In the first dream he got his head halfway around so he could see the street on his left disappearing into limbo behind him as he ran along it; in the second (and from this one his alarmclock woke him, sweating lightly in a crouched fetal position on the far side of the bed) he got his head turned enough to see the dog just as its forepaws came down in his own tracks, and he saw the paws were digging crumbly little craters in the cement because they had sprouted claws ... and from the back of each lower legjoint there protruded a long thorn of bone that looked like a spur. The thing's muddy reddish eye was locked on Kevin. Dim fire blew and dripped from its nostrils. Jesus, Jesus Christ, its SNOT'S on fire, Kevin thought, and when he woke he was horrified to hear himself whispering it over and over, very rapidly '. . . snot's on fire, snot's on fire, snot's on fire.' Night by night the dog gained on him as he fled down the sidewalk. Even when he wasn't turning to look he could hear the Sun dog gaining. He was aware of a spread of warmth from his crotch and knew he was in enough fear to have wet himself, although the emotion came through in the same diluted, numbed way he seemed to have to move in this world. He could hear the Sun dog's paws striking the cement, could hear the dry crack and squall of the cement breaking. He could hear the hot blurts of its breath, the suck of air flowing in past those outrageous teeth. And on the night Pop woke up to find he had not only walked in his sleep but taken at least one picture in it, Kevin felt as well as heard the Sun dog's breath for the first time a warm rush of air on his buttocks like the sultry suck of wind a subway on an express run pulls through a station where it needn't stop. He knew the dog was close enough to spring on his back now, and that would come next; he would feel one more breath, this one not just warm but hot, as hot as acute indigestion in your throat, and then that crooked living beartrap of a mouth would sink deep into the flesh of his back, between the shoulderblades, ripping the skin and meat off his spine, and did he think this was really just a dream? Did he? He awoke from this last one just as Pop was gaining the top of the stairs to his apartment and resting one final time before going inside back to bed. This time Kevin woke sitting bolt upright, the sheet and blanket which had been over him puddled around his waist, his skin covered with sweat and yet freezing, a million stiff little white goosepimples standing out all over his belly, chest, back, and arms like stigmata. Even his cheeks seemed to crawl with them. And what he thought about was not the dream, or at least not directly; he thought instead It's wrong, the number is wrong, it says three but it can't  Then he flopped back and, in the way of children (for even at fifteen most of him was still a child and would be until later that day), he fell into a deep sleep again. The alarm woke him at seventhirty, as it always did on school mornings, and he found himself sitting up in bed again, wideeyed, every piece suddenly in place. The Sun he had smashed hadn't been his Sun, and that was why he kept having this same crazy dream over and over and over again. Pop Merrill, that kindly old crackerbarrel philosopher and repairer of cameras and clocks and small appliances, had euchered him and his father as neatly and competently as a riverboat gambler does the tenderfeet in an old Western movie. His father ! He heard the door downstairs slam shut and leaped out of bed. He took two running strides toward the door in his underwear, thought better of it, turned, yanked the window up, and hollered 'Dad!' just as his father was folding himself into the car to go to work. CHAPTER 1 The StandIn 1 Everything, Sam Peebles decided later, was the fault of the goddamned acrobat. If the acrobat hadn't gotten drunk at exactly the wrong time, Sam never would have ended up in such trouble. It is not bad enough, he thought with a perhaps justifiable bitterness, that life is like a narrow beam over an endless chasm, a beam we have to walk blindfolded. It's bad, but not bad enough. Sometimes, we also get pushed. But that was later. First, before the Library Policeman, was the drunken acrobat. 2 In Junction City, the last Friday of every month was Speaker's Night at the local Rotarians' Hall. On the last Friday in March of 1990, the Rotarians were scheduled to hear  and to be entertained by  The Amazing Joe, an acrobat with Curry  Trembo's AllStar Circus and Travelling Carnival. The telephone on Sam Peebles's desk at Junction City Realty and Insurance rang at five past four on Thursday afternoon. Sam picked it up. It was always Sam who picked it up  either Sam in person or Sam on the answering machine, because he was Junction City Realty and Insurance's owner and sole employee. He was not a rich man, but he was a reasonably happy one. He liked to tell people that his first Mercedes was still quite a distance in the future, but he had a Ford which was almost new and owned his own home on Kelton Avenue. 'Also, the business keeps me in beer and skittles,' he liked to add ... although in truth, he hadn't drunk much beer since college and wasn't exactly sure what skittles were. He thought they might be pretzels. 'Junction City Realty and In  ' 'Sam, this is Craig. The acrobat broke his neck.' 'What?' 'You heard me!' Craig Jones cried in deeply aggrieved tones. 'The acrobat broke his fucking neck!' 'Oh,' Sam said. 'Gee.' He thought about this for a moment and then asked cautiously, 'Is he dead, Craig?' 'No, he's not dead, but he might as well be as far as we're concerned. He's in the hospital over in Cedar Rapids with his neck dipped in about twenty pounds of plaster. Billy Bright just called me. He said the guy came on drunk as a skunk at the matinee this afternoon, tried to do a backover flip, and landed outside the center ring on the nape of his neck. Billy said he could hear it way up in the bleachers, where he was sitting. He said it sounded like when you step in a puddle that just iced over.' 'Ouch!' Sam exclaimed, wincing. 'I'm not surprised. After all  The Amazing Joe. What kind of name is that for a circus performer? I mean, The Amazing Randix, okay. The Amazing Tortellini, still not bad. But The Amazing Joe? It sounds like a prime example of brain damage in action to me.' 'Jesus, that's too bad.' 'Fucking shit on toast is what it is. It leaves us without a speaker tomorrow night, good buddy.' Sam began to wish he had left the office promptly at four. Craig would have been stuck with Sam the answering machine, and that would have given Sam the living being a little more time to think. He felt he would soon need time to think. He also felt that Craig Jones was not going to give him any. 'Yes,' he said, 'I guess that's true enough.' He hoped he sounded philosophical but helpless. 'What a shame.' 'It sure is,' Craig said, and then dropped the dime. 'But I know you'll be happy to step in and fill the slot.' 'Me? Craig, you've got to be kidding! I can't even do a somersault, let alone a backover fl  ' 'Thought you could talk about the importance of the independently owned business in smalltown life,' Craig Jones pressed on relentlessly. 'If that doesn't do it for you, there's baseball. Lacking that, you could always drop your pants and wag your wingwang at the audience. Sam, I am not just the head of the Speaker's Committee  that would be bad enough. But since Kenny moved away and Carl quit coming, I am the Speaker's Committee. Now, you've got to help me. I need a speaker tomorrow night. There are about five guys in the whole damn club I feel I can trust in a pinch, and you're one of them.' 'But  ' 'You're also the only one who hasn't filled in already in a situation like this, so you're elected, buddyboy.' 'Frank Stephens pinchhit for the guy from the trucking union last year when the grand jury indicted him for fraud and he couldn't show up. Sam  it's your turn in the barrel. You can't let me down, man. You owe me.' 'I run an insurance business!' Sam cried. 'When I'm not writing insurance, I sell farms! Mostly to banks! Most people find it boring! The ones who don't find it boring find it disgusting!' 'None of that matters.' Craig was now moving in for the kill, marching over Sam's puny objections in grim hobnailed boots. 'They'll all be drunk by the end of dinner and you know it. They won't remember a goddam word you said come Saturday morning, but in the meantime, I need someone to stand up and talk for half an hour and you're elected!' Sam continued to object a little longer, but Craig kept coming down on the imperatives, italicizing them mercilessly. Need. Gotta. Owe. 'All right!' he said at last. 'All right, all right! Enough!' 'My man!' Craig exclaimed. His voice was suddenly full of sunshine and rainbows. 'Remember, it doesn't have to be any longer than thirty minutes, plus maybe another ten for questions. If anybody has any questions. And you really can wag your wingwang if you want to. I doubt that anybody could actually see it, but  ' 'Craig,' Sam said, 'that's enough.' 'Oh! Sorry! Shet mah mouf!' Craig, perhaps lightheaded with relief, cackled. 'Listen, why don't we terminate this discussion?' Sam reached for the roll of Turns he kept in his desk drawer. He suddenly felt he might need quite a few Turns during the next twentyeight hours or so. 'It looks as if I've got a speech to write.' 'You got it,' Craig said. 'Just remember  dinner at six, speech at seventhirty. As they used to say on Hawaii Five0, be there! Aloha!' 'Aloha, Craig,' Sam said, and hung up. He stared at the phone. He felt hot gas rising slowly up through his chest and into his throat. He opened his mouth and uttered a sour burp  the product of a stomach which had been reasonably serene until five minutes ago. He ate the first of what would prove to be a great many Tums indeed. 3 Instead of going bowling that night as he had planned, Sam Peebles shut himself in his study at home with a yellow legal pad, three sharpened pencils, a package of Kent cigarettes, and a sixpack of Jolt. He unplugged the telephone from the wall, lit a cigarette, and stared at the yellow pad. After five minutes of staring, he wrote this on the top line of the top sheet SMALLTOWN BUSINESSES THE LIFEBLOOD OF AMERICA He said it out loud and liked the sound of it. Well ... maybe he didn't exactly like it, but he could live with it. He said it louder and liked it better. A little better. It actually wasn't that good; in fact, it probably sucked the big hairy one, but it beat the shit out of 'Communism Threat or Menace.' And Craig was right  most of them would be too hung over on Saturday morning to remember what they'd heard on Friday night, anyway. Marginally encouraged, Sam began to write. 'When I moved to Junction City from the more or less thriving metropolis of Ames in 1984 4 and that is why I feel now, as I did on that bright September morn in 1984, that small businesses are not just the lifeblood of America, but the bright and sparkly lifeblood of the entire Western world.' Sam stopped, crushed out a cigarette in the ashtray on his office desk, and looked hopefully at Naomi Higgins. 'Well? What do you think?' Naomi was a pretty young woman from Proverbia, a town four miles west of Junction City. She lived in a ramshackle house by the Proverbia River with her ramshackle mother. Most of the Rotarians knew Naomi, and wagers had been offered from time to time on whether the house or the mother would fall apart first. Sam didn't know if any of these wagers had ever been taken, but if so, their resolution was still pending. Naomi had graduated from Iowa City Business College, and could actually retrieve whole legible sentences from her shorthand. Since she was the only local woman who possessed such a skill, she was in great demand among Junction City's limited business population. She also had extremely good legs, and that didn't hurt. She worked mornings five days a week, for four men and one woman two lawyers, one banker, and two realtors. In the afternoons she went back to the ramshackle house, and when she was not caring for her ramshackle mother, she typed up the dictation she had taken. Sam Peebles engaged Naomi's services each Friday morning from ten until noon, but this morning he had put aside his correspondence  even though some of it badly needed to be answered  and asked Naomi if she would listen to something. 'Sure, I guess so,' Naomi had replied. She looked a little worried, as if she thought Sam  whom she had briefly dated  might be planning to propose marriage. When he explained that Craig Jones had drafted him to stand in for the wounded acrobat, and that he wanted her to listen to his speech, she'd relaxed and listened to the whole thing  all twentysix minutes of it  with flattering attention. 'Don't be afraid to be honest,' he added before Naomi could do more than open her mouth. 'It's good,' she said. 'Pretty interesting.' 'No, that's okay  you don't have to spare my feelings. Let it all hang out.' 'I am. It's really okay. Besides, by the time you start talking, they'll all be  ' 'Yes, they'll all be hammered, I know.' This prospect had comforted Sam at first, but now it disappointed him a little. Listening to himself read, he'd actually thought the speech was pretty good. 'There Is one thing,' Naomi said thoughtfully. 'Oh?' 'It's kind of ... you know . . . dry.' 'Oh,' Sam said. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. He had been up until nearly one o'clock this morning, first writing and then revising. 'But that's easy to fix,' she assured him. 'Just go to the library and get a couple of those books.' Sam felt a sudden sharp pain in his lower belly and grabbed his roll of Tums. Research for a stupid Rotary Club speech? Library research? That was going a little overboard, wasn't it? He had never been to the Junction City Library before, and he didn't see a reason to go there now. Still, Naomi had listened very closely, Naomi was trying to help, and it would be rude not to at least listen to what she had to say. 'What books?' 'You know  books with stuff in them to liven up speeches. They're like . . .' Naomi groped. 'Well, you know the hot sauce they give you at China Light, if you want it?' 'Yes  ' 'They're like that. They have jokes. Also, there's this one book, Best Loved Poems of the American People. You could probably find something in there for the end. Something sort of uplifting.' 'There are poems in this book about the importance of small businesses in American life?' Sam asked doubtfully. 'When you quote poetry, people get uplifted,' Naomi said. 'Nobody cares what it's about, Sam, let alone what it's for.' 'And they really have jokebooks especially for speeches?' Sam found this almost impossible to believe, although hearing that the library carried books on such esoterica as smallengine repair and wigstyling wouldn't have surprised him in the least. 'Yes.' 'How do you know?' 'When Phil Brakeman was running for the State House, I used to type up speeches for him all the time,' Naomi said. 'He had one of those books. I just can't remember what the name of it was. All I can think of is Jokes for the John, and of course that's not right.' 'No,' Sam agreed, thinking that a few choice tidbits from Jokes for the John would probably make him a howling success. But he began to see what Naomi was getting at and the idea appealed to him despite his reluctance to visit the local library after all his years of cheerful neglect. A little spice for the old speech. Dress up your leftovers, turn your meatloaf into a masterpiece. And a library, after all, was just a library. If you didn't know how to find what you wanted, all you had to do was ask a librarian. Answering questions was one of their jobs, right? 'Anyway, you could leave it just the way it is,' Naomi said. 'I mean, they will be drunk.' She looked at Sam kindly but severely and then checked her watch. 'You have over an hour left  did you want to do some letters?' 'No, I guess not. Why don't you type up my speech instead?' He had already decided to spend his lunch hour at the library. Secret Window, Secret Garden THIS IS FOR CHUCK VERRILL. TWO PAST MIDNIGHT 1 'You stole my story,' the man on the doorstep said. 'You stole my story and something's got to be done about it. Right is right and fair is fair and something has to be done.' Morton Rainey, who had just gotten up from a nap and who was still feeling only halfway into the real world, didn't have the slightest idea what to say. This was never the case when he was at work, sick or well, wide awake or half asleep; he was a writer, and hardly ever at a loss when it became necessary to fill a character's mouth with a snappy comeback. Rainey opened his mouth, found no snappy comeback there (not even a limp one, in fact), and so closed it again. He thought This man doesn't look exactly real. He looks like a character out of a novel by William Faulkner. This was of no help in resolving the situation, but it was undeniably true. The man who had rung Rainey's doorbell out here in the western Maine version of nowhere looked about fortyfive. He was very thin. His face was calm, almost serene, but carved with deep lines. They moved horizontally across his high brow in regular waves, cut vertically downward from the ends of his thin lips to his jawline, and radiated outward in tiny sprays from the corners of his eyes. The eyes were bright, unfaded blue. Rainey couldn't tell what color his hair was; he wore a large black hat with a round crown planted squarely on his head. The underside of the brim touched the tops of his ears. It looked like the sort of hat Quakers wore. He had no sideburns, either, and for all Morton Rainey knew, he might be as bald as Telly Savalas under that roundcrowned felt hat. He was wearing a blue workshirt. It was buttoned neatly all the way to the loose, razorreddened flesh of his neck, although he wore no tie. The bottom of the shirt disappeared into a pair of bluejeans that looked a little too big for the man who was wearing them. They ended in cuffs which lay neatly on a pair of faded yellow workshoes which looked made for walking in a furrow of playedout earth about three and a half feet behind a mule's ass. 'Well?' he asked when Rainey continued to say nothing. 'I don't know you,' Rainey said finally. It was the first thing he'd said since he'd gotten up off the couch and come to answer the door, and it sounded sublimely stupid in his own cars. 'I know that,' said the man. 'That doesn't matter. I know you, Mr Rainey. That's what matters.' And then he reiterated 'You stole my story.' He held out his hand, and for the first time Rainey saw that he had something in it. It was a sheaf of paper. But not just any old sheaf of paper; it was a manuscript. After you've been in the business awhile, he thought, you always recognized the look of a manuscript. Especially an unsolicited one. And. belatedly, he thought Good thing for you it wasn't a gun, Mort old kid. You would have been in hell before you knew you were dead. And even more belatedly, he realized that he was probably dealing with one of the Crazy Folks. It was long overdue, of course; although his last three books had been bestsellers, this was his first visit from one of that fabled tribe. He felt a mixture of fear and chagrin, and his thoughts narrowed to a single point how to get rid of the guy as fast as possible, and with as little unpleasantness as possible. 'I don't read manuscripts  ' he began. 'You read this one already,' the man with the hardworking sharecropper's face said evenly. 'You stole it.' He spoke as if stating a simple fact. like a man noting that the sun was out and it was a pleasant fall day. All of Mort's thoughts were belated this afternoon, it seemed; he now realized for the first time how alone he was out here. He had come to the house in Tashmore Glen in early October, after two miserable months in New York; his divorce had become final just last week. It was a big house, but it was a summer place, and Tashmore Glen was a summer town. There were maybe twenty cottages on this particular road running along the north bay of Tashmore Lake, and in July or August there would be people staying in most or all of them . . . but this wasn't July or August. It was late October. The sound of a gunshot, he realized, would probably drift away unheard. If it was heard, the hearers would simply assume someone was shooting at quail or pheasant  it was the season. 'I can assure you  ' 'I know you can.' the man in the black hat said with that same unearthly patience. 'I know that.' Behind him, Mort could see the car the man had come in. It was an old station wagon which looked as if it had seen a great many miles, very few of them on good roads. He could see that the plate on it wasn't from the State of Maine, but couldn't tell what state it was from; he'd known for some time now that he needed to go to the optometrist and have his glasses changed, had even planned early last summer to do that little chore, but then Henry Young had called him one day in April, asking who the fellow was he'd seen Amy with at the mall  some relative, maybe?  and the suspicions which had culminated in the eerily quick and quiet nofault divorce had begun, the shitstorm which had taken up all his time and energy these last few months. During that time he had been doing well if he remembered to change his underwear, let alone handle more esoteric things like optometrist appointments. 'If you want to talk to someone about some grievance you feel you have,' Mort began uncertainly, hating the pompous, talkingboilerplate sound of his own voice but not knowing how else to reply, 'you could talk to my ag ' 'This is between you and me,' the man on the doorstep said patiently. Bump, Mort's tomcat, had been curled up on the low cabinet built into the side of the house  you had to store your garbage in a closed compartment or the racoons came in the night and pulled it all over hell  and now he jumped down and twined his way sinuously between the stranger's legs. The stranger's brightblue eyes never left Rainey's face. 'We don't need any outsiders, Mr Rainey. It is strictly between you and me.' 'I don't like being accused of plagiarism, if that's what you're doing,' Mort said. At the same time, part of his mind was cautioning him that you had to be very careful when dealing with people of the Crazy Folks tribe. Humor them? Yes. But this man didn't seem to have a gun, and Mort outweighed him by at least fifty pounds. I've also got five or ten years on him, by the look, he thought. He had read that a bonafide Crazy Guy could muster abnormal strength, but he was damned if he was simply going to stand here and let this man he had never seen before go on saying that he, Morton Rainey, had stolen his story. Not without some kind of rebuttal. 'I don't blame you for not liking it,' the man in the black hat said. He spoke in the same patient and serene way. He spoke, Mort thought, like a therapist whose work is teaching small children who are retarded in some mild way. 'But you did it. You stole my story.' 'You'll have to leave,' Mort said. He was fully awake now, and he no longer felt so bewildered, at such a disadvantage. 'I have nothing to say to you.' 'Yes, I'll go,' the man said. 'We'll talk more later.' He held out the sheaf of manuscript, and Mort actually found himself reaching for it. He put his hand back down to his side just before his uninvited and unwanted guest could slip the manuscript into it, like a process server finally slipping a subpoena to a man who has been ducking it for months. 'I'm not taking that,' Mort said, and part of him was marvelling at what a really accommodating beast a man was when someone held something out to you, your first instinct was to take it. No matter if it was a check for a thousand dollars or a stick of dynamite with a lit and fizzing fuse, your first instinct was to take it. 'Won't do you any good to play games with me, Mr Rainey,' the man said mildly. 'This has got to be settled.' 'So far as I'm concerned, it is,' Mort said, and closed the door on that lined, used, and somehow timeless face. He had only felt a moment or two of fear, and those had come when he first realized, in a disoriented and sleepbefogged way, what this man was saying. Then it had been swallowed by anger  anger at being bothered during his nap, and more anger at the realization that he was being bothered by a representative of the Crazy Folks. Once the door was closed, the fear returned. He pressed his lips together and waited for the man to start pounding on it. And when that didn't come, he became convinced that the man was just standing out there, still as a stone and as patient as same, waiting for him to reopen the door ... as he would have to do, sooner or later. Then he heard a low thump, followed by a series of light steps crossing the board porch. Mort walked into the master bedroom, which looked out on the driveway. There were two big windows in here, one giving on the driveway and the shoulder of hill behind it, the other providing a view of the slope which fell away to the blue and agreeable expanse of Tashmore Lake. Both windows were reflectorized, which meant he could look out but anyone trying to look in would see only his own distorted image, unless he put his nose to the glass and cupped his eyes against the glare. He saw the man in the workshirt and cuffed bluejeans walking back to his old station wagon. From this angle, he could make out the license plate's state of issue  Mississippi. As the man opened the driver'sside door, Mort thought Oh shit. The gun's in the car. He didn't have it on him because he believed he could reason with me ... whatever his idea of 'reasoning' is. But now he's going to get it and come back. It's probably in the glove compartment or under the seat But the man got in behind the wheel, pausing only long enough to take off his black hat and toss it down beside him. As he slammed the door and started the engine, Mort thought, There's something different about him now. But it wasn't until his unwanted afternoon visitor had backed up the driveway and out of sight behind the thick screen of bushes Mort kept forgetting to trim that he realized what it was. When the man got into his car, he had no longer been holding the manuscript. 2 It was on the back porch. There was a rock on it to keep the individual pages from blowing all over the little dooryard in the light breeze. The small thump he'd heard had been the man putting the rock on the manuscript. Mort stood in the doorway, hands in the pockets of his khaki pants, looking at it. He knew that craziness wasn't catching (except maybe in cases of prolonged exposure, he supposed), but he still didn't want to touch the goddam thing. He supposed he would have to, though. He didn't know just how long he would be here  a day, a week, a month, and a year all looked equally possible at this point  but he couldn't just let the fucking thing sit there. Greg Carstairs, his caretaker, would be down early this afternoon to give him an estimate on how much it would cost to reshingle the house, for one thing, and Greg would wonder what it was. Worse, he would probably assume it was Mort's, and that would entail more explanations than the damned thing was worth. He stood there until the sound of his visitor's engine had merged into the low, slow hum of the afternoon, and then he went out on the porch, walking carefully in his bare feet (the porch had needed painting for at least a year now, and the dry wood was prickly with potential splinters), and tossed the rock into the juniperchoked gully to the left of the porch. He picked up the little sheaf of pages and looked down at it. The top one was a title page. It read SECRET WINDOW, SECRET GARDEN By John Shooter Mort felt a moment's relief in spite of himself. He had never heard of John Shooter, and he had never read or written a short story called 'Secret Window, Secret Garden' in his life. He tossed the manuscript in the kitchen wastebasket on his way by, went back to the couch in the living room, lay down again, and was asleep in five minutes. He dreamed of Amy. He slept a great lot and he dreamed of Amy a great lot these days, and waking up to the sound of his own hoarse shouts no longer surprised him much. He supposed it would pass. 3 The next morning he was sitting in front of his word processor in the small nook off the living room which had always served as his study when they were down here. The word processor was on, but Mort was looking out the window at the lake. Two motorboats were out there, cutting broad white wakes in the blue water. He had thought they were fishermen at first, but they never slowed down  just cut back and forth across each other's bows in big loops. Kids, he decided. Just kids playing games. They weren't doing anything very interesting, but then, neither was he. He hadn't written anything worth a damn since he had left Amy. He sat in front of the word processor every day from nine to eleven, just as he had every day for the last three years (and for about a thousand years before that he had spent those two hours sitting in front of an old Royal office model), but for all the good he was doing with it, he might as well have traded it in on a motorboat and gone out grabassing with the kids on the lake. Today, he had written the following lines of deathless prose during his twohour stint Four days after George had confirmed to his own satisfaction that his wife was cheating on him, he confronted her. 'I have to talk to you, Abby,' he said. It was no good. It was too close to real life to be good. He had never been so hot when it came to real life. Maybe that was part of the problem. He turned off the word processor, realizing just a second after he'd flicked the switch that he'd forgotten to save the document. Well, that was all right. Maybe it had even been the critic in his subconscious, telling him the document wasn't worth saving. Mrs Gavin had apparently finished upstairs; the drone of the Electrolux had finally ceased. She came in every Tuesday to clean, and she had been shocked into a silence very unlike her when Mort had told her two Tuesdays ago that he and Amy were quits. He suspected that she had liked Amy a good deal more than she had liked him. But she was still coming, and Mort supposed that was something. He got up and went out into the living room just as Mrs Gavin came down the main staircase. She was holding the vacuumcleaner hose and dragging the small tubular machine after her. It came down in a series of thumps, looking like a small mechanical dog. If I tried to pull the vacuum downstairs that way, it'd smack into one of my ankles and then roll all the way to the bottom, Mort thought. How does she get it to do that, I wonder? 'Hi there, Mrs G.,' he said, and crossed the living room toward the kitchen door. He wanted a Coke. Writing shit always made him thirsty. 'Hello, Mr Rainey.' He had tried to get her to call him Mort, but she wouldn't. She wouldn't even call him Morton. Mrs Gavin was a woman of her principles, but her principles had never kept her from calling his wife Amy. Maybe I should tell her I caught Amy in bed with another man at one of Derry's finer motels, Mort thought as he pushed through the swing door. She might go back to calling her Mrs Rainey again, at the very least. This was an ugly and meanspirited thought, the kind of thinking he suspected was at the root of his writing problems, but he didn't seem to be able to help it. Perhaps it would also pass ... like the dreams. For some reason this idea made him think of a bumper sticker he'd seen once on the back of a very old VW beetle. CONSTIPATED  CANNOT PASS, the sticker had read.


As the kitchen door swung back, Mrs Gavin called 'I found one of your stories in the trash, Mr Rainey. I thought you might want it, so I put it on the counter.' 'Okay,' he said, having no idea what she might be talking about. He was not in the habit of tossing bad manuscripts or frags in the kitchen trash. When he produced a stinker  and lately he had produced more than his share  it went either directly to data heaven or into the circular file to the right of his wordprocessing station. The man with the lined face and round black Quaker hat never even entered his mind. He opened the refrigerator door, moved two small Tupperware dishes filled with nameless leftovers, discovered a bottle of Pepsi, and opened it as he nudged the fridge door closed with his hip. As he went to toss the cap in the trash, he saw the manuscript  its title page was spotted with something that looked like orange juice, but otherwise it was all right  sitting on the counter by the Silex. Then he remembered. John Shooter, right. Charter member of the Crazy Folks, Mississippi Branch. He took a drink of Pepsi, then picked up the manuscript. He put the title page on the bottom and saw this at the head of the first page. John Shooter General Delivery Dellacourt, Mississippi 30 pages Approximately 7500 words Selling 1st serial rights, North America SECRET WINDOW, SECRET GARDEN By John Shooter The manuscript had been typed on a good grade of bond paper, but the machine must have been a sad case  an old office model, from the look, and not very well maintained. Most of the letters were as crooked as an old man's teeth. He read the first sentence, then the second, then the third, for a few moments clear thought ceased. Todd Downey thought that a woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had was not much of a woman. He therefore decided to kill her. He would do it in the deep corner formed when the house and the barn came together at an extreme angle  he would do it where his wife kept her garden. 'Oh shit,' Mort said, and put the manuscript back down. His arm struck the Pepsi bottle. It overturned, foaming and fizzing across the counter and running down the cabinet facings. 'Oh SHIT!' he yelled. Mrs Gavin came in a hurry, surveyed the situation, and said 'Oh, that's nothing. I thought from the sound that maybe you'd cut your own throat. Move a little, can't you, Mr Rainey?' He moved, and the first thing she did was to pick the sheaf of manuscript up off the counter and thrust it back into his hands. It was still okay; the soda had run the other way. He had once been a man with a fairly good sense of humor  he had always thought so, anyway  but as he looked down at the little pile of paper in his hands, the best he could manage was a sour sense of irony. It's like the cat in the nursery rhyme, he thought. The one that kept coming back. 'If you're trying to wreck that,' Mrs Gavin said, nodding at the manuscript as she got a dishrag from under the sink, 'you're on the right track.' 'It's not mine,' he said, but it was funny, wasn't it? Yesterday, when he had almost reached out and taken the script from the man who had brought it to him, he'd thought about what an accommodating beast a man was. Apparently that urge to accommodate stretched in all directions, because the first thing he'd felt when he read those three sentences was guilt ... and wasn't that just what Shooter (if that was really his name) had wanted him to feel? Of course it was. You stole my story, he'd said, and weren't thieves supposed to feel guilty? 'Pardon me, Mr Rainey,' Mrs Gavin said, holding up the dishrag. He stepped aside so she could get at the spill. 'It's not mine,' he repeated  insisted, really. 'Oh,' she said, wiping up the spill on the counter and then stepping to the sink to wring out the cloth. 'I thought it was.' 'It says John Shooter,' he said, putting the title page back on top and turning it toward her. 'See?' Mrs Gavin favored the title page with the shortest glance politeness would allow and then began wiping the cabinet faces. 'Thought it was one of those whatchacallums,' she said. 'Pseudonames. Or nyms. Whatever the word is names.' 'I don't use one,' he said. 'I never have.' This time she favored him with a brief glance  country shrewd and slightly amused  before getting down on her knees to wipe up the puddle of Pepsi on the floor. 'Don't s'pose you'd tell me if you did,' she said. 'I'm sorry about the spill,' he said, edging toward the door. 'My job,' she said shortly. She didn't look up again. Mort took the hint and left. He stood in the living room for a moment, looking at the abandoned vacuum cleaner in the middle of the rug. In his head he heard the man with the lined face saying patiently, This is between you and me. We don't need any outsiders, Mr Rainey. It is strictly between you and me. Mort thought of that face, recalled it carefully to a mind which was trained to recall faces and actions, and thought It wasn't just a momentary aberration, or a bizarre way to meet an author he may or may not consider famous. He will be back. He suddenly headed back into his study, rolling the manuscript into a tube as he went. 4 Three of the four study walls were lined with bookshelves, and one of them had been set aside for the various editions, domestic and foreign, of his works. He had published six books in all five novels and a collection of short stories. The book of short stories and his first two novels had been well received by his immediate family and a few friends. His third novel, The OrganGrinder's Boy, had been an instant bestseller. The early works had been reissued after he became a success, and had done quite well, but they had never been as popular as his later books. The shortstory collection was called Everybody Drops the Dime, and most of the tales had originally been published in the men's magazines, sandwiched around pictures of women wearing lots of eye makeup and not much else. One of the stories, however, had been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. It was called 'Sowing Season,' and it was to this story he now turned. A woman who would steal your love when your love was all you had wasn't much of a woman  that, at least, was Tommy Havelock's opinion. He decided to kill her. He even knew the place he would do it, the exact place the little patch of garden she kept in the extreme angle formed where the house and the barn came together. Mort sat down and worked his way slowly through the two stories, reading back and forth. By the time he was halfway through, he understood he really didn't need to go any further. They varied in diction in some places; in many others even that was the same, word for word. Diction aside, they were exactly the same. In both of them, a man killed his wife. In both of them, the wife was a cold, loveless bitch who cared only for her garden and her canning. In both of them, the killer buried his spousal victim in her garden and then tended it, growing a really spectacular crop. In Morton Rainey's version, the crop was beans. In Shooter's, it was corn. In both versions, the killer eventually went crazy and was discovered by the police eating vast amounts of the vegetable in question and swearing he would be rid of her, that in the end he would finally be rid of her. Mort had never considered himself much of a horrorstory writer  and there was nothing supernatural about 'Sowing Season'  but it had been a creepy little piece of work all the same. Amy had finished it with a little shiver and said, 'I suppose it's good, but that man's mind ... God, Mort, what a can of worms.' That had summed up his own feelings pretty well. The landscape of 'Sowing Season' wasn't one he would care to travel through often, and it was no 'TellTale Heart,' but he thought he had done a fair job of painting Tom Havelock's homicidal breakdown. The editor at EQ had agreed, and so had the readers  the story had generated favorable mail. The editor had asked for more, but Mort had never come up with another story even remotely like 'Sowing Season.' 'I know I can do it,' Tod Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. 'I'm sure that in time all of her will be gone.' That was how Shooter's ended. 'I am confident I can take care of this business,' Tom Havelock told them, and helped himself to another portion of beans from the brimming, steaming bowl. 'I'm sure that, in time, her death will be a mystery even to me.' That was how Mort Rainey's ended. Mort closed his copy of Everybody Drops the Dime and replaced it thoughtfully on his shelf of first editions. He sat down and began to rummage slowly and thoroughly through the drawers of his desk. It was a big one, so big the furniture men had had to bring it into the room in sections, and it had a lot of drawers. The desk was solely his domain; neither Amy nor Mrs G. had ever set a hand to it, and the drawers were full of ten years' worth of accumulated rickrack. It had been four years since Mort had given up smoking, and if there were any cigarettes left in the house, this was where they would be. If he found some, he would smoke. just about now, he was crazy for a smoke. If he didn't find any, that was all right, too; going through his junk was soothing. Old letters which he'd put aside to answer and never had, what had once seemed so important now looking antique, even arcane; postcards he'd bought but never mailed; chunks of manuscript in varying stages of completion; half a bag of very elderly Doritos; envelopes; paperclips; cancelled checks. He could sense layers here which were almost geological  layers of summer life frozen in place. And it was soothing. He finished one drawer and went on to the next, thinking all the while about John Shooter and how John Shooter's story  his story, goddammit!  had made him feel. The most obvious thing, of course, was that it had made him feel like he needed a cigarette. This wasn't the first time he'd felt that way in the last four years; there had been times when just seeing someone puffing away behind the wheel of a car next to his at a stoplight could set off a raging momentary lust for tobacco. But the key word there, of course, was 'momentary.' Those feelings passed in a hurry, like fierce rainsqualls  five minutes after a blinding silver curtain of rain has dropped out of the sky, the sun is shining again. He'd never felt the need to turn in to the next convenience store on his way for a deck of smokes ... or go rummaging through his glove compartment for a stray or two as he was now rummaging through his desk. He felt guilty, and that was absurd. Infuriating. He had not stolen John Shooter's story, and he knew he hadn't  if there had been stealing (and there must have been; for the two stories to be that close without prior knowledge on the part of one of the two players was impossible for Mort to believe), then it had been Shooter who had stolen from him. Of course. It was as plain as the nose on his face ... or the round black hat on John Shooter's head. Yet he still felt upset, unsettled, guilty ... he felt at a loss in a way for which there was perhaps no word. And why? Well ... because... At that moment Mort lifted up a Xerox of The OrganGrinder's Boy manuscript, and there, beneath it, was a package of L  M cigarettes. Did they make L  M's anymore? He didn't know. The pack was old, crumpled, but definitely not flat. He took it out and looked at it. He reflected that he must have bought this particular pack in 1985, according to the informal science of stratification one might call  for want of a better word  Deskology. He peered inside the pack. He saw three little coffin nails, all in a row. Timetravellers from another age, Mort thought. He stuck one of the cigarettes in his mouth, then went out into the kitchen to get a match from the box by the stove. Timetravellers from another age, riding up through the years, patient cylindrical voyagers, their mission to wait, to persevere, to bide until the proper moment to start me on the road to lung cancer again finally arrives. And it seems the time has finally come. 'It'll probably taste like shit,' he said aloud to the empty house (Mrs Gavin had long since gone home), and set fire to the tip of the cigarette. It didn't taste like shit, though. It tasted pretty good. He wandered back toward his study, puffing away and feeling pleasantly lightheaded. Ah, the dreadful patient persistence of addiction, he thought. What had Hemingway said? Not this August, nor this September  this year you have to do what you like. But the time comes around again. It always does. Sooner or later you stick something back in your big dumb old mouth again. A drink, a smoke, maybe the barrel of a shotgun. Not this August, nor this September ... ... unfortunately, this was October. At an earlier point in his prospecting, he had found an old bottle half full of Planter's Peanuts. He doubted if the nuts would be fit to eat, but the lid of the bottle made a fine ashtray. He sat behind his desk, looked out at the lake (like Mrs G., the boats which had been out there earlier were gone), relished his old, vile habit, and found he could think about John Shooter and John Shooter's story with a little more equanimity. The man was one of the Crazy Folks, of course; that was now proven in brass if any further proof had been needed. As to how it had made him feel, finding that the similarity actually existed ... Well, a story was a thing, a real thing  you could think of it like that, anyway, especially if someone had paid you for it  but in another, more important, way, it wasn't a thing at all. It wasn't like a vase, or a chair, or an automobile. It was ink on paper, but it wasn't the ink and it wasn't the paper. People sometimes asked him where he got his ideas, and although he scoffed at the question, it always made him feel vaguely ashamed, vaguely spurious. They seemed to feel there was a Central Idea Dump somewhere (just as there was supposed to be an elephant graveyard somewhere, and a fabled lost city of gold somewhere else), and he must have a secret map which allowed him to get there and back, but Mort knew better. He could remember where he had been when certain ideas came to him, and he knew that the idea was often the result of seeing or sensing some odd connection between objects or events or people which had never seemed to have the slightest connection before, but that was the best he could do. As to why he should see these connections or want to make stories out of them after he had ... to that he hadn't a clue. If John Shooter had come to his door and said 'You stole my car' instead of 'You stole my story,' Mort would have scotched the idea quickly and decisively. He could have done it even if the two cars in question had been the same year, make, model, and color. He would have shown the man in the round black hat his automobile registration, invited him to compare the number on the pink slip to the one on the doorpost, and sent him packing. But when you got a story idea, no one gave you a bill of sale. There was no provenance to be traced. Why would there be? Nobody gave you a bill of sale when you got something for free. You charged whoever wanted to buy that thing from you  oh yes, all the traffic would bear, and a little more than that, if you could, to make up for all the times the bastards shorted you  magazines, newspapers, book publishers, movie companies. But the item came to you free, clear, and unencumbered. That was it, he decided. That was why he felt guilty even though he knew he hadn't plagiarized Farmer John Shooter's story. He felt guilty because writing stories had always felt a little bit like stealing, and probably always would. John Shooter just happened to be the first person to show up on his doorstep and accuse him of it right out loud. He thought that, subconsciously, he had been expecting something like this for years. Mort crushed out his cigarette and decided to take a nap. Then he decided that was a bad idea. It would be better, healthier both mentally and physically, to eat some lunch ' read for half an hour or so, and then go for a nice long walk down by the lake. He was sleeping too much, and sleeping too much was a sign of depression. Halfway to the kitchen, he deviated to the long sectional couch by the windowwall in the living room. The hell with it, he thought, putting a pillow under his neck and another one behind his head. I Am depressed. His last thought before drifting off was a repeat He's not done with me yet. Oh no, not this guy. He's a repeater. 5 He dreamed he was lost in a vast cornfield. He blundered from one row to the next, and the sun glinted off the watches he was wearing  half a dozen on each forearm, and each watch set to a different time. Please help me! he cried. Someone please help me! I'm lost and afraid! Ahead of him, the corn on both sides of the row shook and rustled. Amy stepped out from one side. John Shooter stepped out from the other. Both of them held knives. I am confident I can take care of this business, Shooter said as they advanced on him with their knives raised. I'm sure that, in time, your death will be a mystery even to us. Mort turned to run, but a hand  Amy's, he was sure  seized him by the belt and pulled him back. And when the knives, glittering in the hot sun of this huge secret garden 6 It was the telephone which woke him an hour and a quarter later. He struggled out of a terrible dream  someone had been chasing him, that was all he could clearly remember  to a sitting position on the couch. He was horribly hot; every inch of his skin seemed to be running with sweat. The sun had crept around to this side of the house while he was sleeping and had shone in on him through the windowwall for God knew how long. Mort walked slowly toward the telephone table in the front hall, plodding like a man in a diver's suit walking in the bed of a river against the current, his head thumping slowly, his mouth tasting like old dead gophershit. For every step he took forward, the entrance to the hall seemed to retreat a step, and it occurred to Mort, not for the first time, that hell was probably like the way you felt after sleeping too long and too hard on a hot afternoon. The worst of it wasn't physical. The worst was that dismaying, disorienting sense of being outside yourself, somehow  just an observer looking through dual TV cameras with blurry lenses. He picked up the phone thinking it would be Shooter. Yeah, it'll be him, all right  the one person in the whole wide world I shouldn't be talking to with my guard down and one half of my mind feeling unbuttoned from the other half. Sure tell be him  who else? 'Hello?' It wasn't Shooter, but as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line reply to his greeting, he discovered there was at least one other person to whom he had no business talking while in a physically vulnerable state. 'Hello, Mort,' Amy said. 'Are you all right?' 7 Some time later that afternoon, Mort donned the extralarge red flannel shirt he used as a jacket in the early fall and took the walk he should have taken earlier. Bump the cat followed him long enough to ascertain that Mort was serious, then returned to the house. He walked slowly and deliberately through an exquisite afternoon which seemed to be all blue sky, red leaves, and golden air. He walked with his hands stuffed into his pockets, trying to let the lake's quiet work through his skin and calm him down, as it had always done before  he supposed that was the reason he had come here instead of staying in New York, as Amy had expected him to do, while they trundled steadily along toward divorce. He had come here because it was a magic place, especially in autumn, and he had felt, when he arrived, that if there was a sad sack anywhere on the planet who needed a little magic, he was that person. And if that old magic failed him now that the writing had turned so sour, he wasn't sure what he would do. It turned out that he didn't need to worry about it. After awhile the silence and that queer atmosphere of suspension which always seemed to possess Tashmore Lake when fall had finally come and the summer people had finally gone began to work on him, loosening him up like gently kneading hands. But now he had something besides John Shooter to think about; he had Amy to think about as well. 'Of course I'm all right,' he'd said, speaking as carefully as a drunk trying to convince people that he's sober. In truth, he was still so muzzy that he felt a little bit drunk. The shapes of words felt too big in his mouth, like chunks of soft, friable rock, and he had proceeded with great care, groping his way through the opening formalities and gambits of telephone conversation as if for the first time. 'How are you?' 'Oh, fine, I'm fine,' she said, and then trilled the quick little laugh which usually meant she was either flirting or nervous as hell, and Mort doubted that she was flirting with him  not at this point. The realization that she was nervous, too, set him a little more at ease. 'It's just that you're alone down there, and almost anything could happen and nobody would know  ' She broke off abruptly. 'I'm really not alone,' he said mildly. 'Mrs Gavin was here today and Greg Carstairs is always around.' 'Oh, I forgot about the roof repairs,' Amy said, and for a moment he marvelled at how natural they sounded, how natural and undivorced. Listening to us, Mort thought, you'd never guess there's a rogue realestate agent in my bed ... or what used to be my bed. He waited for the anger to come back  the hurt, jealous, cheated anger  but only a ghost stirred where those lively if unpleasant feelings had been. 'Well, Greg didn't forget,' he assured her. 'He came down yesterday and crawled around on the roof for an hour and a half.' 'How bad is it?' He told her, and they talked about the roof for the next five minutes or so, while Mort slowly woke up; they talked about that old roof as if things were just the same as they always had been, talked about it as if they would be spending next summer under the new cedar shingles just as they had spent the last nine summers under the old cedar shingles. Mort thought Gimme a roof, gimme some shingles, and I'll talk to this bitch forever. As he listened to himself holding up his side of the conversation, he felt a deepening sense of unreality settling in. It felt as if he were returning to the halfwaking, halfsleeping zombie state in which he had answered the phone, and at last he couldn't stand it anymore. If this was some sort of contest to see who could go the longest pretending that the last six months had never happened, then he was willing to concede. More than willing. She was asking where Greg was going to get the cedar shakes and if he would be using a crew from town when Mort broke in. 'Why did you call, Amy?' There was a moment's silence in which he sensed her trying on responses and then rejecting them, like a woman trying on hats, and that did cause the anger to stir again. It was one of the things  one of the few things, actually  that he could honestly say he detested in her. That totally unconscious duplicity. 'I told you why,' she said at last. 'To see if you were all right.' She sounded flustered and unsure of herself again, and that usually meant she was telling the truth. When Amy lied, she always sounded as if she was telling you the world was round. 'I had one of my feelings  I know you don't believe in them, but I think you do know that I get them, and that I believe in them ... don't you, Mort?' There was none of her usual posturing or defensive anger, that was the thing she sounded almost as if she were pleading with him. 'Yeah, I know that.' 'Well, I had one. I was making myself a sandwich for lunch, and I had a feeling that you ... that you might not be all right. I held off for awhile  I thought it would go away, but it didn't. So I finally called. You are all right, aren't you?' 'Yes,' he said. 'And nothing's happened?' 'Well, something did happen,' he said, after only a moment of interior debate. He thought it was possible, maybe even likely, that John Shooter (if that's really his name, his mind insisted on adding) had tried to make contact with him in Derry before coming down here. Derry, after all, was where he usually was at this time of year. Amy might even have sent him down here. 'I knew it,' she said. 'Did you hurt yourself with that goddam chainsaw? Or  ' 'Nothing requiring hospitalization,' he said, smiling a little. 'Just an annoyance. Does the name John Shooter ring a bell with you, Amy?' 'No, why?' He let an irritated little sigh escape through his closed teeth like steam. Amy was a bright woman, but she had always had a bit of a deadshort between her brain and her mouth. He remembered once musing that she should have a teeshirt reading SPEAK NOW, THINK LATER. 'Don't say no right off the bat. Take a few seconds and really think about it. The guy is fairly tall, about six feet, and I'd guess he's in his midforties. His face looked older, but he moved like a man in his forties. He has a country kind of face. Lots of color, lots of sunwrinkles. When I saw him, I thought he looked like a character out of Faulk  ' 'What's this all about, Mort?' Now he felt all the way back; now he could understand again why, as hurt and confused as he had been, he had rejected the urges he felt  mostly at night  to ask her if they couldn't at least try to reconcile their differences. He supposed he knew that, if he asked long enough and hard enough, she would agree. But facts were facts; there had been a lot more wrong with their marriage than Amy's realestate salesman. The drilling quality her voice had taken on now  that was another symptom of what had killed them. What have you done now? the tone under the words asked ... no, demanded. What kind of a mess have you gotten yourself into now? Explain yourself. He closed his eyes and hissed breath through his closed teeth again before answering. Then he told her about John Shooter, and Shooter's manuscript, and his own short story. Amy clearly remembered 'Sowing Season,' but said she had never heard of a man named John Shooter  it wasn't the kind of name you forget, she said, and Mort was inclined to agree  in her life. And she certainly hadn't seen him. 'You're sure?' Mort pressed. 'Yes, I am,' Amy said. She sounded faintly resentful of Mort's continued questioning. 'I haven't seen anyone like that since you left. And before you tell me again not to say no right off the bat, let me assure you that I have a very clear memory of almost everything that's happened since then.' She paused, and he realized she was speaking with an effort now, quite possibly with real pain. That small, mean part of him rejoiced. Most of him did not; most of him was disgusted to find even a small part of him happy about any of this. That had no effect on the interior celebrant, however. That guy might be outvoted, but he also seemed impervious to Mort's  the larger Mort's  attempts to root him out. 'Maybe Ted saw him,' he said. Ted Milner was the realestate agent. He still found it hard to believe she had tossed him over for a realestate agent, and he supposed that was part of the problem, part of the conceit which had allowed things to progress to this point in the first place. He certainly wasn't going to claim, especially to himself, that he had been as innocent as Mary's little lamb, was he? 'Is that supposed to be funny?' Amy sounded angry, ashamed, sorrowful, and defiant all at the same time. 'No,' he said. He was beginning to feel tired again. 'Ted isn't here,' she said. 'Ted hardly ever comes here. I ... I go to his place.' Thank you for sharing that with me, Amy, he almost said, and choked it off. It would be nice to get out of at least one conversation without a swap of accusations. So he didn't say thanks for sharing and he didn't say that'll change and most of all he didn't ask what in the hell's the matter with you, Amy? Mostly because she might then have asked the same thing of him. 8 She had suggested he call Dave Newsome, the Tashmore constable  after all, the man might be dangerous. Mort told her he didn't think that would be necessary, at least not yet, but if 'John Shooter' called by again, he would probably give Dave a jingle. After a few more stilted amenities, they hung up. He could tell she was still smarting over his oblique suggestion that Ted might currently be sitting in Mortybear's chair and sleeping in Mortybear's bed, but he honestly didn't know how he could have avoided mentioning Ted Milner sooner or later. The man had become a part of Amy's life, after all. And she had called him, that was the thing. She had gotten one of her funny feelings and called him. Mort reached the place where the lakeside path forked, the righthand branch climbing the steep bank back up to Lake Drive. He took that branch, walking slowly and savoring the fall color. As he came around the final curve in the path and into sight of the narrow ribbon of blacktop, he was somehow not surprised to see the dusty blue station wagon with the Mississippi plates parked there like an oftwhipped dog chained to a tree, nor the lean figure of John Shooter propped against the right front mudguard with his arms folded across his chest. Mort waited for his heartbeat to speed up, for the surge of adrenaline into his body, but his heart went on maintaining its normal beat, and his glands kept their own counsel  which, for the time being, seemed to be to remain quiet. The sun, which had gone behind a cloud, came out again, and fall colors which had already been bright now seemed to burst into flame. His own shadow reappeared, dark and long and clearcut. Shooter's round black hat looked blacker, his blue shirt bluer, and the air was so clear the man seemed scissored from a swatch of reality that was brighter and more vital than the one Mort knew as a rule. And he understood that he had been wrong about his reasons for not calling Dave Newsome  wrong, or practicing a little deception  on himself as well as on Amy. The truth was that he wanted to deal with this matter himself. Maybe just to prove to myself that there are things I still deal with, he thought, and started up the hill again toward where John Shooter was leaning against his car and waiting for him. 9 His walk along the lake path had been both long and slow, and Amy's call hadn't been the only thing Mort had thought about as he picked his way over or around the occasional downed tree or paused to skip the occasional flat stone across the water (as a boy he had been able to get a really good one  what they called 'a flattie'  to skip as many as nine times, but today four was the most he'd been able to manage). He had also thought about how to deal with Shooter, when and if Shooter turned up again. It was true he had felt a transient  or maybe notsotransient  guilt when he saw how close to identical the two stories were, but he had worked that one out; it was only the generalized guilt he guessed all writers of fiction felt from time to time. As for Shooter himself, the only feelings he had were annoyance, anger . . . and a kind of relief. He was full of an unfocussed rage; had been for months. It was good to finally have a donkey to pin this rotten, stinking tail on. Mort had heard the old saw about how, if four hundred monkeys banged away on four hundred typewriters for four million years, one of them would produce the complete works of Shakespeare. He didn't believe it. Even if it were true, John Shooter was no monkey and he hadn't been alive anywhere near that long, no matter how lined his face was. So Shooter had copied his story.


Why he had picked 'Sowing Season' was beyond Mort Rainey's powers of conjecture, but he knew that was what had happened because he had ruled out coincidence, and he knew damned well that, while he might have stolen that story, like all his others, from The Great Idea Bank of the Universe, he most certainly had not stolen it from Mr John Shooter of the Great State of Mississippi. Where, then, had Shooter copied it from? Mort thought that was the most important question; his chance to expose Shooter as a fake and a cheat might lie buried within the answer to it. There were only two possible answers, because 'Sowing Season' had only been published twice  first in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and then in his collection, Everybody Drops the Dime. The dates of publication for the short stories in a collection are usually listed on the copyright page at the front of the book, and this format had been followed in Everybody Drops the Dime. He had looked up the acknowledgement for 'Sowing Season' and found that it had been originally published in the June, 1980, issue of EQMM. The collection, Everybody Drops the Dime, had been issued by St Martin's Press in 1983. There had been subsequent printings since then  all but one of them in paperback  but that didn't matter. All he really had to work with were those two dates 1980 and 1983 ... and his own hopeful belief that, aside from agents and publishingcompany lawyers, no one paid much attention to those lines of fine print on the copyright page. Hoping that this would prove true to John Shooter, hoping that Shooter would simply assume  as most general readers did  that a story he had read for the first time in a collection had no prior existence, Mort approached the man and finally stood before him on the edge of the road. 10 'I guess you must have had a chance to read my story by now,' Shooter said. He spoke as casually as a man commenting on the weather. 'I did.' Shooter nodded gravely. 'I imagine it rang a bell, didn't it?' 'It certainly did,' Mort agreed, and then, with studied casualness 'When did you write it?' 'I thought you'd ask that,' Shooter said. He smiled a secret little smile, but said no more. His arms remained crossed over his chest, his hands laid against his sides just below the armpits. He looked like a man who would be perfectly content to remain where he was forever, or at least until the sun sank below the horizon and ceased to warm his face. 'Well, sure,' Mort said, still casually. 'I have to, you know. When two fellows show up with the same story, that's serious.' 'Serious,' Shooter agreed in a deeply meditative tone of voice. 'And the only way to sort a thing like that out,' Mort continued, 'to decide who copied from whom, is to find out who wrote the words first.' He fixed Shooter's faded blue eyes with his own dry and uncompromising gaze. Somewhere nearby a chickadee twittered selfimportantly in a tangle of trees and was then quiet again. 'Wouldn't you say that's true?' 'I suppose I would,' Shooter agreed. 'I suppose that's why I came all the way up here from Miss'ippi.' Mort heard the rumble of an approaching vehicle. They both turned in that direction, and Tom Greenleafs Scout came over the nearest hill, pulling a little cyclone of fallen leaves behind it. Tom, a hale and healthy Tashmore native of seventysomething, was the caretaker for most of the places on this side of the lake that Greg Carstairs didn't handle. Tom raised one hand in salute as he passed. Mort waved back. Shooter removed one hand from its resting place and tipped a finger at Tom in a friendly gesture which spoke in some obscure way of a great many years spent in the country, of the uncountable and unrecollected number of times he had saluted the passing drivers of passing trucks and tractors and tedders and balers in that exact same casual way. Then, as Tom's Scout passed out of sight, he returned his hand to his ribcage so that his arms were crossed again. As the leaves rattled to rest on the road, his patient, unwavering, almost eternal gaze came back to Mort Rainey's face once more. 'Now what were we saying?' he asked almost gently. 'We were trying to establish provenance,' Mort said. 'That means ' 'I know what it means,' Shooter said, favoring Mort with a glance which was both calm and mildly contemptuous. 'I know I am wearing shitkicker clothes and driving a shitkicker car, and I come from a long line of shitkickers, and maybe that makes me a shitkicker myself, but it doesn't necessarily make me a stupid shitkicker.' 'No,' Mort agreed. 'I don't guess it does. But being smart doesn't necessarily make you honest, either. In fact, I think it's more often apt to go the other way.' 'I could figure that much out from you, had I not known it,' Shooter said dryly, and Mort felt himself flush. He didn't like to be zinged and rarely was, but Shooter had just done it with the effortless ease of an experienced shotgunner popping a clay pigeon. His hopes of trapping Shooter dropped. Not all the way to zero, but quite a considerable way. Smart and sharp were not the same things, but he now suspected that Shooter might be both. Still, there was no sense drawing this out. He didn't want to be around the man any longer than he had to be. In some strange way he had looked forward to this confrontation, once he had become sure that another confrontation was inevitable  maybe only because it was a break in a routine which had already become dull and unpleasant. Now he wanted it over. He was no longer sure John Shooter was crazy  not completely, anyway  but he thought the man could be dangerous. He was so goddam implacable. He decided to take his best shot and get it over with  no more dancing around. 'When did you write your story, Mr Shooter?' 'Maybe my name's not Shooter,' the man said, looking faintly amused. 'Maybe that's just a pen name.' 'I see. What's your real one?' 'I didn't say it wasn't; I only said maybe. Either way, that's not part of our business.' He spoke serenely, appearing to be more interested in a cloud which was making its way slowly across the high blue sky and toward the westering sun. 'Okay,' Mort said, 'but when you wrote that story is.' 'I wrote it seven years ago,' he said, still studying the cloud  it had touched the edge of the sun now and had acquired a gold fringe. 'In 1982.' Bingo, Mort thought. Wily old bastard or not, he stepped right into the trap after all. He got the story out of the collection, all right. And since Everybody Drops the Dime was published in 1983, he thought any date before then had to be safe. Should have read the copyright page, old son. He waited for a feeling of triumph, but there was none. Only a muted sense of relief that this nut could be sent on his merry way with no further fuss or muss. Still, he was curious; it was the curse of the writing class. For instance, why that particular story, a story which was so out of his usual run, so downright atypical? And if the guy was going to accuse him of plagiarism, why settle for an obscure short story when he could have cobbled up the same sort of almost identical manuscript of a bestseller like The OrganGrinder's Bay? That would have been juicy; this was almost a joke. I suppose knocking off one of the novels would have been too much like work, Mort thought. 'Why did you wait so long?' he asked. 'I mean, my book of short stories was published in 1983, and that's six years ago. Going on seven now.' 'Because I didn't know,' Shooter said. He removed his gaze from the cloud and studied Mort with that discomfiting look of faint contempt again. 'A man like you, I suppose that kind of man just assumes that everyone in America, if not everyone in every country where his books are published, reads what he has written.' 'I know better than that, I think,' Mort said, and it was his turn to be dry. 'But that's not true,' Shooter went on, ignoring what Mort had said in his scarily serene and utterly fixated way. 'That is not true at all. I never saw that story until the middle of June. This June.' Mort thought of saying Well, guess what, Johnnymebay? I never saw my wife in bed with another man until the middle of May! Would it knock Shooter off his pace if he actually did say something like that out loud? He looked into the man's face and decided not. The serenity had burned out of those faded eyes the way mist burns off the hills on a day which is going to be a real scorcher. Now Shooter looked like a fundamentalist preacher about to ladle a large helping of fire and brimstone upon the trembling, downcast heads of his flock, and for the first time Mort Rainey felt really and personally afraid of the man. Yet he was also still angry. The thought he'd had near the end of his first encounter with 'John Shooter' now recurred scared or not, he was damned if he was just going to stand here and take it while this man accused him of theft especially now that the falsity had been revealed out of the man's own mouth. 'Let me guess,' Mort said. 'A guy like you is a little too picky about what he reads to bother with the sort of trash I write. You stick to guys like Marcel Proust and Thomas Hardy, right? At night, after the milking's done, you like to fire up one of those honest country kerosene lamps, plunk it down on the kitchen table  which is, of course, covered with a homey redandwhitechecked tablecloth  and unwind with a little Tess or Remembrance of Things Past. Maybe on the weekend you let your hair down a little, get a little funky, and drag out some Erskine Caldwell or Annie Dillard. It was one of your friends who told you about how I'd copied your honestly wrought tale. Isn't that how the story goes, Mr Shooter ... or whatever your name is?' His voice had taken on a rough edge, and he was surprised to find himself on the edge of real fury. But, he discovered, not totally surprised. 'Nope. I don't have any friends.' Shooter spoke in the dry tone of a man who is only stating a fact. 'No friends, no family, no wife. I've got a little place about twenty miles south of Perkinsburg, and I do have a checked tablecloth on my kitchen table  now that you mention it  but we got electric lights in our town. I only bring out the kerosenes when there's a storm and the lines go down.' 'Good for you,' Mort said. Shooter ignored the sarcasm. 'I got the place from my father, and added to it with a little money that came to me from my gram. I do have a dairy herd, about twenty milkers, you were right about that, too, and in the evenings I write stories. I suppose you've got one of those fancy computers with a screen, but I make do with an old typewriter.' He fell silent, and for a moment they could both hear the crisp rustle of the leaves in the light lateafternoon wind that had sprung up. 'As for your story being the same as mine, I found that out all on my own hook. You see, I'd been thinking about selling the farm. Thinking that with a little more money, I could write days, when my mind's fresh, instead of just after dark. The realtor in Perkinsburg wanted me to meet a fellow up in Jackson, who owns a lot of dairy farms in Miss'ippi. I don't like to drive more than ten or fifteen miles at a time  it gives me a headache, especially when some of it's city driving, because that's where they let all the fools loose  and so I took the bus. I got ready to get on, and then remembered I hadn't brought anything to read. I hate a long bus ride without something to read.' Mort found himself nodding involuntarily. He also hated a ride  bus, train, plane, or car  without something to read, something a little more substantial than the daily paper. 'There isn't any bus station in Perkinsburg  the Greyhound just stops at the Rexall for five minutes or so and then it's down the road. I was already inside the door of that 'hound and starting up the steps when I realized I was emptyhanded. I asked the bus driver if he'd hold it for me and he said he was damned if he would, he was late already, and he was pulling out in another three minutes by his pocketwatch. If I was with him, that would be fine by him, and if I wasn't, then I could kiss his fanny when we met up again.' He TALKS like a storyteller, Mort thought. Be damned if he doesn't. He tried to cancel this thought  it didn't seem to be a good way to be thinking  and couldn't quite do it. 'Well, I ran inside that drugstore. They've got one of those old fashioned wire paperback racks in the Perkinsburg Rexall, the ones that turn around and around, just like the one in the little general store up the road from you.' 'Bowie's?' Shooter nodded. 'That's the place, all right. Anyway, I grabbed the first book my hand happened on. Could have been a paperback Bible, for all I saw of the cover. But it wasn't. It was your book of short stories. Everybody Drops the Dime. And for all I know, they were your short stories. All but that one.' Stop this now. He's working up a head of steam, so spike his boiler right now. But he discovered. he didn't want to. Maybe Shooter was a writer. He fulfilled both of the main requirements he told a tale you wanted to hear to the end, even if you had a pretty good idea what the end was going to be, and he was so full of shit he squeaked. Instead of saying what he should have said  that even if Shooter was by some wild stretch of the imagination telling the truth, he, Mort, had beaten him to that miserable story by two years  he said 'So you read "Sowing Season" on a Greyhound bus while you were going to Jackson to sell your dairy farm last June.' 'No. The way it happened, I read it on the way back. I sold the farm and went back on the Greyhound with a check for sixty thousand dollars in my pocket. I'd read the first half a dozen stories going down. I didn't think they were any great shakes, but they passed the time.' 'Thank you.' Shooter studied him briefly. 'Wasn't offering you any real compliment.' 'Don't I know it.' Shooter thought about this for a moment, then shrugged. 'Anyway, I read two more going back ... and then that one. My story.' He looked at the cloud, which was now an airy mass of shimmering gold, and then back at Mort. His face was as dispassionate as ever, but Mort suddenly understood he had been badly mistaken in believing this man possessed even the slightest shred of peace or serenity. What he had mistaken for those things was the iron mantle of control Shooter had donned to keep himself from killing Morton Rainey with his bare hands. The face was dispassionate, but his eyes blazed with the deepest, wildest fury Mort had ever seen. He understood that he had stupidly walked up the path from the lake toward what might really be his own death at this fellow's hands. Here was a man mad enough  in both senses of that word  to do murder. 'I am surprised no one has taken that story up with you before  it's not like any of the others, not a bit.' Shooter's voice was still even, but Mort now recognized it as the voice of a man laboring mightily to keep from striking out, bludgeoning, perhaps throttling; the voice of a man who knows that all the incentive he would ever need to cross the line between talking and killing would be to hear his own voice begin to spiral upward into the registers of cheated anger; the voice of a man who knows how fatally easy it would be to become his own lynchmob. Mort suddenly felt like a man in a dark room which is crisscrossed with hairthin tripwires, all of them leading to packets of high explosive. It was hard to believe that only moments ago he had felt in charge of this situation. His problems  Amy, his inability to write  now seemed like unimportant figures in an unimportant landscape. In a sense, they had ceased to be problems at all. He only had one problem now, and that was staying alive long enough to get back to his house, let alone long enough to see the sun go down. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. There was nothing he dared to say, not now. The room was full of tripwires. 'I am very surprised,' Shooter repeated in that heavy even voice that now sounded like a hideous parody of calmness. Mort heard himself say 'My wife. She didn't like it. She said that it wasn't like anything I'd ever written before.' 'How did you get it?' Shooter asked slowly and fiercely. 'That's what I really want to know. How in hell did a bigmoney scribbling asshole like you get down to a little shitsplat town in Mississippi and steal my goddam story? I'd like to know why, too, unless you stole all the other ones as well, but the how of it'll be enough to satisfy me right now.' The monstrous unfairness of this brought Mort's own anger back like an unslaked thirst. For a moment he forgot that he was out here on Lake Drive, alone except for this lunatic from Mississippi. 'Drop it,' he said harshly. 'Drop it?' Shooter asked, looking at Mort with a kind of clumsy amazement. 'Drop it? What in hell do you mean, drop it?' 'You said you wrote your story in 1982,' Mort said. 'I think I wrote mine in late 1979. I can't remember the exact date, but I do know that it was published for the first time in June of 1980. In a magazine. I beat you by two years, Mr Shooter or whatever your name is. If anyone here has got a bitch about plagiarism, it's me.' Mort did not precisely see the man move. At one moment they were standing by Shooter's car, looking at each other; at the next he found himself pressed against the driver's door, with Shooter's hands wrapped around his upper arms and Shooter's face pressed against his own, forehead to forehead. In between his two positions, there was only a blurred sensation of being first grabbed and then whirled. 'You lie,' Shooter said, and on his breath was a dry whiff of cinnamon. 'The fuck I do,' Mort said, and lunged forward against the man's pressing weight. Shooter was strong, almost certainly stronger than Mort Rainey, but Mort was younger, heavier, and he had the old blue station wagon to push against. He was able to break Shooter's hold and send him stumbling two or three steps backward. Now he'll come for me, Mort thought. Although he hadn't had a fight since a schoolyard youpullmeandI'llpushyou scuffle back in the fourth grade, he was astounded to find his mind was clear and cool. We're going to duke it out over that dumb fucking story. Well, okay; I wasn't doing anything else today anyhow. But it didn't happen. Shooter raised his hands, looked at them, saw they were knotted into fists ... and forced them to open. Mort saw the effort it took for the man to reimpose that mantle of control, and felt a kind of awe. Shooter put one of his open palms to his mouth and wiped his lips with it, very slowly and very deliberately. 'Prove it,' he said. 'All right. Come back to the house with me. I'll show you the entry on the copyright page of the book.' 'No,' Shooter said. 'I don't care about the book, I don't care a pin for the book. Show me the story. Show me the magazine with the story in it, so I can read it for myself.' 'I don't have the magazine here.' He was about to say something else, but Shooter turned his face up toward the sky and uttered a single bark of laughter. The sound was as dry as an axe splitting kindling wood. 'No,' he said. The fury was still blazing and dancing in his eyes, but he seemed in charge of himself again. 'No, I bet you don't.' 'Listen to me,' Mort said. 'Ordinarily, this is just a place my wife and I come in the summer. I have copies of my books here, and some foreign editions, but I've published in a lot of magazines as well  articles and essays as well as stories. Those magazines are in our yearround house. The one in Derry.' 'Then why aren't you there?' Shooter asked. In his eyes Mort read both disbelief and a galling satisfaction  it was clear that Shooter had expected him to try and squirm his way out of it, and in Shooter's mind, that was just what Mort was doing. Or trying to do. 'I'm here because  ' He stopped. 'How did you know I'd be here?' 'I just looked on the back of the book I bought,' Shooter said, and Mort could have slapped his own forehead in frustration and sudden understanding. Of course  there had been a picture of him on the back of both the hardcover and paperback editions of Everybody Drops the Dime. Amy had taken it herself, and it had been an excellent shot. He was in the foreground; the house was in the middle distance; Tashmore Lake was in the background. The caption had read simply, Morton Rainey at his home in western Maine. So Shooter had come to western Maine, and he probably hadn't had to visit too many smalltown bars andor drugstores before he found someone who said, 'Mort Rainey? Hell, yes! Got a place over in Tashmore. Personal friend of mine, in fact!' Well, that answered one question, anyway. 'I'm here because my wife and I got a divorce,' he said. 'It just became final. She stayed in Derry. Any other year, the house down here would have been empty.' 'Uhhuh,' Shooter said. His tone of voice infuriated Mort all over again. You're lying, it said, but in this case it doesn't much matter. Because I knew you'd lie. After all, lying is mostly what you're about, isn't it? 'Well, I would have found you, one place or the other.' He fixed Mort with a flinty stare. 'I would have found you if you'd moved to Brazil.' 'I believe that,' Mort said. 'Nevertheless, you are mistaken. Or conning me. I'll do you the courtesy of believing it's only a mistake, because you seem sincere enough  ' Oh God, didn't he. '  but I published that story two years before you say you wrote it.' He saw that mad flash in Shooter's eyes again, and then it was gone. Not extinguished but collared, the way a man might collar a dog with an evil nature. 'You say this magazine is at your other house?' 'Yes.' 'And the magazine has your story in it.' 'Yes.' 'And the date of that magazine is June, 1980.' 'Yes.' Mort had felt impatient with this laborious catechism (there was a long, thoughtful pause before each question) at first, but now he felt a little hope it was as if the man was trying to teach himself the truth of what Mort had said ... a truth, Mort thought, that part of 'John Shooter' must have known all along, because the almost exact similarity between the two stories was not coincidence. He still believed that firmly, but he had come around to the idea that Shooter might have no conscious memory of committing the plagiarism. Because the man was clearly mad. He wasn't quite as afraid as he had been when he first saw the hate and fury dancing in Shooter's eyes, like the reflection of a barnfire blazing out of control. When he pushed the man, he had staggered backward, and Mort thought that if it came to a fight, he could probably hold his own ... or actually put his man on the ground. Still, it would be better if it didn't come to that. In an odd, backhand sort of way, he had begun to feel a bit sorry for Shooter. That gentleman, meanwhile, was stolidly pursuing his course. 'This other house  the one your wife has now  it's here in Maine, too?' 'Yes.' 'She's there?' 'Yes.' There was a much longer pause this time. In a weird way, Shooter reminded Mort of a computer processing a heavy load of information. At last he said 'I'll give you three days.' 'That's very generous of you,' Mort said. Shooter's long upper lip drew back from teeth too even to be anything but mailorder dentures. 'Don't you make light of me, son,' he said. 'I'm trying my best to hold my temper, and doing a pretty good job of it, but ' 'You!' Mort cried at him. 'What about me? This is unbelievable! You come out of nowhere and make just about the most serious accusation a man can make against a writer, and when I tell you I've got proof you're either mistaken or lying through your damned teeth, you start patting yourself on the back for holding your temper! Unbelievable!' Shooter's eyelids drooped, giving him a sly look. 'Proof?' he said. 'I don't see no proof. I hear you talking, but talking ain't proof.' 'I told you!' Mort shouted. He felt helpless, like a man trying to box cobwebs. 'I explained all that!' Shooter looked at Mort for a long moment, then turned and reached through the open window of his car. 'What are you doing?' Mort asked, his voice tight. Now he felt the adrenaline dump into his body, readying him for fight or flight ... probably the latter, if Shooter was reaching for the big handgun Mort suddenly saw in the eye of his imagination. 'Just gettin m'smokes,' Shooter said. 'Hold your water.' When he pulled his arm out of the car, he had a red package of Pall Malls in his hand. He had taken them off the dashboard. 'Want one?' 'I have my own,' Mort said rather sulkily, and took the ancient pack of L  M's from the pocket beneath the red flannel overshirt. They lit up, each from his own pack. 'If we keep on this way, we're going to have a fight,' Shooter said finally. 'I don't want that.' 'Well, Jesus, neither do I' 'Part of you does,' Shooter contradicted. He continued to study Mort from beneath his dropped lids with that expression of country shrewdness. 'Part of you wants just that. But I don't think it's just me or my story that's making you want to fight. You have got some other bee under your blanket that's got you all riled up, and that is making this harder. Part of you wants to fight, but what you don't understand is that, if we do start to fight, it's not going to end until one or the other of us is dead.' Mort looked for signs that Shooter was exaggerating for effect and saw none. He suddenly felt cold along the base of his spine. 'So I'm going to give you three days. You call your ex and get her to send down the magazine with your story in it, if there is such a magazine. And I'll be back. There isn't any magazine, of course; I think we both know that. But you strike me as a man who needs to do some long, hard thinking.' He looked at Mort with a disconcerting expression of stern pity. 'You didn't believe anybody would ever catch you out, did you?' he asked. 'You really didn't.' 'If I show you the magazine, will you go away?' Mort asked. He was speaking more to himself than to Shooter. 'I guess what I really want to know is whether or not it's even worth it.' Shooter abruptly opened his car door and slid in behind the wheel. Mort found the speed with which the man could move a little creepy. 'Three days. Use it the way you like, Mr Rainey.' He started the engine. It ran with the low wheeze characteristic of valves which need to be reground, and the tang of oilsmoke from the old tailpipe polluted the air of the fading afternoon. 'Right is right and fair is fair. The first thing is to get you to a place where you see I have really got you, and you can't wiggle out of this mess the way you've probably been wiggling out of the messes you have made all your life. That's the first thing.' He looked at Mort expressionlessly out of the driver'sside window. 'The second thing,' he said, 'is the real reason I come.' 'What's that?' Mort heard himself say. It was strange and not a little infuriating, but he felt that sensation of guilt creeping relentlessly over him again, as if he really had done the thing of which this rustic lunatic was accusing him. 'We'll talk about it,' Shooter said, and threw his elderly station wagon in gear. 'Meantime, you think about what's right and what's fair.' 'You're nuts!' Mort shouted, but Shooter was already rolling up Lake Drive toward where it spilled out onto Route 23. He watched until the wagon was out of sight, then walked slowly back to the house. It felt emptier and emptier in his mind as he drew closer and closer to it. The rage and the fear were gone. He felt only cold, tired, and homesick for a marriage which no longer was, and which, it now began to seem to him, had never been at all. The telephone started ringing when he was halfway along the driveway which ran down the steep hill from Lake Drive to the house. Mort broke into a run, knowing he wasn't going to make it but running anyway, cursing himself for his foolish reaction. Talk about Pavlov's dogs! He had opened the screen door and was fumbling with the knob of the inside door when the phone silenced. He stepped in, closed the door behind him, and looked at the telephone, which stood on a little antique desk Amy had picked up at a flea market in Mechanic Falls. He could, in that moment, easily imagine that the phone was looking back at him with studied mechanical impatience Don't ask me, boss  I don't make the news ' I only report it. He thought that he ought to buy one of those machines that take messages ... or maybe not. When he thought about it carefully, he realized that the telephone was hardly his favorite gadget. If people really wanted you, they eventually called back. He made himself a sandwich and a bowl of soup and then discovered he didn't want them. He. felt lonely, unhappy, and mildly infected by John Shooter's craziness. He was not much surprised to find that the sum of these feelings was sleepiness. He began to cast longing glances at the couch. Okay, an interior voice whispered. Remember, though you can run but you can't hide. This shit is still gonna be here when you wake up. That was very true, he thought, but in the meantime, it would all be gone, gone, blessedly gone. The one thing you could definitely say for shortterm solutions was that they were better than nothing. He decided he would call home (his mind persisted in thinking of the Derry house as home, and he suspected that was a circumstance which would not soon change), ask Amy to pull the copy of EQMM with 'Sowing Season' in it and send it down by express mail. Then he would sack on the couch for a couple of hours. He would arise around seven or so, go into the study refreshed, and write a little more shit. And shit i's all you will write, with that attitude, the interior voice reproached him. 'Fuck you,' Mort told it  one of the few advantages to living alone, so far as he could see, was that you could talk to yourself right out loud without having anyone wonder if you were crazy or what. He picked up the phone and dialled the Derry number. He listened to the customary clicks of the longdistance connection being made, and then that most irritating of all telephone sounds the dahdahdah of a busy signal. Amy was on the telephone with someone, and when Amy really got going, a conversation could go on for hours. Possibly days. 'Oh, fuck, great!' Mort cried, and jacked the handset back into the cradle hard enough to make the bell jingle faintly. So  what now, little man? He supposed he could call Isabelle Fortin who lived across the street, but that suddenly seemed like too much work and a pain in the ass besides. Isabelle was already so deeply into his and Amy's breakup that she was doing everything but taking home movies. Also, it was already past five o'clock  the magazine couldn't actually start to move along the postal channel between Derry and Tashmore until tomorrow morning no matter what time it was mailed today. He would try Amy later on this evening, and if the line to the house was busy again (or if Amy was, perchance, still on the same call), he would call Isabelle with the message after all. For the moment, the sirensong of the couch in the living room was too strong to be denied. Mort pulled the phone jack  whoever had tried to call him just as he was coming down the driveway would have to wait a little longer, please and thank you  and strolled into the living room. He propped the pillows in their familiar positions, one behind his head and one behind his neck, and looked out at the lake, where the sun was setting at the end of a long and spectacular golden track. I have never felt so lonely and so utterly horrible in my whole life, he thought with some amazement. Then his lids closed slowly over his slightly bloodshot eyes, and Mort Rainey, who had yet to discover what true horror was all about, fell asleep. 12 He dreamed he was in a classroom.