The Mangler - Stephen King, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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THE MANGLERTHE MANGLEROfficer Hunton got to the laundry just ag the ambulance was leaving - slowly,with no siren or flashing lights. Ominous. Inside, the office was stuffed withmilling, silent people, some of them weeping. The plant itself was empty; thebig automatic washers at the far end had not even been shut down. It made Huntonvery wary. The crowd should be at the scene of the accident, not in the office.It was the way things worked - the human animal had a built-in urge to view theremains. A very bad one, then. Hunton felt his stomach tighten as it always didwhen the accident was very bad. Fourteen years of cleaning human litter fromhighways and streets and the sidewalks at the bases of very tall buildings hadnot been able to erase that little hitch in the belly, as if something evil hadclotted there.A man in a white shirt saw Hunton and walked towards him reluctantly. He was abuffalo of a man with head thrust forward between shoulders, nose and cheeksvein-broken either from high blood pressure or too many conversations with thebrown bottle. He was trying to frame words, but after two tries Hunton cut himoff briskly:'Are you the owner? Mr Gartley?''No. . . no. I'm Stanner. The foreman. God, this -'Hunton got out his notebook. 'Please show me the scene of the accident, MrStanner, and tell me what happened.'Stanner seemed to grow even more white; the blotches on his nose and cheeksstood out like birthmarks. 'D-do I have to?'Hunton raised his eyebrows. 'I'm afraid you do. The call I got said it wasserious.''Serious -' Stanner seemed to be battling with his gorge; for a moment hisAdam's apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick. 'Mrs Frawley is dead.Jesus, I wish Bill Garley was here.''What happened?'Stanner said, 'You better come over here.'He led Hunton past a row of hand presses, a shirt-folding unit, and then stoppedby a laundry-marking machine. He passed a shaky hand across his forehead.'You'll have to go over by yourself, Officer. I can't look at it again. It makesme. . .I can't. I'm sorry.'Hunton walked around the marking machine with a mild feeling of contempt for theman. They run a loose shop, cut corners, run live steam through home-weldedpipes, they work with dangerous cleaning chemicals without the properprotection, and finally, someone gets hurt. Or gets dead. Then they can't look.They can't -Hunton saw it.The machine was still running. No one had shut it off. The machine he later cameto know intimately: the HadleyWatson Model-6 Speed Ironer and Folder. A long andclumsy name. The people who worked here in the steam and the wet had a bettername for it. The mangler.Hunton took a long, frozen look, and then he performed a first in his fourteenyears as a law-enforcement officer: he turned around, put a convulsive hand tohis mouth, and threw up.'You didn't each much,' Jackson said.The women were inside, doing dishes and talking babies while John Hunton andMark Jackson sat in lawn chairs near the aromatic barbecue. Hunton smiledslightly at the understatement. He had eaten nothing.'There was a bad one today,' he said. 'The worst.''Car crash?''No. Industrial.''Messy?'Hunton did not reply immediately, but his face made an involuntary, writhinggrimace. He got a beer out of the cooler between them, opened it, and emptiedhalf of it. 'I suppose you college profs don't know anything about industriallaundries?'Jackson chuckled. 'This one does. I spent a summer working in one as anundergraduate.''Then you know the machine they call the speed ironer?' Jackson nodded. 'Sure.They run damp flatwork through them, mostly sheets and linen. A big, longmachine.''That's it,' Hunton said. 'A woman named Adelle Frawley got caught in it at theBlue Ribbon Laundry crosstown. It sucked her right in.'Jackson looked suddenly ill. 'But. . . that can't happen, Johnny. There's asafety bar. If one of the women feeding the machine accidentally gets a handunder it, the bar snaps up and stops the machine. At least that's how I rememberit.'Hunton nodded. 'It's a state law. But it happened.'Hunton closed his eyes and in the darkness he could see the Hadley-Watson speedironer again, as it had been that afternoon. It formed a long, rectangular boxin shape, thirty feet by six. At the feeder end, a moving canvas belt movedunder the safety bar, up at a slight angle, and then down. The belt carried thedamp-dried, wrinkled sheets in continuous cycle over and under sixteen hugerevolving cylinders that made up the main body of the machine. Over eight andunder eight, pressed between them like thin ham between layers of superheatedbread. Steam heat in the cylinders could be adjusted up to 300 degrees formaximum drying. The pressure on the sheets that rode the moving canvas belt wasset at 800 pounds per square foot to get out every wrinkle.And Mrs Frawley, somehow, had been caught and dragged in. The steel,asbestos-jacketed pressing cylinders had been as red as barn paint, and therising steam from the machine had carried the sickening stench of hot blood.Bits of her white blouse and blue slacks, even ripped segments of her bra andpanties, had been torn free and ejected from the machine's far end thirty feetdown, the bigger sections of cloth folded with grotesque and blood-stainedneatness by the automatic folder. But not even that was the worst.'It tried to fold everything,' he said to Jackson, tasting bile in his throat.'But a person isn't a sheet, Mark. What I saw. . . what was left of her . . .'Like Stanner, the hapless foreman, he could not finish. 'They took her out in abasket,' he said softly.Jackson whistled. 'Who's going to get it in the neck? The laundry or the stateinspectors?''Don't know yet,' Hunton said. The malign image still hung behind his eyes, theimage of the mangler wheezing and thumping and hissing, blood dripping down thegreen sides of the long cabinet in runnels, the burning stink of her'It depends on who okayed that goddamn safety bar and under what circumstances.''If it's the management, can they wiggle out of it?'Hunton smiled without humour. 'The woman died, Mark. If Gartley and Stanner werecutting corners on the speed ironer's maintenance, they'll go to jail. No matterwho they know on the City Council.''Do you think they were cutting corners?'Hunton thought of the Blue Ribbon Laundry, badly lighted, floors wet andslippery, some of the machines incredibly ancient and creaking. 'I think it'slikely,' he said quietly.They got up to go in the house together. 'Tell me how it comes out, Johnny,'Jackson said. 'I'm interested.'Hunton was wrong about the mangler; it was clean as a whistle.Six state inspectors went over it before the inquest, piece by piece. The netresult was absolutely nothing. The inquest verdict was death by misadventure.Hunton, dumbfounded, cornered Roger Martin, one of the inspectors, after thehearing. Martin was a tall drink of water with glasses as thick as the bottomsof shot glasses. He fidgeted with a ball-point pen under Hunton's questions.'Nothing? Absolutely nothing doing with the machine?''Nothing,' Martin said. 'Of course, the safety bar was the guts of the matter.It's in perfect working order. You heard that Mrs Gillian testify. Mrs Frawleymust have pushed her hand too far. No one saw that; they were watching their ownwork. She started screaming. Her hand was gone already, and the machine wastaking her arm. They tried to pull her out instead of shutting it down - purepanic. Another woman, Mrs Keene, said she did try to shut it off, but it's afair assumption that she hit the start button rather than the stop in theconfusion. By then it was too late.''Then the safety bar malfunctioned,' Hunton said flatly. 'Unless she put herhand over it rather than under?''You can't. There's a stainless-steel facing above the safety bar. And the baritself didn't malfunction. It's circuited into the machine itself. If the safetybar goes on the blink, the machine shuts down.''Then how did it happen, for Christ's sake?''We don't know. My colleagues and I are of the opinion that the only way thespeed ironer could have killed Mrs Frawley was for her to have fallen into itfrom above. And she had both feet on the floor when it happened. A dozenwitnesses can testify to that.''You're describing an impossible accident,' Hunton said.'No. Only one we don't understand.' He paused, hesitated, and then said: 'I willtell you one thing, Hunton, since you seem to have taken this case to heart. Ifyou mention it to anyone else, I'll deny I said it. But I didn't like thatmachine. It seemed. . . almost to be mocking us. I've inspected over a dozenspeed ironers in the last five years on a regular basis. Some of them are insuch bad shape that I wouldn't have a dog unleashed around them - the state lawis lamentably lax. But they were only machines for all that. But this one. . .it's a spook. I don't know why, but it is. I think if I'd found one thing, evena technicality, that was off whack, I would have ordered it shut down. Crazy,huh?''I felt the same way,' Hunton said.'Let me tell you about something that happened two years ago in Milton,' theinspector said. He took off his glasses and began to polish them slowly on hisvest. 'Fella had parked an old ice-box out in his backyard. The woman who calledus said her dog had been caught in it and suffocated. We got the state policemanin the area to inform him it had to go to the town dump. Nice enough fella,sorry about the dog. He loaded it into his pick...
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