Four Past Midnight (42 page)

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:

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.

“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.

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.

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 “Tell-Tale 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.”

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.

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.