Free Uncollected Stories 2003 by Stephen King Page A

oddly one-dimensional, touched her lips. "That's why. You
can only see a blink from the road: unless you're walking, you miss it."
She pointed west at a slight angle away from the dunes and the house.
"There. Right over that little hill."
"All right," he said, then stood there smiling. He really had no idea
how to terminate the interview.
"Would you like to come in for some coffee? Or a Coca-Cola?"
"Yes," he said instantly.
She seemed a little taken back by his instant agreement. He had, after
all, been her husband's friend, not her own. The face loomed above
Gerald, moonlike, disconnected, undecided. Then she led him into the
elderly, waiting house.
She had tea. He had Coke, Millions of eyes seemed to watch them. He
felt like a burglar, stealing around the hidden fiction he could make of
her, carrying only his own youthful winsomeness and a psychic
flashlight.
* * *
    My own name, of course, is Steve King, and you'll pardon my
intrusion on your mind – or I hope you will. I could argue that the
drawing-aside of the curtain of presumption between reader and author
is permissible because I am the writer; i.e., since it's my story I'll do any
goddam thing I please with it – but since that leaves the reader out of it
completely, that is not valid. Rule One for all writers is that the teller is
not worth a tin tinker's fart when compared to the listener. Let us drop
the matter, if we may. I am intruding for the same reason that the Pope
defecates: we both have to.
    You should know that Gerald Nately was never brought to the dock;
his crime was not discovered. He paid all the same. After writing four
twisted, monumental, misunderstood novels, he cut his own head off
with an ivory-figured guillotine purchased in Kowloon. I invented him
first during a moment of eight o'clock boredom in a class taught by
Carroll F. Terrell of the University of Maine English faculty. Dr. Terrell
was speaking of Edgar A. Poe, and I thought
    ivory guillotine Kowloon
twisted woman of shadows, like a pig
some big house
The blue air compressor did not come until later. It is desperately
important that the reader be made cognizant of these facts.
    He did show her some of his writing. Not the important part, the story
he was writing about her, but fragments of poetry, the spine of a novel
that had ached in his mind for a year like embedded shrapnel, four
essays. She was a perceptive critic, and addicted to marginal notations
with her black felt-tip pen. Because she sometimes dropped in when he
was gone to the village, he kept the story hidden in the back shed.
    September melted into cool October, and the story was completed,
mailed to a friend, returned with suggestions (bad ones), rewritten. He
felt it was good, but not quite right. Something indefinable was missing.
The focus was a shade fuzzy. He began to toy with the idea of giving it
to her for criticism, rejected it, toyed with it again. After all, the story
was her; he never doubted she could supply the final vector.His attitude
concerning her became increasingly unhealthy; he was fascinated by her
huge, animalistic bulk, by the slow, tortoise-like way she trekked across
the space between the house and the cottage
    * * * image: "mammoth shadow of decay swaying across the shadowless
sand, cane held in one twisted hand, feet clad in huge canvas shoes
which pump and push at the coarse grains, face like a serving platter,
puffy dough arms, breasts like drumlins, a geography in herself, a
country of tissue"
    by her reedy, vapid voice; but at the same time he loathed her, could not
stand her touch. He began to feel like the young man in "The Tell-Tale
Heart, " by Edgar A. Poe. He felt he could stand at her bedroom door for
endless midnights, shining one ray of light on her sleeping eye, ready to
pounce and rip the instant it flashed open.
    The urge to show her the story itched at him maddeningly. He had
decided, by the first day of December, that he would do it.