THE CURSED EXPEDITION
“Well,” said Jimmy Keller, looking across to the gantry to where the rocket rested in the middle of the desert. A lonely wind blew across the desert, and Hugh Bullford said, “Yeah. It’s about time to leave for Venus. Why? Why do we want to go to Venus?”
“I don’t know,” Keller said. “I just don’t know.”
The rocket ship touched down on Venus. Bullford checked the air and said in amazed tones, “Why, it’s good old type Earth air! Perfectly breathable.”
They went out, and it was Keller’s turn for amazement. “Why, it’s just like spring on earth! Everything's lush and green and beautiful. Why...
it's Paradise!”
They ran out. The fruits were exotic and delicious, the temperature perfect. When night fell, they slept outside.
“I’m going to call it the Garden of Eden,” said Keller enthusiastically.
Bullford stared into the fire. “I don’t like this place, Jimmy. It feels all wrong. There’s something...evil about it.”
“You’re space happy.” Keller scoffed. "Sleep it off."
The next morning James Keller was dead.
There was a look of horror on his face that Bullford never hoped to see again.
After the burial, Bullford called Earth. He got no reply. The radio was dead. Bullford took it apart and put it together. There was nothing wrong with it, but the fact remained: it didn’t work.
Bullford’s worry doubled itself. He ran outside. The landscape was the same pleasant and happy. But Bullford could see the evil in it.
“You killed him!” he cried. “I know it!”
Suddenly the ground opened up and it slithered toward him. In near panic, he ran back to the ship. But not before he got a piece of soil.
He analyzed the soil and then panic took him. Venus was alive.
Suddenly the space ship tilted and went over. Bullford screamed. But the soil closed over it and almost seemed to lick its lips.
Then it reset itself, waiting for the next victim...
10
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FOG
As Pete Jacobs stepped out, the fog immediately swallowed up his house and he could see nothing but the white blanket all around him. It gave him the weird feeling of being the last man in the world.
Suddenly Pete felt dizzy. His stomach did a flip-flop. He felt like a person in a falling elevator. Then it passed and he walked on. The fog began to clear and Pete’s eyes opened wide with fright, awe and wonder.
He was in the middle of the city.
But the nearest city was forty miles away!
But what a city! Pete had never seen anything like it.
Graceful buildings with high spires seemed to reach to the sky. People walked along on moving conveyer belts.
The cornerstone on a skyscraper read April, 17, 2007. Pete had walked into the future. But how?
Suddenly Pete was frightened. Horribly, terribly, frightened.
He didn’t belong here. He couldn’t stay. He ran after the receding fog.
A policeman in a strange uniform called angrily. Strange cars that rode six inches or so off the ground narrowly missed hitting him. But Pete succeeded. He ran back into the fog and soon everything was blanked out.
Then the feeling came again. That weird feeling of falling then the fog began to clear.
It looked like home
Suddenly there was an earsplitting screech. He turned to see a huge prehistoric brontosaurus lumbering toward him. The desire to kill was in his small beady eyes.
Terrified, he ran into the fog again
The next time the fog closes in on you and you hear hurried footsteps running through the whiteness…call out.
That would be Pete Jacobs, trying to find his side of the Fog Help the poor guy.
11
NEVER LOOK BEHIND YOU
George Jacobs was closing his office, when an old woman felt free to walk right in. Hardly anyone walked through his door these days. The people hated him. For fifteen years he’d picked the people’s pockets clean of money. No one had ever been able to hook him on a charge.
But back to our little story. The old woman that came in had an ugly scar on her left cheek. Her clothes were mostly filthy rags and other crude material. Jacobs was counting his money.
“There! Fifty-thousand, nine hundred and seventy-three dollars and sixty-two cents.”
Jacobs always liked to be precise.
“Indeed a lot of money,” she spoke up. “Too bad you won’t be able to spend it.” Jacobs turned around.
“Why – who are you?” he asked in half surprise. “What right have you to spy on me?”
The woman didn’t answer. She held up her bony hand. There was a flash of fire on his throat – and a scream. Then, with a final gurgle, George Jacobs died.
“I wonder what – or who – could have killed him?” said a young man.
“I’m glad he’s gone,” said another. That one was lucky.
He didn’t look behind him.
12
IN A HALF-WORLD OF TERROR
King's first published story; he was 18 when this thriller appeared in a 1965
issue of Comics Review as ‘I Was a Teenage Graverobber’. It was published in
Stories of Suspense the following year under the present title.
Chapter One
It was like a nightmare. Like some unreal dream that you wake up from the next morning. Only this nightmare was happening. Ahead of me I could see Rankin's flashlight; a large yellow eye in the sultry summer darkness. I tripped over a gravestone and almost went sprawling.
Rankin whirled on me with a hissed oath.
"Do you want to wake up the caretaker, you fool?"
I muttered a reply and we crept forward. Finally, Rankin stopped and shone the flashlight's beam on a freshly chiseled gravestone.
On it, it read:
DANIEL WHEATHERBY
1899-1962
He has joined his beloved wife in a better land.
I felt a shovel thrust into my hands and suddenly I was sure that I couldn't go through with it. But I remembered the bursar shaking his head and saying, "I'm afraid we can't give you any more time, Dan.
You'll have to leave today. If I could help in any way, I would, believe me..."
I dug into the still soft earth and lifted it over my shoulder. Perhaps fifteen minutes later my shovel came in contact with wood. The two of us quickly excavated the hole until the coffin stood revealed under Rankin's flashlight. We jumped down and heaved the coffin up.
Numbed, I watched Rankin swing the spade at the locks and seals. After a few blows it gave and we lifted the lid. The body of Daniel Wheatherby looked up at us with glazed eyes. I felt horror gently wash over me. I had always thought that the eyes closed when one died.
"Don't just stand there," Rankin whispered, "it's almost four. We've got to get out of here!"
We wrapped the body in a sheet and lowered the coffin back into the earth. We shoveled rapidly and carefully replaced the sod. The dirt we had missed was scattered. By the time we picked up the white-sheeted 13
body, the first traces of dawn were beginning to lighten the sky in the east. We went through the hedge that skirted the cemetery and entered the woods that fronted it on the west. Rankin expertly picked his way through it for a quarter of a mile until we came to the car, parked where we had left it on an overgrown and unused wagon track that had once been a road. The body was put into the trunk. Shortly thereafter, we joined the stream of commuters hurrying for the 6.00 train. I looked at my hands as if I had never seen them before. The dirt under my fingernails had been piled up on top of a man's final resting place not twenty-four hours ago. It felt unclean.
Rankin's attention was directed entirely on his driving. I looked at him and realized that he didn't mind the repulsive act that we had just performed. To him it was just another job. We turned off the main road and began to climb the twisting, narrow dirt road. And then we came out into the open and I could see it, the huge rambling Victorian mansion that sat on the summit of the steep grade. Rankin drove around back and wordlessly up to the steep rock face of a bluff that rose another forty feet upward, slightly to the right of the house.