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 from 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? "