If that Little spark is there, someone will probably see it sooner
orlater, gleaming faintly in the dark. And, if you tend the spark
nestled in the kindling, it really can grow into a large, blazing fire.
It happened to me, and it started here.
I remember getting the idea for the story, and it just came as the
ideas come now - casually, with no flourish of trumpets. I was
walking down a dirt road to see a friend, and for no reason at all I
began to wonder what it would be like to stand in a room whose
floor was a mirror. The image was so intriguing that writing the
story became a necessity. It wasn't written for money; it was
written so I could see better. Of course I did not see it as well as I
had hoped; there is still that shortfall between what I hope I will
accomplish and what I actually manage. Still, I came away from it
with two valuable things: a salable story after five years of
rejection slips, and a bit of experience. So here it is, and as that
fellow Griner says in Dickey's novel, it ain't really as bad as I
thought.
- Stephen King
Wharton moved slowly up the wide steps, hat in hand, craning his
neck to get a better look at the Victorian monstrosity that his sister
had died in. It wasn't a house at all, he reflected, but a mausoleum -
a huge, sprawling mausoleum. It seemed to grow out of the top of
the hill like an outsized, perverted toadstool, all gambrels and
gables and jutting, blank-windowed cupolas. A brass weather-vane
surmounted the eighty degree slant of shake-shingled roof, the
tarnished effigy of a leering little boy with one hand shading eyes
Wharton was just as glad he could not see.
Then he was on the porch, and the house as a whole was cut off
from him. He twisted the old-fashioned bell, and listened to it echo
hollowly through the dim recesses within. There was a rose-tinted
fanlight over the door, and Wharton could barely make out the date
1770 chiseled into the glass. Tomb is right, he thought.
The door suddenly swung open. 'Yes, sir?' The housekeeper
stared out at him. She was old, hideously old. Her face hung like
limp dough on her skull, and the hand on the door above the chain
was grotesquely twisted by arthritis.
'I've come to see Anthony Reynard,' Wharton said. He fancied he
could even smell the sweetish odor of decay emanating from the
rumpled silk of the shapeless black dress she wore.
'Mr Reynard isn't seein' anyone. He's mournin'.'
'He'll see me,' Wharton said. 'I'm Charles Wharton. Janine's
brother.'
'Oh.' Her eyes widened a little, and the loose bow of her mouth
worked around the empty ridges of her gums. 'Just a minute.' She
disappeared, leaving the door ajar.
Wharton stared into the dim mahogany shadows, making out high-
backed easy chairs, horse-hair upholstered divans, tall narrow-
shelved bookcases, curlicued, floridly carven wainscoting.
Janine, he thought. Janine, Janine, Janine. How could you live
here? How in hell could you stand it?
