NOT HE WHO TELLS
This story borrows from Christine, the Shining, Pet Sematery, the Dark Tower, and nearly all other King/Bachman novels. All names, places and stories referred to (except for Howard Pope and his Gremlin) are the property of Stephen King/Richard Bachman/Peter Straub and their respective publishers. Visit the companion website to this story, which includes the PDF version, and the web's only interactive 3D environment exploring the world of King/Bachman, at www dot mellowtiger dot com.
Chapter One
Everybody knows my name.
I have long since reached that position of dubious honor. Everybody, from the critics to my greatest fans to the lottery-jockey who wouldn't recognize one of my books if it chased him ten blocks and mugged him in a blind alley, they all know my name.
Of course, that is due to more than just my books. The movies that were made from them are certainly part of the blame for my widespread recognition among those who don't subscribe to Book-of-the-Month Club. Let me admit at the outset, Constant Reader, with due respect to the film-makers, that more than a few of those movies were not so great. A couple of them were out-and-out clinkers. When I watch them, it's like seeing some dearly departed loved one resurrected in zombie form by some impish but powerful force, like Louis Creed's unfortunate son in Pet Sematery. The walking dead always look more or less like they did when they dwelled among the living, but there's always some tell-tale missing element in the eyes. Just like George Romero's movie zombies, the characters in the movies based on my books don't get around very well compared to the novel versions. They seem to lurch and gimp, trailing bits of themselves like rancid candies from a broken piñata. Annoyingly enough, I could never quite pin down where the movies got it wrong, at what point those familiar characters began to lurch and grunt like zombies, leaving essential character developments and plot details lying around the cinema-scape like rotted fingers and toes. Someone once told me that my books didn't translate well to the silver screen because it wasn't the stories that made them great, but the life that was breathed into the characters by the author. That was a compliment, I'm sure, but it made me feel lousy. It made me feel like a wretched parent pimping my gifted children, treating them like monkeys collecting change for the grinder. I won't try to tell you I didn't get a neat thrill every time I saw one of my characters get up and walk and talk on the big screen, but I will tell you it was a numb thrill, like that first whiff of ether at the dentist's office. And just like the dentist's ether, when the thrill wore off I usually found a strange empty socket where something else used to be, something that had been a part of me.
But I digress.
Lately I've been kicking around the idea of retirement.
I don't usually tell this to people. When I do, the response is always the same: theatrical incredulity followed by hearty, well-meaning denials that are half encouragement and half scolding. To some extent I suspect these admonitions are merely an effort to stroke my pride. The temperamental literary primadonna, they think, has to feed his ego monster somehow. And this, I am ashamed to admit, is not entirely untrue. But the people who say these things are my friends, my family. Deep down, they know that eventually the old story mill may just shut down and I'll stop writing no matter how many books I've sold or how many reviewers have said that the writer is "still at the top of his game". When and if that were to happen, most of those people would continue to be exactly what they are to me now, what friends and family are to any regular kinda guy.
But then there are the others: my readers, the members of the Official Fan Club, the people who pay the exorbitant fees to hear me speak at the occasional (as occasional as possible) writing seminar. I've learned not to talk about retirement with them. On the surface, their response looks the same as the response I get from my friends and family, but only on the surface. There's something under their unfamiliar but intimate gazes, something in the sheer, impersonal force of their anonymous numbers, an under beat that reminds me unsettlingly of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. When Max, the little boy in the wolf costume, made to leave their island, the Wild Things (if you'll pardon the analogy) roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws, and they cried, "No, no, please don't go, we'll eat you up, we love you so!"
I know that it isn't very polite, or even fair, of me to think that way. Constant Reader has proved very generous and loyal to me in the years since I finished Carrie while hunkered down in a nook between the washer and dryer of a rented trailer. But I feel it nonetheless. It's been a few raucous decades since I came to the land of the Wild Things, since I tamed them with the magic trick of staring into their yellow eyes and not blinking once until they proclaimed me the wildest thing of all. It's been one long, Wild Rumpus. Still, I am beginning to feel that the time has come for me to secretly hop back into the boat that got me here and hope it still knows its way back. After all, I'm not really the wildest thing of all. I'm just a little boy in a wolf suit. The trick, just like Max knew, is to get away before the real Wild Things figure that out.
But why, (the inner interviewer asks, taking off his glasses in a let's-get-down-to-brass-tacks-manner, and in my mind he always looks like Charlie Rose on PBS) why stop writing at all? It's fun, isn't it? It's profitable. And really, can you stop? Is it even possible?
Good questions, every one.
Many readers have pointed out to me over the years how many of the characters in my stories have been writers. From The Shining's Jack Torrance to Thad Beaumont of The Dark Half to the beleaguered hero of the short story Word Processor of the Gods (one of my personal favorites) someone recently informed me that, at last count, I have written stories about forty-seven fictitious authors. Frankly, I think it's more than that. And there is a simple reason for it. The fact is that, to me, the bare act of writing, of watching people and events and worlds scroll spontaneously out of a plain old keyboard, is one of the most singularly mysterious and inexplicable tricks imaginable. It is a form of magic, but the difference between a stage magician and the word magician is that the stage magician won't tell you how the trick works. The word magician would tell, is sometimes paid very handsomely to tell, but he simply and honestly doesn't know.
I wrote a story once called The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet. It was one of my earlier novellas and it was, to be honest, a little flabby. The essence of the story, however, still haunts me now just as much as it did a few decades ago when it was only a seed of an idea rattling around in my head. The story is about a writer who actively confronts the mystery-magic of his typewriter. Baffled by his success and the sheer enigma of fiction, he decides that the actual creative work of writing is, in fact, accomplished by a tiny magical elf that lives inside his Underwood typewriter. He called the elf a fornit. In the end, a little boy "kills" the fornit, and the writer, driven to the point of ragged insanity, bites a bullet from his own gun.
Over the past few decades I have occasionally lain awake at night wondering how close I had (or would) come to making that story autobiographical.
The attendees of those writing seminars I infrequently speak at have asked The Dreaded Question more times than I can count. You all know The Dreaded Question, right? Let's ask it together: Where do you get your ideas? My publicist put together a neat little website that answers questions about me for the world (more questions than I am sincerely comfortable with, but enquiring minds want to know, I guess) and he has devised a tidy answer to that awful, insidious question: Where does the author get his ideas? Very simply, the author has a very active imagination.
Ha ha, I told him, that's a good one. But it isn't really an answer. It's just another way of asking the question.
The reason I hate The Dreaded Question so very much is that I simply don't know the answer myself. Like Pharaoh seeking the meanings of his prophetic dreams, I would pay a modern day Joseph grandly if he could answer that riddle for me.
Thad Beaumont, in The Dark Half, said it was like having an invisible third eye. The third eye saw things that other people couldn't see, and what it saw he simply wrote down. Perhaps more simply, writing stories is like being a conduit. The stories somehow want to be written, want to be channeled through the conduit to the paper, where they become real. I think most writers, if they are honest, will tell you: the stories surprise you sometimes. They twist and writhe as they reach the paper, as if hand-written with a live snake dipped in ink. Characters say things you didn't expect, events spin off into directions you hadn't planned, happy endings invert on you and turn ugly and bitter (and vice versa). And in the end, no matter how much you may want it to roll out the way you plotted, fighting the story only makes it weak. Sometimes it kills it altogether. A good writer, fundamentally, is merely the conduit who has settled back and offered as little interference as possible. A good writer lets the story write itself.
But the conduit, which starts out sweet and intoxicating, a good trick to impress people with at parties, grows. It gets fat and bossy. In time, you realize it has mastered you more than you it. It's like the old junior high joke about the two homosexuals who pick up the straight hitchhiker. You've heard this one, right? The first guy, the driver, passes gas: pfffft. The second follows in kind: pfffft. The straight rider, wanting to be personable, musters himself and lets one rip as well: ffBLLAAT! The homosexuals look at each other smugly and pronounce in unison, "Viiiirgin!" Yes, it is a crude old joke, but it makes a rather uncomfortable analogy. In the literary sense, in the sense of being the conduit, it's been a long, long time since I was a virgin. The thrill, as it were, is almost gone. That fact, more than anything, has been the thing needling me to consider the possibility of retirement, of packing up the old word processor and scratch books for good.
Fornit and all.
I was thinking about these things as I drove to a meeting three weeks ago. The meeting was with a pair of producers and my agent. The producers were planning a television movie based on a screenplay I had written. Screenplays, I might mention (if you'll indulge me), transfer better to film much better than do the fully developed novels, probably because they start out being exactly what they end up. Nothing needs to be condensed or summarized or lopped off to fit them into their ninety minute time slot. When I see them as finished works, I don't just see all the bits and details that didn't make the final cut. Ultimately, they may be no richer than the book adaptations, but at least they are as rich as they were ever intended to be, for better or worse. They don't make me feel like a bastard's father.
The meeting was in a little town called Hanford. The producers had chosen the town as the setting for their film and I, having at least some creative input in things like location and casting, had planned to meet them there to give it a once over and grant my rather ubiquitous okee-dokee. My agent was flying in to handle the official stuff. I hate the official stuff. That's what I pay him for, and he richly deserves it.
The trip to Hanford took three and a half hours by car. I used to fly to appointments like this, even though I hate flying, but those days are pretty much over. Being something of a literary household name, even now, doesn't mean that I have an immediately recognizable face, regardless of how many versions of it have graced (or marred) the backs of my bestsellers. Airports, however, as even the least literate know, are places to bring a book. The newsstands there are full of paperbacks of my stuff, being just the sort of apparently meaningless brain candy that I suppose is perfect for a long flight or a long wait between flights. I can still walk an occasional mall and not be stopped by anyone with that crazed look of star-struck recognition (even perfectly delightful people can look like toothy stalkers when the recognition sets in, I am unhappy to say), but I can't seem to navigate a single airport anymore without at least one person surreptitiously comparing me to the photo on the back of a dust jacket, as if they were verifying a killer again his most-wanted poster.
So now I drive. And I like it. I stop sometimes and jaw with the attendants when I fuel up. We chew the fat about the weather and the price of premium unleaded and the Patriots playoffs chances. Small talk is a lost art these days, outside of gas station mechanics and fuel jockeys on the flat stretches of New England's highways. And I've never met a one who recognized me (or gave a flying fart if he did). I drive and I listen to classic rock (the hits of the seventies, eighties AND today!) Or an occasional jazz station on the radio. Sometimes I turn off the radio and just think. Very often, in the old days, it was in that companionable lull, with the road thrumming dreamily away beneath me, that the Story would drop by. Don't let me get in the way, it would say affably, I'm just gonna set up over here in my usual spot in the corner. Tinker a bit. You know. And in the old days I would let it. I would watch. My wife, when she rode with me, would see it on my face, and in the long bouts of silence. Later she'd say "You were working on a story. I didn't want to interrupt you." and I would smile and nod. It was nice to be known that way.
But I wasn't really working on the Story. It was more the other way around.
As I drove to my meeting, I could feel the conduit's opening: fat, more invasive than it used to be. The Story tried to come, more confident these days, but I stopped it at the door. I didn't tell it I was closed for business. Not yet. I just told it to come back later.
I arrived almost two hours before my meeting. Leaving early, almost obsessively so, is a habit I have developed in recent years. I always allow myself extra time; time to stop for a burger and a beer, time to browse an interesting junk shop, time to jaw with the gas station joes. Less serendipitous but perhaps more probably, while under the influence of the Story, I have been known to forget where exactly I am supposed to be going. More than once, while engaged in the voyeuristic Tinker toy constructions of other worlds and other lives, I have not only driven straight past important exits,but have continued merrily on for some miles before even realizing it.
Uncharacteristically, none of that had happened that day. As I passed the sign which turned U.S. Highway twenty-four into the "Business District" of Hanford, I coasted to a leisurely thirty-five and checked my watch, musing about what I was going to do with myself for the next few hours.
Hanford was an almost absurdly typical small town. At its furthest edge, just past the fast food joints and a Red Roof Inn (which always cluster just outside of small towns like this, like reluctant big city transfers refusing to mingle with the local-yokels) there was a Sunoco station which doubled as a used car lot, followed by a Moose lodge and an elderly L and K motel/restaurant. There was a dutiful looking IGA and a Rainbow Bowl-A-Way and a Rusty's Corner Barber shop. After a mile or so, the businesses gave way to large, meticulous houses which tucked their crew-cut yards about them like the skirts of old southern debutantes. I passed a high school with a group of kids playing scratch baseball on the back diamond, then progressed more slowly into an area of tightly clustered world war two tract houses and enormous, overgrown trees. Cars lined the road this Sunday afternoon, their owners most likely sequestered away in their living rooms watching Sportscenter, drinking beer, avoiding yard work.
I checked my watch again, reminding myself I had time to kill. Spontaneously, I decided to drive on a bit further, find some nondescript roadside greasy spoon where I could grab some lunch and read the paper, or maybe the book I had brought with me. Hanford began to break apart and trickle past me as I sped up, then, just at the farthest, wind-burnt edge of the town, a small bar cropped up. It wasn't a particularly welcoming place, merely a squat, cinder-block box with a few dark windows buzzing neon. The gravel parking lot had half a dozen cars scattered around it. It wasn't the sort of place that I'd had in mind to stop, but I found myself steering my Navigator in nonetheless. It was the name of the place which hooked me. It was called "The Mellow Tiger." The name was painted in cracked, black letters between two Coca-Cola logos.
The Mellow Tiger is a particularly odd name for a bar. Even odder, it is the name of the bar on the edge of the fictional town of Castle Rock, a place I know well, a place I have done a lot of romping and caused an awful lot of mischief. Hugh Priest, cutting work early from his city job, would spend most of his nights in the old Mellow Tiger, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and kicking the jukebox when the Hank Williams records skipped. It was the place where Homer Gomache met his VFW buddies on Wednesday nights for pinochle or poker. It was also the place where Billy Tupper and Henry Beaufort were shot with poison dipped .45 bullets on the night all of Castle Rock went succinctly to hell to the tune of Mr. Leland Gaunt's fiddling.
The Mellow Tiger is a weird name for a bar. That's why I made it up, why I tacked it in red neon letters to the front of the tiny bar on the square lot at the corner of Route 16 and the Old Castle Road. It is a weird enough name to be believable. It is somehow too fictional to be fiction.
Feeling a mixture of amusement and pique, I locked the doors of my Navigator and headed in.
