Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (23 page)

When Mulder and Scully receive the video enlargement that evening they see, “It’s not a shadow Melissa is looking at in the glass door of the freezer compartment; it’s a Little Girl. She stands with her hands pressed against the glass, indistinct but really there. There is the SNARLING LOOK OF HATE on her face.” 

Mulder claims it’s the same girl, “Polly. Same striped top, see? The hair’s the same. It’s her.” Scully suggests the image is a reflection but Mulder points out one of the girls is sitting in a supermarket cart, the “other is on her feet, chilling out with the Stouffer’s frozen dinners and the Tombstone pizza.” They decide to visit the Turners, not realizing there are four government agents in a house across the street, armed to the teeth with tranquilizers and child restraint devices! Just before knocking on the Turners’ door, Mulder picks a Raggedy Ann doll up from the porch glider, looks at it and puts it down as the door opens. 

Melissa refuses to let Mulder and Scully in. Meanwhile the agents across the road record the events on video as Polly comes downstairs chanting, “Chinga. Chinga. Chinga.” Melissa tells Polly she hasn’t seen Chinga and continues to talk to Mulder and Scully. After Mulder frightens Melissa with threats that she might end up “talking to some people who don’t bother knocking” Polly reacts, pulling away, her eyes widening. Mulder suddenly loses control of his hand, smashing a wind-chime and cutting himself on the shells from which it is constructed. His arm starts to bring a sharp-edged shell toward his throat as Scully struggles to help. Mulder sees “the same little girl” as the one now held by her mother “standing in the shadows halfway up the stairs, dressed in the same white nightgown,” hissing at him! Act One ends. 

Act Two opens with the shell’s sharp edge at Mulder’s throat and Melissa yelling to Polly, “Make her go away! Make Molly go away.” Scully now sees Molly on the stairs and the strange little girl forces Scully to slap her own face. Mulder asks Polly, “Do you still want Chinga? … Make her go away, then. Make Molly go away and I’ll give you Chinga.” Mulder regains control of his arm and hands the Raggedy Ann doll to Polly who cries out, “Chinga!”  

Apologizing, Melissa takes them all inside while the Agent in Charge across the road tells his men that they will be taking the girl but “…maybe not right this minute … That was Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. They are prophets without honor in their own country.”  

Melissa explains to Mulder and Scully that such incidents had occurred almost since Polly was born, mostly in the form of making her and her husband dance. The slapping had only begun after Polly went to daycare. Queried about Molly Melissa replies, “I don’t really know. I don’t think I
want
to know.” Mulder warns Melissa that she needs to help them as, “Molly may have attracted attention from the wrong people.” She replies that Molly is getting stronger, “and more violent.” Mulder sends Scully to visit Froelich again to determine who else has been talking to her. He tells Scully that Molly is, “Polly’s mirror-image. Her doppelganger. If there was ever an evil twin, it’s Molly.” As Scully leaves, the Agent in Charge of those watching remarks that, if she is going to see Froelich, she’s wasting her time. 

Sure enough, at the Froelich house Scully finds the woman hanging from an overhead beam, with a note on her body reading, “I’m so ashamed.” Searching the house Scully finds a balled up note reading “LITCHFIELD PROJECT” and “WHITING INSTITUTE.” Back at the beach Mulder asks if Scully believes the death is suicide, particularly after finding the note, “The Whiting Institute for the Criminally Insane. Where the government keeps their failures, their genetic leftovers … their Adams … their Eves.” He claims Polly will become part of the Litchfield Project, where “they’ll study her. And reproduce her. If they can.” Of course, it is not Polly they want but Molly, yet Mulder speculates “they” do not yet know of Molly’s existence. Mulder also claims, “the Bureau doesn’t know us on this one – the people behind the Litchfield Project are very powerful, very high up. We’ve got Chief Bonsaint on our side, and that had better be enough.” Mulder had already briefed Bonsaint and called “a guy in Ohio. He’s in another Federal organization. He’s also a friend.” They begin to plan. 

In Act Three Bonsaint and Mulder arrive at the Turner house the next morning, with Mulder claiming that Scully had been called back to Washington late the previous night. Bonsaint says his investigation had revealed “some fellas” in the house across the street. To Mulder’s comment that they had been “remarkably careless” the Chief responds, “I’d say they think we’re hicks. They might find out different. That’d be lovely.” 

Mulder briefs Melissa about the men across the street and his plan to help her and Polly escape. He joins Polly in a pretend picnic for Chinga and begins to talk to her about Molly. After he asks her if she wants Molly to go away, she nods and tells him, “Molly-bad. Molly-slap.” Mulder convinces her to try and bring Molly outside, “so she can’t … can’t run back inside.” Mulder gives Bonsaint a pre-arranged signal and he drives off, siren howling, drawing the attention of the agents across the road. 

Immediately, they don Federal Marshal jackets and grab their equipment. The Agent in Charge tells his team if Mulder gets in the way, “Nobody likes him anyway – he’s a bowser. Kill him.” 

Mulder and the Turners make a run for Mulder’s car just as the agents spill out of their house yelling but their targets climb into the car while one aims a gun at Mulder. Now we can see the ghostly image of a “HATEFUL little girl” in the front passenger seat. Of course, the “Marshals” begin to attack themselves, probably saving Mulder’s life, and his car screeches away. Mulder catches a glimpse of what might be Molly in the front seat before the image disappears. 

The “Marshals” jump in their car for the chase, with Mulder careful not to lose them! They race down Maine Highway 114 through crowds of beachgoers. The angry reaction of a kid in a dune buggy they pass brings Molly back “too soon” and Mulder begins to slap himself, but Polly calls “Chinga!” and Molly disappears again. 

Act Four begins with Mulder’s car roaring into the parking lot of the Lobsterland restaurant in Newshire, Maine (another fictional location not mentioned in other King works). They wait for the chasing “agents” and then run into the restaurant. As the pursuers burst in Agent in Charge Hal, yelling that they are Federal agents, demands everyone hit the floor. “They are waving guns and looking as crazy as an ATF posse out to roast ‘em a bunch of Branch Davidians. People don’t argue with that look; they grab for some tile.” 

Hal has his gun trained on Mulder but the Turners have already made it into the ladies’ room, where they meet the waiting Scully. Melissa now asks Polly to bring Molly “all the way” out. Mulder, disarmed, announces to those in the restaurant, “I’m Fox Mulder, Federal Bureau of Investigation. And although these men’s jackets say they are federal marshals, I doubt very much they have convincing ID to back that … Please note their descriptions … and could someone take down the plate number of their car please?”  

Molly appears in a bathroom stall, whispering in a creepy voice, “Give me Chinga. I want her … Give her to me, you little brat.” Polly cries, “Molly-bad! Molly-bad, mummy, can’t have Chinga! Molly pulls Chinga’s hair!” Meanwhile, the bad guys are demanding the Turners come out or they’ll kill Mulder. Melissa convinces Polly that the chasers intend to “hurt mummy” and Polly gives in, making her “sadder than anything in her whole unfortunate life, perhaps” and passes the doll under the stall wall to Scully, who gives it into the grasping hand of the nasty little doppelganger.  

As Hal is about to order Mulder’s death Polly comes out of the toilet with Chinga in hand, “But it’s not Polly, and Mulder knows it straight away.” The “agents” again begin attacking themselves; one shooting most of his hand off and Mulder also begins slapping himself in something of a Three Stooges takeoff. Meanwhile, Scully escapes with Melissa and Polly. 

Inside the restaurant Molly watches the mayhem as patrons and workers join in the slap and dance-fest. She is “hugging Chinga and smiling. She’s having the time of her life …” but she has overlooked Hal, who shoots her in her now very real neck with a tranquillizer dart. She turns to him and tries to force him to gouge his eyes out with a broken water glass but succumbs to the drug before she can inflict this (well-deserved) damage. Hal and his men grab Molly’s slumped body and Hal prepares to shoot Mulder before approaching sirens convince him that discretion is the better part of murder.  

Scully drives her charges toward Boston’s South Station, telling Melissa, “We’ve got to make at least one stop somewhere along the line. This little girl needs a new doll.” 

Back at FBI Headquarters Scully tells Mulder she’d handed the Turners over to a tall, blond man after being given the right password, “Believe.” Mulder has arranged for them to be relocated under new names and tosses Scully a tee shirt. It reads, in big letters across the middle, “You Don’t Know Me” and, on the breast, carries a Federal seal with the words “FEDERAL WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM.” 

The action cuts to a view of the Whiting Institute for the Criminally Insane (which had appeared in the Eve episode of The X-Files, first broadcast on 10 December 1993) while in voiceover Scully asks Mulder what will happen to Molly. He replies, “It may already have happened, Scully. Molly wasn’t really a doppelganger; she was an extrusion. Extrusions don’t have much of a future when they’re cut off from the life-systems which have supported them.” 

In the same Cellblock Z as appeared in Eve we get a brief view of various steel doors, each stencilled with Eve and a number, “Eve 6,” “Eve 8,” and so on. “At one of them, a hand that ends in three curved claws grips the mesh-covered slot in the door.” A burly prison matron explains to a uniformed man that she doesn’t know what happened, “she was alright … at seven, when the orderly brought her breakfast.” The man replies, “She’s not all right now. There’s going to be a complete investigation of this, I guarantee you.” And Hal, looking furious, declaims, “Ask Mulder. He knows. That I guarantee you.” The uniformed man simply comments, “Mulder is back in Washington. Among such friends as he has. You should have taken him out while you had the chance.” 

Looking into the cell we see Molly’s clothes. “Surrounding them is a vaguely humanoid shape made of gray fluff … looks like the stuff that comes out of a vacuum cleaner bag. At the end of one dusty ‘arm’ is Chinga, lying on her back and peering up into the shadows.” 

The final scene takes us to DeMeara Heights, Chapel Hill, North Carolina where Polly is having tea with her new doll. Polly is now Sally and Melissa is “Mrs. Drake.” Polly/Sally holds the doll up, smiles radiantly at it and says, “Chinga!” 

It is clear that Molly is very different to Chinga. Using the same characters and with the full participation of Mulder, it takes a totally different tack as to the basic storyline, with a nasty doppelganger/extrusion rather than a possessed doll.  

Of the two, Molly is much the better and more interesting story. Carter, as Master of the X-Files Universe, of course had every right to seek a storyline more in tune with the “reality” he created and the flow of his series. However, it is a shame that the imaginative, interesting and fast-paced story created by King in Molly was, as a result, lost to King fans and students alike. Investigation has confirmed that there is no possibility of King ever allowing publication or circulation of Molly. 

King, as quoted in Cinescape Presents The X-Files Yearbook
(1998), “would happily repeat the experience,” and had “already concocted an idea for a future plot.” In an amusing aside he noted he would not do an
X-Files
novel, excepting one in which “Mulder and Scully go to bed together.” 

⁴⁷
Cinescape Presents The X-Files Yearbook
(ISSN: 1077-3363, 1998), p.15 

Comb Dump (Undated) 

Rocky Wood “rediscovered” this story in Box 1012 at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library of the University of Maine at Orono during a research trip in December 2002. As the box is unrestricted readers who attend the Library may read this partial story. 

The 41 page double-spaced undated manuscript, headed “by Stephen King,” is incomplete and there is no indication that King ever continued writing it past the point at which it ends. It can be presumed he lost interest in the story, intriguing though the developments in it are. 

In this story fragment a young cocaine addict decides to attend a rehabilitation clinic. Tommy Brigham, only twenty-one years old, had watched one of his young addict friends, Roy Duchien, suffer a stroke after taking cocaine. Brigham became the sole remaining of Duchien’s so-called friends still helping him shortly after the stroke. As a result of observing the damage, and a conversation with a young doctor at Augusta General, Tommy decided to kick his habit. 

Brigham then worked for seven months on a construction job and for a short time became a drug dealer to accrue half the money he needed to check in to the Cold Strap Psychiatric Hospital. The remaining half of the $18,000 fee for the 28 day course at Cold Strap was to be paid by Blue Cross. The Hospital, a stand-alone complex, set in the countryside, was 16 miles north of Augusta, Maine. The hospital was in a Y shape with the adult and juvenile dependency units in the left arm, administration in the downstroke and the psychiatric ward in the right arm. The adult dependency ward had 26 beds. Violent inmates were sent to the Quiet Room.  

Brigham had an old black comb in his pocket when he checked into Cold Strap. It had three broken teeth in the middle and a little broken jagged bit at one end. He couldn’t find it when he was leaving his apartment until he conducted a lengthy search. This gave the comb talismanic qualities in Brigham’s mind. The comb started to replicate a week after he checked in, with absolutely exact replicas mysteriously continuing to appear until there were six in total. 

Concerned for his sanity, Tommy approached George, an orderly. George confirmed the combs were real and exact duplicates. As a teenager and for most of his 20s George had also been a heroin addict but he’d been clean for nine years when Brigham came to the Hospital, and he was doing post-graduate work in substance abuse counselling. At this point the story fragment ends. 

No timeline is given but the story is certainly set after 1984, as that was the year the Hospital began treating junkies, and probably in the mid to late 1980s. Due to the tale’s setting at The Cold Strap Psychiatric Hospital, sixteen miles north of Augusta, Maine it is naturally enough classified as a Maine Street Horror story. 

There are strong links with other King fictional tales through the fact the same corporation that owns the Cold Strap Psychiatric Hospital also owns the Juniper Hill Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Juniper Hill is also mentioned in
Bag of Bones
,
Cell, The Dark Half
,
Gerald’s Game
,
Insomnia
,
Needful Things,
the
Nightmares & Dreamscapes
version
of
Suffer the Little Children
,
The Tommyknockers
,
Cell
and
It
(
see feature panel
). 

An even stronger link is the fact that the town of Derry is said to be upstate from Augusta. Derry is second only to Castle Rock as King’s best-known fictional town. It is a key location in
Autopsy Room Four
,
Bag of Bones
,
The Bird and the Album
,
Insomnia
,
It
,
The Road Virus Heads North
and
Secret Window, Secret Garden
.
It receives considerable mention in both
Dreamcatcher
and
The Tommyknockers
and is also mentioned in
The Body
,
The Dark Half
,
Dolores Claiborne
,
Gerald’s Game
,
Hearts in Atlantis
,
Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut
,
Pet Sematary
,
The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson
,
The Running Man
,
Storm of the Century
,
Under the Dome
and
Uncle Otto’s Truck
. 

As always, King had already introduced some other interesting characters by the point at which this manuscript ends. For instance, another patient who was probably called “Ray” was an ancient drunk with thick bowed-glasses and hearing aids. He died the first night.  

The wonderfully named Billy Boggs was Tommy Brigham’s original roommate at Cold Strap. Employed by a private trash collection company in Derry he would take old medicines from the garbage. He’d checked in to kick the habit. One wonders if he had collected trash from the homes of any other King characters?  

One other character with a spectacular name is Bongo Bill Bongarsarian, who ran the Bongarsarian Billiard Hall in Augusta. It was located between a barbershop and a dirty bookshop. When Bongo Bill sold Brigham cocaine to deal on the streets he advised him to get out of the game as soon as possible. 

This is an unusual King story in that the early part is set in Augusta, the state capital of Maine, a city rarely visited in depth in King’s fiction. A number of businesses are mentioned, including a drug store at which a young employee had developed a taste for his own product; the Augusta High School, to whose students Brigham sold cocaine; The Oven, a pizza place at which he also sold his drugs, but only for one day; and the University of Maine at Augusta (he sold his product there next to the cannons). 

All in all, this story is hard to assess, as it is just getting interesting at the point where the manuscript ends. What was causing Brigham’s comb to replicate perfectly? After the reader, along with Brigham, wonders about his sanity, George the orderly seems to close off that option. Why did King tentatively title the story
Comb
Dump
? We can only presume the story moves to a psychiatric hospital for a very good reason, but what is it? Atmosphere? The reaction of other inmates/patients?  

The answers to these questions will probably remain unrevealed; as it is most unlikely King will ever return to this tale.  

The Juniper Hill Asylum for the Criminally Insane 

Probably King’s most famous mental asylum, and as well-known as Shawshank Prison to his Constant Readers, it is revealed in
Comb Dump
that Juniper Hill is owned by the same corporation as The Cold Strap Psychiatric Hospital. Importantly, the corporation bought Juniper Hill from the State in August 1983. 

In
The Dark Half
Dolly Arsenault claims Juniper Hill is not far from Castle Rock and from
It
we know that it is near the Sidney town line. In
Cell
we are told it is in Augusta. We also know from
Bag of Bones
and
It
that the asylum has a Blue Ward Wing and from
It
that it has a Red Ward.
Comb Dump
reveals that violent inmates were sent to the Rubber Room. 

Its residents over the years include the following characters. (
Note:
Cass Knowles was sent to “a place” in Augusta after she killed her son in 1939 in
Sword in the Darkness
, and it is quite possible that place was either Juniper Hill or Cold Strap). 

Name Story Crime; Dates of Incarceration 

Benny Beaulieu
It
Pyromania; 1985 

Henry Bowers
It
Murder; 1979 - 30 May 1985 

Nettie Cobb
Needful Things
Murder; 1977 - 1982 

Franklin D’Cruz
It
Rape 

George de Ville
It
Murder; 1962 - ? 

Jimmy Donlin
It
Murder/Cannibalism; 1965 - ?
 

Raymond Joubert
Gerald’s Game
Sex Crimes 1979 - 1984 

Bill Keeton
Needful Things
Unknown; c. 1977 - 1982 

Charles Pickering
Insomnia
Arson; 1982 - 1983 

Emily Sidley
Suffer the Little Children
Murder 

Arlen Weston
It
Unknown 

Among the known guards were Adler, Fogarty and the amusingly named John Koontz (
It
).