Read Online Danse Macabre by Stephen King - Free Book Online Page A

while, but ordinary fat is no big deal, either—I'm talking about the case of acne that has run absolutely apeshit, spreading like something out of a Japanese horror movie, pimples on pimples, and most of them red and suppurating.
    Like the chest-burster in Alien , it's enough to put you off your popcorn . . . except this is real . Perhaps I've not touched your idea of monstrosity in real life even yet, and perhaps I won't, but for just a moment consider such an ordinary thing as left-handedness. Of course, the discrimination against lefthanded people is obvious from the start. If you've attended a college or high school with the more modern desks, you know that most of them are built for inhabitants of an exclusively right-handed world. Most educational facilities will order a few left-hand desks as a token gesture, but that's all. And during testing or composition situations, lefties are usually segregated on one side of the lecture hall so they will not jog the elbows of their more normal counterparts. But it goes deeper than discrimination. The roots of discrimination spread wide, but the roots of monstrosity spread both wide and deep. Left-handed baseball players are all considered screwballs, whether they are or not.* The French for left, bastardized from the Latin, is la sinistre.
    *Take for instance Bill Lee, now of the Montreal Expos, late of the Boston Red Sox. Lee was dubbed "The Spaceman" by his colleagues and is remembered fondly by Boston fans for exhorting those who attended a rally following the Sox's pennant win in 1976 to pick up their trash when they left. Perhaps the strongest proof of his "leftiness" came when he referred to Red Sox manager Don Zimmer as "the designated gerbil." Lee moved to Montreal soon after. from which comes our word sinister . According to the old superstition, your right side belongs to God, your left side to that other fellow. Southpaws have always been suspect. My mother was a leftie, and as a schoolgirl, so she told my brother and me, the teacher would rap her left hand smartly with a ruler to make her change her pen to her right hand. When the teacher left she would switch the pen back again, of course, because with her right hand she could make only large, childish scrawls-the fate of most of us when we try to write with what New Englanders call "the dumb hand." A few of us, such as Branwell Brontë (the gifted brother of Charlotte and Emily), can write clearly and well with either hand. Branwell Brontë was in fact so ambidextrous that he could write two different letters to two different people at the same tine . We might reasonably wonder if such an ability qualifies as monstrosity . . . or genius.
    In fact, almost every physical and mental human aberration has been at some point in history, or is now, considered monstrous—a complete list would include widows' peaks ( once considered a reliable sign that a man was a sorcerer), moles on the female body ( supposed to be witches' teats), and extreme schizophrenia, which on occasion has caused the afflicted to be canonized by one church or another.
    Monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides within all of us. We love and need the concept of monstrosity because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings . . . and let me further suggest that it is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which these aberrations seem to imply.
    The late John Wyndham, perhaps the best writer of science fiction that England has ever produced, summarized the idea in his novel The Chrysalids (published as Rebirth in America). It is a story that considers the ideas of mutation and deviation more brilliantly than any other novel written in English since World War II, I think. A series of plaques in the home of the novel's young protagonist offer stern counsel: ONLY THE IMAGE OF GOD IS MAN; KEEP PURE THE STOCK