Uncollected Stories 2003 (8 page)

Any author who tells you he has never plagiarized is a liar. A good
author begins with bad ideas and improbabilities and fashions them into
comments on the human condition. In a horror story, it is imperative
that the grotesque be elevated to the status of the abnormal.

The compressor turned on with a whoosh and a chug. The hose flew out
of Mrs.Leighton's mouth. Giggling and gibbering, Gerald stuffed it back
in. Her feet drummed and thumped on the floor. The flesh of her checks
and diaphragm began to swell rhythmically. Her eyes bulged, and
became glass marbles. Her torso began to expand.

here it is here it is you lousy louse are you big enough yet are you big
enough

 

The compressor wheezed and racketed. Mrs. Leighton swelled like a
beachball. Her lungs became straining blowfish.

 

Fiends! Devils! Dissemble no more! Here! Here! It is the beating of his
hideous heart!

 

She seemed to explode all at once.

Sitting in a boiling hotel room in Bombay, Gerald re-wrote the story he
had begun at the cottage on the other side of the world. The original title
had been "The Hog." After some deliberation he retitled it "The Blue
Air Compressor."

He had resolved it to his own satisfaction. There was a certain lack of
motivation concerning the final scene where the fat old woman was
murdered, but he did not see that as a fault. In "The Tell-Tale Heart,"
Edgar A. Poe's finest story, there is no real motivation for the murder of
the old man, and that was as it should be. The motive is not the point.
* * *

She got very big just before the end: even her legs swelled up to twice
their normal size. At the very end, her tongue popped out of her mouth
like a party-favor.

After leaving Bombay, Gerald Nately went on to Hong Kong, then to
Kowloon. The ivory guillotine caught his fancy immediately.

As the author, I can see only one correct omega to this story, and that is
to tell you how Gerald Nately got rid of the body. He tore up the floor
boards of the shed, dismembered Mrs. Leighton, and buried the sections
in the sand beneath. When he notified the police that she had been
missing for a week, the local constable and a State Policeman came at
once. Gerald entertained them quite naturally, even offering them
coffee. He heard no beating heart, but then – the interview was
conducted in the big house.

On the following day he flew away, toward Bombay, Hong Kong, and
Kowloon.
THE CAT FROM HELL

First appeared in
Cavalier
Magazine, 1971. The story was initially supposed to
be 500 words and intended to be finished by the readers of
Cavalier
, but King
wrote the complete story once he got into the writing mood.

H
alston thought the old man in the wheelchair looked sick, terrified,
and ready to die. He had experience in seeing such things. Death was
Halston's business; he had brought it to eighteen men and six women in
his career as an independent hitter. He knew the death look. The house –
mansion, actually – was cold and quiet. The only sounds were the low
snap of the fire on the big stone hearth and the low whine of the
November wind outside.

"I want you to make a kill," the old man said. His voice was quavery
and high, peevish. "I understand that is what you do."
"Who did you talk to?" Halston asked.
"With a man named Saul Loggia. He says you know him."
Halston nodded. If Loggia was the go-between, it was all right. And if
there was a bug in the room, anything the old man – Drogan – said was
entrapment.
"Who do you want hit?"
Drogan pressed a button on the console built into the arm of his
wheelchair and it buzzed forward. Closeup, Halston could smell the
yellow odors of fear, age, and urine all mixed. They disgusted him, but
he made no sign. His face was still and smooth.
“Your victim is right behind you," Drogan said softly.
Halston moved quickly. His reflexes were his life and they were always
set on a filed pin. He was off the couch, falling to one knee, turning,
hand inside his specially tailored sport coat, gripping the handle of
the short-barreled .45 hybrid that hung below his armpit in a
springloaded holster that laid it in his palm at a touch. A moment
later it was out and pointed at...a cat. For a moment Halston and the
cat stared at each other. It was a strange moment for Halston, who was
an unimaginative man with no superstitions. For that one moment as he
knelt on the floor with the gun pointed, he felt that he knew this cat,
although if he had ever seen one with such unusual markings he surely
would have remembered.
Its face was an even split: half black, half white. The dividing line
ran from the top of its flat skull and down its nose to its mouth,
straightarrow. Its eyes were huge in the gloom, and caught in each
nearly circular black pupil was a prism of firelight, like a sullen
coal of hate.
And the thought echoed back to Halston:
We know each other, you
and I.
Then it passed. He put the gun away and stood up. "I ought to kill
you for that, old man. I don't take a joke."
"And I don't make them," Drogan said. "Sit down. Look in here."
He had taken a fat envelope out from beneath the blanket that covered
his legs.
Halston sat. The cat, which had been crouched on the back of the sofa,
jumped lightly down into his lap. It looked up at Halston for a moment
with those huge dark eyes, the pupils surrounded by thin green-gold
rings, and then it settled down and began to purr.
Halston looked at Drogan questioningly.
"He's very friendly," Drogan said. "At first. Nice friendly pussy has
killed three people in this household. That leaves only me. I am old, I
am sick...but I prefer to die in my own time."
"I can't believe this," Halston said. "You hired me to hit a cat?"
"Look in the envelope, please."
Halston did. It was filled with hundreds and fifties, all of them old.
"How much is it?"
"Six thousand dollars. There will be another six when you bring me
proof that the cat is dead. Mr. Loggia said twelve thousand was your
usual fee?"
Halston nodded, his hand automatically stroking the cat in his lap. It
was asleep, still purring. Halston liked cats. They were the only animals
he did like, as a matter of fact. They got along on their own. God – if
there was one – had made them into perfect, aloof killing machines.
Cats were the hitters of the animal world, and Halston gave them his
respect.
"I need not explain anything, but I will," Drogan said. "Forewarned is
forearmed, they say, and I would not want you to go into this lightly.
And I seem to need to justify myself. So you'll not think I'm insane."
Halston nodded again. He had already decided to make this peculiar
hit, and no further talk was needed. But if Drogan wanted to talk, he
would listen. "First of all, you know who I am? Where the money
comes from?"
"Drogan Pharmaceuticals."
"Yes. One of the biggest drug companies in the world. And the
cornerstone of our financial success has been this." From the pocket of
his robe he handed Halston a small, unmarked vial of pills.
"TriDormal-phenobarbin, compound G. Prescribed almost exclusively for
the terminally ill. It's extremely habit-forming, you see. It's a
combination painkiller, tranquilizer, and mild hallucinogen. It is
remarkably helpful in helping the terminally ill face their conditions
and adjust to them."
"Do you take it?" Halston asked.
Drogan ignored the question. "It is widely prescribed throughout the
world. It's a synthetic, was developed in the fifties at our New Jersey
labs. Our testing was confined almost solely to cats, because of the
unique quality of the feline nervous system."
"How many did you wipe out?"
Drogan stiffened. "That is an unfair and prejudicial way to put it."
Halston shrugged.
"In the four-year testing period which led to FDA approval of TriDormal-G, about fifteen thousand cats...uh, expired."
Halston whistled. About four thousand cats a year. "And now you
think this one's back to get you, huh?"
"I don't feel guilty in the slightest," Drogan said, but that quavering,
petulant note was back in his voice. "Fifteen thousand test animals died
so that hundreds of thousands of human beings – "
"Never mind that," Halston said. Justifications bored him.
"That cat came here seven months ago. I've never liked cats. Nasty,
disease-bearing animals...always out in the fields...crawling around in
barns...picking up God knows what germs in their fur...always trying to
bring something with its insides falling out into the house for you to
look at...it was my sister who wanted to take it in. She found out. She
paid." He looked at the cat sleeping on Halston's lap with dead hate.
"You said the cat killed three people."
Drogan began to speak. The cat dozed and purred on Halston's lap
under the soft, scratching strokes of Halston's strong and expert killer's
fingers. Occasionally a pine knot would explode on the hearth, making
it tense like a series of steel springs covered with hide and muscle.
Outside the wind whined around the big stone house far out in the
Connecticut countryside. There was winter in that wind's throat. The old
man's voice droned on and on. Seven months ago there had been four of
them here-Drogan, his sister Amanda, who at seventy-four was two
years Drogan's elder, her lifelong friend Carolyn Broadmoor ("of the
Westchester Broadmoors," Drogan.said), who was badly afflicted with
emphysema, and Dick Gage, a hired man who had been with the Drogan
family for twenty years. Gage, who was past sixty himself, drove the big
Lincoln Mark IV, cooked, served the evening sherry. A day maid came
in. The four of them had lived this way for nearly two years, a dull
collection of old people and their family retainer. Their only pleasures
were The Hollywood Squares and waiting to see who would outlive
whom. Then the cat had come.
"It was Gage who saw it first, whining and skulking around the house.
He tried to drive it away. He threw sticks and small rocks at it, and hit it
several times. But it wouldn't go. It smelled the food, of course. It was
little more than a bag of bones. People put them out beside the road to
die at the end of the summer season, you know. A terrible, inhumane
thing."
"Better to fry their nerves?" Halston asked.
Drogan ignored that and went on. He hated cats. He always had.
When the cat refused to be driven away, he had instructed Gage to put
out poisoned food. Large, tempting dishes of Calo cat food spiked with
Tri-Dormal-G, as a matter of fact. The cat ignored the food. At that
point Amanda Drogan had noticed the cat and had insisted they take it
in. Drogan had protested vehemently, but Amanda – had gotten her
way. She always did, apparently.
"But she found out," Drogan said. "She brought it inside herself, in her
arms. It was purring, just as it is now. But it wouldn't come near me. It
never has ... yet. She poured it a saucer of milk. 'Oh, look at the poor
thing, it's starving,' she cooed. She and Carolyn both cooed over it.
Disgusting. It was their way of getting back at me, of course. They
knew the way I've felt about felines ever since the Tri-Dormal-G testing
program twenty years ago. They enjoyed teasing me, baiting me with
it." He looked at Halston grimly. "But they paid.”
In mid-May, Gage had gotten up to set breakfast and found Amanda
Drogan lying at the foot of the main stairs in a litter of broken crockery
and Little Friskies. Her eyes bulged sightlessly up at the ceiling. She
had bled a great deal from the mouth and nose. Her back was broken,
both legs were broken, and her neck had been literally shattered like
glass.
"It slept in her room," Drogan said. "She treated it like a baby ...
'Is oo
hungwy, darwing? Does oo need to go out and do poopoos!'
Obscene,
coming from an old battle-ax like my sister. I think it woke her up,
meowing. She got his dish. She used to say that Sam didn't really like
his Friskies unless they were wetted down with a little milk. So she was
planning to go downstairs. The cat was rubbing against her legs. She
was old, not too steady on her feet. Half asleep. They got to the head of
the stairs and the cat got in front of her.. tripped her..."
Yes, it could have happened that way, Halston thought. In his mind's
eye he saw the old woman falling forward and outward, too shocked to
scream, the Friskies spraying out as she tumbled head over heels to the
bottom, the bowl smashing. At last she comes to rest at the bottom, the
old bones shattered, the eyes glaring, the nose and ears trickling blood.
And the purring cat begins to work its way down the stairs, contentedly
munching Little Friskies...
"What did the coroner say?" he asked Drogan. "Death by accident, of
course. But I knew."
"Why didn't you get rid of the cat then? With Amanda gone?"
Because Carolyn Broadmoor had threatened to leave if he did,
apparently. She was hysterical, obsessed with the subject. She was a
sick woman, and she was nutty on the subject of spiritualism. A
Hartford medium had told her (for a mere twenty dollars) that Amanda's
soul had entered Sam's feline body. Sam had been Amanda's, she told
Drogan, and if Sam went, she went. Halston, who had become
something of an expert at reading between the lines of human lives,
suspected that Drogan and the old Broadmoor bird had been lovers long
ago, and the old dude was reluctant to let her go over a cat.
"It would have been the same as suicide," Drogan said. "In her mind
she was still a wealthy woman, perfectly capable of packing up that cat
and going to New York or London or even Monte Carlo with it. In fact
she was the last of a great family, living on a pittance as a result of a
number of bad investments in the sixties. She lived on the second floor
here in a specially controlled, superhumidified room. The woman was
seventy, Mr. Halston. She was a heavy smoker until the last two years
of her life, and the emphysema was very bad. I wanted her here, and if
the cat had to stay..."
Halston nodded and then glanced meaningfully at his watch.
"Near the end of June, she died in the night. The doctor seemed to
take it as a matter of course...just came and wrote out the death
certificate and that was the end of it. But the cat was in the room. Gage
told me."
"We all have to go sometime, man," Halston said.
"Of course. That's what the doctor said. But I knew. I remembered.
Cats like to get babies and old people when they're asleep. And steal
their breath."
"An old wives' tale."
"Based on fact, like most so-called old wives' tales," Drogan replied.
"Cats like to knead soft things with their paws, you see. A pillow, a
thick shag rug...or a blanket. A crib blanket or an old person's blanket.
The extra weight on a person who's weak to start with..."
Drogan trailed off, and Halston thought about it. Carolyn Broadmoor
asleep in her bedroom, the breath rasping in and out of her damaged
lungs, the sound nearly lost in the whisper of special humidifiers and air
conditioners. The cat with the queer black-and-white markings leaps
silently onto her spinster's bed and stares at her old and wrinkle-grooved
face with those lambent, black-and- green eyes. It creeps onto her thin
chest and settles its weight there, purring…and the breathing slows...
slows...and the cat purrs as the old woman slowly smothers beneath its
weight on her chest. He was not an imaginative man, but Halston
shivered a little.
"Drogan," he said, continuing to stroke the purring cat. "Why don't
you just have it put away? A vet would give it the gas for twenty
dollars."
Drogan said, "The funeral was on the first day of July, I had Carolyn
buried in our cemetery plot next to my sister. The way she would have
wanted it. On July third I called Gage to this room and handed him a
wicker basket…a picnic hamper sort of thing. Do you know what I
mean?"
Halston nodded.
"I told him to put the cat in it and take it to a vet in Milford and have it
put to sleep. He said, 'Yes, sir,' took the basket, and went out. Very like
him. I never saw him alive again. There was an accident on the turnpike.
The Lincoln was driven into a bridge abutment at better than sixty miles
an hour. Dick Gage was killed instantly. When they found him there
were scratches on his face."
Halston was silent as the picture of how it might have been formed in
his brain again. No sound in the room but the peaceful crackle of the fire
and the peaceful purr of the cat in his lap. He and the cat together before
the fire would make a good illustration for that Edgar Guest poem, the
one that goes:
"The cat on my lap, the hearth's good fire/...A happy man,
should you enquire."
Dick Gage moving the Lincoln down the turnpike toward Milford, beating
the speed limit by maybe five miles an hour. The wicker basket beside
him – a picnic hamper sort of thing. The chauffeur is watching traffic,
maybe he's passing a big cab-over Jimmy
and he doesn't notice the peculiar black-on-one-side,
white-on-the-other face that pokes out of one side of the basket. Out
of the driver's side. He doesn't notice because he's passing the big
trailer truck and that's when the cat jumps onto his face, spitting and
clawing, its talons raking into one eye, puncturing it, deflating it,
blinding it. Sixty and the hum of the Lincoln's big motor and the other
paw is hooked over the bridge of the nose, digging in with exquisite,
damning pain – maybe the Lincoln starts to veer right, into the path of
the Jimmy, and its airhorn blares earshatteringly, but Gage can't hear
it because the cat is yowling, the cat is spread-eagled over his face
like some huge furry black spider, ears laid back, green eyes glaring
like spotlights from hell, back legs jittering and digging into the
soft flesh of the old man's neck. The car veers wildly back the other
way. The bridge abutment looms. The cat jumps down and the Lincoln, a
shiny black torpedo, hits the cement and goes up like a bomb.