Stephen King - Skeleton Crew

“Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” — My wife is the real Mrs. Todd; the woman really is mad for a shortcut, and much of the one in the story actually exists. She found it, too. And Tabby really does seem to be getting younger sometimes, although I hope I am not like Worth Todd. I try not to be.

I like this story a lot; it tickles me. And the old guy’s voice is soothing. Every now and then you write something that brings back the old days, when everything you wrote seemed fresh and full of invention. “Mrs. Todd” felt that way to me when I was writing it.

One final note on it — three women’s magazines turned it down, two because of that line about how a woman will pee down her own leg if she doesn’t squat. They apparently felt that either women don’t pee or don’t want to be reminded of the fact. The third magazine to reject it, Cosmopolitan, did so because they felt the main character was too old to interest their target audience.

No comment — except to add that Redbook finally took it. God bless ’em.

“The Jaunt” — This was originally for Omni, which quite rightly rejected it because the science is so wonky. It was Ben Bova’s idea to have the colonists in the story mining for water, and I have incorporated that in this version.

“The Raft” — I wrote this story in the year 1968 as “The Float.” In late 1969 I sold it to Adam magazine, which — like most of the girlie magazines — paid not on acceptance but only on publication. The amount promised was two hundred and fifty dollars.

In the spring of 1970, while creeping home in my white Ford station wagon from the University Motor Inn at 12:30 in the morning, I ran over a number of traffic cones which were guarding a crosswalk that had been painted that day. The paint had dried, but no one had bothered to take the cones in when it got dark. One of them bounced up and knocked my muffler loose from the rotted remains of my tailpipe. I was immediately suffused with the sort of towering, righteous rage which only drunk undergraduates can feel. I decided to circle the town of Orono, picking up traffic cones. I would leave them all in front of the police station the next morning, with a note saying that I had saved numerous mufflers and exhaust systems from extinction, and ought to get a medal.

I got about a hundred and fifty before blue lights started to swirl around in the rearview mirror.

I will never forget the Orono cop turning to me after a long, long look into the back of my station wagon and asking: “Son, are those traffic cones yours?”

The cones were confiscated and so was I; that night I was a guest of the town of Orono, that crossword-puzzle favorite. A month or so later, I was brought to trial in Bangor District Court on a charge of petty larceny. I was my own attorney and did indeed have a fool for a client. I was fined two hundred and fifty dollars, which I of course did not have. I was given seven days to come up with it, or do thirty more days as a guest of Penobscot County. I probably could have borrowed it from my mother, but the circumstances were not easy to understand (unless you had a skinful of booze, that was).

Although one is now not supposed to ever use a deus ex machina in his or her fiction because these gods from the machine are not believable, I notice that they arrive all the time in real life. Mine came three days after the judge levied my fine and arrived in the form of a check from Adam magazine for two hundred and fifty dollars. It was for my story “The Float.” It was like having someone send you a real Get Out of Jail Free card. I cashed the check immediately and paid my fine. I determined to go straight and give all traffic cones a wide berth thereafter. Straight I have not exactly gone, but believe me when I tell you I’m quits with the cones.

But here’s the thing: Adam paid only on publication, dammit, and since I got the money, the story must have come out. But no copy was ever sent to me, and I never saw one on the stands, although I checked regularly — I would simply push my way in between the dirty old men checking out such literary pinnacles as Boobs and Buns and Spanking Lesbians and thumb through every magazine the Knight Publishing Company put out. I never saw that story in any of them.

Somewhere along the way I lost the original manuscript, too. I got to thinking about the story again in 1981, some thirteen years later. I was in Pittsburgh, where the final Creepshow editing was going on, and I was bored. So I decided to have a go at re-creating that story, and the result was “The Raft.” It is the same as the original in terms of event, but I believe it is far more gruesome in its specifics.

Anyway, if anyone out there has ever seen “The Float,” or even if someone has a copy, could you send me a Xerox copy or something? Even a postcard confirming the fact that I’m not crazy? It would have been in Adam, or Adam Quarterly, or (most likely) Adam Bedside Reader (not much of a name, I know, I know, but in those days I only had two pairs of pants and three pairs of underwear, and beggars can’t be choosers, and it was a lot better than Spanking Lesbians, let me tell you). I’d just like to make sure it was published someplace other than the Dead Zone.

“Survivor Type” — I got to thinking about cannibalism one day — because that’s the sort of thing guys like me sometimes think about — and my muse once more evacuated its magic bowels on my head. I know how gross that sounds, but it’s the best metaphor I know, inelegant or not, and believe me when I tell you I’d give that little Fornit Ex-Lax if he wanted it. Anyway, I started to wonder if a person could eat himself, and if so, how much he could eat before the inevitable happened. This idea was so utterly and perfectly revolting that I was too overawed with delight to do more than think about it for days — I was reluctant to write it down because I thought I could only fuck it up. Finally, when my wife asked me what I was laughing at one day when we were eating hamburgers on the back deck, I decided I ought to at least take it for a testdrive.

We were living in Bridgton at the time, and I spent an hour or so talking with Ralph Drews, the retired doctor next door. Although he looked doubtful at first (the year before, in pursuit of another story, I had asked him if he thought it was possible for a man to swallow a cat), he finally agreed that a guy could subsist on himself for quite a while — like everything else which is material, he pointed out, the human body is just stored energy. Ah, I asked him, but what about the repeated shock of the amputations? The answer he gave me is, with very few changes, the first paragraph of the story.

I guess Faulkner never would have written anything like this, huh? Oh, well.

“Uncle Otto’s Truck” — The truck is real, and so is the house; I made up the story that goes around them one day in my head on a long drive to pass the time. I liked it and so I took a few days to write it down.

“The Reach” — Tabby’s youngest brother, Tommy, used to be in the Coast Guard. He was stationed downeast, in the Jonesport-Beals area of the long and knotty Maine coast, where the Guard’s main chores are changing the batteries in the big buoys and saving idiot drug smugglers who get lost in the fog or run on the rocks.

There are lots of islands out there, and lots of tightly knit island communities. He told me of a real-life counterpart of Stella Flanders, who lived and died on her island. Was it Pig Island? Cow Island? I can’t remember. Some animal, anyway.