Skeleton Crew

by Stephen King

All the same, you don’t do it for money, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of the bottom line, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you’re a monkey. In the end you don’t even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because to not do it is suicide.

You don’t do it for money; you do it because it saves you from feeling bad. A man or woman able to turn his or her back on something like that is just a monkey, that’s all. The story paid me by letting me get back to sleep when I felt as if I couldn’t. I paid the story back by getting it concrete, which it wanted to be. The rest is just side effects.

One of those terrible visions came to me—I think they are reserved exclusively for husbands and fathers—of the picture window blowing in with a low hard coughing sound and sending jagged arrows of glass into my wife’s bare stomach, into my boy’s face and neck. The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones.

It disappeared back into the mist with the red cloth curled in its grip and I thought of something my mother used to say when my brother and I would beg for something she didn’t want us to have—candy, a comic book, some toy. “You need that like a hen needs a flag,” she’d say. I thought of that, and I thought of that tentacle waving Norm’s red apron around, and I got laughing. I got laughing, except my laughter and Norm’s screams sounded about the same. Maybe no one even knew I was laughing except me.

He was not screaming anymore; he was beyond that.

She was an apocalypse of yellow and dark joy.

Hal glanced casually at the shore but would not allow himself to actually study it. It had been nearly fifteen years, and if he studied the shoreline carefully, he would see the changes rather than the similarities and become lost.

And I don’t expect you’ll believe a single damn word of the whole yarn.” In the sky one of those big flat-bottomed clouds moved enough to disclose the ghost of the moon—half-full and pale as milk. And something in my heart leaped up at the sight, half in fright, half in love. “I do though,” I said. “Every frigging damned word. And even if it ain’t true, Homer, it ought to be.”

He realized with an adult’s comprehension that questions of concrete reality became not unimportant but less vital when they were examined in the mute bland face of mortal remains. He realized this with an adult’s comprehension and accepted with an adult’s relief. This was a passing footprint, the shape of a shoe, in his mind. So are all the child’s adult impressions; it is only in later years that the child realizes that he was being made; formed; shaped by random experiences; all that remains in the instant beyond the footprint is that bitter gunpowder smell which is the ignition of an idea beyond a child’s given years.

A popular theme in twentieth-century literature. All the greats have taken a hack at it and all the hacks have taken an ax to it.

There are plenty of people who won’t walk under ladders or open an umbrella in the house. There are basketball players who cross themselves before taking foul shots and baseball players who change their socks when they’re in a slump. I think it’s the rational mind playing a bad stereo accompaniment with the irrational subconscious. Forced to define ‘irrational subconscious,’ I would say that it is a small padded room inside all of us, where the only furnishing is a small card table, and the only thing on the card table is a revolver loaded with flexible bullets.

Madness has to start somewhere, and it has to go somewhere. Like a road. Or a bullet from the barrel of a gun.