this moment in Red Sox history, I do not want to see that shit. Its not bad luck, its bad taste, and whoever thought it was appropriate is a jerk. With one down, Pujols singles through Foulkes legs, right through the fivehole, a ball Foulke, a diehard hockey fan, should have at least gotten a pad on. Were nervousanother runner and theyll bring the tying run to the platebut Foulkes cool. Hes got that bitter disdainthat nastiness, reallyof a great closer. He easily strikes out Edmonds (now 1 for 15), then snags Edgar Renterias comebacker and flips to Mientkiewicz, and thats it, its that simple the Red Sox have won the World Series! While were still hugging and pounding each other (Trudys crying, she cant help it; Stephs laughing; Im just going Wow. Wow. Wow.) Caitlin calls from Boston. In the background, girls are shrieking. Shes at Nickerson Field, formerly Braves Field, where B.U. |
is showing the game on a big screen. I can barely hear her for the noise. They did it! she yells. They did! I yell back. Theres no analysis, just a visceral appreciation of the win. I tell her to stay out of the riots, meaning keep away from Fenway, and she assures me she will. Its not until I get off the phone with her that I realize the weird parallel when I was a freshman there, my team won the World Series too. Its more than just a win; its a statement. By winning tonight, we broke the record for consecutive playoff wins, with eight straight. Another stat that every commentator unpacks is that were one of only four championship teams to have never trailed in the Series. Thanks to Johnny, O.C., Manny and Papi, we scored in the first inning of every game, and our starters, with the exception of Wake, shut down St. Louiss big sticks. Schill, Petey and DLowe combined for 20 shutout innings. Much respect to pitching coach Dave Wallace and his scouts for coming up with a game plan to stop the Cards. As a team, they batted .190, well below the Mendoza Line. Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds went 1 for 30, that one hit being a gimme bunt single by Edmonds against a shifted infield. Albert Pujols had zero RBIs. Reggie Sanders went 0 for 9. Its not that we crushed the ball. We scored only four runs in Game 3 and three in Game 4. Essentially, after the Game 1 slugfest, we played NL ball, beating them with pitching, and in the last two games our defense was flawless. In finally putting the supposed Curse to rest, we dotted every i and crossed every t. And to make it all even sweeter, the last out was made by Edgar Renteria, who wearsas a couple of folks notedthe Babes famous 3. October 28th It came down to this with two outs in the St. Louis half of the ninth and Keith Foulke on the moundFoulke, the nearly sublime Red Sox closer this postseasononly Edgar Renteria stood between Boston and the end of its World Series drought. Renteria hit a comebacker to the mound. Stabbed by Foulke! crowed longtime Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione. He underhands to first! The Red Sox are World Champions! Can you believe it? I hardly could, and I wasnt the only one. A hundred miles away, my son woke up his fiveyearold son to see the end. When it was over and the RedSox were mobbing each other on the infield, Ethan asked his father, Is this a dream or are we living real life? The answer, it seems to me this morning, is both. The only newspaper available at the general store was the local one (the others were held up because of the lateness of the game), and the SunJournals huge frontpage headline, of a size usually reserved only for the outbreak of war or the sudden death of a president, was only two words and an exclamation mark AT LAST! When the other New England papers finally do arrive in my sleepy little pocket of New England, Im confident they will bear similar happy headlines of a similar size on their front pages. A game summary would be thin stuff indeed compared to this outpouring of joy on a beautiful blue and gold New England morning in late October.Usually when I go to get the papers and my 8 A.M. doughnut, the little store up the road is almost empty. This morning it was jammed, mostly with people waiting for those newspapers to come in. The majority were wearing Red Sox hats, and the latest political news was the last thing on their minds. They wanted to talk about last nights game. They wanted to talk about the Series as a whole. They wanted to talk about the guts of Curt Schilling, pitching on his hurt ankle, and the grit of Mr. Lowe, who was supposed to spend the postseason in the bullpen and ended up securing a magickal and historickal place for himself in the record books instead, as the winner in all three postseason clinchers Game 3 of the Division Series, Game 7 of the League Championship Series, and now Game 4 of the World Series. And while none of those waiting for the bigtime morning papersthe Boston Globe, USA Today, and the New York Timescame right out and asked my grandsons question, I could see it in their eyes, and I know they could see it in mine Is this a dream, or are we living real life? Its real life. If there was a curse (other than a sportswriters brilliantMacGuffin for selling books, amplified in the media echo chamber until even otherwise rational people started to halfbelieve it), it was the undeniable fact that the Red Sox hadnt won a World Series since 1918, and all the baggage that fact brought with it for the teams longsuffering fans. The Yankees and their fans have always been the heaviest of that baggage, of course. Yankee rooters were never shy about reminding Red Sox partisans that they were supporting lifetime losers. There was also the undeniable fact that in recent years the Yankee ownershipcomfy and complacent in their much bigger ballpark and camped just downstream from a waterfall of fan cashhad been able to outspend the Red Sox ownership, sometimes at a rate of two dollars to one. There was the constant patronization of the New York press (the Times, for instance, chuckling in its indulgently intelligent way over the ARod deal, and concluding that the Yankees were still showing the Red Sox how to win, even in the offseason), the jokes and the gibes. The ball through Bill Buckners legs in 1986 was horrible, of course, but now Buckner can be forgiven. Whats better is that now the Bucky Dent home run, the Aaron Boone home run and the monotonous chants of Whos your Daddy? can be forgotten. Laughed off, even. On the whole, I would have to say that while to forgive is human, to forget is freakin divine. And winning is better than losing. Thats easy to lose sight of, if youve never done it. I can remember my younger son sayingand there was some truth in thisthat when the Philadelphia Phillies finally won their World Championship after years of trying, they became just another baseball team. When I asked Owen if he could live with that as a Red Sox fan, he didnt even hesitate. Sure, he said. I feel the same way. No one likes to root for a loser, year after year; being faithful does not save one from feeling, after a while, like a fool, the butt of everyones joke. At last I dont feel that way. This mornings sense of splendid unreality will surely rub away, but the feeling of lightness that comes with finally shedding a burden that has been carried far too long will linger for months or maybe even years. Cubs fans now must bear the loser legacy all by themselves. They have their Curse of the Billy Goat, and although I am sure it is equally bogus,they are welcome to it. Bottom of the ninth, two out, Albert Pujols on second, Red Sox Nation holding its breath. Foulke pitches. Renteria hits an easy comebacker to the mound. Foulke fields it and tosses it to Mientkiewicz, playing first. Mientkiewicz jumps in the air, holding up the index finger of his right hand, signaling Were number one. Red Sox players mob the field while stunned and disappointed Cardinal fans look on. Some of the little kids are crying, and I feel bad about that, but back in New England little kids of all ages are jumping for joy. Can you believe it? Joe Castiglione exults, and eightysix years of disappointment fall away in the length of time it takes the firstbase ump to hoist his thumb in the out sign. This is not a dream. We are living real life. While the Babe may be resting easier, I barely sleep, and wake exhausted, only to watch the same highlights again and again, seeing things I missed while we were celebrating. As the Sox mob each other, in the background Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore are kissing, shooting their fairytale ending to Fever Pitch (nice timing, Farrellys!). In short center, right behind second base, Curtis Leskanic lies down and makes the natural grass equivalent of a Patriots snow angel. The crawl says RED SOX WIN WORLD SERIES, and I think, yes, yes they did. It did happen. It was no dream. Were the World Champions, finally, and theres that freeing sense of redemption and fulfillment I expectedthe same cleansing feeling I had after the Pats first Super Bowl win. The day is bright and blue, the leaves are brilliant and blowing. Its a beautiful day in the Nation, maybe the best ever. And yet, the seasons over, too. There will be no more baseball this year, and while Ive said I wouldnt mind eating my tickets to Games 6 and 7, it feels wrong that I wont be back in Fenway again until April. Just for fun, I go to the website (choked with new World Champions merchandise) and poke around, looking for spring training information. Theres a number for City of Palms Park, but when I call it, its busy. Its going to be crazy there next year. If I want to get in, Id better start working on it now. I flip the pages of our 2005 calendar to February and March and wonder when Trudys school has its break. I wonder if theres a nicer hotel closer to City of Palms Park, and whether theyd have any rooms left at this point. I have to stop myself. Okay, calm down. Theres no need to hustle now, the very morning after. I can take a day off and appreciate what weve donewhat theyve done, the players, because as much as we support them, theyre the ones out there who have to field shots wed never get to, and hit pitches that would make us look silly, and beat throws that would have us by miles. And the coaches and the manager, the owners and the general manager, who have to make decisions well never take any heat for. They did it, all of them together, our Red Sox. Congratulations, guys. And thank you. You believed in yourselves even more than we did. Thats why youre World Champions, and why well never forget you or this season. Wherever you go, any of you, youll always have a home here, in the heart of the Nation. Go Sox! SO You know how the papers are always saying you bring the team bad luck? Well, the one year you write a book about the club, we win it all. Another fake curse reversed. Not in your lifetime, huh? Well, brutha, welcome to Heaven! SK How do you suppose Angry Bill is doing? SO Hes in that box of a room in Vegas, grumbling about somethingprobably the Bruins. SK Are you going to the VR Day Parade? SO No, but tonight I ate that Break the Curse cookie I got on Opening Day. A vows a vow. Washed that stiff sixmonthold biscuit down with champagne and enjoyed every morsel. Life is sweet. Off to drink more champagne. You (and Johnny D) are still The Man. SK No, Stewart, you (and Papi) are The Man. Im giving you the two PointyFinger Salute. SO Right back atcha, baby. Keep the Faith. All right, Im no ingrate he saved our bacon in extras in Game 5, holding the Yanks scoreless for three nervous, passedballfilled innings and picking up the win. In my high school, the phrase lovers, muggers and thieves was routinely construed to be either lovers, junkies and thieves or lovers, fuckers and thieves. To prolong or deepen this drama, the pitchspeed display above the wall in leftcenter was tantalizingly blank for this halfinning. Who knew what Schill had? Only Tek and the hitters. SO Respectively Tek with a triple to the triangle thats out if the wind isnt blowing straight in; Marky Mark with a similar bomb off the wall in dead center; and OCab, who was uncharacteristically ahead in the count all night, bonking one off the Monster. SO It rained heavily in St. Louis right up until game time, and the warning track was a swimming pool. I hate it when teams are forced to play ball under these conditions, but its the same old sordid story when Fox talks, Major League Baseball walks. If this is going to continue, the Players Association ought to consider insisting on pads and helmets (at least for the outfielders) after October 15th. Followed, in the bottom of the inning, by Mannys perfect onehop peg on a short fly to nail Larry Walker at the plate and keep us up 10. This moment of redemption after Manny had made errors on consecutive and very ogly plays in Game 1. Cardinals third base coach Jose Oquendo, like so many other baseball people, mistook Mannys spaciness for lack of ability. Anyone whos watched Manny throw knows hes amazingly accurate and that Walker had no chance. SO Along with Tony La Russas 1989 As, the 66 Os and the 63 Dodgers. All three, like the Sox, had a pair of acesDave Stewart and Bob Welch with the As, Jim Palmer and Dave McNally with the Os, and Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale with the Dodgers. And the summary is simple enough once again last night we hit and pitched. The Cardinals did neither. Only one Cardinal starterJason Marquismanaged to stay in a Series game for six innings, and the heart of the St. Louis batting order (Pujols, Rolen, Edmonds) got only a single run batted in during the entire fourgame contest. It came on a sac fly. Not so! That ones real, and solidly documented. SO So many story lines wrapped last night Manny, who went unclaimed on waivers, is the World Series MVP (and very possibly the regularseason MVP as well); Lowe totally vindicates himself, making him an incredibly attractive free agent; the same with Pedro; Terry Francona goes from The Coma to a legendary Red Sox manager; Orlando Cabrera, who stepped up big in the number two slot and fielded brilliantly in the postseason, makes us forget Nomar. The year is signed, sealed and delivered. All thats left now is the Boston Duck Tours parade and the team deciding who gets a World Series share. As always, I hope Daubers not forgotten. Acknowledgments For our baseball widows, Trudy and Tabby And for Ted, Johnny, Yaz, Lonnie, Rico, Tony C, Boomer, Luis, Spaceman, Pudge, Rooster, Bernie, Jim Ed, Freddy, Eck, Ned Martin, Ken Coleman, Dewey, Hendu, Bruce Hurst, Sherm Feller, John Kiley, Marty Barrett, The Can, Mo, El Guapo, and yes, for you, Billy Buck, and even you, Rocket, and finallyfinallyfor you, Babe. All is forgiven. Boston Red Sox 2004 Stats |
UR Stephen King Table of Contents IExperimenting with New Technology IIUr Functions IIIWesley Refuses to Go Mad IVNews Archive VUr Local (Under Construction) VICandy Rymer VIIThe Paradox Police VIIIEllen IExperimenting with New Technology When Wesley Smiths colleagues asked himsome with an eyebrow hoicked satiricallywhat he was doing with that gadget (they all called it a gadget), he told them he was experimenting with new technology, but that was not true. He bought the gadget, which was called a Kindle, out of spite. I wonder if the market analysts at Amazon even have that one on their productsurvey radar, he thought. He guessed not. This gave him some satisfaction, but not as much as he hoped to derive from Ellen Silvermans surprise when she saw him with his new purchase. That hadnt happened yet, but it would. It was a small campus, after all, and hed only been in possession of his new toy (he called it his new toy, at least to begin with) for a week. Wesley was an instructor in the English Department at MooreCollege, in Moore, Kentucky. Like all instructors of English, he thought he had a novel in him somewhere and would write it someday. MooreCollege was the sort of institution that people call a good school. Wesleys friend in the English Department (his only friend in the English Department) once explained what that meant. His friends name was Don Allman, and when he introduced himself, he liked to say, One of the Allman Brothers. I play a mean tuba. (He did not actually play anything.) A good school, he said, is one nobody has ever heard of outside a thirtymile radius. People call it a good school because nobody knows its a bad school, and most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all. Does that make you a realist? Wesley once asked him. I think the world is mostly populated by shitheads, Don Allman responded. You figure it out. Moore wasnt a good school, but neither was it a bad school. On the great scale of academic excellence, its place resided just a little south of mediocre. Most of its three thousand students paid their bills and many of them got jobs after graduating, although few went on to obtain (or even try for) graduate degrees. There was a fair amount of drinking, and of course there were parties, but on the great scale of partyschools, Moores place resided a little to the north of mediocre. It had produced politicians, but all of the smallwater variety, even when it came to graft and chicanery. In 1978, one Moore graduate was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, but he dropped dead of a heart attack after serving only four months. His replacement was a graduate of Baylor. The schools only marks of exceptionality had to do with its Division Three football team and its Division Three womens basketball team. The football team (the Moore Meerkats) was one of the worst in America, having won only seven games in the last ten years. There was constant talk of disbanding it. The current coach was a drug addict who liked to tell people that he had seen The Wrestler twelve times and never failed to cry when Mickey Rourke told his estranged daughter that he was just a brokendown piece of meat. The womens basketball team, however, was exceptional in a good way, especially considering that most of the players were no more than fivefeetseven and were preparing for jobs as marketing managers, wholesale buyers, or (if they were lucky) personal assistants to Men of Power. The Lady Meerkats had won eight conference titles in the last ten years. The coach was Wesleys exgirlfriend, ex as of one month previous. Ellen Silverman was the source of the spite that had moved Wesley to buy a Kindle from Amazon, Inc., the company that sold them. WellEllen and the Henderson kid in Wesleys Introduction to Modern American Fiction class. . Don Allman also claimed the Moore faculty was mediocre. Not terrible, like the football teamthat, at least, would have been interestingbut definitely mediocre. What about us? Wesley asked. They were in the office they shared. If a student came in for a conference, the instructor who had not been sought would leave. For most of the fall and spring semesters this was not an issue, as students never came in for conferences until just before finals. Even then, only the veteran gradegrubbers, the ones whod been doing it since elementary school, turned up. Don Allman said he sometimes fantasized about a juicy coed wearing a teeshirt that said I WILL SCREW YOU FOR AN A, but this never happened. What about us? What about us? Look at us, bro. Im going to write a novel, Wesley replied, although even saying it depressed him. Almost everything depressed him since Ellen had walked out. When he wasnt depressed, he felt spiteful. Yes! And President Obama is going to tab me as the new Poet Laureate! Don Allman exclaimed. Then he pointed at something on Wesleys cluttered desk. The Kindle was currently sitting on American Dreams, the textbook Wesley used in his Intro to American Lit class. Hows that working out for you? Fine, Wesley said. Will it ever replace the book? Never, Wesley said. But he had already begun to wonder. I thought they only came in white, Don Allman said. Wesley looked at Don as haughtily as he himself had been looked at in the department meeting where his Kindle had made its public debut. Nothing only comes in white, he said. This is America. Don Allman considered this, then said I heard you and Ellen broke up. Wesley sighed. . Ellen had been his other friend, and one with benefits, until four weeks ago. She wasnt in the English Department, of course, but the thought of going to bed with anyone in the English Department, even Suzanne Montanari, who was vaguely presentable, made him shudder. Ellen was fivetwo (eyes of blue!), slim, with a mop of short, curly black hair that made her look distinctly elfin. She had a dynamite figure and kissed like a dervish. (Wesley had never kissed a dervish, but he could imagine.) Nor did her energy flag when they were in bed. Once, winded, he lay back and said, Ill never equal you as a lover. If you keep talking snooty like that, you wont be my lover for long. Youre okay, Wes. But he guessed he wasnt. He guessed he was just sort ofmediocre. It wasnt his lessthanathletic sexual ability that ended their relationship, however. It wasnt the fact that Ellen was a vegan with tofu hotdogs in her fridge. It wasnt the fact that she would sometimes lie in bed after lovemaking, talking about pickandrolls, giveandgos, and the inability of Shawna Deeson to learn something Ellen called the old garden gate. In fact, these monologues sometimes put Wesley into his deepest, sweetest, and most refreshing sleeps. He thought it was the monotony of her voice, so different from the shrieks (often profane) of encouragement she let out while they were making love, shrieks that were similar to the ones she uttered during games, running up and down the sidelines like a hare (or a squirrel going up a tree), exhorting her girls to Pass the ball! and Go to the hole! and Drive the paint! Sometimes in bed she was reduced to yelling Harder, harder, harder! As, in the closing minutes of a game, she was often able to exhort no more than Bucketbucketbucket! They were in some ways perfectly matched, at least for the short term; she was fiery iron, straight from the forge, and hein his apartment filled with bookswas the water in which she cooled herself. The books were the problem. That, and the fact that he had called her an illiterate bitch. He had never called a woman such a thing in his life before, but she had surprised an anger out of him that he had never suspected. He might be a mediocre instructor, as Don Allman had suggested, and the novel he had in him might remain in him (like a wisdom tooth that never comes up, at least avoiding the possibility of rot, infection, and an expensivenot to mention painfuldental process), but he loved books. Books were his Achilles heel. She had come in fuming, which was not new, but also fundamentally upseta state he failed to recognize because he had never seen her in it before. Also, he was rereading James Dickeys Deliverance, reveling again in how well Dickey had harnessed his poetic sensibility, at least that once, to narrative, and he had just gotten to the closing passages, where the unfortunate canoeists are trying to cover up both what they have done and what has been done to them. He had no idea that Ellen had just been forced to boot Shawna Deeson off the team, or that the two of them had had a screaming fight in the gym in front of the whole teamplus the boys basketball team, which was waiting their turn to practice their mediocre movesor that Shawna Deeson had then gone outside and heaved a large rock at the windshield of Ellens Volvo, an act for which she would surely be suspended. He had no idea that Ellen was now blaming herself, bitterly blaming herself, because she was supposed to be the adult. He heard that partIm supposed to be the adultand said Uhhuh for the fifth or sixth time, which was one time too many for Ellen Silverman, whose fiery temper hadnt exhausted itself for the day after all. She plucked Deliverance from Wesleys hands, threw it across the room, and said the words that would haunt him for the next lonely month Why cant you just read off the computer, like the rest of us? She really said that? Don Allman asked, a remark that woke Wesley from a trancelike state. He realized he had just told the whole story to his officemate. He hadnt meant to, but he had. And there was no going back now. She did. And I said, That was a first edition I got from my father, you illiterate bitch. Don Allman was speechless. He could only stare. She walked out, Wesley said miserably. I havent seen or spoken to her since. Havent even called to say youre sorry? Wesley had tried to do this, and had gotten only her answering machine. He had thought of going over to the house she rented from the college, but thought she might put a fork in his faceor some other part of his anatomy. Also, he didnt consider what had happened to be entirely his fault. She hadnt even given him a chance. Plusshe was illiterate, or close to it. Had told him once in bed that the only book shed read for pleasure since coming to Moore was Reach for the Summit The Definite Dozen System for Succeeding at Whatever You Do, by Tennessee Vols coach Pat Summit. She watched TV (mostly sports), and when she wanted to dig deeper into some news story, she went to The Drudge Report. She certainly wasnt computer illiterate. She praised the MooreCollege wireless network (which was superlative rather than mediocre), and never went anywhere without her laptop slung over her shoulder. On the front was a picture of Tamika Catchings with blood running down her face from a split eyebrow and the legend I PLAY LIKE A GIRL. Don Allman sat in silence for a few moments, tapping his fingers on his narrow chest. Outside their window, November leaves rattled across Moore Quadrangle. Then he said Did Ellen walking out have anything to do with that? He nodded to Wesleys new electronic sidekick. It did, didnt it? You decided to read off the computer, just like the rest of us. Towhat? Woo her back? No, Wesley said, because he didnt want to tell the truth in a way he still didnt completely understand, he had done it to get back at her. Or make fun of her. Or something. Not at all. Im merely experimenting with new technology. Right, said Don Allman. And Im the new Poet Laureate. . His car was in Parking Lot A, but Wesley elected to walk the two miles back to his apartment, a thing he often did when he wanted to think. He trudged down Moore Avenue, first past the fraternity houses, then past apartment houses blasting rock and rap from every window, then past the bars and takeout restaurants that serve as a lifesupport system for every small college in America. There was also a bookstore specializing in used texts and last years bestsellers offered at fifty per cent off. It looked dusty and dispirited and was often empty. Because people were home reading off the computer, Wesley assumed. Brown leaves blew around his feet. His briefcase banged against one knee. Inside were his texts, the current book he was reading for pleasure (2666, by the late Roberto Bolano), and a bound notebook with beautiful marbleized boards. This had been a gift from Ellen on the occasion of his birthday. For your book ideas, she had said. In July, that was, when things between them had still been swell and theyd had the campus pretty much to themselves. The blank book had over two hundred pages, but only the first one had been marked by his large, flat scrawl. At the top of the page (printed) was THE NOVEL! Below that was A young boy discovers that his father and mother are both having affairs And A young boy, blind since birth, is kidnapped by his lunatic grandfather who And A teenager falls in love with his best friends mother and Below this one was the final idea, written shortly after Ellen had thrown Deliverance across the room and stalked out of his life. A shy but dedicated small college instructor and his athletic but largely illiterate girlfriend have a fallingout after It was probably the best ideawrite what you know, all the experts agreed on thatbut he simply couldnt go there. Talking to Don had been hard enough. And even then, complete honesty had escaped him. Like saying how much he wanted her back, for instance. As he approached the threeroom flat he called homewhat Don Allman sometimes called his bachelor padWesleys thoughts turned to the Henderson kid. Was his name Richard or Robert? Wesley had a block about that, not the same as the block he had about fleshing out any of the fragmentary missionstatements for his novel, but probably related. He had an idea all such blocks were probably fearcentered and basically hysterical in nature, as if the brain detected (or thought it had detected) some nasty interior beast and had locked it in a cell with a steel door. You could hear it thumping and jumping in there like a rabid raccoon that would bite if approached, but you couldnt see it. The Henderson kid was on the football teama noseback or point guard or some such thingand while he was as horrible on the gridiron as any of them, he was a nice kid and a fairly good student. Wesley liked him. But still, he had been ready to tear the boys head off when he spotted him in class with what Wesley assumed was a PDA or a newfangled cell phone. This was shortly after Ellen had walked out. In those early days of the breakup, Wesley often found himself up at three in the morning, pulling some literary comfortfood down from the shelf usually his old friends Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, their adventures recounted by Patrick OBrian. And not even that had kept him from remembering the ringing slam of the door as Ellen left his life, probably for good. So he was in a foul mood and more than ready for backtalk as he approached Henderson and said, Put it away. This is a literature class, not an Internet chatroom. The Henderson kid had looked up and given him a sweet smile. It hadnt lifted Wesleys foul mood in the slightest, but it did dissolve his anger on contact. Mostly because he wasnt an angry man by nature. He supposed he was depressive by nature, maybe even dysthymic. Hadnt he always suspected that Ellen Silverman was too good for him? Hadnt he known, in his heart of hearts, that the doorslam had been waiting for him from the very beginning, when hed spent the evening talking to her at a boring faculty party? Ellen played like a girl; he played like a loser. He couldnt even stay mad at a student who was goofing with his pocket computer (or Nintendo, or whatever it was) in class. Its the assignment, Mr. Smith, the Henderson kid had said (on his forehead was a large purple bruise from his latest outing in the Meerkat blue). Its Pauls Case. Look. The kid turned the gadget so Wesley could see it. It was a flat white panel, rectangular, less than half an inch thick. At the top was amazonkindle and the smilelogo Wesley knew well; he was not entirely computer illiterate himself, and had ordered books from Amazon plenty of times (although he usually tried the bookstore in town first, partly out of pity; even the cat who spent most of its life dozing in the window looked malnourished). The interesting thing on the kids gadget wasnt the logo on top or the teenytiny keyboard (a computer keyboard, surely!) on the bottom. In the middle of the gadget was a screen, and on the screen was not a screensaver or a video game where young men and women with buffedout bodies were killing zombies in the ruins of New York, but a page of Willa Cathers story about the poor boy with the destructive illusions. Wesley had reached for it, then drew back his hand. May I? Go ahead, the Henderson kidRichard or Roberttold him. Its pretty neat. You can download books from thin air, and you can make the type as big as you want. Also, the books are cheaper because theres no paper or binding. That sent a minor chill through Wesley. He became aware that most of his Intro to American Lit class was watching him. As a thirtyfiveyearold, Wesley supposed it was hard for them to decide if he was Old School (like the ancient Dr. Wence, who looked remarkably like a crocodile in a threepiece suit) or NewSchool (like Suzanne Montanari, who liked to play Avril Lavignes Girlfriend in her Introduction to Modern Drama class). Wesley supposed his reaction to Hendersons Kindle would help them with that. Mr. Henderson, he said, there will always be books. Which means there will always be paper and binding. Books are real objects. Books are friends. Yeah, but! Henderson had replied, his sweet smile now becoming slightly sly. But? Theyre also ideas and emotions. You said so in our first class. Well, Wesley had said, youve got me there. But books arent solely ideas. Books have a smell, for instance. One that gets bettermore nostalgicas the years go by. Does this gadget of yours have a smell? Nope, Henderson replied. Not really. But when you turn the pageshere, with this buttonthey kind of flutter, like in a real book, and I can go to any page I want, and when it sleeps, it shows pictures of famous writers, and it holds a charge, and Its a computer, Wesley had said. Youre reading off the computer. The Henderson kid had taken his Kindle back. You say that like its a bad thing. Its still Pauls Case. Youve never heard of a Kindle, Mr. Smith? Josie Quinn had asked. Her tone was that of a kindly anthropologist asking a member of New Guineas Kombai tribe if he had ever heard of electric stoves and elevator shoes. No, he said, not because it was truehe had seen something called SHOP THE KINDLE STORE when he bought books from Amazon onlinebut because, on the whole, he thought he would prefer being perceived by them as Old School. New School was somehowmediocre. You ought to get one, the Henderson kid said, and when Wesley had replied, without even thinking, Perhaps I will, the class had broken into spontaneous applause. For the first time since Ellens departure, Wesley had felt faintly cheered. Because they wanted him to get a bookreading gadget, and also because the applause suggested they did see him as Old School. Teachable Old School. He did not seriously consider buying a Kindle (if he was Old School, then books were definitely the way to go) until a couple of weeks later. One day on his way home from school he imagined Ellen seeing him with his Kindle, just strolling across the quad and bopping his finger on the little NEXT PAGE button. What in the world are you doing? she would ask. Speaking to him at last. Reading off the computer, he would say. Just like the rest of you. Spiteful! But, as the Henderson kid might put it, was that a bad thing? It occurred to him that spite was a kind of methadone for lovers. Was it better to go cold turkey? Perhaps not. When he got home he turned on his desktop Dell (he owned no laptop and took pride in the fact) and went to the Amazon website. He had expected the gadget to go for four hundred dollars or so, maybe more if there was a Cadillac model, and was surprised to find it was cheaper than that. Then he went to the Kindle Store (which he had been so successfully ignoring) and discovered that the Henderson kid was right the books were ridiculously cheap, hardcover novels (what cover, haha) priced below most trade paperbacks. Considering what he spent on books, the Kindle might pay for itself. As for the reaction of his colleaguesall those hoicked eyebrowsWesley discovered he relished the prospect. Which led to an interesting insight into human nature, or at least the human nature of the academic one liked to be perceived by ones students as Old School, but by ones peers as NewSchool. Im experimenting with new technology, he imagined himself saying. He liked the sound of it. It was NewSchool all the way. He also liked thinking of Ellens reaction. He had stopped leaving messages on her phone, and he had begun avoiding placesThe Pit Stop, Harrys Pizzawhere he might run into her, but that could change. Surely Im reading off the computer, just like the rest of you was too good a line to waste. Oh, thats small, he scolded himself as he sat in front of his computer, looking at the picture of the Kindle.That is spite so small it probably wouldnt poison a newborn kitten. True! But if it was the only spite of which he was capable, why not indulge it? So he had clicked on the Buy Kindle box, and the gadget had arrived a day later, in a box stamped with the smile logo and the words ONEDAY DELIVERY. Wesley hadnt opted for oneday, and would protest that charge if it showed up on his MasterCard bill, but he had unpacked his new acquisition with real pleasuresimilar to the pleasure he felt when unpacking a box of books, but sharper. Because there was that sense of heading into the unknown, he supposed. Not that he expected the Kindle to replace books, or to be much more than a novelty item, really; an attentiongetter for a few weeks or months that would afterward stand forgotten and gathering dust beside the Rubiks Cube on the knickknack shelf in his living room. It didnt strike him as peculiar that, whereas the Henderson kids Kindle had been white, his was pink. Not then. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Copyright 2009 by Stephen King All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Author. For information address Ralph M. Vicinanza, Ltd. 303 West 18th Street New York, N.Y. 10011 Contents IExperimenting with New Technology IIUr Functions IIIWesley Refuses to Go Mad IVNews Archive VUr Local (Under Construction) VICandy Rymer VIIThe Paradox Police VIIIEllen IIIWesley Refuses to Go Mad In a real dark night of the soul, Scott Fitzgerald had said, it is always three oclock in the morning, day after day. At three oclock on that Tuesday morning, Wesley lay feverishly awake, wondering if he might be cracking up himself. He had forced himself to turn off the pink Kindle and put it back in his briefcase an hour ago, but its hold over him remained every bit as strong as it had been at midnight, when he had still been deep in the UR BOOKS menu. He had searched for Ernest Hemingway in two dozen of the Kindles almost ten and a half million Urs, and had come up with at least twenty novels he had never heard of. In one of the Urs (it happened to be 6,201,949which, when broken down, was his mothers birth date), Hemingway appeared to have been a crime writer. Wesley had downloaded a title called Its Blood, My Darling!, and discovered your basic dime novelbut written in staccato, punchy sentences he would have recognized anywhere. Hemingway sentences. And even as a crime writer, Hemingway had departed from gang wars and cheating, gorehappy debs long enough to write A Farewell to Arms. He always wrote A Farewell to Arms, it seemed; other titles came and went, but A Farewell to Arms was always there and The Old Man and the Sea was usually there. He tried Faulkner. Faulkner was not there at all, in any of the Urs. He checked the regular menu, and discovered that Faulkner was not available in what he was coming to think of as his reality, either, at least not in Kindle editions. Only a few books about American literatures Count Nocount. He checked Roberto Bolano, the author of 2666, and although it wasnt available from the normal Kindle menu, it was listed in several UR BOOKS submenus. So were other Bolano novels, including (in Ur 101) a book with the colorful title Marilyn Blows Fidel. He almost downloaded that one, then changed his mind. So many authors, so many Urs, so little time. A part of his minddistant yet authentically terrifiedcontinued to insist it was all an elaborate joke which had arisen from some degenerate computer programmers lunatic imagination. Yet the evidence, which he continued to compile as that long night progressed, suggested otherwise. James Cain, for instance. In one Ur Wesley checked, he had died exceedingly young, producing only two books Nightfall (a new one) and Mildred Pierce (an oldie). Wesley would have bet on The Postman Always Rings Twice to have been a Cain constanthis urnovel, so to speakbut no. Although he checked a dozen Urs for Cain, he found Postman only once.Mildred Pierce, on the other handwhich he considered very minor Cain, indeedwas always there. Like A Farewell to Arms. He had checked his own name, and discovered what he feared although the Urs were lousy with Wesley Smiths (one appeared to be a writer of Westerns, another the author of porno novels such as Hot Tub Honey), none seemed to be him. Of course it was hard to be a hundred per cent sure, but it appeared that he had stumbled on 10.4 million alternate realities and he was an unpublished loser in all of them. Wide awake in his bed, listening to one lonely dog bark in the distance, Wesley began to shiver. His own literary aspirations seemed very minor to him at this moment. What seemed majorwhat loomed over his life and very sanitywere the riches hidden within that slim pink panel of plastic. He thought of all the writers whose passing he had mourned, from Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow to Donald Westlake and Evan Hunter; one after another, Thanatos stilled the magic voices and they spoke no more. But now they could. They could speak to him. He threw back the bedclothes. The Kindle was calling him. Not in a human voice, but in an organic one. It sounded like a beating heart, Poes telltale heart, coming from inside his briefcase instead of from under the floorboards, and Poe! Good God, he had never checked Poe! He had left his briefcase in its accustomed spot beside his favorite chair. He hurried to it, opened it, grabbed the Kindle, and plugged it in (no way he was going to risk running down the battery). He hurried to UR BOOKS, typed in Poes name, and on his first try found an Ur2,555,676where Poe had lived until 1875 instead of dying in 1849, at the age of forty. And this version of Poe had written novels! Six of them! Greed filled Wesleys heart (his mostly kind heart) as his eyes raced over the titles. One was called The House of Shame, or Degradations Price. Wesley downloaded itthe charge for this one was only 4.95and read until dawn. Then he turned off the pink Kindle, put his head in his arms, and slept for two hours at the kitchen table. He also dreamed. No images; only words. Titles! Endless lines of titles, many of them of undiscovered masterpieces. As many titles as there were stars in the sky. . He got through Tuesday and Wednesdaysomehowbut during his Intro to American Lit class on Thursday, lack of sleep and overexcitement caught up with him. Not to mention his increasingly tenuous hold on reality. Halfway through his Mississippi Lecture (which he usually gave with a high degree of cogency) about how Hemingway was downriver from Twain, and almost all of twentieth century American fiction was downriver from Hemingway, he realized he was telling the class that Papa had never written a great story about dogs, but if he had lived, he surely would have. Something more nutritious than Marley and Me, he said, and laughed with unnerving good cheer. He turned from the blackboard and saw twentytwo pairs of eyes looking at him with varying degrees of concern, perplexity, and amusement. He heard a whisper, low, but as clear as the beating of the old mans heart to the ears of Poes mad narrator Smithys losin it. Smithy wasnt, but there could be no doubt that he was in danger of losing it. I refuse, he thought. I refuse, I refuse. And realized, to his horror, that he was actually muttering this under his breath. The Henderson kid, who sat in the first row, had heard it. Mr. Smith? A hesitation. Sir? Are you all right? Yes, he said. No. A touch of the bug, maybe. Poes goldbug, he thought, and barely restrained himself from bursting into wild cackles. Class dismissed. Go on, get out of here. And, as they scrambled for the door, he had presence of mind enough to add Raymond Carver next week! Dont forget! Where Im Calling From! And thought What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there oneor a dozen, or a thousandwhere he quit smoking, lived to be seventy, and wrote another half a dozen books? He sat down at his desk, reached for his briefcase with the pink Kindle inside, then pulled his hand back. He reached again, stopped himself again, and moaned. It was like a drug. Or a sexual obsession. Thinking of that made him think of Ellen Silverman, something he hadnt done since discovering the Kindles hidden menus. For the first time since shed walked out, Ellen had completely slipped his mind. Ironic, isnt it? Now Im reading off the computer, Ellen, and I cant stop. I refuse to spend the rest of the day looking into that thing, he said, and I refuse to go mad. I refuse to look, and I refuse to go mad. To look or go mad. I refuse both. I But the pink Kindle was in his hand! He had taken it out even as he had been denying its power over him! When had he done that? And did he really intend to sit here in this empty classroom, mooning over it? Mr. Smith? The voice startled him so badly that he dropped the Kindle on his desk. He snatched it up at once and examined it, terrified it might be broken, but it was all right. Thank God. I didnt mean to startle you. It was the Henderson kid, standing in the doorway and looking concerned. This didnt surprise Wesley much. If I saw me right now, Id probably be concerned, too. Oh, you didnt startle me, Wesley said. This obvious lie struck him as funny, and he gave voice to a glassy giggle. He clapped his hand over his mouth to hold it in. Whats wrong? The Henderson kid took a step inside. I think its more than a virus. Man, you look awful. Did you get some bad news, or something? Wesley almost told him to mind his business, peddle his papers, put an egg in his shoe and beat it, but then the terrified part of him that had been cowering in the farthest corner of his brain, insisting that the pink Kindle was a prank or the opening gambit of some elaborate con, decided to stop hiding and start acting. If you really refuse to go mad, you better do something about this, it said. So how about it? Whats your first name, Mr. Henderson? Its entirely slipped my mind. The kid smiled. A pleasant smile, but the concern was still in his eyes. Robert, sir. Robbie. Well, Robbie, Im Wes. |
And I want to show you something. Either you will see nothingwhich means Im deluded, and very likely suffering a nervous breakdownor you will see something that completely blows your mind. But not here. Come to my office, would you? Henderson tried to ask questions as they crossed the mediocre quad. Wesley shook them off, but he was glad Robbie Henderson had come back, and glad that the terrified part of his mind had taken the initiative and spoken up. He felt better about the Kindlesaferthan he had since discovering the hidden menus. In a fantasy story, Robbie Henderson would see nothing and the protagonist would decide he was going insane. Or had already gone. Reality seemed to be different. His reality, at least, Wesley Smiths Ur. I actually want it to be a delusion. Because if it is, and if with this young mans help I can recognize it as such, Im sure I can avoid going mad. And I refuse to go mad. Youre muttering sir, Robbie said. Wes, I mean. Sorry. Youre scaring me a little. Im also scaring me a little. Don Allman was in the office, wearing headphones, correcting papers, and singing about Jeremiah the bullfrog in a voice that went beyond the borders of merely bad and into the unexplored country of the execrable. He shut off his iPod when he saw Wesley. I thought you had class. Canceled it. This is Robert Henderson, one of my American Lit students. Robbie, Henderson said, extending his hand. Hello, Robbie. Im Don Allman. One of the Allman Brothers. I play a mean tuba. Robbie laughed politely and shook Don Allmans hand. Until that moment, Wesley had planned on asking Don to leave, thinking one witness to his mental collapse would be enough. But maybe this was that rare case where the more really was the merrier. Need some privacy? Don asked. No, Wesley said. Stay. I want to show you guys something. And if you see nothing and I see something, Ill be delighted to check into Central State Psychiatric. He opened his briefcase. Whoa! Robbie exclaimed. A pink Kindle! Sweet! Ive never seen one of those before! Now Im going to show you something else that youve never seen before, Wesley said. At least, I think I am. He plugged in the Kindle and turned it on. . What convinced Don Allman was the Collected Works of William Shakespeare from Ur 17,000. After downloading it at Dons requestbecause in this particular Ur, Shakespeare had died in 1620 instead of 1616the three men discovered two new plays. One was titled Two Ladies of Hampshire, a comedy that seemed to have been written soon after Julius Caesar. The other was a tragedy called A Black Fellow in London, written in 1619. Wesley opened this one and then (with some reluctance) handed Don the Kindle. Don Allman was ordinarily a ruddycheeked guy who smiled a lot, but as he paged through Acts I and II of A Black Fellow in London, he lost both his smile and his color. After twenty minutes, during which Wesley and Robbie sat watching him silently, he pushed the Kindle back to Wesley. He did it with the tips of his fingers, as if he really didnt want to touch it at all. So? Wesley asked. Whats the verdict? It could be an imitation, Don said, but of course there have always been scholars who claimed that Shakespeares plays werent written by Shakespeare. There are supporters of Christopher MarloweFrancis Baconeven the Earl of Darby Yeah, and James Frey wrote Macbeth, Wesley said. What do you think? I think this could be authentic Willie, Don said. He sounded on the verge of tears. Or laughter. Maybe both. I think its far too elaborate to be a joke. And if its a hoax, I have no idea how it works. He reached a finger to the Kindle, touched it lightly, then pulled it away. Id have to study both plays closely, with reference works at hand, to be more definite, butits got his lilt. Robbie Henderson, it turned out, had read almost all of John D. MacDonalds mystery and suspense novels. In the Ur 2,171,753 listing of MacDonalds works, he found seventeen novels in what was called the Dave Higgins series. All the titles had colors in them. That parts right, Robbie said, but the titles are all wrong. And John Ds series character was named Travis McGee, not Dave Higgins. Wesley downloaded one called The Blue Lament, hitting his credit card with another 4.50 charge, and pushed the Kindle over to Robbie once the book had been downloaded to the evergrowing library that was Wesleys Kindle. While Robbie read, at first from the beginning and then skipping around, Don went down to the main office and brought back three coffees. Before settling in behind his desk, he hung the littleused CONFERENCE IN PROGRESS DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. Robbie looked up, nearly as pale as Don had been after dipping into the neverwritten Shakespeare play about the African prince who is brought to London in chains. This is a lot like a Travis McGee novel called Pale Gray for Guilt, he said. Only Travis McGee lives in Fort Lauderdale, and this guy Higgins lives in Sarasota. McGee has a friend named Meyera guyand Higgins has a friend named Sarah He bent over the Kindle for a moment. Sarah Mayer. He looked at Wesley, his eyes showing too much white around the irises. Jesus Christ, and theres ten million of thesethese other worlds? Ten million, four hundred thousand and some, according to the UR BOOKS menu, Wesley said. I think exploring even one author fully would take more years than you have left in your life, Robbie. I could die today, Robbie Henderson said in a low voice. That thing could give me a freaking heart attack. He abruptly seized his Styrofoam cup of coffee and swallowed most of the contents, although the coffee was still steaming. Wesley, on the other hand, felt almost like himself again. But with the fear of madness removed, a host of questions were cramming his mind. Only one seemed completely relevant. So what do I do now? For one thing, Dan said, this has to stay a dead secret among the three of us. He turned to Robbie. Can you keep a secret? Say no and Ill have to kill you. I can keep one. But how about the people who sent it to you, Wes? Can they keep a secret? Will they? How do I know that when I dont know who they are? What credit card did you use when you ordered Little Pink here? MasterCard. Its the only one I use these days. Robbie pointed to the English Department computer terminal Wesley and Don shared. Go online, why dont you, and check your account. If thosethose urbooks came from Amazon, Ill be very surprised. Where else could they have come from? Wesley asked. Its their gadget, they sell the books for it. Also, it came in an Amazon box. It had the smile on it. And do they sell their gadget in Glowstick Pink? Robbie asked. Well, no. Dude, check your credit card account. . Wesley drummed his fingers on Dons Mighty Mouse mousepad as the offices outdated PC cogitated. Then he sat up straight and began to read. Well? Don asked. Share. According to this, Wesley said, my latest MasterCard purchase was a blazer from Mens Warehouse. A week ago. No downloaded books. Not even the ones you ordered the normal way? The Old Man and the Sea and Revolutionary Road? Nope. Robbie asked, What about the Kindle itself? Wesley scrolled back. Nothingnothingnothwait, here it He leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the screen. Ill be damned. What? Don and Robbie said it together. According to this, my purchase was denied. It says, wrong creditcard number. He considered. That could be. Im always reversing two of the digits, sometimes even when I have the damn card right beside the keyboard. Im a little dyslexic. But the order went through, anyway, Don said thoughtfully. Somehowto someone. Somewhere. What Ur does the Kindle say were in? Refresh me on that. Wesley went back to the relevant screen. 117,586. Only to enter that as a choice, you omit the comma. Don said, That might not be the Ur were living in, but I bet it was the Ur this Kindle came from. In that Ur, the MasterCard number you gave is the right one for the Wesley Smith that exists there. What are the odds of something like that happening? Robbie asked. I dont know, Don said, but probably a lot steeper than 10.4 million to one. Wesley opened his mouth to say something, and was interrupted by a fusillade of knocks on the door. They all jumped. Don Allman actually uttered a little scream. Who is it? Wesley asked, grabbing the Kindle and holding it protectively to his chest. Janitor, the voice on the other side of the door said. You folks ever going home? Its almost seven oclock, and I need to lock up the building. IIUr Functions When Wesley got back to his apartment after his confessional conversation with Don Allman, the message light on his answering machine was blinking. Two messages. He pushed the playback button, expecting to hear his mother complaining about her arthritis and making trenchant observations about how some sons actually called home more often than twice a month. After that would come a robocall from the MooreEcho, reminding himfor the dozenth timethat his subscription had lapsed. But it wasnt his mother and it wasnt the newspaper. When he heard Ellens voice, he paused in the act of reaching for a beer and listened bentover, with one hand outstretched in the fridges frosty glow. Hi, Wes, she said, sounding uncharacteristically unsure of herself. There was a long pause, long enough for Wesley to wonder if that was all there was going to be. In the background he heard hollow shouts and bouncing balls. She was in the gym, or had been when she left the message. Ive been thinking about us. Thinking that maybe we should try again. I miss you. And then, as if she had seen him rushing for the door But not yet. I need to think a little more aboutwhat you said. A pause. I was wrong to throw your book like that, but I was upset. Another pause, almost as long as the one after shed said hi. Theres a preseason tourney in Lexington this weekend. You know, the one they call the Bluegrass. Its a big deal. Maybe when I get back, we should talk. Please dont call me until then, because Ive got to concentrate on the girls. Defense is terrible, and Ive only got one girl who can actually shoot from the perimeter, andI dont know, this is probably a big mistake. Its not, he told the answering machine. His heart was pumping. He was still leaning into the open refrigerator, feeling the cold wafting out and striking his face, which seemed too hot. Believe me, its not. I had lunch with Suzanne Montanari the other day, and she says youre carrying around one of those electronic reading thingies. To me that seemedI dont know, like a sign that we should try again. She laughed, then screamed so loud that Wesley jumped. Chase down that loose ball! You either run or you sit! Then Sorry. Ive got to go. Dont call me. Ill call you. One way or the other. After the Bluegrass. Im sorry Ive been dodging your calls, butyou hurt my feelings, Wes. Coaches have feelings too, you know. I A beep interrupted her. The allotted message time had run out. Wesley uttered the word Norman Mailers publishers had refused to let him use in The Naked and the Dead. Then the second message started and she was back. I guess English teachers also have feelings. Suzanne says were not right for each other, she says were too far apart in our interests, butmaybe theres a middle ground. Im glad you got the reader. If its a Kindle, I think you can also use it to go to the Internet. II need to think about this. Dont call me. Im not quite ready. Goodbye. Wesley got his beer. He was smiling. Then he thought of the spite that had been living in his heart for the last month and stopped. He went to the calendar on the wall, and wrote PRESEASON TOURNEY across Saturday and Sunday. He paused, then drew a line through the days of the workweek after, a line on which he wrote ELLEN??? With that done he sat down in his favorite chair, drank his beer, and tried to read 2666. It was a crazy book, but sort of interesting. He wondered if it was available from the Kindle Store. . That evening, after replaying Ellens messages for the third time, Wesley turned on his Dell and went to the Athletic Department website to check for details concerning the Bluegrass PreSeason Invitational Tournament. He knew it would be a mistake to turn up there, and he had no intentions of doing so, but he did want to know who the Meerkats were playing, what their chances were, and when Ellen would be back. It turned out there were eight teams, seven from Division Two and only one from Division Three the Lady Meerkats of Moore. Wesley felt pride on Ellens behalf when he saw that, and was once more ashamed of his spitewhich she (lucky him!) knew nothing about. She actually seemed to think he had bought the Kindle as a way of sending her a message Maybe youre right, and maybe I can change. Maybe we both can. He supposed that if things went well, he would in time come to convince himself that was indeed so. On the website he saw that the team would leave for Lexington by bus at noon this coming Friday. They would practice at Rupp Arena that evening, and play their first gameagainst the Bulldogs of Truman State, Indianaon Saturday morning. Because the tourney was double elimination, they wouldnt be starting back until Sunday evening no matter what. Which meant he wouldnt hear from her until the following Monday at the earliest. It was going to be a long week. And, he told his computer (a good listener!), she may decide against trying again, anyway. I have to be prepared for that. Well, he could try. And he could also call that bitch Suzanne Montanari and tell her in no uncertain terms to stop campaigning against him. Why would she do that in the first place? She was a colleague, for Gods sake! Only if he did that, Suzanne might carry tales straight back to her friend (friend? who knew? who even suspected?) Ellen. It might be best to leave that aspect of things alone. Although the spite wasnt entirely out of his heart after all, it seemed. Now it was directed at Ms. Montanari. Never mind, he told his computer. George Herbert was wrong. Living well isnt the best revenge; loving well is. He started to turn off his computer, then remembered something Don Allman had said about Wesleys Kindle I thought they only came in white. Certainly the Henderson kids had been white, butwhat was the saying?one swallow didnt make a summer. After a few false starts (Google, full of information but essentially dumb as a post, lead him first to a discussion of whether or not the Kindle would ever be able to produce color images on its screen, a subject in which Wesleyas a bookreaderhad absolutely zero interest), he thought to search for Kindle Fan Sites. He found one called The Kindle Kandle. At the top was a bizarre photo of a woman in Quaker garb reading her Kindle by candlelight. Or possibly kandlelight. Here he read several postscomplaints, mostlyabout how the Kindle came in only one color, which one blogger called plain old smudgefriendly white. Below it was a reply suggesting that if the complainer persisted in reading with dirty fingers, he could buy a custom sleeve for his Kindle. In any color you like, she added. Grow up and show some creativity! Wesley turned off his computer, went into the kitchen, got another beer, and pulled his own Kindle from his briefcase. His pink Kindle. Except for the color, it looked exactly the same as the ones on the Kindle Kandle website. KindleKandle, bibblebabble, he said. Its just some flaw in the plastic. Perhaps, but why had it come oneday express delivery when he hadnt specified that? Because someone at the Kindle factory wanted to get rid of the pink mutant as soon as possible? That was ridiculous. They would have just thrown it away. Another victim of quality control. He thought of Ellens message again (by then he had it by heart). If its a Kindle, I think you can use it to go to the Internet, shed said. He wondered if it was true. He turned the Kindle on, and as he did so, he remembered there was something else odd about it no instruction booklet. He hadnt questioned that until now, because the device was so simple to use it practically ran itself (a creepy idea, when you considered it). He thought of going back to the Kindle Kandlers to find out if this was a true oddity, then dismissed the idea. He was just goofing around, after all, beginning to while away the hours between now and next Monday, when he might hear from Ellen again. I miss you, kiddo, he said, and was surprised to hear his voice waver. He did miss her. He hadnt realized how much until hed heard her voice. Hed been too wrapped up in his own wounded ego. Not to mention his sweaty little spite. Strange to think that spite might have earned him a second chance. Much stranger, when you got right down to it, than a pink Kindle. The screen titled Wesleys Kindle booted up. Listed were the books he had so far purchasedRevolutionary Road, by Richard Yates, and The Old Man and the Sea, by Hemingway. The gadget had come with The New Oxford American Dictionary preloaded. You only had to begin typing your word and the Kindle found it for you. It was, he thought, TiVo for smart people. The question was, could you access the Internet? He pushed the MENU button and was presented with a number of choices. The top one (of course) invited him to SHOP THE KINDLE STORE. But near the bottom was something called EXPERIMENTAL. That looked interesting. He moved the cursor to it, opened it, and read this at the top of the screen We are working on these experimental prototypes. Do you find them useful? Well, I dont know, Wesley said. What are they? The first prototype turned out to be BASIC WEB. So Ellen was right. The Kindle was apparently a lot more computerized than it looked at first blush. He glanced at the other experimental choices music downloads (big whoop) and texttospeech (which might come in handy if he were blind). He pushed the NEXT PAGE button to see if there were other experimental prototypes. There was one UR FUNCTIONS. Now what in the hell was that? Ur, so far as he knew, had only two meanings a city in the Old Testament, and a prefix meaning primitive or basic. The screen didnt help; although there were explanations for the other experimental functions, there was none for this. Well, there was one way to find out. He highlighted UR FUNCTIONS and selected it. A new menu appeared. There were three items UR BOOKS, UR NEWS ARCHIVE, and UR LOCAL (UNDER CONSTRUCTION). Huh, Wesley said. What in the world. He highlighted UR BOOKS, dropped his finger onto the select button, then hesitated. Suddenly his skin felt cold, as when hed been stilled by the sound of Ellens recorded voice while reaching into the fridge for a beer. He would later think, It was my own ur. Something basic and primitive deep inside, telling me not to do it. But was he not a modern man? One who now read off the computer? He was. He was. So he pushed the button. The screen blanked, then WELCOME TO UR BOOKS! appeared at the top of the screenand in red! The Kandlers were behind the technological curve, it seemed; there was Kolor on the Kindle. Beneath the welcome message was a picturenot of Charles Dickens or Eudora Welty, but of a large black tower. There was something ominous about it. Below, also in red, was an invitation to Select Author (your choice may not be available). And below that, a blinking cursor. What the hell, Wesley told the empty room. He licked his lips, which were suddenly dry, and typed ERNEST HEMINGWAY. The screen wiped itself clean. The function, whatever it was supposed to be, didnt seem to work. After ten seconds or so, Wesley reached for the Kindle, meaning to turn it off. Before he could push the slideswitch, the screen finally produced a new message. 10,438,721 URS SEARCHED 17,894 ERNEST HEMINGWAY TITLES DETECTED IF YOU DO NOT KNOW TITLE, SELECT UR OR RETURN TO UR FUNCTIONS MENU SELECTIONS FROM YOUR CURRENT UR WILL NOT BE DISPLAYED What in the name of God is this? Wesley whispered. Below the message, the cursor blinked. Above it, in small type (black, not red), was one further instruction NUMERIC ENTRY ONLY. NO COMMAS OR DASHES. YOUR CURRENT UR 117586. Wesley felt a strong urge (an ur urge!) to turn the pink Kindle off and drop it into the silverware drawer. Or into the freezer along with the ice cream and Stouffers frozen dinners, that might be even better. Instead, he used the teenytiny keypad to enter his birth date. 7191974 would do as well as any number, he reckoned. He hesitated again, then plunged the tip of his index finger down on the select button. When the screen blanked this time, he had to fight an impulse to get up from the kitchen chair he was sitting in and back away from the table. A crazy certainty had arisen in his mind a handor perhaps a clawwas going to swim up from the grayness of the Kindles screen, grab him by the throat, and yank him in. He would exist forever after in computerized grayness, floating around the microchips and between the many worlds of Ur. Then the screen produced type, plain old prosaic type, and the superstitious dread departed. He scanned the Kindles screen (the size of a small paperback) eagerly, although what he was eager for he had no idea. At the top was the authors full nameErnest Miller Hemingwayand his dates. Next came a long list of his published worksbut it was wrong. The Sun Also Rises was thereFor Whom the Bell Tollsthe short storiesThe Old Man and the Sea, of coursebut there were also three or four titles Wesley didnt recognize, and except for minor essays, he thought he had read all of Hemingways considerable output. Also He examined the dates again and saw that the deathdate was wrong. Hemingway had died on July 2, 1961, of a selfinflicted gunshot wound. According to the screen, he had gone to that great library in the sky on August 19, 1964. Birth dates wrong, too, Wesley muttered. He was running his free hand through his hair, pulling it into exotic new shapes. Im almost sure it is. Should be 1899, not 1897. He moved the cursor down to one of the titles he didnt know Cortlands Dogs. This was some lunatic computer programmers idea of a joke, pretty much had to be, but Cortlands Dogs at least sounded like a Hemingway title. Wesley selected it. The screen blanked, then produced a book cover. The jacket imagein black and whiteshowed barking dogs surrounding a scarecrow. In the background, shoulders slumped in a posture of weariness or defeat (or both), was a hunter with a gun. The eponymous Cortland, surely. In the woods of upper Michigan, James Cortland deals with the infidelity of his wife and his own mortality. When three dangerous criminals appear at the old Cortland farm, Papas most famous hero is faced with a terrible choice. Rich in event and symbolism, Ernest Hemingways final novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize shortly before his death. 7.50 Below the thumbnail, Kindle asked BUY THIS BOOK? Y N. Total bullshit, Wesley whispered as he highlighted Y and pushed the select button. The screen blanked again, then flashed a new message Ur novels may not be disseminated as according to all applicable Paradox Laws. Do you agree? Y N. Smilingas befitted someone who got the joke but was going along with it anywayWesley selected Y. The screen blanked, then presented new information THANK YOU, WESLEY! YOUR UR NOVEL HAS BEEN ORDERED YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE DEBITED 7.50 REMEMBER UR NOVELS TAKE LONGER TO DOWNLOAD ALLOW 24 MINS Wesley returned to the screen headed Wesleys Kindle. The same items were thereRevolutionary Road, The Old Man and the Sea, the New Oxford Americanand he was sure that wouldnt change. There was no Hemingway novel called Cortlands Dogs, not in this world or any other. Nonetheless, he got up and went to the phone. It was picked up on the first ring. Don Allman, his officemate said. And yes, I was indeed born a ramblin man. No hollow gymsounds in the background this time; just the barbaric yawps of Dons three sons, who sounded as though they might be dismantling the Allman residence board by board. Don, its Wesley. Ah, Wesley! I havent seen you ingee, it must be three hours! From deeper within the lunatic asylum where Wesley assumed Don lived with his family, there came what sounded like a deathscream. Don Allman was not perturbed. Jason, dont throw that at your brother. Be a good little troll and go watch SpongeBob. Then, to Wesley What can I do for you, Wes? Advice on your lovelife? Tips on improving your sexual performance and stamina? A title for your novel in progress? I have no novel in progress and you know it, Wesley snapped. But its novels I want to talk about. You know Hemingways oeuvre, dont you? I love it when you talk dirty. Do you or dont you? Of course. But not as well as you, I hope. Youre the 20th century American lit man, after all; I stick to the days when writers wore wigs, took snuff, and said picturesque things like ecod and damme. Whats on your mind? To your knowledge, did Hemingway ever write any fiction about dogs? Don considered while another young child commenced shrieking. Wes, are you okay? You sound a little Just answer the question. Did he or didnt he? Highlight Y or N, Wesley thought. All right, Don said. So far as I can say without consulting my trusty computer, he didnt. I remember him once claiming the Batista partisans clubbed his pet pooch to death, thoughhows that for a factoid? You know, when he was in Cuba. He took it as a sign that he and Mary should beat feet to Florida, and they didposthaste. You dont happen to remember that dogs name, do you? I think I do. Id want to doublecheck it on the Internet, but I think it was Cortland. Like the apple? Thanks, Don. His lips felt numb. Ill see you tomorrow. Wes, are you sure youreFRANKIE, PUT THAT DOWN! DONT There was a crash. Shit. I think that was Delft. I gotta go, Wes. See you tomorrow. Right. Wesley went back to the kitchen table. He saw that a fresh selection now appeared on the contents page of his Kindle. A novel (or something) called Cortlands Dogs had been downloaded from Where, exactly? Some other plane of reality called Ur (or possibly UR) 7,191,974? Wesley no longer had the strength to call this idea ridiculous and push it away. He did, however, have enough to go to the refrigerator and get a beer. Which he needed. He opened it, drank half in five long swallows, belched. He sat down, feeling a little better. He highlighted his new acquisition (7.50 would be mighty cheap for an undiscovered Hemingway, he reckoned) and a title page came up. The next page was a dedication To Sy, and to Mary, with love. Then this Chapter 1 A mans life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortlands winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog Liquid rose up in Wesleys throat. He ran for the sink, bent over it, and struggled to keep the beer down. His gorge settled, and instead of turning on the water to rinse puke down the drain, he cupped his hands under the flow and splashed it on his sweaty skin. That was better. Then he went back to the Kindle and stared down at it. A mans life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. Somewhereat some college a lot more ambitious than Moore of Kentuckythere was a computer programmed to read books and identify the writers by their stylistic tics and tocks, which were supposed to be as unique as fingerprints or snowflakes. Wesley had a vague recollection that this computer program had been used to identify the author of a pseudonymous novel called Primary Colors; the program had whiffled through thousands of writers in a matter of hours or days and had come up with a newsmagazine columnist named Joe Klein, who later owned up to his literary paternity. Wesley thought that if he submitted Cortlands Dogs to that computer, it would spit out Ernest Hemingways name. In truth, he didnt think he needed a computer. He picked up the Kindle with hands that were now shaking badly. What are you? he asked. The Kindle did not answer. IVNews Archive They werent done, couldnt be done. Not yet. Wesley in particular was anxious to press on. Although he hadnt slept for more than three hours at a stretch in days, he felt wide awake, energized. He and Robbie walked back to his apartment while Don went home to help his wife put the boys to bed. When that was done, hed join them at Wesleys place for an extended skullsession. Wesley said hed order some food. Good, Don said, but be careful. UrChinese just doesnt taste the same. For a wonder, Wesley found he could actually laugh. So this is what an English instructors apartment looks like, Robbie said, gazing around. Man, I dig all the books. Good, Wesley said. I loan to people who bring back. Keep it in mind. I will. My parents have never been, you know, great readers. Few magazines, some diet books, a selfhelp manual or twothats all. I might have been the same way, if not for you. Just bangin my head out on the football field, you know, with nothing ahead except maybe teaching PE in GilesCounty. Thats in Tennessee. Yeehaw. Wesley was touched by this. Probably because hed been hurled through so many emotional hoops just lately. Thanks, he said. Just remember, theres nothing wrong with a good loud yeehaw. Thats part of who you are, too. Both parts are equally valid. He thought of Ellen, ripping Deliverance out of his hands and hurling across the room. And why? Because she hated books? No, because he hadnt been listening when she needed him to. Hadnt it been Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer, who had called books the scholars mistress? And when Ellen needed him, hadnt he had been in the arms of his other lover, the one who made no demands (other than on his vocabulary) and always took him in? Wes? What were those other things on the UR FUNCTIONS menu? At first Wesley didnt know what the kid was talking about. Then he remembered that there had been a couple of other items. Hed been so fixated on the BOOKS submenu that he had forgotten the other two. Well, lets see, he said, and turned the Kindle on. Every time he did this, he expected either the EXPERIMENTAL menu or the UR FUNCTIONS menu to be gonethat would also happen in a fantasy story or a Twilight Zone episodebut they were still right there. UR NEWS ARCHIVE and UR LOCAL, Robbie said. Huh. UR LOCALs under construction. Better watch out, traffic fines double. What? Never mind, just goofin witcha. Try the news archive. Wesley selected it. The screen blanked. After a few moments, a message appeared. WELCOME TO THE NEWS ARCHIVE! ONLY THE NEW YORK TIMES IS AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME YOUR PRICE IS 1.004 DOWNLOADS 1050 DOWNLOADS 100800 DOWNLOADS SELECT WITH CURSOR YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE BILLED Wesley looked at Robbie, who shrugged. I cant tell you what to do, but if my credit card wasnt being billedin this world, anywayId spend the hundred. Wesley thought he had a point, although he wondered what the other Wesley (if indeed there was one) was going to think when he opened his next MasterCard bill. He highlighted the 100800 line and pushed the select button. This time the Paradox Laws didnt come up. Instead, the new message invited him to CHOOSE DATE AND UR. USE APPROPRIATE FIELDS. You do it, he said, and pushed the Kindle across the kitchen table to Robbie. This was getting easier to do, and he was glad. An obsession about keeping the Kindle in his own hands was a complication he didnt need, understandable as it was. Robbie thought for a moment, then typed in January 21, 2009. In the Ur field he selected 1000000. Ur one million, he said. Why not? And pushed the button. The screen went blank, then produced a message reading ENJOY YOUR SELECTION! A moment later the front page of the New York Times appeared. |
They bent over the screen, reading silently, until there was a knock at the door. Thatll be Don, Wesley said. Ill let him in. Robbie Henderson didnt reply. He was still transfixed. Getting cold out there, Don said as he came in. And theres a wind knocking all the leaves off the He studied Wesleys face. What? Or should I say, what now? Come and see, Wesley said. Don went into Wesleys booklined living roomstudy, where Robbie remained bent over the Kindle. The kid looked up and turned the screen so Don could see it. There were blank patches where the photos should have gone, each with the message IMAGE UNAVAILABLE, but the headline was big and black NOW ITS HER TURN. And below it, the subhead Hillary Clinton Takes Oath, Assumes Role as 44th President. Looks like she made it after all, Wesley said. At least in Ur 1,000,000. And check out who shes replacing, Robbie said, and pointed to the name. It was Albert Arnold Gore. . An hour later, when the doorbell rang, they didnt jump but rather looked around like men startled from a dream. Wesley went downstairs and paid the delivery guy, who had arrived with a loaded pizza from Harrys and a sixpack of Pepsi. They ate at the kitchen table, bent over the Kindle. Wesley put away three slices himself, a personal best, with no awareness of what he was eating. They didnt use up the eight hundred downloads they had orderednowhere near itbut in the next four hours they skimmed enough stories from various Urs to make their heads ache. Wesley felt as though his mind were aching. From the nearly identical looks he saw on the faces of the other twopale cheeks, avid eyes in bruised sockets, crazed hairhe guessed he wasnt alone. Looking into one alternate reality would have been challenging enough; here were over ten million, and although most appeared to be similar, not one was exactly the same. The inauguration of the fortyfourth President of the United States was only one example, but a powerful one. They checked it in two dozen different Urs before getting tired and moving on. Fully seventeen front pages on January 21st of 2009 announced Hillary Clinton as the new President. In fourteen of them, Bill Richardson of New Mexico was her vice president. In two, it was Joe Biden. In one it was a Senator none of them had heard of Linwood Speck of New Jersey. He always says no when someone else wins the top spot, Don said. Who always says no? Robbie asked. Obama? Yeah. He always gets asked, and he always says no. Its in character, Wesley said. And while events change, character never seems to. You cant say that for sure, Don said. We have a miniscule sample compared to thethe He laughed feebly. You know, the whole thing. All the worlds of Ur. Barack Obama had been elected in six Urs. Mitt Romney had been elected once, with John McCain as his running mate. He had run against Obama, who had been tapped after Hillary was killed in a motorcade accident late in the campaign. They saw not a single mention of Sarah Palin. Wesley wasnt surprised. He thought that if they stumbled on her, it would be more by luck than by probability, and not just because Mitt Romney showed up more often as the Republican nominee than John McCain did. Palin had always been an outsider, a longshot, the one nobody expected. Robbie wanted to check the Red Sox. Wesley felt it was a waste of time, but Don came down on the kids side, so Wesley agreed. The two of them checked the sports pages for October in ten different Urs, plugging in dates from 1918 to 2009. This is depressing, Robbie said after the tenth try. Don Allman agreed. Why? Wesley asked. They win lots of times. But theres no rhyme or reason to it, Robbie said. And no curse, Don said. They always win just enough to avoid it. Which is sort of boring. What curse? Wesley was mystified. Don opened his mouth to explain, then sighed. Never mind, he said. It would take too long, and you wouldnt get it, anyway. Look on the bright side, Robbie said. The Yankees are always there, so it isnt all luck. Yeah, Don said glumly. The militaryindustrial complex of the sporting world. Sohree. Does anyone want that last slice? Don and Wes shook their heads. Robbie scarfed it and said, Why not peek at the Big Casino, before we all decide were nuts and check ourselves into CentralState? What Big Casino might that be, Yoda? Don asked. The JFK assassination, Robbie said. Mr. Tollman says that was the seminal event of the twentieth century, even more important than the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. I thought seminal events usually happened in bed, but hey, I came to college to learn. Mr. Tollmans in the History Department. I know who Hugh Tollman is, Don said. Hes a goddam commie, and he never laughs at my jokes. But he could be right about the Kennedy assassination, Wesley said. Lets look. . They pursued the JohnKennedyinDallas thread until nearly eleven oclock, while college students hooted unnoticed below them, on their way to and from the local beerpits. They checked over seventy versions of the New York Times for November 23rd, 1963, and although the story was never the same, one fact seemed undeniable to all of them whether he missed Kennedy, wounded Kennedy, or killed Kennedy, it was always Lee Harvey Oswald, and he always acted alone. The Warren Report was right, Don said. For once the bureaucracy did its job. Im gobsmacked. In some Urs, that day in November had passed with no assassination stories, either attempted or successful. Sometimes Kennedy decided not to visit Dallas after all. Sometimes he did, and his motorcade was uneventful; he arrived at the Dallas Trade Mart, gave his hundreddollaraplate luncheon speech (God, things were cheap back in the day, werent they? Robbie remarked), and flew off into the sunset. This was the case in Ur 88,416. Wesley began to plug in more dates from that Ur. What he saw filled him with awe and horror and wonder and sorrow. In Ur 88,416, Kennedy had seen the folly of Vietnam and had pulled out over the vehement objections of Robert McNamara, his Secretary of Defense. McNamara quit and was replaced by a man named Bruce Palmer, who resigned his rank of U.S. Army general to take the job. The civil rights turmoil was milder than when Lyndon Johnson was President, and there were almost no riots in the American citiespartly because in Ur 88,416, Martin Luther King wasnt assassinated in Memphis or anywhere else. In this Ur, JFK was elected for a second term. In 1968, Edmund Muskie of Maine won the Presidency in a landslide over Nelson Rockefeller. By then the outgoing President was hardly able to walk without the aid of crutches, and said his first priority was going to be major back surgery. Robbie ignored that and fixed on a story that had to do with Kennedys last White House party. The Beatles had played, but the concert ended early when drummer Pete Best suffered a seizure and had to be taken to Washington DC Hospital. Holy shit, Don whispered. What happened to Ringo? Guys, Wesley said, yawning, I have to go to bed. Im dying here. Check one more, Robbie said. 4,121,989. Its my birthday. Gotta be lucky. But it wasnt. When Wesley selected the Ur and added a dateJanuary 20, 1973not quite at random, what came up instead of ENJOY YOUR SELECTION was this NO TIMES THIS UR AFTER NOVEMBER 19, 1962. Oh my God, Wesley said, and clapped a hand to his mouth. Dear sweet God. What? Robbie asked. What is it? I think I know, Don said. He tried to take the pink Kindle. Wesley, who guessed he had gone pale (but probably not as pale as he felt inside), put a hand over Dons. No, he said. I dont think I can bear it. Bear what? Robbie nearly shouted. Didnt Hugh Tollman cover the Cuban Missile Crisis? Don asked. Or didnt you get that far yet? What missile crisis? Was it something to do with Castro? Don was looking at Wesley. I dont really want to see, either, he said, but I wont sleep tonight unless I make sure, and I dont think you will, either. Okay, Wesley said, and thoughtnot for the first time, eitherthat curiosity rather than rage was the true bane of the human spirit. Youll have to do it, though. My hands are trembling too much. Don filled in the fields for NOVEMBER 19, 1962. The Kindle told him to enjoy his selection, but he didnt. None of them did. The headlines were stark and huge NYC TOLL SURPASSES 6 MILLION MANHATTAN DECIMATED BY RADIATION RUSSIA SAID TO BE OBLITERATED LOSSES IN EUROPE AND ASIA INCALCULABLE CHINESE LAUNCH 40 ICBMS Turn it off, Robbie said in a small, sick voice. Its like that song saysI dont wanna see no more. Don said, Look on the bright side, you two. It seems we dodged the bullet in most of the Urs, including this one. But his voice wasnt quite steady. Robbies right, Wesley said. He had discovered that the final issue of the New York Times in Ur 4,121,989 was only three pages long. And every article was death. Turn it off. I wish Id never seen the damn thing in the first place. Too late now, Robbie said. And how right he was. . They went downstairs together and stood on the sidewalk in front of Wesleys building. Main Street was almost deserted now. The rising wind moaned around the buildings and rattled late November leaves along the sidewalks. A trio of drunk students was stumbling back toward Fraternity Row, singing what might have been ParadiseCity. I cant tell you what to doits your gadgetbut if it was mine, Id get rid of it, Don said. Itll suck you in. Wesley thought of telling him hed already had this idea, but didnt. Well talk about it tomorrow. Nope, Don said. Im driving the wife and kids to Frankfort for a wonderful threeday weekend at my inlaws. Suzy Montanaris taking my classes. And after this little seminar tonight, Im delighted to be getting away. Robbie? Drop you somewhere? Thanks, but no need. I share an apartment with a couple of other guys two blocks up the street. Over Susan and Nans Place. Isnt that a little noisy? Wesley asked. Susan and Nans was the local caf, and opened at six AM seven days a week. Most days I sleep right through it. Robbie flashed a grin. Also, when it comes to the rent, the price is right. Good deal. Night, you guys, Don started for his Tercel, then turned back. I intend to kiss my kids before I turn in. Maybe itll help me get to sleep. That last story He shook his head. I could have done without that. No offense, Robbie, but stick your birthday up your ass. They watched his diminishing taillights and Robbie said thoughtfully, Nobody ever told me to stick my birthday before. Im sure he wouldnt want you to take it personally. And hes probably right about the Kindle, you know. Its fascinatingtoo fascinatingbut useless in any practical sense. Robbie stared at him, wideeyed. Youre calling access to thousands of undiscovered novels by the great masters of the craft useless? Sheezis, what kind of English teacher are you? Wesley had no comeback. Especially when he knew that, late or not, hed probably be reading more of Cortlands Dogs before turning in. Besides, Robbie said. It might not be entirely useless. You could type up one of those books and send it in to a publisher, ever think of that? You know, submit it under your own name. Become the next big thing. Theyd call you the heir to Vonnegut or Roth or whoever. It was an attractive idea, especially when Wesley thought of the useless scribbles in his briefcase. But he shook his head. Itd probably violate the Paradox Lawswhatever they are. More importantly, it would eat at me like acid. From the inside out. He hesitated, not wanting to sound prissy, but wanting to articulate what felt like the real reason for not doing such a thing. I would feel ashamed. The kid smiled. Youre a good dude, Wesley. They were walking in the direction of Robbies apartment now, the leaves rattling around their feet, a quarter moon flying through the winddriven clouds overhead. You think so? I do. And so does Coach Silverman. Wesley stopped, caught by surprise. What do you know about me and Coach Silverman? Personally? Not a thing. But you must know Josies on the team. Josie Quinn from class? Of course I know Josie. The one whod sounded like a kindly anthropologist when theyd been discussing the Kindle. And yes, he had known she was a Lady Meerkat. Unfortunately one of the subs who usually got into the game only if it was a total blowout. Josie says Coach has been really sad since you and her broke up. Grouchy, too. She makes them run all the time, and kicked one girl right off the team. That was before we broke up. Thinking In a way thats why we broke up. Umdoes the whole team know about us? Robbie Henderson looked at him as though he were mad. If Josie knows, they all know. How? Because Ellen wouldnt have told them; briefing the team on your lovelife was not a coachly thing to do. How do women know anything? Robbie asked. They just do. Are you and Josie Quinn an item, Robbie? Were going in the right direction. Gnight, Wes. Im gonna sleep in tomorrowno classes on Fridaybut if you drop by Susan and Nans for lunch, come on up and knock on my door. I might do that, Wesley said. Goodnight, Robbie. Thanks for being one of the Three Stooges. Id say the pleasure was all mine, but I have to think about that. . Instead of reading urHemingway when he got back, Wesley stuffed the Kindle in his briefcase. Then he took out the mostly blank bound notebook and ran his hand over its pretty cover. For your book ideas, Ellen had said, and it had tove been an expensive present. Too bad it was going to waste. I could still write a book, he thought. Just because I havent in any of the other Urs doesnt mean I couldnt here. It was true. He could be the Sarah Palin of American letters. Because sometimes longshots came in. Both for good and for ill. He undressed, brushed his teeth, then called the English Department and left a message for the secretary to cancel his one morning class. Thanks, Marilyn. Sorry to put this on you, but I think Im coming down with the flu. He added an unconvincing cough and hung up. He thought he would lie sleepless for hours, thinking of all those other worlds, but in the dark they seemed as unreal as actors when you saw them on a movie screen. They were big up thereoften beautiful, toobut they were still only shadows thrown by light. Maybe the Urworlds were like that, too. What seemed real in this postmidnight hour was the sound of the wind, the beautiful sound of the wind telling tales of Tennessee, where it had been earlier this evening. Lulled by it, Wesley fell asleep, and he slept deeply and long. There were no dreams, and when he woke up, sunshine was flooding his bedroom. For the first time since his own undergraduate days, he had slept until almost eleven in the morning. VUr Local (Under Construction) He took a long hot shower, shaved, dressed, and decided to go down to Susan and Nans for either a late breakfast or an early lunch, whichever looked better on the menu. As for Robbie, Wesley decided hed let the kid sleep. Hed be out practicing with the rest of the hapless football team this afternoon; surely he deserved to sleep late. It occurred to him that, if he took a table by the window, he might see the Athletic Department bus go by as the girls set off for the Bluegrass Invitational, eighty miles away. Hed wave. Ellen wouldnt see him, but he'd do it anyway. He took his briefcase without even thinking about it. . He ordered the Susans Sexy Scramble (onions, peppers, mozzarella cheese) with bacon on the side, along with coffee and juice. By the time the young waitress brought his food, hed taken out the Kindle and was reading Cortlands Dogs. It was Hemingway, all right, and one terrific story. Kindle, isnt it? the waitress asked. I got one for Christmas, and I love it. Im reading my way through all of Jodi Picoults books. Oh, probably not all of them, Wesley said. Huh? Why not? Shes probably got another one done already. Thats all I meant. And James Pattersons probably written one since he got up this morning! she said, and went off chortling. Wesley had pushed the MAIN MENU button while they were talking, hiding the UrHemingway novel without really thinking about it. Feeling guilty about what he was reading? Afraid the waitress might get a look and start screaming Thats not real Hemingway? Ridiculous. But just owning the pink Kindle made him feel a little bit like a crook. It wasnt his, after all, and the stuff he had downloaded wasnt really his, either, because he wasnt the one paying for it. Maybe no one is, he thought, but didnt believe it. He thought one of the universal truths of life was that, sooner or later, someone always paid. There was nothing especially sexy about his scramble, but it was good. Instead of going back to Cortland and his winter dog, he accessed the UR menu. The one function he hadnt peeked into was UR LOCAL. Which was UNDER CONSTRUCTION. What had Robbie said about that last night? Better watch out, traffic fines double. The kid was sharp and might get even sharper, if he didnt batter his brains out playing senseless Division Three football. Smiling, Wesley highlighted UR LOCAL and pushed the select button. This message came up ACCESS CURRENT UR LOCATION? Y N Wesley selected Y. The Kindle thought some more, then posted a new message THE CURRENT UR LOCAL IS MOOREECHO ACCESS? Y N Wesley considered the question while eating a strip of bacon. The Echo was a rag specializing in yard sales, local sports, and town politics. The townies scanned those things, he supposed, but mostly bought the paper for the obituaries and Police Beat. Everybody liked to know which neighbors had died or been jailed. Searching 10.4 million Moore, Kentucky Urs sounded pretty boring, but why not? Wasnt he basically marking time, drawing his breakfast out, so he could watch the players bus go by? Sad but true, he said, and highlighted the Y button. What came up was similar to a message he had seen before Ur Local is protected by all applicable Paradox Laws. Do you agree? Y N. Now that was strange. The New York Times archive wasnt protected by these Paradox Laws, whatever they were, but their pokey local paper was? It made no sense, but seemed harmless. Wesley shrugged and selected Y. WELCOME TO THE ECHO PREARCHIVE! YOUR PRICE IS 40.004 DOWNLOADS 350.0010 DOWNLOADS 2500.00100 DOWNLOADS Wesley put his fork on his plate and sat frowning at the screen. Not only was the local paper Paradox Lawprotected, it was a hell of a lot more expensive. Why? And what the hell was a prearchive? To Wesley, that sounded like a paradox in itself. Or an oxymoron. Well, its under construction, he said. Traffic fines double and so do download expenses. Thats the explanation. Plus, Im not paying for it. No, but because the idea persisted that he might someday be forced to (someday soon!), he compromised on the middle choice. The next screen was similar to the one for the Times archive, but not quite the same; it just asked him to select a date. To him this suggested nothing but an ordinary newspaper archive, the kind he could find on microfilm at the local library. If so, why the big expense? He shrugged, typed in July 5, 2008, and pushed select. The Kindle responded immediately, posting this message FUTURE DATES ONLY THIS IS NOVEMBER 20, 2009 For a moment he didnt get it. Then he did, and the world suddenly turned itself up to superbright, as if some supernatural being had cranked the rheostat controlling the daylight. And all the noises in the cafthe clash of forks, the rattle of plates, the steady babble of conversationseemed too loud. My God, he whispered. No wonder its expensive. This was too much. Way too much. He moved to turn the Kindle off, then heard cheering and yelling outside. He looked up and saw a yellow bus with MOORE COLLEGE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT printed on the side. Cheerleaders and players were leaning out the open windows, waving and laughing and yelling stuff like Go, Meerkats! and Were number one! One of the young women was actually wearing a big foam Number One finger on her hand. The pedestrians on Main Street were grinning and waving back. Wesley lifted his own hand and waved feebly. The bus driver honked his horn. Flapping from the rear of the bus was a piece of sheeting with THE MEERKATS WILL ROCK THE RUPP spraypainted on it. Wesley became aware that people in the caf were applauding. All this seemed to be happening in another world. Another Ur. When the bus was gone, Wesley looked down at the pink Kindle again. He decided he wanted to utilize at least one of his ten downloads, after all. The locals didnt have much use for the student body as a wholethe standard townversusgown thingbut they loved the Lady Meerkats because everybody loves a winner. The tourneys results, preseason or not, would be frontpage news in Mondays Echo. If they won, he could buy Ellen a victory gift, and if they lost, he could buy her a consolation present. Im a winner either way, he said, and entered Mondays date November 23rd, 2009. The Kindle thought for a long time, then produced a newspaper front page. The date was Mondays date. The headline was huge and black. Wesley spilled his coffee and yanked the Kindle out of danger even as lukewarm coffee soaked his crotch. . Fifteen minutes later he was pacing the living room of Robbie Hendersons apartment while Robbiewhod been up when Wesley came hammering at the door but was still wearing the teeshirt and basketball shorts he slept instared at the screen of the Kindle. We have to call someone, Wesley said. He was smacking a fist into an open palm, and hard enough to turn the skin red. We have to call the police. No, wait! The arena! Call the Rupp and leave a message for her to call me, ASAP! No, thats wrong! Too slow! Ill call her now. Thats what Relax, Mr. SmithWes, I mean. How can I relax? Dont you see that thing? Are you blind? No, but you still have to relax. Pardon the expression, but youre losing your shit, and people cant think productively when theyre doing that. But Take a deep breath. And remind yourself that according to this, weve got almost sixty hours. Easy for you to say. Your girlfriend isnt going to be on that bus when it starts back to Then he stopped, because that wasnt so. Josie Quinn was on the team, and according to Robbie, he and Josie had a thing going on. Im sorry, he said. I saw the headline and freaked. I didnt even pay for my breakfast, just ran up here. I know I look like I wet my pants, and I damn near did. Not with coffee, either. Thank God your roommates are gone. Im pretty freaked, too, Robbie admitted, and for a moment they studied the screen in silence. According to Wesleys Kindle, Mondays edition of The Echo was going to have a black border around the front page as well as a black headline on top of it. That headline read COACH, 7 STUDENTS KILLED IN HORRIFIC BUS CRASH; 9 OTHERS CRITICAL The story itself really wasnt a story at all, only an item. Even in his distress, Wesley knew why. The accident had happenedno, was going to happenat just short of nine PM on Sunday night. Too late to report any details, although probably if they heated up Robbies computer and went to the Internet What was he thinking? The Internet did not predict the future; only the pink Kindle did that. His hands were shaking too badly to enter November 24th. He pushed the Kindle to Robbie. You do it. Robbie managed, though it took him two tries. The Echos Tuesday story was more complete, but the headline was even worse DEATH TOLL RISES TO 10 TOWN AND COLLEGE MOURN Is Josie Wesley began. Yeah, Robbie said. Survives the crash, dies on Monday. Christ. According to Antonia Toni Burrell, one of the Meerkat cheerleaders, and one of the lucky ones to survive Sunday nights horrific buscrash with only cuts and bruises, the celebration was still going on, the Bluegrass Trophy still being passed handtohand. We were singing We Are the Champions for the twentieth time or so, she said from the hospital in Bowling Green, where most of the survivors were taken. Coach turned around and yelled for us to keep it down, and thats when it happened. According to State Police Captain Moses Arden, the bus was traveling on Route 139, the Princeton Road, and was about two miles west of Cadiz when an SUV driven by Candy Rymer of Montgomery struck it. Ms.Rymer was traveling at a high rate of speed west along Highway 80, Captain Arden said, and struck the bus at the intersection. The busdriver, Herbert Allison, 58, of Moore apparently saw Ms. Rymers vehicle at the last moment and tried to swerve. That swerve, coupled with the impact, drove the bus into the ditch, where it overturned and exploded There was more, but neither of them wanted to read it. Okay, Robbie said. Lets think about this. First, can we be sure its true? Maybe not, Wesley said. But Robbiecan we afford to take the chance? No, Robbie said. No, I guess we cant. Of course we cant. But Wes, if we call the police, they wont believe us. You know that. Well show them the Kindle! Well show them the story! But even to himself, Wesley sounded deflated. Okay, how about this. Ill tell Ellen. Even if she wont believe me, she might agree to hold the bus for fifteen minutes or so, or change the route this guy Allisons planning to take. Robbie considered. Yeah. Worth a try. Wesley took his phone out of his briefcase. Robbie had gone back to the story, using the NEXT PAGE button to access the rest. The phone rang twicethree timesfour. Wesley was preparing to deliver his message to voicemail when Ellen answered. Wesley, I cant talk to you now. I thought you understood that Ellen, listen but if you got my message, you know were going to talk. In the background he could hear raucous, excited girlsJosie would be among themand lots of loud music. Yes, I did get the message, but we have to talk n No! Ellen said. We dont. Im not going to take your calls this weekend, and Im not going to listen to your messages. Her voice softened. And honevery one you leave is going to make it harder. For us, I mean. Ellen, you dont understa Goodbye, Wes. Ill talk to you next week. Do you wish us luck? Ellen, please! Ill take that as a yes, she said. And you know what? I guess I still care about you, even though you are a lug. With that she was gone. . He poised his finger over the redial buttonthen made himself not push it. It wouldnt help. Ellen was wearing her mywayorthehighway hat. It was insane, but there it was. She wont talk to me except on her schedule. What she doesnt realize is that after Sunday night she may not have a schedule. Youll have to call Ms. Quinn. In his current state, the girls first name escaped him. Josied think I was prankin on her, Robbie said. A story like that, any girld think I was prankin on her. He was still studying the Kindles screen. Want to know something? The woman who caused the accidentwho will cause ithardly gets hurt at all. Ill bet you next semesters tuition she was just as drunk as a goddam skunk. Wesley hardly heard this. Tell Josie that Ellen has to take my call. Have her say its not about us. Tell her to say its an emer Dude, Robbie said. Slow down and listen. Are you listening? Wesley nodded, but what he heard most clearly was his own pounding heart. Point one, Josie would still think I was prankin on her. Point two, she might think we both were. Point three, I dont think shed go to Coach Silverman anyway, given the mood that Coach has been in latelyand she gets even worse on game trips, Josie says. Robbie sighed. You have to understand about Josie. Shes sweet, shes smart, shes sexy as hell, but shes also a timid little mousie. Its sort of what I like about her. That probably says heaps of good things about your character, Robbie, but youll pardon me if right now I dont give a tomcats ass. Youve told me what wont work; do you have any idea what might? Thats point four. With a little luck, we wont have to tell anybody about this. Which is good, since they wouldnt believe it. Elucidate. First, we need to use another one of your Echo downloads. Robbie punched in November 25th, 2009. Another girl, a cheerleader who had been horribly burned in the explosion, had died, raising the deathtoll to eleven. Although the Echo didnt come right out and say so, more were likely to die before the week was out. Robbie only gave this story a quick scan. What he was looking for was a boxed story on the lower half of page one CANDACE RYMER CHARGED WITH MULTIPLE COUNTS OF VEHICULAR HOMICIDE There was a gray square in the middle of the storyher picture, Wesley assumed, only the pink Kindle didnt seem able to reprint news photographs. But it didnt matter, because now he got it. It wasnt the bus they had to stop; it was the woman who was going to hit the bus. She was point four. VICandy Rymer At five oclock on a gray Sunday afternoonas the Lady Meerkats were cutting down basketball nets in a nottoodistant part of the stateWesley Smith and Robbie Henderson were sitting in Wesleys modest Chevy Malibu, watching the door of a roadhouse in Eddyville, twenty miles north of Cadiz. The parking lot was oiled dirt and mostly empty. There was almost certainly a TV inside The Broken Windmill, but Wesley guessed discriminating tipplers would rather do their drinking and NFLwatching at home. You didnt have to go inside the joint to know it was a hole. Candy Rymers first stop had been bad, but this second one was worse. Parked slightly crooked (and blocking what appeared to be the fire exit) was a filthy, dingedup Ford Explorer with two bumper stickers on the back. MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT THE STATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, one read. The other was even more succinct I BRAKE FOR JACK DANIELS. Maybe we oughtta do it right here, Robbie said. While shes inside slopping it up and watching the Titans. It was a tempting idea, but Wesley shook his head. Well wait. Shes got one more stop to make. Hopson, remember? Thats miles from here. Right, Wesley said. But weve got time to kill, and were going to kill it. Why? Because what were up to is changing the future. Or trying to, at least. We have no idea how tough that is. Waiting as long as possible improves our chances. Wesley, that is one drunk chick. She was drunk when she got out of that first jukejoint in Central City, and shes going to be a lot drunker when she comes out of yonder shack. I cant see her getting her car repaired in time to rendezvous with the girls bus forty miles from here. And what if we break down while were trying to follow her to her last stop? Wesley hadnt considered this. Now he did. My instincts say wait, but if you have a strong feeling that we should do it now, we will. The only strong feeling I have is a scaredtofreakindeath feeling, Robbie said. He sat up. Too late to do anything else, anyway. Here she comes, Miss America. Candy Rymer emerged from The Broken Windmill in a moderate weave. She dropped her purse, bent down to get it, almost fell over, cursed, picked it up, laughed, and then continued to where her Explorer was parked, digging her keys out as she went. Her face was puffy, not quite hiding the remains of what must once have been very good looks. Her hair, blond on top and black at the roots, hung around her cheeks in lank curls. Her belly pooched out the front of elasticwaist jeans just below the hem of what had to be a Kmart smock top. She got in her beattoshit SUV, kicked the engine into life (it sounded in desperate need of a tuneup) and drove forward into the roadhouses fire door. There was a crunch. Then her backup lights came on and she reversed so fast that for one sickening moment Wesley thought she was going to hit his Malibu, crippling it and leaving them on foot as she drove off toward her appointment in Samarra. But she stopped in time and peeled onto the highway without pausing to look for traffic. A moment later Wesley was following as she headed east toward Hopson. And the intersection where the Lady Meerkats bus would arrive in four hours. . |
In spite of the terrible thing she was going to do, Wesley couldnt help feeling a little sorry for her, and he had an idea Robbie felt the same. The followup story theyd read about her in the Echo told a tale as familiar as it was sordid. Candace Candy Rymer, age fortyone, divorced. Three children, now in the custody of their father. For the last twelve years of her life shed been in and out of spindry facilities. According to an acquaintance (she seemed to have no friends), she had tried AA and decided it wasnt for her. Too much holyrolling. She had been arrested for DUI half a dozen times. She had lost her license after each of the last two, but in both cases it had been restored, the second time by special petition. She needed her license to get to her job at the fertilizer factory in Bainbridge, she told Judge Wallenby. What she didnt tell him was that she had lost the job six months previousand nobody checked. Candy Rymer was a boozebomb waiting to go off, and the explosion was now very close. The story hadnt mentioned her home address in Montgomery, but it didnt need to. In what Wesley considered a rather brilliant piece of investigative journalism (especially for the Echo), the reporter had retraced Candys final binge, from The Pot O Gold in Central City to The Broken Windmill in Eddyville to Bantys Bar in Hopson. There the bartender was going to try to take her keys. Unsuccessfully. Candy was going to give him the finger and leave, shouting Im done giving my business to this dive! back over her shoulder. That was at seven oclock. The reporter theorized that Candy must have pulled over somewhere for a short nap, possibly on Route 124, before cutting across to Route 80. A little further down 80, she would make her final stop. A fiery one. . Once Robbie put the thought in his head, Wesley kept expecting his alwaystrustworthy Chevrolet to die and coast to a stop at the side of the twolane blacktop, a victim of either a bad battery or the Paradox Laws. Candy Rymers taillights would disappear from view and they would spend the following hours making frantic but useless calls (always assuming their phones would even work out here in the williwags) and cursing themselves for not disabling her vehicle back in Eddyville, while they still had a chance. But the Malibu cruised as effortlessly as always, without a single gurgle or glitch. He stayed about half a mile behind Candys Explorer. Man, shes all over the road, Robbie said. Maybe shell ditch the damn thing before she gets to the next bar. Save us the trouble of slashing her tires. According to the Echo, that doesnt happen. Yeah, but we know the futures not cast in stone, dont we? Maybe this is another Ur, or something. Wesley didnt think it worked that way with UR LOCAL, but he kept his mouth shut. Either way, it was too late now. Candy Rymer made it to Bantys without going in the ditch or hitting any oncoming traffic, although she could have done either; God knew she had enough close calls. When one of the cars that swerved out of her way passed Wesleys Malibu, Robbie said Thats a family. Mom, Pop, three little kids goofin around in the back. That was when Wesley stopped feeling sorry for Rymer and started feeling angry at her. It was a clean, hot emotion that made his pique at Ellen feel paltry by comparison. That bitch, he said. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. That drunken whogivesashit bitch. Ill kill her if thats the only way I can stop her. Ill help, Robbie said, then clamped his mouth so tightly shut his lips nearly disappeared. . They didnt have to kill her, and the Paradox Laws stopped them no more than the laws against drinking and driving had stopped Candy Rymer on her tour of southern Kentuckys more desperate watering holes. The parking lot of Bantys Bar was paved, but the buckling concrete looked like something left over from an Israeli bombing raid in Gaza. Overhead, a fizzing neon rooster flashed on and off. Hooked in one set of its talons was a moonshine jug with XXX printed on the side. The Rymer womans Explorer was parked almost directly beneath this fabulous bird, and by its stuttering orangered glow, Wesley slashed open the elderly SUVs front tires with the butcher knife they had brought for that express purpose. As the whoosh of escaping air hit him, he was struck by a wave of relief so great that at first he couldnt get up but only hunker on his knees like a man praying. My turn, Robbie said, and a moment later the Explorer settled further as the kid punctured the rear tires. Then came another hiss. He had put a hole in the spare for good measure. By then Wesley had gotten to his feet. Lets park around to the side, Robbie said. I think we better keep an eye on her. Im going to do a lot more than that, Wesley said. Easy, big fella. What are you planning on? Im not planning. Im beyond that. But the rage shaking through his body suggested something different. . According to the Echo, she had called Bantys a dive in her parting shot, but apparently that had been cleaned up for family consumption. What she actually threw back over her shoulder was, Im done doing business with this shitpit! Only by this point she was so drunk the vulgarity came out in a slippery slur shippih. Robbie, fascinated at seeing the news story played out before his eyes right down to the upraised middle finger (which the Echo had primly referred to as an obscene gesture), made no effort to grab Wesley as he strode toward her. He did call Wait! but Wesley didnt. He seized the woman and commenced shaking her. Candy Rymers mouth dropped open; the keys shed been holding in the hand not occupied with birdflipping dropped to the cracked concrete tarmac. Leggo me, you bassard! Wesley didnt. He slapped her face hard enough to split her lower lip, then went back on her the other way. Sober up! he screamed into her frightened face. Sober up, you useless bitch! Get a life and stop fucking up other peoples! Youre going to kill people! Do you understand that? You are going to fucking KILL people! He slapped her a third time, the sound as loud as a pistolshot. She staggered back against the side of the building, weeping and holding her hands up to protect her face. Blood trickled down her chin. Their shadows, turned into elongated gantries by the neon bird, winked off and on. He raised his hand to slap a fourth timebetter to slap than to choke, which was what he really wanted to dobut Robbie grabbed him from behind and wrestled him away. Stop it! Thats enough! The bartender and a couple of goofylooking patrons were now standing in the doorway, gawking. Candy Rymer had slid down to a sitting position. She was weeping hysterically, her hands pressed to her swelling face. Why does everyone hate me? she sobbed. Why is everyone so goddam mean? Wesley looked at her dully, the anger out of him. What replaced it was a kind of hopelessness. You would say that a drunk driver who caused the deaths of at least eleven people had to be evil, but there was no evil here. Only a sobbing alkie sitting on the cracked, weedy concrete of a country roadhouse parking lot. A woman who, if the offandon light of the stuttering rooster did not lie, had wet her pants. You can get the person but you cant get the evil, Wesley said. The evil always survives. Isnt that a bitch. Just a total bitch. Yeah, Im sure, but come on. Before they get a really good look at you. Robbie was leading him back to the Malibu. Wesley went as docilely as a child. He was trembling. The evil always survives, Robbie. In all the Urs. Remember that. You bet, absolutely. Give me the keys. Ill drive. Hey! someone shouted from behind them. Why in the hell did you beat up that woman? She wasnt doing nothing to you! Come back here! Robbie pushed Wesley into the car, ran around the hood, threw himself behind the wheel, and drove away fast. He kept the pedal down until the stuttering rooster disappeared, then eased up. What now? Wesley ran a hand over his eyes. Im sorry I did that, he said. And yet Im not. Do you understand? Yeah, Robbie said. You bet. It was for Coach Silverman. And Josie too. He smiled. My little mousie. Wesley nodded. So where do we go? Home? Not yet, Wesley said. . They parked on the edge of a cornfield near the intersection of Route 139 and Highway 80, two miles west of Cadiz. They were early, and Wesley used the time to fire up the pink Kindle. When he tried to access UR LOCAL, he was greeted by a somehow unsurprising message THIS SERVICE NO LONGER AVAILABLE. Probably for the best, he said. Robbie turned toward him. Say what? Nothing. It doesnt matter. He put the Kindle back in his briefcase. Wes? What, Robbie? Did we break the Paradox Laws? Undoubtedly, Wes said. And with some satisfaction. At five to nine, they heard honking and saw lights. They got out of the Malibu and stood in front of it, waiting. Wesley observed that Robbies hands were clenched, and was glad he himself wasnt the only one still afraid that Candy Rymer might still somehow appear. Headlights breasted the nearest hill. It was the bus, followed by a dozen cars filled with Lady Meerkat supporters, all honking deliriously and flashing their high beams off and on. As the bus passed, Wesley heard young female voices singing We Are the Champions and felt a chill race up his back and lift the hair on his neck. He raised his hand and waved. Beside him, Robbie did the same. Then he turned to Wesley, smiling. What do you say, Prof? Want to join the parade? Wesley clapped him on the shoulder. That sounds like a damn fine idea. When the last of the cars had passed, Robbie got in line. Like the others, he honked and flashed his lights all the way back to Moore. Wesley didnt mind. VIIThe Paradox Police When Robbie got out in front of Susan and Nans (where LADY MEERKATS RULE had been soaped on the window), Wesley said, Wait a sec. He came around the front of the car and embraced the kid. You did good. Ungrammatical but appreciated. Robbie wiped at his eyes, then grinned. Does this mean I get a gift A for the semester? Nope, just some advice. Get out of football. Youll never make it a career, and your head deserves better. Duly noted, Robbie saidwhich was not agreement, as they both knew. See you in class? On Tuesday, Wesley said. But fifteen minutes later he had reason to wonder if anyone would see him. Ever again. . There was a car in the spot where he usually left the Malibu when he didnt leave it in Parking Lot A at the college. Wesley could have parked behind it, but chose the other side of the street instead. Something about the car made him uneasy. It was a Cadillac, and in the glow of the arc sodium beneath which it was parked, it seemed too bright. The red paint almost seemed to yell Here I am! Do you like me? Wesley didnt. Nor did he like the tinted windows or the oversized gangsta hubcabs with their gold Cadillac emblems. It looked like a drug dealers car. If, that was, the dealer in question also happened to be a homicidal maniac. Now why would I think that? Stress of the day, thats all, he said as he crossed the deserted street with his briefcase banging against his leg. He bent down. Nobody was inside the car. At least he didnt think so. With the darkened windows, it was hard to be entirely sure. Its the Paradox Police. Theyve come for me. This idea should have seemed ridiculous at best, a paranoid fantasy at worst, but felt like neither. And when you considered all that had happened, maybe it wasnt paranoid at all. Wesley stretched out a hand, touched the door of the car, then snatched it back. The door felt like metal, but it was warm. And it seemed to be pulsing. As if, metal or not, the car were alive. Run. The thought was so powerful he felt his lips mouth it, but he knew running wasnt an option. If he tried, the man or men who belonged to the loathsome red car would find him. This was a fact so simple that it defied logic. It bypassed logic. So instead of running, he used his key to open the street door and went upstairs. He did it slowly, because his heart was racing and his legs kept threatening to give way. The door of his apartment stood open, light spilling onto the upstairs landing in a long rectangle. Ah, here you are, a notquitehuman voice said. Come in, Wesley of Kentucky. . There were two of them. One was young and one was old. The old one sat on his sofa, where Wesley and Ellen Silverman had once seduced each other to their mutual enjoyment (nay, ecstasy). The young one sat in Wesleys favorite chair, the one he always ended up in when the night was late, the leftover cheesecake tasty, the book interesting, and the light from the standing lamp just right. They both wore long mustardcolored coats, the kind that are called dusters, and Wesley understood, without knowing how he understood, that the coats were alive. He also understood that the men wearing them were not men at all. Their faces kept changing, and what lay just beneath the skin was reptilian. Or birdlike. Or both. On their lapels, where lawmen in a Western movie would have worn badges, both wore buttons bearing a red eye. Wesley thought these too were alive. Those eyes were watching him. How did you know it was me? Smelled you, the older of the two replied, and the terrible thing was this it didnt sound like a joke. What do you want? You know why were here, the young one said. The older of the two never spoke again at all until the end of the visit. Listening to one of them was bad enough. It was like listening to a man whose voicebox was stuffed with crickets. I suppose I do, Wesley said. His voice was steady, at least so far. I broke the Paradox Laws. He prayed they didnt know about Robbie, and thought they might not; the Kindle had been registered to Wesley Smith, after all. You have no idea what you did, the man in the yellow coat said in a meditative voice. The Tower trembles; the worlds shudder in their courses. The rose feels a chill, as of winter. Very poetic, but not very illuminating. What Tower? What rose? Wesley could feel sweat breaking on his forehead even though he liked to keep the apartment cool. Its because of them, he thought. These boys run hot. It doesnt matter, his younger visitor said. Explain yourself, Wesley of Kentucky. And do it well, if you would ever see sunshine again. For a moment Wesley couldnt. His mind was filled with a single thought Im on trial here. Then he swept it aside. The return of his angera pale imitation of what he had felt toward Candy Rymer, but real anger, just the samehelped in this regard. People were going to die. Almost a dozen. Maybe more. That might not mean much to fellows like you, but it does to me, especially since one of them happens to be a woman Im in love with. All because of one selfindulgent drunk who wont address her problems. And He almost said And we, but made the necessary coursecorrection just in time. And I didnt even hurt her. Slapped her a little, but I couldnt help myself. You boys can never help yourselves, the buzzing voice of the thing in his favorite chairwhich would never be his favorite chair againreplied. Poor impulse control is ninety per cent of your problem. Did it ever cross your mind, Wesley of Kentucky, that the Paradox Laws exist for a reason? I didnt The thing raised its voice. Of course you didnt. We know you didnt. Were here because you didnt. It didnt cross your mind that one of the people on that bus might become a serial killer, someone who might murder dozens, including a child who would otherwise grow up to cure cancer or Alzheimers Disease. It didnt occur to you that one of those young women might give birth to the next Hitler or Stalin, a human monster who could go on to kill millions of your fellow humans on this level of the Tower. It didnt occur to you that you were meddling in events far beyond your ability to understand! No, he had not considered those things at all. Ellen was what he had considered. As Josie Quinn was what Robbie had considered. And together they had considered the others. Kids screaming, their skin turning to tallow and dripping off their bones, maybe dying the worst deaths God visits on His suffering people. Does that happen? he whispered. We dont know what happens, the thing in the yellow coat said. Thats precisely the point. The experimental program you foolishly accessed can see clearly six months into the futurewithin a single narrow geographical area, that is. Beyond six months, predictive sight grows dim. Beyond a year, all is darkness. So you see, we dont know what you and your young friend may have done. And since we dont, theres no chance to repair the damage, if there was damage. Your young friend. They knew about Robbie Henderson after all. Wesleys heart sank. Is there some sort of power controlling all this? There is, isnt there? When I accessed UR BOOKS for the first time, I saw a tower. All things serve the Tower, the manthing in the yellow duster said, and touched the hideous button on its coat with a kind of reverence. Then how do you know Im not serving it, too? They said nothing. Only stared at them with their black, predatory birdeyes. I never ordered it, you know. I meanI ordered a Kindle, that much is true, but I never ordered the one I got. It just came. There was a long silence, and Wesley understood that his life was spinning inside it. Life as he knew it, at least. He might continue some sort of existence if these two creatures took him away in their loathsome red car, but it would be a dark existence, probably an imprisoned existence, and he guessed he would not retain his sanity for long. We think it was a mistake in shipping, the young one said finally. But you dont know for sure, do you? Because you dont know where it came from. Or who sent it. More silence. Then the older of the two said All things serve the Tower. He stood, and held out his hand. It shimmered and became a claw. Shimmered again and became a hand. Give it to me, Wesley of Kentucky. Wesley of Kentucky didnt have to be asked twice, although his hands were trembling so badly that he fumbled with the buckles of his briefcase for what felt like hours. At last the top sprang open, and he held the pink Kindle out to the older of the two. The creature stared at it with a crazed hunger that made Wesley feel like screaming. I dont think it works anymore, anyw The creature snatched it. For one second Wesley felt its skin and understood the creatures flesh had its own thoughts. Howling thoughts that ran along their own unknowable circuits. This time he did screamor tried to. What actually came out was a low, choked groan. This time were giving you a pass, the young one said. But if anything like this ever happens again... It didnt finish. It didnt have to. They moved to the door, the hems of their coats making loathsome liquid chuckling sounds. The older one went out, still holding the pink Kindle in its clawhands. The other paused for a moment to look back at Wesley. Do you understand how lucky you are? Yes, Wesley whispered. Then say thank you. Thank you. It was gone without another word. . He couldnt bring himself to sit on the sofa, or in the chair that had seemedin the days before Ellento be his best friend in the world. He lay down on his bed and crossed his arms over his chest in an effort to stop the shudders that were whipping through him. He left the lights on because there was no sense turning them off. He felt sure he would not sleep again for weeks. Perhaps never. Hed begin to drift off, then see those greedy black eyes and hear that voice saying Do you understand how lucky you are? No, sleep was definitely out. And with that, consciousness ceased. VIIIEllen Wesley slept until the musicbox tinkle of Pachelbels Canon in D woke him at nine oclock the next morning. If there were dreams (of pink Kindles, women in roadhouse parking lots, or low men in yellow coats), he did not remember them. All he knew was that someone was calling his cell, and it might be someone he wanted to talk to very badly. He ran into the living room, but the ringing ceased before he could get the phone out of his briefcase. He flipped it open and saw YOU HAVE 1 NEW MESSAGE. He accessed it. Hey, pal, Don Allmans voice said. You better check the morning paper. That was all. He no longer subscribed to the Echo, but old Mrs. Ridpath, his downstairs neighbor, did. He took the stairs two at a time, and there it was, sticking out of her mailbox. He reached for it, then hesitated. What if his deep sleep hadnt been natural? What if he had been anesthetized somehow, so he could be booted into a different Ur, one where the crash had happened after all? What if Don had called to prepare him? Suppose he unfolded the paper and saw the black border that was the newspaper worlds version of funeral crepe? Please, he whispered, unsure if it was God or that mysterious dark tower he was praying to. Please let it still be my Ur. He took the paper in a numb hand and unfolded it. The border was there, boxing in the entire front page, but it was blue rather than black. Meerkat blue. The photo was the biggest hed ever seen in the Echo; it took up half of the front page, under a headline reading LADY MEERKATS TAKE BLUEGRASS, AND THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD! The team was clustered on the hardwood of Rupp Arena. Three were hoisting a shiny silver trophy. Anotherit was Josiestood on a stepladder, twirling a net over her head. Standing in front of her team, dressed in the prim blue slacks and blue blazer she invariably wore on game days, was Ellen Silverman. She was smiling and holding up a handmade sign that read I LOVE YOU WESLEY. Wesley thrust his hands, one still holding the newspaper, over his head and let out a yell that caused a couple of kids on the other side of the street to look around. Wassup? one of them called. Sports fan! Wesley called back, then raced back upstairs. He had a call to make. |
PRAISE FOR STEPHEN KING The most wonderfully gruesome man on the planet. USA Today An undisputed master of suspense and terror. The Washington Post [King] probably knows more about scary goingson in confined, isolated places than anybody since Edgar Allan Poe. Entertainment Weekly Hes the author who can always make the improbable so scary youll feel compelled to check the locks on the front door. The Boston Globe Peerless imagination. The Observer (London) FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS MASS MARKET EDITION, JULY 2012 Copyright 1977 by Stephen King Excerpt from Doctor Sleep by Stephen King. Copyright 2013 by Stephen King. Reprinted by permission of Simon Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1977. Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material appear on this page. The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows King, Stephen. 1947 The shining Stephen King.1st ed. 1. HotelkeepersFiction. 2. FamiliesFiction. I. Title. PZ4.K5227 Sh PS3561.l483 813.54 76024212 eISBN 9780385528863 www.anchorbooks.com Cover design and photograph Henry Steadman v3.1r1 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Authors Note Epigraph Part One Prefatory Matters Chapter One Job Interview Chapter Two Boulder Chapter Three Watson Chapter Four Shadowland Chapter Five Phonebooth Chapter Six Night Thoughts Chapter Seven In Another Bedroom Part Two Closing Day Chapter Eight A View of the Overlook Chapter Nine Checking It Out Chapter Ten Hallorann Chapter Eleven The Shining Chapter Twelve The Grand Tour Chapter Thirteen The Front Porch Part Three The Wasps Nest Chapter Fourteen Up On the Roof Chapter Fifteen Down in the Front Yard Chapter Sixteen Danny Chapter Seventeen The Doctors Office Chapter Eighteen The Scrapbook Chapter Nineteen Outside 217 Chapter Twenty Talking to Mr. Ullman Chapter TwentyOne Night Thoughts Chapter TwentyTwo In the Truck Chapter TwentyThree In the Playground Chapter TwentyFour Snow Chapter TwentyFive Inside 217 Part Four Snowbound Chapter TwentySix Dreamland Chapter TwentySeven Catatonic Chapter TwentyEight It Was Her! Chapter TwentyNine Kitchen Talk Chapter Thirty 217 Revisited Chapter ThirtyOne The Verdict Chapter ThirtyTwo The Bedroom Chapter ThirtyThree The Snowmobile Chapter ThirtyFour The Hedges Chapter ThirtyFive The Lobby Chapter ThirtySix The Elevator Chapter ThirtySeven The Ballroom Part Five Matters of Life and Death Chapter ThirtyEight Florida Chapter ThirtyNine On the Stairs Chapter Forty In the Basement Chapter FortyOne Daylight Chapter FortyTwo MidAir Chapter FortyThree Drinks On the House Chapter FortyFour Conversations At the Party Chapter FortyFive Stapleton Airport, Denver Chapter FortySix Wendy Chapter FortySeven Danny Chapter FortyEight Jack Chapter FortyNine Hallorann, Going Up the Country Chapter Fifty Redrum Chapter FiftyOne Hallorann Arrives Chapter FiftyTwo Wendy and Jack Chapter FiftyThree Hallorann Laid Low Chapter FiftyFour Tony Chapter FiftyFive That Which Was Forgotten Chapter FiftySix The Explosion Chapter FiftySeven Exit Chapter FiftyEight Epilogue Summer Excerpt from Doctor Sleep Acknowledgements About the Author Other Books by This Author This is for Joe Hill King, who shines on. My editor on this book, as on the previous two, was Mr. William G. Thompson, a man of wit and good sense. His contribution to this book has been large, and for it, my thanks. S.K. Some of the most beautiful resort hotels in the world are located in Colorado, but the hotel in these pages is based on none of them. The Overlook and the people associated with it exist wholly within the authors imagination. It was in this apartment, also, that there stood a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause to hearken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly and [they] smiled as if at their own nervousness and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before. But in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel E. A. Poe The Masque of the Red Death The sleep of reason breeds monsters. Goya Itll shine when it shines. Folk saying PART ONE PREFATORY MATTERS CHAPTER ONE JOB INTERVIEW Jack Torrance thought Officious little prick. Ullman stood fivefive, and when he moved, it was with the prissy speed that seems to be the exclusive domain of all small plump men. The part in his hair was exact, and his dark suit was sober but comforting. I am a man you can bring your problems to, that suit said to the paying customer. To the hired help it spoke more curtly This had better be good, you. There was a red carnation in the lapel, perhaps so that no one on the street would mistake Stuart Ullman for the local undertaker. As he listened to Ullman speak, Jack admitted to himself that he probably could not have liked any man on that side of the deskunder the circumstances. Ullman had asked a question he hadnt caught. That was bad; Ullman was the type of man who would file such lapses away in a mental Rolodex for later consideration. Im sorry? I asked if your wife fully understood what you would be taking on here. And theres your son, of course. He glanced down at the application in front of him. Daniel. Your wife isnt a bit intimidated by the idea? Wendy is an extraordinary woman. And your son is also extraordinary? Jack smiled, a big wide PR smile. We like to think so, I suppose. Hes quite selfreliant for a fiveyearold. No returning smile from Ullman. He slipped Jacks application back into a file. The file went into a drawer. The desk top was now completely bare except for a blotter, a telephone, a Tensor lamp, and an inout basket. Both sides of the inout were empty, too. Ullman stood up and went to the file cabinet in the corner. Step around the desk, if you will, Mr. Torrance. Well look at the hotel floor plans. He brought back five large sheets and set them down on the glossy walnut plane of the desk. Jack stood by his shoulder, very much aware of the scent of Ullmans cologne. All my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all came into his mind for no reason at all, and he had to clamp his tongue between his teeth to keep in a bray of laughter. Beyond the wall, faintly, came the sounds of the Overlook Hotels kitchen, gearing down from lunch. Top floor, Ullman said briskly. The attic. Absolutely nothing up there now but bricabrac. The Overlook has changed hands several times since World War II and it seems that each successive manager has put everything they dont want up in the attic. I want rattraps and poison bait sowed around in it. Some of the thirdfloor chambermaids say they have heard rustling noises. I dont believe it, not for a moment, but there mustnt even be that oneinahundred chance that a single rat inhabits the Overlook Hotel. Jack, who suspected that every hotel in the world had a rat or two, held his tongue. Of course you wouldnt allow your son up in the attic under any circumstances. No, Jack said, and flashed the big PR smile again. Humiliating situation. Did this officious little prick actually think he would allow his son to goof around in a rattrap attic full of junk furniture and God knew what else? Ullman whisked away the attic floor plan and put it on the bottom of the pile. The Overlook has one hundred and ten guest quarters, he said in a scholarly voice. Thirty of them, all suites, are here on the third floor. Ten in the west wing (including the Presidential Suite), ten in the center, ten more in the east wing. All of them command magnificent views. Could you at least spare the salestalk? But he kept quiet. He needed the job. Ullman put the third floor on the bottom of the pile and they studied the second floor. Forty rooms, Ullman said, thirty doubles and ten singles. And on the first floor, twenty of each. Plus three linen closets on each floor, and a storeroom which is at the extreme east end of the hotel on the second floor and the extreme west end on the first. Questions? Jack shook his head. Ullman whisked the second and first floors away. Now. Lobby level. Here in the center is the registration desk. Behind it are the offices. The lobby runs for eighty feet in either direction from the desk. Over here in the west wing is the Overlook Dining Room and the Colorado Lounge. The banquet and ballroom facility is in the east wing. Questions? Only about the basement, Jack said. For the winter caretaker, thats the most important level of all. Where the action is, so to speak. Watson will show you all that. The basement floor plan is on the boiler room wall. He frowned impressively, perhaps to show that as manager, he did not concern himself with such mundane aspects of the Overlooks operation as the boiler and the plumbing. Might not be a bad idea to put some traps down there too. Just a minute He scrawled a note on a pad he took from his inner coat pocket (each sheet bore the legend From the Desk of Stuart Ullman in bold black script), tore it off, and dropped it into the out basket. It sat there looking lonesome. The pad disappeared back into Ullmans jacket pocket like the conclusion of a magicians trick. Now you see it, Jackyboy, now you dont. This guy is a real heavyweight. They had resumed their original positions, Ullman behind the desk and Jack in front of it, interviewer and interviewee, supplicant and reluctant patron. Ullman folded his neat little hands on the desk blotter and looked directly at Jack, a small, balding man in a bankers suit and a quiet gray tie. The flower in his lapel was balanced off by a small lapel pin on the other side. It read simply STAFF in small gold letters. Ill be perfectly frank with you, Mr. Torrance. Albert Shockley is a powerful man with a large interest in the Overlook, which showed a profit this season for the first time in its history. Mr. Shockley also sits on the Board of Directors, but he is not a hotel man and he would be the first to admit this. But he has made his wishes in this caretaking matter quite obvious. He wants you hired. I will do so. But if I had been given a free hand in this matter, I would not have taken you on. Jacks hands were clenched tightly in his lap, working against each other, sweating. Officious little prick, officious little prick, officious I dont believe you care much for me, Mr. Torrance. I dont care. Certainly your feelings toward me play no part in my own belief that you are not right for the job. During the season that runs from May fifteenth to September thirtieth, the Overlook employs one hundred and ten people fulltime; one for every room in the hotel, you might say. I dont think many of them like me and I suspect that some of them think Im a bit of a bastard. They would be correct in their judgment of my character. I have to be a bit of a bastard to run this hotel in the manner it deserves. He looked at Jack for comment, and Jack flashed the PR smile again, large and insultingly toothy. Ullman said The Overlook was built in the years 1907 to 1909. The closest town is Sidewinder, forty miles east of here over roads that are closed from sometime in late October or November until sometime in April. A man named Robert Townley Watson built it, the grandfather of our present maintenance man. Vanderbilts have stayed here, and Rockefellers, and Astors, and Du Ponts. Four Presidents have stayed in the Presidential Suite. Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt, and Nixon. I wouldnt be too proud of Harding and Nixon, Jack murmured. Ullman frowned but went on regardless. It proved too much for Mr. Watson, and he sold the hotel in 1915. It was sold again in 1922, in 1929, in 1936. It stood vacant until the end of World War II, when it was purchased and completely renovated by Horace Derwent, millionaire inventor, pilot, film producer, and entrepreneur. I know the name, Jack said. Yes. Everything he touched seemed to turn to gold except the Overlook. He funneled over a million dollars into it before the first postwar guest ever stepped through its doors, turning a decrepit relic into a showplace. It was Derwent who added the roque court I saw you admiring when you arrived. Roque? A British forebear of our croquet, Mr. Torrance. Croquet is bastardized roque. According to legend, Derwent learned the game from his social secretary and fell completely in love with it. Ours may be the finest roque court in America. I wouldnt doubt it, Jack said gravely. A roque court, a topiary full of hedge animals out front, what next? A lifesized Uncle Wiggily game behind the equipment shed? He was getting very tired of Mr. Stuart Ullman, but he could see that Ullman wasnt done. Ullman was going to have his say, every last word of it. When he had lost three million, Derwent sold it to a group of California investors. Their experience with the Overlook was equally bad. Just not hotel people. In 1970, Mr. Shockley and a group of his associates bought the hotel and turned its management over to me. We have also run in the red for several years, but Im happy to say that the trust of the present owners in me has never wavered. Last year we broke even. And this year the Overlooks accounts were written in black ink for the first time in almost seven decades. Jack supposed that this fussy little mans pride was justified, and then his original dislike washed over him again in a wave. He said I see no connection between the Overlooks admittedly colorful history and your feeling that Im wrong for the post, Mr. Ullman. One reason that the Overlook has lost so much money lies in the depreciation that occurs each winter. It shortens the profit margin a great deal more than you might believe, Mr. Torrance. The winters are fantastically cruel. In order to cope with the problem, Ive installed a fulltime winter caretaker to run the boiler and to heat different parts of the hotel on a daily rotating basis. To repair breakage as it occurs and to do repairs, so the elements cant get a foothold. To be constantly alert to any and every contingency. During our first winter I hired a family instead of a single man. There was a tragedy. A horrible tragedy. Ullman looked at Jack coolly and appraisingly. I made a mistake. I admit it freely. The man was a drunk. Jack felt a slow, hot grinthe total antithesis of the toothy PR grinstretch across his mouth. Is that it? Im surprised Al didnt tell you. Ive retired. Yes, Mr. Shockley told me you no longer drink. He also told me about your last job your last position of trust, shall we say? You were teaching English in a Vermont prep school. You lost your temper, I dont believe I need to be any more specific than that. But I do happen to believe that Gradys case has a bearing, and that is why I have brought the matter of your uh, previous history into the conversation. During the winter of 197071, after we had refurbished the Overlook but before our first season, I hired this this unfortunate named Delbert Grady. He moved into the quarters you and your wife and son will be sharing. He had a wife and two daughters. I had reservations, the main ones being the harshness of the winter season and the fact that the Gradys would be cut off from the outside world for five to six months. But thats not really true, is it? There are telephones here, and probably a citizens band radio as well. And the Rocky Mountain National Park is within helicopter range and surely a piece of ground that big must have a chopper or two. I wouldnt know about that, Ullman said. The hotel does have a twoway radio that Mr. Watson will show you, along with a list of the correct frequencies to broadcast on if you need help. The telephone lines between here and Sidewinder are still aboveground, and they go down almost every winter at some point or other and are apt to stay down for three weeks to a month and a half. There is a snowmobile in the equipment shed also. Then the place really isnt cut off. Mr. Ullman looked pained. Suppose your son or your wife tripped on the stairs and fractured his or her skull, Mr. Torrance. Would you think the place was cut off then? Jack saw the point. A snowmobile running at top speed could get you down to Sidewinder in an hour and a half maybe. A helicopter from the Parks Rescue Service could get up here in three hours under optimum conditions. In a blizzard it would never even be able to lift off and you couldnt hope to run a snowmobile at top speed, even if you dared take a seriously injured person out into temperatures that might be twentyfive belowor fortyfive below, if you added in the wind chill factor. In the case of Grady, Ullman said, I reasoned much as Mr. Shockley seems to have done in your case. Solitude can be damaging in itself. Better for the man to have his family with him. If there was trouble, I thought, the odds were very high that it would be something less urgent than a fractured skull or an accident with one of the power tools or some sort of convulsion. A serious case of the flu, pneumonia, a broken arm, even appendicitis. Any of those things would have left enough time. I suspect that what happened came as a result of too much cheap whiskey, of which Grady had laid in a generous supply, unbeknownst to me, and a curious condition which the oldtimers call cabin fever. Do you know the term? Ullman offered a patronizing little smile, ready to explain as soon as Jack admitted his ignorance, and Jack was happy to respond quickly and crisply. Its a slang term for the claustrophobic reaction that can occur when people are shut in together over long periods of time. The feeling of claustrophobia is externalized as dislike for the people you happen to be shut in with. In extreme cases it can result in hallucinations and violencemurder has been done over such minor things as a burned meal or an argument about whose turn it is to do the dishes. Ullman looked rather nonplussed, which did Jack a world of good. He decided to press a little further, but silently promised Wendy he would stay cool. I suspect you did make a mistake at that. Did he hurt them? He killed them, Mr. Torrance, and then committed suicide. He murdered the little girls with a hatchet, his wife with a shotgun, and himself the same way. His leg was broken. Undoubtedly so drunk he fell downstairs. Ullman spread his hands and looked at Jack selfrighteously. Was he a high school graduate? As a matter of fact, he wasnt, Ullman said a little stiffly. I thought a, shall we say, less imaginative individual would be less susceptible to the rigors, the loneliness That was your mistake, Jack said. A stupid man is more prone to cabin fever just as hes more prone to shoot someone over a card game or commit a spurofthemoment robbery. He gets bored. When the snow comes, theres nothing to do but watch TV or play solitaire and cheat when he cant get all the aces out. Nothing to do but bitch at his wife and nag at the kids and drink. It gets hard to sleep because theres nothing to hear. So he drinks himself to sleep and wakes up with a hangover. He gets edgy. And maybe the telephone goes out and the TV aerial blows down and theres nothing to do but think and cheat at solitaire and get edgier and edgier. Finally boom, boom, boom. Whereas a more educated man, such as yourself? My wife and I both like to read. I have a play to work on, as Al Shockley probably told you. Danny has his puzzles, his coloring books, and his crystal radio. I plan to teach him to read, and I also want to teach him to snowshoe. Wendy would like to learn how, too. Oh yes, I think we can keep busy and out of each others hair if the TV goes on the fritz. He paused. And Al was telling the truth when he told you I no longer drink. I did once, and it got to be serious. But I havent had so much as a glass of beer in the last fourteen months. I dont intend to bring any alcohol up here, and I dont think there will be an opportunity to get any after the snow flies. In that you would be quite correct, Ullman said. But as long as the three of you are up here, the potential for problems is multiplied. I have told Mr. Shockley this, and he told me he would take the responsibility. Now Ive told you, and apparently you are also willing to take the responsibility I am. All right. Ill accept that, since I have little choice. But I would still rather have an unattached college boy taking a year off. Well, perhaps youll do. Now Ill turn you over to Mr. Watson, who will take you through the basement and around the grounds. Unless you have further questions? No. None at all. Ullman stood. I hope there are no hard feelings, Mr. Torrance. There is nothing personal in the things I have said to you. I only want whats best for the Overlook. It is a great hotel. I want it to stay that way. No. No hard feelings. Jack flashed the PR grin again, but he was glad Ullman didnt offer to shake hands. There were hard feelings. All kinds of them. CHAPTER TWO BOULDER She looked out the kitchen window and saw him just sitting there on the curb, not playing with his trucks or the wagon or even the balsa glider that had pleased him so much all the last week since Jack had brought it home. He was just sitting there, watching for their shopworn VW, his elbows planted on his thighs and his chin propped in his hands, a fiveyearold kid waiting for his daddy. Wendy suddenly felt bad, almost crying bad. She hung the dish towel over the bar by the sink and went downstairs, buttoning the top two buttons of her house dress. Jack and his pride! Hey no, Al, I dont need an advance. Im okay for a while. The hallway walls were gouged and marked with crayons, grease pencil, spray paint. The stairs were steep and splintery. The whole building smelled of sour age, and what sort of place was this for Danny after the small neat brick house in Stovington? The people living above them on the third floor werent married, and while that didnt bother her, their constant, rancorous fighting did. It scared her. The guy up there was Tom, and after the bars had closed and they had returned home, the fights would start in earnestthe rest of the week was just a prelim in comparison. The Friday Night Fights, Jack called them, but it wasnt funny. The womanher name was Elainewould at last be reduced to tears and to repeating over and over again Dont, Tom. Please dont. Please dont. And he would shout at her. Once they had even awakened Danny, and Danny slept like a corpse. The next morning Jack caught Tom going out and had spoken to him on the sidewalk at some length. Tom started to bluster and Jack had said something else to him, too quietly for Wendy to hear, and Tom had only shaken his head sullenly and walked away. That had been a week ago and for a few days things had been better, but since the weekend things had been working back to normalexcuse me, abnormal. It was bad for the boy. Her sense of grief washed over her again but she was on the walk now and she smothered it. Sweeping her dress under her and sitting down on the curb beside him, she said Whats up, doc? He smiled at her but it was perfunctory. Hi, Mom. The glider was between his sneakered feet, and she saw that one of the wings had started to splinter. Want me to see what I can do with that, honey? Danny had gone back to staring up the street. No. Dad will fix it. Your daddy may not be back until suppertime, doc. Its a long drive up into those mountains. Do you think the bug will break down? No, I dont think so. But he had just given her something new to worry about. Thanks, Danny. I needed that. Dad said it might, Danny said in a matteroffact, almost bored manner. He said the fuel pump was all shot to shit. Dont say that, Danny. Fuel pump? he asked her with honest surprise. She sighed. No, All shot to shit. Dont say that. Why? Its vulgar. Whats vulgar, Mom? Like when you pick your nose at the table or pee with the bathroom door open. Or saying things like All shot to shit. Shit is a vulgar word. Nice people dont say it. Dad says it. When he was looking at the bugmotor he said, Christ this fuel pumps all shot to shit. Isnt Dad nice? How do you get into these things, Winnifred? Do you practice? Hes nice, but hes also a grownup. And hes very careful not to say things like that in front of people who wouldnt understand. You mean like Uncle Al? Yes, thats right. Can I say it when Im grownup? I suppose you will, whether I like it or not. How old? How does twenty sound, doc? Thats a long time to have to wait. I guess it is, but will you try? Hokay. He went back to staring up the street. He flexed a little, as if to rise, but the beetle coming was much newer, and much brighter red. He relaxed again. She wondered just how hard this move to Colorado had been on Danny. He was closemouthed about it, but it bothered her to see him spending so much time by himself. In Vermont three of Jacks fellow faculty members had had children about Dannys ageand there had been the preschoolbut in this neighborhood there was no one for him to play with. Most of the apartments were occupied by students attending CU, and of the few married couples here on Arapahoe Street, only a tiny percentage had children. She had spotted perhaps a dozen of high school or junior high school age, three infants, and that was all. Mommy, why did Daddy lose his job? She was jolted out of her reverie and floundering for an answer. She and Jack had discussed ways they might handle just such a question from Danny, ways that had varied from evasion to the plain truth with no varnish on it. But Danny had never asked. Not until now, when she was feeling low and least prepared for such a question. Yet he was looking at her, maybe reading the confusion on her face and forming his own ideas about that. She thought that to children adult motives and actions must seem as bulking and ominous as dangerous animals seen in the shadows of a dark forest. They were jerked about like puppets, having only the vaguest notions why. The thought brought her dangerously close to tears again, and while she fought them off she leaned over, picked up the disabled glider, and turned it over in her hands. Your daddy was coaching the debate team, Danny. Do you remember that? Sure, he said. Arguments for fun, right? Right. She turned the glider over and over, looking at the trade name (SPEEDOGLIDE) and the blue star decals on the wings, and found herself telling the exact truth to her son. There was a boy named George Hatfield that Daddy had to cut from the team. That means he wasnt as good as some of the others. George said your daddy cut him because he didnt like him and not because he wasnt good enough. Then George did a bad thing. I think you know about that. Was he the one who put holes in our bugs tires? Yes, he was. It was after school and your daddy caught him doing it. Now she hesitated again, but there was no question of evasion now; it was reduced to tell the truth or tell a lie. Your daddy sometimes he does things hes sorry for later. Sometimes he doesnt think the way he should. That doesnt happen very often, but sometimes it does. Did he hurt George Haffield like the time I spilled all his papers? Sometimes (Danny with his arm in a cast) he does things hes sorry for later. Wendy blinked her eyes savagely hard, driving her tears all the way back. Something like that, honey. Your daddy hit George to make him stop cutting the tires and George hit his head. Then the men who are in charge of the school said that George couldnt go there anymore and your daddy couldnt teach there anymore. She stopped, out of words, and waited in dread for the deluge of questions. Oh, Danny said, and went back to looking up the street. Apparently the subject was closed. If only it could be closed that easily for her She stood up. Im going upstairs for a cup of tea, doc. Want a couple of cookies and a glass of milk? I think Ill watch for Dad. I dont think hell be home much before five. Maybe hell be early. Maybe, she agreed. Maybe he will. She was halfway up the walk when he called, Mommy? What, Danny? Do you want to go and live in that hotel for the winter? Now, which of five thousand answers should she give to that one? The way she had felt yesterday or last night or this morning? They were all different, they crossed the spectrum from rosy pink to dead black. She said If its what your father wants, its what I want. She paused. What about you? I guess I do, he said finally. Nobody much to play with around here. You miss your friends, dont you? Sometimes I miss Scott and Andy. Thats about all. She went back to him and kissed him, rumpled his lightcolored hair that was just losing its babyfineness. He was such a solemn little boy, and sometimes she wondered just how he was supposed to survive with her and Jack for parents. The high hopes they had begun with came down to this unpleasant apartment building in a city they didnt know. The image of Danny in his cast rose up before her again. Somebody in the Divine Placement Service had made a mistake, one she sometimes feared could never be corrected and which only the most innocent bystander could pay for. Stay out of the road, doc, she said, and hugged him tight. Sure, Mom. She went upstairs and into the kitchen. She put on the teapot and laid a couple of Oreos on a plate for Danny in case he decided to come up while she was lying down. Sitting at the table with her big pottery cup in front of her, she looked out the window at him, still sitting on the curb in his bluejeans and his oversized dark green Stovington Prep sweatshirt, the glider now lying beside him. The tears which had threatened all day now came in a cloudburst and she leaned into the fragrant, curling steam of the tea and wept. In grief and loss for the past, and terror of the future. CHAPTER THREE WATSON You lost your temper, Ullman had said. Okay, heres your furnace, Watson said, turning on a light in the dark, mustysmelling room. He was a beefy man with fluffy popcorn hair, white shirt, and dark green chinos. He swung open a small square grating in the furnaces belly and he and Jack peered in together. This heres the pilot light. A steady bluewhite jet hissing steadily upward channeled destructive force, but the key word, Jack thought was destructive and not channeled if you stuck your hand in there, the barbecue would happen in three quick seconds. Lost your temper. (Danny, are you all right?) The furnace filled the entire room, by far the biggest and oldest Jack had ever seen. The pilots got a failsafe, Watson told him. Little sensor in there measures heat. |
If the heat falls below a certain point, it sets off a buzzer in your quarters. Boilers on the other side of the wall. Ill take you around. He slammed the grating shut and led Jack behind the iron bulk of the furnace toward another door. The iron radiated a stuporous heat at them, and for some reason Jack thought of a large, dozing cat. Watson jingled his keys and whistled. Lost your (When he went back into his study and saw Danny standing there, wearing nothing but his training pants and a grin, a slow, red cloud of rage had eclipsed Jacks reason. It had seemed slow subjectively, inside his head, but it must have all happened in less than a minute. It only seemed slow the way some dreams seem slow. The bad ones. Every door and drawer in his study seemed to have been ransacked in the time he had been gone. Closet, cupboards, the sliding bookcase. Every desk drawer yanked out to the stop. His manuscript, the threeact play he had been slowly developing from a novelette he had written seven years ago as an undergraduate, was scattered all over the floor. He had been drinking a beer and doing the Act II corrections when Wendy said the phone was for him, and Danny had poured the can of beer all over the pages. Probably to see it foam. See it foam, see it foam, the words played over and over in his mind like a single sick chord on an outoftune piano, completing the circuit of his rage. He stepped deliberately toward his threeyearold son, who was looking up at him with that pleased grin, his pleasure at the job of work so successfully and recently completed in Daddys study; Danny began to say something and that was when he had grabbed Dannys hand and bent it to make him drop the typewriter eraser and the mechanical pencil he was clenching in it. Danny had cried out a little no no tell the truth he screamed. It was all hard to remember through the fog of anger, the sick single thump of that one Spike Jones chord. Wendy somewhere, asking what was wrong. Her voice faint, damped by the inner mist. This was between the two of them. He had whirled Danny around to spank him, his big adult fingers digging into the scant meat of the boys forearm, meeting around it in a closed fist, and the snap of the breaking bone had not been loud, not loud but it had been very loud, HUGE, but not loud. Just enough of a sound to slit through the red fog like an arrowbut instead of letting in sunlight, that sound let in the dark clouds of shame and remorse, the terror, the agonizing convulsion of the spirit. A clean sound with the past on one side of it and all the future on the other, a sound like a breaking pencil lead or a small piece of kindling when you brought it down over your knee. A moment of utter silence on the other side, in respect to the beginning future maybe, all the rest of his life. Seeing Dannys face drain of color until it was like cheese, seeing his eyes, always large, grow larger still, and glassy, Jack sure the boy was going to faint dead away into the puddle of beer and papers; his own voice, weak and drunk, slurry, trying to take it all back, to find a way around that not too loud sound of bone cracking and into the pastis there a status quo in the house?saying Danny, are you all right? Dannys answering shriek, then Wendys shocked gasp as she came around them and saw the peculiar angle Dannys forearm had to his elbow; no arm was meant to hang quite that way in a world of normal families. Her own scream as she swept him into her arms, and a nonsense babble Oh God Danny oh dear God oh sweet God your poor sweet arm; and Jack was standing there, stunned and stupid, trying to understand how a thing like this could have happened. He was standing there and his eyes met the eyes of his wife and he saw that Wendy hated him. It did not occur to him what the hate might mean in practical terms; it was only later that he realized she might have left him that night, gone to a motel, gotten a divorce lawyer in the morning; or called the police. He saw only that his wife hated him and he felt staggered by it, all alone. He felt awful. This was what oncoming death felt like. Then she fled for the telephone and dialed the hospital with their screaming boy wedged in the crook of her arm and Jack did not go after her, he only stood in the ruins of his office, smelling beer and thinking) You lost your temper. He rubbed his hand harshly across his lips and followed Watson into the boiler room. It was humid in here, but it was more than the humidity that brought the sick and slimy sweat onto his brow and stomach and legs. The remembering did that, it was a total thing that made that night two years ago seem like two hours ago. There was no lag. It brought the shame and revulsion back, the sense of having no worth at all, and that feeling always made him want to have a drink, and the wanting of a drink brought still blacker despairwould he ever have an hour, not a week or even a day, mind you, but just one waking hour when the craving for a drink wouldnt surprise him like this? The boiler, Watson announced. He pulled a redandblue bandanna from his back pocket, blew his nose with a decisive honk, and thrust it back out of sight after a short peek into it to see if he had gotten anything interesting. The boiler stood on four cement blocks, a long and cylindrical metal tank, copperjacketed and often patched. It squatted beneath a confusion of pipes and ducts which zigzagged upward into the high, cobwebfestooned basement ceiling. To Jacks right, two large heating pipes came through the wall from the furnace in the adjoining room. Pressure gauge is here. Watson tapped it. Pounds per square inch, psi. I guess youd know that. I got her up to a hundred now, and the rooms get a little chilly at night. Few guests complain, what the fuck. Theyre crazy to come up here in September anyway. Besides, this is an old baby. Got more patches on her than a pair of welfare overalls. Out came the bandanna. A honk. A peek. Back it went. I got me a fuckin cold, Watson said conversationally. I get one every September. I be tinkering down here with this old whore, then I be out cuttin the grass or rakin that roque court. Get a chill and catch a cold, my old mum used to say. God bless her, she been dead six year. The cancer got her. Once the cancer gets you, you might as well make your will. Youll want to keep your press up to no more than fifty, maybe sixty. Mr. Ullman, he says to heat the west wing one day, central wing the next, east wing the day after that. Aint he a crazyman? I hate that little fucker. Yapyapyap, all the livelong day, hes just like one a those little dogs that bites you on the ankle then run around an pee all over the rug. If brains was black powder he couldnt blow his own nose. Its a pity the things you see when you aint got a gun. Look here. You open an close these ducks by pullin these rings. I got em all marked for you. The blue tags all go to the rooms in the east wing. Red tags is the middle. Yellow is the west wing. When you go to heat the west wing, you got to remember thats the side of the hotel that really catches the weather. When it whoops, those rooms get as cold as a frigid woman with an ice cube up her works. You can run your press all the way to eighty on west wing days. I would, anyway. The thermostats upstairs Jack began. Watson shook his head vehemently, making his fluffy hair bounce on his skull. They aint hooked up. Theyre just there for show. Some of these people from California, they dont think things is right unless they got it hot enough to grow a palm tree in their fuckin bedroom. All the heat comes from down here. Got to watch the press, though. See her creep? He tapped the main dial, which had crept from a hundred pounds per square inch to a hundred and two as Watson soliloquized. Jack felt a sudden shiver cross his back in a hurry and thought The goose just walked over my grave. Then Watson gave the pressure wheel a spin and dumped the boiler off. There was a great hissing, and the needle dropped back to ninetyone. Watson twisted the valve shut and the hissing died reluctantly. She creeps, Watson said. You tell that fat little peckerwood Ullman, he drags out the account books and spends three hours showing how we cant afford a new one until 1982. I tell you, this whole place is gonna go skyhigh someday, and I just hope that fat fucks here to ride the rocket. God, I wish I could be as charitable as my mother was. She could see the good in everyone. Me, Im just as mean as a snake with the shingles. What the fuck, a man cant help his nature. Now you got to remember to come down here twice a day and once at night before you rack in. You got to check the press. If you forget, itll just creep and creep and like as not you an your famblyll wake up on the fuckin moon. You just dump her off a little and youll have no trouble. Whats top end? Oh, shes rated for twofifty, but shed blow long before that now. You couldnt get me to come down an stand next to her when that dial was up to one hundred and eighty. Theres no automatic shutdown? No, there aint. This was built before such things were required. Federal governments into everything these days, aint it? FBI openin mail, CIA buggin the goddam phones and look what happened to that Nixon. Wasnt that a sorry sight? But if you just come down here regular an check the press, youll be fine. An remember to switch those ducks around like he wants. Wont none of the rooms get much above fortyfive unless we have an amazin warm winter. And youll have your own apartment just as warm as you like it. What about the plumbing? Okay, I was just getting to that. Over here through this arch. They walked into a long, rectangular room that seemed to stretch for miles. Watson pulled a cord and a single seventyfivewatt bulb cast a sickish, swinging glow over the area they were standing in. Straight ahead was the bottom of the elevator shaft, heavy greased cables descending to pulleys twenty feet in diameter and a huge, greaseclogged motor. Newspapers were everywhere, bundled and banded and boxed. Other cartons were marked Records or Invoices or ReceiptsSAVE! The smell was yellow and moldy. Some of the cartons were falling apart, spilling yellow flimsy sheets that might have been twenty years old out onto the floor. Jack stared around, fascinated. The Overlooks entire history might be here, buried in these rotting cartons. That elevators a bitch to keep runnin, Watson said, jerking his thumb at it. I know Ullmans buying the state elevator inspector a few fancy dinners to keep the repairman away from that fucker. Now, heres your central plumbin core. In front of them five large pipes, each of them wrapped in insulation and cinched with steel bands, rose into the shadows and out of sight. Watson pointed to a cobwebby shelf beside the utility shaft. There were a number of greasy rags on it and a looseleaf binder. That there is all your plumbin schematics, he said. I dont think youll have any trouble with leaksnever has beenbut sometimes the pipes freeze up. Only way to stop that is to run the faucets a little bit durin the nights, but theres over four hundred taps in this fuckin palace. That fat fairy upstairs would scream all the way to Denver when he saw the water bill. Aint that right? Id say thats a remarkably astute analysis. Watson looked at him admiringly. Say, you really are a college fella, arent you? Talk just like a book. I admire that, as long as the fella aint one of those fairyboys. Lots of em are. You know who stirred up all those college riots a few years ago? The hommasexshuls, thats who. They get frustrated an have to cut loose. Comin out of the closet, they call it. Holy shit, I dont know what the worlds comin to. Now, if she freezes, she most likely gonna freeze right up in this shaft. No heat, you see. If it happens, use this. He reached into a broken orange crate and produced a small gas torch. You just unstrap the insulation when you find the ice plug and put the heat right to her. Get it? Yes. But what if a pipe freezes outside the utility core? That wont happen if youre doin your job and keepin the place heated. You cant get to the other pipes anyway. Dont you fret about it. Youll have no trouble. Beastly place down here. Cobwebby. Gives me the horrors, it does. Ullman said the first winter caretaker killed his family and himself. Yeah, that guy Grady. He was a bad actor, I knew that the minute I saw him. Always grinnin like an eggsuck dog. That was when they were just startin out here and that fat fuck Ullman, he woulda hired the Boston Strangler if hedve worked for minimum wage. Was a ranger from the National Park that found em; the phone was out. All of em up in the west wing on the third floor, froze solid. Too bad about the little girls. Eight and six, they was. Cute as cutbuttons. Oh, that was a hell of a mess. That Ullman, he manages some honkytonky resort place down in Florida in the offseason, and he caught a plane up to Denver and hired a sleigh to take him up here from Sidewinder because the roads were closeda sleigh, can you believe that? He about split a gut tryin to keep it out of the papers. Did pretty well, I got to give him that. There was an item in the Denver Post, and of course the bituary in that pissant little rag they have down in Estes Park, but that was just about all. Pretty good, considerin the reputation this place has got. I expected some reporter would dig it all up again and just sorta put Grady in it as an excuse to rake over the scandals. What scandals? Watson shrugged. Any big hotels have got scandals, he said. Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go. Sometimes one of em will pop off in his room, heart attack or stroke or something like that. Hotels are superstitious places. No thirteenth floor or room thirteen, no mirrors on the back of the door you come in through, stuff like that. Why, we lost a lady just this last July. Ullman had to take care of that, and you can bet your ass he did. Thats what they pay him twentytwo thousand bucks a season for, and as much as I dislike the little prick, he earns it. Its like some people just come here to throw up and they hire a guy like Ullman to clean up the messes. Heres this woman, must be sixty fuckin years oldmy age!and her hairs dyed just as red as a whores stoplight, tits saggin just about down to her belly button on account of she aint wearin no brassyear, big varycoarse veins all up and down her legs so they look like a couple of goddam roadmaps, the jools drippin off her neck and arms an hangin out her ears. And shes got this kid with her, he cant be no more than seventeen, with hair down to his asshole and his crotch bulgin like he stuffed it up with the funnypages. So theyre here a week, ten days maybe, and every night its the same drill. Down in the Colorado Lounge from five to seven, her suckin up Singapore slings like theyre gonna outlaw em tomorrow and him with just the one bottle of Olympia, suckin it, makin it last. And shed be makin jokes and sayin all these witty things, and every time she said one hed grin just like a fuckin ape, like she had strings tied to the corners of his mouth. Only after a few days you could see it was gettin harder an harder for him to grin, and God knows what he had to think about to get his pump primed by bedtime. Well, theyd go in for dinner, him walkin and her staggerin, drunk as a coot, you know, and hed be pinchin the waitresses and grinnin at em when she wasnt lookin. Hell, we even had bets on how long hed last. Watson shrugged. Then he comes down one night around ten, sayin his wife is indisposedwhich meant she was passed out again like every other night they was thereand hes goin to get her some stomach medicine. So off he goes in the little Porsche they come in, and thats the last we see of him. Next morning she comes down and tries to put on this big act, but all day shes gettin paler an paler, and Mr. Ullman asks her, sorta diplomaticlike, would she like him to notify the state cops, just in case maybe he had a little accident or something. Shes on him like a cat. Nonono, hes a fine driver, she isnt worried, everythings under control, hell be back for dinner. So that afternoon she steps into the Colorado around three and never has no dinner at all. She goes up to her room around tenthirty, and thats the last time anybody saw her alive. What happened? County coroner said she took about thirty sleepin pills on top of all the booze. Her husband showed up the next day, some bigshot lawyer from New York. He gave old Ullman four different shades of holy hell. Ill sue this an Ill sue that an when Im through you wont even be able to find a clean pair of underwear, stuff like that. But Ullmans good, the sucker. Ullman got him quieted down. Probably asked that bigshot how hed like to see his wife splashed all over the New York papers Wife of Prominent New York Blah Blah Found Dead with Bellyful of Sleeping Pills. After playing hidethesalami with a kid young enough to be her grandson. The state cops found the Porsche in back of this allnight burger joint down in Lyons, and Ullman pulled a few strings to get it released to that lawyer. Then both of them ganged up on old Archer Houghton, which is the county coroner, and got him to change the verdict to accidental death. Heart attack. Now ole Archers driving a Chrysler. I dont begrudge him. A mans got to take it where he finds it, especially when he starts gettin along in years. Out came the bandanna. Honk. Peek. Out of sight. So what happens? About a week later this stupid cunt of a chambermaid, Delores Vickery by name, she gives out with a helluva shriek while shes makin up the room where those two stayed, and she faints dead away. When she comes to she says she seen the dead woman in the bathroom, layin naked in the tub. Her face was all purple an puffy, she says, an she was grinnin at me. So Ullman gave her two weeks worth of walking papers and told her to get lost. I figure theres maybe fortyfifty people died in this hotel since my grandfather opened it for business in 1910. He looked shrewdly at Jack. You know how most of em go? Heart attack or stroke, while theyre bangin the lady theyre with. Thats what these resorts get a lot of, old types that want one last fling. They come up here to the mountains to pretend theyre twenty again. Sometimes somethin gives, and not all the guys who ran this place was as good as Ullman is at keepin it out of the papers. So the Overlooks got a reputation, yeah. Ill bet the fuckin Biltmore in New York City has got a reputation, if you ask the right people. But no ghosts? Mr. Torrance, Ive worked here all my life. I played here when I was a kid no oldern your boy in that wallet snapshot you showed me. I never seen a ghost yet. You want to come out back with me, Ill show you the equipment shed. Fine. As Watson reached up to turn off the light, Jack said, There sure are a lot of papers down here. Oh, youre not kiddin. Seems like they go back a thousand years. Newspapers and old invoices and bills of lading and Christ knows what else. My dad used to keep up with them pretty good when we had the old woodburning furnace, but now theyve got all out of hand. Some year I got to get a boy to haul them down to Sidewinder and burn em. If Ullman will stand the expense. I guess he will if I holler rat loud enough. Then there are rats? Yeah, I guess theres some. I got the traps and the poison Mr. Ullman wants you to use up in the attic and down here. You keep a good eye on your boy, Mr. Torrance. You wouldnt want nothing to happen to him. No, I sure wouldnt. Coming from Watson the advice didnt sting. They went to the stairs and paused there for a moment while Watson blew his nose again. Youll find all the tools you need out there and some you dont, I guess. And theres the shingles. Did Ullman tell you about that? Yes, he wants part of the west roof reshingled. Hell get all the forfree out of you that he can, the fat little prick, and then whine around in the spring about how you didnt do the job half right. I told him once right to his face, I said Watsons words faded away to a comforting drone as they mounted the stairs. Jack Torrance looked back over his shoulder once into the impenetrable, mustysmelling darkness and thought that if there was ever a place that should have ghosts, this was it. He thought of Grady, locked in by the soft, implacable snow, going quietly berserk and committing his atrocity. Did they scream? he wondered. Poor Grady, feeling it close in on him more every day, and knowing at last that for him spring would never come. He shouldnt have been here. And he shouldnt have lost his temper. As he followed Watson through the door, the words echoed back to him like a knell, accompanied by a sharp snaplike a breaking pencil lead. Dear God, he could use a drink. Or a thousand of them. CHAPTER FOUR SHADOWLAND Danny weakened and went up for his milk and cookies at quarter past four. He gobbled them while looking out the window, then went in to kiss his mother, who was lying down. She suggested that he stay in and watch Sesame Streetthe time would pass fasterbut he shook his head firmly and went back to his place on the curb. Now it was five oclock, and although he didnt have a watch and couldnt tell time too well yet anyway, he was aware of passing time by the lengthening of the shadows, and by the golden cast that now tinged the afternoon light. Turning the glider over in his hands, he sang under his breath Skip to m Lou, n I dont care skip to m Lou, n I dont care my masters gone away Lou, Lou, skip to m Lou They had sung that song all together at the Jack and Jill Nursery School he had gone to back in Stovington. He didnt go to nursery school out here because Daddy couldnt afford to send him anymore. He knew his mother and father worried about that, worried that it was adding to his loneliness (and even more deeply, unspoken between them, that Danny blamed them), but he didnt really want to go to that old Jack and Jill anymore. It was for babies. He wasnt quite a big kid yet, but he wasnt a baby anymore. Big kids went to the big school and got a hot lunch. First grade. Next year. This year was someplace between being a baby and a real kid. It was all right. He did miss Scott and Andymostly Scottbut it was still all right. It seemed best to wait alone for whatever might happen next. He understood a great many things about his parents, and he knew that many times they didnt like his understandings and many other times refused to believe them. But someday they would have to believe. He was content to wait. It was too bad they couldnt believe more, though, especially at times like now. Mommy was lying on her bed in the apartment, just about crying she was so worried about Daddy. Some of the things she was worried about were too grownup for Danny to understandvague things that had to do with security, with Daddys selfimage, feelings of guilt and anger and the fear of what was to become of thembut the two main things on her mind right now were that Daddy had had a breakdown in the mountains (then why doesnt he call?) or that Daddy had gone off to do the Bad Thing. Danny knew perfectly well what the Bad Thing was since Scotty Aaronson, who was six months older, had explained it to him. Scotty knew because his daddy did the Bad Thing, too. Once, Scotty told him, his daddy had punched his mom right in the eye and knocked her down. Finally, Scottys dad and mom had gotten a DIVORCE over the Bad Thing, and when Danny had known him, Scotty lived with his mother and only saw his daddy on weekends. The greatest terror of Dannys life was DIVORCE, a word that always appeared in his mind as a sign painted in red letters which were covered with hissing, poisonous snakes. In DIVORCE, your parents no longer lived together. They had a tug of war over you in a court (tennis court? badminton court? Danny wasnt sure which or if it was some other, but Mommy and Daddy had played both tennis and badminton at Stovington, so he assumed it could be either) and you had to go with one of them and you practically never saw the other one, and the one you were with could marry somebody you didnt even know if the urge came on them. The most terrifying thing about DIVORCE was that he had sensed the wordor concept, or whatever it was that came to him in his understandingsfloating around in his own parents heads, sometimes diffuse and relatively distant, sometimes as thick and obscuring and frightening as thunderheads. It had been that way after Daddy punished him for messing the papers up in his study and the doctor had to put his arm in a cast. That memory was already faded, but the memory of the DIVORCE thoughts was clear and terrifying. It had mostly been around his mommy that time, and he had been in constant terror that she would pluck the word from her brain and drag it out of her mouth, making it real. DIVORCE. It was a constant undercurrent in their thoughts, one of the few he could always pick up, like the beat of simple music. But like a beat, the central thought formed only the spine of more complex thoughts, thoughts he could not as yet even begin to interpret. They came to him only as colors and moods. Mommys DIVORCE thoughts centered around what Daddy had done to his arm, and what had happened at Stovington when Daddy lost his job. That boy. That George Haffield who got pissed off at Daddy and put the holes in their bugs feet. Daddys DIVORCE thoughts were more complex, colored dark violet and shot through with frightening veins of pure black. He seemed to think they would be better off if he left. That things would stop hurting. His daddy hurt almost all the time, mostly about the Bad Thing. Danny could almost always pick that up too Daddys constant craving to go into a dark place and watch a color TV and eat peanuts out of a bowl and do the Bad Thing until his brain would be quiet and leave him alone. But this afternoon his mother had no need to worry and he wished he could go to her and tell her that. The bug had not broken down. Daddy was not off somewhere doing the Bad Thing. He was almost home now, putputting along the highway between Lyons and Boulder. For the moment his daddy wasnt even thinking about the Bad Thing. He was thinking about about Danny looked furtively behind him at the kitchen window. Sometimes thinking very hard made something happen to him. It made thingsreal thingsgo away, and then he saw things that werent there. Once, not long after they put the cast on his arm, this had happened at the supper table. They werent talking much to each other then. But they were thinking. Oh yes. The thoughts of DIVORCE hung over the kitchen table like a cloud full of black rain, pregnant, ready to burst. It was so bad he couldnt eat. The thought of eating with all that black DIVORCE around made him want to throw up. And because it had seemed desperately important, he had thrown himself fully into concentration and something had happened. When he came back to real things, he was lying on the floor with beans and mashed potatoes in his lap and his mommy was holding him and crying and Daddy had been on the phone. He had been frightened, had tried to explain to them that there was nothing wrong, that this sometimes happened to him when he concentrated on understanding more than what normally came to him. He tried to explain about Tony, who they called his invisible playmate. His father had said Hes having a Ha Loo Sin Nation. He seems okay, but I want the doctor to look at him anyway. After the doctor left, Mommy had made him promise to never do that again, to never scare them that way, and Danny had agreed. He was frightened himself. Because when he had concentrated his mind, it had flown out to his daddy, and for just a moment, before Tony had appeared (far away, as he always did, calling distantly) and the strange things had blotted out their kitchen and the carved roast on the blue plate, for just a moment his own consciousness had plunged through his daddys darkness to an incomprehensible word much more frightening than DIVORCE, and that word was SUICIDE. Danny had never come across it again in his daddys mind, and he had certainly not gone looking for it. He didnt care if he never found out exactly what that word meant. But he did like to concentrate, because sometimes Tony would come. Not every time. Sometimes things just got woozy and swimmy for a minute and then clearedmost times, in factbut at other times Tony would appear at the very limit of his vision, calling distantly and beckoning It had happened twice since they moved to Boulder, and he remembered how surprised and pleased he had been to find Tony had followed him all the way from Vermont. So all his friends hadnt been left behind after all. The first time he had been out in the backyard and nothing much had happened. Just Tony beckoning and then darkness and a few minutes later he had come back to real things with a few vague fragments of memory, like a jumbled dream. The second time, two weeks ago, had been more interesting. Tony, beckoning, calling from four yards over Danny come see It seemed that he was getting up, then falling into a deep hole, like Alice into Wonderland. Then he had been in the basement of the apartment house and Tony had been beside him, pointing into the shadows at the trunk his daddy carried all his important papers in, especially THE PLAY. See? Tony had said in his distant, musical voice. Its under the stairs. Right under the stairs. The movers put it right under the stairs. Danny had stepped forward to look more closely at this marvel and then he was falling again, this time out of the backyard swing, where he had been sitting all along. He had gotten the wind knocked out of himself, too. Three or four days later his daddy had been stomping around, telling Mommy furiously that he had been all over the goddam basement and the trunk wasnt there and he was going to sue the goddam movers who had left it somewhere between Vermont and Colorado. How was he supposed to be able to finish THE PLAY if things like this kept cropping up? Danny said, No, Daddy. Its under the stairs. The movers put it right under the stairs. Daddy had given him a strange look and had gone down to see. The trunk had been there, just where Tony had shown him. Daddy had taken him aside, had sat him on his lap, and had asked Danny who let him down the cellar. Had it been Tom from upstairs? The cellar was dangerous, Daddy said. That was why the landlord kept it locked. If someone was leaving it unlocked, Daddy wanted to know. He was glad to have his papers and his PLAY but it wouldnt be worth it to him, he said, if Danny fell down the stairs and broke his his leg. Danny told his father earnestly that he hadnt been down in the cellar. That door was always locked. And Mommy agreed. Danny never went down in the back hall, she said, because it was damp and dark and spidery. And he didnt tell lies. Then how did you know, doc? Daddy asked. Tony showed me. His mother and father had exchanged a look over his head. This had happened before, from time to time. Because it was frightening, they swept it quickly from their minds. But he knew they worried about Tony, Mommy especially, and he was careful about thinking the way that could make Tony come where she might see. But now he thought she was lying down, not moving about in the kitchen yet, and so he concentrated hard to see if he could understand what Daddy was thinking about. His brow furrowed and his slightly grimy hands clenched into tight fists on his jeans. |
He did not close his eyesthat wasnt necessarybut he squinched them down to slits and imagined Daddys voice, Jacks voice, John Daniel Torrances voice, deep and steady, sometimes quirking up with amusement or deepening even more with anger or just staying steady because he was thinking. Thinking of. Thinking about. Thinking (thinking) Danny sighed quietly and his body slumped on the curb as if all the muscles had gone out of it. He was fully conscious; he saw the street and the girl and boy walking up the sidewalk on the other side, holding hands because they were (?in love?) so happy about the day and themselves together in the day. He saw autumn leaves blowing along the gutter, yellow cartwheels of irregular shape. He saw the house they were passing and noticed how the roof was covered with (shingles. i guess itll be no problem if the flashings ok yeah thatll be all right. that watson. christ what a character. wish there was a place for him in THE PLAY. ill end up with the whole fucking human race in it if i dont watch out. yeah. shingles. are there nails out there? oh shit forgot to ask him well theyre simple to get. sidewinder hardware store. wasps. theyre nesting this time of year. i might want to get one of those bug bombs in case theyre there when i rip up the old shingles. new shingles. old) shingles. So thats what he was thinking about. He had gotten the job and was thinking about shingles. Danny didnt know who Watson was, but everything else seemed clear enough. And he might get to see a wasps nest. Just as sure as his name was Danny Dannee He looked up and there was Tony, far up the street, standing by a stop sign and waving. Danny, as always, felt a warm burst of pleasure at seeing his old friend, but this time he seemed to feel a prick of fear, too, as if Tony had come with some darkness hidden behind his back. A jar of wasps which when released would sting deeply. But there was no question of not going. He slumped further down on the curb, his hands sliding laxly from his thighs and dangling below the fork of his crotch. His chin sank onto his chest. Then there was a dim, painless tug as part of him got up and ran after Tony into funneling darkness. Dannee Now the darkness was shot with swirling whiteness. A coughing, whooping sound and bending, tortured shadows that resolved themselves into fir trees at night, being pushed by a screaming gale. Snow swirled and danced. Snow everywhere. Too deep, Tony said from the darkness, and there was a sadness in his voice that terrified Danny. Too deep to get out. Another shape, looming, rearing. Huge and rectangular. A sloping roof. Whiteness that was blurred in the stormy darkness. Many windows. A long building with a shingled roof. Some of the shingles were greener, newer. His daddy put them on. With nails from the Sidewinder hardware store. Now the snow was covering the shingles. It was covering everything. A green witchlight glowed into being on the front of the building, flickered, and became a giant, grinning skull over two crossed bones. Poison, Tony said from the floating darkness. Poison. Other signs flickered past his eyes, some in green letters, some of them on boards stuck at leaning angles into the snowdrifts. NO SWIMMING. DANGER! LIVE WIRES. THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED. HIGH VOLTAGE. THIRD RAIL. DANGER OF DEATH. KEEP OFF. KEEP OUT. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT. He understood none of them completelyhe couldnt read!but got a sense of all, and a dreamy terror floated into the dark hollows of his body like light brown spores that would die in sunlight. They faded. Now he was in a room filled with strange furniture, a room that was dark. Snow spattered against the windows like thrown sand. His mouth was dry, his eyes like hot marbles, his heart triphammering in his chest. Outside there was a hollow booming noise, like a dreadful door being thrown wide. Footfalls. Across the room was a mirror, and deep down in its silver bubble a single word appeared in green fire and that word was REDRUM. The room faded. Another room. He knew (would know) this one. An overturned chair. A broken window with snow swirling in; already it had frosted the edge of the rug. The drapes had been pulled free and hung on their broken rod at an angle. A low cabinet lying on its face. More hollow booming noises, steady, rhythmic, horrible. Smashing glass. Approaching destruction. A hoarse voice, the voice of a madman, made the more terrible by its familiarity Come out! Come out, you little shit! Take your medicine! Crash. Crash. Crash. Splintering wood. A bellow of rage and satisfaction. REDRUM. Coming. Drifting across the room. Pictures torn off the walls. A record player (?Mommys record player?) overturned on the floor. Her records, Grieg, Handel, the Beatles, Art Garfunkel, Bach, Liszt, thrown everywhere. Broken into jagged black pie wedges. A shaft of light coming from another room, the bathroom, harsh white light and a word flickering on and off in the medicine cabinet mirror like a red eye, REDRUM, REDRUM, REDRUM No, he whispered. No, Tony please And, dangling over the white porcelain lip of the bathtub, a hand. Limp. A slow trickle of blood (REDRUM) trickling down one of the fingers, the third, dripping onto the tile from the carefully shaped nail No oh no oh no (oh please, Tony, youre scaring me) REDRUM REDRUM REDRUM (stop it, Tony, stop it) Fading. In the darkness the booming noises grew louder, louder still, echoing, everywhere, all around. And now he was crouched in a dark hallway, crouched on a blue rug with a riot of twisting black shapes woven into its pile, listening to the booming noises approach, and now a Shape turned the corner and began to come toward him, lurching, smelling of blood and doom. It had a mallet in one hand and it was swinging it (REDRUM) from side to side in vicious arcs, slamming it into the walls, cutting the silk wallpaper and knocking out ghostly bursts of plaster dust Come on and take your medicine! Take it like a man! The Shape advancing on him, reeking of that sweetsour odor, gigantic, the mallet head cutting across the air with a wicked hissing whisper, then the great hollow boom as it crashed into the wall, sending the dust out in a puff you could smell, dry and itchy. Tiny red eyes glowed in the dark. The monster was upon him, it had discovered him, cowering here with a blank wall at his back. And the trapdoor in the ceiling was locked. Darkness. Drifting. Tony, please take me back, please, please And he was back, sitting on the curb of Arapahoe Street, his shirt sticking damply to his back, his body bathed in sweat. In his ears he could still hear that huge, contrapuntal booming sound and smell his own urine as he voided himself in the extremity of his terror. He could see that limp hand dangling over the edge of the tub with blood running down one finger, the third, and that inexplicable word so much more horrible than any of the others REDRUM. And now sunshine. Real things. Except for Tony, now six blocks up, only a speck, standing on the corner, his voice faint and high and sweet. Be careful, doc Then, in the next instant, Tony was gone and Daddys battered red bug was turning the corner and chattering up the street, farting blue smoke behind it. Danny was off the curb in a second, waving, jiving from one foot to the other, yelling Daddy! Hey, Dad! Hi! Hi! His daddy swung the VW into the curb, killed the engine, and opened the door. Danny ran toward him and then froze, his eyes widening. His heart crawled up into the middle of his throat and froze solid. Beside his daddy, in the other front seat, was a shorthandled mallet, its head clotted with blood and hair. Then it was just a bag of groceries. Danny you okay, doc? Yeah. Im okay. He went to his daddy and buried his face in Daddys sheepskinlined denim jacket and hugged him tight tight tight. Jack hugged him back, slightly bewildered. Hey, you dont want to sit in the sun like that, doc. Youre drippin sweat. I guess I fell asleep a little. I love you, Daddy. I been waiting. I love you too, Dan. I brought home some stuff. Think youre big enough to carry it upstairs? Sure am! Doc Torrance, the worlds strongest man, Jack said, and ruffled his hair. Whose hobby is falling asleep on street corners. Then they were walking up to the door and Mommy had come down to the porch to meet them and he stood on the second step and watched them kiss. They were glad to see each other. Love came out of them the way love had come out of the boy and girl walking up the street and holding hands. Danny was glad. The bag of groceriesjust a bag of groceriescrackled in his arms. Everything was all right. Daddy was home. Mommy was loving him. There were no bad things. And not everything Tony showed him always happened. But fear had settled around his heart, deep and dreadful, around his heart and around that indecipherable word he had seen in his spirits mirror. CHAPTER FIVE PHONEBOOTH Jack parked the VW in front of the Rexall in the Table Mesa shopping center and let the engine die. He wondered again if he shouldnt go ahead and get the fuel pump replaced, and told himself again that they couldnt afford it. If the little car could keep running until November, it could retire with full honors anyway. By November the snow up there in the mountains would be higher than the beetles roof maybe higher than three beetles stacked on top of each other. Want you to stay in the car, doc. Ill bring you a candy bar. Why cant I come in? I have to make a phone call. Its private stuff. Is that why you didnt make it at home? Check. Wendy had insisted on a phone in spite of their unraveling finances. She had argued that with a small childespecially a boy like Danny, who sometimes suffered from fainting spellsthey couldnt afford not to have one. So Jack had forked over the thirtydollar installation fee, bad enough, and a ninetydollar security deposit, which really hurt. And so far the phone had been mute except for two wrong numbers. Can I have a Baby Ruth, Daddy? Yes. You sit still and dont play with the gearshift, right? Right. Ill look at the maps. You do that. As Jack got out, Danny opened the bugs glovebox and took out the five battered gas station maps Colorado, Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico. He loved road maps, loved to trace where the roads went with his finger. As far as he was concerned, new maps were the best part of moving West. Jack went to the drugstore counter, got Dannys candy bar, a newspaper, and a copy of the October Writers Digest. He gave the girl a five and asked for his change in quarters. With the silver in his hand he walked over to the telephone booth by the keymaking machine and slipped inside. From here he could see Danny in the bug through three sets of glass. The boys head was bent studiously over his maps. Jack felt a wave of nearly desperate love for the boy. The emotion showed on his face as a stony grimness. He supposed he could have made this obligatory thankyou call to Al from home; he certainly wasnt going to say anything Wendy would object to. It was his pride that said no. These days he almost always listened to what his pride told him to do, because along with his wife and son, six hundred dollars in a checking account, and one weary 1968 Volkswagen, his pride was all that was left. The only thing that was his. Even the checking account was joint. A year ago he had been teaching English in one of the finest prep schools in New England. There had been friendsalthough not exactly the same ones hed had before going on the wagonsome laughs, fellow faculty members who admired his deft touch in the classroom and his private dedication to writing. Things had been very good six months ago. All at once there was enough money left over at the end of each twoweek pay period to start a little savings account. In his drinking days there had never been a penny left over, even though Al Shockley had stood a great many of the rounds. He and Wendy had begun to talk cautiously about finding a house and making a down payment in a year or so. A farmhouse in the country, take six or eight years to renovate it completely, what the hell, they were young, they had time. Then he had lost his temper. George Hatfield. The smell of hope had turned to the smell of old leather in Crommerts office, the whole thing like some scene from his own play the old prints of previous Stovington headmasters on the walls, steel engravings of the school as it had been in 1879, when it was first built, and in 1895, when Vanderbilt money had enabled them to build the field house that still stood at the west end of the soccer field, squat, immense, dressed in ivy. April ivy had been rustling outside Crommerts slit window and the drowsy sound of steam heat came from the radiator. It was no set, he remembered thinking. It was real. His life. How could he have fucked it up so badly? This is a serious situation, Jack. Terribly serious. The Board has asked me to convey its decision to you. The Board wanted Jacks resignation and Jack had given it to them. Under different circumstances, he would have gotten tenure that June. What had followed that interview in Crommerts office had been the darkest, most dreadful night of his life. The wanting, the needing to get drunk had never been so bad. His hands shook. He knocked things over. And he kept wanting to take it out on Wendy and Danny. His temper was like a vicious animal on a frayed leash. He had left the house in terror that he might strike them. Had ended up outside a bar, and the only thing that had kept him from going in was the knowledge that if he did, Wendy would leave him at last, and take Danny with her. He would be dead from the day they left. Instead of going into the bar, where dark shadows sat sampling the tasty waters of oblivion, he had gone to Al Shockleys house. The Boards vote had been six to one. Al had been the one. Now he dialed the operator and she told him that for a dollar eightyfive he could be put in touch with Al two thousand miles away for three minutes. Time is relative, baby, he thought, and stuck in eight quarters. Faintly he could hear the electronic boops and beeps of his connection sniffing its way eastward. Als father had been Arthur Longley Shockley, the steel baron. He had left his only son, Albert, a fortune and a huge range of investments and directorships and chairs on various boards. One of these had been on the Board of Directors for Stovington Preparatory Academy, the old mans favorite charity. Both Arthur and Albert Shockley were alumni and Al lived in Barre, close enough to take a personal interest in the schools affairs. For several years Al had been Stovingtons tennis coach. Jack and Al had become friends in a completely natural and uncoincidental way at the many school and faculty functions they attended together, they were always the two drunkest people there. Shockley was separated from his wife, and Jacks own marriage was skidding slowly downhill, although he still loved Wendy and had promised sincerely (and frequently) to reform, for her sake and for baby Dannys. The two of them went on from many faculty parties, hitting the bars until they closed, then stopping at some mom n pop store for a case of beer they would drink parked at the end of some back road. There were mornings when Jack would stumble into their leased house with dawn seeping into the sky and find Wendy and the baby asleep on the couch, Danny always on the inside, a tiny fist curled under the shelf of Wendys jaw. He would look at them and the selfloathing would back up his throat in a bitter wave, even stronger than the taste of beer and cigarettes and martinismartians, as Al called them. Those were the times that his mind would turn thoughtfully and sanely to the gun or the rope or the razor blade. If the bender had occurred on a weeknight, he would sleep for three hours, get up, dress, chew four Excedrins, and go off to teach his nine oclock American Poets still drunk. Good morning, kids, today the RedEyed Wonder is going to tell you about how Longfellow lost his wife in the big fire. He hadnt believed he was an alcoholic, Jack thought as Als telephone began ringing in his ear. The classes he had missed or taught unshaven, still reeking of last nights martians. Not me, I can stop anytime. The nights he and Wendy had passed in separate beds. Listen, Im fine. Mashed fenders. Sure, Im okay to drive. The tears she always shed in the bathroom. Cautious looks from his colleagues at any party where alcohol was served, even wine. The slowly dawning realization that he was being talked about. The knowledge that he was producing nothing at his Underwood but balls of mostly blank paper that ended up in the wastebasket. He had been something of a catch for Stovington, a slowly blooming American writer perhaps, and certainly a man well qualified to teach that great mystery, creative writing. He had published two dozen short stories. He was working on a play, and thought there might be a novel incubating in some mental back room. But now he was not producing and his teaching had become erratic. It had finally ended one night less than a month after Jack had broken his sons arm. That, it seemed to him, had ended his marriage. All that remained was for Wendy to gather her will if her mother hadnt been such a gradeA bitch, he knew, Wendy would have taken a bus back to New Hampshire as soon as Danny had been okay to travel. It was over. It had been a little past midnight. Jack and Al were coming into Barre on U.S. 31, Al behind the wheel of his Jag, shifting fancily on the curves, sometimes crossing the double yellow line. They were both very drunk; the martians had landed that night in force. They came around the last curve before the bridge at seventy, and there was a kids bike in the road, and then the sharp, hurt squealing as rubber shredded from the Jags tires, and Jack remembered seeing Als face looming over the steering wheel like a round white moon. Then the jingling crashing sound as they hit the bike at forty, and it had flown up like a bent and twisted bird, the handlebars striking the windshield, and then it was in the air again, leaving the starred safety glass in front of Jacks bulging eyes. A moment later he heard the final dreadful smash as it landed on the road behind them. Something thumped underneath them as the tires passed over it. The Jag drifted around broadside, Al still jockeying the wheel, and from far away Jack heard himself saying Jesus, Al. We ran him down. I felt it. In his ear the phone kept ringing. Come on, Al. Be home. Let me get this over with. Al had brought the car to a smoking halt not more than three feet from a bridge stanchion. Two of the Jags tires were flat. They had left zigzagging loops of burned rubber for a hundred and thirty feet. They looked at each other for a moment and then ran back in the cold darkness. The bike was completely ruined. One wheel was gone, and looking back over his shoulder Al had seen it lying in the middle of the road, half a dozen spokes sticking up like piano wire. Al had said hesitantly I think thats what we ran over, Jackyboy. Then wheres the kid? Did you see a kid? Jack frowned. It had all happened with such crazy speed. Coming around the corner. The bike looming in the Jags headlights. Al yelling something. Then the collision and the long skid. They moved the bike to one shoulder of the road. Al went back to the Jag and put on its fourway flashers. For the next two hours they searched the sides of the road, using a powerful fourcell flashlight. Nothing. Although it was late, several cars passed the beached Jaguar and the two men with the bobbing flashlight. None of them stopped. Jack thought later that some queer providence, bent on giving them both a last chance, had kept the cops away, had kept any of the passersby from calling them. At quarter past two they returned to the Jag, sober but queasy. If there was nobody riding it, what was it doing in the middle of the road? Al demanded. It wasnt parked on the side; it was right out in the fucking middle! Jack could only shake his head. Your party does not answer, the operator said. Would you like me to keep on trying? A couple more rings, operator. Do you mind? No, sir, the voice said dutifully. Come on, Al! Al had hiked across the bridge to the nearest pay phone, called a bachelor friend and told him it would be worth fifty dollars if the friend would get the Jags snow tires out of the garage and bring them down to the Highway 31 bridge outside of Barre. The friend showed up twenty minutes later, wearing a pair of jeans and his pajama top. He surveyed the scene. Kill anybody? he asked. Al was already jacking up the back of the car and Jack was loosening lug nuts. Providentially, no one, Al said. I think Ill just head on back anyway. Pay me in the morning. Fine, Al said without looking up. The two of them had gotten the tires on without incident, and together they drove back to Al Shockleys house. Al put the Jag in the garage and killed the motor. In the dark quiet he said Im off drinking, Jackyboy. Its all over. Ive slain my last martian. And now, sweating in this phonebooth, it occurred to Jack that he had never doubted Als ability to carry through. He had driven back to his own house in the VW with the radio turned up, and some disco group chanted over and over again, talismanic in the house before dawn Do it anyway you wanta do it do it anyway you want No matter how loud he heard the squealing tires, the crash. When he blinked his eyes shut, he saw that single crushed wheel with its broken spokes pointing at the sky. When he got in, Wendy was asleep on the couch. He looked in Dannys room and Danny was in his crib on his back, sleeping deeply, his arm still buried in the cast. In the softly filtered glow from the streetlight outside he could see the dark lines on its plastered whiteness where all the doctors and nurses in pediatrics had signed it. It was an accident. He fell down the stairs. (o you dirty liar) It was an accident. I lost my temper. (you fucking drunken waste god wiped snot out of his nose and that was you) Listen, hey, come on, please, just an accident But the last plea was driven away by the image of that bobbing flashlight as they hunted through the dry late November weeds, looking for the sprawled body that by all good rights should have been there, waiting for the police. It didnt matter that Al had been driving. There had been other nights when he had been driving. He pulled the covers up over Danny, went into their bedroom, and took the Spanish Llama .38 down from the top shelf of the closet. It was in a shoe box. He sat on the bed with it for nearly an hour, looking at it, fascinated by its deadly shine. It was dawn when he put it back in the box and put the box back in the closet. That morning he had called Bruckner, the department head, and told him to please post his classes. He had the flu. Bruckner agreed, with less good grace than was common. Jack Torrance had been extremely susceptible to the flu in the last year. Wendy made him scrambled eggs and coffee. They ate in silence. The only sound came from the backyard, where Danny was gleefully running his trucks across the sand pile with his good hand. She went to do the dishes. Her back to him, she said Jack. Ive been thinking. Have you? He lit a cigarette with trembling hands. No hangover this morning, oddly enough. Only the shakes. He blinked. In the instants darkness the bike flew up against the windshield, starring the glass. The tires shrieked. The flashlight bobbed. I want to talk to you about about whats best for me and Danny. For you too, maybe. I dont know. We should have talked about it before, I guess. Would you do something for me? he asked, looking at the wavering tip of his cigarette. Would you do me a favor? What? Her voice was dull and neutral. He looked at her back. Lets talk about it a week from today. If you still want to. Now she turned to him, her hands lacy with suds, her pretty face pale and disillusioned. Jack, promises dont work with you. You just go right on with She stopped, looking in his eyes, fascinated, suddenly uncertain. In a week, he said. His voice had lost all its strength and dropped to a whisper. Please. Im not promising anything. If you still want to talk then, well talk. About anything you want. They looked across the sunny kitchen at each other for a long time, and when she turned back to the dishes without saying anything more, he began to shudder. God, he needed a drink. Just a little pickmeup to put things in their true perspective Danny said he dreamed you had a car accident, she said abruptly. He has funny dreams sometimes. He said it this morning, when I got him dressed. Did you, Jack? Did you have an accident? No. By noon the craving for a drink had become a lowgrade fever. He went to Als. You dry? Al asked before letting him in. Al looked horrible. Bone dry. You look like Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera. Come on in. They played twohanded whist all afternoon. They didnt drink. A week passed. He and Wendy didnt speak much. But he knew she was watching, not believing. He drank coffee black and endless cans of CocaCola. One night he drank a whole sixpack of Coke and then ran into the bathroom and vomited it up. The level of the bottles in the liquor cabinet did not go down. After his classes he went over to Al Shockleysshe hated Al Shockley worse than she had ever hated anyoneand when he came home she would swear she smelled scotch or gin on his breath, but he would talk lucidly to her before supper, drink coffee, play with Danny after supper, sharing a Coke with him, read him a bedtime story, then sit and correct themes with cup after cup of black coffee by his hand, and she would have to admit to herself that she had been wrong. Weeks passed and the unspoken word retreated further from the back of her lips. Jack sensed its retirement but knew it would never retire completely. Things began to get a little easier. Then George Hatfield. He had lost his temper again, this time stone sober. Sir, your party still doesnt Hello? Als voice, out of breath. Go ahead, the operator said dourly. Al, this is Jack Torrance. Jackyboy! Genuine pleasure. How are you? Good. I just called to say thanks. I got the job. Its perfect. If I cant finish that goddam play snowed in all winter, Ill never finish it. Youll finish. How are things? Jack asked hesitantly. Dry, Al responded. You? As a bone. Miss it much? Every day. Al laughed. I know that scene. But I dont know how you stayed dry after that Hatfield thing, Jack. That was above and beyond. I really bitched things up for myself, he said evenly. Oh, hell. Ill have the Board around by spring. Effingers already saying they might have been too hasty. And if that play comes to something Yes. Listen, my boys out in the car, Al. He looks like he might be getting restless Sure. Understand. You have a good winter up there, Jack. Glad to help. Thanks again, Al. He hung up, closed his eyes in the hot booth, and again saw the crashing bike, the bobbing flashlight. There had been a squib in the paper the next day, no more than a spacefiller really, but the owner had not been named. Why it had been out there in the night would always be a mystery to them, and perhaps that was as it should be. He went back out to the car and gave Danny his slightly melted Baby Ruth. Daddy? What, doc? Danny hesitated, looking at his fathers abstracted face. When I was waiting for you to come back from that hotel, I had a bad dream. Do you remember? When I fell asleep? Umhm. But it was no good. Daddys mind was someplace else, not with him. Thinking about the Bad Thing again. (I dreamed that you hurt me, Daddy) What was the dream, doc? Nothing, Danny said as they pulled out into the parking lot. He put the maps back into the glove compartment. You sure? Yes. Jack gave his son a faint, troubled glance, and then his mind turned to his play. CHAPTER SIX NIGHT THOUGHTS Love was over, and her man was sleeping beside her. Her man. She smiled a little in the darkness, his seed still trickling with slow warmth from between her slightly parted thighs, and her smile was both rueful and pleased, because the phrase her man summoned up a hundred feelings. Each feeling examined alone was a bewilderment. Together, in this darkness floating to sleep, they were like a distant blues tune heard in an almost deserted nightclub, melancholy but pleasing. Lovin you baby, is just like rollin off a log, But if I cant be your woman, I sure aint goin to be your dog. Had that been Billie Holiday? Or someone more prosaic like Peggy Lee? Didnt matter. It was low and torchy, and in the silence of her head it played mellowly, as if issuing from one of those oldfashioned jukeboxes, a Wurlitzer, perhaps, half an hour before closing. Now, moving away from her consciousness, she wondered how many beds she had slept in with this man beside her. They had met in college and had first made love in his apartment that had been less than three months after her mother drove her from the house, told her never to come back, that if she wanted to go somewhere she could go to her father since she had been responsible for the divorce. That had been in 1970. So long ago? A semester later they had moved in together, had found jobs for the summer, and had kept the apartment when their senior year began. She remembered that bed the most clearly, a big double that sagged in the middle. When they made love, the rusty box spring had counted the beats. That fall she had finally managed to break from her mother. Jack had helped her. She wants to keep beating you, Jack had said. The more times you phone her, the more times you crawl back begging forgiveness, the more she can beat you with your father. Its good for her, Wendy, because she can go on making believe it was your fault. But its not good for you. They had talked it over again and again in that bed, that year. (Jack sitting up with the covers pooled around his waist, a cigarette burning between his fingers, looking her in the eyehe had a halfhumorous, halfscowling way of doing thattelling her She told you never to come back, right? Never to darken her door again, right? Then why doesnt she hang up the phone when she knows its you? Why does she only tell you that you cant come in if Im with you? Because she thinks I might cramp her style a little bit. She wants to keep putting the thumbscrews right to you, baby. Youre a fool if you keep letting her do it. She told you never to come back, so why dont you take her at her word? Give it a rest. And at last shed seen it his way.) It had been Jacks idea to separate for a whileto get perspective on the relationship, he said. She had been afraid he had become interested in someone else. Later she found it wasnt so. They were together again in the spring and he asked her if she had been to see her father. She had jumped as if hed struck her with a quirt. How did you know that? The Shadow knows. Have you been spying on me? And his impatient laughter, which had always made her feel so awkwardas if she were eight and he was able to see her motivations more clearly than she. You needed time, Wendy. For what? I guess to see which one of us you wanted to marry. Jack, what are you saying? I think Im proposing marriage. The wedding. Her father had been there, her mother had not been. She discovered she could live with that, if she had Jack. Then Danny had come, her fine son. That had been the best year, the best bed. After Danny was born, Jack had gotten her a job typing for half a dozen English Department profsquizzes, exams, class syllabi, study notes, reading lists. She ended up typing a novel for one of them, a novel that never got published much to Jacks very irreverent and very private glee. |
The job was good for forty a week, and skyrocketed all the way up to sixty during the two months she spent typing the unsuccessful novel. They had their first car, a fiveyearold Buick with a baby seat in the middle. Bright, upwardly mobile young marrieds. Danny forced a reconciliation between her and her mother, a reconciliation that was always tense and never happy, but a reconciliation all the same. When she took Danny to the house, she went without Jack. And she didnt tell Jack that her mother always remade Dannys diapers, frowned over his formula, could always spot the accusatory first signs of a rash on the babys bottom or privates. Her mother never said anything overtly, but the message came through anyway the price she had begun to pay (and maybe always would) for the reconciliation was the feeling that she was an inadequate mother. It was her mothers way of keeping the thumbscrews handy. During the days Wendy would stay home and housewife, feeding Danny his bottles in the sunwashed kitchen of the fourroom secondstory apartment, playing her records on the battered portable stereo she had had since high school. Jack would come home at three (or at two if he felt he could cut his last class), and while Danny slept he would lead her into the bedroom and fears of inadequacy would be erased. At night while she typed, he would do his writing and his assignments. In those days she sometimes came out of the bedroom where the typewriter was to find both of them asleep on the studio couch, Jack wearing nothing but his underpants, Danny sprawled comfortably on her husbands chest with his thumb in his mouth. She would put Danny in his crib, then read whatever Jack had written that night before waking him up enough to come to bed. The best bed, the best year. Sun gonna shine in my backyard someday In those days, Jacks drinking had still been well in hand. On Saturday nights a bunch of his fellow students would drop over and there would be a case of beer and discussions in which she seldom took part because her field had been sociology and his was English arguments over whether Pepyss diaries were literature or history; discussions of Charles Olsons poetry; sometimes the reading of works in progress. Those and a hundred others. No, a thousand. She felt no real urge to take part; it was enough to sit in her rocking chair beside Jack, who sat crosslegged on the floor, one hand holding a beer, the other gently cupping her calf or braceleting her ankle. The competition at UNH had been fierce, and Jack carried an extra burden in his writing. He put in at least an hour at it every night. It was his routine. The Saturday sessions were necessary therapy. They let something out of him that might otherwise have swelled and swelled until he burst. At the end of his grad work he had landed the job at Stovington, mostly on the strength of his storiesfour of them published at that time, one of them in Esquire. She remembered that day clearly enough; it would take more than three years to forget it. She had almost thrown the envelope away, thinking it was a subscription offer. Opening it, she had found instead that it was a letter saying that Esquire would like to use Jacks story Concerning the Black Holes early the following year. They would pay nine hundred dollars, not on publication but on acceptance. That was nearly half a years take typing papers and she had flown to the telephone, leaving Danny in his high chair to goggle comically after her, his face lathered with creamed peas and beef pure. Jack had arrived from the university fortyfive minutes later, the Buick weighted down with seven friends and a keg of beer. After a ceremonial toast (Wendy also had a glass, although she ordinarily had no taste for beer), Jack had signed the acceptance letter, put it in the return envelope, and went down the block to drop it in the letter box. When he came back he stood gravely in the door and said, Veni, vidi, vici. There were cheers and applause. When the keg was empty at eleven that night, Jack and the only two others who were still ambulatory went on to hit a few bars. She had gotten him aside in the downstairs hallway. The other two were already out in the car, drunkenly singing the New Hampshire fight song. Jack was down on one knee, owlishly fumbling with the lacings of his moccasins. Jack, she said, you shouldnt. You cant even tie your shoes, let alone drive. He stood up and put his hands calmly on her shoulders. Tonight I could fly to the moon if I wanted to. No, she said. Not for all the Esquire stories in the world. Ill be home early. But he hadnt been home until four in the morning, stumbling and mumbling his way up the stairs, waking Danny up when he came in. He had tried to soothe the baby and dropped him on the floor. Wendy had rushed out, thinking of what her mother would think if she saw the bruise before she thought of anything elseGod help her, God help them bothand then picked Danny up, sat in the rocking chair with him, soothed him. She had been thinking of her mother for most of the five hours Jack had been gone, her mothers prophecy that Jack would never come to anything. Big ideas, her mother had said. Sure. The welfare lines are full of educated fools with big ideas. Did the Esquire story make her mother wrong or right? Winnifred, youre not holding that baby right. Give him to me. And was she not holding her husband right? Why else would he take his joy out of the house? A helpless kind of terror had risen up in her and it never occurred to her that he had gone out for reasons that had nothing to do with her. Congratulations, she said, rocking Dannyhe was almost asleep again. Maybe you gave him a concussion. Its just a bruise. He sounded sulky, wanting to be repentant a little boy. For an instant she hated him. Maybe, she said tightly. Maybe not. She heard so much of her mother talking to her departed father in her own voice that she was sickened and afraid. Like mother like daughter, Jack muttered. Go to bed! she cried, her fear coming out sounding like anger. Go to bed, youre drunk! Dont tell me what to do. Jack please, we shouldnt it There were no words. Dont tell me what to do, he repeated sullenly, and then went into the bedroom. She was left alone in the rocking chair with Danny, who was sleeping again. Five minutes later Jacks snores came floating out to the living room. That had been the first night she had slept on the couch. Now she turned restlessly on the bed, already dozing. Her mind, freed of any linear order by encroaching sleep, floated past the first year at Stovington, past the steadily worsening times that had reached low ebb when her husband had broken Dannys arm, to that morning in the breakfast nook. Danny outside playing trucks in the sandpile, his arm still in the cast. Jack sitting at the table, pallid and grizzled, a cigarette jittering between his fingers. She had decided to ask him for a divorce. She had pondered the question from a hundred different angles, had been pondering it in fact for the six months before the broken arm. She told herself she would have made the decision long ago if it hadnt been for Danny, but not even that was necessarily true. She dreamed on the long nights when Jack was out, and her dreams were always of her mothers face and of her own wedding. (Who giveth this woman? Her father standing in his best suit which was none too goodhe was a traveling salesman for a line of canned goods that even then was going brokeand his tired face, how old he looked, how pale I do.) Even after the accidentif you could call it an accidentshe had not been able to bring it all the way out, to admit that her marriage was a lopsided defeat. She had waited, dumbly hoping that a miracle would occur and Jack would see what was happening, not only to him but to her. But there had been no slowdown. A drink before going off to the Academy. Two or three beers with lunch at the Stovington House. Three or four martinis before dinner. Five or six more while grading papers. The weekends were worse. The nights out with Al Shockley were worse still. She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time. How much of it was her fault? That question haunted her. She felt like her mother. Like her father. Sometimes, when she felt like herself, she wondered what it would be like for Danny, and she dreaded the day when he grew old enough to lay blame. And she wondered where they would go. She had no doubt her mother would take her in, and no doubt that after half a year of watching her diapers remade, Dannys meals recooked andor redistributed, of coming home to find his clothes changed or his hair cut or the books her mother found unsuitable spirited away to some limbo in the attic after half a year of that, she would have a complete nervous breakdown. And her mother would pat her hand and say comfortingly, Although its not your fault, its all your own fault. You were never ready. You showed your true colors when you came between your father and me. My father, Dannys father. Mine, his. (Who giveth this woman? I do. Dead of a heart attack six months later.) The night before that morning she had lain awake almost until he came in, thinking, coming to her decision. The divorce was necessary, she told herself. Her mother and father didnt belong in the decision. Neither did her feelings of guilt over their marriage nor her feelings of inadequacy over her own. It was necessary for her sons sake, and for herself, if she was to salvage anything at all from her early adulthood. The handwriting on the wall was brutal but clear. Her husband was a lush. He had a bad temper, one he could no longer keep wholly under control now that he was drinking so heavily and his writing was going so badly. Accidentally or not accidentally, he had broken Dannys arm. He was going to lose his job, if not this year then the year after. Already she had noticed the sympathetic looks from the other faculty wives. She told herself that she had stuck with the messy job of her marriage for as long as she could. Now she would have to leave it. Jack could have full visitation rights, and she would want support from him only until she could find something and get on her feetand that would have to be fairly rapidly because she didnt know how long Jack would be able to pay support money. She would do it with as little bitterness as possible. But it had to end. So thinking, she had fallen off into her own thin and unrestful sleep, haunted by the faces of her own mother and father. Youre nothing but a homewrecker, her mother said. Who giveth this woman? the minister said. I do, her father said. But in the bright and sunny morning she felt the same. Her back to him, her hands plunged in warm dishwater up to the wrists, she had commenced with the unpleasantness. I want to talk to you about something that might be best for Danny and I. For you too, maybe. We should have talked about it before, I guess. And then he had said an odd thing. She had expected to discover his anger, to provoke the bitterness, the recriminations. She had expected a mad dash for the liquor cabinet. But not this soft, almost toneless reply that was so unlike him. It was almost as though the Jack she had lived with for six years had never come back last nightas if he had been replaced by some unearthly doppelgnger that she would never know or be quite sure of. Would you do something for me? A favor? What? She had to discipline her voice strictly to keep it from trembling. Lets talk about it in a week. If you still want to. And she had agreed. It remained unspoken between them. During that week he had seen Al Shockley more than ever, but he came home early and there was no liquor on his breath. She imagined she smelled it but knew it wasnt so. Another week. And another. Divorce went back to committee, unvoted on. What had happened? She still wondered and still had not the slightest idea. The subject was taboo between them. He was like a man who had leaned around a corner and had seen an unexpected monster lying in wait, crouching among the dried bones of its old kills. The liquor remained in the cabinet, but he didnt touch it. She had considered throwing them out a dozen times but in the end always backed away from the idea, as if some unknown charm would be broken by the act. And there was Dannys part in it to consider. If she felt she didnt know her husband, then she was in awe of her childawe in the strict meaning of that word a kind of undefined superstitious dread. Dozing lightly, the image of the instant of his birth was presented to her. She was again lying on the delivery table, bathed in sweat, her hair in strings, her feet splayed out in the stirrups (and a little high from the gas they kept giving her whiffs of; at one point she had muttered that she felt like an advertisement for gang rape, and the nurse, an old bird who had assisted at the births of enough children to populate a high school, found that extremely funny) the doctor between her legs, the nurse off to one side, arranging instruments and humming. The sharp, glassy pains had been coming at steadily shortening intervals, and several times she had screamed in spite of her shame. Then the doctor told her quite sternly that she must PUSH, and she did, and then she felt something being taken from her. It was a clear and distinct feeling, one she would never forgetthe thing taken. Then the doctor held her son up by the legsshe had seen his tiny sex and known he was a boy immediatelyand as the doctor groped for the airmask, she had seen something else, something so horrible that she found the strength to scream again after she had thought all screams were used up He has no face! But of course there had been a face, Dannys own sweet face, and the caul that had covered it at birth now resided in a small jar which she had kept, almost shamefully. She did not hold with old superstition, but she had kept the caul nevertheless. She did not hold with wives tales, but the boy had been unusual from the first. She did not believe in second sight but Did Daddy have an accident? I dreamed Daddy had an accident. Something had changed him. She didnt believe it was just her getting ready to ask for a divorce that had done it. Something had happened before that morning. Something that had happened while she slept uneasily. Al Shockley said that nothing had happened, nothing at all, but he had averted his eyes when he said it, and if you believed faculty gossip, Al had also climbed aboard the fabled wagon. Did Daddy have an accident? Maybe a chance collision with fate, surely nothing much more concrete. She had read that days paper and the next days with a closer eye than usual, but she saw nothing she could connect with Jack. God help her, she had been looking for a hitandrun accident or a barroom brawl that had resulted in serious injuries or who knew? Who wanted to? But no policeman came to call, either to ask questions or with a warrant empowering him to take paint scrapings from the VWs bumpers. Nothing. Only her husbands one hundred and eighty degree change and her sons sleepy question on waking Did Daddy have an accident? I dreamed She had stuck with Jack more for Dannys sake than she would admit in her waking hours, but now, sleeping lightly, she could admit it Danny had been Jacks for the asking, almost from the first. Just as she had been her fathers, almost from the first. She couldnt remember Danny ever spitting a bottle back on Jacks shirt. Jack could get him to eat after she had given up in disgust, even when Danny was teething and it gave him visible pain to chew. When Danny had a stomachache, she would rock him for an hour before he began to quiet; Jack had only to pick him up, walk twice around the room with him, and Danny would be asleep on Jacks shoulder, his thumb securely corked in his mouth. He hadnt minded changing diapers, even those he called the special deliveries. He sat with Danny for hours on end, bouncing him on his lap, playing finger games with him, making faces at him while Danny poked at his nose and then collapsed with the giggles. He made formulas and administered them faultlessly, getting up every last burp afterward. He would take Danny with him in the car to get the paper or a bottle of milk or nails at the hardware store even when their son was still an infant. He had taken Danny to a StovingtonKeene soccer match when Danny was only six months old, and Danny had sat motionlessly on his fathers lap through the whole game, wrapped in a blanket, a small Stovington pennant clutched in one chubby fist. He loved his mother but he was his fathers boy. And hadnt she felt, time and time again, her sons wordless opposition to the whole idea of divorce? She would be thinking about it in the kitchen, turning it over in her mind as she turned the potatoes for supper over in her hands for the peelers blade. And she would turn around to see him sitting crosslegged in a kitchen chair, looking at her with eyes that seemed both frightened and accusatory. Walking with him in the park, he would suddenly seize both her hands and sayalmost demand Do you love me? Do you love Daddy? And, confused, she would nod or say, Of course I do, honey. Then he would run to the duck pond, sending them squawking and scared to the other end, flapping their wings in a panic before the small ferocity of his charge, leaving her to stare after him and wonder. There were even times when it seemed that her determination to at least discuss the matter with Jack dissolved, not out of her own weakness but under the determination of her sons will. I dont believe such things. But in sleep she did believe them, and in sleep, with her husbands seed still drying on her thighs, she felt that the three of them had been permanently welded togetherthat if their threeoneness was to be destroyed, it would not be destroyed by any of them but from outside. Most of what she believed centered around her love for Jack. She had never stopped loving him, except maybe for that dark period immediately following Dannys accident. And she loved her son. Most of all she loved them together, walking or riding or only sitting, Jacks large head and Dannys small one poised alertly over the fans of old maid hands, sharing a bottle of Coke, looking at the funnies. She loved having them with her, and she hoped to dear God that this hotel caretaking job Al had gotten for Jack would be the beginning of good times again. And the wind gonna rise up, baby, and blow my blues away Soft and sweet and mellow, the song came back and lingered, following her down into a deeper sleep where thought ceased and the faces that came in dreams went unremembered. CHAPTER SEVEN IN ANOTHER BEDROOM Danny awoke with the booming still loud in his ears, and the drunk, savagely pettish voice crying hoarsely Come out here and take your medicine! Ill find you! Ill find you! But now the booming was only his racing heart, and the only voice in the night was the faraway sound of a police siren. He lay in bed motionlessly, looking up at the windstirred shadows of the leaves on his bedroom ceiling. They twined sinuously together, making shapes like the vines and creepers in a jungle, like patterns woven into the nap of a thick carpet. He was clad in Doctor Denton pajamas, but between the pajama suit and his skin he had grown a more closely fitting singlet of perspiration. Tony? he whispered. You there? No answer. He slipped out of bed and padded silently across to the window and looked out on Arapahoe Street, now still and silent. It was two in the morning. There was nothing out there but empty sidewalks drifted with fallen leaves, parked cars, and the longnecked streetlight on the corner across from the Cliff Brice gas station. With its hooded top and motionless stance, the streetlight looked like a monster in a space show. He looked up the street both ways, straining his eyes for Tonys slight, beckoning form, but there was no one there. The wind sighed through the trees, and the fallen leaves rattled up the deserted walks and around the hubcaps of parked cars. It was a faint and sorrowful sound, and the boy thought that he might be the only one in Boulder awake enough to hear it. The only human being, at least. There was no way of knowing what else might be out in the night, slinking hungrily through the shadows, watching and scenting the breeze. Ill find you! Ill find you! Tony? he whispered again, but without much hope. Only the wind spoke back, gusting more strongly this time, scattering leaves across the sloping roof below his window. Some of them slipped into the raingutter and came to rest there like tired dancers. Danny Danneee He started at the sound of that familiar voice and craned out the window, his small hands on the sill. With the sound of Tonys voice the whole night seemed to have come silently and secretly alive, whispering even when the wind quieted again and the leaves were still and the shadows had stopped moving. He thought he saw a darker shadow standing by the bus stop a block down, but it was hard to tell if it was a real thing or an eyetrick. Dont go, Danny Then the wind gusted again, making him squint, and the shadow by the bus stop was gone if it had ever been there at all. He stood by his window for (a minute? an hour?) some time longer, but there was no more. At last he crept back into his bed and pulled the blankets up and watched the shadows thrown by the alien streetlight turn into a sinuous jungle filled with flesheating plants that wanted only to slip around him, squeeze the life out of him, and drag him down into a blackness where one sinister word flashed in red REDRUM. PART TWO CLOSING DAY CHAPTER EIGHT A VIEW OF THE OVERLOOK Mommy was worried. She was afraid the bug wouldnt make it up and down all these mountains and that they would get stranded by the side of the road where somebody might come ripping along and hit them. Danny himself was more sanguine; if Daddy thought the bug would make this one last trip, then probably it would. Were just about there, Jack said. Wendy brushed her hair back from her temples. Thank God. She was sitting in the righthand bucket, a Victoria Holt paperback open but facedown in her lap. She was wearing her blue dress, the one Danny thought was her prettiest. It had a sailor collar and made her look very young, like a girl just getting ready to graduate from high school. Daddy kept putting his hand high up on her leg and she kept laughing and brushing it off, saying Get away, fly. Danny was impressed with the mountains. One day Daddy had taken them up in the ones near Boulder, the ones they called the Flatirons, but these were much bigger, and on the tallest of them you could see a fine dusting of snow, which Daddy said was often there yearround. And they were actually in the mountains, no goofing around. Sheer rock faces rose all around them, so high you could barely see their tops even by craning your neck out the window. When they left Boulder, the temperature had been in the high seventies. Now, just after noon, the air up here felt crisp and cold like November back in Vermont and Daddy had the heater going not that it worked all that well. They had passed several signs that said FALLING ROCK ZONE (Mommy read each one to him), and although Danny had waited anxiously to see some rock fall, none had. At least not yet. Half an hour ago they had passed another sign that Daddy said was very important. This sign said ENTERING SIDEWINDER PASS, and Daddy said that sign was as far as the snowplows went in the wintertime. After that the road got too steep. In the winter the road was closed from the little town of Sidewinder, which they had gone through just before they got to that sign, all the way to Buckland, Utah. Now they were passing another sign. Whats that one, Mom? That one says SLOWER VEHICLES USE RIGHT LANE. That means us. The bug will make it, Danny said. Please, God, Mommy said, and crossed her fingers. Danny looked down at her opentoed sandals and saw that she had crossed her toes as well. He giggled. She smiled back, but he knew that she was still worried. The road wound up and up in a series of slow Scurves, and Jack dropped the bugs stick shift from fourth gear to third, then into second. The bug wheezed and protested, and Wendys eye fixed on the speedometer needle, which sank from forty to thirty to twenty, where it hovered reluctantly. The fuel pump she began timidly. The fuel pump will go another three miles, Jack said shortly. The rock wall fell away on their right, disclosing a slash valley that seemed to go down forever, lined a dark green with Rocky Mountain pine and spruce. The pines fell away to gray cliffs of rock that dropped for hundreds of feet before smoothing out. She saw a waterfall spilling over one of them, the early afternoon sun sparkling in it like a golden fish snared in a blue net. They were beautiful mountains but they were hard. She did not think they would forgive many mistakes. An unhappy foreboding rose in her throat. Further west in the Sierra Nevada the Donner Party had become snowbound and had resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. The mountains did not forgive many mistakes. With a punch of the clutch and a jerk, Jack shifted down to first gear and they labored upward, the bugs engine thumping gamely. You know, she said, I dont think weve seen five cars since we came through Sidewinder. And one of them was the hotel limousine. Jack nodded. It goes right to Stapleton Airport in Denver. Theres already some icy patches up beyond the hotel, Watson says, and theyre forecasting more snow for tomorrow up higher. Anybody going through the mountains now wants to be on one of the main roads, just in case. That goddam Ullman better still be up there. I guess he will be. Youre sure the larder is fully stocked? she asked, still thinking of the Donners. He said so. He wanted Hallorann to go over it with you. Halloranns the cook. Oh, she said faintly, looking at the speedometer. It had dropped from fifteen to ten miles an hour. Theres the top, Jack said, pointing three hundred yards ahead. Theres a scenic turnout and you can see the Overlook from there. Im going to pull off the road and give the bug a chance to rest. He craned over his shoulder at Danny, who was sitting on a pile of blankets. What do you think, doc? We might see some deer. Or caribou. Sure, Dad. The VW labored up and up. The speedometer dropped to just above the fivemileanhour hashmark and was beginning to hitch when Jack pulled off the road (Whats that sign, Mommy? SCENIC TURNOUT, she read dutifully.) and stepped on the emergency brake and let the VW run in neutral. Come on, he said, and got out. They walked to the guardrail together. Thats it, Jack said, and pointed at eleven oclock. For Wendy, it was discovering truth in a clich her breath was taken away. For a moment she was unable to breathe at all; the view had knocked the wind from her. They were standing near the top of one peak. Across from themwho knew how far?an even taller mountain reared into the sky, its jagged tip only a silhouette that was now nimbused by the sun, which was beginning its decline. The whole valley floor was spread out below them, the slopes that they had climbed in the laboring bug falling away with such dizzying suddenness that she knew to look down there for too long would bring on nausea and eventual vomiting. The imagination seemed to spring to full life in the clear air, beyond the rein of reason, and to look was to helplessly see ones self plunging down and down and down, sky and slopes changing places in slow cartwheels, the scream drifting from your mouth like a lazy balloon as your hair and your dress billowed out She jerked her gaze away from the drop almost by force and followed Jacks finger. She could see the highway clinging to the side of this cathedral spire, switching back on itself but always tending northwest, still climbing but at a more gentle angle. Farther up, seemingly set directly into the slope itself, she saw the grimly clinging pines give way to a wide square of green lawn and standing in the middle of it, overlooking all this, the hotel. The Overlook. Seeing it, she found breath and voice again. Oh, Jack, its gorgeous! Yes, it is, he said. Ullman says he thinks its the single most beautiful location in America. I dont care much for him, but I think he might be Danny! Danny, are you all right? She looked around for him and her sudden fear for him blotted out everything else, stupendous or not. She darted toward him. He was holding on to the guardrail and looking up at the hotel, his face a pasty gray color. His eyes had the blank look of someone on the verge of fainting. She knelt beside him and put steadying hands on his shoulders. Danny, whats Jack was beside her. You okay, doc? He gave Danny a brisk little shake and his eyes cleared. Im okay, Daddy. Im fine. What was it, Danny? she asked. Were you dizzy, honey? No, I was just thinking. Im sorry. I didnt mean to scare you. He looked at his parents, kneeling in front of him, and offered them a small puzzled smile. Maybe it was the sun. The sun got in my eyes. Well get you up to the hotel and give you a drink of water, Daddy said. Okay. And in the bug, which moved upward more surely on the gentler grade, he kept looking out between them as the road unwound, affording occasional glimpses of the Overlook Hotel, its massive bank of westwardlooking windows reflecting back the sun. It was the place he had seen in the midst of the blizzard, the dark and booming place where some hideously familiar figure sought him down long corridors carpeted with jungle. The place Tony had warned him against. It was here. It was here. Whatever Redrum was, it was here. CHAPTER NINE CHECKING IT OUT Ullman was waiting for them just inside the wide, oldfashioned front doors. He shook hands with Jack and nodded coolly at Wendy, perhaps noticing the way heads turned when she came through into the lobby, her golden hair spilling across the shoulders of the simple navy dress. The hem of the dress stopped a modest two inches above the knee, but you didnt have to see more to know they were good legs. Ullman seemed truly warm toward Danny only, but Wendy had experienced that before. Danny seemed to be a child for people who ordinarily held W. C. Fieldss sentiments about children. He bent a little from the waist and offered Danny his hand. Danny shook it formally, without a smile. My son, Danny, Jack said. And my wife, Winnifred. Im happy to meet you both, Ullman said. How old are you, Danny? Five, sir. Sir, yet. Ullman smiled and glanced at Jack. Hes well mannered. Of course he is, Jack said. And Mrs. Torrance. He offered the same little bow, and for a bemused instant Wendy thought he would kiss her hand. She halfoffered it and he did take it, but only for a moment, clasped in both of his. His hands were small and dry and smooth, and she guessed that he powdered them. The lobby was a bustle of activity. Almost every one of the oldfashioned highbacked chairs was taken. Bellboys shuttled in and out with suitcases and there was a line at the desk, which was dominated by a huge brass cash register. The BankAmericard and Master Charge decals on it seemed jarringly anachronistic. To their right, down toward a pair of tall double doors that were pulled closed and roped off, there was an oldfashioned fireplace now blazing with birch logs. Three nuns sat on a sofa that was drawn up almost to the hearth itself. They were talking and smiling with their bags stacked up to either side, waiting for the checkout line to thin a little. As Wendy watched them they burst into a chord of tinkling, girlish laughter. She felt a smile touch her own lips; not one of them could be under sixty. |
In the background was the constant hum of conversation, the muted ding! of the silverplated bell beside the cash register as one of the two clerks on duty struck it, the slightly impatient call of Front, please! It brought back strong, warm memories of her honeymoon in New York with Jack, at the Beekman Tower. For the first time she let herself believe that this might be exactly what the three of them needed a season together away from the world, a sort of family honeymoon. She smiled affectionately down at Danny, who was goggling around frankly at everything. Another limo, as gray as a bankers vest, had pulled up out front. The last day of the season, Ullman was saying. Closing day. Always hectic. I had expected you more around three, Mr. Torrance. I wanted to give the Volks time for a nervous breakdown if it decided to have one, Jack said. It didnt. How fortunate, Ullman said. Id like to take the three of you on a tour of the place a little later, and of course Dick Hallorann wants to show Mrs. Torrance the Overlooks kitchen. But Im afraid One of the clerks came over and almost tugged his forelock. Excuse me, Mr. Ullman Well? What is it? Its Mrs. Brant, the clerk said uncomfortably. She refuses to pay her bill with anything but her American Express card. I told her we stopped taking American Express at the end of the season last year, but she wont His eyes shifted to the Torrance family, then back to Ullman. He shrugged. Ill take care of it. Thank you, Mr. Ullman. The clerk crossed back to the desk, where a dreadnought of a woman bundled into a long fur coat and what looked like a black feather boa was remonstrating loudly. I have been coming to the Overlook Hotel since 1955, she was telling the smiling, shrugging clerk. I continued to come even after my second husband died of a stroke on that tiresome roque courtI told him the sun was too hot that dayand I have never I repeat never paid with anything but my American Express credit card. Call the police if you like! Have them drag me away! I will still refuse to pay with anything but my American Express credit card. I repeat Excuse me, Mr. Ullman said. They watched him cross the lobby, touch Mrs. Brants elbow deferentially, and spread his hands and nod when she turned her tirade on him. He listened sympathetically, nodded again, and said something in return. Mrs. Brant smiled triumphantly, turned to the unhappy desk clerk, and said loudly Thank God there is one employee of this hotel who hasnt become an utter Philistine! She allowed Ullman, who barely came to the bulky shoulder of her fur coat, to take her arm and lead her away, presumably to his inner office. Whooo! Wendy said, smiling. Theres a dude who earns his money. But he didnt like that lady, Danny said immediately. He was just pretending to like her. Jack grinned down at him. Im sure thats true, doc. But flattery is the stuff that greases the wheels of the world. Whats flattery? Flattery, Wendy told him, is when your daddy says he likes my new yellow slacks even if he doesnt or when he says I dont need to take off five pounds. Oh. Is it lying for fun? Something very like that. He had been looking at her closely and now said Youre pretty, Mommy. He frowned in confusion when they exchanged a glance and then burst into laughter. Ullman didnt waste much flattery on me, Jack said. Come on over by the window, you guys. I feel conspicuous standing out here in the middle with my denim jacket on. I honest to God didnt think thered be anybody much here on closing day. Guess I was wrong. You look very handsome, she said, and then they laughed again, Wendy putting a hand over her mouth. Danny still didnt understand, but it was okay. They were loving each other. Danny thought this place reminded her of somewhere else (the beakman place) where she had been happy. He wished he liked it as well as she did, but he kept telling himself over and over that the things Tony showed him didnt always come true. He would be careful. He would watch for something called Redrum. But he would not say anything unless he absolutely had to. Because they were happy, they had been laughing, and there were no bad thoughts. Look at this view, Jack said. Oh, its gorgeous! Danny, look! But Danny didnt think it was particularly gorgeous. He didnt like heights; they made him dizzy. Beyond the wide front porch, which ran the length of the hotel, a beautifully manicured lawn (there was a putting green on the right) sloped away to a long, rectangular swimming pool. A CLOSED sign stood on a little tripod at one end of the pool; closed was one sign he could read by himself, along with Stop, Exit, Pizza, and a few others. Beyond the pool a graveled path wound off through baby pines and spruces and aspens. Here was a small sign he didnt know ROQUE. There was an arrow below it. Whats ROQUE, Daddy? A game, Daddy said. Its a little bit like croquet, only you play it on a gravel court that has sides like a big billiard table instead of grass. Its a very old game, Danny. Sometimes they have tournaments here. Do you play it with a croquet mallet? Like that, Jack agreed. Only the handles a little shorter and the head has two sides. One side is hard rubber and the other side is wood. (Come out, you little shit!) Its pronounced roke, Daddy was saying. Ill teach you how to play, if you want. Maybe, Danny said in an odd colorless little voice that made his parents exchange a puzzled look over his head. I might not like it, though. Well if you dont like it, doc, you dont have to play. All right? Sure. Do you like the animals? Wendy asked. Thats called a topiary. Beyond the path leading to roque there were hedges clipped into the shapes of various animals. Danny, whose eyes were sharp, made out a rabbit, a dog, a horse, a cow, and a trio of bigger ones that looked like frolicking lions. Those animals were what made Uncle Al think of me for the job, Jack told him. He knew that when I was in college I used to work for a landscaping company. Thats a business that fixes peoples lawns and bushes and hedges. I used to trim a ladys topiary. Wendy put a hand over her mouth and snickered. Looking at her, Jack said, Yes, I used to trim her topiary at least once a week. Get away, fly, Wendy said, and snickered again. Did she have nice hedges, Dad? Danny asked, and at this they both stifled great bursts of laughter. Wendy laughed so hard that tears streamed down her cheeks and she had to get a Kleenex out of her handbag. They werent animals, Danny, Jack said when he had control of himself. They were playing cards. Spades and hearts and clubs and diamonds. But the hedges grow, you see (They creep, Watson had said no, not the hedges, the boiler. You have to watch it all the time or you and your fambly will end up on the fuckin moon.) They looked at him, puzzled. The smile had faded off his face. Dad? Danny asked. He blinked at them, as if coming back from far away. They grow, Danny, and lose their shape. So Ill have to give them a haircut once or twice a week until it gets so cold they stop growing for the year. And a playground, too, Wendy said. My lucky boy. The playground was beyond the topiary. Two slides, a big swing set with half a dozen swings set at varying heights, a jungle gym, a tunnel made of cement rings, a sandbox, and a playhouse that was an exact replica of the Overlook itself. Do you like it, Danny? Wendy asked. I sure do, he said, hoping he sounded more enthused than he felt. Its neat. Beyond the playground there was an inconspicuous chainlink security fence, beyond that the wide, macadamized drive that led up to the hotel, and beyond that the valley itself, dropping away into the bright blue haze of afternoon. Danny didnt know the word isolation, but if someone had explained it to him he would have seized on it. Far below, lying in the sun like a long black snake that had decided to snooze for a while, was the road that led back through Sidewinder Pass and eventually to Boulder. The road that would be closed all winter long. He felt a little suffocated at the thought, and almost jumped when Daddy dropped his hand on his shoulder. Ill get you that drink as soon as I can, doc. Theyre a little busy right now. Sure, Dad. Mrs. Brant came out of the inner office looking vindicated. A few moments later two bellboys, struggling with eight suitcases between them, followed her as best they could as she strode triumphantly out the door. Danny watched through the window as a man in a gray uniform and a hat like a captain in the Army brought her long silver car around to the door and got out. He tipped his cap to her and ran around to open the trunk. And in one of those flashes that sometimes came, he got a complete thought from her, one that floated above the confused, lowpitched babble of emotions and colors that he usually got in crowded places. (id like to get into his pants) Dannys brow wrinkled as he watched the bellboys put her cases into the trunk. She was looking rather sharply at the man in the gray uniform, who was supervising the loading. Why would she want to get that mans pants? Was she cold, even with that long fur coat on? And if she was that cold, why hadnt she just put on some pants of her own? His mommy wore pants just about all winter. The man in the gray uniform closed the trunk and walked back to help her into the car. Danny watched closely to see if she would say anything about his pants, but she only smiled and gave him a dollar billa tip. A moment later she was guiding the big silver car down the driveway. He thought about asking his mother why Mrs. Brant might want that carmans pants, and decided against it. Sometimes questions could get you in a whole lot of trouble. It had happened to him before. So instead he squeezed in between them on the small sofa they were sharing and watched all the people check out at the desk. He was glad his mommy and daddy were happy and loving each other, but he couldnt help being a little worried. He couldnt help it. CHAPTER TEN HALLORANN The cook didnt conform to Wendys image of the typical resort hotel kitchen personage at all. To begin with, such a personage was called a chef, nothing so mundane as a cookcooking was what she did in her apartment kitchen when she threw all the leftovers into a greased Pyrex casserole dish and added noodles. Further, the culinary wizard of such a place as the Overlook, which advertised in the resort section of the New York Sunday Times, should be small, rotund, and pastyfaced (rather like the Pillsbury DoughBoy); he should have a thin pencilline mustache like a forties musical comedy star, dark eyes, a French accent, and a detestable personality. Hallorann had the dark eyes and that was all. He was a tall black man with a modest afro that was beginning to powder white. He had a soft southern accent and he laughed a lot, disclosing teeth too white and too even to be anything but 1950 vintage Sears and Roebuck dentures. Her own father had had a pair, which he called Roebuckers, and from time to time he would push them out at her comically at the supper table always, Wendy remembered now, when her mother was out in the kitchen getting something else or on the telephone. Danny had stared up at this black giant in blue serge, and then had smiled when Hallorann picked him up easily, set him in the crook of his elbow, and said You aint gonna stay up here all winter. Yes I am, Danny said with a shy grin. No, youre gonna come down to St. Petes with me and learn to cook and go out on the beach every damn evenin watchin for crabs. Right? Danny giggled delightedly and shook his head no. Hallorann set him down. If youre gonna change your mind, Hallorann said, bending over him gravely, you better do it quick. Thirty minutes from now and Im in my car. Two and a half hours after that, Im sitting at Gate 32, Concourse B, Stapleton International Airport, in the milehigh city of Denver, Colorado. Three hours after that, Im rentin a car at the Miama Airport and on my way to sunny St. Petes, waiting to get inta my swimtrunks and just laaafin up my sleeve at anybody stuck and caught in the snow. Can you dig it, my boy? Yes, sir, Danny said, smiling. Hallorann turned to Jack and Wendy. Looks like a fine boy there. We think hell do, Jack said, and offered his hand. Hallorann took it. Im Jack Torrance. My wife, Winnifred. Danny youve met. And a pleasure it was. Maam, are you a Winnie or a Freddie? Im a Wendy, she said, smiling. Okay. Thats better than the other two, I think. Right this way. Mr. Ullman wants you to have the tour, the tour youll get. He shook his head and said under his breath And wont I be glad to see the last of him. Hallorann commenced to tour them around the most immense kitchen Wendy had ever seen in her life. It was sparkling clean. Every surface was coaxed to a high gloss. It was more than just big; it was intimidating. She walked at Halloranns side while Jack, wholly out of his element, hung back a little with Danny. A long wallboard hung with cutting instruments which went all the way from paring knives to twohanded cleavers hung beside a fourbasin sink. There was a breadboard as big as their Boulder apartments kitchen table. An amazing array of stainlesssteel pots and pans hung from floor to ceiling, covering one whole wall. I think Ill have to leave a trail of bread crumbs every time I come in, she said. Dont let it get you down, Hallorann said. Its big, but its still only a kitchen. Most of this stuff youll never even have to touch. Keep it clean, thats all I ask. Heres the stove Id be using, if I was you. There are three of them in all, but this is the smallest. Smallest, she thought dismally, looking at it. There were twelve burners, two regular ovens and a Dutch oven, a heated well on top in which you could simmer sauces or bake beans, a broiler, and a warmerplus a million dials and temperature gauges. All gas, Hallorann said. Youve cooked with gas before, Wendy? Yes I love gas, he said, and turned on one of the burners. Blue flame popped into life and he adjusted it down to a faint glow with a delicate touch. I like to be able to see the flame youre cookin with. You see where all the surface burner switches are? Yes. And the oven dials are all marked. Myself, I favor the middle one because it seems to heat the most even, but you use whichever one you likeor all three, for that matter. A TV dinner in each one, Wendy said, and laughed weakly. Hallorann roared. Go right ahead, if you like. I left a list of everything edible over by the sink. You see it? Here it is, Mommy! Danny brought over two sheets of paper, written closely on both sides. Good boy, Hallorann said, taking it from him and ruffling his hair. You sure you dont want to come to Florida with me, my boy? Learn to cook the sweetest shrimp creole this side of paradise? Danny put his hands over his mouth and giggled and retreated to his fathers side. You three folks could eat up here for a year, I guess, Hallorann said. We got a coldpantry, a walkin freezer, all sorts of vegetable bins, and two refrigerators. Come on and let me show you. For the next ten minutes Hallorann opened bins and doors, disclosing food in such amounts as Wendy had never seen before. The food supplies amazed her but did not reassure her as much as she might have thought the Donner Party kept recurring to her, not with thoughts of cannibalism (with all this food it would indeed be a long time before they were reduced to such poor rations as each other), but with the reinforced idea that this was indeed a serious business when snow fell, getting out of here would not be a matter of an hours drive to Sidewinder but a major operation. They would sit up here in this deserted grand hotel, eating the food that had been left them like creatures in a fairy tale and listening to the bitter wind around their snowbound eaves. In Vermont, when Danny had broken his arm (when Jack broke Dannys arm) she had called the emergency Medix squad, dialing the number from the little card attached to the phone. They had been at the house only ten minutes later. There were other numbers written on that little card. You could have a police car in five minutes and a fire truck in even less time than that, because the fire station was only three blocks away and one block over. There was a man to call if the lights went out, a man to call if the shower stopped up, a man to call if the TV went on the fritz. But what would happen up here if Danny had one of his fainting spells and swallowed his tongue? (oh God what a thought!) What if the place caught on fire? If Jack fell down the elevator shaft and fractured his skull? What if? (what if we have a wonderful time now stop it, Winnifred!) Hallorann showed them into the walkin freezer first, where their breath puffed out like comic strip balloons. In the freezer it was as if winter had already come. Hamburger in big plastic bags, ten pounds in each bag, a dozen bags. Forty whole chickens hanging from a row of hooks in the woodplanked walls. Canned hams stacked up like poker chips, a dozen of them. Below the chickens, ten roasts of beef, ten roasts of pork, and a huge leg of lamb. You like lamb, doc? Hallorann asked, grinning. I love it, Danny said immediately. He had never had it. I knew you did. Theres nothin like two good slices of lamb on a cold night, with some mint jelly on the side. You got the mint jelly here, too. Lamb eases the belly. Its a noncontentious sort of meat. From behind them Jack said curiously How did you know we called him doc? Hallorann turned around. Pardon? Danny. We call him doc sometimes. Like in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. Looks sort of like a doc, doesnt he? He wrinkled his nose at Danny, smacked his lips, and said, Ehhhh, whats up, doc? Danny giggled and then Hallorann said something (Sure you dont want to go to Florida, doc?) to him, very clearly. He heard every word. He looked at Hallorann, startled and a little scared. Hallorann winked solemnly and turned back to the food. Wendy looked from the cooks broad, sergeclad back to her son. She had the oddest feeling that something had passed between them, something she could not quite follow. You got twelve packages of sausage, twelve packages of bacon, Hallorann said. So much for the pig. In this drawer, twenty pounds of butter. Real butter? Jack asked. The Anumberone. I dont think Ive had real butter since I was a kid back in Berlin, New Hampshire. Well, youll eat it up here until oleo seems a treat, Hallorann said, and laughed. Over in this bin you got your breadthirty loaves of white, twenty of dark. We try to keep racial balance at the Overlook, dont you know. Now I know fifty loaves wont take you through, but theres plenty of makings and fresh is better than frozen any day of the week. Down here you got your fish. Brain food, right, doc? Is it, Mom? If Mr. Hallorann says so, honey. She smiled. Danny wrinkled his nose. I dont like fish. Youre dead wrong, Hallorann said. You just never had any fish that liked you. This fish here will like you fine. Five pounds of rainbow trout, ten pounds of turbot, fifteen cans of tuna fish Oh yeah, I like tuna. and five pounds of the sweetesttasting sole that ever swam in the sea. My boy, when next spring rolls around, youre gonna thank old He snapped his fingers as if he had forgotten something. Whats my name, now? I guess it just slipped my mind. Mr. Hallorann, Danny said, grinning. Dick, to your friends. Thats right! And you bein a friend, you make it Dick. As he led them into the far corner, Jack and Wendy exchanged a puzzled glance, both of them trying to remember if Hallorann had told them his first name. And this here I put in special, Hallorann said. Hope you folks enjoy it. Oh really, you shouldnt have, Wendy said, touched. It was a twentypound turkey wrapped in a wide scarlet ribbon with a bow on top. You got to have your turkey on Thanksgiving, Wendy, Hallorann said gravely. I believe theres a capon back here somewhere for Christmas. Doubtless youll stumble on it. Lets come on out of here now before we all catch the peenumonia. Right, doc? Right! There were more wonders in the coldpantry. A hundred boxes of dried milk (Hallorann advised her gravely to buy fresh milk for the boy in Sidewinder as long as it was feasible), five twelvepound bags of sugar, a gallon jug of blackstrap molasses, cereals, glass jugs of rice, macaroni, spaghetti; ranked cans of fruit and fruit salad; a bushel of fresh apples that scented the whole room with autumn; dried raisins, prunes, and apricots (You got to be regular if you want to be happy, Hallorann said, and pealed laughter at the coldpantry ceiling, where one oldfashioned light globe hung down on an iron chain); a deep bin filled with potatoes; and smaller caches of tomatoes, onions, turnips, squashes, and cabbages. My word, Wendy said as they came out. But seeing all that fresh food after her thirtydollaraweek grocery budget so stunned her that she was unable to say just what her word was. Im runnin a bit late, Hallorann said, checking his watch, so Ill just let you go through the cabinets and the fridges as you get settled in. Theres cheeses, canned milk, sweetened condensed milk, yeast, bakin soda, a whole bagful of those Table Talk pies, a few bunches of bananas that aint even near to ripe yet Stop, she said, holding up a hand and laughing. Ill never remember it all. Its super. And I promise to leave the place clean. Thats all I ask. He turned to Jack. Did Mr. Ullman give you the rundown on the rats in his belfry? Jack grinned. He said there were possibly some in the attic, and Mr. Watson said there might be some more down in the basement. There must be two tons of paper down there, but I didnt see any shredded, as if theyd been using it to make nests. That Watson, Hallorann said, shaking his head in mock sorrow. Aint he the foulesttalking man you ever ran on? Hes quite a character, Jack agreed. His own father had been the foulesttalking man Jack had ever run on. Its sort of a pity, Hallorann said, leading them back toward the wide swinging doors that gave on the Overlook Dining Room. There was money in that family, long ago. It was Watsons granddad or greatgranddadI cant remember whichthat built this place. So I was told, Jack said. What happened? Wendy asked. Well, they couldnt make it go, Hallorann said. Watson will tell you the whole storytwice a day, if you let him. The old man got a bee in his bonnet about the place. He let it drag him down, I guess. He had two boys and one of them was killed in a riding accident on the grounds while the hotel was still abuilding. That would have been 1908 or 09. The old mans wife died of the flu, and then it was just the old man and his youngest son. They ended up getting took on as caretakers in the same hotel the old man had built. It is sort of a pity, Wendy said. What happened to him? The old man? Jack asked. He plugged his finger into a light socket by mistake and that was the end of him, Hallorann said. Sometime in the early thirties before the Depression closed this place down for ten years. Anyway, Jack, Id appreciate it if you and your wife would keep an eye out for rats in the kitchen as well. If you should see them traps, not poison. Jack blinked. Of course. Whod want to put rat poison in the kitchen? Hallorann laughed derisively. Mr. Ullman, thats who. That was his bright idea last fall. I put it to him, I said What if we all get up here next May, Mr. Ullman, and I serve the traditional opening night dinnerwhich just happens to be salmon in a very nice sauceand everybody gits sick and the doctor comes and says to you, Ullman, what have you been doing up here? Youve got eighty of the richest folks in America suffering from rat poisoning! Jack threw his head back and bellowed laughter. What did Ullman say? Hallorann tucked his tongue into his cheek as if feeling for a bit of food in there. He said Get some traps, Hallorann. This time they all laughed, even Danny, although he was not completely sure what the joke was, except it had something to do with Mr. Ullman, who didnt know everything after all. The four of them passed through the dining room, empty and silent now, with its fabulous western exposure on the snowdusted peaks. Each of the white linen tablecloths had been covered with a sheet of tough clear plastic. The rug, now rolled up for the season, stood in one corner like a sentinel on guard duty. Across the wide room was a double set of batwing doors, and over them an oldfashioned sign lettered in gilt script The Colorado Lounge. Following his gaze, Hallorann said, If youre a drinkin man, I hope you brought your own supplies. That place is picked clean. Employees party last night, you know. Every maid and bellhop in the place is goin around with a headache today, me included. I dont drink, Jack said shortly. They went back to the lobby. It had cleared greatly during the half hour theyd spent in the kitchen. The long main room was beginning to take on the quiet, deserted look that Jack supposed they would become familiar with soon enough. The highbacked chairs were empty. The nuns who had been sitting by the fire were gone, and the fire itself was down to a bed of comfortably glowing coals. Wendy glanced out into the parking lot and saw that all but a dozen cars had disappeared. She found herself wishing they could get back in the VW and go back to Boulder or anywhere else. Jack was looking around for Ullman, but he wasnt in the lobby. A young maid with her ashblond hair pinned up on her neck came over. Your luggage is out on the porch, Dick. Thank you, Sally. He gave her a peck on the forehead. You have yourself a good winter. Getting married, I hear. He turned to the Torrances as she strolled away, backside twitching pertly. Ive got to hurry along if Im going to make that plane. I want to wish you all the best. Know youll have it. Thanks, Jack said. Youve been very kind. Ill take good care of your kitchen, Wendy promised again. Enjoy Florida. I always do, Hallorann said. He put his hands on his knees and bent down to Danny. Last chance, guy. Want to come to Florida? I guess not, Danny said, smiling. Okay. Like to give me a hand out to my car with my bags? If my mommy says I can. You can, Wendy said, but youll have to have that jacket buttoned. She leaned forward to do it but Hallorann was ahead of her, his large brown fingers moving with smooth dexterity. Ill send him right back in, Hallorann said. Fine, Wendy said, and followed them to the door. Jack was still looking around for Ullman. The last of the Overlooks guests were checking out at the desk. CHAPTER ELEVEN THE SHINING There were four bags in a pile just outside the door. Three of them were giant, battered old suitcases covered with black imitation alligator hide. The last was an oversized zipper bag with a faded tartan skin. Guess you can handle that one, cant you? Hallorann asked him. He picked up two of the big cases in one hand and hoisted the other under his arm. Sure, Danny said. He got a grip on it with both hands and followed the cook down the porch steps, trying manfully not to grunt and give away how heavy it was. A sharp and cutting fall wind had come up since they had arrived; it whistled across the parking lot, making Danny wince his eyes down to slits as he carried the zipper bag in front of him, bumping on his knees. A few errant aspen leaves rattled and turned across the now mostly deserted asphalt, making Danny think momentarily of that night last week when he had wakened out of his nightmare and had heardor thought he heard, at leastTony telling him not to go. Hallorann set his bags down by the trunk of a beige Plymouth Fury. This aint much car, he confided to Danny, just a rental job. My Bessies on the other end. Shes a car. 1950 Cadillac, and does she run sweet? Ill tell the world. I keep her in Florida because shes too old for all this mountain climbing. You need a hand with that? No, sir, Danny said. He managed to carry it the last ten or twelve steps without grunting and set it down with a large sigh of relief. Good boy, Hallorann said. He produced a large key ring from the pocket of his blue serge jacket and unlocked the trunk. As he lifted the bags in he said You shine on, boy. Harder than anyone I ever met in my life. And Im sixty years old this January. Huh? You got a knack, Hallorann said, turning to him. Me, Ive always called it shining. Thats what my grandmother called it, too. She had it. We used to sit in the kitchen when I was a boy no older than you and have long talks without even openin our mouths. Really? Hallorann smiled at Dannys openmouthed, almost hungry expression and said, Come on up and sit in the car with me for a few minutes. Want to talk to you. He slammed the trunk. In the lobby of the Overlook, Wendy Torrance saw her son get into the passenger side of Halloranns car as the big black cook slid in behind the wheel. A sharp pang of fear struck her and she opened her mouth to tell Jack that Hallorann had not been lying about taking their son to Floridathere was a kidnaping afoot. But they were only sitting there. She could barely see the small silhouette of her sons head, turned attentively toward Halloranns big one. Even at this distance that small head had a set to it that she recognizedit was the way her son looked when there was something on the TV that particularly fascinated him, or when he and his father were playing old maid or idiot cribbage. Jack, who was still looking around for Ullman, hadnt noticed. Wendy kept silent, watching Halloranns car nervously, wondering what they could possibly be talking about that would make Danny cock his head that way. In the car Hallorann was saying Get you kinda lonely, thinkin you were the only one? Danny, who had been frightened as well as lonely sometimes, nodded. Am I the only one you ever met? he asked. Hallorann laughed and shook his head. No, child, no. But you shine the hardest. Are there lots, then? No, Hallorann said, but you do run across them. A lot of folks, they got a little bit of shine to them. They dont even know it. But they always seem to show up with flowers when their wives are feelin blue with the monthlies, they do good on school tests they dont even study for, they got a good idea how people are feelin as soon as they walk into a room. I come across fifty or sixty like that. But maybe only a dozen, countin my gram, that knew they was shinin. Wow, Danny said, and thought about it. Then Do you know Mrs. Brant? Her? Hallorann asked scornfully. She dont shine. Just sends her supper back twothree times every night. I know she doesnt, Danny said earnestly. But do you know the man in the gray uniform that gets the cars? Mike? Sure, I know Mike. What about him? Mr. Hallorann, why would she want his pants? What are you talking about, boy? Well, when she was watching him, she was thinking she would sure like to get into his pants and I just wondered why But he got no further. Hallorann had thrown his head back, and rich, dark laughter issued from his chest, rolling around in the car like cannonfire. The seat shook with the force of it. Danny smiled, puzzled, and at last the storm subsided by fits and starts. Hallorann produced a large silk handkerchief from his breast pocket like a white flag of surrender and wiped his streaming eyes. Boy, he said, still snorting a little, you are gonna know everything there is to know about the human condition before you make ten. I dunno if to envy you or not. But Mrs. Brant You never mind her, he said. And dont go askin your mom, either. Youd only upset her, dig what Im sayin? Yes, sir, Danny said. He dug it perfectly well. He had upset his mother that way in the past. That Mrs. Brant is just a dirty old woman with an itch, thats all you have to know. He looked at Danny speculatively. How hard can you hit, doc? Huh? Give me a blast. Think at me. |
I want to know if you got as much as I think you do. What do you want me to think? Anything. Just think it hard. Okay, Danny said. He considered it for a moment, then gathered his concentration and flung it out at Hallorann. He had never done anything precisely like this before, and at the last instant some instinctive part of him rose up and blunted some of the thoughts raw forcehe didnt want to hurt Mr. Hallorann. Still the thought arrowed out of him with a force he never would have believed. It went like a Nolan Ryan fastball with a little extra on it. (Gee I hope I dont hurt him) And the thought was (!!! HI, DICK!!!) Hallorann winced and jerked backward on the seat. His teeth came together with a hard click, drawing blood from his lower lip in a thin trickle. His hands flew up involuntarily from his lap to the level of his chest and then settled back again. For a moment his eyelids fluttered limply, with no conscious control, and Danny was frightened. Mr. Hallorann? Dick? Are you okay? I dont know, Hallorann said, and laughed weakly. I honest to God dont. My God, boy, youre a pistol. Im sorry, Danny said, more alarmed. Should I get my daddy? Ill run and get him. No, here I come. Im okay, Danny. You just sit right there. I feel a little scrambled, thats all. I didnt go as hard as I could, Danny confessed. I was scared to, at the last minute. Probably my good luck you did my brains would be leakin out my ears. He saw the alarm on Dannys face and smiled. No harm done. What did it feel like to you? Like I was Nolan Ryan throwing a fastball, he replied promptly. You like baseball, do you? Hallorann was rubbing his temples gingerly. Daddy and me like the Angels, Danny said. The Red Sox in the American League East and the Angels in the West. We saw the Red Sox against Cincinnati in the World Series. I was a lot littler then. And Daddy was Dannys face went dark and troubled. Was what, Dan? I forget, Danny said. He started to put his thumb in his mouth to suck it, but that was a baby trick. He put his hand back in his lap. Can you tell what your mom and dad are thinking, Danny? Hallorann was watching him closely. Most times, if I want to. But usually I dont try. Why not? Well He paused a moment, troubled. It would be like peeking into the bedroom and watching while theyre doing the thing that makes babies. Do you know that thing? I have had acquaintance with it, Hallorann said gravely. They wouldnt like that. And they wouldnt like me peeking at their thinks. It would be dirty. I see. But I know how theyre feeling, Danny said. I cant help that. I know how youre feeling, too. I hurt you. Im sorry. Its just a headache. Ive had hangovers that were worse. Can you read other people, Danny? I cant read yet at all, Danny said, except a few words. But Daddys going to teach me this winter. My daddy used to teach reading and writing in a big school. Mostly writing, but he knows reading, too. I mean, can you tell what anybody is thinking? Danny thought about it. I can if its loud, he said finally. Like Mrs. Brant and the pants. Or like once, when me and Mommy were in this big store to get me some shoes, there was this big kid looking at radios, and he was thinking about taking one without buying it. Then hed think, what if I get caught? Then hed think, I really want it. Then hed think about getting caught again. He was making himself sick about it, and he was making me sick. Mommy was talking to the man who sells the shoes so I went over and said, Kid, dont take that radio. Go away. And he got really scared. He went away fast. Hallorann was grinning broadly. I bet he did. Can you do anything else, Danny? Is it only thoughts and feelings, or is there more? Cautiously Is there more for you? Sometimes, Hallorann said. Not often. Sometimes sometimes there are dreams. Do you dream, Danny? Sometimes, Danny said, I dream when Im awake. After Tony comes. His thumb wanted to go into his mouth again. He had never told anyone but Mommy and Daddy about Tony. He made his thumbsucking hand go back into his lap. Whos Tony? And suddenly Danny had one of those flashes of understanding that frightened him most of all; it was like a sudden glimpse of some incomprehensible machine that might be safe or might be deadly dangerous. He was too young to know which. He was too young to understand. Whats wrong? he cried. Youre asking me all this because youre worried, arent you? Why are you worried about me? Why are you worried about us? Hallorann put his large dark hands on the small boys shoulders. Stop, he said. Its probably nothin. But if it is somethin well, youve got a large thing in your head, Danny. Youll have to do a lot of growin yet before you catch up to it, I guess. You got to be brave about it. But I dont understand things! Danny burst out. I do but I dont! People they feel things and I feel them, but I dont know what Im feeling! He looked down at his lap wretchedly. I wish I could read. Sometimes Tony shows me signs and I can hardly read any of them. Whos Tony? Hallorann asked again. Mommy and Daddy call him my invisible playmate, Danny said, reciting the words carefully. But hes really real. At least, I think he is. Sometimes, when I try real hard to understand things, he comes. He says, Danny, I want to show you something. And its like I pass out. Only there are dreams, like you said. He looked at Hallorann and swallowed. They used to be nice. But now I cant remember the word for dreams that scare you and make you cry. Nightmares? Hallorann asked. Yes. Thats right. Nightmares. About this place? About the Overlook? Danny looked down at his thumbsucking hand again. Yes, he whispered. Then he spoke shrilly, looking up into Halloranns face But I cant tell my daddy, and you cant, either! He has to have this job because its the only one Uncle Al could get for him and he has to finish his play or he might start doing the Bad Thing again and I know what that is, its getting drunk, thats what it is, its when he used to always be drunk and that was a Bad Thing to do! He stopped, on the verge of tears. Shh, Hallorann said, and pulled Dannys face against the rough serge of his jacket. It smelled faintly of mothballs. Thats all right, son. And if that thumb likes your mouth, let it go where it wants. But his face was troubled. He said What you got, son, I call it shinin on, the Bible calls it having visions, and theres scientists that call it precognition. Ive read up on it, son. Ive studied on it. They all mean seeing the future. Do you understand that? Danny nodded against Halloranns coat. I remember the strongest shine I ever had that way Im not liable to forget. It was 1955. I was still in the Army then, stationed overseas in West Germany. It was an hour before supper, and I was standin by the sink, givin one of the KPs hell for takin too much of the potato along with the peel. I says, Here, lemme show you how thats done. He held out the potato and the peeler and then the whole kitchen was gone. Bang, just like that. You say you see this guy Tony before before you have dreams? Danny nodded. Hallorann put an arm around him. With me its smellin oranges. All that afternoon Id been smellin them and thinkin nothin of it, because they were on the menu for that nightwe had thirty crates of Valencias. Everybody in the damn kitchen was smellin oranges that night. For a minute it was like I had just passed out. And then I heard an explosion and saw flames. There were people screaming. Sirens. And I heard this hissin noise that could only be steam. Then it seemed like I got a little closer to whatever it was and I saw a railroad car off the tracks and laying on its side with Georgia and South Carolina Railroad written on it, and I knew like a flash that my brother Carl was on that train and it jumped the tracks and Carl was dead. Just like that. Then it was gone and heres this scared, stupid little KP in front of me, still holdin out that potato and the peeler. He says, Are you okay, Sarge? And I says, No. My brothers just been killed down in Georgia. And when I finally got my momma on the overseas telephone, she told me how it was. But see, boy, I already knew how it was. He shook his head slowly, as if dismissing the memory, and looked down at the wideeyed boy. But the thing you got to remember, my boy, is this Those things dont always come true. I remember just four years ago I had a job cookin at a boys camp up in Maine on Long Lake. So I am sittin by the boarding gate at Logan Airport in Boston, just waiting to get on my flight, and I start to smell oranges. For the first time in maybe five years. So I say to myself, My God, whats comin on this crazy late show now? and I got down to the bathroom and sat on one of the toilets to be private. I never did black out, but I started to get this feelin, stronger and stronger, that my plane was gonna crash. Then the feeling went away, and the smell of oranges, and I knew it was over. I went back to the Delta Airlines desk and changed my flight to one three hours later. And do you know what happened? What? Danny whispered. Nothin! Hallorann said, and laughed. He was relieved to see the boy smile a little, too. Not one single thing! That old plane landed right on time and without a single bump or bruise. So you see sometimes those feelins dont come to anything. Oh, Danny said. Or you take the race track. I go a lot, and I usually do pretty well. I stand by the rail when they go by the starting gate, and sometimes I get a little shine about this horse or that one. Usually those feelins help me get real well. I always tell myself that someday Im gonna get three at once on three long shots and make enough on the trifecta to retire early. It aint happened yet. But theres plenty of times Ive come home from the track on shanks mare instead of in a taxicab with my wallet swollen up. Nobody shines on all the time, except maybe for God up in heaven. Yes, sir, Danny said, thinking of the time almost a year ago when Tony had showed him a new baby lying in a crib at their house in Stovington. He had been very excited about that, and had waited, knowing that it took time, but there had been no new baby. Now you listen, Hallorann said, and took both of Dannys hands in his own. Ive had some bad dreams here, and Ive had some bad feelins. Ive worked here two seasons now and maybe a dozen times Ive had well, nightmares. And maybe half a dozen times Ive thought Ive seen things. No, I wont say what. It aint for a little boy like you. Just nasty things. Once it had something to do with those damn hedges clipped to look like animals. Another time there was a maid, Delores Vickery her name was, and she had a little shine to her, but I dont think she knew it. Mr. Ullman fired her do you know what that is, doc? Yes, sir, Danny said candidly, my daddy got fired from his teaching job and thats why were in Colorado, I guess. Well, Ullman fired her on account of her saying shed seen something in one of the rooms where well, where a bad thing happened. That was in Room 217, and I want you to promise me you wont go in there, Danny. Not all winter. Steer right clear. All right, Danny said. Did the ladythe maidendid she ask you to go look? Yes, she did. And there was a bad thing there. But I dont think it was a bad thing that could hurt anyone, Danny, thats what Im tryin to say. People who shine can sometimes see things that are gonna happen, and I think sometimes they can see things that did happen. But theyre just like pictures in a book. Did you ever see a picture in a book that scared you, Danny? Yes, he said, thinking of the story of Bluebeard and the picture where Bluebeards new wife opens the door and sees all the heads. But you knew it couldnt hurt you, didnt you? Yeess Danny said, a little dubious. Well, thats how it is in this hotel. I dont know why, but it seems that all the bad things that ever happened here, theres little pieces of those things still layin around like fingernail clippins or the boogers that somebody nasty just wiped under a chair. I dont know why it should just be here, theres bad goingson in just about every hotel in the world, I guess, and Ive worked in a lot of them and had no trouble. Only here. But, Danny, I dont think those things can hurt anybody. He emphasized each word in the sentence with a mild shake of the boys shoulders. So if you should see something, in a hallway or a room or outside by those hedges just look the other way, and when you look back, itll be gone. Are you diggin me? Yes, Danny said. He felt much better, soothed. He got up on his knees, kissed Halloranns cheek, and gave him a big hard hug. Hallorann hugged him back. When he released the boy he asked Your folks, they dont shine, do they? No, I dont think so. I tried them like I did you, Hallorann said. Your momma jumped the tiniest bit. I think all mothers shine a little, you know, at least until their kids grow up enough to watch out for themselves. Your dad Hallorann paused momentarily. He had probed at the boys father and he just didnt know. It wasnt like meeting someone who had the shine, or someone who definitely did not. Poking at Dannys father had been strange, as if Jack Torrance had somethingsomethingthat he was hiding. Or something he was holding in so deeply submerged in himself that it was impossible to get to. I dont think he shines at all, Hallorann finished. So you dont worry about them. You just take care of you. I dont think theres anything here that can hurt you. So just be cool, okay? Okay. Danny! Hey, doc! Danny looked around. Thats Mom. She wants me. I have to go. I know you do, Hallorann said. You have a good time here, Danny. Best you can, anyway. I will. Thanks, Mr. Hallorann. I feel a lot better. The smiling thought came in his mind (Dick, to my friends) (Yes, Dick, okay) Their eyes met, and Dick Hallorann winked. Danny scrambled across the seat of the car and opened the passenger side door. As he was getting out, Hallorann said, Danny? What? If there is trouble you give a call. A big loud holler like the one you gave a few minutes ago. I might hear you even way down in Florida. And if I do, Ill come on the run. Okay, Danny said, and smiled. You take care, big boy. I will. Danny slammed the door and ran across the parking lot toward the porch, where Wendy stood holding her elbows against the chill wind. Hallorann watched, the big grin slowly fading. I dont think theres anything here that can hurt you. I dont think. But what if he was wrong? He had known that this was his last season at the Overlook ever since he had seen that thing in the bathtub of Room 217. It had been worse than any picture in any book, and from here the boy running to his mother looked so small I dont think His eyes drifted down to the topiary animals. Abruptly he started the car and put it in gear and drove away, trying not to look back. And of course he did, and of course the porch was empty. They had gone back inside. It was as if the Overlook had swallowed them. CHAPTER TWELVE THE GRAND TOUR What were you talking about, hon? Wendy asked him as they went back inside. Oh, nothing much. For nothing much it sure was a long talk. He shrugged and Wendy saw Dannys paternity in the gesture; Jack could hardly have done it better himself. She would get no more out of Danny. She felt strong exasperation mixed with an even stronger love the love was helpless, the exasperation came from a feeling that she was deliberately being excluded. With the two of them around she sometimes felt like an outsider, a bit player who had accidentally wandered back onstage while the main action was taking place. Well, they wouldnt be able to exclude her this winter, her two exasperating males; quarters were going to be a little too close for that. She suddenly realized she was feeling jealous of the closeness between her husband and her son, and felt ashamed. That was too close to the way her own mother might have felt too close for comfort. The lobby was now empty except for Ullman and the head desk clerk (they were at the register, cashing up), a couple of maids who had changed to warm slacks and sweaters, standing by the front door and looking out with their luggage pooled around them, and Watson, the maintenance man. He caught her looking at him and gave her a wink a decidedly lecherous one. She looked away hurriedly. Jack was over by the window just outside the restaurant, studying the view. He looked rapt and dreamy. The cash register apparently checked out, because now Ullman ran it shut with an authoritative snap. He initialed the tape and put it in a small zipper case. Wendy silently applauded the head clerk, who looked greatly relieved. Ullman looked like the type of man who might take any shortage out of the head clerks hide without ever spilling a drop of blood. Wendy didnt much care for Ullman or his officious, ostentatiously bustling manner. He was like every boss shed ever had, male or female. He would be saccharin sweet with the guests, a petty tyrant when he was backstage with the help. But now school was out and the head clerks pleasure was written large on his face. It was out for everyone but she and Jack and Danny, anyway. Mr. Torrance, Ullman called peremptorily. Would you come over here, please? Jack walked over, nodding to Wendy and Danny that they were to come too. The clerk, who had gone into the back, now came out again wearing an overcoat. Have a pleasant winter, Mr. Ullman. I doubt it, Ullman said distantly. May twelfth, Braddock. Not a day earlier. Not a day later. Yes, sir. Braddock walked around the desk, his face sober and dignified, as befitted his position, but when his back was entirely to Ullman, he grinned like a schoolboy. He spoke briefly to the two girls still waiting by the door for their ride, and he was followed out by a brief burst of stifled laughter. Now Wendy began to notice the silence of the place. It had fallen over the hotel like a heavy blanket muffling everything but the faint pulse of the afternoon wind outside. From where she stood she could look through the inner office, now neat to the point of sterility with its two bare desks and two sets of gray filing cabinets. Beyond that she could see Halloranns spotless kitchen, the big portholed double doors propped open by rubber wedges. I thought I would take a few extra minutes and show you through the Hotel, Ullman said, and Wendy reflected that you could always hear that capital H in Ullmans voice. You were supposed to hear it. Im sure your husband will get to know the ins and outs of the Overlook quite well, Mrs. Torrance, but you and your son will doubtless keep more to the lobby level and the first floor, where your quarters are. Doubtless, Wendy murmured demurely, and Jack shot her a private glance. Its a beautiful place, Ullman said expansively. I rather enjoy showing it off. Ill bet you do, Wendy thought. Lets go up to third and work our way down, Ullman said. He sounded positively enthused. If were keeping you Jack began. Not at all, Ullman said. The shop is shut. Tout fini, for this season, at least. And I plan to overnight in Boulderat the Boulderado, of course. Only decent hotel this side of Denver except for the Overlook itself, of course. This way. They stepped into the elevator together. It was ornately scrolled in copper and brass, but it settled appreciably before Ullman pulled the gate across. Danny stirred a little uneasily, and Ullman smiled down at him. Danny tried to smile back without notable success. Dont you worry, little man, Ullman said. Safe as houses. So was the Titanic, Jack said, looking up at the cutglass globe in the center of the elevator ceiling. Wendy bit the inside of her cheek to keep the smile away. Ullman was not amused. He slid the inner gate across with a rattle and a bang. The Titanic made only one voyage, Mr. Torrance. This elevator has made thousands of them since it was installed in 1926. Thats reassuring, Jack said. He ruffled Dannys hair. The plane aint gonna crash, doc. Ullman threw the lever over, and for a moment there was nothing but a shuddering beneath their feet and the tortured whine of the motor below them. Wendy had a vision of the four of them being trapped between floors like flies in a bottle and found in the spring with little bits and pieces gone like the Donner Party (Stop it!) The elevator began to rise, with some vibration and clashing and banging from below at first. Then the ride smoothed out. At the third floor Ullman brought them to a bumpy stop, retracted the gate, and opened the door. The elevator car was still six inches below floor level. Danny gazed at the difference in height between the thirdfloor hall and the elevator floor as if he had just sensed the universe was not as sane as he had been told. Ullman cleared his throat and raised the car a little, brought it to a stop with a jerk (still two inches low), and they all climbed out. With their weight gone the car rebounded almost to floor level, something Wendy did not find reassuring at all. Safe as houses or not, she resolved to take the stairs when she had to go up or down in this place. And under no conditions would she allow the three of them to get into the rickety thing together. What are you looking at, doc? Jack inquired humorously. See any spots there? Of course not, Ullman said, nettled. All the rugs were shampooed just two days ago. Wendy glanced down at the hall runner herself. Pretty, but definitely not anything she would choose for her own home, if the day ever came when she had one. Deep blue pile, it was entwined with what seemed to be a surrealistic jungle scene full of ropes and vines and trees filled with exotic birds. It was hard to tell just what sort of birds, because all the interweaving was done in unshaded black, giving only silhouettes. Do you like the rug? Wendy asked Danny. Yes, Mom, he said colorlessly. They walked down the hall, which was comfortably wide. The wallpaper was silk, a lighter blue to go against the rug. Electric flambeaux stood at tenfoot intervals at a height of about seven feet. Fashioned to look like London gas lamps, the bulbs were masked behind cloudy, creamhued glass that was bound with crisscrossing iron strips. I like those very much, she said. Ullman nodded, pleased. Mr. Derwent had those installed throughout the Hotel after the warnumber Two, I mean. In fact mostalthough not allof the thirdfloor decorating scheme was his idea. This is 300, the Presidential Suite. He twisted his key in the lock of the mahogany double doors and swung them wide. The sitting rooms wide western exposure made them all gasp, which had probably been Ullmans intention. He smiled. Quite a view, isnt it? It sure is, Jack said. The window ran nearly the length of the sitting room, and beyond it the sun was poised directly between two sawtoothed peaks, casting golden light across the rock faces and the sugared snow on the high tips. The clouds around and behind this picturepostcard view were also tinted gold, and a sunbeam glinted duskily down into the darkly pooled firs below the timberline. Jack and Wendy were so absorbed in the view that they didnt look down at Danny, who was staring not out the window but at the redandwhitestriped silk wallpaper to the left, where a door opened into an interior bedroom. And his gasp, which had been mingled with theirs, had nothing to do with beauty. Great splashes of dried blood, flecked with tiny bits of grayishwhite tissue, clotted the wallpaper. It made Danny feel sick. It was like a crazy picture drawn in blood, a surrealistic etching of a mans face drawn back in terror and pain, the mouth yawning and half the head pulverized (So if you should see something just look the other way and when you look back, itll be gone. Are you diggin me?) He deliberately looked out the window, being careful to show no expression on his face, and when his mommys hand closed over his own he took it, being careful not to squeeze it or give her a signal of any kind. The manager was saying something to his daddy about making sure to shutter that big window so a strong wind wouldnt blow it in. Jack was nodding. Danny looked cautiously back at the wall. The big dried bloodstain was gone. Those little graywhite flecks that had been scattered all through it, they were gone, too. Then Ullman was leading them out. Mommy asked him if he thought the mountains were pretty. Danny said he did, although he didnt really care for the mountains, one way or the other. As Ullman was closing the door behind them, Danny looked back over his shoulder. The bloodstain had returned, only now it was fresh. It was running. Ullman, looking directly at it, went on with his running commentary about the famous men who had stayed here. Danny discovered that he had bitten his lip hard enough to make it bleed, and he had never even felt it. As they walked on down the corridor, he fell a little bit behind the others and wiped the blood away with the back of his hand and thought about (blood) (Did Mr. Hallorann see blood or was it something worse?) (I dont think those things can hurt you.) There was an iron scream behind his lips, but he would not let it out. His mommy and daddy could not see such things; they never had. He would keep quiet. His mommy and daddy were loving each other, and that was a real thing. The other things were just like pictures in a book. Some pictures were scary, but they couldnt hurt you. They couldnt hurt you. Mr. Ullman showed them some other rooms on the third floor, leading them through corridors that twisted and turned like a maze. They were all sweets up here, Mr. Ullman said, although Danny didnt see any candy. He showed them some rooms where a lady named Marilyn Monroe once stayed when she was married to a man named Arthur Miller (Danny got a vague understanding that Marilyn and Arthur had gotten a DIVORCE not long after they were in the Overlook Hotel). Mommy? What, honey? If they were married, why did they have different names? You and Daddy have the same names. Yes, but were not famous, Danny, Jack said. Famous women keep their same names even after they get married because their names are their bread and butter. Bread and butter, Danny said, completely mystified. What Daddy means is that people used to like to go to the movies and see Marilyn Monroe, Wendy said, but they might not like to go to see Marilyn Miller. Why not? Shed still be the same lady. Wouldnt everyone know that? Yes, but She looked at Jack helplessly. Truman Capote once stayed in this room, Ullman interrupted impatiently. He opened the door. That was in my time. An awfully nice man. Continental manners. There was nothing remarkable in any of these rooms (except for the absence of sweets, which Mr. Ullman kept calling them), nothing that Danny was afraid of. In fact, there was only one other thing on the third floor that bothered Danny, and he could not have said why. It was the fire extinguisher on the wall just before they turned the corner and went back to the elevator, which stood open and waiting like a mouthful of gold teeth. It was an oldfashioned extinguisher, a flat hose folded back a dozen times upon itself, one end attached to a large red valve, the other ending in a brass nozzle. The folds of the hose were secured with a red steel slat on a hinge. In case of a fire you could knock the steel slat up and out of the way with one hard push and the hose was yours. Danny could see that much; he was good at seeing how things worked. By the time he was two and a half he had been unlocking the protective gate his father had installed at the top of the stairs in the Stovington house. He had seen how the lock worked. His daddy said it was a NACK. Some people had the NACK and some people didnt. This fire extinguisher was a little older than others he had seenthe one in the nursery school, for instancebut that was not so unusual. Nonetheless it filled him with faint unease, curled up there against the light blue wallpaper like a sleeping snake. And he was glad when it was out of sight around the corner. Of course all the windows have to be shuttered, Mr. Ullman said as they stepped back into the elevator. Once again the car sank queasily beneath their feet. But Im particularly concerned about the one in the Presidential Suite. The original bill on that window was four hundred and twenty dollars, and that was over thirty years ago. It would cost eight times that to replace today. Ill shutter it, Jack said. They went down to the second floor where there were more rooms and even more twists and turns in the corridor. The light from the windows had begun to fade appreciably now as the sun went behind the mountains. Mr. Ullman showed them one or two rooms and that was all. He walked past 217, the one Dick Hallorann had warned him about, without slowing. Danny looked at the bland numberplate on the door with uneasy fascination. Then down to the first floor. Mr. Ullman didnt show them into any rooms here until they had almost reached the thickly carpeted staircase that led down into the lobby again. Here are your quarters, he said. I think youll find them adequate. They went in. Danny was braced for whatever might be there. There was nothing. Wendy Torrance felt a strong surge of relief. The Presidential Suite, with its cold elegance, had made her feel awkward and clumsyit was all very well to visit some restored historical building with a bedroom plaque that announced Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt had slept there, but another thing entirely to imagine you and your husband lying beneath acreages of linen and perhaps making love where the greatest men in the world had once lain (the most powerful, anyway, she amended). But this apartment was simpler, homier, almost inviting. She thought she could abide this place for a season with no great difficulty. Its very pleasant, she said to Ullman, and heard the gratitude in her voice. Ullman nodded. Simple but adequate. During the season, this suite quarters the cook and his wife, or the cook and his apprentice. Mr. Hallorann lived here? Danny broke in. Mr. Ullman inclined his head to Danny condescendingly. Quite so. He and Mr. Nevers. He turned back to Jack and Wendy. This is the sitting room. There were several chairs that looked comfortable but not expensive, a coffee table that had once been expensive but now had a long chip gone from the side, two bookcases (stuffed full of Readers Digest Condensed Books and Detective Book Club trilogies from the forties, Wendy saw with some amusement), and an anonymous hotel TV that looked much less elegant than the buffed wood consoles in the rooms. No kitchen, of course, Ullman said, but there is a dumbwaiter. This apartment is directly over the kitchen. He slid aside a square of paneling and disclosed a wide, square tray. He gave it a push and it disappeared, trailing rope behind it. Its a secret passage! Danny said excitedly to his mother, momentarily forgetting all fears in favor of that intoxicating shaft behind the wall. Just like in Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters! Mr. Ullman frowned but Wendy smiled indulgently. Danny ran over to the dumbwaiter and peered down the shaft. This way, please. He opened the door on the far side of the living room. It gave on the bedroom, which was spacious and airy. There were twin beds. Wendy looked at her husband, smiled, shrugged. No problem, Jack said. Well push them together. Mr. Ullman looked over his shoulder, honestly puzzled. Beg pardon? The beds, Jack said pleasantly. We can push them together. Oh, quite, Ullman said, momentarily confused. Then his face cleared and a red flush began to creep up from the collar of his shirt. Whatever you like. He led them back into the sitting room, where a second door opened on a second bedroom, this one equipped with bunk beds. |
A radiator clanked in one corner, and the rug on the floor was a hideous embroidery of western sage and cactusDanny had already fallen in love with it, Wendy saw. The walls of this smaller room were paneled in real pine. Think you can stand it in here, doc? Jack asked. Sure I can. Im going to sleep in the top bunk. Okay? If thats what you want. I like the rug, too. Mr. Ullman, why dont you have all the rugs like that? Mr. Ullman looked for a moment as if he had sunk his teeth into a lemon. Then he smiled and patted Dannys head. Those are your quarters, he said, except for the bath, which opens off the main bedroom. Its not a huge apartment, but of course youll have the rest of the hotel to spread out in. The lobby fireplace is in good working order, or so Watson tells me, and you must feel free to eat in the dining room if the spirit moves you to do so. He spoke in the tone of a man conferring a great favor. All right, Jack said. Shall we go down? Mr. Ullman asked. Fine, Wendy said. They went downstairs in the elevator, and now the lobby was wholly deserted except for Watson, who was leaning against the main doors in a rawhide jacket, a toothpick between his lips. I would have thought youd be miles from here by now, Mr. Ullman said, his voice slightly chill. Just stuck around to remind Mr. Torrance here about the boiler, Watson said, straightening up. Keep your good weather eye on her, fella, and shell be fine. Knock the press down a couple of times a day. She creeps. She creeps, Danny thought, and the words echoed down a long and silent corridor in his mind, a corridor lined with mirrors where people seldom looked. I will, his daddy said. Youll be fine, Watson said, and offered Jack his hand. Jack shook it. Watson turned to Wendy and inclined his head. Maam, he said. Im pleased, Wendy said, and thought it would sound absurd. It didnt. She had come out here from New England, where she had spent her life, and it seemed to her that in a few short sentences this man Watson, with his fluffy fringe of hair, had epitomized what the West was supposed to be all about. And never mind the lecherous wink earlier. Young master Torrance, Watson said gravely, and put out his hand. Danny, who had known all about handshaking for almost a year now, put his own hand out gingerly and felt it swallowed up. You take good care of em, Dan. Yes, sir. Watson let go of Dannys hand and straightened up fully. He looked at Ullman. Until next year, I guess, he said, and held his hand out. Ullman touched it bloodlessly. His pinky ring caught the lobbys electric lights in a baleful sort of wink. May twelfth, Watson, he said. Not a day earlier or later. Yes, sir, Watson said, and Jack could almost read the codicil in Watsons mind you fucking little faggot. Have a good winter, Mr. Ullman. Oh, I doubt it, Ullman said remotely. Watson opened one of the two big main doors; the wind whined louder and began to flutter the collar of his jacket. You folks take care now, he said. It was Danny who answered. Yes, sir, we will. Watson, whose notsodistant ancestor had owned this place, slipped humbly through the door. It closed behind him, muffling the wind. Together they watched him clop down the porchs broad front steps in his battered black cowboy boots. Brittle yellow aspen leaves tumbled around his heels as he crossed the lot to his International Harvester pickup and climbed in. Blue smoke jetted from the rusted exhaust pipe as he started it up. The spell of silence held among them as he backed, then pulled out of the parking lot. His truck disappeared over the brow of the hill and then reappeared, smaller, on the main road, heading west. For a moment Danny felt more lonely than he ever had in his life. CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE FRONT PORCH The Torrance family stood together on the long front porch of the Overlook Hotel as if posing for a family portrait, Danny in the middle, zippered into last years fall jacket which was now too small and starting to come out at the elbow, Wendy behind him with one hand on his shoulder, and Jack to his left, his own hand resting lightly on his sons head. Mr. Ullman was a step below them, buttoned into an expensivelooking brown mohair overcoat. The sun was entirely behind the mountains now, edging them with gold fire, making the shadows around things look long and purple. The only three vehicles left in the parking lots were the hotel truck, Ullmans Lincoln Continental, and the battered Torrance VW. Youve got your keys, then, Ullman said to Jack, and you understand fully about the furnace and the boiler? Jack nodded, feeling some real sympathy for Ullman. Everything was done for the season, the ball of string was neatly wrapped up until next May 12not a day earlier or laterand Ullman, who was responsible for all of it and who referred to the hotel in the unmistakable tones of infatuation, could not help looking for loose ends. I think everything is well in hand, Jack said. Good. Ill be in touch. But he still lingered for a moment, as if waiting for the wind to take a hand and perhaps gust him down to his car. He sighed. All right. Have a good winter, Mr. Torrance, Mrs. Torrance. You too, Danny. Thank you, sir, Danny said. I hope you do, too. I doubt it, Ullman repeated, and he sounded sad. The place in Florida is a dump, if the outandout truth is to be spoken. Busywork. The Overlook is my real job. Take good care of it for me, Mr. Torrance. I think it will be here when you get back next spring, Jack said, and a thought flashed through Dannys mind (but will we?) and was gone. Of course. Of course it will. Ullman looked out toward the playground where the hedge animals were clattering in the wind. Then he nodded once more in a businesslike way. Goodbye, then. He walked quickly and prissily across to his cara ridiculously big one for such a little manand tucked himself into it. The Lincolns motor purred into life and the taillights flashed as he pulled out of his parking stall. As the car moved away, Jack could read the small sign at the head of the stall RESERVED FOR MR. ULLMAN, MGR. Right, Jack said softly. They watched until the car was out of sight, headed down the eastern slope. When it was gone, the three of them looked at each other for a silent, almost frightened moment. They were alone. Aspen leaves whirled and skittered in aimless packs across the lawn that was now neatly mowed and tended for no guests eyes. There was no one to see the autumn leaves steal across the grass but the three of them. It gave Jack a curious shrinking feeling, as if his life force had dwindled to a mere spark while the hotel and the grounds had suddenly doubled in size and become sinister, dwarfing them with sullen, inanimate power. Then Wendy said Look at you, doc. Your nose is running like a fire hose. Lets get inside. And they did, closing the door firmly behind them against the restless whine of the wind. PART THREE THE WASPS NEST CHAPTER FOURTEEN UP ON THE ROOF Oh you goddam fucking son of a bitch! Jack Torrance cried these words out in both surprise and agony as he slapped his right hand against his blue chambray workshirt, dislodging the big, slowmoving wasp that had stung him. Then he was scrambling up the roof as fast as he could, looking back over his shoulder to see if the wasps brothers and sisters were rising from the nest he had uncovered to do battle. If they were, it could be bad; the nest was between him and his ladder, and the trap door leading down into the attic was locked from the inside. The drop was seventy feet from the roof to the cement patio between the hotel and the lawn. The clear air above the nest was still and undisturbed. Jack whistled disgustedly between his teeth, sat straddling the peak of the roof, and examined his right index finger. It was swelling already, and he supposed he would have to try and creep past that nest to his ladder so he could go down and put some ice on it. It was October 20. Wendy and Danny had gone down to Sidewinder in the hotel truck (an elderly, rattling Dodge that was still more trustworthy than the VW, which was now wheezing gravely and seemed terminal) to get three gallons of milk and do some Christmas shopping. It was early to shop, but there was no telling when the snow would come to stay. There had already been flurries, and in some places the road down from the Overlook was slick with patch ice. So far the fall had been almost preternaturally beautiful. In the three weeks they had been here, golden day had followed golden day. Crisp thirtydegree mornings gave way to afternoon temperatures in the low sixties, the perfect temperature for climbing around on the Overlooks gently sloping western roof and doing the shingling. Jack had admitted freely to Wendy that he could have finished the job four days ago, but he felt no real urge to hurry. The view from up here was spectacular, even putting the vista from the Presidential Suite in the shade. More important, the work itself was soothing. On the roof he felt himself healing from the troubled wounds of the last three years. On the roof he felt at peace. Those three years began to seem like a turbulent nightmare. The shingles had been badly rotted, some of them blown entirely away by last winters storms. He had ripped them all up, yelling Bombs away! as he dropped them over the side, not wanting Danny to get hit in case he had wandered over. He had been pulling out bad flashing when the wasp had gotten him. The ironic part was that he warned himself each time he climbed onto the roof to keep an eye out for nests; he had gotten that bug bomb just in case. But this morning the stillness and peace had been so complete that his watchfulness had lapsed. He had been back in the world of the play he was slowly creating, roughing out whatever scene he would be working on that evening in his head. The play was going very well, and although Wendy had said little, he knew she was pleased. He had been roadblocked on the crucial scene between Denker, the sadistic headmaster, and Gary Benson, his young hero, during the last unhappy six months at Stovington, months when the craving for a drink had been so bad that he could barely concentrate on his inclass lectures, let alone his extracurricular literary ambitions. But in the last twelve evenings, as he actually sat down in front of the officemodel Underwood he had borrowed from the main office downstairs, the roadblock had disappeared under his fingers as magically as cotton candy dissolves on the lips. He had come up almost effortlessly with the insights into Denkers character that had always been lacking, and he had rewritten most of the second act accordingly, making it revolve around the new scene. And the progress of the third act, which he had been turning over in his mind when the wasp put an end to cogitation, was coming clearer all the time. He thought he could rough it out in two weeks, and have a clean copy of the whole damned play by New Years. He had an agent in New York, a tough redheaded woman named Phyllis Sandler who smoked Herbert Tareytons, drank Jim Beam from a paper cup, and thought the literary sun rose and set on Sean OCasey. She had marketed three of Jacks short stories, including the Esquire piece. He had written her about the play, which was called The Little School, describing the basic conflict between Denker, a gifted student who had failed into becoming the brutal and brutalizing headmaster of a turnofthecentury New England prep school, and Gary Benson, the student he sees as a younger version of himself. Phyllis had written back expressing interest and admonishing him to read OCasey before sitting down to it. She had written again earlier that year asking where the hell was the play? He had written back wryly that The Little School had been indefinitelyand perhaps infinitelydelayed between hand and page in that interesting intellectual Gobi known as the writers block. Now it looked as if she might actually get the play. Whether or not it was any good or if it would ever see actual production was another matter. And he didnt seem to care a great deal about those things. He felt in a way that the play itself, the whole thing, was the roadblock, a colossal symbol of the bad years at Stovington Prep, the marriage he had almost totaled like a nutty kid behind the wheel of an old jalopy, the monstrous assault on his son, the incident in the parking lot with George Hatfield, an incident he could no longer view as just another sudden and destructive flare of temper. He now thought that part of his drinking problem had stemmed from an unconscious desire to be free of Stovington and the security he felt was stifling whatever creative urge he had. He had stopped drinking, but the need to be free had been just as great. Hence George Hatfield. Now all that remained of those days was the play on the desk in his and Wendys bedroom, and when it was done and sent off to Phylliss holeinthewall New York agency, he could turn to other things. Not a novel, he was not ready to stumble into the swamp of another threeyear undertaking, but surely more short stories. Perhaps a book of them. Moving warily, he scrambled back down the slope of the roof on his hands and knees past the line of demarcation where the fresh green Bird shingles gave way to the section of roof he had just finished clearing. He came to the edge on the left of the wasps nest he had uncovered and moved gingerly toward it, ready to backtrack and bolt down his ladder to the ground if things looked too hot. He leaned over the section of pulledout flashing and looked in. The nest was in there, tucked into the space between the old flashing and the final roof undercoating of threebyfives. It was a damn big one. The grayish paper ball looked to Jack as if it might be nearly two feet through the center. Its shape was not perfect because the space between the flashing and the boards was too narrow, but he thought the little buggers had still done a pretty respectable job. The surface of the nest was acrawl with the lumbering, slowmoving insects. They were the big mean ones, not yellow jackets, which are smaller and calmer, but wall wasps. They had been rendered sludgy and stupid by the fall temperatures, but Jack, who knew about wasps from his childhood, counted himself lucky that he had been stung only once. And, he thought, if Ullman had hired the job done in the height of summer, the workman who tore up that particular section of the flashing would have gotten one hell of a surprise. Yes indeedy. When a dozen wall wasps land on you all at once and start stinging your face and hands and arms, stinging your legs right through your pants, it would be entirely possible to forget you were seventy feet up. You might just charge right off the edge of the roof while you were trying to get away from them. All from those little things, the biggest of them only half the length of a pencil stub. He had read someplacein a Sunday supplement piece or a backofthebook newsmagazine articlethat 7 percent of all automobile fatalities go unexplained. No mechanical failure, no excessive speed, no booze, no bad weather. Simply onecar crashes on deserted sections of road, one dead occupant, the driver, unable to explain what had happened to him. The article had included an interview with a state trooper who theorized that many of these socalled foo crashes resulted from insects in the car. Wasps, a bee, possibly even a spider or moth. The driver gets panicky, tries to swat it or unroll a window to let it out. Possibly the insect stings him. Maybe the driver just loses control. Either way its bang! all over. And the insect, usually completely unharmed, would buzz merrily out of the smoking wreck, looking for greener pastures. The trooper had been in favor of having pathologists look for insect venom while autopsying such victims, Jack recalled. Now, looking down into the nest, it seemed to him that it could serve as both a workable symbol for what he had been through (and what he had dragged his hostages to fortune through) and an omen for a better future. How else could you explain the things that had happened to him? For he still felt that the whole range of unhappy Stovington experiences had to be looked at with Jack Torrance in the passive mode. He had not done things; things had been done to him. He had known plenty of people on the Stovington faculty, two of them right in the English Department, who were hard drinkers. Zack Tunney was in the habit of picking up a full keg of beer on Saturday afternoon, plonking it in a backyard snowbank overnight, and then killing damn near all of it on Sunday watching football games and old movies. Yet through the week Zack was as sober as a judgea weak cocktail with lunch was an occasion. He and Al Shockley had been alcoholics. They had sought each other out like two castoffs who were still social enough to prefer drowning together to doing it alone. The sea had been whole grain instead of salt, that was all. Looking down at the wasps, as they slowly went about their instinctual business before winter closed down to kill all but their hibernating queen, he would go further. He was still an alcoholic, always would be, perhaps had been since Sophomore Class Night in high school when he had taken his first drink. It had nothing to do with willpower, or the morality of drinking, or the weakness or strength of his own character. There was a broken switch somewhere inside, or a circuit breaker that didnt work, and he had been propelled down the chute willynilly, slowly at first, then accelerating as Stovington applied its pressures on him. A big greased slide and at the bottom had been a shattered, ownerless bicycle and a son with a broken arm. Jack Torrance in the passive mode. And his temper, same thing. All his life he had been trying unsuccessfully to control it. He could remember himself at seven, spanked by a neighbor lady for playing with matches. He had gone out and hurled a rock at a passing car. His father had seen that, and he had descended on little Jacky, roaring. He had reddened Jacks behind and then blacked his eye. And when his father had gone into the house, muttering, to see what was on television, Jack had come upon a stray dog and had kicked it into the gutter. There had been two dozen fights in grammar school, even more of them in high school, warranting two suspensions and uncounted detentions in spite of his good grades. Football had provided a partial safety valve, although he remembered perfectly well that he had spent almost every minute of every game in a state of high pissoff, taking every opposing block and tackle personally. He had been a fine player, making AllConference in his junior and senior years, and he knew perfectly well that he had his own bad temper to thank or to blame. He had not enjoyed football. Every game was a grudge match. And yet, through it all, he hadnt felt like a son of a bitch. He hadnt felt mean. He had always regarded himself as Jack Torrance, a really nice guy who was just going to have to learn how to cope with his temper someday before it got him in trouble. The same way he was going to have to learn how to cope with his drinking. But he had been an emotional alcoholic just as surely as he had been a physical onethe two of them were no doubt tied together somewhere deep inside him, where youd just as soon not look. But it didnt much matter to him if the root causes were interrelated or separate, sociological or psychological or physiological. He had had to deal with the results the spankings, the beatings from his old man, the suspensions, with trying to explain the school clothes torn in playground brawls, and later the hangovers, the slowly dissolving glue of his marriage, the single bicycle wheel with its bent spokes pointing into the sky, Dannys broken arm. And George Hatfield, of course. He felt that he had unwittingly stuck his hand into The Great Wasps Nest of Life. As an image it stank. As a cameo of reality, he felt it was serviceable. He had stuck his hand through some rotted flashing in high summer and that hand and his whole arm had been consumed in holy, righteous fire, destroying conscious thought, making the concept of civilized behavior obsolete. Could you be expected to behave as a thinking human being when your hand was being impaled on redhot darning needles? Could you be expected to live in the love of your nearest and dearest when the brown, furious cloud rose out of the hole in the fabric of things (the fabric you thought was so innocent) and arrowed straight at you? Could you be held responsible for your own actions as you ran crazily about on the sloping roof seventy feet above the ground, not knowing where you were going, not remembering that your panicky, stumbling feet could lead you crashing and blundering right over the rain gutter and down to your death on the concrete seventy feet below? Jack didnt think you could. When you unwittingly stuck your hand into the wasps nest, you hadnt made a covenant with the devil to give up your civilized self with its trappings of love and respect and honor. It just happened to you. Passively, with no say, you ceased to be a creature of the mind and became a creature of the nerve endings; from collegeeducated man to wailing ape in five easy seconds. He thought about George Hatfield. Tall and shaggily blond, George had been an almost insolently beautiful boy. In his tight faded jeans and Stovington sweatshirt with the sleeves carelessly pushed up to the elbows to disclose his tanned forearms, he had reminded Jack of a young Robert Redford, and he doubted that George had much trouble scoringno more than that young footballplaying devil Jack Torrance had it ten years earlier. He could say that he honestly didnt feel jealous of George, or envy him his good looks; in fact, he had almost unconsciously begun to visualize George as the physical incarnation of his play hero, Gary Bensonthe perfect foil for the dark, slumped, and aging Denker, who grew to hate Gary so much. But he, Jack Torrance, had never felt that way about George. If he had, he would have known it. He was quite sure of that. George had floated through his classes at Stovington. A soccer and baseball star, his academic program had been fairly undemanding and he had been content with Cs and an occasional B in history or botany. He was a fierce field contender but a lackadaisical, amused sort of student in the classroom. Jack was familiar with the type, more from his own days as a high school and college student than from his teaching experience, which was at second hand. George Hatfield was a jock. He could be a calm, undemanding figure in the classroom, but when the right set of competitive stimuli was applied (like electrodes to the temples of Frankensteins monster, Jack thought wryly), he could become a juggernaut. In January, George had tried out with two dozen others for the debate team. He had been quite frank with Jack. His father was a corporation lawyer, and he wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. George, who felt no burning call to do anything else, was willing. His grades were not top end, but this was, after all, only prep school and it was still early times. If should be came to must be, his father could pull some strings. Georges own athletic ability would open still other doors. But Brian Hatfield thought his son should get on the debate team. It was good practice, and it was something that law school admissions boards always looked for. So George went out for debate, and in late March Jack cut him from the team. The late winter intersquad debates had fired George Hatfields competitive soul. He became a grimly determined debater, prepping his pro or con position fiercely. It didnt matter if the subject was legalization of marijuana, reinstating the death penalty, or the oildepletion allowance. George became conversant, and he was just jingoist enough to honestly not care which side he was ona rare and valuable trait even in highlevel debaters, Jack knew. The souls of a true carpetbagger and a true debater were not far removed from each other; they were both passionately interested in the main chance. So far, so good. But George Hatfield stuttered. This was not a handicap that had even shown up in the classroom, where George was always cool and collected (whether he had done his homework or not), and certainly not on the Stovington playing fields, where talk was not a virtue and they sometimes even threw you out of the game for too much discussion. When George got tightly wound up in a debate, the stutter would come out. The more eager he became, the worse it was. And when he felt he had an opponent dead in his sights, an intellectual sort of buck fever seemed to take place between his speech centers and his mouth and he would freeze solid while the clock ran out. It was painful to watch. SSSo I thththink we have to say that the fuhfuhfacts in the ccase Mr. DDDDorsky cities are renrenrendered obsolete by the ruhrecent duhduhdecision handed down ininin The buzzer would go off and George would whirl around to stare furiously at Jack, who sat beside it. Georges face at those moments would be flushed, his notes crumpled spasmodically in one hand. Jack had held on to George long after he had cut most of the obvious flat tires, hoping George would work out. He remembered one late afternoon about a week before he had reluctantly dropped the ax. George had stayed after the others had filed out, and then had confronted Jack angrily. You sset the timer ahead. Jack looked up from the papers he was putting back into his briefcase. George, what are you talking about? I ddidnt get my whole five mihminutes. You set it ahead. I was wuhwatching the clock. The clock and the timer may keep slightly different times, George, but I never touched the dial on the damned thing. Scouts honor. Yuhyuhyou did! The belligerent, Imstickingupformyrights way George was looking at him had sparked Jacks own temper. He had been off the sauce for two months, two months too long, and he was ragged. He made one last effort to hold himself in. I assure you I did not, George. Its your stutter. Do you have any idea what causes it? You dont stutter in class. I duhduhdont ssstststutter! Lower your voice. You wwant to gget me! You duhdont wwant me on your gggoddam team! Lower your voice, I said. Lets discuss this rationally. Ffuhfuck ththat! George, if you can control your stutter, Id be glad to have you. Youre well prepped for every practice and youre good at the background stuff, which means youre rarely surprised. But all that doesnt mean much if you cant control that Ive nehnehnever stuttered! he cried out. Its yuhyou! Iiif suhsomeone else had the dddebdebate tteam, I could Jacks temper slipped another notch. George, youre never going to make much of a lawyer, corporation or otherwise, if you cant control that. Law isnt like soccer. Two hours of practice every night wont cut it. What are you going to do, stand up in front of a board meeting and say, Nuhnuhnow, ggentlemen, about this tttort? He suddenly flushed, not with anger but with shame at his own cruelty. This was not a man in front of him but a seventeenyearold boy who was facing the first major defeat of his life, and maybe asking in the only way he could for Jack to help him find a way to cope with it. George gave him a final, furious glance, his lips twisting and bucking as the words bottled up behind them struggled to find their way out. Yuhyuhyou ssset it ahead! You huhhate me bbecause you nuhnuhnuhknow you know nuhnuh With an inarticulate cry he had rushed out of the classroom, slamming the door hard enough to make the wirereinforced glass rattle in its frame. Jack had stood there, feeling, rather than hearing, the echo of Georges Adidas in the empty hall. Still in the grip of his temper and his shame at mocking Georges stutter, his first thought had been a sick sort of exultation For the first time in his life George Hatfield had wanted something he could not have. For the first time there was something wrong that all of Daddys money could not fix. You couldnt bribe a speech center. You couldnt offer a tongue an extra fifty a week and a bonus at Christmas if it would agree to stop flapping like a record needle in a defective groove. Then the exultation was simply buried in shame, and he felt the way he had after he had broken Dannys arm. Dear God, I am not a son of a bitch. Please. That sick happiness at Georges retreat was more typical of Denker in the play than of Jack Torrance the playwright. You hate me because you know Because he knew what? What could he possibly know about George Hatfield that would make him hate him? That his whole future lay ahead of him? That he looked a little bit like Robert Redford and all conversation among the girls stopped when he did a double gainer from the pool diving board? That he played soccer and baseball with a natural, unlearned grace? Ridiculous. Absolutely absurd. He envied George Hatfield nothing. If the truth was known, he felt worse about Georges unfortunate stutter than George himself, because George really would have made an excellent debater. And if Jack had set the timer aheadand of course he hadntit would have been because both he and the other members of the squad were embarrassed for Georges struggle, they had agonized over it the way you agonize when the Class Night speaker forgets some of his lines. If he had set the timer ahead, it would have been just to to put George out of his misery. But he hadnt set the timer ahead. He was quite sure of it. A week later he had cut him, and that time he had kept his temper. The shouts and the threats had all been on Georges side. A week after that he had gone out to the parking lot halfway through practice to get a pile of sourcebooks that he had left in the trunk of the VW and there had been George, down on one knee with his long blond hair swinging in his face, a hunting knife in one hand. He was sawing through the VWs right front tire. The back tires were already shredded, and the bug sat on the flats like a small, tired dog. Jack had seen red, and remembered very little of the encounter that followed. He remembered a thick growl that seemed to issue from his own throat All right, George. If thats how you want it, just come here and take your medicine. He remembered George looking up, startled and fearful. He had said Mr. Torrance as if to explain how all this was just a mistake, the tires had been flat when he got there and he was just cleaning dirt out of the front treads with the tip of this gutting knife he just happened to have with him and Jack had waded in, his fists held up in front of him, and it seemed that he had been grinning. But he wasnt sure of that. The last thing he remembered was George holding up the knife and saying You better not come any closer And the next thing was Miss Strong, the French teacher, holding Jacks arms, crying, screaming Stop it, Jack! Stop it! Youre going to kill him! He had blinked around stupidly. There was the hunting knife, glittering harmlessly on the parking lot asphalt four yards away. There was his Volkswagen, his poor old battered bug, veteran of many wild midnight drunken rides, sitting on three flat shoes. There was a new dent in the right front fender, he saw, and there was something in the middle of the dent that was either red paint or blood. For a moment he had been confused, his thoughts (jesus christ al we hit him after all) of that other night. Then his eyes had shifted to George, George lying dazed and blinking on the asphalt. His debate group had come out and they were huddled together by the door, staring at George. There was blood on his face from a scalp laceration that looked minor, but there was also blood running out of one of Georges ears and that probably meant a concussion. |
When George tried to get up, Jack shook free of Miss Strong and went to him. George cringed. Jack put his hands on Georges chest and pushed him back down. Lie still, he said. Dont try to move. He turned to Miss Strong, who was staring at them both with horror. Please go call the school doctor, Miss Strong, he told her. She turned and fled toward the office. He looked at his debate class then, looked them right in the eye because he was in charge again, fully himself, and when he was himself there wasnt a nicer guy in the whole state of Vermont. Surely they knew that. You can go home now, he told them quietly. Well meet again tomorrow. But by the end of that week six of his debaters had dropped out, two of them the class of the act, but of course it didnt matter much because he had been informed by then that he would be dropping out himself. Yet somehow he had stayed off the bottle, and he supposed that was something. And he had not hated George Hatfield. He was sure of that. He had not acted but had been acted upon. You hate me because you know But he had known nothing. Nothing. He would swear that before the Throne of Almighty God, just as he would swear that he had set the timer ahead no more than a minute. And not out of hate but out of pity. Two wasps were crawling sluggishly about on the roof beside the hole in the flashing. He watched them until they spread their aerodynamically unsound but strangely efficient wings and lumbered off into the October sunshine, perchance to sting someone else. God had seen fit to give them stingers and Jack supposed they had to use them on somebody. How long had he been sitting here, looking at that hole with its unpleasant surprise down inside, raking over old coals? He looked at his watch. Almost half an hour. He let himself down to the edge of the roof, dropped one leg over, and felt around until his foot found the top rung of the ladder just below the overhang. He would go down to the equipment shed where he had stored the bug bomb on a high shelf out of Dannys reach. He would get it, come back up, and then they would be the ones surprised. You could be stung, but you could also sting back. He believed that sincerely. Two hours from now the nest would be just so much chewed paper and Danny could have it in his room if he wanted toJack had had one in his room when he was just a kid, it had always smelled faintly of woodsmoke and gasoline. He could have it right by the head of his bed. It wouldnt hurt him. Im getting better. The sound of his own voice, confident in the silent afternoon, reassured him even though he hadnt meant to speak aloud. He was getting better. It was possible to graduate from passive to active, to take the thing that had once driven you nearly to madness as a neutral prize of no more than occasional academic interest. And if there was a place where the thing could be done, this was surely it. He went down the ladder to get the bug bomb. They would pay. They would pay for stinging him. CHAPTER FIFTEEN DOWN IN THE FRONT YARD Jack had found a huge whitepainted wicker chair in the back of the equipment shed two weeks ago, and had dragged it around to the porch over Wendys objections that it was really the ugliest thing she had ever seen in her whole life. He was sitting in it now, amusing himself with a copy of E. L. Doctorows Welcome to Hard Times, when his wife and son rattled up the driveway in the hotel truck. Wendy parked it in the turnaround, raced the engine sportily, and then turned it off. The trucks single taillight died. The engine rumbled grumpily with postignition and finally stopped. Jack got out of his chair and ambled down to meet them. Hi, Dad! Danny called, and raced up the hill. He had a box in one hand. Look what Mommy bought me! Jack picked his son up, swung him around twice, and kissed him heartily on the mouth. Jack Torrance, the Eugene ONeill of his generation, the American Shakespeare! Wendy said, smiling. Fancy meeting you here, so far up in the mountains. The common ruck became too much for me, dear lady, he said, and slipped his arms around her. They kissed. How was your trip? Very good. Danny complains that I keep jerking him but I didnt stall the truck once and oh, Jack, you finished it! She was looking at the roof, and Danny followed her gaze. A faint frown touched his face as he looked at the wide swatch of fresh shingles atop the Overlooks west wing, a lighter green than the rest of the roof. Then he looked down at the box in his hand and his face cleared again. At night the pictures Tony had showed him came back to haunt in all their original clarity, but in sunny daylight they were easier to disregard. Look, Daddy, look! Jack took the box from his son. It was a model car, one of the Big Daddy Roth caricatures that Danny had expressed an admiration for in the past. This one was the Violent Violet Volkswagen, and the picture on the box showed a huge purple VW with long 59 Cadillac Coupe de Ville taillights burning up a dirt track. The VW had a sunroof, and poking up through it, clawed hands on the wheel down below, was a gigantic warty monster with popping bloodshot eyes, a maniacal grin, and a gigantic English racing cap turned around backward. Wendy was smiling at him, and Jack winked at her. Thats what I like about you, doc, Jack said, handing the box back. Your taste runs to the quiet, the sober, the introspective. You are definitely the child of my loins. Mommy said youd help me put it together as soon as I could read all of the first Dick and Jane. That ought to be by the end of the week, Jack said. What else have you got in that finelooking truck, maam? Uhuh. She grabbed his arm and pulled him back. No peeking. Some of that stuff is for you. Danny and I will take it in. You can get the milk. Its on the floor of the cab. Thats all I am to you, Jack cried, clapping a hand to his forehead. Just a dray horse, a common beast of the field. Dray here, dray there, dray everywhere. Just dray that milk right into the kitchen, mister. Its too much! he cried, and threw himself on the ground while Danny stood over him and giggled. Get up, you ox, Wendy said, and prodded him with the toe of her sneaker. See? he said to Danny. She called me an ox. Youre a witness. Witness, witness! Danny concurred gleefully, and broadjumped his prone father. Jack sat up. That reminds me, chumly. Ive got something for you, too. On the porch by my ashtray. What is it? Forgot. Go and see. Jack got up and the two of them stood together, watching Danny charge up the lawn and then take the steps to the porch two by two. He put an arm around Wendys waist. You happy, babe? She looked up at him solemnly. This is the happiest Ive been since we were married. Is that the truth? Gods honest. He squeezed her tightly. I love you. She squeezed him back, touched. Those had never been cheap words with John Torrance; she could count the number of times he had said them to her, both before and after marriage, on both her hands. I love you too. Mommy! Mommy! Danny was on the porch now, shrill and excited. Come and see! Wow! Its neat! What is it? Wendy asked him as they walked up from the parking lot, hand in hand. Forgot, Jack said. Oh, youll get yours, she said, and elbowed him. See if you dont. I was hoping Id get it tonight, he remarked, and she laughed. A moment later he asked, Is Danny happy, do you think? You ought to know. Youre the one who has a long talk with him every night before bed. Thats usually about what he wants to be when he grows up or if Santa Claus is really real. Thats getting to be a big thing with him. I think his old buddy Scott let some pennies drop on that one. No, he hasnt said much of anything about the Overlook to me. Me either, she said. They were climbing the porch steps now. But hes very quiet a lot of the time. And I think hes lost weight, Jack, I really do. Hes just getting tall. Dannys back was to them. He was examining something on the table by Jacks chair, but Wendy couldnt see what it was. Hes not eating as well, either. He used to be the original steam shovel. Remember last year? They taper off, he said vaguely. I think I read that in Spock. Hell be using two forks again by the time hes seven. They had stopped on the top step. Hes pushing awfully hard on those readers, too, she said. I know he wants to learn how, to please us to please you, she added reluctantly. To please himself most of all, Jack said. I havent been pushing him on that at all. In fact, I do wish he wouldnt go quite so hard. Would you think I was foolish if I made an appointment for him to have a physical? Theres a G.P. in Sidewinder, a young man from what the checker in the market said Youre a little nervous about the snow coming, arent you? She shrugged. I suppose. If you think its foolish I dont. In fact, you can make appointments for all three of us. Well get our clean bills of health and then we can sleep easy at night. Ill make the appointments this afternoon, she said. Mom! Look, Mommy! He came running to her with a large gray thing in his hands, and for one comichorrible moment Wendy thought it was a brain. She saw what it really was and recoiled instinctively. Jack put an arm around her. Its all right. The tenants who didnt fly away have been shaken out. I used the bug bomb. She looked at the large wasps nest her son was holding but would not touch it. Are you sure its safe? Positive. I had one in my room when I was a kid. My dad gave it to me. Want to put it in your room, Danny? Yeah! Right now! He turned around and raced through the double doors. They could hear his muffled, running feet on the main stairs. There were wasps up there, she said. Did you get stung? Wheres my purple heart? he asked, and displayed his finger. The swelling had already begun to go down, but she ooohed over it satisfyingly and gave it a small, gentle kiss. Did you pull the stinger out? Wasps dont leave them in. Thats bees. They have barbed stingers. Wasp stingers are smooth. Thats what makes them so dangerous. They can sting again and again. Jack, are you sure thats safe for him to have? I followed the directions on the bomb. The stuff is guaranteed to kill every single bug in two hours time and then dissipate with no residue. I hate them, she said. What wasps? Anything that stings, she said. Her hands went to her elbows and cupped them, her arms crossed over her breasts. I do too, he said, and hugged her. CHAPTER SIXTEEN DANNY Down the hall, in the bedroom, Wendy could hear the typewriter Jack had carried up from downstairs burst into life for thirty seconds, fall silent for a minute or two, and then rattle briefly again. It was like listening to machinegun fire from an isolated pillbox. The sound was music to her ears; Jack had not been writing so steadily since the second year of their marriage, when he wrote the story that Esquire had purchased. He said he thought the play would be done by the end of the year, for better or worse, and he would be moving on to something new. He said he didnt care if The Little School stirred any excitement when Phyllis showed it around, didnt care if it sank without a trace, and Wendy believed that, too. The actual act of his writing made her immensely hopeful, not because she expected great things from the play but because her husband seemed to be slowly closing a huge door on a roomful of monsters. He had had his shoulder to that door for a long time now, but at last it was swinging shut. Every key typed closed it a little more. Look, Dick, look. Danny was hunched over the first of the five battered primers Jack had dug up by culling mercilessly through Boulders myriad secondhand bookshops. They would take Danny right up to the secondgrade reading level, a program she had told Jack she thought was much too ambitious. Their son was intelligent, they knew that, but it would be a mistake to push him too far too fast. Jack had agreed. There would be no pushing involved. But if the kid caught on fast, they would be prepared. And now she wondered if Jack hadnt been right about that, too. Danny, prepared by four years of Sesame Street and three years of Electric Company, seemed to be catching on with almost scary speed. It bothered her. He hunched over the innocuous little books, his crystal radio and balsa glider on the shelf above him, as though his life depended on learning to read. His small face was more tense and paler than she liked in the close and cozy glow of the goosenecked lamp they had put in his room. He was taking it very seriously, both the reading and the workbook pages his father made up for him every afternoon. Picture of an apple and a peach. The word apple written beneath in Jacks large, neatly made printing. Circle the right picture, the one that went with the word. And their son would stare from the word to the pictures, his lips moving, sounding out, actually sweating it out. And with his doublesized red pencil curled into his pudgy right fist, he could now write about three dozen words on his own. His finger traced slowly under the words in the reader. Above them was a picture Wendy halfremembered from her own grammar school days, nineteen years before. A laughing boy with brown curly hair. A girl in a short dress, her hair in blond ringlets, one hand holding a jump rope. A prancing dog running after a large red rubber ball. The firstgrade trinity. Dick, Jane, and Jip. See Jip run, Danny read slowly. Run, Jip, run. Run, run, run. He paused, dropping his finger down a line. See the He bent closer, his nose almost touching the page now. See the Not so close, doc, Wendy said quietly. Youll hurt your eyes. Its Dont tell me! he said, sitting up with a jerk. His voice was alarmed. Dont tell me, Mommy, I can get it! All right, honey, she said. But its not a big thing. Really its not. Unheeding, Danny bent forward again. On his face was an expression that might be more commonly seen hovering over a graduate record exam in a college gym somewhere. She liked it less and less. See the buh. Aw. El. El. See the buhawelel? See the buhawl. Ball! Suddenly triumphant. Fierce. The fierceness in his voice scared her. See the ball! Thats right, she said. Honey, I think thats enough for tonight. A couple more pages, Mommy? Please? No, doc. She closed the redbound book firmly. Its bedtime. Please? Dont tease me about it, Danny. Mommys tired. Okay. But he looked longingly at the primer. Go kiss your father and then wash up. Dont forget to brush. Yeah. He slouched out, a small boy in pajama bottoms with feet and a large flannel top with a football on the front and NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS written on the back. Jacks typewriter stopped, and she heard Dannys hearty smack. Night, Daddy. Good night, doc. Howd you do? Okay, I guess. Mommy made me stop. Mommy was right. Its past eightthirty. Going to the bathroom? Yeah. Good. Theres potatoes growing out of your ears. And onions and carrots and chives and Dannys giggle, fading, then cut off by the firm click of the bathroom door. He was private about his bathroom functions, while both she and Jack were pretty much catchascatchcan. Another signand they were multiplying all the timethat there was another human being in the place, not just a carbon copy of one of them or a combination of both. It made her a little sad. Someday her child would be a stranger to her, and she would be strange to him but not as strange as her own mother had become to her. Please dont let it be that way, God. Let him grow up and still love his mother. Jacks typewriter began its irregular bursts again. Still sitting in the chair beside Dannys reading table, she let her eyes wander around her sons room. The gliders wing had been neatly mended. His desk was piled high with picture books, coloring books, old SpiderMan comic books with the covers half torn off, Crayolas, and an untidy pile of Lincoln Logs. The VW model was neatly placed above these lesser things, its shrinkwrap still undisturbed. He and his father would be putting it together tomorrow night or the night after if Danny went on at this rate, and never mind the end of the week. His pictures of Pooh and Eeyore and Christopher Robin were tacked neatly to the wall, soon enough to be replaced with pinups and photographs of dopesmoking rock singers, she supposed. Innocence to experience. Human nature, baby. Grab it and growl. Still it made her sad. Next year he would be in school and she would lose at least half of him, maybe more, to his friends. She and Jack had tried to have another one for a while when things had seemed to be going well at Stovington, but she was on the pill again now. Things were too uncertain. God knew where they would be in nine months. Her eyes fell on the wasps nest. It held the ultimate high place in Dannys room, resting on a large plastic plate on the table by his bed. She didnt like it, even if it was empty. She wondered vaguely if it might have germs, thought to ask Jack, then decided he would laugh at her. But she would ask the doctor tomorrow, if she could catch him with Jack out of the room. She didnt like the idea of that thing, constructed from the chewings and saliva of so many alien creatures, lying within a foot of her sleeping sons head. The water in the bathroom was still running, and she got up and went into the big bedroom to make sure everything was okay. Jack didnt look up; he was lost in the world he was making, staring at the typewriter, a filter cigarette clamped in his teeth. She knocked lightly on the closed bathroom door. You okay, doc? You awake? No answer. Danny? No answer. She tried the door. It was locked. Danny? She was worried now. The lack of any sound beneath the steadily running water made her uneasy. Danny? Open the door, honey. No answer. Danny! Jesus Christ, Wendy, I cant think if youre going to pound on the door all night. Dannys locked himself in the bathroom and he doesnt answer me! Jack came around the desk, looking put out. He knocked on the door once, hard. Open up, Danny. No games. No answer. Jack knocked harder. Stop fooling, doc. Bedtimes bedtime. Spanking if you dont open up. Hes losing his temper, she thought, and was more afraid. He had not touched Danny in anger since that evening two years ago, but at this moment he sounded angry enough to do it. Danny, honey she began. No answer. Only running water. Danny, if you make me break this lock I can guarantee you youll spend the night sleeping on your belly, Jack warned. Nothing. Break it, she said, and suddenly it was hard to talk. Quick. He raised one foot and brought it down hard against the door to the right of the knob. The lock was a poor thing; it gave immediately and the door shuddered open, banging the tiled bathroom wall and rebounding halfway. Danny! she screamed. The water was running full force in the basin. Beside it, a tube of Crest with the cap off. Danny was sitting on the rim of the bathtub across the room, his toothbrush clasped limply in his left hand, a thin foam of toothpaste around his mouth. He was staring, trancelike, into the mirror on the front of the medicine cabinet above the washbasin. The expression on his face was one of drugged horror, and her first thought was that he was having some sort of epileptic seizure, that he might have swallowed his tongue. Danny! Danny didnt answer. Guttural sounds came from his throat. Then she was pushed aside so hard that she crashed into the towel rack, and Jack was kneeling in front of the boy. Danny, he said. Danny, Danny! He snapped his fingers in front of Dannys blank eyes. Ahsure, Danny said. Tournament play. Stroke. Nurrrrr Danny Roque! Danny said, his voice suddenly deep, almost manlike. Roque. Stroke. The roque mallet has two sides. Gaaaaaa Oh Jack my God whats wrong with him? Jack grabbed the boys elbows and shook him hard. Dannys head rolled limply backward and then snapped forward like a balloon on a stick. Roque. Stroke. Redrum. Jack shook him again, and Dannys eyes suddenly cleared. His toothbrush fell out of his hand and onto the tiled floor with a small click. What? he asked, looking around. He saw his father kneeling before him, Wendy standing by the wall. What? Danny asked again, with rising alarm. Wwwuhwhats wrrr Dont stutter! Jack suddenly screamed into his face. Danny cried out in shock, his body going tense, trying to draw away from his father, and then he collapsed into tears. Stricken, Jack pulled him close. Oh, honey, Im sorry. Im sorry, doc. Please. Dont cry. Im sorry. Everythings okay. The water ran ceaselessly in the basin, and Wendy felt that she had suddenly stepped into some grinding nightmare where time ran backward, backward to the time when her drunken husband had broken her sons arm and had then mewled over him in almost the exact same words. (Oh honey. Im sorry. Im sorry, doc. Please. So sorry.) She ran to them both, pried Danny out of Jacks arms somehow (she saw the look of angry reproach on his face but filed it away for later consideration), and lifted him up. She walked him back into the small bedroom, Dannys arms clasped around her neck, Jack trailing them. She sat down on Dannys bed and rocked him back and forth, soothing him with nonsensical words repeated over and over. She looked up at Jack and there was only worry in his eyes now. He raised questioning eyebrows at her. She shook her head faintly. Danny, she said. Danny, Danny, Danny. S okay, doc. S fine. At last Danny was quiet, only faintly trembling in her arms. Yet it was Jack he spoke to first, Jack who was now sitting beside them on the bed, and she felt the old faint pang (Its him first and its always been him first) of jealousy. Jack had shouted at him, she had comforted him, yet it was to his father that Danny said, Im sorry if I was bad. Nothing to be sorry for, doc. Jack ruffled his hair. What the hell happened in there? Danny shook his head slowly, dazedly. I I dont know. Why did you tell me to stop stuttering, Daddy? I dont stutter. Of course not, Jack said heartily, but Wendy felt a cold finger touch her heart. Jack suddenly looked scared, as if hed seen something that might just have been a ghost. Something about the timer Danny muttered. What? Jack was leaning forward, and Danny flinched in her arms. Jack, youre scaring him! she said, and her voice was high, accusatory. It suddenly came to her that they were all scared. But of what? I dont know, I dont know, Danny was saying to his father. What what did I say, Daddy? Nothing, Jack muttered. He took his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his mouth with it. Wendy had a moment of that sickening timeisrunningbackward feeling again. It was a gesture she remembered well from his drinking days. Why did you lock the door, Danny? she asked gently. Why did you do that? Tony, he said. Tony told me to. They exchanged a glance over the top of his head. Did Tony say why, son? Jack asked quietly. I was brushing my teeth and I was thinking about my reading, Danny said. Thinking real hard. And and I saw Tony way down in the mirror. He said he had to show me again. You mean he was behind you? Wendy asked. No, he was in the mirror. Danny was very emphatic on this point. Way down deep. And then I went through the mirror. The next thing I remember Daddy was shaking me and I thought I was being bad again. Jack winced as if struck. No, doc, he said quietly. Tony told you to lock the door? Wendy asked, brushing his hair. Yes. And what did he want to show you? Danny tensed in her arms; it was as if the muscles in his body had turned into something like piano wire. I dont remember, he said, distraught. I dont remember. Dont ask me. I I dont remember nothing! Shh, Wendy said, alarmed. She began to rock him again. Its all right if you dont remember, hon. Sure it is. At last Danny began to relax again. Do you want me to stay a little while? Read you a story? No. Just the night light. He looked shyly at his father. Would you stay, Daddy? For a minute? Sure, doc. Wendy sighed. Ill be in the living room, Jack. Okay. She got up and watched as Danny slid under the covers. He seemed very small. Are you sure youre okay, Danny? Im okay. Just plug in Snoopy, Mom. Sure. She plugged in the night light, which showed Snoopy lying fast asleep on top of his doghouse. He had never wanted a night light until they moved into the Overlook, and then he had specifically requested one. She turned off the lamp and the overhead and looked back at them, the small white circle of Dannys face, and Jacks above it. She hesitated a moment (and then I went through the mirror) and then left them quietly. You sleepy? Jack asked, brushing Dannys hair off his forehead. Yeah. Want a drink of water? No There was silence for five minutes. Danny was still beneath his hand. Thinking the boy had dropped off, he was about to get up and leave quietly when Danny said from the brink of sleep Roque. Jack turned back, all zero at the bone. Danny? Youd never hurt Mommy, would you, Daddy? No. Or me? No. Silence again, spinning out. Daddy? What? Tony came and told me about roque. Did he, doc? What did he say? I dont remember much. Except he said it was in innings. Like baseball. Isnt that funny? Yes. Jacks heart was thudding dully in his chest. How could the boy possibly know a thing like that? Roque was played by innings, not like baseball but like cricket. Daddy ? He was almost asleep now. What? Whats redrum? Red drum? Sounds like something an Indian might take on the warpath. Silence. Hey, doc? But Danny was asleep, breathing in long, slow strokes. Jack sat looking down at him for a moment, and a rush of love pushed through him like tidal water. Why had he yelled at the boy like that? It was perfectly normal for him to stutter a little. He had been coming out of a daze or some weird kind of trance, and stuttering was perfectly normal under those circumstances. Perfectly. And he hadnt said timer at all. It had been something else, nonsense, gibberish. How had he known roque was played in innings? Had someone told him? Ullman? Hallorann? He looked down at his hands. They were made into tight, clenched fists of tension (god how i need a drink) and the nails were digging into his palms like tiny brands. Slowly he forced them to open. I love you, Danny, he whispered. God knows I do. He left the room. He had lost his temper again, only a little, but enough to make him feel sick and afraid. A drink would blunt that feeling, oh yes. It would blunt that (Something about the timer) and everything else. There was no mistake about those words at all. None. Each had come out clear as a bell. He paused in the hallway, looking back, and automatically wiped his lips with his handkerchief. Their shapes were only dark silhouettes in the glow of the night light. Wendy, wearing only panties, went to his bed and tucked him in again; he had kicked the covers back. Jack stood in the doorway, watching as she put her inner wrist against his forehead. Is he feverish? No. She kissed his cheek. Thank God you made that appointment, he said as she came back to the doorway. You think that guy knows his stuff? The checker said he was very good. Thats all I know. If theres something wrong, Im going to send you and him to your mothers, Wendy. No. I know, he said, putting an arm around her, how you feel. You dont know how I feel at all about her. Wendy, theres no place else I can send you. You know that. If you came Without this job were done, he said simply. You know that. Her silhouette nodded slowly. She knew it. When I had that interview with Ullman, I thought he was just blowing off his bazoo. Now Im not so sure. Maybe I really shouldnt have tried this with you two along. Forty miles from nowhere. I love you, she said. And Danny loves you even more, if thats possible. He would have been heartbroken, Jack. He will be, if you send us away. Dont make it sound that way. If the doctor says theres something wrong, Ill look for a job in Sidewinder, she said. If I cant get one in Sidewinder, Danny and I will go to Boulder. I cant go to my mother, Jack. Not on those terms. Dont ask me. I I just cant. I guess I know that. Cheer up. Maybe its nothing. Maybe. The appointments at two? Yes. Lets leave the bedroom door open, Wendy. I want to. But I think hell sleep through now. But he didnt. Boom boom boomboomBOOMBOOM He fled the heavy, crashing, echoing sounds through twisting, mazelike corridors, his bare feet whispering over a deeppile jungle of blue and black. Each time he heard the roque mallet smash into the wall somewhere behind him he wanted to scream aloud. But he mustnt. He mustnt. A scream would give him away and then (then REDRUM) (Come out here and take your medicine, you fucking crybaby!) Oh and he could hear the owner of that voice coming, coming for him, charging up the hall like a tiger in an alien blueblack jungle. A maneater. (Come out here, you little son of a bitch!) If he could get to the stairs going down, if he could get off this third floor, he might be all right. Even the elevator. If he could remember what had been forgotten. But it was dark and in his terror he had lost his orientation. He had turned down one corridor and then another, his heart leaping into his mouth like a hot lump of ice, fearing that each turn would bring him face to face with the human tiger in these halls. The booming was right behind him now, the awful hoarse shouting. The whistle the head of the mallet made cutting through the air (roque stroke roque stroke REDRUM) before it crashed into the wall. The soft whisper of feet on the jungle carpet. Panic squirting in his mouth like bitter juice. (You will remember what was forgotten but would he? What was it?) He fled around another corner and saw with creeping, utter horror that he was in a culdesac. Locked doors frowned down at him from three sides. The west wing. He was in the west wing and outside he could hear the storm whooping and screaming, seeming to choke on its own dark throat filled with snow. He backed up against the wall, weeping with terror now, his heart racing like the heart of a rabbit caught in a snare. When his back was against the light blue silk wallpaper with the embossed pattern of wavy lines, his legs gave way and he collapsed to the carpet, hands splayed on the jungle of woven vines and creepers, the breath whistling in and out of his throat. Louder. Louder. There was a tiger in the hall, and now the tiger was just around the corner, still crying out in that shrill and petulant and lunatic rage, the roque mallet slamming, because this tiger walked on two legs and it was He woke with a sudden indrawn gasp, sitting bolt upright in bed, eyes wide and staring into the darkness, hands crossed in front of his face. Something on one hand. Crawling. Wasps. Three of them. They stung him then, seeming to needle all at once, and that was when all the images broke apart and fell on him in a dark flood and he began to shriek into the dark, the wasps clinging to his left hand, stinging again and again. The lights went on and Daddy was standing there in his shorts, his eyes glaring. Mommy behind him, sleepy and scared. Get them off me! Danny screamed. Oh my God, Jack said. He saw. Jack, whats wrong with him? Whats wrong? He didnt answer her. He ran to the bed, scooped up Dannys pillow, and slapped Dannys thrashing left hand with it. Again. Again. Wendy saw lumbering, insectile forms rise into the air, droning. Get a magazine! he yelled over his shoulder. Kill them! Wasps? she said, and for a moment she was inside herself, almost detached in her realization. That her mind crosspatched, and knowledge was connected to emotion. Wasps, oh Jesus, Jack, you said Shut the fuck up and kill them! he roared. Will you do what I say! One of them had landed on Dannys reading desk. She took a coloring book off his worktable and slammed it down on the wasp. It left a viscous brown smear. |
Theres another one on the curtain, he said, and ran out past her with Danny in his arms. He took the boy into their bedroom and put him on Wendys side of the makeshift double. Lie right there, Danny. Dont come back until I tell you. Understand? His face puffed and streaked with tears, Danny nodded. Thats my brave boy. Jack ran back down the hall to the stairs. Behind him he heard the coloring book slap twice, and then his wife screamed in pain. He didnt slow but went down the stairs two by two into the darkened lobby. He went through Ullmans office into the kitchen, slamming the heavy part of his thigh into the corner of Ullmans oak desk, barely feeling it. He slapped on the kitchen overheads and crossed to the sink. The washed dishes from supper were still heaped up in the drainer, where Wendy had left them to dripdry. He snatched the big Pyrex bowl off the top. A dish fell to the floor and exploded. Ignoring it, he turned and ran back through the office and up the stairs. Wendy was standing outside Dannys door, breathing hard. Her face was the color of table linen. Her eyes were shiny and flat; her hair hung damply against her neck. I got all of them, she said dully, but one stung me. Jack, you said they were all dead. She began to cry. He slipped past her without answering and carried the Pyrex bowl over to the nest by Dannys bed. It was still. Nothing there. On the outside, anyway. He slammed the bowl down over the nest. There, he said. Come on. They went back into their bedroom. Where did it get you? he asked her. My on my wrist. Lets see. She showed it to him. Just above the bracelet of lines between wrist and palm, there was a small circular hole. The flesh around it was puffing up. Are you allergic to stings? he asked. Think hard! If you are, Danny might be. The fucking little bastards got him five or six times. No, she said, more calmly. I I just hate them, thats all. Hate them. Danny was sitting on the foot of the bed, holding his left hand and looking at them. His eyes, circled with the white of shock, looked at Jack reproachfully. Daddy, you said you killed them all. My hand it really hurts. Lets see it, doc no, Im not going to touch it. That would make it hurt even more. Just hold it out. He did and Wendy moaned. Oh Danny oh, your poor hand! Later the doctor would count eleven separate stings. Now all they saw was a dotting of small holes, as if his palm and fingers had been sprinkled with grains of red paper. The swelling was bad. His hand had begun to look like one of those cartoon images where Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck has just slammed himself with a hammer. Wendy, go get that spray stuff in the bathroom, he said. She went after it, and he sat down next to Danny and slipped an arm around his shoulders. After we spray your hand, I want to take some Polaroids of it, doc. Then you sleep the rest of the night with us, kay? Sure, Danny said. But why are you going to take pictures? So maybe we can sue the ass out of some people. Wendy came back with a spray tube in the shape of a chemical fire extinguisher. This wont hurt, honey, she said, taking off the cap. Danny held out his hand and she sprayed both sides until it gleamed. He let out a long, shuddery sigh. Does it smart? she asked. No. Feels better. Now these. Crunch them up. She held out five orangeflavored baby aspirin. Danny took them and popped them into his mouth one by one. Isnt that a lot of aspirin? Jack asked. Its a lot of stings, she snapped at him angrily. You go and get rid of that nest, John Torrance. Right now. Just a minute. He went to the dresser and took his Polaroid Square Shooter out of the top drawer. He rummaged deeper and found some flashcubes. Jack, what are you doing? she asked, a little hysterically. Hes gonna take some pictures of my hand, Danny said gravely, and then were gonna sue the ass out of some people. Right, Dad? Right, Jack said grimly. He had found the flash attachment, and he jabbed it onto the camera. Hold it out, son. I figure about five thousand dollars a sting. What are you talking about? Wendy nearly screamed. Ill tell you what, he said. I followed the directions on that fucking bug bomb. Were going to sue them. The damn thing was defective. Had to have been. How else can you explain this? Oh, she said in a small voice. He took four pictures, pulling out each covered print for Wendy to time on the small locket watch she wore around her neck. Danny, fascinated with the idea that his stung hand might be worth thousands and thousands of dollars, began to lose some of his fright and take an active interest. The hand throbbed dully, and he had a small headache. When Jack had put the camera away and spread the prints out on top of the dresser to dry, Wendy said Should we take him to the doctor tonight? Not unless hes really in pain, Jack said. If a person has a strong allergy to wasp venom, it hits within thirty seconds. Hits? What do you A coma. Or convulsions. Oh. Oh my Jesus. She cupped her hands over her elbows and hugged herself, looking pale and wan. How do you feel, son? Think you could sleep? Danny blinked at them. The nightmare had faded to a dull, featureless background in his mind, but he was still frightened. If I can sleep with you. Of course, Wendy said. Oh honey, Im so sorry. Its okay, Mommy. She began to cry again, and Jack put his hands on her shoulders. Wendy, I swear to you that I followed the directions. Will you get rid of it in the morning? Please? Of course I will. The three of them got in bed together, and Jack was about to snap off the light over the bed when he paused and pushed the covers back instead. Want a picture of the nest, too. Come right back. I will. He went to the dresser, got the camera and the last flashcube, and gave Danny a closed thumbandforefinger circle. Danny smiled and gave it back with his good hand. Quite a kid, he thought as he walked down to Dannys room. All of that and then some. The overhead was still on. Jack crossed to the bunk setup, and as he glanced at the table beside it, his skin crawled into goose flesh. The short hairs on his neck prickled and tried to stand erect. He could hardly see the nest through the clear Pyrex bowl. The inside of the glass was crawling with wasps. It was hard to tell how many. Fifty at least. Maybe a hundred. His heart thudding slowly in his chest, he took his pictures and then set the camera down to wait for them to develop. He wiped his lips with the palm of his hand. One thought played over and over in his mind, echoing with (You lost your temper. You lost your temper. You lost your temper.) an almost superstitious dread. They had come back. He had killed the wasps but they had come back. In his mind he heard himself screaming into his frightened, crying sons face Dont stutter! He wiped his lips again. He went to Dannys worktable, rummaged in its drawers, and came up with a big jigsaw puzzle with a fiberboard backing. He took it over to the bedtable and carefully slid the bowl and the nest onto it. The wasps buzzed angrily inside their prison. Then, putting his hand firmly on top of the bowl so it wouldnt slip, he went out into the hall. Coming to bed, Jack? Wendy asked. Coming to bed, Daddy? Have to go downstairs for a minute, he said, making his voice light. How had it happened? How in Gods name? The bomb sure hadnt been a dud. He had seen the thick white smoke start to puff out of it when he had pulled the ring. And when he had gone up two hours later, he had shaken a drift of small dead bodies out of the hole in the top. Then how? Spontaneous regeneration? That was crazy. Seventeenthcentury bullshit. Insects didnt regenerate. And even if wasp eggs could mature fullgrown insects in twelve hours, this wasnt the season in which the queen laid. That happened in April or May. Fall was their dying time. A living contradiction, the wasps buzzed furiously under the bowl. He took them downstairs and through the kitchen. In back there was a door which gave on the outside. A cold night wind blew against his nearly naked body, and his feet went numb almost instantly against the cold concrete of the platform he was standing on, the platform where milk deliveries were made during the hotels operating season. He put the puzzle and the bowl down carefully, and when he stood up he looked at the thermometer nailed outside the door. FRESH UP WITH 7UP, the thermometer said, and the mercury stood at an even twentyfive degrees. The cold would kill them by morning. He went in and shut the door firmly. After a moments thought he locked it, too. He crossed the kitchen again and shut off the lights. He stood in the darkness for a moment, thinking, wanting a drink. Suddenly the hotel seemed full of a thousand stealthy sounds creakings and groans and the sly sniff of the wind under the eaves where more wasps nests might be hanging like deadly fruit. They had come back. And suddenly he found that he didnt like the Overlook so well anymore, as if it wasnt wasps that had stung his son, wasps that had miraculously lived through the bug bomb assault, but the hotel itself. His last thought before going upstairs to his wife and son (from now on you will hold your temper. No Matter What.) was firm and hard and sure. As he went down the hall to them he wiped his lips with the back of his hand. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE DOCTORS OFFICE Stripped to his underpants, lying on the examination table, Danny Torrance looked very small. He was looking up at Dr. (Just call me Bill) Edmonds, who was wheeling a large black machine up beside him. Danny rolled his eyes to get a better look at it. Dont let it scare you, guy, Bill Edmonds said. Its an electroencephalograph, and it doesnt hurt. Electro We call it EEG for short. Im going to hook a bunch of wires to your headno, not stick them in, only tape themand the pens in this part of the gadget will record your brain waves. Like on The Six Million Dollar Man? About the same. Would you like to be like Steve Austin when you grow up? No way, Danny said as the nurse began to tape the wires to a number of tiny shaved spots on his scalp. My daddy says that someday hell get a short circuit and then hell be up sh hell be up the creek. I know that creek well, Dr. Edmonds said amiably. Ive been up it a few times myself, sans paddle. An EEG can tell us lots of things, Danny. Like what? Like for instance if you have epilepsy. Thats a little problem where Yeah, I know what epilepsy is. Really? Sure. There was a kid in my nursery school back in VermontI went to nursery school when I was a little kidand he had it. He wasnt supposed to use the flashboard. What was that, Dan? He had turned on the machine. Thin lines began to trace their way across graph paper. It had all these lights, all different colors. And when you turned it on, some colors would flash but not all. And you had to count the colors and if you pushed the right button, you could turn it off. Brent couldnt use that. Thats because bright flashing lights sometimes cause an epileptic seizure. You mean using the flashboard mightve made Brent pitch a fit? Edmonds and the nurse exchanged a brief, amused glance. Inelegantly but accurately put, Danny. What? I said youre right, except you should say seizure instead of pitch a fit. Thats not nice Okay, lie just as still as a mouse now. Okay. Danny, when you have these whatever they ares, do you ever recall seeing bright flashing lights before? No. Funny noises? Ringing? Or chimes like a doorbell? Huhuh. How about a funny smell, maybe like oranges or sawdust? Or a smell like something rotten? No, sir. Sometimes do you feel like crying before you pass out? Even though you dont feel sad? No way. Thats fine, then. Have I got epilepsy, Dr. Bill? I dont think so, Danny. Just lie still. Almost done. The machine hummed and scratched for another five minutes and then Dr. Edmonds shut it off. All done, guy, Edmonds said briskly. Let Sally get those electrodes off you and then come into the next room. I want to have a little talk with you. Okay? Sure. Sally, you go ahead and give him a tine test before he comes in. All right. Edmonds ripped off the long curl of paper the machine had extruded and went into the next room, looking at it. Im going to prick your arm just a little, the nurse said after Danny had pulled up his pants. Its to make sure you dont have TB. They gave me that at my school just last year, Danny said without much hope. But that was a long time ago and youre a big boy now, right? I guess so. Danny sighed, and offered his arm up for sacrifice. When he had his shirt and shoes on, he went through the sliding door and into Dr. Edmondss office. Edmonds was sitting on the edge of his desk, swinging his legs thoughtfully. Hi, Danny. Hi. Hows that hand now? He pointed at Dannys left hand, which was lightly bandaged. Pretty good. Good. I looked at your EEG and it seems fine. But Im going to send it to a friend of mine in Denver who makes his living reading those things. I just want to make sure. Yes, sir. Tell me about Tony, Dan. Danny shuffled his feet. Hes just an invisible friend, he said. I made him up. To keep me company. Edmonds laughed and put his hands on Dannys shoulders. Now thats what your mom and dad say. But this is just between us, guy. Im your doctor. Tell me the truth and Ill promise not to tell them unless you say I can. Danny thought about it. He looked at Edmonds and then, with a small effort of concentration, he tried to catch Edmondss thoughts or at least the color of his mood. And suddenly he got an oddly comforting image in his head file cabinets, their doors sliding shut one after another, locking with a click. Written on the small tabs in the center of each door was AC, SECRET; DG, SECRET; and so on. This made Danny feel a little easier. Cautiously he said I dont know who Tony is. Is he your age? No. Hes at least eleven. I think he might be even older. Ive never seen him right up close. He might be old enough to drive a car. You just see him at a distance, huh? Yes, sir. And he always comes just before you pass out? Well, I dont pass out. Its like I go with him. And he shows me things. What kind of things? Well Danny debated for a moment and then told Edmonds about Daddys trunk with all his writing in it, and about how the movers hadnt lost it between Vermont and Colorado after all. It had been right under the stairs all along. And your daddy found it where Tony said he would? Oh yes, sir. Only Tony didnt tell me. He showed me. I understand. Danny, what did Tony show you last night? When you locked yourself in the bathroom? I dont remember, Danny said quickly. Are you sure? Yes, sir. A moment ago I said you locked the bathroom door. But that wasnt right, was it? Tony locked the door. No, sir. Tony couldnt lock the door because he isnt real. He wanted me to do it, so I did. I locked it. Does Tony always show you where lost things are? No, sir. Sometimes he shows me things that are going to happen. Really? Sure. Like one time Tony showed me the amusements and wild animal park in Great Barrington. Tony said Daddy was going to take me there for my birthday. He did, too. What else does he show you? Danny frowned. Signs. Hes always showing me stupid old signs. And I cant read them, hardly ever. Why do you suppose Tony would do that, Danny? I dont know. Danny brightened. But my daddy and mommy are teaching me to read, and Im trying real hard. So you can read Tonys signs. Well, I really want to learn. But that too, yeah. Do you like Tony, Danny? Danny looked at the tile floor and said nothing. Danny? Its hard to tell, Danny said. I used to. I used to hope hed come every day, because he always showed me good things, especially since Mommy and Daddy dont think about DIVORCE anymore. Dr. Edmondss gaze sharpened, but Danny didnt notice. He was looking hard at the floor, concentrating on expressing himself. But now whenever he comes he shows me bad things. Awful things. Like in the bathroom last night. The things he shows me, they sting me like those wasps stung me. Only Tonys things sting me up here. He cocked a finger gravely at his temple, a small boy unconsciously burlesquing suicide. What things, Danny? I cant remember! Danny cried out, agonized. Id tell you if I could! Its like I cant remember because its so bad I dont want to remember. All I can remember when I wake up is REDRUM. Red drum or red rum? Rum. Whats that, Danny? I dont know. Danny? Yes, sir? Can you make Tony come now? I dont know. He doesnt always come. I dont even know if I want him to come anymore. Try, Danny. Ill be right here. Danny looked at Edmonds doubtfully. Edmonds nodded encouragement. Danny let out a long, sighing breath and nodded. But I dont know if it will work. I never did it with anyone looking at me before. And Tony doesnt always come, anyway. If he doesnt, he doesnt, Edmonds said. I just want you to try. Okay. He dropped his gaze to Edmondss slowly swinging loafers and cast his mind outward toward his mommy and daddy. They were here someplace right beyond that wall with the picture on it, as a matter of fact. In the waiting room where they had come in. Sitting side by side but not talking. Leafing through magazines. Worried. About him. He concentrated harder, his brow furrowing, trying to get into the feeling of his mommys thoughts. It was always harder when they werent right there in the room with him. Then he began to get it. Mommy was thinking about a sister. Her sister. The sister was dead. His mommy was thinking that was the main thing that turned her mommy into such a (bitch?) into such an old biddy. Because her sister had died. As a little girl she was (hit by a car oh god i could never stand anything like that again like aileen but what if hes sick really sick cancer spinal meningitis leukemia brain tumor like john gunthers son or muscular dystrophy oh jeez kids his age get leukemia all the time radium treatments chemotherapy we couldnt afford anything like that but of course they just cant turn you out to die on the street can they and anyway hes all right all right all right you really shouldnt let yourself think) (Danny) (about aileen and) (Dannee) (that car) (Dannee) But Tony wasnt there. Only his voice. And as it faded, Danny followed it down into darkness, falling and tumbling down some magic hole between Dr. Bills swinging loafers, past a loud knocking sound, further, a bathtub cruised silently by in the darkness with some horrible thing lolling in it, past a sound like sweetly chiming church bells, past a clock under a dome of glass. Then the dark was pierced feebly by a single light festooned with cobwebs. The weak glow disclosed a stone floor that looked damp and unpleasant. Somewhere not far distant was a steady mechanical roaring sound, but muted, not frightening. Soporific. It was the thing that would be forgotten, Danny thought with dreamy surprise. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he could see Tony just ahead of him, a silhouette. Tony was looking at something and Danny strained his eyes to see what it was. (Your daddy. See your daddy?) Of course he did. How could he have missed him, even in the basement lights feeble glow? Daddy was kneeling on the floor, casting the beam of a flashlight over old cardboard boxes and wooden crates. The cardboard boxes were mushy and old; some of them had split open and spilled drifts of paper onto the floor. Newspapers, books, printed pieces of paper that looked like bills. His daddy was examining them with great interest. And then Daddy looked up and shone his flashlight in another direction. Its beam of light impaled another book, a large white one bound with gold string. The cover looked like white leather. It was a scrapbook. Danny suddenly needed to cry out to his daddy, to tell him to leave that book alone, that some books should not be opened. But his daddy was climbing toward it. The mechanical roaring sound, which he now recognized as the boiler at the Overlook which Daddy checked three or four times every day, had developed an ominous, rhythmic hitching. It began to sound like like pounding. And the smell of mildew and wet, rotting paper was changing to something elsethe high, junipery smell of the Bad Stuff. It hung around his daddy like a vapor as he reached for the book and grasped it. Tony was somewhere in the darkness (This inhuman place makes human monsters. This inhuman place) repeating the same incomprehensible thing over and over. (makes human monsters.) Falling through darkness again, now accompanied by the heavy, pounding thunder that was no longer the boiler but the sound of a whistling mallet striking silkpapered walls, knocking out whiffs of plaster dust. Crouching helplessly on the blueblack woven jungle rug. (Come out) (This inhuman place) (and take your medicine!) (makes human monsters.) With a gasp that echoed in his own head he jerked himself out of the darkness. Hands were on him and at first he shrank back, thinking that the dark thing in the Overlook of Tonys world had somehow followed him back into the world of real thingsand then Dr. Edmonds was saying Youre all right, Danny. Youre all right. Everything is fine. Danny recognized the doctor, then his surroundings in the office. He began to shudder helplessly. Edmonds held him. When the reaction began to subside, Edmonds asked, You said something about monsters, Dannywhat was it? This inhuman place, he said gutturally. Tony told me this inhuman place makes makes He shook his head. Cant remember. Try! I cant. Did Tony come? Yes. What did he show you? Dark. Pounding. I dont remember. Where were you? Leave me alone! I dont remember! Leave me alone! He began to sob helplessly in fear and frustration. It was all gone, dissolved into a sticky mess like a wet bundle of paper, the memory unreadable. Edmonds went to the water cooler and got him a paper cup of water. Danny drank it and Edmonds got him another one. Better? Yes. Danny, I dont want to badger you tease you about this, I mean. But can you remember anything about before Tony came? My mommy, Danny said slowly. Shes worried about me. Mothers always are, guy. No she had a sister that died when she was a little girl. Aileen. She was thinking about how Aileen got hit by a car and that made her worried about me. I dont remember anything else. Edmonds was looking at him sharply. Just now she was thinking that? Out in the waiting room? Yes, sir. Danny, how would you know that? I dont know, Danny said wanly. The shining, I guess. The what? Danny shook his head very slowly. Im awful tired. Cant I go see my mommy and daddy? I dont want to answer any more questions. Im tired. And my stomach hurts. Are you going to throw up? No, sir. I just want to go see my mommy and daddy. Okay, Dan. Edmonds stood up. You go on out and see them for a minute, then send them in so I can talk to them. Okay? Yes, sir. There are books out there to look at. You like books, dont you? Yes, sir, Danny said dutifully. Youre a good boy, Danny. Danny gave him a faint smile. I cant find a thing wrong with him, Dr. Edmonds said to the Torrances. Not physically. Mentally, hes bright and rather too imaginative. It happens. Children have to grow into their imaginations like a pair of oversized shoes. Dannys is still way too big for him. Ever had his IQ tested? I dont believe in them, Jack said. They straitjacket the expectations of both parents and teachers. Dr. Edmonds nodded. That may be. But if you did test him, I think youd find hes right off the scale for his age group. His verbal ability, for a boy who is five going on six, is amazing. We dont talk down to him, Jack said with a trace of pride. I doubt if youve ever had to in order to make yourself understood. Edmonds paused, fiddling with a pen. He went into a trance while I was with him. At my request. Exactly as you described him in the bathroom last night. All his muscles went lax, his body slumped, his eyeballs rotated outward. Textbook autohypnosis. I was amazed. I still am. The Torrances sat forward. What happened? Wendy asked tensely, and Edmonds carefully related Dannys trance, the muttered phrase from which Edmonds had only been able to pluck the word monsters, the dark, the pounding. The aftermath of tears, nearhysteria, and nervous stomach. Tony again, Jack said. What does it mean? Wendy asked. Have you any idea? A few. You might not like them. Go ahead anyway, Jack told him. From what Danny told me, his invisible friend was truly a friend until you folks moved out here from New England. Tony has only become a threatening figure since that move. The pleasant interludes have become nightmarish, even more frightening to your son because he cant remember exactly what the nightmares are about. Thats common enough. We all remember our pleasant dreams more clearly than the scary ones. There seems to be a buffer somewhere between the conscious and the subconscious, and one hell of a bluenose lives in there. This censor only lets through a small amount, and often what does come through is only symbolic. Thats oversimplified Freud, but it does pretty much describe what we know of the minds interaction with itself. You think moving has upset Danny that badly? Wendy asked. It may have, if the move took place under traumatic circumstances, Edmonds said. Did it? Wendy and Jack exchanged a glance. I was teaching at a prep school, Jack said slowly. I lost my job. I see, Edmonds said. He put the pen he had been playing with firmly back in its holder. Theres more here, Im afraid. It may be painful to you. Your son seems to believe you two have seriously contemplated divorce. He spoke of it in an offhand way, but only because he believes you are no longer considering it. Jacks mouth dropped open, and Wendy recoiled as if slapped. The blood drained from her face. We never even discussed it! she said. Not in front of him, not even in front of each other! We I think its best if you understand everything, Doctor, Jack said. Shortly after Danny was born, I became an alcoholic. Id had a drinking problem all the way through college, it subsided a little after Wendy and I met, cropped up worse than ever after Danny was born and the writing I consider to be my real work was going badly. When Danny was three and a half, he spilled some beer on a bunch of papers I was working on papers I was shuffling around, anyway and I well oh shit. His voice broke, but his eyes remained dry and unflinching. It sounds so goddam beastly said out loud. I broke his arm turning him around to spank him. Three months later I gave up drinking. I havent touched it since. I see, Edmonds said neutrally. I knew the arm had been broken, of course. It was set well. He pushed back from his desk a little and crossed his legs. If I may be frank, its obvious that hes been in no way abused since then. Other than the stings, theres nothing on him but the normal bruises and scabs that any kid has in abundance. Of course not, Wendy said hotly. Jack didnt mean No, Wendy, Jack said. I meant to do it. I guess someplace inside I really did mean to do that to him. Or something even worse. He looked back at Edmonds again. You know something, Doctor? This is the first time the word divorce has been mentioned between us. And alcoholism. And childbeating. Three firsts in five minutes. That may be at the root of the problem, Edmonds said. I am not a psychiatrist. If you want Danny to see a child psychiatrist, I can recommend a good one who works out of the Mission Ridge Medical Center in Boulder. But I am fairly confident of my diagnosis. Danny is an intelligent, imaginative, perceptive boy. I dont believe he would have been as upset by your marital problems as you believed. Small children are great accepters. They dont understand shame, or the need to hide things. Jack was studying his hands. Wendy took one of them and squeezed it. But he sensed the things that were wrong. Chief among them from his point of view was not the broken arm but the brokenor breakinglink between you two. He mentioned divorce to me but not the broken arm. When my nurse mentioned the set to him, he simply shrugged it off. It was no pressure thing. It happened a long time ago is what I think he said. That kid, Jack muttered. His jaws were clamped together, the muscles in the cheeks standing out. We dont deserve him. You have him, all the same, Edmonds said dryly. At any rate, he retires into a fantasy world from time to time. Nothing unusual about that; lots of kids do. As I recall, I had my own invisible friend when I was Dannys age, a talking rooster named ChugChug. Of course no one could see ChugChug but me. I had two older brothers who often left me behind, and in such a situation ChugChug came in mighty handy. And of course you two must understand why Dannys invisible friend is named Tony instead of Mike or Hal or Dutch. Yes, Wendy said. Have you ever pointed it out to him? No, Jack said. Should we? Why bother? Let him realize it in his own time, by his own logic. You see, Dannys fantasies were considerably deeper than those that grow around the ordinary invisible friend syndrome, but he felt he needed Tony that much more. Tony would come and show him pleasant things. Sometimes amazing things. Always good things. Once Tony showed him where Daddys lost trunk was under the stairs. Another time Tony showed him that Mommy and Daddy were going to take him to an amusement park for his birthday At Great Barrington! Wendy cried. But how could he know those things? Its eerie, the things he comes out with sometimes. Almost as if He had second sight? Edmonds asked, smiling. He was born with a caul, Wendy said weakly. Edmondss smile became a good, hearty laugh. Jack and Wendy exchanged a glance and then also smiled, both of them amazed at how easy it was. Dannys occasional lucky guesses about things was something else they had not discussed much. Next youll be telling me he can levitate, Edmonds said, still smiling. No, no, no, Im afraid not. Its not extrasensory but good old human perception, which in Dannys case is unusually keen. Mr. Torrance, he knew your trunk was under the stairs because you had looked everywhere else. Process of elimination, what? Its so simple Ellery Queen would laugh at it. Sooner or later you would have thought of it yourself. As for the amusement park at Great Barrington, whose idea was that originally? Yours or his? His, of course, Wendy said. They advertised on all the morning childrens programs. He was wild to go. But the thing is, Doctor, we couldnt afford to take him. And we had told him so. Then a mens magazine Id sold a story to back in 1971 sent a check for fifty dollars, Jack said. They were reprinting the story in an annual, or something. So we decided to spend it on Danny. Edmonds shrugged. Wish fulfillment plus a lucky coincidence. Goddammit, I bet thats just right, Jack said. Edmonds smiled a little. And Danny himself told me that Tony often showed him things that never occurred. Visions based on faulty perception, thats all. Danny is doing subconsciously what these socalled mystics and mind readers do quite consciously and cynically. I admire him for it. If life doesnt cause him to retract his antennae, I think hell be quite a man. Wendy noddedof course she thought Danny would be quite a manbut the doctors explanation struck her as glib. It tasted more like margarine than butter. Edmonds had not lived with them. He had not been there when Danny found lost buttons, told her that maybe the TV Guide was under the bed, that he thought he better wear his rubbers to nursery school even though the sun was out and later that day they had walked home under her umbrella through the pouring rain. Edmonds couldnt know of the curious way Danny had of preguessing them both. She would decide to have an unusual evening cup of tea, go in the kitchen and find her cup out with a tea bag in it. |
She would remember that the books were due at the library and find them all neatly piled up on the hall table, her library card on top. Or Jack would take it into his head to wax the Volkswagen and find Danny already out there, listening to tinny topforty music on his crystal radio as he sat on the curb to watch. Aloud she said, Then why the nightmares now? Why did Tony tell him to lock the bathroom door? I believe its because Tony has outlived his usefulness, Edmonds said. He was bornTony, not Dannyat a time when you and your husband were straining to keep your marriage together. Your husband was drinking too much. There was the incident of the broken arm. The ominous quiet between you. Ominous quiet, yes, that phrase was the real thing, anyway. The stiff, tense meals where the only conversation had been please pass the butter or Danny, eat the rest of your carrots or may I be excused, please. The nights when Jack was gone and she had lain down, dryeyed, on the couch while Danny watched TV. The mornings when she and Jack had stalked around each other like two angry cats with a quivering, frightened mouse between them. It all rang true; (dear God, do old scars ever stop hurting?) horribly, horribly true. Edmonds resumed, But things have changed. You know, schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. Its accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics. They have invisible friends. They may go and sit in the closet when theyre depressed, withdrawing from the world. They attach talismanic importance to a special blanket, or a teddy bear, or a stuffed tiger. They suck their thumbs. When an adult sees things that arent there, we consider him ready for the rubber room. When a child says hes seen a troll in his bedroom or a vampire outside the window, we simply smile indulgently. We have a onesentence explanation that explains the whole range of such phenomena in children Hell grow out of it, Jack said. Edmonds blinked. My very words, he said. Yes. Now I would guess that Danny was in a pretty good position to develop a fullfledged psychosis. Unhappy home life, a big imagination, the invisible friend who was so real to him that he nearly became real to you. Instead of growing out of his childhood schizophrenia, he might well have grown into it. And become autistic? Wendy asked. She had read about autism. The word itself frightened her; it sounded like dread and white silence. Possible but not necessarily. He might simply have entered Tonys world someday and never come back to what he calls real things. God, Jack said. But now the basic situation has changed drastically. Mr. Torrance no longer drinks. You are in a new place where conditions have forced the three of you into a tighter family unit than ever beforecertainly tighter than my own, where my wife and kids may see me for only two or three hours a day. To my mind, he is in the perfect healing situation. And I think the very fact that he is able to differentiate so sharply between Tonys world and real things says a lot about the fundamentally healthy state of his mind. He says that you two are no longer considering divorce. Is he as right as I think he is? Yes, Wendy said, and Jack squeezed her hand tightly, almost painfully. She squeezed back. Edmonds nodded. He really doesnt need Tony anymore. Danny is flushing him out of his system. Tony no longer brings pleasant visions but hostile nightmares that are too frightening for him to remember except fragmentarily. He internalized Tony during a difficultdesperatelife situation, and Tony is not leaving easily. But he is leaving. Your son is a little like a junkie kicking the habit. He stood up, and the Torrances stood also. As I said, Im not a psychiatrist. If the nightmares are still continuing when your job at the Overlook ends next spring, Mr. Torrance, I would strongly urge you to take him to this man in Boulder. I will. Well, lets go out and tell him he can go home, Edmonds said. I want to thank you, Jack told him painfully. I feel better about all this than I have in a very long time. So do I, Wendy said. At the door, Edmonds paused and looked at Wendy. Do you or did you have a sister, Mrs. Torrance? Named Aileen? Wendy looked at him, surprised. Yes, I did. She was killed outside our home in Somersworth, New Hampshire, when she was six and I was ten. She chased a ball into the street and was struck by a delivery van. Does Danny know that? I dont know. I dont think so. He says you were thinking about her in the waiting room. I was, Wendy said slowly. For the first time in oh, I dont know how long. Does the word redrum mean anything to either of you? Wendy shook her head but Jack said, He mentioned that word last night, just before he went to sleep. Red drum. No, rum, Edmonds corrected. He was quite emphatic about that. Rum. As in the drink. The alcoholic drink. Oh, Jack said. It fits in, doesnt it? He took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his lips with it. Does the phrase the shining mean anything to you? This time they both shook their heads. Doesnt matter, I guess, Edmonds said. He opened the door into the waiting room. Anybody here named Danny Torrance that would like to go home? Hi, Daddy! Hi, Mommy! He stood up from the small table where he had been leafing slowly through a copy of Where the Wild Things Are and muttering the words he knew aloud. He ran to Jack, who scooped him up. Wendy ruffled his hair. Edmonds peered at him. If you dont love your mommy and daddy, you can stay with good old Bill. No, sir! Danny said emphatically. He slung one arm around Jacks neck, one arm around Wendys, and looked radiantly happy. Okay, Edmonds said, smiling. He looked at Wendy. You call if you have any problems. Yes. I dont think you will, Edmonds said, smiling. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN THE SCRAPBOOK Jack found the scrapbook on the first of November, while his wife and son were hiking up the rutted old road that ran from behind the roque court to a deserted sawmill two miles farther up. The fine weather still held, and all three of them had acquired improbable autumn suntans. He had gone down in the basement to knock the press down on the boiler and then, on impulse, he had taken the flashlight from the shelf where the plumbing schematics were and decided to look at some of the old papers. He was also looking for good places to set his traps, although he didnt plan to do that for another monthI want them all to be home from vacation, he had told Wendy. Shining the flashlight ahead of him, he stepped past the elevator shaft (at Wendys insistence they hadnt used the elevator since they moved in) and through the small stone arch. His nose wrinkled at the smell of rotting paper. Behind him the boiler kicked on with a thundering whoosh, making him jump. He flickered the light around, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. There was a scalemodel Andes range down here dozens of boxes and crates stuffed with papers, most of them white and shapeless with age and damp. Others had broken open and spilled yellowed sheaves of paper onto the stone floor. There were bales of newspaper tied up with hayrope. Some boxes contained what looked like ledgers, and others contained invoices bound with rubber bands. Jack pulled one out and put the flashlight beam on it. ROCKY MOUNTAIN EXPRESS, INC. To OVERLOOK HOTEL From SIDEYS WAREHOUSE, 1210 16th Street, Denver, CO. Via CANADIAN PACIFIC RR Contents 400 CASES DELSEY TOILET TISSUE, 1 GROSSCASE Signed D E F Date August 24, 1954 Smiling, Jack let the paper drop back into the box. He flashed the light above it and it speared a hanging lightbulb, almost buried in cobwebs. There was no chain pull. He stood on tiptoe and tried screwing the bulb in. It lit weakly. He picked up the toiletpaper invoice again and used it to wipe off some of the cobwebs. The glow didnt brighten much. Still using the flashlight, he wandered through the boxes and bales of paper, looking for rat spoor. They had been here but not for quite a long time maybe years. He found some droppings that were powdery with age and several nests of neatly shredded paper that were old and unused. Jack pulled a newspaper from one of the bundles and glanced down at the headline. JOHNSON PROMISES ORDERLY TRANSITION Says Work Begun by JFK Will Go Forward in Coming Year The paper was the Rocky Mountain News, dated December 19, 1963. He dropped it back onto its pile. He supposed he was fascinated by that commonplace sense of history that anyone can feel glancing through the fresh news of ten or twenty years ago. He found gaps in the piled newspapers and records; nothing from 1937 to 1945, from 1957 to 1960, from 1962 to 1963. Periods when the hotel had been closed, he guessed. When it had been between suckers grabbing for the brass ring. Ullmans explanations of the Overlooks checkered career still didnt ring quite true to him. It seemed that the Overlooks spectacular location alone should have guaranteed its continuing success. There had always been an American jetset, even before jets were invented, and it seemed to Jack that the Overlook should have been one of the bases they touched in their migrations. It even sounded right. The Waldorf in May, the Bar Harbor House in June and July, the Overlook in August and early September, before moving on to Bermuda, Havana, Rio, wherever. He found a pile of old desk registers and they bore him out. Nelson Rockefeller in 1950. Henry Ford Fam. in 1927. Jean Harlow in 1930. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. In 1956 the whole top floor had been taken for a week by Darryl F. Zanuck Party. The money must have rolled down the corridors and into the cash registers like a twentiethcentury Comstock Lode. The management must have been spectacularly bad. There was history here, all right, and not just in newspaper headlines. It was buried between the entries in these ledgers and account books and roomservice chits where you couldnt quite see it. In 1922 Warren G. Harding had ordered a whole salmon at ten oclock in the evening and a case of Coors beer. But whom had he been eating and drinking with? Had it been a poker game? A strategy session? What? Jack glanced at his watch and was surprised to see that fortyfive minutes had somehow slipped by since he had come down here. His hands and arms were grimy, and he probably smelled bad. He decided to go up and take a shower before Wendy and Danny got back. He walked slowly between the mountains of paper, his mind alive and ticking over possibilities in a speedy way that was exhilarating. He hadnt felt this way in years. It suddenly seemed that the book he had semijokingly promised himself might really happen. It might even be right here, buried in these untidy heaps of paper. It could be a work of fiction, or history, or botha long book exploding out of this central place in a hundred directions. He stood beneath the cobwebby light, took his handkerchief from his back pocket without thinking, and scrubbed at his lips with it. And that was when he saw the scrapbook. A pile of five boxes stood on his left like some tottering Pisa. The one on top was stuffed with more invoices and ledgers. Balanced on top of those, keeping its angle of repose for who knew how many years, was a thick scrapbook with white leather covers, its pages bound with two hanks of gold string that had been tied along the binding in gaudy bows. Curious, he went over and took it down. The top cover was thick with dust. He held it on a plane at lip level, blew the dust off in a cloud, and opened it. As he did so a card fluttered out and he grabbed it in midair before it could fall to the stone floor. It was rich and creamy, dominated by a raised engraving of the Overlook with every window alight. The lawn and playground were decorated with glowing Japanese lanterns. It looked almost as though you could step right into it, an Overlook Hotel that had existed thirty years ago. Horace M. Derwent Requests The Pleasure of Your Company At a Masked Ball to Celebrate The Grand Opening of THE OVERLOOK HOTEL Dinner Will Be Served At 8 P.M. Unmasking And Dancing At Midnight August 29, 1945 RSVP Dinner at eight! Unmasking at midnight! He could almost see them in the dining room, the richest men in America and their women. Tuxedos and glimmering starched shirts; evening gowns; the band playing; gleaming highheeled pumps. The clink of glasses, the jocund pop of champagne corks. The war was over, or almost over. The future lay ahead, clean and shining. America was the colossus of the world and at last she knew it and accepted it. And later, at midnight, Derwent himself crying Unmask! Unmask! The masks coming off and (The Red Death held sway over all!) He frowned. What left field had that come out of? That was Poe, the Great American Hack. And surely the Overlookthis shining, glowing Overlook on the invitation he held in his handswas the furthest cry from E. A. Poe imaginable. He put the invitation back and turned to the next page. A pasteup from one of the Denver papers, and scratched beneath it the date May 15, 1947. POSH MOUNTAIN RESORT REOPENS WITH STELLAR GUEST REGISTER Derwent Says Overlook Will Be Showplace of the World By David Felton, Features Editor The Overlook Hotel has been opened and reopened in its thirtyeightyear history, but rarely with such style and dash as that promised by Horace Derwent, the mysterious California millionaire who is the latest owner of the hostelry. Derwent, who makes no secret of having sunk more than one million dollars into his newest ventureand some say the figure is closer to three millionsays that The new Overlook will be one of the worlds showplaces, the kind of hotel you will remember overnighting in thirty years later. When Derwent, who is rumored to have substantial Las Vegas holdings, was asked if his purchase and refurbishing of the Overlook signaled the opening gun in a battle to legalize casinostyle gambling in Colorado, the aircraft, movie, munitions, and shipping magnate denied it with a smile. The Overlook would be cheapened by gambling, he said, and dont think Im knocking Vegas! Theyve got too many of my markers out there for me to do that! I have no interest in lobbying for legalized gambling in Colorado. It would be spitting into the wind. When the Overlook opens officially (there was a gigantic and hugely successful party there some time ago when the actual work was finished), the newly painted, papered, and decorated rooms will be occupied by a stellar guest list, ranging from Chic designer Corbat Stani to Smiling bemusedly, Jack turned the page. Now he was looking at a fullpage ad from the New York Sunday Times travel section. On the page after that a story on Derwent himself, a balding man with eyes that pierced you even from an old newsprint photo. He was wearing rimless spectacles and a fortiesstyle pencilline mustache that did nothing at all to make him look like Errol Flynn. His face was that of an accountant. It was the eyes that made him look like someone or something else. Jack skimmed the article rapidly. He knew most of the information from a Newsweek story on Derwent the year before. Born poor in St. Paul, never finished high school, joined the Navy instead. Rose rapidly, then left in a bitter wrangle over the patent on a new type of propeller that he had designed. In the tug of war between the Navy and an unknown young man named Horace Derwent, Uncle Sam came off the predictable winner. But Uncle Sam had never gotten another patent, and there had been a lot of them. In the late twenties and early thirties, Derwent turned to aviation. He bought out a bankrupt cropdusting company, turned it into an airmail service, and prospered. More patents followed a new monoplane wing design, a bomb carriage used on the Flying Fortresses that had rained fire on Hamburg and Dresden and Berlin, a machine gun that was cooled by alcohol, a prototype of the ejection seat later used in United States jets. And along the line, the accountant who lived in the same skin as the inventor kept piling up the investments. A piddling string of munitions factories in New York and New Jersey. Five textile mills in New England. Chemical factories in the bankrupt and groaning South. At the end of the Depression his wealth had been nothing but a handful of controlling interests, bought at abysmally low prices, salable only at lower prices still. At one point Derwent boasted that he could liquidate completely and realize the price of a threeyearold Chevrolet. There had been rumors, Jack recalled, that some of the means employed by Derwent to keep his head above water were less than savory. Involvement with bootlegging. Prostitution in the Midwest. Smuggling in the coastal areas of the South where his fertilizer factories were. Finally an association with the nascent western gambling interests. Probably Derwents most famous investment was the purchase of the foundering Top Mark Studios, which had not had a hit since their child star, Little Margery Morris, had died of a heroin overdose in 1934. She was fourteen. Little Margery, who had specialized in sweet sevenyearolds who saved marriages and the lives of dogs unjustly accused of killing chickens, had been given the biggest Hollywood funeral in history by Top Markthe official story was that Little Margery had contracted a wasting disease while entertaining at a New York orphanageand some cynics suggested the studio had laid out all that long green because it knew it was burying itself. Derwent hired a keen businessman and raging sex maniac named Henry Finkel to run Top Mark, and in the two years before Pearl Harbor the studio ground out sixty movies, fiftyfive of which glided right into the face of the Hayes Office and spit on its large blue nose. The other five were government training films. The feature films were huge successes. During one of them an unnamed costume designer had juryrigged a strapless bra for the heroine to appear in during the Grand Ball scene, where she revealed everything except possibly the birthmark just below the cleft of her buttocks. Derwent received credit for this invention as well, and his reputationor notorietygrew. The war had made him rich and he was still rich. Living in Chicago, seldom seen except for Derwent Enterprises Board meetings (which he ran with an iron hand), it was rumored that he owned United Air Lines, Las Vegas (where he was known to have controlling interests in four hotelcasinos and some involvement in at least six others), Los Angeles, and the U.S.A. itself. Reputed to be a friend of royalty, presidents, and underworld kingpins, it was supposed by many that he was the richest man in the world. But he had not been able to make a go of the Overlook, Jack thought. He put the scrapbook down for a moment and took the small notebook and mechanical pencil he always kept with him out of his breast pocket. He jotted Look into H. Derwent, Sidwndr lbry? He put the notebook back and picked up the scrapbook again. His face was preoccupied, his eyes distant. He wiped his mouth constantly with his hand as he turned the pages. He skimmed the material that followed, making a mental note to read it more closely later. Press releases were pasted into many of the pages. Soandso was expected at the Overlook next week, thusandsuch would be entertaining in the lounge (in Derwents time it had been the RedEye Lounge). Many of the entertainers were Vegas names, and many of the guests were Top Mark executives and stars. Then, in a clipping marked February 1, 1952 MILLIONAIRE EXEC TO SELL COLORADO INVESTMENTS Deal Made with California Investors on Overlook, Other Investments, Derwent Reveals By Rodney Conklin, Financial Editor In a terse communique yesterday from the Chicago offices of the monolithic Derwent Enterprises, it was revealed that millionaire (perhaps billionaire) Horace Derwent has sold out of Colorado in a stunning financial power play that will be completed by October 1, 1954. Derwents investments include natural gas, coal, hydroelectric power, and a land development company called Colorado Sunshine, Inc., which owns or holds options on better than 500,000 acres of Colorado land. The most famous Derwent holding in Colorado, the Overlook Hotel, has already been sold, Derwent revealed in a rare interview yesterday. The buyer was a California group of investors headed by Charles Grondin, a former director of the California Land Development Corporation. While Derwent refused to discuss price, informed sources He had sold out everything, lock, stock, and barrel. It wasnt just the Overlook. But somehow somehow He wiped his lips with his hand and wished he had a drink. This would go better with a drink. He turned more pages. The California group had opened the hotel for two seasons, and then sold it to a Colorado group called Mountainview Resorts. Mountainview went bankrupt in 1957 amid charges of corruption, nestfeathering, and cheating the stockholders. The president of the company shot himself two days after being subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. The hotel had been closed for the rest of the decade. There was a single story about it, a Sunday feature headlined FORMER GRAND HOTEL SINKING INTO DECAY. The accompanying photos wrenched at Jacks heart the paint on the front porch peeling, the lawn a bald and scabrous mess, windows broken by storms and stones. This would be a part of the book, if he actually wrote it, toothe phoenix going down into the ashes to be reborn. He promised himself he would take care of the place, very good care. It seemed that before today he had never really understood the breadth of his responsibility to the Overlook. It was almost like having a responsibility to history. In 1961 four writers, two of them Pulitzer Prize winners, had leased the Overlook and reopened it as a writers school. That had lasted one year. One of the students had gotten drunk in his thirdfloor room, crashed out of the window somehow, and fell to his death on the cement terrace below. The paper hinted that it might have been suicide. Any big hotels have got scandals, Watson had said, just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go Suddenly it seemed that he could almost feel the weight of the Overlook bearing down on him from above, one hundred and ten guest rooms, the storage rooms, kitchen, pantry, freezer, lounge, ballroom, dining room (In the room the women come and go) ( and the Red Death held sway over all.) He rubbed his lips and turned to the next page in the scrapbook. He was in the last third of it now, and for the first time he wondered consciously whose book this was, left atop the highest pile of records in the cellar. A new headline, this one dated April 10, 1963. LAS VEGAS GROUP BUYS FAMED COLORADO HOTEL Scenic Overlook to Become Key Club Robert T. Leffing, spokesman for a group of investors going under the name of High Country Investments, announced today in Las Vegas that High Country has negotiated a deal for the famous Overlook Hotel, a resort located high in the Rockies. Leffing declined to mention the names of specific investors, but said the hotel would be turned into an exclusive key club. He said that the group he represents hopes to sell memberships to highechelon executives in American and foreign companies. High Country also owns hotels in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. The Overlook became worldknown in the years 1946 to 1952 when it was owned by elusive megamillionaire Horace Derwent, who The item on the next page was a mere squib, dated four months later. The Overlook had opened under its new management. Apparently the paper hadnt been able to find out or wasnt interested in who the key holders were, because no name was mentioned but High Country Investmentsthe most anonymoussounding company name Jack had ever heard except for a chain of bike and appliance shops in western New England that went under the name of Business, Inc. He turned the page and blinked down at the clipping pasted there. MILLIONAIRE DERWENT BACK IN COLORADO VIA BACK DOOR? High Country Exec Revealed to be Charles Grondin By Rodney Conklin, Financial Editor The Overlook Hotel, a scenic pleasure palace in the Colorado high country and once the private plaything of millionaire Horace Derwent, is at the center of a financial tangle which is only now beginning to come to light. On April 10 of last year the hotel was purchased by a Las Vegas firm, High Country Investments, as a key club for wealthy executives of both foreign and domestic breeds. Now informed sources say that High Country is headed by Charles Grondin, 53, who was the head of California Land Development Corp. until 1959, when he resigned to take the position of executive veep in the Chicago home office of Derwent Enterprises. This has led to speculation that High Country Investments may be controlled by Derwent, who may have acquired the Overlook for the second time and under decidedly peculiar circumstances. Grondin, who was indicted and acquitted on charges of tax evasion in 1960, could not be reached for comment, and Horace Derwent, who guards his own privacy jealously, had no comment when reached by telephone. State Representative Dick Bows of Golden has called for a complete investigation into That clipping was dated July 27, 1964. The next was a column from a Sunday paper that September. The byline belonged to Josh Brannigar, a muckraking investigator of the Jack Anderson breed. Jack vaguely recalled that Brannigar had died in 1968 or 69. MAFIA FREEZONE COLORADO? By Josh Brannigar It now seems possible that the newest rr spot of Organization overlords in the U.S. is located at an outoftheway hotel nestled in the center of the Rockies. The Overlook Hotel, a white elephant that has been run lucklessly by almost a dozen different groups and individuals since it first opened its doors in 1910, is now being operated as a securityjacketed key club, ostensibly for unwinding businessmen. The question is, what business are the Overlooks key holders really in? The members present during the week of August 1623 may give us an idea. The list below was obtained by a former employee of High Country Investments, a company first believed to be a dummy company owned by Derwent Enterprises. It now seems more likely that Derwents interest in High Country (if any) is outweighed by those of several Las Vegas gambling barons. And these same gaming honchos have been linked in the past to both suspected and convicted underworld kingpins. Present at the Overlook during that sunny week in August were Charles Grondin, President of High Country Investments. When it became known in July of this year that he was running the High Country ship it was announcedconsiderably after the factthat he had resigned his position in Derwent Enterprises previously. The silvermaned Grondin, who refused to talk to me for this column, has been tried once and acquitted on tax evasion charges (1960). Charles Baby Charlie Battaglia, a 60yearold Vegas impresario (controlling interests in The Greenback and The Lucky Bones on the Strip). Battaglia is a close personal friend of Grondin. His arrest record stretches back to 1932, when he was tried and acquitted in the ganglandstyle murder of Jack Dutchy Morgan. Federal authorities suspect his involvement in the drug traffic, prostitution, and murder for hire, but Baby Charlie has only been behind bars once, for income tax evasion in 195556. Richard Scarne, the principal stockholder of Fun Time Automatic Machines. Fun Time makes slot machines for the Nevada crowd, pinball machines and jukeboxes (MelodyCoin) for the rest of the country. He has done time for assault with a deadly weapon (1940), carrying a concealed weapon (1948), and conspiracy to commit tax fraud (1961). Peter Zeiss, a Miamibased importer, now nearing 70. For the last five years Zeiss has been fighting deportation as an undesirable person. He has been convicted on charges of receiving and concealing stolen property (1958) and conspiracy to commit tax fraud (1954). Charming, distinguished, and courtly, Pete Zeiss is called Poppa by his intimates and has been tried on charges of murder and accessory to murder. A large stockholder in Scarnes Fun Time company, he also has known interests in four Las Vegas casinos. Vittorio Gienelli, also known as Vito the Chopper, tried twice for ganglandstyle murders, one of them the axmurder of Boston vice overlord Frank Scoffy. Gienelli has been indicted twentythree times, tried fourteen times, and convicted only once, for shoplifting in 1940. It has been said that in recent years Gienelli has become a power in the organizations western operation, which is centered in Las Vegas. Carl JimmyRicks Prashkin, a San Francisco investor, reputed to be the heir apparent of the power Gienelli now wields. Prashkin owns large blocks of stock in Derwent Enterprises, High Country Investments, Fun Time Automatic Machines, and three Vegas casinos. Prashkin is clean in America, but was indicted in Mexico on fraud charges that were dropped quickly three weeks after they were brought. It has been suggested that Prashkin may be in charge of laundering money skimmed from Vegas casino operations and funneling the big bucks back into the organizations legitimate western operations. And such operations may now include the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Other visitors during the current season include There was more but Jack only skimmed it, constantly wiping his lips with his hand. A banker with Las Vegas connections. Men from New York who were apparently doing more in the Garment District than making clothes. Men reputed to be involved with drugs, vice, robbery, murder. God, what a story! And they had all been here, right above him, in those empty rooms. Screwing expensive whores on the third floor, maybe. Drinking magnums of champagne. Making deals that would turn over millions of dollars, maybe in the very suite of rooms where Presidents had stayed. There was a story, all right. One hell of a story. A little frantically, he took out his notebook and jotted down another memo to check all of these people out at the library in Denver when the caretaking job was over. Every hotel has its ghost? The Overlook had a whole coven of them. First suicide, then the Mafia, what next? The next clipping was an angry denial of Brannigars charges by Charles Grondin. Jack smirked at it. The clipping on the next page was so large that it had been folded. Jack unfolded it and gasped harshly. The picture there seemed to leap out at him the wallpaper had been changed since June of 1966, but he knew that window and the view perfectly well. It was the western exposure of the Presidential Suite. Murder came next. The sitting room wall by the door leading into the bedroom was splashed with blood and what could only be white flecks of brain matter. A blankfaced cop was standing over a corpse hidden by a blanket. Jack stared, fascinated, and then his eyes moved up to the headline. GANGLANDSTYLE SHOOTING AT COLORADO HOTEL Reputed Crime Overlord Shot at Mountain Key Club, Two Others Dead SIDEWINDER, COLO (UPI)Forty miles from this sleepy Colorado town, a ganglandstyle execution has occurred in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. The Overlook Hotel, purchased three years ago as an exclusive key club by a Las Vegas firm, was the site of a triple shotgun slaying. Two of the men were either the companions or bodyguards of Vittorio Gienelli, also known as The Chopper for his reputed involvement in a Boston slaying twenty years ago. Police were summoned by Robert Norman, manager of the Overlook, who said he heard shots and that some of the guests reported two men wearing stockings on their faces and carrying guns had fled down the fire escape and driven off in a latemodel tan convertible. State Trooper Benjamin Moorer discovered two dead men, later identified as Victor T. |
Boorman and Roger Macassi, both of Las Vegas, outside the door of the Presidential Suite where two American Presidents have stayed. Inside, Moorer found the body of Gienelli sprawled on the floor. Gienelli was apparently fleeing his attackers when he was cut down. Moorer said Gienelli had been shot with heavygauge shotguns at close range. Charles Grondin, the representative of the company which now owns the Overlook, could not be reached for Below the clipping, in heavy strokes of a ballpoint pen, someone had written They took his balls along with them. Jack stared at that for a long time, feeling cold. Whose book was this? He turned the page at last, swallowing a click in his throat. Another column from Josh Brannigar, this one dated early 1967. He only read the headline NOTORIOUS HOTEL SOLD FOLLOWING MURDER OF UNDERWORLD FIGURE. The sheets following that clipping were blank. (They took his balls along with them.) He flipped back to the beginning, looking for a name or address. Even a room number. Because he felt quite sure that whoever had kept this little book of memories had stayed at the hotel. But there was nothing. He was getting ready to go through all the clippings, more closely this time, when a voice called down the stairs Jack? Hon? Wendy. He started, almost guiltily, as if he had been drinking secretly and she would smell the fumes on him. Ridiculous. He scrubbed his lips with his hand and called back, Yeah, babe. Lookin for rats. She was coming down. He heard her on the stairs, then crossing the boiler room. Quickly, without thinking why he might be doing it, he stuffed the scrapbook under a pile of bills and invoices. He stood up as she came through the arch. What in the world have you been doing down here? Its almost three oclock! He smiled. Is it that late? I got rooting around through all this stuff. Trying to find out where the bodies are buried, I guess. The words clanged back viciously in his mind. She came closer, looking at him, and he unconsciously retreated a step, unable to help himself. He knew what she was doing. She was trying to smell liquor on him. Probably she wasnt even aware of it herself, but he was, and it made him feel both guilty and angry. Your mouth is bleeding, she said in a curiously flat tone. Huh? He put his hand to his lips and winced at the thin stinging. His index finger came away bloody. His guilt increased. Youve been rubbing your mouth again, she said. He looked down and shrugged. Yeah, I guess I have. Its been hell for you, hasnt it? No, not so bad. Has it gotten any easier? He looked up at her and made his feet start moving. Once they were actually in motion it was easier. He crossed to his wife and slipped an arm around her waist. He brushed aside a sheaf of her blond hair and kissed her neck. Yes, he said. Wheres Danny? Oh, hes around somewhere. Its started to cloud up outside. Hungry? He slipped a hand over her taut, jeansclad bottom with counterfeit lechery. Like ze bear, madame. Watch out, slugger. Dont start something you cant finish. Figfig, madame? he asked, still rubbing. Dirty peectures? Unnatural positions? As they went through the arch, he threw one glance back at the box where the scrapbook (whose?) was hidden. With the light out it was only a shadow. He was relieved that he had gotten Wendy away. His lust became less acted, more natural, as they approached the stairs. Maybe, she said. After we get you a sandwichyeek! She twisted away from him, giggling. That tickles! It teekles nozzing like Jock Torrance would like to teekle you, madame. Lay off, Jock. How about a ham and cheese for the first course? They went up the stairs together, and Jack didnt look over his shoulder again. But he thought of Watsons words Every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go Then Wendy shut the basement door behind them, closing it into darkness. CHAPTER NINETEEN OUTSIDE 217 Danny was remembering the words of someone else who had worked at the Overlook during the season Her saying shed seen something in one of the rooms where a bad thing happened. That was in Room 217 and I want you to promise me you wont go in there, Danny steer right clear It was a perfectly ordinary door, no different from any other door on the first two floors of the hotel. It was dark gray, halfway down a corridor that ran at right angles to the main secondfloor hallway. The numbers on the door looked no different from the house numbers on the Boulder apartment building they had lived in. A 2, a 1, and a 7. Big deal. Just below them was a tiny glass circle, a peephole. Danny had tried several of them. From the inside you got a wide, fisheye view of the corridor. From outside you could screw up your eye seven ways to Sunday and still not see a thing. A dirty gyp. (Why are you here?) After the walk behind the Overlook, he and Mommy had come back and she had fixed him his favorite lunch, a cheese and bologna sandwich plus Campbells Bean Soup. They ate in Dicks kitchen and talked. The radio was on, getting thin and crackly music from the Estes Park station. The kitchen was his favorite place in the hotel, and he guessed that Mommy and Daddy must feel the same way, because after trying their meals in the dining room for three days or so, they had begun eating in the kitchen by mutual consent, setting up chairs around Dick Halloranns butcher block, which was almost as big as their dining room table back in Stovington, anyway. The dining room had been too depressing, even with the lights on and the music playing from the tape cassette system in the office. You were still just one of three people sitting at a table surrounded by dozens of other tables, all empty, all covered with those transparent plastic dustcloths. Mommy said it was like having dinner in the middle of a Horace Walpole novel, and Daddy had laughed and agreed. Danny had no idea who Horace Walpole was, but he did know that Mommys cooking had begun to taste better as soon as they began to eat it in the kitchen. He kept discovering little flashes of Dick Halloranns personality lying around, and they reassured him like a warm touch. Mommy had eaten half a sandwich, no soup. She said Daddy must have gone out for a walk of his own since both the VW and the hotel truck were in the parking lot. She said she was tired and might lie down for an hour or so, if he thought he could amuse himself and not get into trouble. Danny told her around a mouthful of cheese and bologna that he thought he could. Why dont you go out into the playground? she asked him. I thought youd love that place, with a sandbox for your trucks and all. He swallowed and the food went down his throat in a lump that was dry and hard. Maybe I will, he said, turning to the radio and fiddling with it. And all those neat hedge animals, she said, taking his empty plate. Your fathers got to get out and trim them pretty soon. Yeah, he said. (Just nasty things once it had to do with those damn hedges clipped to look like animals ) If you see your father before I do, tell him Im lying down. Sure, Mom. She put the dirty dishes in the sink and came back over to him. Are you happy here, Danny? He looked at her guilelessly, a milk mustache on his lip. Uhhuh. No more bad dreams? No. Tony had come to him once, one night while he was lying in bed, calling his name faintly and from far away. Danny had squeezed his eyes tightly shut until Tony had gone. You sure? Yes, Mom. She seemed satisfied. Hows your hand? He flexed it for her. All better. She nodded. Jack had taken the nest under the Pyrex bowl, full of frozen wasps, out to the incinerator in back of the equipment shed and burned it. They had seen no more wasps since. He had written to a lawyer in Boulder, enclosing the snaps of Dannys hand, and the lawyer had called back two days agothat had put Jack in a foul temper all afternoon. The lawyer doubted if the company that had manufactured the bug bomb could be sued successfully because there was only Jack to testify that he had followed directions printed on the package. Jack had asked the lawyer if they couldnt purchase some others and test them for the same defect. Yes, the lawyer said, but the results were highly doubtful even if all the test bombs malfunctioned. He told Jack of a case that involved an extension ladder company and a man who had broken his back. Wendy had commiserated with Jack, but privately she had just been glad that Danny had gotten off as cheaply as he had. It was best to leave lawsuits to people who understood them, and that did not include the Torrances. And they had seen no more wasps since. Go and play, doc. Have fun. But he hadnt had fun. He had wandered aimlessly around the hotel, poking into the maids closets and the janitors rooms, looking for something interesting, not finding it, a small boy padding along a dark blue carpet woven with twisting black lines. He had tried a room door from time to time, but of course they were all locked. The passkey was hanging down in the office; he knew where, but Daddy had told him he shouldnt touch that. And he didnt want to. Did he? (Why are you here?) There was nothing aimless about it after all. He had been drawn to Room 217 by a morbid kind of curiosity. He remembered a story Daddy had read to him once when he was drunk. That had been a long time ago, but the story was just as vivid now as when Daddy had read it to him. Mommy had scolded Daddy and asked what he was doing, reading a threeyearold baby something so horrible. The name of the story was Bluebeard. That was clear in his mind too, because he had thought at first Daddy was saying Bluebird, and there were no bluebirds in the story, or birds of any kind for that matter. Actually the story was about Bluebeards wife, a pretty lady that had corncolored hair like Mommy. After Bluebeard married her, they lived in a big and ominous castle that was not unlike the Overlook. And every day Bluebeard went off to work and every day he would tell his pretty little wife not to look in a certain room, although the key to that room was hanging right on a hook, just like the passkey was hanging on the office wall downstairs. Bluebeards wife had gotten more and more curious about the locked room. She tried to peep through the keyhole the way Danny had tried to look through Room 217s peephole with similar unsatisfying results. There was even a picture of her getting down on her knees and trying to look under the door, but the crack wasnt wide enough. The door swung wide and The old fairy tale book had depicted her discovery in ghastly, loving detail. The image was burned in Dannys mind. The severed heads of Bluebeards seven previous wives were in the room, each one on its own pedestal, the eyes turned up to whites, the mouths unhinged and gaping in silent screams. They were somehow balanced on necks ragged from the broadswords decapitating swing, and there was blood running down the pedestals. Terrified, she had turned to flee from the room and the castle, only to discover Bluebeard standing in the doorway, his terrible eyes blazing. I told you not to enter this room, Bluebeard said, unsheathing his sword. Alas, in your curiosity you are like the other seven, and though I loved you best of all, your ending shall be as was theirs. Prepare to die, wretched woman! It seemed vaguely to Danny that the story had had a happy ending, but that had paled to insignificance beside the two dominant images the taunting, maddening locked door with some great secret behind it, and the grisly secret itself, repeated more than half a dozen times. The locked door and behind it the heads, the severed heads. His hand reached out and stroked the rooms doorknob, almost furtively. He had no idea how long he had been here, standing hypnotized before the bland gray locked door. (And maybe three times Ive thought Ive seen things nasty things ) But Mr. HallorannDickhad also said he didnt think those things could hurt you. They were like scary pictures in a book, that was all. And maybe he wouldnt see anything. On the other hand He plunged his left hand into his pocket and it came out holding the passkey. It had been there all along, of course. He held it by the square metal tab on the end which had OFFICE printed on it in Magic Marker. He twirled the key on its chain, watching it go around and around. After several minutes of this he stopped and slipped the passkey into the lock. It slid in smoothly, with no hitch, as if it had wanted to be there all along. (Ive thought Ive seen things nasty things promise me you wont go in there.) (I promise.) And a promise was, of course, very important. Still, his curiosity itched at him as maddeningly as poison ivy in a place you arent supposed to scratch. But it was a dreadful kind of curiosity, the kind that makes you peek through your fingers during the scariest parts of a scary movie. What was beyond that door would be no movie. (I dont think those things can hurt you like scary pictures in a book ) Suddenly he reached out with his left hand, not sure of what it was going to do until it had removed the passkey and stuffed it back into his pocket. He stared at the door a moment longer, bluegray eyes wide, then turned quickly and walked back down the corridor toward the main hallway that ran at right angles to the corridor he was in. Something made him pause there and he wasnt sure what for a moment. Then he remembered that directly around this corner, on the way back to the stairs, there was one of those oldfashioned fire extinguishers curled up against the wall. Curled there like a dozing snake. They werent chemicaltype extinguishers at all, Daddy said, although there were several of those in the kitchen. These were the forerunner of the modern sprinkler systems. The long canvas hoses hooked directly into the Overlooks plumbing system, and by turning a single valve you could become a oneman fire department. Daddy said that the chemical extinguishers, which sprayed foam or CO2, were much better. The chemicals smothered fires, took away the oxygen they needed to burn, while a highpressure spray might just spread the flames around. Daddy said that Mr. Ullman should replace the oldfashioned hoses right along with the oldfashioned boiler, but Mr. Ullman would probably do neither because he was a CHEAP PRICK. Danny knew that this was one of the worst epithets his father could summon. It was applied to certain doctors, dentists, and appliance repairmen, and also to the head of his English Department at Stovington, who had disallowed some of Daddys book orders because he said the books would put them over budget. Over budget, hell, he had fumed to WendyDanny had been listening from his bedroom where he was supposed to be asleep. Hes just saving the last five hundred bucks for himself, the CHEAP PRICK. Danny looked around the corner. The extinguisher was there, a flat hose folded back a dozen times on itself, the red tank attached to the wall. Above it was an ax in a glass case like a museum exhibit, with white words printed on a red background IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS. Danny could read the word EMERGENCY, which was also the name of one of his favorite TV shows, but was unsure of the rest. But he didnt like the way the word was used in connection with that long flat hose. EMERGENCY was fire, explosions, car crashes, hospitals, sometimes death. And he didnt like the way that hose hung there so blandly on the wall. When he was alone, he always skittered past these extinguishers as fast as he could. No particular reason. It just felt better to go fast. It felt safer. Now, heart thumping loudly in his chest, he came around the corner and looked down the hall past the extinguisher to the stairs. Mommy was down there, sleeping. And if Daddy was back from his walk, he would probably be sitting in the kitchen, eating a sandwich and reading a book. He would just walk right past that old extinguisher and go downstairs. He started toward it, moving closer to the far wall until his right arm was brushing the expensive silk paper. Twenty steps away. Fifteen. A dozen. When he was ten steps away, the brass nozzle suddenly rolled off the fat loop it had been lying (sleeping?) on and fell to the hall carpet with a dull thump. It lay there, the dark bore of its muzzle pointing at Danny. He stopped immediately, his shoulders twitching forward with the suddenness of his scare. His blood thumped thickly in his ears and temples. His mouth had gone dry and sour, his hands curled into fists. Yet the nozzle of the hose only lay there, its brass casing glowing mellowly, a loop of flat canvas leading back up to the redpainted frame bolted to the wall. So it had fallen off, so what? It was only a fire extinguisher, nothing else. It was stupid to think that it looked like some poison snake from Wide World of Animals that had heard him and woken up. Even if the stitched canvas did look a little bit like scales. He would just step over it and go down the hall to the stairs, walking a little bit fast, maybe, to make sure it didnt snap out after him and curl around his foot He wiped his lips with his left hand, in unconscious imitation of his father, and took a step forward. No movement from the hose. Another step. Nothing. There, see how stupid you are? You got all worked up thinking about that dumb room and that dumb Bluebeard story and that hose was probably ready to fall off for the last five years. Thats all. Danny stared at the hose on the floor and thought of wasps. Eight steps away, the nozzle of the hose gleamed peacefully at him from the rug as if to say Dont worry. Im just a hose, thats all. And even if that isnt all, what I do to you wont be much worse than a bee sting. Or a wasp sting. What would I want to do to a nice little boy like you except bite and bite and bite? Danny took another step, and another. His breath was dry and harsh in his throat. Panic was close now. He began to wish the hose would move, then at last he would know, he would be sure. He took another step and now he was within striking distance. But its not going to strike at you, he thought hysterically. How can it strike at you, bite at you, when its just a hose? Maybe its full of wasps. His internal temperature plummeted to ten below zero. He stared at the black bore in the center of the nozzle, nearly hypnotized. Maybe it was full of wasps, secret wasps, their brown bodies bloated with poison, so full of autumn poison that it dripped from their stingers in clear drops of fluid. Suddenly he knew that he was nearly frozen with terror; if he did not make his feet go now, they would become locked to the carpet and he would stay here, staring at the black hole in the center of the brass nozzle like a bird staring at a snake, he would stay here until his daddy found him and then what would happen? With a high moan, he made himself run. As he reached the hose, some trick of the light made the nozzle seem to move, to revolve as if to strike, and he leaped high in the air above it; in his panicky state it seemed that his legs pushed him nearly all the way to the ceiling, that he could feel the stiff back hairs that formed his cowlick brushing the hallways plaster ceiling, although later he knew that couldnt have been so. He came down on the other side of the hose and ran, and suddenly he heard it behind him, coming for him, the soft dry whicker of that brass snakes head as it slithered rapidly along the carpet after him like a rattlesnake moving swiftly through a dry field of grass. It was coming for him, and suddenly the stairs seemed very far away; they seemed to retreat a running step into the distance for each running step he took toward them. Daddy! he tried to scream, but his closed throat would not allow a word to pass. He was on his own. Behind him the sound grew louder, the dry sliding sound of the snake slipping swiftly over the carpets dry hackles. At his heels now, perhaps rising up with clear poison dribbling from its brass snout. Danny reached the stairs and had to pinwheel his arms crazily for balance. For one moment it seemed sure that he would cartwheel over and go headforheels to the bottom. He threw a glance back over his shoulder. The hose had not moved. It lay as it had lain, one loop off the frame, the brass nozzle on the hall floor, the nozzle pointing disinterestedly away from him. You see, stupid? he berated himself. You made it all up, scaredycat. It was all your imagination, scaredycat, scaredycat. He clung to the stairway railing, his legs trembling in reaction. (It never chased you) his mind told him, and seized on that thought, and played it back. (never chased you, never chased you, never did, never did) It was nothing to be afraid of. Why, he could go back and put that hose right into its frame, if he wanted to. He could, but he didnt think he would. Because what if it had chased him and had gone back when it saw that it couldnt quite catch him? The hose lay on the carpet, almost seeming to ask him if he would like to come back and try again. Panting, Danny ran downstairs. CHAPTER TWENTY TALKING TO MR. ULLMAN The Sidewinder Public Library was a small, retiring building one block down from the towns business area. It was a modest, vinecovered building, and the wide concrete walk up to the door was lined with the corpses of last summers flowers. On the lawn was a large bronze statue of a Civil War general Jack had never heard of, although he had been something of a Civil War buff in his teenage years. The newspaper files were kept downstairs. They consisted of the Sidewinder Gazette that had gone bust in 1963, the Estes Park daily, and the Boulder Camera. No Denver papers at all. Sighing, Jack settled for the Camera. When the files reached 1965, the actual newspapers were replaced by spools of microfilm. (A federal grant, the librarian told him brightly. We hope to do 1958 to 64 when the next check comes through, but theyre so slow, arent they? You will be careful, wont you? I just know you will. Call if you need me.) The only reading machine had a lens that had somehow gotten warped, and by the time Wendy put her hand on his shoulder some fortyfive minutes after he had switched from the actual papers, he had a juicy thumper of a headache. Dannys in the park, she said, but I dont want him outside too long. How much longer do you think youll be? Ten minutes, he said. Actually he had traced down the last of the Overlooks fascinating historythe years between the gangland shooting and the takeover by Stuart Ullman Co. But he felt the same reticence about telling Wendy. What are you up to, anyway? she asked. She ruffled his hair as she said it, but her voice was only halfteasing. Looking up some old Overlook history, he said. Any particular reason? No, (and why the hell are you so interested anyway?) just curiosity. Find anything interesting? Not much, he said, having to strive to keep his voice pleasant now. She was prying, just the way she had always pried and poked at him when they had been at Stovington and Danny was still a cribinfant. Where are you going, Jack? When will you be back? How much money do you have with you? Are you going to take the car? Is Al going to be with you? Will one of you stay sober? On and on. She had, pardon the expression, driven him to drink. Maybe that hadnt been the only reason, but by Christ lets tell the truth here and admit it was one of them. Nag and nag and nag until you wanted to clout her one just to shut her up and stop the (Where? When? How? Are you? Will you?) endless flow of questions. It could give you a real (headache? hangover?) headache. The reader. The damned reader with its distorted print. That was why he had such a cunt of a headache. Jack, are you all right? You look pale He snapped his head away from her fingers. I am fine! She recoiled from his hot eyes and tried on a smile that was a size too small. Well if you are Ill just go and wait in the park with Danny She was starting away now, her smile dissolving into a bewildered expression of hurt. He called to her Wendy? She looked back from the foot of the stairs. What, Jack? He got up and went over to her. Im sorry, babe. I guess Im really not all right. That machine the lens is distorted. Ive got a really bad headache. Got any aspirin? Sure. She pawed in her purse and came up with a tin of Anacin. You keep them. He took the tin. No Excedrin? He saw the small recoil on her face and understood. It had been a bitter sort of joke between them at first, before the drinking had gotten too bad for jokes. He had claimed that Excedrin was the only nonprescription drug ever invented that could stop a hangover dead in its tracks. Absolutely the only one. He had begun to think of his morningafter thumpers as Excedrin Headache Number Vat 69. No Excedrin, she said. Sorry. Thats okay, he said, thesell do just fine. But of course they wouldnt, and she should have known it, too. At times she could be the stupidest bitch Want some water? she asked brightly. (No I just want you to GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!) Ill get some at the drinking fountain when I go up. Thanks. Okay. She started up the stairs, good legs moving gracefully under a short tan wool skirt. Well be in the park. Right. He slipped the tin of Anacin absently into his pocket, went back to the reader, and turned it off. When he was sure she was gone, he went upstairs himself. God, but it was a lousy headache. If you were going to have a visegripper like this one, you ought to at least be allowed the pleasure of a few drinks to balance it off. He tried to put the thought from his mind, more ill tempered than ever. He went to the main desk, fingering a matchbook cover with a telephone number on it. Maam, do you have a pay telephone? No, sir, but you can use mine if its local. Its long distance, sorry. Well then, I guess the drugstore would be your best bet. They have a booth. Thanks. He went out and down the walk, past the anonymous Civil War general. He began to walk toward the business block, hands stuffed in his pockets, head thudding like a leaden bell. The sky was also leaden; it was November 7, and with the new month the weather had become threatening. There had been a number of snow flurries. There had been snow in October too, but that had melted. The new flurries had stayed, a light frosting over everythingit sparkled in the sunlight like fine crystal. But there had been no sunlight today, and even as he reached the drugstore it began to spit snow again. The phone booth was at the back of the building, and he was halfway down an aisle of patent medicines, jingling his change in his pocket, when his eyes fell on the white boxes with their green print. He took one of them to the cashier, paid, and went back to the telephone booth. He pulled the door closed, put his change and matchbook cover on the counter, and dialed 0. Your call, please? Fort Lauderdale, Florida, operator. He gave her the number there and the number in the booth. When she told him it would be a dollar ninety for the first three minutes, he dropped eight quarters into the slot, wincing each time the bell bonged in his ear. Then, left in limbo with only the faraway clickings and gabblings of connectionmaking, he took the green bottle of Excedrin out of its box, pried up the white cap, and dropped the wad of cotton batting to the floor of the booth. Cradling the phone receiver between his ear and shoulder, he shook out three of the white tablets and lined them up on the counter beside his remaining change. He recapped the bottle and put it in his pocket. At the other end, the phone was picked up on the first ring. SurfSand Resort, how may we help you? the perky female voice asked. Id like to speak with the manager, please. Do you mean Mr. Trent or I mean Mr. Ullman. I believe Mr. Ullman is busy, but if you would like me to check I would. Tell him its Jack Torrance calling from Colorado. One moment, please. She put him on hold. Jacks dislike for that cheap, selfimportant little prick Ullman came flooding back. He took one of the Excedrin from the coutner, regarded it for a moment, then put it into his mouth and began to chew it, slowly and with relish. The taste flooded back like memory, making his saliva squirt in mingled pleasure and unhappiness. A dry, bitter taste, but a compelling one. He swallowed with a grimace. Chewing aspirin had been a habit with him in his drinking days; he hadnt done it at all since then. But when your headache was bad enough, a hangover headache or one like this one, chewing them seemed to make them get to work quicker. He had read somewhere that chewing aspirin could become addictive. Where had he read that, anyway? Frowning, he tried to think. And then Ullman came on the line. Torrance? Whats the trouble? No trouble, he said. The boilers okay and I havent even gotten around to murdering my wife yet. Im saving that until after the holidays, when things get dull. Very funny. Why are you calling? Im a busy Busy man, yes, I understand that. Im calling about some things that you didnt tell me during your history of the Overlooks great and honorable past. Like how Horace Derwent sold it to a bunch of Las Vegas sharpies who dealt it through so many dummy corporations that not even the IRS knew who really owned it. About how they waited until the time was right and then turned it into a playground for Mafia bigwigs, and about how it had to be shut down in 1966 when one of them got a little bit dead. Along with his bodyguards, who were standing outside the door to the Presidential Suite. Great place, the Overlooks Presidential Suite. Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt, Nixon, and Vito the Chopper, right? There was a moment of surprised silence on the other end of the line, and then Ullman said quietly I dont see how that can have any bearing on your job, Mr. Torrance. It The best part happened after Gienelli was shot, though, dont you think? Two more quick shuffles, now you see it and now you dont, and then the Overlook is suddenly owned by a private citizen, a woman named Sylvia Hunter who just happened to be Sylvia Hunter Derwent from 1942 to 1948. Your three minutes are up, the operator said. Signal when through. My dear Mr. Torrance, all of this is public knowledge and ancient history. It formed no part of my knowledge, Jack said. I doubt if many other people know it, either. Not all of it. They remember the Gienelli shooting, maybe, but I doubt if anybody has put together all the wondrous and strange shuffles the Overlook has been through since 1945. And it always seems like Derwent or a Derwent associate comes up with the door prize. What was Sylvia Hunter running up there in 67 and 68, Mr. Ullman? It was a whorehouse, wasnt it? Torrance! His shock crackled across two thousand miles of telephone cable without losing a thing. Smiling, Jack popped another Excedrin into his mouth and chewed it. She sold out after a rather wellknown U.S. senator died of a heart attack up there. There were rumors that he was found naked except for black nylon stockings and a garter belt and a pair of highheeled pumps. Patentleather pumps, as a matter of fact. Thats a vicious, damnable lie! Ullman cried. Is it? Jack asked. He was beginning to feel better. The headache was draining away. He took the last Excedrin and chewed it up, enjoying the bitter, powdery taste as the tablet shredded in his mouth. It was a very unfortunate occurrence, Ullman said. Now what is the point, Torrance? If youre planning to write some ugly smear article if this is some illconceived, stupid blackmail idea Nothing of the sort, Jack said. I called because I didnt think you played square with me. And because Didnt play square? Ullman cried. |
My God, did you think I was going to share a large pile of dirty laundry with the hotels caretaker? Who in heavens name do you think you are? And how could those old stories possibly affect you anyway? Or do you think there are ghosts parading up and down the halls of the west wing wearing bedsheets and crying Woe!? No, I dont think there are any ghosts. But you raked up a lot of my personal history before you gave me the job. You had me on the carpet, quizzing me about my ability to take care of your hotel like a little boy in front of the teachers desk for peeing in the coatroom. You embarrassed me. I just do not believe your cheek, your bloody damned impertinence, Ullman said. He sounded as if he might be choking. Id like to sack you. And perhaps I will. I think Al Shockley might object. Strenuously. And I think you may have finally overestimated Mr. Shockleys commitment to you, Mr. Torrance. For a moment Jacks headache came back in all its thudding glory, and he closed his eyes against the pain. As if from a distance away he heard himself ask Who owns the Overlook now? Is it still Derwent Enterprises? Or are you too smallfry to know? I think that will do, Mr. Torrance. You are an employee of the hotel, no different from a busboy or a kitchen pot scrubber. I have no intention of Okay, Ill write Al, Jack said. Hell know; after all, hes on the Board of Directors. And I might just add a little P.S. to the effect that Derwent doesnt own it. What? I couldnt quite make that out. I said Derwent doesnt own it. The stockholders are all Easterners. Your friend Mr. Shockley owns the largest block of stock himself, better than thirtyfive percent. You would know better than I if he has any ties to Derwent. Who else? I have no intention of divulging the names of the other stockholders to you, Mr. Torrance. I intend to bring this whole matter to the attention of One other question. I am under no obligation to you. Most of the Overlooks historysavory and unsavory alikeI found in a scrapbook that was in the cellar. Big thing with white leather covers. Gold thread for binding. Do you have any idea whose scrapbook that might be? None at all. Is it possible it could have belonged to Grady? The caretaker who killed himself? Mr. Torrance, Ullman said in tones of deepest frost, I am by no means sure that Mr. Grady could read, let alone dig out the rotten apples you have been wasting my time with. Im thinking of writing a book about the Overlook Hotel. I thought if I actually got through it, the owner of the scrapbook would like to have an acknowledgment at the front. I think writing a book about the Overlook would be very unwise, Ullman said. Especially a book done from your uh, point of view. Your opinion doesnt surprise me. His headache was all gone now. There had been that one flash of pain, and that was all. His mind felt sharp and accurate, all the way down to millimeters. It was the way he usually felt only when the writing was going extremely well or when he had a threedrink buzz on. That was another thing he had forgotten about Excedrin; he didnt know if it worked for others, but for him crunching three tablets was like an instant high. Now he said What youd like is some sort of commissioned guidebook that you could hand out free to the guests when they checked in. Something with a lot of glossy photos of the mountains at sunrise and sunset and a lemonmeringue text to go with it. Also a section on the colorful people who have stayed there, of course excluding the really colorful ones like Gienelli and his friends. If I felt I could fire you and be a hundred percent certain of my own job instead of just ninetyfive percent, Ullman said in clipped, strangled tones, I would fire you right this minute, over the telephone. But since I feel that five percent of uncertainty, I intend to call Mr. Shockley the moment youre off the line which will be soon, or so I devoutly hope. Jack said, There isnt going to be anything in the book that isnt true, you know. Theres no need to dress it up. (Why are you baiting him? Do you want to be fired?) I dont care if Chapter Five is about the Pope of Rome screwing the shade of the Virgin Mary, Ullman said, his voice rising. I want you out of my hotel! Its not your hotel! Jack screamed, and slammed the receiver into its cradle. He sat on the stool breathing hard, a little scared now, (a little? hell, a lot) wondering why in the name of God he had called Ullman in the first place. (You lost your temper again, Jack.) Yes. Yes, he had. No sense trying to deny it. And the hell of it was, he had no idea how much influence that cheap little prick had over Al, no more than he knew how much bullshit Al would take from him in the name of auld lang syne. If Ullman was as good as he claimed to be, and if he gave Al a hegoesorIgo ultimatum, might not Al be forced to take it? He closed his eyes and tried to imagine telling Wendy. Guess what, babe? I lost another job. This time I had to go through two thousand miles of Bell Telephone cable to find someone to punch out, but I managed it. He opened his eyes and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. He wanted a drink. Hell, he needed one. There was a caf just down the street, surely he had time for a quick beer on his way up to the park, just one to lay the dust He clenched his hands together helplessly. The question recurred Why had he called Ullman in the first place? The number of the SurfSand in Lauderdale had been written in a small notebook by the phone and the CB radio in the officeplumbers numbers, carpenters, glaziers, electricians, others. Jack had copied it onto the matchbook cover shortly after getting out of bed, the idea of calling Ullman fullblown and gleeful in his mind. But to what purpose? Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a fullblown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family. Could it be true? Was he afraid somewhere inside that the Overlook might be just what he needed to finish his play and generally collect up his shit and get it together? Was he blowing the whistle on himself? Please God no, dont let it be that way. Please. He closed his eyes and an image immediately arose on the darkened screen of his inner lids sticking his hand through that hole in the shingles to pull out the rotted flashing, the sudden needling sting, his own agonized, startled cry in the still and unheeding air Oh you goddam fucking son of a bitch Replaced with an image two years earlier, himself stumbling into the house at three in the morning, drunk, falling over a table and sprawling fulllength on the floor, cursing, waking Wendy up on the couch. Wendy turning on the light, seeing his clothes ripped and smeared from some cloudy parkinglot scuffle that had occurred at a vaguely remembered honkytonk just over the New Hampshire border hours before, crusted blood under his nose, now looking up at his wife, blinking stupidly in the light like a mole in the sunshine, and Wendy saying dully, You son of a bitch, you woke Danny up. If you dont care about yourself, cant you care a little bit about us? Oh, why do I even bother talking to you? The telephone rang, making him jump. He snatched it off the cradle, illogically sure it must be either Ullman or Al Shockley. What? he barked. Your overtime, sir. Three dollars and fifty cents. Ill have to break some ones, he said. Wait a minute. He put the phone on the shelf, deposited his last six quarters, then went out to the cashier to get more. He performed the transaction automatically, his mind running in a single closed circle like a squirrel on an exercise wheel. Why had he called Ullman? Because Ullman had embarrassed him? He had been embarrassed before, and by real mastersthe Grand Master, of course, being himself. Simply to crow at the man, expose his hypocrisy? Jack didnt think he was that petty. His mind tried to seize on the scrapbook as a valid reason, but that wouldnt hold water either. The chances of Ullman knowing who the owner was were no more than two in a thousand. At the interview, he had treated the cellar as another countrya nasty underdeveloped one at that. If he had really wanted to know, he would have called Watson, whose winter number was also in the office notebook. Even Watson would not have been a sure thing, but surer than Ullman. And telling him about the book idea, that had been another stupid thing. Incredibly stupid. Besides jeopardizing his job, he could be closing off wide channels of information once Ullman called around and told people to beware of New Englanders bearing questions about the Overlook Hotel. He could have done his researches quietly, mailing off polite letters, perhaps even arranging some interviews in the spring and then laughed up his sleeve at Ullmans rage when the book came out and he was safely awayThe Masked Author Strikes Again. Instead he had made that damned senseless call, lost his temper, antagonized Ullman, and brought out all of the hotel managers little Caesar tendencies. Why? If it wasnt an effort to get himself thrown out of the good job Al had snagged for him, then what was it? He deposited the rest of the money in the slots and hung up the phone. It really was the senseless kind of thing he might have done if he had been drunk. But he had been sober; dead cold sober. Walking out of the drugstore he crunched another Excedrin into his mouth, grimacing yet relishing the bitter taste. On the walk outside he met Wendy and Danny. Hey, we were just coming after you, Wendy said. Snowing, dont you know. Jack blinked up. So it is. It was snowing hard. Sidewinders Main Street was already heavily powdered, the center line obscured. Danny had his head tilted up to the white sky, his mouth open and his tongue out to catch some of the fat flakes drifting down. Do you think this is it? Wendy asked. Jack shrugged. I dont know. I was hoping for another week or two of grace. We still might get it. Grace, that was it. (Im sorry, Al. Grace, your mercy. For your mercy. One more chance. I am heartily sorry) How many times, over how many years, had hea grown manasked for the mercy of another chance? He was suddenly so sick of himself, so revolted, that he could have groaned aloud. Hows your headache? she asked, studying him closely. He put an arm around her and hugged her tight. Better. Come on, you two, lets go home while we still can. They walked back to where the hotel truck was slantparked against the curb, Jack in the middle, his left arm around Wendys shoulders, his right hand holding Dannys hand. He had called it home for the first time, for better or worse. As he got behind the trucks wheel it occurred to him that while he was fascinated by the Overlook, he didnt much like it. He wasnt sure it was good for either his wife or his son or himself. Maybe that was why he had called Ullman. To be fired while there was still time. He backed the truck out of its parking space and headed them out of town and up into the mountains. CHAPTER TWENTYONE NIGHT THOUGHTS It was ten oclock. Their quarters were filled with counterfeit sleep. Jack lay on his side facing the wall, eyes open, listening to Wendys slow and regular breathing. The taste of dissolved aspirin was still on his tongue, making it feel rough and slightly numb. Al Shockley had called at quarter of six, quarter of eight back East. Wendy had been downstairs with Danny, sitting in front of the lobby fireplace and reading. Person to person, the operator said, for Mr. Jack Torrance. Speaking. He had switched the phone to his right hand, had dug his handkerchief out of his back pocket with his left, and had wiped his tender lips with it. Then he lit a cigarette. Als voice then, strong in his ear Jackyboy, what in the name of God are you up to? Hi, Al. He snuffed the cigarette and groped for the Excedrin bottle. Whats going on, Jack? I got this weird phone call from Stuart Ullman this afternoon. And when Stu Ullman calls long distance out of his own pocket, you know the shit has hit the fan. Ullman has nothing to worry about, Al. Neither do you. What exactly is the nothing we dont have to worry about? Stu made it sound like a cross between blackmail and a National Enquirer feature on the Overlook. Talk to me, boy. I wanted to poke him a little, Jack said. When I came up here to be interviewed, he had to drag out all my dirty laundry. Drinking problem. Lost your last job for racking over a student. Wonder if youre the right man for this. Et cetera. The thing that bugged me was that he was bringing all this up because he loved the goddam hotel so much. The beautiful Overlook. The traditional Overlook. The bloody sacred Overlook. Well, I found a scrapbook in the basement. Somebody had put together all the less savory aspects of Ullmans cathedral, and it looked to me like a little black mass had been going on after hours. I hope thats metaphorical, Jack. Als voice sounded frighteningly cold. It is. But I did find out I know the hotels history. Jack ran a hand through his hair. So I called him up and poked him with it. I admit it wasnt very bright, and I sure wouldnt do it again. End of story. Stu says youre planning to do a little dirtylaundryairing yourself. Stu is an asshole! he barked into the phone. I told him I had an idea of writing about the Overlook, yes. I do. I think this place forms an index of the whole postWorld War II American character. That sounds like an inflated claim, stated so baldly I know it does but its all here, Al! My God, it could be a great book. But its far in the future, I can promise you that, Ive got more on my plate right now than I can eat, and Jack, thats not good enough. He found himself gaping at the black receiver of the phone, unable to believe what he had surely heard. What? Al, did you say I said what I said. How long is far in the future, Jack? For you it may be two years, maybe five. For me its thirty or forty, because I expect to be associated with the Overlook for a long time. The thought of you doing some sort of a scumjob on my hotel and passing it off as a great piece of American writing, that makes me sick. Jack was speechless. I tried to help you, Jackyboy. We went through the war together, and I thought I owed you some help. You remember the war? I remember it, he muttered, but the coals of resentment had begun to glow around his heart. First Ullman, then Wendy, now Al. What was this? National Lets Pick Jack Torrance Apart Week? He clamped his lips more tightly together, reached for his cigarettes, and knocked them off onto the floor. Had he ever liked this cheap prick talking to him from his mahoganylined den in Vermont? Had he really? Before you hit that Hatfield kid, Al was saying, I had talked the Board out of letting you go and even had them swung around to considering tenure. You blew that one for yourself. I got you this hotel thing, a nice quiet place for you to get yourself together, finish your play, and wait it out until Harry Effinger and I could convince the rest of those guys that they made a big mistake. Now it looks like you want to chew my arm off on your way to a bigger killing. Is that the way you say thanks to your friends, Jack? No, he whispered. He didnt dare say more. His head was throbbing with the hot, acidetched words that wanted to get out. He tried desperately to think of Danny and Wendy, depending on him, Danny and Wendy sitting peacefully downstairs in front of the fire and working on the first of the secondgrade reading primers, thinking everything was AOK. If he lost this job, what then? Off to California in that tired old VW with the distintegrating fuel pump like a family of dustbowl Okies? He told himself he would get down on his knees and beg Al before he let that happen, but still the words struggled to pour out, and the hand holding the hot wires of his rage felt greased. What? Al said sharply. No, he said. That is not the way I treat my friends. And you know it. How do I know it? At the worst, youre planning to smear my hotel by digging up bodies that were decently buried years ago. At the best, you call up my temperamental but extremely competent hotel manager and work him into a frenzy as part of some some stupid kids game. It was more than a game, Al. Its easier for you. You dont have to take some rich friends charity. You dont need a friend in court because you are the court. The fact that you were one step from a brownbag lush goes pretty much unmentioned, doesnt it? I suppose it does, Al said. His voice had dropped a notch and he sounded tired of the whole thing. But Jack, Jack I cant help that. I cant change that. I know, Jack said emptily. Am I fired? I guess you better tell me if I am. Not if youll do two things for me. All right. Hadnt you better hear the conditions before you accept them? No. Give me your deal and Ill take it. Theres Wendy and Danny to think about. If you want my balls, Ill send them airmail. Are you sure selfpity is a luxury you can afford, Jack? He had closed his eyes and slid an Excedrin between his dry lips. At this point I feel its the only one I can afford. Fire away no pun intended. Al was silent for a moment. Then he said First, no more calls to Ullman. Not even if the place burns down. If that happens, call the maintenance man, that guy who swears all the time, you know who I mean Watson. Yes. Okay. Done. Second, you promise me, Jack. Word of honor. No book about a famous Colorado mountain hotel with a history. For a moment his rage was so great that he literally could not speak. The blood beat loudly in his ears. It was like getting a call from some twentiethcentury Medici prince no portraits of my family with their warts showing, please, or back to the rabble youll go. I subsidize no pictures but pretty pictures. When you paint the daughter of my good friend and business partner, please omit birthmark or back to the rabble youll go. Of course were friends we are both civilized men, arent we? Weve shared bed and board and bottle. Well always be friends, and the dog collar I have on you will always be ignored by mutual consent, and Ill take good and benevolent care of you. All I ask in return is your soul. Small item. We can even ignore the fact that youve handed it over, the way we ignore the dog collar. Remember, my talented friend, there are Michelangelos begging everywhere in the streets of Rome Jack? You there? He made a strangled noise that was intended to be the word yes. Als voice was firm and very sure of itself. I really dont think Im asking so much, Jack. And there will be other books. You just cant expect me to subsidize you while you All right, agreed. I dont want you to think Im trying to control your artistic life, Jack. You know me better than that. Its just that Al? What? Is Derwent still involved with the Overlook? Somehow? I dont see how that can possibly be any concern of yours, Jack. No, he said distantly. I suppose it isnt. Listen, Al, I think I hear Wendy calling me for something. Ill get back to you. Sure thing, Jackyboy. Well have a good talk. How are things? Dry? (YOUVE GOT YOUR POUND OF FLESH BLOOD AND ALL NOW CANT YOU LEAVE ME ALONE?) As a bone. Here too. Im actually beginning to enjoy sobriety. If Ill get back, Al. Wendy Sure. Okay. And so he had hung up and that was when the cramps had come, hitting him like lightning bolts, making him curl up in front of the telephone like a penitent, hands over his belly, head throbbing like a monstrous bladder. The moving wasp, having stung, moves on It had passed a little when Wendy came upstairs and asked him who had been on the phone. Al, he said. He called to ask how things were going. I said they were fine. Jack, you look terrible. Are you sick? Headaches back. Im going to bed early. No sense trying to write. Can I get you some warm milk? He smiled wanly. That would be nice. And now he lay beside her, feeling her warm and sleeping thigh against his own. Thinking of the conversation with Al, how he had groveled, still made him hot and cold by turns. Someday there would be a reckoning. Someday there would be a book, not the soft and thoughtful thing he had first considered, but a gemhard work of research, photo section and all, and he would pull apart the entire Overlook history, nasty, incestuous ownership deals and all. He would spread it all out for the reader like a dissected crayfish. And if Al Shockley had connections with the Derwent empire, then God help him. Strung up like piano wire, he lay staring into the dark, knowing it might be hours yet before he could sleep. Wendy Torrance lay on her back, eyes closed, listening to the sound of her husbands slumberthe long inhale, the brief hold, the slightly guttural exhale. Where did he go when he slept, she wondered. To some amusement park, a Great Barrington of dreams where all the riders were free and there was no wife mother along to tell them theyd had enough hot dogs or that theyd better be going if they wanted to get home by dark? Or was it some fathomsdeep bar where the drinking never stopped and the batwings were always propped open and all the old companions were gathered around the electronic hockey game, glasses in hand, Al Shockley prominent among them with his tie loosened and the top button of his shirt undone? A place where both she and Danny were excluded and the boogie went on endlessly? Wendy was worried about him, the old, helpless worry that she had hoped was behind her forever in Vermont, as if worry could somehow not cross state lines. She didnt like what the Overlook seemed to be doing to Jack and Danny. The most frightening thing, vaporous and unmentioned, perhaps unmentionable, was that all of Jacks drinking symptoms had come back, one by one all but the drink itself. The constant wiping of the lips with hand or handkerchief, as if to rid them of excess moisture. Long pauses at the typewriter, more balls of paper in the wastebasket. There had been a bottle of Excedrin on the telephone table tonight after Al had called him, but no water glass. He had been chewing them again. He got irritated over little things. He would unconsciously start snapping his fingers in a nervous rhythm when things got too quiet. Increased profanity. She had begun to worry about his temper, too. It would almost come as a relief if he would lose it, blow off steam, in much the same way that he went down to the basement first thing in the morning and last thing at night to dump the press on the boiler. It would almost be good to see him curse and kick a chair across the room or slam a door. But those things, always an integral part of his temperament, had almost wholly ceased. Yet she had the feeling that Jack was more and more often angry with her or Danny, but was refusing to let it out. The boiler had a pressure gauge old, cracked, clotted with grease, but still workable, Jack had none. She had never been able to read him very well. Danny could, but Danny wasnt talking. And the call from Al. At about the same time it had come, Danny had lost all interest in the story they had been reading. He left her to sit by the fire and crossed to the main desk where Jack had constructed a roadway for his Matchbox cars and trucks. The Violent Violet Volkswagen was there and Danny had begun to push it rapidly back and forth. Pretending to read her own book but actually looking at Danny over the top of it, she had seen an odd amalgam of the ways she and Jack expressed anxiety. The wiping of the lips. Running both hands nervously through his hair, as she had done while waiting for Jack to come home from his round of the bars. She couldnt believe Al had called just to ask how things were going. If you wanted to shoot the bull, you called Al. When Al called you, that was business. Later, when she had come back downstairs, she had found Danny curled up by the fire again, reading the secondgradeprimer adventures of Joe and Rachel at the circus with their daddy in complete, absorbed attention. The fidgety distraction had completely disappeared. Watching him, she had been struck again by the eerie certainty that Danny knew more and understood more than there was room for in Dr. (Just call me Bill) Edmondss philosophy. Hey, time for bed, doc, shed said. Yeah, okay. He marked his place in the book and stood up. Wash up and brush your teeth. Okay. Dont forget to use the floss. I wont. They stood side by side for a moment, watching the wax and wane of the coals of the fire. Most of the lobby was chilly and drafty, but this circle around the fireplace was magically warm, and hard to leave. It was Uncle Al on the phone, she said casually. Oh yeah? Totally unsurprised. I wonder if Uncle Al was mad at Daddy, she said, still casually. Yeah, he sure was, Danny said, still watching the fire. He didnt want Daddy to write the book. What book, Danny? About the hotel. The question framed on her lips was one she and Jack had asked Danny a thousand times How do you know that? she hadnt asked him. She didnt want to upset him before bed, or make him aware that they were casually discussing his knowledge of things he had no way of knowing at all. And he did know, she was convinced of that. Dr. Edmondss patter about inductive reasoning and subconscious logic was just that patter. Her sister how had Danny known she was thinking about Aileen in the waiting room that day? And (I dreamed Daddy had an accident.) She shook her head, as if to clear it. Go wash up, doc. Okay. He ran up the stairs toward their quarters. Frowning, she had gone into the kitchen to warm Jacks milk in a saucepan. And now, lying wakeful in her bed and listening to her husbands breathing and the wind outside (miraculously, theyd had only another flurry that afternoon; still no heavy snow), she let her mind turn fully to her lovely, troubling son, born with a caul over his face, a simple tissue of membrane that doctors saw perhaps once in every seven hundred births, a tissue that the old wives tales said betokened the second sight. She decided that it was time to talk to Danny about the Overlook and high time she tried to get Danny to talk to her. Tomorrow. For sure. The two of them would be going down to the Sidewinder Public Library to see if they could get him some secondgradelevel books on an extended loan through the winter, and she would talk to him. And frankly. With that thought she felt a little easier, and at last began to drift toward sleep. Danny lay awake in his bedroom, eyes open, left arm encircling his aged and slightly worseforwear Pooh (Pooh had lost one shoebutton eye and was oozing stuffing from half a dozen sprung seams), listening to his parents sleep in their bedroom. He felt as if he were standing unwilling guard over them. The nights were the worst of all. He hated the nights and the constant howl of the wind around the west side of the hotel. His glider floated overhead from a string. On his bureau the VW model, brought up from the roadway setup downstairs, glowed a dimly fluorescent purple. His books were in the bookcase, his coloring books on the desk. A place for everything and everything in its place, Mommy said. Then you know where it is when you want it. But now things had been misplaced. Things were missing. Worse still, things had been added, things you couldnt quite see, like in one of those pictures that said CAN YOU SEE THE INDIANS? And if you strained and squinted, you could see some of themthe thing you had taken for a cactus at first glance was really a brave with a knife clamped in his teeth, and there were others hiding in the rocks, and you could even see one of their evil, merciless faces peering through the spokes of a covered wagon wheel. But you could never see all of them, and that was what made you uneasy. Because it was the ones you couldnt see that would sneak up behind you, a tomahawk in one hand and a scalping knife in the other He shifted uneasily in his bed, his eyes searching out the comforting glow of the night light. Things were worse here. He knew that much for sure. At first they hadnt been so bad, but little by little his daddy thought about drinking a lot more. Sometimes he was angry at Mommy and didnt know why. He went around wiping his lips with his handkerchief and his eyes were far away and cloudy. Mommy was worried about him and Danny, too. He didnt have to shine into her to know that; it had been in the anxious way she had questioned him on the day the fire hose had seemed to turn into a snake. Mr. Hallorann said he thought all mothers could shine a little bit, and she had known on that day that something had happened. But not what. He had almost told her, but a couple of things had held him back. He knew that the doctor in Sidewinder had dismissed Tony and the things that Tony showed him as perfectly (well almost) normal. His mother might not believe him if he told her about the hose. Worse, she might believe him in the wrong way, might think he was LOSING HIS MARBLES. He understood a little about LOSING YOUR MARBLES, not as much as he did about GETTING A BABY, which his mommy had explained to him the year before at some length, but enough. Once, at nursery school, his friend Scott had pointed out a boy named Robin Stenger, who was moping around the swings with a face almost long enough to step on. Robins father taught arithmetic at Daddys school, and Scotts daddy taught history there. Most of the kids at the nursery school were associated either with Stovington Prep or with the small IBM plant just outside of town. The prep kids chummed in one group, the IBM kids in another. There were crossfriendships, of course, but it was natural enough for the kids whose fathers knew each other to more or less stick together. When there was an adult scandal in one group, it almost always filtered down to the children in some wildly mutated form or other, but it rarely jumped to the other group. He and Scotty were sitting in the play rocketship when Scotty jerked his thumb at Robin and said You know that kid? Yeah, Danny said. Scott leaned forward. His dad LOST HIS MARBLES last night. They took him away. Yeah? Just for losing some marbles? Scotty looked disgusted. He went crazy. You know. Scott crossed his eyes, flopped out his tongue, and twirled his index fingers in large elliptical orbits around his ears. They took him to THE BUGHOUSE. Wow, Danny said. When will they let him come back? Nevernevernever, Scotty said darkly. In the course of that day and the next, Danny heard that a.) Mr. Stenger had tried to kill everybody in his family, including Robin, with his World War II souvenir pistol; b.) Mr. Stenger ripped the house to pieces while he was STINKO; c.) Mr. Stenger had been discovered eating a bowl of dead bugs and grass like they were cereal and milk and crying while he did it; d.) Mr. Stenger had tried to strangle his wife with a stocking when the Red Sox lost a big ball game. Finally, too troubled to keep it to himself, he had asked Daddy about Mr. Stenger. His daddy had taken him on his lap and had explained that Mr. Stenger had been under a great deal of strain, some of it about his family and some about his job and some of it about things that nobody but doctors could understand. He had been having crying fits, and three nights ago he had gotten crying and couldnt stop it and had broken a lot of things in the Stenger home. It wasnt LOSING YOUR MARBLES, Daddy said, it was HAVING A BREAKDOWN, and Mr. Stenger wasnt in a BUGHOUSE but in a SANNYTARIUM. But despite Daddys careful explanations, Danny was scared. There didnt seem to be any difference at all between LOSING YOUR MARBLES and HAVING A BREAKDOWN, and whether you called it a BUGHOUSE or a SANNYTARIUM, there were still bars on the windows and they wouldnt let you out if you wanted to go. |
And his father, quite innocently, had confirmed another of Scottys phrases unchanged, one that filled Danny with a vague and unformed dread. In the place where Mr. Stenger now lived, there were THE MEN IN THE WHITE COATS. They came to get you in a truck with no windows, a truck that was gravestone gray. It rolled up to the curb in front of your house and THE MEN IN THE WHITE COATS got out and took you away from your family and made you live in a room with soft walls. And if you wanted to write home, you had to do it with Crayolas. When will they let him come back? Danny asked his father. Just as soon as hes better, doc. But when will that be? Danny had persisted. Dan, Jack said, NO ONE KNOWS. And that was the worst of all. It was another way of saying nevernevernever. A month later, Robins mother took him out of nursery school and they moved away from Stovington without Mr. Stenger. That had been over a year ago, after Daddy stopped taking the Bad Stuff but before he had lost his job. Danny still thought about it often. Sometimes when he fell down or bumped his head or had a bellyache, he would begin to cry and the memory would flash over him, accompanied by the fear that he would not be able to stop crying, that he would just go on and on, weeping and wailing, until his daddy went to the phone, dialed it, and said Hello? This is Jack Torrance at 149 Mapleline Way. My son here cant stop crying. Please send THE MEN IN THE WHITE COATS to take him to the SANNYTARIUM. Thats right, hes LOST HIS MARBLES. Thank you. And the gray truck with no windows would come rolling up to his door, they would load him in, still weeping hysterically, and take him away. When would he see his mommy and daddy again? NO ONE KNOWS. It was this fear that had kept him silent. A year older, he was quite sure that his daddy and mommy wouldnt let him be taken away for thinking a fire hose was a snake, his rational mind was sure of that, but still, when he thought of telling them, that old memory rose up like a stone filling his mouth and blocking words. It wasnt like Tony; Tony had always seemed perfectly natural (until the bad dreams, of course), and his parents had also seemed to accept Tony as a more or less natural phenomenon. Things like Tony came from being BRIGHT, which they both assumed he was (the same way they assumed they were BRIGHT), but a fire hose that turned into a snake, or seeing blood and brains on the wall of the Presidential Sweet when no one else could, those things would not be natural. They had already taken him to see a regular doctor. Was it not reasonable to assume that THE MEN IN THE WHITE COATS might come next? Still he might have told them except he was sure, sooner or later, that they would want to take him away from the hotel. And he wanted desperately to get away from the Overlook. But he also knew that this was his daddys last chance, that he was here at the Overlook to do more than take care of the place. He was here to work on his papers. To get over losing his job. To love MommyWendy. And until very recently, it had seemed that all those things were happening. It was only lately that Daddy had begun to have trouble. Since he found those papers. (This inhuman place makes human monsters.) What did that mean? He had prayed to God, but God hadnt told him. And what would Daddy do if he stopped working here? He had tried to find out from Daddys mind, and had become more and more convinced that Daddy didnt know. The strongest proof had come earlier this evening when Uncle Al had called his daddy up on the phone and said mean things and Daddy didnt dare say anything back because Uncle Al could fire him from this job just the way that Mr. Crommert, the Stovington headmaster, and the Board of Directors had fired him from his schoolteaching job. And Daddy was scared to death of that, for him and Mommy as well as himself. So he didnt dare say anything. He could only watch helplessly and hope that there really werent any Indians at all, or if there were that they would be content to wait for bigger game and let their little threewagon train pass unmolested. But he couldnt believe it, no matter how hard he tried. Things were worse at the Overlook now. The snow was coming, and when it did, any poor options he had would be abrogated. And after the snow, what? What then, when they were shut in and at the mercy of whatever might have only been toying with them before? (Come out here and take your medicine!) What then? REDRUM. He shivered in his bed and turned over again. He could read more now. Tomorrow maybe he would try to call Tony, he would try to make Tony show him exactly what REDRUM was and if there was any way he could prevent it. He would risk the nightmares. He had to know. Danny was still awake long after his parents false sleep had become the real thing. He rolled in his bed, twisting the sheets, grappling with a problem years too big for him, awake in the night like a single sentinel on picket. And sometime after midnight, he slept, too, and then only the wind was awake, prying at the hotel and hooting in its gables under the bright gimlet gaze of the stars. CHAPTER TWENTYTWO IN THE TRUCK I see a bad moon arising. I see trouble on the way. I see earthquakes and lightnin. I see bad times today. Dont go round tonight, Its bound to take your life, Theres a bad moon on the rise. Someone had added a very old Buick car radio under the hotel trucks dashboard, and now, tinny and choked with static, the distinctive sound of John Fogertys Creedence Clearwater Revival band came out of the speaker. Wendy and Danny were on their way down to Sidewinder. The day was clear and bright. Danny was turning Jacks orange library card over and over in his hands and seemed cheerful enough, but Wendy thought he looked drawn and tired, as if he hadnt been sleeping enough and was going on nervous energy alone. The song ended and the disc jockey came on. Yeah, thats Creedence. And speakin of bad moon, it looks like it may be risin over the KMTX listening area before long, hard as it is to believe with the beautiful, springlike weather weve enjoyed for the last couplethree days. The KMTX Fearless Forecaster says high pressure will give way by one oclock this afternoon to a widespread lowpressure area which is just gonna grind to a stop in our KMTX area, up where the air is rare. Temperatures will fall rapidly, and precipitation should start around dusk. Elevations under seven thousand feet, including the metroDenver area, can expect a mixture of sleet and snow, perhaps freezing on some roads, and nothin but snow up here, cuz. Were lookin at one to three inches below seven thousand and possible accumulations of six to ten inches in Central Colorado and on the Slope. The Highway Advisory Board says that if youre plannin to tour the mountains in your car this afternoon or tonight, you should remember that the chain law will be in effect. And dont go nowhere unless you have to. Remember, the announcer added jocularly, thats how the Donners got into trouble. They just werent as close to the nearest SevenEleven as they thought. A Clairol commercial came on, and Wendy reached down and snapped the radio off. You mind? Huhuh, thats okay. He glanced out at the sky, which was bright blue. Guess Daddy picked just the right day to trim those hedge animals, didnt he? I guess he did, Wendy said. Sure doesnt look much like snow, though, Danny added hopefully. Getting cold feet? Wendy asked. She was still thinking about that crack the disc jockey had made about the Donner Party. Nah, I guess not. Well, she thought, this is the time. If youre going to bring it up, do it now or forever hold your peace. Danny, she said, making her voice as casual as possible, would you be happier if we went away from the Overlook? If we didnt stay the winter? Danny looked down at his hands. I guess so, he said. Yeah. But its Daddys job. Sometimes, she said carefully, I get the idea that Daddy might be happier away from the Overlook, too. They passed a sign which read SIDEWINDER 18 MI. and then she took the truck cautiously around a hairpin and shifted up into second. She took no chances on these downgrades; they scared her silly. Do you really think so? Danny asked. He looked at her with interest for a moment and then shook his head. No, I dont think so. Why not? Because hes worried about us, Danny said, choosing his words carefully. It was hard to explain, he understood so little of it himself. He found himself harking back to an incident he had told Mr. Hallorann about, the big kid looking at department store TV sets and wanting to steal one. That had been distressing, but at least it had been clear what was going on, even to Danny, then little more than an infant. But grownups were always in a turmoil, every possible action muddied over by thoughts of the consequences, by selfdoubt, by selfimage, by feelings of love and responsibility. Every possible choice seemed to have drawbacks, and sometimes he didnt understand why the drawbacks were drawbacks. It was very hard. He thinks Danny began again, and then looked at his mother quickly. She was watching the road, not looking at him, and he felt he could go on. He thinks maybe well be lonely. And then he thinks that he likes it here and its a good place for us. He loves us and doesnt want us to be lonely or sad but he thinks even if we are, it might be okay in the LONGRUN. Do you know LONGRUN? She nodded. Yes, dear. I do. Hes worried that if we left he couldnt get another job. That wed have to beg, or something. Is that all? No, but the rest is all mixed up. Because hes different now. Yes, she said, almost sighing. The grade eased a little and she shifted cautiously back to third gear. Im not making this up, Mommy. Honest to God. I know that, she said, and smiled. Did Tony tell you? No, he said. I just know. That doctor didnt believe in Tony, did he? Never mind that doctor, she said. I believe in Tony. I dont know what he is or who he is, if hes a part of you thats special or if he comes from somewhere outside, but I do believe in him, Danny. And if you he think we should go, we will. The two of us will go and be together with Daddy again in the spring. He looked at her with sharp hope. Where? A motel? Hon, we couldnt afford a motel. It would have to be at my mothers. The hope in Dannys face died out. I know he said, and stopped. What? Nothing, he muttered. She shifted back to second as the grade steepened again. No, doc, please dont say that. This talk is something we should have had weeks ago, I think. So please. What is it you know? I wont be mad. I cant be mad, because this is too important. Talk straight to me. I know how you feel about her, Danny said, and sighed. How do I feel? Bad, Danny said, and then rhyming, singsong, frightening her Bad. Sad. Mad. Its like she wasnt your mommy at all. Like she wanted to eat you. He looked at her, frightened. And I dont like it there. Shes always thinking about how she would be better for me than you. And how she could get me away from you. Mommy, I dont want to go there. Id rather be at the Overlook than there. Wendy was shaken. Was it that bad between her and her mother? God, what hell for the boy if it was and he could really read their thoughts for each other. She suddenly felt more naked than naked, as if she had been caught in an obscene act. All right, she said. All right, Danny. Youre mad at me, he said in a small, neartotears voice. No, Im not. Really Im not. Im just sort of shook up. They were passing a SIDEWINDER 15 MI. sign, and Wendy relaxed a little. From here on in the road was better. I want to ask you one more question, Danny. I want you to answer it as truthfully as you can. Will you do that? Yes, Mommy, he said, almost whispering. Has your daddy been drinking again? No, he said, and smothered the two words that rose behind his lips after that simple negative Not yet. Wendy relaxed a little more. She put a hand on Dannys jeansclad leg and squeezed it. Your daddy has tried very hard, she said softly. Because he loves us. And we love him, dont we? He nodded gravely. Speaking almost to herself she went on Hes not a perfect man, but he has tried Danny, hes tried to hard! When he stopped he went through a kind of hell. Hes still going through it. I think if it hadnt been for us, he would have just let go. I want to do whats right. And I dont know. Should we go? Stay? Its like a choice between the fat and the fire. I know. Would you do something for me, doc? What? Try to make Tony come. Right now. Ask him if were safe at the Overlook. I already tried, Danny said slowly. This morning. What happened? Wendy asked. What did he say? He didnt come, Danny said. Tony didnt come. And he suddenly burst into tears. Danny, she said, alarmed. Honey, dont do that. Please The truck swerved across the double yellow line and she pulled it back, scared. Dont take me to Grammas, Danny said through his tears. Please, Mommy, I dont want to go there, I want to stay with Daddy All right, she said softly. All right, thats what well do. She took a Kleenex out of the pocket of her Westernstyle shirt and handed it to him. Well stay. And everything will be fine. Just fine. CHAPTER TWENTYTHREE IN THE PLAYGROUND Jack came out onto the porch, tugging the tab of his zipper up under his chin, blinking into the bright air. In his left hand he was holding a batterypowered hedgeclipper. He tugged a fresh handkerchief out of his back pocket with his right hand, swiped his lips with it, and tucked it away. Snow, they had said on the radio. It was hard to believe, even though he could see the clouds building up on the far horizon. He started down the path to the topiary, switching the hedgeclipper over to the other hand. It wouldnt be a long job, he thought; a little touchup would do it. The cold nights had surely stunted their growth. The rabbits ears looked a little fuzzy, and two of the dogs legs had grown fuzzy green bonespurs, but the lions and the buffalo looked fine. Just a little haircut would do the trick, and then let the snow come. The concrete path ended as abruptly as a diving board. He stepped off it and walked past the drained pool to the gravel path which wound through the hedge sculptures and into the playground itself. He walked over to the rabbit and pushed the button on the handle of the clippers. It hummed into quiet life. Hi, Brer Rabbit, Jack said. How are you today? A little off the top and get some of the extra off your ears? Fine. Say, did you hear the one about the traveling salesman and the old lady with a pet poodle? His voice sounded unnatural and stupid in his ears, and he stopped. It occurred to him that he didnt care much for these hedge animals. It had always seemed slightly perverted to him to clip and torture a plain old hedge into something that it wasnt. Along one of the highways in Vermont there had been a hedge billboard on a high slope overlooking the road, advertising some kind of ice cream. Making nature peddle ice cream, that was just wrong. It was grotesque. (You werent hired to philosophize, Torrance.) Ah, that was true. So true. He clipped along the rabbits ears, brushing a small litter of sticks and twigs off onto the grass. The hedgeclipper hummed in that low and rather disgustingly metallic way that all batterypowered appliances seem to have. The sun was brilliant but it held no warmth, and now it wasnt so hard to believe that snow was coming. Working quickly, knowing that to stop and think when you were at this kind of a task usually meant making a mistake, Jack touched up the rabbits face (up this close it didnt look like a face at all, but he knew that at a distance of twenty paces or so light and shadow would seem to suggest one; that, and the viewers imagination) and then zipped the clippers along its belly. That done, he shut the clippers off, walked down toward the playground, and then turned back abruptly to get it all at once, the entire rabbit. Yes, it looked all right. Well, he would do the dog next. But if it was my hotel, he said, Id cut the whole damn bunch of you down. He would, too. Just cut them down and resod the lawn where theyd been and put in half a dozen small metal tables with gaily colored umbrellas. People could have cocktails on the Overlooks lawn in the summer sun. Sloe gin fizzes and margaritas and pink ladies and all those sweet tourist drinks. A rum and tonic, maybe. Jack took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and slowly rubbed his lips with it. Come on, come on, he said softly. That was nothing to be thinking about. He was going to start back, and then some impulse made him change his mind and he went down to the playground instead. It was funny how you never knew kids, he thought. He and Wendy had expected Danny would love the playground; it had everything a kid could want. But Jack didnt think the boy had been down half a dozen times, if that. He supposed if there had been another kid to play with, it would have been different. The gate squeaked slightly as he let himself in, and then there was crushed gravel crunching under his feet. He went first to the playhouse, the perfect scale model of the Overlook itself. It came up to his lower thigh, just about Dannys height when he was standing up. Jack hunkered down and looked in the thirdfloor windows. The giant has come to eat you all up in your beds, he said hollowly. Kiss your TripleA rating goodbye. But that wasnt funny, either. You could open the house simply by pulling it apartit opened on a hidden hinge. The inside was a disappointment. The walls were painted, but the place was mostly hollow. But of course it would have to be, he told himself, or how else could the kids get inside? What play furniture might go with the place in the summer was gone, probably packed away in the equipment shed. He closed it up and heard the small click as the latch closed. He walked over to the slide, set the hedgeclipper down, and after a glance back at the driveway to make sure Wendy and Danny hadnt returned, he climbed to the top and sat down. This was the big kids slide, but the fit was still uncomfortably tight for his grownup ass. How long had it been since he had been on a slide? Twenty years? It didnt seem possible it could be that long, it didnt feel that long, but it had to be that, or more. He could remember his old man taking him to the park in Berlin when he had been Dannys age, and he had done the whole bitslide, swings, teetertotters, everything. He and the old man would have a hot dog lunch and buy peanuts from the man with the cart afterward. They would sit on a bench to eat them and dusky clouds of pigeons would flock around their feet. Goddam scavenger birds, his dad would say, dont you feed them, Jacky. But they would both end up feeding them, and giggling at the way they ran after the nuts, the greedy way they ran after the nuts. Jack didnt think the old man had ever taken his brothers to the park. Jack had been his favorite, and even so Jack had taken his lumps when the old man was drunk, which was a lot of the time. But Jack had loved him for as long as he was able, long after the rest of the family could only hate and fear him. He pushed off with his hands and went to the bottom, but the trip was unsatisfying. The slide, unused, had too much friction and no really pleasant speed could be built up. And his ass was just too big. His adult feet thumped into the slight dip where thousands of childrens feet had landed before him. He stood up, brushed at the seat of his pants, and looked at the hedgeclipper. But instead of going back to it he went to the swings, which were also a disappointment. The chains had built up rust since the close of the season, and they squealed like things in pain. Jack promised himself he would oil them in the spring. You better stop it, he advised himself. Youre not a kid anymore. You dont need this place to prove it. But he went on to the cement ringsthey were too small for him and he passed them upand then to the security fence which marked the edge of the grounds. He curled his fingers through the links and looked through, the sun crosshatching shadowlines on his face like a man behind bars. He recognized the similarity himself and he shook the chain link, put a harried expression on his face, and whispered Lemme outta here! Lemme outta here! But for the third time, not funny. It was time to get back to work. That was when he heard the sound behind him. He turned around quickly, frowning, embarrassed, wondering if someone had seen him fooling around down here in kiddie country. His eyes ticked off the slides, the opposing angles of the seesaws, the swings in which only the wind sat. Beyond all that to the gate and the low fence that divided the playground from the lawn and the topiarythe lions gathered protectively around the path, the rabbit bent over as if to crop grass, the buffalo ready to charge, the crouching dog. Beyond them, the putting green and the hotel itself. From here he could even see the raised lip of the roque court on the Overlooks western side. Everything was just as it had been. So why had the flesh of his face and hands begun to creep, and why had the hair along the back of his neck begun to stand up, as if the flesh back there had suddenly tightened? He squinted up at the hotel again, but that was no answer. It simply stood there, its windows dark, a tiny thread of smoke curling from the chimney, coming from the banked fire in the lobby. (Buster, you better get going or theyre going to come back and wonder if you were doing anything all the while.) Sure, get going. Because the snow was coming and he had to get the damn hedges trimmed. It was part of the agreement. Besides, they wouldnt dare (Who wouldnt? What wouldnt? Dare do what?) He began to walk back toward the hedgeclipper at the foot of the big kids slide, and the sound of his feet crunching on the crushed stone seemed abnormally loud. Now the flesh on his testicles had begun to creep too, and his buttocks felt hard and heavy, like stone. (Jesus, what is this?) He stopped by the hedgeclipper, but made no move to pick it up. Yes, there was something different. In the topiary. And it was so simple, so easy to see, that he just wasnt picking it up. Come on, he scolded himself, you just trimmed the fucking rabbit, so whats the (thats it) His breath stopped in his throat. The rabbit was down on all fours, cropping grass. Its belly was against the ground. But not ten minutes ago it had been up on its hind legs, of course it had been, he had trimmed its ears and its belly. His eyes darted to the dog. When he had come down the path it had been sitting up, as if begging for a sweet. Now it was crouched, head tilted, the clipped wedge of mouth seeming to snarl silently. And the lions (oh no, baby, oh no, uhuh, no way) the lions were closer to the path. The two on his right had subtly changed positions, had drawn closer together. The tail of the one on the left now almost jutted out over the path. When he had come past them and through the gate, that lion had been on the right and he was quite sure its tail had been curled around it. They were no longer protecting the path; they were blocking it. Jack put his hand suddenly over his eyes and then took it away. The picture didnt change. A soft sigh, too quiet to be a groan, escaped him. In his drinking days he had always been afraid of something like this happening. But when you were a heavy drinker you called it the DTsgood old Ray Milland in Lost Weekend, seeing the bugs coming out of the walls. What did you call it when you were cold sober? The question was meant to be rhetorical, but his mind answered it (you call it insanity) nevertheless. Staring at the hedge animals, he realized something had changed while he had his hand over his eyes. The dog had moved closer. No longer crouching, it seemed to be in a running posture, haunches flexed, one front leg forward, the other back. The hedge mouth yawned wider, the pruned sticks looked sharp and vicious. And now he fancied he could see faint eye indentations in the greenery as well. Looking at him. Why do they have to be trimmed? he thought hysterically. Theyre perfect. Another soft sound. He involuntarily backed up a step when he looked at the lions. One of the two on the right seemed to have drawn slightly ahead of the other. Its head was lowered. One paw had stolen almost all the way to the low fence. Dear God, what next? (next it leaps over and gobbles you up like something in an evil nursery fable) It was like that game they had played when they were kids, red light. One person was it, and while he turned his back and counted to ten, the other players crept forward. When it got to ten, he whirled around, and if he caught anyone moving, they were out of the game. The others remained frozen in statue postures until it turned his back and counted again. They got closer and closer, and at last, somewhere between five and ten, you would feel a hand on your back Gravel rattled on the path. He jerked his head around to look at the dog and it was halfway down the pathway, just behind the lions now, its mouth wide and yawning. Before, it had only been a hedge clipped in the general shape of a dog, something that lost all definition when you got up close to it. But now Jack could see that it had been clipped to look like a German shepherd, and shepherds could be mean. You could train shepherds to kill. A low rustling sound. The lion on the left had advanced all the way to the fence now; its muzzle was touching the boards. It seemed to be grinning at him. Jack backed up another two steps. His head was thudding crazily and he could feel the dry rasp of his breath in his throat. Now the buffalo had moved, circling to the right, behind and around the rabbit. The head was lowered, the green hedge horns pointing at him. The thing was, you couldnt watch all of them. Not all at once. He began to make a whining sound, unaware in his locked concentration that he was making any sound at all. His eyes darted from one hedge creature to the next, trying to see them move. The wind gusted, making a hungry rattling sound in the closematted branches. What kind of sound would there be if they got him? But of course he knew. A snapping, rending, breaking sound. It would be (no no NO NO I WILL NOT BELIEVE THIS NOT AT ALL!) He clapped his hands over his eyes, clutching at his hair, his forehead, his throbbing temples. And he stood like that for a long time, dread building until he could stand it no longer and he pulled his hands away with a cry. By the putting green the dog was sitting up, as if begging for a scrap. The buffalo was gazing with disinterest back toward the roque court, as it had been when Jack had come down with the clippers. The rabbit stood on its hind legs, ears up to catch the faintest sound, freshly clipped belly exposed. The lions, rooted into place, stood beside the path. He stood frozen for a long time, the harsh breath in his throat finally slowing. He reached for his cigarettes and shook four of them out onto the gravel. He stooped down and picked them up, groped for them, never taking his eyes from the topiary for fear the animals would begin to move again. He picked them up, stuffed three carelessly back into the pack, and lit the fourth. After two deep drags he dropped it and crushed it out. He went to the hedgeclipper and picked it up. Im very tired, he said, and now it seemed okay to talk out loud. It didnt seem crazy at all. Ive been under a strain. The wasps the play Al calling me like that. But its all right. He began to trudge back up to the hotel. Part of his mind tugged fretfully at him, tried to make him detour around the hedge animals, but he went directly up the gravel path, through them. A faint breeze rattled through them, that was all. He had imagined the whole thing. He had had a bad scare but it was over now. In the Overlooks kitchen he paused to take two Excedrin and then went downstairs and looked at papers until he heard the dim sound of the hotel truck rattling into the driveway. He went up to meet them. He felt all right. He saw no need to mention his hallucination. Hed had a bad scare but it was over now. CHAPTER TWENTYFOUR SNOW It was dusk. They stood on the porch in the fading light, Jack in the middle, his left arm around Dannys shoulders and his right arm around Wendys waist. Together they watched as the decision was taken out of their hands. The sky had been completely clouded over by twothirty and it had begun to snow an hour later, and this time you didnt need a weatherman to tell you it was serious snow, no flurry that was going to melt or blow away when the evening wind started to whoop. At first it had fallen in perfectly straight lines, building up a snowcover that coated everything evenly, but now, an hour after it had started, the wind had begun to blow from the northwest and the snow had begun to drift against the porch and the sides of the Overlooks driveway. Beyond the grounds the highway had disappeared under an even blanket of white. The hedge animals were also gone, but when Wendy and Danny had gotten home, she had commended him on the good job he had done. Do you think so? he had asked, and said no more. Now the hedges were buried under amorphous white cloaks. Curiously, all of them were thinking different thoughts but feeling the same emotion relief. The bridge had been crossed. Will it ever be spring? Wendy murmured. Jack squeezed her tighter. Before you know it. What do you say we go in and have some supper? Its cold out here. She smiled. All afternoon Jack had seemed distant and well, odd. Now he sounded more like his normal self. Fine by me. How about you, Danny? Sure. So they went in together, leaving the wind to build to the lowpitched scream that would go on all nighta sound they would get to know well. Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly threequarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact that it was now cut off from the world. Or possibly it was pleased with the prospect. Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster. CHAPTER TWENTYFIVE INSIDE 217 A week and a half later two feet of snow lay white and crisp and even on the grounds of the Overlook Hotel. The hedge menagerie was buried up to its haunches; the rabbit, frozen on its hind legs, seemed to be rising from a white pool. Some of the drifts were over five feet deep. The wind was constantly changing them, sculpting them into sinuous, dunelike shapes. Twice Jack had snowshoed clumsily around to the equipment shed for his shovel to clear the porch; the third time he shrugged, simply cleared a path through the towering drift lying against the door, and let Danny amuse himself by sledding to the right and left of the path. The truly heroic drifts lay against the Overlooks west side; some of them towered to a height of twenty feet, and beyond them the ground was scoured bare to the grass by the constant windflow. The firstfloor windows were covered, and the view from the dining room which Jack had so admired on closing day was now no more exciting than a view of a blank movie screen. Their phone had been out for the last eight days, and the CB radio in Ullmans office was now their only communications link with the outside world. It snowed every day now, sometimes only brief flurries that powdered the glittering snow crust, sometimes for real, the low whistle of the wind cranking up to a womanish shriek that made the old hotel rock and groan alarmingly even in its deep cradle of snow. |
Night temperatures had not gotten above 10, and although the thermometer by the kitchen service entrance sometimes got as high as 25 in the early afternoons, the steady knife edge of the wind made it uncomfortable to go out without a ski mask. But they all did go out on the days when the sun shone, usually wearing two sets of clothing and mittens on over their gloves. Getting out was almost a compulsive thing; the hotel was circled with the double track of Dannys Flexible Flyer. The permutations were nearly endless Danny riding while his parents pulled; Daddy riding and laughing while Wendy and Danny tried to pull (it was just possible for them to pull him on the icy crust, and flatly impossible when powder covered it); Danny and Mommy riding; Wendy riding by herself while her menfolk pulled and puffed white vapor like drayhorses, pretending she was heavier than she was. They laughed a great deal on these sled excursions around the house, but the whooping and impersonal voice of the wind, so huge and hollowly sincere, made their laughter seem tinny and forced. They had seen caribou tracks in the snow and once the caribou themselves, a group of five standing motionlessly below the security fence. They had all taken turns with Jacks Zeiss Ikon binoculars to see them better, and looking at them had given Wendy a weird, unreal feeling they were standing legdeep in the snow that covered the highway, and it came to her that between now and the spring thaw, the road belonged more to the caribou than it did to them. Now the things that men had made up here were neutralized. The caribou understood that, she believed. She had put the binoculars down and had said something about starting lunch and in the kitchen she had cried a little, trying to rid herself of the awful pentup feeling that sometimes fell on her like a large, pressing hand over her heart. She thought of the caribou. She thought of the wasps Jack had put out on the service entrance platform, under the Pyrex bowl, to freeze. There were plenty of snowshoes hung from nails in the equipment shed, and Jack found a pair to fit each of them, although Dannys pair was quite a bit outsized. Jack did well with them. Although he had not snowshoed since his boyhood in Berlin, New Hampshire, he retaught himself quickly. Wendy didnt care much for iteven fifteen minutes of tramping around on the outsized laced paddles made her legs and ankles ache outrageouslybut Danny was intrigued and working hard to pick up the knack. He still fell often, but Jack was pleased with his progress. He said that by February Danny would be skipping circles around both of them. This day was overcast, and by noon the sky had already begun to spit snow. The radio was promising another eight to twelve inches and chanting hosannas to Precipitation, that great god of Colorado skiers. Wendy, sitting in the bedroom and knitting a scarf, thought to herself that she knew exactly what the skiers could do with all that snow. She knew exactly where they could put it. Jack was in the cellar. He had gone down to check the furnace and boilersuch checks had become a ritual with him since the snow had closed them inand after satisfying himself that everything was going well he had wandered through the arch, screwed the lightbulb on, and had seated himself in an old and cobwebby camp chair he had found. He was leafing through the old records and papers, constantly wiping his mouth with his handkerchief as he did so. Confinement had leached his skin of its autumn tan, and as he sat hunched over the yellowed, crackling sheets, his reddishblond hair tumbling untidily over his forehead, he looked slightly lunatic. He had found some odd things tucked in among the invoices, bills of lading, receipts. Disquieting things. A bloody strip of sheeting. A dismembered teddy bear that seemed to have been slashed to pieces. A crumpled sheet of violet ladies stationery, a ghost of perfume still clinging to it beneath the musk of age, a note begun and left unfinished in faded blue ink Dearest Tommy, I cant think so well up here as Id hoped, about us I mean, of course, who else? Ha. Ha. Things keep getting in the way. Ive had strange dreams about things going bump in the night, can you believe that and That was all. The note was dated June 27, 1934. He found a hand puppet that seemed to be either a witch or a warlock something with long teeth and a pointy hat, at any rate. It had been improbably tucked between a bundle of naturalgas receipts and a bundle of receipts for Vichy water. And something that seemed to be a poem, scribbled on the back of a menu in dark pencil Medoc are you here? Ive been sleepwalking again, my dear. The plants are moving under the rug. No date on the menu, and no name on the poem, if it was a poem. Elusive, but fascinating. It seemed to him that these things were like pieces in a jigsaw, things that would eventually fit together if he could find the right linking pieces. And so he kept looking, jumping and wiping his lips every time the furnace roared into life behind him. Danny was standing outside Room 217 again. The passkey was in his pocket. He was staring at the door with a kind of drugged avidity, and his upper body seemed to twitch and jiggle beneath his flannel shirt. He was humming softly and tunelessly. He hadnt wanted to come here, not after the fire hose. He was scared to come here. He was scared that he had taken the passkey again, disobeying his father. He had wanted to come here. Curiosity (killed the cat; satisfaction brought him back) was like a constant fishhook in his brain, a kind of nagging siren song that would not be appeased. And hadnt Mr. Hallorann said, I dont think theres anything here that can hurt you? (You promised.) (Promises were made to be broken.) He jumped at that. It was as if that thought had come from outside, insectile, buzzing, softly cajoling. (Promises were made to be broken my dear redrum, to be broken. splintered. shattered. hammered apart. FORE!) His nervous humming broke into low, atonal song Lou, Lou, skip to m Lou, skip to m Lou my daaarlin Hadnt Mr. Hallorann been right? Hadnt that been, in the end, the reason why he had kept silent and allowed the snow to close them in? Just close your eyes and it will be gone. What he had seen in the Presidential Sweet had gone away. And the snake had only been a fire hose that had fallen onto the rug. Yes, even the blood in the Presidential Sweet had been harmless, something old, something that had happened long before he was born or even thought of, something that was done with. Like a movie that only he could see. There was nothing, really nothing, in this hotel that could hurt him, and if he had to prove that to himself by going into this room, shouldnt he do so? Lou, Lou, skip to m Lou (Curiosity killed the cat my dear redrum, redrum my dear, satisfaction brought him back safe and sound, from toes to crown; from head to ground he was safe and sound. He knew that those things) (are like scary pictures, they cant hurt you, but oh my god) (what big teeth you have Grandma and is that a wolf in a BLUEBEARD suit or a BLUEBEARD in a wolf suit and im so) (glad you asked because curiosity killed that cat and it was the HOPE of satisfaction that brought him) up the hall, treading softly over the blue and twisting jungle carpet. He had stopped by the fire extinguisher, had put the brass nozzle back in the frame, and then had poked it repeatedly with his finger, heart thumping, whispering Come on and hurt me. Come on and hurt me, you cheap prick. Cant do it, can you? Huh? Youre nothing but a cheap fire hose. Cant do nothin but lie there. Come on, come on! He had felt insane with bravado. And nothing had happened. It was only a hose after all, only canvas and brass, you could hack it to pieces and it would never complain, never twist and jerk and bleed green slime all over the blue carpet, because it was only a hose, not a nose and not a rose, not glass buttons or satin bows, not a snake in a sleepy doze and he had hurried on, had hurried on because he was (late, Im late, said the white rabbit.) the white rabbit. Yes. Now there was a white rabbit out by the playground, once it had been green but now it was white, as if something had shocked it repeatedly on the snowy, windy nights and turned it old Danny took the passkey from his pocket and slid it into the lock. Lou, Lou (the white rabbit had been on its way to a croquet party to the Red Queens croquet party storks for mallets hedgehogs for balls) He touched the key, let his fingers wander over it. His head felt dry and sick. He turned the key and the tumblers thumped back smoothly. (OFF WITH HIS HEAD! OFF WITH HIS HEAD! OFF WITH HIS HEAD!) (this game isnt croquet though the mallets are too short this game is) (WHACKBOOM! Straight through the wicket.) (OFF WITH HIS HEEEEEAAAAAAAD) Danny pushed the door open. It swung smoothly, without a creak. He was standing just outside a large combination bedsitting room, and although the snow had not reached up this farthe highest drifts were still a foot below the secondfloor windowsthe room was dark because Daddy had closed all the shutters on the western exposure two weeks ago. He stood in the doorway, fumbled to his right, and found the switch plate. Two bulbs in an overhead cutglass fixture came on. Danny stepped farther in and looked around. The rug was deep and soft, a quiet rose color. Soothing. A double bed with a white coverlet. A writing desk (Pray tell me Why is a raven like a writing desk?) by the large shuttered window. During the season the Constant Writer (having a wonderful time, wish you were fear) would have a pretty view of the mountains to describe to the folks back home. He stepped farther in. Nothing here, nothing at all. Only an empty room, cold because Daddy was heating the east wing today. A bureau. A closet, its door open to reveal a clutch of hotel hangers, the kind you cant steal. A Gideon Bible on an endtable. To his left was the bathroom door, a fulllength mirror on it reflecting his own whitefaced image. That door was ajar and He watched his double nod slowly. Yes, thats where it was, whatever it was. In there. In the bathroom. His double walked forward, as if to escape the glass. It put its hand out, pressed it against his own. Then it fell away at an angle as the bathroom door swung open. He looked in. A long room, oldfashioned, like a Pullman car. Tiny white hexagonal tiles on the floor. At the far end, a toilet with the lid up. At the right, a washbasin and another mirror above it, the kind that hides a medicine cabinet. To the left, a huge white tub on claw feet, the shower curtain pulled closed. Danny stepped into the bathroom and walked toward the tub dreamily, as if propelled from outside himself, as if this whole thing were one of the dreams Tony had brought him, that he would perhaps see something nice when he pulled the shower curtain back, something Daddy had forgotten or Mommy had lost, something that would make them both happy So he pulled the shower curtain back. The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gasfilled belly rising out of the cold, icerimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Dannys, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her breasts lolled. Her pubic hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws. Danny shrieked. But the sound never escaped his lips; turning inward and inward, it fell down in his darkness like a stone in a well. He took a single blundering step backward, hearing his heels clack on the white hexagonal tiles, and at the same moment his urine broke, spilling effortlessly out of him. The woman was sitting up. Still grinning, her huge marble eyes fixed on him, she was sitting up. Her dead palms made squittering noises on the porcelain. Her breasts swayed like ancient cracked punching bags. There was the minute sound of breaking ice shards. She was not breathing. She was a corpse, and dead long years. Danny turned and ran. Bolting through the bathroom door, his eyes starting from their sockets, his hair on end like the hair of a hedgehog about to be turned into a sacrificial (croquet? or roque?) ball, his mouth open and soundless. He ran fulltilt into the outside door of 217, which was now closed. He began hammering on it, far beyond realizing that it was unlocked, and he had only to turn the knob to let himself out. His mouth pealed forth deafening screams that were beyond human auditory range. He could only hammer on the door and hear the dead woman coming for him, bloated belly, dry hair, outstretched handssomething that had lain slain in that tub for perhaps years, embalmed there in magic. The door would not open, would not, would not, would not. And then the voice of Dick Hallorann came to him, so sudden and unexpected, so calm, that his locked vocal cords opened and he began to cry weaklynot with fear but with blessed relief. (I dont think they can hurt you theyre like pictures in a book close your eyes and theyll be gone.) His eyelids snapped down. His hands curled into balls. His shoulders hunched with the effort of his concentration (Nothing there nothing there not there at all NOTHING THERE THERE IS NOTHING!) Time passed. And he was just beginning to relax, just beginning to realize that the door must be unlocked and he could go, when the yearsdamp, bloated, fishsmelling hands closed softly around his throat and he was turned implacably around to stare into that dead and purple face. PART FOUR SNOWBOUND CHAPTER TWENTYSIX DREAMLAND Knitting made her sleepy. Today even Bartk would have made her sleepy, and it wasnt Bartk on the little phonograph, it was Bach. Her hands grew slower and slower, and at the time her son was making the acquaintance of Room 217s longterm resident, Wendy was asleep with her knitting on her lap. The yarn and needles rose in the slow time of her breathing. Her sleep was deep and she did not dream. Jack Torrance had fallen asleep too, but his sleep was light and uneasy, populated by dreams that seemed too vivid to be mere dreamsthey were certainly more vivid than any dreams he had ever had before. His eyes had begun to get heavy as he leafed through packets of milk bills, a hundred to a packet, seemingly tens of thousands all together. Yet he gave each one a cursory glance, afraid that by not being thorough he might miss exactly the piece of Overlookiana he needed to make the mystic connection that he was sure must be here somewhere. He felt like a man with a power cord in one hand, groping around a dark and unfamiliar room for a socket. If he could find it he would be rewarded with a view of wonders. He had come to grips with Al Shockleys phone call and his request; his strange experience in the playground had helped him to do that. That had been too damned close to some kind of breakdown, and he was convinced that it was his mind in revolt against Als highgoddamhanded request that he chuck his book project. It had maybe been a signal that his own sense of selfrespect could only be pushed so far before disintegrating entirely. He would write the book. If it meant the end of his association with Al Shockley, that would have to be. He would write the hotels biography, write it straight from the shoulder, and the introduction would be his hallucination that the topiary animals had moved. The title would be uninspired but workable Strange Resort The Story of the Overlook Hotel. Straight from the shoulder, yes, but it would not be written vindictively, in any effort to get back at Al or Stuart Ullman or George Hatfield or his father (miserable, bullying drunk that he had been) or anyone else, for that matter. He would write it because the Overlook had enchanted himcould any other explanation be so simple or so true? He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to. Five hundred gals whole milk. One hundred gals skim milk. Pd. Billed to acct. Three hundred pts orange juice. Pd. He slipped down farther in his chair, still holding a clutch of the receipts, but his eyes no longer looking at what was printed there. They had come unfocused. His lids were slow and heavy. His mind had slipped from the Overlook to his father, who had been a male nurse at the Berlin Community Hospital. Big man. A fat man who had towered to six feet two inches, he had been taller than Jack even when Jack got his full growth of six feet evennot that the old man had still been around then. Runt of the litter, he would say, and then cuff Jack lovingly and laugh. There had been two other brothers, both taller than their father, and Becky, who at fiveten had only been two inches shorter than Jack and taller than he for most of their childhood. His relationship with his father had been like the unfurling of some flower of beautiful potential, which, when wholly opened, turned out to be blighted inside. Until he had been seven he had loved the tall, bigbellied man uncritically and strongly in spite of the spankings, the blackandblues, the occasional black eye. He could remember velvet summer nights, the house quiet, oldest brother Brett out with his girl, middle brother Mike studying something, Becky and their mother in the living room, watching something on the balky old TV; and he would sit in the hall dressed in a pajama singlet and nothing else, ostensibly playing with his trucks, actually waiting for the moment when the silence would be broken by the door swinging open with a large bang, the bellow of his fathers welcome when he saw Jacky was waiting, his own happy squeal in answer as this big man came down the hall, his pink scalp glowing beneath his crewcut in the glow of the hall light. In that light he always looked like some soft and flapping oversized ghost in his hospital whites, the shirt always untucked (and sometimes bloody), the pants cuffs drooping down over the black shoes. His father would sweep him into his arms and Jacky would be propelled deliriously upward, so fast it seemed he could feel air pressure settling against his skull like a cap made out of lead, up and up, both of them crying Elevator! Elevator!; and there had been nights when his father in his drunkenness had not stopped the upward lift of his slabmuscled arms soon enough and Jacky had gone right over his fathers flattopped head like a human projectile to crashland on the hall floor behind his dad. But on other nights his father would only sweep him into a giggling ecstasy, through the zone of air where beer hung around his fathers face like a mist of raindrops, to be twisted and turned and shaken like a laughing rag, and finally to be set down on his feet, hiccupping with reaction. The receipts slipped from his relaxing hand and seesawed down through the air to land lazily on the floor; his eyelids, which had settled shut with his fathers image tattooed on their backs like stereopticon images, opened a little bit and then slipped back down again. He twitched a little. Consciousness, like the receipts, like autumn aspen leaves, seesawed lazily downward. That had been the first phase of his relationship with his father, and as it was drawing to its end he had become aware that Becky and his brothers, all of them older, hated the father and that their mother, a nondescript woman who rarely spoke above a mutter, only suffered him because her Catholic upbringing said that she must. In those days it had not seemed strange to Jack that the father won all his arguments with his children by use of his fists, and it had not seemed strange that his own love should go hand in hand with his fear fear of the elevator game which might end in a splintering crash on any given night; fear that his fathers bearish good humor on his day off might suddenly change to boarish bellowing and the smack of his good right hand; and sometimes, he remembered, he had even been afraid that his fathers shadow might fall over him while he was at play. It was near the end of this phase that he began to notice that Brett never brought his dates home, or Mike and Becky their chums. Love began to curdle at nine, when his father put his mother into the hospital with his cane. He had begun to carry the cane a year earlier, when a car accident had left him lame. After that he was never without it, long and black and thick and goldheaded. Now, dozing, Jacks body twitched in a remembered cringe at the sound it made in the air, a murderous swish, and its heavy crack against the wall or against flesh. He had beaten their mother for no good reason at all, suddenly and without warning. They had been at the supper table. The cane had been standing by his chair. It was a Sunday night, the end of a threeday weekend for Daddy, a weekend which he had boozed away in his usual inimitable style. Roast chicken. Peas. Mashed potatoes. Daddy at the head of the table, his plate heaped high, snoozing or nearly snoozing. His mother passing plates. And suddenly Daddy had been wide awake, his eyes set deeply into their fat eyesockets, glittering with a kind of stupid, evil petulance. They flickered from one member of the family to the next, and the vein in the center of his forehead was standing out prominently, always a bad sign. One of his large freckled hands had dropped to the gold knob of his cane, caressing it. He said something about coffeeto this day Jack was sure it had been coffee that his father said. Momma had opened her mouth to answer and then the cane was whickering through the air, smashing against her face. Blood spurted from her nose. Becky screamed. Mommas spectacles dropped into her gravy. The cane had been drawn back, had come down again, this time on top of her head, splitting the scalp. Momma had dropped to the floor. He had been out of his chair and around to where she lay dazed on the carpet, brandishing the cane, moving with a fat mans grotesque speed and agility, little eyes flashing, jowls quivering as he spoke to her just as he had always spoken to his children during such outbursts. Now. Now by Christ. I guess youll take your medicine now. Goddam puppy. Whelp. Come on and take your medicine. The cane had gone up and down on her seven more times before Brett and Mike got hold of him, dragged him away, wrestled the cane out of his hand. Jack (little Jacky now he was little Jacky now dozing and mumbling on a cobwebby camp chair while the furnace roared into hollow life behind him) knew exactly how many blows it had been because each soft whump against his mothers body had been engraved on his memory like the irrational swipe of a chisel on stone. Seven whumps. No more, no less. He and Becky crying, unbelieving, looking at their mothers spectacles lying in her mashed potatoes, one cracked lens smeared with gravy. Brett shouting at Daddy from the back hall, telling him hed kill him if he moved. And Daddy saying over and over Damn little puppy. Damn little whelp. Give me my cane, you damn little pup. Give it to me. Brett brandishing it hysterically, saying yes, yes, Ill give it to you, just you move a little bit and Ill give you all you want and two extra. Ill give you plenty. Momma getting slowly to her feet, dazed, her face already puffed and swelling like an old tire with too much air in it, bleeding in four or five different places, and she had said a terrible thing, perhaps the only thing Momma had ever said which Jacky could recall word for word Whos got the newspaper? Your daddy wants the funnies. Is it raining yet? And then she sank to her knees again, her hair hanging in her puffed and bleeding face. Mike calling the doctor, babbling into the phone. Could he come right away? It was their mother. No, he couldnt say what the trouble was, not over the phone, not over a party line he couldnt. Just come. The doctor came and took Momma away to the hospital where Daddy had worked all of his adult life. Daddy, sobered up some (or perhaps only with the stupid cunning of any hardpressed animal), told the doctor she had fallen downstairs. There was blood on the tablecloth because he had tried to wipe her dear face with it. Had her glasses flown all the way through the living room and into the dining room to land in her mashed potatoes and gravy? the doctor asked with a kind of horrid, grinning sarcasm. Is that what happened, Mark? I have heard of folks who can get a radio station on their gold fillings and I have seen a man get shot between the eyes and live to tell about it, but that is a new one on me. Daddy had merely shook his head and said he didnt know; they must have fallen off her face when he brought her through into the dining room. The four children had been stunned to silence by the calm stupendousness of the lie. Four days later Brett quit his job in the mill and joined the Army. Jack had always felt it was not just the sudden and irrational beating his father had administered at the dinner table but the fact that, in the hospital, their mother had corroborated their fathers story while holding the hand of the parish priest. Revolted, Brett had left them to whatever might come. He had been killed in Dong Ho province in 1965, the year when Jack Torrance, undergraduate, had joined the active college agitation to end the war. He had waved his brothers bloody shirt at rallies that were increasingly well attended, but it was not Bretts face that hung before his eyes when he spokeit was his mothers dazed, uncomprehending face, his mother saying Whos got the newspaper? Mike escaped three years later when Jack was twelvehe went to UNH on a hefty Merit Scholarship. A year after that their father died of a sudden, massive stroke which occurred while he was prepping a patient for surgery. He had collapsed in his flapping and untucked hospital whites, dead possibly even before he hit the industrial blackandred hospital tiles, and three days later the man who had dominated Jackys life, the irrational white ghostgod, was underground. The stone read Mark Anthony Torrance, Loving Father. To that Jack would have added one line He Knew How to Play Elevator. There had been a great lot of insurance money. There are people who collect insurance as compulsively as others collect coins and stamps, and Mark Torrance had been that type. The insurance money came in at the same time the monthly policy payments and liquor bills stopped. For five years they had been rich. Nearly rich In his shallow, uneasy sleep his face rose before him as if in a glass, his face but not his face, the wide eyes and innocent bowed mouth of a boy sitting in the hall with his trucks, waiting for his daddy, waiting for the white ghostgod, waiting for the elevator to rise up with dizzying, exhilarating speed through the saltandsawdust mist of exhaled taverns, waiting perhaps for it to go crashing down, spilling old clocksprings out of his ears while his daddy roared with laughter, and it (transformed into Dannys face, so much like his own had been, his eyes had been light blue while Dannys were cloudy gray, but the lips still made a bow and the complexion was fair; Danny in his study, wearing training pants, all his papers soggy and the fine misty smell of beer rising a dreadful batter all in ferment, rising on the wings of yeast, the breath of taverns snap of bone his own voice, mewling drunkenly, Danny, you okay, doc? Oh God oh God, your poor sweet arm and that face transformed into) (mommas dazed face rising up from below the table, punched and bleeding, and momma was saying) (from your father. I repeat, an enormously important announcement from your father. Please stay tuned or tune immediately to the Happy Jack frequency. Repeat, tune immediately to the Happy Hour frequency. I repeat) A slow dissolve. Disembodied voices echoing up to him as if along an endless, cloudy hallway. (Things keep getting in the way, dear Tommy ) (Medoc, are you here? Ive been sleepwalking again, my dear. Its the inhuman monsters that I fear ) (Excuse me, Mr. Ullman, but isnt this the ) office, with its file cabinets, Ullmans big desk, a blank reservations book for next year already in placenever misses a trick, that Ullmanall the keys hanging neatly on their hooks (except for one, which one, which key, passkeypasskey, passkey, whos got the passkey? if we went upstairs perhaps wed see) and the big twoway radio on its shelf. He snapped it on. CB transmissions coming in short, crackly bursts. He switched the band and dialed across bursts of music, news, a preacher haranguing a softly moaning congregation, a weather report. And another voice which he dialed back to. It was his fathers voice. kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because theyll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down. Right this minute that boy of yours is in where he shouldnt be. Trespassing. Thats what hes doing. Hes a goddam little pup. Cane him for it, Jacky, cane him within an inch of his life. Have a drink, Jacky my boy, and well play the elevator game. Then Ill go with you while you give him his medicine. I know you can do it, of course you can. You must kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man His fathers voice, going up higher and higher, becoming something maddening, not human at all, something squealing and petulant and maddening, the voice of the GhostGod, the PigGod, coming dead at him out of the radio and No! he screamed back. Youre dead, youre in your grave, youre not in me at all! Because he had cut all the father out of him and it was not right that he should come back, creeping through this hotel two thousand miles from the New England town where his father had lived and died. He raised the radio up and brought it down, and it smashed on the floor, spilling old clocksprings and tubes like the result of some crazy elevator game gone awry, making his fathers voice gone, leaving only his voice, Jacks voice, Jackys voice, chanting in the cold reality of the office dead, youre dead, youre dead! And the startled sound of Wendys feet hitting the floor over his head, and Wendys startled, frightened voice Jack? Jack! He stood, blinking down at the shattered radio. Now there was only the snowmobile in the equipment shed to link them to the outside world. He put his hands over his eyes and clutched at his temples. He was getting a headache. CHAPTER TWENTYSEVEN CATATONIC Wendy ran down the hall in her stocking feet and ran down the main stairs to the lobby two at a time. She didnt look up at the carpeted flight that led to the second floor, but if she had, she would have seen Danny standing at the top of them, still and silent, his unfocused eyes directed out into indifferent space, his thumb in his mouth, the collar and shoulders of his shirt damp. There were puffy bruises on his neck and just below his chin. Jacks cries had ceased, but that did nothing to ease her fear. Ripped out of her sleep by his voice, raised in that old hectoring pitch she remembered so well, she still felt that she was dreamingbut another part knew she was awake, and that terrified her more. She halfexpected to burst into the office and find him standing over Dannys sprawledout body, drunk and confused. She pushed through the door and Jack was standing there, rubbing at his temples with his fingers. His face was ghostwhite. The twoway CB radio lay at his feet in a sprinkling of broken glass. Wendy? he asked uncertainly. |
Subsets and Splits