Stephen King - The Plant

Whatever that business might be.

As soon as Sandra Jackson and Dina Andrews step off the train, eleven-year-old Dina expresses her desire to go on the Wonder Wheel, which has just resumed operation for another season.

On their way down there, they are huckstered cheerfully from both sides of the mostly empty midway. One cry makes Sandra smile: “Hey, pretty blonde lady! Hey, you little red-headed cutie! Come on over here and try your luck! Make my day!”

Sandra diverts to the Wheel of Chance and sizes the game up. It's a little like roulette, only with prizes instead of money if you win. Hit red or black, odd or even, and win a small prize. Hit one of the triples and win a bigger one. Hit a four-way and win a bigger one yet. And if you should pick a single number and hit, you win the prize of prizes—the big pink teddy bear. All this possibility for a quarter!

Sandra turns to Dina (who is indeed both a redhead and a cutie). “What are you going to name your new bear?” she asks her.

The guy running the Wheel of Chance grins. “Confidence!” he cries. “Sweetheart, that's the best thing in life!”

“I'll name him Rinaldo,” Dina says promptly. “If you win him.”

“Oh, I'll win him, all right,” Sandra says. She takes a quarter from her purse and surveys the numbers, which run from one to thirty-four and include such ringers as FREE SPIN, BYE-BYE NICE TRY, and double zero. She looks at the concessionaire, who is checking out her bod in a way that is thorough without being creepy. “My friend,” she says to him, “I want you to remember that I'm only putting a floor under you. From this point, your season is only going to get better.”

“Gosh, you are confident,” he says. “Well, pick your number and I'll let er rip.”

Sandra lays her quarter down on seventeen. Three minutes later the concessionaire is watching with wide eyes as the pretty lady and her pretty young friend continue to walk down toward the Wonder Wheel, the pretty young friend now in charge of a pink teddy-bear almost as big as she is.

“How'd you do it, Aunt Sandy?” Dina wants to know. She is all but bursting with excitement. “How'd you do it?”

Aunt Sandy taps her forehead and grins. “Psychic waves, sweetheart. Call it that. Come on, let's see what the world looks like from way up high.”

Sometimes life exhibits (or seems to exhibit) an observable pattern. This is certainly one of those times. Because, as the two of them begin to skip hand in hand toward the Wonder Wheel, Sandra Jackson begins to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Dina quickly joins in.

Gosh and fishes, gee whillikers, and Katie bar the door! What a time old Iron-Guts is having! Talk about making the best of your time! Talk about your gauzy moon-drenched madhouse dreams made real!

At first he felt some doubt. Disquiet, even. For a few moments there, after he picked the lock of the hallway door (no problem there, he could have done it in a doze) and stepped into the Zenith House reception area, something in the back of his brain actually tried to flash a Code Red. It was as if all those alligator instincts which served him so well in three wars and half a dozen brushfire skirmishes had sniffed something out and were trying to warn him. But a command officer didn't call off a mission simply because of a little trench-fright. What a command officer did was remind himself of his objective.

“Designated Jew,” Hecksler murmured. That was his objective. The liar who had led him on and then stolen his best ideas.

Nonetheless he continued to feel that electric tickle of unease, that sense of being watched. Being watched by the very walls, it seemed.

He looked sharply along those walls, keeping his gaze above eye-level and peering with special penetrating attention into the corners. No surveillance cameras. So that was all right.

He sniffed sharply, spreading the wings of his nose, really flaring the old nostrils.

“Garlic,” he muttered. “No question. Known it and grown it. All my life. Ha! And...”

Something else, there was definitely something else, but he couldn't get it. Not, at least, in the reception area.

“Damn garlic,” he said. “Like a bore at a party. A bore with a loud voice.”

At the portal which lead into the editorial offices, that interior warning voice spoke again. Only two words, but Hecksler heard them clearly: GET OUT!

“Not happening,” he said, and issued the Saturday-silent world of Zenith House a tight and unpleasant grin that likely would have turned Herb Porter's blood if he'd seen it. “Screaming lone eagle. Suicide mission, if that's what it takes. Nobody goes home.”

A step further and the smell of garlic was gone, as if someone had rubbed the stuff around the doorway. What replaced it was an entrancing odor Hecksler knew well and loved above all things: the tangy, bitter smell of burst gunpowder. The smell of battle.

The General, who had hunched over a bit without even realizing it (the first impulse when going into an unknown and possibly dangerous area, he knew, was to protect the family jewels), now straightened up. He looked around with a mad glare that would have done more than turn Herb's blood; it would have sent him fleeing in a blind panic. After a moment he relaxed. And now, below the bulging eyes, the lips first parted and then began to draw up. They reached the point where you would have said lips must stop and still they continued, until the corners seemed to have reached the level of Hecksler's bulging blue eyes. The smile became a grin; the grin became a bigger grin; the bigger grin became a grimace; the grimace became a cannibal's leer; the cannibal's leer became an insane cannibal's leer.

“Zenith House, I am here!” he thundered into the empty corridor with its faded gray industrial strength rug and its framed book jackets of bosomy maidens and marching giant bugs on the walls. He struck his chest with a closed fist “You house of mockers, I am here! You den of thieves, I am here! Designated Jew, I AM HERE!”

His first impulse, curbed only with difficulty, was to remove his not inconsiderable penis from his pants and urinate everywhere: on the carpet, the walls, even the framed jacket covers if his admittedly aging piss-pump could fling the stream that high (twenty years before he could have washed the ceiling tiles, by God), like a dog marking its territory. Sanity didn't reassert itself because there was none left in the haunted belfry of his brush-cut-topped head, but there was still plenty of guile. Nothing must appear out of place here in the hallway. Chances that the D. J. would come in first on Monday were mighty slim.

“Goddam slacker is what he is,” Hecksler said. “A goddam commissary cowboy. Ha! Seen a thousand of em!”

And so he walked down the main corridor as decorously as a nun, passing doors marked WADE EDITOR IN CHIEF, KENTON, and GELB (that one another Jew, undoubtedly, but not the Jew) before coming to one marked... PORTER.

“Yessss,” Hecksler said, bringing the word out in a long and satisfying hiss, like steam. There wasn't even any need to pick the lock; the D. J. 's door was open. The General stepped in. And now... now that he's in a place where he no longer has to be careful... gosh!

The urine which General Hecksler withheld in the hall goes into Herb Porter's desk drawers, starting with the lower and working to the upper. There is even a final squirt for the keyboard of typewriter.

There's an IN/OUT box filled with what look like submission letters, manuscript reports, and a personal letter (although typed) which begins Dear Fergus. Hecksler tears it all up and sprinkles the pieces on top of the desk like confetti.