Four Past Midnight (43 page)

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 window-wall 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.

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.

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 then the knives, glittering in the hot sun of this huge secret garden—

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 window-wall 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 gopher-shit. 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.

“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 psychically vulnerable state.

“Hello, Mort,” Amy said. “Are you all right?”

Some time later that afternoon, Mort donned the extra-large 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 a while 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 real-estate 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 half-waking, half-sleeping 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 dead-short between her brain and her mouth. He remembered once musing that she should have a tee-shirt 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 mid-forties. 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 sun-wrinkles. 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 real-estate 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 clenched 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 real-estate agent. He still found it hard to believe she had tossed him over for a real-estate 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?