Everything's Eventual

STEPHEN

KING

Everything's

Eventual

1 4 D A R K T A L E S

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales

or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2002 by Stephen King

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Set in Garamond No. 3

ISBN 0-7432-3704-8

The following selections, some in different form, were previously published: 'Autopsy Room Four' in Robert Bloch's Psychos; 'The Man in the Black Suit' in The New Yorker and Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 1995; 'All That You Love Will Be Carried Away' and 'The Death of Jack Hamilton' in The New Yorker; 'In the Deathroom' on Blood and Smoke (audio book); 'The Little Sisters of Eluria' in Legends; 'Everything's Eventual' in Fantasy & Science Fiction and on F13 (CD-ROM); 'L.T.'s Theory of Pets' in The Best of the Best 1998; 'The Road Virus Heads North' in 999; 'Lunch at the Gotham Cafe' in Dark Love, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 1996 and on Blood and Smoke (audio book); 'That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French' in The New Yorker; '1408' on Blood and Smoke (audio book); 'Riding the Bullet' as a Scribner e-book; and 'Luckey Quarter' in USA Weekend.

This is for Shane Leonard

Contents

What I did was take all the spades out of a deck of cards plus a joker. Ace to King = 1–13. Joker = 14. I shuffled the cards and dealt them. The order in which they came out of the deck became the order of the stories, based on their position in the list my publisher sent me. And it actually created a very nice balance between the literary stories and the all-out screamers. I also added an explanatory note before or after each story, depending on which seemed the more fitting position. Next collection: selected by Tarot.

Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art     11

Autopsy Room Four     19

The Man in the Black Suit     45

All That You Love Will Be Carried Away     71

The Death of Jack Hamilton     87

In the Deathroom     119

The Little Sisters of Eluria     145

Everything's Eventual     211

L.T.'s Theory of Pets     265

The Road Virus Heads North     287

Lunch at the Gotham Cafe     313

That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French     347

1408 365

Riding the Bullet 405

Luckey Quarter 447

Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art

I've written more than once about the joy of writing and see no need to reheat that particular skillet of hash at this late date, but here's a confession: I also take an amateur's slightly crazed pleasure in the business side of what I do. I like to goof widdit, do a little media cross-pollination and envelope-pushing. I've tried doing visual novels (Storm of the Century, Rose Red), serial novels (The Green Mile), and serial novels on the Internet (The Plant). It's not about making more money or even precisely about creating new markets; it's about trying to see the act, art, and craft of writing in different ways, thereby refreshing the process and keeping the resulting artifacts—the stories, in other words—as bright as possible.

   I started to write 'keeping [the stories] new' in the line above, then deleted the phrase in the interest of honesty. I mean, come on here, ladies and gentlemen, whom can I possibly kid at this late date, except maybe myself? I sold my first story when I was twenty-one and a junior in college. I'm now fifty-four, and have run a lot of language through the 2.2-pound organic computer/word processor I hang my Red Sox cap on. The act of writing stories hasn't been new for me in a long time, but that doesn't mean it's lost its fascination. If I don't find ways of keeping it fresh and interesting, though, it'll get old and tired in a hurry. I don't want that to happen, because I don't want to cheat the people who read my stuff (that would be you, dear Constant Reader), and I don't want to cheat myself, either. We're in it together, after all. This is a date we're on. We should have fun. We should dance.

   So, keeping that in mind, here's yet another story. My wife and I own these two radio stations, okay? WZON- AM, which is sports radio, and WKIT-FM, which is classic rock ('The Rock of Bangor,' we say). Radio is a tough business these days, especially in a market like Bangor, where there are too many stations and not enough