Springsteen hissed, showing his teeth. His tail switched back and forth
– not just the tip now but the whole thing.
“I don’t care if you are mad!” Owen yelled at him. He was still crying a little, because his hands hurt as if he had put them in the fire. They were both bleeding, one from Springsteen biting him and one from Springsteen clawing him. “You can’t kill people on our lawn even if they are little!”
Springsteen hised again and backed away. Okay, his mean green eyes seemed to say. Okay for this time. Next time…we’ll see! Then he turned and ran away. Owen hurried back to see it the little man was all right. At first he thought the little man was gone. Then he saw the blood on the grass, and the little leaf hat. The little man was nearby, lying on his side.
The reason Owen hadn’t been able to see him at first was the little man’s shirt was the exact color of the grass. Owen touched him gently with his finger. He was terribly afraid the little man was dead. But when Owen touched him, the little man groaned and sat up.
“Are you all right?” Owen asked.
The fellow in the grass made a face and clapped his hands to his ears.
For a moment Owen thought Springsteen must have hurt the little guy’s head as well as his back, and then he realized that his voice must sound like thunder to such a small person. The little man in the grass was not much longer than Owen’s thumb. This was Owen’s first good look at the little fellow he had rescued, and he saw right away why the little man 159
had been so hard to find again. His green shirt was not just the color of grass; it was grass. Carefully woven blades of green grass. Owen wondered how come they didn’t turn brown.
160
KEYHOLES
An unfinished short story – only one copy of these notes is known to exist in a spiral holographic notebook that was auctioned off.
Conklin’s first, snap, judgement was that this man, Michael Briggs, was not the sort of fellow who usually sort psychiatric help. He was dressed in dark corduroy pants, a neat blue shirt, and a sport-coat that matched – sort of – both. His hair was long, almost shoulder-length.
His face was sunburned. His large hands were chapped, scabbed in a number of places, and when he reached over the desk to shake, he felt the rasp of rough calluses.
“Hello, Mr Briggs.”
“Hello.” Briggs smiled – a small ill-at-ease smile. His eyes moved about the room and centered on the couch – it was an eye movement Conklin had seen before, but it was no one Conklin associated with people who had been in therapy before – they knew the couch would be there. This Briggs with this work-hardened hands and sunburned face was looking for the profession’s most well-known symbol – the one they saw in the movies and the magazine cartoons.
“You’re a construction worker?” Conklin asked.
“Yes.” Briggs sat down carefully across the desk.
“You want to talk to me about your son?”
“Yes.”
“Jeremy.”
“Yes.”
A little silence fell. Conklin, used to using silence as a tool, was less uncomfortable with it than Briggs obviously was. Mrs Adrian, his nurse and receptionist, had taken the call five days before, and had said Briggs sounded distraught – a man who had control, she said, but by inches.
Conklin’s specialty was not child psychology and his schedule was full, but Nancy Adrian’s assessment of the man behind the bare facts typed onto the printed form in front of him had intrigued him. Michael Briggs was forty-five, a construction worker who lived in Lovinger, New York, a town forty miles north of New York City. He was a widower. He wanted to consult with Conklin about his son, Jeremy, who was seven.
Nancy had promised him a call-back by the end of the day.
“Tell him to try Milton Abrams in Albany,” Conklin had said, sliding the form back across the desk toward her.
161
“Can I suggest you see him once before you decide that?” Nancy Adrian asked.
Conklin looked at her, then leaned back in his chair and took out his cigarette case. Each morning he filled it with exactly ten Winston 100s
– when they were gone, he was done smoking until the next day. It was not as good as quitting; he knew that. It was just a truce he had been able to reach. Now it was the end of the day – no more patients, anyway – and he deserved a cigarette. And Nancy’s reaction to Briggs intrigued him. Such suggestions as this were not unheard of, but they were rare…and the woman’s intuitions were good.
“Why?” he asked, lighting the cigarette.
“Well, I suggested Milton Abrams – he’s close to where this man Briggs is and he likes kids – but Briggs knows him a little – he worked on a construction crew that built a pool addition at Abrams’ country house two years ago. He says he would go to him if you still recommended it after hearing what he has to say, but that he wanted to tell a total stranger first and get an opinion. He said ‘I’d tell a priest if I was Catholic’.”
“Um.”
“He said ‘I just want to know what’s going on with my kid – if it’s me or what.’ He sounded aggressive about it, but he also sounded very, very scared.”
“The boy is – ”
“Seven.”
“Um. And you want me to see him.”
She shrugged, then grinned. She was forty-five, but when she grinned she still looked twenty. “He sounded…concrete. As though he could tell a clear story with no shadows. Phenomena, not ephemera.”
“Quote me all you want – I still won’t raise your salary.”
She wrinkled her nose at him, then grinned. In his way he loved Nancy Adrian – once, over drinks, he had called her the Della Street of psychiatry, and she had almost hit him. But he valued her insights, and here came one now, clear and simple:
“He sounded like a man who thinks there’s something physically wrong with his son. Except he called the office of a New York psychiatrist. An expensive New York psychiatrist. And he sounded scared.”
“All right. Enough.” He butted the cigarette – not without regret.
“Book him next week – Tuesday or Wednesday – around four.”
And here it was, Wednesday afternoon – not around four but 4:03 on the nose – and here was Mr Briggs sitting opposite him with his work-reddened hands folded in his lap and looking warily at Conklin.
162
FOR THE BIRDS
From a 1986 anthology by various authors: King had to contribute a one-page story that ended with a pun; his punchline consequently became the title of the compilation.
Okay, this is a science fiction joke.
It seems like in 1995 or so the pollution in the atmosphere of London has started to kill off all the rooks. And the city government is very concerned because the rooks roosting on the cornices and the odd little crannies of the public buildings are a big attraction. The Yanks with their Kodaks, if you get it. So they say, “What are we going to do?”
They get a lot of brochures from places with climates similar to London’s so they can raise the rooks until the pollution problem is finally licked. One place with a similar climate, but low pollution count, turns to be Bangor, Maine. So they put an ad in the paper soliciting bird fanciers and talk to a bunch of guys in the trade. Finally, they engage this one guy at the rate of $50,000 a year to raise rooks. They send an ornithologist over on the concord with two cases of rook eggs packed in these shatterproof cases – they keep the shipping compartment constantly heated and all that stuff. So this guy has a new business –
North American Rook Farms, Inc. He goes to work right off incubating new rooks so London will not become a rookless city. The only thing is, the London City Council is really impatient, and every day they send him a telegram that says: “Bred Any Good RooksLately? ”
163
THE REPLOIDS
Appeared in Night Visions #5, 1988
No one knew exactly how long it had been going on. Not long. Two days, two weeks; it couldn’t have been much longer than that, Cheyney reasoned. Not that it mattered. It was just that people got to watch a little more of the show with the added thrill of knowing the show was real. When the United States – the whole world – found out about the Reploids, it was pretty spectacular. Just as well, maybe. These days, unless it’s spectacular, a thing can go on damned near forever. It is neither believed nor disbelieved. It is simply part of the weird Godhead mantra that made up the accelerating flow of events and experience as the century neared its end. It’s harder to get peoples’ attention. It takes machine-guns in a crowded airport or a live grenade rolled up the aisle of a bus load of nuns stopped at a roadblock in some Central American country overgrown with guns and greenery. The Reploids became national – and international – news on the morning of November 30, 1989, after what happened during the first two chaotic minutes of the Tonight Show taping in Beautiful Downtown Burbank, California, the night before. The floor manager watched intently as the red sweep secondhand moved upward toward the twelve. The studio audience clockwatched as intently as the floor manager. When the red sweep second-hand crossed the twelve, it would be five o’clock and taping of the umpty-umptieth Tonight Show would commence. As the red secondhand passed the eight, the audience stirred and muttered with its own peculiar sort of stage fright. After all, they represented America, didn’t they? Yes!