Read Uncollected Stories 2003 Online
Authors: Stephen King
“Well,” said Jimmy Keller, looking across to the gantry to where the
rocket rested in the middle of the desert. A lonely wind blew across the
desert, and Hugh Bullford said, “Yeah. It’s about time to leave for
Venus. Why? Why do we want to go to Venus?”
The rocket ship touched down on Venus. Bullford checked the air and
said in amazed tones, “Why, it’s good old type Earth air! Perfectly
breathable.”
They went out, and it was Keller’s turn for amazement. “Why, it’s just
like spring on earth! Everything's lush and green and beautiful. Why...
it's Paradise!”
They ran out. The fruits were exotic and delicious, the temperature
perfect. When night fell, they slept outside.
“I’m going to call it the Garden of Eden,” said Keller enthusiastically.
Bullford stared into the fire. “I don’t like this place, Jimmy. It feels all
wrong. There’s something...evil about it.”
“You’re space happy.” Keller scoffed. "Sleep it off."
The next morning James Keller was dead.
There was a look of horror on his face that Bullford never hoped to
see again.
After the burial, Bullford called Earth. He got no reply. The radio was
dead. Bullford took it apart and put it together. There was nothing
wrong with it, but the fact remained: it didn’t work.
Bullford’s worry doubled itself. He ran outside. The landscape was the
same pleasant and happy. But Bullford could see the evil in it.
“You killed him!” he cried. “I know it!”
Suddenly the ground opened up and it slithered toward him. In near
panic, he ran back to the ship. But not before he got a piece of soil.
He analyzed the soil and then panic took him. Venus was alive.
Suddenly the space ship tilted and went over. Bullford screamed. But
the soil closed over it and almost seemed to lick its lips.
Then it reset itself, waiting for the next victim...
As Pete Jacobs stepped out, the fog immediately swallowed up his
house and he could see nothing but the white blanket all around him. It
gave him the weird feeling of being the last man in the world.
Suddenly Pete felt dizzy. His stomach did a flip-flop. He felt like a
person in a falling elevator. Then it passed and he walked on. The fog
began to clear and Pete’s eyes opened wide with fright, awe and
wonder.
He was in the middle of the city.
But the nearest city was forty miles away!
But what a city! Pete had never seen anything like it.
Graceful buildings with high spires seemed to reach to the sky.
People walked along on moving conveyer belts.
The cornerstone on a skyscraper read April, 17, 2007. Pete had walked
into the future. But how?
Suddenly Pete was frightened. Horribly, terribly, frightened.
He didn’t belong here. He couldn’t stay. He ran after the receding fog.
A policeman in a strange uniform called angrily. Strange cars that
rode six inches or so off the ground narrowly missed hitting him. But
Pete succeeded. He ran back into the fog and soon everything was
blanked out.
Then the feeling came again. That weird feeling of falling then the fog
began to clear.
It looked like home
Suddenly there was an earsplitting screech. He turned to see a huge
prehistoric brontosaurus lumbering toward him. The desire to kill was in
his small beady eyes.
Terrified, he ran into the fog again
The next time the fog closes in on you and you hear hurried footsteps
running through the whiteness…call out.
That would be Pete Jacobs, trying to find his side of the Fog
Help the poor guy.
George Jacobs was closing his office, when an old woman felt free to
walk right in. Hardly anyone walked through his door these days. The
people hated him. For fifteen years he’d picked the people’s pockets
clean of money. No one had ever been able to hook him on a charge.
But back to our little story. The old woman that came in had an ugly
scar on her left cheek. Her clothes were mostly filthy rags and other
crude material. Jacobs was counting his money.
“There! Fifty-thousand, nine hundred and seventy-three dollars and
sixty-two cents.”
Jacobs always liked to be precise.
“Indeed a lot of money,” she spoke up. “Too bad you won’t be able to
spend it.” Jacobs turned around.
“Why – who are you?” he asked in half surprise. “What right have you
to spy on me?”
The woman didn’t answer. She held up her bony hand. There was a
flash of fire on his throat – and a scream. Then, with a final gurgle,
George Jacobs died.
“I wonder what – or who – could have killed him?” said a young man.
“I’m glad he’s gone,” said another. That one was lucky.
He didn’t look behind him.
King's first published story; he was 18 when this thriller appeared in a 1965
issue of
Comics Review
as ‘I Was a Teenage Graverobber’. It was published in
Stories of Suspense
the following year under the present title.
the next morning. Only this nightmare was happening. Ahead of me I
could see Rankin's flashlight; a large yellow eye in the sultry summer
darkness. I tripped over a gravestone and almost went sprawling.
Rankin whirled on me with a hissed oath.
I muttered a reply and we crept forward. Finally, Rankin stopped and
shone the flashlight's beam on a freshly chiseled gravestone.
On it, it read:
DANIEL WHEATHERBY
1899-1962
He has joined his beloved wife in a better land.
I felt a shovel thrust into my hands and suddenly I was sure that I
couldn't go through with it. But I remembered the bursar shaking his
head and saying, "I'm afraid we can't give you any more time, Dan.
You'll have to leave today. If I could help in any way, I would, believe
me..."
I dug into the still soft earth and lifted it over my shoulder. Perhaps
fifteen minutes later my shovel came in contact with wood. The two of
us quickly excavated the hole until the coffin stood revealed under
Rankin's flashlight. We jumped down and heaved the coffin up.
Numbed, I watched Rankin swing the spade at the locks and seals. After
a few blows it gave and we lifted the lid. The body of Daniel
Wheatherby looked up at us with glazed eyes. I felt horror gently wash
over me. I had always thought that the eyes closed when one died.
"Don't just stand there," Rankin whispered, "it's almost four. We've
got to get out of here!"
We wrapped the body in a sheet and lowered the coffin back into the
earth. We shoveled rapidly and carefully replaced the sod. The dirt we
had missed was scattered. By the time we picked up the white-sheeted
body, the first traces of dawn were beginning to lighten the sky in the
east. We went through the hedge that skirted the cemetery and entered
the woods that fronted it on the west. Rankin expertly picked his way
through it for a quarter of a mile until we came to the car, parked where
we had left it on an overgrown and unused wagon track that had once
been a road. The body was put into the trunk. Shortly thereafter, we
joined the stream of commuters hurrying for the 6.00 train. I looked at
my hands as if I had never seen them before. The dirt under my
fingernails had been piled up on top of a man's final resting place not
twenty-four hours ago. It felt unclean.
Rankin's attention was directed entirely on his driving. I looked at him
and realized that he didn't mind the repulsive act that we had just
performed. To him it was just another job. We turned off the main road
and began to climb the twisting, narrow dirt road. And then we came out
into the open and I could see it, the huge rambling Victorian mansion
that sat on the summit of the steep grade. Rankin drove around back and
wordlessly up to the steep rock face of a bluff that rose another forty
feet upward, slightly to the right of the house.
There was a hideous grinding noise and a portion of the hill large
enough to carve an entrance for the car slid open. Rankin drove in and
killed the engine. We were in a small, cube-like room that served as a
hidden garage. Just then, a door at the far end slid open and a tall, rigid
man approached us. Steffen Weinbaum's face was much like a skull; his
eyes were deep-set and the skin was stretched so tautly over his
cheekbones that his flesh was almost transparent.
"Where is it?" His voice was deep, ominous.
Wordlessly, Rankin got out and I followed his lead. Rankin opened
the trunk and we pulled the sheet-swaddled figure out.
Weinbaum nodded slowly.
"Good, very good. Bring him into the lab."
When I was thirteen, my parents were killed in an automobile crash. It
left me an orphan and should have landed me in an orphan's home. But
my father's will disclosed the fact that he had left me a substantial sum
of money and I was self-reliant. The welfare people never came around
and I was left in the somewhat bizarre role as the sole tenant of my own
house at thirteen. I paid the mortgage out of the bank account and tried
to stretch a dollar as far as possible. By the time I was eighteen and was
out of school, the money was low, but I wanted to go to college. I sold
the house for $10,000.00 through a real estate buyer. In early
September, the roof fell in. I received a very nice letter from Erwin,
Erwin and Bradstreet, attorneys at law. To put it in layman's language, it
said that the department store at which my father had been employed
had just got around to a general audit of their books. It seemed that there
was $15,000.00 missing and that they had proof that my father had
stolen it. The rest of the letter merely stated that if I didn't pay up the
$15,000.00 we'd go to court and they would try to get double the
amount. It shook me up and a few questions that should have stood out
in my mind just didn't register as a result. Why didn't they uncover the
error earlier? Why were they offering to settle out of court? I went down
to the office of Erwin, Erwin, & Bradstreet and talked the matter over.
To make a long story short, I paid the sum they were asking, I had no
more money. The next day I looked up the firm of Erwin, Erwin &
Bradstreet in the phone book. It wasn't listed. I went down to their office
and found a
For Rent
sign on the door. It was then that I realized that I
had been conned like gullible kid which, I reflected miserably, was what
I was.
I bluffed my way through the first for months of college but finally
they discovered that I hadn't been properly registered. That same day I
met Rankin at a bar. It was my first experience in a tavern. I had a
forged driver's license and I bought enough whiskey to get drunk. I
figured that it would take about two straight whiskeys since I had never
had anything but a bottle of beer now and then prior to that night. One
felt good, two made my trouble seem rather inconsequential. I was
nursing my third when Rankin entered the bar.
He sat on the stool next to me and looked attentively at me.
"You got troubles?" I asked rudely.
Rankin smiled. "Yes, I'm out to find a helper."
"Oh, yeah?" I asked, becoming interested.
"You mean you want to hire somebody?"
"Yes."
"Well, I'm your man."
He started to say something and then changed his mind.
"Let's go over to a booth and talk it over, shall we?"
We walked over to a booth and I realized that I was listing slightly.
Rankin pulled the curtain.
"That's better. Now, you want a job?"
I nodded.
"Do you care what it is?"
"No. Just how much does it pay?"
"Five hundred a job."
I lost a little bit of the rosy fog that encased me. Something was wrong
here. I didn't like the way he used the word "job".
"Who do I have to kill?" I asked with a humorless smile.
"You don't. But before I can tell you what it is, you'll have to talk with
Mister Weinbaum."
"Who's he?"
"A scientist."
More fog evaporated. I got up.
"Uh-uh. No making a human guinea pig out of yours truly. Get yourself another boy."
"Don't be silly," he said, "No harm will come to you."
Against my better judgement, I said, "Okay, let's go."
Weinbaum approached the subject of my duties after a tour of the house,
including the laboratory. He wore a white smock and there was
something about him that made me crawl inside. He sat down in the
living room and motioned me into a seat. Rankin had disappeared.
Weinbaum stared at me with fixed eyes and once again I felt a blast of
icy coldness sweep over me.
"I'll put it to you bluntly," he said, "my experiments are too
complicated to explain in any detail, but they concern human flesh.
Dead human flesh."
I was becoming intensely aware that his eyes burnt with flickering
fires. He looked like a spider ready to engulf a fly, and this whole house
was his web. The sun was striking fire to the west and deep pools of
shadows were spreading across the room, hiding his face, but leaving
the glittering eyes as they shifted in the creeping darkness. He was still
speaking.
"Often, people bequeath their bodies to scientific institutes for study.
Unfortunately, I'm only one man, so I have to resort to other methods."
Horror leapt grinning from the shadows and across my mind there
flitted the black picture of two men digging by the light of an uncertain
moon. A shovel struck wood the noise chilled my soul.
I rose quickly.
"I think I can find my own way out, Mr. Weinbaum."
He laughed softly. "Did Rankin tell you how much this job pays?"
"I'm not interested."
"Too bad. I was hoping you could see it my way. It wouldn't take a
year before you would make enough money to return to college."
I started, and got the uncanny feeling that this man was searching my
soul.
"How much do you know about me? How did you find out?"
"I have my ways." He chuckled again. "Will you reconsider?"
I hesitated.
"Shall we put it on a trial basis?" he asked softly. "I'm quite sure that
we can both reach a mutual satisfaction."
I got the eerie feeling that I was talking to the devil himself, that
somehow I had been tricked into selling my soul.
"Be here at 8.00 sharp, the night after next," he said.
That was how it started.
As Rankin and I laid the sheeted body of Daniel Whetherby on the lab
table, lights flashed on behind sheeted oblongs that looked like glass
tanks.
"Weinbaum," I had dropped the title, Mister, without thinking, "I
think – "
"Did you say something?" he asked, his eyes boring into mine. The
laboratory seemed far away. There were only the two of us, sliding
through a half-world peopled with horrors beyond the imagination.
Rankin entered in a white smock coat and broke the spell by saying,
"All ready, professor."
At the door, Rankin stopped me. "Friday, at eight."
A shudder, cold and terrible raced up my spine as I looked back.
Weinbaum had produced a scalpel and the body was unsheeted. They
looked at me strangely and I hurried out.
I took the car and quickly drove down the narrow dirt road. I didn't
look back. The air was fresh and warm with a promise of budding
summer. The sky was blue with fluffy white clouds fleeting along in the
warm summer breeze. The night before seemed like a nightmare, a
vague dream, that, as all nightmares, is unreal and transparent when the
bright light of day shines upon it. But as I drove past the wrought iron
gates of the Crestwood Cemetery I realized that this was no dream. Four
hours ago my shovel had removed the dirt that covered the grave of
Daniel Wheatherby. For the first time a new thought occurred to me.
What was the body of Daniel Wheatherby being used for at that
moment? I shoved the thought into a deep corner of my mind and let out
onto the go-pedal. The car screamed ahead. I put my thoughts into
driving, glad to put the terrible thing I had done out of my mind, for a
short time, anyway.