（外文电子版资料）Stephen King - The Mangler.pdf

THE MANGLER THE MANGLER Officer Hunton got to the laundry just ag the ambulance was leaving - slowly, with no siren or flashing lights. Ominous. Inside, the office was stuffed with milling, silent people, some of them weeping. The plant itself was empty; the big automatic washers at the far end had not even been shut down. It made Hunton very 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 the remains. A very bad one, then. Hunton felt his stomach tighten as it always did when the accident was very bad. Fourteen years of cleaning human litter from highways and streets and the sidewalks at the bases of very tall buildings had not been able to erase that little hitch in the belly, as if something evil had clotted there. A man in a white shirt saw Hunton and walked towards him reluctantly. He was a buffalo of a man with head thrust forward between shoulders, nose and cheeks vein-broken either from high blood pressure or too many conversations with the brown bottle. He was trying to frame words, but after two tries Hunton cut him off briskly: Are you the owner? Mr Gartley? No. . . no. Im Stanner. The foreman. God, this - Hunton got out his notebook. Please show me the scene of the accident, Mr Stanner, and tell me what happened. Stanner seemed to grow even more white; the blotches on his nose and cheeks stood out like birthmarks. D-do I have to? Hunton raised his eyebrows. Im afraid you do. The call I got said it was serious. Serious - Stanner seemed to be battling with his gorge; for a moment his Adams 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 stopped by a laundry-marking machine. He passed a sha