Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King

Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King

Contents:

Introduction

Dolan’s Cadillac

The End of the Whole Mess

Suffer the Little Children

The Night Flier

Popsy

It Grows on You

Chattery Teeth

Dedication

The Moving Finger

Sneakers

You Know They Got a Hell of a Band

Home Delivery

Rainy Season

My Pretty Pony

Sorry, Right Number

The Ten O’ Clock People

Crouch End

The House on Maple Street

The Fifth Quarter

The Doctor’s Case

Umney’s Last Case

Head Down

Brooklyn August

Notes

Introduction:

Myth, Belief, Faith and Ripley’s

Believe It or Not!

When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights. I knew even then, you see, that there were people in the world — too many of them, actualy — whose imaginative senses were either numb or completely deadened, and who lived in a mental state akin to colorblindness. I always felt sorry for them, never dreaming (at least then) that many of these un-imaginative types either pitied me or held me in contempt, not just because I suffered from any number of irrational fears but because I was deeply and unreservedly credulous on almost every subject. ‘There’s a boy,’ some of them must have thought (I know my mother did), ‘who wil buy the Brooklyn Bridge not just once but over and over again, all his life.’

There was some truth to that then, I suppose, and if I am to be honest, I suppose there’s some truth to it now. My wife still delights in telling people that her husband cast his first Presidential ballot, at the tender age of twenty-one, for Richard Nixon. ‘Nixon said he had a plan to get us out of Vietnam,’ she says, usually with a gleeful gleam in her eye, ‘and Steve believed him!’

That’s right; Steve believed him. Nor is that all Steve has believed during the often-eccentric course of his forty-five years. I was, for example, the last kid in my neighborhood to decide that all those street-corner Santas meant there was no real Santa (I stil find no logical merit in the idea; it’s like saying that a million disciples prove there is no master). I never questioned my Uncle Oren’s assertion that you could tear off a person’s shadow with a steel tent-peg (if you struck precisely at high noon, that was) or his wife’s claim that every time you shivered, a goose was walking over the place where your grave would someday be. Given the course of my life, that must mean I’m slated to end up buried behind Aunt Rhody’s barn out in Goose Wallow, Wyoming.

I also believed everything I was told in the schoolyard; little minnows and whale-sized whoppers went down my throat with equal ease. One kid told me with complete certainty that if you put a dime down on a railroad track, the first train to come along would be derailed by it. Another kid told me that a dime left on a railroad track would be perfectly smooshed (that was exactly how he put it —

perfectly smooshed) by the next train, and what you took off the rail after the train had passed would be a flexible and nearly transparent coin the size of a silver dollar. My own belief was that both things were true: that dimes left on railroad tracks were perfectly smooshed before they derailed the trains which did the smooshing.

Other fascinating schoolyard facts which I absorbed during my years at Center School in Stratford, Connecticut, and Durham Elementary School in Durham, Maine, concerned such diverse subjects as golf-balls (poisonous and corrosive at the center), miscarriages (sometimes born alive, as malformed monsters which had to be killed by health-care individuals ominously referred to as ‘the special nurses’), black cats (if one crossed your path, you had to fork the sign of the evil eye at it quickly or risk

almost certain death before the end of the day), and sidewalk cracks. I probably don’t have to explain the potentially dangerous relationship of these latter to the spinal columns of completely innocent mothers.

My primary sources of wonderful and amazing facts in those days were the paperback compilations from Ripley’s Believe It or Not! which were issued by Pocket Books. It was in Ripley’s that I discovered you could make a powerful explosive by scraping the celluloid off the backs of playing cards and then tamping the stuff into a length of pipe, that you could drill a hole in your own skull and then plug it with a candle, thereby turning yourself into a kind of human night-light (why anyone would want to do such a thing was a question which never occurred to me until years later), that there were actual giants (one man well over eight feel tall), actual elves (one woman barely eleven inches tal), and actual MONSTERS TOO HORRIBLE TO DESCRIBE . . . except Ripley’s described them all, in loving detail, and usually with a picture (if I live to be a hundred, I’ll never forget the one of the guy with the candle stuck in the center of his shaved skull).

That series of paperbacks was — to me, at least — the world’s most wonderful sideshow, one I could carry around in my back pocket and curl up with on rainy weekend afternoons, when there were no baseball games and everyone was tired of Monopoly. Were all of Ripley’s fabulous curiosities and human monsters real? In this context that hardly seems relevant. They were real to me, and that probably is — during the years from six to eleven, crucial years in which the human imagination is largely formed, they were very real to me. I believed them just as I believed you could derail a freight-train with a dime or that the drippy goop in the center of a golf-ball would eat the hand right off your arm if you were careless and got some of it on you. It was in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

that I first began to see how fine the line between the fabulous and the humdrum could sometimes be, and to understand that the juxtaposition of the two did as much to illuminate the ordinary aspects of life as it did to illuminate its occasional weird outbreaks. Remember it’s belief we’re talking about here, and belief is the cradle of myth. What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I’m concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I’ve never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.

I think that myth and imagination are, in fact, nearly interchangeable concepts, and that belief is the wellspring of both. Belief in what? I don’t think it matters very much, to tell you the truth.

One god or many. Or that a dime can derail a freight-train.

These beliefs of mine had nothing to do with faith; let’s be very clear on that subject. I was raised Methodist and hold onto enough of the fundamentalist teachings of my childhood to believe that such a claim would be presumptuous at best and downright blasphemous at worst. I believed all that weird stuff because I was built to believe in weird stuff. Other people run races because they were built to run fast, or play basketball because God made them six-foot-ten, or solve long, complicated equations on blackboards because they were built to see the places where the numbers all lock together.

Yet faith comes into it someplace, and I think that place has to do with going back to do the same thing again and again even though you believe in your deepest, truest heart that you will never be able to do it any better than you already have, and that if you press on, there’s really no place to go but downhill. You don’t have anything to lose when you take your first whack at the piñata, but to take a second one (and a third . . . and a fourth . . . and a thirty-fourth) is to risk failure, depression, and, in the case of the short-story writer who works in a pretty well defined genre, self-parody. But we do go on, most of us, and that gets to be hard. I never would have believed that twenty years ago, or even ten, but it does. It gets hard. And I have days when I

think this old Wang word-processor stopped running on electricity about five years ago; that from The Dark Half on, it’s been running completely on faith. But that’s okay; whatever gets the words across the screen, right?