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The Crate

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"The Crate" is a short story by Stephen King, first published in the July 1979 issue of Gallery. In 1982, the story was adapted as a segment in the movie Creepshow, and included in comic-book form in the Creepshow graphic novella.

Plot

An old wooden crate, marked from an 1834 arctic expedition, is discovered by a janitor beneath the basement stairs at the Horlicks University. Along with, Dexter Stanley, the school's biology professor, open it to discover the crate contains a small yet powerful - and hungry - beast still alive after 140 years. The creature kills and eats the janitor as well as Stanley's grad student Charlie Gereson - consuming them entirely, leaving only scraps of clothing behind. In a daze, Stanley flees to the home of his only friend, English professor Henry Northrup. He tells Henry the whole story, and Northrup believes him, seeing the crate-dwelling beast as a way to rid himself of his verbally abusive, alcoholic wife, Wilma.

He dopes Stanley's drink, and while Stanley is unconscious clears up the blood and remaining scraps from the beast, before luring his wife to the basement under the pretence that Stanley has attacked a female student who needs calming down. As planned, the beast - Northrup likens it to a Tasmanian Devil - does indeed attack and eat Wilma completely, although as he carefully loads the crate into another larger crate for disposal he notes that Wilma's face (and only her face) is still visible in the crate. Northrup drives the crate within a crate to a local quarry and tips the entire cargo into the deep quarry lake. Upon his return Stanley wakes up, and the two decide to keep quiet about the entire incident - Stanley has gained a friend, and Northrup has lost his abusive wife, a situation both are happy with.

Film adaptations

The story was adapted as a segment in the film Creepshow. Although there are numerous small changes, the film version remains essentially faithful to the written source material. The changes include the appearance of the beast, described as small and wolverine-like, possibly with six limbs, in the story but is ape-like in the movie, and the written story ends with Henry disposing of the crate in a 400-foot-deep (120 m) lake, with the beast still chained up inside, but the movie ends the segment with the beast destroying the water-logged crate and escaping into the outside world.

Publications

"The Crate" has not yet been collected in a Stephen King collection, but it has been printed a few times:

See also

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