Haunted by the Horror King
During the day it is okay, but at night I am sleeping in my room, and suddenly I snap awake. I know what has awakened me, but I have to slow my breathing and wait before I hear it again. At first I hear nothing but the snores of my roommate, Jack Hodges, a large, gloomy black man who told me—my first day here—not to worry; he wasn’t violent as long as he remembered to take his Thorazine.
I keep on listening, with my eyes wide open. Then I hear it. Click! It is a dreadful sound, like a switchblade being flicked open in a dark alley. Then: click, click! One last pause on a precipice of silence, and then: click, click, click, click, click, click!
The noise goes on and on, growing louder, relentless, filling the darkness and making my heart race.
It is the sound of Stephen King’s typewriter as he brutally bangs the keys. The sound has traveled across six states, to find me here in this mental health facility in Northern Virginia. I lie in bed, helpless, listening to the words being hammered out and falling—click, click, click—like cold rain on my heart.
When Elaine comes to visit, she tries to disabuse me of this notion. “Stephen King doesn’t even write on a typewriter,” she says. “He uses a word processor.”
“Why should I believe you?” I say. “You’re sleeping with him.”
Accused, she feigns shock and outrage, and this usually signals the end of our visit.
In group, Danny Wolitzer—who is here because he likes to take off all his clothes while riding buses—says I am crazy.
“Maybe I am, now,” I say. “I wasn’t always.”
I wasn’t.
It started in 1978, long before I met and married Elaine. I had written five unpublished novels, and I was just completing my sixth novel while working as a clerk typist for an insurance company. Sarah and I had been living together for a year, and we were, I think, deeply in love.
I gave the finished manuscript to her to read. She was the person whose opinion mattered most to me, and I was certain she would love this novel. It was the best thing I had ever written, a dark and haunting foray into the mind of an aging high school English teacher.
Knowing Sarah’s reaction would be positive, I was still jittery and had to leave the apartment to avoid popping in on her every five minutes to ask how it was going. Adjourning to a nearby bar, I encountered two other writers (an accountant and a used car salesman) and we had a few beers.
When I returned to the apartment, the living room and kitchen were dark. There was a light coming from the bedroom, however, and I tiptoed in, thinking to observe the play of emotions on my beloved’s face as she read my novel. Perhaps I would find her just as she read that heartrending section where my hero is forced to retire.
My darling lay propped up in bed, three pillows behind her, and the expression on her face was, indeed, enraptured—everything an author could hope for, really. But she was not reading my manuscript; she was reading a hardcover book.
“Sarah,” I said, bursting into the room.
She was caught and she knew it. “Oh,” she said, laying the book down (but even then—dear God what inconstancy have you wrought in women!—she held her place with an index finger). “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I guess not,” I said, and I leaned over and snatched the book from her.
It was a fat, shiny book printed by Doubleday—a publisher whose interest I coveted. Need I say it? The book was The Stand; its author Stephen King.
Sarah had purchased the book that morning, begun reading it during her lunch break, and been unable to put it down. With the best intentions in the world, she had begun to read my manuscript, but then—just as murderers come out of a daze with the bloody knife clenched tightly and the bodies strewn about—she unaccountably found herself immersed in The Stand.
I suggested—rather stiffly—that she finish The Stand so that she could give my manuscript her undivided attention, and with unseemly alacrity, Sarah accepted this proposal.
She dispatched The Stand in no time at all and then read my manuscript, declaring it a brilliant, poetic achievement. But she was too late with her praise. Faith had been broken, and I suspected that her enthusiasm was all a sham. I knew where her true affections lay. One night I surprised her at the kitchen table, writing a letter. She quickly folded it and left the room. I looked at the blank tablet she had been writing on. The indentations of her ballpoint pen revealed just enough to confirm what I already suspected. She had been writing a fan letter. To whom? Guess.
Our lives went on. My manuscript was returned by innumerable New York publishers and agents. “This is a good mid-list book,” one agent wrote, “but unfortunately, there is no mid-list anymore. What we want is a blockbuster, I’m afraid. This book just doesn’t pack the wallop contemporary audiences require. The psychological insights are excellent, but you might think of beefing them up with some popular elements—horror, perhaps. You might take a look at The Shining by Stephen King.”
I quit the insurance company. They were beginning to make too many demands. I found employment as a dishwasher in an all night diner. One morning I came home to hear Sarah talking on the phone about the fire that had started, spontaneously, in the kitchen wastebasket. “Whup!” she said. “Just like that. We were just eating dinner and all of a sudden the wastebasket like exploded, flames right up to the ceiling. No. Absolutely not. We don’t smoke or anything and …”
I thought nothing of the conversation at the time, assumed she was talking to her friend Janice, and it was much later—years in fact—that I seem to recall a certain evasiveness when I asked her who she was talking to. Did she answer at all? I don’t think so.
Some eighteen months later, King published Firestarter. I saw no connection at the time. Only later did I piece it together.
A month after the publication of that book, our cat, Winston, was killed out on the highway. I was still working nights, and poor Sarah found the animal’s stiff body. I overheard the phone conversation in which she tearfully related the discovery of Winston’s body.
“Who was that?” I asked, hurt that she would seek someone else for the full outpouring of her grief.
“Janice,” she said, and it never occurred to me that she might be lying.
Later that year, Sarah confessed she was having an affair.
“Who?” I demanded.
She refused to say. I tried following her, but she always managed to lose me in a Walden’s or a B. Dalton’s—she knew my weakness, my inability to leave a bookstore on a moment’s notice.
Eight months after this announcement, I found the copy of Pet Sematary in the bottom of her dresser, and suddenly, like a blow to the bridge of the nose, enlightenment came. She was having an affair with Stephen King. He had stolen my wife. He had stolen my dead cat.
She denied it all.
“What about the cat in Pet Sematary?” I demanded. I had refused to read the novel—had never read any of them—but a skimming of the opening chapters had revealed a cat and its fate. “There is a dead cat in that book, and it too is killed on the highway.”
“Coincidence,” Sarah said—a bit quickly, I thought.
“What about the names?” I said.
She did a fair job of looking baffled. “Well, the name of the cat in the book is Church and our cat was named Winston, so, as you say, what about the names?”
I was nodding my head rapidly. “Uh huh, uh huh. And Church is short for Winston Churchill. Winston,” I said, with the air of a prosecutor producing a murder weapon. But Sarah was a skilled liar, and she rolled her eyes convincingly and did not crack.
Nonetheless, I knew what I knew. I wrote King a letter telling him to stay away from Sarah. He did not reply. I hadn’t expected him to.
I thought of calling his wife. “Tabitha,” I would say. “Your husband is unfaithful.”
But I didn’t do it. Why bother? And Sarah left, moving back to her parents’ house in New Orleans.
A year later I met Elaine. She was a lovely, dark-haired woman with gray eyes.
One night, when we were beginning to get serious, I asked her: “Do you like Stephen King?”
“Never read him,” she said. “I don’t like horror fiction.”
I hugged her and let my heart loose. “Go for it, heart,” I said to myself.
I married Elaine in a small wedding attended by some of her friends from the department store where she worked and my writer friends.
My writer friends pitched in and got me a pen and pencil set with a silver case. On the case, they had engraved: “May your happiness be unexpurgated.” I was touched.
But happiness is always edited by events, and so mine was. At first, we could not have been happier. Elaine was very supportive of my writing. I had been working on a multi-generational novel which I thought had great commercial potential. An agent had expressed interest in the opening chapters. Well, what he had actually said was he would be willing to look at it for a reduced reading fee. I took this as a hopeful sign, and so did Elaine.
You know what is coming, of course. I came home from work for lunch—I had taken a job as a telephone solicitor and my hours were flexible. Elaine was cozily—and the word “brazenly” comes to mind—settled in an armchair and—yes—she was reading Stephen King. The book was The Tommyknockers.
“Elaine,” I said, trying to control my voice. “I thought you didn’t read horror fiction?”
And my beloved replied, oblivious to my pain, “I don’t. A friend said this one was science fiction. I’m crazy about science fiction. And you know, this isn’t half bad.”
I said nothing and went into the study to work on the final draft of my manuscript, tentatively entitled Sinew or perhaps Sinews. It was almost finished and when, in fact, I finished it the following week, I asked Elaine if she would like to read it. My wife said that she certainly would after she finished Cujo, a King novel about a rabid dog. She had decided to go back and read all his books, beginning with Carrie. She was now at Cujo.
“I thought …” I began, but she had already immersed herself in the book and what did it matter what I thought? I sent my novel off to the agent, and he wrote back to say that it was a large book and would require some time to read and, time being money, would cost more than he had initially stated.
I sent him the extra money and waited. Several months passed and I called his office. After some equivocating, a secretary admitted that he worked there, but she said he was on vacation. I practiced patience. Three months later he responded. The letter seemed inordinately short considering the money. It read: “A near-miss here. The characterization is good, but the pace flags. You might look at Stephen King’s Firestarter to get a feel for pacing. As it stands, I’m afraid it lacks the focus to penetrate today’s competitive market. Till next time. Best.”
It was somewhere around this time that I began to hear Stephen King’s typewriter, clacking away at three in the morning, carried on a chill ghost wind all the way from Maine. I identified it easily enough.
In the grocery store lines his face stared at me from People magazine. Newspapers and television also carried his image. I tried to write another novel, but my thoughts would be scattered by the din of his typewriter, and my resolve would be crushed by the force of his hideous industry.
My telephone soliciting job suffered. I found myself asking total strangers: “Do you read Stephen King?” and when they answered in the affirmative, I would hang up without even attempting a magazine sale.
And then Elaine began having an affair with him. I know. I know. It seems outrageous, doesn’t it? But on the title page of her copy of Misery was written: “To Elaine—You are my premier hot mamma, Big Steve.”
“What’s this?” I had demanded of Elaine.
“Steve Clarendon in Appliances gave me the book. He knows I love Stephen King, and he knew it was my birthday, something you forgot,” she said. But I know guilt when I see it. I know a woman caught in adultery.
He would call in the night, and I would answer the phone and hear him breathing. He wouldn’t talk to me, of course. “Big Steve,” I would say. “Leave my wife alone.”
I am a strong-willed man and I might have been able to go on, but the republication of The Stand, twice as big, kicked me over the edge. I broke the window of the Crown bookstore that contained a display of the obscenely fat book, and, had they not wrestled the gasoline can from me, I would have initiated a roaring bonfire.
I am not, today, repentant—and my doctor, Dr. Abram, knows it.
“And why,” he asks, reasonably enough, “would Stephen King, a world famous author who lives in Maine, carry on an affair with your wife, who lives here in Northern Virginia?”
“That is a good question, Dr. Abram.” I try to offer positive reinforcement when Dr. Abram asks an intelligent question. “I have, of course, given it considerable thought. I don’t know. I have thought perhaps that he is not one man. I have thought that he is the army of the anti-Christ. Perhaps my affliction, that of being cuckolded as a man and ruined as a writer, will begin to befall others. Perhaps you will begin to have many cases like mine, and it will be revealed that Stephen King is a whole army of look-alikes doing Satan’s bidding.”
“Stephen King as the anti-Christ seems a bit far-fetched,” my shrink says.
I shrug my shoulders. “The man’s eyebrows are demonic,” I say.
Dr. Abram shakes his head sadly.
I have no time to convince Dr. Abram. And what function would it serve? My own soul is lost.
Does that sound melodramatic? Last week, I was in the rec room with my fellow inmates. We were watching some insipid television show about undercover cops in women’s clothing. Hugely depressed, I grabbed a paperback and retired to my room. I read half of it before realizing that this tale of vampires was entitled Salems Lot and that its author was … you know its author.
It was too late then, and like a man lost to vice, I read recklessly, abandoning myself to the words. The next day I scavenged Carrie from a pile of paperback gothics.
I will read whatever of his books I can find in this madhouse. And then—for I have no shame—I will beg my faithless wife to bring me those I still haven’t read.
I hear they are coming out with a collection of his blurbs, those quotes that he has strewn across the covers of other authors’ books. This may be a rumor. So many rumors surround him.