Four Past Midnight

  "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 year-round 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 small-town bars and/or 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."

  "Uh-huh," 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 barn-fire 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 mail-order 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's-side 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.

  11

  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 short-term 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 is 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 long-distance connection being made, and then that most irritating of all telephone sounds: the dah-dah-dah 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 siren-song 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.

  It was a familiar classroom, although he couldn't have said just why. He was in the classroom with John Shooter. Shooter was holding a grocery bag in the curve of one arm. He took an orange out of the bag and bounced it reflectively up and down in his hand. He was looking in Mort's direction, but not at Mort; his gaze seemed fixed on something beyond Mort's shoulder. Mort turned and saw a cinderblock wall and a blackboard and a door with a frosted-glass upper panel. After a moment he could puzzle out the backward writing on the frosted glass.

  WELCOME TO THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS,

  it said. The writing on the blackboard was easier to read.

  SOWING SEASON A Short Story by Morton Rainey,

  it said.

  Suddenly something whizzed over Mort's shoulder, just missing his head. The orange. As Mort cringed back, the orange struck the blackboard, burst open with a rotten squashing sound, and splattered gore across what had been written there.

  He turned back to Shooter. Stop that! he cried in a shaky scolding voice.

  Shooter dipped into his bag again. What's the matter? Shooter asked in his calm, stern voice. Don't you recognize blood oranges when you see them? What kind of writer are you?

  He threw another one. It splattered crimson across Mort's name and began to drip slowly down the wall.

  No more! Mort screamed, but Shooter dipped slowly, implacably, into the bag again. His long, callused fingers sank into the skin of the orange he brought out; blood began to sweat its way onto the orange's skin in pinprick droplets.

  No more! No more! Please! No more! I'll admit it, I'll admit anything, everything, if you just stop! Anything, if you'll just stop! If you'll--

  13

  "--stop, if you'll just stop--"

  He was falling.

  Mort grabbed at the edge of the couch just in time to save himself a short and probably painful trip to the living-room floor. He rolled toward the back of the couch and simply lay there for a moment, clutching the cushions, shivering, and trying to grasp at the ragged tails of the dream.

  Something about a classroom, and blood oranges, and the school of hard knocks. Even this was going, and the rest was already gone. It had been real, whatever it was. Much too real.

  At last he opened his eyes, but there was precious little to see; he had slept until long past sundown. He was horribly stiff, especially at the base of his neck, and he suspected he had been asleep at least four hours, maybe five. He felt his way cautiously to the living-room light-switch, managing to avoid the octagonal glass-topped coffee table for a change (he had an idea the coffee table was semi-sentient, and given to shifting its position slightly after dark, the better to hack away at his shins), and then went into the front hall to try Amy again. On the way, he checked his watch. It was quarter past ten. He had slept over five hours... nor was this the first time. And he wouldn't even pay for it by tossing and turning all night. Judging by past experience, he would be asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow in the bedroom.

  He picked up the phone, was momentarily puzzled by the dead silence in his ear, then remembered he had yanked the damn thing's fang. He pulled the wire through his fingers until he got to the jack, turned around to plug it in ... and paused. From here he could look out the small window to the left of the door. This gave him an angle of vision on the back porch, where the mysterious and unpleasant Mr. Shooter had left his manuscript under a rock yesterday. He could also see the garbage cabinet, and there was something on it--two somethings, actually. A white something and a dark something. The
dark something looked nasty; for one frightening second, Mort thought a giant spider was crouched there.

  He dropped the phone cord and turned on the porch light in a hurry. Then there was a space of time--he didn't know just how long and didn't care to know--when he was incapable of further movement.

  The white thing was a sheet of paper--a perfectly ordinary 81/2'' x 11" sheet of typing paper. Although the garbage cabinet was a good fifteen feet away from where Mort was standing, the few words on it were printed in large strokes and he could read them easily. He thought Shooter must have used either a pencil with an extremely soft lead or a piece of artist's charcoal. REMEMBER, YOU HAVE 3 DAYS, the message read. I AM NOT JOKING.

  The black thing was Bump. Shooter had apparently broken the cat's neck before nailing him to the roof of the garbage cabinet with a screwdriver from Mort's own toolshed.

  14

  He wasn't aware of breaking the paralysis which held him. At one moment he was standing frozen in the hall by the telephone table, looking out at good old Bump, who seemed to have grown a screwdriver handle in the middle of his chest, where there was a ruff of white fur--what Amy had liked to call Bump's bib. At the next he was standing in the middle of the porch with the chilly night air biting through his thin shirt, trying to look six different ways at once.

  He forced himself to stop. Shooter was gone, of course. That's why he had left the note. Nor did Shooter seem like the kind of nut who would enjoy watching Mort's obvious fear and horror. He was a nut, all right, but one which had fallen from a different tree. He had simply used Bump, used him on Mort the way a farmer might use a crowbar on a stubborn rock in his north forty. There was nothing personal in it; it was just a job that had to be done.

  Then he thought of how Shooter's eyes had looked that afternoon and shivered violently. No, it was personal, all right. It was all kinds of personal.

  "He believes I did it," Mort whispered to the cold western Maine night, and the words came out in ragged chunks, bitten off by his chattering teeth. "The crazy son of a bitch really believes I did it."