thousand. Bill was telling her that she shouldn't have slept on the
plane and she was agreeing.
There was a pink house coming up, little more than a bungalow,
fringed with palm trees that looked like the ones you saw in the
Second World War movies, fronds framing incoming Learjets with
their machine guns blazing-
Blazing. Burning hot. All at once the magazine he's holding turns
into a torch. Holy Mary, mother of God, hey there, Mary, what's
the story-
They passed the house. The old man sat on the porch and watched
them go by. The lenses of his rimless glasses glinted in the sun.
Bill's hand established a beachhead on her hip. He said something
about how they might pause to refresh themselves between the
doffing of her dress and the donning of her shorts and she agreed,
although they were never going to get to Palm House. They were
going to go down this road and down this road, they were for the
white Crown Vic and the white Crown Vic was for them, forever
and ever amen.
The next billboard would say "Palm House 2 Mi." Beyond it was
the one saying that Mother of Mercy Charities helped the Florida
sick. Would they help her?
Now that it was too late she was be-ginning to understand.
Beginning to see the light the way she could see the subtropical
sun sparkling off the water on their left. Wondering how many
wrongs she had done in her life, how many sins if you liked that
word, God knew her parents and her Gram certainly had, sin this
and sin that and wear the medallion between those growing things
the boys look at. And years later she had lain in bed with her new
husband on hot summer nights, knowing a decision had to be
made, knowing the clock was ticking, the cigarette butt was
smoldering, and she remembered making the decision, not telling
him out loud because about some things you could be silent.
Her head itched. She scratched it. Black flecks came swirling down
past her face. On the Crown Vic's instrument panel the
speedometer froze at sixteen thousand feet and then blew out, but
Bill appeared not to notice.
Here came a mailbox with a Grateful Dead sticker pasted on the
front; here came a little black dog with its head down, trotting
busily, and God how her head itched, black flakes drifting in the
air like fallout and Mother Teresa's face looking out of one of
them.
"Mother of Mary Charities Help the Florida Hungry-Won't You
Help Us?"
Floyd What's that over there? Oh shit
She has time to see something big. And to read the word "Delta."
"Bill? Bill?"
His reply, clear enough but nevertheless coming from around the
rim of the universe: "Christ, honey, what's in your hair?"
She plucked the charred remnant of Mother Teresa's face from her
hair and held it out to him, the older version of the man she had
married, the secretary fucking man she had married, the man who
had nonetheless rescued her from people who thought that you
could live forever in paradise if you only lit enough candles and
wore the blue blazer and stuck to the approved skipping rhymes -
Lying there with this man one hot summer night while the drug
deals went on upstairs and Iron Butterfly sang "In-A-Gadda-Da-
Vida" for the nine-billionth time, she had asked what he thought
you got, you know, after. When your part in the show is over. He
had taken her in his arms and held her, down the beach she had
heard the jangle-jingle of the mid-way and the bang of the Dodgem
cars and Bill - Bill's glasses were melted to his face.
One eye bulged out of its socket. His mouth was a bloodhole. In
the trees a bird was crying, a bird was screaming, and Carol began
to scream with it, holding out the charred fragment of paper with
Mother Teresa's picture on it, screaming, watching as his cheeks
turned black and his forehead swarmed and his neck split open like
a poisoned goiter, screaming, she was screaming, somewhere Iron
Butterfly was singing "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and she was
screaming.
"CAROL?"
It was Bill's voice, from a thousand miles away. His hand was on
her, but it was concern in his touch rather than lust.
She opened her eyes and looked around the sun-brilliant cabin of
the Lear 35, and for a moment she understood everything in the
way one understands the tremendous import of a dream upon the
first moment of waking. She remembered asking him what he
believed you got, you know, after, and he had said you probably
got what you'd always thought you would get, that if Jerry Lee
Lewis thought he was going to Hell for playing boogie-woogie,
that's exactly where he'd go. Heaven, Hell, or Grand Rapids, it was
your choice or the choice of those who had taught you what to
believe. It was the human mind's final great service: the perception
of eternity in the place where you'd always expected to spend it.
"Carol? You O.K., babe?" In one hand was the magazine he'd been
reading, a Newsweek with Mother Teresa on the cover.
"SAINTHOOD NOW?" it said in white.
Looking around wildly at the cabin, she was thinking, it happens at
sixteen thousand feet I have to tell them, I have to warn them.
But it was fading, all of it, the way those feelings always did. They
went like dreams, or cotton candy turning into a sweet mist just
above your tongue.
"Landing? Already." She felt wide awake, but her voice sounded
thick and muzzy.
"It's fast, huh?" he said, sounding pleased, as if he'd flown it
himself instead of paying for it. "Floyd says we'll be on the ground
in-"
"Who?" she asked. The cabin of the little plane was warm but her
fingers were cold. "Who?"
"Floyd. You know, the pilot" He pointed his thumb toward the
cockpit's left-hand seat. They were descending into a scrim of
clouds. The plane began to shake. "He says we'll be on the ground
in Fort Myers in twenty minutes. You took a hell of a jump, girl.
And before that you were moaning."
Carol opened her mouth to say it was that feeling, the one you
could only say what it was in French, something vu or rous, but it
was fading and all she said was "I had a nightmare."
There was a beep as Floyd the pilot switched the seat-belt light on.
Carol turned her head. Somewhere below, waiting for them now
and forever, was a white car from Hertz, a gangster car, the kind
the characters in a Martin Scorsese movie would probably call a
Crown Vic. She looked at the cover of the news magazine, at the
face of Mother Teresa, and all at once she remembered skipping
rope behind Our Lady of Angels, skipping to one of the forbidden
rhymes, skipping to the one that went Hey there, Mary, what's the
story, save my ass from Purgatory
All the hard days are coming, her Gram had said. She had pressed
the medal into Carol's palm, wrapped the chain around her fingers.
The hard days are coming.
THE GLASS
FLOOR
STEPHEN KING
Appeared in:
"Weird Tales" Fall, 1990
Starlight Mystery Stories, 1967
INTRODUCTION
In the novel Deliverance, by James Dickey, there is a scene where
a country fellow who lives way up in the back of beyond whangs
his hand with a tool while repairing a car. One of the city men who
are looking for a couple of guys to drive their cars downriver asks
this fellow, Griner by name, if he's hurt himself. Griner looks at his
bloody hand, then mutters: "Naw - it ain't as bad as I thought."
That's the way I felt after re-reading "The Glass Floor," the first
story for which I was ever paid, after all these years. Darrell
Schweitzer, the editor of Weird Tales invited me to make changes if