Four Past Midnight

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'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.

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 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 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