on his side. The reason Owen hadn't been able to see him at first
was the little man's shirt was the exact color of the grass. Owen
touched him gently with his finger. He was terribly afraid the little
man was dead. But when Owen touched him, the little man
groaned and sat up.
"Are you all right?" Owen asked.
The fellow in the grass made a face and clapped his hands to his
ears. For a moment Owen thought Springsteen must have hurt the
little guy's head as well as his back, and then he realized that his
voice must sound like thunder to such a small person. The little
man in the grass was not much longer than Owen's thumb. This
was Owen's first good look at the little fellow he had rescued, and
he saw right away why the little man had been so hard to find
again. His green shirt was not just the color of grass; it was grass.
Carefully woven blades of green grass. Owen wondered how come
they didn't turn brown.
Silence
Stephen King
Published in "Moth", 1970
Nothing
but the insect whine of
chemicals moving between
refrigerator walls:
the mind becomes CONFESSIONAL
(enamel)
murder
lurks
I stand with books in hand
the feary silence of fury
waiting
for the furnace to kick on
Skybar
by Brian Hartz &
Stephen King
The following story was written from a contest with Doubleday
books to promote the 1982 "Do it Yourself Bestseller" book edited
by Tom Silberkleit and Jerry Biederman.
There were many authors featured in the book, including Belva
Plain and Isaac Asimov. Each writer provided the beginning and
ending to a story.
It was up to the reader to provide the middle, hence the name "Do
It Yourself Bestseller."
As part of the promotion, Doubleday books held a national contest
to see who could write the best middle portion.
Each winner was chosen by the individual writer - in this case,
Stephen King. Brian Hartz was 18 at the time it was written.
This story contains strong language and material that may be
unsuitable for younger readers.
There were twelve of us when we went in that night, but only two
of us came out - my friend Kirby and me. And Kirby was insane.
All of the things I'm going to tell you about happened twelve years
ago. I was eleven then, in the sixth grade. Kirby was ten and in the
fifth. In those days, before gas shot up to $1.40 a gallon or more
(as I recall the best deal in town was at Dewey's Sunoco, where
you could get hi-test for 31.9 cents, plus double S&H Green
stamps), Skybar Amusement Park was still a growing concern; its
great double Ferris wheel turned endlessly against a summer sky,
and you could hear the great, grinding mechanical laugh of the fun-
house clown even at my house, five miles inland, when the wind
was right
Yeah, Skybar was the place to go, all right - you could blast away
with the .22 of your choice at Pop Dupree's Dead Eye Shootin'
Gallery, you could ride the Whip until you puked, wander into the
Mirror Labyrinth, or look at the Adults Only freak tent and wonder
what was in there...you especially wondered when the people came
out, white-faced, some of the women crying, or hysterical. Brant
Callahan said it was all just a fake, whatever it was, but sometimes
I saw the doubt even in Brant's tough gray eyes.
Then, of course, the murders started, and eventually Skybar was
shut down. The double Ferris stood frozen against the sky, and the
only sound the mechanical clown's mouth produced was the lunatic
hooting of the sea breeze. We went in, the twelve of us, and. . .but
I'm getting ahead of myself. It began just after school let out that
June; it began when Randy Stayner, a seventh-grader from the
junior high school, was thrown from the highest point of the
SkyCoaster. I was there that day - Kirby was with me, in fact - and
we both heard his scream as he came down.
It was one of the strangest ways for a person to die - the shadowed
Ferris wheel turned in the sunlight, the bumper cars honked and
sparked the roof and walls of Spunky's Dodge 'Em, the carousel
spun wildly to the rise and fall of horses and lions, and the steady
beat of its repeating tune echoed throughout the park. A man
balancing his screaming son in one hand, ice cream cones in the
other, little kids with cotton candy racing to see who's first to get
on Sandee's Spinning Sombrero, and in the midst of all the
peaceful confusion, Randy Stayner performing a one-time solo
swan dive 100 feet into the solid steel tracks of the SkyCoaster.
For a while, I wasn't all too sure the people around me weren't
thinking it was just an act - a Saturday afternoon performance by a
skilled diver. When blood and bone hit, however, it was clear the
act was over. And then, as if to clear the whole thing up with a
final attempt to achieve his original goal, he rolled lazily over the
bottom rails of the SkyCoaster into the brown murky water of
Skybar Pond, swirls of red and grey following him.
The SkyCoaster was shut down the day of Randy's dive, and
despite weeks of dragging the pond's bottom, his body was never
found. Authorities concluded that his remains had drifted under a
sandbar or some unmarked passageway, and all search ceased after
four weeks.
Skybar lost a lot of customers after that. Most people were afraid
to go there, and other businesses in the town began to boom
because of it. In fact, Starboard Cinema, which showed horror
movies to an audience of four or five during the parks better days
now showed repeats of "I was a Teen Age Werewolf" to sell-out
crowds. More and more, people drifted away from Skybar until it
was shut down for good.
It was during those last few weeks that the worst accidents started
happening. A morning worker, reaching under a car on the Whip
for a paper cup, caught his arm on the supporting bar between two
clamps just as a faulty circuit started the machine. He was crushed
between two cars. Another worker was fixing a bottom rail on the
Ferris wheel when a 500 pound car dropped off the top and
smeared him onto the asphalt below. These and several other rides
were shut down, and when the only thing left open was Pop
Dupree's .22 gallery and the Adults Only freak tent, the spark ran
out of Skybar's amusement, and it was forced to shut down after its
third year in operation.
It had only been closed for two months when Brant Callahan came
up with his plan that night. We were in a group of five camping in
back of John Wilkenson's dad's workshop, in a single five-man
Sportsman pup tent illuminated by four flashlights shining on back
issues of Famous Detective Stories, when he stood up (or rather
scufffled on his knees, due to the height of the tent) and proposed
we all do something to separate the pussies from the men.
I tossed aside my Mystery of the Haunted Hearse, leaned teach in
the glow of Dewey Howardson's light, and squinted halfway at the
hulking shadow crouching by the double-flap zipper door. No one
else appeared to pay any attention to him.
"Come on, lard-asses!" he shouted. "Are ya all just going to sit
around playing Dick-fucking-Tracy all night?"
Kirby slapped at the bugs attacking his glowing arm and looked
from Brant, to me, to the rest of the guys still gazing with mild
interest at their Alfred Hitchcock tales of suspense, unaware of any
other activities going on in their presence. I gazed at my watch. It