Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (29 page)

(Apart from
Slade
, which has a separate chapter in this book, King’s most notable later attempts at satire are
A Possible Fairy Tale
in a UMO Campus newspaper in May 1970; and
America the Literate
in
Book
magazine for July 2003.) 

As a direct result of this incident the school principal secured King a role as sports reporter for the Lisbon
Enterprise
. That was the first time King was paid to write professionally. 

Tinker has since sold the business but it still operates as a specialist King bookshop. 

For the Birds (1986) 

This “story” appeared in a collection of stories that all end with a malaproped quotation or popular phrase. The collection also features the writing of Roy Blount, Jr., John D. MacDonald, Peter Schickele, Elmore Leonard, Anna Quindlen, Tony Hillerman and King’s partner in writing
The Talisman
and
Black House
, Peter Straub.  

King’s closing line, “Bred any good rooks lately?” became the title of the collection and was the malapropism of “read any good books lately?”
Bred Any Good Rooks Lately?
was published by Doubleday in 1986 and reprinted in 1990 and 1994. While now out of print the book can be purchased from second hand booksellers and online King resources. 

The
very
short story begins with the line, “Okay, this is a science fiction joke.” Only 235 words in length the tone is very casual, as befits a joke – for instance, when describing how two cases of rook eggs are sent via Concorde, King writes, “…they keep the shipping compartment constantly heated and all that stuff.” 

In this tale the rooks of London start to become extinct and a solution is sought. As they had been a popular tourist attraction the English decided to breed rooks in Bangor, Maine and re-populate London with them. Each day the English sent a telegram to North American Rook Farms containing the words: “Bred any good rooks lately?” 

King vaguely links this story to his other works by the use of his home town as the place chosen to build the repopulation of London’s rooks, with the payment of a guy there, “at the rate of $50,000 a year to raise rooks.” Despite this link, as King himself classifies the tale as “science fiction” it is best placed in the New Worlds Reality, rather than that of Maine Street Horror. 

In a strangely redundant note for the science fiction date of 1995 (even though the story was written in 1986, just as fax machines were beginning to rollout) King has the London City Council send a daily telegram! 

The Furnace (2005) 

This America Under Siege piece consists of the first two paragraphs of a story, written by King and is headed “By Stephen King and …” It was first published in a magazine for US school students,
Know Your World Extra
for September 2005 and simultaneously on the parent company’s web site,
www.weeklyreader.com
. 

Winning entries were posted weekly on
The Weekly Reader
’s web site. King’s assistant, Marsha DeFilippo, confirmed King would not be completing the story; and that the author himself had not provided the title. 

According to the website of the publisher, the Weekly Reader Corporation:  

Know Your World Extra
builds reading success and self-esteem by motivating students to read with high-interest, age-appropriate topics. Written for teens and near-teens in a mature tone (never patronizing or childish), at a second-to fourth-grade reading level, KYW Extra includes original plays and dynamic nonfiction content … 

The magazine is distributed “For teens (and near-teens at a second- to fourth-grade reading level)” by subscription. 

In the two paragraphs we learn that a ten-year-old boy, Tommy, has been sent to get firewood from a cellar that he hated. He believes there is something alive behind the furnace (“breathing back there,” he “knew it was watching him”) and, as he is getting the wood, the door swings shut and the light goes out. 

There are no links to King’s other fiction. Copies of the magazine will be very difficult to find (one of King’s previous items in a sister magazine, an abridged version of
Battleground
in
Read
, is one of the rarest King pieces). As the existence of
The Furnace
was brought to the attention of the King community during the month of publication some copies of
Know Your World Extra
may have been saved and, if so, are likely to appear for re-sale. A number of King websites published the entire text in September 2005 and, despite some possible copyright issues, they may still appear. Copies of the website post of the story circulate freely. 

George D. X. McArdle (1980s) 

George D. X. McArdle
is a partial novel held in Box 2315 at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library of the University of Maine at Orono. As this box is unrestricted readers who attend the Library may read the work. 

The 123 page single-spaced manuscript is undated, incomplete and there is no indication that King ever continued it. It is likely it was written in the 1980s. 

McArdle
is a delightful, humorous Western. King has only rarely attempted this genre, most notably in the satirical
Slade
. One suspects he has an underlying desire to dabble in the genre, having incorporated elements of it in other works such as
The Dark Tower
,
The Shotgunners
; and with characters such as Bobbi Anderson (
The Tommyknockers)
being a successful Western novelist. 

In this America Under Siege tale a young man awakes on the side of a stream in the Old West. Peter Crager’s erstwhile partner, Jake Box, had shot him in the head and killed the third member of their gang, which had robbed the Kingston Stage. 

George D. X. McArdle and his “girls” found Crager lying wounded. McArdle and Crager began to exchange their personal stories while considering robbing the payroll from a B. S. & M. train that would be guarded by the famously vicious Bob Valery, a railroad private detective, along with one hundred soldiers. 

McArdle grew up in Boston and attended Harvard, where he was involved in a cheating episode that lead to his being blackballed from employment at most Eastern schools. He did secure a position in Kingsport, Rhode Island and six years later began an affair with a fellow mathematics teacher’s wife. The man discovered their love letters and committed suicide. As a result of the scandal McArdle was forced to resign, setting him on the road and a spiral of adventures, including being lost in a swamp, time as a gigolo and various business ventures. He was a gun dealer in Richmond, Virginia prior to the Civil War but a bank manager stole his savings after he duelled with the manager’s friend over McArdle’s getting the friend’s middle-aged and unmarried daughter pregnant. After avoiding the Civil War by going to Canada, he returned to America intending to become the world’s first progressive Whoremaster. In 1868 he formed a traveling medicine show with Asa Burroughs and, after the death of Burroughs in September 1871, had collected a group of six girls as part of his prostitution plan. They were headed to San Francisco but the axle of their wagon (which also carried a tiger!) had broken and they were contemplating how to fund its replacement when they met Crager. 

Peter Crager grew up in Pennsylvania but had to leave the family farm after punching his stepfather, Rev. Floyd Hastings, who was in the process of selling off parts of the property and giving the money to overseas religious missions. Crager went to Kansas before deciding to head South just before the Civil War. He served in the 215th Georgia, including at the Battles of the Wilderness and Gettysburg before being captured shortly before the war ended. He was sent to the brutal Shalagh prison camp where he was severely beaten by guards in March of 1865. After his release he became a petty criminal and robbed the Kingston Stage in 1873. When Jake Box shot him in the head the bullet entered just above an eye and traveled around the skull, exiting at his neck. 

The story ends at this point but we can speculate that McArdle and Crager did rob the payroll train as Crager states he was “nearly hung for the killing of Bob Valery.” 

The “present day” of the story is set in 1873, near Gordon’s Stream in the state of Missouri. The back-stories of both McArdle and Crager are deep and full of detail. As most readers will never enjoy reading this partial story, further detail follows. 

George McArdle was very tall, at 6 foot 6 inches and fat, weighing 350 lbs. An atheist, he had thinning black hair and blue eyes. Born in 1820 in Boston, the third eldest of the nine children of a successful baker, he attended a Boston grammar school, where he was a good student and was accepted into Harvard in 1838. While there he regularly did magic tricks. In his sophomore year he was elected to the elite Harvard society, The Hellenists, even though he did poorly at Greek. He was involved in trying to steal a Greek exam, which resulted in the expulsion of a fellow student, John Reynolds, but he personally escaped punishment. Afterwards, Reynolds’ father set the son up in a first rate law firm where he did not progress and ran up debts, which the father had to pay off. 

McArdle completed his four years at Harvard, graduating 23rd in his class and got his degree. However, he was blackballed from teaching positions across the East by one of the Greek teachers, Young and another student, Stewart, who had failed to have George thrown out after the exam scandal. 

In August 1842 McArdle managed to secure a role as maths teacher at the Kingsport Preparatory School for Boys in Rhode Island. In the summer of 1848 he took as a mistress Jennifer Pettigrew, a wife of another teacher at the school. When her husband Norman discovered the affair in August 1849, he committed suicide by hanging, leaving the love letters from McArdle scattered about his body. McArdle collected and burnt them, but was still forced to resign.  

He next got a job speechwriting for a US Senator, who died of a heart attack in 1853 while in a brothel with two women. McArdle then became a barker at an Atlanta carnival and medicine show and followed this up by working at building a railroad in Georgia. In 1856 he survived being lost in the Okeefenokee swamp when he came across a mute man with no nose or teeth, three toes on his left foot missing and feet and legs covered with running sores. McArdle thought he was a leper. He successfully demanded McArdle have sex with him before he would guide him out of the swamp! 

Traveling to Richmond in January 1857 he became a gun merchant and in the summer of that year got Cynthia Devereaux pregnant. As a result her father challenged him to a duel. His opponent had a heart attack just after the shots were fired and died a month later while tongue lashing a nurse!
 

George then drifted to Canada and became a rancher. In 1860 he went into logging but nearly went broke in 1861. That year he got a job as a bartender at The Velvet Garter in Curser’s Mill in Canada, where he was initially exposed to the whoring business. After the Civil War he drifted back to the US intending to become the world’s first “progressive whoremaster.” He next became a pillow vendor on a New York railroad and in 1867 a gigolo to a matron in Port Stephen, New Jersey. In 1868 McArdle invested all his capital with Asa Burroughs and they formed a traveling medicine show. For the purposes of the show he claimed having been Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut and a magician, with a Ph.D. He displayed the letters BA, LMS (for Legerdemanic Magical Specialties) and DM (Doctor of Magic) on his wagon. He wanted to be the greatest whoremaster the West had ever known and, from September 1871, collected a group of working girls. They then set out for San Francisco to set up shop in that city.  

Peter (“Pete”) Crager’s background was nearly as exciting. Effectively the hero of the tale and its narrator, he was born 1838 in Pride’s Corner, Pennsylvania, the youngest of four children. He was six foot one inch tall, with black hair and blue eyes. After his father, a blacksmith and farmer of some means, died of a stroke in 1854 his mother re-married. Peter had to leave town after punching her new husband, more of whom later. 

After living for a period in Paterson, Kansas before the Civil War Crager headed South to Georgia in late 1859. He took a clerking job in Waycross and joined the local militia. Stars and Bars flags were everywhere in the South in 1861 and Peter had sex sixty odd times on account of his uniform. Fighting for the Confederacy (one of the rare notable King characters to fight on either side) he was at many battles, including the Wilderness, Chickamauga and Gettysburg, but made no higher than corporal. He was wounded at Stone Mountain, captured there (or in Virginia, the manuscript is a little confused on this point) and sent to the brutal prison camp at Shalagh, Pennsylvania, where he was severely beaten by Negro guards in March 1865. 

During the Kingston Stage robbery in 1873 he used the fake name “Ray” and he had used other names at various times, including “Peter Kirk.” Immediately after that robbery Jake Box shot Crager and left him for dead.  

Crager’s stepfather was the Reverend Floyd Hastings (although he is also called Harkness on page five of this admittedly unedited manuscript). A tall thin preacher from Daniels County, Crager’s mother took up with him after her husband died. Hastings had blue eyes and slicked back hair and they married in 1855 or 1856. He then began selling parts of the family farm and giving the money to Christian missions. In frustration Peter punched him and had to leave town ahead of the law. Hastings died in 1885. Mrs. Crager/Hastings died of consumption, probably in August 1863, while Peter was serving in the Rebel Army. 

The woman who first taught McArdle about whoring was Annabelle Dupray, who had whored in Alberta and Saskatchewan and bore ten children! In 1861 she was a gray-haired, old and dirty whore at The Velvet Garter in Curser’s Mills, where McArdle became her friend. Born and raised in a Baptist family in Ohio she had been brutally raped by the boy next door when she was 18. She did not report the rape and he attacked her more and more often, to her slow acceptance. When she fell pregnant he denied responsibility and her parents put her on the road.  

As one would expect King produces tremendous back-story for each of McArdle’s “girls.” Crager was attracted to Marianne Franklin. She was shy, 5 foot 9 inches tall, with gray-green eyes. She was 18 and McArdle had recently aborted her unborn child. Another of the girls was Tabitha (“Tabby”) Gordon (one wonders how Mrs. King reacted to this character’s proposed profession). She had brown hair tied in horsetails and was four month’s pregnant. She had decided to take her child to term and then give it up. Helen Grier had given birth to a stillborn child in the second half of 1871 and joined McArdle in early 1872 after working in a St Louis café. Victoria (“Vicky”) Johns was middle-sized and had dark black hair. McArdle’s group found her delirious at Canner’s Falls, Missouri in mid-1872. On recovering, she could not remember her past.  

Amanda Lowell was blonde, with blue eyes. She met McArdle in December 1871 or January 1872 when she was two months pregnant and contemplating suicide. McArdle and Jane Stockholm talked her out of it, McArdle aborted her and she agreed to the offer to join in his prostitution plan. Jane (“Janey”) Stockholm was born in 1855. She had milky skin, red hair and played the piano. She fell pregnant in about January 1871 and joined McArdle in September of that year as a servant, initially refusing to consider prostitution. Her son was born in October or November 1871 and was adopted out to a bank teller and his wife in the town of Doogan. At that point she decided to prostitute herself after all. 

There are many other interesting characters in both McArdle and Crager’s background. For instance, Henry Hyde was another student at Harvard in McArdle’s time. He almost certainly raped and murdered a barmaid at The Storm Pig tavern near the college. The tavern was then severely damaged by a fire set in the employee’s wing. His father, rich and influential in Boston, probably saved Henry from the consequences of these crimes. 

McArdle’s lover at Kingsport Preparatory School for Boys was the auburn haired Jennifer (“Jenny”) Pettigrew. After a lengthy affair, including the exchange of love letters, her husband and McArdle’s fellow maths teacher, Norman discovered the letters. In a deeply melodramatic turn he committed suicide by hanging. Tall, gangling and balding, with a bushy red beard, he was also an unsuccessful writer of short stories and religious verse.  

McArdle’s partner in the medicine show and tigers was Asa Burroughs. McArdle invested with him in 1868, when Burroughs was making his CorrectAll “medicine” (McArdle himself had been making and peddling “African Wonder Liniment and Cargo Elixir”). Their business was called Professor D. X. McArdle’s Pandaemonium Magic Show. Burroughs died of a stroke on 8 September 1871, 20 miles from Westbound, Missouri and was buried the next day by the Warren River. The tigers (reminding the reader only slightly of
The Night of the Tiger
) were Sheenah, a female Bengal who died in the winter of 1870; and Yaphet, a male Bengal with deep emerald eyes. It seems certain King had plot development intentions in mind when he introduced such an exotic animal, caged in McArdle’s wagon. 

The man who shot Pete Crager and left him for dead was Jake Box. He claimed to have ridden with Quantrill’s Raiders during the Civil War. Five foot seven, bow-legged and dirty, he had only six teeth left and most of those were black. He had a salt-and-pepper beard and long, clotted hair. Their partner in the robbery was Frank Carter. A country ploughboy from St Louis, he was six foot tall, blonde, with a walleye and a yuk-yuk laugh that showed he was a little slow. He couldn’t “shoot for shit.” During the Kingston Stage robbery he was shot in the elbow. Back at their hideout Jake Box shot him dead.