Skeleton Crew (84 page)

“Look, Stella,” Bill said, and she saw black rising out of the gloom like the splintered prows of many ships. It was not ships, it was split and fissured rock. They had reached the Head. They had crossed the Reach.

She heard voices, but was not sure they actually spoke:

Take my hand, Bill
—

“Will you take my hand, Stella?” a new voice asked.

She looked around and there was Bull Symes. He was smiling kindly at her and yet she felt a kind of terror in her at what was in his eyes and for a moment she drew away, clutching Bill’s hand on her other side the tighter.

“Is it—”

“Time?” Bull asked. “Oh, ayuh, Stella, I guess so. But it don’t hurt. At least, I never heard so. All that’s before.”

She burst into tears suddenly—all the tears she had never wept—and put her hand in Bull’s hand. “Yes,” she said, “yes I will, yes I did, yes I do.”

They stood in a circle in the storm, the dead of Goat Island, and the wind screamed around them, driving its packet of snow, and some kind of song burst from her. It went up into the wind and the wind carried it away. They all sang then, as children will sing in their high, sweet voices as a summer evening draws down to summer night. They sang, and Stella felt herself going to them and with them, finally across the Reach. There was a bit of pain, but not much; losing her maidenhead had been worse. They stood in a circle in the night. The snow blew around them and they sang. They sang, and—

—
and Alden could not tell David and Lois, but in the summer after Stella died, when the children came out for their annual two weeks, he told Lona and Hal. He told them that during the great storms of winter the wind seems to sing with almost human voices, and that sometimes it seemed to him he could almost make out the words: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow/Praise Him, ye creatures here below . . .”

There are things that can never be told, and there are things, not exactly secret, that are not discussed. They had found Stella frozen to death on the mainland a day after the storm had blown itself out. She was sitting on a natural chair of rock about one hundred yards south of the Raccoon Head town limits, frozen just as neat as you please. The doctor who owned the Corvette said that he was frankly amazed. It would have been a walk of over four miles, and the autopsy required by law in the case of an unattended, unusual death had shown an advanced cancerous condition
—
intruth, the old woman had been riddled with it. Was Alden to tell David and Lois that the cap on her head had not been his? Larry McKeen had recognized that cap. So had John Bensohn. He had seen it in their eyes, and he supposed they had seen it in his. He had not lived long enough to forget his dead father’s cap, the look of its bill or the places where the visor had been broken.

N
ot everyone is interested in where short stories come from, and that is perfectly proper—you don’t have to understand the internal-combustion engine to drive a car, and you don’t need to know the circumstances which surrounded the making of a story to get a bit of pleasure from it. Engines interest mechanics; the creation of stories interests academics, fans, and snoops (the first and the last are almost synonymous, but never mind). I’ve included a few notes here on a few of the stories—such things as I thought might interest the casual reader. But if you’re even more casual than that, I assure you that you can close the book without a qualm—you won’t be missing much.

 

“The Mist”—This was written in the summer of 1976, for an anthology of new stories being put together by my agent, Kirby McCauley. McCauley had created another book of this sort, called
Frights,
two or three years previous. That book was a paperback. This one was to be a hardcover and much more ambitious in scope. It was called
Dark Forces.
Kirby wanted a story from me, and he pursued that story with doggedness, determination... and a kind of gentle diplomacy that is, I think, the hallmark of a really good agent.

I couldn’t think of a thing. The harder I thought, the more easily nothing came. I began to think that maybe the short-story machine in my head was temporarily or permanently broken. Then came the storm, which was much as described in this story. At the height of it there was indeed a waterspout on Long Lake in Bridgton, where we were living at the time, and I did insist that my family come downstairs with me for a while (although my wife’s name is Tabitha—Stephanie is her sister’s name). The trip to the market the next day was also much as described in the story, although I was spared the company of such an odious creature as Norton—in the real world, the people living in Norton’s summer cottage were a very pleasant doctor, Ralph Drews, and his wife.

In the market, my muse suddenly shat on my head—this happened as it always does, suddenly, with no warning. I was halfway down the middle aisle, looking for hot-dog buns, when I imagined a big prehistoric bird flapping its way toward the meat counter at the back, knocking over cans of pineapple chunks and bottles of tomato sauce. By the time my son Joe and I were in the checkout lane, I was amusing myself with a story about all these people trapped in a supermarket surrounded by prehistoric animals. I thought it was wildly funny—what
The Alamo
would have been like if directed by Bert I. Gordon. I wrote half the story that night and the rest the following week.

It got a little long, but Kirby thought it was good and it went into the book. I never liked it that much until the rewrite—I particularly didn’t like David Drayton sleeping with Amanda and then never finding out what happened to his wife. That seemed cowardly to me. But in the rewrite, I discovered a rhythm of language that I liked—and keeping that rhythm in mind, I was able to peel the story down to its basics more successfully than with some of my other long stories (“Apt Pupil” in
Different Seasons
is a particularly good example of this disease I have—literary elephantiasis).

The real key to this rhythm lay in the deliberate use of the story’s first line, which I simply stole from Douglas Fairbairn’s brilliant novel
Shoot.
The line is, for me, the essence of all story, a kind of Zen incantation.

I must tell you that I also liked the metaphor implied in David Drayton’s discovery of his own limitations, and I liked the story’s cheery cheesiness—you’re supposed to see this one in black-and-white, with your arm around your girl’s shoulders (or your guy’s), and a big speaker stuck in the window.
You
make up the second feature.

 

“Here There Be Tygers”—My first-grade teacher in Stratford, Connecticut, was Mrs. Van Buren. She was pretty scary. I guess if a tiger had come along and eaten her up, I could have gotten behind that. You know how kids are.

 

“The Monkey”—I was in New York City on business about four years ago. I was walking back to my hotel after visiting my people at New American Library when I saw a guy selling wind-up monkeys on the street. There was a platoon of them standing on a gray blanket he’d spread on the sidewalk at the corner of Fifth and Forty-fourth, all bending and grinning and clapping their cymbals. They looked really scary to me, and I spent the rest of my walk back to the hotel wondering why. I decided it was because they reminded me of the lady with the shears... the one who cuts everyone’s thread one day. So keeping that idea in mind, I wrote the story, mostly longhand, in a hotel room.

 

“Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut”—My wife is the real Mrs. Todd; the woman really is mad for a shortcut, and much of the one in the story actually exists. She found it, too. And Tabby really
does
seem to be getting younger sometimes, although I hope I am not like Worth Todd. I try not to be.

I like this story a lot; it tickles me. And the old guy’s voice is soothing. Every now and then you write something that brings back the old days, when
everything
you wrote seemed fresh and full of invention. “Mrs. Todd” felt that way to me when I was writing it.

One final note on it—three women’s magazines turned it down, two because of that line about how a woman will pee down her own leg if she doesn’t squat. They apparently felt that either women don’t pee or don’t want to be reminded of the fact. The third magazine to reject it,
Cosmopolitan,
did so because they felt the main character was too old to interest their target audience.

No comment—except to add that
Redbook
finally took it. God bless ’em.

 

“The Jaunt”—This was originally for
Omni,
which quite rightly rejected it because the science is so wonky. It was Ben Bova s idea to have the colonists in the story mining for water, and I have incorporated that in this version.

 

“The Raft”—I wrote this story in the year 1968 as “The Float.” In late 1969 I sold it to
Adam
magazine, which—like most of the girlie magazines—paid not on acceptance but only on publication. The amount promised was two hundred and fifty dollars.

In the spring of 1970, while creeping home in my white Ford station wagon from the University Motor Inn at 12:30 in the morning, I ran over a number of traffic cones which were guarding a crosswalk that had been painted that day. The paint had dried, but no one had bothered to take the cones in when it got dark. One of them bounced up and knocked my muffler loose from the rotted remains of my tailpipe. I was immediately suffused with the sort of towering, righteous rage which only drunk undergraduates can feel. I decided to circle the town of Orono, picking up traffic cones. I would leave them all in front of the police station the next morning, with a note saying that I had saved numerous mufflers and exhaust systems from extinction, and ought to get a medal.

I got about a hundred and fifty before blue lights started to swirl around in the rearview mirror.

I will never forget the Orono cop turning to me after a long, long look into the back of my station wagon and asking: “Son, are those traffic cones yours?”

The cones were confiscated and so was I; that night I was a guest of the town of Orono, that crossword-puzzle favorite. A month or so later, I was brought to trial in Bangor District Court on a charge of petty larceny. I was my own attorney and did indeed have a fool for a client. I was fined two hundred and fifty dollars, which I of course did not have. I was given seven days to come up with it, or do thirty
more
days as a guest of Penobscot County. I probably could have borrowed it from my mother, but the circumstances were not easy to understand (unless you had a skinful of booze, that was).

Although one is now not supposed to
ever
use a
deus ex machina
in his or her fiction because these gods from the machine are not believable, I notice that they arrive all the time in real life. Mine came three days after the judge levied my fine and arrived in the form of a check from
Adam
magazine for two hundred and fifty dollars. It was for my story “The Float.” It was like having someone send you a
real
Get Out of Jail Free card. I cashed the check immediately and paid my fine. I determined to go straight and give all traffic cones a wide berth thereafter. Straight I have not exactly gone, but believe me when I tell you I’m quits with the cones.

But here’s the thing:
Adam
paid only on
publication,
dammit, and since I got the money, the story must have come out. But no copy was ever sent to me, and I never saw one on the stands, although I checked regularly—I would simply push my way in between the dirty old men checking out such literary pinnacles as
Boobs and Buns and Spanking Lesbians
and thumb through every magazine the Knight Publishing Company put out. I never saw that story in any of them.

Somewhere along the way I lost the original manuscript, too. I got to thinking about the story again in 1981, some thirteen years later. I was in Pittsburgh, where the final
Creepshow
editing was going on, and I was bored. So I decided to have a go at re-creating that story, and the result was “The Raft.” It is the same as the original in terms of event, but I believe it is far more gruesome in its specifics.

Anyway, if anyone out there
has
ever seen “The Float,” or even if someone has a copy, could you send me a Xerox copy or something? Even a postcard confirming the fact that I’m not crazy? It would have been in
Adam,
or
Adam Quarterly,
or (most likely)
Adam Bedside Reader
(not much of a name, I know, I know, but in those days I only had two pairs of pants and three pairs of underwear, and beggars can’t be choosers, and it was a lot better than
Spanking Lesbians,
let me tell you). I’d just like to make sure it was published someplace other than the Dead Zone.