Paladin's blue one showed James Madison.
Stephen King
The Crate
First appeared in:
Gallery magazine 1979
Available in comic book form in:
Creepshow
Dexter Stanley was scared. More; he felt as if that central axle that
binds us to the state we call sanity were under a greater strain than
it had ever been under before. As he pulled up beside Henry
Northrup's house on North Campus Avenue that August night, he
felt that if he didn't talk to someone, he really, would go crazy.
There was no one to talk to but Henry Northrup. Dex Stanley was
the head of the zoology department, and once might have been
university president if he had been better at academic politics. His
wife had died twenty years before, and they had been childless.
What remained of his own family was all west of the Rockies. He
was not good at making friends.
Northrup was an exception to that. In some ways, they were two of
a kind; both had been disappointed in the mostly meaningless, but
always vicious, game of university politics. Three years before,
Northrup had made his run at the vacant English department
chairmanship. He had lost, and one of the reasons had undoubtedly
been his wife, Wilma, an abrasive and unpleasant woman. At the
few cocktail parties Dex had attended where English people and
zoology people could logically mix, it seemed he could always
recall the harsh mule-bray of her voice, telling some new faculty
wife to 'call me Billie, dear everyone does!'
Dex made his way across the lawn to Northrup's door at a
stumbling run. It was Thursday, and Northrup's unpleasant spouse
took two classes on Thursday nights. Consequently, it was Dex and
Henry's chess night. The two men had been playing chess together
for the last eight years.
Dex rang the bell beside the door of his friend's house; leaned on
it. The door opened at ast and Northrup was there.
'Dex,' he said. I didn't expect you for another--'
Dex pushed in past him. 'Wilma,' he said. 'Is she here?'
'No, she left fifteen minutes ago. I was just making myself some
chow. Dex, you look awful.'
They had walked under the hall light, and it illuminated the cheesy
pallor of Dex's face and seemed to outline wrinkles as deep and
dark as fissures in the earth. Dex was sixty-one, but on the hot
August night, he looked more like ninety.
'I ought to.' Dex wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
'Well, what is it?'
'I'm afraid I'm going crazy, Henry. Or that I've already gone.'
'You want something to eat? Wilma left cold ham.'
'I'd rather have a drink. A big one.'
'All right.'
'Two men dead, Henry,' Dex said abruptly. 'And I could be
