face jerked back in. The door slammed. A bolt rattled frantically.
The first man rejoined them.
'All right," he said. "Down the stairs and out the back door. Let's
go."
They were outside and climbing into the parked car three minutes
later. They left the Overlook behind them, standing gilded in
mountain moonlight, white as bone under high stars. The hotel
would stand long after the three of them were as dead as the three
they had left behind.
The Overlook was at home with the dead.
The Blue Air Compressor
Stephen King
first appeared in
Onan, 1971
The house was tall, with an incredible slope of shingled roof. As he
walked up toward it from the shore road, Gerald Nately thought it
was almost a country in itself, geography in microcosm. The roof
dipped and rose at varying angles above the main building and two
strangely-angled wings; a widow's walk skirted a mushroom-
shaped cupola which looked toward the sea; the porch, facing the
dunes and lusterless September scrubgrass was longer than a
Pullman car and screened in. The high slope of roof made the
house seem to beetle its brows and loom above him. A Baptist
grandfather of a house.
He went to the porch and after a moment of hesitation, through the
screen door to the fanlighted one beyond. There was only a wicker
chair, a rusty porch swing, and an old discarded knitting basket to
watch him go. Spiders had spun silk in the shadowy upper corners.
He knocked.
There was silence, inhabited silence. He was about to knock again
when a chair someplace inside wheezed deeply in its throat. It was
a tired sound. Silence. Then the slow, dreadfully patient sound of
old, overburdened feet finding their way up the hall. Counterpoint
of cane: Whock... whock... whock...
The floorboards creaked and whined. A shadow, huge and
unformed in the pearled glass, bloomed on the fanlight. Endless
sound of fingers laboriously solving the riddle of chain, bolt, and
hasp lock. The door opened. "Hello," the nasal voice said flatly.
"You're Mr. Nately. You've rented the cottage. My husband's
cottage."
"Yes." Gerald said, his tongue swelling in his throat. "That's right.
And you're-"
"Mrs. Leighton," the nasal voice said, pleased with either his
quickness or her name, though neither was remarkable. "I'm Mrs.
Leighton."
* * *
this woman is so goddam fucking big and old she looks like oh
jesus christ print dress she must be six-six and fat my god Shes fat
as a hog can't smell her white hair long white hair her legs those
redwood trees ill that movie a Lank she could be a tank she could
kill me her voice is out of any context like a kazoo jesus if i laugh i
can't laugh can she be seventy god how does she walk and the cane
her hands are bigger than my feet like a goddam tank she could go
through oak oak for christs sake.
* * *
"You write." She hadn't offered him in.
"That's about the size of it," he said, and laughed to cover his own
sudden shrinking from that metaphor.
"Will you show me some after you get settled?" she asked. Her
eyes seemed perpetually luminous and wistful. They were not
touched by the age that had run riot in the rest of her
* * *
wait get that written down
* * *
image: "age had run riot in her with luxuriant fleshiness: she was
like a wild sow let loose in a great and dignified house to shit on
the carpet, gore at the welsh dresser and send the crystal goblets
and wine-glasses all crash-atumble, to trample the wine colored
divans to lunatic puffs of springs and stuffing, to spike the
mirrorbright finish of the great hall floor with barbarian hoofprints
and flying puddles of urine"
okay Shes there its a story i feel her
* * *
body, making it sag and billow.
"If you like," he said. "I didn't even see the cottage from the Shore
Road, Mrs. Leighton. Could you tell me where--"
"Did you drive in?"
"Yes. I left my car over there.'' He pointed beyond the dunes,
toward the road.
A smile, oddly one-dimensional, touched her lips. "That's why.
You can only see a blink from the road: unless you're walking, you
miss it." She pointed west at a slight angle away from the dunes
and the house. "There. Right over that little hill."
"All right," he said, then stood there smiling. He really had no idea
how to terminate the interview.
"Would you like to come in for some coffee? Or a Coca-Cola?"
"Yes," he said instantly.
She seemed a little taken back by his instant agreement. He had,
after 211, been her husband's friend, not her own. The face loomed
above Gerald, moonlike, disconnected, undecided. Then she led
him into the elderly, waiting house.
She had tea. He had Coke, Millions of eyes seemed to watch them.
He felt like a burglar, stealing around the hidden fiction he could
Make of her, carrying only his own youthful winsomeness and a
psychic flashlight.
* * *
My own name, of course, is Steve King, and you'll pardon my
intrusion on your mind-or I hope you will. I could argue that the
drawing-aside of the curtain of presumption between reader and
author is permissible because I am the writer; i.e., since it's my
story I'll do any goddam thing I please with it-but since that leaves
the reader out of it completely, that is not valid. Rule One for all
writers is that the teller is not worth a tin tinker's fart when
compared to the listener. Let us drop the matter, if we may. I am
intruding for the same reason that the Pope defecates: we both
have to.
You should know that Gerald Nately was never brought to the
dock; his crime was not discovered. He paid all the same. After
writing four twisted, monumental, misunderstood novels, he cut
his own head off with an ivory-figured guillotine purchased in
Kowloon.
I invented him first during a moment of eight o'clock boredom in a
class taught by Carroll F. Terrell of the University of Maine
English faculty. Dr. Terrell was speaking of Edgar A. Poe, and I
thought
ivory guillotine Kowloon
twisted woman of shadows, like a pig
some big house
The blue air compressor did not come until later. It is desperately
important that the reader be made cognizant of these facts.
* * *
He did show her some of his writing. Not the important part, the
story he was writing about her, but fragments of poetry, the spine
of a novel that had ached in his mind for a year like embedded
shrapnel, four essays. She was a perceptive critic, and addicted to
marginal notations with her black felt-tip pen. Because she
sometimes dropped in when lie was gone to the village, he kept the
story hidden in the back shed.
September melted into cool October, and the story was completed,
mailed to a friend, returned with suggestions (bad ones), rewritten.
He felt it was good, but not quite right. Some indefinable was
missing. The focus was a shade fuzzy. He began to toy, with the
idea of giving it to her for Criticism, rejected it, toyed with it again.
After all. the story was her; he never doubted she could supply the
final vector.
His attitude concerning her became increasing])- unhealthy; he was
fascinated by her huge, animalistic bulk, by the slow, tortoise-like
way she trekked across the space between the house and the
cottage.
* * *
image: "mammoth shadow of decay swaying across the
shadowless sand, cane held in one twisted hand, feet clad in huge
canvas shoes which pump and push at the coarse grains, face like a