Stephen King - Skeleton Crew

“You, my dear” — he turned toward the writer’s wife — “have been wondering why she stuck with him. Although you haven’t said as much, it’s been on your mind. Am I right?”

She nodded.

“Yes. And I’m not going to offer a long motivational thesis — the convenient thing about stories that are true is that you only need to say this is what happened and let people worry for themselves about the why. Generally, nobody ever knows why things happen anyway… particularly the ones who say they do.

“But in terms of Jane Thorpe’s own selective perception, things had gotten one hell of a lot better. She interviewed a middle-aged black woman about the cleaning job, and brought herself to speak as frankly as she could about her husband’s idiosyncrasies. The woman, Gertrude Rulin by name, laughed and said she’d done for people who were a whole lot stranger. Jane spent the first week of the Rulin woman’s employ pretty much the way she’d spent that first visit with the young people next door — waiting for some crazy outburst. But Reg charmed her as completely as he’d charmed the kids, talking to her about her church work, her husband, and her youngest son, Jimmy, who, according to Gertrude, made Dennis the Menace look like the biggest bore in the first grade. She’d had eleven children in all, but there was a nine-year gap between Jimmy and his next oldest sib. He made things hard on her.

“Reg seemed to be getting well… at least, if you looked at things a certain way he did. But he was just as crazy as ever, of course, and so was I. Madness may well be a sort of flexible bullet, but any ballistics expert worth his salt will tell you no two bullets are exactly the same. Reg’s one letter to me talked a little bit about his new novel, and then passed directly to Fornits. Fornits in general, Rackne in particular. He speculated on whether they actually wanted to kill Fornits, or — he thought this more likely — capture them alive and study them. He closed by saying, ‘Both my appetite and my outlook on life have improved immeasurably since we began our correspondence, Henry. Appreciate it all. Affectionately yours, Reg.’ And a P.S. below inquiring casually if an illustrator had been assigned to do his story. That caused a guilty pang or two and a quick trip to the liquor cabinet on my part.

“Reg was into Fornits; I was into wires.

“My answering letter mentioned Fornits only in passing — by then I really was humoring the man, at least on that subject; an elf with my mother’s maiden name and my own bad spelling habits didn’t interest me a whole hell of a lot.

“What had come to interest me more and more was the subject of electricity, and microwaves, and RF waves, and RF interference from small appliances, and low-level radiation, and Christ knows what else. I went to the library and took out books on the subject; I bought books on the subject. There was a lot of scary stuff in them… and of course that was just the sort of stuff I was looking for.

“I had my phone taken out and my electricity turned off. It helped for a while, but one night when I was staggering in the door drunk with a bottle of Black Velvet in my hand and another one in my topcoat pocket, I saw this little red eye peeping down at me from the ceiling. God, for a minute I thought I was going to have a heart attack. It looked like a bug up there at first… a great big dark bug with one glowing eye.

“I had a Coleman gas lantern and I lit it. Saw what it was at once. Only instead of relieving me, it made me feel worse. As soon as I got a good look at it, it seemed I could feel large, clear bursts of pain going through my head — like radio waves. For a moment it was as if my eyes had rotated in their sockets and I could look into my own brain and see cells in there smoking, going black, dying. It was a smoke detector — a gadget which was even newer than microwave ovens back in 1969.

“I bolted out of the apartment and went downstairs — I was on the fifth floor but by then I was always taking the stairs — and hammered on the super’s door. I told him I wanted that thing out of there, wanted it out of there right away, wanted it out of there tonight, wanted it out of there within the hour. He looked at me as though I had gone completely — you should pardon the expression — bonzo seco, and I can understand that now. That smoke detector was supposed to make me feel good, it was supposed to make me safe. Now, of course, they’re the law, but back then it was a Great Leap Forward, paid for by the building tenants’ association.

“He removed it — it didn’t take long — but the look in his eyes was not lost upon me, and I could, in some limited way, understand his feelings. I needed a shave, I stank of whiskey, my hair was sticking up all over my head, my topcoat was dirty. He would know I no longer went to work; that I’d had my television taken away; that my phone and electrical service had been voluntarily interrupted. He thought I was crazy.

“I may have been crazy but — like Reg — I was not stupid. I turned on the charm. Editors have got to have a certain amount, you know. And I greased the skids with a ten-dollar bill. Finally I was able to smooth things over, but I knew from the way people were looking at me in the next couple of weeks — my last two weeks in the building, as things turned out — that the story had traveled. The fact that no members of the tenants’ association approached me to make wounded noises about my ingratitude was particularly telling. I suppose they thought I might take after them with a steak knife.

“All of that was very secondary in my thoughts that evening, however. I sat in the glow of the Coleman lantern, the only light in the three rooms except for all the electricity in Manhattan that came through the windows. I sat with a bottle in one hand, a cigarette in the other, looking at the plate in the ceiling where the smoke detector with its single red eye — an eye which was so unobtrusive in the daytime that I had never even noticed it — had been. I thought of the undeniable fact that, although I’d had all the electricity turned off in my place, there had been that one live item… and where there was one, there might be more.

“Even if there wasn’t, the whole building was rotten with wires — it was filled with wires the way a man dying of cancer is filled with evil cells and rotting organs. Closing my eyes I could see all those wires in the darkness of their conduits, glowing with a sort of green nether light. And beyond them, the entire city. One wire, almost harmless in itself, running to a switchplate… the wire behind the switchplate a little thicker, leading down through a conduit to the basement where it joined a still thicker wire… that one leading down under the street to a whole bundle of wires, only those wires so thick that they were really cables.

“When I got Jane Thorpe’s letter mentioning the tinfoil, part of my mind recognized that she saw it as a sign of Reg’s craziness, and that part knew I would have to respond as if my whole mind thought she was right. The other part of my mind — by far the largest part now — thought: ‘What a marvelous idea!’ and I covered my own switchplates in identical fashion the very next day. I was the man, remember, that was supposed to be helping Reg Thorpe. In a desperate sort of way it’s actually quite funny.

“I determined that night to leave Manhattan. There was an old family place in the Adirondacks I could go to, and that sounded fine to me. The one thing keeping me in the city was Reg Thorpe’s story. If ‘The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet’ was Reg’s life-ring in a sea of madness, it was mine, too — I wanted to place it in a good magazine. With that done, I could get the hell out.