Four Past Midnight (53 page)

“I killed a goddam fucking mirror
!” he shrieked, and was about to sling the poker away when something
did
move in the tub, behind the corrugated shower door. There was a frightened little squeal. Grinning, Mort slashed sideways with the poker, tearing a jagged gash through the plastic door and knocking it off its tracks. He raised the poker over his shoulder, his eyes glassy and staring, his lips drawn into the grimace he had imagined on Shooter's face.

Then he lowered the poker slowly. He found he had to use the fingers of his left hand to pry open the fingers of his right so that the poker could fall to the floor.

“Wee sleekit cowerin' beastie,” he said to the fieldmouse scurrying blindly about in the tub. “What a panic's in thy breastie.” His voice sounded hoarse and flat and strange. It didn't sound like his own voice at all. It was like listening to himself on tape for the first time.

He turned and walked slowly out of the bathroom past the leaning door with its popped hinge, his shoes gritting on broken mirror glass.

All at once he wanted to go downstairs and lie on the couch and take a nap. All at once he wanted that more than anything else in the world.

It was the telephone that woke him up. Twilight had almost become night, and he made his way slowly past the glass-topped coffee table that liked to bite with a weird feeling that time had somehow doubled back on itself. His right arm ached like hell. His back wasn't in much better shape. Exactly how hard had he swung that poker, anyway? How much panic had been driving him? He didn't like to think.

He picked up the telephone, not bothering to guess who it might be. Life has been so dreadfully busy lately, darling, that it might even be the President. “Hello?”

“How you doin, Mr. Rainey?” the voice asked, and Mort recoiled, snatching the telephone away from his ear for a moment as if it were a snake which had tried to bite. He returned it slowly.

“I'm doing fine, Mr. Shooter,” he said in a dry, spitless voice. “How are you doing?”

“I'm-a country fair,” Shooter allowed, speaking in that thick crackerbarrel Southern accent that was somehow as bald and staring as an unpainted barn standing all by itself in the middle of a field. “But I don't think you're really all that well. Stealing from another man, that don't seem to have ever bothered you none. Being caught up on, though ... that seems to have given you the pure miseries.”

“What are you talking about?”

Shooter sounded faintly amused. “Well, I heard on the radio news that someone burned down your house. Your other house. And then, when you come back down here, it sounded like you pitched a fit or something once you got into the house. Shouting ... whacking on things ... or maybe it's just that successful writers like you throw tantrums when things don't go the way they expect. Is that it, maybe?”

My God,
he
was
here
.
He
was.

Mort found himself looking out the window as if Shooter
still
might be out there ... hiding in the bushes, perhaps, while he spoke to Mort on some sort of cordless telephone. Ridiculous, of course.

“The magazine with my story in it is on the way,” he said. “When it gets here, are you going to leave me alone?”

Shooter still sounded lazily amused. “There isn't any magazine with that story in it, Mr. Rainey. You and me, we
know
that. Not from 1980, there isn't. How could there be, when my story wasn't there for you to steal until 1982?”

“
Goddammit
,
I did not steal your st
-”

“When I heard about your house,” Shooter said, “I went out and bought an
Evening Express
. They had a picture of what was left. Wasn't very much. Had a picture of your wife, too.” There was a long, thoughtful pause. Then Shooter said, “She's purty.” He used the country pronunciation purposely, sarcastically. “How'd an ugly son of a buck like you luck into such a purty wife, Mr. Rainey?”

“We're divorced,” he said. “I told you that. Maybe she discovered how ugly I was. Why don't we leave Amy out of this? It's between you and me.”

For the second time in two days, he realized he had answered the phone while he was only half awake and nearly defenseless. As a result, Shooter was in almost total control of the conversation. He was leading Mort by the nose, calling the shots.

Hang up
,
then
.

But he couldn't. At least, not yet.

“Between you and me, is it?” Shooter asked. “Then I don't s'pose you even mentioned me to anyone else.”

“What do you want? Tell me! What in the hell do you want?”

“You want the second reason I came, is that it?”

“
Yes
!”

“I want you to write me a story,” Shooter said calmly. “I want you to write a story and put my name on it and then give it to me. You owe me that. Right is right and fair is fair.”

Mort stood in the hallway with the telephone clutched in his aching fist and a vein pulsing in the middle of his forehead. For a few moments his rage was so total that he found himself buried alive inside it and all he was capable of thinking was
So THAT'S it
!
SO THAT'S it
!
SO THAT'S it
! over and over again.

“You there, Mr. Rainey?” Shooter asked in his calm, drawling voice.

“The only thing I'll write for you,” Mort said, his own voice slow and syrupy-thick with rage, “is your death-warrant, if you don't leave me alone.”

“You talk big, pilgrim,” Shooter said in the patient voice of a man explaining a simple problem to a stupid child, “because you know I can't put no hurtin on you. If you had stolen my dog or my car, I could take
your
dog or car. I could do that just as easy as I broke your cat's neck. If you tried to stop me, I could put a hurtin on you and take it anyway. But this is different. The goods I want are inside your head. You got the goods locked up like they were inside a safe. Only I can't just blow off the door or torch open the back. I have to find me the combination. Don't I?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Mort said, “but the day you get a story out of me will be the day the Statue of Liberty wears a diaper.
Pilgrim
.”

Shooter said meditatively, “I'd leave her out of it if I could,. but I'm startin to think you ain't going to leave me that option.”

All the spit in Mort's mouth was suddenly gone, leaving it dry and glassy and hot. “What ... what do you—”

“Do you want to wake up from one of your stupid naps and find
Amy
nailed to your garbage bin?” Shooter asked. “Or turn on the radio some morning and hear she came off second best in a match with the chainsaw you keep in your garage up there? Or did the garage burn, too?”

“Watch what you say,” Mort whispered. His wide eyes began to prickle with tears of rage and fear.

“You still have two days to think about it. I'd think about it real close, Mr. Rainey. I mean I'd really hunker down over her, if I were you. And I don't think I'd talk about this to anyone else. That'd be like standing out in a thunderstorm and tempting the lightning. Divorced or not, I have got an idea you still have some feeling for that lady. It's time for you to grow up a little.
You can't get away with it
. Don't you realize that yet?
I know what you did
,
and I ain't quitting until I get what's mine
.”

“You're
crazy
!” Mort screamed.

“Good night, Mr. Rainey,” Shooter said, and hung up.

Mort stood there for a moment, the handset sinking away from his ear. Then he scooped up the bottom half of the Princess-style telephone. He was on the verge of throwing the whole combination against the wall before he was able to get hold of himself. He set it down again and took a dozen deep breaths—enough to make his head feel swimmy and light. Then he dialled Herb Creekmore's home telephone.

Herb's lady-friend, Delores, picked it up on the second ring and called Herb to the telephone.

“Hi, Mort,” Herb said. “What's the story on the house?” His voice moved away from the telephone's mouthpiece a little. “Delores, will you move that skillet to the back burner?”

Suppertime in New York
, Mort thought,
and he wants me to know it
.
Well
,
what the hell
.
A maniac has just threatened to turn my wife into veal cutlets
,
but life has to go on
,
right
?

“The house is gone,” Mort said. “The insurance will cover the loss.” He paused. “The
monetary
loss, anyway.”

“I'm sorry,” Herb said. “Can I do anything?”

“Well, not about the house,” Mort said, “but thanks for offering. About the story, though—”

“What story is that, Mort?”

He felt his hand tightening down on the telephone's handset again and forced himself to loosen up. He doesn't know what
the situation up here is
. You have to remember that.

“The one my nutty friend is kicking sand about,” he said, trying to maintain a tone which was light and mostly unconcerned. “ ‘Sowing Season.'
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
?”

“Oh,
that
!” Herb said.

Mort felt a jolt of fear. “You didn't forget to call, did you?”

“No—I called,” Herb reassured him. “I just forgot all about it for a minute. You losing your house and all ...”

“Well? What did they say?”

“Don't worry about a thing. They're going to send a Xerox over to me by messenger tomorrow, and I'll send it right up to you by Federal Express. You'll have it by ten o'clock day after tomorrow.”

For a moment it seemed that all of his problems were solved, and he started to relax. Then he thought of the way Shooter's eyes had blazed. The way he had brought his face down until his forehead and Mort's were almost touching. He thought of the dry smell of cinnamon on Shooter's breath as he said, “You lie.”

A Xerox? He was by no means sure that Shooter would accept an
original
copy ... but a
Xerox
?

“No,” he said slowly. “That's no good, Herb. No Xerox, no phone-call from the editor. It has to be an original copy of the magazine.”

“Well, that's a little tougher. They have their editorial offices in Manhattan, of course, but they store copies at their subscription offices in Pennsylvania. They only keep about five copies of each issue—it's really all they can
afford
to keep, when you consider that
EQMM
has been publishing since 1941. They really aren't crazy about lending them out.”

“Come on, Herb! You can find those magazines at yard sales and in half the small-town libraries in America!”

“But never a complete run.” Herb paused. “Not even a phone-call will do, huh? Are you telling me this guy is so paranoid he'd think he was talking to one of your thousands of stooges?”

From the background: “Do you want me to pour the wine, Herb?”

Herb spoke again with his mouth away from the phone. “Hold on a couple of minutes, Dee.”

“I'm holding up your dinner,” Mort said. “I'm sorry.”

“It goes with the territory. Listen, Mort, be straight with me—is this guy as crazy as he sounds? Is he dangerous?”

I don't think I'd talk about this to anyone else
.
That'd be like standing out in a thunderstorm and tempting the lightning
.

“I don't think so,” he said, “but I want him off my back, Herb.” He hesitated, searching for the right tone. “I've spent the last half-year or so walking through a shitstorm. This might be one thing I can do something about. I just want the doofus off my back.”

“Okay,” Herb said with sudden decision. “I'll call Marianne Jaffery over at
EQMM
. I've known her for a long time. If I ask her to ask the library curator—that's what they call the guy, honest, the library curator—to send us a copy of the June, 1980, ish, she'll do it. Is it okay if I say you might have a story for them at some point in the future?”

“Sure,” Mort said, and thought:
Tell her it'll be under the name John Shooter
, and almost laughed aloud.

“Good. She'll have the curator send it on to you Federal Express, direct from Pennsylvania. Just return it in good condition, or you'll have to find a replacement copy at one of those yard sales you were talking about.”

“It there any chance all this could happen by the day after tomorrow?” Mort asked. He felt miserably sure that Herb would think he was crazy for even asking ... and he surely must feel that Mort was making an awfully big mountain out of one small molehill.

“I think there's a very good chance,” Herb said. “I won't guarantee it, but I'll almost guarantee it.”

“Thanks, Herb,” Mort said with honest gratitude. “You're swell.”

“Aw, shucks, ma'am,” Herb said, doing the bad John Wayne imitation of which he was so absurdly proud.

“Now go get your dinner. And give Delores a kiss for me.”

Herb was still in his John Wayne mode. “To heck with that. I'll give 'er a kiss fer
me
, pilgrim.”

You talk big
,
pilgrim
.

Mort felt such a spurt of horror and fear that he almost cried out aloud. Same word, same flat, staring drawl. Shooter had tapped his telephone line, somehow, and no matter who Mort tried to call or what number he dialled, it was John Shooter who answered. Herb Creekmore had become just another one of his pen names, and—