Free Uncollected Stories 2003 by Stephen King Page B

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decisionmaking did not relieve him, as it is supposed to do in the
novels, but it did leave him with a feeling of antiseptic pleasure. It
was right that it should be so – an omega that quite dovetailed with
the alpha. And it was omega; he was vacating the cottage on the fifth
of December. On this day he had just returned from the Stowe Travel
Agency in Portland, where he had booked passage for the Far East. He
had done this almost on the spur of the moment: the decision to go and
the decision to show his manuscript to Mrs. Leighton had come together,
almost as if he had been guided by an invisible hand.
In truth, he was guided by an invisible hand-mine.
    The day was white with overcast and the promise of snow lurked in its
throat. The dunes seemed to foreshadow the winter already, as Gerald
crossed them between the slate-roofed house of her dominion and the
low stone cottage of his. The sea, sullen and gray, curled on the shingle
of beach. Gulls rode the slow swells like buoys.
    He crossed the top of the last dune and knew she was there – her cane,
with its white bicycle handgrip at the base, stood against the side of the
door. Smoke drifted from the toy chimney. Gerald went up the board
steps, kicked sand from his high-topped shoes to make her aware of his
presence, and then went in.
"Hi, Mrs. Leighton!"
    But the tiny living room and the kitchen both stood empty. The ship's
clock on the mantle ticked only for itself and for Gerald. Her gigantic
fur coat lay draped over the rocker like some animal sail. A small fire
had been laid in the fireplace, and it glowed and crackled busily. The
teapot was on the gas range in the kitchen, and one teacup stood on the
counter, still waiting for water. He peered into the narrow hall which led
to the bedroom.
"Mrs. Leighton?"
Hall and bedroom both empty.
He was about to turn back to the kitchen when the mammoth chuckles
    began. They were large, helpless shakings of laughter, the kind that
stays hidden for years and ages like wine (There is also an Edgar A. Poe
story about wine). The chuckles evolved into large bellows of laughter.
They came from behind the door to the right of Gerald's bed, the last
door in the cottage. From the tool-shed.
    my balls are crawling like in grammar school the old bitch shes
laughing she found it the old fat she bitch goddam her goddam her
goddam her you old whore youre doing that cause im out here you old
she bitch whore you piece of shit
    He went to the door in one step and pulled it open. She was sitting next
to the small space-heater in the shed, her dress pulled up over oak-stump
knees to allow her to sit cross-legged, and his manuscript was held,
dwarfed, in her bloated hands.
    Her laughter roared and racketed around him. Gerald Nately saw
bursting colors
in front of his eyes. She was a slug, a maggot, a gigantic crawling thing
evolved in the cellar of the shadowy house by the sea. A dark bug that
had swaddled itself in grotesque human form.
    In the flat light from the one cobwebbed window her face became a
hanging graveyard moon, pocked by the sterile craters of her eyes and
the ragged earthquake rift of her mouth.
    "Don't you laugh," Gerald said stiffly.
"Oh Gerald," she said, laughing all the same. "This is such a bad story.
I don't blame you for using a penname. It's – " she wiped tears of
laughter from her eyes, "it's abominable!"
He began to walk toward her stiffly.
"You haven't made me big enough, Gerald. That's the trouble. I'm too
big for you. Perhaps Poe, or Dosteyevsky, or Melville…but not you,
Gerald. Not even under your royal pen-name. Not you. Not you.”
She began to laugh again, huge racking explosions of sound.
"Don't you laugh," Gerald said stiffly.
    The tool-shed, after the manner of Zola:
Wooden walls, which showed occasional chinks of light, surrounding
rabbit-traps hung and slung in corners; a pair of dusty, unstrung
snowshoes: a rusty spaceheater showing flickers of yellow flame like
cat's