The Collective Read online

  lacking two days of September, and as usual, the pinstripers looked

  formidable. Just talking about the Yankees made them feel a little

  better. They were New York boys, on loan from Walt Abruzzi, and

  they were a long way from home.

  The man inside was a big wheel in the Organization. That was all

  they knew all they wanted to know. "You do your job, we all get

  well," Abruzzi had told them. "What's to know?"

  They had heard things,, of course. That there was a place in

  Colorado that was completely neutral ground. A place where even

  a crazy little West Coast hood like Tony Giorgio could sit down

  and have a fancy brandy in a balloon glass with the Gray Old Men

  who saw him as some sort of homicidal stinging insect to be

  crushed. A place where guys from Boston who had been used to

  putting each other in the trunks of cars behind bowling alleys in

  Malden or into garbage cans in Roxbury could get together and

  play gin and tell jokes about the Polacks. A place where hatchets

  could be buried or unearthed, pacts made, plans laid. A place

  where warm people could sometimes cool off.

  Well, here they were, and it wasn't so much - in fact, both of them

  were homesick for New York, which was why they were talking

  about the Yankees. But they never saw New York or the Yankees

  again.

  Their voices reached down the hall to the stairwell where the

  murderers stood six risers down, with their stocking-covered heads

  just below line of sight, if you happened to be looking down the

  hall from the door of the Presidential Suite. There were three of

  them on the stairs, dressed in dark pants and coats, carrying

  shotguns with the barrels sawed off to six inches. The shotguns

  were loaded with expanding buckshot.

  One of the three motioned and they walked up the stairs to the hall.

  The two outside the door never even saw them until the murderers

  were almost on top of them. One of them was saying animatedly,

  "Now you take Ford. Who's better in the American League than

  Whitey Ford? No, I want to ask you that sincerely, because when it

  comes to the stretch he just

  The speaker looked up and saw three black shapes with no

  discernable faces standing not 10 paces away. For a moment he

  could not believe it. They were just standing there. He shook his

  head, fully expecting them to go away like the floating black

  specks you sometimes saw in the darkness. They didn't. Then he

  knew.

  "What's the matter?" his buddy said.

  The young man who had been speaking about Whitey Ford clawed

  under his jacket for his gun. One of the murderers placed the butt

  of his shotgun against a leather pad strapped to his belly beneath

  his dark turtleneck. And pulled both triggers. The blast in the

  narrow hallway was deafening. The muzzle flash was like summer

  lightning, purple in its brilliance. A stink of cordite. The young

  man was blown backward down the hall in a disintegrating cloud

  of Ivy League jacket, blood, and hair. His arm looped over

  backward, spilling the Magnum from his dying fingers, and the

  pistol thumped harmlessly to the carpet with the safety still on.

  The second young man did not even make an effort to go for his

  gun. He stuck his hands high in the air and wet his pants at the

  same time.

  "I give up, don't shoot me, it's OK-!'

  "Say hello to Albert Anastasia when you get down there, punk",

  one of the murderers said, and placed the butt of his shotgun

  against his belly.

  "I ain't a. problem, I ain't a problem!" the young man screamed in a

  thick Bronx accent, and then the blast of the shotgun lifted him out

  of his shoes and he slammed back against the silk wallpaper with

  its delicate raised pattern. He actually stuck for a moment before

  collapsing to the hall floor.

  The three of them walked to the door of the suite. One of them

  tried the knob. "Locked."

  "OK."

  The third man, who hadn't shot yet, stood in front of the door,

  leveled his weapon slightly above the knob, and pulled both

  triggers. A jagged hole appeared in the door, and light rayed

  through. The third man reached through the hole and grasped the

  deadbolt on the other side. There was a pistol shot, then two more.

  None of the three flinched.

  There was a snap as the deadbolt gave, and then the third man

  kicked the door open. Standing in the wide sitting room in front of

  the picture window, which now showed a view only of darkness,

  was a man of about 35 wearing only jockey shorts. He held a pistol

  in each hand and as the murderers walked in he began to fire at

  them, spraying bullets wildly. Slugs peeled splinters from the door

  frame, dug furrows in the rug, dusted plaster down from the

  ceiling. He fired five times, and the closest he came to any of his

  assassins was a bullet that twitched the pants of the second man at

  the left knee.

  They raised their shotguns with almost military precision.

  The man in the sitting room screamed, threw both guns on the

  floor, and ran for the bedroom. The triple blast caught him just

  outside the door and a wet fan of blood, brains, and bits of flesh

  splashed across the cherrystriped wallpaper. He fell through the

  open bedroom doorway, half in and half out.

  "Watch the door," the first man said, and dropped his smoking

  shotgun to the rug. He reached into his coat pocket, brought out a

  bone-handled switchblade, and thumbed the chrome button. He

  approached the dead man, who was lying in the doorway on his

  side. He squatted beside the corpse and yanked down the front of

  the man's jockey shorts.

  Down the hall the door to one of the other suites opened and a

  pallid face peered out. The third man raised his shotgun and the

  face jerked back in. The door slammed. A bolt rattled frantically.

  The first man rejoined them.

  'All right," he said. "Down the stairs and out the back door. Let's

  go."

  They were outside and climbing into the parked car three minutes

  later. They left the Overlook behind them, standing gilded in

  mountain moonlight, white as bone under high stars. The hotel

  would stand long after the three of them were as dead as the three

  they had left behind.

  The Overlook was at home with the dead.

  The Blue Air Compressor

  Stephen King

  first appeared in

  Onan, 1971

  The house was tall, with an incredible slope of shingled roof. As he

  walked up toward it from the shore road, Gerald Nately thought it

  was almost a country in itself, geography in microcosm. The roof

  dipped and rose at varying angles above the main building and two

  strangely-angled wings; a widow's walk skirted a mushroom-

  shaped cupola which looked toward the sea; the porch, facing the

  dunes and lusterless September scrubgrass was longer than a

  Pullman car and screened in. The high slope of roof made the

  house seem to beetle its brows and loom above him. A Baptist

  grandfather of a house.
/>   He went to the porch and after a moment of hesitation, through the

  screen door to the fanlighted one beyond. There was only a wicker

  chair, a rusty porch swing, and an old discarded knitting basket to

  watch him go. Spiders had spun silk in the shadowy upper corners.

  He knocked.

  There was silence, inhabited silence. He was about to knock again

  when a chair someplace inside wheezed deeply in its throat. It was

  a tired sound. Silence. Then the slow, dreadfully patient sound of

  old, overburdened feet finding their way up the hall. Counterpoint

  of cane: Whock... whock... whock...

  The floorboards creaked and whined. A shadow, huge and

  unformed in the pearled glass, bloomed on the fanlight. Endless

  sound of fingers laboriously solving the riddle of chain, bolt, and

  hasp lock. The door opened. "Hello," the nasal voice said flatly.

  "You're Mr. Nately. You've rented the cottage. My husband's

  cottage."

  "Yes." Gerald said, his tongue swelling in his throat. "That's right.

  And you're-"

  "Mrs. Leighton," the nasal voice said, pleased with either his

  quickness or her name, though neither was remarkable. "I'm Mrs.

  Leighton."

  * * *

  this woman is so goddam fucking big and old she looks like oh

  jesus christ print dress she must be six-six and fat my god Shes fat

  as a hog can't smell her white hair long white hair her legs those

  redwood trees ill that movie a Lank she could be a tank she could

  kill me her voice is out of any context like a kazoo jesus if i laugh i

  can't laugh can she be seventy god how does she walk and the cane

  her hands are bigger than my feet like a goddam tank she could go

  through oak oak for christs sake.

  * * *

  "You write." She hadn't offered him in.

  "That's about the size of it," he said, and laughed to cover his own

  sudden shrinking from that metaphor.

  "Will you show me some after you get settled?" she asked. Her

  eyes seemed perpetually luminous and wistful. They were not

  touched by the age that had run riot in the rest of her

  * * *

  wait get that written down

  * * *

  image: "age had run riot in her with luxuriant fleshiness: she was

  like a wild sow let loose in a great and dignified house to shit on

  the carpet, gore at the welsh dresser and send the crystal goblets

  and wine-glasses all crash-atumble, to trample the wine colored

  divans to lunatic puffs of springs and stuffing, to spike the

  mirrorbright finish of the great hall floor with barbarian hoofprints

  and flying puddles of urine"

  okay Shes there its a story i feel her

  * * *

  body, making it sag and billow.

  "If you like," he said. "I didn't even see the cottage from the Shore

  Road, Mrs. Leighton. Could you tell me where--"

  "Did you drive in?"

  "Yes. I left my car over there.'' He pointed beyond the dunes,

  toward the road.

  A smile, oddly one-dimensional, touched her lips. "That's why.

  You can only see a blink from the road: unless you're walking, you

  miss it." She pointed west at a slight angle away from the dunes

  and the house. "There. Right over that little hill."

  "All right," he said, then stood there smiling. He really had no idea

  how to terminate the interview.

  "Would you like to come in for some coffee? Or a Coca-Cola?"

  "Yes," he said instantly.

  She seemed a little taken back by his instant agreement. He had,

  after 211, been her husband's friend, not her own. The face loomed

  above Gerald, moonlike, disconnected, undecided. Then she led

  him into the elderly, waiting house.

  She had tea. He had Coke, Millions of eyes seemed to watch them.

  He felt like a burglar, stealing around the hidden fiction he could

  Make of her, carrying only his own youthful winsomeness and a

  psychic flashlight.

  * * *

  My own name, of course, is Steve King, and you'll pardon my

  intrusion on your mind-or I hope you will. I could argue that the

  drawing-aside of the curtain of presumption between reader and

  author is permissible because I am the writer; i.e., since it's my

  story I'll do any goddam thing I please with it-but since that leaves

  the reader out of it completely, that is not valid. Rule One for all

  writers is that the teller is not worth a tin tinker's fart when

  compared to the listener. Let us drop the matter, if we may. I am

  intruding for the same reason that the Pope defecates: we both

  have to.

  You should know that Gerald Nately was never brought to the

  dock; his crime was not discovered. He paid all the same. After

  writing four twisted, monumental, misunderstood novels, he cut

  his own head off with an ivory-figured guillotine purchased in

  Kowloon.

  I invented him first during a moment of eight o'clock boredom in a

  class taught by Carroll F. Terrell of the University of Maine

  English faculty. Dr. Terrell was speaking of Edgar A. Poe, and I

  thought

  ivory guillotine Kowloon

  twisted woman of shadows, like a pig

  some big house

  The blue air compressor did not come until later. It is desperately

  important that the reader be made cognizant of these facts.

  * * *

  He did show her some of his writing. Not the important part, the

  story he was writing about her, but fragments of poetry, the spine

  of a novel that had ached in his mind for a year like embedded

  shrapnel, four essays. She was a perceptive critic, and addicted to

  marginal notations with her black felt-tip pen. Because she

  sometimes dropped in when lie was gone to the village, he kept the

  story hidden in the back shed.

  September melted into cool October, and the story was completed,

  mailed to a friend, returned with suggestions (bad ones), rewritten.

  He felt it was good, but not quite right. Some indefinable was

  missing. The focus was a shade fuzzy. He began to toy, with the

  idea of giving it to her for Criticism, rejected it, toyed with it again.

  After all. the story was her; he never doubted she could supply the

  final vector.

  His attitude concerning her became increasing])- unhealthy; he was

  fascinated by her huge, animalistic bulk, by the slow, tortoise-like

  way she trekked across the space between the house and the

  cottage.

  * * *

  image: "mammoth shadow of decay swaying across the

  shadowless sand, cane held in one twisted hand, feet clad in huge

  canvas shoes which pump and push at the coarse grains, face like a

  serving platter, puffy dough arms, breasts like drumlins, a

  geography in herself, a country of tissue"

  * * *

  by her reedy, vapid voice; but at the same time he loathed her,

  could not stand her touch. lie began to feel like the young man in

  "The Tell-Tale Heart, " by Edgar A. Poe. He felt lie could stand at

  her bedroom door for endless midnights, shining one Tay of light

  on her sleeping eye, ready to pounce and rip the instant it flashed

  open.

&
nbsp; The urge to show her the story itched at him maddeningly. He had

  decided, by the first day of December, that he would do it. The

  decision-making did not relieve him, as it is supposed to do in the

  novels, but it did leave him with a feeling of antiseptic pleasure. It

  was right that it should be so-an omega that quite dovetailed with

  he alpha. And it was omega; he was vacating the cottage on he

  fifth of December. On this day he had just returned from the Stowe

  Travel Agency in Portland, where he had booked passage for the

  Far East. He had done this almost on the spur of the moment: the

  decision to go and the decision to show his manuscript to Mrs.

  Leighton had come together, almost as if he had been guided by an

  invoisible hand.

  * * *

  In truth, he was guide; by an invisible hand-mine.

  * * *

  The day was white with overcast and the promise of snow lurked

  in its throat. The dunes seemed to foreshadow the winter already,

  as Gerald crossed them between the slate-roofed house of her

  dominion and the low stone cottage of his. The sea, sullen and

  gray, curled on the shingle of beach. Gulls rode the slow swells

  like buoys.

  He Crossed the top of the last dune and knew she it-as there-her

  cane, with its white bicycle handgrip at the base, stood against the

  side of the door. Smoke rifted from the toy chimney.

  Gerald went up the board steps, kicked sand from his high-topped

  shoes to make her aware of his presence, and then went in.

  "Hi, Mrs. Leighton!"

  But the tiny living room and the kitchen both stood empty. The

  ship's clock on the mantle ticked only for itself and for Gerald. Her

  gigantic fur coat lay draped over the rocker like Some animal sail.

  A small fire had been laid in the fireplace, and it glowed and

  crackled busily. The teapot was on the gas range in the kitchen,

  and one teacup stood on the counter, still waiting for water. He

  peered into the narrow hall which led to the bedroom.

  "Mrs. Leighton?"

  Hall and bedroom both empty.

  He was about to turn back to the kitchen when the mammoth

  chuckles began. They were large, helpless shakings of laughter, the

  kind that stays hidden for years and ages like wine. (There is also

  an Edgar A. Poe story about wine.)

  The chuckles evolved into large bellows of laughter. They came

  from behind the door to the right of Gerald's bed, the last door in

  the cottage. From the tool-shed.

  * * *