Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (28 page)

The Drum Stories (1965, 1966) 

In researching
The Complete Guide to the Works of Stephen King
in Bangor, Maine in December 2002 I met Stu Tinker, the superb proprietor of the specialist King bookshop, Betts Bookstore
⁶²
. Tinker mentioned he had heard from a collector that an unknown story from King’s high school days had come onto the market. After some months of research I made contact with Kerry Johnson, who provided me with a copy and the provenance of
Code Name: Mousetrap
. 

One of King’s earliest published writings,
Code Name: Mousetrap
was printed in the Lisbon High school newspaper,
The Drum
, for 27 October 1965. King was a senior that year and had been on the newspaper staff for three years (
see feature panel
). That academic year Ms. Prudence Grant was in her first year of teaching and her extra-curricular assignment was to be advisor to
The Drum
. Ms. Grant retired in June 2002 and while cleaning her files ran across some original copies of the newspaper, including the one containing
Code Name: Mousetrap
. Kerry Johnson purchased it from her through eBay. Ms. Grant provided Johnson with excellent background information and he also corroborated the background with another teacher from the school. 

In a letter to Johnson, dated 15 October 2002, Ms. Grant wrote, “I have the copies after all these years because I’m something of a packrat and had not cleaned those things out of my file cabinet. I found them again when I cleaned out my papers because I retired in June 2002.” 

In an interview with Ray Routhier of the Portland, Maine
Press-Herald
,
Ms. Grant said that while she never had King in class she remembered him working for the paper. She recalled him as “a goofy guy who went on to do far, far, far better than any of us.” 

When the story’s existence was initially revealed I thought this, “…was King’s only piece of fiction in the paper.” I was surprised but delighted when shortly thereafter another collector, Bob Jackson, advised he had bought a different copy of
The Drum
from Ms. Grant, also over eBay. Jackson also provided a copy and the provenance of this story,
The 43rd Dream
. That edition of
The Drum
was dated 29 January 1966. 

In total Grant sold four copies of the 27 October 1965 issue, containing
Code Name: Mousetrap
for between $400 and $500. The single copy of
The 43rd Dream
went for $800! In 2009 I had the joy of meeting Ms. Grant, when lecturing to the Lisbon (Maine) Historical Society, on the impacts of Lisbon and Durham on King’s fiction. Along with Ms. Grant and one of King’s teachers, Merton Ricker, I also got to meet and learn from many of those who attended school with the boy who would become one of the world’s best-selling, and best loved authors. They, and the officials of the Society, were gracious in their hospitality. 

Each story was published as written by “Steve King.” The first full details of these stories were then released to the public in May 2003, in
The Complete Guide
in May 2003. I provided copies of the stories to King’s office, as it was my understanding Steve no longer had a copy. Marsha DeFilippo, King’s personal assistant, later reported King said, “...he had great fun writing them.” The author was “news editor” of
The Drum
in 1963-64 (the first issue – Vol 1, No 1 is dated November 27, 1963); “Editor-In-Chief” in 1964-65; and, as a senior, was credited for “Copy” in 1965-66. 

In 2009 King allowed reproduction of
The 43rd Dream
,
from collector Bob Jackson’s copy, in
The Stephen King Illustrated Companion
by Bev Vincent.
Code Name: Mousetrap
has not been published outside the original
The Drum
. Copies do not circulate. It is very unlikely that readers or researchers will be able to obtain a copy unless the original eBay purchaser resells their copy or further copies turn up in file cabinets or attics somewhere in Maine. 

Code Name: Mousetrap 

In this America Under Siege story a man breaks into a supermarket with a recently installed burglar alarm. The burglar, Kelly, becomes somewhat wary after reading “B.J. Burgular Alarms” (
sic
) had installed a new burglar (also misspelled “burgular”) alarm. The bottom of the note read, “Code Name: MOUSETRAP.” It was a very large store, “Twenty cash-registers, full of Friday night receipts, faced him blankly.” Suddenly, a buzzer sounded and the lights came up, causing Kelly to run for it. 

With that, “…the soup display began to move. It clattered toward him, spilling individual cans, and revealing the glitter of stainless steel beneath.” One can clearly see King in those last words! “Now, he could clearly see the shape of the Mousetrap. Three limber-jointed steel tentacles snaked out at him. An insectivorous row of TV eyes stared at him. In the silence of the store, he could actually hear the clitter of the relays in its electronic brain.”  

As he ran from this creature, he “…could not believe what he saw – and when he did, he let out a soft moan”
–
dozens of beefsteaks were rolling over the meat counter and coming after him along with a “…rump roast with two glittering antenna…” that “…crashed into his leg and clutched him with bright steel claws. 98 cents a pound, he thought widly (
sic
), my rump roast certainly isn’t as cheap as it use
(sic
) to be.” Dodging a “V-formation of sirloins” and a shopping cart, “waving tentacles like a wild Medusa on wheels,” Kelly crashed through a plate-glass window and onto the pavement.  

“His arms dripped blood, and he picked jagged shards of glass out of them numbly. But I made it, he thought, getting up. I made it! And then the parking-meter grabbed him.” No timelines are given in this story but clearly the burglary occurred on a Friday night, as the cash registers were “full of Friday night receipts.” 

While not directly linked to any other King work this story has foreshadowing elements for such future stories as
Trucks
,
Maximum Overdrive
and
The Mangler
, where technology suddenly becomes animate, and dangerous. This is one of King’s most original horror themes and, apparently, an old favorite! 

King had just turned 18 when this story was published and it shows a growing level of maturity, compared to
People, Places and Things
, written two to five years earlier. It is similar in maturity to
The Aftermath
(see the separate chapter in this book), written in 1963. 

The 43rd Dream 

In this story a high school student relates his dream. The narrator was in his Batmobile when approached by a bum who said, “…you shoot your high school teachers and forbid your birds to fly.” Quickly, a cross-eyed cop accused the narrator of looking like John Wilkes Booth and a crowd formed, beating the narrator with hula-hoops. Running to a bar, he was served by Jack the Ripper before stealing money from a blind, fat card dealer who then hit him with his cane. 

The narrator then “…ran down the kitchen drain…” and came up in Lisbon High, “…where a friendly rat said I could,” and attended his favorite class, “…capitalistic Basket-Weaving,” taught by Captain Hook. 

After being sent to detention hall the narrator ran into a man in uniform, “…I think it was Captain Bligh,” who wanted to swing him from the yardarm, “…we wanted Pontius Pilate, but you look enough like him.” Just then Brigette (
sic
) Bardot arrived and the narrator awoke, “…it was just going through my mind, I wouldn’t knock another dream, but not quite the same kind.” 

One of the more entertaining aspects of this story is its constant use of rhyme. “‘I’m goin’ outta my head!’ This girl began to scream. Her stockings were red and her makeup sky-blue green.” Or: “I said, ’I need a drink, I’m feeling rather sick.’ He poured it but wanted to know just where was my hockey stick.” 

This use of rhyme has caused some experts to speculate
The 43rd Dream
is actually a poem, but the layout and tone mitigate against that view. It is classified as a New Worlds short story. 

The narrator, who wakes from his/her dreams of various matters wishing for a different dream next time, is apparently a student at Lisbon High, and male (after all, the cop likened the person to John Wilkes Booth). It is not too much of a stretch to imagine “him” as Steve King, Lisbon High School senior. No timelines are given. 

While there are no links to other King works of fiction the theme of shooting high school teachers would reappear in one of King’s more controversial works, the Bachman novel
Rage
. Of course, in today’s society rather than being a throw-away line or a sign of some teenage angst a student might be arrested for writing “…you shoot your high school teachers.”  

The reference to forbidding “your birds” to fly very interesting indeed (see
The Dark Half
) and the use of drains as a method of travel recurs in
It
. It seems that in this short story, written in early 1966, some of King’s later ideas already lay in his fertile imagination, waiting to be translated into print. 

King,
The Drum
And
The Village Vomit
 

King tells of his efforts as the editor of
The Drum
and his mis-adventure with a satirical equivalent in his non-fiction work,
On Writing
: 

…during my sophomore year at Lisbon High I became editor of our school newspaper,
The Drum.
I don’t recall being given any choice in this matter; I think I was simply appointed.
The Drum
did not prosper under my editorship. Then as now, I tend to go through periods of idleness followed by periods of workaholic frenzy. In the schoolyear 1963–1964,
The Drum
published just one issue, but that one was a monster thicker than the Lisbon Falls telephone book. 

One night
–
sick to death of Class Reports, Cheerleading Updates, and some lamebrain’s efforts to write a school poem
–
I created a satiric high school newspaper of my own when I should have been captioning photographs for
The Drum.
What resulted was a four-sheet which I called
The Village Vomit.
The boxed motto in the upper lefthand corner was not “All the News That’s Fit to Print” but “All the Shit That Will Stick.” That piece of dimwit humor got me into the only real trouble of my high school career. It also led me to the most useful writing lesson I ever got. In typical
Mad
magazine style (“What, me worry?”), I filled the
Vomit
with fictional tidbits about the LHS faculty, using teacher nicknames the student body would immediately recognize. 

Taking the
Vomit
to school for his friends to “bust a collective gut” over, King was caught when a copy was confiscated by one of the teachers lampooned in the paper, on which King had, “… either out of over-weening pride or almost unbelievable naiveté, put my name as Editor in Chief & Grand High Poobah, and at the close of school I was for the second time in my student career summoned to the office on account of something I had written.” One teacher (“Maggot” Margitan) took enormous offence at her description and demanded King be disciplined. “In the end, Miss Margitan settled for a formal apology and two weeks of detention for the bad boy who had dared call her Maggot in print.” 

If it makes any difference, my apology was heartfelt. Miss Margitan really had been hurt by what I wrote, and that much I could understand. I doubt that she hated me
–
she was probably too busy
–
but she was the National Honor Society advisor at LHS, and when my name showed up on the candidate list two years later, she vetoed me. The Honor Society did not need boys “of his type,” she said. I have come to believe she was right. A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn’t belong in a smart people’s club. I haven’t trucked much with satire since then.