The plant - By Stephen King Page 0,6

of them there is a much younger man who is probably Detweiller himself-this young man is always shot from the rear or with his face in deep shadow), and the locale appears, in most cases, to be a greenhouse-associated with the florist's where Detweiller told me he works, I imagine.

There's one packet of six photos labelled "The Sakred Seance" which show plasmic manifestations so obviously faked it's pitiful (what appears to be a balloon frosted with Day-Glo paint is floating from the medium's fingertips). A third packet of photos (all SX-70 shots) are textbook-style "exhibit" shots of various plants which purport to be deadly nightshade, belladonna, virgin's hair, etc. (impossible for me to tell if the labels are accurate-I can't tell a maple tree from a ponderosa pine without help; Ruth would probably know).

Okay, the disturbing part. Some of the photos (four, to be completely accurate) in the "Black Mass" scenes purport to show a human sacrifice-and it looks to me as if maybe they really did kill someone. The first photo shows an old man with an extremely realistic expression of terror on his face lying spread-eagled on a table in the greenhouse I mentioned. Several people in hokey robes are holding him down. The young man I presume to be Carlos Detweiller is standing on the left, naked, with what looks like a Bowie knife. The second shows the knife plunging into the old fellow's chest; in the third, the man I presume to be Detweiller is reaching into the chest cavity; in the last he is holding up a dripping thing for the others to look at. The dripping thing looks very much like a human heart.

The pictures could be complete hokum, and I'd be the first to admit it-a half-decent special effects man could cobble up something like this, I suppose, especially in stills... but the efforts to mislead in the other photos are so painfully obvious that I wonder if that can be.

Just glancing at them is enough to make me want to whoops my cookies, Roger-what if we've stumbled onto a bunch of people who are really practicing human sacrifice? Mass murder, perhaps? I'm nauseated, but right now I'm more scared than anything else. I could have told you all of this in person, of course, but it seemed important to get this down in writing, just in case it does turn out to be a legal matter. Christ, I wish I'd never even heard of Carlos Fucking Detweiller.

Come down and take a look at these as soon as you possibly can, okay? I just don't know if I should pick up the phone and call the police in Central Falls or not.

John

SYNOPSIS

JOHN KENTON, who attended Brown University, majored in English, and was president of the Literary Society, has had a rude awakening in the real world: he is one of four editors at Zenith House, a down-at-the-heels paperback publisher in New York.

Zenith has 2% of the paperback market and is fifteenth in a field of fifteen paperback publishers. All of the Zenith House personnel are worried that Apex, the parent corporation, may decide to put the house on the market if there isn't a sales turnaround in the calendar year 1981... and due to Zenith's poor distribution network, that seems unlikely.

On January 4th of 1981, Kenton receives a query letter from CARLOS DETWEILLER, of Central Falls, Rhode Island. Detweiller, twenty-three, works in the Central Falls House of Flowers, and is hawking a book he has written called True Tales of Demon Infestations. It's obvious to Kenton that Detweiller has absolutely no talent as a writer... but then, neither do most of the writers on Zenith's roster (biggest seller: the Macho Man series). He encourages Detweiller to submit sample chapters and an outline.

Instead, Detweiller submits the work entire, which is even more abysmal than Kenton-who thought that the book could perhaps be cut down, ghost-written, and juiced up for The Amityville Horror audience-would have believed in his worst nightmares. Yet the worst nightmare of all is in the photographs Detweiller encloses. Some are painfully faked pictures of a seance in progress, but a series of four show a gruesomely realistic human sacrifice, in which an old man's chest is cut open and a dripping human heart is pulled out of the incision.

The story, which is told in epistolary style, resumes with a letter from John Kenton to his fiancee, RUTH TANAKA, who is working on her PhD in California.

January 30, 1981

Dear Ruth,

Yes, it was