Stephen King was twenty minutes late for his part-time job as the night clerk at the Motel 6 off I-93 in New Salem, New Hampshire. He spent the night at the La Quinta down the road, and he miscalculated how long it would take to crawl around the parking lots and access roads, in Christine, his ketchup-red '69 Pontiac Beaumont convertible. He knew Christine might give him away, not exactly a night clerk's kind of ride, but he just couldn't help himself. He wasn't buying a junker for this job, and maybe Lou, the general manager, wasn't so observant.
With his Adler Universal portable typewriter under his arm, and a ream of paper in his shoulder bag, Stephen King walked into the Motel 6 lobby and stepped behind the desk to join Lou for his first night on the job. The Adler required no power and as long as he had ribbon and paper Stephen King was known to type and type-in a spooky wooded grove, in an empty lighthouse, a lifer's jail cell, a Confederate cemetery-all the haunted places a horror writer might find inspiration. He learned to write banging out pages on a manual typewriter like this and he left the laptop at home. Writing was harder in those days and he wanted the feeling back, when Stephen King was the rejected writer, fueled by uncertainty and desperate hope, and that's what he's after at least as much as the on-the-job research.
When he drove the two-and-a-half hours to answer the help wanted ad in person, he noted the depressing ambience of New Salem: the rust-tinged water tower, the way the kids would skateboard in abandoned lots with grass grown up in the cracks, and not so much the smallness of the place as the way it could all disappear and probably no one would care. The first time he walked through the glass double door into the low-ceilinged white-walled unadorned lobby, under the flicker of the buzzing fluorescent lights, Stephen King could intuit the presence of ghosts: the bleach-blonde runaway and her boyfriend gone missing; the too-poor-to-retire hobbled maid who worked well into advanced old age and worked the last double-shift, right up to her death; the divorced-travelling-salesman-suicide, in the closet with his leather belt; the overdosed-on-Xanax-Vodka-and-Hydrocodone-will-never-get-over-her-first-bad-boyfriend suicide; the overweight regional district McDonald's manager (white / heart attack); and the overweight regional district Wendy's manager (black / stroke). There was inspiration in the sad old ceilings of cheap rooms, temporary rest stops in the lives of these desperate souls. Except this book had to be different. A little shorter and somehow more true. Stephen King was getting on. And when he was hit by that van in '99, it gave him a better view of his mortality. He thought a lot about his legacy. He would rework the genre and this book had to count.
Stephen King also got away from the wife and kids for this job. One of his children has started writing and he stands outside the home office to ask for pointers. The kid is eleven. He wears a silk smoking jacket and waves an empty pipe. He ambushes Stephen King on his way to the bathroom to ask about periods and commas. Generally speaking, which is better? He asks about the cops who show up in his Dad's work just in the nick of time-and how, also a tendency of his Dad's plots, these cops often join the pile of bodies. Is this good technique, his son wants to know.
"Worked for Shakespeare," Stephen King has said, but the kid doesn't know Shakespeare from shinola, and the boy, in his eleven-year-old wisdom, thinks maybe his dad, Stephen King, is smug. Meanwhile, Stephen King becomes convinced he needs to spend time away from the mansion.
The fictional version of Lou—the one who was taking shape in Stephen King's imagination for the new novel—he had been the general manager of the Pizza Palace in town before it was lost to a fire, and he's been the general manager at the haunted Motel 6 ever since. There were no ghosts in the Pizza Palace, but there will be if anyone rebuilds. Despite the prime location, New Salem kind of knows this, so the lot has been left vacant and the high school kid who died, who also caused the fire, the oven tender, the bricks-for-brains kid who happened to love fireworks—he wanders the collapsed charred remains of the Pizza Palace with a Metallica song on replay in his spirit-consciousness. This was the phrase Stephen King was batting about, because it wouldn't make sense for a ghost to have a song stuck in his head. There was no head; they buried it in the sanctified grounds of the Lutheran cemetery, also out by I-93, but on the Parson's Creek side. Lou cried about the pizza-pyro and also hated him. Lou had been kind to the kid's parents and he shook his head as soon as he was away from them. Who sticks a bag of bottle rockets and roman candles into a pizza oven? And who trusts a kid like that? Who hires him?
Lou greeted Stephen King with a knowing nod and said, "Might not seem like it, but this is a job."
Stephen King blushed, because he had been that kid growing up, always late. As an adult taken serious by the rest of the world, he tried not to be. Then Stephen King remembered who he was. He didn't really depend on Lou for anything other than lines like that, though he worried maybe Lou was coming off as a bit of a cliché, and that his study of the man would turn into time wasted.
There were slim pickings in New Salem, that's for sure, so Stephen King was hired the moment Lou saw him, with his short hair accented gray, his outdated spectacles, and his clean sneakers, both of them tied. Lou told himself he'd never hire another pyro, and he could tell by looking, that whatever else Stephen King might be, he was at least not one of those.
Of course, Lou didn't recognize that this was Stephen King. He didn't know the lanky guy he'd spend the evening training on the credit card machine and the reservations computer could buy all the Motel 6s in New Hampshire, if he wants, or just as many whatever elses, however more glamorous, because he can. When Lou gave him the job application, Stephen King wrote down Jack. And because Lou watched him fill out the job app, and no one but no one pauses to try to think of their own last name, Stephen King wrote the first thing that came to mind, and it was easy and obvious and it made Lou tilt his head and look him over sideways, because he had written Nicholson.
Stephen King had met Jack Nicholson. Considered himself friends with Jack Nicholson. For several years he was in the habit of shipping outrageous birthday gifts to Jack Nicholson: an ivory putter, a pound of Laotian hash, a live spider monkey, a self-winding watch powered entirely by the natural motion of the wearer. Okay, some of these gifts he saw in the Sky Mall catalog back when he was flying more, but the pound of hash and the monkey were certainly outrageous. Because what do you get the man who has everything? And when Stephen King realized people probably felt the same way about him, he quit doing it, because he was pretty sure Jack Nicholson could out-outrageous him, and that's where this was headed if he kept it up. But as he filled out the job application in front of Lou, Stephen King was thinking of his first haunted hotel story, the one everybody loved, and so he saw himself as, and also happened to write down, well, you know.
After the suspicion around Stephen King mostly dissipated, Lou laughed, and for a while that was his story, what he told everyone, until one or two had to say he'd already told them, that he'd hired Jack Nicholson to work the night desk, a guy who was the complete opposite, a guy Lou didn't think had even seen any Jack Nicholson films. You can't handle the truth!
Lou was a straightforward kind of guy. When he chatted up a customer he asked all the usual questions: How's the weather been? Had a long day on the road? Where's your destination? For check-out in the morning, Lou recommended to Stephen King an equally familiar line of inquiry: Sleep well? Everything satisfactory? Getting out on the road early?
Lou had no idea the motel was haunted. This wasn't information covered in the manual, and it wasn't good business, but between dusk and dawn, Stephen King had the feeling of being watched and the sensation of hairs standing on the back of his neck. The kind of thing he always hoped to pull off with his fiction, except this was the real deal. Lou stayed the night with him, not quite ready to completely hand over the keys. But Lou also wasn't a night manager, he wasn't used to the hours, and around 1:30 AM, with the bulk of the inky black night ahead of them, he took his rest on one of the puffy leather couches of the lobby, and he fell right to sleep. As was the motel's procedure after 11:00 PM, the front door was locked and any weary travelers who showed up would have to be buzzed in. So Stephen King left his post and if anyone needed a room, Lou would take care of it.
Down the hall past the continental breakfast room and the conference room, with large potted ferns at each end, there was a row of doors to the empty motel rooms, and Stephen King had the master card key in his pocket. He was glad to get away from the flickering fluorescent lights of the lobby, but the lighting in the hall was just as harsh and the space also uninviting. He had a notion to buy some peanuts and a Coke from the vending machine, but was taken aback at the prices. He had a vague awareness that vending machine inflation was the steepest and always on the rise, but seeing how much someone might spend made him feel out of touch. Like ten years had gone by.
The room he entered was uninspiring. The bed was made, the bathroom was clean. He didn't sense the vestigial energy of anything bad, sinful, or even untoward ever having occurred there. It kind of reminded him of when he was flying more, and he could see himself sitting at the small round table and the uncomfortable chair and hammering away at the Adler well into the night as he accumulated a stack of pages. Sometimes someone would bang on the wall from the neighboring room. And sometimes he would bang back, since he couldn't believe the sound of a typewriter was all that much of a nuisance. He sat on the corner of the bed and got the urge to call his wife. He'd always called when he was away, and she would talk to him, even and especially when he called in the middle of the night like this.
Stephen King took his cell phone from his pocket, scrolled through his contacts, and highlighted his own number at home. This was a secret number he never gave out. For business contacts he kept a separate line. The phone rang and he could imagine the sharp electronic trill echoing through the large rooms of his quiet mansion, and he let it ring.
His son picked up and Stephen King felt his heart drop. He'd forgotten about the boy but had wanted to speak to his longtime partner.
"How's it going, Dad? Working on a book?"
"Junior," Stephen King stammered. He felt he shouldn't give anything away, least of all the location of this gem of a motel. "Is your mom around?"
"She's asleep," his son said. "But I can take a message. Guess why I'm up so late."
"Writing?"
"Writing what?" his son said.
"Oh, I don't know," Stephen King said. "A novel?"
"An amazing haunted-hotel novel," he said. "I'm pulling all the stops. And you're in it. Kind of a rewrite of The Shining. Updated."
"You can't rewrite The Shining." Stephen King said. "You'd have to have my permission. It would look—I don't know—kind of cheap, kind of tacky."
"It's not cheap," Stephen King's son said. "It's not tacky. And I've already started, so what are you going to do, sue me?"
"Write what you like," Stephen King said. "I'm sorry I can't be a better help. I know writing's in your genes. It's had to have been hard growing up in my shadow."
"Except I got an earlier start," his son said. "I can be better than you."
His son continued to talk in this vein and he outlined the things he would put in a book that was more daring. He would be a writer who would take risks. And Stephen King became distracted, tired of feeling guilty about his son and deciding he'd have to let the kid go about things on his own. He tried to remember if he'd left the bathroom light on, because there was a radiant glow coming from the bathroom now, and the door swung slowly open. In a trance, Stephen King left the phone on the bed and he walked into the bathroom that was thick with shower steam. The mirror was fogged over and the air took an effort to breath. He felt condensation beading on his skin and he pressed on, coming to the edge of the tub, where the silhouette of a young woman went through the motions of washing herself behind the transparent shower curtain.
"I'm sorry," Stephen King said, loud enough to be heard over the din of the shower. "I didn't know the room was occupied." The figure behind the shower curtain paused and the water cut off. She reached out, the back of a beautiful hand moving toward Stephen King as her other hand drew open the shower curtain.
And there she was: wet, young, beautiful.
Stephen King had been in this room and no one was here. He knew the girl was a suicide and that as soon as her hand got hold of him, it would turn over to reveal the violence done to her soft wrist with a razor. And this woman, this inviting seductress, as bewitching as she was, was part corpse, and this other state of being would flash into his mind the instant she held him.
Why couldn't he just walk away? Why didn't he want to? He inched closer to her and he waited, driven by foolish desire. He recognized the sound of his son reading aloud, a small voice too near to be coming from the phone he'd left on the bed in the other room, an authorial delivery not quite drowned out by the hum of the bathroom fan. And Stephen King listened to his son reading a passage, the description of what would happen next.