Stephen King - Nightmares and Dreamscapes

By Stephen King and published by

New English Library

Carrie

'Salem's Lot

The Shining

Night Shift

The Stand

By Stephen King as Richard Bachman

Thinner

The Bachman Books

Published by Hodder Stoughton

Christine

Pet Sematary

It

Misery

The Tommyknockers

The Dark Half

The Stand: the Complete and Uncut Edition

Four Past Midnight

Needful Things

Gerald's Game

Dolores Claiborne

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Most of the selections in this book are works of fiction. Names,

characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's

imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual

persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from

the British Library

ISBN 0-340-59282-6

Copyright 1993 by Stephen King

First published in Great Britain 1993

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. The right of Stephen King to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Hodder and Stoughton,

a division of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd,

Mill Road, Dunton Green, Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 2YA.

Editorial Office: 47 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Photoset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd,

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent

Illustration from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg 1984 by Chris Van Allsburg, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

The following selections, some in different form, were previously published: 'Dolan's Cadillac' in the Castle Rock Newsletter; 'The End of the Whole Mess' in Omni; 'Suffer the Little Children' and 'The Fifth Quarter' in Cavalier; 'The Night Flier' in Prime Evil: New Stories by the Masters of Modern Horror edited by Douglas E. Winter, New American Library; 'Popsy' in Masques II: All-New Storiesof Horror and the Supernatural edited by J. N. Williamson, Maclay Associates; 'It Grows on You' in Marshroots; 'Chattery Teeth' in Cemetery Dance Magazine; 'Dedication' and 'Sneakers' in Night Visions V by Stephen King, et al., Dark Harvest; 'The Moving Finger' in Science Fiction and Fantasy; 'You Know They Got a Hell of a Band' in Shock Rock edited by Jeff Gelb and Claire Zion, Pocket Books; 'Home Delivery' in Book of the Dead, Mark Ziesing, publisher; 'Rainy Season' in Midnight Graffiti edited by Jessica Horsting and James Van Hise, Warner Books; 'Crouch End' in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by H. P. Lovecraft, et al., Arkham House; 'The Doctor's Case' in New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Stephen King, et al., edited by Martin Greenberg and Carol-Lynn Rossel Waugh, Carroll Graf; 'Head Down' in The New Yorker; 'Brooklyn August' in Io.

'Dolan's Cadillac' was later published in a limited edition by Lord John Press. 'My Pretty Pony' was published in a limited edition by the Whitney Museum of Art.

When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights. I knew even then, you see, that there were people in the world too many of them, actually whose imaginative senses were either numb or completely deadened, and who lived in a mental state akin to colorblindness. I always felt sorry for them, never dreaming (at least then) that many of these un imaginative types either pitied me or held me in contempt, not just because I suffered from any number of irrational fears but because I was deeply and unreservedly credulous on almost every subject. 'There's a boy,' some of them must have thought (I know my mother did), 'who will buy the Brooklyn Bridge not just once but over and over again, all his life.'

There was some truth to that then, I suppose, and if I am to be honest, I suppose there's some truth to it now. My wife still delights in telling people that her husband cast his first Presidential ballot, at the tender age of twenty-one, for Richard Nixon. 'Nixon said he had a plan to get us out of Vietnam,' she says, usually with a gleeful gleam in her eye, 'and Stevebelieved him!'

That's right; Steve believed him. Nor is that all Steve has believed during the often-eccentric course of his forty-five years. I was, for example, the last kid in my neighborhood to decide that all those street-corner Santas meant there was no real Santa (I still find no logical merit in the idea; it's like saying that a million disciples prove there is no master). I never questioned my Uncle Oren's assertion that you could tear off a person's shadow with a steel tent-peg (if you struck precisely at high noon, that was) or his wife's claim that every time you shivered, a goose was walking over the place where your grave would someday be. Given the course of my life, that must mean I'm slated to end up buried behind Aunt Rhody's barn out in Goose Wallow, Wyoming.

I also believed everything I was told in the schoolyard; little minnows and whale-sized whoppers went down my throat with equal ease. One kid told me with complete certainty that if you put a dime down on a railroad track, the first train to come along would be derailed by it. Another kid told me that a dime left on a railroad track would be perfectly smooshed (that was exactly how he put it perfectly smooshed) by the next train, and what you took off the rail after the train had passed would be a flexible and nearly transparent coin the size of a silver dollar. My own belief was that both things were true: that dimes left on railroad tracks were perfectly smooshed before they derailed the trains which did the smooshing.

Other fascinating schoolyard facts which I absorbed during my years at Center School in Stratford, Connecticut, and Durham Elementary School in Durham, Maine, concerned such diverse subjects as golf-balls (poisonous and corrosive at the center), miscarriages (sometimes born alive, as malformed monsters which had to be killed by health-care individuals ominously referred to as 'the special nurses'), black cats (if one crossed your path, you had to fork the sign of the evil eye at it quickly or risk almost certain death before the end of the day), and sidewalk cracks. I probably don't have to explain the potentially dangerous relationship of these latter to the spinal columns of completely innocent mothers.