The Collective Page 3
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.
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.
* * *