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 juniper-choked 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 motor-boats 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 motor-boat and gone out grab-assing with the kids on the lake.
Today, he had written the following lines of deathless prose during his two-hour 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 vacuum-cleaner 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 mean-spirited 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 word-processing 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, and 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 where the house and 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 for pen 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 Organ-Grinder's Boy, had been an instant best-seller. 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 short-story 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 make-up 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 horror-story 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 EQMM 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," Todd 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 rick-rack. 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; paper-clips; 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 rain-squalls--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 Organ-Grinder's Boy manuscript, and there, beneath it, was a package of L & M cigarettes. Did they even 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.
Time-travellers 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. Time-travellers 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.