The Horror Show, Fall 1987

During the #coronavirus pandemic, I am regularly posting stories and selections from my published collections and novels. Read for free! Reading is the best at this time!

The tenth free offering is “Nothing There,” a short story originally published in the late legendary Dave Silva’s “The Horror Show” and republished in "Vapors: The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction, V. 2," 2013, Crossroad Press.

BONUS No. 1: Cover of the Fall 1987 “The Horror Show,” when Dave Silva rated me a “rising star,” along with Elizabeth Massie, Poppy Z. Brite, Bentley Little and others. Also, the first page of “Nothing There,” the original illustration, and a two-page interview from three-plus decades ago.

My, how time flies!

Nothing There: Story, illustration, interviews and link to audio drama

During the #coronavirus pandemic, I am regularly posting stories and selections from my published collections and novels. Read for free! Reading is the best at his time!

This is the tenth free offering: “Nothing There,” a short story originally published in the late legendary Dave Silva’s “The Horror Show” and republished in "Vapors: The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction, V. 2," 2013, Crossroad Press.

BONUS No. 1: Cover of the Fall 1987 “The Horror Show,” when DaveSilva rated me a “rising star,” along with Elizabeth Massie, Poppy Z. Brite, Bentley Little and others. Also, the first page of “Nothing There,” the original illustration, and a two-page interview from three-plus decades ago.

BONUS No. 2: Twisted Pulp’s audio drama based on the story will be broadcast this summer on KKRN radio in northern California, but you can hear it now – including an interview of me on writing, Stephen King, Story in the Public Square and more: https://bit.ly/2XwGFdx

Nothing There

He drove north from Chicago in a rented Honda. The Saturday afternoon traffic was thick and sluggish, like blood through diseased arteries. How polite these drivers seemed. Back in Boston, you couldn't go a block without some idiot trying to nail you. Here, folks signaled when passing. They stayed close to the speed limit. No one tailgated. He supposed it was part of their Midwestern nature to be so courteous. He wondered momentarily what kind of world it would be if everyone were like them.

Before long, the factories and tenements had thinned and then disappeared. The jets in and out of O'Hare had shrunk to distant specks. He passed an amusement park, closed for the season. He saw transmission lines coming down from Canada. It was suburbia now, 7-11 stores and neat little lawns fronting neat little houses. Soon they, too, had faded. Farmhouses took their place. Cornfields and dairy cattle. Silos, rigid and tall, guardians of this rich black soil. He crossed the line and he was in Wisconsin. From here, she'd said, it was only another half hour.

The traffic was weaker now. The November day was, too. High, thin clouds spread across the measureless sky. Another hour, and the sun would be swallowed by the fields. At kitchen tables, dinner would be served. He imagined seeing aproned housewives, their hair done up in curlers and kerchiefs, bending over ovens where hamburger casseroles simmered. He imagined hearing the children, giddy with the thought of Saturday night, and the tired husbands, ready for their evening of rest.

Overhead, the sign said County K, one mile. What a funny name for a road, he thought. County K, like some new brand of cereal. He looked down at the directions he'd scribbled on hotel stationery. Yes, this was it. He eased over into the travel lane, slowed and left Interstate 94. There was the 76 truck stop, just as she'd said. A combination restaurant, gift shop and Greyhound bus stop. A parking lot full of full-sized Fords and Chryslers, with hardly a Toyota in sight. The heartland.

He'd called her after lunch from his hotel room. The first few minutes had been awkward for them both. He could hear the sounds of kids in the background. He told her about his convention. She talked about the weather, unseasonably mild, and unlikely to last, considering Thanksgiving was just around the corner.

``Where are you staying?'' she'd asked.

``The Palmer House.''

``Very fancy.''

``It's OK.''

``No, it's fancy,'' she insisted. ``I've been there. Window- shopping in that big lobby.''

``They have some nice shops.''

``You've done all right for yourself, John,'' she said, trying to mask her bitterness. A trace still showed. ``You always did.''

He didn't answer. Didn't know what he could have said if he'd tried.

``So how'd you find me?'' she asked after shouting at the children to be quiet, Mommy's got a very special call.

``The alumni office.'' They'd been the same class, the class of '96. He'd gone back east after graduation. She'd gone home to Wisconsin, never expecting to hear from him again.

``It's funny.''

``What?''

``That you tracked me down. I tried to find you, you know.''

He didn't. But it didn't surprise him. There was a time he'd actually dreaded her call, but that had passed. During the period he was married, he'd almost forgotten her. It wasn't until after his divorce that he'd thought much about her again.

``I tried several times, as a matter of fact,'' she continued. ``I wrote letters. They kept coming back.''

``I've moved a lot,'' he said. ``The company.''

``It doesn't matter now.''

There was another pause. The words weren't coming easily from either of them.

``I'm divorced, you know,'' she said after a bit.

``I know. I am, too.''

``I've got two children. That's who you hear running around. A boy and a girl.''

``I know,'' he repeated dumbly.

``You seem to have done your homework,'' she said, and he couldn't tell if she was mad or not.

``It's all on record at the alumni office,'' he explained. ``Anyone can get it by calling.''

``Did they tell you they were both adopted?'' she asked.

``No.''

``After Bryce, I couldn't have children. Of my own.''

Bryce, he thought. So that's what she called him. Why did she even bother to name him? What could it matter?

``I'm sorry,'' he said. He wished he had a glass of water to get rid of the dryness in his mouth.

``I am, too.'' He was surprised at how cold her voice had turned. How suddenly. He didn't remember her like that. He remembered her as soft, pretty, the youngest-looking girl sitting at the back of Economics 101 the morning he first set eyes on her.

``I'm really sorry.''

``Sure.''

There was silence again. It was a bad cell, and he could hear static through the phone.

The child had been stillborn. That much he'd heard years ago from a friend of a friend of a friend. 

There had been whispers of some horrible deformity, but he'd never been able to confirm that, never bothered to try. What would have been the gain? What was done was done. All he knew for sure was that Sheryl had carried the baby to term, and he'd come out blue and unbreathing. There was a question of medical malpractice. As far as he knew, it had never come to a suit. That wouldn't have been like her. This had all happened that September, three months after he'd said goodbye.

``So why'd you call, John?'' she asked, breaking the silence.

He'd been ready for this one, but he still didn't have a good answer. Just some private feelings he couldn't share because he wasn't sure what they meant, if they meant anything at all.

``I just thought I should,'' he said. ``I've been thinking about it for a long time.''

``Do you want to see him?'' she asked. ``I think you should see him. Just once. It wouldn't have to be for long.''

He had no idea what she was talking about.

``Who?''

``Bryce. His grave, I mean.''

What a strange idea, he thought. Perverse. Again, the pause was long, uncomfortable. He wished desperately that the call was over, but he saw no way of ending it. It was up to her now.

``I could tell you how to get there. It's not even two hours from Chicago.''

``I--''

``I think you should, John,'' she said sternly. ``I think you owe him at least that. Him and me. Respect for the memory. Respect for the past.''

``Yes,'' he finally said. ``I'd like to.''

She gave him directions. He was reading them again now after stopping at the restaurant to use the men's room. County K six miles west to an intersection. Right on Rowe's Lane about a mile to a seed farm. The cemetery would be just over the next knoll. You can't miss it, she'd said. It's on the highest land around.

He rolled the window down and put the car in gear.

Night wasn't far off, but it seemed to have warmed up since leaving Chicago. The air on his face felt refreshing, like a shower after a bad night's sleep. For some reason, he'd been getting increasingly anxious the last few miles. Strung out. He could feel the excess nervous energy running up and down his body. It was like having too many cups of coffee. His palms were actually sweaty. For the first time since talking to her, he wondered what exactly he'd gotten himself into, and why. He didn't have the answers. That bothered him more than anything. He'd gotten where he had in business by coming up with answers.

County K, a two-lane blacktop, wound off toward the setting sun. There was almost no traffic, only an occasional tractor or pickup truck or stainless-steel tanker carrying milk destined to become butter or cheese. The only buildings were farmhouses and barns. It seemed everyone was flying an American flag. In the Ivy-League East, patriotism smacked too much of Tea Party politics to be worn on the sleeve. Here, it fit.

He found the cemetery without any trouble. From this knoll, you could see for miles and miles over the rolling countryside. It reminded him of a Grandma Moses painting, the fields and outbuildings arranged like patchwork.

He got out of the car and paused a moment, surveying the cemetery.

It was unexpectedly tiny, a postage stamp of graveyards. The only smaller one he recalled ever seeing was one near Concord, Mass., where a handful of Revolutionary War heroes were buried together under white headstones whose inscriptions had worn off over the years. He counted, unconsciously using his finger as a measure. There couldn't be more than a dozen families buried here. One of them was hers, the Andersens. He remembered her telling the story of how the family had come over from Sweden during the great wave of Scandinavian immigration a century ago. They'd been carpenters and masons, these Andersens, and they'd done all right for themselves in the New Land.

The wind had picked up since the truck stop and it was insistent now, brisk but not harsh. In a few short weeks it would deliver the sleet and the snow, but today, on the cusp of fall, it brought only a final reminder of summer. In great sheets, it came whipping across the flat landscape, fragrant with a sweet agricultural odor he did not recognize. He stood, letting the wind caress him. He looked out over the stones, the torn veterans' flags, potted geraniums wilted by the autumn's first frost. The cemetery was surrounded by fields. They were brown, their life gone silently underground to await a more encouraging season.

The heartland. He'd probably eaten food grown around here, maybe from one of these very fields.

Carrying the green bag he'd picked up in the Palmer House lobby, he opened the rusted iron gate and walked uncertainly into the cemetery. That shaky feeling had returned. His lips were dry. He felt suddenly alone, inexplicably embarrassed, like the man in the dream who finds himself in public without any clothes. Let's get it over with and get out of here, he thought. He went directly to the Andersen plot, past the Birds, the Bergmans, the Mondales, the Thompsons. The featured Andersen stone was a towering obelisk, at least twice his height, cut from what appeared to be gray marble, polished and mirror-smooth. The shadow from a leafless tree fell across it in an abstract pattern. Somebody had paid a small fortune for this display, he could tell that. He remembered her father, Ambrose Andersen, a tall, stern man he'd met once. Andersen had made a small fortune in construction, and like many newly wealthy people, he enjoyed spending. He'd probably footed the bill.

Laid out in front of the obelisk were perhaps 25 flat stones, each roughly the size of a hardcover dictionary. All that had been inscribed on any of them were names and the two most important years in anyone's existence. ``Mother, 1845-1912.'' ``Father, 1840-1905.'' ``Henry, 1884-1944,'' and so forth. On the extreme left-hand perimeter of the Andersen territory, almost into the Birds', was the stone he was looking for.

``Baby Bryce,'' it read, ``1996-1996.''

He opened the green bag and laid what was in it, a single white rose, atop the stone. His fingers were clumsy, his breath more labored than it should have been. He didn't have any of the thoughts he had expected would be haunting him right now; maybe they would come on the return trip to Chicago, or the plane home tomorrow to Boston. Nothing about what might have been, how he might have been playing Little League baseball, what he might have looked like, what his favorite subject in school might have been. None of that. Only a nagging sensation of having done wrong, and never being able to make contrition, even if he wanted to.

He didn't hear the pickup. Didn't see her approach from the field.

When he looked up, she was there, barely 20 feet away.

He looked at her, startled initially. Time had gotten to her. It had to him, too, he couldn't kid himself. She looked unkempt, haggard, as if she never got enough sleep any more. Her clothes looked freshly laundered but worn, as if she'd had them too long. For an instant, their eyes locked. It was impossible to say what was exchanged between them in that moment. Recognition, but more. Loneliness. A glimmer of what might have been, perhaps. A rush of memories, none well defined. Then it was gone. Her eyes went as cold as the gathering evening. There was nothing to say.

She came closer. He didn't move. He hadn't expected it to play out like this.

They embraced. For his part, it was instinctive. Reflexive. There was no more thought to it than drawing a breath. She was warm, her breath intoxicating. Through her coat, he could feel the swell of her breasts. Suddenly, the memories had taken on sharp definition. Now he remembered them making love the first time, the way he'd eased inside her, the softly building passion that had finally exploded one Saturday evening when his roommate was away.

He didn't see her knife.

She plunged it into the back of his neck.

The first blood fell in perfect splatters on Baby Bryce's stone, like drops of wax from a flaming red candle. It was only a surface wound, calculated and deliberate. Alone, it might have stopped bleeding. He wasn't even sure at first that he'd been stabbed. He thought maybe she'd dug her fingernails into him. The tenderness he'd started to feel escaped him like steam. He was tempted to slap her. He'd never wanted to hit a woman before. He did now. Self-defense. But he didn't. He turned, headed for the car. A trickle of warmth ran down the inside of his shirt. The crazy fucker.

She roared toward him, her cutting arm a scythe of blurred motion. This time he saw the blade. It was a pocket knife, the kind young punks smuggle into school. The blade couldn't have been four inches long. In that instant of confused terror, he remembered something his mother had told him as a kid. It wasn't about knives. It was about drowning. You can drown anywhere there's water, she'd said. Even in your own bathtub, even in an inch of water.

This time, she connected only once, a long, violent gash that sliced through his coat sleeve into his forearm. The fabric was quickly moist from the inside out. The pain was immense. She meant to kill him. It was like being kicked in the stomach, realizing that, but he knew it was true. He was suddenly breathless, fevered. With his good arm, he grabbed his wounded one, holding it fiercely, as if that would stop the bleeding. She came at him again. For a second, he saw her eyes. There was nothing there but emptiness. He ducked to one side, and she charged past him, almost falling.

He hesitated. For a second, he thought of fighting back. He was bigger than she, stronger. And she was out of her mind, a crazed psychotic with a knife. He looked wildly around, but there was nothing he could use as a weapon, no branch or loose rock. The best bet was to get the hell away. The bleeding wasn't bad, but he'd have to see a doctor. Then he would go to the police and have the crazy fucker arrested. That's what he was going to do, goddamn it. Have her put behind bars for good.

He took a step, a step that brought his foot into contact with Baby Bryce's stone.

He felt something lock around his ankle. Tiny, vice-like.

He looked down. There was nothing there, of course, only grass and that flat polished marble stone, blending into the shadows of approaching evening. He could taste bile as his panic rose.

He tried to move.

He was locked in place.

``What the--''

She was back, blade whistling. Her aim was more precise than before. He saw the knife, heard it, tried to roll out of its trajectory, but his foot was stuck. He did the best he could, twisting and squirming to one side. It was not enough.

She made contact, again and again. His shoulder. His side. His thigh. His right hand. He felt each cut. None was deeper than tendon level. It was more like being pricked with a needle or stung by hornets than being stabbed. After each cut, the warm moisture. Death by a thousand cuts.

His ankle.

He grabbed at it, like a mink caught in a leg hold trap. There was nothing there, of course. With his other hand, he tried frantically to fend her off. She was nimble. She seemed able to anticipate him, dodging when he lashed out, closing back in when he tried unsuccessfully to get to his feet.

Maybe he could crawl. In his panic, that new thought was delightful. It was like being born again. He was on his belly and maybe he could crawl. Maybe he'd broken his ankle, that was all, and he could slither away from her.

But he couldn't crawl, not more than a few inches. His foot was frozen.

She was in no hurry. There was still plenty of daylight remaining, 15 minutes or more until blackness settled over them. She was nicking him. Little flicks of cuts, counting toward a thousand. It was uncanny how she kept missing all the major arteries and organs, the ones that would have ended it quickly. She seemed to know anatomy, seemed to have studied it until she was sure what to hit, what to avoid. He was bleeding everywhere but gushing nowhere. His central nervous system only gradually was shifting into shock.

The pain was building. Soon it was too big for screaming. He began to moan. A mortally wounded animal sound, back through the millennia to when ancestors walked on all fours. Hunter and prey. 

Victor and vanquished.

His vision blurred.

As consciousness drained away to nothingness, he thought he saw her.

Smiling, her face inches from his.

He thought he heard a new sound.

The sound of a newborn crying.

The sound of birth.

(Should you wish to purchase any of my collections and books, fiction or non-fiction, visit www.gwaynemiller.com/books.htm)

LANDING PAGE for all the Free Reads during #coronavirus

The time I interviewed Stephen King

READ AFTER THIS INTRO: One of my favorite interviews ever... of my still-favorite author.

If you will pardon the pun, look between the lines (this one, for example: Suddenly, without warning, the lines on King's face deepen, his eyes become cat slits and he's baring his teeth...) and you will see evidence of King's then-cocaine addiction, unknown to the world at the time but later very public when King himself wrote and spoke about his struggle. He's been clean and sober for decades now.

BUT then -- during this interview -- he was deep into it. Every few minutes during my hour-or-so-with him he jumped up, disappeared into a back room of his hotel suite, and returned, even more animated and hyper than before. Little did I know. I just thought he was, well, full of energy.

Another note: King was in a suite on an upper floor of a hotel overlooking New York City's Central Park (I forget which one, maybe The Pierre?). I waited in the lobby for a publicist to take me up and when the elevator opened, who stepped off but the now-disgraced Today Show ex-host Matt Lauer, who had just interviewed King for Fox affiliate WNYW, the NYC station he'd joined after leaving PM Magazine, Channel 10, Providence. We said hello; I knew him peripherally. No clue, of course, what awaited him...

And one more note, if I may?

King's editor then was the late Alan Williams, one of publishing's greats. He happened to be the editor who bought and published my first book, Thunder Rise. How glorious that was, and how long ago. I can recall like yesterday sitting in his mid-town Manhattan office discussing the book, which my first agent, the wonderful Kay McCauley, late sister of then-King agent Kirby McCauley, had sold.

OK now:


The Providence Journal
KING OF HORROR: His career's in 'Overdrive' as he directs his first film
Publication date:  8/3/1986 Page:  I-01 Section:  ARTS
Byline:  G. WAYNE MILLER

STEPHEN KING, the most popular horror writer of all time, is eating pizza - thick, oily, mega-calorie pizza with all the fixings. He's eating it the way a big hungry kid would - ferociously and noisily. Stephen King loves pizza, just as he loves scaring the pants off people.

King, who has made enough money from what he calls his "marketable obsession" to buy Brooks Brothers' entire inventory, is dressed in jeans, work shirt, running shoes. Comfort is the thing for King, who sets many of his stories in rural Maine, the place he's lived most of his 38 years.

Would his visitor like a slice of that greasy monster masquerading as a pizza, he asks politely? No? Then have a seat. Feel at home.

He sits - flops is probably a better word - onto an oversized chair in his hotel suite. King is well over six feet tall, and his long legs seem to stretch halfway across this elegantly furnished sitting room. He brushes his black hair off his face, grins mischievously, and peers from behind thick glasses, his "Coke bottles," as he's referred to them.

"Whatever you want to talk about," he says in a voice that is a curious mix of Downeast twang and Ted Kennedy drone. "The film is what I'm supposed to talk about, so why don't we start with the film?"

Maximum Overdrive, King's first shot at directing, opened last weekend. It's about a group of people trapped by driverless vehicles in an isolated truck stop the week all the machines in the world go murderously beserk. Machines gone mad. It's a favorite King theme, and if one were to psychoanalyze it, the connection to modern man's uneasy coexistence with his nuclear genie would be hard to miss.

The obvious first question, of course, is why a one-time teacher who has parlayed a lifelong fascination with the macabre into a fairy-tale existence as best-selling author (70 million books in print) would want to trade his golden pen for a camera.

Certainly, King is no stranger to movies. He admits to being a horror-movie junkie growing up in the '50s and '60s; as an adult, he has written the screenplays for five films, including Overdrive. Eight of his full-length novels have been made into films of varying quality, and another four (including Pet Sematary, his most recent) are in various stages of production. On top of all that, several King short stories have been adapted for TV, and an unpublished novel has been sold for a mini-series.

So why direct?

"Curiosity," he says, continuing to gorge himself on pizza.

Actually, it wasn't simply curiosity that prompted King to accept movie mogul Dino De Laurentis's offer to direct.

Pleased with some

Although King is pleased with some film adaptations of his works - he thinks Cujo and The Dead Zone are great - he has been disappointed with others. In particular, Firestarter, Children of the Corn, and The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, still make King cringe. (He once described Firestarter as "flavorless," like "cafeteria mashed potatoes.")

The disappointing films, King explains between bites, failed to capture the spirit of his written works - either they didn't frighten, or took implausible twists, or were blandly acted, or sloppily directed, whatever. With Overdrive, King finally wanted to see if he could capture that spirit on film. If he couldn't, well, at least he'd have no one but himself to blame.

"My son's got this wonderful imitation of Leonard Malton on Entertainment Tonight," King says, becoming suddenly animated.

"He'll start off the way he always starts off when he's going to give a really bad review. He'll say, 'This is Leonard Malton, Entertainment Tonight. Stephen King says that he wanted to direct a picture to see if whatever makes his books so successful could be translated to film if he did it himself.

" 'The answer is no]' "

King grins. "Actually," he continues, "the answer is yes. I think. I think it has a lot of appeal of the books."

Not that he's exactly rehearsing his Academy Award acceptance speech, as he notes wryly. Although the film does not look amateurish - for a rookie, King's grasp of cinematic technique is quite impressive - its human characters are undeveloped. And despite King's hopes, Overdrive only hints at his books' rich textures. It's hard to escape the conclusion that what King does so well in print probably can't be translated onto the silver screen.

"I think by and large this movie will get kind of a sour critical reception," he predicts. "It's a 'moron movie,' for one thing. It's crash and bash. It's a head-banger movie - really, really loud."

Promotional tour

Critics notwithstanding, King believes audiences will like Overdrive as much as he does. He hopes so, anyway. The only reason he agreed to do a nationwide promotional tour is to hype the film. Too many earlier King films, he laments, have lasted in theaters all of two weeks.

"Graham Greene said . . . writers write books they can't find on library shelves. To some extent, I think directors must direct movies that they can't go and watch in movie theaters.

"Overdrive is fun. I like movies where you can just, like, check your brains at the box office and pick 'em up two hours later. Sit and kind of let it flow over you and, you know, dig on it. This movie is just sort of gaudy blaaaaah. It's not a heavy social statement," he asserts.

Suddenly, without warning, the lines on King's face deepen, his eyes become cat slits and he's baring his teeth - he's got one hell of a set of incisors, one discovers. Normally a rational and intelligent human being, he's transformed himself into a raving lunatic.

He jumps up and screams: "One of the things I wanted was to never let up. My idea is that what you do is build up, like reaching out and grabbing somebody by the ----] Right out of the page if possible or right out of the screen] Tell you what, ------------, you're mine]]]]]]"

He sits down again, laughing like - like a kid.

Four new novels

To say that Stephen King is big is a little like saying Carrie, telekinetic murderess of his first novel, is odd.

Some noteworthy footnotes to the King saga:

* The initial hardcover printing of last year's Skeleton Crew, his second anthology, was one million copies, one of the largest first hardcover printings in publishing history.

* King books are hot collectors items. In May, for example, an uncorrected proof of his Night Shift collection brought $2,500 at a San Francisco auction. A small-press magazine in which one of his stories appeared years ago brought a cool $150.

* For a decade, King's books have consistently topped the best-seller lists. According to Publishers Weekly, his scorecard for 1985 included the fifth and 11th best-selling fiction hardcover books; the second, fourth and eight best-selling mass paperbacks; and the second and third best-selling trade paperbacks. Total sales of those seven books alone: 11.49 million.

* King has his own monthly newspaper, Castle Rock, published and edited by his secretary, Stephanie Leonard.

* Against the advice of his publisher, who's worried that the market will be saturated (King disagrees), King will release four new novels in the next year, including the 1,000-page-plus IT later this summer.

* A musical version of Carrie takes to Broadway this fall.

Not to mention all those movies.

This being America, money has come hand-in-hand with his fame. King is so rich that when someone threatened to buy his favorite radio station in Bangor, Maine, and replace its rock format with EZ Listening, he rushed out and bought it himself. Rumor has it he paid cash.

The unknowns remain

Naturally, there are secrets to King's success.

One - hardly the best-kept - is that people, millions of them, anyway, like to be scared. Late at night, with the wind moaning, the leaves on the trees rustling, the kids sleeping (are they still breathing?) and something downstairs making a strange noise (is it only the cat?), they love to curl up with a good scary book and let the chills crawl down their spines.

King has lectured and written extensively about fear. He understands that no matter how technologically advanced we become, no matter how much the scientists figure out about ourselves and our world, the great unknowns remain: darkness, death, whatever is beyond the grave.

Still, there are plenty of horror writers slogging away out there, including several who have won critical acclaim - such as Robert Bloch, who wrote Psycho, and Peter Straub, author of the million-seller Ghost Story, and J.N. Williamson and Richard Matheson, two of the more prolific writers of the genre. Some are literary, closer to Poe than King; others are more gruesome, more skilled with plot. In terms of popularity, King has eclipsed them all.

The real secret is where King has taken horror - out of the Egyptian mummy's tomb and straight into the living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens of contemporary middle- and lower-class America. King's landscape is the America of kids and pets and Coke and malls and cheeseburgers and troubles with the mortgage payment and that old clunker, the family car - much the same vision of America that Steven Speilberg has brought to Hollywood.

Not that everything is ordinary in King's works. Whether haunted car or haunted child, King's villains and monsters and spirits are deeply troubling, frequently uncontrollable, and usually deadly. There's a lot of darkness in King's work, and plenty of ghosts. Death is never very far away.

It is precisely this juxtaposition - ordinary people victimized by extraordinary forces - that is the key to all good horror, not just King's.

Hitting the nerves

Still . . . 70 million books, 16 movies, a Broadway play, and no end in sight?

"Some of it," King explains as he polishes off lunch, "has got to be that I'm talking about things that, like you say, hit nerves. Or maybe they don't hit nerves - maybe they just resonate.

"You know, people say, 'I know about that, because that happened to me.' I don't mean an ability to light fires or anything like that (the heroine of Firestarter is a young girl with pyrotechnic powers), but something about family life, or something your kid said, something like that."

Not that King's intent is anthropological exposition; he is not a scholar, nor does he pretend to be. He bases his fiction on situations he understands because they've been his life, too - family, marriage, the battle (at least in the early days) for a buck. King and his wife, Tabitha, also an author, have three children. The eldest is 16.

"I don't write with an audience in mind. I mean, the audience is me. My popularity says something about my own mind. It's a little bit distressing when you think about it. It says, 'Well, here's a person who's so perfectly in tune with middle-cultural drone that there must be this incredible bowling alley echo inside his head.' "

Even King's detractors - there's no shortage of critics who dismiss his work as insignificant - concede that he has a true talent for depicting children. Maybe that's because King himself could well be the biggest kid in America. Even when they are blessed/cursed with supernatural powers, King's fictional children are flesh and blood - so seemingly real that you wonder if they don't actually exist somewhere, and King is only documenting their lives.

In fact, King's own children have had enormous impact, and if you doubt that, you only need look at his dedications.

"I grew up with them," he says. "Bringing up baby or child or children or whatever has been one of the experiences of my life, and so it's one of the things I write about. But also it's a way of trying to make sense of how the child you were yourself became the man that you are and that whole crazy business."

Woes with women

As good as King has been creating children, he has had his woes with women, as countless critics have been quick to point out.

"I've had such problems with women characters," he agrees, the smile leaving his face. "God knows I have tried. I tried with Donna Trenton in Cujo - tried to make a real woman. (I thought) she worked pretty well, except I got hit pretty hard by a lot of critics. An awful lot of critics said the dog is punishment for adultery.

"The death of her child . . . consciously, on top of my mind, I was simply trying to create a convincing chain of events that would put the boy and her in that position where they could spend a period of time. But when you think about it. . . .

"Yes, I've had trouble with women. It's funny because that's why I started to write Carrie. This friend of mine said to me, 'The trouble with you is you don't understand women.' I said, 'What do you mean?' It's like he'd accused me of being a virgin or something like that, which I just barely wasn't at that time.

"He says, 'Ah, all these stories with these hairy-chested horror things, these guys fighting monsters and stuff like that.' I was trying to tell him, 'You don't understand. That's what they buy, these men's magazines.' He said, 'You couldn't create a woman character if you tried. You know, a good one.' I said I bet I could. Carrie - that's a book about women, almost completely about women. There are almost no male characters in it."

Father ran off

By now, the story of King's climb to the top is legendary.

It begins with a kid growing up in Maine and (for four years) in Connecticut - a kid whose father ran off never to be heard from again, a kid whose mother raised him and his elder brother on a shoestring. On the outside, King was a polite child who liked cars, played some sports - but inside, he would later recall, he often felt unhappy, "different," even violent.

He remembers writing his first horror story at the age of seven; it was about dinosaurs on a rampage. Through his teens, he read voraciously, spent hours in movie theaters, kept on writing and writing and writing. It was while attending the University of Maine, Orono, that he began to sell short stories to magazines. But his novels, and there were several of them by this point, were going nowhere.

After college, he and his wife worked a succession of jobs to keep their family afloat: Tabitha as a waitress, he as a worker in a coin laundry and as an English teacher at a private school. The short stories kept selling - they were helping to pay the rent on the tiny trailer where they lived - but the novels were still moribund.

King wrote Carrie working late into the night in the furnace room of their trailer - the only available space in already cramped quarters. Somewhere, King says, they still have the Olivetti portable typewriter on which he banged out several early novels and stories.

The old portable

"There were no word processors then," King remembers. "I used my wife's portable. She stills says sometimes - in jest, I think - 'My husband married me for my portable typewriter.' It's got my fingerprints carved into the keys. I mean, I beat that thing to death just about.

"I used to have to bring Joe in in his crib to where I worked, which was the furnace room. You'd get hot and you'd be going along good and he'd wake up and you'd have to give him a bottle because he'd cried. It was just, you know, you get it done the best you can.

"You don't raise your head and look around, because if you do you just get depressed. And I was depressed then. Because I was selling some short stories, but I had had like three, four novels bounced back at me at that time and also a number of other short stories."

Even after finally selling Carrie to Doubleday, the struggle continued.

"My wife used to work at 'Drunken' Donuts,' which is what they called it on the night shift. I used to take care of the kids while I did the rewrite. This was after the contract and everything, but before we had any money. I mean, the contract was only for $2,500. It wasn't exactly a king's ransom," he says, seemingly unaware of the pun.

The big break came with the paperback contract for Carrie, which had done reasonably well in hardcover. King had expected to earn $5,000 to $12,000 on the paperback rights. When his editor called to tell him that the sale had been for $400,000, virtually unprecedented at the time for a newcomer, he was flabbergasted.

He celebrated by buying the thing he thought his wife would like the most - a $29 hair dryer.

'Normal' life in Maine

It seems a lifetime ago, those early days.

Today, King and his family live in a large Victorian house in Bangor. He has a summer home on a Maine lake, drives a Mercedes, is a Red Sox fan, loves beer as much as pizza, enjoys tennis and softball, usually wears a beard in winter. Except when he's on tour, he writes every day of the year, except Christmas, the Fourth of July and his birthday. He does the family shopping. His children attend public schools.

"They don't have any sense that there's anything really odd about what I do because I've never made out like I'm a big shot because I don't feel that I am. Also, we don't live in New York or California, where they might live in an atmosphere that's a little stranger. They seem pretty normal."

Although he is Bangor's most famous citizen - arguably Maine's, as well - the natives, he says, "mostly leave me alone. I have the town broken in. I guess familiarity breeds contempt."

Not that he hasn't become something of a celebrity for the tourists - a class of citizen he has often lampooned in his written works.

"Oh, sure," he says. "They have Canadian tour buses that come down to go to the mall - the Bangor Mall, which is the closest real big super mall to Nova Scotia. One of the things they throw in with this is you get to go by the 'Stephen King House,' like you're stuffed and embalmed. You're in there and one day you look out and you see this huge bus with 150 Canadians lined up along the fence snapping pictures. It's very odd."

Next interview

A TV crew has arrived early to set up for King's next interview. "Let's go into the bedroom," he suggests. "It's quieter." He gets up, crosses the room and closes the door behind him. Stretching full-length on his unmade bed, he props himself up on his elbows and resumes talking about his film.

Overdrive is based on "Trucks," one of several brilliant short stories in his first anthology, Night Shift.

"It's always been my favorite from that collection," he says. "Trucks I liked just for the feel of it. It had a desperate film noir quality as a story."

Machines gone mad. In Overdrive, which will be remembered more for its special effects and pyrotechnics than its acting or social significance, they go one step further: They try to take over the world. Knives, soda machines, video games, lawnmowers, a drawbridge, cars, 18-wheelers - all become killers.

"I'm fascinated by (machines)," King says enthusiastically. "They scare me. There's so much potential for destruction. In the film there's a track shot that starts on this hammock that's empty and swinging. In the background you see a guy who's obviously had his head cut off by his own chainsaw. The chainsaw is buried somewhere in his neck.

"There's a little Watchman with a little teeny screen giving this information about machines having gone beserk. The camera pans down and tracks and you see an overturned Styrofoam cooler and then you see empty beer bottles and then you see the Watchman. It doesn't have a picture on it but it's splattered with blood.

"Then you see the guy and you track up his body and he's all been shredded because he's been, you know, 'lawn-mowered' to death. You come to the lawnmower itself and it's all covered with blood and everything. When it finally runs, it chases this kid. It's quite funny."

He chuckles, then pauses. "Well to me, it's funny," he explains. "A lot of people are going to say it's gross and gratuitous. That's OK."

Machines and actors

King chose Overdrive for his directorial debut because he thought it would be easier to work with special effects and machines rather than with real-life actors.

It turned out to be the other way around.

"I thought to myself: 'My electric knife is never going to say, 'I can't cut the actress's arm today because my hairdresser didn't come in from New York.' My truck is never going to say, 'I can't run by myself today because I'm having my period.' You know what I mean?

"I went into the thing with a lot of the stereotyped ideas that people get about actors. You know, 'They're a bunch of conceited snobs. They're all babyish, you have to baby them along, you have to always be feeding them constant praise, they're always difficult to work with,' all this stuff.

"It turned out all to be b-------. They all worked really hard. They gave me more than 150 percent. They were almost always at their best.

"The actors were great, but all the machines . . . they wouldn't run. The trucks wouldn't start. We crashed four vehicles that were supposed to roll over before one finally did, and that was only on the third take. We had problems with the power mower. It was radio-controlled. Back at the studio, it went like a bat out of hell. Get it on location, it would just sit there.

"The electric knife that goes beserk . . . skittering along the floor like a big bug. The special-effects guys built three knives using dildo motors - basically vibrator motors to make them work. Two of them got wrecked on bad takes and we only had one left and we had to get it right. Luckily we did."

What scares him

The TV people are ready and time is almost up.

A few questions remain.

What scares you?

"Just about everything, in one way or another," he says. "But I think the thing that scares me most would be to check on one of my kids one night and find him dead in bed."

Did you ever expect to sell 70 million books?

"I don't even know what that figure means," he says, as if still finding it impossible to believe. "Do you realize if I live along enough there could be as many copies of my stuff actually sold as there are people in the country?"

No, King never expected all this - not even in his wildest dreams.

Are you afraid that someday it'll all be gone?

"Yeah," he laughs, starting to act out a scene from a movie where an enormously fat man explodes after a gargantuan meal. "Someday I'll just burst like that guy in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Did you see that? 'Just one more mint.' 'Nah, I'll burst'. . . and he did."

A brutal surgery, a Midwest romance

Dr. C. Walton Lillehei's pioneering, high-risk surgery in the 1950s brought us life-saving open-heart surgery. Lillehei himself underwent a radical operation at the hands of his mentor, Dr. Owen Wangensteen, to save him from deadly cancer. Walt's wife, Kaye, nursed him back to health. It was the latest chapter in a romance that began before Walt left to operate a MASH unit in World War II.

You may purchase the book in paperback, Kindle and audio editions!


An excerpt from 

Chapter Three: Invasive Procedures

After reading what he could find about the treatment of lym­phosarcoma, Lillehei reluctantly agreed to surgery. Trying to stay focused on his work until the very last minute, he was awake into the early hours of the day of his operation com­pleting the final draft of an article about ulcers that he'd coauthored with Wangensteen. Before finally going to bed, Lille­hei asked his wife, Kaye, to type it.

At 7:15 A.M. on Thursday, June 1, Lillehei entered Univer­sity Hospital's Room I, Wangensteen's room. He did not know exactly what would be done to him while he was asleep. He knew only that Wangensteen intended to open him up and remove everything that might conceivably be cancerous.

David State, the surgeon who'd removed Lillehei's parotid tumor in February, began the operation.

Under Wangensteen's supervision, State excised the re­mainder of Lillehei's parotid gland. Then senior surgeon Varco scrubbed in and he and State started on Lillehei's neck, from which they took all of the lymph nodes and glands. Some of the nodes near the jugular vein were enlarged, and Wangen­steen decided they had to go down into the chest. Wangen­steen had not raised this possibility to his patient, but it was too late now to seek permission: Lillehei was dead to the world, his face and neck splayed open like an anatomy-class cadaver.

Now Wangensteen scrubbed in. Four hours had passed; for 1950, it was already a marathon.

Assisted by yet another surgeon, John Lewis, Lillehei's best friend, Wangensteen split the sternum and opened the chest. Wangensteen carved deep, removing more lymph nodes, more glands, muscle, fat, vessels, the thymus, an entire rib. No op­eration like this had ever been done anywhere. This was scorched earth, and the bleeding was horrendous. Lillehei was transfused, pint after pint after pint of blood—including one donated by Norman E. Shumway, an intern who many years later would invent human heart transplantation.

Ten hours and thirty-five minutes after the operation started, Wangensteen was finally done.

Seven surgeons, four anesthesiologists, and several nurses had assisted.

Nine pints of blood had been used.

Twenty-three specimens had been sent to the pathologist.

Lillehei faced twelve sessions of radiation. Still, he was alive.

The odds said that in five years, he would not be.

¨¨¨¨

A week after Wangensteen's lymphosarcoma surgery, Lillehei was discharged to the care of his wife. They lived with their young daughter in a duplex apartment near the university.

The only daughter of Swedish immigrants, Katherine Ruth Lindberg grew up in Minneapolis. She was an uncommonly pretty girl, who was voted Most Popular by her high school classmates—and who had her choice of boys. "If you had lis­tened closely, you would have heard my knees rattle," one of her high school suitors confided in a note he slipped to Kaye after watching her play volleyball, one of several sports at which she excelled. "You were the cutest one on the floor—thanks for the privilege of looking at you. I think you are per­fectly proportioned. . . . What is your locker number?"

Kaye Lindbergh Lillehei, 1938.

After graduating at the top of her class, Kaye entered the University of Minnesota's nursing school, intending to be­come a stewardess and then a practicing nurse, perhaps even a supervisor or administrator. Kaye met Walt in 1941, at Min­neapolis General Hospital, where she was studying and Walt was serving his internship.

Wow—look at that blond! a friend of Kaye's said to her one day when Dr. Lillehei walked onto the ward.

Kaye agreed that Walt was a looker. And she admired the way he, unlike so many of the interns, always took the time to listen to patients and offer them encouraging words. For his part, Walt thought Kaye had the best legs of any of the stu­dent nurses.

Kaye was dating someone else, but when he left for the navy, Walt asked her to a hospital picnic. They went steady from that day until Lillehei enlisted in the army, in June of 1942. Before leaving, Walt gave Kaye his fraternity pin; when the war was over, they would marry. For more than three years, as Lillehei moved with the Allies across northern Africa and into Italy, the couple exchanged letters constantly—and planned to reunite overseas even as war raged.

"My darling Kaye, Sweetheart," wrote Walt in one of his letters, "I'm so damn much in love with you I'm in misery. . . . You are so darn cute and lovely darling that you undoubtedly will get many invitations for dates, but please wait for me faithfully my dear because I am sure that we will be together very soon."

But Kaye never did get overseas during the war. And three and a half years apart took a toll: although Kaye and Walt re­mained engaged after Walt came home, they did not rush to the altar. Wangensteen's demanding residency program ab­sorbed Walt, and Kaye was flying for Northwest Airlines. "We were two different people," Kaye recalled later. "We just sort of went on different paths."

An abrupt change in airline policy pushed Kaye and Walt to wed. Desiring only unmarried stewardesses, Northwest in late 1946 declared that starting in 1947, married women would no longer be hired; the only married stewardesses would be those already married and on the payroll by that January 1. Figuring it was now or never, Kaye married Walt on New Year's Eve—beating the deadline by mere hours. Eighteen months later, the Lilleheis had their first child, a girl they named Kim.

¨¨¨¨

Never before gloomy, Lillehei went into a funk the summer of 1950. His chest wound became painfully infected, and Varco came by evenings to clean it out (for his troubles, Lillehei mixed them both martinis). Another complication, a dilated stomach, sent Lillehei staggering to the emergency room. Two weeks of radiation treatment for his face left him nauseated and raised the specter of worse side effects some day, including cataracts. That, of course, was assuming Lillehei lived.

This was no easy time for Kaye, either. Doctors had just sent her mother to a sanatorium for tuberculosis, and with the care of her sick husband, now Kaye had to abandon her work toward a master's degree in nursing, which she had been pur­suing at the University of Minnesota. Her stewardess days were already history; abruptly reversing its marital-status pol­icy, Northwest Airlines had sent the newlywed a pink slip shortly after she'd returned from her honeymoon.

That terrible summer, Walt tried to move his mind off things by watching TV, mostly afternoon baseball games and a few programs that were broadcast before midnight, when stations signed off until morning. He read medical journals, worked some on his doctoral dissertation, and looked ahead to autumn, when he hoped to resume operating and open his own lab.

Physical suffering was only a part of that summer's misery. Although he never mentioned it to Wangensteen, Lillehei re­sented the chief's cutting so deep, without forewarning—es­pecially considering the pathologist's final report, which showed no further malignancy anywhere. Nonetheless, Wan­gensteen had recommended a second-look operation in six months. Lillehei refused. Enough was enough.

And Lillehei worried for his young family. Wangensteen continued to pay his salary, but no insurer would cover a lym­phosarcoma survivor. With savings from the wartime pay he had dutifully sent home, Lillehei began to invest in the stock market. This, too, would turn out to be fortuitous in ways the young doctor could never have imagined.

Asylum

During the #coronavirus pandemic, I am regularly posting stories and selections from my published collections and novels. Read for free! Reading is the best at this time!

This is the eighth free offering: An excerpt from "Asylum: Book Two of the Thunder Rise Trilogy," published in 2013 by Crossroad Press.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Fred, Roger and Saint Peter

Good, Saint Peter thought as he hovered in the shadows near the Victorian. Adams’s room was ablaze. Every light must have been burning.

Magnificent. He’s not sleeping, after all.

As absurd as it initially sounded, one of Nick’s big concerns was that the superintendent would be awake. Under ideal circumstance, of course, Adams and his goon platoon would sleep straight through the escape, blissfully unaware of what was transpiring; they would simply wake up the next morning and find an empty Elmwood. In reality, something was bound to wake them up — there was no way you could get everyone out without some noise, probably a lot of noise.

With such a mind-boggling array of permutations for how the whole damn thing could go down the shitter, Nick wanted the surprises kept to a minimum. He wanted Adams a screaming meemie who would be incapable of finding his own fly, let alone directing the counter-offensive that would be needed to thwart Nick’s plans once the shit hit the fan — and the shit most assuredly would hit the fan. For what Nick had in mind, the superintendent had to be awake. He had to be unrelentingly, painfully in command of all his senses when his own particular apportionment of shit flew. If necessary, there were ways to wake him, shouting or throwing rocks at windows being the two contingencies; that duty, among others, had fallen to Saint Peter. It would be better if Adams were already awake, plagued again by that vicious insomnia. A raw bundle of nerves staring into the maw of madness would be best.

Since Field Day, Adams had kept an armed sentry posted on the front porch of the Victorian. Tonight was no exception. As Saint Peter made his way toward the residence — he was slinking from trunk to trunk under the maples that lined the drive — the sentry came into view. He was sitting on a rattan chair to the left of the door, a shotgun cradled in his lap. Saint Peter could not tell if he was awake or — as the angle of his neck suggested — dozing off. There was no motion in the man at all, not even an occasional swat of a hand to ward off the mosquitoes. Saint Peter had the sudden conviction that he could walk right past the man and into the Victorian without a peep of protest.

Still... Nick had been adamant.

Don’t take chances, he’d repeated to the Mouse Housers so many times it had become a running joke. Even this week, his letters from isolation had had those words scribbled every second page. Don’t take chances. This whole thing is one gigantic chance already.

Saint Peter cut left and was swallowed by the August night. The grass was cool on his sandaled feet, pleasantly moist; tomorrow morning’s dew had already arrived. Saint Peter gave the Victorian wide berth, a course that brought him to the edge of the woods that flowed down from the Berkshire Hills. He stopped. Someone inside the house was talking. Who, about what — Saint Peter’s hearing was too poor to give him that. The voice subsided and then it was crickets, only crickets.

Saint Peter started toward the house. The switchboard wasn’t in the Victorian — it was over in a small cubicle just inside the main administration building — but Nick had remembered from Berkshire Acres that the main telephone line entered the institution at the Victorian, then split in two: one line going to the superintendent’s private phone, the other, larger, continuing on to administration.

He was at the house now, peering up. Just as Nick had said, two phone lines — one thicker than the other — were strung across poles and down the side of the house to sill level, where they disappeared inside. With the wire cutters Roger had pilfered from the shop, Saint Peter cut both wires. Two snaps and Elwmood was cut off from the world.

Saint Peter looked up. Of the myriad of unpredictables, the chance Adams — or anyone anywhere at Elmwood, where telephone access was limited and guarded — would be on the phone at such an hour was negligible.

No, it wasn’t fear that kept the old man frozen.

Not any strange new sound from within.

It was something inside of him.

Something that went beyond excitement or apprehension. Something more fundamental. Something more profound. Something someone else, but not Saint Peter, might have called sudden new strength — tinged with shame.

My whole life I’ve struggled to do good, Saint Peter thought. Every single day — even here, in this stinking cesspool of a place — I’ve turned the other cheek. And where has it gotten me? The respect, even affection, of my fellow beings... most of them, anyway. Love given and returned. But who ultimately has been served by all this? Me? My god? Certainly not Elmwood’s patients, who have borne a cross no man should ever be asked to bear.

And me the while, preaching sufferance and forbearance and the empty promise of eternal bliss.

Is not Reilly right? Should not I have emulated such a one? Would not resistance have been the better course? If I had set a different tone, one more combative, would not we have achieved more? Would we not now be free?

Yes, maybe it was me responsible for getting my grandson here, at least indirectly. Maybe I have given him everything he needs. Maybe tonight will really be the night, and this terrible dream will finally be at an end.

But him, Saint Peter thought, looking toward the second floor, where Adams’s bedroom was.

Him. Evil incarnate.

And not once did I confront him. Not once, like my chosen namesake at the hands of Nero, did I dare defy. I was content with platitudes and prayer... prayer that echoes so hollowly now.

Satan.

And where was the true light? Hidden under a bushel basket.

The church bell tolling twelve-thirty interrupted Saint Peter’s thoughts. According to Nick’s plan, he’d dallied too long at the Victorian already. Helping empty Jefferson was his next task, but that building — indeed, the rest of Elmwood — seemed distant, the barest echo from another lifetime.

The only reality anymore for Saint Peter was this building and the man within.

(Should you wish to purchase any of my collections and books, fiction or non-fiction, visit www.gwaynemiller.com/books.htm)

LANDINGPAGE for all the Free Reads during #coronavirus

The Beach That Summer

During the #coronavirus pandemic, I am regularly posting stories and selections from my published collections and novels. Read for free! Reading is the best at this time!

This is the seventh free offering: "The Beach That Summer," title short story in "The Beach That Summer: The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction, Vol 3," published in 2014 by Crossroad Press.

The Beach That Summer

That summer, Sand Hill was overrun by crazies. Try as you might, you couldn’t get away from them – not at the beach, not in the bars, not even in your own backyard.

I don’t mean the summer people, the Applebaums and Lodges, the Bloomfields and Morgans. They came that summer, as always, but they stayed even more to themselves inside their Victorians and Capes. I don’t know how many installed burglar alarms or hired guards or took up arms, but I guarantee you there were a lot.

No, they were a new breed, strangers to old-time islanders like me. Out-of-towners, drawn by the big-city papers and the checkout-counter tabloids and that big story on network news the day before the Fourth of July, which Huff Post and all the other sites immediately picked up. Just for fun, I stood on the bridge one morning and checked license plates. It’s a two-lane job, and both those lanes were busy the hour I was there. Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, a few New Yorks, a couple of Ohios, even a California – that’s what I saw. I don’t claim every one of them was drawn by what was going on, but I’d bet you a shore dinner most were.

We had gorgeous weather that summer, absolutely picture-postcard perfect the whole way through, and that didn’t help, either. Come Labor Day, an islander – a sailor whose business it is to know such things – counted the rainy days and came up with a total of five. Even the thunderstorms stayed away that summer.

Of course, the crazies would’ve come anyway, fair weather or foul. I knew that. Most every islander knew that. The authorities knew it, too, and the frustration of it nearly drove them mad.

See, there was a crackle in the air that summer on Sand Hill. A tension you couldn’t hide from. A tension that was strongest out on West Shore, where all of them were found.

Paula Hempson was first. I knew Paula – about as well as anyone else, I guess, and that was none too well at all.

She was a loner – a seamstress by trade but a drinker by profession, an overweight woman about my age, 47, who lived with a couple of strays in a trailer out by the landfill. Once in a blue moon you’d see her at Jake’s Cafe, swilling beers alone at the end of the bar, clothes unkempt and hair dirty, looking for all the world like somebody who’d just poisoned her overbearing mother.

June 8, they found her body – what was left of it – on a tidal flat off West Shore.

West Shore is the island’s scenic gem, three miles of beautiful white sand that belongs in Florida or South Carolina or Hawaii, not southern New England. Three miles of clean, virgin beach, not a hot dog stand or a windsurfing shop in sight. State land, the only reason it’s stayed undeveloped for so long.

West Shore – since I was old enough to walk, I must’ve been there a million times, swimming, fishing, clamming, falling in love with it again and again and again. I lost my virginity on West Shore. She was 36 and I was 17 and she took me there in the back seat of her car, a ’79 Mustang, after we shared wine and a blanket as we watched Fourth of July fireworks. She disappeared years ago – there’s still talk it was murder – but I never forgot her, or that night.

I say they found Hempson’s body, but it actually was a 10-year-old girl. She was the daughter of Jake Cabot, the selectman, and she was out there clamming when she stumbled onto it. As Jake later told it, first she screamed, then got sick, then finally ran like the devil himself was after her – ran straight to the police station, a full mile away.

Sgt. Ross Miller was on duty that afternoon, and he knew Jake’s little girl well enough to know she wasn’t bull-crapping about what she’d seen off West Shore. After calling her dad, he got in his cruiser and headed down. On the way, he called Rescue One.

I was at home, camped out in front of the TV, checking the Twitter traffic on my phone, when I heard the chatter over my Bearcat. In half a minute, the fire horn downtown was blaring. I heard a second siren – somebody had decided to send an engine, too. I got in my Jeep and headed after it.

When I got to West Shore, half the department was already there (but not a single other soul), sloshing knee-deep through the incoming tide on their way out to the flat. I headed out with them, curious, but also strangely edgy and…

 …excited isn’t quite the word.

Nobody spoke, but everybody felt it, what I was feeling. There wasn’t going to be any rescue today, we saw that right off, only a cleanup we’d be seeing in our dreams for months to come. I don’t blame that girl for getting sick. I damn near did myself, and I’ve spent my adult life in fishing boats – not the pleasantest of places to be, especially a week after a full catch.

Paula was face down, three-quarters submerged, bobbing gently as the waves licked over her. With his billy stick as a prod, Sarge Miller turned her over.

That’s when we saw – total evisceration. I think we all gasped. I think we all said a silent prayer. We stood, not wanting to look, unable to turn away, wishing that the sea would swallow the body up again so we could go home and forget we’d ever seen it. Ten seconds, half a minute, a minute – who was counting? The time went by and we were still there, lost in our thoughts, the sea lapping against our boots, a few gulls skimming low over the water, the sun pinkening as it started down toward evening.

Finally, Sarge Miller said in an unsteady voice, “OK, boys, we got work to do. Tide’s gonna beat us, we don’t get a move on.”

Sarge’s order was like a rock through glass. In no time, we had the body on the sand, safe from high tide.

Buzz Aldrich went across the sand to his four-wheel-drive to have the station call the ME’s office.

The rest of us moved off some and lit up cigarettes.

Sarge Miller was the first to use the word “shark.”

It was, as events would later prove, a most unfortunate choice of word. It was a word that would come back to sorely haunt him, and the island, and the state – a word that would be misinterpreted and misquoted and misused so badly that for part of that summer, at least, it would seem like our lives were being scripted in Hollywood, and we were actors in a real-life Jaws. It was wrong, as we would find out – about as wrong as you can get – but then, the beginning of that summer, that’s what we believed.

Now, it would be one thing if Sarge made his assessment over beers at Jake’s, but he didn’t. He made it in to a reporter.

His name was Storin, and he worked for one of the Boston papers. Storin was on the island that day getting notes on Sand Hill’s summer set when the siren blew and we tore-assed down to West Shore, him not far behind. I remember thinking that Sarge was going to tell him to take a flying leap when he strolled up, dressed in tan slacks and a button-down shirt, Mr. City Slicker himself. Only he didn’t. He didn’t say boo when Storin pushed straight past us, barely a word of hello, to get a better look.

“Mauled,” Storin said simply when he strolled back. Mauled – it was the word we’d been wracking our brains for.

“You got it, my friend,” Sarge said.

“Homicide?” Storin asked casually as he pulled his notebook out of his back pocket.

I saw that notebook and cringed, and I figured by that point alarm bells should have been going off inside Sarge’s head. They weren’t. Maybe he was shocked. Maybe he didn’t understand the press. 

Maybe he’d been cozying up to Jack Daniel again.

Whatever the maybe, he was just as cordial as can be.

“No person could have done that,” he said, as Storin scribbled crazily. “Had to be something from out there,” he finished, sweeping the expanse of the sea with his right arm.

“You mean shark,” Storin said, and that’s when he pulled the tape recorder out of his pocket.

You knew, listening, that the guy had Jaws dancing in his head. You knew he couldn’t wait to get back to Boston to write it. You knew, if you knew anything at all, that his story would draw the media to Sand Hill like gulls to a homebound trawler.

Even then, Sarge didn’t come to his senses. “That’s right,” he said, spitting into the sand. “I mean shark.”

The Herald splashed Storin’s story across the front page. It mentioned Jaws, quoted Sarge Miller extensively, and included a list of documented shark attacks around the world the last 50 years.

Beyond that – well, what more could it have said?

The ME wasn’t talking and there were no grieving relatives to be quoted. I understand the police phone rang off the hook the next day, and I understand that Sarge Miller got reamed but good by Chief, but until Marjorie Peters, that Herald story was it.

Mark Peters was second.

It was after him that the lid blew off Sand Hill. It was after him that the crazies took over the beach.

I wasn’t on the island the day he washed up, June 30, but Chief gave me a description over Rolling Rocks at Jake’s Cafe. Thank God, no kid found him. That kind of thing could have scarred another kid for life – just ask Jake. No, this time, a guy from state Environmental Affairs had the honors. Spotted him through binoculars on a law-enforcement patrol of West Shore, about a half-mile north of where we fished Hempson out of the surf.

Spotted him and then threw his lunch, just like Jake’s girl.

Like Hempson, Peters was a shadow figure, a ghost. He wasn’t poor like Hempson – he had a nice waterfront cottage, what was rumored to be a nice fat nest egg in a First State trust. The other particulars were identical: Mark Peters was lonely and alone.

“Looked like Hemspon,” Chief said, “exactly like Hempson,” and he knew he didn’t need to say any more. I killed my Rolling Rock and ordered a double Cutty. Chief followed suit. We sat together on our stools, silent as the mahogany under our elbows.

Silent, that is, until another double Cutty was history. That’s when Chief whispered: “It ain’t no shark.”

I didn’t catch his drift, not immediately.

“Somebody wanted it to look that way,” he continued, “faked it like a shark. Mark Peters was murdered.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish I was. Lord, how I wish I was.”

“How can you be sure?”

“We got a note. Hand-written. Arrived at the station an hour after we fished him out. Certain details in that note are consistent with certain preliminary findings from the ME. And there was a drawing. Very precise. Very gory. Made me sick.”

“Holy smokes.”

“There’s more,” Chief said on our third Cutty. “Hempson wasn’t any shark, either.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am. ME’s report came back.”

“And–”

“–and it seems we got a nut on the loose.”

The papers and blogs and TMZ and all those other sites went ape over Mark Peters. TV joined right in. By Friday night, the island was crawling with reporters and photographers and bloggers – I mean crawling, the way an army of ants’ll crawl over something sweet that’s dripped down your kitchen counter.

Who cared if Chief was urging restraint, was insisting nothing was definitive, that no sharks had ever been sighted within miles of Sand Hill? Who cared if the ME took pains to explain that the natural action of seawater and bacteria have a certain disgusting but distinctly deteriorative effect on human flesh?

Who cared?

This was the rarest of opportunities, probably it would never come again, a summertime Jaws in real life and all there within a couple hours driving time of the big East Coast cities.

If you wanted to put a date on when we first felt the crackle in the air that summer, first really felt it, it’s fair to say it was at 6:39 p.m. on Sunday, July 3.

I knew it was coming, and I guess most other islanders did, too. Hadn’t we seen the big-shot film crew sticking cameras in shoppers’ faces on their way out of Franny’s Market? Hadn’t we seen three shiny new Lincolns parked outside Clipper Inn? Hadn’t they rented Bill Weather’s 44-foot Chris Craft, mooring it for an entire afternoon off West Shore? Hadn’t there been a helicopter?

We knew the report was coming, but still the force of it was overwhelming – introduced, as it was, by NBC’s Brian Williams.

I remember that report like it just ended. It opened with an aerial shot of the island, the water shimmering like diamonds in a jewelry-store display case, and then it cut directly to West Shore, where a pretty-boy type was standing alone with a microphone, the wind tousling his hair, this terribly somber look on his face.

“Fear has struck this quintessential New England resort,” he said, or something very close to that, “fear that man’s greatest natural enemy is prowling these beautiful waters. Fear that a great white shark which has apparently claimed two victims will go for more before the long hot summer is through…”

The day after that broadcast. That’s when it got crazy to walk the beach.

Crazy, because for a spell, it didn’t seem the off-islanders were ever going to leave. Crazy, because everyone knew why everyone else was there – to wait, to watch, to hope in the sickest fashion that they would be the ones there when… when it happened again.

And nobody doubted it would.

All day, they were there, and well into the evening. They parked their Broncos and Winnebagos and played Frisbee and set up volleyball nets and lit charcoal fires on Hibachi grilles and the younger and more foolish ones, the gold-chained men with their painted-toenail women, dared each other to wade in. From the dunes, you could see them – shadowy characters in a bad dream.

Few islanders walked deep down the beach from then on that summer, but I did.

I did because I’d always done it, always been in love with the smells and sounds and sunsets you get there, only there, on West Shore. I did because I’d been going there since I was a kid. I did because stress and tension magically dissipated there, carried away on the warm summer breeze. If I’d been a poet, I think I would have camped out forever on West Shore. The poems I would have written would have been soft and billowy, like clouds, not angry and irrational and unforgiving, like the world around us.

Once a day, I walked West Shore, end to end, three miles in all. Once a day, invariably in early evening, when the sun was dropping down to kiss the sea and the breeze was stiff enough to keep the black flies grounded.

I carried a .38 that summer, and sometimes, the razor-sharp stiletto I picked up in New York years ago. I carried them – and carrying them gave me security. Few islanders walked West Shore that summer, but when they did, they carried weapons, too.

After Billie Robards, it would have been crazy not to.

Billie put an end to all the shark talk. There were two good reasons for that. One was where they found her: in the West Shore dunes, 100 yards, easy, from mean high tide.

The other was the letter that was mailed to the editorial offices of The Providence Journal.

It arrived July 14, hours before they found her, decapitated and limbless, so there was no question it was authentic. They never published the full text of that letter, which had a Providence postmark, but word got around the island pretty quickly about what was in it: Billie’s name, a drawing, a plea to “stop me, I can’t control myself,” all of it in black felt pen.

“He’s sick, really sick,” Chief said to me, and I could see the desperation and frustration and the something I hesitated to call fear in his tired blue eyes.

I knew Billie.

Knew her personally, and well. She was married to Will Robards, the skipper and owner of the Liza D., a Sand Hill trawler I’d crewed on for years. Will’s boat had kept me in dough times when times were rotten, and for that, I was eternally grateful. His wife was a peach, a 40-year-old brown-eyed peach with a wonderful laugh. I used to run into her in the market, at the gas station, wherever, and we always exchanged pleasantries. For years, she’d made it a point to stop by the house Christmas Eve to drop off her home-baked goodies. “Bachelor’s Special,” she’d say, and we always laughed heartily as we toasted our mutual good health.

After Billie’s autopsy, they quietly exhumed Paula Hempson and Mark Peters, allowing the pathologists to conclude that one person almost certainly was responsible for all three deaths. It answered the question the papers and blogs and TV had forgotten to ask: Just what had Hempson and Peters been doing swimming off West Shore, anyway?

If they loved Shark, they went berserk for Maniac on the Loose.

They’d smelled blood, real honest-to-God fresh-flowing blood, blood that seemed certain to flow again if everybody only waited a spell, and now there was no stopping them. Somebody joked that every fourth person on Narragansett Avenue was a reporter from there on out, but I didn’t laugh. One knocked on my door, and I live half a mile from the main drag. Forget downtown, Jake’s Cafe, the docks. Things were at a fever pitch, nobody seemed sane anymore, everybody had a theory and a suspect and…

…and that crackle was in the air.

I don’t know how else to describe it. I think back to that summer and I can hear it inside my head, a loud, painful crackle, this terrible thing that prickles the hairs on my neck.

“All that publicity can only be encouraging him. Sons of Satan, every one of these reporters.”

If Chief said it once that summer, he said it a hundred times, and he was right, he was right. That was the bitch of it; everyone knew what the publicity was doing, but we were powerless to stop it. A great country, America, isn’t it? You could see this sick puppy, living alone, catching the evening news and getting all worked up about his latest victim – a steam-filled pressure cooker set to blow again, and no one there to turn the burners off.

Off-islanders still walked West Shore – for the most part, only in the bold light of day now. And they did it in tighter and larger clusters than before – the foolish illusion of strength in numbers, I imagine. But mostly, after Billie Robards, they stuck to the docks and the restaurants and Jake’s, endlessly, morbidly fascinated with the Shore Stalker, as they came to call him.

I kept walking West Shore, my hand a little tighter on my .38, my eyes straining a little harder, every passerby a suspect. I kept walking because I was determined the Stalker couldn’t keep me from the place I loved so. I kept walking because I always had.

Victims four and five were found August 14, three days after a letter arrived on Chief’s desk. The State Police sent it off to the lab for analysis, but it didn’t take a criminologist to see that the same hand had penned both letters.

I got a photocopy of that letter from Sarge Miller. Photocopies were worth their weight in gold that summer. “Stop me,” the letter said. “Please, I beg you, stop me.”

Nothing else.

I forget their names – they were off-islanders, a honeymooning couple in their 20s from Pennsylvania. Their car was found in the West Shore lot, and there was some dispute over whether they had known what was happening on the beach that summer or had wandered there unsuspectingly through impossibly bad luck.

Even after them, the curious came, but they came in much smaller numbers. By late afternoon, West Shore would be deserted, whatever off-islanders there had been having retreated to the safety of the motels and bars. After Aug. 14, the only people I met on my evening walks were cops and a couple of old salts who’ll be out there surf casting the day they drop the Big One.

We islanders drew tightly together then – for solace, more than protection. I bet there have never been more floodlights sold than that summer, more German Shepherds bought, more shotguns oiled, locked and loaded, mine included.

For all that, it was an uneasy camaraderie.

Media or no media, one fact could not be exaggerated: there was a cold-blooded killer out there, and who’s to say he wasn’t your Uncle Joe or your Cousin Henry? Who’s to say he wasn’t sitting right there with you in Jake’s, or standing with you at the checkout counter, or behind the wheel of the car in front of you coming over the bridge? Who’s to say it wasn’t Jake, or Will Robards, or Chief, or Sgt. Ross? Stranger things have happened.

Truth was, we were an island scared to death.

Up in the capitol, there was a sense of urgency you usually see only after hurricanes or blizzards. The governor went on TV to announce creation of the Sand Hill Task Force, what he described as the state’s largest, most ambitious crime hunt ever. State Police, Sand Hill Police, the National Guard – they were all in on it. The FBI sent agents down from Boston. The president, vacationing out on Martha’s Vineyard, even lent his support in an impromptu press conference.

The Shore Stalker was going to be caught, yes he was.

Except he wasn’t.

One week, two weeks, three weeks went by, Labor Day was just around the corner, and there hadn’t been an arrest. Thank the Lord, the Stalker was quiet, but the authorities were no closer to finding him than they’d been all summer.

They tried everything – roadblocks, unmarked cars, armed men in the dunes. They searched cars, boats, crunched names through national data bases, run up the biggest overtime bill in the history of Rhode Island law enforcement. Eventually, the American Civil Liberties Union began to squawk. It was that big.

That unsuccessful.

“It’s the goddamndest thing I ever saw,” Chief told me on September 3, two days before the Board of Selectmen fired him. “It’s almost like this guy doesn’t really exist.”

He wasn’t the first to think that. I’d thought it myself.

Labor Day came and went, and the Stalker didn’t strike, and then it was Columbus Day, and Christmas, and we were into the new year. The media moved on to other places, other tragedies.

Still, he wasn’t caught. There wasn’t even an arrest.

So here it is, Friday of Fourth of July weekend, and the traffic into Sand Hill is noticeably heavier, and every islander is remembering last summer and feeling strangely skittish and…

 …and that crackle in the air is back, louder than before.

I close my eyes and I can hear it, feel it, excruciatingly painful, like the first stab of a migraine at the back of your skull.

They won’t admit it, of course, but the authorities are convinced that there’s a better-than-even chance the Stalker will be tempted this weekend. Something about the pattern of last year’s killings, they say, something about the renewed publicity, something the handwriting experts say they can see in his letters.

Another one, you see, was received by the new Chief today.

So they’ve closed off West Shore for the weekend, and they’re turning back cars headed into the parking lot, and they’re warning people not to go out alone, and there are rumors that National Guardsmen will be patrolling the beach around the clock.

But I fully expect that some fool will still walk the beach this weekend. Some poor drunk slob slipping past the guardsmen and wandering the dunes, those sprawling, magnificent dunes.

I expect that I might see that slob. I plan to be there, as usual, walking the beach as the sun is setting and the soft summer breeze is blowing gently in off the water.

Just like last summer.

(Should you wish to purchase any of my collections and books, fiction or non-fiction, visit www.gwaynemiller.com/books.htm)

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