Four Past Midnight (61 page)

His name wasn't on the cover.

Well, of course not. He was scarcely known as a writer at all then, and certainly not as a writer of mystery stories; “Sowing Season” had been a oner. His name would have meant nothing to regular readers of the magazine, so the editors would not have put it on. He turned the cover back.

There was no contents page beneath.

The contents page had been cut out.

He thumbed frantically through the magazine, dropping it once and then picking it up with a little cry. He didn't find the excision the first time, but on the second pass, he realized that pages 83 to 97 were gone.

“You cut it out!”
he screamed. He screamed so loudly that his eyeballs bulged from their sockets. He began to bring his fists down on the steering wheel of the Buick, again and again and again. The horn burped and blared.
“You cut it out, you son of a bitch! How did you do that? You cut it out! You cut it out! You cut it out!”

He was halfway to the house before the deadly little voice again wondered how Shooter could have done that. The envelope had come Federal Express from Pennsylvania, and Juliet had taken possession of it, so how, how in God's name—

He stopped.

Good,
Juliet had said.
Good, because I saw what you did.

That was it; that explained it. Juliet was in on it. Except—

Except Juliet had been in Tashmore since forever.

Except that hadn't been what she said. That had only been his mind. A little paranoid flatulence.

“He's doing it, though,” Mort said. He went into the house and once he was inside the door, he threw the magazine as hard as he could. It flew like a startled bird, pages riffling, and landed on the floor with a slap. “Oh yeah, you bet, you bet your fucking ass, he's doing it. But I don't have to wait around for him. I—”

He saw Shooter's hat. Shooter's hat was lying on the floor in front of the door to his study.

Mort stood where he was for a moment, heart thundering in his ears, and then walked over to the stove in great cartoon tippy-toe steps. He pulled the poker from the little clutch of tools, wincing when the poker's tip clanged softly against the ash-shovel. He took the poker and walked carefully back to the closed door again, holding the poker as he had held it before crashing into the bathroom. He had to skirt the magazine he'd thrown on the way.

He reached the door and stood in front of it.

“Shooter?”

There was no answer.

“Shooter, you better come out under your own power! If I have to come in and get you, you'll never walk out of anyplace under your own power again!”

There was still no answer.

He stood a moment longer, nerving himself (but not really sure he had the nerve), and then twisted the knob. He hit the door with his shoulder and barrelled in, screaming, waving the poker—

And the room was empty.

But Shooter had been here, all right. Yes. The VDT unit of Mort's word cruncher lay on the floor, its screen a shattered staring eye. Shooter had killed it. On the desk where the VDT had stood was an old Royal typewriter. The steel surfaces of this dinosaur were dull and dusty. Propped on the keyboard was a manuscript. Shooter's manuscript, the one he had left under a rock on the porch a million years ago.

It was “Secret Window, Secret Garden.”

Mort dropped the poker on the floor. He walked toward the typewriter as if mesmerized and picked up the manuscript. He shuffled slowly through its pages, and came to understand why Mrs. Gavin had been so sure it was his ... sure enough to rescue it from the trash. Maybe she hadn't known consciously, but her eye had recognized the irregular typeface. And why not? She had seen manuscripts which looked like “Secret Window, Secret Garden” for years. The Wang word processor and the System Five laser printer were relative new-comers. For most of his writing career he had used this old Royal. The years had almost worn it out, and it was a sad case now—when you typed on it, it produced letters as crooked as an old man's teeth.

But it had been here all the time, of course—tucked away at the back of the study closet behind piles of old galleys and manuscripts ... what editors called “foul matter.” Shooter must have stolen it, typed his manuscript on it, and then sneaked it back when Mort was out at the post office. Sure. That made sense, didn't it?

Mort dropped the pages with a great wild cry and they seesawed lazily down around him as all of the truth rushed in on him at once like a jagged bolt of silver lightning.

There was no John Shooter.

There never had been.

“No,” Mort said. He was striding back and forth through the big living room again. His headache came and went in waves of pain. “No, I do not accept that. I do not accept that at
all.
”

But his acceptance or rejection didn't make much difference. All the pieces of the puzzle were there, and when he saw the old Royal typewriter, they began to fly together. Now, fifteen minutes later, they were
still
flying together, and he seemed to have no power to will them apart.

The picture which kept coming back to him was of the gas jockey in Mechanic Falls, using a squeegee to wash his windshield. A sight he had never expected to witness again in his lifetime. Later, he had assumed that the kid had given him a little extra service because he had recognized Mort and liked Mort's books. Maybe that was so, but the windshield had
needed
washing. Summer was gone, but plenty of stuff still splatted on your windshield if you drove far enough and fast enough on the back roads. And he must have used the back roads. He must have sped up to Derry and back again in record time, only stopping long enough to burn down his house. He hadn't even stopped long enough to get gas on the way back. After all, he'd had places to go and cats to kill, hadn't he? Busy, busy, busy.

He stopped in the middle of the floor and whirled to stare at the window-wall. “If I did all that, why can't I remember?” he asked the silvery crack in the glass. “Why can't I remember even now?”

He didn't know ... but he
did
know where the name had come from, didn't he? One half from the Southern man whose story he had stolen in college; one half from the man who had stolen his wife. It was like some bizarre literary in-joke.

“Fuck that. A man who sleeps with another man's wife is a thief. And the woman is his accomplice.”

He looked defiantly at the crack.

The crack said nothing.

Three years ago, Mort had published a novel called
The Delacourt Family.
The return address on Shooter's story had been Dellacourt, Mississippi. It—

He suddenly ran for the encyclopedias in the study, slipping and almost falling in the mess of pages strewn on the floor in his hurry. He pulled out the M volume and at last found the entry for Mississippi. He ran a trembling finger down the list of towns—it took up one entire page—hoping against hope.

It was no good.

There was no Dellacourt or Delacourt, Mississippi.

He thought of looking for Perkinsburg, the town where Shooter had told him he'd picked up a paperback copy of
Everybody Drops the Dime
before getting on the Greyhound bus, and then simply closed the encyclopedia. Why bother? There might be a Perkinsburg in Mississippi, but it would mean nothing if there was.

The name of the novelist who'd taught the class in which Mort had met John Kintner had been Richard Perkins, Jr. That was where the name had come from.

Oh, Mort,
the small voice mourned.
You're very sick. You're a very sick man.

“I don't accept that,” he said again, horrified by the wavery weakness of his voice, but what other choice was there? Hadn't he even thought once that it was almost as if he were doing things, taking irrevocable steps, in his sleep?

Stop, the little voice whispered inside his head, and Mort stopped.

For
a moment there was utter silence in both worlds: the one inside his head, and the one outside of it.

And, after an interval, the little voice asked quietly: Why
did you do it, Mort? This whole elaborate and homicidal episode ? Shooter kept saying he wanted a story, but there is no Shooter. What do you want, Mort? What did you create John Shooter FOR?

Then, from outside, came the sound of a car rolling down the driveway. Mort looked at his watch and saw that the hands were standing straight up at noon. A blaze of triumph and relief roared through him like flames shooting up the neck of a chimney. That he had the magazine but still no proof did not matter. That Shooter might kill him did not matter. He could die happily, just knowing that there was a John Shooter and that he himself was not responsible for the horrors he had been considering.

“He's here!”
he screamed joyfully, and ran out of the study. He waved his hands wildly above his head, and actually cut a little caper as he rounded the corner and came into the hall.

He stopped, looking out at the driveway past the sloping roof of the garbage cabinet where Bump's body had been nailed up. His hands dropped slowly to his sides. Dark horror stole over his brain. No, not over it; it came down, as if some merciless hand were pulling a shade. The last piece fell into place. It had occurred to him moments before in the study that he might have created a fantasy assassin because he lacked the courage to commit suicide. Now he realized that Shooter had told the truth when he said he would never kill Mort.

It wasn't John Shooter's imaginary station wagon but Amy's no-nonsense little Subaru which was just now coming to a stop. Amy was behind the wheel. She had stolen his love, and a woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman.

He loved her, all the same.

It was
Shooter
who hated her. It was
Shooter
who meant to kill her and then bury her down by the lake near Bump, where she would before long be a mystery to both of them.

“Go away, Amy,” he whispered in the palsied voice of a very old man. “Go away before it's too late.”

But Amy was getting out of the car, and as she closed the door behind her, the hand pulled.the shade in Mort's head all the way down and he was in darkness.

Amy tried the door and found it unlocked. She stepped in, started to call for Mort, and then didn't. She looked around, wide-eyed and startled.

The place was a mess. The trash can was full and had overflowed onto the floor. A few sluggish autumn flies were crawling in and out of an aluminum pot-pie dish that had been kicked into the corner. She could smell stale cooking and musty air. She thought she could even smell spoiled food.

“Mort?”

There was no answer. She walked further into the house, taking small steps, not entirely sure she wanted to look at the rest of the place. Mrs. Gavin had been in only three days ago—how had things gotten so out of hand since then? What had happened?

She had been worried about Mort during the entire last year of their marriage, but she had been even more worried since the divorce. Worried, and, of course, guilty. She held part of the blame for herself, and supposed she always would. But Mort had never been strong ... and his greatest weakness was his stubborn (and sometimes almost hysterical) refusal to recognize the fact. This morning he had sounded like a man on the point of suicide. And the only reason she had heeded his admonition not to bring Ted was because she thought the sight of him might set Mort off if he really was poised on the edge of such an act.

The thought of murder had never crossed her mind, nor did it do so now. Even when he had brandished the gun at them that horrible afternoon at the motel, she had not been afraid. Not of
that.
Mort was no killer.

“Mort? M—”

She came around the kitchen counter and the word died. She stared at the big living room with wide, stunned eyes. Paper was littered everywhere. It looked as if Mort must at some point have exhumed every copy of every manuscript he had in his desk drawers and in his files and strewn the pages about in here like confetti at some black New Year's Eve celebration. The table was heaped with dirty dishes. The Silex was lying shattered on the floor by the window-wall, which was cracked.