Read Uncollected Stories 2003 for Free Online

bad as I thought."
    That's the way I felt after re-reading "The Glass Floor," the first story for
which I was ever paid, after all these years. Darrell Schweitzer, the editor of Weird Tales invited me to make changes if I wanted to, but I decided that
would probably be a bad idea. Except for two or three word changes and the
addition of a paragraph break (which was probably a typographical error in
the first place), I've left the tale just as it was. If I really did start making
changes, the result would be an entirely new story.
    "The Glass Floor" was written, to the best of my recollection, in the summer
of 1967, when I was about two months shy of my twentieth birthday. I had
been trying for about two years to sell a story to Robert A.W. Lowndes, who
edited two horror/fantasy magazines for Health Knowledge ( The Magazine of
Horror and Startling Mystery Stories ) as well as a vastly more popular digest
called Sexology . He had rejected several submissions kindly (one of them,
marginally better than "The Glass Floor," was finally published in The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under the title "Night of the Tiger"),
then accepted this one when I finally got around to submitting it. That first
check was for thirty-five dollars. I've cashed many bigger ones since then, but
none gave me more satisfaction; someone had finally paid me some real
money for something I had found in my head!
    The first few pages of the story are clumsy and badly written – clearly the
product of an unformed story-teller's mind – but the last bit pays off better
than I remembered; there is a genuine frisson in what Mr. Wharton finds
waiting for him in the East Room. I suppose that's at least part of the reason I
agreed to allow this mostly unremarkable work to be reprinted after all these
years. And there is at least a token effort to create characters which are more
than paper-doll cutouts; Wharton and Reynard are antagonists, but neither is
"the good guy" or "the bad guy." The real villain is behind that plastered-over
door. And I also see an odd echo of "The Glass Floor" in a very recent work
called "The Library Policeman." That work, a short novel, will be published
as part of a collection of short novels called Four Past Midnight this fall, and
if you read it, I think you'll see what I mean. It was fascinating to see the same
image coming around again after all this time.
    Mostly I'm allowing the story to be republished to send a message to young
writers who are out there right now, trying to be published, and collecting
rejection slips from such magazines as F&SF, Midnight Graffiti , and, of
course, Weird Tales , which is the granddaddy of them all. The message is
simple: you can learn, you can get better, and you can get published.
    If that Little spark is there, someone will probably see it sooner or later,
gleaming faintly in the dark. And, if you tend the spark nestled in the kindling,
it really can grow into a large, blazing fire. It happened to me, and it started
here.
I remember getting the idea for the story, and it just came as the ideas come
now – casually, with no flourish of trumpets. I was walking down a dirt road
to see a friend, and for no reason at all I began to wonder what it would be
like to stand in a room whose floor was a mirror. The image was so intriguing
that writing the story became a necessity. It wasn't written for money; it was
written so I could see better. Of course I did not see it as well as I had hoped;
there is still that shortfall between what I hope I will accomplish and what I
actually manage. Still, I came away from it with two valuable things: a salable
story after five years of rejection slips, and a bit of experience. So here it is,
and as that fellow Griner says in Dickey's novel, it ain't really as bad as I
thought.
    W
harton moved slowly up the wide steps, hat in hand, craning his neck
to get a better look at the Victorian monstrosity that his