Don't Look Down
The Ledge, wagers, and starting close to the action
Good morning.
If you’re new here, this is The Barrens, Kindling’s first ever book club. Right now we’re making our way through all things Stephen King. You find us in the middle of his first short story collection, Night Shift. Today’s post is on “The Ledge.”
If you’d like to join in, grab a copy and read “The Lawnmower Man.”
This post also features additional audio. It is not a voiceover of the article, just some extra thoughts from your truly. Please listen if you’d like, share your own bookish opinions and comment below!
Some Inspiration
I always do a little digging on these stories, to see if I can find King’s commentary or any background. This one was an homage to Jack Finney’s "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket,” written in 1956. That short story follows Tom Benecke, a man climbing the corporate ladder, working extra one evening in an effort to impress his boss.
He foregoes a movie with his wife, choosing instead to keep writing a memo after weeks spent working on a marketing project. His yellow legal pad paper is scrawled with notes. He lights a cigarette, but the room is hot. So he decides to open a window.
(You can see where this is going right?)
A gust of wind blows and carries his papers out into the night, where they land on the ledge bordering the apartment building. Desperate to salvage all his hard work, he steps out, balancing on the sliver of concrete building. By the time he retrieves the paper and stuffs it into his pocket, he has nearly fallen a half dozen times. He makes his way carefully back to his apartment window, and on reaching it, he shuts it by accident, trapping himself outside. All he has to break back in are the contents of his pockets, some matches, a silver dollar. But in the end, his fists do the trick. He shatters the window and collapses inside.
The story ends ironically with him safe, but the papers blown away through the open window. The image of his dead body splattered on the sidewalk below, with nothing in his pockets except the scrawl of marketing notes on legal pad had changed him. He decides to go to the movies with his wife.
King first published “The Ledge” in a 1976 issue of Penthouse, and two years later it landed in Night Shift, the collection we’ve been working through over the past couple of months. The tale begins with a deadly interaction between Stan Norris, and a wealthy criminal boss, Cressner. Stan has been sleeping with Cressner’s wife, but the man seems willing to get over it. That is if Stan takes his wager.
The Gist
Either he faces a prison sentence—Mr. Cressner has planted heroin in his car, the discovery of which is only a 911 call away—or he performs a simple task. Walk around the five inch ledge of the high rise apartment building. It’s only forty-three stories up after all. And the wind isn’t so bad. Cold, but only ten miles per hour when it isn’t gusting. Do that, and Stan gets $20,000, Cressner’s wife, and his freedom.
Cressner is a man who likes wagers. He is world weary, a bored man with so much wealth he has little left to entertain him. So he comes up with games to play when people owe him, or wrong him. The deadlier the better. This particular one, he tells Stan, has been attempted six times before, and not a single person has ever made it.
Backed against a wall, Stan takes the wager, making his way along the ledges of the high rise, working to calm his mind through deep breathing, steadying himself using techniques and muscles built through his tennis playing. But if it’s not his own mind actively attempting to buckle his legs, it’s the obstacles he encounters along the way.
A crosswind at the first corner as he rounds the building, Cressner’s startling noisemaker surprise, thrown from a window above, and lastly, a territorial pigeon defending his nest. Slowly by slowly, and step by step, Stan makes his way around. It’s taken him over two hours. His ankles are on fire when he lifts himself over the other side of the Cressner’s balcony.
But his win is too good to be true.
I hauled myself up, wriggled over the top, collapsed thankfully on the floor…and felt the cold steel muzzle of a .45 against my temple.
I looked up and saw a goon ugly enough to stop Big Ben dead in its clockwork. He was grinning.
“Excellent!” Cressner’s voice said from within. “I applaud you, Mr. Norris!” He proceeded to do just that.
Of course he did. He’s the bad guy after all.
The Villain
He was wearing a silk dressing gown on which a dragon was embroidered. His eyes were calm and intelligent behind his glasses. He looked just like what he was: an A-number-one, 500-carat, dyed-in-the-wool son of a bitch.
He’s rich and powerful, a game player who never loses. And Stan Norris is no exception. Cressner has Plan A, Plan B, Plan C. And if that doesn’t work out? He’ll make sure that Stan loses while keeping true to his word.
He is a caricature, but not a totally unbelievable one. His behavior is modeled after the powerful psychopaths who played murder games with their victims. Think Pablo Escobar or Sadam Hussein’s sons, mob families and cartels responsible for thousands of deaths, some conducted in this very manner.
But this is horror, and that means justice…most of the time.
Cressner thought he was safe playing his little game, but he underestimated his pawn.
“I told you I never welsh, and I never do. You won three things, Mr. Norris. The money, your freedom, my wife. You have the first two. You can pick up the third at the county morgue.”
The realization that he’s been played for a fool hits Stan hard. He gets the money, he gets to leave, but Marcia is gone. Filled with rage, and with nothing left to lose, Stan blindsides the hitman Tony, hitting him with the bag of money given as a consolation prize. He grabs the gun, knocking the man across the nose. Cressner is all his.
Cressner was almost out the door when I snapped a shot over his shoulder and said, “Stop right there, or you’re dead.”
And then some of my favorite lines.
He thought about it and stopped. When he turned around, his cosmopolitan world-weary act had curdled a little around the edges.
The game has been upended, and now Stan has his own bet for Cressner. He can face death, a bullet in the head, or take his chances on the ledge.
A Change In Tense
I love it when authors can do this successfully. The entire story has been told in first person, past tense. “I motioned,” “I thought,” etcetera. Until the final paragraphs as Stan watches Cressner round the corner of the building, dressing gown billowing in the wind.
But he probably knows that if I catch him there when I break into the other penthouse, I’ll shoot him down like a dog.
And then
The bank clock says 12:44.
Stan waits, knowing that no matter what happens, Cressner is headed for the morgue.
Cressner said he’s never welshed on a bet.
But I’ve been known to.
A Moment to Appreciate the Craft
I think what I like about this story is that it starts right in the middle, close to the action as they say. There’s an important lesson in story telling here. We’ve all been trapped at a party, listening to that guy blabbering on, taking an hour to tell what should be told in five minutes. We don’t need to know if Stan Norris brushed his teeth or not. And so King starts right where it counts: with the wager.
“Go on,” Cressner said again. “Look in the bag.”
We’re in the penthouse, dizzied by what we quickly realize is a life or death situation.
I love the power of storytelling in its ability to go big, build entire worlds and summarize histories and languages and wars, or to zoom in, and spend twenty pages following one man’s three hour, life altering event.
We can do that with our own stories, our own childhoods and countries and histories. So long as we avoid being that guy, filling the time with nonsense and too much where none is needed. In other words, hurry it up. Get to the good part.
This is one of those stories where King does tension. Suspense. It reminds me of an earlier story we read, “Battleground.” I felt the same about this one as I did the other. It is well written, the tension is good, my attention is caught. But it is not a favorite of mine.
I did appreciate the page-turning quality that I expect from a thriller, and the startling realization that Marcia was dead. It caught me by surprise. I knew things wouldn’t go Stan’s way, but I assumed Cressner would kill him if he made it around the ledge. The alternative didn’t cross my mind, and part of the reason for that is in King’s fast-paced story telling. He takes our minds off of Marcia and sets them right on the ledge with Stan. Brilliant.
How did you all like it?
Yay, more The Barrens. I'm a bit behind on a lot of Substacks at the moment, so catching on posts but great to see this just hit my inbox. I actually remember reading this one, which is strange because I haven't read Night Shift itself, but maybe a friend had it and I just picked this one to read at random (and I definitely didn't have a copy of Penthouse 😆).
Great read and summary, thanks Shaina. Really like what King did with the shift in tense at the end. You don't see that often.
“What’s in the box? What’s in the box?!” from the movie “Seven” went through my head as you described the mysterious bag in the opening scene. I loved your commentary on the tennis ankles. I needed that factoid because it makes the situation more believable. Average American would not be able to shimmy around a building for three hours. Those arduous hours reminds me of the iron grip I had for a particular drive in a blizzard once. One small mistake could mean utter ruin and you feel completely exhausted afterwards. I too like it when the protagonist can reverse the situation, particularly when it is the exact same challenge. I want to think of other examples but none come to mind right now. Thank you for including the audio! Made my drive today a lot more fun.