The Collective Read online

  to raise one of them and wipe the blood away.

  They trembled in his lap, but he was still unable to actually move

  them. He thought of the .45 special in its holster under his left arm.

  If I can get to my piece, kitty, the rest of your nine lives are going

  in a lump sum.

  More tingles now. Dull throbs of pain from his feet, buried and

  surely shattered under the engine block, zips and tingles from his

  legs - it felt exactly the way a limb that you've slept on does when

  it's starting to wake up. At that moment Halston didn't care about

  his feet. It was enough to know that his spine wasn't severed, that

  he wasn't going to finish out his life as a dead lump of body

  attached to a talking head.

  Maybe I had a few lives left myself.

  Take care of the cat. That was the first thing. Then get out of the

  wreck - maybe someone would come along, that would solve both

  problems at once. Not likely at 4:30 in the morning on a back road

  like this one, but barely possible. And-

  And what was the cat doing back there?

  He didn't like having it on his face, but he didn't like having it

  behind him and out of sight, either. He tried the rearview mirror,

  but that was useless. The crash had knocked it awry and all it

  reflected was the grassy ravine he had finished up in.

  A sound from behind him, like low, ripping cloth.

  Purring.

  Hellcat my ass. It's gone to sleep back there.

  And even if it hadn't, even if it was somehow planning murder,

  what could it do? It was a skinny little thing, probably weighed all

  of four pounds soaking wet. And soon ... soon he would be able to

  move his hands enough to get his gun. He was sure of it.

  Halston sat and waited. Feeling continued to flood back into his

  body in a series of pins-and-needles incursions. Absurdly (or

  maybe in instinctive reaction to his close brush with death) he got

  an erection for a minute or so. Be kind of hard to beat off under

  present circumstances, he thought.

  A dawn-line was appearing in the eastern sky. Somewhere a bird

  sang.

  Halston tried his hands again and got them to move an eighth of an

  inch before they fell back.

  Not yet. But soon.

  A soft thud on the seatback beside him. Halston turned his head

  and looked into the black-white face, the glowing eyes with their

  huge dark pupils.

  Halston spoke to it.

  "I have never blown a hit once I took it on, kitty. This could be a

  first. I'm getting my hands back. Five minutes, ten at most. You

  want my advice? Go out the window. They're all open. Go out and

  take your tail with you."

  The cat stared at him.

  Halston tried his hands again. They came up, trembling wildly.

  Half an inch. An inch. He let them fall back limply. They slipped

  off his lap and thudded to the Plymouth's seat. They glimmered

  there palely, like large tropical spiders.

  The cat was grinning at him.

  Did I make a mistake?, he wondered confusedly. He was a creature

  of hunch, and the feeling that he had made one was suddenly

  overwhelming. Then the cat's body tensed, and even as it leaped,

  Halston knew what it was going to do and he opened his mouth to

  scream.

  The cat landed on Halston's crotch, claws out, digging.

  At that moment, Halston wished he had been paralyzed. The pain

  was gigantic, terrible. He had never suspected that there could be

  such pain in the world. The cat was a spitting coiled spring of fury,

  clawing at his balls.

  Halston did scream, his mouth yawning open, and that was when

  the cat changed direction and leaped at his face, leaped at his

  mouth. And at that moment Halston knew that it was something

  more than a cat. It was something possessed of a malign,

  murderous intent.

  He caught one last glimpse of that black-and-white face below the

  flattened ears, its eyes enormous and filled with lunatic hate. It had

  gotten rid of the three old people and now it was going to get rid of

  John Halston.

  It rammed into his mouth, a furry projectile. He gagged on it. Its

  front claws pinwheeled, tattering his tongue like a piece of liver.

  His stomach recoiled and he vomited. The vomit ran down into his

  windpipe, clogging it, and he began to choke.

  In this extremity, his will to survive overcame the last of the

  impact paralysis. He brought his hands up slowly to grasp the cat.

  Oh my God, he thought.

  The cat was forcing its way into his mouth, flattening its body,

  squirming, working itself farther and farther in. He could feel his

  jaws creaking wider and wider to admit it.

  He reached to grab it, yank it out, destroy it ...and his hands

  clasped only the cat's tail.

  Somehow it had gotten its entire body into his mouth. Its strange,

  black-and-white face must be crammed into his very throat.

  A terrible thick gagging sound came from Halston's throat, which

  was swelling like a flexible length of garden hose.

  His body twitched. His hands fell back into his lap and the fingers

  drummed senselessly on his thighs. His eyes sheened over, then

  glazed. They stared out through the Plymouth's windshield blankly

  at the coming dawn.

  Protruding from his open mouth was two inches of bushy tail ...

  half black, half white. It switched lazily back and forth.

  It disappeared.

  A bird cried somewhere again. Dawn came in breathless silence

  then, over the frost-rimmed fields of rural Connecticut.

  The farmer's name was Will Reuss.

  He was on his way to Placer's Glen to get the inspection sticker

  renewed on his farm truck when he saw the late-morning sun

  twinkle on something in the ravine beside the road. He pulled over

  and saw the Plymouth lying at a drunken, canted angle in the ditch,

  barbed wire tangled in its grille like a snarl of steel knitting.

  He worked his way down and then sucked in his breath sharply.

  "Holy moley," he muttered to the bright November day. There was

  a guy sitting bolt upright behind the wheel, eyes open and glaring

  emptily into eternity. The Roper organization was never going to

  include him in its presidential poll again. His face was smeared

  with blood. He was still wearing his seat belt.

  The driver's door had been crimped shut, but Reuss managed to get

  it open by yanking with both hands. He leaned in and unstrapped

  the seat belt, planning to check for ID. He was reaching for the

  coat when he noticed that the dead guy's shirt was rippling, just

  above the belt buckle. Rippling ... and bulging. Splotches of blood

  began to bloom there like sinister roses.

  "What the Christ?" He reached out, grasped the dead man's shirt,

  and pulled it up.

  Will Reuss looked - and screamed.

  Above Halston's navel, a ragged hole had been clawed in his flesh.

  Looking out was the gore-streaked black-and-white face of a cat,

  its eyes huge and glaring.

  Reuss staggered back, shrieking, hands clapped to his face. A score

  of crows took cawing wing f
rom a nearby field.

  The cat forced its body out and stretched in obscene languor.

  Then it leaped out the open window. Reuss caught sight of it

  moving through the high dead grass and then it was gone.

  It seemed to be in a hurry, he later told a reporter from the local

  paper.

  As if it had unfinished business.

  The Dark Man

  Stephen King

  Published in

  "Ubris", 1969 and later in Moth, 1970.

  I have stridden the fuming way

  of sun-hammered tracks and

  smashed cinders;

  I have ridden rails

  and bumed sterno in the

  gantry silence of hob jungles:

  I am a dark man.

  I have ridden rails

  and passed the smuggery

  of desperate houses with counterfeit chimneys

  and heard from the outside

  the inside clink of cocktail ice

  while closed doors broke the world -

  and over it all a savage sickle moon

  that bummed my eyes with bones of light.

  I have slept in glaring swamps

  where musk-reek rose

  to mix with the sex smell of rotting cypress stumps

  where witch fire clung in sunken

  psycho spheres of baptism -

  and heard the suck of shadows

  where a gutted columned house

  leeched with vines

  speaks to an overhung mushroom sky

  I have fed dimes to cold machines

  in all night filling stations

  while traffic in a mad and flowing flame

  streaked red in six lanes of darkness,

  and breathed the cleaver hitchhike wind

  within the breakdown lane with thumb levelled

  and saw shadowed faces made complacent

  with heaters behind safety glass

  faces that rose like complacent moons

  in riven monster orbits.

  and in a sudden jugular flash

  cold as the center af a sun

  I forced a girl in a field of wheat

  and left her sprawled with the virgin bread

  a savage sacrifice

  and a sign to those who creep in

  fixed ways:

  I am a dark man.

  Donovan's Brain

  Stephen King

  Published in "Moth", 1970

  Shratt came on limping

  obsessed

  he tried to run down a little girl

  and there was a drag of pain

  in his left

  kidney

  **********

  horror

  **********

  he signed checks with Donovan's name

  and made mad love with Donovan's woman.

  poor Shratt!

  warped and sucked by desert wine

  raped by the brain of that monstrous man

  shadowed by his legless shadow

  Shratt, driven by a thing

  (you know about that Thing, don't you?)

  in an electric tank:

  (AMPS-AMPS-AMPS-AMPS-)

  demented paranoia

  from "BEYOND THE GRAVE! !"

  but the tragedy

  was Shratt -oh,

  I could weep for Shratt.

  For The Birds

  Stephen King

  From

  " Bred Any Good Rooks Lately? "

  Okay, this is a science fiction joke.

  It seems like in 1995 or so the pollution in the atmosphere of

  London has started to kill off all the rooks. And the city

  government is very concerned because the rooks roosting on the

  cornices and the odd little crannies of the public buildings are a big

  attraction. The Yanks with their Kodaks, if you get it. So they say,

  " What are we going to do? "

  They get a lot of brochures from places with climates similar to

  London's so they can raise the rooks until the pollution problem is

  finally licked. One place with a similar climate, but low pollution

  count, turns to be Bangor, Maine. So they put an ad in the paper

  soliciting bird fanciers and talk to a bunch of guys in the trade.

  Finally, they engage this one guy at the rate of $50,000 a year to

  raise rooks. They send an ornithologist over on the concord with

  two cases of rook eggs packed in these shatterproof cases - they

  keep the shipping compartment constantly heated and all that stuff.

  So this guy has a new business - North American Rook Farms, Inc.

  He goes to work right off incubating new rooks so London will not

  become a rookless city. The only thing is, the London City Council

  is really impatient, and every day they send him a telegram that

  says: " Bred Any Good Rooks lately? "

  THE

  HARDCASE

  SPEAKS

  STEPHEN KING

  From

  Contraband #2

  In fields and christless allies the psalter is handed

  greedily around with purple bottles of cheap port

  punctuated by the sodium lightness glare of freights

  rising past hobo cinder gantries and pitless bramble

  hollows:

  Dukane, Grand Rapids, Cedar Forks, Harlow, Dover-

  Foxcroft,

  names from the back platform of the A-train

  so don't gimme that shit don't gimme that crap

  I'll put the hoodoo on you, I can do it, it comes in a can

  in 1954 in a back alley behind a bar they

  found a lady cut in four pieces and written in her juice on

  the bricks above

  he had scrawled PLEASE STOP ME BEFORE I KILL

  AGAIN in letters that leaned and

  draggled so they called him The Cleveland Torso Murderer

  and never caught him,

  it figures

  all these liberals are brainless

  if you want to see jeans just peak into any alabaster

  gravel pit in Mestalinas

  all these liberals have hairy shirts

  Real life is in the back row of a 2nd run movie house in

  Utica, have you been

  there

  this guy with his hair greased back was drunk

  and getting drunker when I sat down and his face kept

  twisting; he cried I'm a

  goddamn stupid sonofabitch but doan choo try to tell me

  nothin I didn't he

  might have come from Cleveland

  if the stars are right I can witch you I can make your hair

  fall out

  You don't need hairy jeans to stand outside a Safeway

  store in Smalls Falls and watch a cloud under the high

  blue sky ripple the last shadows of summer over the asphalt

  parking lot two

  acres wide

  A real hack believes blackboards are true

  for myself I would turn them all soft like custard scoop

  them feed them to blackbirds save corn for murderers

  in huge and ancient Buicks sperm grows on seatcovers

  and flows upstream toward the sound of Chuck Berry

  once I saw a drunk in Redcliff and he had stuffed a

  newspaper in his mouth he

  jigged jubilantly

  around a two shadowed light pole

  I could gun you down with magic nose bullets

  There are still drugstore saints

  Still virgins pedalling bikes with playing cards affixed to

  the rear spokes

  with clothespins

  The students have made things up

  The liberals have shit themselves and produced a satchel-

  load of smelly

  numbers

  Radicals scratch
secret sores and pore over back numbers

  bore a little hole in your head sez I insert a candle

  light a light for Charlie Starkweather and let

  your little light shine shine shine

  play bebop

  buy styrofoam dice on 42nd street

  eat sno-cones and read Lois Lane

  Learn to do magic like me and we will drive to Princeton

  in an old Ford with four retread skins and a loose manifold

  that boils up the

  graphite stink of freshcooked

  exhaust we will do hexes with Budweiser pentagrams and

  old

  Diamond matchboxes

  chew some Red Man and let the juice down your chin when

  you spit

  sprinkle sawdust on weird messes

  buy some plastic puke at Atlantic City

  throw away your tape player and gobble Baby Ruths

  Go now. I think you are ready.

  Harrison State Park '68

  Stephen King

  Published in "Ubris", 1968

  "All mental disorders are simply detective strategies

  for handling difficult life situations.''

  ---Thomas Szasz

  ''And I feel like homemade shit.''

  ---Ed Sanders

  - Can you do it ?

  She asked shrewdly

  From the grass where her nylon legs

  in gartered splendor

  made motions.

  - Can you do it ?

  Ah!

  What do I say?

  What are the cools?

  Jimmy Dean?

  Robert Mitchum?

  Soupy Sales?

  Modern Screen Romances is a tent on the grass

  Over a dozen condoms in a quiet box

  and the lady used to say

  (before she passed away)

  - If you can't be an athlete,

  be an athletic supporter.

  The moon is set.

  A cloud scum has covered the stars.

  A man with a gun has passed

  this way

  BUT -

  we do not need your poets.

  Progressed beyond them to

  Sony

  Westinghouse

  Cousin Brucie

  the Doors

  and do I dare

  mention Sonny and Cher ?

  I remember Mickey Rooney

  as Pretty Boy Floyd

  and he was the shortest Pretty Boy Floyd

  on record

  coughing his enthusiastic

  guts out in the last

  reel.

  We have not spilt the blood.

  They have spilt the blood.

  A little girl lies dead

  On the hopscotch grid

  No matter

  - Can you do it?

  She asked shrewdly

  With her Playtex living bra

  cuddling breasts

  softer than a handful of wet Fig Newtons.

  Old enough to bleed