The Dead Zone

CHAPTER ONE

The two things Sarah remembered about that night later were his run of luck at the Wheel of Fortune and the mask. But as time passed, years of it, it was the mask she thought about-when she could bring herself to think about that horrible night at all.

He lived in an apartment house in Cleaves Mills. Sarah got there at quarter to eight, parking around the corner, and buzzing up to be let in. They were taking her car tonight because Johnny's was laid up at Tibbets” Garage in Hampden with a frozen wheel bearing or something like that. Something expensive, Johnny had told her over the phone, and then he had laughed a typical Johnny Smith laugh. Sarah would have been in tears if it had been her car-her pocketbook.

Sarah went through the foyer to the stairs, past the bulletin board that hung there. It was dotted with file cards advertising motorbikes, stereo components, typing services, and appeals from people who needed rides to Kansas or California, people who were driving to Florida and needed riders to share the driving and help pay for the gas. But tonight the board was dominated by a large placard showing a clenched fist against an angry red back-ground suggesting fire. The one word on the poster was STRIKE! It was late October of 1970.

Johnny had the front apartment on the second floor -the penthouse, he called it-where you could stand in your tux like Ramon Navarro, a big slug of Ripple wine in a balloon glass, and look down upon the vast, beating heart of Cleaves Mills; its hurrying after-show crowds, its bustling taxis, its neon signs. There are almost seven thousand stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.

Actually Cleaves Mills was mostly a main street with a stop and go light at the intersection (it turned into a blinker after 6 P. M.), about two dozen stores, and a small moccasin factory. Like most of the towns surrounding Orono, where the University of Maine was, its real industry was supplying the things students consumed -beer, wine, gas, rock “n” roll music, fast food, dope, gro~ ceries, housing, movies. The movie house was The Shade. It showed art films and “40'S nostalgia flicks when school was in. In the summertime it reverted to Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns.

Johnny and Sarah were both out of school a year, and both were teaching at cleaves Mills High, one of the few high schools in the area that had not consolidated into a three-or four-town district. University faculty and ad-ministration as well as university students used Cleaves as their bedroom, and the town had an enviable tax base. It also had a fine high school with a brand-new media wing. The townies might bitch about the university crowd with their smart talk and their Commie marches to end the war and their meddling in town politics, but they had never said no to the tax dollars that were paid annually on the gracious faculty homes and the apartment buildings in the area some students called Fudgey Acres and others called Sleaze Alley.

Sarah rapped on his door and Johnny's voice, oddly muffled, called, “It's open, Sarah!”

Frowning a little, she pushed the door open. Johnny's apartment was in total darkness except for the fitful yellow glow of the blinker half a block up the street. The furniture was so many humped black shadows.

“Johnny…?”

Wondering if a fuse had blown or something, she took a tentative step forward-and then the face appeared before her, floating in the darkness, a horrible face out of a nightmare. It glowed a spectral, rotting green. One eye was wide open, seeming to stare at her in wounded fear. The other was squeezed shut in a sinister leer. The left half of the face, the half with the open eye, appeared to be normal. But the right half was the face of a monster, drawn and inhuman. the thick lips drawn back to reveal snaggle teeth that were also glowing.

Sarah uttered a strangled little shriek and took a stumble-step backward. Then the lights came on and it was just Johnny's apartment again instead of some black limbo, Nixon on the wall trying to sell used cars, the braided rug Johnny's mother had made on the floor, the wine bottles made into candle bases. The face stopped glowing and she saw it was a dime-store Halloween mask, nothing more. Johnny's blue eye was twinkling out of the open eyehole at her.

He stripped it off and stood smiling amiably at her, dressed in faded jeans and a brown sweater.

“Happy Halloween, Sarah,” he said.

Her heart was still racing. He had really frightened her. “Very funny,” she said, and turned to go. She didn't like being scared like that.

He caught her in the doorway. “Hey… I'm sorry. “Well you ought to be. “She looked at him coldly-or tried to. Her anger was already melting away. You just couldn't stay mad at Johnny, that was the thing. Whether she loved him or not-a thing she was still trying to puzzle out-it was impossible to be unhappy with him for very long, or to harbor a feeling of resentment. She wondered if anyone had ever succeeded in harboring a grudge against Johnny Smith, and the thought was so ridiculous she just had to smile.

“There, that's better. Man, I thought you were going to walk out on me.”

“I'm not a man.”

He cast his eyes upon her. “So I've noticed. “She was wearing a bulky fur coat-imitation raccoon or something vulgar like that-and his innocent lechery made her smile again. “In this thing you couldn't tell.”

“Oh, yeah, I can tell,” he said. He put an arm around her and kissed her. At first she wasn't going to kiss back, but of course she did.

“I'm sorry I scared you,” he said, and rubbed her nose companionably with his own before letting her go. He held up the mask. “I thought you'd get a kick out of it. I'm gonna wear it in homeroom Friday.”

“Oh, Johnny, that won't be very good for discipline.”

“I'll muddle through somehow,” he said with a grin. And the hell of it was, he would.

She came to school every day wearing big, schoolmarmish glasses, her hair drawn back into bun so severe it seemed on the verge of a scream. She wore her skirts just above the knee in a season when most of the girls wore them just below the edges of their underpants (and my legs are better than any of theirs, Sarah thought resent-fully). She maintained alphabetical seating charts which, by the law of averages, at least, should have kept the troublemakers away from each other, and she resolutely sent unruly pupils to the assistant principal, her reasoning being that he was getting an extra five hundred a year to act as ramrod and she wasn't. And still her days were a constant struggle with that freshman teacher demon, Discipline. More disturbing, she had begun to sense that there was a collective, unspoken jury-a kind of school consciousness, maybe-that went into deliberations over every new teacher, and that the verdict being returned on her was not so good.

Johnny, on the face of it, appeared to be the antithesis of everything a good teacher should be. He ambled from dass to dass in an agreeable sort of daze, often showing up tardy because he had stopped to chat with someone between bells. He let the kids sit where they wanted so that the same face was never in the same seat from day to day (and the class thuds invariably gravitated to the back of the room). Sarah would not have been able to learn their names that way until March, but Johnny seemed to have them down pat already.

He was a tall man who had a tendency to slouch, and the kids called him Frankenstein. Johnny seemed amused rather than outraged by this. And yet his classes were mostly quiet and well-behaved, there were few skippers (Sarah had a constant problem with kids cutting class), and that same jury seemed to be coming back in his favor.

He was the sort of teacher who, in another ten years, would have the school yearbook dedicated to him. She just wasn't. And sometimes wondering why drove her crazy.

“You want a beer before we go? Glass of wine? Anything?”

“No, but I hope you're going well-heeled,” she said, taking his arm and deciding not to be mad anymore. “I always eat at least three hot dogs. Especially when it's the last county fair of the year. “They were going to Esty, twenty miles north of Cleave Mills, a town whose only dubious claim to fame was that it held ABSOLUTELY THE LAST AGRICULTRAL FAIR OF THE YEAR IN NEW ENGLAND. The fair would close Friday night, on Halloween.

“Considering Friday's payday, I'm doing good. I got eight bucks.”

“Oh… my… God,” Sarah said, rolling her eyes. “I always knew if I kept myself pure I'd meet a sugar daddy someday.”

He smiled and nodded. “Us pimps make biiig money, baby. Just let me get my coat and we're off.”

She looked after him with exasperated affection, and the voice that had been surfacing in her mind more and more often-in the shower, while she was reading a book or prepping a class or making her supper for one-came up again, like one of those thirty-second public-service spots on TV: He's a very nice man and all that, easy to get along with, fun, he never made you cry. But is that love? I mean, is that all there is to it? Even when you learned to ride your two-wheeler, you had to fall off a few times and scrape both knees. Call it a rite of passage. And that was just a little thing.

“Gonna use the bathroom,” he called to her.

“Uh-huh. “She smiled a little. Johnny was one of those people who invariably mentioned their nature calls -God knew why.

She went over to the window and looked out on Main Street. Kids were pulling into the parking lot next to O'Mike's, the local pizza-and-beer hangout. She suddenly wished she were back with them, one of them, with this confusing stuff behind her-or still ahead of her. The university was safe. It was a kind of never-never land where everybody, even the teachers, could be a part of Peter Pan's band and never grow up. And there would always be a Nixon or an Agnew to play Captain Hook.

She had met Johnny when they started teaching in September, but she had known his face from the Ed courses they had shared. She had been pinned to a Delta Tau Delta, and none of the judgments that applied to Johnny had applied to Dan. He had been almost flawlessly handsome, witty in a sharp and restless way that always made her a trifle uncomfortable, a heavy drinker, a passionate lover. Sometimes when he drank he turned mean. She rememberd a night in Bangor's Brass Rail when that had happened. The man in the next booth had taken joking issue with something Dan had been saying about the UMO football team, and Dan had asked him if he would like to go home with his head on backward. The man had apologized, but Dan hadn't wanted an apology; he had wanted a fight. He began to make personal remarks about the woman with the other man. Sarah had put her hand on Dan's arm and asked him to stop. Dan had shaken her hand off and had looked at her with a queer flat light in his grayish eyes that made any other words she might have spoken dry up in her throat. Eventually, Dan and the other guy went outside and Dan beat him up. Dan had beaten him until the other man, who was in his late thirties and getting a belly, had screamed. Sarah had never heard a man scream before -she never wanted to hear it again. They had to leave quickly because the bartender saw how it was going and called the police. She would have gone home alone that night (oh? are you sure? her mind asked nastily), but it was twelve miles back to the campus and the buses had stopped running at six and she was afraid to hitch.

Dan didn't talk on the way back. He had a scratch on one cheek. Just one scratch. When they got back to Hart Hall, her dorm, she told him she didn't want to see him anymore. “Any way you want it, babe,” he said with an indifference that had chilled her-and the second time he called after the Brass Rail incident she had gone out with him. Part of her had hated herself for that.

It had continued all that fall semester of her senior year. He had frightened and attracted her at the same time. He was her first real lover, and even now, two days shy of Halloween 1970, he had been her only real lover.

She and Johnny had not been to bed.

Dan had been very good. He had used her, but he had been very good. He would not take any precautious and so she had been forced to go to the university infirmary, where she talked fumblingly about painful menstruation and got the pill. Sexually, Dan had dominated her all along. She did not have many orgasms with him, but his very roughness brought her some, and in the weeks before it had ended she bad begun to feel a mature woman's greediness for good sex, a desire that was bewilderingly intermixed with other feelings: dislike for both Dan and herself, a feeling that no sex that depended so much on humiliation and domination could really be called “good sex,” and self-contempt for her own inability to call a halt to a relationship that seemed based on destructive feelings.

It had ended swiftly, early this year. He flunked out. “Where will you be going?” she asked him timidly, sitting on his roomie's bed as he threw things into two suitcases. She had wanted to ask other, more personal questions. Will you be near here? Will you take a job? Take night classes? Is there a place for me in your plans? That question, above all others, she had not been able to ask. Because she wasn't prepared for any answer. The answer he gave to her one neutral question was shocking enough.

“Vietnam, I guess.”

“What?”

He reached onto a shelf, thumbed briefly through the papers there, and tossed her a letter. It was from the induction center in Bangor: an order to report for his physical exam.

“Can't you get out of it?”

“No. Maybe. I don't know. “He lit a cigarette. “I don't think I even want to try.”

She had stared at him, shocked.

“I'm tired of this scene. College and get a job and find a little wifey. You've been applying for the little wifey spot, I guess. And don't think I haven't thought it over. It wouldn't work. You know it wouldn't, and so do I. We don't fit, Sarah.”

She had fled then, all her questions answered, and she never saw him again. She saw his roommate a few times. He got three letters from Dan between January and June. He was inducted and sent down south somewhere for basic training. And that was the last the roommate had heard. It was the last Sarah Bracknell heard, too.

At first she thought she was going to be okay. All those sad, torchy songs, the ones you always seem to hear on the car radio after midnight, they didn't apply to her. Or the cliches about the end of the affair or the crying jags. She didn't pick up a guy on the rebound or start doing the bars. Most evenings that spring she spent studying quietly in her dorm room. It was a relief. It wasn't messy.

It was only after she met Johnny-at a freshman mixer dance last month; they were both chaperoning, purely by luck of the draw that she realized what a horror her last semester at school had been. It was the kind of thing you couldn't see when you were in it, it was too much a part of you. Two donkeys meet at a hitching rail in a western town. One of them is a town donkey with nothing on his back but a saddle. The other is a prospector's donkey, loaded down with packs, camping and cooking gear, and four fifty-pound sacks of ore. His back is bent into a concertina shape from the weight. The town donkey says, That's quite a load you got there. And the prospector 5 donkey says, What load?

In retrospect it was the emptiness that horrified her; it had been five months of Cheyne-Stokes respiration. Eight months if you counted this summer, when she took a small apartment on Flagg Street in Veazie and did nothing but apply for teaching jobs and read paperback novels. She got up, ate breakfast, went out to class or to whatever job interviews she had scheduled, came home, ate, took a nap (the naps were sometimes four hours long), ate again, read until eleven-thirty or so, watched Cavett until she got sleepy, went to bed. She could not remember thinking during that period. Life was routine. Sometimes there was a vague sort of ache in her loins, an unfulfilled ache, she believed the lady novelists sometimes called it, and for this she would either take a cold shower or a douche. After a while the douches grew painful, and this gave her a bitter, absent sort of satisfaction.

During this period she would congratulate herself from time to time on how adult she was being about the whole thing. She hardly ever thought about Dan-Dan Who, ha-ha. Later she realized that for eight months she had thought of nothing or no one else. The whole country had gone through a spasm of shudders during those eight months, but she had hardly noticed. The marches, the cops in their crash helmets and gas masks, the mounting attacks on the press by Agnew, the Kent State shootings, the-summer of violence as Macks and radical groups took to the streets-those things might have happened on some TV late show. Sarah was totally wrapped up in how wonderfully she had gotten over Dan, how well she was adjusting, and how relieved she was to find that everything was just fine. What load?

Then she had started at Cleaves Mills High, and that had been a personal upheaval, being on the other side of the desk after sixteen years as a professional student. Meeting Johnny Smith at that mixer (and with an absurd name like John Smith, could he be completely for real?). Coming out of herself enough to see the way he was looking at her, not lecherously, but with a good healthy appreciation for the way she looked in the light-gray knitted dress she had worn.

He had asked her to go to a movie-Citizen Kane was playing at The Shade-and she said okay. They had a good time and she was thinking to herself, No fireworks. She had enjoyed his kiss goodnight and had thought, He's sure no Errol Flynn. He had kept her smiling with his line of patter, which was outrageous, and she had thought, He wants to be Henry Youngman when he grows up.

Later that evening, sitting in the bedroom of her apartment and watching Bette Davis play a bitchy career woman on the late movie, some of these thoughts had come back to her and she paused with her teeth sunk into an apple, rather shocked at her own unfairness.

And a voice that had been silent for the best part of a year-not so much the voice of conscience as that of perspective-spoke up abruptly. What you mean is, he sure isn't Dan. Isn't that it?

No! she assured herself, not just rather shocked now. I don't think about Dan at all anymore. That… was a long time ago.

Diapers, the voice replied, that was a long time ago. Dan left yesterday.

She suddenly realized she was sitting in an apartment by herself late at night, eating an apple and watching a movie on TV that she cared nothing about, and doing it all because it was easier than thinking, thinking was so boring really, when all you had to think about was yourself and your lost love.

Very shocked now.

She had burst into tears.

She had gone out with Johnny the second and third time he asked, too” and that was also a revelation of exactly what she had become. She couldn't very well say that she had another date because it wasn't so. She was a smart, pretty girl, and she had been asked out a lot after the affair with Dan ended, but the only dates she had accepted were hamburger dates at the Den with Dan's roomie, and she realized now (her disgust tempered with rueful humor) that she had only gone on those completely innocuous dates in order to pump the poor guy about Dan. What load?

Most of her college girl friends had dropped over the horizon after graduation. Bettye Hackman was with the Peace Corps in Africa, to the utter dismay of her wealthy old-line Bangor parents, and sometimes Sarah wondered what the Ugandans must make of Bettye with her white, impossible-to-tan skin and ash-blonde hair and cool, sorority good looks. Deenie Stubbs was at grad school in Houston. Rachel Jurgens had married her fella and was currently gestating somewhere in the wilds of western Massachusetts.

Slightly dazed, Sarah had been forced to the conclusion that Johnny Smith was the first new friend she had made in a long, long time-and she had been her senior high school class's Miss Popularity. She had acepted dates from a couple of other Cleaves teachers, just to keep things in perspective. One of them was Gene Sedecki, the new math man-but obviously a veteran bore. The other, George Rounds, had immediately tried to make her. She had slapped his face-and the next day he'd had the gall to wink at her as they passed in the hall.

But Johnny was fun, easy to be with. And he did attract her sexually-just how strongly she couldn't honestly say, at least not yet. A week ago, after the Friday they'd had off for the October teachers” convention in Waterville, he had invited her back to his apartment for a home-cooked spaghetti dinner. While the sauce simmered, he had dashed around the corner to get some wine and had come back with two bottles of Apple Zapple. Like announcing his bathroom calls, it was somehow Johnny's style.

After the meal they had watched TV and that had turned to necking and God knew what that might have turned into if a couple of his friends, instructors from the university, hadn't turned up with a faculty position paper on academic freedom. They wanted Johnny to look it over and see what he thought. He had done so, but with noticeably less good will than was usual with him. She had noticed that with a warm, secret delight and the ache in her own loins-the unfulfilled ache-had also delighted her, and that night she hadn't killed it with a douche.

She turned away from the window and walked over to the sofa where Johnny had left the mask.

“Happy Halloween,” she snorted, and laughed a little.

“What?” Johnny called out.

“I said if you don't come pretty quick I'm going with-out you.”

“Be right out.”

“Swell!”

She ran a finger over the Jekyll-and-Hyde mask, kindly Dr. Jekyll the left half, ferocious, subhuman Hyde the right half. Where will we be by Thanksgiving? she wondered. Or by Christmas?

The thought sent a funny, excited little thrill shooting through her. She liked him. He was a perfectly ordinary, sweet man.

She looked down at the mask again, horrible Hyde growing out of Jekyll's face like a lumpy carcinoma. It had been treated with fluorescent paint so it would glow in the dark.

What's ordinary? Nothing, nobody. Not really. If he was so ordinary, how could he be planning to wear something like that into his homeroom and still be confident of keeping order? And how can the kids call him Frankenstein and still respect and like him? What's ordinary?

Johnny came out, brushing through the beaded curtain that divided the bedroom and bathroom off from the living room.

If he wants me to go to bed with him tonight, l think I'm going to say okay.

And it was a warm thought, like coming home.

“What are you grinning about?”

“Nothing,” she said, tossing the mask back to the sofa.

“No, really. Was it something good?”

“Johnny,” she said, putting a hand on his chest and standing on tiptoe to kiss him lightly, “some things will never be told. Come on, let's go.”

They paused downstairs in the foyer while he buttoned his denim jacket, and she found her eyes drawn again to the STRIKE! poster with its clenched fist and flaming background.

“There'll be another student strike this year,” he said, following her eyes.

“The war?”

“That's only going to be part of it this time. Vietnam and the fight over ROTC and Kent State have activated more students than ever before. I doubt if there's ever been a time when there were so few grunts taking up space at the university.”

“What do you mean, grunts?”

“Kids just studying to make grades, with no interest in the system except that it provides them with a ten-thousand-dollar a year job when they get out. A grunt is a student who gives a shit about nothing except his sheep skin. That's over. Most of them are awake. There are going to be some big changes.”

“Is that important to you? Even though you're out?”

He drew himself up. “Madam, I am an alumnus. Smith, class of “70. Fill the stems to dear old Maine.”

She smiled. “Come on, let's go. I want a ride on the whip before they shut it down for the night.”

“Very good,” he said, taking her arm. “I just happen to have your car parked around the corner.”

“And eight dollars. The evening fairly glitters before us.

The night was overcast but not rainy, mild for late October. Overhead, a quarter moon was struggling to make it through the cloud cover. Johnny slipped an arm around her and she moved closer to him.

“You know, I think an awful lot of you, Sarah. “His tone was almost offhand, but only almost. Her heart slowed a little and then made speed for a dozen beats or so.

“Really?”

“I guess this Dan guy, he hurt you, didn't he?”

“I don't know what he did to me,” she said truthfully.

The yellow blinker, a block behind them now, made their shadows appear and disappear on the concrete in front of them.

Johnny appeared to think this over. “I wouldn't want to do that,” he said finally.

“No, I know that. But Johnny… give it time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Time. We've got that, I guess. “And that would come back to her, awake and even more strongly in her dreams, in tones of inexpressible bitterness and loss.

They went around the corner and Johnny opened the passenger door for her. He went around and got in behind the wheel. “You cold?”

“No,” she said. “It's a great night for it.”

“It is,” he agreed, and pulled away from the curb. Her -thoughts went back to that ridiculous mask. Half Jekyll with Johnny's blue eye visible behind the widened-O eyesocket of the surprised doctor-Say, that's some cocktail I invented last night) but l don't think they'll be able to move it in the bars-and that side was all right because you could see a bit of Johnny inside. It was the Hyde part that had scared her silly, because that eye was closed down to a slit. It could have been anybody. Anybody at all. Dan, for instance.

But by the time they reached the Esty fairgrounds, where the naked bulbs of the midway twinkled in the darkness and the long spokes of the Ferris wheel neon revolved up and down, she had forgotten the mask. She was with her guy, and they were going to have a good time.

They walked up the midway hand in hand, not talking much, and Sarah found herself reliving the county fairs of her youth. She had grown up in South Paris, a paper town in western Maine, and the big fair had been the one in Fryeburg. For Johnny, a Pownal boy, it probably would have been Topsham. But they were all the same, really, and they hadn't changed much over the years.

You parked your car in a dirt parking lot and paid your two bucks at the gate, and when you were barely inside the fairgrounds you could smell hot dogs, frying peppers and onions, bacon, cotton candy, sawdust, and sweet, aromatic horseshit. You heard the heavy, chain-driven rumble of the baby roller coaster, the one they called The Wild Mouse. You heard the popping of in the shooting galleries, the tinny blare of the Bingo caller from the PA system strung around the big tent filled with long tables and folding chairs from the local mortuary. Rock “n” roll music vied with the calliope for supremacy. You heard the steady cry of the barkers-two shots for two bits, win one of these stuffed doggies for your baby, hey-hey-yer-here, pitch till you win. It didn't change. It turned you into a kid again, willing and eager to be suckered.

“Here!” she said, stopping him. “The whip! The whip!”

“Of course,” Johnny said comfortingly. He passed the woman in the ticket cage a dollar bill, and she pushed back two red tickets and two dimes with barely a glance up from her Photoplay.

“What do you mean; “of course”? Why are you “of coursing” me in that tone of voice?”

He shrugged. His face was much too innocent.

“It wasn't what you said, John Smith. It was how you said it.”

The ride had stopped. Passengers were getting off and streaming past them, mostly teenagers in blue melton CPO shirts or open parkas. Johnny led her up the wooden ramp and surrendered their tickets to the whip's starter, who looked like the most bored sentient creature in the universe.

“Nothing,” he said as the starter settled them into one of the little round shells and snapped the safety bar into place. “It's just that these cars are on little circular tracks, right?”

“Right.”

“And the little circular tracks are embedded on a large

circular dish that spins around and around, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, when this ride is going full steam, the little car we're sitting in whips around on its little circular track and sometimes develops up to seven g, which is only five less than the astronauts get when they lift off from Cape Kennedy. And I knew this kid… “Johnny was leaning solemnly over her now.

“Oh, here comes one of your big lies,” Sarah said uneasily.

“When this kid was five he fell down the front steps and put a tiny hairline fracture in his spine at the top of his neck. Then ten years later-he went on the whip at Topsham Fair… and… “He shrugged and then patted her hand sympathetically. “But you'll probably be okay, Sarah.”

“Ohhh… I want to get olliff…”

And the whip whirled them away, slamming the fair and the midway into a tilted blur of lights and faces, and she shrieked and laughed and began to pummel him.

“Hairline fracture!” she shouted at him. “I'll give you a hairline fracture when we get off this, you liar!”

“Do you feel anything giving in your neck yet?” he inquired sweetly.

“Oh, you liar!”

They whirled around, faster and faster, and as they snapped past the ride starter for the-tenth? fifteenth? -time, he leaned over and kissed her, and the car whistled around on its track, pressing their lips together in something that was hot and exciting and skintight. Then the ride was slowing down, their car clacked around on its track more reluctantly, and finally came to a swaying, swinging stop.

They got out, and Sarah squeezed his neck. “Hairline fracture, you ass! “she whispered.

A fat lady in blue slacks and penny loafers was passing them. Johnny spoke to her, jerking a thumb hack toward Sarah. “That girl is bothering me, ma'am. If you see a policeman would you tell him?”

“You young people think you're smart,” the fat lady said disdainfully. She waddled away toward the bingo tent, holding her purse more tightly under her arm” Sarah was giggling helplessly.

“You're impossible.”

“I'll come to a bad end,” Johnny agreed. “My mother always said so.”

They walked up the midway side by side again, waiting for the world to stop making unstable motions before their eyes and under their feet.

“She's pretty religious, your mom, isn't she?” Sarah asked.

“She's as Baptist as you can get,” Johnny agreed. “But she's okay. She keeps it under control. She can't resist passing me a few tracts when I'm at home, but that's her thing. Daddy and I put up with it. I used to try to get on her case about it-I'd ask her who the heck was in Nod for Cain to go live with if his dad and mom were the first people on earth, stuff like that-but I decided it was sort of mean and quit it. Two years ago I thought Eugene McCarthy could save the world, and at least the Baptists don't have Jesus running for president.”

“Your father's not religious?”

Johnny laughed. “I don't know about that, but he's sure no Baptist. After a moment's thought he added, “Dad's a carpenter,” as if that explained it. She smiled.

“What would your mother think if she knew you were seeing a lapsed Catholic?”

“Ask me to bring you home,” Johnny said promptly, “so she could slip you a few tracts.”

She stopped, still holding his hand. “Would you like to bring me to your house?” she asked, looking at him closely.

Johnny's long, pleasant face became serious. “Yeah,” he said. “I'd like you to meet them… and vice versa.”

“Why?”

“Don't you know why?” he asked her gently, and suddenly her throat closed and her head throbbed as if she might cry” and she squeezed his hand tightly.

“Oh Johnny, I do like you.”

“I like you even more than that,” he said seriously.

“Take me on the Ferris wheel,” she demanded suddenly, smiling. No more talk like this until she had a chance to consider it, to think where it might be leading. “I want to go up high where we can see everything.”

“Can I kiss you at the top?”

“Twice, if you're quick.”

He allowed her to lead him to the ticket booth, where he surrendered another dollar bill. As he paid he told her, “When I was in high school, I know this kid who worked at the fair, and he said most of the guys who put these rides together are dead drunk and they leave off all sorts of…”

“Co to hell,” she said merrily, “nobody lives forever.”

“But everybody tries, you ever notice that?” he said, following her into one of the swaying gondolas.

As a matter of fact he got to kiss her several times at the top, with the October wind ruffling their hair and the midway spread out below them like a glowing clockface in the dark.

After the Ferris wheel they did the carousel, even though he told her quite honestly that he felt like a horse's ass. His legs were so long that he could have stood astride one of the plaster horses. She told him maliciously that she had known a girl in high school who had had a weak heart, except nobody knew she had a weak heart, and she she had gotten on the carousel with her boyfriend and…

“Someday you'll be sorry,” he told her with quiet sincerity. “A relationship based on lies is no good, Sarah.”

She gave him a very moist raspberry.

After the carousel came the mirror maze, a very good mirror maze as a matter of fact, it made her think of the one in Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, where the little-oldlady schoolteacher almost got lost forever. She could see Johnny in another part of it, fumbling around, waving to her. Dozens of Johnnies, dozens of Sarahs. They bypassed each other, flickered around nonEuclidian angles, and seemed to disappear. She made left turns, right turns, bumped her nose on panes of clear glass, and got giggling helplessly, partly in a nervous claustrophobic reaction. One of the mirrors turned her into a squat Tolkein dwarf. Another created the apotheoeis of teenage gangliness with shins a quarter of a mile long.

At last they escaped and he got them a couple of fried hot dogs and a Dixie cup filled with greasy french fries that tasted the way french fries hardly ever do once you've gotten past your fifteenth year.

They passed a kooch joint. Three girls stood out front in sequined skirts and bras. They were shimmying to an old Jerry Lee Lewis tune while the barker hawked them through a microphone. “Come on over baby,” Jerry Lee blared, his piano boogying frankly across the sawdust-sprinkled arcades. “Come on over baby, baby got the bull by the horns… we ain't fakin… whole lotta shakin goin on…

“Club Playboy,” Johnny marveled, and laughed. “There used to he a place like this down at Harrison Beach. The barker used to swear the girls could take the glasses right off your nose with their hands tied behind their backs.”

“It sounds like an interesting way to get a social disease,” Sarah said, and Johnny roared with laughter.

Behind them the barker's amplified voice grew hollow with distance, counterpointed by Jerry Lee's pumping piano, music like some mad, dented hot rod that was too tough to die, rumbling out of the dead and silent fifties like an omen. “Come in, men, come on over, don't be shy because these girls sure aren't, not in the least little bit! It's all on the inside… your education isn't complete until you've seen the Club Playboy show…

“Don't you want to go on back and finish your education?” she asked.

He smiled. “I finshed my basic course work on that subject some time ago. I guess I can wait a while to get my Ph. D.”

She glanced at her watch. “Hey, it's getting late, Johnny. And tomorrow's a school day.”

“Yeah. But at least it's Friday.”

She sighed, thinking of her fifth-period study hall and her seventh-period New Fiction class, both of them impossibly rowdy.

They had worked their way back to the main part of the midway. The crowd was thinning. The Tilt-A-Whirl had shut down for the evening. Two workmen with unfiltered cigarettes jutting from the corners of their mouths were covering the Wild Mouse with a tarpaulin. The man in the Pitch-Til-U-Win was turning off his lights.

“You doing anything Saturday?” he asked, suddenly diffident. “I know it's short notice, but…”

“I have plans,” she said.

“Oh.”

And she couldn't bear his crestfallen expression, it was really too mean to tease him about that. “I'm doing something with you.

“You are?… Oh, you are. Say, that's good. “He grinned at her and she grinned back. The voice in her mind, which was sometimes as real to her as the voice of another human being, suddenly spoke up.

You're feeling good again, Sarah. Feeling happy. Isn't it fine?

“Yes, it is,” she said. She went up on tiptoe and kissed him quickly. She made herself go on before she could chicken out. “It gets pretty lonely down there in Veazie sometimes, you know. Maybe I could… sort of spend the night with you.”

He looked at her with warm thoughtfulness, and with a speculation that made her tingle deep inside. “Would that be what you want, Sarah?”

She nodded. “Very much what I want.”

“All right,” he said, and put an arm around her.

“Are you sure?” Sarah asked a little shyly.

“I'm just afraid you'll change your mind.”

“I won't, Johnny.”

He hugged her tighter against him. “Then it's my lucky night.”

They were passing the Wheel of Fortune as he said it, and Sarah would later remember that it was the only booth still open on that side of the midway for thirty yards in either direction. The man behind the counter had just finished sweeping the packed dirt inside for any spare dimes that might have fallen from the playing board during the night's action. Probably his last chore before closing up, she thought. Behind him was his large spoked wheel, outlined by tiny electric bulbs. He must have heard Johnny's remark, because he went into his pitch more or less automatically, his eyes still searching the dirt floor of his booth for the gleam of silver.

“Hey-hey-hey, if you feel lucky, mister, spin the Wheel of Fortune, turn dimes into dollars. It's all in the Wheel, try your luck, one thin dime sets this Wheel of Fortune in motion.”

Johnny swung back toward the sound of his voice.

“Johnny?”

“I feel lucky, just like the man said. “He smiled down at her. “Unless you mind…?”

“No, go ahead. Just don't take too long.”

He looked at her again in that frankly speculative way that made her feel a little weak, wondering how it would be with him. Her stomach did a slow roll-over that made her feel a bit nauseated with sudden sexual longing.

“No, not long. “He looked at the pitchman. The midway behind them was almost completely empty now, and as the overcast had melted off above them it had turned chilly. The three of them were puffing white vapor as they breathed.

“Try” your luck, young man?”

“Yes.”

He had switched all his cash to his front pocket when they arrived at the fair, and now he pulled out the remains of his eight dollars. It came to a dollar eighty-five.

The playing board was a strip of yellow plastic with numbers and odds painted on it in squares. It looked a bit like a roulette board, but Johnny saw immediately that the odds here would have turned a Las Vegas roulette player gray… A trip combination paid off at only two to one. There were two house numbers, zero and double zero. He pointed this out to the pitchman, who only shrugged.

“You want Vegas, go to Vegas. What can I say?”

But Johnny's good humor tonight was unshakable. Things had gotten off to a poor start with that mask, but it had been all upbeat from there. In fact, it was the best night he could remember in years, maybe the best night ever. He looked at Sarah. Her color was high, her eyes sparkling. “What do you say, Sarah?”

She shook her head. “It's Greek to me. What do you do?”

“Play a number. Or red/black. Or odd/even. Or a ten-number series. They all pay differently. “He gazed at the pitchman, who gazed back blandly. “At least, they should.”

“Play black,” she said. “It is sort of exciting, isn't it?”

“Black,” he said, and dropped his odd dime on the black square.

The pitchman stared at the single dime on his expanse of playboard and sighed. “Heavy plunger. “He turned to the Wheel.

Johnny's hand wandered absently to his forehead and touched it. “Wait,” he said abruptly. He pushed one of his quarters onto the square reading 11-20.

“That it?”

“Sure,” Johnny said.

The pitchman gave the Wheel a twist and it spun in-side its circle of lights, red and black merging. Johnny absently rubbed at his forehead. The Wheel began to slow and now they could hear the metronome-like tick-tock of the small wooden clapper sliding past the pins that divided the numbers. It reached 8, 9, seemed about to stop on 10, and slipped into the 11 slot with a final dick and came to rest.

“The lady loses, the gentleman wins,” the pitchman said.

“You won, Johnny?”

“Seems like it,” Johnny said as the pitchman added two quarters to his original one. Sarah gave a little squeal, barely noticing as the pitchman swept the dime away.

“Told you, my lucky night,” Johnny said.

“Twice is luck, once is just a fluke,” the pitchman remarked. “Hey-hey-hey.”

“Go again, Johnny,” she said.

“All right. Just as it is for me.”

“Let it ride?”

“Yes.”

The pitchman spun the Wheel again, and as it slid around, Sarah murmured quietly to him, “Aren't all these carnival wheels suppose to be fixed?”

“They used to be. Now the state inspects them and they just rely on their outrageous odds system.”

The Wheel had slowed to its final unwinding tick-tock. The pointer passed 10 and entered Johnny's trip, still slowing.

“Come on, come on! “Sarah cried. A couple of teenagers on their way out paused to watch.

The wooden clapper, moving very slowly now, passed 16 and 17, then came to a stop on 18.

“Gentleman wins again. “The pitchman added six more quarters to Johnny's pile.

“You're rich!” Sarah gloated, and kissed him on the cheek.

“You're streaking, fella,” the pitchman agreed enthusiastically. “Nobody quits a hot stick. Hey-hey-hey.”

“Should I go again?” Johnny asked her.

“Why not?”

“Yeah, go ahead, man,” one of the teenagers said. A button on his jacket bore the face of Jimi Hendrix. “That guy took me for four bucks tonight. I love to see him take a beatin.”

“You too then,” Johnny told Sarah. He gave her the odd quarter off his stack of nine. After a moment's hesitation she laid it down on 21. Single numbers paid off ten to one on a hit, the board announced.

“You're riding the middle trip, right, fella?”

Johnny looked down at the eight quarters stacked on the board, and then he began to rub his forehead again, as if he felt the beginnings of a headache. Suddenly he swept the quarters off the board and jingled them in his two cupped hands.

“No. Spin for the lady. I'll watch this one.”

She looked at him, puzzled. “Johnny?”

He shrugged. “Just a feeling.”

The pitchman rolled his eyes in a heaven-give-me-strength-to-bear-these fools gesture and set his Wheel going again. It spun, slowed, and stopped. On double zero. “House numbah, house numbah,” the pitchman chanted, and Sarah's quarter disappeared into his apron.

“Is that fair, Johnny?” Sarah asked, hurt.

“Zero and double zero only pay the house,” he said.

“Then you were smart to take your money off the board.”

“I guess I was.”

“You want me to spin this Wheel or go for coffee?” the pitchman asked.

“Spin it,” Johnny said, and put his quarters down in two stacks of four on the third trip.

As the Wheel buzzed around in its cage of lights, Sarah asked Johnny, never taking her eyes from the spin, “How much can a place like this take in on one night?”

The teenagers had been joined by a quartet of older people, two men and two women. A man with the build of a construction worker said, “Anywheres from five to seven hundred dollars.”

The pitchman rolled his eyes again. “Oh, man, I wish you was right,” he said.

“Hey, don't give me that poor mouth,” the man who looked like a construction worker said. “I used to work this scam twenty years ago. Five to seven hundred a night, two grand on a Saturday, easy. And that's running a straight Wheel.”

Johnny kept his eyes on the Wheel, which was now spinning slowly enough to read the individual numbers as they flashed past. It flashed past 0 and 00, through the first trip, slowing, through the second trip, still slowing.

“Too much legs, man,” one of the teenagers said.

“Wait,” Johnny said, in a peculiar tone of voice. Sarah glanced at him, and his long, pleasant face looked oddly strained, his blue eyes darker than usual, for away, distant.

The pointer stopped on 30 and came to rest.

“Hot stick, hot stick,” the pitchman chanted resignedly as the little crowd behind Johnny and Sarah uttered a cheer. The man who looked like a construction worker clapped Johnny on the back hard enough to make him stagger a bit. The pitchman reached into the Roi-Tan box under the counter and dropped four singles beside Johnny's eight quarters.

“Enough?” Sarah asked.

“One more,” Johnny said. “If I win, this guy paid for our fair and your gas. If I lose, we're out half a buck or so.

“Hey-hey-hey,” the pitchman chanted. He was brightening up now, getting his rhythm back. “Get it down where you want it down. Step right up, you other folks. This ain't no spectator sport. Round and round she's gonna go and where she's gonna stop ain't nobody knows.”

The man who looked like a construction worker and the two teenagers stepped up beside Johnny and Sarah. After a moment's consultation, the teenagers produced half a buck in change between them and dropped it on the middle trip. The man who looked like a construction worker, who introduced himself as Steve Bernhardt, put a dollar on the square marked EVEN.

“What about you, buddy?” the pitchman asked Johnny. “You gonna play it as it lays?”

“Yes,” Johnny said.

“Oh man,” one of the teenagers said, “that's tempting fate.”

“I guess,” Johnny said, and Sarah smiled at him.

Bernhardt gave Johnny a speculative glance and suddenly switched his dollar to his third trip. “What the hell,” sighed the teenager who had told Johnny he was tempting fate. He switched the fifty cents he and his friend had come up with to the same trip.

“All the eggs in one basket,” the pitchman chanted. “That how you want it?”

The players stood silent and affirmative. A couple of roustabouts had drifted over to watch, one of them with a lady friend; there was now quite a respectable little knot of people in front of the Wheel of Fortune concession in the darkening arcade. The pitchman gave the Wheel a mighty spin. Twelve pairs of eyes watched it revolve. Sarah found herself looking at Johnny again, thinking how strange his face was in this bold yet somehow furtive lighting. She thought of the mask again-Jekyll and Hyde, odd and even. Her stomach turned over again, making her feel a little weak. The Wheel slowed, began to tick. The teenagers began to shout at it, urging it onward.

“Little more, baby,” Steve Bernhardt cajoled it. “Little more, honey.”

The Wheel ticked into the third trip and came to a stop on 24. A cheer went up from the crowd again.

“Johnny, you did it, you did it I” Sarah cried.

The pitchman whistled through his teeth in disgust and paid off. A dollar for the teenagers, two for Bernhardt, a ten and two ones for Johnny. He now had eighteen dollars in front of him on the board.

“Hot stick, hot stick, hey-hey-hey. One more, buddy? This Wheel's your friend tonight.”

Johnny looked at Sarah.

Up to you, Johnny. “But she felt suddenly uneasy.

“Go on, man,” the teenager with the Jimi Hendrix button urged. “I love to see this guy get a beatin.”

“Okay,” Johnny said, “last time.”

“Get it down where you want it down.”

They all looked at Johnny, who stood thoughtful for a moment, rubbing his forehead. His usually good-humored face was still and serious and composed. He was looking at the Wheel in its cage of lights and his fingers worked steadily at the smooth skin over his right eye.

“As is,” he said finally.

A little speculative murmur from the crowd.

“Oh, man, that is really tempting it.”

“He's hot,” Bernhardt said doubtfully. He glanced back at his wife, who shrugged to show her complete mystification. “I'll tag along with you, long, tall, and ugly.”

The teenager with the button glanced at his friend, who shrugged and nodded. “Okay,” he said, turning back to the pitchman. “We'll stick, too.”

The Wheel spun. Behind them Sarah heard one of the roustabouts bet the other five dollars against the third trip coming up again. Her stomach did another forward roll but this time it didn't stop; it just went on somersaulting over and over and she became aware that she was getting sick. Cold sweat stood out on her face.

The Wheel began to slow in the first trip, and one of the teenagers flapped his hands in disgust. But he didn't move away. It ticked past 11, 12, 13. The pitchman looked happy at last. Tick-tock-tick, 14, 15, 16.

“It's going through,” Bernhardt said. There was awe in his voice. The pitchman looked at his Wheel as if he wished he could just reach out and stop it. It clicked past

20, 21, and settled to a stop in the slot marked 22.

There was another shout of triumph from the crowd, which had now grown almost to twenty. All the people left at the fair were gathered here, it seemed. Faintly, Sarah heard the roustabouts who had lost his bet grumble something about “Shitass luck,” as he paid off. Her head thumped. Her legs felt suddenly, horribly unsteady, the muscles trembling and untrustworthy. She blinked her eyes rapidly several times and got only a nauseating instant of vertigo for her pains. The world seemed to tilt up at a skewed angle, as if they were still on the Whip, and then slowly settle back down.

I got a bad hot dog, she thought dismally. That's what you get for trying your luck at the county fair, Sarah.

“Hey-hey-hey,” the pitchman said without much enthusiasm, and paid off. Two dollars for the teenagers, four for Steve Bernhardt, and then a bundle for Johnny -three tens, a five, and a one. The pitchman was not overjoyed, but he was sanguine. If the tall, skinny man with the good-looking blonde tried the third trip again, the pitchman would almost surely gather back in everything he had paid out. It wasn't the skinny man's money until it was off the board. And if he walked? Well, he had cleared a thousand dollars on the Wheel just today, he could afford to pay out a little tonight. The word would get around that Sol Drummore's Wheel had been hit and tomorrow play would be heavier than ever. A winner was a good ad.

“Lay em down where you want em down,” he chanted. Seyeral of the others had moved up to the board and were putting down dimes and quarters. But the pitchman looked only at his money player. “What do you say, fella? Want to shoot the moon?”

Johnny looked down at Sarah. “What do you… hey, are you all right? You're white as a ghost.”

“My stomach,” she said, managing a smile. “I think it was my hot dog. Can we go home?”

“Sure. You bet. “He was gathering the wad of crinkled bills up from the board when his eyes happened on the Wheel again. The warm concern for her that had been in them faded out. They seemed to darken again, become speculative in a cold way. He's looking at that wheel the way a little boy would look at his own private ant colony, Sarah thought.

“Just a minute,” he said.

“All right,” Sarah answered. But she felt light-headed now as well as sick to her stomach. And there were rumblings in her lower belly that she didn't like. Not the backdoor trots, Lord. Please.

She thought: He can't be content until he's lost it all back.

And then, with strange certainty: But he's not going to lose.

“What do you say, buddy?” the pitchman asked. “On or off, in or out.”

“Shit or git,” one of the roustabouts said, and there was nervous laughter. Sarah's head swam.

Johnny suddenly shoved bills and quarters up to the corner of the board.

“What are you doing,” the pitchman asked, genuinely shocked.

“The whole wad on 19,” Johnny said.

Sarah wanted to moan and bit it back.

The crowd murmured.

“Don't push it,” Steve Bernhardt said in Johnny's ear. Johnny didn't answer. He was staring at the Wheel with something like indifference. His eyes seemed almost violet.

There was a sudden jingling sound that Sarah at first thought must be in her own ears. Then she saw that the others who had put money down were sweeping it back off the board again, leaving Johnny to make his play alone.

No! She found herself wanting to shout. Not like that, not alone, it isn't……

She bit down on her lips. She was afraid that she might throw up if she opened her mouth. Her stomach was very bad now. Johnny's pile of winnings sat alone under the naked lights. Fifty-four dollars, and the single-number pay-off was ten for one.

The pitchman wet his lips. “Mister, the state says I'm not supposed to take any single number bets over two dollars.”

“Come on,” Bernhardt growled. “You aren't supposed to take trip bets over ten and you just let the guy bet eighteen. What is it, your balls starting to sweat?”

“No, it's just…

“Come on,” Johnny said abruptly. “One way or the other. My girl's sick.”

The pitchman sized up the crowd. The crowd looked back at him with hostile eyes. It was bad. They didn't understand that the guy was just throwing his money away and he was trying to restrain him. Fuck it. The crowd wasn't going to like it either way. Let the guy do his headstand and lose his money so he could shut down for the night.

“Well,” he said, “as long as none of youse is state inspectors… “He turned to his Wheel. “Round and round she's gonna go, and where she's gonna stop, ain't nobody knows.”

He spun, sending the numbers into an immediate blur. For a time that seemed much longer than it actually could have been, there was no sound but the whirring of the Wheel of Fortune, the night wind rippling a swatch of canvas somewhere, and the sick thump in Sarah's own head. In her mind she begged Johnny to put his arm around her but he only stood quietly with his hands on the playing board and his eyes on the Wheel, which seemed determined to spin forever.

At last it slowed enough for her to be able to read the numbers and she saw 19, the 1 and 9 painted bright red on a black background. Up and down, up and down. The Wheel's smooth whirr broke into a steady ticka-ticka-ticka that was very loud in the stillness.

Now the numbers marched past the pointer with slowing deliberation.

One of the roustabouts called out in wonder: “By the Jesus, it's gonna be close, anyway!”

Johnny stood calmly, watching the Wheel, and now it seemed to her (although it might have been the sickness, which was now rolling through her belly in gripping, peristaltic waves) that his eyes were almost black. Jekyll and Hyde, she thought, and was suddenly, senselessly, afraid of him.

Ticka-ticka-ticka.

The Wheel clicked into second trip, passed 15 and 16, clicked over 17 and, after an instant's hesitation, 18 as well. With a final tick! the pointer dropped into the 19 slot. The crowd held its breath. The Wheel revolved slowly, bringing the pointer up against the small pin between 19 and 20. For a quarter of a second it seemed that the pin could not hold the pointer in the 19 slot; that the last of its dying velocity would carry it over to 20. Then the Wheel rebounded, its force spent, and came to rest.

For a moment there was no sound from the crowd. No sound at all.

Then one of the teenagers, soft and awed: “Hey, man, you just won five hundred and forty dollars.”

Steve Bernhardt: “I never seen a run like that. Never. “Then the crowd cheered. Johnny was slapped on the back, pummeled. People brushed by Sarah to get at him, to touch him, and for the moment they were separated she felt miserable, raw panic. Strengthless, she was butted this way and that, her stomach rolling crazily. A dozen afterimages of the Wheel whirled blackly before her eyes.

A moment later Johnny was with her and she saw with weak gladness that it really was Johnny and not the composed, mannequinlike figure that had watched the Wheel on its last spin. He looked confused and concerned about her.

“Baby, I'm sorry,” he said, and she loved him for that.

“I'm okay,” she answered, not knowing if she was or not. The pitchman cleared his throat. “The Wheel's shut down,” he said. “The Wheel's shut down.”

An accepting, ill-tempered rumble from the crowd.

The pitchman looked at Johnny. “I'll have to give you a check, young gentleman. I don't keep that much cash in the booth.”

“Sure, anything,” Johnny said. “Just make it quick. The lady here really is sick.”

“Sure, a check,” Steve Bernhardt said with infinite contempt. “He'll give you a check that'll bounce as high as the WGAN Tall Tower and he'll be down in Florida for the winter.”

“My dear sir,” the pitchman began, “I assure you…

“Oh, go assure your mother, maybe she'll believe you, Bernhardt said. He suddenly reached over the playing board and groped beneath the counter.

“Hey!” The pitchman yelped. “This is robbery!”

The crowd did not appear impressed with his claim.

“Please,” Sarah muttered. Her head was whirling.

“I don't care about the money,” Johnny said suddenly. “Let us by, please. The lady's sick.”

“Oh, man,” the teenager with the Jimi Hendrix button said, but he and his buddy drew reluctantly aside.

“No, Johnny,” Sarah said, although she was only holding back from vomiting by an act of will now. “Get your money. “Five hundred dollars was Johnny's salary for three weeks.

“Pay off, you cheap tinhorn!” Bernhardt roared. He brought up the Roi-Tan cigar box from under the counter, pushed it aside without even looking inside it, groped again, and this time came up with a steel lockbox painted industrial green. He slammed it down on the play-board. “If there ain't five hundred and forty bucks in there, I'll eat my own shirt in front of all these people. “He dropped a hard, heavy hand on Johnny's shoulder. “You just wait a minute, sonny. You're gonna have your payday or my name's not Steve Bernhardt.”

“Really, sir, I don't have that much…”

“You pay,” Steve Bernhardt said, leaning over him, “or I'll see you shut down. I mean that. I'm sincere about it.”

The pitchman sighed and fished inside his shirt. He produced a key on a fine-link chain. The crowd sighed. Sarah could stay no longer. Her stomach felt bloated and suddenly as still as death. Everything was going to come up, everything, and at express-train speed. She stumbled away from Johnny's side and battered through the crowd.

“Honey, you all right?” a woman's voice asked her, and Sarah shook her head blindly.

“Sarah!” Johnny called.

You just can't hide… from Jekyll and Hyde, she thought incoherently. The fluorescent mask seemed to hang sickly before her eyes in the midway dark as she hurried past the merry-go-round. She struck a light pole with her shoulder, staggered, grabbed it, and threw up. It seemed to come all the way from her heels, convulsing her stomach like a sick, slick fist. She let herself go with it as much as she could.

Smells like cotton candy, she thought, and with a groan she did it again, then again. Spots danced in front of her eyes. The last heave had brought up little more than mucus and air.

“Oh, my,” she said weakly, and clung to the light pole to keep from falling over. Somewhere behind her Johnny was calling her name, but she couldn't answer just yet, didn't want to. Her stomach was settling back down a little and for just a moment she wanted to stand here in the dark and congratulate herself on being alive, on having survived her night at the fair.

“Sarah? Sarah!”

She spat twice to clear her mouth a little.

“Over here, Johnny.”

He came around the carousel with its plaster horses frozen in mid-leap. She saw he was absently clutching a thick wad of greenbacks in one hand.

“Are you all right?”

“No, but better. I threw up.”

“Oh. Oh, Jesus. Let's go home. “He took her arm gently.

“You got your money.

He glanced down at the wad of bills and then tucked it absently into his pants pocket. “Yeah. Some of it or all of it, I don't know. That burly guy counted it out.”

Sarah took a handkerchief from her purse and began rubbing her mouth with it. Drink of water, she thought. I'd sell my soul for a drink of water.

“You ought to care,” she said. “It's a lot of money.”

“Found money brings bad luck,” he said darkly. “One of my mother's sayings. She has a million of em. And she's death on gambling.”

“Dyed-in-the-wool Baptist,” Sarah said, and then shuddered convulsively.

“You okay?” he asked, concerned.

“The chills,” she said. “When we get in the car I want the heater on full blast, and… oh, Lord, I'm going to do it again.”

She turned away from him and retched up spittle with a groaning sound. She staggered. He held her gently but firmly. “Can you get back to the car?”

“Yes. I'm all right now. “But her head ached and her mouth tasted foul and the muscles of her back and belly all felt sprung out of joint, strained and achey.

They walked slowly down the midway together, scuffing through the sawdust, passing tents that had been closed up and snugged down for the night. A shadow glided up behind them and Johnny glanced around sharply, perhaps aware of how much money he had in his pocket.

It was one of the teenagers-about fifteen years old. He smiled shyly at them. “I hope you feel better,” he said to Sarah. “It's those hot dogs, I bet. You can get a bad one pretty easy.”

“Ag, don't talk about it,” Sarah said.

“You need a hand getting her to the car?” he asked Johnny.

“No, thanks. We're fine.”

“Okay. I gotta cut out anyway. “But he paused a moment longer, his shy smile widening into a grin. “I love to see that guy take a beatin.”

He trotted off into the dark.

Sarah's small, white station wagon was the only car left in the dark parking lot; it crouched under a sodium light like a forlorn, forgotten pup. Johnny opened the passenger door for Sarah and she folded herself carefully in. He slipped in behind the wheel and started it up.

“It'll take a few minutes for the heater,” he said.

“Never mind. I'm hot now.

He looked at her and saw the sweat breaking on her face. “Maybe we ought to trundle you up to the emergency room at Eastern Maine Medical,” he said. “If it's salmonella, it could be serious.”

“No, I'm okay. I just want to go home and go to sleep, I'm going to get up just long enough tomorrow morning to call in sick at school and then go back to sleep again.”

“Don't even bother to get up that long. I'll call you in, Sarah.”

She looked at him gratefully. “Would you?”

“Sure.”

They were headed back to the main highway now. “I'm sorry I can't come back to your place with you,” Sarah said. “Really and truly.”

“Not your fault.”

“Sure it is. I ate the bad hot dog. Unlucky Sarah.”

“I love you, Sarah,” Johnny said. So it was out, it couldn't be called back, it hung between them in the moving car waiting for someone to do something about it.

She did what she could. “Thank you, Johnny. “They drove on in a comfortable silence.

CHAPTER TWO

It was nearly midnight when Johnny turned the wagon into her driveway. Sarah was dozing.

“Hey,” he said, cutting the motor and shaking her gently. “We're here.”

“Oh… okay. “She sat up and drew her coat more tightly about her.

“How do you feel?”

“Better. My stomach's sore and my back hurts, but better. Johnny, you take the car back to Cleaves with you.

“No, I better not,” he said. “Someone would see it parked in front of the apartment house all night. That kind of talk we don't need.”

“But I was going to come back with you…

Johnny smiled. “And that would have made it worth the risk, even if we had to walk three blocks. Besides, I want you to have the car in case you change your mind about the emergency room.”

“I won't.”

“You might. Can I come in and call a cab?”

“You sure can.

They went in and Sarah turned on the lights before being attacked by a fresh bout of the shivers.

“The phone's in the living room. I'm going to lie down and cover up with a quilt.”

The living room was small and functional, saved from a barracks flavor only by the splashy curtains-flowers in a psychedelic pattern and color-and a series of posters along one wall: Dylan at Forest Hills, Baez at Carnegie Hall, Jefferson Airplane at Berkeley, the Byrds in Cleveland.

Sarah lay down on the couch and pulled a quilt up to her chin. Johnny looked at her with real concern. Her face was paper-white except for the dark circles under her eyes. She looked about as sick as a person can get.

“Maybe I ought to spend the night here,” he said. “Just in case something happens, like…”

“Like a hairline fracture at the top of my spine?” She looked at him with rueful humor.

“Well, you know. Whatever.”

The ominous rumbling in her nether regions decided her. She had fully intended to finish this night by sleeping with John Smith. It wasn't going to work out that way. But that didn't mean she had to end the evening with him in attendance while she threw up, dashed for the w. c., and chugged most of a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

“I'll be okay,” she said. “It was just a bad carnival hot dog, Johnny. You could have just as easily gotten it yourself. Give me a call during your free period tomorrow.

“You sure?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Okay, kid. “He picked up the phone with no further argument and called his cab. She closed her eyes, lulled and comforted by the sound of his voice. One of the things she liked most about him was that he would always really try to do the right thing, the best thing, with no self-serving bullshit. That was good. She was too tired and feeling too low to play little social games.

“The deed's done,” he said, hanging up. “They'll have a guy over in five minutes.”

“At least you've got cab fare,” she said, smiling.

“And I plan to tip handsomely,” he replied, doing a passable W. C. Fields.

He came over to the couch, sat beside her, held her hand.

“Johnny, how did you do it?”

“Hmmm?”

“The Wheel. How could you do that?”

“It was a streak, that's all,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable. “Everybody has a streak once in a while. Like at the race track or playing blackjack or just matching dimes.”

“No,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I don't think everybody does have a streak once in a while. It was almost uncanny. It… scared me a little.”

“Did it?”

“Yes.”

Johnny sighed. “Once in a while I get feelings, that's all. For as long as I can remember, since I was just a little kid. And I've always been good at finding things people have lost. Like that little Lisa Schumann at school. You know the girl I mean?”

“Little, sad, mousy Lisa?” She smiled. “I know her. She's wandering in clouds of perplexity through my business grammar course.

“She lost her class ring,” Johnny said, “and came to me in tears about it. I asked her if she'd checked the back corners of the top shelf in her locker. Just a guess. But it was there.”

“And you've always been able to do that?”

He laughed and shook his head. “Hardly ever. “The smile slipped a little. “But it was strong tonight, Sarah. I had that Wheel… “He closed his fists softly and looked at them, now frowning. “I had it right here. And it had the strangest goddam associations for me.”

“Like what?”

“Rubber,” he said slowly. “Burning rubber. And cold. And ice. Black ice. Those things were in the back of my mind. God knows why. And a bad feeling. Like to beware.”

She looked at him closely, saying nothing, and his face slowly cleared.

“But it's gone now, whatever it was. Nothing probably.”

“It was five hundred dollars worth of good luck, anyway,” she said. Johnny laughed and nodded. He didn't talk anymore and she drowsed, glad to have him there. She came back to wakefulness when headlights from outside splashed across the wall. His cab.

“I'll call,” he said, and kissed her face gently. “You sure you don't want me to hang around?”

Suddenly she did, but she shook her head “Call me,” she said.

“Period three,” he promised. He went to the door.

“Johnny?”

He turned back.

“I love you, Johnny,” she said, and his face lit up like a lamp.

He blew a kiss. “Feel better,” he said, “and we'll talk.”

She nodded, but it was four-and-a-half years before she talked to Johnny Smith again.

“Do you mind if I sit up front?” Johnny asked the cab driver.

“Nope. Just don't bump your knee on the meter. It's delicate.”

Johnny slid his long legs under the meter with some effort and slammed the door. The cabbie, a middle-aged man with a bald head and a paunch, dropped his flag and the cab cruised up Flagg Street.

“Where to?”

“Cleaves Mills,” Johnny said. “Main Street. I'll show you where.”

“I got to ask you for fare-and-a-half,” the cabbie said. “I don't like to, but I got to come back empty from there.”

Johnny's hand closed absently over the lump of bills in his pants pocket. He tried to remember if he had ever had so much money on him at one time before. Once. He had bought a two-year-old Chevy for twelve hundred dollars. On a whim, he had asked for cash at the savings bank, just to see what all that cash looked like. It hadn't been all that wonderful, but the surprise on the car dealer's face when Johnny pumped twelve one hundred dollar bills into his hand had been wonderful to behold. But this lump of money didn't make him feel good at all, just vaguely uncomfortable, and his mother's axiom recurred to him: Found money brings bad luck.

“Fare-and-a-half's okay,” he told the cabbie.

“Just as long's we understand each other,” the cabbie said more expansively. “I got over so quick on account of I had a call at the Riverside and nobody there would own up when I got over there.”

“That so?” Johnny asked without much interest. Dark houses flashed by outside. He had won five hundred dollars, and nothing remotely like it had ever happened to him before. That phantom smell of rubber burning… the sense of partially reliving something that had happened to him when he was very small… and that feeling of bad luck coming to balance off the good was still with him.

“Yeah, these drunks call and then they change their minds,” the cabbie said. “Damn drunks, I hate em. They call and decide what the hell, they'll have a few more beers. Or they drink up the fare while they're waitin and when I come in and yell “Who wants the cab?” they don't want to own up.

“Yeah,” Johnny said. On their left the Penobscot River flowed by, dark and oily. Then Sarah getting sick and saying she loved him on top of everything else. Probably just caught her in a weak moment, but God! If she had meant it I He had been gone on her almost since the first date.

That was the luck of the evening, not beating that Wheel. But it was the Wheel his mind kept coming back to, worrying at it. In the dark he could still see it revolving, and in his ears he could hear the slowing ticka-ticka-ticka of the marker bumping over the pins like something heard in an uneasy dream. Found money brings bad luck.

The cabbie turned off onto Route 6, now well-launched into his own monologue.

“So I says, “Blow it outcha you-know-where.” I mean, the kid is a smart-aleck, right? I don't have to take a load of horseshit like that from anyone, including my own boy. I been drivin this cab twenty-six years. I been held up six times. I been in fender-benders without number, although I never had a major crash, for which I thank Mary Mother of Jesus and Saint Christopher and God the Father Almighty, know what I mean? And every week, no matter how thin that week was, I put five bucks away for his college. Ever since he was nothin but a pip squeak suckin a bottle. And what for? So he can come home one fine day and tell me the president of the United States is a pig. Hot damn! The kid probably thinks I'm a pig, although he knows if he ever said it I'd rearrange his teeth for him. So that's today's young generation for you. So I says, “Blow it outcha-you-know. where. "”

“Yeah,” Johnny said. Now woods were floating by. Carson's Bog was on the left. They were seven miles from Cleaves Mills, give or take. The meter kicked over another dime.

One thin dime, one tenth of a dollar. Hey-hey-hey.

“What's your game, might I ask?” the cabbie said.

“I teach high school in Cleaves.”

“Oh, yeah? So you know what I mean. What the hell's wrong with these kids, anyway?”

Well, they ate a bad hot dog called Vietnam and it gave them ptomaine. A guy named Lyndon Johnson sold it to them. So they went to this other guy, see, and they said, “Jesus, mister, I'm sick as hell. “And this other guy, his name was Nixon, he said, “I know how to fix that,

Have a few more hot dogs. “And that's what's wrong with the youth of America.

“I don't know,” Johnny said.

“You plan all your life and you do what you can,” the cabbie said, and now there was honest bewilderment in his voice, a bewilderment which would not last much longer because the cabbie was embarked upon the last minute of his life. And Johnny, who didn't know that, felt a real pity for the man, a sympathy for his inability to understand.

Come on over baby, whole lotta shakin goin on.

“You never want nothing but the best, and the kid comes home with hair down to his asshole and says the president of the United States is a pig. A pig! Sheeyit, I don't…”

“Look out!” Johnny yelled.

The cabbie had half-turned to face him, his pudgy American Legionnaire's face earnest and angry and miserable in the dashlights and in the sudden glow of oncoming headlights. Now he snapped forward again, but too late.

“Jeeesus… -,

There were two cars, one on each side of the white line. They had been dragging, side by side, coming up over the hill, a Mustang and a Dodge Charger. Johnny could hear the revved-up whine of their engines. The Charger was boring straight down at them. It never tried to get out of the way and the cabbie froze at the wheel.

“Jeeeeee…

Johnny was barely aware of the Mustang flashing by on their left. Then the cab and the Charger met head-on and Johnny felt himself getting lifted up and out. There was no pain, although he was marginally aware that his thighs had connected with the taximeter hard enough to rip it out of its frame.

There was the sound of smashing glass. A huge gout of flame stroked its way up into the night. Johnny's head collided with the cab's windshield and knocked it out. Reality began to go down a hole. Pain, faint and far away, in his shoulders and arms as the rest of him followed his head through the jagged windshield. He was flying. Flying into the October night.

Dim flashing thoughs Am I dying? Is this going to kill me?

Interior voice answering: Yes, this is probably it.

Flying. October stars flung across the night. Racketing boom of exploding gasoline. An orange glow. Then darkness.

His trip through the void ended with a hard thump and a splash. Cold wetness as he went into Carson's Bog, twenty-five feet from where the Charger and the cab, welded together, pushed a pyre of flame into the night sky.

Darkness.

Fading.

Until all that was left seemed to be a giant red-and-black wheel revolving in such emptiness as there may be between the stars, try your luck, first time fluky, second time lucky, hey-hey-hey. The wheel revolved up and down, red and black, the marker ticking past the pins, and he strained to see if it was going to come up double zero, house number, house spin, everybody loses but the house. He strained to see but the wheel was gone. There was only blackness and that universal emptiness, negatory, good buddy, el zilcho. Cold limbo.

Johnny Smith stayed there a long, long time.

CHAPTER THREE

At some time a little past two A. M. on the morning of October 30, 1970, the telephone began to ring in the downstairs hall of a small house about a hundred and fifty miles south of Cleaves Mills.

Herb Smith sat up in bed, disoriented, dragged half-way across the threshold of sleep and left in its doorway, groggy and disoriented.

Vera's voice beside him, muffled by the pillow. “Phone.”

“Yeah,” he said, and swung out of bed. He was a big, broad-shouldered man in his late forties, losing his hair, now dressed in blue pajama bottoms. He went out into the upstairs hall and turned on the light. Down below, the phone shrilled away.

He went down to what Vera liked to call “the phone nook. “It consisted of the phone and a strange little desk-table that she had gotten with Green Stamps about three years ago. Herb had refused from the first to slide his two hundred and forty pound bulk into it. When he talked on the phone, he stood up. The drawer of the desk-table was full of Upper Rooms, Reader's Digests, and Fate magazines.

Herb reached for the phone, then let it ring again.

A phone call in the middle of the night usually meant one of three things: an old friend had gotten totally shitfaced and had decided you'd be glad to hear from him even at two in the morning; a wrong number; bad news.

Hoping for the middle choice, Herb lifted up the phone. “Hello?”

A crisp male voice said: “Is this the Herbert Smith residence?”

“Yes?”

“To whom am I speaking, please?”

“I'm Herb Smith. What…”

“Will you hold for a moment?”

“Yes, but who. -

Too late. There was a faint clunk in his ear, as if the party on the other end had dropped one of his shoes. He had been put on hold. Of the many things he disliked about the telephone-bad connections, kid pranksters who wanted to know if you had Prince Albert in a can, operators who sounded like computers, and smoothies who wanted you to buy magazine subscriptions-the thing he disliked the most was being on hold. It was one of those insidious things that had crept into modern life almost unnoticed over the last ten years or so. Once upon a time the fellow on the other end would simply have said, “Hold the phone, willya?” and set it down. At least in those days you were able to hear faraway conversations, a barking dog, a radio, a crying baby. Being on hold was a totally different proposition. The line was darkly, smoothly blank. You were nowhere. Why didn't they just say, “Will you hold on while I bury you alive for a little while?”

He realized he was just a tiny bit scared.

“Herbert?”

He turned round, the phone to his ear. Vera was at the top of the stairs in her faded brown bathrobe, hair up in curlers, some sort of cream hardened to a castlike consistency on her cheeks and forehead.

“Who is it?”

“I don't know yet. They've got me on hold.”

“On hold? At quarter past two in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“It's not Johnny, is it? Nothing's happened to Johnny?”

“I don't know,” he said, struggling to keep his voice from rising. Somebody calls you at two in the morning, puts you on hold, you count your relatives and inventory their condition. You make lists of old aunts. You tot up the ailments of grandparents, if you still have them. You wonder if the ticker of one of your friends just stopped ticking. And you try not to think that you have one son you love very much, or about how these calls always seem to come at two in the morning, or how all of a sudden your calves are getting stiff and heavy with tension…

Vera had closed her eyes and had folded her hands in the middle of her thin bosom. Herb tried to control his irritation. Restrained himself from saying, “Vera, the Bible makes the strong suggestion that you go and do that in your closet. “That would earn him Vera Smith's Sweet Smile for Unbelieving and Hellbound Husbands. At two o'clock in the morning, and on hold to boot, he didn't think he could take that particular smile.

The phone clunked again and a different male voice, an older one, said, “Hello, Mr. Smith?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, sir. Sergeant Meggs of the state police, Orono branch.”

“Is it my boy? Something about my boy?”

Unaware, he sagged onto the seat of the phone nook. He felt weak all over.

Sergeant Meggs said, “Do you have a son named John Smith, no middle initial?”

“Is he all right? Is he okay?”

Footsteps on the stairs. Vera stood beside him. For a moment she looked calm, and then she clawed for the phone like a tigress. “What is it? What's happened to my Johnny?”

Herb yanked the handset away from her, splintering one of her fingernails. Staring at her hard he said, “I am handling this.”

She stood looking at him, her mild, faded blue eyes wide above the hand clapped to her mouth.

“Mr. Smith, are you there?”

Words that seemed coated with novocaine fell from Herb's mouth. “I have a son named John Smith, no middle initial, yes. He lives in Cleaves Mills. He's a teacher at the high school there.”

“He's been in a car accident, Mr. Smith. His condition is extremely grave. I'm very sorry to have to give you this news. “The voice of Meggs was cadenced, formal.

“Oh, my God,” Herb. said. His thoughts were whirling. Once, in the army, a great, mean, blond-haired Southern boy named Childress had beaten the crap out of him behind an Atlanta bar. Herb had felt like this then, unmanned, all his thoughts knocked into a useless, smeary sprawl. “Oh, my God,” he said again.

“He's dead?” Vera asked. “He's dead? Johnny's dead?”

He covered the mouthpiece. “No,” he said. “Not dead.”

“Not dead! Not dead!” she cried, and fell on her knees in the phone nook with an audible thud. “0 God we most heartily thank Thee and ask that You show Thy tender care and loving mercy to our son and shelter him with Your loving hand we ask it in the name of Thy only begotten Son Jesus and…

“Vera shut up!”

For a moment all three of them were silent, as if considering the world and its not-so-amusing ways: Herb, his bulk squashed into the phone nook bench with his knees crushed up against the underside of the desk and a bouquet of plastic flowers in his face: Vera with her knees planted on the hallway furnace grille; the unseen Sergeant Meggs was in a strange auditory way witnessing this black comedy.

“Mr. Smith?”

“Yes. I… I apologize for the ruckus.”

“Quite understandable,” Meggs said.

“My boy… Johnny… was he driving his Volkswagen?”

“Deathtraps, deathtraps, those little beetles are death-traps,” Vera babbled. Tears streamed down her face, sliding over the smooth hard surface of the nightpack like rain on chrome.

“He was in a Bangor amp; Orono Yellow Cab,” Meggs said. “I'll give you the situation as I understand it now. There were three vehicles involved, two of them driven by kids from Cleaves Mills. They were dragging. They came up over what's known as Carson's Hill on Route 6, headed east. Your son was in the cab, headed west, toward Cleaves. The cab and the car on the wrong side of the road collided headon. The cab driver was killed, and so was the boy driving the other car. Your son and a passenger in that other car are at Eastern Maine Med. I understand both of them are listed as critical.”

“Critical,” Herb said.

“Critical! Critical! “Vera moaned.

Oh, Christ, we sound like one of those weird off Broadway shows, Herb thought. He felt embarrassed for Vera, and for Sergeant Meggs, who must surely be hearing Vera, like some nutty Greek chorus in the back-ground. He wondered how many conversations like this Sergeant Meggs had held in the course of his job. He decided he must have had a good many. Possibly he had already called the cab driver's wife and the dead boy's mother to pass the news. How had they reacted? And what did it matter? Wasn't it Vera's right to weep for her son? And why did a person have to think such crazy things at a time like this?

“Eastern Maine,” Herb said. He jotted it on a pad. The drawing on top of the pad showed a smiling telephone handset. The phone cord spelled out the words PHONE PAL. “How is he hurt?”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Smith?”

“Where did he get it? Head? Belly? What? Is he burned?”

Vera shrieked.

“Vera can you please shut UP!”

“You'd have to call the hospital for that information,” Meggs said carefully. “I'm a couple of hours from having a complete report.”

“All right. All right.”

“Mr. Smith, I'm sorry to have to call you in the middle of the night with such bad news…

“It's bad, all right,” he said. “I've got to call the hospital, Sergeant Meggs. Good-bye.”

“Good night, Mr. Smith.”

Herb hung up and stared stupidly at the phone. Just like that it happens, he thought. How “bout that. Johnny.

Vera uttered another shriek, and he saw with some alarm that she had grabbed her hair, rollers and all, and was pulling it. “It's a judgment! A judgment on the way we live, on sin, on something! Herb, get down on your knees with me…”

“Vera, I have to call the hospital. I don't want to do it on my knees.”

“We'll pray for him… promise to do better… if you'd only come to church more often with me I know… may be it's your cigars, drinking beer with those men after work… cursing… taking the name of the Lord God in vain… a judgment… it's a judgment…”

He put his hands on her face to stop its wild, uneasy whipping back and forth. The feel of the night cream was unpleasant, but he didn't take his hands away. He felt pity for her. For the last ten years his wife had been walking somewhere in a gray area between devotion to her Baptist faith and what he considered to be a mild religious mania. Five years after Johnny was born, the doctor had found a number of benign tumors in her uterus and vaginal canal. Their removal had made it impossible for her to have another baby. Five years later, more tumors had necessitated a radical hysterectomy. That was when it had really begun for her, a deep religious feeling strangely coupled with other beliefs. She avidly read pamphlets on Atlantis, spaceships from heaven, races of “pure Christians” who might live in the bowels of the earth. She read Fate magazine almost as frequently as the Bible, often using one to illuminate the other.

“Vera,” he said.

“We'll do better,” she whispered, her eyes pleading with him. “We'll do better and he'll live. You'll see. You'll…”

“Vera.”

She fell silent, looking at him.

“Let's call the hospital and see just how bad it really is,” he said gently.

“A-All right. Yes.”

“Can you sit on the stairs there and keep perfectly quiet?”

“I want to pray,” she said childishly. “You can't stop me.”

“I don't want to. As long as you pray to yourself.”

“Yes. To myself. All right, Herb.”

She went to the stairs and sat down and pulled her robe primly around her. She folded her hands and her lips began to move. Herb called the hospital. Two hours later they were headed north on the nearly deserted Maine Turnpike. Herb was behind the wheel of their “66 Ford station wagon. Vera sat bolt upright in the passenger seat. Her Bible was on her lap.

The telephone woke Sarah at quarter of nine. She went to answer it with half her mind still asleep in bed. Her back hurt from the vomiting she had done the night before and the muscles in her stomach felt strained, but otherwise she felt much better.

She picked up the phone, sure it would be Johnny. “Hello?”

“Hi, Sarah. “It wasn't Johnny. It was Anne Strafford from school. Anne was a year older than Sarah and in her second year at Cleaves. She taught Spanish. She was a bubbly, effervescent girl and Sarah liked her very much. But this morning she sounded subdued.

“How are you, Annie? It's only temporary. Probably Johnny told you. Carnival hot dogs, I guess…”

“Oh, my God, you don't know. You don't… “The words were swallowed in odd, choked sounds. Sarah listened to them, frowning. Her initial puzzlement turned to deadly disquiet as she realized Anne was crying.

“Anne? What's wrong? It's not Johnny, is it? Not…”

“There was an accident,” Anne said. She was now sobbing openly. “He was in a cab. There was a head-on collision. The driver of the other car was Brad Freneau, I had him in Spanish II, he died, his girl friend died this morning, Mary Thibault, she was in one of Johnny's classes, I heard, it's horrible, just horr.

“Johnny!” Sarah screamed into the phone. She was sick to her stomach again. Her hands and feet were suddenly as cold as four gravestones. “What about Johnny?”

“He's in critical condition, Sarah. Dave Pelsen called the hospital this morning. He's not expected… well, it's very bad.”

The world was going gray. Anne was still talking but her voice was far and wee, as e. e. cummings had said about the balloon man. Flocked images tumbling over and over one another, none making sense. The carny wheel. The mirror maze. Johnny's eyes, strangely violet, almost black. His dear, homely face in the harsh, county fair lighting, naked bulbs strung on electric wire.

“Not Johnny,” she said, far and wee, far and wee. “You're mistaken. He was fine when he left here.”

And Anne's voice coming back like a fast serve, her voice so shocked and unbelieving, so affronted that such a thing should have happened to someone her own age, someone young and vital. “They told Dave he'd never wake up even if he survived the operation. They have to operate because his head… his head was…”

Was she going to say crushed? That Johnny's head had been crushed?

Sarah fainted then, possibly~to avoid that final irrevocable word, that final horror. The phone spilled out of her fingers and she sat down hard in a gray world and then slipped over and the phone swung back and forth in a decreasing arc, Anne Strafford's voice coming out of it: “Sarah?… Sarah?. Sarah?”

When Sarah got to Eastern Maine Medical, it was quarter past twelve. The nurse at the reception desk looked at her white, strained face, estimated her capacity for further truth, and told her that John Smith was still in OR. She added that Johnny's mother and father were in the waiting room.

“Thank you,” Sarah said. She turned right instead of left, wound up in a medical closet, and had to backtrack.

The waiting room was done in bright, solid colors that gashed her eyes A few people sat around looking at tattered magazines or empty space. A gray-haired woman came in from the elevators, gave her visitor's pass to a friend, and Sat down. The friend clicked away on high heels. The rest of them went on sitting, waiting their own chance to visit a father who had had gallstones removed, ~ mother who had discovered a small lump under one of her breasts a bare three days ago, a friend who had been struck in the chest with an invisible sledgehammer while jogging. The faces of the waiters were care fully made-up with composure. Worry was swept under the face like dirt under a rug. Sarah felt the unreality hovering again.

Somewhere a soft bell was ringing. Crepe-soled shoes squeaked. He had been fine when he left her place. Impossible to think he was in one of these brick towers, engaged in dying.

She knew Mr. and Mrs. Smith at once. She groped for their first names and could not immediately find them. They were sitting together near the back of the room, and unlike the others here, they hadn't yet had time to come to terms with what had happened in their lives.

Johnny's mom sat with her coat on the chair behind her and her Bible clutched in her hands. Her lips moved as she read, and Sarah remembered Johnny saying she was very religious-maybe too religious, somewhere in that great middle ground between holy rolling and snake-handling, she remembered him saying. Mr. Smith -Herb, it came to her, his name is Herb-had one of the magazines on his knees, but he wasn't looking at it. He was looking out the window, where New England fall burned its way toward November and winter beyond.

She went over to them. “Mr. and Mrs. Smith?”

They looked up at her, their faces tensed for the dreaded blow. Mrs. Smith's hands tightened on her Bible, which was open to the Book of Job, until her knuckles were white. The young woman before them was not in nurse's or doctor's whites, but that made no difference to them at this point. They were waiting for the final blow.

“Yes, we're the Smiths,” Herb said quietly.

“I'm Sarah Bracknell. Johnny and I are good friends. Going together, I suppose you'd say. May I sit down?”

“Johnny's girl friend?” Mrs. Smith asked in a sharp, almost accusing tone. A few of the others looked around briefly and then back at their own tattered magazines.

“Yes,” she said. “Johnny's girl.”

“He never wrote that he had a lady friend,” Mrs. Smith said in that same sharp tone. “No, he never did at all.”

“Hush, Mother,” Herb said. “Sit down, Miss. -. Bracknell, wasn't it?”

“Sarah,” she said gratefully, and took a chair. “I…”

“No, he never did,” Mrs. Smith said sharply. “My boy loved God, but just lately he maybe fell away just a bit. The judgment of the Lord God is sudden, you know. That's what makes backsliding so dangerous. You know not the day nor the hour…

“Hush,” Herb said. People were looking around again. He fixed his wife with a stern glance. She looked back defiantly for a moment, but his gaze didn't waver. Vera dropped her eyes. She had closed the Bible but her fingers fiddled restlessly along the pages, as if longing to get back to the colossal demolition derby of Job's life, enough bad luck to put her own and her son's in some sort of bitter perspective.

“I was with him last night,” Sarah said, and that made the woman look up again, accusingly. At that moment Sarah remembered the biblical connotation of being “with” somebody and felt herself beginning to blush. It was as if the woman could read her thoughts.

“We went to the county fair…”

“Places of sin and evil,” Vera Smith said clearly.

“I'll tell you one last time to hush, Vera,” Herb said grimly, and clamped one of his hands over one of his wife's. “I mean it, now. This seems like a nice girl here, and I won't have you digging at her. Understand?”

“Sinful places,” Vera repeated stubbornly.

“Will you hush?”

“Let me go. I want to read my Bible.”

He let her go. Sarah felt confused embarrassment. Vera opened her Bible and began to read again, lips moving.

“Vera is very upset, Herb said. “We're both upset. You are too, from the look of you.”

“Yes.”

“Did you and Johnny have a good time last night?” he asked. “At your fair?”

“Yes,” she said, the lie and truth of that simple word all mixed up in her mind. “Yes we did, until… well, I ate a bad hot dog or something. We had my car and Johnny drove me home to my place in Veazie. I was pretty sick to my stomach. He called a cab. He said he'd call me in sick at school today. And that's the last time I saw him. “The tears started to come then and she didn't want to cry in front of them, particularly not in front of Vera Smith, but there was no way to stop it. She fumbled a Kleenex out of her purse and held it to her face.

“There, now,” Herb said, and put an arm around her.

“There, now. “She cried, and it seemed to her in some unclear way that he felt better for having someone to comfort; his wife had found her own dark brand of comfort in Job's story and it didn't include him.

A few people turned around to gawk; through the prisms of her tears they seemed like a crowd. She had a bitter knowledge of what they were thinking: Better her than me, better all three of them than me or mine, guy must be dying, guy must have gotten his head crushed for her to cry like that. Only a matter of time before some doctor comes down and takes them into a private room to tell them that -Somehow she choked off the tears and got hold of her-self. Mrs. Smith sat bolt upright, as if startled out of a nightmare, noticing neither Sarah's tears nor her husband's effort to comfort her. She read her Bible.

“Please,” Sarah said. “How bad is it? Can we hope?”

Before Herb could answer, Vera spoke up. Her voice was a dry bolt of certified doom: “There's hope in God, Missy.”

Sarah saw the apprehensive flicker in Herb's eyes and thought: He thinks it's driven her crazy. And maybe it has.

A long afternoon stretching into evening.

Sometime after two P. M., when the schools began to let out, a number of Johnny's students began to come in, wearing fatigue coats and strange hats and washed-out jeans. Sarah didn't see many of the kids she thought of as the button-down crowd-upward-bound, college-oriented kids, clear of eye and brow. Most of the kids who bothered to come in were the freaks and long-hairs.

A few came over and asked Sarah in quiet tones what she knew about Mr. Smith's condition. She could only shake her head and say she had heard nothing. But one of the girls, Dawn Edwards, who had a crush on Johnny, read the depth of Sarah's fear in her face. She burst into tears. A nurse came and asked her to leave.

“I'm sure she'll be all right,” Sarah said. She had a protective arm around Dawn's shoulders. “Just give her a minute or two.

“No, I don't want to stay,” Dawn said, and left in a hurry, knocking one of the hard plastic contour chairs over with a clatter. A few moments later Sarah saw the girl sitting out on the steps in the cold, late, October sunshine with her head on her knees.

Vera Smith read her Bible.

By five o'clock most of the students had left. Dawn had also left; Sarah had not seen her go. At seven P. M., a young man with DR. STRAWNS pinned askew to the lapel of his white coat came into the waiting room, glanced around, and walked toward them.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith?” he asked.

Herb took a deep breath. “Yes. We are.”

Vera shut her Bible with a snap.

“Would you come with me, please?”

That's it, Sarah thought. The walk down to the small private room, and then the news. Whatever the news is. She would wait, and when they came back, Herb Smith would tell her what she needed to know. He was a kind man.

“Have you news of my son?” Vera asked in that same clear, strong, and nearly hysterical voice.

“Yes. “Dr. Strawns glanced at Sarah. “Are you family, ma'am?”

“No,” Sarah said. “A friend.”

“A close friend,” Herb said. A warm, strong hand closed above her elbow, just as another had closed around Vera's upper arm. He helped them both to their feet. “We'll all go together, if you don't mind.”

“Not at all.”

He led them past the elevator bank and down a hall-way to an office with CONFERENCE ROOM on the door. He let them in and turned on the overhead fluorescent lights. The room was furnished with a long table and a dozen office chairs.

Dr. Strawns closed the door, lit a cigarette, and dropped the burned match into one of the ashtrays that marched up and down the table. “This is difficult,” he said, as if to himself.

“Then you had best just say it out,” Vera said.

“Yes, perhaps I'd better.”

It was not her place to ask, but Sarah could not help it. “Is he dead? Please don't say he's dead…

“He's in a coma. “Strawns sat down and dragged deeply on his cigarette. “Mr. Smith has sustained serious head injuries and an undetermined amount of brain damage. You may have heard the phrase “subdural hematoma” on one or the other of the doctor shows. Mr. Smith has suffered a very grave subdural hematoma, which is localized cranial bleeding. A long operation was necessary to relieve the pressure, and also to remove bone-splinters from his brain.”

Herb sat down heavily, his face doughy and stunned. Sarah noticed his blunt, scarred hands and remembered Johnny telling her his father was a carpenter.

“But God has spared him,” Vera said. “I knew he would. I prayed for a sign. Praise God, Most High! All ye here below praise His name!”

“Vera,” Herb said with no force.

“In a coma,” Sarah repeated. She tried to fit the information into some sort of emotional frame and found it wouldn't go. That Johnny wasn't dead, that he had come through a serious and dangerous operation on his brain-those things should have renewed her hope. But they didn't. She didn't like that word coma. It had a sinister, stealthy sound. Wasn't it Latin for “sleep of death”?

“What's ahead for him?” Herb asked.

“No one can really answer that now,” Strawns said. He began to play with his cigarette, tapping it nervously over the ashtray. Sarah had the feeling he was answering Herb's question literally while completely avoiding the question Herb had really asked. “He's on life support equipment, of course.”

“But you must know something about his chances,” Sarah said. “You must know… “She gestured helplessly with her hands and let them drop to her sides.

“He may come out of it in forty-eight hours. Or a week. A month. He may never come out of…… there is a strong possibility that he may die. I must tell you frankly that's the most likely. His injuries… grave.

“God wants him to live,” Vera said. “I know it.”

Herb had put his face into his hands and was scrubbing it slowly.

Dr. Strawns looked at Vera uncomfortably. “I only want you to be prepared for… any eventuality.”

“Would you rate his chances for coming out of it?” Herb asked.

Dr. Strawns hesitated, puffed nervously on his cigarette. “No, I can't do that,” he said finally.

The three of them waited another hour and then left. It was dark. A cold and gusty wind had come up and it whistled across the big parking lot. Sarah's long hair streamed out behind her. Later, when she got home, she would find a crisp yellow oak leaf caught in it. Overhead, the moon rode the sky, a cold sailor of the night.

Sarah pressed a scrap of paper into Herb's hand. Written on it was her address and phone number. “Would you call me if you hear something? Anything at all?”

“Yes, of course. “He bent suddenly and kissed her cheek, and Sarah held his shoulder for a moment in the blowing dark.

“I'm very sorry if I was stiff with you earlier, dear,” Vera said, and her voice was surprisingly gentle. “I was upset.”

“Of course you were,” Sarah said.

“I thought my boy might die. But I've prayed. I've spoken to God about it. As the song says, “Are we weak and heavy-laden? Cumbered with a load of care? We must never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord in “prayer. "”

“Vera, we ought to go along,” Herb said. “We ought to get some sleep and see how things look in the…”

“But now I've heard from my God,” Vera said, looking dreamily up at the moon. “Johnny isn't going to die. It isn't in God's plan for Johnny to die. I listened and I heard that still, small voice speaking in my heart, and I am comforted.”

Herb opened the car door. “Come on, Vera.”

She looked back at Sarah and smiled. In that smile Sarah suddenly saw Johnny's own easy, devil-may-care grin-but at the same time she thought it was the most ghastly smile she had ever seen in her life.

“God has put his mark on my Johnny,” Vera said, “and I rejoice.”

“Good night, Mrs. Smith,” Sarah said through numb lips.

“Good night, Sarah,” Herb said. He got in and started the car. It pulled out of its space and moved across the parking lot to State Street, and Sarah realized she hadn't asked where they were staying. She guessed they might not know themselves yet.

She turned to go to her own car and paused, struck by the river that ran behind the hospital, the Penobscot. It flowed like dark silk, and the reflected moon was caught in its center. She looked up into the sky, standing alone in the parking lot now. She looked at the moon.

God has put his mark on my Johnny and I rejoice.

The moon hung above her like a tawdry carnival toy, a Wheel of Fortune in the sky with the odds all slugged in favor of the house, not to mention the house numbers-zero and double zero. House numbah, house numbah,

y'all pay the house, hey-hey-hey.

The wind blew rattling leaves around her legs. She went to her car and sat behind the wheel. She felt suddenly sure she was going to lose him. Terror and loneliness woke in her. She began to shiver. At last she started her car and drove home.

There was a great outpouring of comfort and good wishes from the Cleaves Mill student body in the following week; Herb Smith told her later that Johnny received better than three hundred cards. Almost all of them contamed a hesitant personal note saying they hoped Johnny would be well soon. Vera answered each of them with a thank-you note and a Bible verse.

Sarah's discipline problem in her classes disappeared. Her previous feeling that some returning jury of class consciousness was bringing in an unfavorable verdict changed to just the opposite. Gradually she realized that the kids were viewing her as a tragic heroine, Mr. Smith's lost love. This idea struck her in the teacher's room during her free period on the Wednesday following the accident, and she went off into sudden gales of laughter that turned into a crying jag. Before she was able to get herself under control she had frightened herself badly. Her nights were made restless with incessant dreams of Johnny-Johnny in the Halloween Jekyll-and-Hyde mask, Johnny standing at the Wheel of Fortune concession while some disembodied voice chanted, “Man, I love to watch this guy get a beatin,” over and over. Johnny saying, “It's all right now, Sarah, everything's fine,” and then coming into the room with his head gone above the eyebrows.

Herb and Vera Smith spent the week in the Bangor House, and Sarah saw them every afternoon at the hospital, waiting patiently for something to happen. Nothing did. Johnny lay in a room on the intensive care ward on the sixth floor, surrounded by life-support equipment, breathing with the help of a machine. Dr. Strawns had grown less hopeful. On the Friday following the accident, Herb called Sarah on the phone and told her he and Vera were going home.

“She doesn't want to,” he said, “but I've gotten her to see reason. I think.”

“Is she all right?” Sarah asked.

There was a long pause, long enough to make Sarah

think she had overstepped the bounds. Then Herb said, “I don't know. Or maybe I do and I just don't want to say right out that she isn't. She's always had strong ideas about religion and they got a lot stronger after her operation. Her hysterectomy. Now they've gotten worse again. She's been talking a lot about the end of the world. She's connected Johnny's accident with the Rapture, somehow. Just before Armageddon, God is supposed to take all the faithful up to heaven in their actual bodies.”

Sarah thought of a bumper sticker she had seen somewhere: IF THE RAPTURE'S TODAY, SOMEBODY GRAB MY STEERING WHEEL! “Yes, I know the idea,” she said.

“Well,” Herb said uncomfortably, “some of the groups she… she corresponds with… they believe that God is going to come for the faithful in flying saucers. Take them all up to heaven in flying saucers, that is. These… sects… have proved, at least to themselves, that heaven is somewhere out in the constellation of Orion. No; don't ask me how they proved it. Vera could tell you. It's… well, Sarah, it's all a little hard on me.

“Of course it must be.”

Herb's voice strengthened. “But she can still distinguish between what's real and what's not. She needs time to adjust. So I told her she could face whatever's coming at home as easily as here. I've… “He paused, sounding embarrassed, then cleared his throat and went on. “I've got to get back to work. I've got jobs. I've signed contracts…

“Sure, of course. “She paused. “What about insurance? I mean, this must be costing a Denver mint… “It was her turn to feel embarrassed.

“I've talked with Mr. Pelsen, your assistant principal there at Cleaves Mills,” Herb said. “Johnny had the standard Blue Cross, but not that new Major Medical. The Blue Cross will cover some of it, though. And Vera and I have our savings.”

Sarah's heart sank. Vera and I have our savings. How long would one passbook stand up to expenses of two hundred dollars a day or more? And for what purpose in the end? So Johnny could hang on like an insensible animal, pissing brainlessly down a tube while he bankrupted his dad and mom? So his condition could drive his mother mad with unrealized hope? She felt the tears start to slip down her cheeks and for the first time-but not the last-she found herself wishing Johnny would die and be at peace. Part of her revolted in horror at the thought, but it remained.

“I wish you all the best,” Sarah said.

“I know that, Sarah. We wish you the best. Will you write?”

“I sure will.”

“And come see us when you can. Pownal's not so far away. “He hesitated. “Looks to me like Johnny had picked himself out the right girl. It was pretty serious, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” Sarah said. The tears were still coming and the past tense was not lost on her. “It was.”

“Good-bye, honey.”

“Good-bye, Herb.”

She hung up the phone, held the buttons down for a second or two, and then called the hospital and asked about Johnny. There had been no change. She thanked the intensive care nurse and walked aimlessly back and forth through the apartment. She thought about God sending out a fleet of flying saucers to pick up the faithful and buzz them off to Orion. It made as much sense as anything else about a God crazy enough to scramble John Smith's brains and put him in a coma that was probably never going to end-except in an unexpected death.

There was a folder of freshman compositions to correct. She made herself a cup of tea and sat down to them. If there was any one moment when Sarah Bracknell picked up the reins of her post-Johnny life again, that was

CHAPTER FOUR

The killer was slick.

He sat on a bench in the town park near the bandstand, smoking a Marlboro and humming a song from the Beatles” white album-'you don't know how lucky you are, boy, back in the, back in the, back in the USSR…”

He wasn't a killer yet, not really. But it had been on his mind a long time, killing had. It had been itching at him and itching at him. Not in a bad way, no. He felt quite optimistic about it. The time was right. He didn't have to worry about getting caught. He didn't have to worry about the clothespin. Because he was slick.

A little snow began to drift down from the sky. It was November 11, 1970, and a hundred and sixty miles northeast of this middle-sized western Maine town, John Smith's sleep went on and on.

The killer scanned the park-the town common, the tourists who came to Castle Rock and the Lakes Region liked to call it. But there were no tourists now. The common that was so green in the summer was now yellow, balding, and dead. It waited for winter to cover it decently. The wire-mesh backstop behind the Little League home plate stood in rusty overlapping diamonds, framed against the white sky. The bandstand needed a fresh coat of paint.

It was a depressing scene, but the killer was not depressed. He was almost manic with joy. His toes wanted to tap, his fingers wanted to “snap. There would be no shying away this time.

He crushed his smoke under one boot heel and lit another immediately. He glanced at his watch. 3:05 P. M. He sat and smoked. Two boys passed through the park, tossing a football back and forth, but they didn't see the killer because the benches were down in a dip. He supposed it was a place where the nasty-fuckers came at night when the weather was warmer. He knew all about the nasty-fuckers and the things they did. His mother had told him, and he had seen them.

Thinking about his mother made his smile fade a little. He remembered a time when he had been seven, she had come into his room without knocking-she never knocked-and had caught him playing with his thing. She had just about gone crazy. He had tried to tell her it was nothing. Nothing bad. It had just stood up. He hadn't done anything to make it stand up, it did it all on its own. And he just sat there, boinging it back and forth. It wasn't even that much fun. It was sort of boring. But his mother had just about gone crazy.

Do you want to be one of those nasty-fuckers? she had screamed at him. He didn't even know what that word meant-not nasty, he knew that one, but the other one -although he had heard some of the bigger kids use it in the play-yard at the Castle Rock Elementary School. Do you want to be one of those nasty-fuckers and get one of those diseases? Do you want to have pus running out of it? Do you want it to turn black? Do you want it to rot off? Huh? Huh? Huh?

She began to shake him back and forth then, and he began to blubber with fear, even then she was a big woman, a dominant and overbearing ocean liner of a woman, and he was not the killer then, he was not slick then, he was a little boy blubbering with fear, and his thing had collapsed and was trying to shrivel back into his body.

She had made him wear a clothespin on it for two hours, so he would know how those diseases felt.

The pain was excruciating.

The little snow flurry had passed. He brushed the image of his mother out of his mind, something he could do effortlessly when he was feeling good, something he couldn't do at all when he was feeling depressed and low.

His thing was standing up now.

He glanced at his watch. 3: 07. He dropped his cigarette half-smoked. Someone was coming.

He recognized her. It was Alma, Alma Frechette from the Coffee Pot across the street. Just coming off-shift. He knew Alma; he had dated her up once or twice, shown her a good time. Took her to Serenity Hill over in Naples.

She was a good dancer. Nasty-fuckers often were. He was glad it was Alma coming.

She was by herself.

Back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR -'Alma!” he called, and waved. She started a little, looked around, and saw him. She smiled and walked over to the bench where he sat, saying hello and calling him by name. He stood up, smiling. He wasn't worried about anyone coming. He was untouchable. He was Superman.

“Why you wearing that?” she asked, looking at him.

“Slick, isn't it?” he said, smiling.

“Well, I wouldn't exactly…

“You want to see something?” he asked. “On the bandstand. It's the goddamnest thing.”

“What is it?”

“Come and look.”

“All right.”

As simple as that. She went with him to the bandstand. If anyone had been coming, he still could have called it off. But no one came. No one passed. They had the common to themselves. The white sky brooded over them. Alma was a small girl with light blonde hair. Dyed blonde hair, he was quite sure. Sluts dyed their hair.

He led her up onto the enclosed bandstand. Their feet made hollow, dead echoes on the boards. An overturned music stand lay in one corner. There was an empty Four Roses bottle. This was a place where the nasty-fuckers came, all right.

“What?” she asked, sounding a little puzzled now. A little nervous.

The killer smiled joyously and pointed to the left of the music stand. “There. See?”

She followed his finger. A used condom lay on the boards like a shriveled snakeskin.

Alma's face went tight and she turned to go so quickly that she almost got by the killer. “That's not very funny…”

He grabbed her and threw her back. “Where do you think you're going?”

Her eyes were suddenly watchful and frightened. “Let me out of here. Or you'll be sorry. I don't have any time for sick jokes…

“It's no joke,” he said. “It's no joke, you nasty-fucker. “He was light-headed with the joy of naming her, naming her for what she was. The world whirled.

Alma broke left, heading for the low railing that surrounded the bandstand, meaning to leap over it. The killer caught the back of her cheap cloth coat at the collar and yanked her back again. The cloth ripped with a low purring sound and she opened her mouth to scream.

He slammed his hand over her mouth, mashing her lips back against her teeth. He felt warm blood trickle over his palm. Her other hand was beating at him now, clawing for purchase, but there was no purchase. There was none because he… he was…

Slick!

He threw her to the board floor. His hand came off her mouth, which was now smeared with blood, and she opened her mouth to scream again, but he landed on top of her, panting, grinning, and the air was driven out of her lungs in a soundless whoosh. She could feel him now, rock hard, gigantic and throbbing, and she quit trying to scream and went on struggling. Her fingers caught and slipped, caught and slipped. He forced her legs rudely apart and lay between them. One of her hands glanced off the bridge of his nose, making his eyes water.

“You nasty-fucker,” he whispered, and his hands closed on her throat. He began to throttle her, yanking her head up from the bandstand's board flooring and then slamming it back down. Her eyes bulged. Her face went pink, then red, then a congested purple. Her struggles began to weaken.

“Nasty-fucker, nasty-fucker, nasty-fucker,” the killer panted hoarsely. He really was the killer now, Alma Frechette's days of rubbing her body all over people at Serenity Hill were done now. Her eyes bugged out like the eyes of some of those crazy dolls they sold along carnival midways. The killer panted hoarsely. Her hands lay limp on the boards now. His fingers had almost disappeared from sight.

He let go of her throat, ready to grab her again if she stirred. But she didn't. After a moment he ripped her coat open with shaking hands and shoved the skirt of her pink waitress uniform up.

The white sky looked down. The Castle Rock town common was deserted. In fact, no one found the strangled, violated corpse of Alma Frechette until the next day. The sheriff's theory was that a drifter had done it. There were statewide newspaper headlines, and in Castle Rock there was general agreement with the sheriff's idea.

Surely no hometown boy could have done such a dreadful thing.

CHAPTER FIVE

Herb and Vera Smith went back to Pownal and took up the embroidery of their days. Herb finished a house in Durham that December. Their savings did indeed melt away, as Sarah had foreseen, and they applied to the state for Extraordinary Disaster Assistance. That aged Herb almost as much as the accident itself had done. EDA was only a fancy way of saying “welfare” or “charity” in his mind. He had spent a lifetime working hard and honestly-with his hands and had thought he would never see the day when he would have to take a state dollar. But here that day was.

Vera subscribed to three new magazines which came through the mail at irregular intervals. All three were badly printed and might have been illustrated by talented children. God's Saucers, The Coming Transfiguration, and God's Psychic Miracles. The Upper Room, which still came monthly, now sometimes lay unopened for as long as three weeks at a stretch, but she read these others to tatters. She found a great many things in them that seemed to bear upon Johnny's accident, and she read these nuggets to her tired husband at supper in a high, piercing voice that trembled with exaltation. Herb found himself telling her more and more frequently to be quiet, and on occasion shouting at her to shut up that drivel and let him alone. When he did that, she would give him long-suffering, compassionate, and hurt glances-then slink upstairs to continue her studies. She began to correspond with these magazines, and to exchange letters with the contributors and with other pen-friends who had had similar experiences in their lives.

Most of her correspondents were good-hearted people like Vera herself, people who wanted to help and to ease the nearly insupportable burden of her pain. They sent prayers and prayer stones, they sent charms, they sent promises to include Johnny in their nightly devotions. Yet there were others who were nothing but con-men and women, and Herb was alarmed by his wife's increasing inability to recognize these. There was an offer to send her a sliver of the One True Cross of Our Lord for just $99. 98. An offer to send a vial of water drawn from the spring at Lourdes, which would almost certainly work a miracle when rubbed into Johnny's forehead. That one was $1. 10 plus postage. Cheaper (and more attractive to Vera) was a continuously playing cassette tape of the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord's Prayer as spoken by southern evangelist Billy Humbair… Played at Johnny's bedside over a period of weeks it would almost certainly effect a marvelous recovery, according to the pamphlet.

As an added blessing (For A Short Time Only) an autographed picture of Billy Humbarr himself would be included.

Herb was forced to step in more and more frequently as her passion for these pseudoreligious geegaws grew. Sometimes he surreptitiously tore up her checks and simply readjusted the checkbook balance upward. But when the offer specified cash and nothing but, he simply had to put his foot down-and Vera began to draw away from him, to view him with distrust as a sinner and an unbeliever.

Sarah Bracknell kept school during her days. Her afternoons and evenings were not much different than they had been following the breakup with Dan; she was in a kind of limbo, waiting for something to happen. In Paris, the peace talks were stalled. Nixon had ordered the bombing of Hanoi continued in spite of rising domestic and foreign protests. At a press conference he produced pictures proving conclusively that American planes were surely not bombing North Vietnamese hospitals, but he went everywhere by Army helicopter. The investigation into the brutal rape-murder of a Castle Rock waitress was stalled following the release of a wandering sign painter who had once spent three years in the Augusta State Mental Hospital-against everyone's expectations, the sign painter's alibi had turned out to hold water. Janis Joplin was screaming the blues. Paris decreed (for the second year in a row) that hemlines would go down, but they didn't. Sarah was aware of all these things in a vague way, like voices from another room where some incomprehensible party went on and on.

The first snow fell-just a dusting-then a second dusting, and ten days before Christmas there was a storm that closed area schools for the day and she sat home, looking out at the snow as it filled Flagg Street. Her brief thing with Johnny-she could not even properly call it an affair-was part of another season now, and she could feel him beginning to slip away from her. It was a panicky feeling, as if a part of her was drowning. Drowning in days.

She read a good deal about head injuries, comas, and brain damage. None of it was very encouraging. She found out there was a girl in a small Maryland town who had been in a coma for six years; there had been a young man from Liverpool, England, who had been struck by a grappling hook while working on the docks and had remained in a coma for fourteen years before expiring. Little by little this brawny young dock-walloper had severed his connections with the world, wasting away, losing his hair, optic nerves degenerating into oatmeal behind his closed eyes, body gradually drawing up into a fetal position as his ligaments shortened. He had reversed time, had become a fetus again, swimming in the placental waters of coma as his brain degenerated. An autopsy following his death had shown that the folds and convolutions of his cerebrum had smoothed out, leaving the frontal and prefrontal lobes almost utterly smooth and blank.

Oh, Johnny, it just isn't fair, she thought, watching the snow fall outside, filling the world up with blank whiteness, burying fallen summer and red-gold autumn. It isn't fair, they should let you go to whatever there is to go to.

There was a letter from Herb Smith every ten days to two weeks-Vera had her pen-friends, and he had his. He wrote in a large, sprawling hand, using an old-fashioned fountain pen. “We are both fine and well. Waiting to see what will happen next as you must be. Yes, I have been doing some reading and I know what you are too kind and thoughtful to” say in your letter, Sarah. It looks bad. But of course we hope. I don't believe in God the way Vera does, but I do believe in him after my fashion, and wonder why he didn't take John outright if he was going to. Is there a reason? No one knows, I guess. We only hope.”

In another letter:

“I'm having to do most of the Xmas shopping this year as Vera has decided Xmas presents are a sinful custom. This is what I mean about her getting worse all the time. She's always thought it was a holy day instead of a holiday-if you see what I mean-and if she saw me calling it Xmas instead of Christmas I guess she'd “shoot me for a hoss-thief.” She was always saying how we should remember it is the birthday of Jesus Christ and not Santa Claus, but she never minded the shopping before. In fact, she used to like it. Now ragging against it is all she talks about, seems like. She gets a lot of these funny ideas from the people she writes back and forth to. Golly I do wish she'd stop and get back to normal. But otherwise we are both fine and well. Herb. “.

And a Christmas card that she had wept over a little:

“Best to you from both of us this holiday season, and if you'd like to come down and spend Xmas with a couple of “old fogies”, the spare bedroom is made up. Vera and I are both fine and well. Hope the New Year is better for all of us, and am sure it will be. Herb and Vera.”

She didn't go down to Pownal over the Christmas vacation, partly because of Vera's continued withdrawal into her own world-her progress into that world could be read pretty accurately between the lines of Herb's letters-and partly because their mutual tie now seemed so strange and distant to her. The still figure in the Bangor hospital bed had once been seen in close-up, but now she always seemed to be looking at him through the wrong end of memory's telescope; like the balloon man, he was far and wee. So it seemed best to keep her distance.

Perhaps Herb sensed it as well. His letters became less frequent as 1970 became 1971. In one of them he came as close as he could to saying it was time for her to go on with her life, and closed by saying that he doubted a girl as pretty as she was lacked for dates.

But she hadn't had any dates, hadn't wanted them. Gene Sedecki, the math teacher who had once treated her to an evening that had seemed at least a thousand years long, had begun asking her out indecently soon after Johnny's accident, and he was a hard man to discourage, but she believed that he was finally beginning to get the point. It should have happened sooner.

Occasionally other men would ask her, and one of them, a law student named Walter Hazlett, attracted her quite a bit. She met him at Anne Strafford's New Year's Eve party. She had meant only to make an appearance, but she had stayed quite a while, talking primarily to Hazlett. Saying no had been surprisingly hard, but she had, because she understood the source of attraction too well-Walt Hazlett was a tall man with an unruly shock of brown hair and a slanted, half-cynical smile, and he reminded her strongly of Johnny. That was no basis on which to get interested in a man.

Early in February she was asked out by the mechanic who worked on her car at the Cleaves Mills Chevron. Again she almost said yes, and then backed away. The man's name was Arnie Tremont. He was tall, olive-skinned, and handsome in a smiling, predatory way. He reminded her a bit of James Brolin, the second banana on that Dr. Welby program, and even more of a certain Delta Tau Delta named Dan.

Better to wait. Wait and see if something was going to happen.

But nothing did.

In that summer of 1971, Greg Stillson, sixteen years older and wiser than the Bible salesman who had kicked a dog to death in a deserted Iowa dooryard, sat in the back room of his newly incorporated insurance and real estate business in Ridgeway, New Hampshire. He hadn't aged much in the years between. There was a net of wrinkles around his eyes now, and his hair was longer (but still quite conservative). He was still a big man, and his swivel chair creaked when he moved.

He sat smoking a Pall Mall cigarette and looking at the man sprawled comfortably in the chair opposite. Greg was looking at this man the way a zoologist might look at an interesting new specimen.

“See anything green?” Sonny Elliman asked. Elliman topped six feet, five inches. He wore an ancient, grease-stiffened jeans jacket with the arms and buttons cut off. There was no shirt beneath. A Nazi iron cross, black dressed in white chrome, hung on his bare chest. The buckle of the belt running just below his considerable beer-belly was a great ivory skull. From beneath the pegged cuffs of his jeans poked the scuffed, square toes of a pair of Desert Driver boots. His hair was shoulder-length, tangled, and shining with an accumulation of greasy sweat and engine oil. From one earlobe there dangled a swastika earring, also black dressed in white chrome. He spun a coal-scuttle helmet on the tip of one blunt finger. Stitched on the back of his jacket was a leering red devil with a forked tongue. Above the devil was The Devil's Dozen. Below it: Sonny Elliman, Prez.

“No,” Greg Stillson said. “I don't see anything green, but I do see someone who looks suspiciously like a walking asshole.”

Elliman stiffened a little, then relaxed and laughed. In spite of the dirt, the almost palpable body odor, and Nazi regalia, his eyes, a dark green, were not without intelligence and even a sense of humor.

“Rank me to the dogs and back, man,” he said. “It's been done before. You got the power now.

“You recognize that, do you?”

“Sure. I left my guys back in the Hamptons, came here alone. Be it on my own head, man. “He smiled. “But if we should ever catch you in a similar position, you want to hope your kidneys are wearing combat boots.”

“I'll chance it,” Greg said. He measured Elliman. They were both big men. He reckoned Elliman had forty pounds on him, but a lot of it was beer muscle. “I could take you, Sonny.”

Elliman's face crinkled in amiable good humor again. “Maybe. Maybe not. But that's not the way we play it, man. All that good American John Wayne stuff. “He leaned forward, as if to impart a great secret. “Me personally, now, whenever I get me a piece of mom's apple pie, I make it my business to shit on it.”

“Foul mouth, Sonny,” Greg said mildly.

“What do you want with me?” Sonny asked. “Why don't you get down to it? You'll miss your Jaycee's meeting.”

“No,” Greg said, still serene. “The Jaycees meet Tuesday nights. We've got all the time in the world.”

Elliman made a disgusted blowing sound.

“Now what I thought,” Greg went on, “is that you'd want something from me. “He opened his desk drawer and from it took three plastic Baggies of marijuana. Mixed in with the weed were a number of gel capsules. “Found this in your sleeping bag,” Greg said. “Nasty, nasty, nasty, Sonny. Bad boy. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Go directly to New Hampshire State Prison.”

“You didn't have any search warrant,” Elliman said. “Even a kiddy lawyer could get me off, and you know it.”

“I don't know any such thing,” Greg Stillson said. He leaned back in his swivel chair and cocked his loafers, bought across the state line at L. L. Bean's in Maine, up on his desk. “I'm a big man in this town, Sonny. I came into New Hampshire more or less on my uppers a few years back, and now I've got a nice operation here. I've helped the town council solve a couple of problems, including just what to do about all these kids the chief of police catches doing dope… oh, I don't mean bad-hats like you, Sonny, drifters like you we know what to do with when we catch them with a little treasure trove like that one right there on my desk… I mean the nice local kids. Nobody really wants to do anything to them at all, you know? I figured that out for them. Put them to work on community projects instead of sending them to jail, I said. It worked out real good. Now we've got the biggest head in the town area coaching Little League and doing a real good job at it.”

Elliman was looking bored. Greg suddenly brought his feet down with a crash, grabbed a vase with a UNH logo on the side, and threw it past Sonny Elliman's nose. It missed him by less than an inch, flew end over end across the room, and shattered against the file cabinets in the corner. For the first time Elliman looked startled. And for just a moment the face of this older, wiser Greg Still-son was the face of the younger man, the dog-bludgeoner.

“You want to listen when I talk,” he said softly. “Because what we're discussing here is your career over the next ten years or so. Now if you don't have any interest in making a career out of stamping LIVE FREE OR DIE on license plates, you want to listen up, Sonny. You want to pretend this is the first day of school again, Sonny. You want to get it all right the first time. Sonny.”

Elliman looked at the smashed fragments of vase, then back at Stillson. His former uneasy calm was being replaced by a feeling of real interest. He hadn't been really interested in anything for quite a while now. He had made the run for beer because he was bored. He had come by himself because he was bored. And when this big guy had pulled him over, using a flashing blue light on the dashboard of his station wagon, Sonny Elliman had assumed that what he had to deal with was just another small-town Deputy Dawg, protecting his territory and rousting the big bad biker on the modified Harley-Davidson. But this guy was something else. He was

was…

He's crazy! Sonny realized, with dawning delight at the discovery. He's got two public service awards on his wall, and pictures of him talking to the Rotarians and the Lions, and he's vice president of this dipshit town's Jaycees, and next year he'll be president, and he's just as crazy as a fucking bedbug!

“Okay,” he said. “You got my attention.”

“I have had what you might call a checkered career,” Greg told him. “I've been up, but I've also been down. I've had a few scrapes with the law. What I'm trying to say, Sonny, is that I don't have any set feelings about you. Not like the other locals. They read in the Union-Leader about what you and your bikie friends are doing over in the Hamptons this summer and they'd like to castrate you with a rusty Gillette razor blade.”

“That's not the Devil's Dozen,” Sonny said. “We came down on a run from upstate New York to get some beach-time, man. We're on vacation. We're not into trashing a bunch of honky-tonk bars. There's a bunch of Hell's Angels tearing ass, and a chapter of the Black Riders from New Jersey, but you know who it is mostly? A bunch of college kids. “Sonny's lip curled. “But the papers don't like to report that, do they? They'd rather lay the rap on us than on Susie and Jim.”

“You're so much more colorful,” Greg said mildly. “And William Loeb over at the Union-Leader doesn't like bike clubs.”

“That bald-headed creep,” Sonny muttered.

Greg opened his desk drawer and pulled out a flat pint of Leader's bourbon. “I'll drink to that,” he said. He cracked the seal and drank half the pint at a draught. He blew out a great breath, his eyes watering, and held the pint across the desk. “You?”

Sonny polished the pint off. Warm fire bellowed up from his stomach to his throat.

“Light me up, man,” he gasped.

Greg threw back his head and laughed. “We'll get along, Sonny. I have a feeling we'll get along.”

“What do you want?” Sonny asked again, holding the empty pint.

“Nothing… not now. But I have a feeling… “Greg's eyes became far away, almost puzzled. “I told you I'm a big man in Ridgeway. I'm going to run for mayor next time the office comes up, and I'll win. But that's Just the beginning?” Sonny prompted.

“It's a start, anyway. “That puzzled expression was still there. “I get things done. People know it. I'm good at what I do. I feel like… there's a lot ahead of me. Sky's the limit. But I'm not… quite…… what I mean. You know?”

Sonny only shrugged.

The puzzled expression faded. “But there's a story, Sonny. A story about a mouse who took a thorn out of a lion's paw. He did it to repay the lion for not eating him a few years before. You know that story?”

“I might have heard it when I was a kid,”

Greg nodded. “Well, it's a few years before”… whatever it is, Sonny. “He shoved the plastic Baggies across the desk. “I'm not going to eat you. I could if I wanted to, you know. A kiddie lawyer couldn't get you off. In this town, with the riots going on in Hampton less than twenty miles away, Clarence Fucking Darrow couldn't get you off in Ridgeway. These good people would love to see you go up.

Elliman didn't reply, but he suspected Greg was right. There was nothing heavy in his dope stash-two Brown Bombers was the heaviest-but the collective parents of good old Susie and Jim would be glad to see him breaking rocks in Portsmouth, with his hair cut off his head.

“I'm not going to eat you,” Greg repeated. “I hope you'll remember that in a few years if I get a thorn in my paw… or maybe if I have a job opportunity for you. Keep it in mind?”

Gratitude was not in Sonny Elliman's limited catalogue of human feelings, but interest and curiosity were. He felt both ways about this man Stillson. That craziness in his eyes hinted at many things, but boredom was not one of them.

“Who knows where we'll all be in a few years?” he murmured. “We could all be dead, man.”

“Just keep me in mind. That's all I'm asking.”

Sonny looked at the broken shards of vase. “I'll keep you in mind,” he said.

1971 passed. The New Hampshire beach riots blew over, and the grumblings of the beachfront entrepreneurs were muted by the increased balances in their bankbooks. An obscure fellow named George McGovern declared for the presidency comically early. Anyone who followed politics knew that the nominee from the Democratic party in 1972 was going to be Edmund Muskie, and there were those who felt he might just wrestle the Troll of San Clemente off his feet and pin him to the mat.

In early June, just before school let out for the summer, Sarah met the young law student again. She was in Day's appliance store, shopping for a toaster, and he had been looking for a gift for his parents” wedding anniversary. He asked her if she'd like to go to the movies with him -the new Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, was in town. Sarah went. And the two of them had a good time. Walter Hazlett had grown a beard, and he no longer reminded her so much of Johnny. In fact, it had become increasingly difficult for her to remember just what Johnny did look like. His face only came dear in her dreams, dreams where he stood in front of the Wheel of Fortune, watching it spin, his face cold and his blue eyes darkened to that perplexing, and a little fearsome, dark violet shade, watching the Wheel as if it were his own private game preserve.

She and Walt began to see a lot of each other. He was easy to get along with. He made no demands-or, if he did, they were of such a gradually increasing nature as to be unnoticeable. In October he asked her if he could buy her a small diamond. Sarah asked him if she could have the weekend to think it over. That Saturday night she had gone to the Eastern Maine Medical Center, had gotten a special red-bordered pass at the desk, and had gone up to intensive care. She sat beside Johnny's bed for an hour. Outside, the fall wind howled in the dark, promising cold, promising snow, promising a season of death. It lacked sixteen days of a year since the fair, the Wheel, and the head-on collision near the Bog.

She sat and listened to the wind and looked at Johnny. The bandages were gone. The scar began on his forehead an inch above his right eyebrow and twisted up under the hairline. His hair there had gone white-making her think of that fictional detective in the 87th Precinct stories -Cotton Hawes, his name was. To Sarah's eyes there seemed to have been no degeneration in him, except for the inevitable weight loss. He was simply a young man she barely knew, fast asleep.

She bent over him and kissed his mouth softly, as if the old fairy tale could be reversed and her kiss could wake him. But Johnny only slept.

She left, went back to her apartment in Veazie, lay down on her bed and cried as the wind walked the dark world outside, throwing its catch of yellow and red leaves before it. On Monday she told Walt that if he really did want to buy her a diamond-a small one, mind-she would be happy and proud to wear it.

That was Sarah Bracknell's 1971.

In early 1972, Edmund Muskie burst into tears during an impassioned speech outside the offices of the man Sonny Elliman had referred to as “that bald-headed creep”. George McGovern upset the primary”, and Loeb announced gleefully in his paper that the people of New Hampshire didn't like crybabies. In July, McGovern was nominated. In that same month Sarah Bracknell became Sarah Hazlett. She and Walt were married in the First Methodist Churth of Bangor.

Less than two miles away, Johnny Smith slept on. And the thought of him came to Sarah, suddenly and horribly, as Walt kissed her in front of the dearly beloved there assembled for the nuptials-Johnny, she thought, and saw him as she had when the lights went on, half Jekyll and half snarling Hyde. She stiffened in Walt's arms for a moment, and then it was gone. Memory, vision, whatever it had been, it was gone.

After long thought and discussion with Walt, she had invited Johnny's folks to the wedding. Herb had come alone. At the reception, she asked him if Vera was all right.

He glanced around, saw they were alone for the moment, and rapidly downed the remainder of his Scotch and soda. He had aged five years in the last eighteen months, she thought. His hair was thinning. The lines on his face were deeper. He was wearing glasses in the careful and self-conscious way of people who have just started wearing them, and behind the mild corrective lenses his eyes were wary and hurt.

“No. she really isn't, Sarah. The truth is, she's up in Vermont. On a farm. Waiting for the end of the world.”

What?”

Herb told her that six months ago Vera had begun to correspond with a group of about ten people who called themselves The American Society of the Last Times. They were led by Mr. and Mrs. Harry L. Stonkers from Racine, Wisconsin. Mr. and Mrs. Stonkers claimed to have been picked up by a flying saucer while they were on a camping trip. They had been taken away to heaven, which was not out in the constellation Orion but on an earth-type planet that circled Arcturus. There they had communed with the society of angels and had seen Paradise. The Stonkerses had been informed that the Last Times were at hand. They were given the power of telepathy and had been sent back to Earth to gather a few fruitful together-for the first shuttle to heaven, as it were. And so the ten of them had gotten together, bought a farm north of St. Johnsbury, and had been settled in there for about seven weeks, waiting for the saucer to come and pick them up.

“It sounds… “Sarah began, and then closed her mouth. “I know how it sounds,” Herb said. “It sounds crazy. The place cost them nine thousand dollars. It's nothing but a crashed-in farmhouse with two acres of scrubland. Vera's share was seven hundred dollars-all she could put up. There was no way I could stop her… short of committal. “He paused, then smiled. “But this is nothing to talk about at your wedding party, Sarah. You and your fellow are going to have all the best. I know you will.”

Sarah smiled back as best she could. “Thank you, Herb. Will you… I mean, do you think she'll…

“Come back? Oh yes. If the world doesn't end by winter, I think she'll be back.”

“Oh, I only wish you the best,” she said, and embraced

The farm in Vermont had no furnace, and when the saucer had still not arrived by late October, Vera came home. The saucer had not come, she said, because they were not yet perfect-they had not burned away the nonessential and sinful dross of their lives. But she was uplifted and spiritually exalted. She had had a sign in a dream. She was perhaps not meant to go to heaven in a saucer. She felt more and more strongly that she would be needed to guide her boy, show him the proper way, when he came out of his trance.

Herb took her in, loved her as best he could-and life went on. Johnny had been in his coma for two years.

Nixon was reinaugurated. The American boys started coming home from Vietnam. Walter Hazlett took his bar exam and was invited to take it again at a later date. Sarah Hazlett kept school while he crammed for his tests. The students who had been silly, gawky freshmen the year she started teaching were now juniors. Flat-chested girls had become bosomy. Shrimps who hadn't been able to find their way around the building were now playing varsity basketball.

The second Arab-Israeli war came and went. The oil boycott came and went. Bruisingly high gasoline prices came and did not go. Vera Smith became convinced that Christ would return from below the earth at the South Pole. This intelligence was based on a new pamphlet (seventeen pages, price $4. 50) entitled God's Tropical Underground. The startling hypothesis of the pamphleteer was that heaven was actually below our very feet, and that the easiest point of ingress was the South Pole. One of the sections of the pamphlet was “Psychic Experiences of the South Pole Explorers”.

Herb pointed out to her that less than a year before she had been convinced that heaven was somewhere out There, most probably circling Arcturus. “I'd surely be more apt to believe that than this crazy South Pole stuff,” he told her. “Mter all, the Bible says heaven's in the sky. That tropical place below the ground is supposed to be…

“Stop it I” she said sharply, lips pressed into thin white lines. “No need to mock what you don't understand.”

“I wasn't mocking, Vera,” he said quietly.

“God knows why the unbeliever mocks and the heathen rages,” she said. That blank light was in her eyes. They were sitting at the kitchen table, Herb with an old plumbing J. bolt in front of him, Vera with a stack of old National Geographics which she had been gleaning for South Pole pictures and stories. Outside, restless clouds fled west to east and the leaves showered off the trees. It was early October again, and October always seemed to be her worst month. It was the month when that blank light came more frequently to her eyes and stayed longer. And it was always in October that his thoughts turned treacherously to leaving them both. His possibly certifiable wife and his sleeping son, who was probably already dead by any practical definition. Just now he had been turning the J-bolt over in his hands and looking out the window at that restless sky and thinking, I could pack up. Just throw my things into the back of the pickup and go. Florida, maybe. Nebraska. California. A good carpenter can make good money any damn place. Just get up and go.

But he knew he wouldn't. It was just that October was his month to think about running away, as it seemed to be Vera's month to discover some new pipeline to Jesus and the eventual salvation of the only child she had been able to nurture in her substandard womb.

Now he reached across the table and took her hand, which was thin and terribly bony-an old woman's hand. She looked up, surprised. “I love you very much, Vera,” he said.

She smiled back, and for a glimmering moment she was a great deal like the girl he had courted and won, the girl who had goosed him with a hairbrush on their wedding night. It was a gentle smile, her eyes briefly dear and warm and loving in return. Outside, the sun came out again, sending great shutter-shadows fleeing across their back field.

“I know you do, Herbert. And I love you.”

He put his other hand over hers and clasped it.

“Vera,” he said.

“Yes?” Her eyes were so clear… suddenly she was with him, totally with him, and it made him realize how dread-fully far apart they had grown over the last three years.

“Vera, if he never does wake up… God forbid, but if he doesn't… we'll still have each other, won't we? I mean…

She jerked her hand away. His two hands, which had been holding it lightly, dapped on nothing.

“Don't you ever say that. Don't you ever say that Johnny isn't going to wake up.”

“All I meant was that we…”

“Of course he's going to wake up,” she said, looking out the window to the field, where the shadows still crossed and crossed. “It's God's plan for him. Oh yes. Don't you think I know? I know, believe me. God has great things in store for my Johnny. I have heard him in my heart.”

“Yes, Vera,” he said. “Okay.”

Her fingers groped for the National Geographics, found them, and began to turn the pages again.

“I know,” she said in a childish, petulant voice.

“Okay,” he said quietly.

She looked at her magazines. Herb propped his chin in his palms and looked out at the sunshine and shadow and thought how soon winter came after golden, treacherous October. He wished Johnny would die. He had loved the boy from the very first. He had seen the wonder on his tiny face when Herb had brought a tiny tree frog to the boy's carriage and had put the small living thing in the boy's hands. He had taught Johnny how to fish and skate and shoot. He had sat up with him all night during his terrible bout with the flu in 1951, when the boy's temperature had crested at a giddy one hundred and five degrees. He had hidden tears in his hand when Johnny graduated salutatorian of his high school class and had made his speech from memory without a slip. So many memories of him-teaching him to drive, standing on the bow of the Bolero with him when they went to Nova Scotia on vacation one year, Johnny eight years old, laughing and excited by the screwlike motion of the boat, helping him with his homework, helping him with his treehouse, helping him get the hang of his Silva compass when he had been in the Scouts. All the memories were jumbled together in no chronological order at all -Johnny was the single unifying thread, Johnny eagerly discovering the world that had maimed him so badly in the end. And now he wished Johnny would die, oh how he wished it, that he would die, that his heart would stop beating, that the final low traces on the EEG would go flat, that he would just flicker out like a guttering candle in a pool of wax: that he would die and release them.

The seller of lightning rods arrived at Cathy's Roadhouse in Somersworth, New Hampshire, in the early afternoon of a blazing summer's day less than a week after the Fourth of July in that year of 1973,” and somewhere not so far away there were, perhaps, storms only waiting to be born in the warm elevator shafts of summer's thermal updrafts.

He was a man with a big thirst, and he stopped at Cathy's to slake it with a couple of beers, not to make a sale. But from force of long habit, he glanced up at the roof of the low, ranch-style building, and the unbroken line he saw standing against the blistering gunmetal sky caused him to reach back in for the scuffed suede bag that was his sample case.

Inside, Cathy's was dark and cool and silent except for the muted rumble of the color TV on the wall. A few regulars were there, and behind the bar was the owner, keeping an eye on “As The World. Turns” along with his patrons.

The seller of lightning rods lowered himself onto a bar stool and put his sample case on the stool to his left. The owner came over. “Hi, friend. What'll it be?”

“A Bud,” the lightning rod salesman said. “And draw another for yourself, if you're of a mind.”

“I'm always of a mind,” the owner said. He returned with two beers, took the salesman's dollar, and left three dimes on the bar. “Bruce Carrick,” he said, and offered his hand.

The seller of lightning rods shook it. “Dohay is the name,” he said, “Andrew Dohay. “He drained off half his beer.

“Pleased to meet you,” Carrick said. He wandered off to serve a young woman with a hard face another Tequila Sunrise and eventually wandered back to Dohay. “From out of town?”

“I am,” Dohay admitted. “Salesman. “He glanced around. “Is it always this quiet?”

“No. It jumps on the weekends and I do a fair trade through the week. Private parties is where we make our dough-if we make it. I ain't starving, but neither am I driving a Cadillac. “He pointed a pistol finger at Dohay's glass. “Freshen that?”

“And another for yourself, Mr. Carrick.”

“Bruce. “He laughed. “You must want to sell me some-thing.”

When Carrick returned with the beers the seller of lightning rods said: “I came in to lay the dust, not to sell anything. But now that you mention it… “He hauled his sample case up onto the bar with a practiced jerk. Things jingled inside it.

“Oh, here it comes,” Carrick said, and laughed.

Two of the afternoon regulars, an old fellow with a wart on his right eyelid and a younger man in gray fatigues, wandered over to see what Dohay was selling. The hard-faced woman went on watching “As The World Turns”.

Dohay took out three rods, a long one with a brass ball at the tip, a shorter one, and one with porcelain conductors.

“What the hell… “Carrick said.

“Lightning rods,” the old campaigner said, and cackled. “He wants to save this ginmill from God's wrath, Brucie. You better listen to what he says.”

He laughed again, the man in the gray fatigues joined him, Carrick's face darkened, and the lightning rod salesman knew that whatever chance he had had of making a sale had just flown away. He was a good salesman, good enough to recognize that this queer combination of personalities and circumstances sometimes got together and queered any chance of a deal even before he had a chance to swing into his pitch. He took it philosophically and went into his spiel anyway, mostly from force of habit:

“As I was getting out of my car, I just happened to notice that this fine establishment wasn't equipped with lightning conductors-and that it's constructed of wood. Now for a very small price-and easy credit terms if you should want them-I can guarantee that…”

“That lightning'll strike this place at four this afternoon,” the man in the gray fatigues said with a grin. The old campaigner cackled.

“Mister, no offense,” Carrick said, “but you see that?” He pointed to a golden nail on a small wooden plaque beside the TV near the glistening array of bottles. Spiked on the nail was a drift of papers. “All of those things are bills. They got to be paid by the fifteenth of the month. They get written in red ink. Now you see how many people are in here drinking right now? I got to be careful. I got to…

“Just my point,” Dohay broke in smoothly. “You have to be careful. And the purchase of three or four lightning rods is a careful purchase. You've got a going concern here. You wouldn't want it wiped out by one stroke of lightning on a summer's day, would you?”

“He wouldn't mind,” the old campaigner said. “He'd just collect the insurance and go down to Florida. Woon'tchoo, Brucie?”

Carrick looked at the old man with distaste.

“Well, then, let's talk about insurance,” the lightning rod salesman interposed. The man in the gray fatigues had lost interest and had wandered away. “Your fire insurance premiums will go down…”

The insurance is all lumped together,” Carrick said flatly. “Look, I just can't afford the outlay. Sorry. Now if you was to talk to me again next year…

“Well, perhaps I will,” the lightning rod salesman said, giving up. “Perhaps I will. “No one thought they could be struck by lightning until they were struck; it was a constant fact of this business. You couldn't make a fellow like this Carrick see that it was the cheapest form of fire insurance he could buy. But Dohay was a philosopher. After all, he had told the truth when he said he came in to lay the dust.

To prove it, and to prove there were no hard feelings, he ordered another beer. But this time he did not match it with one for Carrick.

The old campaigner slid onto the stool beside him.

“About ten years ago there was a fella got hit by lightning out on the golf course,” he said. “Killed him just as dead as shit. Now, there's a man could have used a lightning rod right up on his head, am I right?” He cackled, sending out a lot of stale beer-breath into Dohay's face. Dohay smiled dutifully. “All the coins in his pockets were fused together. That's what I heard. Lightning's a funny thing. Sure is. Now, I remember one time…

A funny thing, Dohay thought, letting the old man's words flow harmlessly over him, nodding in the right places out of instinct. A funny thing, all right, because it doesn't care who or what it hits. Or when.

He finished his beer and went out, carrying his satchelful of insurance against the wrath of God-maybe the only kind ever invented-with him. The heat struck him like a hammerblow, but still he paused for a moment in the mostly deserted parking lot, looking up at the unbroken line of roof-ridge. $19. 95, $29. 95 tops, and the man couldn't afford the outlay. He'd save seventy bucks on his combined insurance the first year, but he couldn't afford the outlay-and you couldn't tell him different with those clowns standing around yukking it up.

Maybe some day he would be sorry.

The seller of lightning rods got into his Buick, cranked up the air conditioning, and drove away west toward Concord and Berlin, his sample case on the seat beside him, running ahead of whatever storms might be whistling up the wind behind.

In early 1974 Walt Hazlett passed his bar exams. He and Sarah threw a party for all of his friends, her friends, and their mutual friends-more than forty people in all. The beer flowed like water, and after it was over Walt said they could count themselves damn lucky not to have been evicted. When the last of the guests were seen out (at three in the morning), Walt had come back from the door to find Sarah in the bedroom, naked except for her shoes and the diamond chip earrings he had gone into hock to give her for her birthday. They had made love not once but twice before falling into sodden slumber from which they awoke at nearly noon, with paralyzing hangovers. About six weeks later Sarah discovered that she was pregnant. Neither of them ever doubted that conception had occurred on the night of the big party.

In Washington, Richard Nixon was being pressed slowly into a corner, wrapped in a snarl of magnetic tapes. In Georgia, a peanut farmer, ex-Navy man and current governor named James Earl Carter had begun talking with a number of close friends about running for the job Mr. Nixon would soon be vacating.

In Room 619 of the Eastern Maine Medical Center, Johnny Smith still slept. He had begun to pull into a fetal shape.

Dr. Strawns, the doctor who had talked to Herb and Vera and Sarah in the conference room on the day following the accident, had died of burns in late 1973. His house had caught fire on the day. after Christmas. The Bangor fire department had determined that the fire had been caused by a faulty set of Christmas tree ornaments. Two new doctors, Weizak and Brown, interested themselves in Johnny's case.

Four days before Nixon resigned, Herb Smith fell into the foundation of a house he was building in Gray, landed on a wheelbarrow, and broke his leg. The bone was a long time healing, and it never really felt good again. He limped, and on wet days he began to use a cane. Vera prayed for him, and insisted that he wrap a cloth that had been personally blessed by the Reverend Freddy Coltsmore of Bessemer, Alabama, around the leg each night when he went to bed. The price of the Blessed Coltsmore Cloth (as Herb called it) was $35. It did no good that he was aware of.

In the middle of October, shortly after Gerald Ford had pardoned the ex-president, Vera became sure that the world was going to end again. Herb realized what she was about barely in time; she had made arrangements to give what little cash and savings they had recouped since Johnny's accident to the Last Times Society of America. She had tried to put the house up for sale, and had made an arrangement with the Goodwill, which was going to send a van out in two days” time to pick up all the furniture. Herb found out when the realtor called him to ask if a prospective buyer could come and look at the house that afternoon.

For the first time he had genuinely lost his temper with Vera.

“What in Christ's name did you think you were doing?” he roared, after dragging the last of the incredible story out of her. They were in the living room. He had just finished calling Goodwill to tell them to forget the van. Outside, rain fell in monotonous gray sheets.

“Don't blaspheme the name of the Savior, Herbert.

“Shut up! Shut up! I'm tired of listening to you rave about that crap!”

She drew in a startled gasp.

He limped over to her, his cane thumping the floor in counterpoint. She flinched back a little in her chair and then looked up at him with that sweet martyr's expression that made him want, God forgive him, to bust her one across the head with his own damn walking stick.

“You're not so far gone that you don't know what you're doing,” he said. “You don't have that excuse. You snuck around behind my back, Vera. You…

“I did not! That's a lie! I did no such…

“You did!” he bellowed. “Well, you listen to me, Vera. This is where I'm drawing the line. You pray all you want. Praying's free. Write all the letters you want, a stamp still only costs thirteen cents. If you want to take a bath in all the cheap, shitty lies those Jesusiumpers tell, if you want to go on with the delusions and the make-believe, you go on. But I'm not a part of it. Remember that. Do you understand me?”

“Do you understand me?”

“You think I'm crazy!” she shouted at him, and her face crumpled and squeezed together in a terrible way. She burst into the braying, ugly tears of utter defeat and disillusion.

“No,” he said more quietly. “Not yet. But maybe it's time for a little plain talk, Vera, and the truth is, I think you will be if you don't pull out of this and start facing reality.”

“You'll see,” she said through her team. “You'll see. God knows the truth but waits.”

“Just as long as you understand that he's not going to have our furniture while he's waiting,” Herb said grimly. “As long as we see eye to eye on that.”

“It's Last Times!” she told him. “The hour of the Apocalypse is at hand.”

“Yeah? That and fifteen cents will buy you a cup of coffee, Vera.”

Outside the rain fell in steady sheets. That was the year Herb turned fifty-two, Vera fifty one, and Sarah Hazlett twenty-seven.

Johnny had been in his coma for four years.

The baby came on Halloween night. Sarah's labor lasted nine hours. She was given mild whiffs of gas when she needed them, and at some point in her extremity it occurred to her that she was in the same hospital as Johnny, and she called his name over and over again. Afterward she barely remembered this, and certainly never told Walt. She thought she might have dreamed it.

The baby was a boy. They named him Dennis Edward Hazlett. He and his mother went home three days later, and Sarah was teaching again after the Thanksgiving holiday. Walt had landed what looked like a fine job with a Bangor firm of lawyers, and if all went well they planned for Sarah to quit teaching in June of 1975. She wasn't all that sure she wanted to. She had grown to like it.

On the first day of 1975, two small boys, Charlie Norton and Norm Lawson, both of Otisfield, Maine, were in the Nortons” back yard, having a snowball fight. Charlie was eight, Norm was nine. The day was overcast and drippy.

Sensing that the end of the snowball fight was nearing-it was almost time for lunch-Norm charged Charlie, throwing a barrage of snowballs. Ducking and laughing, Charlie was at first forced back, and then turned tail and ran, jumping the low stone wall that divided the Norton back yard from the woods. He ran down the path that led toward Strimmer's Brook. As he went, Norm caught him a damn good one on the back of the hood.

Then Charlie disappeared from sight.

Norm jumped the wall and stood there for a moment, looking into the snowy woods and listening to the drip of melt-water from the birches, pines, and spruces.

“Come on back, chicken!” Norm called, and made a series of high gobbling sounds.

Charlie didn't rise to the bait. There was no sign of him now, but the path descended steeply as it went down toward the brook. Norm gobbled again and shifted irresolutely from one foot to the other. These were Charlie's woods, not his. Charlie's territory. Norm loved a good snowball fight when he was winning, but he didn't really want to go down there if Charlie was lying in ambush for him with half a dozen good hard slushballs all ready to go.

Nonetheless he had taken half a dozen steps down the path when a high, breathless scream rose from below.

Norm Lawson went as cold as the snow his green gum-rubber boots were planted in. The two snowballs he had been holding dropped from his hands and plopped to the ground. The scream rose again, so thin it was barely audible.

Jeepers-creepers, he went and fell in the brook, Norm thought, and that broke the paralysis of his fear. He ran down the path, slipping and sliding, falling right on his can once. His heartbeat roared in his ears. Part of his mind saw him fishing Charlie from the brook just before he went down for the third time and getting written up in Boys” Life as a hero.

Three-quarters of the way down the slope the path dog-legged, and when he got around the corner he saw that Charlie Norton hadn't fallen in Strimmer's Brook after all. He was standing at the place where the path levelled out, and he was staring at something in the melting snow. His hood had fallen back and his face was nearly as white as the snow itself. As Norm approached, he uttered that horrible gasping out-of-breath scream again.

“What is it?” Norm asked, approaching. “Charlie, what's wrong?”

Charlie turned to him, his eyes huge, his mouth gaping. He tried to speak but nothing came out of his mouth but two inarticulate grunts and a silver cord of saliva. He pointed instead.

Norm came closer and looked. Suddenly all the strength went out of his legs and he sat down hard. The world swam around him.

Protruding from the melting snow were two legs clad in blue jeans. There was a loafer on one foot, but the other was bare, white, and defenseless. One arm stuck out of the snow, and the hand at the end of it seemed to plead for a rescue that had never come. The rest of the body was still mercifully hidden.

Charlie and Norm had discovered the body of seventeen-year old Carol Dunbarger, the fourth victim of the Castle Rock Strangler.

It had been almost two years since he had last killed, and the people of Castle Rock (Strimmer's Brook formed the southern borderline between the towns of Castle Rock and Otisfield) had begun to relax, thinking the nightmare was finally over.

It wasn't.

CHAPTER SIX

Eleven days after the discovery of the Dunbarger girl's body, a sleet-and-ice storm struck northern New England. On the sixth floor of the Eastern Maine Medical Center, everything was running just a little bit late in consequence. A lot of the staff had run into problems getting to work, and those that made it found themselves running hard just to stay even.

It was after nine am when one of the aides, a young woman named Allison Conover, brought Mr. Starret his light breakfast. Mr. Starret was recovering from a heart attack and was “doing his sixteen” in intensive care-a sixteen-day stay following a coronary was standard operating procedure. Mr. Starret was doing nicely. He was in room 619, and he had told his wife privately that the biggest incentive to his recovery was the prospect of getting away from the living corpse in the room's second bed. The steady whisper of the poor guy's respirator made it hard to sleep, he told her. After a while it got so you didn't know if you wanted it to go on whispering or stop. Stop dead, so to speak.

The TV was on when Allison came in. Mr. Starret was sitting up in bed with his control button in one hand. “Today” had ended, and Mr. Starret had not yet decided to blank out “My Back Yard”, the cartoon show that followed it. That would have left him alone with the sound of Johnny's respirator.

“I'd about given up on you this morning,” Mr. Starret said, looking at his breakfast tray of orange juice, plain yoghurt, and wheat flakes with no great joy. What he really craved was two cholesterol-filled eggs, fried over easy and sweating butter, with five slices of bacon on the side, not too crisp. The sort of fare that had, in fact, landed him here in the first place. At least according to his doctor-the birdbrain.

“The going's bad outside,” Allison said shortly. Six patients had already told her they had about given up on her this morning, and the line was getting old. Allison was a pleasant girl, but this morning she was feeling harried.

“Oh, sorry,” Mr. Starret said humbly. “Pretty slippery on the roads, is it?”

“It sure is,” Allison said, thawing slightly. “If I didn't have my husband's four-wheel drive today, I never would have made it.”

Mr. Starret pushed the button that raised his bed so he could eat his breakfast comfortably. The electric motor that raised and lowered it was small but loud. The TV was still quite loud-Mr. Starret was a little deaf, and as he had told his wife, the guy in the other bed had never complained about a little extra volume. Never asked to see what was on the other channel either. He supposed a joke like that was in pretty poor taste, but when you'd had a heart attack and wound up in intensive care sharing a room with a human vegetable, you either learned a little black humor or you went crazy.

Allison raised her voice a little to be heard over the whining motor and the TV as she finished setting up Mr. Starret's tray. “There were cars off the road all up and down State Street hill.”

In the other bed Johnny Smith said softly, “The whole wad on nineteen. One way or the other. My girl's sick.”

“You know, this yogurt isn't half bad,” Mr. Starret said. He hated yogurt, but he didn't want to be left alone until absolutely necessary. When he was alone he kept taking his own pulse. “It tastes a little bit like wild hickory…

“Did you hear something?” Allison asked. She looked around doubtfully.

Mr. Starret let go of the control button on the side of the bed and the whine of the electric motor died. On the TV, Elmer Fudd took a potshot at Bugs Bunny and missed.

“Nothing but the TV,” Mr. Starret said. “What'd I miss?”

“Nothing, I guess. It must have been the wind around that window. “She could feel a stress headache coming on-too much to do and not enough people this morning to help her do it-and she rubbed at her temples, as if to drive the pain away before it could get properly seated.

On her way out she paused and looked down at the man in the other bed for a moment. Did he look different somehow? As if he had shifted position? Surely not.

Allison left the room and went on down the hall, pushing her breakfast cabinet ahead of her. It was as terrible a morning as she had feared it would be, everything out of kilter, and by noon her head was pounding. She had quite understandably forgotten all about anything she might have heard that morning in Room 619.

But in the days that followed she found herself looking more and more often at Smith, and by March Allison had become almost sure that he had straightened a bit-come out of what the doctors called his prefetal position a little. Not much just a little. She thought of mentioning it to someone, but in the end did not. After all, she was only an aide, little more than kitchen help.

It really wasn't her place.

It was a dream, he guessed.

He was in a dark, gloomy place-a hallway of some kind. The ceiling was too high to see. It was lost in the shadows. The walls were dark chromed steel. They opened out as they went upward. He was alone, but a voice floated up to where he stood, as if from a great distance. A voice he knew, words that had been spoken to him in another place, at another time. The voice frightened him. It was groaning and lost, echoing back and forth between that dark chromed steel like a trapped bird he remembered from his childhood. The bird had flown into his father's toolshed and hadn't the wit to get back out. It had panicked and had gone swooping back and forth, cheeping in desperate alarm, battering itself against the walls until it had battered itself to death. This voice had the same doomed quality as that long ago bird's cheeping. It was never going to escape this place.

“You plan all your life and you do what you can,” this spectral voice groaned. “You never want nothing but the best, and the kid comes home with hair down to his ass-hole and says the president of the United States is a pig. A pig! Sheeyit, I don't…

Look out, he wanted to say. He wanted to warn the voice, but he was mute. Look out for what? He didn't know. He didn't even know for sure who he was, although he had a suspicion that he had once been a teacher or a preacher.

“Jeeeesus!” The faraway voice screamed. Lost voice, doomed, drowned. “Jeeeee…

Silence then. Echoes dying. away. Then, in a little while, it would start again.

So after a while-he did not know how long, time seemed to have no meaning or relevance in this place-he began to grope his way down the hall, calling in return (or perhaps only calling in his mind), perhaps hoping that he and the owner of the voice could find their way out together, perhaps only hoping to give some comfort and receive some in return.

But the voice kept getting further and further away, dimmer and fainter

(far and wee)

until it was just an echo of an echo. And then it was gone. He was alone now, walking down this gloomy and deserted hall of shadows. And it began to seem to him that it wasn't an illusion or a mirage or a dream-at least not of the ordinary kind. It was as if he had entered limbo, a weird conduit between the land of the living and that of the dead. But toward which end was he moving?

Things began to come back. Disturbing things. They were like ghosts that joined him on his walk, fell in on either side of him, in front of him, behind him, until they circled him in an eldritch ring-weave a circle round him thrice and touch his eyes with holy dread, was that how it went? He could almost see them. All the whispering voices of purgatory. There was a Wheel turning and turning in the night, a Wheel of the Future, red and black, life and death, slowing. Where had he laid his bet? He couldn't remember and he should be able to, because the stakes were his existence. In and out? It had to be one or the other. His girl was sick. He had to get her home.

After a while, the hallway began to seem brighter. At first he thought it was imagination, a sort of dream within a dream if that were possible, but after an unknown length of time the brightness became too marked to be an illusion. The whole experience of the corridor seemed to become less dreamlike. The walls drew back until he could barely see them, and the dull dark color changed to a sad and misty gray, the color of twilight on a warm and overcast March afternoon. It began to seem that he was not in a hallway at all anymore, but in a room -almost in a room, separated from it by the thinnest of membranes, a sort of placental sac, like a baby waiting to be born. Now he heard other voices, not echoey but dull and thudding, like the voices of nameless gods speaking in forgotten tongues. Little by little these voices came clearer, until he could nearly make out what they were saying.

He began to open his eyes from time to time (or thought he did) and he could actually see the owners of those voices: bright, glowing, spectral shapes with no faces at first, sometimes moving about the room, sometimes bending over him. It didn't occur to him to try speaking to them, at least not at first. It came to him that this might be some sort of afterlife, and these bright shapes the shapes of angels.

The faces, like the voices, began to come clearer with time. He saw his mother once, leaning into his field of vision and slowly thundering something totally without meaning into his upturned face. His father was there another time. Dave Pelsen from school. A nurse he came to know; he believed her name was Mary or possibly Marie. Faces, voices, coming closer, jelling together.

Something else crept in: a feeling that he had changed. He didn't like the feeling. He distrusted it. It seemed to him that whatever the change was, it was nothing good. It seemed to him that it meant sorrow and bad times. He had gone into the darkness with everything, and now it felt to him that he was coming out of it with nothing at all-except for some secret strangeness.

The dream was ending. Whatever it had been, the dream was ending. The room was very real now, very close. The voices, the faces -He was going to come into the room. And it suddenly seemed to him that what he wanted to do was turn and run-to go back down that dark hallway forever. The dark hallway was not good, but it was better than this new feeling of sadness and impending loss.

He turned and looked behind him, and yes, it was there, the place where the room's walls changed to dark chrome, a corner beside one of the chairs where, unnoticed by the bright people who came and went, the room became a passageway into what he now suspected was eternity. The place where that other voice had gone, the voice of -The cab driver.

Yes. That memory was all there now. The cab ride, the driver bemoaning his son's long hair, bemoaning the fact that his son thought Nixon was a pig. Then the headlights breasting the hill, a pair on each side of the white line. The crash. No pain, but the knowledge that his thighs had connected with the taximeter hard enough to rip it out of its frame. There had been a sensation of cold wetness and then the dark hallway and now this.

Choose, something inside whispered. Choose or they'll choose for you, they'll rip you out of this place, whatever and wherever it is, like doctors ripping a baby out of its mother's womb by cesarian section.

And then Sarah's face came to him-she had to be out there someplace, although hers had not been one of the bright faces bending over his. She had to be out there, worried and scared. She was almost his, now. He felt that. He was going to ask her to marry him.

That feeling of unease came back, stronger than ever, and this time it was all mixed up with Sarah. But wanting her was stronger, and he made his decision. He turned his back on the dark place, and when he looked back over his shoulder later on, it had disappeared; there was nothing beside the chair but the smooth white wall of the room where he lay. Not long after he began to know where the room must be-it was a hospital room, of course. The dark hallway faded to a dreamy memory, never completely forgotten. But more important, more immediate, was the fact that he was John Smith, he had a girl named Sarah Bracknell, and he had been in a terrible car accident. He suspected that he must be very lucky to be alive, and he could only hope that all his original equipment was still there and still functioning. He might be in Cleaves Mills Community Hospital, but he guessed the EMMC was more likely. From the way he felt he guessed he had been here for some time-he might have been blacked out for as long as a week or ten days. It was time to get going again.

Time to get going again. That was the thought in Johnny's mind when things finally jelled all the way back together and he opened his eyes.

It was May 17, 1975. Mr. Starret had long since gone home with standing orders to walk two miles a day and mend his high cholesterol ways. Across the room was an old man engaged in a weary” fifteenth round with that all-time heavyweight champ, carcinoma. He slept the sleep of morphia, and the room was otherwise empty. It was 3 15 P. M. The TV screen was a drawn green shade.

“Here I am,” Johnny Smith croaked to no one at all. He was shocked by the “weakness of his voice. There was no calendar in the room, and he had no way of knowing that he had been out of it four-and-a-half years.

The nurse came in some forty minutes later. She went over to the old man in the other bed, changed his IV feed, went into the bathroom, and came out with a blue plastic pitcher. She watered the old man's flowers. There were over half a dozen bouquets, and a score of get-well cards standing open on his table and windowsill. Johnny watched her perform this homey chore, feeling as yet no urge to try his voice again.

She put the pitcher back and came over to Johnny's bed. Going to turn my pillows, he thought. Their eyes met briefly, but nothing in hers changed. She doesn't know I'm awake. My eyes have been open before. It doesn't mean anything to her.

She put her hand on the back of his neck. It was cool and comforting and Johnny knew she had three children and that the youngest had lost most of the sight of one eye last Fourth of July. A firecracker accident. The boy's name was Mark.

She lifted his head, flipped his pillow over, and settled him back. She started to turn away, adjusting her nylon

uniform at the hips, and then turned back, puzzled. Belatedly thinking that there had been something new in his eyes, maybe. Something that hadn't been there before.

She glanced at him thoughtfully, started to turn away again, and he said, “Hello, Marie.”

She froze, and he could hear an ivory dick as her teeth came suddenly and violently together. Her hand pressed against her chest just above the swell of her breasts. A small gold crucifix hung there. “0-my-God,” she said. “You're awake. I thought you looked different. How did you know my name?”

“I suppose I must have heard it. “It was hard to talk, terribly hard. His tongue was a sluggish worm, seemingly unlubricated by saliva.

She nodded. “You've been coming up for some time now. I'd better go down to the nurses” station and have Dr. Brown or Dr. Weizak paged. They'll want to know you're back with us. “But she stayed a moment longer, looking at him with a frank fascination that made him uneasy.

“Did I grow a third eye?” he asked.

She laughed nervously. “No… of course not. Excuse me.

His eye caught on his own window ledge and his table pushed up against it. On the ledge was a faded African violet and a picture of Jesus Christ-it was the sort of picture of Jesus his mother favored, with Christ looking as if he was ready to bat dean-up for the New York Yankees or something of a similar clean and athletic nature. But the picture was yellow. Yellow and beginning to curl at the corners. Sudden fear dropped over him like a suffocating blanket. “Nurse! he called. “Nurse!”

In the doorway she turned back.

“Where are my get-well cards?” Suddenly it was hard for him to breathe. “That other guy's got… didn't anyone send me a card?”

She smiled, but it was forced. It was the smile of some one who is hiding something. Suddenly Johnny wanted her by his bed. He would reach out and touch her. If he could touch her, he would know what she was hiding.

“I'll have the doctor paged,” she said, and left before he could say anything else. He looked at the African violet, at the aging picture of Jesus, baffled and afraid. After a little while, he drifted off to sleep again.

“He was awake,” Marie Michaud said. “He was completely coherent.”

“Okay,” Dr. Brown answered. “I'm not doubting you. If he woke up once, he'll wake up again. Probably. It's just a matter of…

Johnny moaned. His eyes opened. They were blank, half rolled up. Then he seemed to see Marie, and his eyes came into focus. He smiled a little. But his face was still slack, as if only his eyes were awake and the rest of him still slept. She had a sudden feeling that he was not looking at her but into her.

“I think he'll be okay,” Johnny said. “Once they clean that impacted cornea, the eye'll be as good as new. Should be.”

Marie gasped harshly, and Brown glanced at her.

“What is it?”

“He's talking about my boy,” she whispered. “My Mark.”

“No,” Brown said. “He's talking in his sleep, that's all Don't make a picture out of an inkblot, Nurse.”

“Yes. Okay. But he's not asleep now, is he?”

“Marie?” Johnny asked. He smiled tentatively. “I dozed off, didn't I?”

“Yes,” Brown said. “You were talking in your sleep. Gave Marie here a turn. Were you dreaming?”

“No-oo… not that I remember. What did I say? And who are you?”

“I'm Dr. James Brown. Just like the soul singer. Only I'm a neurologist. You said, “I think he'll be okay once they clean that impacted cornea.” I think that was it, wasn't it, Nurse?”

“My boy's going to have that operation,” Marie said. “My boy Mark.”

“I don't remember anything,” Johnny said. “I guess I was sleeping. “He looked at Brown. His eyes were clear now, and scared. “I can't lift my arms. Am I paralyzed?”

“Nope. Try your fingers.”

Johnny did. They all wiggled. He smiled.

“Superfine,” Brown said. “Tell me your name.”

“John Smith.”

“Good, and your middle name?”

“I don't have one.”

“That's fine, who needs one? Nurse, go down to your station and find out who's in neurology tomorrow. I'd like to start a whole series of tests on Mr. Smith.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And you might call Sam Weizak. You'll get him at home or at the golf course.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And no reporters, please… for your life!” Brown was smiling but serious.

“No, of course not. “She left, white shoes squeaking faintly. Her little boy's going to be just fine, Johnny thought. I'll be sure to tell her.

“Dr. Brown,” he said, “where are my get-well cards? Didn't anybody send me a card?”

“Just a few more questions,” Dr. Brown said smoothly. “Do you recall your mother's name?”

“Of course I do. Vera.”

“Her maiden name?”

“Nason.”

“Your father's name?”

“Herbert. Herb. And why did you tell her no reporters?”

“Your mailing address?”

“RFD #1, Pownal,” Johnny said promptly, and then stopped. An expression of comic surprise passed across his face. “I mean… well, I live in Cleaves Mills now, at 110 North Main Street. Why the hell did I give you my parents” address? I haven't lived there since I was eighteen.”

“And how old are you now?”

“Look it up on my driver's license,” Johnny said. “I want to know why I don't have any get-well cards. How long have I been in the hospital, anyway? And which hospital is this?”

“It's the Eastern Maine Medical Center. And we'll get to all the rest of your questions if you'll just let me…

Brown was sitting by the bed in a chair he had drawn over from the corner-the same corner where Johnny had once seen the passage leading away. He was making notes on a clipboard with a type of pen Johnny couldn't remember ever having seen before. It had a thick blue plastic barrel and a fibrous tip. It looked like the strange hybrid offspring of a fountain pen and. a ballpoint.

Just looking at it made that formless dread come back, and without thinking about it, Johnny suddenly seized Dr. Brown's left hand in one of his own. His arm moved creakily, as if there were invisible sixty-pound weights tied to it-a couple below the elbow and a couple above. He captured the doctor's hand in a weak grip and pulled. The funny pen left a thick blue line across the paper.

Brown looked at him, at first only curious. Then his face drained of color. The sharp expression of interest left his eyes and was replaced with a muddy look of fear. He snatched his hand away-Johnny had no power to hold it-and for an instant a look of revulsion crossed the doctor's face, as if he had been touched by a leper.

Then it was gone, and he only looked surprised and disconcerted. “What did you do that for? Mr. Smith…”

His voice faltered. Johnny's face had frozen in an expression of dawning comprehension. His eyes were the eyes of a man who has seen something terrible moving and shifting in the shadows, something too terrible to be described or even named.

But it was a fact. It had to be named.

“Fifty-five months?” Johnny asked hoarsely. “Going on five years? No. Oh my God, no.”

“Mr. Smith,” Brown said, now totally flustered. “Please, it's not good for you to excite…

Johnny raised his upper body perhaps three inches from the bed and then slumped back, his face shiny with sweat. His eyes rolled helplessly in their sockets. “I'm twenty-seven?” he muttered. “Twenty-seven? Oh my Jesus.”

Brown swallowed and heard an audible dick. When Smith had grabbed his hand, he had felt a sudden on-rush of bad feelings, childlike in their intensity; crude images of revulsion had assaulted him. He had found himself remembering a picnic in the country when he had been seven or eight, sitting down and putting his hand in something warm and slippery. He had looked around and had seen that he had put his hand into the maggoty remains of a woodchuck that had lain under a laurel bush all that hot August. He had screamed then, and he felt a little bit like screaming now-except that the feeling was fading, dwindling, to be replaced with a question: How did he know? He touched me and he knew.

Then twenty years of education rose up strongly in him, and he pushed the notion aside. There were cases without number of comatose patients who had awakened with a dreamlike knowledge of many of the things that had gone on around them while they were in coma. Like anything else, coma was a matter of degree. Johnny Smith had never been a vegetable; his EEG had never gone flat-line, and if it had, Brown would not be talking with him now. Sometimes being in a coma was a little like being behind a one-way glass. To the beholding eye the patient was completely conked out, but the patient's senses might still continue to function in some low, power-down fashion. And that was the case here, of course.

Marie Michaud came back in. “Neurology is confirmed, and Dr. Weizak is on his way.”

“I think Sam will have to wait until tomorrow to meet Mr. Smith,” Brown said. “I want him to have five milligrams of Valium.”

“I don't want a sedative,” Johnny said. “I want to get out of here. I want to know what happened!”

“You'll know everything in time,” Brown said. “Right now it's important that you rest.”

“I've been resting for four-and-a-half years!”

“Then another twelve hours won't make much difference,” Brown said inexorably.

A few moments later the nurse swabbed his upper arm with alcohol, and there was the sting of a needle. Johnny began to feel sleepy almost at once. Brown and the nurse began to look twelve feet tall.

“Tell me one thing, at least,” he said. His voice seemed to come from far, far away. Suddenly it seemed terribly important. “That pen. What do you call that pen?”

“This?” Brown held it out from his amazing height. Blue plastic body, fibrous tip. “It's called a Flair. Now go to sleep, Mr. Smith.”

And Johnny did, but the word followed him down into his sleep like a mystic incantation, full of idiot meaning:

Flair… Flair…

Herb put the telephone down and looked at it. He looked at it for a long time. From the other room came the sound of the TV, turned up almost all the way. Oral Roberts was talking about football and the healing love of Jesus there was a connection there someplace, but Herb had missed it. Because of the telephone call. Oral's voice boomed and roared. Pretty soon the show would end and Oral would dose it out by confidently telling his audience that something good was going to happen to them. Apparently Oral was right.

My boy, Herb thought. While Vera had prayed for a miracle, Herb had prayed for his boy to die. It was Vera's prayer that had been answered… What did that mean, and where did it leave him? And what was it going to do to her?

He went into the living room. Vera was sitting on the couch. Her feet, encased in elastic pink mules, were up on a hassock. She was wearing her old gray robe. She was eating popcorn straight from the popper. Since Johnny's accident she had put on nearly forty pounds and her blood pressure had skyrocketed. The doctor wanted to put her on medication, but Vera wouldn't have it-if it was the will of the Lord for her to have the high blood, she said, then she would have it. Herb had once pointed out that the will of the Lord had never stopped her from taking Bufferin when she had a headache. She had answered with her sweetest long-suffering smile and her most potent weapon: silence.

“Who was on the phone?” she asked him, not looking away from the TV. Oral had his arm round the well-known quarterback of an NFC team. He was talking to a hushed multitude. The quarterback was smiling modestly.

…and you have all heard this fine athlete tell you tonight how he abused his body, his Temple of God. And you have heard…

Herb snapped it off.

“Herbert Smith! “She nearly spilled her popcorn sitting up. “I was watching! That was…”

“Johnny woke up.”

…Oral Roberts and

The words snapped off in her mouth. She seemed to crouch back in her chair, as if he had taken a swing at her.

He looked back, unable to say more, wanting to feel joy but afraid. So afraid.

“Johnny's… “She stopped, swallowed, then tried again. “Johnny… our Johnny?”

“Yes. He spoke with Dr. Brown for nearly fifteen minutes. Apparently it wasn't that thing they thought… false-waking… after all. He's coherent. He can move.”

“Johnny's awake?”

Her hands came up to her mouth. The popcorn popper, half full, did a slow dipsy-doodle off her lap and thumped to the rug, spilling popcorn everywhere. Her hands covered the lower half of her face. Above them her eyes got wider and wider still until for a dreadful second, Herb was afraid that they might fall out and dangle by their stalks. Then they dosed. A tiny mewing sound came from behind her hands.

“Vera? Are you all right?”

“O my God I thank You for Your will be done my Johnny You brought me my I knew You would, my Johnny, 0 dear God I will bring You my thanksgiving every day of my life for my Johnny Johnny JOHNNY -, Her voice was rising to an hysterical, triumphant scream. He stepped forward, grabbed the lapels of her robe, and shook her. Suddenly time seemed to have reversed, doubled back on itself like strange cloth-they might have been back on the night when the news of the accident came to them, delivered through that same telephone in that same nook.

By nook or by crook, Herb Smith thought crazily.

“O my precious God my Jesus oh my Johnny the miracle like I said the miracle…”

“Stop it, Vera!”

Her eyes were dark and hazy and hysterical. “Are you sorry he's awake again? After all these years of making fun of me? Of telling people I was crazy?”

“Vera, I never told anyone you were crazy.”

“You told them with your eyes!” she shouted at him. “But my God wasn't mocked. Was he, Herbert? Was he?”

“No,” he said. “I guess not.”

“I told you I told you God had a plan for my Johnny. Now you see his hand beginning to work. “She got up. “I've got to go to him. I've got to tell him. “She walked toward the closet where her coat hung, seemingly unaware that she was in her robe and nightgown. Her face was stunned with rapture. In some bizarre and almost blasphemous way she reminded him of the way she had looked on the day they were married. Her pink mules crunched popcorn into the rug.

“Vera.”

“I've got to tell him that God's plan…

“Vera.”

She turned to him, but her eyes were far away, with her Johnny.

He went to her and put his hands on her shoulders.

“You tell him that you love him… that you prayed… waited… watched. Who has a better right? You're his mother. You bled for him. Haven't I watched you bleed for him over the last five years? I'm not sorry he's back with us, you were wrong to say that. I don't think I can make of it what you do, but I'm not sorry. I bled for him, too.”

“Did you?” Her eyes were flinty, proud, and unbelieving.

“Yes. And I'm going to tell you something else, Vera. You're going to keep your trap shut about God and miracles and Great Plans until Johnny's up on his feet and able to…”

“I'll say what I have to say!”

…and able to think what he's doing. What I'm saying is that you're going to give him a chance to make something of it for himself before you start in on him.”

“You have no right to talk to me that way! No right at all!”

“I'm exercising my right as Johnny's dad,” he said grimly. “Maybe for the last time in my life. And you better not get in my way, Vera. You understand? Not you, not God. not the bleeding holy Jesus. You follow?”

She glared at him sullenly and said nothing.

“He's going to have enough to do just coping with the idea that he's been out like a light for four-and-a-half years. We don't know if he'll be able to walk again, in spite of the therapist that came in. We do know there'll have to be an operation on his ligaments, if he even wants to try; Weizak told us that. Probably more than one. And more therapy, and a lot of it's going to hurt him like hell. So tomorrow you're just going to be his mother.”

“Don't you dare talk to me that way! Don't you dare!”

“If you start sermonizing, Vera, I'll drag you out of his room by the hair of your head.”

She stared at him, white-faced and trembling. Joy and fury were at war in her eyes.

“You better get dressed,” Herb said. “We ought to get going.”

It was a long, silent ride up to Bangor. The happiness they should have felt between them was not there; only Vera's hot and militant joy. She sat bolt upright in the passenger seat, her Bible in her lap, open to the twenty-third Psalm.

At quarter of nine the next morning, Marie came into Johnny's room and said, “Your mom and dad are here, if you're up to seeing them.”

“Yes, I'd like that. “He felt much better this morning, stronger and less disoriented. But the thought of seeing them scared him a little. In terms of his conscious recollection, he had seen them about five months ago. His father had been working on the foundation of a house that had now probably been standing for three years or more. His mom had fixed him home-baked beans and apple pie for dessert and had clucked over how thin he was getting.

He caught Marie's hand weakly as she turned to go.

“Do they look all right? I mean…”

“They look fine.”

“Oh. Good.”

“You can only have half an hour with them now. Some more time this evening if the neurology series doesn't prove too tiring.”

“Dr. Brown's orders?”

“And Dr. Weizak's.”

“All right. For a while. I'm not sure how long I want to be poked and prodded.”

Marie hesitated.

“Something?” Johnny asked.

“No… not now. You must be anxious to see your folks. I'll send them in.”

He waited, nervous. The other bed was empty; the cancer patient had been moved out while Johnny slept off his Valium pop.

The door opened. His mother and father came in. Johnny felt simultaneous shock and relief: shock because they had aged, it was all true; relief because the changes in them did not yet seem mortal. And if that could be said of them, perhaps it could be said of him as well.

But something in him had changed, changed drastically-and it might be mortal.

That was all he had time to think before his mother's arms were around him, her violet sachet strong in his nostrils, and she was whispering: “Thank God, Johnny thank God, thank God you're awake.”

He hugged her back as best he could his arms still had no power to grip and fell away quickly and suddenly, in six seconds, he knew how it was with her, what she thought, and what was going to happen to her. Then it was gone, fading like that dream of the dark corridor. But when she broke the embrace to look at him, the look of zealous joy in her eyes had been replaced with one of thoughtful consideration.

The words seemed to come out of him of their own:

“Let them give you the medicine, Mom. That's best.”

Her eyes widened, she wet her lips and then Herb was beside her, his eyes filled with tears. He had lost some weight-not as much as Vera had put on, but he was noticeably thinner. His hair was going fast but the face was the same, homely and plain and well-loved. He took a large brakeman's bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his eyes with it. Then he stuck out his hand.

“Hi, son,” he said. “Good to have you back.”

Johnny shook his father's hand as well as he could; his pale and strengthless fingers were swallowed up in his father's red hand. Johnny looked from one to the other -his mother in a bulky powder-blue pantsuit, his father in a really hideous houndstooth jacket that looked as if it should belong to a vacuum-cleaner salesman in Kansas -and he burst into tears.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry, it's just that…”

“You go on,” Vera said, sitting on the bed beside him. Her face was calm and clear now. There was more mother than madness in it. “You go on and cry, sometimes that's best.”

And Johnny did.

Herb told him his Aunt Germaine had died. Vera told him that the money for the Pownal Community Hall had finally been raised and the building had commenced a month ago, as soon as the frost was out of the ground. Herb added that he had put in a bid, but he guessed honest work cost too dear for them to want to pay. “Oh, shush, you sore loser,” Vera said.

There was a little silence and then Vera spoke again. “I hope you realize that your recovery is a miracle of God, Johnny. The doctors despaired. In Matthew, chapter nine, we read…

“Vera,” Herb said warningly.

“Of course it was a miracle, Mom. I know that.”

“You… you do?”

“Yes. And I want to talk “about it with you… hear your ideas about what that means… just as soon as I get on my feet again.”

She was staring at him, open-mouthed. Johnny glanced past her at his father and their eyes met for a moment. Johnny saw great relief in his father's eyes. Herb nodded imperceptibly.

“A Conversion!” Vera ejaculated loudly. “My boy has had a Conversion! Oh, praise God!”

“Vera, hush,” Herb said. “Best to praise God in a lower voice when you're in the hospital.”

“I don't see how anybody could not call it a miracle, Mom. And we're going to talk about it a lot. Just as “soon as I'm out of here.”

“You're going to come home,” she said. “Back to the house where you were raised. I'll nurse you back to health and we'll pray for understanding.”

He was smiling at her, but holding the smile was an effort. “You bet. Mom, would you go down to the nurses” station and ask Marie if I can have some juice? Or maybe some ginger ale? I guess I'm not used to talking, and my throat…”

“Of course I will. “She kissed his cheek and stood up. “Oh, you're so thin. But I'll fix that when I get you home. “She left the room, casting a single victorious glance at Herb as she went. They heard her shoes tapping off down the hall.

“How long has she been that way?” Johnny asked quietly.

Herb shook his head. “It's come a little at a time since your accident. But it had its start long before that. You know. You remember.”

“Is she…,”

“I don't know. There are people down South that handle snakes. I'd call them crazy. She doesn't do that, How are you, Johnny? Really?”

“I don't know,” Johnny said. “Daddy, where's Sarah?”

Herb leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. “I don't like to tell you this, John, but…”

“She's married? She got married?”

Herb didn't answer. Without looking directly at Johnny, he nodded his head.

“Oh, God,” Johnny said hollowly. “I was afraid of that.”

“She's been Mrs. Walter Hazlett for going on three years. He's a lawyer. They have a baby boy. John… no one really believed you were going to wake up. Except for your mother, of course. None of us had any reason to believe you would wake up. “His voice was trembling now, hoarse with guilt. “The doctors said… ah, never mind what they said. Even I gave you up. I hate like hell to admit it, but it's true: All I can ask you is try to understand about me… and Sarah.”

He tried to say that he did understand, but all that would come out was a sickly sort of croak. His body felt sick and old, and suddenly he was drowning in his sense of loss. The lost time was suddenly sitting on him like a load of bricks-a real thing, not just a vague concept.

“Johnny, don't take on. There are other things. Good things.”

“It's… going to take some getting used to,” he managed.

“Yeah. I know.”

“Do you ever see her?”

“We write back and forth once in a while. We got acquainted after your accident. She's a nice girl, real nice. She's still teaching at Cleaves, but I understand she is getting done this June. She's happy, John.”

“Good,” he said thickly. “I'm glad someone is.”

“Son…

“I hope you're not telling secrets,” Vera Smith said brightly, coming back into the room. She had an ice-clogged pitcher in one hand. “They said you weren't ready for fruit juice, Johnny, so I brought you the ginger ale.

“That's fine, Mom.”

She looked from Herb to Johnny and back to Herb again. “Have you been telling secrets? Why the long faces?”

“I was just telling Johnny he's going to have to work hard if he wants to get out of here,” said Herb. “Lots of therapy.”

“Now why would you want to talk about that now?” She poured ginger ale into Johnny's glass. “Everything's going to be fine now. You'll see.”

She popped a flexible straw into the glass and handed it to him.

“Now you drink all of it,” she said, smiling. “It's good for you.”

Johnny did drink all of it. It tasted bitter.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Close your eyes,” Dr. Weizak said.

He was a small, roly-poly man with an incredible styled head of hair and spade sideburns. Johnny couldn't get over all that hair. A man with a haircut like that in 1970 would have had to fight his way out of every bar in eastern Maine, and a man Weizak's age would have been considered ripe for committal.

All that hair. Man.

He closed his eyes. His head was covered with electrical contact points. The contacts went to wires that fed into a wall-console EEG. Dr. Brown and a nurse stood by the console, which was calmly extruding a wide sheet of graph paper. Johnny wished the nurse could have been Marie Michaud. He was a little scared.

Dr. Weizak touched his eyelids and Johnny jerked.

“Nuh… hold still, Johnny. These are the last two. Just… there.”

“All right, Doctor',” the nurse said.

A low hum.

“All right, Johnny. Are you comfortable?”

“Feels like there are pennies on my eyelids.”

“Yes? You'll get used to that in no time. Now let me explain to you this procedure. I am going to ask you to visualize a number of things. You will have about ten seconds on each, and there are twenty things to visualize in all. You understand?”

“Yes.

“Very fine. We begin. Dr. Brown?”

“All ready.”

“Excellent. Johnny, I ask you to see a table. On this table there is an orange.”

Johnny thought about it. He saw a small card-table with folding steel legs. Resting on it, a little off-center, was a large orange with the word SUNKIST stamped on its pocky skin.

“Good,” Weizak said.

“Can that gadget see my orange?”

“Nuh… well, yes; in a symbolic way it can. The machine is tracing your brainwaves. We are searching for blocks, Johnny. Areas of impairment. Possible indications of continuing intercranial pressure. Now I ask you to shush with the questions.”

“All right.”

“Now I ask you to see a television. It is on, but not receiving a station.”

Johnny saw the TV that was in his apartment-had been in his apartment. The screen was bright gray with snow. The tips of the rabbit ears were wrapped with tinfoil for better reception.

“Good.”

The series went on. For the eleventh item Weizak said, “Now I ask you to see a picnic table on the left side of a green lawn.”

Johnny thought about it, and in his mind he saw a lawn chair. He frowned.

“Something wrong?” Weizak asked.

“No, not at all,” Johnny said. He thought harder. Picnics. Weiners, a charcoal brazier… associate, dammit, associate. How hard can it be to see a picnic table in your mind, you've only seen a thousand of them in your life; associate your way to it. Plastic spoons and forks, paper plates, his father in a chef's hat, holding a long fork in one hand and wearing an apron with a motto printed across it in tipsy letters, THE COOK NEEDS A DRINK. His father making burgers and then they would all go sit at the -Ah, here it came! Johnny smiled, and then the smile faded. This time the image in his mind was of a hammock. “Shit!”

“No picnic table?”

“It's the weirdest thing. I can't quite… seem to think of it. I mean, I know what it is, but I can't see it in my mind. Is that weird, or is that weird?”

“Never mind. Try this one: a globe of the world, sitting on the hood of a pickup truck.”

That one was easy.

On the nineteenth item, a rowboat lying at the foot of a street sign (who thinks these things up? Johnny wondered), it happened again. It was frustrating. He saw a beachball lying beside a gravestone. He concentrated harder and saw a turnpike overpass. Weizak soothed him, and a few moments later the wires were removed from his head and eyelids.

“Why couldn't I see those things?” he asked, his eyes moving from Weizak to Brown. “What's the problem?”

“Hard to say with any real certainty,” Brown said. “It may be a kind of spot amnesia. Or it may be that the accident destroyed a small portion of your brain-and I mean a really microscopic bit. We don't really know what the problem is, but it's pretty obvious that you've lost a number of trace memories. We happened to strike two. You'll probably come across more.”

Weizak said abruptly, “You sustained a head injury when you were a child, yes?”

Johnny looked at him doubtfully.

“There is an old scar,” Weizak said. “There is a theory, Johnny, backed by a good deal of statistical research…”

“Research that is nowhere near complete,” Brown said, almost primly.

“That is true. But this theory supposes that the people who tend to recover from long-term coma are people who have sustained some sort of brain injury at a previous time… it is as though the brain has made some adaptation as the result of the first injury that allows it to survive the second.”

“It's not proven,” Brown said. He seemed to disapprove of Weizak even bringing it up.

“The scar is there,” Weizak said. “Can you not remember what happened to you, Johnny? I would guess you must have blacked out. Did you fall down the stairs? A bicycle accident, perhaps? The Scar says this happened to a young boy.”

Johnny thought hard, then shook his head. “Have you asked my mom and dad?”

“Neither of them can remember any sort of head injury nothing occurs to you?”

For a moment, something did-a memory of smoke, black and greasy and smelling like rubber. Cold. Then it was gone. Johnny shook his head.

Weizak sighed, then shrugged. “You must be tired.”

“Yes. A little bit.”

Brown sat on the edge of the examination table. “It's quarter of eleven. You've worked hard this morning. Dr. Weizak and I will answer a few questions, if you like, then you go up to your room for a nap. Okay?”

“Okay,” Johnny said. “The pictures you took of my brain…

“The CAT-scan,” Weizak nodded. “Computerized Axial Tomography. “He took a box of Chidets and shook three of them into his mouth. “The CAT-scan is really a series of brain X-rays, Johnny. The computer highlights the pictures and…”

“What did it tell you? How long have I got?”

“What is this how long have I got stuff?” Brown asked. “It sounds like a line from an old movie.”

“I've heard that people who come out of long-term comas don't always last so long,” Johnny said. “They lapse back. It's like a light bulb going really bright before it burns out for good.”

Weizak laughed hard. It was a hearty, bellowing laugh, and it was something of a wonder that he didn't choke on his gum. “Oh, such melodrama. “He put a hand on Johnny's chest. “You think Jim and I are babies in this field? Nuh. We are neurologists. What you Americans call high-priced talent. Which means we are only stupid about the functions of the human brain instead of out-and-out ignoramuses. So I tell you, yes, there have been lapse-backs. But you will not lapse. I think we can say that, Jim, yes, okay?”

“Yes,” Brown said. “We haven't been able to find very much in the way of significant impairment. Johnny, there's a guy in Texas who was in a coma for nine years. Now he's a bank loan officer, and he's been doing that job for six years. Before that he was a teller for two years. There's a woman in Arizona who was down for twelve years. Something went wrong with the anesthesia while she was in labor. Now she's in a wheelchair, but she's alive and aware. She came out of it in 1969 and met the baby she had delivered twelve years before. The baby was in the seventh grade and an honors student.”

“Am I going to be in a wheelchair?” Johnny asked. “I can't straighten my legs out. My arms are a little better, but my legs… “He trailed off, shaking his head.

“The ligaments shorten,” Weizak said. “Yes? That's why comatose patients begin to pull into what we call the prefetal position. But we know more about the physical degeneration that occurs in coma than we used to, we are better at holding it off. You have been exercised regularly by the hospital physical therapist, even in your sleep. And different patients react to coma in different ways. Your deterioration has been quite slow, Johnny. As you say, your arms are remarkably responsive and able. But there has been deterioration. Your therapy will be long and… should I lie to you? Nuh, I don't think so. It will be long and painful. You will shed your tears. You may come to hate your therapist. You may come to fall in love with your bed. And there will be operations-only one if you are very, very lucky, but perhaps as many as four-to lengthen those ligaments. These operations are still new. They may succeed completely, partially, or not at all. And yet as God wills it, I believe you will walk again. I don't believe you will ever ski or leap hurdles, but you may run and you will certainly swim.”

“Thank you,” Johnny said. He felt a sudden wave of affection for this man with the accent and the strange haircut. He wanted to do something for Weizak in return-and with that feeling came the urge, almost the need, to touch him.

He reached out suddenly and took Weizak's hand in both of his own. The doctor's hand was big, deeply lined, warm.

“Yes?” Weizak said kindly. “And what is this?”

And suddenly things changed. It was impossible to say how. Except that suddenly Weizak seemed very clear to him. Weizak seemed to… to stand forth, outlined in a lovely, clear light. Every mark and mole and line on Weizak's face stood in relief. And every line told its own story. He began to understand.

“I want your wallet,” Johnny said.

“My…?” Weizak and Brown exchanged a startled glance.

“There's a picture of your mother in your wallet and I need to have it,” Johnny said. “Please.”

“How did you know that?”

“Please!”

Weizak looked into Johnny's face for a moment, and then slowly dug under his smock and produced an old Lord Buxton, bulgy and out of shape.

“How did you know I carry a picture of my mother? She is dead, she died when the Nazis occupied Warsaw…

Johnny snatched the wallet from Weizak's hand. Both he and Brown looked stunned. Johnny opened it, dismissed the plastic picture-pockets, and dug in the back instead, his fingers hurrying past old business cards, receipted bills, a canceled check, an old ticket to some political function. He came up with a small snapshot that had been laminated in plastic. The picture showed a young woman, her features plain, her hair drawn back under a kerchief. Her smile was radiant and youthful. She held the hand of a young boy. Beside her was a man in the uniform of the Polish army.

Johnny pressed the picture between his hands and closed his eyes and for a moment there was darkness and then rushing out of the darkness came a wagon… no, not a wagon, a hearse. A horse-drawn hearse. The lamps had been muffled in black sacking. Of course it was a hearse because they were

(dying by the hundreds, yes, by the thousands, no match for the panzers, the wehrmacht, nineteenth-century cavalry against the tanks and machine guns. explosions. screaming, dying men. a horse with its guts blown out and its eyes rolling wildly, showing the white, an overturned cannon behind it and still they come. weizak comes, standing in his stirrups, his sword held high in the slanting rain of late summer 1939, his men following him, stumbling through the mud. the turret gun of the nazi tiger tank tracks him, braces him, brackets him, fires, and suddenly he is gone below the waist, the sword flying out of his hand; and down the road is warsaw. the nazi wolf is loose in europe)

“Really, we have to put a stop to this,” Brown said, his voice faraway and worried. “You're overexciting yourself, Johnny.”

The voices came from far away, from a hallway in time.

“He's put himself in some kind of trance,” Weizak said. Hot in here. He was sweating. He was sweating because

(the city's on fire, thousands are fleeing, a truck is roaring from side to side down a cobbled street, and the back of the truck is full of waving German soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets and the young woman is not smiling now, she is fleeing, no reason not to flee. the child has been sent away to safety and now the truck jumps the curb, the mudguard strikes her, shattering her hip and sending her flying through a plate glass window and into a clock shop and everything begins to chime. chime because of the time. the chime time is)

“Six o'clock,” Johnny said thickly. His eyes had rolled up to straining, bulging whites. “September 2, 1939, and all the cuckoo birds are singing.”

“Oh my God, what is it we have?” Weizak whispered. The nurse had backed up against the EEG console, her face pale and scared. Everyone is scared now because death is in the air. It's always in the air in this place, this

(hospital. smell of ether. they're screaming in the place of death. poland is dead, poland has fallen before the lightning warfare wehrmacht blitzkreig. shattered hip. the man in the next bed calling for water, calling, calling, calling. she remembers “THE BOY IS SAFE. “what boy? she doesn't know. what boy? what is her name. she doesn't remember. only that)

“The boy is safe,” Johnny said thickly. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

“We have to put a stop to this,” Brown repeated.

“How do you suggest we do that?” Weizak asked, his voice brittle. “It has gone too far to…

Voices fading. The voices are under the clouds. Everything is under the clouds. Europe is under the clouds of war. Everything is under the clouds but the peaks, the mountain peaks of

(switzerland. switzerland and now her name is BORENTZ. her name is JOHANNA BORENTZ and her husband is an engineer or an architect, whichever it is that builds the bridges. he builds in switzerland and there is goat's milk, goat's cheese. a baby. ooooh the labor! the labor is terrible and she needs drugs, morphine, this JOHANNA BORENTZ, because of the hip. the broken hip. it has mended, it has gone to sleep, but now it awakes and begins to scream as her pelvis spreads to let the baby out, one baby. two. and three. and four. they don't come all at once, no-they are a harvest of years, they are)

“The babies,” Johnny lilted, and now he spoke in a woman's voice, not his own voice at all. It was the voice of a woman. Then gibberish in song came from his mouth.

“What in the name of God… “Brown began.

“Polish, it is Polish!” Weizak cried. His eyes were bulging, his face pale. “It is a cradle song and it is in Polish, my God, my Christ, what is it we have here?”

Weizak leaned forward as if to cross the years with Johnny, as if to leap them, as if to

(bridge, a bridge, it's in turkey. then a bridge somewhere hot in the far east, is it Laos? can't tell, lost a man there, we lost HANS there, then a bridge in virginia, a bridge over the RAPPAHANNOCK RIVER and another bridge in california. we are applying for citizenship now and we go to classes in a hot little room in the back of a post-office where it always smells of glue. it is 1963, november, and when we hear kennedy has been killed in dallas we weep and when the little boy salutes his dead father's coffin she thinks “THE BOY IS SAFE” and it brings back memories of some burning, some great burning and sorrow, what boy? she dreams about the boy, it makes her head hurt. and the man dies, HELMUT BORENTZ dies and she and the children live in carmel california. in a house on. on. on. can't see the street sign, it's in the dead zone, like the rowboat, like the picnic table on the lawn. it's in the dead zone. like warsaw. the children go away, she goes to their graduation ceremonies one by one, and her hip hurts. one dies in vietnam. the rest of them are fine. one of them is building bridges. her name is JOHANNA BORENTZ and late at night alone now she sometimes thinks in the ticking darkness: “THE BOY IS SAFE. “)

Johnny looked up at them. His head felt strange. That peculiar light around Weizak had gone. He felt like himself again, but weak and a little pukey. He looked at the picture in his hands for a moment and then handed it back.

“Johnny?” Brown said. “Are you all right?”

“Tired,” he muttered.

“Can you tell us what happened to you?”

He looked at Weizak. “Your mother is alive,” he said.

“No, Johnny. She died many years ago. In the war.”

“A German trooptruck knocked her through a plate-glass show window and into a dock shop,” Johnny said. “She woke up in a hospital with amnesia. She had no identification, no papers. She took the name Johanna somebody. I didn't get that, but when the war was over she went to Switzerland and married a Swiss… engineer, I think. His specialty was building bridges, and his name was Helmut Borentz. So her married name was-is -Johanna Borentz.”

The nurse's eyes were getting bigger and bigger. Dr. Brown's face was tight, either because he had decided Johnny was having them all on or perhaps just because he didn't like to see his neat schedule of “tests disrupted.

But Weizak's face was still and thoughtful.

“She and Helmut Borentz had four children,” Johnny said in that same, calm, washed-out voice. “His job took him all over the world. He was in Turkey for a while. Somewhere in the Far East, Laos, I think, maybe Cambodia. Then he came here. Virginia first, then some other places I didn't get, finally California. He and Johanna became U. S. citizens. Helmut Borentz is dead. One of the children they had is also dead. The others are alive and fine. But she dreams about you sometimes. And in the dreams she thinks, “the boy is safe”. But she doesn't remember your name. Maybe she thinks it's too late.”

“California?” Weizak said thoughtfully. “Sam,” Dr. Brown said. “Really, you mustn't encourage this.”

“Where in California, John?”

“Carmel. By the sea. But I couldn't tell which street. It was there, but I couldn't tell. It was in the dead zone. Like the picnic table and the rowboat. But she's in Car-mel, California. Johanna Borentz. She's not old.”

“No, of course she would not be old,” Sam Weizak said in that same thoughtful, distant tone. “She was only twenty-four when the Germans invaded Poland.”

“Dr. Weizak, I have to insist,” Brown said harshly. Weizak seemed to come out of a deep study. He looked around as if noticing his younger colleague for the first time. “Of course,” he said. “Of course you must. And John has had his question-and-answer period… although I believe he has told us more than we have told him.”

“That's nonsense,” Brown said curtly, and Johnny thought: He's scared. Scared spitless.

Weizak smiled at Brown, and then at the nurse. She was eyeing Johnny as if he were a tiger in a poorly built cage. “Don't talk about this, Nurse. Not to your supervisor, your mother, your brother, your lover, or your priest. Understood?”

“Yes, Doctor,” the nurse said. But she'll talk, Johnny thought, and then glanced at Weizak. And he knows it.

He slept most of the afternoon. Around four P. M. he was rolled down the corridor to the elevator, taken down to neurology, and there were more tests. Johnny cried. He seemed to have very little control over the functions adults are supposed to be able to control. On his way back up, he urinated on himself and had to be changed like a baby. The first (but far from the last) wave of deep depression washed over him, carried him limply away, and he wished himself dead. Self-pity accompanied the depression and he thought how unfair this was. He had done a Rip van Winkle. He couldn't walk. His girl had married another man and his mother was in the grip of a religious mania, He couldn't see anything ahead that looked worth living for.

Back in his room, the nurse asked him if he would like anything. If Marie had been on duty, Johnny would have asked for ice water. But she had gone off at three.

“No,” he said, and rolled over to face the wall. After a little while, he slept.

CHAPTER EIGHT

His father and mother came in for an hour that evening, and Vera left a bundle of tracts.

“We're going to stay until the end of the week,” Herb said, “and then, if you're still doing fine, we'll be going back to Pownal for a while. But we'll be back up every weekend.”

“I want to stay with my boy,” Vera said loudly.

“It's best that you don't, Mom,” Johnny said. The depression had lifted a little bit, but he remembered how black it had been. If his mother started to talk about God's wonderful plan for him while he was in that state, he doubted if he would be able to hold back his cackles of hysterical laughter.

“You need me, John. You need me to explain

“First I need to get well,” Johnny said. “You can explain after I can walk. Okay?”

She didn't answer. There was an almost comically stubborn expression on her face-except there was nothing very funny about it. Nothing at all. Nothing but a quirk of fate, that's all. Five minutes earlier or later on that road would have changed everything. Now look at us, all of us fucked over royally. And she believes it's God's plan. It's either that or go completely crazy, I suppose

.

To break the awkward silence, Johnny said: “Well, did Nixon get reelected, dad? Who ran against him?”

“He got reelected,” Herb said. “He ran against Mc-Govern.”

“Who?”

“McGovern. George McGovern. Senator from South Dakota.”

“Not Muskie?”

“No. But Nixon's not president anymore. He resigned.”

“What?”

“He was a liar,” Vera said dourly. “He became swollen with pride and the Lord brought him low.”

“Nixon resigned?” Johnny was flabbergasted. “Him?”

“It was either quit or be fired,” Herb said. “They were getting ready to impeach him.”

Johnny suddenly realized that there had been some great and fundamental upheaval in American politics -almost surely as a result of the war in Vietnam-and he had missed it. For the first time he really felt like Rip van Winkle. How much had things changed? He was almost afraid to ask. Then a really chilling thought occurred.

“Agnew… Agnew's president?”

“Ford,” Vera said. “A good, honest man.”

“Henry Ford is president of the United States?”

“Not Henry,” she said. “Jerry.”

He stared from one to the other, more than half convinced that all this was a dream or a bizarre joke.

“Agnew resigned, too,” Vera said. Her lips were pressed thin and white. “He was a thief. He accepted a bribe right in his office. That's what they say.

“He didn't resign over the bribe,” Herb said. “He resigned over some mess back in Maryland. He was up to his neck in it, I guess. Nixon nominated Jerry Ford to become vice president. Then Nixon resigned last August and Ford took over. He nominated Nelson Rockefeller to be vice president. And that's where we are now.

“A divorced man,” Vera said grimly. “God forbid he ever becomes the president.”

“What did Nixon do?” Johnny asked. “Jesus Christ, I… “He glanced at his mother, whose brow had clouded instantly. “I mean, holy crow, if they were going to impeach him…

“You needn't take the Savior's name in vain over a bunch of crooked politicians,” Vera said. “It was Watergate.”

“Watergate? Was that an operation in Vietnam? Something like that?”

“The Watergate Hotel in Washington,” Herb said. “Some Cubans broke into the offices of the Democratic Committee there and got caught. Nixon knew about it. He tried to cover it up.”

“Are you kidding?” Johnny managed at last.

“It was the tapes,” Vera said. “And that John Dean. Nothing but a rat deserting a sinking ship, that's what I think. A common tattletale.”

“Daddy, can you explain this to me?”

“I'll try,” Herb said, “but I don't think the whole story has come out, even yet. And I'll bring you the books. There's been about a million books written on it already, and I guess there'll be a million more before it's finally done. Just before the election, in the summer of 1972…”

It was ten-thirty and his parents were gone. The lights on the ward had been dimmed. Johnny couldn't sleep. It was all dancing around in his head, a frightening jumble of new input. The world had changed more resoundingly than he would have believed possible in so short a time. He felt out of step and out of tune.

Gas prices had gone up nearly a hundred percent, his father had told him. At the time of his accident, you could buy regular gas for thirty or thirty-two cents a gallon. Now it was fifty-four cents and sometimes there were lines at the pumps. The legal speed limit all over the country was fifty-five miles an hour and the long-haul truckers had almost revolted over that.

But all of that was nothing. Vietnam was over. It had ended. The country had finally gone Communist. Herb said it had happened just as Johnny began to show signs that he might come out of his coma. After all those years and all that bloodshed, the heirs of Uncle Ho had rolled up the country like a windowshade in a matter of days.

The president of the United States had been to Red China. Not Ford, but Nixon. He had gone before he resigned. Nixon, of all people, the old witch-hunter himself. If anyone but his dad had told him that, Johnny would have flatly refused to believe.

It was all too much, it was too scary. Suddenly he didn't want to know any more, for fear it might drive him totally crazy. That pen Dr. Brown had had, that Flair -how many other things were there like that? How many hundreds of little things, all of them making the point over and over again: You lost part of your life, almost six percent, if the actuarial tables are to be believed. You're behind the times. You missed out.

“John?” The voice was soft. “Are you asleep, John?”

He turned over. A dim silhouette stood in his doorway. A small man with rounded shoulders. It was Weizak.

“No. I'm awake.”

“I hoped so. May I come in?”

“Yes. Please do.”

Weizak looked older tonight. He sat by Johnny's bed. “I was on the phone earlier,” he said. “I called directory assistance for Carmel, California. I asked for a Mrs. Johanna Borentz. Do you think there was such a number?”

“Unless it's unlisted Qr she doesn't have a phone at all,” Johnny said.

“She has a phone. I was given the number.”

“Ah,” Johnny said. He was interested because he liked Weizak, but that was all. He felt no need to have his knowledge of Johanna Borentz validated, because he knew it was valid knowledge-he knew it the same way he knew he was right-handed.

“I sat for a long time and thought about it,” Weizak said. “I told you my mother was dead, but that was really only an assumption. My father died in the defense of Warsaw. My mother simply never turned up, huh? It was logical to assume that she had been killed in the shelling… during the occupation… you understand. She never turned up, so it was logical to assume that. Amnesia… as a neurologist I can tell you that permanent, general amnesia is very, very rare. Probably rarer than true schizophrenia. I have never read of a documented case lasting thirtyfive years.”

“She recovered from her amnesia long ago,” Johnny said. “I think she simply blocked everything out. When her memory did come back, she had remarried and was the mother of two children… possibly three. Remembering became a guilt trip, maybe. But she dreams of you. “The boy is safe.” Did you call her?”

“Yes,” Weizak said. “I dialed it direct. Did you know you could do that now? Yes. It is a great convenience. You dial one, the area code, the number. Eleven digits and you can be in touch with any place in the country.

It is an amazing thing. In some ways a frightening thing… A boy-no, a young man-answered the telephone. I asked if Mrs. Borentz was at home. I heard him call, “Mom, it's for you.” Clunk went the receiver on the table or desk or whatever. I stood in Bangor, Maine, not forty miles from the Atlantic Ocean and listened to a young man put the phone down on a table in a town on the Pacific Ocean. My heart… it was pounding so hard it frightened me. The wait seemed long. Then she picked up the phone and said, “Yes? Hello?"”

“What did you say? How did you handle it?”

“I did not, as you say, handle it,” Weizak replied, and smiled crookedly. “I hung up the telephone. And I wished for a strong drink, but I did not have one.

“Are you satisfied it was her?”

“John, what a naive question! I was nine years old in 1939. I had not heard my mother's voice since then. She spoke only Polish when I knew her I speak only English now… I have forgotten much of my native language, which is a shameful thing. How could I be satisfied one way or the other?”

“Yes, but were you?”

Weizak scrubbed a hand slowly across his forehead. “Yes,” he said. “It was her. It was my mother.”

“But you couldn't talk to her?”

“Why should I?” Weizak asked, sounding almost angry. “Her life is her life, huh? It is as you said. The boy is safe. Should I upset a woman that is just coming into her years of peace? Should I take the chance of destroying her equilibrium forever? Those feelings of guilt you mentioned… should I set them free? Or even run the risk of so doing?”

“I don't know,” Johnny said. They were troublesome questions, and the answers were beyond him-but he felt that Weizak was trying to say something about what he had done by articulating the questions. The questions he could not answer.

“The boy is safe, the woman is safe in Carmel. The country is between them, and we let that be. But what about you, John? What are we going to do about you?”

“I don't understand what you mean.”

“I will spell it out for you then, huh? Dr. Brown is angry. He is angry at me, angry at you, and angry at himself, I suspect, for half-believing something he has been sure is total poppycock for his whole life. The nurse who was a witness will never keep her silence. She will tell her husband tonight in bed, and it may end there, but her husband may tell his boss, and it is very possible that the papers will have wind of this by tomorrow evening. “Coma Patient Re-Awakens with Second Sight. "”

“Second sight,” Johnny said. “Is that what it is?”

“I don't know what it is, not really. Is it psychic? Seer? Handy words that describe nothing, nothing at all. You told one of the nurses that her son's optic surgery was going to be successful…

“Marie,” Johnny murmured. He smiled a little. He liked Marie.

…and that is already all over the hospital. Did you see the future? Is that what second sight is? I don't know. You put a picture of my mother between your hands and were able to tell me where she lives today. Do you know where lost things and lost people may be found? Is that what second sight is? I don't know. Can you read thoughts? Influence objects of the physical world? Heal by the laying on of hands? These are all things that some call “psychic”. They are all related to the idea of “second sight”. They are things that Dr. Brown laughs at. Laughs? No. He doesn't laugh. He scoffs.”

“And you don't?”

“I think of Edgar Cayce. And Peter Hurkos. I tried to tell Dr. Brown about Hurkos and he scoffed. He doesn't want to talk about it; he doesn't want to know about it.”

Johnny said nothing.

“So… what are we going to do about you?”

“Does something need to be done?”

“I think so,” Weizak said. He stood up. “I'll leave you to think it out for yourself. But when you think, think about this: some things are better not seen, and some things are better lost than found.”

He bade Johnny good night and left quietly. Johnny was very tired now, but still sleep did not come for a long time.

CHAPTER NINE

Johnny's first surgery was scheduled for May 28. Both Weizak and Brown had explained the procedure carefully to him. He would be given a local anesthetic-neither of them felt a general could be risked. This first operation would be on his knees and ankles. His own ligaments, which had shortened during his long sleep, would be lengthened with a combination of plastic wonder-fibers. The plastic to be used was also employed in heart valve bypass surgery. The question was not so much one of his body's acceptance or rejection of the artificial ligaments, Brown told him, as it was a question of his legs” ability to adjust to the change. if they had good results with the knees and the ankles, three more operations were on the boards: one on the long ligaments of his thighs, one on the elbow-trap ligaments, and possibly a third on his neck, which he could barely turn at all. The surgery was to be performed by Raymond Ruopp, who had pioneered the technique. He was flying in from San Francisco.

“What does this guy Ruopp want with me, if he's such a superstar?” Johnny asked. Superstar was a word he had learned from Marie. She had used it in connection with a balding, bespectacled singer with the unlikely name of Elton John.

“You're underestimating your own superstar qualities,” Brown answered. “There are only a handful of people in the United States who have recovered from comas as long as yours was. And of that handful, your recovery from the accompanying brain damage has been the most radical and pleasing.”

Sam Weizak was more blunt. “You're a guinea pig, huh?”

“What?”

“Yes. Look into the light, please. “Weizak shone a light into the pupil of Johnny's left eye. “Did you know I can look right at your optic nerve with this thing? Yes. The eyes are more than the windows of the soul. They are one of the brain's most crucial maintenance points.”

“Guinea pig,” Johnny said morosely, staring into the savage point of light.

“Yes. “The light snapped off. “Don't feel so sorry for yourself. Many of the techniques to be employed in your behalf-and some of those already employed-were perfected during the Vietnam war. No shortage of guinea pigs in the V. A. hospitals, nuh? A man like Ruopp is interested in you because you are unique. Here is a man who has slept four-and-a-half years. Can we make him walk again? An interesting problem. He sees the monograph he will write on it for The New England Journal of Medicine. He looks forward to it the way a child looks forward to new toys under the Christmas tree. He does not see you, he does not see Johnny Smith in his pain, Johnny Smith who must take the bedpan and ring for the nurse to scratch if his back itches. That's good. His hands will not shake. Smile, Johnny. This Ruopp looks like a bank clerk, but he is maybe the best surgeon in North America.”

But it was hard for Johnny to smile.

He had read his way dutifully through the tracts his mother had left him. They depressed him and left him frightened all over again for her sanity. One of them, by a man named Salem Kirban, struck him as nearly pagan in its loving contemplation of a bloody apocalypse and the yawning barbecue pits of hell. Another described the coming Antichrist in pulp-horror terms. The others were a dark carnival of craziness: Christ was living under the South Pole, God drove flying saucers, New York was Sodom, L. A. was Gomorrah. They dealt with exorcism, with witches, with all manner of things seen and unseen. It was impossible for him to reconcile the pamphlets with the religious yet earthy woman he had known before his coma.

Three days after the incident involving Weizak's snap-shot of his mother, a slim and dark-haired reporter from the Bangor Daily News named David Bright showed up at the door of Johnny's room and asked if he could have a short interview.

“Have you asked the doctors?” Johnny asked.

Bright grinned. “Actually, no.”

“All right,” Johnny said. “In that case, I'd be happy to talk to you.”

“You're a man after my own heart,” Bright said. He came in and sat down.

His first questions were about the accident and about Johnny's thoughts and feelings upon slipping out of the coma and discovering he had misplaced nearly half a decade. Johnny answered these questions honestly and straightforwardly. Then Bright told him that he had heard from “a source” that Johnny had gained some sort of sixth sense as a result of the accident.

“Are you asking me if I'm psychic?”

Bright smiled and shrugged. “That'll do for a start.”

Johnny had thought carefully about the things Weizak had said. The more he thought, the more it seemed to him that Weizak had done exactly the right thing when he hung up the phone without saying anything. Johnny had begun to associate it in his mind with that W. W. Jacobs story, “The Monkey's Paw”. The paw was for wishing, but the price you paid for each of your three wishes was a black one. The old couple had wished for one hundred pounds and had lost their son in a mill accident-the mill's compensation had come to exactly one hundred pounds. Then the old woman had wished for her son back and he had come-but before she could open the door and see what a horror she had summoned out of its grave, the old man had used the last wish to send it back. As Weizak had said, maybe some things were better lost than found.

“No,” he said. “I'm no more psychic than you are.”

“According to my source, you…

“No, it isn't true.”

Bright smiled a trifle cynically, seemed to debate pressing the matter further, then turned to a fresh page in his notebook. He began to ask about Johnny's prospects for the future, his feelings about the road back, and Johnny also answered these questions as honestly as he could.

“So what are you going to do when you get out of here?” Bright asked, closing his notebook.

“I haven't really thought about that. I'm still trying to adjust to the idea that Gerald Ford is the president.”

Bright laughed. “You're not alone in that, my friend.”

“I suppose I'll go back to teaching. It's all I know. But right now that's too far ahead to think about.”

Bright thanked him for the interview and left. The artide appeared in the paper two days later, the day before his leg surgery. It was on the bottom of the front page, and the headline read: JOHN SMITH, MODERN RIP VAN WINKLE, FACES LONG ROAD BACK.

There were three pictures, one of them Johnny's picture for the Cleaves Mills High School yearbook (it had been taken barely a week before the accident), a picture of Johnny in his hospital bed, looking thin and twisted with his arms and legs in their bent positions. Between these two was a picture of the almost totally demolished taxi, lying on its side like a dead dog. There was no mention in Bright's artide of sixth senses, precognitive powers, or wild talents.

“How did you turn him off the ESP angle?” Weizak asked him that evening.

Johnny shrugged. “He seemed like a nice guy. Maybe he didn't want to stick me with it.”

“Maybe not,” Weizak said. “But he won't forget it. Not if he's a good reporter, and I understand that he is.”

“You understand?”

“I asked around.”

“Looking out for my best interests?”

“We all do what we can, nuh? Are you nervous about tomorrow, Johnny?”

“Not nervous, no. Scared is a more accurate word.”

“Yes, of course you are. I would be.”

“Will you be there?”

“Yes, in the observation section of the operating theater. You won't be able to tell me from the others in my greens, but I will be there.”

“Wear something,” Johnny said. “Wear something so I'll know it's you.”

Weizak looked at him, and smiled. “All right. I'll pin my watch to my tunic.”

“Good,” Johnny said. “What about Dr. Brown? Will he be there?”

“Dr. Brown is in Washington. Tomorrow he will present you to the American Society of Neurologists. I have read his paper. It is quite good. Perhaps overstated.”

“You weren't invited?”

Weizak shrugged. “I don't like to fly. That is something that scares me-”

“And maybe you wanted to stay here?”

Weizak smiled crookedly, spread his hands, and said nothing.

“He doesn't like me much, does he?” Johnny asked. “Dr. Brown?”

“No, not much,” Weizak said. “He thinks you are having us on. Making things up for some reason of your own. Seeking attention, perhaps. Don't judge him solely on that, John. His cast of mind makes it impossible for him to think otherwise. if you feel anything for Jim, feel a little pity. He is a brilliant man, and he will go far. Already he has offers, and someday soon he will fly from these cold north woods and Bangor will see him no more. He will go to Houston or Hawaii or possibly even to Paris. But he is curiously limited. He is a mechanic of the brain. He has cut it to pieces with his scalpel and found no soul. Therefore there is none. Like the Russian astronauts who circled the earth and did not see God. It is the empiricism of the mechanic, and a mechanic is only a child with superior motor control. You must never tell him I said that.”

“No.”

“And now you must rest. Tomorrow you have a long day.

All Johnny saw of the worldfamous Dr. Ruopp during the operation was a pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses and a large wen at the extreme left side of the man's forehead. The rest of him was capped, gowned, and gloved.

Johnny had been given two preop injections, one of demerol and one of atropine, and when he was wheeled in he was as high as a kite. The anesthetist approached with the biggest novocaine needle Johnny had ever seen in his life. He expected that the injection would hurt, and he was not wrong. He was injected between L4 and L5, the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae, high enough up to avoid the cauda equina, that bundle of nerves at the base of the spine that vaguely resembles a horse's tail.

Johnny lay on his stomach and bit his arm to keep from screaming.

After an endless time, the pain began to fade to a dull sensation of pressure. Otherwise, the lower half of his body was totally gone.

Ruopp's face loomed over him. The green bandit, Johnny thought. Jesse James in horn-rims. Your money or your life.

“Are you comfortable, Mr. Smith?” Ruopp asked.

“Yes. But I'd just as soon not go through that again.”

“You may read magazines, if you like. Or you may watch in the mirror, if you feel it will not upset you.”

“All right.”

“Nurse, give me a blood pressure, please.”

“One-twenty over seventy-six, Doctor.”

“That's lovely. Well, group, shall we begin?”

“Save me a drumstick,” Johnny said weakly, and was surprised by the hearty laughter. Ruopp patted his sheet-covered shoulder with one thinly gloved hand.

He watched Ruopp select a scalpel and disappear behind the green drapes hung over the metal hoop that curved above Johnny. The mirror was convex, and Johnny had a fairly good if slightly distorted view of everything.

“Oh yes,” Ruopp said. “Oh yes, dee-de-dee… here's what we want… hum-de-hum… okay… damp, please, Nurse, come on, wake up for Christ's sake… yes sir… now I believe I'd like one of those… no, hold it… don't give me what I ask for, give me what I need… yes, okay. Strap, please.”

With forceps, the nurse handed Ruopp something that looked like a bundle of thin wires twisted together. Ruopp picked them delicately out of the air with tweezers.

Like an Italian dinner, Johnny thought, and look at all that spaghetti sauce. That was what made him feel ill, and he looked away. Above him, in the gallery, the rest of the bandit gang looked down at him. Their eyes looked pale and merciless and frightening. Then he spotted Weizak, third from the right, his watch pinned neatly to the front of his gown.

Johnny nodded.

Weizak nodded back.

That made it a little better.

Ruopp finished the connections between his knees and calves, and Johnny was turned over. Things continued. The anesthesiologist asked him if he felt all right. Johnny told her he thought he felt as well as possible under the circumstances. She asked him if he would like to listen to a tape and he said that would be very nice. A few moments later the dear, sweet voice of Joan Baez filled the operating room. Ruopp did his thing. Johnny grew sleepy and dozed off. When he woke up the operation was still going on. Weizak was still there. Johnny raised one hand, acknowledging his presence, and Weizak nodded again.

An hour later it was done. He was wheeled into a recovery room where a nurse kept asking him if he could tell her how many of his toes she was touching. After a while, Johnny could.

Ruopp came in, his bandit's mask hanging off to one side.

“All right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“It went very well,” Ruopp said. “I'm optimistic.”

“Good.”

“You'll have some pain,” Ruopp said. “Quite a lot of it, perhaps. The therapy itself will give you a lot of pain at first. Stick with it.”

“Stick with it,” Johnny muttered.

“Good afternoon,” Ruopp said, and left. Probably, Johnny thought, to play a quick nine on the local golf course before it got too dark.

Quite a lot of pain.

By nine P. M. the last of the local had worn off, and Johnny was in agony. He was forbidden to move his legs without the help of two nurses. It felt as if nail-studded belts had been looped around his knees and then cinched cruelly tight. Time slowed to an inchworm's crawl. He would glance at his watch, sure that an hour had passed since the last time he had looked at it, and would see instead that it had only been four minutes. He became sure he couldn't stand the pain for another minute, then the minute would pass, and he would be sure he couldn't stand it for another minute.

He thought of all the minutes stacked up ahead, like coins in a slot five miles high, and the blackest depression he had ever known swept over him in a smooth solid wave and carried him down. They were going to torture him to death. Operations on his elbows, thighs, his neck. Therapy. Walkers, wheelchairs, canes.

You're going to have pain… stick with it.

No, you stick with it, Johnny thought. Just leave me alone. Don't come near me again with your butchers” knives. If this is your idea of helping, I want no part of it.

Steady throbbing pain, digging into the meat of him.

Warmth on his belly, trickling.

He had wet himself.

Johnny Smith turned his face toward the wall and cried.

Ten days after that first operation and two weeks before the next one was scheduled, Johnny looked up from the book he was reading-Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men-and saw Sarah standing in the doorway, looking at him hesitantly.

“Sarah,” he said. “It is you, isn't it?”

She let out her breath shakily. “Yes. It's me, Johnny.”

He put the book down and looked at her. She was smartly dressed in a light-green linen dress, and she held a small, brown clutch bag in front of her like a shield. She had put a streak in her hair and it looked good. It also made him feel a sharp and twisting stab of jealousy -had it been her idea, or that of the man she lived and slept with? She was beautiful.

“Come in,” he said. “Come in and sit down.”

She crossed the room and suddenly he saw himself as she must see him-too thin, his body slumped a little to one side in the chair by the window, his legs stuck out straight on the hassock, dressed in a johnny and a cheap hospital bathrobe.

“As you can see, I put on my tux,” he said.

“You look fine. “She kissed his cheek and a hundred memories shuffled brightly through his mind like a doubled pack of cards. She sat in the other chair, crossed her legs, and tugged at the hem of her dress.

They looked at each other without saying anything.

He saw that she was very nervous. If someone were to touch her on the shoulder, she would probably spring right out of her seat.

“I didn't know if I should come,” she said, “but I really wanted to.”

“I'm glad you did.”

Like strangers on a bus, he thought dismally. It's got to be more than this, doesn't it?

“So how're you doing?” she asked.

He smiled. “I've been in the war. Want to see my battle scars?” He raised his gown over his knees, showing the S-shaped incisions that were now beginning to heal. They were still red and hashmarked with stitches.

“Oh, my Lord, what are they doing to you?”

“They're trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Johnny said. “All the king's horses, all the king's men, and all the king's doctors. So I guess… “And then he stopped, because she was crying.

“Don't say it like that. Johnny,” she said. “Please don't say it like that.”

“I'm sorry. It was just… I was trying to joke about it. “Was that it? Had he been trying to laugh it off or had it been a way of saying, Thanks for coming to see me, they're cutting me to pieces?

“Can you? Can you joke about it?” She had gotten a Kleenex from the clutch bag and was wiping her eyes with it.

“Not very often. I guess seeing you again… the defenses go up, Sarah.”

“Are they going to let you out of here?”

“Eventually. It's like running the gauntlet in the old days, did you ever read about that? If I'm still alive after every Indian in the tribe has had a swing at me with his tomahawk, I get to go free.”

“This summer?”

“No, I… I don't think so.”

“I'm so sorry it happened,” she said, so low he could barely hear her. “I try to figure out why… or how things could have changed -,. and it just robs me of sleep. if I hadn't eaten that bad hot dog… if you had stayed instead of going back… “She shook her head and looked at him, her eyes red. “It seems sometimes there's no percentage.

Johnny smiled. “Double zero. House spin. Hey, you remember that? I clobbered that Wheel, Sarah.”

“Yes. You won over five hundred dollars.

He looked at her, still smiling, but now the smile was puzzled, wounded almost. “You want to know something funny? My doctors think maybe the reason I lived was because I had some sort of head injury when I was young. But I couldn't remember any, and neither could my mom and dad. But it seems like every time I think of it, I flash on that Wheel of Fortune… and a smell like burning rubber.”

“Maybe you were in a car accident… “she began doubtfully.

“No, I don't think that's it. But it's like the Wheel was my warning… and I ignored it.”

She shifted a little and said uneasily, “Don't, Johnny.”

He shrugged. “Or maybe it was just that I used up four years of luck in one evening. But look at this, Sarah. “Carefully, painfully, he took one leg off the hassock, bent it to a ninety degree angle, then stretched it out on the hassock again. “Maybe they can put Humpty back together again. When I woke up, I couldn't do that, and I couldn't get my legs to straighten out as much as they are now, either.”

“And you can think, Johnny,” she said. “You can talk. We all thought that… you know.”

“Yeah, Johnny the turnip. “A silence fell between them again, awkward and heavy. Johnny broke it by saying with forced brightness, “So how's by you?”

“Well… I'm married. I guess you knew that.”

“Dad told me.”

“He's such a fine man,” Sarah said. And then, in a burst, “I couldn't wait, Johnny. I'm sorry about that, too. The doctors said you'd never come out of it, that you'd get lower and lower until you just… just slipped away. And

even if I had known… “She looked up at him with an uneasy expression of defense on her face. “Even if I had known, Johnny, I don't think I could have waited. Four-and-a-half years is a long time.”

“Yeah, it is,” he said. “That's a hell of a long time. You want to hear something morbid? I got them to bring me four years worth of news magazines just so I could see who died. Truman. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix-Jesus, I thought of him doing “Purple Haze” and I could hardly believe it. Dan Blocker. And you and me. We just slipped away.”

“I feel so bad about it,” she said, nearly whispering. “So damn guilty. But I love the guy, Johnny. I love him a lot.”

“Okay, that's what matters.”

“His name is Walt Hazlett, and he's a…”

“I think I'd rather hear about your kid,” Johnny said. “No offense, huh?”

“He's a peach,” she said, smiling. “He's seven months old now. His name is Dennis but we call him Denny. He's named after his paternal grandfather.”

“Bring him in sometime. I'd like to see him.”

“I will,” Sarah said, and they smiled at each other falsely, knowing that nothing of the kind was ever going to happen. “Johnny, is there anything that you need?”

Only you, babe. And the last four-and-a-half years back again.

“Nah,” he said. “You still teachin?”

“Still teachin, for a while yet,” she agreed.

“Still snortin that wicked cocaine?”

“Oh Johnny, you haven't changed. Same old tease.”

“Same old tease,” he agreed, and the silence fell between them again with an almost audible thump.

“Can I come see you again?”

“Sure,” he said. “That would be fine, Sarah. “He hesitated, not wanting it to end so inconclusively, not wanting to hurt her or himself if it could be avoided. Wanting to say something honest.

“Sarah,” he said, “you did the right thing.”

“Did I?” she asked. She smiled, and it trembled at the corners of her mouth. “I wonder. It all seems so cruel and… I can't help it, so wrong. I love my husband and my baby, and when Walt says that someday we're going to be living in the finest house in Bangor, I believe him. He says someday he's going to run for Bill Cohen's seat in the House, and I believe that, too. He says someday someone from Maine is going to be elected president, and I can almost believe that. And I come in here and look at your poor legs… “She was beginning to cry again now. “They look like they went through a Mixmaster or something and you're so thin…

“No, Sarah, don't.”

“You're so thin and it seems wrong and cruel and I hate it, I hate it, because it isn't right at all, none of it!”

“Sometimes nothing is right, I guess,” he said. “Tough old world. Sometimes you just have to do what you can and try to live with it. You go and be happy, Sarah. Ann if you want to come and see me, come on and come. Bring a cribbage board.”

“I will,” she said. “I'm sorry to cry. Not very cheery for you, huh?”

“It's all right,” he said, and smiled. “You want to get off that cocaine, baby. Your nose'll fall off.”

She laughed a little. “Same old Johnny,” she said. Suddenly she bent and kissed his mouth. “0h Johnny, be well soon.”

He looked at her thoughtfully as she drew away.

“Johnny?”

“You didn't leave it,” he said. “No, you didn't leave it at all.”

“Leave what?” She was frowning in puzzlement.

“Your wedding ring. You didn't leave it in Montreal.”

He had put his hand up to his forehead and was rubbing the patch of skin over his right eye with his fingers. His arm cast a shadow and she saw with something very like superstitious fear that his face was half-light, half-dark. It made her think of the Halloween mask he had scared her with. She and Walt had honeymooned in Montreal, but how could Johnny know that? Unless maybe Herb had told him. Yes, that was almost certainly it. But only she and Walt knew that she had lost her wedding ring somewhere in the hotel room. No one else knew because he had bought her another ring before they flew home. She had been too embarrassed to tell anyone, even her mother.

“How…

Johnny frowned deeply, then smiled at her. His hand fell away from his forehead and clasped its mate in his lap.

“It wasn't sized right,” he said. “You were packing, don't you remember, Sarah? He was out buying something and you were packing. He was out buying… buying… don't know. It's in the dead zone.”

Dead zone?

“He went out to a novelty shop and bought a whole bunch of silly stuff as souvenirs. Whoopee cushions and things like that. But Johnny, how could you know I lost my r…

“You were packing. The ring wasn't sized right, it was a lot too big. You were going to have it taken care of when you got back. But in the meantime, you…… That puzzled frown began to return, then cleared immediately. He smiled at her. “You stuffed it with toilet paper!”

There was no question about the fear now. It was coiling lazily in her stomach like cold water. Her hand crept up to her throat and she stared at him, nearly hypnotized. He's got the same look in his eyes, that same cold amused look that he had when he was beating the Wheel that night. What's happened to you, Johnny? What are you? The blue of his eyes had darkened to a near violet, and he seemed far away. She wanted to run. The room itself seemed to be darkening, as if he were somehow tearing the fabric of reality, pulling apart the links between past and present.

“It slipped off your finger,” he said. “You were putting his shaving stuff into one of those side pockets and it just sllipped off. You didn't notice you'd lost it until later, and so you thought it was somewhere in the room. “He laughed, and it was a high, tinkling, tripping sound-not like Johnny's usual laugh at all-but cold… cold. “Boy, you two turned that room upside down. But you packed it. It's still in that suitcase pocket. All this time. You go up in the attic and look, Sarah. You'll see.”

In the corridor outside, someone dropped a water glass or something and cursed in surprise when it broke. Johnny glanced toward the sound, and his eyes cleared. He looked back, saw her frozen, wide-eyed face, and frowned with concern.

“What? Sarah, did I say something wrong?”

“How did you know?” she whispered. “How could you know those things?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Sarah, I'm sorry” if I… “Johnny, I ought to go, Denny's with the sitter. “All right. Sarah, I'm sorry I upset you.”

“How could you know about my ring, Johnny?” He could only shake his head.

Halfway down the first-floor corridor, her stomach began to feel strange. She found the ladies” just in time. She hurried in, dosed the door of one of the stalls, and threw up violently. She flushed and then stood with her eyes closed, shivering, but also close to laughter. The last time she had seen Johnny she had thrown up, too. Rough justice? Brackets in time, like bookends? She put her hands over her mouth to stifle whatever might be trying to get out-laughter or maybe a scream. And in the darkness the world seemed to tilt irrationally, like a dish. Like a spinning Wheel of Fortune.

She had left Denny with Mrs. Labelle, so when she got home the house was silent and empty. She went up the narrow stairway to the attic and turned the switch that controlled the two bare, dangling light bulbs. Their luggage was stacked up in one corner, the Montreal travel stickers still pasted to the sides of the orange Grants” suitcases. There were three of them. She opened the first, felt through the elasticized side pouches, and found nothing. Likewise the second. Likewise the third.

She drew in a deep breath and then let it out, feeling foolish and a little disappointed-but mostly relieved. Overwhelmingly relieved. No ring. Sorry, Johnny. But on the other hand, I'm not sorry at all. It would have been just a little bit too spooky.

She started to slide the suitcases back into place between a tall pile of Walt's old college texts and the floor lamp that crazy woman's dog had knocked over and which Sarah had never had the heart to throw out. And as she dusted off her hands preparatory to putting the whole thing behind her, a small voice far inside her whispered, almost too low to hear, Sort of a flying search, wasn't it? Didn't really want to find anything, did you, Sarah?

No. No, she really hadn't wanted to find anything. And if that little voice thought she was going to open all those suitcases again, it was crazy. She was fifteen minutes in picking up Denny. Walt was bringing home one of the senior partners in his firm for dinner (a very big deal), and she owed Bettye Hackman a letter-from the Peace Corps in Uganda, Bettye had gone directly into marriage with the son of a staggeringly rich Kentucky horse breeder. Also, she ought to dean both bathrooms, set her hair, and give Denny a bath. There was really too much to do to be frigging around up in this hot, dirty attic.

So she pulled all three suitcases open again and this time she searched the side pockets very carefully, and tucked all the way down in the corner of the third suitcase she found her wedding ring. She held it up to the glare of one of the naked bulbs and read the engraving inside, still as fresh as it had been on the day Walt slipped the ring on her finger: WALTER AND SARAH HAZLETT-JULY 9, 1972.

Sarah looked at it for a long time.

Then she put the suitcases back, turned off the lights, and went back downstairs. She changed out of the linen dress, which was now streaked with dust, and into slacks and a light top. She went down the block to Mrs. Labelle's and picked up her son. They went home and Sarah put Denny in the living room, where he crawled around vigorously while she prepared the roast and peeled some potatoes. With the roast in the oven, she went into the living room and saw that Denny had gone to sleep on the rug. She picked him up and put him in his crib. Then she began to dean the toilets. And in spite of everything, in spite of the way the dock was racing toward dinnertime, her mind never left the ring. Johnny had known. She could even pinpoint the moment he had come by this knowledge. When she had kissed him before leaving.

Just thinking about him made her feel weak and strange, and she wasn't sure why. It was all mixed up. His crooked smile, so much the same, his body, so terribly changed, so light and undernourished, the lifeless way his hair lay against his scalp contrasting so blindingly with the rich memories she still held of him. She had wanted to kiss him.

“Stop it,” she murmured to herself. Her face in the bathroom mirror looked like a stranger's face. Flushed and hot and let's face it, gang, sexy.

Her hand dosed on the ring in the pocket of her slacks, and almost-but not quite-before she was aware of what she was going to do, she had thrown it into the clean, slightly blue water of the toilet bowl. All sparkly clean so that if Mr. Treaches of Baribault, Treaches, Moorehouse, and Gendron had to take a leak sometime during the dinner party, he wouldn't be offended by any unsightly ring around the bowl, who knows what road-blocks may stand in the way of a young man on his march toward the counsels of the mighty, right? Who knows anything in this world?

It made a tiny splash and sank slowly to the bottom of the dear water, turning lazily over and over. She thought she heard a small clink when it struck the porcelain at the bottom, but that was probably just imagination. Her

head throbbed. The attic had been hot and stale and musty. But Johnny's kiss-that had been sweet. So sweet.

Before she could think about what she was doing (and thus allow reason to reassert itself), she reached out and flushed the toilet. It went with a bang and a roar. It seemed louder, maybe, because her eyes were squeezed shut. When she opened them, the ring was gone. It had been lost, and now it was lost again.

Suddenly her legs felt weak and she sat down on the edge of the tub and put her hands over her face. Her hot, hot face. She wouldn't go back and see Johnny again. It wasn't a good idea. It had upset her. Walt was bringing home a senior partner and she had a bottle of Mondavi and a budget-fracturing roast, those were the things she would think about. She should be thinking about how much she loved Walt, and about Denny asleep in his crib. She should think about how, once you made your choices in this crazy world, you had to live with them. And she would not think about Johnny Smith and his crooked, charming smile anymore.

The dinner that night was a great success.

CHAPTER TEN

The doctor put Vera Smith on a blood-pressure drug called Hydrodiural. It didn't lower her blood pressure much ('not a dime's worth,” she was fond of writing in her letters), but it did make her feel sick and weak. She had to sit down and rest after vacuuming the floor. Climbing a flight of stairs made her stop at the top and pant like a doggy on a hot August afternoon. If Johnny hadn't told her it was for the best, she would have thrown the pills out the window right then.

The doctor tried her on another drug, and that made her heart race so alarmingly that she did stop taking it.

“This is a trial-and-error procedure,” the doctor said. “We'll get you fixed up eventually, Vera. Don't worry.

“I don't worry,” Vera said. “My faith is in the Lord God.”

“Yes, of course it is. Just as it should be, too.”

By the end of June, the doctor had settled on a combination of Hydrodiural and another drug called Aldomet fat, yellow, expensive pills, nasty things. When she started taking the two drugs together, it seemed like she had to make water every fifteen minutes. She had headaches. She had heart palpitations. The doctor said her blood pressure was down into the normal range again, but she didn't believe him. What good were doctors, anyway? Look what they were doing to her Johnny, cutting him up like butcher's meat, three operations already, he looked like a monster with stitches all over his arms and legs and neck, and he still couldn't get around without one of those walkers, like old Mrs. Sylvester had to use. If her blood pressure was down, why did she feel so crummy all the time?

“You've got to give your body time enough to get used to the medication,” Johnny said. It was the first Saturday in July, and his parents were up for the weekend. Johnny had just come back from hydrotherapy, and he looked pale and haggard. In each hand he held a small lead ball, and he was raising them and then lowering them into his lap as,they talked, flexing his elbows, building up his biceps and triceps. The healing scars which ran like slashmarks across his elbows and forearms expanded and contracted.

“Put your faith in God, Johnny,” Vera said. “There's no need of all this foolishness. Put your faith in God and he'll help you.”

“Vera… “Herb began.

“Don't you Vera me. This is foolishness! Doesn't the Bible say, ask and it shall be given, knock and it shall be opened unto you? There's no need for me to take that evil medicine and no need for my boy to let those doctors go on torturing him. It's wrong, it's not helping, and it's sinful!”

Johnny put the balls of lead shot on the bed. The muscles in his arms were trembling. He felt sick to his stomach and exhausted and suddenly furious at his mother.

“The Lord helps those who help themselves,” he said. “You don't want the Christian God at all, Mom. You want a magic genie that's going to come out of a bottle and give you three wishes.”

“Johnny!”

“Well, it's true.”

“Those doctors put that idea in your head! All of these crazy ideas I” Her lips were trembling; her eyes wide but tearless. “God brought you out of that coma to do his will, John. These others, they're just…

“Just trying to get me back on my feet so I won't have to do God's will from a wheelchair the rest of my life.”

“Let's not have an argument,” Herb said. “Families shouldn't argue. “And hurricanes shouldn't blow, but they do every year, and nothing he could say was going to stop this. It had been coming.

“If you put your trust in God, Johnny… “Vera began, taking no notice of Herb at all.

“I don't trust anything anymore.”

“I'm sorry to hear you say that,” she said. Her voice was stiff and distant. “Satan's agents are everywhere. They'll try to turn you from your destiny. Looks like they are getting along with it real well.”

“You have to make some kind of… of eternal thing out of it, don't you? I'll tell you what it was, it was a stupid accident. a couple of kids were dragging and I just happened to get turned into dog meat. You know what I want, Mom? I want to get out of here. That's all I want. And I want you to go on taking your medicine and and try to get your feet back on the ground. That's all I want.”

“I'm leaving. “She stood up. Her face was pale and drawn. “I'll pray for you, Johnny.”

He looked at her helpless, frustrated, and unhappy. His anger was gone. He had taken it out on her. “Keep taking your medicine! “he said.

“I pray that you'll see the light.”

She left the room, her face set and as grim as stone.

Johnny looked helplessly at his father.

“John, I wish you hadn't done that,” Herb said.

“I'm tired. It doesn't do a thing for my judgment. Or my temper.”

“Yeah,” Herb said. He seemed about to say more and didn't.

“Is she still planning to go out to California for that flying saucer symposium or whatever it is?”

“Yes. But she may change her mind. You never know from one day to the next, and it's still a month away.”

“You ought to do something.”

“Yeah? What? Put her away? Commit her?” Johnny shook his head. “I don't know. But maybe it's time you thought about that seriously instead of just acting like it's out of the question. She's sick. You have to see that.”

Herb said loudly: “She was all right before you…

Johnny winced, as if slapped.

Look, I'm sorry. John, I didn't mean that.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“No, I really didn't. “Herb's face was a picture of misery. “Look, I ought to go after her. She's probably leafleting the hallways by now.”

“Okay.”

“Johnny, just try to forget this and concentrate on getting well. She does love you, and so do I. Don't be hard on us.”

“No. It's all right, dad.”

Herb kissed Johnny's cheek. “I have to go after her.”

“All right.”

Herb left. When they were gone, Johnny got up and tottered the three steps between his chair and the bed. Not much. But something. A start, He wished more than his father knew that he hadn't blown up at his mother like that. He wished it because an odd sort of certainty was growing in him that his mother was not going to live much longer.

Vera stopped taking her medication. Herb talked to her, then cajoled, finally demanded. It did no good. She showed him the letters of her “correspondents in Jesus”, most of them scrawled and full of misspellings, all of them supporting her stand and promising to pray for her. One of them was from a lady in Rhode Island who had also been at the farm in Vermont, waiting for the end of the world (along with her pet Pomeranian, Otis). “GOD is the best medicine,” this lady wrote, “ask GOD and YOU WILL BE HEALED, not DRS who OSURP the POWER of GOD, it is DRS who have caused all the CANCER in this evil world with there DEVIL'S MEDDLING, anyone who has had SURGERY for instance, even MINOR like TONSILS OUT, sooner or later they will end up with CANCER, this is a proven fact, so ask GOD, pray GOD, merge YOUR WILL with HIS WILL and YOU WILL BE HEALED!!”

Herb talked to Johnny on the phone, and the next day Johnny called his mother and apologized for being so short with her. He asked her to please start taking the medicine again-for him. Vera accepted his apology, but refused to go back to the medication. If God needed her treading the earth, then he would see she continued to tread it. If God wanted to call her home, he would do that even if she took a barrel of pills a day. It was a seamless argument, and Johnny's only possible rebuttal was the one that Catholics and Protestants alike have rejected for eighteen hundred years: that God works His will through the mind of man as well as through the spirit of man.

“Momma,” he said, “haven't you thought that God's will was for some doctor to invent that drug so you could live longer? Can't you even consider that idea?”

Long distance was no medium for theological argument. She hung up.

The next day Marie Michaud came into Johnny's room, put her head on his bed, and wept.

“Here, here,” Johnny said, startled and alarmed. “What's this? What's wrong?”

“My boy,” she said, still crying. “My Mark. They operated on him and it was just like you said. He's fine. He's going to see out of his bad eye again. Thank God.”

She hugged Johnny and he hugged her back as best he could. With her warm tears on his own cheek, he thought that whatever had happened to him wasn't all bad. Maybe some things should be told, or seen, or found again. It wasn't even so farfetched to think that God was working through him, although his own concept of God was fuzzy and ill-defined. He held Marie and told her how glad he was. He told her to remember that he wasn't the one who had operated on Mark, and that he barely remembered what it was that he had told her. She left shortly after that, drying her eyes as she went, leaving Johnny alone to think.

Early in August, Dave Pelsen came to see Johnny. The Cleaves Mills High assistant principal was a small, neat man who wore thick glasses and Hush Puppies and a series of loud sports jackets. Of all the people who came to see Johnny during that almost endless summer of 1975, Dave had changed the least. The gray was speckled a little more fully through his hair, but that was all.

“So how are you doing? Really?” Dave asked, when they had finished the amenities.

“Not so bad,” Johnny said. “I can walk alone now if I don't overdo it. I can swim six laps in the pool. I get headaches sometimes, real killers, but the doctors say I can expect that to go on for some time. Maybe the rest of my life.”

“Mind a personal question?”

“If you're going to ask me if I can still get it up,” Johnny said with a grin, “that's affirmative.”

“That's good to know, but what I wanted to know about is the money. Can you pay for this?”

Johnny shook his head. “I've been in the hospital for going on five years. No one but a Rockefeller could pay for that. My father and mother got me into some sort of state-funded program. Total Disaster, or something like that.”

Dave nodded. “The Extraordinary Disaster program. I figured that. But how did they keep you out of the state hospital, Johnny? That place is the pits.”

“Dr. Weizak and Dr. Brown saw to that. And they're largely responsible for my having been able to come back as far as I have. I was a… a guinea pig, Dr. Weizak says. How long can we keep this comatose man from turning into a total vegetable? The physical therapy unit was working on me the last two years I was in coma. I had megavitamin shots… my ass still looks like a case of smallpox. Not that they expected any return on the project from me personally. I was assumed to be a terminal case almost from the time I came in. Weizak says that what he and Brown did with me is aggressive life support”. He thinks it's the beginning of a response to all the criticism about sustaining life after hope of recovery is gone. Anyway, they couldn't continue to use me if I'd gone over to the state hospital, so they kept me here. Eventually, they would have finished with me and then I would have gone to the state hospital.”

“Where the most sophisticated care you would have gotten would have been a turn every six hours to prevent bedsores,” Dave said. “And if you'd waked up in 1980, you would have been a basket case.”

“I think I would have been a basket case no matter what,” Johnny said. He shook his head slowly. “I think if someone proposes one more operation on me, I'll go nuts. And I'm still going to have a limp and I'll never be able to turn my head all the way to the left.”

“When are they letting you out?”

“In three weeks, God willing.”

“Then what?”

Johnny shrugged. “I'm going down home, I guess. To Pownal. My mother's going to be in California for a while on a… a religious thing. Dad and I can use the time to get reacquainted. I got a letter from one of the big literary agents in New York… well, not him, exactly, but one of his assistants. They think there might be a book in what happened to me. I thought I'd try to do two or three chapters and an outline, maybe this guy or his assistants can sell it. The money would come in pretty damn handy, no kidding there.”

“Has there been any other media interest?”

“Well, the guy from the Bangor Daily News who did that original story…

“Bright? He's good.”

“He'd like to come down to Pownal after I blow this joint and do a feature story. I like the guy; but right now I'm holding him off. There's no money in it for me, and right now, frankly, that's what I'm looking for. I'd go on “To Tell the Truth” if I thought I could make two hundred bucks out of it. My folks” savings are gone. They sold their car and bought a clunker. Dad took a second mortgage on the house when he should have been thinking about retiring and selling it and living on the proceeds.”

“Have you thought about coming back into teaching?”

Johnny glanced up. “Is that an offer?”

“It ain't chopped liver.”

“I'm grateful,” Johnny said. “But I'm just not going to be ready in September, Dave.”

“I wasn't thinking about September. You must remember Sarah's friend, Anne Strafford?” Johnny nodded. “Well, she's Anne Beatty now, and she's going to have a baby in December. So we need an English teacher second semester. Light schedule. Four classes, one senior study hall, two free periods.”

“Are you making a firm offer, Dave?”

“Firm.”

“That's pretty damn good of you,” Johnny said hoarsely.

“Hell with that,Dave said easily. “You were a pretty damn good teacher.”

“Can I have a couple of weeks to think it over?”

“Until the first of October, if you want,” Dave said. “You'd still be able to work on your book, I think. If it looks like there might be a possibility there.”

Johnny nodded.

“And you might not want to stay down there in Pownal too long,” Dave said. “You might find it… uncomfortable.”

Words rose to Johnny's lips and he had to choke them off.

Not for long, Dave. You see, my mother's in the process of blowing her brains out right now. She's just not using a gun. She's going to have a stroke. She'll be dead before Christmas unless my father and I can persuade her to start taking her medicine again, and I don't think we can. And I'm a part of it-how much of a part I don't know. I don't think I want to know.

Instead he replied, “News travels, huh?”

Dave shrugged. “I understand through Sarah that your mother has had problems adjusting. She'll come around, Johnny. In the meantime, think about it.”

“I will. In fact, I'll give you a tentative yes right now. It would be good to teach again. To get back to normal.”

“You're my man,” Dave said.

After he left, Johnny lay down on his bed and looked out the window. He was very tired. Get back to normal Somehow he didn't think that was ever really going to happen.

He felt one of his headaches coming on.

The fact that Johnny Smith had come out of his coma with something extra finally did get into the paper, and it made page one under David Bright's byline. It happened less than a week before Johnny left the hospital.

He was in physical therapy, lying on his back on a floorpad. Resting on his belly was a twelve-pound medicine ball. His physical therapist, Eileen Magown, was standing above him and counting off situps. He was supposed to do ten of them, and he was currently struggling over number eight. Sweat was streaming down his face, and the healing scars on his neck stood out bright red, Eileen was a small, homely woman with a whipcord body, a nimbus of gorgeous, frizzy red hair, and deep green eyes flecked with hazel. Johnny sometimes called her-with a mixture of irritation and amusement-the world's smallest Marine D. I. She had ordered and cajoled and demanded him back from a bed-fast patient who could barely hold a glass of water to a man who could walk without a cane, do three chinups at a time, and do a complete turn around the hospital pool in fifty-three seconds-not Olympic time, but not bad. She was unmarried and lived in a big house on Center Street in Old-town with her four cats. She was slate-hard and she wouldn't take no for an answer.

Johnny collapsed backward. “Nope,” he panted. “Oh, I don't think so, Eileen.”

“Up. boy!” she cried in high and sadistic good humor. “Up! Up! Just three more and you can have a Coke!”

“Give me my ten-pound ball and I'll give you two more.”

“That ten-pound ball is going into the Guinness Book of Records as the world's biggest suppository if you don't give me three more. Up!”

“Urrrrrrgrah!” Johnny cried, jerking through number eight. He flopped back down, then jerked up again.

“Great! “Eileen cried. “One more, one more!”

“OOOOARRRRRRRRUNCH!” Johnny screamed, and sat up for the tenth time. He collapsed to the mat, letting the medicine ball roil away. “I ruptured myself, are you happy. all my guts just came loose, they're floating around inside me, I'll sue you, you goddam harpy.”

“Jeez, what a baby,” Eileen said, offering him her hand. “This is nothing compared to what I've got on for next time.”

“Forget it,” Johnny said. “All I I'm gonna do next time is swim in the…”

He looked at her, an expression of surprise spreading over his face. His grip tightened on her hand until it was almost painful.

“Johnny? What's wrong? Is it a charley horse?”

“Oh gosh,” Johnny said mildly.

“Johnny?”

He was still gripping her hand, looking into her face with” a faraway, dreamy contemplation that made her feel nervous. She had heard things about Johnny Smith, rumors that she had disregarded with her own brand of hard-headed pragmatism. There was a story that he had predicted Marie Michaud's boy was going to be all right, even before the doctors were one hundred percent sure they wanted to try the risky operation. Another rumor had something to do with Dr. Weizak; it was said Johnny had told him his mother was not dead but living someplace on the West Coast under another name. As far as Eileen Magown was concerned, the stories were so much eyewash. on a par with the confession magazines and sweet-savage love stories so many nurses read on station. But the way he was looking at her now made her feel afraid. It was as if he was looking inside her.

“Johnny, are you okay?” They were alone in the physical therapy room. The big double doors with the frosted glass panels which gave on the pool area were closed.

“Gosh sakes,” Johnny said. “You better… yes, there's still time. Just about.”

“What are you talking about?”

He snapped out of it then. He let go of her hand but he had gripped it tightly enough to leave white indentations along the back.

“Call the fire department,” he said. “You forgot to turn off the burner. The curtains are catching on fire.”

“What…?”

“The burner caught the dish towel and the dish towel caught the curtains,” Johnny said impatiently. “Hurry up and call them. Do you want your house to burn down?”

“Johnny, you can't know…

“Never mind what you can't know,” Johnny said, grabbing her elbow. He got her moving and they walked across to the doors. Johnny was limping badly on his left leg, as he always did when he was tired. They crossed the room that housed the swimming pool, their heels clacking hollowly on the tiles, then went out into the first floor hallway and down to the nurses” station. Inside, two nurses were drinking coffee and a third was on the phone, telling someone on the other end how she had redone her apartment.

“Are you going to call or should I?” Johnny asked.

Eileen's mind was in a whirl. Her morning routine was as set as a single person's is apt to be. She had gotten up and boiled herself a single egg while she ate a whole grapefruit, unsweetened, and a bowl of All-Bran. After breakfast she had dressed and driven to the hospital. Had she turned off the burner? Of course she had. She couldn't specifically remember doing it, but it was habit. She must have.

“Johnny, really, I don't know where you got the idea…”

“Okay, I will.”

They were in the nurses” station now, a glassed in booth furnished with three straight-backed chairs and a hot plate. The little room was dominated by the callboard -rows of small lights that flashed red when a patient pushed his call button. Three of them were flashing now. The two nurses went on drinking their coffee and talking about some doctor who had turned up drunk at Benjamin's. The third was apparently talking with her beautician.

“Pardon me, I have to make a call,” Johnny said.

The nurse covered the phone with her hand. “There's a pay phone in the lob…”

“Thanks,” Johnny said, and took the phone out of her hand. He pushed for one of the open lines and dialed 0. He got a busy signal. “What's wrong with this thing?”

“Hey!” The nurse who had been talking to her beautician cried. “What the hell do you think you're doing? Give me that!”

Johnny remembered that he was in a hospital with its own switchboard and dialed 9 for an outside line. Then he redialed the 0.

The deposed nurse, her cheeks flaming with anger, grabbed for the phone. Johnny pushed her away. She whirled, saw Eileen, and took a step toward her. “Eileen, what's with this crazy guy?” she asked stridently. The other two nurses had put down their coffee cups and were staring gape-mouthed at Johnny.

Eileen shrugged uncomfortably. “I don't know, he just

“Operator.”

“Operator, I want to report a fire in Oldtown,” Johnny said. “Can you give me the correct number to call, please?”

“Hey,” one of the nurses said. “Whose house is on fire?”

Eileen shifted her feet nervously. “He says mine is.”

The nurse who had been talking about her apartment to her beautician did a double take. “Oh my God, it's that guy,” she said.

Johnny pointed at the callboard, where five or six lights were flashing now. “Why don't you go see what those people want?”

The operator had connected him with the Oldtown Fire Department.

“My name is John Smith and I need to report a fire. It's at… “He looked at Eileen. “What's your address?”

For a moment Johnny didn't think she was going to tell him. Her mouth worked, but nothing came out. The two coffee drinkers had now forsaken their cups and withdrawn to the station's far corner. They were whispering together like little girls in a grammar school john. Their eyes were wide.

“Sir?” the voice on the other end asked.

“Come on,” Johnny said, “do you want your cats to fry?”

“624 Center Street,” Eileen said reluctantly. “Johnny, you've wigged out.”

Johnny repeated the address into the phone. “It's in the kitchen.”

“Your name, sir?”

“John Smith. I'm calling from the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.”

“May I ask how you came by your information?”

“We'd be on the phone the rest of the day. My information is correct. Now go put it out. “He banged the phone down.

…and he said Sam Weizak's mother was still…”

She broke off and looked at Johnny. For a moment he felt all of them looking at him, their eyes lying on his skin like tiny, hot weights, and he knew what would come of this and it made his stomach turn.

“Eileen,” he said.

“What?”

“Do you have a friend next door?”

“Yes… Burt and Janice are next door…”

“Either of them home?”

“I guess Janice probably would be, sure.

“Why don't you give her a call?”

Eileen nodded, suddenly understanding what he was getting at. She took the phone from his hand and dialed an 827 exchange number. The nurses stood by watching avidly, as if they had stepped into a really exciting TV program by accident.

“Hello? Jan? It's Eileen. Are you in your kitchen?… Would you take a look out your window and tell me if everything looks, well, all right over at my place?… Well, a friend of mine says… I'll tell you after you go look, okay?” Eileen was blushing. “Yes, I'll wait. “She looked at Johnny and repeated, “You've wigged out, Johnny.”

There was a pause that seemed to go on and on. Then Eileen began listening again. She listened for a long time and then said in a strange, subdued voice totally unlike her usual one: “No, that's all right, Jan. They've been called. No… I can't explain right now but I'll tell you later. “She looked at Johnny. “Yes, it is funny how I could have known… but I can explain. At least I think I can. Good-bye.”

She hung up the telephone. They all looked at her, the nurses with avid curiosity, Johnny with only dull certainty.

“Jan says there's smoke pouring out of my kitchen window,” Eileen said, and all three nurses sighed in unison. Their eyes, wide and somehow accusing, turned to Johnny again. Jury's eyes, he thought dismally.

“I ought to go home,” Eileen said. The aggressive, cajoling, positive physical therapist was gone, replaced by a small woman who was worried about her cats and her house and her things… I don't know how to thank you, Johnny… I'm sorry I didn't believe you, but… “She began to weep.

One of the nurses moved toward her, but Johnny was there first. He put an arm around her and led her out into the hall.

“You really can,” Eileen whispered. “What they said…”

“You go on,” Johnny said. “I'm sure it's going to be fine. There's going to be some minor smoke and water damage, and that's all. That movie poster from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I think you're going to lose that, but that's all.”

“Yes, okay. Thank you. Johnny. God bless you. “She kissed him on the cheek and then began to trot down the hall. She looked back once, and the expression on her face was very much like superstitious dread.

The nurses were lined up against the glass of the nurses” station, staring at him. Suddenly they reminded him of crows on a telephone line, crows staring down at something bright and shiny, something to be pecked at and pulled apart.

“Go on and answer your calls,” he said crossly, and they. flinched back at the sound of his voice. He began to limp up the hall toward the elevator, leaving them to start the gossip on its way. He was tired. His legs hurt. His hip joints felt as if they had broken glass in them. He wanted to go to bed.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“What are you going to do?” Sam Weizak asked.

“Christ, I don't know,” Johnny said. “How many did you say are down there?”

“About eight. One of them is the northern New England AP stringer. And there are people from two of the TV stations with cameras and lights. The hospital director is quite angry with you, Johnny. He feels you have been naughty.”

“Because a lady's house was going to burn down?” Johnny asked. “All I can say is it must have been one frigging slow news day.”

“As a matter of fact it wasn't. Ford vetoed two bills. The P. L. O. blew up a restaurant in Tel Aviv. And a police dog sniffed out four hundred pounds of marijuana at the airport.”

“Then what are they doing here?” Johnny asked. When Sam had come in with the news that reporters were gathering in the lobby, his first sinking thought was what his mother might make of this. She was with his father in Pownal, making ready for her California pilgrimage, which began the following week. Neither Johnny nor his father believed the trip was a good idea, and the news that her son had somehow turned psychic might make her cancel it, but in this case Johnny was very much afraid that the cure might be the greater of two evils. Something like this could set her off for good.

On the other hand-this thought suddenly blossomed in his mind with all the force of inspiration-it might persuade her to start taking her medicine again.

“They're here because what happened is news,” Sam said. “It has all the classic ingredients.”

“I didn't do anything, I just…

“You just told Eileen Magown her house was on fire and it was,” Sam said softly. “Come on, Johnny, you must have known this was going to happen sooner or later.”

“I'm no publicity hound,” Johnny said grimly.

“No. I didn't mean to suggest you were. An earthquake is no publicity hound. But the reporters cover it. People want to know.”

“What if I just refuse to talk to them?”

“That is not much of an option,” Sam replied. “They will go away and publish crazy rumors. Then, when you leave the hospital, they will fall on you. They will shove microphones in your face as if you were a senator or a crime boss, nuh?”

Johnny thought about it. “Is Bright down there?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose I ask him to come up? He can get the story and give it to the rest of them.”

“You can do that, but it would make the rest of them extremely unhappy. And an unhappy reporter will be your enemy. Nixon made them unhappy and they tore him to pieces.”

“I'm not Nixon,” Johnny said.

Weizak grinned radiantly. “Thank God,” he said. “What do you suggest?” Johnny asked.

The reporters stood up and crowded forward when Johnny stepped through the swing doors and into the west lobby. He was wearing a white shirt, open at the collar, and a pair of blue jeans that were too big for him. His face was pale but composed. The scars from the tendon operations stoodout clearly on his neck. Flashbulbs popped warm fire at him and made him wince. Questions were babbled.

“Here! Here!” Sam Weizak shouted. “This is a convalescent patient! He wants to make a brief statement and he will answer some of your questions, but only if you behave in an orderly fashion! Now fall back and let him breathe!”

Two sets of TV light bars flashed on, bathing the lobby in an unearthly glare. Doctors and nurses had gathered by the lounge doorway to watch. Johnny winced away from the lights, wondering if this was what they meant by the limelight. He felt as if all of it might be a dream.

“Who're you?” one of the reporters yelled at Weizak.

“I am Samuel Weizak, this young man's doctor, and that name is spelled with two X's.”

There was general laughter and the mood eased a little. “Johnny, you feel all right?” Weizak asked. It was early evening, and his sudden insight that Eileen Magown's kitchen was catching fire seemed distant and unimportant, the memory of a memory.

“Sure,” he said.

“What's your statement?” one of the reporters called.

“Well,” Johnny said, “it's this. My physical therapist is a woman named Eileen Magown. She's a very nice lady, and she's been helping me get my strength back. I was in an accident, you see, and… “One of the TV cameras moved in, goggling at him blankly, throwing him off-stride for a moment “… and I got pretty weak. My muscles sort of collapsed. We were in the physical therapy room this morning, just finishing up, and I got the feeling that her house was on fire. That is, to be more specific… “Jesus) you sound like an asshole! “I felt that she had forgotten to turn off her stove and that the curtains in the kitchen were about to catch fire. So we just went and called the fire department and that's all there was to it.”

There was a moment's gaping pause as they digested that-I sort of got the feeling, and that's all there was to it-and then the barrage of questions came again, everything mixed together into a meaningless stew of human voices. Johnny looked around helplessly, feeling disoriented and vulnerable.

“One at a time!” Weizak yelled. “Raise your hands! Were you never schoolchildren?”

Hands waved, and Johnny pointed at David Bright.

“Would you call this a psychic experience, Johnny?”

“I would call it a feeling,” Johnny answered. “I was doing situps and I finished. Miss Magown took my hand to help me up and I just knew.”

He pointed at someone else.

“Mel Allen, Portland Sunday Telegram, Mr. Smith. Was it like a picture? A picture in your head?”

“No, not at all,” Johnny said, but he was not really able to remember what it had been like.

“Has this happened to you before, Johnny?” A young woman in a slacksuit asked.

“Yes, a few times.”

“Can you tell us about the other incidents?”

“No, I'd rather not.”

One of the TV reporters raised his hand and Johnny nodded at him. “Did you have any of these flashes before your accident and the resulting coma, Mr. Smith?”

Johnny hesitated.

The room seemed very still. The TV lights were warm on his face, like a tropical sun. “No,” he said.

Another barrage of questions. Johnny looked helplessly at Weizak again.

“Stop! Stop!” He bellowed. He looked at Johnny as the roar subsided. “You are done, Johnny?”

“I'll answer two more questions,” Johnny said. “Then… really… it's been a long day for me… yes, Ma'am?”

He was pointing to a stout woman who had wedged herself in between two young reporters. “Mr. Smith,” she said in a loud, carrying, tubalike voice, “who will be the Democrats” nominee for president next year?”

“I can't tell you that,” Johnny said, honestly surprised at the question. “How could I tell you that?”

More hands were raised. Johnny pointed to a tall, sober-faced man in a dark suit. He took one step forward. There was something prim and coiled about him.

“Mr. Smith, I'm Roger Dussault, from the Lewiston Sun, and I would like to know if you have any idea why you should have such an extraordinary ability as this… if indeed you do. Why you, Mr. Smith?”

Johnny cleared his throat. “As I understand your question… you're asking me to justify something I don't understand. I can't do that.”

“Not justify, Mr. Smith. Just explain.”

He thinks I'm hoaxing them. Or trying.

Weizak stepped up beside Johnny. “I wonder if I might answer that,” he said. “Or at least attempt to explain why it cannot be answered.”

“Are you psychic, too?” Dussault asked coldly.

“Yes, all neurologists must be, it's a requirement,” Weizak said. There was a burst of laughter and Dussault flushed.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the press. This man spent four-and-a-half years in a coma. We who study the human brain have no idea why he did, or why he came out of it, and this is for the simple reason that we do not understand what a coma really is, any more than we understand sleep or the simple act of waking. Ladies and gentlemen, we do not understand the brain of a frog or the brain of an ant. You may quote me on these things… you see I am fearless, nuh?”

More laughter. They liked Weizak. But Dussault did not laugh.

“You may also quote me as saying I believe this man is now in possession of a very new human ability, or a very old one. Why? If I and my coleagues do not understand the brain of an ant, can I tell you why? I cannot. I can suggest some interesting things to you, however, things which may or may not have bearing. A part of John Smith's brain has been damaged beyond repair-a very small part, but all parts of the brain may be vital. He calls this his “dead zone”, and there, apparently, a number of trace memories were stored. all of these wiped out memories seem to be part of a “set” that of street, road, and highway designations. A subset of a larger overall set, that of where it is. This is a small but total aphasia which seems to include both language and vizualization skills.

“Balancing this off, another tiny part of John Smith's brain appears to have awakened. A section of the cerebrum within the parietal lobe. This is one of the deeply grooved sections of the “forward” or “thinking” brain. The electrical responses from this section of Smith's brain are way out of line from what they should be, nuh? Here is one more thing. The parietal lobe has something to do with the sense of touch-how much or how little we are not completely sure-and it is very near to that area of the brain that sorts and identifies various shapes and textures. And it has been my own observation that John's “flashes” are always preceded by some sort of touching.”

Silence. Reporters were scribbling madly. The TV cameras, which had moved in to focus on Weizak, now pulled back to include Johnny in the picture.

“Is that it, Johnny?” Weizak asked again.

“I guess…”

Dussault suddenly shouldered his way through the knot of reporters. For a bemused moment Johnny thought he was going to join them in front of the doors, possibly for the purpose of rebuttal. Then he saw that Dussault was slipping something from around his neck.

“Let's have a demonstration,” he said. He was holding a medallion on a fine-link gold chain. “Let's see what you can do with this.”

“We'll see no such thing,” Weizak said. His bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows had drawn thunderously together and he stared down at Dussault like Moses. “This man is not a carnival performer, sir!”

“You sure could have fooled me,” Dussault said. “Either he can or he can't, right? While you were busy suggesting things, I was busy suggesting something to myself. What I was suggesting was that these guys can never perform on demand, because they're all as genuine as a pile of three-dollar bills.”

Johnny looked at the other reporters. Except for Bright, who looked rather embarrassed, they were watching avidly. They looked like the nurses peering at him through the glass; Suddenly he felt like a Christian in a pitful of lions. They win either way, he thought. If I can tell him something, they've got a front-page story. If I can't, or if I refuse to try, they've got another kind of story.

“Well?” Dussault asked. The medallion swung back and forth below his fist.

Johnny looked at Weizak, but Weizak was looking away, disgusted.

“Give it to me,” Johnny said.

Dussault handed it over. Johnny put the medallion in his palm. It was a St. Christopher medal. He dropped the fine-link chain on top of it in a crisp little yellow heap and closed his hand over it.

Dead silence fell in the room. The handful of doctors and nurses standing by the lounge doorway had been joined by half a dozen others, some of them dressed in streetclothes and on their way out of the hospital for the night. A crowd of patients had gathered at the end of the hallway leading to the first-floor TV and game lounge. The people who had come for the regular early evening visiting hours had drifted over from the main lobby. A feeling of thick tension lay in the air like a humming power cable.

Johnny stood silently, pale and thin in his white shirt and oversized blue jeans. The St. Christopher medal was clamped so tightly in his right hand that the cords in his wrist stood out dearly in the glare of the TV light bars. In front of him, sober, impeccable, and judgmental in his dark suit, Dussault stood in the adversary position. The moment seemed to stretch out interminably. No one coughed or whispered.

“()h,” Johnny said softly… then: “Is that it?”

His fingers loosened slowly. He looked at Dussault.

“Well?” Dussault asked, but the authority was suddenly gone from his voice. The tired, nervous young man who had answered the reporters” questions seemed also to be gone. There was a half-smile on Johnny's lips, but there was nothing warm about it. The blue of his eyes had darkened. They had grown cold and distant. Weizak saw and felt a chill of gooseflesh. He later told his wife that it had been the face of a man looking through a high-powered microscope and observing an interesting species of paramecium.

“It's your sister's medallion,” he said to Dussault. “Her name was Anne but everyone called her Terry. Your older sister. You loved her. You almost worshiped the ground she walked on.”

Suddenly, terribly, Johnny Smith's voice began to climb and change. It became the cracked and unsure voice of an adolescent.

“It's for when you cross Lisbon Street against the lights, Terry, or when you're out parking with one of those guys from E. L. Don't forget, Terry… don't forget…”

The plump woman who had asked Johnny who the Democrats would nominate next year uttered a frightened little moan. One of the TV cameramen muttered “Holy Jesus!” in a hoarse voice.

“Stop it,” Dessault whispered. His face had gone a sick shade of gray. His eyes bulged and spittle shone like chrome on his lower lip in this harsh light. His hands moved for the medallion, which was now looped on its fine gold chain over Johnny's fingers. But his hands moved with no power or authority. The medallion swung back and forth, throwing off hypnotic gleams of light.

“Remember me, Terry,” the adolescent voice begged. “Stay clean, Terry… please, for God's sake stay clean…”

“Stop it! Stop it, you bastard!”

Now Johnny spoke in his own voice again. “It was speed, wasn't it? Then meth. She died of a heart attack at twenty-seven. But she wore it ten years, Rog. She remembered you. She never forgot. Never forgot… never

never… never.”

The medallion slipped from his fingers and struck the floor with a small, musical sound. Johnny stared away into emptiness for a moment, his face calm and cool and distant. Dussault grubbed at his feet for the medallion, sobbing hoarsely in the stunned silence.

A flashbulb popped, and Johnny's face cleared and became his own again. Horror touched it, and then pity. He knelt clumsily beside Dussault.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean…

“You cheapjack, bastard hoaxer!” Dussault screamed at him. “It's a lie! All a lie! All a lie!” He struck Johnny a clumsy, open-handed blow on the neck and Johnny fell over, striking his head on the floor, hard. He saw stars.

Uproar.

He was dimly aware that Dussault was pushing his way blindly through the crowd and toward the doors. People milled around Dussault, around Johnny. He saw Dussault through a forest of legs and shoes. Then Weizak was beside him, helping him to sit up.

“John, are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

“Not as bad as I hurt him. I'm okay. “He struggled to his feet. Hands-maybe Weizak's, maybe someone else's -helped him. He felt dizzy and sick; almost revolted. This had been a mistake, a terrible mistake.

Someone screamed piercingly-the stout woman who had asked about the Democrats. Johnny saw Dussault pitch forward to his knees, grope at the sleeve of the stout woman's print blouse and then slide tiredly forward onto the tile near the doorway he had been trying to reach. The St. Christopher medal was still in one hand.

“Fainted,” someone said. “Fainted dead away. I'll be damned.”

“My fault,” Johnny said to Sam Weizak. His throat felt close and tight with shame, with tears. “All my fault.”

“No,” Sam said. “No, John.”

But it was. He shook loose of Weizak's hands and went to where Dussault lay, coming around now, eyes blinking dazedly at the ceiling. Two of the doctors had come over to where he lay.

“Is he all right?” Johnny asked. He turned toward the woman reporter in the slacksuit and she shrank away from him. A cramp of fear passed over her face.

Johnny turned the other way, toward the TV reporter who had asked him if he'd had any flashes before his accident. It suddenly seemed very important that he explained to someone. “I didn't mean to hurt him,” he said. “Honest to God, I never meant to hurt him. I didn't know…

The TV reporter backed up a step. “No,” he said. “Of course you didn't. He was asking for it, anybody could see that. Just… don't touch me, huh?”

Johnny looked at him dumbly, lips quivering. He was still in shock but beginning to understand. Oh yes. He was beginning to understand. The TV reporter tried to smile and could only produce a death's-head rictus.

“Just don't touch me, Johnny. Please.”

“It's not like that,” Johnny said-or tried to. Later, he was never sure if any sound had come out.

“Don't touch me, Johnny, okay?”

The reporter backed up to where his cameraman was packing his gear. Johnny stood and watched him. He began to shake all over.

“It's for your own good, John,” Weizak said. The nurse stood behind him, a white ghost, a sorcerer's apprentice with her hands hovering above the small, wheeled medication table, a junkie's paradise of sweet dreams.

“No,” Johnny said. He was still shaking, and now there was cold sweat as well. “No more shots. I've had it up to here with shots.”

“A pill, then.”

“No more pills, either.”

“To help you sleep.”

“Will he be able to sleep? That man Dussault?”

“He asked for it,” the nurse murmured, and then flinched as Weizak turned toward her. But Weizak smiled crookedly.

“She is right, nuh?” he said. “The man asked for it. He thought you were selling empty bottles, John. A good night's sleep and you'll be able to put this in perspective.”

“I'll sleep on my own.”

“Johnny, please.”

It was quarter past eleven. The TV across the room had just gone off. Johnny and Sam had watched the filmed story together; it had been second-lined right after the bills Ford had vetoed. My own story made better theater, Johnny thought with morbid amusement. Film footage of a bald-headed Republican mouthing platitudes about the national budget just didn't compare with the film clip that WABI camera man had gotten here earlier this evening. The clip had ended with Dussault plunging across the floor with his sister's medal clutched in his hand and then crashing down in a faint, clutching at the woman reporter the way a drowning man might clutch at a straw.

When the TV anchorman went on to the police dog and the four hundred pounds of pot, Weizak had left briefly and had come back with the news that the hospital switchboard had jammed up with calls for him even before the report was over. The nurse with the medication had shown up a few minutes later, leading Johnny to believe that Sam had gone down to the nurses” station to do more than check on incoming calls.

At that instant, the telephone rang.

Weizak swore softly under his breath. “I told them to hold them all. Don't answer it, John, I'll…

But Johnny already had it. He listened for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, that was right. “He put a hand over the receiver. “It's my dad,” he said. He uncovered the receiver. “Hi, Dad. I guess you… “He listened. The small smile on his lips faded and was replaced by an expression of dawning horror. His lips moved silently.

“John, what is it?” Weizak asked sharply.

“All right, Daddy,” Johnny said, almost in a whisper. “Yes. Cumberland General. I know where it is. Just above Jerusalem's Lot. Okay. All right Daddy…

His voice broke. His eyes were tearless but glistening.

“I know that, Daddy. I love you too. I'm sorry.

Listened.

“Yes. Yes it was,” Johnny said. “I'll see you, Daddy. Yes. Good-bye.”

He hung up the phone, put the heels of his hands to his eyes, and pressed.

“Johnny?” Sam leaned forward, took one of his hands away and held it gently. “Is it your mother?”

“Yeah. It's my mother.”

“Heart attack?”

“Stroke,” Johnny said, and Sam Weizak made a small, pained hissing between his teeth. “They were watching the TV news… neither of them had any idea… and I came on… and she had a stroke. Christ. She's in the hospital. Now if something happens to my dad, we got a triple play. “He uttered a high scream of laughter. His eyes rolled wildly from Sam to the nurse and back to Sam again. “It's a good talent,” he said. “Everybody should have it. “The laugh came again, so like a scream.

“How bad is she?” Sam asked.

“He doesn't know. “Johnny swung his legs out of bed. He had changed back to a hospital gown and his feet were bare.

“What do you think you are doing?” Sam asked sharply.

“What does it look like?”

Johnny got up, and for a moment it seemed that Sam would push him hack onto the bed. But he only watched Johnny limp over to the closet. “Don't be ridiculous. You're not ready for this, John.”

Unmindful of the nurse-they had seen his bare tail enough times, God knew Johnny let the gown drop around his feet. The thick, twisting scars stood out on the backs of his knees and dimpled into the scant swell of his calves. He began to rummage in the closet for clothes, and came up with the white shirt and jeans he had worn to the news conference.

“John, I absolutely forbid this. As your doctor and your friend- I tell you, it is madness.”

“Forbid all you want, I'm going,” Johnny said. He began to dress. His face wore that expression of distant preoccupation that Sam associated with his trances. The nurse gawped.

“Nurse, you might as well go back to your station,” Sam said.

She backed to the door, stood there for a moment, and then left. Reluctantly.

“Johnny,” Sam said. He got up, went to him, and put a hand on his shoulder. “You didn't do it.”

Johnny shook the hand off. “I did it, all right,” he said. “She was watching me when it happened. “He began to button the shirt.

“You urged her to take her medicine and she stopped.”

Johnny looked at Weizak for a moment and then went back to buttoning his shirt.

“If it hadn't happened tonight, it would have happened tomorrow, next week, next month…

“Or next year. Or in ten years.

“No. It would not have been ten years. or even one. And you know it. Why are you so anxious to pin this tail on yourself? Because of that smug reporter? Is it maybe an inverted kind of self-pity? An urge to believe that you have been cursed?”

Johnny's face twisted. “She was watching me when it happened. Don't you get that? Are you so fucking soft you don't get that?”

“She was planning a strenuous trip, all the way to California and back, you told me that yourself. A symposium of some kind. A highly emotional sort of thing, from what you have said. Yes? Yes. It would almost certainly have happened then. A stroke is not lightning from a blue sky, Johnny.”

Johnny buttoned the jeans and then sat down as if the act of dressing had tired him out too much to do more. His feet were still bare. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you may be right.”

“Sense! He sees sense! Thank the Lord!”

“But I still have to go, Sam.”

Weizak threw up his hands. “And do what? She is in the hands of her doctors and her God. That is the situation. Better than anyone else, you must understand.”

“My dad will need me,” Johnny said softly. “I understand that, too.”

“How will you go? It's nearly midnight.”

“By bus. I'll grab a cab over to Peter's Candlelighter. The Greyhounds still stop there, don't they?”

“You don't have to do that,” Sam said.

Johnny was groping under the chair for his shoes and not finding them, Sam got them from under the bed and handed them to him.

“I'll drive you down.”

Johnny looked up at him. “You'd do that?”

“If you'll take a mild tranquilizer, yes.

“But your wife… “He realized in a confused sort of way that the only concrete thing he knew about Weizak's personal life was that his mother was living in California.

“I am divorced,” Weizak said. “A doctor has to be out at all hours of the night… unless he is a pediatrist or a dermatologist, nub? My wife saw the bed as half-empty rather than half-full. So she filled it with a variety of men.

“I'm sorry,” Johnny said, embarrassed.

“You spend far too much time being sorry, John. “Sam's face was gentle, but his eyes were stern. “Put on your shoes.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Hospital to hospital, Johnny thought dreamily, flying gently along on the small blue pill he had taken just be-fore he and Sam left the EMMC and climbed into Sam's “75 El Dorado. Hospital to hospital, person to person, station to station.

In a queer, secret way, he enjoyed the trip-it was his first time out of the hospital in almost five years. The night was clear, the Milky Way sprawled across the sky in an unwinding clockspring of light, a half-moon followed them over the dark tree line as they fled south through Palmyra, Newport, Pittsfield, Benton, Clinton. The car whispered along in near total silence. Low music, Haydn, issued from the four speakers of the stereo tape player.

Came to one hospital in the Cleaves Mills Rescue Squad ambulance, went to another in a Cadillac, he thought. He didn't let it bother him. It was just enough to ride, to float along on the track, to let the problem of his mother, his new ability, and the people who wanted to pry into his soul (He asked for it… just don't touch me, huh?) rest in a temporary limbo. Weizak didn't talk. Occasionally he hummed snatches of the music.

Johnny watched the stars. He watched the turnpike, nearly deserted this late. It unrolled ceaselessly in front of them. They went through the tollgate at Augusta and Weizak took a time-and-toll ticket. Then they went on again-Gardener, Sabbatus, Lewiston.

Nearly five years, longer than some convicted murderers spend in the slam.

He slept.

Dreamed.

“Johnny,” his mother said in his dream. “Johnny, make me better, make me well. “She was in a beggar's rags. She was crawling toward him over cobblestones. Her face was white. Thin blood ran from her knees. White lice squirmed in her thin hair. She held shaking hands out to him. “It's the power of God working in you,” she said. “It's a great responsibility, Johnny. A great trust. You must be worthy.”

He took her hands, closed his own over them, and said, “Spirits, depart from this woman.”

She stood up. “Healed!” she cried in a voice that was filled with a strange and terrible triumph. “Healed! My son has healed me! His work is great upon the earth!”

He tried to protest, to tell her that he didn't want to do great works, or heal, or speak in tongues, to divine the future, or find those things that had been lost. He tried to tell her, but his tongue wouldn't obey the command of his brain. Then she was past him, striding off down the cobbled street, her posture cringing and servile but somehow arrogant at the same time; her voice belled like a clarion: “Saved! Savior! Saved! Savior!”

And to his horror he saw that there had been thousands of others behind her, maybe millions, all of them maimed or deformed or in terror. The stout lady reporter was there, needing to know who the Democrats would nominate for the presidency in 1976; there was a death-eyed farmer in biballs with a picture of his son, a smiling young man in Air Force blues, who had been reported MIA over Hanoi in 1972, he needed to know if his son was dead or alive; a young woman who looked like Sarah with tears on her smooth cheeks, holding up a baby with a hydrocephalic head on which blue veins were traced like runes of doom; an old man with his fingers turned into clubs by arthritis; others. They stretched for miles, they would wait patiently, they would kill him with their mute, bludgeoning need.

“Saved!” His mother's voice carried back imperatively. “Savior! Saved! Saved!”

He tried to tell them that he could neither heal nor save, but before he could open his mouth to make the denial, the first had laid hands on him and was shaking him.

The shaking was real enough. It was Weizak's hand on his arm. Bright orange light filled the car, turning the interior as bright as day it was nightmare light, turning Sam's kind face into the face of a hobgoblin. For a moment he thought the nightmare was still going on and then he saw the light was coming from parking-lot lamps. They had changed those, too, apparently, while he was in his coma. From hard white to a weird orange that lay on the skin like paint.

“Where are we?” he asked thickly.

“The hospital,” Sam said. “Cumberland General.”

“Oh. All right.”

He sat up. The dream seemed to slide off him in fragments, still littering the floor of his mind like something broken and not yet swept up.

“Are you ready to go in?”

“Yes,” Johnny said.

They crossed the parking lot amid the soft creak of summer crickets in the woods. Fireflies stitched through the darkness. The image of his mother was very much on him-but not so much that he was unable to enjoy the soft and fragrant smell of the night and the feel of the faint breeze against his skin. There was time to enjoy the health of the night, and the feeling of health coming inside him. In the context of why he was here, the thought seemed almost obscene-but only almost. And it wouldn't go away.

Herb came down the hallway to meet them, and Johnny saw that his father was wearing old pants, shoes with no socks, and his pajama shirt. It told Johnny a lot about the suddenness with which it had come. It told him more than he wanted to know.

“Son,” he said. He looked smaller, somehow. He tried to say more and couldn't. Johnny hugged him and Herb burst into tears. He sobbed against Johnny's shirt.

“Daddy,” he said. “That's all right, Daddy, that's all right.”

His father put his arms on Johnny's shoulders and wept. Weizak turned away and began to inspect the pictures on the walls, indifferent water colors by local artists.

Herb began to recover himself. He swiped his arm across his eyes and said, “Look at me, still in my pi top. I had time to change before the ambulance came. I guess I never thought of it. Must be getting senile.”

“No, you're not.”

“Well. “He shrugged. “Your doctor friend brought you down? That was nice of you, Dr. Weizak.”

Sam shrugged. “It was nothing.”

Johnny and his father walked toward the small waiting room and sat down. “Daddy, is she…”

“She's sinking,” Herb said. He seemed calmer now. “Conscious, but sinking. She's been asking for you,

Johnny. I think she's been holding on for you.”

“My fault,” Johnny said. “All this is my-…”

The pain in his ear startled him, and he stared at his father, astonished. Herb had seized his ear and twisted it firmly. So much for the role reversal of having his father cry in his arms. The old twist-the-ear trick had been a punishment Herb had reserved for the gravest of errors. Johnny couldn't remember having his ear twisted since he was thirteen, and had gotten fooling around with their old Rambler. He had inadvertently pushed in the clutch and the old car had rumbled silently downhill to crash into their back shed.

“Don't you ever say that,” Herb said.

“Jeez Dad!”

Herb let go, a little smile lurking just below the corners of his mouth. “Forgot all about the old twist-the-ear, huh? Probably thought I had, too. No such luck, Johnny.”

Johnny stared at his father, still dumbfounded.

“Don't you ever blame yourself.”

“But she was watching that damned…

“News, yes. She was ecstatic, she was thrilled… then she was on the floor, her poor old mouth opening and closing like she was a fish out of water. “Herb leaned closer to his son. “The doctor won't come right out and tell me, but he asked me about “heroic measures”. I told him none of that stuff. She committed her own kind of sin, Johnny. She presumed to know the mind of God. So don't you ever blame yourself for her mistake. “Fresh tears glinted in his eyes. His voice roughened. “God knows I spent my life loving her and it got hard in the late going. Maybe this is just the best thing.”

“Can I see her?”

“Yes, she's at the end of the hall, Room ~ They're expecting you, and so is she. Just one thing, Johnny. Agree with anything and everything she might say. Don't… let her die thinking it was all for nothing.”

“No. “He paused. “Are you coming with me?”

“Not now. Maybe later.”

Johnny nodded and walked up the hall. The lights were turned down low for the nighttime. The brief moment in the soft, kind summer night seemed far away now, but his nightmare in the car seemed very close.

Room 35. VERA HELEN SMITH, the little card on the door read. Had he known her middle name was Helen? It seemed he must have, although he couldn't remember. But he could remember other things: her bringing him an ice-cream bar wrapped in her handkerchief one bright summer day at Old Orchard Beach, smiling and gay. He and his mother and father playing rummy for matches-later, after the religion business began to deepen its hold on her, she wouldn't have cards in the house, not even to play cribbage with. He remembered the day the bee had stung him and he ran to her, bawling his head off, and she had kissed the swelling and pulled out the stinger with tweezers and then had wrapped the wound in a strip of cloth that had been dipped in baking soda.

He pushed the door open and went in. She was a vague hump in the bed and Johnny thought, That's what I looked like. A nurse was taking her pulse; she turned when the door opened and the dim hall lights flashed on her spectacles.

“Are you Mrs. Smith's son?”

“Yes.”

“Johnny?” The voice rose from the hump in the bed, dry and hollow, rattling with death as a few pebbles will rattle in an empty gourd. The voice-God help him -made his skin crawl. He moved closer. Her face was twisted into a snarling mask on the left-hand side. The hand on the counterpane was a claw. Stroke, he thought. What the old people call a shock. Yes. That's better. That's what she looks like. Like she's had a bad shock.

“Is that you, John?”

“It's me, Ma.”

“Johnny? Is that you?”

“Yes, Ma.”

He came closer yet, and forced himself to take the bony claw.

“I want my Johnny,” she said querulously.

The nurse shot him a pitying look, and he found him-self wanting to smash his fist through it.

“Would you leave us alone?” he asked.

“I really shouldn't while…”

“Come on, she's my mother and I want some time alone with her,” Johnny said. “What about it?”

“Well…”

“Bring me my juice, Dad!” his mother cried hoarsely. “Feel like I could drink a quart!”

“Would you get out of here?” he cried at the nurse. He was filled with a terrible sorrow of which he could not even find the focus. It seemed like a whirlpool going down into darkness.

The nurse left.

“Ma,” he said, sitting beside her. That weird feeling of doubled time, of reversal, would not leave him. How many times had she sat over his bed like this, perhaps holding his dry hand and talking to him? He recalled the timeless period when the room had seemed so close to him-seen through a gauzy placental membrane, his mother's face bending over him, thundering senseless sounds slowly into his upturned face.

“Ma,” he said again, and kissed the hook that had replaced her hand.

“Gimme those nails, I can do that,” she said. Her left eye seemed frozen in its orbit; the other rolled wildly. It was the eye of a gutshot horse. “I want Johnny.”

“Ma, I'm here.”

“John-ny! John-ny! JOHN-NY!”

“Ma,” he said, afraid the nurse would come back.

“You… “She broke off and her head turned toward him a little. “Bend over here where I can see,” she whispered.

He did as she asked.

“You came,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you. “Tears began to ooze from the good eye. The bad one, the one on the side of her face that had been frozen by the shock, stared indifferently upward.

“Sure I came.”

“I saw you,” she whispered. “What a power God has given you, Johnny! Didn't I tell you? Didn't I say it was so?”

“Yes, you did.”

“He has a job for you,” she said. “Don't run from him, Johnny. Don't hide away in a cave like Elijah or make him send a big fish to swallow you up. Don't do that, John.”

“No. I won't. “He held her claw-hand. His head throbbed.

“Not the potter but the potter's clay, John. Remember.”

“All right.”

“Remember that!” she said stridently, and he thought, She's going back into nonsense land. But she didn't; at least she went no further into nonsense land than she had been since he came out of his coma.

“Heed the still, small voice when it comes,” she said.

“Yes, Ma. I will.”

Her head turned a tiny bit on the pillow, and-was she smiling?

“You think I'm crazy, I guess. “She twisted her head a little more, so she could look directly at him. “But that doesn't matter. You'll know the voice when it comes. It'll tell you what to do. It told Jeremiah and Daniel and Amos and Abraham. It'll come to you. It'll tell you. And when it does, Johnny… do your duty.”

“Okay, Ma.”

“What a power,” she murmured. Her voice was growing furry and indistinct. “What a power God has given you… I knew… I always knew… “Her voice trailed off. The good eye closed. The other stared blankly forward.

Johnny sat with her another five minutes, then got up to leave. His hand was on the doorknob and he was easing the door open when her dry, rattling voice came again, chilling him with its implacable, positive command.

“Do your duty, John.”

“Yes, Ma.”

It was the last time he ever spoke to her. She died at five minutes past eight on the morning of August 20. Somewhere north of them, Walt and Sarah Hazlett were having a discussion about Johnny that was almost an argument, and somewhere south of them, Greg Stillson was cutting himself some prime asshole.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“You don't understand,” Greg Stillson said in a voice of utter, reasonable patience to the kid sitting in the lounge at the back of the Ridgeway police station. The kid, shirt-less, was tilted back in a padded folding chair and drinking a bottle of Pepsi. He was smiling indulgently at Greg Stillson, not understanding that twice was all Greg Still-son ever repeated himself, understanding that there was one prime asshole in the room, but not yet understanding who it was.

That realization would have to be brought home to him.

Forcibly, if necessary.

Outside, the late August morning was bright and warm. Birds sang in the trees. And Greg felt his destiny was closer than ever. That was why he would be careful with this prime asshole. That was no long-haired bike-freak with a bad case of bowlegs and B. O.; this kid was a college boy, his hair was moderately long but squeaky clean, and he was George Harvey's nephew. Not that George cared for him much (George had fought his way across Germany in 1945, and he had two words for these long-haired freaks, and those two words were not Happy Birthday), but he was blood. And George was a man to be reckoned with on the town council. See what you can do with him, George had told Greg when Greg informed him that Chief Wiggins had arrested his sister's kid. But his eyes said, Don't hurt him. He's blood.

The kid was looking at Greg with lazy contempt. “I understand,” he said. “Your Deputy Dawg took my shirt and I want it back. And you better understand something. If I don't get it back, I'm going to have the American Civil Liberties Union down on your red neck.”

Greg got up, went to the steel-gray file cabinet opposite the soda machine, pulled out his keyring, selected a key, and opened the cabinet. From atop a pile of accident and traffic forms, he took a red T-shirt. He spread it open so the legend on it was clear: BABY LET'S FUCK.

“You were wearing this,” Greg said in that same mild voice. “On the street.”

The kid rocked on the back legs of his chair and swigged some more Pepsi. The little indulgent smile playing around his mouth-almost a sneer-did not change. “That's right,” he said. “And I want it back. It's my property.

Greg's head began to ache. This smartass didn't realize how easy it would be. The room was soundproofed, and there had been times when that soundproofing had muffled screams. No-he didn't realize. He didn't understand.

But keep your hand on it. Don't go overboard. Don't upset the applecart.

Easy to think. Usually easy to do. But sometimes, his temper-his temper got out of hand.

Greg reached into his pocket and pulled out his Bic lighter.

“So you just go tell your gestapo” chief and my fascist uncle that the First Amendment… “He paused, eyes widening a little. “What are you…? Hey! Hey!”

Taking no notice and at least outwardly calm, Greg struck a light. The Bic's gas flame vroomed upward, and Greg lit the kid's T-shirt on fire. It burned quite well, actually.

The front legs of the kid's chair came down with a bang and he leaped toward Greg with his bottle of Pepsi still in his hand. The self-satisfied little smirk was gone, replaced with a look of wide-eyed shock and surprise-and the anger of a spoiled brat who has had everything his own way for too long.

No one ever called him runt, Greg Stillson thought, and his headache worsened. Oh, he was going to have to be careful.

“Gimme that!” the kid shouted. Greg was holding the shirt out, pinched together in two fingers at the neck, ready to drop it when it got too hot. “Gimme that, you asshole! That's mine! That's…”

Greg planted his hand in the middle of the kid's bare chest and shoved him as hard as he could-which was hard indeed. The kid went flying across the room, the anger dissolving into total shock, and-at last-what Greg needed to see: fear.

He dropped the shirt on the tile floor, picked up the kid's Pepsi, and poured what was left in the bottle onto the smouldering T-shirt. It hissed balefully.

The kid was getting up slowly, his back pressed against the wall. Greg caught his eyes with his own. The kid's eyes were br6wn and very, very wide.

“We're going to reach an understanding,” Greg said, and the words seemed distant to him, behind the sick thud in his head. “We're going to have a little seminar right here in this back room about just who's the asshole. you got my meaning? We're gonna reach some conclusions. Isn't that what you college boys like to do? Reach conclusions?”

The kid drew breath in hitches. He wet his lips, seemed about to speak, and then he yelled: “Help!”

“Yeah, you need help, all right,” Greg said. “I'm going to give you some, too.”

“You're crazy,” George Harvey's nephew said, and then yelled again, louder: “HELP!”

“I may be,” Greg said. “Sure. But what we got to find out, Sonny, is who the prime asshole is. See what I mean?”

He looked down at the Pepsi bottle in his hand, and suddenly he swung it savagely against the corner of the steel cabinet. It shattered, and when the kid saw the scatter of glass on the floor and the jagged neck in Greg's hand pointing toward him, he screamed. The crotch of his jeans, faded almost white, suddenly darkened. His face went the color of old parchment. And as Greg walked toward him, gritting glass under the workboots he wore summer and winter, he cringed against the wall.

“When I go out on the street, I wear a white shirt,” Greg said. He was grinning, showing white teeth. “Sometimes a tie. When you go out on the street, you wear some rag with a filthy saying on it. So who's the asshole, kiddo?”

George Harvey's nephew whined something. His bulging eyes never left the spears of glass jutting from the bottle neck in Greg's hand.

“I'm standing here high and dry,” Greg said, coming a little closer, “and you got piss running down both legs into your shoes. So who's the asshole?”

He began to jab the bottle neck lightly toward the kid's bare and sweaty midriff, and George Harvey's nephew began to cry. This was the sort of kid that was tearing the country in two, Greg thought. The thick wine of fury buzzed and coursed in his head. Stinking yellow-belly crybaby assholes like this.

Ah, but don't hurt him-don't kick over the apple cart -'I sound like a human being,” Greg said, “and you sound like a pig in a grease-pit, boy. So who's the ass-hole?”

He jabbed with the bottle again: one of the jagged glass points dimpled the kid's skin just below the right nipple and brought a tiny bead of blood. The kid howled.

“I'm talking to you,” Greg said. “You better answer up, same as you'd answer up one of your professors. Who's the asshole?”

The kid sniveled but made no coherent sound.

“You answer up if you want to pass this exam,” Greg said. “I'll let your guts loose all over this floor, boy. “And in that instant, he meant it. He couldn't look directly at this welling drop of blood; it would send him crazy if he did, George Harvey's nephew or not. “Who's the asshole?”

“Me,” the kid said, and began to sob like a small child afraid of the bogeyman, the Allamagoosalum that waits behind the closet door in the dead hours of the night.

Greg smiled. The headache thumped and flared. “Well, that's pretty good, you know. That's a start. But it's not quite good enough. I want you to say, “I'm an asshole. "”

“I'm an asshole,” the kid said, still sobbing. Snot flowed from his nose and hung there in a runner. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

“Now I want you to say, “I'm a prime asshole. "”

“I… I'm a prime asshole.”

“Now you just say one more thing and maybe we can be done here. You say, “Thank you for burning up that dirty shirt, Mayor Stilison.”

The kid was eager now. The kid saw his way clear. “Thanks for burning up that dirty shirt.”

In a flash, Greg ran one of the jagged points from left to right across the kid's soft belly, bringing a line of blood. He barely broke the skin, but the kid howled as if all the devils of hell were behind him.

“You forgot to say “Mayor Stillson”,” Greg said, and just like that it broke. The headache gave one more massive beat right between his eyes and was gone. He looked down stupidly at the bottle neck in his hand and could barely remember how it had gotten there. Stupid damn thing. He had almost thrown everything away over one numbnuts kid.

“Mayor Stillson!” The kid was screaming. His terror was perfect and complete. “Mayor Stillson! Mayor Still-son Mayor Still…”

“That's good,” Greg said.

“… son Mayor Stillson! Mayor Stillson! Mayor…”

Greg whacked him hard across the face, and the kid rapped his head on the wall. He fell silent, his eyes wide and blank.

Greg stepped very close to him. He reached out. He closed one hand around each of the kid's ears. He pulled the kid's face forward until their noses were touching. Their eyes were less than half an inch apart.

“Now, your uncle is a power in this town,” he said softly, holding the kid's ears like handles. The kid's eyes were huge and brown and swimming. “I'm a power too -coming to be one-but I ain't no George Harvey. He was born here, raised here, everything. And if you was to tell your uncle what went on in here, he might take a notion to finish me in Ridgeway.”

The kid's lips were twitching in a nearly soundless blubber. Greg shook the boy's head slowly back and forth by the ears, banging their noses together.

“He might not… he was pretty damn mad about that shirt. But he might. Blood ties are strong ties. So you think about this, son. If you was to tell your uncle what went on here and your uncle squeezed me out, I guess I would come along and kill you. Do you believe that?”

“Yeah,” the kid whispered. His cheeks were wet, gleaming.

“Yes sir, Mayor Stillson. "”

“Yessir, Mayor Stilison.”

Greg let go of his ears. “Yeah,” he said. “I'd kill you, but first I'd tell anybody that'd listen about how you pissed yourself and stood there crying with snot running out of your nose.”

He turned and walked away quickly, as if the kid smelled bad, and went to the cabinet again. He got a box of Band-Aids from one of the shelves and tossed them across to the kid, who flinched back and fumbled them. He hastened to pick them up off the floor, as if Stillson might attack him again for missing.

Greg pointed. “Bathroom over there. You clean yourself up. I'm gonna leave you a Ridgeway PAL sweatshirt. I want it mailed back, clean, no bloodstains. You understand?”

“Yes,” the kid whispered.

“SIR!” Stillson screamed at him. “SIR! SIR! SIR! Can't you remember that?”

“Sir,” the kid moaned. “Yessir, yessir.”

“They don't teach you kids respect for nothing,” Greg said. “Not for nothing.”

The headache was trying to come back. He took several deep breaths and quelled it-but his stomach felt miserably upset. “Okay, that's the end. I just want to offer you one good piece of advice. Don't you make the mistake of getting back to your damn college this fall or whenever and start thinking this was some way it wasn't. Don't you try to kid yourself about Greg Stillson. Best forgotten, kid. By you, me, and George. Working this around in your mind until you think you could have another swing at it would be the worst mistake of your life. Maybe the last.”

With that Greg left, taking one last contemptuous look at the kid standing there, his chest and belly caked with a few minor smears of dried blood, his eyes wide, his lips trembling. He looked like an overgrown ten-year-old who has struck out in the Little League playoffs.

Greg made a mental bet with himself that he would never see or hear from this particular kid again, and it was a bet he won. Later that week, George Harvey stopped by the barbershop where Greg was getting a shave and thanked him for “talking some sense” into his nephew. “You're good with these kids, Greg,” he said. “I dunno… they seem to respect you.”

Greg told him not to mention it.

While Greg Stillson was burning a shirt with an obscene saying on it in New Hampshire, Walt and Sarah Hazlett were having a late breakfast in Bangor, Maine. Walt had the paper.

He put his coffee cup down with a clink and said, “Your old boyfriend made the paper, Sarah.”

Sarah was feeding Denny. She was in her bathrobe, her hair something of a mess, her eyes still only about a quarter open. Eighty percent of her mind was still asleep. There had been a party last night. The guest of honor had been Harrison Fisher, who had been New Hampshire's third district congressman since dinosaurs walked the earth, and a sure candidate for reelection next year.

It had been politic for her and Walt to go. Politic. That was a word that Walt used a lot lately. He had had lots more to drink than she had, and this morning he was dressed and apparently chipper while she felt buried in a pile of sludge. It wasn't fair.

“Blue!” Denny remarked, and spat back a mouthful of mixed fruit.

“That's not nice,” Sarah said to Denny. To Walt: “Are you talking about Johnny Smith?”

“The one and only.”

She got up and came around to Walt's side of the table. “He's all right, isn't he?”

“Feeling good and kicking up dickens by the sound of this,” Walt said dryly.

She had a hazy idea that it might be related to what had happened to her when she went to see Johnny, but the size of the headline shocked her: REAWAKENED COMA PATIENT DEMONSTRATES PSYCHIC ABILITY AT DRAMATIC NEWS CONFERENCE.

The story was under David Bright's by-line. The accompanying photo showed Johnny, still looking thin and, in the unsparing glare of the flash, pitifully confused, standing over the sprawled body of a man the caption identified as Roger Dussault, a reporter for the Lewiston paper. Reporter Faints after Revelation, the caption read.

Sarah sank down into the chair next to Walt and began to read the article. This did not please Denny, who began to pound on the tray of his highchair for his morning egg.

“I believe you're being summoned,” Walt said.

“Would you feed him, honey? He eats better for you anyway. “Story Continued Page 9, Col. 3. She folded the paper open to page nine.

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Walt said agreeably. He slipped off his sports coat and put on her apron. “Here it comes, guy,” he said, and began feeding Denny his egg.

When she had finished the story, Sarah went back and read it again. Her eyes were drawn again and again to the picture, to Johnny's confused, horror-struck face. The people loosely grouped around the prone Dussault were looking at Johnny with an expression close to fear. She could understand that. She remembered kissing him, and the strange, preoccupied look that had slipped over his face. And when he told her where to find the lost wedding ring, she had been afraid.

But Sarah, what you were afraid of wasn't quite the same thing, was it?

“Just a little more, big boy,” Walt was saying, as if from a thousand miles away. Sarah looked up at them, sitting together in a bar of mote-dusted sunlight, her apron flapping between Walt's knees, and she was suddenly afraid again. She saw the ring sinking to the bottom of the toilet bowl, turning over and over. She heard the small clink as it struck the porcelain. She thought of Halloween masks, of the kid saying, l love to see this guy take a beatin. She thought of promises made and never kept, and her eyes went to his thin newsprint face, looking out at her with such haggard, wretched surprise.

“… gimmick, anyway,” Walt said, hanging up her apron. He had gotten Denny to eat the egg, every bit of it, and now their son and heir was sucking contentedly away at a juice-bottle.

“Huh?” Sarah looked up as he came over to her.

“I said that for a man who must have almost half a million dollars” worth of hospital bills outstanding, it's a helluva good gimmick.”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean, gimmick?”

“Sure,” he said, apparently missing her anger. “He could make seven, maybe ten thousand dollars doing a book about the accident and the coma. But if he came out of the coma psychic-the sky's the limit.”

“That's one hell of an allegation!” Sarah said, and her voice was thin with fury.

He turned to her, his expression first one of surprise and then of understanding. The understanding look made her angrier than ever. If she had a nickel for every time Walt Hazlett had thought he understood her, they could fly first-class to Jamaica.

“Look, I'm sorry I brought it up,” he said.

“Johnny would no more lie than the Pope would… would… you know.”

He bellowed laughter, and in that moment she nearly picked up his own coffee cup and threw it at him. Instead, she locked her hands together tightly under the table and squeezed them. Denny goggled at his father and then burst into his own peal of laughter.

“Honey,” Walt said. “I have nothing against him, I have nothing against what he's doing. In fact, I respect him for it. If that fat old mossback Fisher can go from a broke lawyer to a millionaire during fifteen years in the House of Representatives, then this guy should have a perfect right to pick up as much as he can playing psychic…”

“Johnny doesn't lie,” she repeated tonelessly.

“It's a gimmick for the blue-rinse brigade who read the weekly tabloids and belong to the Universe Book Club,” he said cheerily. “Although I will admit that a little second sight would come in handy during jury selection in this damn Timmons trial.”

“Johnny Smith doesn't lie,” she repeated, and heard him saying: It slipped off your finger. You were putting his shaving stuff into one of those side pockets and it just slipped off… you go up in the attic and look, Sarah. You'll see. But she couldn't tell Walt that. Walt didn't know she had been to see Johnny.

Nothing wrong in going to see him, her mind offered uneasily.

No, but how would he react to the news that she had thrown her original wedding ring into the toilet and flushed it away? He might not understand the sudden twitch of fear that had made her do it-the same fear she saw mirrored on those other newsprint faces, and, to some degree, on Johnny's own. No, Walt might not under-stand that at all. After all, throwing your wedding ring into the toilet and then pushing the flush did suggest a certain vulgar symbolism.

“All right,” Walt was saying, “he doesn't lie. But I just don't believe

Sarah said softly, “Look at the people behind him, Walt. Look at their faces. They believe.”

Walt gave them a cursory glance. “Sure, the way a kid believes in a magician as long as the trick is ongoing.”

“You think this fellow Dussault was a, what-do-you-call-it, a shill? According to the article, he and Johnny had

never met before.”

“That's the only way the illusion will work, Sarah,” Walt said patiently. “It doesn't do a magician any good to pull a bunny out of a rabbit hutch, only out of a hat. Either Johnny Smith knew something or he made a terribly good guess based on this guy Dussault's behavior at the time. But I repeat, I respect him for it. He got a lot of mileage out of it. If it turns him a buck, more power to him.”

In that moment she hated him, loathed him, this good man she had married. There was really nothing so terrible on the reverse side of his goodness, his steadiness, his mild good humor-just the belief, apparently grounded in the bedrock of his soul, that everybody was looking out for number one, each with his or her own little racket. This morning he could call Harrison Fisher a fat old mossback; last night he had been bellowing with laughter at Fisher's stories about Greg Stillson, the funny mayor of some-town-or-other and who might just be crazy enough to run as an independent in the House race next year.

No, in the world of Walt Hazlett, no one had psychic powers and there were no heroes and the doctrine of we-have-to-change-the-system from-within was all-powerful. He was a good man, a steady man, he loved her and Denny, but suddenly her soul cried out for Johnny and the five years together of which they had been robbed. Or the lifetime together. A child with darker hair.

“You better get going, babe,” she said quietly. “They'll have your guy Timmons in stocks and bonds, or whatever they are.”

“Sure. “He smiled at her, the summation done, session adjourned. “Still friends?”

“Still friends. “But he knew where the ring was. He knew.

Walt kissed her, his right hand resting lightly on the back of her neck. He always had the same thing for breakfast, he always kissed her the same way, some day they were going to Washington, and no one was psychic.

Five minutes later he was gone, backing their little red Pinto out onto Pond Street, giving his usual brief toot on the horn, and putting away. She was left alone with Denny, who was in the process of strangling himself while he tried to wriggle under his highchair tray.

“You're going at that all wrong, Sluggo,” Sarah said, crossing the kitchen and unlatching the tray.

“Blue!” Denny said, disgusted with the whole thing.

Speedy Tomato, their tomcat, sauntered into the kitchen at his usual slow, hipshot juvenile delinquent's stride, and Denny grabbed him, making little chuckling noises. Speedy laid his ears back and looked resigned.

Sarah smiled a little and cleared the table. Inertia. A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and she was at rest. Never mind Walt's darker side; she had her own. She had no intention of doing more than sending Johnny a card at Christmas. It was better, safer, that way-because a body in motion tends to keep moving. Her life here was good. She had survived Dan, she had survived Johnny, who had been so unfairly taken from her (but so much in this world was unfair), she had come through her own personal rapids to this smooth water, and here she would stay. This sunshiny kitchen was not a bad place. Best to forget county fairs, Wheels of Fortune, and Johnny Smith's face.

As she ran water into the sink to do the dishes she turned on the radio and caught the beginning of the news. The first item made her freeze with a just-washed plate in one hand, her eyes looking out over their small backyard in startled contemplation. Johnny's mother had had a stroke while watching a TV report on her son's press conference. She had died this morning, not an hour ago.

Sarah dried her hands, snapped off the radio, and pried Speedy Tomato out of Denny's hands. She carried her boy into the living room and popped him into his play-pen. Denny protested this indignity with loud, lusty howls of which she took no notice. She went to the telephone and called the EMMC. A switchboard operator who sounded tired of repeating the same piece of intelligence over and over again told her that John Smith had discharged himself the night before, slightly before mid-night.

She hung up the phone and sat down in a chair. Denny continued to cry from his playpen. Water ran into the kitchen sink. After a while she got up, went into the kitchen, and turned it off.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The man from Inside View showed up on October 16, not long after Johnny had walked up to get the mail.

His father's house was set well back from the road; their graveled driveway was nearly a quarter of a mile long, running through a heavy stand of second-growth spruce and pine. Johnny did the total round trip every day. At first he had returned to the porch trembling with exhaustion, his legs on fire, his limp so pronounced that he was really lurching along. But now, a month and a half after the first time (when the half a mile had taken him an hour to do), the walk had become one of his day's pleasures, something to look forward to. Not the mail, but the walk.

He had begun splitting wood for the coming winter, a chore Herb had been planning to hire out since he himself had landed a contract to do some inside work on a new housing project in Libertyville. “You know when old age has started lookin over your shoulder, John,” he had said with a smile. “It's when you start lookin for inside work as soon as fall rolls around.”

Johnny climbed the porch and sat down in the wicker chair beside the glider, uttering a small sound of relief. He propped his right foot on the porch railing, and with a grimace of pain, used his hands to lift his left leg over it. That done, he began to open his mail.

It had tapered off a lot just lately. During the first week he had been back here in Pownal, there had sometimes been as many as two dozen letters and eight or nine packages a day, most of them forwarded through the EMMC, a few of them sent to General Delivery, Pownal (and assorted variant spellings: Pownell, Poenul, and, in one memorable case, Poonuts).

Most of them were from dissociated people who seemed to be drifting through life in search of any rudder. There were children who wanted his autograph, women who wanted to sleep with him, both men and women seeking advice to the lovelorn. Some sent lucky charms. Some sent horoscopes. A great many of the letters were religious in nature, and in these badly spelled missives, usually written in a large and careful handwriting but one step removed from the scrawl of a bright first-grader, he seemed to feel the ghost of his mother.

He was a prophet, these letters assured him, come to lead the weary and disillusioned American people out of the wilderness. He was a sign that the Last Times were at hand. To this date, October 16, he had received eight copies of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth -his mother surely would have approved of that one. He was urged to proclaim the divinity of Christ and put a stop to the loose morals of youth.

These letters were balanced off by the negative contingent, which was smaller but just as vocal-if usually anonymous. One correspondent, writing in grubby pencil on a sheet of yellow legal paper proclaimed him the Antichrist and urged him to commit suicide. Four or five of the letter writers had inquired about how it felt to murder your own mother. A great many wrote to accuse him of perpetrating a hoax. One wit wrote, “PRECOGNITION, TELEPATHY, BULLSHIT! EAT MY DONG, YOU EXTRASENSORY TURKEY!”

And they sent things. That was the worst of it.

Every day on his way home from work, Herb would stop at the Pownal post office and pick up the packages that were too big to fit in their mailbox. The notes accompanying the things were all essentially the same; a low-grade scream. Tell me, tell me, tell me.

This scarf belonged to my brother, who disappeared on a fishing trip in the Allagash in 1969. I feel very strongly that he is still alive. Tell me where he is.

This lipstick came from my wife's dressing table. I think she's having an affair, but I'm not sure. Tell me if she is.

This is my son's ID bracelet. He never comes home after school anymore, he stays out until all hours, I'm worried sick. Tell me what he's doing.

A woman in North Carolina-God knew how she had found out about him; the press conference in August had not made the national media-sent a charred piece of wood. Her house had burned down, her letter explained, and her husband and two of her five children had died in the blaze. The Charlotte fire department said it was faulty wiring, but she simply couldn't accept that. It had to be arson. She wanted Johnny to feel the enclosed blackened relic and tell her who had done it, so the monster would spend the rest of his life rotting in prison.

Johnny answered none of the letters and returned all the objects (even the charcoaled hunk of wood) at his cost and with no comment. He did touch some of them. Most, like the charred piece of wallboard from the grief-stricken woman in Charlotte, told him nothing at all. But when he touched a few of them, disquieting images came, like waking dreams. In most cases there was barely a trace; a picture would form and fade in seconds, leaving him with nothing concrete at all, only a feeling. But one of them…

It had been the woman who sent the scarf in hopes of finding out what had happened to her brother. It was a white knitted scarf, no different from a million others. But as he handled it, the reality of his father's house had suddenly been gone, and the sound of the television in the next room rose and flattened, rose and flattened, until it was the sound of drowsing summer insects and the far-away babble of water.

Woods smells in his nostrils. Green shafts of sunlight falling through great old trees. The ground had been soggy for the last three hours or so, squelchy, almost swamplike. He was scared, plenty scared, but he had kept his head. If you were lost in the big north country and panicked, they might as well carve your headstone. He had kept pushing south. It had been two days since he had gotten separated from Stiv and Rocky and Logan. They had been camping near

(but that wouldn't come, it was in the dead zone)

some stream, trout-fishing, and it had been his own damn fault; he had been pretty damn drunk.

Now he could see his pack leaning against the edge of an old and moss-grown blowdown, white deadwood poking through the green here and there like bones, he could see his pack, yes, but he couldn't reach it because he had walked a few yards away to take a leak and he had walked into a really squelchy place, mud almost to the tops of his L. L. Bean's boots, and he tried to back out, find a dryer place to do his business, but he couldn't get out. He couldn't get out because it wasn't mud at all. It was

something else.

He stood there, looking around fruitlessly for something to grab onto, almost laughing at the idiocy of having walked right into a patch of quicksand while looking for a place to take a piss.

He stood there, at first positive that it must be a shallow patch of quicksand, at the very worst over his boot-tops, another tale to tell when he was found.

He stood there, and real panic did not begin to set in until the quicksand oozed implacably over his knees. He began to struggle then, forgetting that if you got your stupid self into quicksand you were supposed to remain very still. In no time at all the quicksand was up to his waist and now it was chest-high, sucking at him like great brown lips, constricting his breathing; he began to scream and no one came, nothing came except for a fat brown squirrel that picked its way down the side of the mossy deadfall and perched on his pack and watched him with his bright, black eyes.

Now it was up to his neck, the rich, brown smell of it in his nose and his screams became thin and gasping as the quicksand implacably pressed the breath out of him. Birds flew swooping and cheeping and scolding, and green shafts of sunlight like tarnished copper fell through the trees, and the quicksand rose over his chin. Alone, he was going to die alone, and he opened his mouth to scream one last time and there was no scream because the quicksand flowed into his mouth, it flowed over his tongue, it flowed between his teeth in thin ribbons, he was swallowing quicksand and the scream was never uttered -Johnny had come out of that in a cold sweat, his flesh marbled into goosebumps, the scarf wrapped tightly between his hands, his breath coming in sh6rt, strangled gasps. He had thrown the scarf on the floor where it lay like a twisted white snake. He would not touch it again. His father had put it in a return envelope and sent it back.

But now, mercifully, the mail was beginning to taper off. The crazies had discovered some fresher object for their public and private obsessions. Newsmen no longer called for interviews, partly because the phone number had been changed and unlisted, partly because the story was old hat.

Roger Dussault had written a long and angry piece for his paper, of which he was the feature editor. He proclaimed the whole thing a cruel and tasteless hoax. Johnny had undoubtedly boned up on incidents from the pasts of several reporters who were likely to attend the press conference, just in case. Yes, he admitted, his sister Anne's nickname had been Terry. She had died fairly young, and amphetamines might have been a contributing cause. But all of that was accessible information to anyone who wanted to dig it up. He made it all seem quite logical. The article did not explain how Johnny, who had not been out of the hospital, could have come by this “accessible information”, but that was a point most readers seemed to have overlooked. Johnny could not have cared less. The incident was closed, and he had no intention of creating new ones. What good could it possibly do to write the lady who had sent the scarf and tell her that her brother had drowned, screaming, in quicksand because he had gone the wrong way while looking for a place to take a piss? Would it ease her mind or help her live her life any better?

Today's mail was a mere six letters. A power bill. A card from Herb's cousin out in Oklahoma. A lady who had sent Johnny a crucifix with MADE IN TAIWAN stamped on Christ's feet in tiny gold letters. There was a brief note from Sam Weizak. And a small envelope with a return address that made him blink and sit up straighter. S. Hazlett, 12 Pond Street, Bangor.

Sarah. He tore it open.

He had received a sympathy card from her two days after the funeral services for his mother. Written on the back of it in her cool, back-slanting hand had been:

“Johnny-I'm so sorry that this has happened. I heard on the radio that your mom had passed away-in some ways that seemed the most unfair thing of all, that your private grief should have been made a thing of public knowledge. You may not remember, but we talked a little about your mom the night of your accident. I asked you what she'd do if you brought home a lapsed Catholic and you said she would smile and welcome me in and slip me a few tracts. I could see your love for her in the way you smiled. I know from your father that she had changed, but much of the change was because she loved you so much and just couldn't accept what had happened. And in the end I guess her faith was rewarded. Please accept my warm sympathy, and if there's anything I can do, now or later on, please count on your friend-Sarah.”

That was one note he had answered, thanking her for both the card and the thought. He had written it carefully, afraid that he might betray himself and say the wrong thing. She was a married woman now, that was beyond his control or ability to change. But he did remember their conversation about his mother-and so many other things about that night. Her note had summoned up the whole evening, and he answered in a bittersweet mood that was more bitter than sweet. He still loved Sarah Bracknell, and he had to remind himself constantly that she was gone, replaced by another woman who was five years older and the mother of a small boy.

Now he pulled a single sheet of stationery out of the envelope and scanned it quickly. She and her boy were headed down to Kennebunk to spend a week with Sarah's freshman and sophomore roommate, a girl named Stephanie Constantine now, Stephanie Carsleigh then. She said that Johnny might remember her, but Johnny didn't. Anyway, Walt was stuck in Washington for three weeks on combined firm and Republican party business, and Sarah thought she might take one afternoon and come by Pownal to see Johnny and Herb, if it was no trouble.

“You can reach me at Steph's number, 814-6219, any time between Oct. 17th and the 23rd. Of course, if it would make you feel uncomfortable in any way, just call me and say so, either up here or down there in K'bunk. I'll understand. Much love to both of you-Sarah.”

Holding the letter in one hand, Johnny looked across the yard and into the woods, which had gone russet and gold, seemingly just in the last week. The leaves would be falling soon, and then it would be time for winter.

Much love to both of you-Sarah. He ran his thumb across the words thoughtfully. It would be better not to call, not to write, not to do anything, he thought. She would get the message. Like the woman who mailed the scarf what possible good could it do? Why kick a sleeping dog? Sarah might be able to use that phrase, much love, blithely, but he could not. He wasn't over the hurt of the past. For him, time had been crudely folded, stapled, and mutilated. In the progression of his own interior time, she had been his girl only six months ago. He could accept the coma and the loss of time in an intellectual way, but his emotions stubbornly resisted. Answering her condolence note had been difficult, but with a note it was always possible to crumple the thing up and start again if it began to go in directions it shouldn't go, if it began to overstep the bounds of friendship, which was all they were now allowed to share. If he saw her, he might do or say something stupid. Better not to call. Better just to let it sink.

But he would call, he thought. Call and invite her over.

Troubled, he slipped the note back into the envelope.

The sun caught on bright chrome, twinkled there, and tossed an arrow of light back into his eyes. A Ford sedan was crunching its way down the driveway. Johnny squinted and tried to make out if it was a familiar car. Company out here was rare. There had been lots of mail, but people had only stopped by on three or four occasions. Pownal was small on the map, hard to find. If the car did belong to some seeker after knowledge, Johnny would send him or her away quickly, as kindly as possible, but firmly. That had been Weizak's parting advice. Good advice, Johnny thought.

“Don't let anyone rope you into the role of consulting swami, John. Give no encouragement and they will forget. It may seem heartless to you at first-most of them are misguided people with too many problems and only the best of intentions-but it is a question of your life, your privacy. So be firm. “And so he had been.

The Ford pulled into the turnaround between the shed and the woodpile, and as it swung around, Johnny saw the small Hertz sticker in the corner of the wind-shield. A very tall man in very new blue jeans and a red plaid hunting shirt that looked as if it had just come out of an L. L. Bean box got out of the car and glanced around. He had the air of a man who is not used to the country, a man who knows there are no more wolves or cougars in New England, but who wants to make sure all the same. A city man. He glanced up at the porch, saw Johnny, and raised one hand in greeting.

“Good afternoon,” he said. He had a flat city accent as well-Brooklyn, Johnny thought-and he sounded as if he were talking through a Saltine box.

“Hi,” Johnny said. “Lost?”

“Boy, I hope not,” the stranger said, coming over to the foot of the steps. “You're either John Smith or his twin brother.”

Johnny grinned. “I don't have a brother, so I guess you found your way to the right door. Can I do something for you?”

“Well, maybe we can do something for each other. “The stranger mounted the porch steps and offered his hand. Johnny shook it. “My name is Richard Dees. Inside View magazine.”

His hair was cut in a fashionable ear-length style, and it was mostly gray. Dyed gray, Johnny thought with some amusement. What could you say about a man who sounded as if he were talking through a Saltine box and dyed his hair gray?

“Maybe you've seen the magazine.”

“Oh, I've seen it. They sell it at the checkout counters in the supermarket. I'm not interested in being interviewed. Sorry you had to make a trip out here for nothing. “They sold it in the supermarket, all right. The headlines did everything but leap off the pulp-stock pages and try to mug you. CHILD KILLED BY CREATURES FROM SPACE, DISTRAUGHT MOTHER CRIES. THE FOODS THAT ARE POISONING YOUR CHILDREN. 12 PSYCHICS PREDICT CALIFORNIA EARTHQUAKE BY 1978.

“Well now, an interview wasn't exactly what we were thinking of,” Dees said. “May I sit down?”

“Really, I…”

“Mr. Smith, I've flown all the way up from New York, and from Boston I came on a little plane that had me wondering what would happen to my wife if I died interstate.”

“Portland-Bangor Airways-” Johnny asked, grinning.

“That's what it was,” Dees agreed.

“All right,” Johnny said. “I'm impressed with your valor and your dedication to your job. I'll listen, but only for fifteen minutes or so. I'm supposed to sleep every afternoon. “This was a small lie in a good cause.

“Fifteen minutes should be more than enough. “Dees leaned forward. “I'm just making an educated guess, Mr. Smith, but I'd estimate that you must owe somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars. That roll somewhere within putting distance of the pin, does it?”

Johnny's smile thinned. “What I owe or don't owe,” he said, “is my business.”

“All right, of course, sure. I didn't mean to offend, Mr. Smith. Inside View would like to offer you a job. A rather lucrative job.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“If you'll just give me a chance to lay this out for you…

Johnny said, “I'm not a practicing psychic. I'm not a Jeanne Dixon or an Edgar Cayce or an Alex Tannous. “That's over with. The last thing I want to do is rake it up again.”

“Can I have just a few moments?”

“Mr Dees, you don't seem to understand what I'm-”

“Just a few moments?” Dees smiled winningly.

“How did you find out where I was, anyway?”

“We have a stringer on a mid-Maine paper called the Kennebec Journal He said that although you'd dropped out of the public view, you were probably staying with your father.”

“Well, I owe him a real debt of thanks, don't I?”

“Sure,” Dees said easily. “I'm betting you'll think so when you hear the whole deal. May I?”

“All right,” Johnny said. “But just because you flew up here on Panic Airlines, I'm not going to change my mind.”

“Well, however you see it. It's a free country, isn't it? Sure it is. Inside View specializes in a psychic view of things, Mr. Smith, as you probably know. Our readers, to be perfectly frank, are out of their gourds for this stuff. We have a weekly circulation of three million. Three million readers every week, Mr. Smith, how's that for a long shot straight down the fairway? How do we do it? We stick with the upbeat, the spiritual…”

“Twin Babies Eaten By Killer Bear,” Johnny murmured.

Dees shrugged. “Sure, well, it's a tough old world, isn't it? People have to be informed about these things. It's their right to know. But for every downbeat article we've got three others telling our readers how to lose weight painlessly, how to find sexual happiness and compatibility, how to get closer to God…

“Do you believe in God, Mr. Dees?”

“Actually, I don't,” Dees said, and smiled his winning smile. “But we live in a democracy, greatest country on earth, right? Everyone is the captain of his own soul. No, the point is, our readers believe in God. They believe in angels and miracles…

“And exorcisms and devils and Black Masses…

“Right, right, right. You catch. It's a spiritual audience. They believe all this psychic bushwah. We have a total of ten psychics under contract, including Kathleen Nolan, the most famous seer in America. We'd like to put you under contract, Mr. Smith.”

“Would you?”

“Indeed we would. What would it mean for you? Your picture and a short column would appear roughly twelve times a year, when we run one of our All-Psychic issues. Inside View's Ten Famous Psychics Preview the Second Ford Administration, that sort of thing. We always do a New Year's issue, and one each Fourth of July on the course of America over the next year-that's always a very informative issue, lots of chip shots on foreign policy and economic policy in that one-plus assorted other goodies.”

“I don't think you understand,” Johnny said. He was speaking very slowly, as if to a child. “I've had a couple of precognitive bursts-I suppose you could say I “saw the future”-but I don't have any control over it. I could no more come up with a prediction for the second Ford administration-if there ever is one-than I could milk a bull.”

Dees looked horrified. “Who said you could? Staff writers do all those columns.”

“Staff…?” Johnny gaped at Dees, finally shocked.

“Of course,” Dees said impatiently. “Look. One of our most popular guys over the last couple of years has been Frank Ross, the guy who specializes in natural disasters. Hell of a nice guy, but Jesus Christ, he quit school in the ninth grade. He did two hitches in the Army and was swamping out Greyhound buses at the Port Authority terminal in New York when we found him. You think we'd let him write his own column? He'd misspell cat.

“But the predictions…

“A free hand, nothing but a free hand. But you'd be surprised how often these guys and gals get stuck for a real whopper.

“Whopper,” Johnny repeated, bemused. He was a little surprised to find himself getting angry. His mother had bought inside View for as long as he could remember, all the way back to the days when they had featured pictures of bloody car wrecks, decapitations, and bootlegged execution photos. She had sworn by every word. Presumably the greater part of inside View's other,999,999 readers did as well. And here sat this fellow with his dyed gray hair and his fortydollar shoes and his shirt with the store-creases still in it, talking about whoppers.

“But it all works out,” Dees was saying. “If you ever get stuck, all you have to do is call us collect and we all take it into the pro-shop together and come up with something. We have the right to anthologize your columns in our yearly book, Inside Views of Things to Come. You're perfectly free to sign any contract you can get with a book publisher, however. All we get is first refusal on the magazine rights, and we hardly ever refuse, I can tell you. And we pay very handsomely. That's over and above whatever figure we contract for. Gravy on your mashed potatoes, you might say. “Dees chuckled.

“And what might that figure be?” Johnny asked slowly. He was gripping the arms of his rocker. A vein in his right temple pulsed rhythmically.

“Thirty thousand dollars per year for two years,” Dees said. “And if you prove popular, that figure would become negotiable. Now, all our psychics have some area of expertise. I understand that you're good with objects. “Dees's eyes became half-lidded, dreamy. “I see a regular feature. Twice monthly, maybe-we don't want to run a good thing into the ground. “John Smith invites inside Viewers to send in personal belongings for psychic examination…” Something like that. We'd make it clear, of course, that they should send in inexpensive stuff because nothing could be returned. But you'd be surprised. Some people are crazy as bedbugs, God love em. You'd be surprised at some of the stuff that would come in, Diamonds, gold coins, wedding rings… and we could attach a rider to the contract specifying that all objects mailed in would become your personal property.

Now Johnny began to see tones of dull red before his eyes. “People would send things in and I'd just keep them. That's what you're saying.”

“Sure, I don't see any problem with that. It's just a question of keeping the ground rules clear up front. A little extra gravy for those mashed potatoes.”

“Suppose,” Johnny said, carefully keeping his voice even and modulated, “suppose I got… stuck for a whopper, as you put it… and I just called in and said President Ford was going to be assassinated on September 31, 1976? Not because I felt he was, but because I was stuck?”

“Well, September only has thirty days, you know,” Dees said. “But otherwise, I think it's a hole in one. You're going to be a natural, Johnny. You think big. That's good. You'd be surprised how many of these people think small. Afraid to put their mouths where their money is” I suppose. One of our guys-Tim Clark out in Idaho -wrote in two weeks ago and said he'd had a flash that Earl Butz was going to be forced to resign next year. Well pardon my French, but who gives a fuck? Who's Earl Butz to the American housewife? But you have good waves, Johnny. You were made for this stuff.”

“Good waves,” Johnny muttered.

Dees was looking at him curiously. “You feel all right, Johnny? You look a little white.”

Johnny was thinking 6f the lady who had sent the scarf. Probably she read Inside View, too. “Let me see if I can summarize this,” he said. “You'd pay me thirty thousand dollars a year for my name…

“And your picture, don't forget.

And my picture, for a few ghostwritten columns. Also a feature where I tell people what they want to know about objects they send in. As an extra added attraction, I get to keep the stuff…

“If the lawyers can work it out…”

“… as my personal property. That the deal?”

“That's the bare bones of the deal. Johnny. The way these things feed each other, it's just amazing. You'll be a household word in six months, and after that, the sky is the limit. The Carson show. Personal appearances. Lecture tours. Your book, of course, pick your house, they're practically throwing money at psychics along Publisher's Row. Kathy Nolan started with a contract like the one we're offering you, and she makes over two hundred thou a year now. Also, she founded her own church and the IRS can't touch dime-one of her money. She doesn't miss a trick, does our Kathy. “Dees leaned forward, grinning. “I tell you, Johnny, the sky is the limit.”

“I'll bet.”

“Well? What do you think?”

Johnny leaned forward toward Dees. He grabbed the sleeve of Dees's new L. L. Bean shirt in one hand and the collar of Dees's new L. L. Bean shirt in the other.

“Hey! What the hell do you think you're-…”

Johnny bunched the shirt in both hands and drew Dees forward. Five months of daily exercise had toned up the muscles in his hands and arms to a formidable degree.

“You asked me what I thought,” Johnny said. His head was beginning to throb and ache. “I'll tell you. I think you're a ghoul. A grave robber of people's dreams. I think someone ought to put you to work at Roto-Rooter. I think your mother should have died of cancer the day after she conceived you. If there's a hell, I hope you burn there.”

“You can't talk to me like that!” Dees cried. His voice rose to a fishwife's shriek. “You're fucking crazy! Forget it! Forget the whole thing, you stupid hick sonofabitch I You had your chance! Don't come crawling around…”

“Furthermore, you sound like you're talking through a Saltine box,” Johnny said, standing up. He lifted Dees with him. The tails of his shirt popped out of the waist-band of his new jeans, revealing a fishnet undershirt beneath. Johnny began to shake Dees methodically back and forth. Dees forgot about being angry. He began to blubber and roar.

Johnny dragged him to the porch steps, raised one foot and planted it squarely in the seat of the new Levi's. Dees went down in two big steps, still blubbering and roaring. He fell in the dirt and sprawled full length. When he got up and turned around to face Johnny, his country-cousin duds were caked with dooryard dust. It made them look more real, somehow, Johnny thought, but doubted if Dees would appreciate that.

“I ought to put the cops on you,” he said hoarsely. “And maybe I will.”

“You do whatever turns you on,” Johnny said. “But the law around here doesn't take too kindly to people who stick their noses in where they haven't been invited.”

Dees's face worked in an uneasy contortion of fear, anger, and shock. “God help you if you ever need us,” he said.

Johnny's head was aching fiercely now, but he kept his voice even. “That's just right,” he said. “I couldn't agree more.

“You're going to be sorry, you know. Three million readers. That cuts both ways. When we get done with you the people in this country wouldn't believe you if you predicted spring in April. They wouldn't believe you if you said the World Series is going to come in October. They wouldn't believe you if… if… Dees spluttered, furious.

“Get out of here, you cheap cocksucker,” Johnny said.

“You can kiss off that book!” Dees screamed, apparently summoning up the worst thing he could think of. With his working, knotted face and his dust-caked shirt, he looked like a kid having a class-A tantrum. His Brooklyn accent had deepened and darkened to the point where it was almost a patois. “They'll laugh you out of every publishing house in New York! Nightstand Readers wouldn't touch you when I get done with you! There are ways of fixing smart guys like you and we got em, fuckhead! We…”

“I guess I'll go get my Remmy and shoot myself a trespasserJohnny remarked.

Dees retreated to his rental car, still shouting threats and obscenities. Johnny stood on the porch and watched him, his head thudding sickly. Dees got in, revved the car's engine mercilessly, and then screamed out, throwing dirt into the air in clouds. He let the car drift just enough on his way out to knock the chopping block by the shed flying. Johnny grinned a little at that in spite of his bad head. He could set up the chopping block a lot more easily than Dees was going to be able to explain the big dent in that Ford's front fender to the Hertz people.

Afternoon sun twinkled on chrome again as Dees sprayed gravel all the way up the driveway to the road. Johnny sat down in the rocker again and put his forehead in his hand and got ready to wait out the headache.

“You're going to do what?” the banker asked outside and below, traffic passed back and forth along the bucolic main street of Ridgeway, New Hampshire. On the walls of the banker's pine-panelled, third-floor office were Frederick Remington prints and photographs of the banker at local functions. On his desk was a lucite cube, and embedded in this cube were pictures of his wife and son.

“I'm going to run for the House of Representatives next year,” Greg Stillson repeated. He was dressed in khaki suntan pants, a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a black tie with a single blue figure. He looked out of place in the banker's office, somehow, as if at any moment he might rise to his feet and begin an aimless, destructive charge around the room, knocking over furniture, sweeping the expensively framed Remington prints to the floor, pulling the drapes from their rods.

The banker, Charles “Chuck” Gendron, president of the local Lions Club, laughed-a bit uncertainly. Stillson had a way of making people feel uncertain. As a boy he had been scrawny, perhaps; he liked to tell people that “a high wind woulda blowed me away'; but in the end his father's genes had told, and sitting here in Gendron's office, he looked very much like the Oklahoma oufield roughneck that his father had been.

He frowned at Gendron's chuckle.

“I mean, George Harvey might have something to say about that, mightn't he, Greg?” George Harvey, besides being a mover and a shaker in town politics, was the third district Republican godfather.

“George won't say boo,” Greg said calmly. There was a salting of gray in his hair, but his face suddenly looked very much like the face of the man who long ago had kicked a dog to death in an Iowa farmyard. His voice was patient. “George is going to be on the sidelines, but he's gonna be on my side of the sidelines, if you get my meaning. I ain't going to be stepping on his toes, because I'm going to run as an independent. I don't have twenty years to spend learning the ropes and licking boots.”

Chuck Gendron said hesitantly, “You're kidding, aren't you, Greg?”

Greg's frown returned. It was forbidding. “Chuck, I never kid. People… they think I kid. The Union-Leader and those yo-yos on the Daily Democrat, they think I kid. But you go see George Harvey. You ask him if I kid around, or if I get the job done. You ought to know better, too. After all, we buried some bodies together, didn't we, Chuck?”

The frown metamorphosed into a somehow chilling grin-chilling to Gendron, perhaps, because he had allowed himself to be pulled along on a couple of Greg Stilison's development schemes. They had made money, yes, of course they had, that wasn't the problem. But there had been a couple of aspects of the Sunningdale Acres development (and the Laurel Estates deal as well, to be honest) that hadn't been-well, strictly legal. A bribed EPA agent for one thing, but that wasn't the worst thing.

On the Laurel Estates thing there had been an old man out on the Back Ridgeway Road who hadn't wanted to sell, and first the old man's fourteen-or-so chickens had died of some mysterious ailment and second there had been a fire in the old man's potato house and third when the old man came back from visiting his sister, who was in a nursing home in Keene, one weekend not so long ago, someone bad smeared dogshit all over the old man's living room and dining room and fourth the old man had sold and fifth Laurel Estates was now a fact of life.

And, maybe sixth: That motorcycle spook, Sonny Elliman, was hanging around again. He and Greg were good buddies, and the only thing that kept that from being town gossip was the counterbalancing fact that Greg was seen in the company of a lot of heads, hippies, freaks, and cyclists-as a direct result of the Drug Counselling Center he had set up, plus Ridgeway's rather unusual program for young drug, alcohol, and road offenders. Instead of fining them or locking them up, the town took out their services in trade. It had been Greg's idea-and a good one, the banker would be the first to admit. It had been one of the things that had helped Greg to get elected mayor.

But this-this was utter craziness.

Greg had said something else. Gendron wasn't sure what.

“Pardon me,” he said.

“I asked you how you'd like to be my campaign manager,” Greg repeated.

“Greg… “Gendron had to clear his throat and start again. “Greg, you don't seem to understand. Harrison Fisher is the Third District representative in Washington. Harrison Fisher is Republican, respected, and probably eternal.”

“No one is eternal,” Greg said.

“Harrison is damn close,” Gendron said. “Ask Harvey. They went to school together. Back around 1800, I think.”

Greg took no notice of this thin witticism. “I'll call myself a Bull Moose or something… and everyone will think I'm kidding around… and in the end, the good people of the Third District are going to laugh me all the way to Washington.”

“Greg, you're crazy.”

Greg's smile disappeared as if it had never been there. Something frightening happened to his face. It became very still, and his eyes widened to show too much of the whites. They were like the eyes of a horse that smells bad water.

“You don't want to say something like that, Chuck. Ever.”

The banker felt more than chilled now.

“Greg, I apologize. It's just that…

“No, you don't ever want to say that to me, unless you want to find Sonny Elliman waiting for you some afternoon when you go out to get your big fucking Imperial.”

Gendron's mouth moved but no sound came out.

Greg smiled again, and it was like the sun suddenly breaking through threatening clouds. “Never mind. We don't want to be kicking sand if we're going to be working together.”

“Greg…

“I want you because you know every damn business man in this part of New Hampshire. We're gonna have plenty good money once we get this thing rolling, but I figure we'll have to prime the pump. Now's the time for me to expand a little, and start looking like the state's man as well as Ridgeway's man. I figure fifty thousand dollars ought to be enough to fertilize the grass roots.

The banker, who had worked for Harrison Fisher in his last four canvasses, was so astounded by Greg's political naivete that at first he was at a loss on how to proceed. At last he said, “Greg. Businessmen contribute to campaigns not out of the goodness of their hearts but be-cause the winner ends up owing them something. in a close campaign they'll contribute to any candidate who has a chance of winning, because they can write off the loser as a tax loss as well. But the operant phrase is chance of winning. Now Fisher is a…

“Shoo-in,” Greg supplied. He produced an envelope from his back pocket. “Want you to look at these.”

Gendron looked doubtfully at the envelope, then up at Greg. Greg nodded encouragingly. The banker opened the envelope.

There was a long silence in the pine-panelled office after Gendron's initial gasp for breath. It was unbroken except for the faint hum of the digital clock on the banker's desk and the hiss of a match as Greg lit a Phillies cheroot. On the walls of the office were Frederick Remington pictures. In the lucite cube were family pictures. Now, spread on the desk, were pictures of the banker with his head buried between the thighs of a young woman with black hair-or it might have been red, the pictures were high-grain black-and-white glossies and it was hard to tell. The woman's face was very clear. It was not the face of the banker's wife. Some residents of Ridge. way would have recognized it as the face of one of the waitresses at Bobby Strang's truckstop two towns over.

The pictures of the banker with his head between the legs of the waitress were the safe ones-her face was clear but his was not. In others, his own grandmother would have recognized him. There were pictures of Gendron and the waitress involved in a whole medley of sexual delights-hardly all the positions of the Kama Sutra, but there were several positions represented that had never made the “Sexual Relationships” chapter of the Ridgeway High health textbook.

Gendron looked up, his face cheesy, his hands trembling. His heart was galloping in his chest. He feared a heart attack.

Greg was not even looking at him. He was looking out the window at the bright blue slice of October sky visible between the Ridgeway Five and Ten and the Ridgeway Card and Notion Shoppe.

“The winds of change have started to blow,” he said, and his face was distant and preoccupied; almost mystical. He looked back at Gendron. “One of those drugfreaks down at the Center, you know what he gave me?”

Chuck Gendron shook his head numbly. With one of his shaking hands he was massaging the left side if his chest-just in case. His eyes kept falling to the photographs. The damning photographs. What if his secretary came in right now? He stopped massaging his chest and began gathering up the pictures, stuffing them back into the envelope.

“He gave me Chairman Mao's little red book,” Greg said. A chuckle rumbled up from the barrel chest that had once been so thin, part of a body that had mostly disgusted his idolized father. “And one of the proverbs in there… I can't remember exactly how it went, but it was something like, “The man who senses the wind of change should build not a windbreak but a windmill.” That was the flavor of it, anyway.”

He leaned forward.

“Harrison Fisher's not a shoo-in, he's a has-been. Ford is a has-been. Muskie's a has-been. Humphrey's a has-been. A lot of local and state politicians all the way across this country are going to wake up the day after election day and find out that they're as dead as dodo birds. They forced Nixon out, and the next year they forced out the people who stood behind him in the impeachment hearings, and next year they'll force out Jerry Ford for the same reason.

Greg Stillson's eyes blazed at the banker.

“You want to see the wave of the future? Look up in Maine at this guy Longley. The Republicans ran a guy named Erwin and the Democrats ran a guy named Mitchell and when they counted the votes for governor, they both got a big surprise, because the people went and elected themselves an insurance man from Lewiston that didn't want any part of either party. Now they're talking about him as a dark horse candidate for president.”

Gendron still couldn't talk.

Greg drew in his breath. “They're all gonna think I'm kiddin, see? They thought Longley was kiddin. But I'm not kiddin. I'm building windmills. And you're gonna supply the building materials.”

He ceased. Silence fell in the office, except for the hum of the clock. At last Gendron whispered, “Where did you get these pictures? Was it that Elliman?”

“Aw, hey. You don't want to talk about that. You forget all about those pictures. Keep them.”

“And who keeps the negatives?”

“Chuck,” Greg said earnestly, “you don't understand. I'm offering you Washington. Sky's the limit, boy! I'm not even asking you to raise that much money. Like I said, just a bucket of water to help prime the pump. When we get rolling, plenty of money is going to come in. Now, you know the guys that have money. You have lunch with them down at the Caswell House. You play poker with them. You have written them commercial loans tied to the prime rate at no more than their say so. And you know how to put an armlock on them.”

“Greg you don't understand, you don't…”

Greg stood up. “The way I just put an armlock on you,” he said.

The banker looked up at him. His eyes rolled helplessly. Greg Stillson thought he looked like a sheep that had been led neatly to the slaughter.

“Fifty thousand dollars,” he said. “You find it.”

He walked out, closing the door gently behind him. Gendron heard his booming voice even through the thick walls, bandying with his secretary. His secretary was a sixty-year-old flat-chested biddy, and Stillson probably had her giggling like a schoolgirl. He was a buffoon. It was that as much as his programs for coping with youthful crime that had made him mayor of Ridgeway. But the people didn't elect buffoons to Washington.

Well-hardly ever.

That wasn't his problem. Fifty thousand dollars in campaign contributions, that was his problem. His mind began to scurry around the problem like a trained white rat scurrying around a piece of cheese on a plate. It could probably be done. Yes, it could probably be done-but would it end there?

The white envelope was still on his desk. His smiling wife looked at it from her place in the lucite cube. He scooped the envelope up and jammed it into the inner pocket of his suitcoat. It had been Elliman, somehow Elliman had found out and had taken the pictures, he was sure of it.

But it had been Stillson who told him what to do.

Maybe the man wasn't such a buffoon after all. His assessment of the political climate of 1975-76 wasn't completely stupid. Building windmills instead of wind-breaks… the sky's the limit.

But that wasn't his problem.

Fifty thousand dollars was his problem.

Chuck Gendron, president of the Lions and all-round good fellow (last year he had ridden one of those small, funny motorcycles in the Ridgeway Fourth of July parade), pulled a yellow legal tablet out of the top drawer of his desk and began jotting down a list of names. The trained white rat at work. And down on Main Street Greg Stillson turned his face up into the strong autumn sunlight and congratulated himself on a job well-done-or well-begun.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Later, Johnny supposed that the reason he ended up finally making love to Sarah-almost five years to the day after the fair-had a lot to do with the visit of Richard Dees, the man from inside View. The reason he finally weakened and called Sarah and invited her to come and visit was little more than a wistful urge to have someone nice to come to call and take the nasty taste out of his mouth. Or so he told himself.

He called her in Kennebunk and got the former roommate, who said Sarah would be right with him. The phone clunked down and there was a moment of silence when he contemplated (but not very seriously) just hanging up and closing the books for good. Then Sarah's voice was in his ear.

“Johnny? Is it you?”

“The very same.”

“How are you?”

“Fine. How's by you?”

“I'm fine,” she said. “Glad you called. I… didn't know if you would.”

“Still sniffin that wicked cocaine?”

“No, I'm on heroin now.”

“You got your boy with you?”

“I sure do. Don't go anywhere without him.”

“Well, why don't the two of you truck on out here some day before you have to go back up north?”

“I'd like that, Johnny. “she said warmly.

“Dad's working in Westbrook and I'm chief cook and bottlewasher. He gets home around four-thirty and we eat around five-thirty. You're welcome to stay for dinner, but be warned: all my best dishes use Franco-Amencan spaghetti as their base.”

She giggled. “Invitation accepted. Which day is best?”

“What about tomorrow or the day after, Sarah?”

“Tomorrow's fine,” she said after the briefest of hesitations. “See you then.”

“Take care, Sarah.”

“You too.”

He hung up thoughtfully, feeling both excited and guilty-for no good reason at all. But your mind went where it wanted to, didn't it? And where his mind wanted to go now was to examine possibilities maybe best left unconsidered.

Well, she knows the thing she needs to know. She knows what time dad comes home-what else does she need to know?

And his mind answered itself: What you going to do if she shows up at noon?

Nothing, he answered, and didn't wholly believe it. Just thinking about Sarah, the set of her lips, the small, upward tilt of her green eyes-those were enough to make him feel weak and sappy and a little desperate.

Johnny went out to the kitchen and slowly began to put together this night's supper, not so important, just for two. Father and son batching it. It hadn't been all that bad. He was still healing. He and his father had talked about the four-and-a-half years he had missed, about his mother-working around that carefully but always seeming to come a little closer to the center, in a tightening spiral. Not needing to understand, maybe, but needing to come to terms. No, it hadn't been that bad. It was a way to finish putting things together. For both of them. But it would be over in January when he returned to Cleaves Mills to teach. He had gotten his half-year contract from Dave Pelsen the week before, had signed it and sent it back. What would his father do then? Go on, Johnny supposed. People had a way of doing that, just going on, pushing through with no particular drama, no big drumrolls. He would get down to visit Herb as often as he could, every weekend, if that felt like the right thing to do. So many things had gotten strange so fast that all he could do was feel his way slowly along, groping like a blind man in an unfamiliar room.

He put the roast in the oven, went into the living room, snapped on the TV, then snapped it off again. He sat down and thought about Sarah. The baby, he thought The baby will be our chaperon if she comes early. So that was all right, after all. All bases covered.

But his thoughts were still long and uneasily speculative.

She came at quarter past twelve the next day, wheeling a snappy little red Pinto into the driveway and parking it, getting out, looking tall and beautiful, her dark blonde hair caught in the mild October wind.

“Hi, Johnny! “she called, raising her hand.

“Sarah!” He came down to meet her; she lifted her face and he kissed her cheek lightly.

“Just let me get the emperor,” she said, opening the passenger door.

“Can I help?”

“Naw, we get along just fine together, don't we, Denny? Come on, kiddo. “Moving deftly, she unbuckled the straps holding a pudgy little baby in the car seat. She lifted him out. Denny stared around the yard with wild, solemn interest, and then his eyes fixed on Johnny and held there. He smiled.

“Vig!” Denny said, and waved both hands.

“I think he wants to go to you,” Sarah said. “Very unusual. Denny has his father's Republican sensibilities -he's rather standoffish. Want to hold him?”

“Sure,” Johnny said, a little doubtfully.

Sarah grinned. “He won't break and you won't drop him,” she said, and handed Denny over. “If you did, he'd probably bounce right up like Silly Putty. Disgustingly fat baby.

“Vun bunk! “Denny said, curling one arm nonchalantly around Johnny's neck and looking comfortably at his mother.

“It really is amazing,” Sarah said. “He never takes to people like… Johnny? Johnny?”

When the baby put his arm around Johnny's neck, a confused rush of feelings had washed over him like mild warm water. There was nothing dark, nothing troubling. Everything was very simple. There was no concept of the future in the baby's thoughts. No feeling of trouble. No sense of past unhappiness. And on words, only strong images: warmth, dryness, the mother, the man that was himself.

“Johnny?” She was looking at him apprehensively.

“Hmmmm?”

“Is everything all right?”

She's asking me about Denny, he realized. Is everything all right with Denny? Do you see trouble? Problems?

“Everything's fine,” he said. “We can go inside if you want, but I usually roost on the porch. It'll be time to crouch around the stove all day long soon enough.”

“I think the porch will be super. And Denny looks as if he'd like to try out the yard. Great yard, he says. Right, kiddo?” She ruffled his hair and Denny laughed.

“He'll be okay?”

“As long as he doesn't try to eat any of those wood-chips.”

“I've been splitting stove-lengths,” Johnny said, setting Denny down as carefully as a Ming vase. “Good exercise.”

“How are you? Physically?”

“I think,” Johnny said, remembering the heave-ho he had given Richard Dees a few days ago, “that I'm doing as well as could be expected.”

“That's good. You were kinda low the last time I saw you.

Johnny nodded. “The operations.”

“Johnny?”

He glanced at her and again felt that odd mix of speculation, guilt, and something like anticipation in his viscera. Her eyes were on his face, frankly and openly. “Yeah?”

“Do you remember… about the wedding ring?” He nodded.

“It was there. Where you said it would be. I threw it away.”

“Did you?” He was not completely surprised.

“I threw it away and never mentioned it to Walt. “She shook her head. “And I don't know why. It's bothered me ever since.

“Don't let it.”

They were standing on the steps, facing each other. Color had come up in her cheeks, but she didn't drop her eyes.

“There's something I'd like to finish,” she said simply. “Something we never had the chance to finish.”

“Sarah… “he began, and stopped. He had absolutely no idea what to say next. Below them, Denny tottered six steps and then sat down hard. He crowed, not put out of countenance at all.

“Yes,” she said. “I don't know if it's right or wrong. I love Walt. He's a good man, easy to love. Maybe the one thing I know is a good man from a bad one. Dan-that guy I went with in college-was one of the bad guys. You set my mouth for the other kind, Johnny. Without you, I never could have appreciated Walt for what he is.”

“Sarah, you don't have……

“I do have to,” Sarah contradicted. Her voice was low and intense. “Because things like this you can only say once. And you either get it wrong or right, it's the end either way, because it's too hard to ever try to say again. “She looked at him pleadingly. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, I suppose I do.”

“I love you, Johnny,” she said. “I never stopped. I've tried to tell myself that it was an act of God that split us up. I don't know. Is a bad hot dog an act of God? Or two kids dragging on a back road in the middle of the night? All I want… “Her voice had taken on a peculiar flat emphasis that seemed to beat its way into the cool October afternoon like an artisan's small hammer into thin and precious foil, “… all I want is what was taken from us. “Her voice faltered. She looked down. “And I want it with all my heart, Johnny. Do you?”

“Yes,” he said. He put his arms out and was confused when she shook her head and stepped away.

“Not in front of Denny,” she said. “It's stupid, maybe, but that would be a little bit too much like public infidelity. I want everything, Johnny. “Her color rose again, and her pretty blush began to feed his own excitement. “I want you to hold me and kiss me and love me,” she said. Her voice faltered, nearly broke. “I think it's wrong, but I can't help it. It's wrong but it's right. It's fair.”

He reached out One finger and brushed away a tear that was moving slowly down her cheek.

“And it's only this once, isn't it?”

She nodded. “Once will have to put paid to everything. Everything that would have been, if things hadn't gone wrong. “She looked up, her eyes brighter green than ever, swimming with tears. “Can we put paid to everything with only the one time, Johnny?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “But we can try, Sarah.”

She looked fondly down at Denny, who was trying to climb up onto the chopping block without much success. “He'll sleep,” she said.

They sat on the porch and watched Denny play in the yard under the high blue sky. There was no hurry, no impatience between them, but there was a growing electricity that they both felt. She had opened her coat and sat on the porch glider in a powder-blue wool dress, her ankles crossed, her hair blown carelessly on her shoulders where the wind had spilled it. The blush never really left her face. And high white clouds fled across the sky, west to east.

They talked of inconsequential things-there was no hurry. For the first time since he had come out of it, Johnny felt that time was not his enemy. Time had provided them with this little air pocket in exchange for the main flow of which they had been robbed, and it would be here for as long as they needed it. They talked about people who had been married, about a girl from Cleaves Mills who had won a Merit scholarship, about Maine's independent governor. Sarah said he looked like Lurch on the old Addams Family show and thought like Herbert Hoover, and they both laughed over that.

“Look at him,” Sarah said, nodding toward Denny.

He was sitting on the grass by Vera Smith's ivy trellis, his thumb in his mouth, looking at them sleepily.

She got his car-bed out of the Pinto's back seat.

“Will he be okay on the porch?” she asked Johnny. “It's so mild, I'd like to have him nap in the fresh air.”

“He'll be fine on the porch,” Johnny said.

She Set the bed in the shade, popped him into it, and pulled the two blankets up to his chin. “Sleep, baby,” Sarah said.

He smiled at her and promptly closed his eyes.

“Just like that?” Johnny asked.

“Just like that,” she agreed. She stepped close to him and put her arms around his neck. Quite clearly he could hear the faint rustle of her slip beneath her dress. “I'd like you to kiss me,” she said calmly. “I've waited five years for you to kiss me again, Johnny.”

He put his arms around her waist and kissed her gently. Her lips parted.

“Oh, Johnny,” she said against his neck. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Sarah.”

“Where do we go?” she asked, stepping away from him. Her eyes were as dear and dark as emeralds now. “Where?”

He spread the faded army blanket, which was old but clean, on the straw of the second loft. The smell was fragrant and sweet. High above them there was the mysterious coo and flutter of the barn swallows, and then they settled down again. There was a small, dusty window which looked down on the house and porch. Sarah wiped a clean place on the glass and looked down at Denny.

“It's okay?” Johnny asked.

“Yes. Better here than in the house. That would have been like… “She shrugged.

“Making my dad a part of it?”

“Yes. This is between us.”

“Our business.”

“Our business,” she agreed. She lay on her stomach, her face turned to one side on the faded blanket, her legs bent at the knee. She pushed her shoes off, one by one. “Unzip me, Johnny.”

He knelt beside her and pulled the zipper down. The sound was loud in the stillness. Her back was the color of coffee with cream against the whiteness of her slip. He kissed her between the shoulder blades and she shivered.

“Sarah,” he murmured.

“What?”

“I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“The doctor made a mistake during one of those operations and gelded me.”

She punched him on the shoulder. “Same old Johnny,” she said. “And you had a friend once who broke his neck on the crack-the-whip at Topsham Fair.”

“Sure,” he said.

Her hand touched him like silk, moving gently up and down.

“It doesn't feel like they did anything terminal to you,” she said. Her luminous eyes searched his. “Not at all. Shall we look and see?”

There was the sweet smell of the hay. Time spun out. There was the rough feel of the army blanket, the smooth feel of her flesh, the naked reality of her. Sinking into her was like sinking into an old dream that had never been quite forgotten.

“Oh, Johnny, my dear… “Her voice in rising excitement. Her hips moving in a quickening tempo. Her voice was far away. The touch of her hair was like fire on his shoulder and chest. He plunged his face deeply into it, losing himself in that dark-blonde darkness.

Time spinning out in the sweet smell of hay. The rough-textured blanket. The sound of the old barn creaking gently, like a ship, in the October wind. Mild white light coming in through the roof chinks, catching motes of chaff in half a hundred pencil-thin sunbeams. Motes of chaff dancing and revolving.

She cried out. At some point she cried out his name, again and again and again, like a chant. Her fingers dug into him like spurs. Rider and ridden. Old wine decanted at last, a fine vintage.

Later they sat by the window, looking out into the yard. Sarah slipped her dress on over bare flesh and left him for a little bit. He sat alone, not thinking, content to watch her reappear in the window, smaller, and cross the yard to the porch. She bent over the baby bed and readjusted the blankets. She came back, the wind blowing her hair out behind her and tugging playfully at the hem of her dress.

“He'll sleep another half hour,” she said.

“Will he?” Johnny smiled. “Maybe I will, too.”

She walked her bare toes across his belly. “You better not.”

And so again, and this time she was on top, almost in an attitude of prayer, her head bent, her hair swinging forward and obscuring her face. Slowly. And then it was over.

“Sarah…”

“No, Johnny. Better not say it. Time's up.”

“I was going to say that you're beautiful.”

“Am I?”

“You are,” he said softly. “Dear Sarah.”

“Did we put paid to everything?” she asked him.

Johnny smiled. “Sarah, we did the best we could.”

Herb didn't seem surprised to see Sarah when he got home from Westbrook. He welcomed her, made much of the baby, and then scolded Sarah for not bringing him down sooner.

“He has your color and complexion,” Herb said. “And I think he's going to have your eyes, when they get done changing.”

“if only he has his father's brains,” Sarah said. She had put an apron on over the blue wool dress. Outside, the sun was going down. Another twenty minutes and it would be dark.

“You know, the cooking is supposed to be Johnny's job,” Herb said.

“Couldn't stop her. She put a gun to my head.”

“Well, maybe it's all for the best,” Herb said. “Everything you make comes out tasting like Franco-American spaghetti.”

Johnny shied a magazine at him and Denny laughed, a high, piercing sound that seemed to fill the house.

Can he see? Johnny wondered. It feels like it's written all over my face. And then a startling thought came to him as he watched his father digging in the entryway closet for a box of Johnny's old toys that he had never let Vera give away: Maybe he understands.

They ate. Herb asked Sarah what Walt was doing in Washington and she told them about the conference he was attending, which had to do with Indian land claims. The Republican meetings were mostly wind-testing exercises, she said.

“Most of the people he's meeting with think that if Reagan is nominated over Ford next year, it's going to mean the death of the party. “Sarah said. “And if the Grand Old Party dies, that means Walt won't be able to run for Bill Cohen's seat in 1978 when Cohen goes after Bill Hathaway's Senate seat.

Herb was watching Denny eat string beans, seriously, one by one, using all six of his teeth on them. “I don't think Cohen will be able to wait until “78 to get in the Senate. He'll run against Muskie next year.”

“Walt says Bill Cohen's not that big a dope,” Sarah said. “He'll wait. Walt says his own chance is coming, and I'm starting to believe him.”

After supper they sat in the living room, and the talk turned away from politics. They watched Denny play with the old wooden cars and trucks that a much younger Herb Smith had made for his own son over a quarter of a century ago. A younger Herb Smith who had been married to a tough, good-humored woman who would sometimes drink a bottle of Black Label beer in the evening. A man with no gray in his hair and nothing but the highest hopes for his son.

He does understand, Johnny thought, sipping his coffee. Whether he knows what went on between Sarah and me this afternoon, whether or not he suspects what might have gone on, he understands the basic cheat. You can't change it or rectify it, the best you can do is try to come to terms. This afternoon she and I consummated a marriage that never was. And tonight he's playing with his grandson.

He thought of the Wheel of Fortune, slowing, stopping.

House number. Everyone loses.

Gloom was trying to creep up, a dismal sense of finality, and he pushed it away. This wasn't the time; he wouldn't let it be the time.

By eight-thirty Denny had begun to get scratchy and cross and Sarah said, “Time for us to go, folks. He can suck a bottle on our way back to Kennebunk. About three miles from here, he'll have corked off. Thanks for having us. “Her eyes, brilliant green, found Johnny's for a moment.

“Our pleasure entirely,” Herb said, standing up. “Right, Johnny?”

“Right,” he said. “Let me carry that car-bedout for you, Sarah.”

At the door. Herb kissed the top of Denny's head (and Denny grabbed Herb's nose in his chubby fist and honked it hard enough to make Herb's eyes water) and Sarah's cheek. Johnny carried the car-bed down to the red Pinto and Sarah gave him the keys so he could put everything in the back.

When he finished, she was standing by the driver's door, looking at him. “It was the best we could do,” she said, and smiled a little. But the brilliance of her eyes told him the tears were close again.

“It wasn't so bad at all,” Johnny said.

“We'll stay in touch?”

“I don't know, Sarah. Will we?”

“No, I suppose not. It would be too easy, wouldn't it?”

“Pretty easy, yes.

She stepped close and stretched to kiss his cheek. He could smell her hair, clean and fragrant.

“Take care,” she whispered. “I'll think about you.”

“Be good, Sarah,” he said, and touched her nose.

She turned then, got in behind the wheel, a smart young matron whose husband was on the way up. I doubt like hell if they'll be driving a Pinto next year, Johnny thought.

The lights came on, then the little sewing machine motor roared. She raised a hand to him and then she was pulling out of the driveway. Johnny stood by the chopping block, hands in his pockets, and watched her go. Something in his heart seemed to have closed. It was not a major feeling. That was the worst of it-it wasn't a major feeling at all.

He watched until the taillights were out of sight and then he climbed the porch steps and went back into the house. His dad was sitting in the big easy chair in the living room. The TV was off. The few toys he had found in the closet were scattered on the rug and he was looking at them.

“Good to see Sarah,” Herb said. “Did you and she have… “there was the briefest, most minute hesitation

–'a nice visit?”

“Yes,” Johnny said.

“She'll be down again?”

“No, I don't think so.”

He and his father were looking at each other.

“Well now, maybe that's for the best,” Herb said finally.

“Yes. Maybe so.”

“You played with these toys,” Herb said, getting down on his knees and beginning to gather them up. “I gave a bunch of them to Lottie Gedreau when she had her twins, but I knew I had a few of them left. I saved a few back.”

He put them back in the box one at a time, turning each of them over in his hands, examining them. A race car. A bulldozer. A police car. A small hook-and-ladder truck from which most of the red paint had been worn away where a small hand would grip. He took them back to the entryway closet and put them away.

Johnny didn't see Sarah Hazlett again for three years.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The snow came early that year. There were six inches on the ground by November 7, and Johnny had taken to lacing on a pair of old green gumrubber boots and wearing his old parka for the trek up to the mailbox. Two weeks before, Dave Pelsen had mailed down a package containing the texts he would be using in January, and Johnny had already begun making tentative lesson plans. He was looking forward to getting back. Dave had also found him an apartment on Howland Street in Cleaves. 24 Howland Street. Johnny kept that on a scrap of paper in his wallet, because the name and number had an irritating way of slipping his mind.

On this day the skies were slatey and lowering, the temperature hovering just below the twenty degree mark. As Johnny tramped up the driveway, the first spats of snow began to drift down. Because he was alone, he didn't feel too self conscious about running his tongue out and trying to catch a flake on it. He was hardly limping at all, and he felt good. There hadn't been a headache in two weeks or more.

The mail consisted of an advertising circular, a Newsweek, and a small manila envelope addressed to John Smith, no return address. Johnny opened it on the way back, the rest of the mail stuffed into his hip pocket. He pulled out a single page of newsprint, saw the words Inside View at the top, and came to a halt halfway back to the house.

It was page three of the previous week's issue. The headline story dealt with a reporter's “expose” on the handsome second banana of a TV crime show; the second banana had been suspended from high school twice (twelve years ago) and busted for possession of cocaine (six years ago). Hot news for the hausfraus of America. There was also an all-grain diet, a cute baby photo, and a story of a nine-year-old girl who had been miraculously cured of cerebral palsy at Lourdes (DOCTORS MYSTIFIED, the headline trumpeted gleefully). A story near the bottom of the page had been circled. MAINE “PSYCHIC” ADMITS HOAX, the headline read. The story was not by-lined.

IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE POLICY of Inside View not only to bring you the fullest coverage of the psychics which the so-called “National Press” ignores, but to expose the tricksters and charlatans who have held back true acceptance of legitimate psychic phenomena for so long.

One of these tricksters admitted his own hoax to an Inside View source recently. This so called “psychic”, John Smith of Pownal, Maine, admitted to our source that “it was all a gimmick to pay back my hospital bills. If there's a book in it, I might come out with enough to pay off what I owe and retire for a couple of years in the bargain,” Smith grinned. “These days, people will believe anything-why shouldn't I get on the gravy train?”

Thanks to Inside View, which has always cautioned readers that there are two phony psychics for each real one, John Smith's gravy train has just been derailed. And we reiterate our standing offer of $1000 to anyone who can prove that any nationally known psychic is a fraud.

Hoaxers and charlatans be warned!

Johnny read the article twice as the snow began to come down more heavily. A reluctant grin broke over his features. The ever-vigilant press apparently didn't enjoy being thrown off some bumpkin's front porch, he thought. He tucked the tear sheet back into its envelope and stuffed it into his back pocket with the rest of the mail.

“Dees,” he said aloud, “I hope you're still black and blue.

His father was not so amused. Herb read the clipping and then slammed it down on the kitchen table in disgust. “You ought to sue that son of a whore. That's nothing but slander, Johnny. A deliberate hatchet job.”

“Agreed and agreed,” Johnny said. It was dark outside. This afternoon's silently falling snow had developed into tonight's early winter blizzard. The wind shrieked and howled around the eaves. The driveway had disappeared under a dunelike progression of drifts. “But there was no third party when we talked, and Dees damn well knows it. It's his word against mine.”

“He didn't even have the guts to put his own name to this lie,” Herb said. “Look at this “an Inside View source”. What's this source? Get him to name it, that's what I say.

“Oh, you can't do that,” Johnny said, grinning. “That's like walking up to the meanest street-fighter on the block with a KICK ME HARD sign taped to your crotch. Then they turn it into a holy war, page one and all. No thanks. As far as I'm concerned, they did me a favor. I don't want to make a career out of telling people where gramps hid his stock certificates or who's going to win the fourth at Scarborough Downs. Or take this lottery. “One of the things that had most surprised Johnny on coming out of his coma was to discover that Maine and about a dozen other states had instituted a legal numbers game. “In the last month I've gotten sixteen letters from people who want me to tell them what the number's going to be. It's insane. Even if I could tell them, which I couldn't, what good would it do them? You can't pick your own number in the Maine lottery, you get what they give you. But still I get the letters.”

“I don't see what that has to do with this crappy article.

“If people think I'm a phony, maybe they'll leave me alone.”

“Oh,” Herb said. “Yeah, I see what you mean. “He lit his pipe. “You've never really been comfortable with it, have you?”

“No,” Johnny said. “We never talk much about it, either, which is something of a relief. It seems like the only thing other people do want to talk about. “And it wasn't just that they wanted to talk; that wouldn't have bothered him so much. But when he was in Slocum's Store for a sixpack or a loaf of bread, the girl would try to take his money without touching his hand, and the frightened, skittish look in her eyes was unmistakable. His father's friends would give him a little wave instead of a handshake. In October Herb had hired a local high school girl to come in once a week to do some dusting and vacuum the floors. After three weeks she had quit for no stated reason at all probably someone at her high school had told her who she was cleaning for. It seemed that for everyone who was anxious to be touched, to be informed, to be in contact with Johnny's peculiar talent, there was another who regarded him as a kind of leper. At times like these, Johnny would think of the nurses staring at him the day he had told Eileen Magown that her house was on fire, staring at him like magpies on a telephone wire. He would think of the way the TV reporter had drawn back from him after the press conference's unexpected conclusion, agreeing with everything he said but not wanting to be touched. Unhealthy either way.

“No, we don't talk about it,” Herb agreed. “It makes me think of your mother, I suppose. She was so sure you'd been given the… the whatever-it-is for some reason. Sometimes I wonder if she wasn't right.”

Johnny shrugged. “All I want is a normal life. I want to bury the whole damn thing. And if this little squib helps me do it, so much the better.”

“But you still can do it, can't you?” Herb asked. He was looking closely at his son.

Johnny thought about a night not quite a week ago. They had gone out to dinner, a rare happening on their strapped budget. They had gone to Cole's Farm in Gray, probably the best restaurant in the area, a place that was always packed. The night had been cold, the dining room cheery and warm. Johnny had taken his father's coat and his own into the cloakroom, and as he thumbed through the racked coats, looking for empty hangers, a whole series of clear impressions had cascaded through his mind. It was like that sometimes, and on another occasion he could have handled every coat for twenty minutes and gotten nothing at all. Here was a lady's coat with a fur collar. She was having an affair with one of her husband's poker buddies, was scared sick about it, but didn't know how to close it off. A man's denim jacket, sheepskin-lined. This guy was also worried-about his brother, who had been badly hurt on a construction project the week before. A small boy's parka-his grandmother in Durham had given him a Snoopy transistor radio just today and he was mad because his father hadn't let him bring it into the dining room with him. And another one, a plain, black topcoat, that had turned him cold with terror and robbed him of his appetite. The man who owned this coat was going mad. So far he had kept up appearances-not even his wife suspected-but his vision of the world was being slowly darkened by a series of increasingly paranoid fantasies. Touching that

Coat had been like touching a writhing coil of snakes.

“Yes, I can still do it,” Johnny said briefly. “I wish to hell I couldn't.”

“You really mean that?”

Johnny thought of the plain, black topcoat. He had only picked at his meal, looking this way and that, trying to single the man out of the crowd, unable to do so.

“Yes,” he said. “I mean it.”

“Best forgotten then,” Herb said, and clapped his son on the shoulder.

And for the next month or so it seemed that it would be forgotten. Johnny drove north to attend a meeting at the high school for midyear teachers and to take a load of his personal things up to his new apartment, which he found small but liveable.

He went in his father's car, and as he was getting ready to leave Herb asked him, “You're not nervous? About driving?”

Johnny shook his head. Thoughts of the accident itself troubled him very little now. If something was going to happen to him, it would. And deep down he felt confident that lightning would not strike in the same place again-when he died, he didn't believe it would be in a car accident.

In fact, the long trip was quiet and soothing, the meeting a little bit like Old Home Week. All of his old colleagues who were still teaching at CMHS dropped by to wish him the best. But he couldn't help noticing how few of them actually shook hands with him, and he seemed to sense a certain reserve, a wariness in their eyes. Drivmg home, he convinced himself it was probably imagination. And if not, well-even that had its amusing side. If they had read their Inside View, they would know he was a hoax and nothing to worry about.

The meeting over, there was nothing to do but go back to Pownal and wait for the Christmas holidays to come and go. The packages containing personal objects stopped coming, almost as if a switch had been thrown-the power of the press, Johnny told his father. They were replaced by a brief spate of angry-and mostly anonymous-letters and cards from people who seemed to feel personally cheated.

“You ort to burn in H! E! L! L! for your slimey skeems to bilk this American Republic,” a typical one read. It had been written on a crumpled sheet of Ramada Inn stationery and was postmarked York, Pennsylvania. “You are nothing but a Con Artist and a dirty rotten cheet. I bless God for that paper that saw thru you. You Ort to be ashamed of yourself Sir. The Bible says an ordinery sinner will be cast into the Lake of F!I!R!E! and be consomed but a F!A!L!S!E P!R!O!F!I!T! shall burn forever and EVER! That's you a False Profit who sold your Immortal Soul for a few cheep bucks. So thats the end of my letter and I hope for your sake I never catch you ut on the Streets of your Home Town. Signed, A FRIEND (of God not you Sir)!”

Over two dozen letters in this approximate vein came in during the course of about twenty days following the appearance of the inside View story. Several enterprising souls expressed an interest in joining in with Johnny as partners. “I used to be a magician's assistant,” one of these latter missives bragged, “and I could trick an old whore out of her g-string. If you're planning a mentalist gig, you need me in!”

Then the letters dried up, as had the earlier influx of boxes and packages. On a day in late November when he had checked the mailbox and found it empty for the third afternoon in a row, Johnny walked back to the house remembering that Andy Warhol had predicted that a day would come when everyone in America would be famous for fifteen minutes. Apparently his fifteen minutes had come and gone, and no one was any more pleased about it than he was.

But as things turned out, it wasn't over yet.

“Smith?” The telephone voice asked. “John Smith?”

“Yes. “It wasn't a voice he knew, or a wrong number. That made it something of a puzzle since his father had had the phone unlisted about three months ago. This was December 17, and their tree stood in the corner of the living room, its base firmly wedged into the old tree stand Herb had made when Johnny was just a kid. Outside it was snowing.

“My name is Bannerman. Sheriff George Bannerman, from Castle Rock. “He cleared his throat. “I've got a well, I suppose you'd say I've got a proposal for you.

“How did you get this number?”

Bannerman cleared his throat again. “Well, I could have gotten it from the phone company, I suppose, it being police business. But actually I got it from a friend of yours. Doctor by the name of Weizak.”

“Sam Weizak gave you my number?”

“That's right.”

Johnny sat down in the phone nook, utterly perplexed. Now the name Bannerman meant something to him. He had come across the name in a Sunday supplement article only recently. He was the sheriff of Castle County, which was considerably west of Pownal, in the Lakes region. Castle Rock was the county seat, about thirty miles from Norway and twenty from Bridgton.

“Police business?” he repeated.

“Well, I guess you'd say so, ayuh. I was wondering if maybe the two of us could get together for a cup of coffee

“It involves Sam?”

“No. Dr. Weizak has nothing to do with it,” Banner-man said. “He gave me a call and mentioned your name. That was,… oh, a month ago, at least. To be frank, I thought he was nuts. But now we're just about at our wits” end.”

“About what? Mr. -Sheriff-Bannerman, I don't understand what you're talking about.”

“It'd really be a lot better if we could get together for coffee,” Bannerman said. “Maybe this evening? There's a place called Jon's on the main drag in Bridgton. Sort of halfway between your town and mine.”

“No, I'm sorry,” Johnny said. “I'd have to know what it was about. And how come Sam never called me?”

Bannerman sighed. I guess you're a man who doesn't read the papers,” he said.

But that wasn't true. He had read the papers compulsively since he had regained consciousness, trying to pick up on the things he had missed. And he had seen Bannerman's name just recently. Sure. Because Bannerman was on a pretty hot seat. He was the man in charge of-Johnny held the phone away from his ear and looked at it with sudden understanding. He looked at it the way a man might look at a snake he has just realized is poisonous.

“Mr. Smith?” It squawked tinnily. “Hello, Mr. Smith?”

“I'm here,” Johnny said putting the phone back to his ear. He was conscious of a dull anger at Sam Weizak, Sam who had told him to keep his head down only this summer, and then had turned around and given this local-yokel sheriff an earful-behind Johnny's back.

“It's that strangling business, isn't it?”

Bannerman hesitated a long time. Then he said, “Could we talk, Mr. Smith?”

“No. Absolutely not. “The dull anger had ignited into sudden fury. Fury and something else. He was scared.

“Mr. Smith, it's important. Today…”

“No. I want to be left alone. Besides, don't you read the goddam inside View? I'm a fake anyway.”

“Dr. Weizak said…”

“He had no business saying anything! “Johnny shouted. He was shaking all over. “Good-bye!” He slammed the phone into its cradle and got out of the phone nook quickly, as if that would prevent it from ringing again. He could feel a headache beginning in his temples. Dull drill-bits. Maybe I should call his mother out there in California, he thought. Tell her where her little sonny-buns is. Tell her to get in touch. Tit for tat.

Instead he hunted in the address book in the phone-table drawer, found Sam's office number in Bangor, and called it. As soon as it rang once on the other end he hung up, scared again. Why had Sam done that to him? Goddammit, why?

He found himself looking at the Christmas tree.

Same old decorations. They had dragged them down from the attic again and taken them out of their tissue-paper cradles again and hung them up again, just two evenings ago. It was a funny thing about Christmas decorations. There weren't many things that remained intact year after year as a person grew up. Not many lines of continuity, not many physical objects that could easily serve both the states of childhood and adulthood. Your kid clothes were handed down or packed off to the Salvation Army; your Donald Duck watch sprung its mainspring; your Red Ryder cowboy boots wore out. The wallet you made in your first camp handicrafts class got replaced by a Lord Buxton, and you traded your red wagon and your bike for more adult toys-a car, a tennis racket, maybe one of those new TV hockey games. There were only a few things you could hang onto. A few books, maybe, or a lucky coin, or a stamp collection that had been preserved and improved upon.

Add to that the Christmas tree ornaments in your parents” house.

The same chipped angels year after year, and the same tinsel star on top; the tough surviving platoon of what had once been an entire battalion of glass balls (and we never forget the honored dead, he thought-this one died as a result of a baby's clutching hand, this one slipped as dad was putting it on and crashed to the floor, the red one with the Star of Bethlehem painted on it was simply and mysteriously broken one year when we took them down from the attic, and I cried); the tree stand itself. But sometimes, Johnny thought, absently massaging his temples, it seemed it would be better, more merciful, if you lost touch with even these last vestiges of childhood. You could never discover the books that had first turned you on in quite the same way. The lucky coin had not protected you from any of the ordinary whips and scorns and scrapes of an ordinary life. And when you looked at the ornaments you remembered that there had once been a mother in the place to direct the tree-trimming operation, always ready and willing to piss you off by saying “a little higher” or “a little lower” or “I think you've got too much tinsel on that left side, dear. “You looked at the ornaments and remembered that just the two of you had been around to put them up this year, just the two of you because your mother went crazy and then she died, but the fragile Christmas tree ornaments were still here, still hanging around to decorate another tree taken from the small back woodlot and didn't they say more people committed suicide around Christmas than at any other time of the year? By God, it was no wonder.

What a power God has given you, Johnny.

Sure, that's right, God's a real prince. He knocked me through the windshield of a cab and I broke my legs and spent five years or so in a coma and three people died. The girl I loved got married. She had the son who should have been mine by a lawyer who's breaking his ass to get to Washington so he can help run the big electric train set. If I'm on my feet for more than a couple of hours at a time it feels like somebody took a long splinter and rammed it straight up my leg to my balls. God's a real sport. He's such a sport that he fixed up a funny comic-opera world where a bunch of glass Christmas tree globes could outlive you. Neat world, and a really first-class God in charge of it. He must have been on our side during Vietnam, because that's the way he's been running things ever since time began.

He has a job for you, Johnny.

Bailing some half-assed country cop out of a jam so he can get re-elected next year.

Don't run from him, Johnny. Don't hide away in a cave.

He rubbed his temples. Outside, the wind was rising. He hoped dad would be careful coming home from work.

Johnny got up and pulled on a heavy sweatshirt. He went out into the shed, watching his breath frost the air ahead of him. To the left was a large pile of wood he had split in the autumn just past, all of it cut into neat Stove lengths. Next to it was a box of kindling, and be-side that was a stack of old newspapers. He squatted down and began to thumb through them. His hands went numb quickly but he kept going, and eventually he came to the one he was looking for. The Sunday paper from three weeks ago.

He took it into the house, slapped it down on the kitchen table, and began to root through it. He found the article he was looking for in the features section and sat down to reread it.

The article was accompanied by several photos, one of them showing an old woman locking a door, another showing a police car cruising a nearly deserted street, two others showing a couple of businesses that were nearly deserted. The headline read: THE HUNT FOR THE CASTLE ROCK STRANGLER GOES ON… AND ON.

Five years ago, according to the story, a young woman named Alma Frechette who worked at a local restaurant had been raped and strangled on her way home from work. A joint investigation of the crime had been conducted by the state attorney general's office and the Castle County sheriff's department. The result had been a total zero. A year later an elderly woman, also raped and strangled, had been discovered in her tiny third-floor apartment on Carbine Street in Castle Rock. A month later the killer had struck again; this time the victim had been a bright young junior high school girl.

There had been a more intensive investigation. The investigative facilities of the FBI had been utilized, all to no result. The following November Sheriff Carl M. Kelso, who had been the county's chief law officer since approximately the days of the Civil War, had been voted out and George Bannerman had been voted in, largely on an aggressive campaign to catch the “Castle Rock Strangler”.

Two years passed. The strangler had not been apprehended, but no further murders occurred, either. Then, last January, the body of seventeen-year-old Carol Dunbarger had been found by two small boys. The Dunbarger girl had been reported as a missing person by her parents. She had been in and out of trouble at Castle Rock High School where she had a record of chronic tardiness and truancy, she had been busted twice for shop-lifting, and had run away once before, getting as far as Boston. Both Bannerman and the state police assumed she had been thumbing a ride-and the killer had picked her up. A midwinter thaw had uncovered her body near Strimmer's Brook, where two small boys had found it. The state medical examiner said she had been dead about two months.

Then, this November 2, there had been yet another murder. The victim was a well-liked Castle Rock grammar school teacher named Etta Ringgold. She was a lifetime member of the local Methodist church, holder of an M. B. S. in elementary education, and prominent in local charities. She had been fond of the works of Robert Browning, and her body had been found stuffed into a culvert that ran beneath an unpaved secondary road. The uproar over the murder of Miss Ringgold had rumbled over all of northern New England. Comparisons to Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, were made -comparisons that did nothing to pour oil on the troubled waters. William Loeb's Union-Leader in not-so distant Manchester, New Hampshire, had published a helpful editorial titled THE DO-NOTHING COPS IN OUR SISTER STATE.

This Sunday supplement article, now nearly six weeks old and smelling pungently of shed and woodbox, quoted two local psychiatrists who had been perfectly happy to blue-sky the situation as long as their names weren't printed. One of them mentioned a particular sexual aberration-the urge to commit some violent act at the moment of orgasm. Nice, Johnny thought, grimacing. He strangled them to death as he came. His headache was getting worse all the time.

The other shrink pointed out the fact that all five murders had been committed in late fall or early winter. And while the manic-depressive personality didn't con-form to any one set pattern, it was fairly common for such a person to have mood-swings closely paralleling the change of the seasons. He might have a “low” lasting from mid-April until about the end of August and then begin to climb, “peaking” at around the time of the murders.

During the manic or “up” state, the person in question was apt to be highly sexed, active, daring, and optimistic. “He would be likely to believe the police unable to catch him,” the unnamed psychiatrist had finished. The article concluded by saying that, so far, the person in question had been right.

Johnny put the paper down, glanced at the clock, and saw his father should be home almost anytime, unless the snow was holding him up. He took the old newspaper over to the wood stove and poked it into the firebox.

Not my business. Goddam Sam Weizak anyway.

Don't hide away in a cave, Johnny.

He wasn't hiding away in a cave, that wasn't it at all. It just so happened that he'd had a fairly tough break. Losing a big chunk of your life, that qualified you for tough-break status, didn't it?

And all the self-pity you can guzzle?

“Fuck you,” he muttered to himself. He went to the window and looked out. Nothing to see but snow falling in heavy, wind-driven lines. He hoped dad was being careful, but he also hoped his father would show up soon and put an end to this useless rat-run of introspection. He went over to the telephone again and stood there, undecided.

Self-pity or not, he had lost a goodish chunk of his life. His prime, if you wanted to put it that way. He had worked hard to get back. Didn't he deserve some ordinary privacy? Didn't he have a right to what he had just been thinking of a few minutes ago-an ordinary life?

There is no such thing, my man.

Maybe not, but there was such a thing as an abnormal life. That thing at Cole's Farm. Feeling people's clothes and suddenly knowing their little dreads, small secrets, petty triumphs-that was abnormal. It wasn't a talent, it was a curse.

Suppose he did meet this sheriff? There was no guarantee he could tell him a thing. And suppose he could? Just suppose he could hand him his killer on a silver platter? It would be the hospital press conference all over again, a three-ring circus raised to the grisly nth power.

A little song began to run maddeningly through his aching head, little more than a jingle, really. A Sunday. school song from his early childhood: This little light of mine… I'm gonna let it shine… this little light of mine… I'm gonna let it shine… let it shine, shine, shine, let it shine…

He picked up the phone and dialed Weizak's office number. Safe enough now, after five. Weizak would have gone home, and big-deal neurologists don't list their home phones. The phone rang six or seven times and Johnny was going to put it down when it was answered and Sam himself said, “Hi? Hello?”

“Sam?”

“John Smith?” The pleasure in Sam's voice was Unmistakable-but was there also an undercurrent of unease in it.

“Yeah, it's me.”

“How do you like this snow?” Weizak said, maybe a little heartily. “Is it snowing where you are?”

“It's snowing.”

“Just started here about an hour ago. They say John? Is it the sheriff? Is that why you sound so cold?”

“Well, he called me,” Johnny said, “and I've been sort of wondering what happened. Why you gave him my name?

Why you didn't call me and say you had… and why you didn't call me first and ask if you could.”

Weizak sighed. “Johnny, I could maybe give you a lie, but that would be no good. I didn't ask you first because I was afraid you would say no. And I didn't tell you I'd done it afterward because the sheriff laughed at me. When someone laughs at one of my suggestions, I assume, nub, that the suggestion is not going to be taken.”

Johnny rubbed at one aching temple with his free hand and closed his eyes. “But why, Sam? You know how I feel about that. You were the one who told me to keep my head down and let it blow over. You told me that yourself.”

“It was the piece in the paper,” Sam said. “I said to myself, Johnny lives down that way. And I said to myself, five dead women. Five. “His voice was slow, halting, and embarrassed. It made Johnny feel much worse to hear Sam sounding like this. He wished he hadn't called.

“Two of them teenage girls. A young mother. A teacher of young children who loved Browning. All of it so corny, nuh? So corny I suppose they would never make a movie or a TV show out of it. But nonetheless true. It was the teacher I thought about most. Stuffed into a culvert like a bag of garbage…

“You had no damn right to bring me into your guilt fantasies,” Johnny said thickly.

“No, perhaps not.”

“No perhaps about it!”

“Johnny, are you all right? You sound…”

“I'm fine! “Johnny shouted.

“You don't sound fine.”

“I've got a shitter of a headache, is that so surprising? I wish to Christ you'd left this alone. When I told you about your mother you didn't call her. Because you said…”

“I said some things are better lost than found. But that is not always true, Johnny. This man, whoever he is, has a terribly disturbed personality. He may kill himself. I am sure that when he stopped for two years the police thought he had. But a manicdepressive sometimes has long level periods-it is called a “plateau of normality” -and then goes back to the same mood-swings. He may have killed himself after murdering that teacher last month. But if he hasn't, what then? He may kill another one. Or two. Or four. Or…”

“Stop it.”

Sam said, “Why did Sheriff Bannerman call you? What made him change his mind?”

“I don't know. I suppose the voters are after him.”

“I'm sorry I called him, Johnny, and that this has u~ set you so. But even more I am sorry that I did not call you and tell you what I had done. I was wrong. God knows you have a right to live your life quietly.”

Hearing his own thoughts echoed did not make him feel better. Instead he felt more miserable and guilty than ever.

“All right,” he said. “That's okay, Sam.”

“I'll not say anything to anyone again. I suppose that is like putting a new lock on the barn door after a horse theft, but it's all I can say. I was indiscreet. In a doctor, that's bad.”

“All right,” Johnny said again. He felt helpless, and the slow embarrassment with which Sam spoke made it worse.

“I'll see you soon?”

“I'll be up in Cleaves next month to start teaching. I'll drop by.”

“Good. Again, my sincere apologies, John.”

Stop saying that!

They said their good-byes and Johnny hung up, wishing he hadn't called at all. Maybe he hadn't wanted Sam to agree so readily that what he had done was wrong. Maybe what he had really wanted Sam to say was, Sure l called him. I wanted you to get off your ass and do something.

He wandered across to the window and looked out into the blowing darkness. Stuffed into a culvert like a bag of garbage

.

God, how his head ached.

Herb got home half an hour later, took one look at Johnny's white face and said, “Headache?”

“Yeah.”

“Bad?”

“Not too bad.”

“We want to watch the national news,” Herb said. “Glad I got home in time. Bunch of people from NBC were over in Castle Rock this afternoon, filming. That lady reporter you think is so pretty was there. Cassie Mackin.”

He blinked at the way Johnny turned on him. For a moment it seemed that Johnny's face was all eyes, staring out at him and full of a nearly inhuman pain.

“Castle Rock? Another murder?”

“Yeah. They found a little girl on the town common this morning. Saddest damn thing you ever heard of. I guess she had a pass to go across the common to the library for some project she was working on. She got to the library but she never got back… Johnny, you look terrible, boy.

“How old was she?”

“Just nine,” Herb said. “A man who'd do a thing like that should be strung up by the balls. That's my view on it.”

“Nine,” Johnny said, and sat down heavily. “Stone the crows.

“Johnny, you sure you feel okay? You're white as paper.

“Fine. Turn on the news.”

Shortly, John Chancellor was in front of them, bearing his nightly satchel of political aspirations (Fred Harris's campaign was not catching much fire), government edicts (the cities of America would just have to learn common budgetary sense, according to President Ford), international incidents (a nationwide strike in France), the Dow Jones (up), and a “heartwarming” piece about a boy with cerebral palsy who was raising a 4-H cow.

“Maybe they cut it,” Herb said.

But after a commercial, Chancellor said: “In western Maine, there's a townful of frightened, angry people tonight. The town is Castle Rock, and over the last five years there have been five nasty murders-five women ranging in age from seventy-one to fourteen have been raped and strangled. Today there was a sixth murder in Castle Rock, and the victim was a nine-year-old girl. Catherine Mackin is in Castle Rock with the story.”

And there she was, looking like a figment of make-believe carefully superimposed on a real setting. She was standing across from the Town Office Building. The first of that afternoon's snow which had developed into tonight's blizzard was powdering the shoulders of her coat and her blonde hair.

“A sense of quietly mounting hysteria lies over this small New England mill town this afternoon,” she began. “The townspeople of Castle Rock have been nervous for a long time over the unknown person the local press calls “the Castle Rock Strangler” or sometimes “the November Killer”. That nervousness has changed to terror-no one here thinks that word is too strong-following the discovery of Mary Kate Hendrasen's body on the town common, not far from the bandstand where the body of the November Killer's first victim, a waitress named Alma Frechette, was discovered.”

A long panning shot of the town common, looking bleak and dead in the falling snow. This was replaced with a school photograph of Mary Kate Hendrasen, grinning brashly through a heavy set of braces. Her hair was a fine white-blonde. Her dress was an electric blue. Most likely her best dress, Johnny thought sickly. Her mother put her into her best dress for her school photo.

The report went on-now they were recapitulating the past murders-but Johnny was on the phone, first to directory assistance and then to the Castle Rock town offices. He dialed slowly, his head thudding.

Herb came out of the living room and looked at him curiously. “Who are you calling, son?”

Johnny shook his head and listened to the phone ring on the other end. It was picked up. “Castle County sheriff's office.

“I'd like to talk to Sheriff Bannerman, please.”

“Could I have your name?”

“John Smith, from Pownal.”

“Hold on, please.”

Johnny turned to look at the TV and saw Bannerman as he had been that afternoon, bundled up in a heavy parka with county sheriff patches on the shoulders. He looked uncomfortable and dogged as he fielded the reporters” questions. He was a broad-shouldered man with a big, sloping head capped with curly dark hair. The rimless glasses he wore looked strangely out of place, as spectacles always seem to look out of place on very big men.

“We're following up a number of leads,” Bannerman said.

“Hello? Mr. Smith?” Bannerman said.

Again that queer sense of doubling. Bannerman was in two places at one time. Two times at one time, if you wanted to look at it that way. Johnny felt an instant of helpless vertigo. He felt the way, God help him, you felt on one of those cheap carnival rides, the Tilt-A-Whirl or the Crack-The-Whip.

“Mr. Smith? Are you there, man?”

“Yes, I'm here. “He swallowed. “I've changed my mind.”

“Good boy! I'm damned glad to hear it.”

“I still may not be able to help you, you know.

“I know that. But… no venture, no gain. “Bannerman cleared his throat. “They'd run me out of this town on a rail if they knew I was down to consulting a psychic.”

Johnny's face was touched with a ghost of a grin. “And a discredited psychic, at that.”

“Do you know where Jon's in Bridgton is?”

“I can find it.”

“Can you meet me there at eight o'clock?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Thank you, Mr. Smith.”

“All right.”

He hung up. Herb was watching him closely. Behind him, the “Nightly News” credits were rolling.

“He called you earlier, huh?”

“Yeah, he did. Sam Weizak told him I might be able to help.”

“Do you think you can?”

“I don't know,” Johnny said, “but my headache feels a little better.”

He was fifteen minutes late getting to Jon's Restaurant in Bridgton; it seemed to be the only business establishment on Bridgton's main drag that was still open. The plows were falling behind the snow, and there were drifts across the road in several places. At the junction of Routes 3O2 and 117, the blinker light swayed back and forth in the screaming wind. A police cruiser with CASTLE COUNTY SHERIFF in gold leaf on the door was parked in front of Jon's. He parked behind it and went inside.

Bannerman was sitting at a table in front of a cup of coffee and a bowl of chili. The TV had misled. He wasn't a big man; he was a huge man. Johnny walked over and introduced himself.

Bannerman stood up and shook the offered hand. Looking at Johnny's white, strained face and the way his thin body seemed to float inside his Navy pea jacket, Bannerman's first thought was: This guy is sick-he's maybe not going to live too long. Only Johnny's eyes seemed to have any real life-they were a direct, piercing blue, and they fixed firmly on Bannerman's own with sharp, honest curiosity. And when their hands clasped, Bannerman felt a peculiar kind of surprise, a sensation he would later describe as a draining. It was a little like getting a shock from a bare electrical wire. Then it was gone.

“Glad you could come,” Bannerman said. “Coffee?”

“Yes.”

“How about a bowl of chili? They make a great damn chili here. I'm not supposed to eat it because of my ulcer, but I do anyway. “He saw the look of surprise on Johnny's face and smiled. “I know, it doesn't seem right, a great big guy like me having an ulcer, does it?”

“I guess anyone can get one.

“You're damn tooting,” Bannerman said. “What changed your mind?”

“It was the news. The little girl. Are you sure it was the same guy?”

“It was the same guy. Same M. O. And the same sperm type.

He watched Johnny's face as the waitress came over. “Coffee?” she asked.

“Tea,” Johnny said.

“And bring him a bowl of chili, Miss,” Bannerman said. When the waitress had gone he said, “This doctor, he says that if you touch something, sometimes you get ideas about where it came from, who might have owned it, that sort of thing.”

Johnny smiled. “Well,” he said, “I just shook your hand and I know you've got an Irish setter named Rusty. And I know he's old and going blind and you think it's time he was put to sleep, but you don't know how you'd explain it to your girl.”

Bannerman dropped his spoon back into his chili -plop. He stared at Johnny with his mouth open. “By God,” he said. “You got that from me? Just now?”

Johnny nodded.

Bannerman shook his head and muttered, “It's one thing to hear something like that and another to… doesn't it tire you out?”

Johnny looked at Bannerman, surprised. It was a question he had never been asked before. “Yes. Yes, it does.”

“But you knew. I'll be damned.”

“But look, Sheriff.”

“George. Just plain George.”

“Okay, I'm Johnny, just plain Johnny. George, what I don't know about you would fill about five books. I don't know where you grew up or where you went to police school or who your friends are or where you live. I know you've got a little girl, and her name's something like Cathy, but that's not quite it I. don't know what you; did last week or what beer you favor or what your favorite TV program is.

“My daughter's name is Katrina,” Bannerman said softly. “She's nine, too. She was in Mary Kate's class.”

“What I'm trying to say is that the… the knowing is sometimes a pretty limited thing. Because of the dead zone.”

“Dead zone?”

“It's like some of the signals don't conduct,” Johnny said. “I can never get streets or addresses. Numbers are hard but they sometimes come. “The waitress returned with Johnny's tea and chili. He tasted the chili and nodded at Bannerman. “You're right. It's good. Especially on a night like this.”

“Go to it,” Bannerman said. “Man, I love good chili. My ulcer hollers bloody hell about it. Fuck you, ulcer, I say. Down the hatch.”

They were quiet for a moment. Johnny worked on his chili and Bannerman watched him curiously. He sup-posed Smith could have found out he had a dog named Rusty. He even could have found out that Rusty was old and nearly blind. Take it a step farther: if he knew Katrina's name, he might have done that “something like Cathy but that's not quite it” routine just to add the right touch of hesitant realism. But why? And none of that explained that queer, zapped feeling he'd gotten in his head when Smith touched his hand. If it was a con, it was a damned good one.

Outside, the wind gusted to a low shriek that seemed to rock the small building on its foundations. A flying veil of snow lashed the Pondicherry Bowling Lanes across the street.

“Listen to that,” Bannerman said. “Supposed to keep up all night. Don't tell me the winters're getting milder.”

“Have you got something?” Johnny asked. “Something that belonged to the guy you're looking for?”

“We think we might,” Bannerman said, and then shook his head. “But it's pretty thin,”

“Tell me.”

Bannerman laid it out for him. The grammar school and the library sat facing each other across the town common. It was standard operating procedure to send students across when they needed a book for a project or a report. The teacher gave them a pass and the librarian initialed it before sending them back. Near the center of the common, the land dipped slightly. On the west side of the dip was the town bandstand. In the dip itself were two dozen benches where people sat during band concerts and football rallies in the fall.

“We think he just sat himself down and waited for a kid to come along. He would have been out of sight from both sides of the common. But the footpath runs along the north side of the dip, close to those benches.”

Bannerman shook his head slowly.

“What makes it worse is that the Frechette woman was killed right on the bandstand. I am going to face a shit-storm about that at town meeting in March-that is, if I'm still around in March. Well, I can show them a memo I wrote to the town manager, requesting adult crossing guards on the common during school hours. Not that it was this killer that I was worried about, Christ, no. Never in my wildest dreams did I think he'd go back to the same spot a second time.”

“The town manager turned down the crossing guards?”

“Not enough money,” Bannerman said. “Of course, he can spread the blame around to the town selectmen, and they'll try to spread it back on me, and the grass will grow on Mary Kate Hendrasen's grave and… “He paused for a moment, or perhaps choked on what he was saying. Johnny gazed at his lowered head sympathetically.

“It might not have made any difference anyhow,” Bannerman went on in a dryer voice. “Most of the crossing guards we use are women, and this fuck we're after doesn't seem to care how old or young they are.”

“But you think he waited on one of those benches?”

Bannerman did. They had found an even dozen fresh cigarette butts near the end of one of the benches, and four more behind the bandstand itself, along with an empty box. Marlboros, unfortunately-the second or third most popular brand in the country. The cellophane on the box had been dusted for prints and had yielded none at all.

“None at all?” Johnny said. “That's a little funny, isn't it?”

“Why do you say so?”

“Well, you'd guess the killer was wearing gloves even if he wasn't thinking about prints-it was cold out -, but you'd think the guy that sold him the cigarettes…

Bannerman grinned. “You've got a head for this work,” he said, “but you're not a smoker.”

“No,” Johnny said. “I used to smoke a few cigarettes when I was in college, but I lost the habit after my accident.

“A man keeps his cigarettes in his breast pocket. Take them out, get a cigarette, put the pack back. If you're wearing gloves and not leaving fresh prints every time you get a butt, what you're doing is polishing that cellophane wrapper? Get it? And you missed one other thing, Johnny. Need me to tell you?”

Johnny thought it over and then said, “Maybe the pack of cigarettes came out of a carton. And those cartons are packed by machine.”

“That's it,” Bannerman said. “You are good at this.”

“What about the tax stamp on the package?”

“Maine,” Bannerman said.

“So if the killer and the smoker were the same man… Johnny said thoughtfully.

Bannerman shrugged. “Sure, there's the technical possibility that they weren't. But I've tried to imagine who else would want to sit on a bench in the town common on a cold, cloudy winter morning long enough to smoke twelve or sixteen cigarettes, and I come up a blank.”

Johnny sipped his tea. “None of the other kids that crossed saw anything?”

“Nothing,” Bannerman said. “I've talked to every kid that had a library pass this morning.”

“That's a lot weirder than the fingerprint business. Doesn't it strike you that way?”

“It strikes me as goddam scary. Look, the guy is sitting there, and what he's waiting for is one kid one girl-by herself. He can hear the kids as they come along. And each time he fades back behind the bandstand…”

“Tracks,” Johnny said.

“Not this morning. There was no snow-cover this morning. Just frozen ground. So here's this crazy shitbag that ought to have his own testicles carved off and served to him for dinner, here he is, skulking behind the bandstand. At about 8: 50 A. M., Peter Harrington and Melissa Loggins come along. School has been in session about twenty minutes at that time. When they're gone, he goes back to his bench. At 9: i5 he fades back behind the bandstand again. This time it's two little girls, Susan Flarhaty and Katrina Bannerman.”

Johnny set his mug down with a bang. Bannerman had taken off his spectacles and was polishing them savagely.

“Your daughter crossed this morning? Jesus!”

Bannerman put his glasses on again. His face was dark and dull with fury. And he's afraid, Johnny saw. Not afraid that the voters would turn him out, or that the Union-Leader would publish another editorial about nitwit cops in western Maine, but afraid because, if his daughter had happened to go to the library alone this morning

“My daughter,” Bannerman agreed softly. “I think she passed within forty feet of that… that animal. You know what that makes me feel like?”

“I can guess,” Johnny said.

“No, I don't think you can. It makes me feel like I almost stepped into an empty elevator shaft. Like I passed up the mushrooms at dinner and someone else died of toadstool poisoning. And it makes me feel dirty. It makes me feel filthy. I guess maybe it also explains why I finally called you. I'd do anything right now to nail this guy. Anything at all.”

Outside, a giant orange plow loomed out of the snow like something from a horror movie. It parked and two men got out. They crossed the street to Jon's and sat at the counter. Johnny finished his tea. He no longer wanted the chili.

“This guy goes back to his bench,” Bannerman resumed, “but not for long. Around 9:25 he hears the Harrington boy and the Loggins girl coming back from the library. So he goes back behind the bandstand again. It must have been around 9:25 because the librarian signed them out at 9:18. At 9:45 three boys from the fifth grade went past the bandstand on their way to the library. One of them thinks he might have seen “some guy” standing on the other side of the bandstand. That's our whole description. “Some guy.” We ought to put it out on the wire, what do you think? Be on the lookout for some guy.

Bannerman uttered a short laugh like a bark.

“At 9:55 my daughter and her friend Susan go by on their way back to school. Then, about 10:05, Mary Kate Hendrasen came along… by herself. Katrina and Sue met her going down the school steps as they were going up. They all said hi.”

“Dear God,” Johnny muttered. He ran his hands through his hair.

“Last of all, 10:20 A. M. The three fifth-grade boys are coming back. One of them sees something on the bandstand. It's Mary Kate, with her leotard and her underpants yanked down, blood all over her legs, her face-” her face-”

“Take it easy,” Johnny said, and put a hand on Banner-man's arm.

“No, I can't take it easy,” Bannerman said. He spoke almost apologetically. “I've never seen anything like that, not in eighteen years of police work. He raped that little girl and that would have been enough-enough to, you know, kill her-the medical examiner said the way he did it-he ruptured something and it-yeah, it probably would have, well-killed her-but then he had to go on and choke her. Nine years old and choked and left-left on the bandstand with her underpants pulled down.”

Suddenly Bannerman began to cry. The tears filled his eyes behind his glasses and then rolled down his face in two streams. At the counter the two guys from the Bridgton road crew were talking about the Superbowl. Bannerman took his glasses off again and mopped his face with his handkerchief. His shoulders shook and heaved. Johnny waited, stirring his chili aimlessly.

After a little while, Bannerman put his handkerchief away. His eyes were red, and Johnny thought how oddly naked his face looked without his glasses.

“I'm sorry, man,” he said. “It's been a very long day.”

“It's all right,” Johnny said.

“I knew I was going to do that, but I thought I could hold on until I got home to my wife.”

“Well, I guess that was just too long to wait.”

“You're a sympathetic ear. “Bannerman slipped his glasses back on. “No, you're more than that. You've got something. I'll be damned if I know just what it is, but it's something.”

“What else have you got to go on?”

“Nothing. I'm taking most of the heat, but the state police haven't exactly distinguished themselves. Neither has the attorney general's special investigator, or our pet FBI man. The county M. E. has been able to type the sperm, but that's no good to us at this stage of the game. The thing that bothers me the most is the lack of hair or skin under the victim's fingernails. They all must have struggled, but we don't have as much as a centimeter of skin. The devil must be on this guy's side. He hasn't dropped a button or a shopping list or left a single damn track. We got a shrink from Augusta, also courtesy of the state A. G., and he tells us all these guys give themselves away sooner or later. Some comfort. What if it's later -say about twelve bodies from now?”

“The cigarette pack is in Castle Rock?”

“Yes.”

Johnny stood up. “Well, let's take a ride.”

“My car?”

Johnny smiled a little as the wind rose, shrieking, outside. “On a night like this, it pays to be with a policeman, he said.

The snowstorm was at its height and it took them an hour and a half to get over to Castle Rock in Bannerman's cruiser. It was twenty past ten when they came in through the foyer of the Town Office Building and stamped the snow off their boots.

There were half a dozen reporters in the lobby, most of them sitting on a bench under a gruesome oil portrait of some town founding father, telling each other about previous night watches. They were up and surrounding Bannerman and Johnny in no time.

“Sheriff Bannerman, is it true there has been a break in the case?”

“I have nothing for you at this time,” Bannerman said stolidly.

“There's been a rumor that you've taken a man from Oxford into custody, Sheriff, is that true?”

“No. If you folks will pardon us…

But their attention had turned to Johnny, and he felt a sinking sensation in his belly as he recognized at least two faces from the press conference at the hospital.

“Holy God!” one of them exclaimed. “You're John Smith, aren't you?”

Johnny felt a crazy urge to take the fifth like a gangster at a Senate committee hearing.

“Yes,” he said. “That's me.”

“The psychic guy?” another asked.

“Look, let us pass!” Bannerman said, raising his voice. “Haven't you guys got anything better to do than-”

“According to Inside View, you're a fake,” a young man in a heavy topcoat said. “Is that true?”

“All I can say about that is Inside View prints what they want,” Johnny said. “Look, really-”

“You're denying the Inside View story?”

“Look, I really can't say anything more.”

As they went through the frosted glass door and into the sheriff's office, the reporters were racing toward the two pay phones on the wall by the dog warden's office.

“Now the shit has truly hit the fan,” Bannerman said unhappily. “I swear before God I never thought they'd still be here on a night like this. I should have brought you in the back.”

“Oh, didn't you know?” Johnny asked bitterly. “We love the publicity. All of us psychics are in it for the publicity.”

“No, I don't believe that,” Bannerman said. “At least not of you. Well, it's happened. Can't be helped now.”

But in his mind, Johnny could visualize the headlines:

a little extra seasoning in a pot of stew that was already bubbling briskly. CASTLE ROCK SHERIFF DEPUTIZES LOCAL PSYCHIC IN STRANGLER CASE. “NOVEMBER KILLER” TO BE INVESTIGATED BY SEER. HOAX ADMISSION STORY A FABRICATION, SMITH PROTESTS.

There were two deputies in the outer office, one of them snoozing, the other drinking coffee and looking glumly through a pile of reports.

“His wife kick him out or something?” Bannerman asked sourly, nodding toward the sleeper.

“He just got back from Augusta,” the deputy said. He was little more than a kid himself, and there were dark circles of weariness under his eyes. He glanced over at Johnny curiously.

“Johnny Smith, Frank Dodd. Sleeping beauty over there is Roscoe Fisher.”

Johnny nodded hello.

“Roscoe says the A. G. wants the whole case,” Dodd told Bannerman. His look was angry and defiant and somehow pathetic. “Some Christmas present, huh?”

Bannerman put a hand on the back of Dodd's neck and shook him gently. “You worry too much, Frank. Also, you're spending too much time on the case.”

“I just keep thinking there must be something in these reports… “He shrugged and then flicked them with one finger. “Something.”

“Go home and get some rest, Frank. And take sleeping beauty with you. All we need is for one of those photographers to get a picture of him. They'd run it in the papers with a caption like “In Castle Rock the Intensive Investigation Goes On,” and we'd all be out sweeping streets.”

Bannerman led Johnny into his private office. The desk was awash in paperwork. On the windowsill was a triptych showing Bannerman, his wife, and his daughter Katrina. His degree hung neatly framed on the wall, and beside it, in another frame, the front page of the Castle Rock Call which had announced his election.

“Coffee?” Bannerman asked him, unlocking a file cabinet.

“No thanks. I'll stick to tea.”

“Mrs. Sugarman guards her tea jealously,” Bannerman said. “Takes it home with her every day, sorry. I'd offer you a tonic, but we'd have to run the gauntlet out there again to get to the machine. Jesus Christ, I wish they'd go home.”

“That's okay.”

Bannerman came back with a small clasp envelope. “This is it,” he said. He hesitated for a moment, then handed the envelope over.

Johnny held it but did not immediately open it. “As long as you understand that nothing comes guaranteed. I can't promise. Sometimes I can and sometimes I can't.”

Bannerman shrugged tiredly and repeated: “No venture, no gain.”

Johnny undid the clasp and shook an empty Marlboro cigarette box out into his hand. Red and white box. He held it in his left hand and looked at the far wall. Gray wall. Industrial gray wall. Red and white box. Industrial gray box. He put the cigarette package in his other hand, then cupped it in both. He waited for something, anything to come. Nothing did. He held it longer, hoping against hope, ignoring the knowledge that when things come, they came at once.

At last he handed the cigarette box back. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“No soap, huh?”

“No.”

There was a perfunctory tap at the door and Roscoe Fisher stuck his head in. He looked a bit shamefaced. “Frank and I are going home, George. I guess you caught me coopin.”

“As long as I don't catch you doing it in your cruiser,” Bannerman said. “Say hi to Deenie for me.”

“You bet. “Fisher glanced at Johnny for a moment and then closed the door.

“Well,” Bannerman said. “It was worth the try, I guess. I'll run you back…”

“I want to go over to the common,” Johnny said abruptly.

“No, that's no good. It's under a foot of snow.”

“You can find the place, can't you?”

“Of course I can. But what'll it gain?”

“I don't know. But let's go across.”

“Those reporters are going to follow us, Johnny. Just as sure as God made little fishes.”

“You said something about a back door.”

“Yeah, but it's a fire door. Getting in that way is okay, but if we use it to go out, the alarm goes off.”

Johnny whistled through his teeth. “Let them follow along, then.”

Bannerman looked at him thoughtfully, for several moments and then nodded. “Okay.”

When they came out of the office, the reporters were up and surrounding them immediately. Johnny was reminded of a rundown kennel over in Durham where a strange old woman kept collies. The dogs would all runout at you when you went past with your fishing pole, yapping and snarling and generally scaring the hell out of you. They would nip but not actually bite.

“Do you know who did it, Johnny?” “Have any ideas at all?”

“Got any brainwaves, Mr. Smith?”

“Sheriff, was calling in a psychic your idea?”

“Do the state police and the A. G. “s office know about this development, Sheriff Bannerman?”

“Do you think you can break the case, Johnny?”

“Sheriff, have you deputized this guy?”

Bannerman pushed his way slowly and solidly through them, zipping his coat. “No comment, no comment. “Johnny said nothing at all.

The reporters clustered in the foyer as Johnny and Bannerman went down the snowy steps. It wasn't until they bypassed the cruiser and began wading across the street that one of them realized they were going to the common. Several of them ran back for their topcoats. Those who had been dressed for outside when Banner-man and Johnny emerged from the office now floundered down the Town Office steps after them, calling like children.

Flashlights bobbing in the snowy dark. The wind howled, blowing snow past them this way and that in errant sheets.

“You're not gonna be able to see a damn thing,” Bannerman said. “You w… holy shit!” He was almost knocked off his feet as a reporter in a bulky overcoat and a bizarre tam o'shanter sprawled into him.

“Sorry, Sheriff,” he said sheepishly. “Slippery. Forgot my galoshes.”

Up ahead a yellow length of nylon rope appeared out of the gloom. Attached to it was a wildly swinging sign reading POLICE INVESTIGATION.

“You forgot your brains, too,” Bannerman said. “Noyou keep back, all of you! Keep right back!”

“Town common's public property, Sheriff!” one of the reporters cried.

“That's right, and this is police business. You stay be-hind this rope here or you'll spend the night in my holding cell.”

With the beam of his flashlight he traced the course of the rope for them and then held it up so Johnny could pass beneath. They walked down the slope toward the snow-mounded shapes of the benches. Behind them the reporters gathered at the rope, pooling their few lights so that Johnny and George Bannerman walked in a dull sort of spotlight,

“Flying blind,” Bannerman said.

“Well, there's nothing to see, anyway,” Johnny said. “Is there?”

“No, not now. I told Frank he could take that rope down anytime. Now I'm glad he didn't get around to it. You want to go over to the bandstand?”

“Not yet. Show me where the cigarette butts were. “They went on a little farther and then Bannerman stopped. “Here,” he said, and shone his light on a bench that was little more than a vague hump poking out of a drift.

Johnny took off his gloves and put them in his coat pockets. Then he knelt and began to brush the snow away from the seat of the bench. Again Bannerman was struck by the haggard pallor of the man's face. On his knees before the bench he looked like a religious penitent, a man in desperate prayer.

Johnny's hands went cold, then mostly numb. Melted now ran off his fingers. He got down to the splintered, weatherbeaten surface of the bench. He seemed to see it very clearly, almost with magnifying power. It had once been green, but now much of the paint had flaked and eroded away. Two rusted steel bolts held the seat to the backrest.

He seized the bench in both hands, and sudden weirdness flooded him he had felt nothing so intense before and would feel something so intense only once ever again.

He stared down at the bench, frowning, gripping it tightly in his hands. It -…

(A summer bench)

How many hundreds of different people had sat here at one time or another, listening to “God Bless America”, to “Stars and Stripes Forever” ('Be hind to your web-footed friends… for a duck may be somebody's moooother… “), to the Castle Rock Cougars” fight song? Green summer leaves, smoky haze of fall like a memory of cornhusks and men with rakes in mellow dusk. The thud of the big snare drum. Mellow gold trumpets and trombones. School band uniforms…

(for a duck… may be… somebody's mother…)

Good summer people sitting here, listening. applauding, holding programs that had been designed and printed in the Castle Rock High School graphic arts shop.

But this morning a killer had been sitting here. Johnny could feel him.

Dark tree branches etched against a gray snow-sky like runes. He(I) am sitting here, smoking, waiting, feeling good, feeling like he(I) could jump right over the roof of the world and land lightly on two feet. Humming a song. Something by the Rolling Stones. Can't get that, but very dearly everything is… is what?

All right. Everything is all right) everything is gray and waiting for snow, and Em…

“Slick,” Johnny muttered. “I'm slick, I'm so slick.”

Bannerman leaned forward, unable to catch the words over the howling wind. “What?”

“Slick,” Johnny repeated. He looked up at Bannerman and the Sheriff involuntarily took a step backward. Johnny's eyes were cool and somehow inhuman. His dark hair blew wildly around his white face, and overhead the winter wind screamed through the black sky. His hands seemed welded to the bench.

“I'm so fucking slick,” he said clearly. A triumphant smile had formed on his lips. His eyes stared through Bannerman. Bannerman believed. No one could be acting this, or putting it on. And the most terrible part of it was… he was “reminded of someone. The…… the tone of voice… Johnny Smith was gone; he seemed to have been replaced by a human blank. And lurking behind the planes of his ordinary features, almost near enough to touch. was another face. The face of the killer.

The face of someone he knew.

“Never catch me because I'm too slick for you. “A little laugh escaped him, confident, lightly taunting. “I put it on every time, and if they scratch… or bite… they don't get a bit of me… because I'm so SLICK!” His voice rose to a triumphant, crazy shriek that competed with the wind, and Bannerman fell back another step, his flesh crawling helplessly, his balls tight and cringing against his guts.

Let it stop, he thought. Let it stop now. Please.

Johnny bent his head over the bench. Melting snow dripped between his bare fingers.

(Snow. Silent snow, secret snow -)

(She put a clothespin on it so I'd know how it felt. How it felt when you got a disease. A disease from one of those nasty-fuckers, they're all nasty. fuckers, and they have to be stopped, yes, stopped, stop them, stop, the stop, the STOP-OH MY GOD THE STOP SIGN -!)

He was little again. Going to school through the silent, secret snow. And there was a man looming out of the shifting whiteness, a terrible man, a terrible black grinning man with eyes as shiny as quarters, and there was a red STOP sign clutched in one gloved hand… him!… him!… him!

(OH MY GOD DON'T… DON'T LET HIM GET ME… MOMMA… DON'T LET HIM GET MEEEEE…)

Johnny screamed and fell away from the bench, his hands suddenly pressed to his cheeks. Bannerman crouched beside him, badly frightened. Behind the rope the reporters stirred and murmured.

“Johnny! Snap out of it! Listen, Johnny…”

“Slick,” Johnny muttered. He looked up at Bannerman with hurt, frightened eyes. In his mind he still saw that black shape with the shiny-quarter eyes looming out of the snow. His crotch throbbed dully from the pain of the clothespin the killer's mother had made him wear. He hadn't been the killer then, oh no, not an animal, not a pusbag or a shitbag or whatever Bannerman had called him, he'd only been a scared little boy with a clothespin on his… his…

“Help me get up,” he muttered.

Bannerman helped him to his feet. “The bandstand now,” Johnny said.

“No, I think we ought to go back, Johnny.”

Johnny pushed past him blindly and began to flounder toward the bandstand, a big circular shadow up ahead. It bulked and loomed in the darkness, the death place. Bannerman ran and caught up to him.

“Johnny, who is it? Do you know who…?”

“You never found any scraps of tissue under their finger. nails because he was wearing a raincoat,” Johnny said, He panted the words out. “A raincoat with a hood. A slick vinyl raincoat. You go back over the reports. You go back over the reports and you'll see. It was raining or snowing every time. They clawed at him, all right. They fought him. Sure they did. But their fingers just slipped and slid over it.”

“Who, Johnny? Who?”

“I don't know. But I'm going to find out.”

He stumbled over the lowest of the six steps leading up to the bandstand, fumbled for his balance, and would have lost it if Bannerman had not gripped his arm. Then they were up on the stage. The snow was thin here, a bare dusting, kept off by the conical roof. Bannerman trained his flashlight beam on the floor and Johnny dropped to his hands and knees and began to crawl slowly across it. His hands were bright red. Bannerman thought they must be like chunks of raw meat by now.

Johnny stopped suddenly and stiffened like a dog on point. “Here,” he muttered. “He did it right here.”

Images and textures and sensations flooded in. The copper taste of excitement, the possibility of being seen adding to it. The girl was squirming, trying to scream. He had covered her mouth with one gloved hand. Awful excitement. Never catch me, I'm the Invisible Man, is it dirty enough for you now, momma?

Johnny began to moan, shaking his head back and forth.

Sound of clothes ripping. Warmth. Something flowing. Blood? Semen? Urine?

He began to shudder all over. His hair hung in his face. His face. His smiling, open face caught inside the circular border of the raincoat's hood as his (my) hands close around the neck at the moment of orgasm and squeeze… and squeeze… and squeeze.

The strength left his arms as the images began to fade. He slipped forward, now lying on the stage full-length, sobbing. When Bannerman touched his shoulder he cried out and tried to scramble away, his face crazy with fear. Then, little by little, it loosened. He put his head back against the waist-high bandstand railing and closed his eyes. Shudders raced through his body like whippets. His pants and coat were sugared with snow.

“I know who it is,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later Johnny sat in Bannerman's inner office again, stripped to his shorts and sitting as close as he could to a portable electric heater. He still looked cold and miserable, but he had stopped shaking.

“Sure you don't want some coffee?”

Johnny shook his head. “I can't abide the stuff.”

Johnny… “Bannerman sat down. “Do you really know something?”

“I know who killed them. You would have gotten him eventually. You were just too close to it. You've even seen him in his raincoat, that shiny all-over raincoat. Because he crosses the kids in the morning. He has a stop sign on a stick and he crosses the kids in the morning.”

Bannerman looked at him, thunderstruck. “Are you talking about Frank? Frank Dodd? You're nuts!”

“Frank Dodd killed them,” Johnny said. “Frank Dodd killed them all.”

Bannerman looked as though he didn't know whether to laugh at Johnny or deal him a good swift kick. “That's the craziest goddam thing I've ever heard,” he said finally. “Frank Dodd's a fine officer and a fine man. He's crossing over next November to run for municipal chief of police, and he'll do it with my blessing. “Now his expression was one of amusement mixed with tired contempt. “Frank's twenty-five. That means he would have had to have started this crazy shit when he was just nineteen. He lives at home very quietly with his mother, who isn't very well hypertension, thyroid, and a semidiabetic condition. Johnny, you put your foot in the bucket. Frank Dodd is no murderer. I'd stake my life on that.”

“The murders stopped for two years,” Johnny said. “Where was Frank Dodd then? Was he in town?”

Bannerman turned toward him, and now the tired amusement had left his face and he only looked hard. Hard and angry. “I don't want to hear any more about this. You were right the first time-you're nothing but a fake. Well, you got your press coverage, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to you malign a good officer, a man

I…

“A man you think of as your son,” Johnny said quietly. Bannerman's lips thinned, and a lot of the color that had risen in his cheeks during their time outside now faded out of his face. He looked like a man who has been punched low. Then it passed and his face was expressionless.

“Get out of here,” he said. “Get one of your reporter friends to give you a ride home. You can hold a press conference on your way. But I swear to God, I swear to holy God that if you mention Frank Dodd's name, I'll come for you and I'll break your back. Understood?”

“Sure, my buddies from the press!” Johnny shouted at him suddenly. “That's right! Didn't you see me answering all their questions? Posing for their pictures and making sure they got my good side?. Making sure they spelled my name right?”

Bannerman looked startled, then hard again. “Lower your voice.”

“No, I'll be goddamned if I will!” Johnny said, and his voice rose even higher in pitch and volume. “I think you forgot who called who! I'll refresh your recollection for you. It was you, calling me. That's how eager I was to get over here!”

“That doesn't mean you…

Johnny walked over to Bannerman, pointing his index finger like a pistol. He was several inches shorter and probably eighty pounds lighter, but Bannerman backed up a step-as he had done on the common. Johnny's cheeks had flushed a dull red. His lips were drawn back slightly from his teeth.

“No, you're right, you calling me doesn't mean shit in a tin bucket,” he said. “But you don't want it to be Dodd, do you? It can be somebody else, then we'll at least look into it, but it can't be good old Frank Dodd. Because Frank's upstanding, Frank takes care of his mother, Frank looks up to good old Sheriff George Bannerman, oh, Frank's bloody Christ down from the cross except when he's raping and strangling old ladies and little girls, and it could have been your daughter, Bannerman, don't you understand it could have been your own

Bannerman hit him. At the last moment he pulled the punch, but it was still hard enough to knock Johnny backward; he stumbled over the leg of a chair and then sprawled on the floor. Blood trickled from his cheek where Bannerman's Police Academy ring had grazed him.

“You had that coming,” Bannerman said, but there was no real conviction in his voice. It occurred to him that for the first time in his life he had hit a cripple-or the next thing to a cripple.

Johnny's head felt light and full of bells. His voice seemed to belong to someone else, a radio announcer or a B-movie actor. “You ought to get down on your knees and thank God that he really didn't leave any clues, because you would have overlooked them, feeling like you do about Dodd. And then you could have held yourself responsible in Mary Kate Hendrasen's death, as an accessory.

“That is nothing but a damnable lie,” Bannerman said slowly and clearly. “I'd arrest my own brother if he was the guy doing this. Get up off the floor. I'm sorry I hit you.

He helped Johnny to his feet and looked at the scrape on his cheek.

“I'll get the first-aid kit and put some iodine on that.”

“Forget it,” Johnny said. The anger had left his voice. “I guess I kind of sprang it on you, didn't I?”

“I'm telling you, it can't be Frank. You're not a publicity hound, okay. I was wrong about that. Heat of the moment, okay? But your vibes or your astral plane or whatever it is sure gave you a bum steer this time.”

“Then check,” Johnny said. He caught Bannerman's eyes with his own and held them. “Check it out. Show me I got it wrong. “He swallowed. “Check the times and dates against Frank's work schedule. Can you do that?”

Grudgingly, Bannerman said, “The time cards in the back closet there go back fourteen or fifteen years. I guess I could check it.”

“Then do it.”

“Mister… “He paused. “Johnny, if you knew Frank, you'd laugh at yourself. I mean it. It's not just me, you ask anybody…”

“If I'm wrong, I'll be glad to admit it.”

“This is crazy,” Bannerman muttered, but he went to the storage closet where the old time cards were kept and opened the door.

Two hours passed. It was now nearly one o'clock in the morning. Johnny had called his father and told him he would find a place to sleep in Castle Rock; the storm had leveled off at a single furious pitch, and driving back would be next to impossible.

“What's going on over there?” Herb asked. “Can you tell me?”

“I better not over the phone, Dad.”

“All right, Johnny. Don't exhaust yourself.”

“No.”

But he was exhausted. He was more tired than he could remember being since those early days in physical therapy with Eileen Magown. A nice woman, he thought randomly. A nice friendly woman, at least until I told her that her house was burning down. After that she had become distant and awkward. She had thanked him, sure, but-had she ever touched him after that? Actually touched him? Johnny didn't think so. And it would be the same with Bannerman when this thing was over. Too bad. Like Eileen, he was a fine man. But people get very nervous around people who can just touch things and know all about them.

“It doesn't prove a thing,” Bannerman was saying now. There was a sulky, little-boy rebelliousness in his voice that made Johnny want to grab him and shake him until he rattled. But he was too tired.

They were looking down at a rough chart Johnny had made on the back of a circular for used state police interceptors. Stacked untidily by Bannerman's desk were seven or eight cartons of old time cards, and sitting in the top half of Bannerman's in/out basket were Frank Dodd's cards, going back to 1971, when he had joined the sheriff's department. The chart looked like this:

Alma Frechette (waitress) Then working at Main Street

3:00PM, 11/12/70 Gulf Station

Pauline Toothaker Off-duty

Cheryl Moody U. H. S. student) Off-duty

Carol Dunbarger (H. S. student) Two-week vacation period

Etta Ringgold (teacher) Regular duty tours

Mary Kate Hendrasen Off-duty

All times are “estimated time of death” figures supplied by State Medical Examiner

“No, it doesn't prove anything,” Johnny agreed, rubbing his temples. “But it doesn't exactly rule him out, either.”

Bannerman tapped the chart. “When Miss Ringgold was killed, he was on duty.”

“Yeah, if she really was killed on the twenty-ninth of October. But it might have been the twenty-eighth, or the twenty-seventh. And even if he was on duty, who suspects a cop?”

Bannerman was looking at the little chart very carefully.

“What about the gap?” Johnny said. “The two-year gap?”

Bannerman thumbed the time cards. “Frank was right here on duty all during 1973 and 1974. You saw that.”

“So maybe the urge didn't come on him that year. At least, so far as we know.”

“So far as we know, we don't know anything,” Banner-man contradicted quickly.

“But what about 1972? Late 1972 and early 1973? There are no time cards for that period. Was he on vacation?”

“No,” Bannerman said. “Frank and a guy named Tom Harrison took a semester course in Rural Law Enforcement at a branch of the University of Colorado in Pueblo. It's the only place in the country where they offer a deal like that. It's an eight-week course. Frank and Tom were out there from October 15 until just about Christmas. The state pays part, the county pays part, and the U. S. government pays part under the Law Enforcement Act of 1971. I picked Harrison-he's chief of police over in Gates Falls now-and Frank. Frank almost didn't go, because he was worried about his mother being alone. To tell you the truth, I think she tried to persuade him to stay home. I talked him into it. He wants to be a career officer, and something like the Rural Law Enforcement course looks damn good on your record. I remember that when he and Tom got back in December, Frank had a low-grade virus and he looked terrible. He'd lost twenty pounds. Claimed no one out there in cow country could cook like his mom.

Bannerman fell silent. Something in what he had just said seemed to disturb him.

“He took a week's sick leave around the holidays and then he was okay,” Bannerman resumed, almost defensively. “He was back by the fifteenth of January at the latest. Check the time cards for yourself.”

“I don't have to. Any more than I have to tell you what your next step is.”

“No,” Bannerman said. He looked at his hands. “I told you that you had a head for this stuff. Maybe I was righter than I knew. Or wanted to be.”

He picked up the telephone and pulled out a thick directory with a plain blue cover from the bottom drawer of his desk. Paging through it without looking up, he told Johnny, “This is courtesy of that same Law Enforcement Act. Every sheriff's office in every county of the United States. “He found the number he wanted and made his call.

Johnny shifted in his seat.

“Hello,” Bannerman said. “Am I talking to the Pueblo sheriff's office?… All right. My name is George Banner-man, I'm the county sheriff of Castle County, in western Maine… yes, that's what I said. State of Maine. Who am I talking to, please?… All right, Officer Taylor, this is the situation. We've had a series of murders out here, rape-stranglings, six of them in the past five years. All of them have taken place in the late fall or early winter. We have a… “He looked up at Johnny for a moment, his eyes hurt and helpless. Then he looked down at the phone again. “We have a suspect who was in Pueblo from October 15 of 1972 until… uh, December 17, I think. What I'd like to know is if you have an unsolved homicide on your books during that period, victim female, no particular age, raped, cause of death, strangulation. Further, I would like to know the perpetrator's sperm type if you have had such a crime and a sperm sample was obtained. What?… Yes, okay. Thanks… I'll be right here, waiting. Good-bye, Officer Taylor.”

He hung up. “He's going to verify my bona fides, then check it through, then call me back. You want a cup of no, you don't drink it, do you?”

“No,” Johnny said. “I'll settle for a glass of water.”

He went over to the big glass cooler and drew a paper cupful of water. Outside the storm howled and pounded.

Behind him, Bannerman said awkwardly: “Yeah, okay. You were right. He's the son I'd've liked to have had. My wife had Katrina by cesarian. She can never have another one, the doctor said it would kill her. She had the Band-Aid operation and I had a vasectomy. Just to be sure.”

Johnny went to the window and looked out on darkness, his cup of water in his hand. There was nothing to see but snow, but if he turned around, Bannerman would break off-you didn't have to be psychic to know that.

“Frank's dad worked on the B amp;M line and died in an accident when Frank was five or so. He was drunk, tried to make a coupling in a state where he probably would have pissed down his own leg and never known it. He got crushed between two flatcars. Frank's had to be the man of the house ever since. Roscoe says he had a girl in high school, but Mrs. Dodd put paid to that in a hurry.”

I bet she did, Johnny thought. A woman who would do that thing… that clothespin thing… to her own son… that sort of woman would stop at nothing. She” must be almost as crazy as he is.

“He came to me when he was sixteen and asked if there was such a thing as a part-time policeman. Said it was the only thing he'd ever really wanted to do or be since he was a kid. I took a shine to him right off. Hired him to work around the place and paid him out of my own pocket. Paid him what I could, you know, he never complained about the wages. He was the Sort of kid who would have worked for free. He put in an application for full-time work the month before he graduated from high school, but at that time we didn't have any vacancies. So he went to work at Donny Haggar's Gulf and took a night course in police work at the university down in Gorham. I guess Mrs. Dodd tried to put paid to that, too-felt she was alone too much of the time, or something-but that time Frank stood up to her… with my encouragement. We took him on in July of 1971 and he's been with the department ever since. Now you tell me this and I think of Katrina being out yesterday morning, walking right past whoever did it… and it's like some dirty kind of incest, almost. Frank's been at our house, he's eaten our food, babysat Katie once or twice… and you tell me…

Johnny turned around. Bannerman had taken off his glasses and was wiping his eyes again.

“If you really can see such things, I pity you. You're a freak of God, no different from a two-headed cow I once saw in the carnival. I'm sorry. That's a shit thing to say, I know.”

“The Bible says God loves all his creatures,” Johnny said. His voice was a bit unsteady.

“Yeah?” Bannerman nodded and rubbed the red places on the sides of his nose where his glasses sat. “Got a funny way of showing it, doesn't he?”

About twenty minutes later the telephone rang and Bannerman answered it smartly. Talked briefly. Listened.

Johnny watched his face get old. He hung up and looked at Johnny for a long time without speaking.

“November 12, 1972,” he said. “A college girl. They found her in a field out by the turnpike. Ann Simons, her name was. Raped and strangled. Twenty-three years old. No semen type obtained. It's still not proof, Johnny.”

“I don't think, in your own mind, you need any more proof,” Johnny said. “And if you confront him with what you have, I think he'll break down.”

“And if he doesn't?”

Johnny remembered the vision on the handstand. It whirled back at him like a crazy, lethal boomerang. The tearing sensation. The pain that was pleasant, the pain that recalled the pain of the clothespin, the pain that reconfirmed everything.

“Get him to drop his pants,” Johnny said. Bannerman looked at him.

The reporters were still out in the lobby. In truth, they probably wouldn't have moved even had they not suspected a break in the case-or at least a bizarre new development. The roads out of town were impassable.

Bannerman and Johnny went out the supply closet window.

“Are you sure this is the way to do it?” Johnny asked, and the storm tried to rip the words out of his mouth. His legs hurt.

“No,” Bannerman said simply, “but I think you should be in on it. Maybe I think he should have the chance to look you in the face, Johnny. Come on. The Dodds are only two blocks from here.”

They set off, hooded and booted, a pair of shadows in the driving snow. Beneath his coat Bannerman was wearing his service pistol. His handcuffs were clipped to his belt. Before they had gone a block through the deep snow Johnny was limping badly, but he kept his mouth grimly shut about it.

But Bannerman noticed. They stopped in the doorway of the Castle Rock Western Auto.

“Son, what's the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” Johnny said. His head was starting to ache again, too.

“It sure is something. You act like you're walking on two broken legs.”

“They had to operate on my legs after I came out of the coma. The muscles had atrophied. Started to melt is how Dr. Brown put it. The joints were decayed. They fixed it up the best they could with synthetics…

“Like the Six Million Dollar Man, huh?”

Johnny thought of the neat piles of hospital hills back home, sitting in the top drawer of the dining room hutch.

“Yes, something like that. When I'm on them too long, they stiffen up. That's all.”

“You want to go back?”

You bet I do. Go back and not have” to think about this hellacious business anymore”. Wish I'd never come. Not my problem. This is the guy who compared me to a two-headed cow.

“No, I'm okay,” he said.

They stepped out of the doorway and the wind grabbed them and tried to bowl them along the empty street. They struggled through the harsh, snow-choked glare of arc-sodium streetlights, bent into the wind. They turned onto a side street and five houses down Bannerman stopped in front of a small and neat New England salt-box. Like the other houses on the street, it was dark and battened down.

“This is the house,” Bannerman said, his voice oddly colorless. They worked their way through the snowdrift that the wind had thrown against the porch and mounted the steps.

Mrs. Henrietta Dodd was a big woman who was carrying a dead weight of flesh on her frame. Johnny had never seen a woman who looked any sicker. Her skin was a yellowish-gray. Her hands were nearly reptilian with an eczemalike rash. And there was something in her eyes, narrowed to glittering slits in their puffy sockets, that reminded him unpleasantly of the way his mother's eyes had sometimes looked when Vera Smith was transported into one of her religious frenzies.

She had opened the door to them after Bannerman had rapped steadily for nearly five minutes. Johnny stood beside him on his aching legs, thinking that this night would never end. It would just go on and on until the snow bad piled up enough to avalanche down and bury them all.

“What do you want in the middle of the night, George Bannerman?” she asked suspiciously. Like many fat women, her voice was a high, buzzy reed instrument-it sounded a bit like a fly or a bee caught in a bottle.

“Have to talk to Frank, Henrietta.”

“Then talk to him in the morning,” Henrietta Dodd said, and started to close the door in their faces.

Bannerman stopped the door's swing with a gloved hand. “I'm sorry, Henrietta. Has to be now.”

“Well, I'm not going to wake him up!” she cried, not moving from the doorway. “He sleeps like the dead anyway! Some nights I ring my bell for him, the palpitations are terrible sometimes, and does he come? No, he sleeps right through it and he could wake up some morning to find me dead of a heart attack in my bed instead of getting him his goddam runny poached egg! Because you work him too hard!”

She grinned in a sour kind of triumph; the dirty secret exposed and hats over the windmill.

“All day, all night, swing shift, chasing after drunks in the middle of the night and any one of them could have a-gun under the seat, going out to the ginmills and honky-tonks, oh, they're a rough trade out there but a lot you mind! I guess I know what goes on in those places, those cheap slutty women that'd be happy to give a nice boy like my Frank an incurable disease for the price of a quarter beer!”

Her voice, that reed instrument, swooped and buzzed. Johnny's head pumped and throbbed in counterpoint. He wished she would shut up. It was a hallucination, he knew, just the tiredness and stress of this awful night catching up, but it began to seem more and more to him that this was his mother standing here, that at any moment she would turn from Bannerman to him and begin to huckster him about the wonderful talent God had given him.

“Mrs. Dodd… Henrietta… “Bannerman began patiently.

Then she did turn to Johnny, and regarded him with her smart-stupid little pig's eyes.

“Who's this?”

“Special deputy,” Bannerman said promptly. “Henrietta, I'll take the responsibility for waking Frank up.”

“Oooh, the responsibility!” she cooed with monstrous, buzzing sarcasm, and Johnny finally realized she was afraid. The fear was coming off her in pulsing, noisome waves-that was what was making his headache worse. Couldn't Bannerman feel it? “The ree-spon-si-bil-i-tee! Isn't that big of you, my God yes! Well, I won't have my boy waked up in the middle of the night, George Bannerman, so you and your special deputy can just go peddle your goddam papers!”

She tried to shut the door again and this time Banner-man shoved it all the way open. His voice showed tight anger and beneath that a terrible tension. “Open up, Henrietta, I mean it, now.”

“You can't do this!” she cried. “This isn't no police state! I'll have your job! Let's see your warrant!”

“No, that's right, but I'm going to talk to Frank,” Bannerman said, and pushed past her.

Johnny, barely aware of what he was doing, followed. Henrietta Dodd made a grab for him. Johnny caught her Wrist-and a terrible pain flared in his head, dwarfing the sullen thud of the headache. And the woman felt it, too. The two of them stared at each other for a moment that seemed to last forever, an awful, perfect understanding. For that moment they seemed welded together. Then she fell back, clutching at her ogre's bosom.

“My heart… my heart… “She scrabbled at her robe pocket and pulled out a phial of pills. Her face had gone to the color of raw dough. She got the cap off the phial and spilled tiny pills all over the floor getting one into her palm. She slipped it under her tongue. Johnny stood staring at her in mute horror. His head felt like a swelling bladder full of hot blood.

“You knew?” he whispered.

Her fat, wrinkled mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. No sound came out. It was the mouth of a beached fish.

“All of this time you knew?”

“You're a devil!” she screamed at him. “You're a monster… devil… oh my heart… oh, I'm dying… think I'm dying… call the doctor… George Bannerman don't you go up there and wake my baby!”

Johnny let go of her, and unconsciously rubbing his hand back and forth on his coat as if to free it of a stain, he stumbled up the stairs after Bannerman. The wind outside sobbed around the eaves like a lost child. Halfway up he glanced back. Henrietta Dodd sat in a wicker chair, a sprawled mountain of meat, gasping and holding a huge breast in each hand. His head still felt as if it were swelling and he thought dreamily: Pretty soon it'll just pop and that'll be the end. Thank God.

An old and threadbare runner covered the narrow hall floor. The wallpaper was watermarked. Bannerman was pounding on a closed door. It was at least ten degrees colder up here.

“Frank? Frank! It's George Bannerman! Wake up, Frank!”

There was no response. Bannerman turned the knob and shoved the door open. His hand had fallen to the butt of his gun, but he had not drawn it. It could have been a fatal mistake, but Frank Dodd's room was empty.

The two of them stood in the doorway for a moment, looking in. It was a child's room. The wallpaper-also watermarked-was covered with dancing clowns and rocking horses. There was a child-sized chair with a Raggedy Andy sitting in it, looking back at them with its shiny blank eyes. In one corner was a toybox. In the other was a narrow maple bed with the covers thrown back. Hooked over one of the bedposts and looking out of place was Frank Dodd's holstered gun.

“My God,” Bannerman said softly. “What is this?”

“Help,” Mrs. Dodd's voice floated up. “Help me

“She knew,” Johnny said. “She knew from the very beginning, from the Frechette woman. He told her. And she covered up for him.”

Bannerman backed slowly out of the room and opened another door. His eyes were dazed and hurt. It was a guest bedroom, unoccupied. He opened the closet, which was empty except for a neat tray of D-Con rat-killer on the floor. Another door. This bedroom was unfinished and cold enough to show Bannerman's breath. He looked around. There was another door, this one at the head of the stairs. He went to it, and Johnny followed. This door was locked.

“Frank? Are you in there?” He rattled the knob. “Open it, Frank!”

There was no answer. Bannerman raised his foot and kicked out, connecting with the door just below the knob. There was a flat cracking sound that seemed to echo in Johnny's head like a steel platter dropped on a tile floor.

“Oh God,” Bannerman said in a flat, choked voice. “Frank.”

Johnny could see over his shoulder, could see too much. Frank Dodd was propped on the lowered seat of the toilet. He was naked except for a shiny black raincoat, which he had looped over his shoulders; the raincoat's black hood (executioner's hood, Johnny thought dimly) dangled down on the top of the toilet tank like some grotesque, deflated black pod. He had somehow managed to cut his own throat-Johnny would not have thought that possible. There was a package of Wilkinson Sword Blades on the edge of the washbasin. A single blade lay on the floor, glittering wickedly. Drops of blood had beaded on its edge. The blood from his severed jugular vein and carotid artery had splashed everywhere. There were pools of it caught in the folds of the raincoat which dragged on the floor. It was on the shower curtain, which had a pattern of paddling ducks with umbrellas held over their heads. It was on the ceiling.

Around Frank Dodd's neck on a string was a sign crayoned in lipstick. It read: I CONFESS.

The pain in Johnny's head began to climb to a sizzling, insupportable peak. He groped out with a hand and found the doorjamb.

Knew, he thought incoherently. Knew somehow when he” saw me. Knew it was all over. Came home. Did this.

Black rings overlaying his sight, spreading like evil ripples.

What a talent God has given you, Johnny.

(I CONFESS)

“Johnny?”

From far away.

“Johnny, are you all…”

Fading. Everything fading away. That was good. Would have been better if he had never come out of the coma at all. Better for all concerned. Well, he had had his chance.

“Johnny-”

Frank Dodd had come up here and somehow he had slit his throat from the ear to the proverbial ear while the storm howled outside like all the dark things of the earth let loose. Gone a gusher, as his father had said that winter twelve years or so ago, when the pipes in the basement had frozen and burst. Gone a gusher. Sure as hell had. All the way up to the ceiling.

He believed that he might have screamed then, but afterward was never sure. It might only have been in his own head that he screamed. But he had wanted to scream;

to scream out all the horror and pity and agony in his heart.

Then he was falling forward into darkness, and grateful to go. Johnny blacked out.

From the New York Time's, December 19, 1975:

MAINE PSYCHIC DIRECTS SHERIFF TO KILLER DEPUTY'S HOME AFTER VISITING SCENE OF THE CRIME

(Special to the Times) John Smith of Pownal may not actually be psychic, but one would have difficulty persuading Sheriff George F. Bannerman of Castle County, Maine, to believe that. Desperate after a sixth assault-murder in the small western Maine town of Castle Rock, Sheriff Bannerman called Mr. Smith on the phone and asked him to come over to Castle Rock and lend a hand, if possible. Mr. Smith, who received national attention earlier this year when he recovered from a deep coma after fifty-five months of unconsciousness, had been condemned by the weekly tabloid Inside View as a hoaxer, but at a press conference yesterday Sheriff Bannerman would only say, “We don't put a whole lot of stock up here in Maine in what those New York reporters think.”

According to Sheriff Bannerman, Mr. Smith crawled on his hands and knees around the scene of the sixth murder, which occurred on the Castle Rock town common. He came up with a mild case of frostbite and the murderer's name-Sheriff's Deputy Franklin Dodd, who had been on the Castle County Sheriff's payroll five years, as long as Bannerman himself.

Earlier this year Mr. Smith stirred controversy in his native state when he had a psychic flash that his physical therapist's house had caught fire. The flash turned out to be nothing but the truth. At a press conference following, a reporter challenged him to…

From Newsweek, page 41, week of December 24, 1975:.

It may be that the first genuine psychic since Peter Hurkos has been uncovered in this country Hurkos was the German-born seer who has been able to tell questioners all about their private lives by touching their hands, silverware, or items from their handbags.

John Smith is a shy and unassuming young man from the south-central Maine town of Pownal. Earlier this year he returned to consciousness after a period of more than four years in a deep coma following a car accident (see photo). According to the consulting neurologist in the case, Dr. Samuel Weizak, Smith made a “perfectly astounding recovery”. Today he is recovering from a mild case of frostbite and a four-hour blackout following the bizarre resolution of a long-unsolved multiple murder case in the town of…

December 27, 1975

Dear Sarah,

Dad and I both enjoyed your le'tter, which arrived just this afternoon. I'm really fine, so you can stop worrying, okay? But I thank you for your concern. The” “frostbite” was greatly exaggerated in the press. Just a couple of patches on the” tips of three” fingers of my left hand. The” blackout was really nothing much more” than a fainting spell “brought on by emotional overload”, Weizak says. Yes, he came down himself and insisted on driving me to the hospital in Portland. Just watching him in action is nearly worth the price of admission. He bullied them into giving him a consultation room and an EEG machine and a technician to run it. He says he can find no new brain damage or signs of progressive brain damage. He wants to do a whole series of tests, some of them sound utterly inquisitorial-'Renounce, heretic, or we'll give you another pneumo-brainscan!” (Ha-ha, and are you still sniffin” that wicked cocaine”, darlin”?) Anyway, I turned down the kind offer to be pumped and prodded some more. Dad is rather pissed at me about turning the tests down, keeps trying to draw a parallel between my refusal to have them and my mother's refusal to take her hypertension medicine. It's very hard to make him see” that, if Weizak did find something, the odds would be” nine-to-one against him being able to do anything about it.

Yes, I saw the Newsweek article. That picture of me is from the press conference, only cropped. Don't look like anyone you'd like to meet in a dark alley, do I? Ha-ha! Holy Gee (as your buddy Anne Strafford is so fond of saying), but I wish they hadn't run that story. The packages, cards, and letters have started coming again. l don't open any of them anymore unless I recognize the return address, just mark them “Return to Sender”. They are too pitiful, too full of hope and hate and belief and unbelief, and somehow they all remind me of the way my Mom was.

Well, I don't mean to sound so gloomy, it ain't all that bad. But I don't want to be a practicing psychic, I don't want to go on tour or appear on TV (some yahoo from NBC got our phone number, who knows how, and wanted to know if I'd consider “doing the Carson show”. Great idea, huh? Don Rickles could insult some people, some” starlet could show her jugs, and I could make a few predictions. All brought to you by General Foods.). I don't want to do any of that S~H~I~T. What l am really looking forward to is getting back to Cleaves Mills and sinking into the utter obscurity of the H. S. English teacher. And save the psychic flashes for football pep rallies.

Guess that's all for this time. Hope you and Walt and Denny had yourself a merry little” Christmas and are looking forward eagerly (from what you said I'm sure” Walt is, at the very least) to the Brave Bicentennial Election Year now stretching before us. Glad to hear your spouse has been picked to run for the state senate seat there, but cross your fingers, Sarey-'76 doesn't exactly look like” a banner year for elephant-lovers. Send your thanks for that one” across to San Clemente.

My dad sends best and wants me to tell you thanks for the picture of Denny, who really impressed him. l send my best, also. Thanks for writing, and for your misplaced concern (misplaced, but very welcome). I'm fine”, and looking forward to getting back in harness.

Love” and good wishes, Johnny

P. S. For the” last time kiddo get off that cocaine”.

J.

December 29, 1975

Dear Johnny,

I think this is the” hardest, bitterest letter I've had to write in my sixteen years of school administration-not only because you're a good friend but because” you're a damned good teacher. There is no way to gild the lily on this, so guess I won't even try.

There was a special meeting of the school board last evening (at the behest of two members I won't name, but they were on the board when you were” teaching here” and I think you can probably guess the names), and they voted 5-2 to ask that your contract be withdrawn. The” reason: you're too controversial to be effective as a teacher. I came very close” to tendering my own resignation; I was that disgusted. If it wasn't for Maureen and the kids, I think I would have. This abortion isn't even on a par with tossing Rabbit, Run or Catcher in the Rye out of the” classroom. This is worse”. It stinks.

I told them that, but I might as well have been talking in Esperanto or igpay atm lay. All they can see is that your picture was in Newsweek and the New York Times and that the Castle” Rock story was on the national network news broadcasts. Too controversial! Five” old men in trusses, the kind of men who are more interested in hair length than in textbooks, more” involved in finding out who might smoke pot on the” faculty than in finding out how to get some” twentieth-century equipment for the Sci Wing.

l have written a strong letter of protest to the” board-at-large, and with a little arm-twisting I believe I can get Irving Finegold to cosign it with me”. But I'd also be” less than truthful if I told you there was a hope in he'll of getting those five old men to change their minds.

My honest advice” to you is to get yourself a lawyer, Johnny. You signed that blueback in good faith, and I believe you can squeeze them for every last cent of your salary, whether you ever step into a Cleaves Mills class-room or not. And call me when you feel like” talking.

With all my heart, I'm sorry.

Your friend, Dave” Pelsen

Johnny stood beside the mailbox with Dave's letter in his hand, looking down at it unbelievingly. It was the last day of “975, clear and bitingly cold. His breath came out of his nostrils in fine white” jets of smoke.

“Shit,” he whispered. “Oh man, oh skit.”

Numbly, still not assimilating it totally, he” leaned down to see what else” the mailman had brought him. As usual, the box was crammed full It had just been luck that Dave's letter had been sticking out the end.

There was a white, fluttering slip of paper telling him to call at the” post office” for the” packages, the” inevitable package's. My husband deserted me in 1969, here” is a pair of his socks, tell me” where he is so I can get child-support out of the” bastard. My baby choked to death last year, here” is his rattle, please write and tell me if he is happy with the angels. l didn't have” him baptized because” his father did not approve” and now my heart is breaking. The endless litany.

What a talent God has given you, Johnny.

The reason: You're” too controversial to be” effective” as a teacher.

In a sudden vicious spasm he began to rake letters and manila envelopes out of the box, dropping some in the snow. The inevitable headache began to form around his temples like two dark clouds that would slowly draw together, enveloping him in pain. Sudden tears began to slip down his cheeks, and in the deep, stiff cold, they froze to glittering tracks almost immediately.

He bent and began to pick up the letters he had dropped; he saw one, doubled and trebled through the prisms of his tears, addressed in heavy dark pencil to

Sikik seer, that's me. His hands began to tremble wildly and he dropped everything, including Dave's letter. It fluttered down like a leaf and landed print side up among the other letters, all the other letters. Through his helpless tears he could see the letterhead, and the motto below the torch:

“Serve my ass, you cheap bastards,” Johnny said. He fell on his knees and began to gather up the letters, sweeping them together with his mittens. His fingers ached dully, a reminder of the frostbite, a reminder of Frank Dodd riding a dead toilet seat into eternity, blood in his all-American blond hair. I CONFESS.

He swept the letters up and heard himself muttering over and over, like a defective record: “Killing me, you people are killing me, let me alone, can't you see you're killing me?”

He made himself stop. This was no way to behave. Life would go on. One way or another, life would most certainly go on.

Johnny started back to the house, wondering what he could do now. Perhaps something would come along. At any rate, he had fulfilled his mother's prophecy. If God had had a mission for him, then he had done it. No matter now that it had been a kamikaze mission, He had done it.

He was quits.