Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (30 page)

Frank Sybert and his wife Katherine were childless and farmed near Paterson, Kansas before the Civil War. He employed Peter Crager for just over a year and gave him many books to read, becoming a surrogate father. He was big and gangling, a fierce drinker but also a kind-hearted man. He was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and died from it in 1858. 

The manuscript does not bring us in direct contact with the apparent villain of the piece, Bob Valery. Valery was “the meanest railroad dick west of the Mississippi.” Big, with red hair, he had lots of freckles and a scar on his neck. He had been head “prod” on the Benton, St. Louis and Missouri Railroad (BS&M) since it began in 1865. In 1868 he killed three of four would be train robbers. He beat tramps and others taking a free ride on the railroad. Once he threw a pregnant girl off a freight car causing her to give premature birth. He may have invented the “frankfort” and was thought to have killed 36 people with one. He was killed during a robbery on the BS&M and Peter Crager nearly hung for the crime. This part of the story was not written or is no longer extant. 

King provides a description of the “frankfort,” a cruel device used by railroad police in the 1880s and 1890s. It was a piece of pig iron about 6 inches long. A railroad policeman would drop it about six cars up when a train was speeding. It would bounce and slash and injure tramps riding on the rods below the cars, sometimes forcing them under the wheels to their deaths. In that case a railroad “dick” would notch his frankfort.  

Maine receives a mention in the story in that Bowdoin College initially offered McArdle a teacher’s position but withdrew it when Young and Stewart blackballed him. 

King’s personal feelings may be reflected in the character of Sam Backinger. A Confederate, he was wounded and captured near Grand’s Hollow, Virginia in late December 1864. He took a bullet in his left arm, which became gangrenous and had to be amputated. He was also shot in the left kneecap. Big and bluff, he laughed a lot but was dangerous. Crager saw him again in Atlanta in 1885, begging in his uniform (much as certain Vietnam vets would after another war). 

There is one interesting link from this story to King’s other fiction. Quoting Peter Crager in
McArdle
: “When I was a boy, my poppa gave me a pet rabbit and after I’d gotten used to having it, I forgot to feed it for over a week. When I went into the barn, it was stiff and dead.” Pretty much exactly this happened to Lloyd Henreid as a boy in the
Uncut
version of
The Stand
. 

In an amusing incident, one of McArdle’s fellow Harvard students and member of The Hellenists read the group an essay disparaging Longfellow and praising Poe. Peabody was so castigated by the silence that followed that he never returned. As he left the room Stewart wittily murmured, “Nevermore.” McArdle’s favorite story was Poe’s
The Cask of Amontillado
(the inspiration for King’s
Dolan’s Cadillac
), although George’s attempts at writing were poor compared to it. 

Having read the manuscript as it exists one is left wondering where the tale was heading. Crager and McArdle’s back-stories are amusing and interesting and there is certainly the robbery in which Valery was killed to come, the mystery of the tiger and other elements that may have resulted in an interesting conclusion. The undertone of the story is certainly one of humor, not quite satire, but close to it. One is left wondering if King was simply having fun and realized the end result was likely to be somewhat uncommercial and certainly not what the average King fan would have expected. Perhaps one day King will complete a “serious” Western, the results of which would be of great interest to his Constant Readers. 

The Glass Floor (1967, 1990)
 

This America Under Siege story first appeared in
Startling Mystery Stories
for Fall 1967. It has the honor of being the first fiction for which King was paid ($35). He was but twenty when he received the first payment for his years of writing, and the five years of rejection slips he had collected perhaps seemed to shrink a little on its receipt. There is no doubt that King, like most writers, successful or not, had paid his dues. Barely six or seven years of selling short stories and writing novels later King would sell
Carrie
and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Nearly a quarter century after its first publication King allowed
The Glass Floor
to be reprinted in the Fall 1990 issue of
Weird Tales
. As to that republication King says in an introduction, after acknowledging that the story was not as bad as he’d thought:  

Darrell Schweitzer, the editor of
Weird Tales®,
invited me to make changes if I wanted to, but I decided that would probably be a bad idea. Except for two or three word-changes and the addition of a paragraph break (which was probably a typographical error in the first place), I’ve left the tale just as it was. If I really
did
start making changes, the result would be an entirely new story.  

(
See the feature panel for more detail of the story’s history.
) 

In fact the most significant change is toward the end of the story, in which the original read, “The ladder was still there, stretching up into the darkness and down into the glimmering depths of the mirror,” and was changed to, “The ladder was still there, stretching up into the glimmering depths of the mirror.” There are other minor changes, for instance the changing of the word “accursed” to “cursed.” 

Securing either copy of the story is less difficult than it once was. The original publication runs in the hundreds of dollars, on the rare occasion it comes to market. The republication appears more often but has commanded prices near $100. 

In the story Charles Wharton visited the home of his brother-in-law, Anthony Reynard, wanting to discover the circumstances of his sister’s death. Initially, Reynard refused to give details but was browbeaten into telling Wharton that Janine had fallen from a ladder in a room that was now plastered shut. 

Wharton insisted on breaking through the plaster and entering the room. He found it had a glass floor and ceiling and, losing his own perspective and balance while standing on the floor, died. Reynard used a pole to pull the body from the room and asked his housekeeper to bring more plaster. 

The closing sentence is a small classic, “Not for the first time he (Reynard) wondered if there was really a mirror there at all. In the room, a small pool of blood showed on the floor and ceiling, seeming to meet in the center, blood which hung there quietly and one could wait forever for it to drip.” 

It is interesting to note that King also used the device of a mirrored floor library in his screenplay for the TV mini-series
Rose Red
over three decades later. In
Rose Red
Bollinger disappeared and apparently hung himself in the Mirror Library of the Rose Red house, which had bookcases lined with books and a mirrored floor. In
The Glass Floor
a library (empty of bookshelves) with a mirrored floor and ceilings was the location of at least two deaths. 

Critiquing his own work in the Introduction to the
Weird Tales
version nearly a quarter century later King writes:  

…there is at least a token effort to create characters which are more than paper-doll cutouts; Wharton and Reynard are antagonists, but neither is “the good guy” or “the bad guy.” The
real
villain is behind that plastered-over door. And I also see an odd echo of “The Library Policeman”. That work, a short novel, will be published as part of a collection of short novels called
Four Past Midnight
this fall, and if you read it, I think you’ll see what I mean. It was fascinating to me to see the same image coming around again after all this time. 

King then writes:  

“Mostly, I’m allowing the story to be republished to send a message to young writers who are out there right now, trying to be published, and collecting rejection slips … The message is simple: you
can
learn, you
can
get better, and you
can
get published. If that little spark is there, someone will probably see it sooner or later, gleaming faintly in the dark. And, if you tend the spark nestled in the kindling, it really can grow into a large, blazing fire. It happened to me, and it started here.” 

The genesis of the story, according to King:  

I remember getting the idea for the story, and it just came as the ideas come now – casually, with no flourish of trumpets. I was walking down a dirt road to see a friend, and for no reason at all I began to wonder what it would be like to stand in a room whose floor was a mirror. The image was so intriguing that writing the story became a necessity. It wasn’t written for money; it was written so I could
see better
. Of course I did not see it as well as I had hoped; there is still that shortfall between what I hope I will accomplish and what I actually manage. Still, I came away from it with two valuable experiences: a saleable story after five years of rejection slips, and a bit of experience. 

Of course, readers of this book will wonder just what the other stories were that resulted in those five years of rejection slips. Does King still have those stories, tucked away in a box or filing cabinet? 

There are two likely errors in the tale, relating to historical periods. At the beginning Wharton approaches Reynard’s house, “…craning his neck to get a better look at the Victorian monstrosity his sister had died in. It wasn’t a house at all, he reflected, but a mausoleum …” In the next paragraph, “There was a rose-tinted fanlight over the door, and Wharton could barely make out the date 1770 chiseled into the glass.” Queen Victoria did not ascend the throne until 1839. In 1770 George III was King of England (and still ruled over the Colonies) so the mansion should be described as Georgian or in American terms, Colonial. Later, the house is described as “…this Revolutionary War-vintage crypt.” The American Revolution or War of Independence took place from 1775-1783 but the use of the term “vintage” mitigates or possibly eliminates an error. 

Most King experts refer to the Poe-like nature of this story; also pointing out that it is some way from King’s best. For the author’s
The Glass Floor
is an entertaining tale, informing of King’s development and well worth seeking out and reading. In fact, one of Poe’s stories is recalled by Wharton as he first saw the freshly walled-off room, “…a straggling remnant of Poe’s ‘Black Cat’ clanged through his mind: ‘I had walled the monster up within the tomb…’” 

While there are no direct links to other King works, the description of the Reynard house reminds the reader of other mysterious houses in the King canon, including Joe Newall’s in
It Grows on You
. King wrote of the Reynard home, “It seemed to grow out of the hill like an outsized, perverted toadstool, all gambrels and gables and jutting, blank-windowed cupolas.” 

King Sells His First Story 

King’s introduction to the
Weird Tales
version relates something of the first time he sold a story –
The Glass Floor
. He says it was written,  

…to the best of my recollection, in the summer of 1967, when I was about two months shy of my twentieth birthday. I had been trying for about two years to sell a story to Robert A. W. Lowndes, who edited two horror/fantasy magazines … (
The Magazine of Horror
and
Startling Mystery Stories
) … He had rejected several submissions kindly (one of them, marginally better than “The Glass Floor” was finally published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
under the title “Night of the Tiger”, then accepted this one when I finally got around to submitting it. That first check was for thirty-five dollars. I’ve cashed many bigger ones since then, but none gave me more satisfaction; someone had finally paid me some real money for something I had found in my head! 

The story King mentions above,
Night of the Tiger
, has never been published in a King collection and is the subject of another chapter of this book. 

King, with 23 years of further writing experience to hand, continues about
The Glass Floor
:  

The first few pages of the story are clumsy and badly written – clearly the product of an unformed story-teller’s mind – but the last bit pays off better than I remembered; there is a genuine
frisson
in what Mr. Wharton finds waiting for him in the East Room. I suppose that’s at least part of the reason I agreed to allow it to be reprinted after all these years.