Different Seasons(190)

—whereare we RIGHT THIS SECOND?

But he was waiting for my question.

I opened my mouth. And the question that came out was: “Are there many more rooms upstairs?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine. “A great many. A man could become lost. In fact, men have become lost. Sometimes- it seems to me that they go on for miles. Rooms and corridors.”

“And entrances and exits?”

His eyebrows went up slightly. “Oh yes. Entrances and exits.”

He waited, but I had asked enough, I thought—I had come to the very edge of something that would, perhaps, drive me mad.

“Thank you, Stevens.”

“Of course, sir.” He held out my coat and I slipped into it.

“There will be more tales?”

“Here, sir, there are always more tales.”

That evening was some time ago, and my memory has not improved between then and now (when a man reaches my age, the opposite is much more likely to be true), but I remember with perfect clarity the stab of fear that went through me when Stevens swung the oaken door wide—the cold certainty that I would see that alien landscape, cracked and hellish in the bloody light of those double suns, which might set and bring on an unspeakable darkness of an hour’s duration, or ten hours, or ten thousand years. I cannot explain it, but I tell you that world exists—I am as sure of that as Emlyn McCarron was sure that the severed head of Sandra Stansfield went on breathing. I thought for that one timeless second that the door would open and Stevens would thrust me out into that world and I would then hear that door slam shut behind me ... forever.

Instead, I saw Thirty-fifth Street and a radio-cab standing at the curb, exhaling plumes of exhaust. I felt an utter, almost debilitating relief.

“Yes, always more tales,” Stevens repeated. “Goodnight, sir.”

Always more tales.

Indeed there have been. And, one day soon, perhaps I’ll tell you another.

Afterword

Although “Where do you get your ideas?” has always been the question I’m most frequently asked (it’s number one with a bullet, you might say), the runner-up is undoubtedly this one: “Is horror all you write?” When I say it isn’t, it’s hard to tell if the questioner seems relieved or disappointed.

Just before the publication of Carrie, my first novel, I got a letter from my editor, Bill Thompson, suggesting it was time to start thinking about what we were going to do for an encore (it may strike you as a bit strange, this thinking about the next book before the first was even out, but because the pre-publication schedule for a novel is almost as long as the post-production schedule on a film, we had been living with Carrie for a long time at that point—nearly a year). I promptly sent Bill the manuscripts of two novels, one called Blaze and one called Second Coming. The former had been written immediately after Carrie, during the six-month period when the first draft of Carrie was sitting in a desk drawer, mellowing; the latter was written during the year or so when Carrie inched, tortoiselike, closer and closer to publication.

Blaze was a melodrama about a huge, almost retarded criminal who kidnaps a baby, planning to ransom it back to the child’s rich parents ... and then falls in love with the child instead. Second Coming was a melodrama about vampires taking over a small town in Maine. Both were literary imitations of a sort, Second Coming of Dracula, Blaze of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

I think Bill must have been flabbergasted when these two manuscripts arrived in a single big package (some of the pages of Blaze had been typed on the reverse side of milk-bills, and the Second Coming manuscript reeked of beer because someone had spilled a pitcher of Black Label on it during a New Year’s Eve party three months before)—like a woman who wishes for a bouquet of flowers and discovers her husband has gone out and bought her a hothouse. The two manuscripts together totaled about five hundred and fifty single-spaced pages.

He read them both over the next couple of weeks—scratch an editor and find a saint—and I went down to New York from Maine to celebrate the publication of Carrie (April, 1974, friends and neighbors—Lennon was alive, Nixon was still hanging in there as President, and this kid had yet to see the first gray hair in his beard) and to talk about which of the two books should be next ...or if neither of them should be next.

I was in the city for a couple of days, and we talked around the question three or four times. The final decision was made on a street-corner—Park Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, in fact. Bill and I were standing there waiting for the light, watching the cabs roll into that funky tunnel or whatever it is—the one that seems to burrow straight through the Pan Am Building. And Bill said, “I think it should be Second Coming.”

Well, that was the one I liked better myself—but there was something so oddly reluctant in his voice that I looked at him sharply and asked him what the matter was. “It’s just that if you do a book about vampires as the follow-up to a book about a girl who can move things by mind-power, you’re going to get typed,” he said.

“Typed?” I asked, honestly bewildered. I could see no similarities to speak of between vampires and telekinesis. “As what?”

“As a horror writer,” he said, more reluctantly still.

“Oh,” I said, vastly relieved. “Is that all!”

“Give it a few years,” he said, “and see if you still think it’s ‘all.’ ”