The Plant 3 Read online

  The Plant 3

  Стивен Кинг

  Stephen King

  The Plant III

  SYNOPSIS

  JOHN KENTON, who majored in English and was President of the Brown University Literary Society, has had a rude initiation into the real world as one of Zenith House’s four editors. Zenith House, which captured only 2 % of the total paperback market the year before (1980), is dying on the vine. All of its employees are worried that Apex, the parent corporation, may soon take extreme measures to stem the tide of red ink…and the most likely possibility is looking more and more like terminating Zenith House, with extreme sanction. The only hope is a drastic sales turnaround, but with Zenith’s tiny advances and creaky distribution system, that seems unlikely.

  Enter CARLOS DETWEILLER, first in the form of a query letter received by John Kenton. Detweiller, twenty-three, works in the Central Falls House of Flowers and is hawking a book he’s written, called True Tales of Demon Infestations. Kenton, with the vague idea that Detweiller may have some interesting stuff which can be rewritten by a staffer, encourages Detweiller to submit sample chapters and an outline. Detweiller instead submits the entire manuscript, along with a bundle of photographs. The mss is even more abysmal than Kenton — who thought the book could maybe be juiced up for The Amityville Horror audience — would have believed in his worst nightmares. Yet the worst nightmare of all is contained in the form of the enclosed photographs. Most are shots of painfully faked seance effects, but four of them show a gruesomely realistic human sacrifice, in which an old man’s heart is being pulled from his gaping chest…and it seems very likely to Kenton that the fellow doing the pulling is none other than Carlos Detweiller himself.

  ROGER WADE concurs with Kenton’s feeling that they have stumbled into something which is probably a police matter — and a very nasty police matter at that. Kenton takes the photos to SGT. TYNDALE, who wires them to CHIEF IVERSON in Central Falls. Carlos Detweiller is arrested, then released when an officer assigned to surveillance sees the photos in question and remarks that he saw the so-called “sacrifice victim” sitting in the House of Flowers office that very day, playing solitaire and watching Ryan’s Hope on TV. Tyndale tries to comfort Kenton. Go home, he says, have a drink, forget it. You made a perfectly forgivable mistake in the course of trying to do your civic duty.

  Kenton burns the “sacrifice photos,” but he can’t forget; he receives a letter from the obviously insane Carlos Detweiller, promising revenge. Two weeks later, he receives a letter from one “Roberta Solrac,” who purports to be a great fan of Zenith’s second-hottest author, Anthony La Scorbia (La Scorbia is responsible for a series of nature-run-amok novels such as Rats from Hell, Ants from Hell, and Scorpions from Hell). “She” claims to have sent La Scorbia roses, and wants to send Kenton, as La Scorbia’s editor, a small plant “as a token of esteem.”

  Kenton, no fool, realizes at once that Solrac is Carlos spelled backward…and Detweiller, of course, worked in a greenhouse. Convinced that the “token of esteem” is apt to be something like deadly nightshade or belladonna, Kenton sends an interoffice memo to Riddley, instructing him to incinerate any package which comes to him from a “Roberta Solrac.”

  RIDDLEY WALKER, who respects Kenton more than Kenton himself would ever believe, agrees, but privately adopts a wait-and-see attitude. Near the end of February 1981, a package from “Roberta Solrac,” addressed to John Kenton, actually does arrive. Riddley opens the package in spite of a strong feeling that the sender — Detweiller — is a terribly evil man. If so, the contents of the package are hardly in keeping with such notions; it is nothing more than a sickly-looking Common Ivy with a little plastic sign stuck into the earth of its pot. The sign reads:

  HI!

  MY NAME IS ZENITH

  I AM A GIFT TO JOHN

  FROM ROBERTA

  Riddley puts it on a high shelf of his janitor’s room and forgets it.

  For the time being.

  February 25

  Dear Ruth,

  I’ve got a case of the mean reds, so I thought I’d pass some of them on — see the enclosed Xeroxes, concluding with a typically impudent communication from Riddley, he of the coal-black skin and three hundred huge white teeth.

  You’ll notice that Roger kicked my ass good and hard — not much like Roger, and doubly sobering for that very reason. I don’t think one has to be very paranoid to see that he’s talking about the possibility of firing me. If I’d talked this out with him over martinis at Flaherty’s after work, I doubt very much if he would have come down so hard, and of course I had no idea he was waiting on a call from Enders. I undoubtedly deserved the ass-kicking I got — I haven’t really been doing my job — but he has no idea of the scare that letter threw into me when I realized it was Detweiller again. I’m too goddam thin-skinned for my own good, that’s what Roger thinks…but Detweiller is scary for other, less easily grasped reasons. Being the idle that’s gotten fixe in some crazy’s head has got to be one of the most uncomfortable feelings in the world — if I knew Jody Foster, I think I’d give her a jingle and tell her I know exactly how she feels. There’s an almost palpable texture of slime about Detweiller’s communications, and oh boy, oh yeah, I wish I could get him out of my head, but I still have nightmares about those pictures.

  Anyway, I have taken care of matters as well as I can, and no, I have no intention of calling Central Falls. We have an editorial meeting tomorrow. I’ll try to the best of my limited abilities to get back on the beam…except at Zenith House the beam is so narrow it almost doesn’t exist.

  I love you, I miss you, I long for your return. Maybe you being gone is part of the problem. Not to make you feel guilty.

  All my love,

  John

  From the journals of Riddley Walker

  2/23/81

  Like a stone thrown into a large and stagnant pond, the Detweiller affair has caused any number of ripples at my place of employment. I thought that all of them had gone by; yet this afternoon one more rolled past, and who is to say even that one will be the last?

  I have included a Xerox of an exceedingly curious memo I received from Kenton at 2:35 P.M. plus my own reply (the memo came just after Gelb left, in something of a huff; why he should have been in a huff eludes me since today he brought his own dice and I did him the courtesy of not even checking them, but Ah g’iss Ah woan nevuh understand dese white folks). I think I have covered the Detweiller affair to a nicety in these pages, but I should add that it never surprised me in the least that Kenton was the one to bring Detweiller, the rogue comet, into the erratic (and, I fear, degenerating) orbit of Zenith House.

  He is brighter than Sandra Jackson; brighter than that crap-shooting, Ivy League tie-wearing devil William Gelb; far brighter than Herbert Porter (Porter, as previously noted, is not above wandering into Ms. Jackson’s office after she has left for the day and sniffing the seat of her office chair — a strange man, but be it not for me to judge), and the only one of the staff who might be capable of recognizing a commercial book if it came within his purview. Right now he is eaten up with guilt and embarrassment over l’affaire Detweiller, and can see only that he made a rather comic faux pas. He would be incapable of seeing that his decision to even look at the Detweiller book demonstrated that his editorial ears are still open, and still attuned to that sweetest of all tones — the celestial notes of Sweda cash registers in drugstores and book emporia ringing up sales, even if it was pointed out to him.

  Incapable of seeing that it proves he’s still trying.

  The others have given up.

  Anyway, here is this enchanting memo — between its lines I hear a man whose nerve is temporarily shot, a man who might be capable of facing a lion but who now cannot even look
at a mouse; a man who is, in consequence, shrieking “Eeeek! Get rid of it! Get rid of it!” and swatting at it with the handiest broom, which in dis case jus happen t’be Riddley, who dus’ de awfishes an wipe de windows an delivah de mail. Yassuh, Mist Kenton, I git rid of it fo you! I sholy goan get rid of dat hoodoo Solrac woman’s package if she sen one!

  Maybe.

  On the other hand, maybe John Kenton should have to face up to the consequences of his own actions — swat his own mouse. After all, if you don’t swat your own, maybe you never really know what a harmless little thing a mouse is…and is it not possible that Kenton’s useful days as an editor may be over if he cannot stare down such occasional crazies as Carlos “Roberta” Detweiller?

  I shall ponder the matter. I think there is a very good chance no package will come, but I’ll ponder it all the same.

  2/27/81

  Something from the mysterious “Roberta Solrac” actually came today! I didn’t know whether to be amused or disgusted by my own reaction, which was staring, elemental gut-terror followed by an almost insane urge to put the thing down the incinerator, exactly as Kenton’s note had instructed. The physicality of my reaction as soon as my eye fell on the return address and connected the name there with Kenton’s memo was striking. I had a sudden spasm of shudders. Goosebumps raced up my back. I heard a clear, ringing tone in my ears, and I could feel the hair stiffening on my head. This symphony of physiological atavism lasted no more than five seconds and then it subsided — but it left me as shaken as a sudden deep lance of pain in the area of the heart. Floyd would sneer and call it “a nigger reaction,” but it was no such thing. It was a human reaction. Not to the thing itself — the contents of the package were something of an anticlimax after all the sound and fury — but, I am convinced, to the hands which placed the lid on the small white cardboard box in which the plant came; the hands which tied twine around that box and then cut a brown paper shopping bag in which to wrap the box for mailing, the hands which taped and labelled and carried. Detweiller’s hands.

  Am I speaking of telepathy? Yes…and no. It might be fairer to say that I am speaking of a kind of passive psychokinesis. Dogs shy away from people with cancer; they smell it on them. So, at least, claims my dear old Aunt Olympia. In the same way I smelled Detweiller all over that box, and now I understand Kenton’s upset better and have a good deal more sympathy for him. I think Carlos Detweiller must be dangerously insane…but the plant itself is no deadly nightshade or belladonna or Adder Toadstool (although it may have been any or all of those things in Detweiller’s feverish mind, I suppose). It’s only a very small and very tired-looking common ivy in a red clay pot.

  If not for the “nigger reaction” (Floyd Walker) — or the “human reaction” (his brother Riddley) — I might really have dumped the thing…but after that fit of the shakes, it seemed to me I had to go through with opening the package or deem myself less a man. I did so, in spite of any number of gruesome images — high explosive rigged to special pressure-tapes, noxious floods of black widow spiders, a litter of baby copperheads. And there it was, just a small ivy-plant with yellow-edged leaves (four of them) nodding from one tired, sagging stem. The soil itself is waxy brown. It smells swampy and unpleasant.

  There was a little plastic sign stuck in the earth which read:

  HI!

  MY NAME IS ZENITH

  I AM A GIFT TO JOHN

  FROM ROBERTA

  It was that flash of fear which drove me to open the package. Similarly, it’s that same flash which has decided me against making sure that Kenton gets it after all, which would have been easy enough to do (“Dat plant, Mist Kenton? Oh, drat! I g’iss I fo’got whatchoo said. I am de mos f’gitten’est man!”). Let the ripples end; let him forget Detweiller, if that’s what he wants. I’ve put Zenith the Common Ivy on a shelf in my janitorial-cum-mailroom cubicle — a shelf well above Kenton’s eye-level (not that he stops in much anyway, unlike Gelb with his dice fixation). I’ll keep it until it dies, and then I really will dump it down the incinerator chute. That will be the end of Detweiller fo sho.

  Got fifty pages done on the novel over the weekend.

  Gelb now owes me $75.40.

  From The New York Post, page 1, March 4, 1981:

  INSANE GENERAL ESCAPES OAK COVE ASYLUM, KILLS THREE!!

  (Special to the Post) Major General (ret.) Anthony R. Hecksler, known to the commandos and partisans who followed him across France during World War II as “Iron-Guts” Hecksler, escaped from Oak Cove Asylum late last night, stabbing two orderlies and a nurse to death in his bid for freedom.

  General Hecksler was remanded to Oak Cove in the small upstate town of Cutlersville twenty-seven months ago, following his acquittal, by reason of insanity, on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and assault with intent to kill. His victim was Albany bus driver Herman T. Schneur, whom Hecksler claimed in a signed statement to be “one of the twelve North American foremen of the antichrist.”

  The Oak Cove dead have been identified as Norman Ableson, twenty-six; John Piet, forty; and Alicia Penbroke, thirty-four.

  State Police Lieutenant Arthur P. Ford was surprisingly gloomy when asked if he expected to recapture General Hecksler quickly. “We hope for a quick arrest, naturally,” he said, “but this is a man who trained guerilla units in World War II and in Korea, and who was consulted on more than one occasion by General Westmoreland in Viet Nam. He’s seventy-two now, but still strong and amazingly agile, as his escape from Oak Cove shows.”

  Ford indicated he was referring to Hecksler’s probable method of escape — a leap from a second floor window in the Oak Cove Administration Wing to the garden below (see photographs on pages 2, 3, and Center Section).

  Ford went on to caution everyone within the immediate area to be on the lookout for the mad General, whom he described as “extremely clever, extremely dangerous, and extremely paranoid.”

  In a brief press interview, Ellen K. Moors, the doctor in charge of Hecksler’s case, agreed. “He had a great many enemies,” she said, “or so he imagined. His paranoid delusions were extremely complex, but he never lost track of the score. He was, in his way, a model inmate…but he never lost track of the score.”

  A source close to the investigation says Hecksler may have stabbed Ableson, Piet, and Pembroke to death with a pair of barber’s shears. The source told the Post that there was no outcry; all three were stabbed in the throat, commando-style.

  (Related story P. 12)

  From the journals of Riddley Walker

  3/5/81

  What a difference a day makes!

  Yesterday Herb Porter was his usual self — fat, slovenly, smoking a cigar as he stood by the water-cooler, explaining to Kenton and Gelb how the great train of the world would run if he, Herbert Porter, were the engineer. The man is a walking Reader’s Digest of rabbit-punch solutions, a compendium of declarative answers which are delivered amid the effluvium of cigar smoke and exquisitely bad breath. Close the borders and keep out the spies and wetbacks! End abortion on demand! Build more prisons! Upgrade possession of marijuana to a felony once again! Sell biochemical stocks! Buy cable-TV issues!

  He is, in his way — or was, until today — a wonderful man: rounded and perfect in his assurances, plated with prejudices, caprisoned about with cant, and possessed of just enough native wit to hold a job in a place like this, Porter is an evocation of the Great American Median. Even his occasional surreptitious expeditions into Sandra Jackson’s office to sniff the seat of her chair please me — an endearing little loophole in the walking castle of complacency that is Massa Po’tuh.

  Oh, but today! What a different Herbert Porter crept into my janitorial cubbyhole today! The complacent, ruddy face had become pallid and trembling. The blue eyes shifted so regularly from side to side that Porter looked like a man watching a tennis match even when he was trying to stare right at me. His lips were so shiny with spittle that they looked almost varnished. And while he was of course still fat, he
also looked as if he had somehow lost his surface tension — as if the essential Herb Porter had shrunk away from the borders of his skin, leaving that skin to sag in places where it had been previously stretched smooth.

  “He’s out,” Porter whispered.

  “Who’s dat, Mist Po’tuh?” I asked. I was genuinely curious; I could not imagine what mighty sling or engine could have breached such a gap in Castle Herbert. Although I suppose I should have guessed.

  He proffered me the paper — the Post, of course. He’s the only one around here who reads it. Kenton and Wade read the Times, Gelb and Jackson bring the Times but secretly read the Daily News (the hand that rocks the cradle may rule the world, but de han which empty de white folks’ wastebaskets know de secrets of de worl), but the Post was made for fellows such as Herb Porter. He plays Wingo religiously and says if he ever wins a bundle he is going to buy a Winnebago, paint the word WINGOBAGO on the side, and tour the country.

  I took it, opened it, and read the headline.

  “The General’s escaped,” he whispered. His eyes stopped bouncing back and forth for a moment and he stared at me in dismay and utter horror. “It’s as if that damned Detweiller cursed us. The General’s escaped and I rejected his book!”

  “Now, now, Mist Po’tuh,” I said. “Ain’t no need to take on so. Man lak dis prob’ly got fo-five dozen scores to settle befo he git to you.”

  “But I could be number one,” he whispered. “After all, I rejected his goddam book.”

  It was true, and it is ironic how two such fundamentally different men as Kenton and Porter have managed to get themselves into exactly the same situation this late winter — each the target of a rejected author (Detweiller’s rejection a bit more dramatic than that of the Major-General, granted, but that was indubitably Detweiller’s own fault) who just happens to be insane. The difference — I know it, even if no one else does (and I believe Roger Wade might) — is that, while Kenton thought there might actually be the germ of a book in Detweiller’s obsession, Porter knew better concerning the General’s. But Porter is one of those men who has read omnivorously — and vicariously — about World War II, that Pickett’s Charge of western man (western white man) in the 20th century, and he knew who Hecksler was…in a war filled with military celebrities Hecksler was, granted, of the Hollywood Squares type (if you see what I mean), but to Porter he was somebody. So he asked to see the completed manuscript of Twenty Psychic Garden Flowers in spite of the abysmal outline, thereby encouraging a man who was, by the quality and content of his own written words, a palpable psychotic. I felt that the result and his present terror, although unforeseen, were partly his own fault.