New Tech, Old Demons
The Mangler, machinery, and the fear of progress
Good morning (or afternoon, or evening…wherever this message finds you)!
If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, Kindling’s first book club, where we are working our way through all things Stephen King. Currently, we are reading through Night Shift, King’s first short story collection. This week we read The Mangler, but if you’re interested in joining in, grab a copy and read The Boogeyman for next week. Know someone who might like this dark fiction stuff?
Are you afraid of machines? I ask because I am. I don’t know if it was over-zealous warnings during childhood (Don’t touch that! It’ll rip your fingers right off!) or a natural overflow of my cautious nature, but anything that looks even remotely like the image above freaks me out.
I don’t like to deal with putting coolant in my car because, if the engine is too hot, it can burn you. When I make bread or baked goods, I have to be ever so careful not to have my hands too close to the mixing attachment when I turn it on. I can imagine my fingers getting caught and twisted up until the motor jams or my hand breaks. Never mind saws and power tools.
So when I read The Mangler, I felt a kinship with the fear invoked. I see danger in all machines, and sometimes hate how I have to use them for everything. There is something about their indifference to humanity, the reality that my mixer would churn and turn, breaking my bones with absolute stoicism, unmoved. Machines are this extension of ourselves, but without empathy or feeling or intelligence. They keep folding, flattening, smashing, cutting, without regard for what falls under their grip.
But what if a machine grew hungry? Possessed by some ancient evil with feelings alright, but malevolent ones that make it want to pursue and consume you? What if that great unstoppable machine became a predator? And not just an animalistic predator, but an ancient evil monster looking to inflict harm?
Welcome to King’s short story, The Mangler.
Here we have what I see as a blending of two worlds, the old and the new. People used to fear demons, old and powerful beings who hated humans and God, and could possess your body, ruin your life, hurt those you love. The takeaway from those stories? Don’t mess with what you don’t know. Don’t get too curious. Mysteries are mysteries for a reason. Try not to think (or talk about) such things. Stay in line, or else.
And then we have the machine, arguably the result of man’s endless curiosity and questioning. How can I make this better? Could we do this faster? But with all progress comes some new horror, and technology is often the feature in modern horror stories. From Frankenstein to Godzilla, we’re all afraid of what we’ve created, especially when the off button doesn’t work, and the created takes on a life of its own.
On the left wall there were three heavy gray boxes containing all the fuses for the laundry’s electricity. Diment yanked them open and began to pull the long cylindrical fuses like a crazy man, throwing them back over his shoulders. The overhead lights went out; then the air compressor; then the boiler itself with a huge dying whine.
And still the mangler turned.
Officer Hunton shows up at an industrial laundry to investigate a grisly scene.
He is a seasoned officer, often called to the scene of an accident or crime, but from the start there’s something different about this one. When he walks into the Blue Ribbon Laundry, the workers are huddled in the office, some crying, some quietly milling about. A woman, Adelle Frawley, has just been crushed in a large industrial ironer and folder, coined the mangler by the people that work there, her remains too gruesome to draw the typical curiosity that accidents tend to bring in.
Hunton walked around the marking machine with a mild feeling of contempt for the man. They run a loose shop, cut corners, run live steam through home-welded pipes, they work with dangerous cleaning chemicals without the proper protection, and finally, someone gets hurt. Or gets dead. They they can’t look. They can’t—
Hunton saw it.
The assumption is that the laundry had been cutting corners, leaving people to work in dangerous conditions that were bound to result in loss of life or limb. The inspector comes out, and the mangler passes with flying colors. No corner cutting here, so the woman’s cause of death is due to “misadventure,” and the laundry is not found liable.
Disbelieving, Hunton corners an inspector named Roger Martin to see what he thinks. But the inspector seems as dumbfounded as Hunton. The safety bar was intact. The inspectors can’t see how she could have been pulled into the machine unless she had fallen into it from above. Both feet were planted firmly on the ground.
“…I didn’t like that machine. It seemed … almost to be mocking us. I’ve inspected over a dozen speed ironers in the last five years on a regular basis. Some of them are in such bad shape that I wouldn’t leave a dog unleashed around them—the state law is lamentably lax. But they were only machines for all that. But this one…it’s a spook.”
Martin puts Hunton’s unease into words for the first time. There was something not right about the machine altogether, something that gave him a bad feeling from the start. And Martin senses it too.
The ice box, a slight detour folks.
Martin goes on to tell a story about another incident. A man had parked an ice box in his backyard, only to have a woman’s dog get caught in it and suffocate. Police told the man he would have to get rid of it, take it to the town dump. He listened, and that very afternoon a woman called to report her son missing. The kid turned up at the dump, inside the ice box. Two deaths from the same appliance.
“The dump caretaker went out next day to take the door off the thing. City Ordinance No. 58 on the maintenance of public dumping places.” Martin looked at him expressionlessly. “He found six dead birds inside. Gulls, sparrows, a robin. And he said the door closed on his arm while he was brushing them out. Gave him a hell of a jump.”
Now this isn’t the first time I’ve read about mishaps in ice boxes abandoned at the town dump from King. In It, one of the sideline antagonists, Patrick Hockstetter, uses them to play out his sadistic urges. In The Stand, a woman gets stuck in a walk-in freezer, a fear anyone who has worked in a restaurant has gotten acquainted with. It’s obviously something that played at King’s psyche, and there’s good reason for that.
He was born in 1947, meaning he would have been around 9 years old when The Refrigerator Safety Act of 1956 was passed in America, mandating that fridges be able to open from the inside to prevent the deaths of young children. He would have, no doubt, been warned dozens of times not to play in them, to never go inside one, and the fear lingered and popped up throughout his writing.
We have a sense now that the mangler is alive.
But this story doesn’t stop there. As more accidents happen—Mrs. Gillian is burnt by a sudden steam explosion, George Stanner loses his arm to the shoulder—Hunton and his friend, a college professor named Mark Jackson, start to put the pieces together. The mangler was just fine until a young woman named Sherry Ouelette, young and just out of high school, cut her finger and bled into the machine.
“It wasn’t until after that the bolts started falling off. Adelle was…you know…about a week later. As if the machine had tasted blood and found it liked it. Don’t women get funny ideas sometimes Officer Hinton?”
Jackson has got it into his head that the mangler is not just alive, or haunted, but possessed. He pours over texts on object possession, finding a few “common denominators” that feature across culture and belief: the blood of a virgin, graveyard dirt, the eye of a toad, and the hand of glory, sometimes interpreted as belladonna.
In a ridiculous turn of events, Jackson and Hunton head to Sherry Ouelette’s house to ask her the pressing question…
“Are you a virgin?”
Tale as old as slasher film—the horrorites will understand me here. As it turns out she is, which means of course, the mangler is possessed, and the only way to stop this thing from eating the entirety of the laundry staff and escaping into the world, is to cast the demon out. Jackson reads some books, and determines that all it’ll take is some holy water and “a smidgeon of the Holy Eucharist.”
That should do the trick so long as the demon wasn’t conjured using the hand of glory. But dear readers, we find out that Adelle Fawley, the first victim to the mangler, took an indigestion tablet made with none other than a chemical derivative of belladonna, known in Europe as the hand of glory. Poor thing had dropped some in by accident in the weeks leading up to her death.
There was a sudden ghastly burping noise in the spectral silence of the Blue Ribbon Laundry—a bat fluttered madly for its hole in the insulation above the dryers where it had roosted, wrapping wings around its blind face.
It was a noise almost like a chuckle.
The mangler began to run with a sudden, lurching grind—belts hurrying through the darkness, cogs meeting and meshing and grinding, heavy pulverizing rollers rotating on and on.
It was ready for them.
We’ve got virgin blood, we’ve got bats, and the dreaded hand of glory. As you can imagine, the exorcism doesn’t go well.
The mangler is loosed from the concrete that held it, and the demonic machine makes its way into the streets to eat up the town. Some old timey, cheesy, monster movie magic for you. On a scale from snoozefest to blood-curdling scream? I give it a solid chuckle. The scariest thing about this story is the machine itself, the idea that we can be caught and consumed by something that can’t be stopped. As soon as the demons came into play, I was over it.
As usual I turn to you dear readers.
Which is scarier, the demonic possession, or the inanimate appliance that won’t turn off?
Do you have any particular fears around machines or technology? Where did it come from?
I was a large propulsions systems mechanic on military ships for a decade before becoming a senior engineer for ships and submarines so my relationship with machines is tight and healthy. Because of this experience, I’ve also seen what happens when things go terribly wrong. It almost never ends well for anyone in close proximity to the unauthorized disassembly.
Agree with this take, it did descend into hokey territory. What I got from this as a learning point for me was the dialogue: the back and forth between characters. Even though there's quite a few characters for such a short piece, each voice was distinctive.