Skeleton Crew

by Stephen King

Old b-i-t-c-h, he thought. He spelled because he had decided last year God didn’t say it was a sin if you spelled.

He filled the teakettle with water and put it on a cold burner. He got a teacup and put one of Gramma’s special herb tea bags into it. In case she should wake up and want a cup. He hoped like mad that she wouldn’t, because then he would have to crank up the hospital bed and sit next to her and give her the tea a sip at a time, watching the toothless mouth fold itself over the rim of the cup, and listen to the slurping sounds as she took the tea into her dank, dying guts.

The picture was Gramma, yellow and fat and wrinkled and sluglike, her toothless mouth curved into a sunken grin, her faded, blind eyes somehow sly and cunning; and on her head was a black, conical hat sprinkled with silver stars and glittering Babylonian crescents; at her feet were slinking black cats with eyes as yellow as urine, and the smells were pork and blindness, pork and burning, ancient stars and candles as dark as the earth in which coffins lay; he heard words spoken from ancient books, and each word was like a stone and each sentence like a crypt reared in some stinking boneyard and every paragraph like a nightmare caravan of the plague-dead taken to a place of burning; his eye was the eye of a child and in that moment it opened wide in startled understanding on blackness.

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.

“Madness is a flexible bullet.”

An odd expression of unease flitted across the writer’s face. It was the expression of a man who is in a tiger pit where dozens of better men have been clawed to pieces. So far this man hasn’t seen a single tiger. But he has a feeling that they are there, and that their claws are still sharp.

All the greats have taken a hack at it and all the hacks have taken an ax to it.

“What’s the plot?” the agent asked. “No,” the editor said, “that doesn’t matter. It was just a story about a young man gradually losing his struggle to cope with success. It’s better left vague. A detailed plot synopsis would only be boring. They always are.

I couldn’t think of a thing. The harder I thought, the more easily nothing came.