half black, half white. It switched lazily back and forth.
It disappeared.
A bird cried somewhere again. Dawn came in breathless silence
then, over the frost-rimmed fields of rural Connecticut.
The farmer's name was Will Reuss.
He was on his way to Placer's Glen to get the inspection sticker
renewed on his farm truck when he saw the late-morning sun
twinkle on something in the ravine beside the road. He pulled over
and saw the Plymouth lying at a drunken, canted angle in the ditch,
barbed wire tangled in its grille like a snarl of steel knitting.
He worked his way down and then sucked in his breath sharply.
'Holy moley,' he muttered to the bright November day. There was
a guy sitting bolt upright behind the wheel, eyes open and glaring
emptily into eternity. The Roper organization was never going to
include him in its presidential poll again. His face was smeared
with blood. He was still wearing his seat belt.
The driver's door had been crimped shut, but Reuss managed to get
it open by yanking with both hands. He leaned in and unstrapped
the seat belt, planning to check for ID. He was reaching for the
coat when he noticed that the dead guy's shirt was rippling, just
above the belt buckle. Rippling ... and bulging. Splotches of blood
began to bloom there like sinister roses.
'What the Christ?' He reached out, grasped the dead man's shirt,
and pulled it up.
Will Reuss looked - and screamed.
Above Halston's navel, a ragged hole had been clawed in his flesh.
Looking out was the gore-streaked black-and-white face of a cat,
its eyes huge and glaring.
Reuss staggered back, shrieking, hands clapped to his face. A score
of crows took cawing wing from a nearby field.
The cat forced its body out and stretched in obscene languor.
Then it leaped out the open window. Reuss caught sight of it
moving through the high dead grass and then it was gone.
It seemed to be in a hurry, he later told a reporter from the local
paper.
As if it had unfinished business.
The Dark Man
Stephen King
Published in
'Ubris', 1969 and later in Moth, 1970.
I have stridden the fuming way
of sun-hammered tracks and
smashed cinders;
I have ridden rails
and bumed sterno in the
gantry silence of hob jungles:
I am a dark man.
I have ridden rails
and passed the smuggery
of desperate houses with counterfeit chimneys
