Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (39 page)

This anthology screenplay is in the style of
Creepshow
or
Cat’s Eye
. It would make a great addition to that style of filmmaking and King adaptations in general. However, there seems little hope it will be produced and it is most unlikely the screenplay will ever be published, consigning Harold and Richard Davis and the town of Weathersfield, Maine to a twilight zone existence. 

Considering the variety and quality of the stories in the
Night Shift
collection it is not surprising that most have been adapted to film. Many were produced as “dollar babies,” including:
The Boogeyman
,
The Last Rung on the Ladder, The Lawnmower Man
,
Night Surf
,
Strawberry Spring
and Darabont’s
The Woman in the Room
. The wider release productions include
Children of the Corn
,
Graveyard Shift, The Lawnmower Man
(that production bears no resemblance to the story),
The Ledge
(as a segment of
Cat’s Eye
),
The Mangler
and
Sometimes They Come Back
.
Trucks
was made into a TV special for the USA Network. 

This leaves one wondering how long
Gray Matter
,
I Am the Doorway, I Know What You Need
(apart from the execrable dollar baby),
Jerusalem’s Lot
,
The Man Who Loved Flowers
and
One For the Road
will escape adaptation. 

Jerusalem’s Lot – A “Strange Place” 

Jerusalem’s Lot (widely known as ‘Salem’s Lot),
having been the earlier site of devil-worship and the disappearance of its entire populace in 1789, was taken over by a colony of vampires and effectively abandoned again by the living in 1975. Despite the town’s destruction by fire in 1976 vampires were known to be in the area as late as 1977. Jerusalem’s Lot’s history may be read and discovered in the following order:
Jerusalem’s Lot
,
‘Salem’s Lot
,
One for the Road
and parts of
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
. It is also mentioned in
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
and
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
. 

It was founded by a splinter group of the Puritan faith, headed by James Boon, in 1710. On 31 October 1789 the entire population of town disappeared. 

Source: Jerusalem’s Lot
(in the
Night Shift
collection) 

A small town east of Cumberland and 20 miles north of Portland, it is in Cumberland County and can be accessed via Route 12 from Falmouth. It was incorporated in 1765 and named after one of Charles Belknap Tanner’s pigs, Jerusalem, which escaped into the woods and went wild. Tanner would warn small children away from Jerusalem’s wood lot. The township is nearly circular and two major roads, Brock Street and Jointner Avenue cross dead center at right angles. Central Maine Power pylons march across the town in a northwest to southeast diagonal, forming a 150ft wide gash in the timberland. The northwest quadrant is North Jerusalem and includes the high ground, including the Marsten House. The northeast is mostly open farmland and the Royal River flows through it to Drunk’s Leap. In the southeast section are farms and the homes of white-collar commuters. In the southwest area known as The Bend are many shacks and trailer homes. Town government in the Lot was by town meeting. In 1960 it had 1252 inhabitants and in 1970 1319. The majority of these were of Scotch-English and French ancestry. In 1975 the town was abandoned after an infestation of vampires. On 6 October 1976 it was apparently largely destroyed by fire. 

Source: ‘Salem’s Lot 

Also known as “The Lot,” Richard Davis mentioned the “Boogies” there. It is eight miles from Weathersfield. Harold Davis thought it “a strange place.” 

Source: Night Shift
(Unproduced Screenplay) 

Father Donald Callahan moved there in the Spring of 1969. He became convinced that vampires had infested the town in 1975. He confronted one in October that year but, after losing his faith and being forced to drink the vampire’s blood, fled the town in shame. 

Source: The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla 

The town was apparently taken over by vampires in 1975 and burned flat in 1976. In 1977 there were still vampires in the area. 

Source: One for the Road
(in the
Night Shift
collection) 

Donald Callahan was once the Catholic Priest in this “little” town. By 1999 it no longer existed on any map. 

Source: The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower 

The Old Dude’s Ticker (2000) 

The Old Dude’s Ticker
was first published in the
NECON XX Commemorative Volume
for 2000. That volume was limited to 333 copies. It was reprinted in
The Big Book of Necon
(Cemetery Dance, 2009), which is likely the only way readers might secure a copy of the tale.
 

King actually wrote the story nearly three decades earlier. He explained the story’s genesis in an introduction to the tale: 

In the two years after I was married (1971-1972), I sold nearly two dozen stories to various men’s magazines. Most were purchased by Nye Willden, the fiction editor at
Cavalier
. These stories were important supplements to the meager income I was earning in my two day jobs, one as a high school English teacher and the other as an employee of The New Franklin Laundry, where I washed motel sheets. These were not good times for short horror fiction … but I sold an almost uninterrupted run of mine – no mean feat for an unknown, unagented scribbler from Maine … 

Two of them, however, did not sell. Both were pastiches. The first was a modern day revision of Nikolai Gogol’s story, “The Ring” (my version was called “The Spear”, I think). That one is lost. The second was the one that follows, a crazed revisionist telling of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. I thought the idea was a natural: crazed Vietnam vet kills elderly benefactor as a result of post-traumatic stress syndrome. I’m not sure what Nye’s problem with it might have been; I loved it, but he shot it back at me with a terse “not for us” note. I gave it a final sad look, then put it in a desk drawer and went on to something else. It stayed in said drawer until rescued by Marsha DeFilippo, who found it in a pile of old manuscripts consigned to a collection of my stuff in the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine. 

I was tempted to tinker with it – the seventies slang is pretty out of date – but resisted the impulse, deciding to let it be what it was then: partly satire and partly affectionate homage… 

The story is short, only six small pages in the Volume, and is headed
The Old Dude’s Ticker
– Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe. Typically of King in an environment where he feels very comfortable with the “audience,” he signs the introduction “Steve King.” 

It is unlikely King will include this tale in one of his short story collections. As he says, the slang is very dated and the story would have fitted much more comfortably in one of the early collections such as
Skeleton Crew
. It would be jarringly out of place with King’s more modern style in a collection such as
Everything’s Eventual
. This being the case, readers will need to purchase either the NECON XX Volume or the reprint in the much easier to find
Big Book of NECON
, edited by Bob Booth (Cemetery Dance, 2009). 

King says in his introduction, “If you have half as much fun reading it as I had writing it, we’ll both be well off, I think. I hope some of Poe’s feverish intensity comes through here … and I hope the master isn’t rolling in his grave too much.” In fact, Poe’s style does come through in the story and it is certainly excellent homage to
The Tell-Tale Heart
. While the seventies slang is indeed dated, it serves the story well as it is supposed to be the killer’s own words recorded shortly after the murder. All in all, this is a fun story, to be appreciated as much for its intent as its content. 

In the tale an old man is murdered. Richard Drogan apparently lived with the Old Dude but even though he “…had no case against him …” he became obsessed with one of his eyes
–
“Pale blue, with a cataract on it. And it bulged. When he looked at me, my blood ran cold. That’s how bad it freaked me. So little by little, I made up my mind to waste him and get rid of the eye forever.” Richard watched him sleep each night for a week, using a narrow penlight beam to search out the man’s eye but it was always closed. On the eighth night the Old Dude woke up while Richard was watching. As he stood and waited for the Old Dude to go back to sleep Richard finally decided to shine the light on the eye, only to find it open (“This dull dusty blue with that gross-out white stuff all over it so it looked like the bulging yolk of a poached egg”). 

Richard claimed to have supersensitive hearing following service in Vietnam and could hear the old man’s heart (“ticker”) beating. Panicking and thinking the neighbors would hear it he smothered the old man. He then cut up the body in the shower and pushed the parts under the bedroom floorboards. 

At four the next morning, alerted by a neighbor’s call about a yell in the night, the police asked to look around the house. Richard invited them in but after talking for a while he began to suspect they knew his secret. He became agitated as time progressed and could now hear a beating noise growing steadily louder, presumably that of the old dude’s ticker under the floorboards. Fearing the cops would hear it he then confessed to the murder and showed them the body. “‘Stop it!’ I screamed at them. ‘Stop it! I admit it! – I did it! – rip up the boards! – here, here! its (
sic
) his heart! It’s the beating of his hideous heart!’”  

It turns out that Richard Drogan was actually Robert Deisenhoff, a Vietnam veteran who had scragged an officer there and been sent to the Quigly Veterans Hospital, from which he had escaped more than five years earlier. At the end of the story we find the whole thing is actually Deisenhoff’s statement to the police. This is King’s little twist at the end of the tale, even though we knew early on Richard/Robert was a killer, it is only at the last we realize he had been caught and come to fully understand his mental illness. 

Working backwards we come to understand that Deisenhoff had been in Vietnam but had lost his mind and killed (“scragged” in the parlance of the time) his lieutenant and been shipped back to a Veteran’s Hospital and placed under armed guard. Richard/Robert tells the police he heard a sound from the old dude as he held the light beam to his eye.  

Didn’t I tell you how sharp my hearing has been since Nam? And what came to my ears was this low, quick noise. You know what that sound was like? Have you ever seen a squad of MPs on a parade ground? They all wear white gloves, and they all carry these little short sticks on their belts. And if one of them takes his stick out and starts tapping it into his palm, it makes a sound like that. I remember that … from that hospital where they put me after I came home. Sure, they had MPs there.  

King’s twist on Poe’s tale is to have the killer compare the sound of the heart/ticker to his military background. “I knew what that sound was, there in the dark. It wasn’t any GI head-bopper. It was the old dude’s ticker. It made me even madder, the way beating a drum will make a GI feel ballsier.” 

The closing paragraph of the story reveals that the police statement was taken on August 14, 1976 and that investigations had confirmed that Richard Drogan was indeed Robert Deisenhoff, “who escaped from the Quigly (Ohio) Veteran’s Hospital on April 9, 1971.” This leaves one wondering what other deeds or misdeeds Richard/Robert may have got up to in the intervening five years. One also wonders if there is just a hint of General Anthony Hecksler, the insane killer in both versions of
The Plant
? Deisenhoff’s name reminds one of Dieffenbaker, the new lieutenant and Vietnam veteran in
The New Lieutenant’s Rap
, although the soldier “scragged” in that story was Ralph Clemson, shot by Slocum under Dieffenbaker’s orders to stop Clemson from massacring Vietnamese civilians. Dieffenbaker also appears as the lieutenant in the heavily revised version of
The New Lieutenant’s Rap
published as
Why We’re in Vietnam
in the
Hearts in Atlantis
collection. 

King had not written a great deal relating to America’s Vietnam trauma until the
Hearts in Atlantis
collection. Despite being at University during the heyday of the anti-war movement, or perhaps because of that, King seemed to almost studiously avoid both the War and its impact upon American society in his fiction until later in his career.
The Old Dude’s Ticker
was apparently written about 1971-2 (but not published until 2000) and
Squad D
(which has never been published) was written in the late 1970s. The next significant Vietnam stories appeared decades after King’s involvement with the anti-war movement.
Blind Willie,
the next King story heavily influenced by Vietnam, was first published in 1994, before being heavily revised for its appearance in the
Hearts in Atlantis
collection.
The New Lieutenant’s Rap, Hearts in Atlantis, Why We’re in Vietnam
and
Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling
were all first published in 1999. However, King had written of many characters who served in Vietnam or even died there (for instance, Peter St. George from
Dolores Claiborne
) and referenced some of the events there from time to time. 

The influence of Vietnam and the fact that King never reveals the geographical location of the murders makes this an America Under Siege story. There are no direct links to other King works from this story. 

King in Men’s Magazines 

Before King was a best-selling novelist, and for some time afterward, he supplemented his income selling short stories to lurid men’s magazines, which contrasted articles and fiction with spreads of naked women. In recent times he returned to the now venerable
Playboy
magazine. The following is a list of these stories (and two poems) 

Graveyard Shift Cavalier
October 1970  

I Am the Doorway Cavalier
March 1971 

Suffer the Little Children Cavalier
February 1972 

The Fifth Quarter
(*)
Cavalier
April 1972 

Battleground Cavalier
September 1972 

The Mangler Cavalier
December 1972 

The Boogeyman Cavalier
March 1973 

Trucks Cavalier
June 1973 

Gray Matter Cavalier
October 1973 

Sometimes They Come Back Cavalier
March 1974 

Night Surf (
^)
Cavalier
August 1974 

Strawberry Spring
(#)
Cavalier
November 1975 

The Boogeyman
(+)
Gent
December 1975 

Weeds Cavalier
May 1976 

The Ledge Penthouse
July 1976 

Strawberry Spring
(+)
Gent
February 1977 

Children of the Corn Penthouse
March 1977 

The Cat from Hell Cavalier
March and June 1977 

The Man Who Loved Flowers Gallery
August 1977 

The Man with a Belly Cavalier
December 1978 

Weeds
(+)
Nugget
April 1979 

The Crate Gallery
July 1979 

The Man with a Belly
(+)
Gent
December 1979 

The Monkey Gallery
November 1980 

The Raft Gallery
November 1982 

The Word Processor Playboy
January 1983 

Willa Playboy
December 2006 

Mute Playboy
December 2007 

The Bone Church
(%)
Playboy
November 2009 

Tommy
(%)
Playboy
March 2010 

(*) under the pseudonym John Swithen