A Good Marriage (32 page)

On several occasions I called the attention of my co-workers to these vermin. They claimed not to see them. Perhaps they really did not. I think it far more likely that they were afraid the Sewing Floor might be temporarily closed down so the ratcatchers could come in and do their work. The sewing crew might have lost three days’ wages, or even a week. For men and women with families, that would have been catastrophic. It was easier for them to tell Mr. Hanrahan that I was seeing things. I understood. And when they began to call me Crazy Wilf? I understood that, too. It wasn’t why I quit.

I quit because the rats kept moving in.

*  *  *

I had been putting a little money away, and was prepared to live on it while I looked for another job, but I didn’t have to. Only three days after leaving Bilt-Rite, I saw an ad in the paper for a librarian at the Omaha Public Library—must have references or a degree. I had no degree, but I have been a reader my whole life, and if the events of 1922 taught me anything, it was how to deceive. I forged references from public libraries in Kansas City and Springfield, Missouri, and got the job. I felt sure Mr. Quarles would check the references and discover they were false, so I worked at becoming the best librarian in America, and I worked fast. When
my new boss confronted me with my deception, I would simply throw myself on his mercy and hope for the best. But there was no confrontation. I held my job at the Omaha Public Library for four years. Technically speaking, I suppose I still hold it now, although I haven’t been there in a week and have not ’phoned in sick.

The rats, you see. They found me there, too. I began to see them crouched on piles of old books in the Binding Room, or scuttering along the highest shelves in the stacks, peering down at me knowingly. Last week, in the Reference Room, I pulled out a volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
for an elderly patron (it was Ra-St, which no doubt contains an entry for
Rattus norvegicus,
not to mention
slaughterhouse
) and saw a hungry gray-black face staring out at me from the vacant slot. It was the rat that bit off poor Achelois’s teat. I don’t know how that could be—I’m sure I killed it—but there was no doubt. I recognized it. How could I not? There was a scrap of burlap,
bloodstained
burlap, caught in its whiskers.

Snood!

I brought the volume of
Britannica
to the old lady who had requested it (she wore an ermine stole, and the thing’s little black eyes regarded me bleakly). Then I simply walked out. I wandered the streets for hours, and eventually came here, to the Magnolia Hotel. And here I have been ever since, spending the money I have saved as a librarian—which doesn’t matter any longer—and writing my confession, which does. I—

One of them just nipped me on the ankle. As if to say
Get on with it, time’s almost up
. A little blood has begun to stain my sock. It doesn’t disturb me, not in the slightest. I have seen more blood in my time; in 1922 there was a room filled with it.

And now I think I hear . . . is it my imagination?

No.

Someone has come visiting.

I plugged the pipe, but the rats still escaped. I filled in the well, but
she
also found her way out. And this time I don’t think she’s alone. I think I hear two sets of shuffling feet, not just one. Or—

Three? Is it three? Is the girl who would have been my daughter-in-law in a better world with them as well?

I think she is. Three corpses shuffling up the hall, their faces (what remains of them) disfigured by rat-bites, Arlette’s cocked to one side as well . . . by the kick of a dying cow.

Another bite on the ankle.

And another!

How the management would—

Ow! Another. But they won’t have me. And my visitors won’t, either, although now I can see the doorknob turning and I can smell them, the remaining flesh hanging on their bones giving off the stench of slaughtered

slaught

The gun

god where is the

stop

OH MAKE THEM STOP BITING M

From the
Omaha
World-Herald,
April 14th, 1930

LIBRARIAN COMMITS SUICIDE IN LOCAL HOTEL
Bizarre Scene Greets Hotel Security Man

The body of Wilfred James, a librarian at the Omaha Public Library, was found in a local hotel on Sunday when efforts by hotel staff to contact him met with no response. The resident of a nearby room had complained of “a smell like bad meat,” and a hotel chambermaid reported hearing “muffled shouting or crying, like a man in pain” late Friday afternoon.

After knocking repeatedly and receiving no response, the hotel’s Chief of Security used his pass-key and discovered the body of Mr. James, slumped over the room’s writing desk. “I saw a pistol and assumed he had shot himself,” the security man said, “but no-one had reported a gunshot, and there was no smell of expended powder. When I checked the gun, I determined it was a badly maintained .25, and not loaded.

“By then, of course, I had seen the blood. I have never seen anything like that before, and never want to again. He had bitten himself all over—arms, legs, ankles, even his toes. Nor was that all. It was clear he had been busy with some sort of writing project, but he had chewed up the paper, as well. It was all over the floor. It looked like paper does when rats chew it up to make their nests. In the end, he chewed his own wrists open. I believe that’s what killed him. He certainly must have been deranged.”

Little is known of Mr. James at this writing. Ronald
Quarles, the head librarian at the Omaha Public Library, took Mr. James on in late 1926. “He was obviously down on his luck, and handicapped by the loss of a hand, but he knew his books and his references were good,” Quarles said. “He was collegial but distant. I believe he had been doing factory work before applying for a position here, and he told people that before losing his hand, he had owned a small farm in Hemingford County.”

The
World-Herald
is interested in the unfortunate Mr. James, and solicits information from any readers who may have known him. The body is being held at the Omaha County Morgue, pending disposition by next of kin. “If no next of kin appears,” said Dr. Tattersall, the Morgue’s Chief Medical Officer, “I suppose he will be buried in public ground.”

SCRIBNER

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Copyright © 2010 by Stephen King

Previously published in 2010 in a collection of novellas title
Full Dark, No Stars

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ISBN 978-1-5011-0442-8 (ebook)

Just as many of his acclaimed works of short fiction have generated such enduring films as
The Shawshank Redemption
and
Stand by Me,
this chillingly rendered quartet of Stephen King tales “might yield another classic” (
Columbus Dispatch
), with its richly drawn characters and mesmerizing plotlines pulsing with the evil men do. . . .

FULL DARK, NO STARS

“Solid psychological chillers.”

—
Columbus Dispatch

“Compulsively readable. . . . As disturbing as it is compelling. . . .
Full Dark, No Stars
is the work of a formidably gifted storyteller, a man with a dark, uncompromising vision and an utterly hypnotic voice.”

—SubterraneanPress.com

“Rarely has King gone this dark, but to say there are no stars here is crazy.”

—
Booklist
(starred review)

“A page turner. . . . King . . . seems able to write compact tales or gargantuan ones with equal ease.”

—Janet Maslin,
The New York Times

This title is also available from Simon & Schuster Audio

Stephen King shines against a pitch-black canvas with these dark tales . . .

“I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger,” writes Wilfred Leland James in
“1922,”
and it was that stranger that set off a gruesome train of murder and madness when his wife, Arlette, proposed selling off the family homestead. . . .
“Big Driver”
follows a mystery writer down a Massachusetts back road, where she is violated and left for dead. But plotting revenge brings her face-to-face with another dangerous stranger: herself. . . . Making a deal with the devil not only saves Henry Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment, in
“Fair Extension.”
. . . And, with her husband away on business, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in their garage—and makes a horrifying discovery that definitively ends
“A Good Marriage.”

“
Full Dark, No Stars
is an extraordinary collection, thrillingly merciless, and a career high point.”

—
The Telegraph
(UK)

“These tales show how a skilled storyteller with a good tale to tell can make unsettling fiction compulsively readable.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“King [is] the most wonderfully gruesome man on the planet. . . . The pages practically turn themselves.”