The Old Dude's Ticker
"The Old Dude's Ticker" is a short story by American writer Stephen King. Written in the 1970s, it was not published until 2000. It is an homage to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", adapted to take place in the Vietnam War era and incorporating the slang of the time.
Plot summary
Richard Drogan, a veteran of the Vietnam War, lives with an elderly man referred to only as the "Old Dude". The Old Dude has a cataract in one eye that frightens the narrator, so much so that he plans to murder the old man. After several nights of watching the Old Dude sleep by shining a pen-light through his door, he illuminates the old man's diseased eye, which is open. The Old Dude had been awake for some time, and the narrator speculates that he was very afraid and trying to calm himself down. Seeing the eye, however, drives Drogan into a rage.The narrator claims to have very sensitive hearing from his military service, and smothers the old man for fear of the neighbors hearing the man's heartbeat. He dismembers the body and conceals the parts beneath the floorboards.
The police arrive the following morning; a neighbor summoned them after hearing a yell in the night. Drogan invites them in, but soon hears a rhythmic thudding sound that he believes to be the Old Dude's beating heart. Convinced that the police can hear it as well, he confesses to the crime.
In a paragraph at the end, we are told that the preceding story had been a statement taken from Drogan in 1976 during the course of the investigation. It is revealed that Richard Drogan is actually an alias for Robert S. Deisenhoff, an escapee from the Quigly Veterans Hospital.
Publication
"The Old Dude's Ticker" was written by Stephen King in the early-1970s when King was a self-described "unknown, unagented scribbler". It was one of several stories he submitted to men's magazines as a meaning of supplementing his income, most of which were published in Cavalier. "The Old Dude's Ticker" failed to sell, and was filed away by King; it was later retrieved from a collection of King's manuscripts held in the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine. It was published for the first time in 2000 in the Necon XX 2000: Twentieth Anniversary Commemorative Volume, a limited print run collection edited by Bob Booth. In 2009, it was reprinted in The Big Book of Necon, also edited by Bob Booth. In 2017, it was reprinted in the anthology work Dark Screams: Volume Six edited by Brian James Freeman and Richard Chizmar."The Old Dude's Ticker" is essentially an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" set during the Vietnam War era. King variously describes the story as "satire", "affectionate homage", "pastiche", and "a crazed revisionist telling". It was one of two stories rejected by the magazines King pitched it to; the other was "The Spear", a modern-day retelling of a story by Nikolai Gogol, which has since been lost.