Part 27 (1/2)

Myself I will die a virgin and I am glad.

I hope and expect to be locked away in Kenton's office by noon today.

I have plenty of snacks and two sodas in with my knives and I will be able

to ”hold out” until Monday just fine.

No more dreams of ”The General” and his Designated Juice. That's

a load off my mind.

And now for you, John Kenton. Betrayer of my dreams, thief of my

book. Why wait for the abbalah to do what I can do myself?

COME DEMETER!.

COME GREEN!.

E N D O F T H E P L A N T , P A R T F I V E.

Following next month's installment of this story--next month's very long installment of this story--The Plant will be going back into hibernation so that I can continue work on Black House (the sequel to The Talisman, written in collaboration with Peter Straub). I also need to complete work on two new novels (the first, Dreamcatcher, will be available from Scribner's next March) and see if I can't get going on The Dark Tower again. And my agent insists I need to take a breather so that foreign translation and publication of The Plant--also in installments, also on the Net--can catch up with American publication. Yet don't despair. The last time The Plant furled its leaves, the story remained dormant for nineteen years. If it could survive that, I'm sure it can survive a year or two while I work on other projects.

Part 6 is the most logical stopping point. In a traditional print book, it would be the end of the first long section (which I would probably call ”Zenith Rising”). You will find a climax of sorts, and while not all of your questions will be answered--not yet, at least--the fates of several characters will be resolved.

Nastily Permanently.

As a way of thanking those readers (somewhere between 75 and 80 per cent) who came along for the ride and paid their dues, Part 6 of The Plant will be available free of charge. Enjoy...but don't relax too much. When The Plant returns, it will once more be on a pay-as-you-go basis.

In the meantime, get ready for Part 6. I think you're going to be surprised. Perhaps even shocked.

Best regards (and happy holidays), Stephen King

PART VI.

E D ITO R'S N OTE Z is almost certainly the most interesting doc.u.ment in the collection which makes up this story. Although remarkably coherent, the careful reader must certainly detect the work of various voices, most or all of them already encountered in the various memos, letters, and journals presented so far. In addition to this, the discovered ma.n.u.script (it would harm the unfolding story to say much about the circ.u.mstances of that discovery here) shows many different typefaces and editorial hands. About thirty per cent of it was typed on a portable Olivetti, which can be positively identified as John Kenton's by the flying d and the distinctive crack running through the capital S. Another thirty per cent is certainly the work of Riddley Walker's 1948 office-model Underwood, which was found on the desk of his study in Dobbs Ferry. The other typefaces are those produced by the sort of IBM Selectrics then in use at the Zenith House offices. Ten per cent of the ma.n.u.script was typed with the IBM type-ball ”Script,” which was favored by Sandra Jackson. Twenty per cent of the ma.n.u.script is in IBM's ”Courier” format, which was favored by both Herb Porter and Roger Wade. The remaining work is in IBM's ”Letter Gothic,” which can be found on many (although not all) of Bill Gelb's business letters and in-house memos.

The most interesting thing about this collaboration, which is remarkably uni fied in spite of the stylistic interplay, is the fact that it is told in the third-person omniscient style. Information is conveyed by use of a s.h.i.+fting perspective, and include many incidents at which none of the narrators-Kenton, Wade, Jackson, Gelb, or Walker-were present. The reader may wonder if these pa.s.sages (several of which are interwoven below) are informed speculation based on the available evidence, or if they are pure imagination, no more to be believed than the plots of Anthony Las...o...b..a's ”big bug” books. To these possibilities, the editor would first like to remind the reader that there was a sixth partic.i.p.ant at Zenith House during those months in 1981, and then to suggest that if what Kenton, Wade, et. al. suspected was true-that the ivy sent to them was telepathic and to some degree manipulative-then perhaps the true narrator of Z was Zenith the common ivy itself (or himself, to use Riddley Walker's most common p.r.o.nounal reference).

Although insane by all normal standards of deduction, the idea has a certain persuasive charm when taken in context with other events of that year-many verifiable, such as the crash of the commuter plane on which Tina Barfield was a pa.s.senger-and offers at least one explanation for the ma.n.u.script. The idea that a telepathic ivy plant turned the typewriters of five previously normal editors into Ouija boards is an outrage to rational thought; with that much, no sane person could fail to agree. And yet there is a certain pull to the idea, at least for this reader, a sense that yes, this is how these things happened, and yes, this is how the truth of those days came to be written down.

S. K.

From Z, an unpublished ma.n.u.script

April 4, 1981 490 Park Avenue South New York City Skies fair, winds light, temperature 50 F.