The Dragons of the Night Read online

  I sit by his bed and wait for him to wake up. He tells me he has dreamt of a schoolgirl covered in blood who speaks to him and tells him that everything will be okay. I picture Carrie’s unstable mother, Margaret, and wonder what Dylan thinks of his old man reading horror books to him in between extensive bouts of chemotherapy. I haven’t been much of a father to him; always too busy, too immersed in unimportant things. We’ve never been particularly close, Dylan and I, which is why the reading has felt so good. It’s something between him and me; a last embrace; a connection. It has taken a scorned girl with a mother complex to bring us together; how crazy is that? It’s funny, I suppose, how these things happen. It makes me realise how twisted the world can be. It finds a way to make even the most poignant situation seem absurd.

  After I place the book on his bedside cabinet, Dylan asks me how old I was when I first read it. I tell him I was twelve. He throws back his head and laughs and I marvel at the sight. He asks me what Grandma said when she found out. I tell him that she ripped up the book, threw it on the fire, and banned me from reading for a week. He laughs again and I feel a profound warmth inside. This isn’t what happened, though. My mother never found out that I had read Carrie at such a young age, but I don’t want to tell Dylan this. It simply isn’t the right story; the moment demands more. I make up a lie to my dying son and have never felt so good about it. Sometimes, as I’m sure you’re well aware, the truth is nothing but a crock of shit.

  October 15, 2012 Dear S.K., In between visits to the hospital I trawl through my book collection, looking over old stories you’ve written. I pick out extracts from novels that have made a lasting impression on me: the woman in room 217; Frank Dodd, in his black raincoat, propped on the lowered seat of the toilet; the appalling violence of Tom by-God Rogan. I realise that the last forty years of my life have been measured in an unwavering parade of dreamt-up horrors. My memories are littered with them. I even find myself remembering key events according to which of your books I was reading at the time. How demented is that?

  Dylan and I are currently reading The Shining. My God, it’s good. I’d forgotten just how claustrophobic that novel is. Dylan loves the opening line; he says it tells us so much about Jack Torrance’s character before we’ve even read beyond the first sentence. I forget sometimes how smart Dylan can be. He gets that from his mother. He sees things I wouldn’t even notice. Not like Danny, of course! That would be a horror too far…

  As we delve further into the story I’m increasingly aware that Dylan and I are reading a tale about a troubled father and his damaged son. It makes me feel uncomfortable, and I wonder if Dylan is feeling the same way. The similarity is unsettling. The novel feels too much like real life: fathers and sons, love and loss, life and death. It adds to the overall effect; makes the damn book feel like a dream that I’d almost forgot.

  I tell Dylan that The Shining has been adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick and ask him if he’d like to watch it. I explain that you hate it because it isn’t particularly faithful to the book. Dylan shrugs and says that’s good enough for him. His logic seems sound: if the creator says the film’s a lost cause, then it probably is, he reasons. It is a watershed moment and it brings a smile to my face; suddenly the book is preferable to the movie. Hallelujah! I honestly never thought I’d live to see the day…

  It really is quite something. We find ourselves reading more than we ever intended, drawn into the wide, empty corridors of the Overlook Hotel. The nurses occasionally pop into Dylan’s room and playfully chastise us, advising Dylan to get more rest and telling me I should know better. But they leave the room, close the door, and allow us to continue, even when we’ve drawn the blinds and blocked out the sun so that we can re-join the spiralling narrative of Danny, Wendy, and Jack.

  It’s at night when the reading experience is really heightened, though, especially with a book like The Shining. Dylan does his best with the slop the hospital serves up for dinner, and then buries himself underneath the covers, his large brown eyes blinking expectantly. One of the nurses has already been in and turned on the lamp for us, all of them by this stage well aware of our evening routine. I pick up my treasured copy of the book, a battered New English Library paperback from 1978, and turn to the bookmarked page. I have another copy at home, the beautiful Doubleday hardback edition from 1977 bearing the R49 date code in the footer of page 447, but I can barely bring myself to hold the bloody thing in my hands. Some things are just too valuable to touch. I paid £130 for it many years ago; today it’s probably worth about twenty times that.

  We’ve just reached one of my favourite parts of the book, the scene in which Jack is repairing the roof of the Overlook and discovers the wasps’ nest lodged in the eaves. I ask Dylan why this scene might be important, why you might have included it, and he looks at the ceiling for a moment, thinking. He tells me that the Overlook is really just a giant wasps’ nest and I nod my head, not having considered this before. He asks me what I think it might represent. I stare at him and feel a crushing sorrow as his baldhead peers from beneath the sheets. I pause for a moment, searching for the right words, but I have had years to consider this story, these characters, this book. I think I know exactly what you were driving at with this particular image; isn’t it obvious? The dormant nest, swarming with sluggish wasps, is the ideal symbol for the battle raging inside Jack Torrance’s head. I explain this to Dylan and he looks at me as though a part of me he’s only ever glimpsed before suddenly makes perfect sense.

  I lower my head and quietly begin to read; but the wasps remind me of Watson, the caretaker of the Overlook, and his observation that ‘a man can’t help his nature‘. This is what The Shining is really about, Mr King, isn’t it? This is what I want to tell Dylan as he sits listening to me read: how a man can never turn his back on what he is…

  October 28, 2012 Dear S.K., As I sit writing these letters, I vaguely wonder what on earth you must be making of them, if indeed they even reach you at all. Dylan keeps insisting I post them to you, and refuses to accept what he calls my lame excuses that I don’t know your postal address. So I slip each of them in an envelope, mark them with your name, and despatch them to Bangor, Maine. My guess is that the post office there knows exactly who you are and how to find you; I can’t be the first idiot who’s tried to contact you, now can I? And if the letters get lost along the way no real harm will have been done. Dylan need never know. It won’t spoil what’s happening between us, the gentle intimacy that is born when we dip between the pages of your books. I keep telling him: the stories and our memory of them will never change. They go on forever. It occurs to me that perhaps we were both aware of this right from the beginning; maybe this is why the process of reading your novels has assumed such a fierce significance in our lives.

  I’ve sent a picture this time, so that you can see what Dylan looks like. He’s a lot thinner now and the chemotherapy has left him bald. I tell him he looks like a badass; I tell him he looks like a young Michael Chiklis, which makes him smile. I despise myself for lying; he doesn’t look like Michael Chiklis. He looks like a sick kid, struggling to understand why his body is betraying him, why he’s gone from living to dying in a matter of months.

  Dylan. Named after another hero of mine. A man who knows what the tune is and always seems to find the right key. God, I could listen to that man’s music for hours. Sometimes I get home from the hospital late at night and put my vinyl copy of Blood on the Tracks on the turntable. I listen to Bob sing about an idiot wind, blowing like a circle around his skull, and find myself weeping. Once I start, I’m unable to stop, and the track goes on, seemingly forever, telling me it’s a wonder that I still know how to breathe.

  The next day I tell Dylan how, once a year, you join forces with other famous writers and play rhythm guitar for a garage band by the name of The Rock Bottom Remainders. He thinks I’m joking and calls me on it, makes me download a video of you playing on YouTube. He listens to you singing Dee Clark’s Hey Little G
irl at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles and almost pisses himself. It gets so bad I have to hand him a cardboard urine container, which I encourage him to lower beneath the sheets, just in case. The look on Dylan’s face is a delight, and I’ll never forget it: part horror, part confusion, part disbelief. It is a beautiful moment. When he recovers, Dylan shakes his head and tells me you have balls of steel. He also tells me it’s a good job you know how to write.

  I turn off his laptop and catch his eye. We exchange a smile. It suddenly occurs to me that there are three of us in this cool, impersonal room: me and Dylan, broken by the effects of the cancer, and you standing somewhere in between, taking us by the hand, drawing us towards the bright centre, where our fingers meet in the afternoon light.

  November 3, 2012 Dear S.K., Dylan has taken it upon himself to surf the web and has conducted pretty extensive research on all your novels. He tells me that the next book he wants to read is Pet Sematary. It sounds terrifying, he says. Have I read it? Of course I have, I tell him. But it might not be the best book to choose right now. There are plenty of others just as good.

  My face must have betrayed my concern because he looks at me and frowns. Is there a problem? I trawl through my memory of the book and remember Gage, the Orinco truck on Route 15, Victor Pascow in his red shorts, and Jud Crandall saying: The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis. A man grows what he can …and tends it.

  I explain to Dylan that it’s a pretty tough book to read, even for a hardened horror nut like me. I tell him about the difficult circumstances of the novel’s birth, how you’d struggled to complete it and then vowed never to publish it, calling it ‘a nasty book‘. I even tell him how your wife had finished reading it in tears, hoping that such an obvious emotional discharge might discourage Dylan from selecting it. But the more I disclose about how the damn thing came to be written, the greater his desire to read the book.

  This evening I lift my copy of Pet Sematary from its place on the bookshelf and spend half an hour rifling through it. Just doing this gives me a bitter frisson of dread; the book is as dark and disturbing as anything I’ve ever read. I keep returning to the phrase you use at the end of the headnote: Death is a mystery and burial is a secret. It’s like a sharp prod to the heart, a cruel reminder of what will be waiting for me one day when I walk through those hospital doors. What I failed to articulate to Dylan is that this book isn’t about telekinetic kids or serial killers or rabid dogs. It’s about a father’s guilt over the death of his son. I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with something like that, not yet. (Not ever, the father in me confides quietly. Please God, not ever.)

  I run my finger through the pages of the book and remember Zelda Goldman, dying horribly of spinal meningitis in her room, screaming for Rachel to save her because ‘Oz the Gweat and Tewwible‘ has finally come to take her away. I stroke the cover of the book, knowing that if Dylan and I start to read, Zelda will be crouched between the pages, waiting for us; I know what she looks like because you’ve already told me: ‘blue and twisted, her black tongue puffing out through her lips … just this foul, hateful screaming thing in the back bedroom‘. I try and imagine reading this scene to Dylan, where Rachel recounts how difficult it’s been watching Zelda’s illness degenerate day by painful day; I remember Rachel explaining to Louis how she had wanted Zelda to die, how she had prayed for the exhausting horror of it all to end. She refers to Zelda as ‘our dirty secret‘, and I imagine Dylan’s face as I read these words aloud, hoping he cannot see the deep pool of shame in my eyes.

  Sometimes dead is better.

  November 7, 2012 Dear S.K., I have finally persuaded Dylan to leave Pet Sematary for another day. Instead we are reading Misery; we are three quarters of the way through the book. Dylan lies in bed, listening to me read, practically hanging on my every word, his body hunched forward, his face glistening with sweat. Every time I glance up it is like I’m staring at Paul Sheldon, and I smile, wondering if my son has the same survival instinct, the same burning desire to heal and escape the terrifying confines of his bed. I can’t resist the urge to occasionally look up at the door, half-expecting Annie Wilkes to walk into the room, wielding that damn axe that she’d used to hobble her captive, her big arms swinging from side to side. I remember your description of her face as ‘slack and unplugged‘ and, like so much of your best work, the image has stayed with me. Just thinking of Annie Wilkes fills me with a kind of sustained dread; I explain to Dylan that she is the perfect creation, her madness effortlessly tipping towards the mundane. She is just an ordinary monster, filled to the brim, as Paul Sheldon discovers, with the bitterness of unrequited love.

  Dylan loves the author photo on the back of the book, by the way. He says you look like a university professor gone bad. I tell him I don’t think you’ll appreciate hearing that, but he shrugs and reminds me that you’re a horror writer. He’ll love it, he says. Every novelist worth his salt dreams of looking a little deranged. I laugh at this and gently clip him round the ear. It’s the first time I’ve touched my own son for a long time. His skin feels soft and warm. I try and memorise the sensation; find myself trying to decode the faint vibration that passes through my fingers so that I can relive the moment when the world sees fit to move us apart.

  Talking about Misery somehow brings the two of us even closer together. Dylan is fascinated by the level of tension and suspense in the book, and devotes hours to poring through the pages we’ve already read, trying to figure out how the heart of the novel is constructed, how you keep a reader like him quite literally on the edge of his bed. He tells me that nearly all of the novel so far has been set in a single room of Annie Wilkes’s farmhouse. He marvels at how you sustain the energy and the drama for over three hundred pages when one of your main characters is unable to walk. I explain to him that it is an exercise in narrative control, the work of a master; never have Dylan and I felt more terrified sharing a reading experience, especially with Dylan himself now almost permanently bedridden. I can see in his eyes an agonising level of familiarity and understanding as Paul Sheldon tries to come to terms with his new situation. There is a level of intimacy between them that I’ll never be able to fully comprehend.

  Dylan has taken to teasing me and has started calling me your number-one fan. Cheeky sod. We spend a lot of time trying to imagine what it must be like being you. Wonderful, we decide; at least, most of the time. We discuss celebrity and fame. Dylan wonders how terrifying it must be to have strangers demanding your attention all the time, feeling like you’re their best friend, simply because of the power invested in your work. We talk about the weirdoes, the whackadoos, the nutjobs who probably stalk you for weeks on end. He shows me a YouTube video of people filming your house and I start to feel sick. I think of your wife, your kids; how difficult it must have been for them growing up, watching daddy trying to share out the love.

  Dylan asks me to stop sending the letters, and I nod my head, the lie easier for being one of many that I allow myself each day. He says he’s afraid they might make us look like just another pair of soulless cranks. Whether this is true or not, it’s too late to stop; the letters are a part of the process. I don’t care if you read them; I don’t care if anyone reads them. I suddenly realise that when I sit here, I’m no different to Paul Sheldon, trapped in his room with the old Royal typewriter, considering Misery. I have no choice but to write. It becomes clearer the more I think about it, and I find myself picturing my beautiful son every time my hands flutter across the keyboard. This is where the healing begins: in the writing.

  November 25, 2012 Dear S.K., Dylan is fading fast. I might as well get it out there; it’s the damn truth. I try my best to reassure him, but each night I come away from the hospital feeling weaker than when I went in. He is so thin it makes my eyes water just to look at him; his smile is full of gentle resignation.

  Doctor Pollard visits us at least once a day. He tells Dylan awful jokes and fills the room with booming laughter. I find myself admiring him, not
just for his medical expertise, which is acute, but for his warmth, his humanity. He has a generosity of spirit that both Dylan and I find inspiring.

  Our new story is ‘The Body’, a tale that I must have read at least half a dozen times since it was first published in Different Seasons. It might well be my favourite story of yours, but it’s also the most important; the most essential. Dylan is initially a little suspicious of its short length, but I convince him that this is never something he should be concerned about. In the hands of a great writer the shortest tale can often deliver the greatest emotional punch.

  I explain to Dylan in advance that ‘The Body’ is perhaps the most auto-biographical of your stories and he nods his head, anticipating something special. He can see the gleam of excitement in my eyes; I sense he wants to discover the magic for himself.