The Dead Zone

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The boy read slowly, following the words with his finger, his long brown football-player's legs stretched out on the chaise by the pool in the bright clear light of June.

“Of course young Danny Ju… Juniper… young Danny Juniper was dead, and I…… suppose that there were few in the world who would say he had not de duh. -. dee…” Oh, shit, I don't know.”

“Few in the world who would say he had not deserved his death,"” Johnny Smith said. “Only a slightly fancier way of saying that most would agree that Danny's death was a good thing.”

Chuck was looking at him, and the familiar mix of emotions was crossing his usually pleasant face: amusement, resentment, embarrassment, and a trace of sullenness. Then he sighed and looked down at the Max Brand Western again.

“Deserved his death. But it was my great trah… truhjud… “

“Tragedy,” Johnny supplied.

“But it was my great tragedy that he had died just as he was about to redeem some of his e-e-evil work by one great service to the world.

“Of course that……… that…… sih

Chuck closed the book, looked up at Johnny, and smiled brilliantly.

“Let's quit for the day, Johnny, what do you say?” Chuck's smile was his most winning, the one that had probably tumbled cheerleaders into bed all over New Hampshire. “Doesn't that pool look good? You bet it does. The sweat is running right off your skinny, malnourished little bod.”

Johnny had to admit-at least to himself-that the pool did look good. The first couple of weeks of the Bicentennial Summer of “76 had been uncommonly hot and sticky”. From behind them, around on the other side of the big, gracious white house, came the soporific drone of the riding lawnmower as Ngo Phat, the Vietnamese groundsman, mowed what Chuck called the front forty. It was a sound that made you want to drink two glasses of cold lemonade and then nod off to sleep.

“No derogatory comments about my skinny bod,” he said. “Besides, we just started the chapter.”

“Sure, but we read two before it. “Wheedling.

Johnny sighed. Usually he could keep Chuck at it, but not this afternoon. And today the kid had fought his way gamely through the way John Sherburne had set up his net of guards around the Amity jail and the way the evil Red Hawk had broken through and killed Danny Juniper.

“Yeah, well, just finish this page, then,” he said. “That word you're stuck on's “sickened”. No teeth in that one, Chuck.”

“Good man!” The grin widened. “And no questions, right?”

“Well… maybe just a few.”

Chuck scowled, but it was a puton; he was getting off easy and knew it. He opened the paperback with the picture of the gunslinger shouldering his way through a set of saloon batwings again and began to read in his slow, halting voice… a voice so different from his normal speaking voice that it could have belonged to a different young man altogether.

“Of course that suh… sickened me at” once. But it was… was nothing to what waited for me at the bedside of poor Tom Keyn… Kenyon.

“'He had been shot through the body and he was fast drying when I… “

“Dying,” Johnny said quietly. “Context, Chuck. Read for context.

“Fast drying,” Chuck said, and giggled. Then he resumed “… and he was fast dying when I ar-ar when I arrived. "”

Johnny felt a sadness for Chuck steal over him as he watched the boy, hunched over the paperback copy of Fire” Brain, a good oat opera that should have read like the wind-and instead, here was Chuck, following Max Brand's simple point-to-point prose with a laboriously moving finger. His father, Roger Chatsworth, owned Chatsworth Mills and Weaving, a very big deal indeed in southern New Hampshire. He owned this sixteen-room house in Durham, and there were five people on the staff, including Ngo Phat, who went down to Portsmouth once a week to take United States citizenship classes. Chatsworth drove a restored 1957 Cadillac convertible. His wife, a sweet, clear-eyed woman of forty-two, drove a Mercedes. Chuck had a Corvette. The family fortune was in the neighborhood of five million dollars.

And Chuck, at seventeen, was what God had really meant when he breathed life into the clay, Johnny often thought. He was a physically lovely human being. He stood six-two and weighed a good muscular one hundred and ninety pounds. His face was perhaps not quite interesting enough to be truly handsome, but it was acneand pimple-free and set off by a pair of striking green eyes which had caused Johnny to think that the only other person he knew with really green eyes was Sarah Hazlett. At his high school, Chuck was the apotheosis of the BMOC, almost ridiculously so. He was captain of the baseball and football teams, president of the junior class during the school year just ended, and president-elect of the student council this coming fall. And most amazing of all, none of it had gone to his head. In the words of Herb Smith, who had been down once to check out Johnny's new digs, Chuck was “a regular guy”. Herb had no higher accolade in his vocabulary. In addition, he was someday going to be an exceedingly rich regular guy.

And here he sat, bent grimly over his book like a machine gunner at a lonely outpost, shooting the words down one by one as they came at him. He had taken Max Brand's exciting, fast-moving story of drifting John “Fire Brain” Sherburne and his confrontation with the outlaw Comanche Red Hawk and had turned it into something that sounded every bit as exciting as a trade advertisement for semiconductors or radio components.

But Chuck wasn't stupid. His math grades were good, his retentive memory was excellent, and he was manually adept. His problem was that he had great difficulty storing printed words. His oral vocabulary was fine, and he could grasp the theory of phonics but apparently not it-practice; and he would sometimes reel a sentence off flawlessly and then come up totally blank when you asked him to rephrase it. His father had been afraid that Chuck was dyslexic, but Johnny didn't think so-he had never met a dyslexic child that he was aware of, although many parents seized on the words to explain or excuse the reading problems of their children. Chuck's problem seemed more general-a loose, across-the-board reading phobia.

It was a problem that had become more and more apparent over the last five years of Chuck's schooling, but his parents had only begun to take it seriously-as Chuck had-when his sports eligibility became endangered. And that was not the worst of it. This winter would be Chuck's last good chance to take the Scholastic Achievement Tests, if he expected to start college in the fall of 1977. The maths were not much of a problem, but the rest of the exam… well… if he could have the questions read aloud to him, he would do an average-to-good job. Five hundreds, no sweat. But they don't let you bring a reader with you when you take the SATs, not even if your dad is a biggie in the world of New Hampshire business.

“But I found him a ch… changed man. He knew what lay before him and his courage was…… supper superb. He asked for nothing; he regretted nothing. All the terror and the nerv… nervousness which had puss… possett… possessed him so long as he was cuh cuh… culafronted… confronted by an unknown fate… “

Johnny had seen the ad for a tutor in the Maine” Time's and had applied without too much hope. He had moved down to Kittery in mid-February, needing more than anything else to get away from Pownal, from the boxful of mail each day, the reporters who had begun to find their way to the house in ever-increasing numbers, the nervous women with the wounded eyes who had just “dropped by” because “they just happened to be in the neighborhood” (one of those who had just dropped by because she just happened to be in the neighborhood had a Maryland license plate; another was driving a tired old Ford with Arizona tags). Their hands, stretching out to touch him…

In Kittery he had discovered for the first time that an anonymous name like John-no-middle-initial-Smith had its advantages. His third day in town he had applied for a job as a shortorder cook, putting down his experience in the UMO commons and one summer cooking at a boys” camp in the Rangely Lakes as experience. The diner's owner, a tough-as-nails widow named Ruby Pelletier, had looked over his application and said, “You're a teensy bit overeducated for slinging hash. You know that, don't you, slugger?”

“That's right,” Johnny said. “I went and educated my-self right out of the job market.”

Ruby Pelletier put her hands on her scrawny hips, threw her head back, and bellowed laughter. “You think you can keep your shit together at two in the morning when twelve CB cowboys pull in all at once and order scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, french toast, and flap-jacks?”

“I guess maybe,” Johnny said.

“I guess maybe you don't know what the eff I'm talking about just yet,” Ruby said, “but I'll give you a go, college boy. Go get yourself a physical so we're square with the board of health and bring me back a clean bill. I'll put you right on.”

He had done that, and after a harum-scarum first two weeks (which included a painful rash of blisters on his right hand from dropping a french-fry basket into a well of boiling fat a little too fast), he had been riding the job instead of the other way around. When he saw Chatsworth's ad, he had sent his resume to the box number. In the course of the resume he had listed his special ed credentials, which included a one-semester seminar in learning disabilities and reading problems.

In late April, as he was finishing his second month at the diner, he had gotten a letter from Roger Chatsworth, asking him to appear for an interview on May 5. He made the necessary arrangements to take the day off, and at 2: loon a lovely midspring afternoon he had been sitting in Chatsworth's study, a tall, ice-choked glass of Pepsi-Cola in one hand, listening to Stuart talk about his son's reading problems.

“That sound like dyslexia to you?” Stuart asked.

“No. It sounds like a general reading phobia.”

Chatsworth had winced a little. “Jackson's Syndrome?” Johnny had been impressed-as he was no doubt supposed to be. Michael Carey Jackson was a reading-and-grammar specialist from the University of Southern California who had caused something of a stir nine years ago with a book called The Unlearning Reader. The book described a loose basket of reading problems that had since become known as Jackson's Syndrome. The book was a good one if you could get past the dense academic jargon. The fact that Chatsworth apparently had done so told Johnny a good deal about the man's commitment to solving his son's problem.

“Something like it,” Johnny agreed. “But you understand I haven't even met your son yet, or listened to him read.”

“He's got course work to make up from last year. American Writers, a nine-week history block, and civics, of all things. He flunked his final exam there because he couldn't read the beastly thing. Have you got a New Hampshire teacher's certificate?”

“No,” Johnny said, “but getting one is no problem”

“And how would you handle the situation?”

Johnny outlined the way he would deal with it. A lot of oral reading on Chuck's part, leaning heavily on high-impact materials such as fantasy, science fiction, Westerns, and boy-meets-car juvenile novels. Constant questioning on what had just been read. And a relaxation technique described in Jackson's book. “High achievers often suffer the most,” Johnny said. “They try too hard and reinforce the block. It's a kind of mental stutter that…

“Jackson says that?”. Chatsworth interposed sharply.

Johnny smiled. “No, I say that,” he said

“Okay. Go on.”

“Sometimes, if the student can totally blank his mind right after reading and not feel the pressure to recite back right away, the circuits seem to dear themselves. When that begins to happen, the student begins to rethink his line of attack. It's a positive thinking kind of thing…”

Chatsworth's eyes had gleamed. Johnny had just touched on the linchpin of his own personal philosophy -probably the linchpin for the beliefs of most self-made men. “Nothing succeeds like success,” he said.

“Well, yes. Something like that.”

“How long would it take you to get a New Hampshire certificate?”

“No longer than it takes them to process my application. Two weeks, maybe.”

“Then you could start on the twentieth?”

Johnny blinked. “You mean I'm hired?”

“If you want the job, you're hired. You can stay in the guest house, it'll keep the goddam relatives at bay this summer, not to mention Chuck's friends-and I want him to really buckle down. I'll pay you six hundred dollars a month, not a king's ransom, but if Chuck gets along, I'll pay you a substantial bonus. Substantial.”

Chatsworth removed his glasses and rubbed a hand across his face. “I love my boy, Mr. Smith. I only want the best for him. Help us out a little if you can.”

“I'll try.”

Chatsworth put his glasses back on and picked up Johnny's resume again. “You haven't taught for a helluva long time. Didn't agree with you?”

Here” it comes, Johnny thought.

“It agreed,” he said, “but I was in an accident.”

Chatsworth's eyes had gone to the scars on Johnny's neck where the atrophied tendons had been partially repaired. “Car crash?”

“Yes.”

“Bad one?”

“Yes.”

“You seem fine now,” Chatsworth said. He picked up the resume, slammed it into a drawer and, amazingly, that had been the end of the questions. So after five years Johnny was teaching again, although his student load was only one.

“As for me, who had i… indirectly br… ~. brog… brought his death upon him, he took my hand with a weak grip and smiled his for… forgiveness up to me. It was a hard moment, and I went away feeling that I had done more harm in the world than I could ever ma make up to it.”,

Chuck snapped the book closed. “There. Last one. in the pool's a green banana.”

“Hold it a minute, Chuck.”

“Ahhhhhhh… “Chuck sat down again, heavily, his face composing itself into what Johnny already thought of as his now the questions expression. Long-suffering good humor predominated, but beneath it he could sometimes see another Chuck: sullen, worried, and scared. Plenty scared. Because it was a reader's world, the unlettered of America were dinosaurs lumbering down a blind alley, and Chuck was smart enough to know it. And he was plenty afraid of what might happen to him when he got back to school this fall.

“Just a couple of questions, Chuck.”

“Why bother? You know I won't be able to answer them.”

“Oh yes. This time you'll be able to answer them all.”

“I can never understand what I read, you ought to know that by now. “Chuck looked morose and unhappy. “I don't even know what you stick around for, unless it's the chow.”

“You'll be able to answer these questions because they're not about the book.”

Chuck glanced up. “Not about the book? Then why ask em? I thought…”

“Just humour me, okay?”

Johnny's heart was pounding hard, and he was not totally surprised to find that he was scared. He had been planning this for a long time, waiting for just the right confluence of circumstances. This was as close as he was ever going to get. Mrs. Chatsworth was not hovering around anxiously, making Chuck that much more nervous. None of his buddies were splashing around in the pool, making him feel self-conscious about reading aloud like a backward fourth grader. And most important, his father, the man Chuck wanted to please above all others in the world, was not here. He was in Boston at a New England Environmental Commission meeting on water pollution.

From Edward Stanney's An Overview of Learning Disabilities:

“The subject, Rupert J., was sitting in the” third row of a movie theater. He was closest to the screen by more than six rows, and was the only one in a position to observe that a small fire had started in the accumulated litter on the” floor. Ru pert J. stood up and cried “F-F-F-F-F -” while the people” behind him shouted for him to sit down and be quiet

.

“How did that make you feel?” l asked Rupert J

“I could never explain in a thousand years how it made me feel,” he answered. “J was scared, but even more than being scared, 7 was frustrated. I felt inadequate, not fit to be a member of the human race”. The stuttering always made me feel that way, but now I felt impotent, too.”

“'Was there” anything else?”

“Yes, I felt jealousy, because” someone” else would see” the” fire and you know -'"Get the glory of reporting it?”

“Yes, that's right. I saw the fire starting, I was the only one. And all I could say was F-F-F-F like a stupid broken record. Not fit to be a member of the human race” describes it best.”

“'And how did you break the block?”

“The” day before had been my mother's birthday. l got her half a dozen roses at the florist's. And I stood there with all of them yelling at me and l thought: I am going to open my mouth and scream ROSES! lust as loud as I can. I got that word all ready.”

“'Then what did you do?”

“'I opened my mouth and screamed FIRE! at the top of my lungs. "”

It had been eight years since Johnny had read that case history in the introduction to Stanney's text, but he had never forgotten it. He had always thought that the key word in Rupert J. “s recollection of what had happened was impotent. If you feel that sexual intercourse is the most important thing on earth at this point in time, your risk of corning up with a limp penis increases ten or a hundredfold. And if you feel that reading is the most important thing on earth…

“What's your middle name, Chuck?” he asked casually. “Murphy,” Chuck said with a little grin. “How's that for bad? My mother's maiden name. You tell Jack or Al that, and I'll be forced to do gross damage to your skinny body.”

“No-fear,” Johnny said. “When's your birthday?”

“September 8.”

Johnny began to throw the questions faster, not giving Chuck a chance to think-but they weren't questions you had to think about.

“What's your girl's name?”

“Beth. You know Beth, Johnny…

“What's her middle name?”

Chuck grinned. “Alma. Pretty horrible, right?”

“What's your paternal grandfather's name?”

“Richard.”

“Who do you like in the American League East this year?”

“Yankees. In a walk.”

“Who do you like for president?”

“I'd like to see Jerry Brown get it.”

“You planning to trade that Vette?”

“Not this year. Maybe next.”

“Your mom's idea?”

“You bet. She says it outraces her peace of mind.”

“How did Red Hawk get past the guards and kill Danny Jupiter?”

“Sherburne didn't pay enough attention to that trapdoor leading into the jail attic,” Chuck said promptly. without thinking, and Johnny felt a sudden burst of triumph that hit him like a knock of straight bourbon. It had worked. He had gotten Chuck talking about roses, and he had responded with a good, healthy yell of fire!

Chuck was looking at him in almost total surprise.

“Red Hawk got into the attic through the skylight. Kicked open the trapdoor. Shot Danny Jupiter. Shot Tom Kenyon, too.”

“That's right, Chuck.”

“I remembered,” he muttered, and then looked up at Johnny, eyes widening, a grin starting at the corners of his mouth. “You tricked me into remembering!”

“I just took you by the hand and led you around the side of whatever has been in your way all this time,” Johnny said. “But whatever it is, it's still there, Chuck. Don't kid yourself. Who was the girl Sherburne fell for?”

“It was… “His eyes clouded a little, and he shook his head reluctantly. “I don't remember. “He struck his thigh with sudden viciousness. “I can't remember anything! I'm so fucking stupid!”

“Can you remember ever having been told how your dad and mom met?”

Chuck looked up at him and smiled a little. There was an angry red place on his thigh where he had struck himself. “Sure. She was working for Avis down in Charleston, South Carolina. She rented my dad a car with a fiat tire. “Chuck laughed. “She still claims she only married him because number two tries harder.

“And who was that girl Sherburne got interested in?”

“Jenny Langhorne. Big-time trouble for him. She's Gresham's girl. A redhead. Like Beth. She… “He broke off, staring at Johnny as if he had just produced a rabbit from the breast pocket of his shirt. “You did it again!”

“No. You did it. It's a simple trick of misdirection. Why do you say Jenny Langhorne is big-time trouble for John Sherburne?”

“Well, because Gresham's the big wheel there in that town…”

“What town?”

Chuck opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Suddenly he cut his eyes away from Johnny's face and looked at the pool. Then he smiled and looked back. “Amity. The same as in the flick Jaws.”

“Good! How did you come up with the name?”

Chuck grinned. “This makes no sense at all, but I started thinking about trying out for the swimming team, and there it was. What a trick. What a great trick.”

“Okay. That's enough for today, I think. “Johnny felt tired, sweaty, and very, very good. “You just made a breakthrough, in case you didn't notice. Let's swim:

Last one in's a green banana.”

“Johnny?”

“What?”

“Will that always work?”

“If you make a habit of it, it will,” Johnny said. “And every time you go around that block instead of trying to bust through the middle of it, you're going to make it a little smaller. I think you'll begin to see an improvement in your word-to-word reading before long, also. I know a couple of other little tricks. He fell silent. What he had just given Chuck was less the truth than a king of hypnotic suggestion.

“Thanks, Chuck said. The mask of long-suffering good humor was gone, replaced by naked gratitude. “If you get me over this, I'll… well, I guess I'd get down and kiss your feet if you wanted me to. Sometimes I get so scared, I feel like I'm letting my dad down…”

“Chuck, don't you know that's part of the problem?”

“It is?”

“Yeah. You're… you're overswinging. Overthrowing. Overeverything. And it may not be just a psychological block, you know. There are people who believe that some reading problems, Jackson's Syndrome, reading phobias, all of that, may be some kind of… mental birthmark. A fouled circuit, a faulty relay, a d… “He shut his mouth with a snap.

“A what?” Chuck asked.

“A dead zone,” Johnny said slowly. “Whatever. Names don't matter. Results do. The misdirection trick really isn't a trick at all. It's educating a fallow part of your brain to do the work of that small faulty section. For you, that means getting into an oral-based train of thought every time you hit a snag. You're actually changing the location in your brain from which your thought is coming. It's learning to switch-hit.”

“But can I do it? You think I can do it?”

“I know you can,” Johnny said.

“All right. Then I will. “Chuck dived low and flat into the pool and came up, shaking water out of his long hair in a fine spray of droplets. “Come on in! It's fine!”

“I will,” Johnny said, but for the moment he was content just to stand on the pool's tile facing and watch Chuck swim powerfully toward the pool's deep end to savor this success. There had been no good feeling like this when he had suddenly known Eileen Magown's kitchen curtains were taking fire, no good feeling like this when he had uncovered the name of Frank Dodd. If God had given him a talent, it was teaching, not knowing things he had no business knowing. This was the sort of thing he had been made for, and when he had been teaching at Cleaves Mills back in 1970, he had known it. More important, the kids had known it and responded to it, as Chuck had done just now.

“You gonna stand there like a dummy?” Chuck asked. Johnny dived into the pool.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Warren Richardson came out of his small office building at quarter to five as he always did. He walked around to the parking lot and hoisted his two-hundred-pound bulk behind the wheel of his Chevy Caprice and started the engine. All according to routine. What was not according to routine was the face that appeared suddenly in the rear-view mirror an olive-skinned, stubbled face framed by long hair and set off by eyes every bit as green as those of Sarah Hazlett or Chuck Chatsworth. Warren Richardson had not been so badly scared since he was a kid, and his heart took a great, unsteady leap in his chest.

“Howdy,” said Sonny Elliman, leaning over the seat.

“Who… “was all Richardson managed, uttering the word in a terrified hiss of breath. His heart was pounding so hard that dark specks danced and pulsed before his eyes in rhythm with its beat. He was afraid he might have a heart attack.

“Easy,” the man who had been hiding in his back seat said. “Go easy, man. Lighten up.”

And Warren Richardson felt an absurd emotion. It was gratitude. The man who had scared him wasn't going to scare him anymore. He must be a nice man, he must be-

“Who are you?” he managed this time.

“A friend,” Sonny said.

Richardson started to turn and fingers as hard as pincers bit into the sides of his flabby neck. The pain was excruciating. Richardson drew breath in a convulsive, heaving whine.

“You don't need to turn around, man. You can see me as well as you need to see me in your rear-view. Can you dig that?”

“Yes,” Richardson gasped. “Yes yes yes just let me go I”

The pincers began to ease up, and again he felt that irrational sense of gratitude. But he no longer doubted that the man in the back seat was dangerous, or that he was in this car on purpose although he couldn't think why anyone would -And then he could think why someone would, at least why someone might, it wasn't the sort of thing you'd expect any ordinary candidate for office to do, but Greg Stillson wasn't ordinary, Greg Stillson was a crazy man, and-

Very softly, Warren Richardson began to blubber.

“Got to talk to you, man,” Sonny said. His voice was kind and regretful, but in the rear-view mirror his eyes glittered green. amusement. “Got to talk to you like a Dutch uncle.”

“It's Stillson, isn't it? It's-.

The pincers were suddenly back, the man's fingers were buried in his neck, and Richardson uttered a high-pitched shriek.

“No names,” the terrible man in the back seat told him in that same kind-yet-regretful voice. “You draw your own conclusions, Mr. Richardson, but keep the names to yourself. I've got one thumb just over your carotid artery and my fingers are over by your jugular, and I can turn you into a human turnip, if I want to.”

“What do you want?” Richardson asked. He did not exactly moan, but it was a near thing; he had never felt more like moaning in his life. He could not believe that this was happening in the parking lot behind his real estate office in Capital City. New Hampshire. on a bright summer's day. He could see the clock set into the red brick of the town hall tower. It said ten minutes to five. At home, Norma would be putting the pork chops, nicely coated with Shake “n Bake, into the oven to broil. Sean would be watching Sesame Street on TV. And there was a man behind him threatening to cut off the flow of blood to his brain and turn him into an idiot. No, it wasn't real; it was like a nightmare. The sort of nightmare that makes you moan in your sleep.

“I don't want anything,” Sonny Elliman said. “It's all a matter of what you want.”

“I don't understand what you're talking about. “But he was terribly afraid that he did.

“That story in the New Hampshire Journal about funny real estate deals,” Sonny said. “You surely did have a lot to say, Mr. Richardson, didn't you? Especially about certain people.”

“I…”

“That stuff about the Capital Mail, for instance. Hinting around about kickbacks and payoffs and one hand washing the other. All that horseshit. “The fingers tightened on Richardson's neck again, and this time he did moan. But he hadn't been identified in the story, he had just been “an informed source”. How had they known? How had Greg Stillson known?

The man behind him began to speak rapidly into Warren Richardson's ear now, his breath warm and ticklish.

“You could get certain people into trouble talking horseshit like that, Mr. Richardson, you know it? People running for public office, let's say. Running for office, it's like playing bridge, you dig it? You're vulnerable. People can sling mud and it sticks, especially these days. Now, there's no trouble yet. I'm happy to tell you that, because if there was trouble, you might be sitting here picking your teeth out of your nose instead of having a nice little talk with me.”

In spite of his pounding heart, in spite of his fear, Richardson said: “This… this person… young man, you're crazy if you think you can protect him. He's played it as fast and loose as a snakeoil salesman in a southern town. Sooner or later…”

A thumb slammed into his ear, grinding. The pain was immense, unbelievable. Richardson's head slammed into his window and he cried out. Blindly, he groped for the horn ring.

“You blow that horn, I'll kill you,” the voice whispered.

Richardson let his hands drop. The thumb eased up.

“You ought to use Q-tips in there, man,” the voice said. “I got wax all over my thumb. Pretty gross.”

Warren Richardson began to cry weakly. He was powerless to stop himself. Tears coursed down his fat cheeks. “Please don't hurt me anymore,” he said. “Please don't. Please.

“It's like I said,” Sonny told him. “It's all a matter of what you want. Your job isn't to worry what someone else might say about…… these certain people. Your job is to watch what comes out of your own mouth. Your job is to think before you talk the next time that guy from the Journal comes around. You might think about how easy it is to find out who “an informed source” is. Or you might think about what a bummer it would be if your house burned down. Or you might think about how you'd pay for plastic surgery if someone threw some battery acid in your wife's face.”

The man behind Richardson was panting now. He sounded like an animal in a jungle.

“Or you might think, you know, dig it, how easy it would be for someone to come along and pick up your son on his way home from kindergarten.

“Don't you say that!” Richardson cried hoarsely. “Don't you say that, you slimy bastard!”

“All I'm saying is that you want to think about what you want,” Sonny said. “An election, it's an all-American thing, you know? Especially in a Bicentennial year. Everyone should have a good time. No one has a good time if numb fucks like you start telling a lot of lies. Numb jealous fucks like you.”

The hand went away altogether. The rear door opened. Oh thank God, thank God.

“You just want to think,” Sonny Elliman repeated. “Now do we have an understanding?”

“Yes,” Richardson whispered. “But if you think Gr. a certain person can be elected using these tactics, you're badly mistaken.”

“No,” Sonny said. “You're the one who's mistaken. Because everyone's having a good time. Make sure that you're not left out.”

Richardson didn't answer. He sat rigid behind the steering wheel, his neck throbbing, staring at the clock on the Town Office Building as if it were the only sane thing left in his life. It was now almost five of five. The pork chops would be in by now.

The man in the back seat said one more thing and then he was gone, striding away rapidly, his long hair swinging against the collar of his shirt, not looking back. He went around the corner of the building and out of sight.

The last thing he had said to Warren Richardson was:

“Q-Tips.”

Richardson began to shake all over and it was a long time before he could drive. His first clear feeling was anger-terrible anger. The impulse that came with it was to drive directly to the Capital City police department (housed in the building below the dock) and report what had happened-the threats on his wife and son, the physical abuse-and on whose behalf it had been done.

You might think about how you'd pay for plastic surgery… or how easy it would be for someone to come” along and pick up your son…

But why? Why take the chance? What he had said to that thug was just the plain, unvarnished truth. Everyone in southern New Hampshire real estate knew that Stillson had been running a shell game, reaping short-term profits that would land him in jail, not sooner or later, but sooner or even sooner. His campaign was an exercise in idiocy. And now strong-arm tactics! No one could get away with that for long in America-and especially not in New England.

But let someone else blow the whistle.

Someone with less to lose.

Warren Richardson started his car and went home to his pork chops and said nothing at all. Someone else would surely put a stop to it.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

On a day not long after Chuck's first breakthrough, Johnny Smith stood in the bathroom of the guest house, running his Norelco over his cheeks. Looking at himself closeup in a mirror always gave him a weird feeling these days, as if he were looking at an older brother instead of himself. Deep horizontal lines had grooved themselves across his forehead. Two more bracketed his mouth. Strangest of all, there was that streak of white, and the rest of his hair was beginning to go gray. It seemed to have started almost overnight.

He snapped off the razor and went out into the combination kitchen-living room. Lap of luxury, he thought, and smiled a little. Smiling was starting to feel natural again. He turned on the TV, got a Pepsi out of the fridge, and settled down to watch the news. Roger Chatsworth was due back later in the evening, and tomorrow Johnny would have the distinct pleasure of telling him that his son was beginning to make real progress.

Johnny had been up to see his own father every two weeks or so. He was pleased with Johnny's new job and listened with keen interest as Johnny told him about the Chatsworths, the house in the pleasant college town of Durham, and Chuck's problems. Johnny, in turn, listened as his father told him about the gratis work he was doing at Charlene MacKenzie's house in neighboring New Gloucester.

“Her husband was a helluva doctor but not much of a handyman,” Herb said. Charlene and Vera had been friends before Vera's deepening involvement in the stranger offshoots of fundamentalism. That had separated them. Her husband, a GP, had died of a heart attack in 1973. “Place was practically falling down around that woman's ears,” Herb said. “Least I could do. I go up on Saturdays and she gives me a dinner before I come back home. I have to tell the truth, Johnny, she cooks better than you do.”

“Looks better, too,” Johnny said blandly.

“Sure, she's a fine-looking woman, but it's nothing like that, Johnny. Your mother not even in her grave a year…

But Johnny suspected that maybe it was something like that, and secretly couldn't have been more pleased. He didn't fancy the idea of his father growing old alone.

On the television, Walter Cronkite was serving up the evening's political news. Now, with the primary season over and the conventions only weeks away, it appeared that Jimmy Carter had the Democratic nomination sewed up. It was Ford who was in a scrap for his political life with Ronald Reagan, the ex-governor of California and ex-host of “GE Theater”. It was close enough to have the reporters counting individual delegates, and in one of her infrequent letters Sarah Hazlett had written: “Walt's got his fingers (and toes!) crossed that Ford gets in. As a candidate for state senate up here, he's already thinking about coattails. And he says that, in Maine at least, Reagan hasn't any.”

While he was shortorder cooking in Kittery, Johnny had gotten into the habit of going down to Dover or Portsmouth or any number of smaller towns in New Hampshire a couple of times a week. All of the candidates for president were in and out, and it was a unique opportunity to see those who were running closeup and without the nearly regal trappings bf authority that might later surround any one of them. It became something of a hobby, although of necessity a short-lived one; when New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary was over, the candidates would move on to Florida without a glance back. And of course a few of their number would bury their political ambitions somewhere between Portsmouth and Keene. Never a political creature before -except during the Vietnam era-Johnny became an avid politician-watcher in the healing aftermath of the Castle Rock business-and his own particular talent, affliction, whatever it was, played a part in that, too.

He shook hands with Morris Udall and Henry Jackson. Fred Harris clapped him on the back. Ronald Reagan gave him a quick and practiced politico's double-pump and said, “Get out to the polls and help us if you can. “Johnny had nodded agreeably enough, seeing no point in disabusing Mr. Reagan of his notion that he was a bona fide New Hampshire voter.

He had chatted with Sarge Shriver just inside the main entrance to the monstrous Newington Mall for nearly fifteen minutes. Shriver, his hair freshly cut and smelling of after-shave and perhaps desperation, was accompanied by a single aide with his pockets stuffed full of leaflets, and a Secret Service man who kept scratching furtively at his acne. Shriver had seemed inordinately pleased to be recognized. A minute or two before Johnny said goodbye, a candidate in search of some local office had approached Shriver and asked him to sign his nominating papers. Shriver had smiled gently.

Johnny had sensed things about all of them, but little of a specific nature. It was as if they had made the act of touching such a ritual that their true selves were buried beneath a layer of tough, clear lucite. Although he saw most of them-with the exception of President Ford -Johnny had felt only once that sudden, electrifying snap of knowledge that he associated with Eileen Magown -and, in an entirely different way, with Frank Dodd.

It was a quarter of seven in the morning. Johnny had driven down to Manchester in his old Plymouth. He had worked from ten the evening before until six this morning. He was tired, but the quiet winter dawn had been too good to sleep through. And he liked Manchester, Manchester with its narrow streets and timeworn brick buildings, the gothic textile mills strung along the river like mid-Victorian beads. He had not been consciously politician-hunting that morning; he thought he would cruise the streets for a while, until they began to get crowded, until the cold and silent spell of February was broken, then go back to Kittery and catch some sacktime.

He turned a corner and there had been three nondescript sedans pulled up in front of a shoe factory in a no-parking zone. Standing by the gate in the cyclone fencing was Jimmy Carter, shaking hands with the men and women going on shift. They were carrying lunch buckets or paper sacks, breathing out white clouds, bundled into heavy coats, their faces still asleep. Carter had a word for each of them. His grin, then not so publicized as it became later, was tireless and fresh. His nose was red with the cold.

Johnny parked half a block down and walked toward the factory gate, his shoes crunching and squeaking on the packed snow. The Secret Service agent with Carter sized him up quickly and then dismissed him or seemed to.

“I'll vote for anyone who's interested in cutting taxes,” a man in an old ski parka was saying. The parka had a constellation of what looked like battery-acid burns in one sleeve. “The goddam taxes are killing me, I kid you not.”

“Well, we're gonna see about that,” Carter said. “Lookin over the tax situation is gonna be one of our first priori-ties when I get into the White House. “There was a serene self-confidence in his voice that struck Johnny and made him a little uneasy.

Carter's eyes, bright and almost amazingly blue, shifted to Johnny. “Hi there,” he said.

“Hello, Mr. Carter,” Johnny said. “I don't work here. I was driving by and saw you.”

“Well I'm glad you stopped. I'm running for President.”

“I know.”

Carter put his hand out. Johnny shook it.

Carter began: “I hope you'll… “And broke off.

The flash came, a sudden, powerful zap that was like sticking his finger in an electric socket. Carter's eyes sharpened. He and Johnny looked at each other for what seemed a very long time.

The Secret Service guy didn't like it. He moved toward Carter, and suddenly he was unbuttoning his coat. Some-where behind them, a million miles behind them, the shoe factory's seven o'clock whistle blew its single note into the crisp blue morning.

Johnny let go of Carter's hand, but still the two of them looked at each other.

“What the hell was that?” Carter asked, very softly.

“You've probably got someplace to go, don't you?” the Secret Service guy said suddenly. He put a hand on Johnny's shoulder. It was a very big hand. “Sure you do.”

“It's all right,” Carter said.

“You're going to be president,” Johnny said.

The agent's hand was still on Johnny's shoulder, more lightly now but still there, and he was getting something from him, too. The Secret Service guy

(eyes)

didn't like his eyes. He thought they were

(assassin's eyes, psycho's eyes)

cold and strange, and if this guy put so much as one hand in his coat pocket. if he even looked as if he might be going in that direction, he was going to put him on the sidewalk. Behind the Secret Service guy's second-to-second evaluation of the situation there ran a simple, maddening litany of thought:

(laurel maryland laurel maryland laurel maryland laurel)

“Yes,” Carter said.

“It's going to be closer than anyone thinks… closer than you think, but you'll win. He'll beat himself. Poland. Poland will beat him.”

Carter only looked at him. half-smiling.

“You've got a daughter. She's going to go to a public school in Washington. She's going to go to… “But it was in the dead zone. “I think… it's a school named after a freed slave.”

“Fellow, I want you to move on,” the agent said.

Carter looked at him and the agent subsided.

“It's been a pleasure meeting you,” Carter said. “A little disconcerting, but a pleasure.”

Suddenly, Johnny was himself again. It had passed. He was aware that his ears were cold and that he had to go to the bathroom. “Have a good morning,” he said lamely.

“Yes. You too, now.”

He had gone back to his car, aware of the Secret Service guy's eyes still on him. He drove away, bemused. Shortly after, Carter had put away the competition in New Hampshire and went on to Florida.

Walter Cronkite finished with the politicians and went on to the civil war in Lebanon. Johnny got up and freshened his glass of Pepsi. He tipped the glass at the TV. Your good health, Walt. To the three Ds-death, destruction, and destiny. Where would we be without them.

There was a light tap at the door. “Come in,” Johnny called, expecting Chuck, probably with an invitation to the drive-in over in Somersworth. But it wasn't Chuck. It was Chuck's father.

“Hi, Johnny,” he said. He was wearing wash4aded jeans and an old cotton sports shirt, the tails out. “May I come in?”

“Sure. I thought you weren't due back until late.”

“Well, Shelley gave me a call. “Shelley was his wife. Roger came in and shut the door. “Chuck came to see her. Burst into tears, just like a little kid. He told her you were doing it, Johnny. He said he thought he was going to be all right.”

Johnny put his glass down. “We've got a ways to go,” he said.

“Chuck met me at the airport. I haven't seen him looking like he did since he was… what? Ten? Eleven? When I gave him the. 22 he'd been waiting for for five years. He read me a story out of the newspaper. The improvement is… almost eerie. I came over to thank you.”

“Thank Chuck,” Johnny said. “He's an adaptable boy.

A lot of what's happening to him is positive reinforcement. He's psyched himself into believing he can do it and now he's tripping on it. That's the best way I can put it.”

Roger sat down. “He says you're teaching him to switch-hit.”

Johnny smiled. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Is he going to be able to take the SATs?”

“I don't know. And I'd hate to see him gamble and lose. The SATs are a heavy pressure situation. If he gets in that lecture hall with an answer sheet in front of him and an IBM pencil in his hand and then freezes up, it's going to be a real setback for him. Have you thought about a good prep school for a year? A place like Pittsfield Academy?”

“We've kicked the idea around, but frankly I always thought of it as just postponing the inevitable.”

“That's one of the things that's been giving Chuck trouble. This feeling that he's in a make-or-break situation.”

“I've never pressured Chuck.”

“Not on purpose, I know that. So does he. On the other hand, you're a rich, successful man who graduated from college sum ma cum laude. I think Chuck feels a little bit like he's batting after Hank Aaron.”

“There's nothing I can do about that, Johnny.”

“I think a year at a prep school, away from home, after his senior year might put things in perspective for him. And he wants to go to work in one of your mills next summer. If he were my kid and if they were my mills, I'd let him.”

“Chuck wants to do that? How come he never told me?”

“Because he didn't want you to think he was ass-kissing,” Johnny said.

“He told you that?”

“Yes. He wants to do it because he thinks the practical experience will be helpful to him later on. The kid wants to follow in your footsteps, Mr. Chatsworth. You've left some big ones behind you. That's what a lot of the reading block has been about. He's having buck fever.”

In a sense, he had lied. Chuck had hinted around these things, and even mentioned some of them obliquely, but he had not been as frank as Johnny had led Roger Chats-worth to believe. Not verbally, at least. But Johnny had touched him from time to time, and he had gotten signals that way. He had looked through the pictures Chuck kept in his wallet and knew how Chuck felt about his dad. There were things he could never tell this pleasant but rather distant man sitting across from him. Chuck idolized the ground his father walked on. Beneath his easy-come easy-go exterior (an exterior that was very similar to Roger's), the boy was eaten up by the secret conviction that he could never measure up. His father had built a ten percent interest in a failing woolen mill into a New England textile empire. He believed that the issue of his father's love hung on his own ability to move similar mountains. To play sports. To get into a good college. To read.

“How sure are you about all of this?” Roger asked.

“I'm pretty sure. But I'd appreciate it if you never mentioned to Chuck that we talked this way. They're his secrets I'm telling. “And that's truer than you'll ever know.

“All right. And Chuck and his mother and I will talk over the prep school idea. In the meantime, this is yours. He took out a plain white business envelope from his back pocket and passed it to Johnny.

“What is it?”

“Open it and see.”

Johnny opened it. Inside the envelope was a cashier's check for five hundred dollars.

“Oh, hey…! I can't take this.”

“You can, and you will. I promised you a bonus if you could perform, and I keep my promises. There'll be an-other when you leave.”

“Really, Mr. Chatsworth, I just…”

“Shh. I'll tell you something, Johnny. “He leaned forward. He was smiling a peculiar little smile, and Johnny suddenly felt he could see beneath the pleasant exterior to the man who had made all of this happen-the house, the grounds, the pool, the mills. And, of course, his son's reading phobia, which could probably be classified a hysterical neurosis.

“It's been my experience that ninety-five percent of the people who walk the earth are simply inert, Johnny. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are the people who do what they say they can do. I'm in that three percent, and so are you. You earned that money. I've got people in the mills that take home eleven thousand dollars a year for doing little more than playing with their dicks. But I'm not bitching. I'm a man of the world, and all that means is I under-stand what powers the world. The fuel mix is one part high-octane to nine parts pure bull-shit. You're no bullshitter. So you put that money in your wallet and next time try to value yourself a little higher.

“All right,” Johnny said. “I can put it to good use, I won't lie to you about that.

“Doctor bills?”

Johnny looked up at Roger Chatsworth, his eyes narrowed.

“I know all about you,” Roger said. “Did you think I wouldn't check back on the guy I hired to tutor my son?”

“You know about…”

“You're supposed to be a psychic of some kind. You helped to solve a murder case in Maine. At least, that's what the papers say. You had a teaching job lined up for last January, but they dropped you like a hot potato when your name got in the papers.”

“You knew? For how long?”

“I knew before you moved in.”

“And you still hired me?”

“I wanted a tutor, didn't I? You looked like you might be able to pull it off. I think I showed excellent judgment in engaging your services.”

“Well, thanks,” Johnny said. His voice was hoarse.

“I told you you didn't have to say that.”

As they talked, Walter Cronkite had finished up with the real news of the day and had gone on to the man bites dog stories that sometimes turn up near the end of a newscast. He was saying,… voters in western New Hampshire have an independent running in the third district this year.

“Well, the cash will come in handy,” Johnny said. “That's. -”

“Shh. I want to hear this.”

Chatsworth was leaning forward, hands dangling between his knees, a pleasant smile of expectation on his face. Johnny turned to look at the TV.

…Stillson,” Cronkite said. “This forty-three-year-old insurance and real estate agent is surely running one of the most eccentric races of Campaign “76, but both the third-district Republican candidate, Harrison Fisher, and his Democratic opponent, David Bowes, are running scared, because the polls have Greg Stillson running comfortably ahead. George Herman has the story.”

“Who's Stillson?” Johnny asked.

Chatsworth laughed. “Oh, you gotta see this guy, Johnny. He's as crazy as a rat in a drainpipe. But I do believe the sober-sided electorate of the third district is going to send him to Washington this November. Unless he actually falls down and starts frothing at the mouth. And I wouldn't completely rule that out.”

Now the TV showed a picture of a handsome young man in a white open-throated shirt. He was speaking to a small crowd from a bunting-hung platform in a supermarket parking lot. The young man was exhorting the crowd. The crowd looked less than thrilled. George Herman voiced over: “This is David Bowes, the Democratic candidate-sacrificial offering, some would say-for the third-district seat in New Hampshire. Bowes expected an uphill fight because New Hampshire's third district has never gone Democratic, not even in the great LBJ blitz of 1964. But he expected his competition to come from this man.”

Now the TV showed a man of about sixty-five. He was speaking to a plushy fund-raising dinner. The crowd had that plump, righteous, and slightly constipated look that seems the exclusive province of businessmen who belong to the GOP. The speaker bore a remarkable resemblance to Edward Gurney of Florida, although he did not have Gurney's slim, tough build.

“This is Harrison Fisher,” Herman said. “The voters of the third district have been sending him to Washington every two years since 1960. He is a powerful figure in the house, sitting on five committees and chairing the House Committee on Parks and Waterways. It had been expected that he would beat young David Bowes handily. But neither Fisher nor Bowes counted on a wild card in the deck. This wild card.

The picture switched.

“Holy God!” Johnny said.

Beside him, Chatsworth roared laughter and slapped his thighs. “Can you believe that guy?”

No lackadaisical supermarket parking-lot crowd here. No comfy fund raiser in the Granite State Room of the Portsmouth Hilton, either. Greg Stillson was standing on a platform outside in Ridgeway, his home town. Be-hind him there loomed the statue of a Union soldier with his rifle in his hand and his kepi tilted down over his eyes. The street was blocked off and crowded with wildly cheering people, predominantly young people. Stillson was wearing faded jeans and a two-pocket Army fatigue shirt with the words GIVE PEACE A CHANCE embroidered on one pocket and MOM'S APPLE PIE on the other. There was a hi-impact construction worker's helmet cocked at an arrogant, rakish angle on his head, and plastered to the front of it was a green American flag ecology sticker. Beside him was a stainless steel cart of some kind. From the twin loudspeakers came the sound of John Denver singing “Thank God I'm a Country Boy.”

“What's that cart?” Johnny asked.

“You'll see,” Roger said, still grinning hugely.

Herman said: “The wild card is Gregory Ammas Stillson, forty-three, ex-salesman for the Truthway Bible Company of America, ex-housepainter, and, in Oklahoma, where he grew up, one-time rainmaker.”

“Rainmaker,” said Johnny, bemused.

“Oh, that's one of his planks,” Roger said. “If he's elected, we'll have rain whenever we need it.”

George Herman went on: Stillson's platform is… well, refreshing.”

John Denver finished singing with a yell that brought answering cheers from the crowd. Then Stillson started talking, his voice booming at peak amplification. His PA system at least was sophisticated; there was hardly any distortion. His voice made Johnny vaguely uneasy. The man had the high, hard, pumping delivery of a revival preacher. You could see a fine spray of spittle from his lips as he talked.

“What are we gonna do in Washington? Why do we want to go to Washington?” Stillson roared. “What's our platform? Our platform got five boards, my friends n neighbors, five old boards! And what are they? I'll tell you up front! First board: THROW THE BUMS OUT!”

A tremendous roar of approval ripped out of the crowd. Someone threw double handfuls of confetti into the air and someone else yelled, “Yaaaah-HOO!” Stillson leaned over his podium.

“You wanna know why I'm wearing this helmet, friends n neighbors? I'll tell you why. I'm wearin it because when you send me up to Washington, I'm gonna go through them like you-know-what through a canebrake! Gonna go through em just like this!”

And before Johnny's wondering eyes, Stillson put his head down and began to charge up and down the podium stage like a bull, uttering a high, yipping Rebel yell as he did so. Roger Chatsworth simply dissolved in his chair, laughing helplessly. The crowd went wild. Stillson charged back to the podium, took off his construction helmet, and spun it into the crowd. A minor riot over possession of it immediately ensued.

“Second board!” Stillson yelled into the mike. “We're gonna throw out anyone in the government, from the highest to the lowest, who is spending time in bed with some gal who ain't his wife! If they wanna sleep around, they ain't gonna do it on the public tit!”

“What did he say?” Johnny asked, blinking.

“Oh, he's just getting warmed up,” Roger said. He wiped his streaming eyes and went off into another gale of laughter. Johnny wished it seemed that funny to him.

“Third board!” Stillson roared. “We're gonna send all the pollution right into outer space! Gonna put it in Hefty bags! Gonna put it in Glad bags! Gonna send it to Mars, to Jupiter, and the rings of Saturn! We're gonna have clean air and we're gonna have clean water and we're gonna have it in SIX MONTHS!”

The crowd was in paroxysms of joy. Johnny saw many people in the crowd who were almost killing themselves laughing, as Roger Chatsworth was presently doing.

“Fourth board! We're gonna have all the gas and oil we need! We're gonna stop playing games with these Arabs and get down to brass tacks! Ain't gonna be no old people in New Hampshire turned into Popsicles this coming winter like there was last winter!”

This brought a solid roar of approval. The winter before an old woman in Portsmouth had been found frozen to death in her third-floor apartment, apparently following a turn-off by the gas company for nonpayment.

“We got the muscle, friends n neighbors, we can do it! Anybody out there think we can't do it?”

“NO!” The crowd bellowed back.

“Last board,” Stillson said, and approached the metal cart. He threw back the hinged lid and a cloud of steam puffed out. “HOT DOGS!!”

He began to grab double handfuls of hot dogs from the cart, which Johnny now recognized as a portable steam table. He threw them into the crowd and went back for more. Hot dogs flew everywhere. “Hot dogs for every man, woman, and child in America! And when you put Greg Stillson in the House of Representatives, you gonna say HOT DOG! SOMEONE GIVES A RIP AT LAST!”

The picture changed. The podium was being dismantled by a crew of long-haired young men who looked like rock band roadies. Three more of them were cleaning up the litter the crowd had left behind. George Herman resumed: “Democratic candidate David Bowes calls Still-son a practical joker who is trying to throw a monkey-wrench into the workings of the democratic process. Harrison Fisher is stronger in his criticism. He calls Stillson a cynical carnival pitchman who is playing the whole idea of the free election as a burlesque-house joke. In speeches, he refers to independent candidate Stilison as the only member of the American Hot Dog party. But the fact is this: the latest CBS poll in New Hampshire's third district showed David Bowes with twenty percent of the vote, Harrison Fisher with twenty-six-and maverick Greg Stillson with a whopping forty-two percent. Of course election day is still quite a way down the road, and things may change. But for now, Greg Stillson has captured the hearts-if not the minds-of New Hampshire's third-district voters.”

The TV showed a shot of Herman from the waist up. Both hands had been out of sight. Now he raised one of them. and in it was a hot dog. He took a big bite.

“This is George Herman, CBS News, in Ridgeway, New Hampshire.”

Walter Cronkite came back on in the CBS newsroom, chuckling. “Hot dogs,” he said, and chuckled again. “And that's the way it is-. -,

Johnny got up and snapped off the set. “I just can't believe that,” he said. “That guy's really a candidate? It's not a joke?”

“Whether it's a joke or not is a matter of personal interpretation,” Roger said, grinning, “but he really is running. I'm a Republican myself, born and bred, but I must admit I get a kick out of that guy Stillson. You know he hired half a dozen ex-motorcycle outlaws as bodyguards?

Real iron horsemen. Not Hell's Angels or anything like that, but I guess they were pretty rough customers. He seems to have reformed them.”

Motorcycle freaks as security. Johnny didn't like the sound of that very much. The motorcycle freaks had been in charge of security when the Rolling Stones gave their free concert at Altamont Speedway in California. It hadn't worked out so well.

“People put up with a… a motorcycle goon squad?”

“No, it really isn't like that. They're quite cleancut. And Stillson has a helluva reputation around Ridgeway for reforming kids in trouble.

Johnny grunted doubtfully.

“You saw him,” Roger said, gesturing at the TV set. “The man is a clown. He goes charging around the speaking platform, like that at every rally. Throws his helmet into the crowd-I'd guess he's gone through a hundred of them by now-and gives out hot dogs. He's a clown, so what? Maybe people need a little comic relief from time to time. We're runningout of oil, the inflation is slowly but surely getting out of control, the average guy's tax load has never been heavier, and we're apparently getting ready to elect a fuzzy-minded Georgia cracker president of the United States. So people want a giggle or two. Even more, they want to thumb their noses at a political establishment that doesn't seem able to solve anything. Stillson's harmless.”

“He's in orbit,” Johnny said, and they both laughed.

“We have plenty of crazy politicians around,” Roger said. “In New Hampshire we've got Stillson, who wants to hot dog his way into the House of Representatives, so what? Out in California they've got Hayakawa. Or take our own governor, Meldrim Thomson. Last year he wanted to arm the New Hampshire National Guard with tactical nuclear weapons. I'd call that big-time crazy.

“Are you saying it's okay for those people in the third district to elect the village fool to represent them in Washington?”

“You don't get it,” Chatsworth said patiently. “Take a voter's-eye-view, Johnny. Those third-district people are mostly all blue-collars and shopkeepers. The most rural parts of the district are just starting to develop some recreational potential. Those people look at David Bowes and they see a hungry young kid who's trying to get elected on the basis of some slick talk and a passing resemblance to Dustin Hoffman. They're supposed to think he's a man of the people because he wears blue jeans.

“Then take Fisher. My man, at least nominally. I've organized fund raisers for him and the other Republican candidates around this part of New Hampshire. He's been on the Hill so long he probably thinks the Capitol dome would split in two pieces if he wasn't around to give it moral support. He's never had an original thought in his life, he never went against the party line in his life. There's no stigma attached to his name because he's too stupid to be very crooked, although he'll probably wind up with some mud on him from this Koreagate thing. His speeches have all the excitement of the copy of the National Plumbers Wholesale Catalogue. People don't know all those things, but they can sense them sometimes. The idea that Harrison Fisher is doing anything for his constituency is just plain ridiculous.”

“So the answer is to elect a loony?”

Chatsworth smiled indulgently. “Sometimes these loonies turn out doing a pretty good job. Look at Bella Abzug. There's a damn fine set of brains under those crazy hats. But even if Stillson turns out to be as crazy in Washington as he is down in Ridgeway, he's only renting the seat for two years. They'll turn him out in “78 and put in someone who understands the lesson.”

“The lesson?”

Roger stood up. “Don't fuck the people over for too long,” he said. “That's the lesson. Adam Clayton Powell found out. Agnew and Nixon did, too. Just… don't fuck the people for too long. “He glanced at his watch. “Come on over to the big house and have a drink, Johnny.

Shelley and I are going out later on, but we've got time for a short one.”

Johnny smiled and got up. “Okay,” he said. “You twisted my arm.

CHAPTER TWENTY

In mid-August, Johnny found himself alone at the Chatsworth estate except for Ngo Phat, who had his own quarters over the garage. The Chatsworth family had closed up the house and had gone to Montreal for three weeks of r amp;r before the new school year and the fall rush at the mills began.

Roger had left Johnny the keys to his wife's Mercedes and he motored up to his dad's house in Pownal, feeling like a potentate. His father's negotiations with Charlene MacKenzie had entered the critical stage, and Herb was no longer bothering to protest that his interest in her was only to make sure that the house didn't fall down on top of her. In fact, he was in full courting plumage and made Johnny a little nervous. After three days of it Johnny went back to the Chatsworth house, caught up on his reading and his correspondence, and soaked up the quiet.

He was sitting on a rubber chair float in the middle of the pool, drinking a Seven-Up and reading the New York Times Book Review, when Ngo came over to the pool's apron, took off his zori, and dipped his feet into the water.

“Ahhhh,” he said. “Much better. “He smiled at Johnny. “Quiet, huh?”

“Very quiet,” Johnny agreed. “How goes the citizenship class, Ngo?”

“Very nice going,” Ngo said. “We are having a field trip on Saturday. First one. Very exciting. The whole class will be tripping.”

“Going,” Johnny said, smiling at an image of Ngo Phat's whole citizenship class freaking on LSD or psilpcybin.

“Pardon?” He raised his eyebrows politely.

“Your whole class will he going.”

“Yes, thanks. We are going to the political speech and rally in Trimbull. We are all thinking how lucky it is to be taking the citizenship class in an election year. It is most instructive.”

“Yes, I'll bet it is. Who are you going to see?”

“Greg Stirrs… “He stopped and pronounced it again, very carefully. “Greg Stillson, who is running independently for a seat in the U. S. House of Representatives.”

“I've heard of him,” Johnny said. “Have you discussed him in class at all, Ngo?”

“Yes, we have had some conversation of this man. Born in 1933. A man of many jobs. He came to New Hampshire in 1964. Our instructor has told us that now he is here long enough so people do not see him as a carpetfogger.”

“Bagger,” Johnny said.

Ngo looked at him with blank politeness.

“The term is carpetbagger.”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Do you find Stillson a bit odd?”

“In America perhaps he is odd,” Ngo said. “In Vietnam there were many like him. People who are… “He sat thinking, swishing his small and delicate feet in the blue-green water of the pool. Then he looked up at Johnny again.

“I do not have the English for what I wish to say. There is a game the people of my land play, it is called the Laughing Tiger. It is old and much loved, like your baseball. One child is dressing up as the tiger, you see. He puts on a skin. And the other children tries to catch him as he runs and dances. The child in the skin laughs, but he is also growling and biting, because that is the game. In my country, before the Communists, many of the village leaders played the Laughing Tiger. I think this Still-son knows that game, too.”

Johnny looked over at Ngo. disturbed.

Ngo did not seem disturbed at all. He smiled. “So we will all go and see for ourselves. After, we are having the picnic foods. I myself am making two pies. I think it will be nice.”

“It sounds great.”

“It will be very great,” Ngo said, getting up. “Afterward, in class, we will talk over all we saw in Trimbull. Maybe we will be writing the compositions. It is much easier to write the compositions, because one can look up the exact word. Le mot juste.

“Yes, sometimes writing can be easier. But I never had a high school comp class that would believe it.”

Ngo smiled. “How does it go with Chuck?”

“He's doing quite well.”

“Yes, he is happy now. Not just pretending. He is a good boy. “He stood up. “Take a rest, Johnny. I'm going to take a nap.”

“All right.”

He watched Ngo walk away, small, slim, and lithe in blue jeans and a faded chambray work shirt.

The child in the skin laughs, but he is also growling and biting, because that is the game… I think this Stillson knows that game, too.

That thread of disquiet again.

The pool chair bobbed gently up and down. The sun beat pleasantly on him. He opened his Book Review again, but the article he had been reading no longer engaged him. He put it down and paddled the little rubber float to the edge of the pool and got out. Trimbull was less than thirty miles away. Maybe he would just hop into Mrs. Chatsworth's Mercedes and drive down this Saturday. See Greg Stillson in person. Enjoy the show. Maybe… maybe shake his hand.

No. No!

But why not? After all, he had more or less made politicians his hobby this election year. What could possibly be so upsetting about going to see one more?

But he was upset, no question about that. His heart was knocking harder and more rapidly than it should have been, and he managed to drop his magazine into the pool. He fished it out with a curse before it was saturated.

Somehow, thinking about Greg Stilison made him think about Frank Dodd.

Utterly ridiculous. He couldn't have any feeling at all about Stillson one way or the other from having just seen him on TV.

Stay away.

Well, maybe he would and maybe he wouldn't. May-be he would go down to Boston this Saturday instead. See a film.

But a strange, heavy feeling of fright had settled on him by the time he got back to the guest house and changed his clothes. In a way the feeling was like an old friend-the sort of old friend you secretly hate. Yes, he would go down to Boston on Saturday. That would be better.

Although he relived that day over and over in the months afterward, Johnny could never remember exactly how or why it was that he ended up in Trimbull after all. He had set out in another direction, planning to go down to Boston and take in the Red Sox at Fenway Park, then maybe go over to Cambridge and nose through the book-shops. If there was enough cash left over (he had sent four hundred dollars of Chatsworth's bonus to his father, who in turn sent it on to Eastern Maine Medical-a gesture tantamount to a spit in the ocean) he planned to go to the Orson Welles Cinema and see that reggae movie, The Harder They Come. A good day's program, and a fine day to implement it; that August 19 had dawned hot and dear and sweet, the distillation of the perfect New England summer's day.

He had let himself into the kitchen of the big house and made three hefty ham-and-cheese sandwiches for lunch, put them in an old-fashioned wicker picnic basket he found in the pantry, and after a little soul-searching, had topped off his haul with a sixpack of Tuborg Beer. At that point he had been feeling fine, absolutely first-rate. No thought of either Greg Stillson or his homemade bodyguard corps of iron horsemen had so much as crossed his mind.

He put the picnic basket on the floor of the Mercedes and drove southeast toward 1-95. All clear enough up to that point. But then other things had begun to creep in. Thoughts of his mother on her deathbed first. His mother's face, twisted into a frozen snarl, the hand on the counterpane hooked into a claw, her voice sounding as if it were coming through a big mouthful of cotton wadding.

Didn't I tell you? Didn't I say it was so?

Johnny turned the radio up louder. Good rock “n” roll poured out of the Mercedes's stereo speakers. He had been asleep for four-and-a-half years but rock “n” roll had remained alive and well, thank you very much. Johnny sang along.

He has a job for you. Don't run from him, Johnny.

The radio couldn't drown out his dead mother's voice. His dead mother was going to have her say. Even from beyond the grave she was going to have her say.

Don't hide away in a cave or make him have to send a big fish to swallow you.

But he had been swallowed by a big fish. Its name was not leviathan but coma. He had spent four-and-a-half years in that particular fish's black belly. and that was enough.

The entrance ramp to the turnpike came up-and then slipped behind him. He had been so lost in his thoughts that he had missed his turn. The old ghosts just wouldn't give up and let him alone. Well, he would turn around and go back as soon as he found a good place.

Not the potter but the potter's clay, Johnny.

“Oh, come on,” he muttered. He had to get this crap off his mind, that was all. His mother had been a religious crazy, not a very kind way of putting it, but true all the same. Heaven out in the constellation Orion, angels driving flying saucers, kingdoms under the earth. In her way she had been at least as crazy as Greg Stillson was in his.

Oh for Christ's sake, don't get off on that guy.

“And when you send Greg Stillson to the House of Representatives, you gonna say HOT DOG! SOMEONE GIVES A RIP AT LAST!”

He came to New Hampshire Route 63. A left turn would take him to Concord, Berlin, Ridder's Mill, Trimbull. Johnny made the turn without even thinking about it. His thoughts were elsewhere.

Roger Chatsworth, no babe in the woods, had laughed over Greg Stillson as if he were this year's answer to George Carlin and Chevy Chase all rolled up into one. He's a clown, Johnny.

And if that was all Stillson was, then there was no problem, was there? A charming eccentric, a piece of blank paper on which the electorate could write its message: You other guys are so wasted that we decided to elect this fool for two years instead. That was probably all Stillson was, after all. Just a harmless crazy, there was no need at all to associate him with the patterned, destructive madness of Frank Dodd. And yet… somehow he did.

The road branched ahead. Left branch to Berlin and Ridder's Mill, right branch to Trimbull and Concord. Johnny turned right.

But it wouldn't hurt to just shake his hand, would it?

Maybe not. One more politician for his collection. Some people collected stamps, some coins, but Johnny Smith collects handshakes and -

–and admit it. You've been looking for a wild card in the deck all along.

The thought shook him so badly that he almost pulled over to the side of the road. He caught a glimpse of himself in the rear-view mirror and it wasn't the contented, everything-is-resting-easy face he had gotten up with that morning. Now it was the press conference face, and the face of the man who had crawled through the snow of the Castle Rock town common on his hands and knees. The skin was too white, the eyes circled with bruised-looking brown rings, the lines etched too deep.

No. It isn't true.

But it was. Now that it was out, it couldn't be denied. In the first twenty-three years of his life he had shaken hands with exactly one politician; that was when Ed Muskie had come to talk to his high school government class in 1966. In the last seven months he had shaken hands with over a dozen big names. Arid hadn't the thought flashed across the back of his mind as each one stuck out his hand What's this guy all about? What's he going to tell me?

Hadn't he been looking, all along, for the political equivalent of Frank Dodd?

Yes. It was true.

But the fact was, none of them except Carter had told him much of anything, and the feelings that he had gotten from Carter were not particularly alarming. Shaking hands with Carter had not given him that sinking feeling he had gotten just from watching Greg Stillson on TV. He felt as if Stillson might have taken the game of the Laughing Tiger a step further: inside the beast-skin, a man, yes.

But inside the man-skin, a beast.

Whatever the progression had been, Johnny found himself eating his picnic lunch in the Trimbull town park instead of the Fenway bleachers, He had arrived shortly after noon and had seen a sign on the community notice board announcing the rally at three P. M.

He drifted over to the park, expecting to have the place pretty much to himself so long before the rally was scheduled to begin, but others were already spreading blankets, unlimbering Frisbees, or settling down to their own lunches.

Up front, a number of men were at work on the bandstand. Two of them were decorating the waist-high railings with bunting. Another was on a ladder, hanging colorful crepe streamers from the bandstand's circular eave. Others were setting up the sound system, and as Johnny had guessed when he watched the CBS newsclip, it was no four-hundred-dollar podium PA set. The speakers were Altec-Lansings, and they were being carefully placed to give surround-sound.

The advance men (but the image that persisted was that of roadies setting up for an Eagles or Geils band concert) went about their work with businesslike precision. The whole thing had a practiced, professional quality to it that jarred with Stillson's image of the amiable Wild Man of Borneo.

The crowd mostly spanned about twenty years, from midteens to mid-thirties. They were having a good time. Babies toddled around clutching melting Dairy Queens and Slush Puppies. Women chatted together and laughed. Men drank beer from styrofoam cups. A few dogs bounced around, grabbing what there was to be grabbed, and the sun shone benignly down on everyone.

“Test,” one of the men on the bandstand said laconically into the two mikes. “Test-one, test-two… “One of the speakers in the park uttered a loud feedback whine, and the guy on the podium motioned that he wanted it moved backward.

This isn't the way you set up for a political speech and rally, Johnny thought. They're setting up for a love-feast or a group grope.

“Test-one, test-two… test, test, test.”

They were strapping the big speakers to the trees, Johnny saw. Not nailing them but strapping them. Stillson was an ecology booster, and someone had told his advance men not to hurt so much as one tree in one town park. The operation gave him the feeling of having been honed down to the smallest detail. This was no grab-it-and-run-with-it deal.

Two yellow school buses pulled into the turnaround left of the small (and already full) parking lot. The doors folded open and men and women got out, talking animatedly to one another. They were in sharp contrast to those already in the park because they were dressed in their best-men in suits or sports coats, ladies in crisp

skirt-and-blouse combinations or smart dresses. They were gazing around with expressions of nearly childlike wonder and anticipation, and Johnny grinned. Ngo's citizenship class had arrived.

He walked over to them. Ngo was standing with a tall man in a corduroy suit and two women, both Chinese.

“Hi, Ngo,” Johnny said.

Ngo grinned broadly. “Johnny!” he said. “Good to see you, man! It is being a great day for the state of New Hampshire, right?”

“I guess so,” Johnny said.

Ngo introduced his companions. The man in the corduroy suit was Polish. The two women were sisters from Taiwan. One of the women told Johnny that she was much hoping for shaking hands with the candidate after the program and then, shyly, she showed Johnny the autograph book in her handbag.

“I am so glad to be here in America,” she said. “But it is strange, is it not, Mr. Smith?”

Johnny, who thought the whole thing was strange, agreed.

The citizenship class's two instructors were calling the group together. “I'll see you later, Johnny,” Ngo said. “I've got to be tripping.”

“Going,” Johnny said.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Have a fine time, Ngo.”

“Oh, yes, I am sure I will. “And Ngo's eyes seemed to glint with a secret amusement. “I am sure it will be most entertaining, Johnny.”

The group, about forty in all, went over to the south side of the park to have their picnic lunch. Johnny went back to his own place and made himself eat one of his sandwiches. It tasted like a combination of paper and library paste.

A thick feeling of tension had begun to creep into his body.

By two-thirty the park was completely full; people were jammed together nearly shoulder to shoulder. The town police, augmented by a small contingent of State Police, had closed off the streets leading to the Trimbull town park. The resemblance to a rock concert was stronger than ever. Bluegrass music poured from the speakers, cheery and fast. Fat white clouds drifted across the innocent blue sky.

Suddenly, people started getting to their feet and craning their necks. It was a ripple effect passing through the crowd. Johnny got up too, wondering if Stillson was going to be early. Now he could hear the steady roar of motorcycle engines, the beat swelling to fill the summer afternoon as they grew closer. Johnny got an eyeful of sun-arrows reflecting off chrome, and a few moments later about ten cycles swung into the turnaround where the citizenship buses were parked. There was no car with them. Johnny guessed they were an advance guard.

His feeling of disquiet deepened. The riders were neat enough, dressed for the most part in clean, faded jeans and white shirts, but the bikes themselves, mostly Harleys and BSAs, had been customized almost beyond recognition: ape-hanger handlebars, raked chromium manifolds, and strange fairings abounded.

Their owners killed the engines, swung off, and moved away toward the bandstand in single file. Only one of them looked back. His eyes moved without haste over the big crowd; even from some distance away Johnny could see that the man's irises were a brilliant bottle green. He seemed to be counting the house. He glanced left, at four or five town cops leaning against the chain-link backstop of the Little League ballfield. He waved. One of the cops leaned over and spit. The act had a feeling of ceremony to it, and Johnny's disquiet deepened further. The man with the green eyes sauntered to the bandstand.

Above the disquiet, which now lay like an emotional floor to his other feelings, Johnny felt predominantly a wild mix of horror and hilarity. He had a dreamlike sense of having somehow entered one of those paintings where steam engines are coming out of brick fireplaces or clockfaces are lying limply over tree limbs. The cyclists looked like extras in an American-International bike movie who had all decided to Get Clean For Gene. Their fresh, faded jeans were snugged down over square-toed engineer boots, and on more than one pair Johnny could see chromed chains strapped down over the insteps. The chrome twinkled savagely in the sun. Their expressions were nearly all the same: a sort of vacuous good humor that seemed directed at the crowd. But beneath it there might have been simple contempt for the young mill workers, the summer students who had come over from UNH in Durham, and the factory workers who” were standing to give them a round of applause. Each of them wore a pair of political buttons. One of them showed a construction worker's yellow hard hat with a green ecology sticker on the front. The other bore the motto STILLSON'S GOT “EM IN A FULL-NELSON.

And sticking out of every right hip pocket was a sawed-off pool cue.

Johnny turned to the man next to him, who was with his wife and small child. “Are those things legal?” he asked.

“Who the hell cares,” the young guy responded. laughing. “They're just for show, anyway. “He was still applauding. “Go-get-em-Greg!” he yelled.

The motorcycle honor guard deployed themselves around the bandstand in a circle and stood at parade rest.

The applause tapered off, but conversation went on at a louder level. The crowd's mass mouth had received the meal's appetizer and had found it good.

Brownshirts, Johnny thought, sitting down. Brown-shirts is all they are.

Well, so what? Maybe that was even good. Americans had a rather low tolerance for the fascist approach-even rock-ribbed righties like Reagan didn't go for that stuff; nothing but a pure fact no matter how many tantrums the New Left might want to throw or how many songs Joan Baez wrote. Eight years before, the fascist tactics of the Chicago police had helped lose the election for Hubert Humphrey. Johnny didn't care how clean-cut these fellows were; if they were in the employ of a man running for the House of Representatives, then Stillson couldn't be more than a few paces from overstepping himself. If it wasn't quite so weird, it really would be funny.

All the same, he wished he hadn't come.

Just before three o'clock, the thud of a big bass drum impressed itself on the air, felt through the feet before actually heard by the ears. Other instruments gradually began to surround it, and all of them resolved into a marching band playing a Sousa tune. Small-town election hoopla, all of a summer's day.

The crowd came to its feet again and craned in the direction of the music. Soon the band came in sight-first a baton-twirler in a short skirt, high-stepping in white kidskin boots with pompons on them, then two majorettes, then two pimply boys with grimly set faces carrying a banner that proclaimed this was THE TRIMBULL HIGH SCHOOL MARCHING BAND and you had by. God better not forget it. Then the band itself, resplendent and sweaty in blinding white uniforms and brass buttons.

The crowd cleared a path for them, and then broke into a wave of applause as they began to march in place. Behind them was a white Ford van, and standing spread-legged on the roof, face sunburned and split into a mammoth grin under his cocked-back construction hat, was the candidate himself. He raised a battery-powered bullhorn and shouted into it with leather-lunged enthusiasm: “HI, Y'ALL!”

“Hi, Greg!” The crowd gave it right back.

Greg, Johnny thought a little hysterically. We're on first-name terms with the guy.

Stillson leaped down from the roof of the van, managing to make it look easy. He was dressed as Johnny had seen him on the news, jeans and a khaki shirt. He began to work the crowd on his way to the bandstand, shaking hands, touching other hands outstretched over the heads of those in the first ranks. The crowd lurched and swayed deliriously toward him, and Johnny felt an answering lurch in his own guts.

I'm not going to touch him. No way.

But in front of him the crowd suddenly parted a little and he stepped into the gap and suddenly found himself in the front row. He was close enough to the tuba player in the Trimbull High School Marching Band to have reached out and rapped his knuckles on the bell of his horn, had he wanted to.

Stillson moved quickly through the ranks of the band to shake hands on the other side, and Johnny lost complete sight of him except for the bobbing yellow helmet. He felt relief. That was all right, then. No harm, no foul. Like the pharisee in that famous story, he was going to pass by on the other side. Good. Wonderful. And when he made the podium, Johnny was going to gather up his stuff and steal away into the afternoon. Enough was enough.

The bikies had moved up on both sides of the path through the crowd to keep it from collapsing in on the candidate and drowning him in people. All the chunks of pool cue were still in the back pockets, but their owners looked tense and alert” for trouble. Johnny didn't know exactly what sort of trouble they expected-a Brownie Delight thrown in the candidate's face, maybe-but for the first time the bikies looked really interested.

Then something did happen, but Johnny was unable to tell exactly what it had been. A female hand reached for the bobbing yellow hard hat, maybe just to touch it for good luck, and one of Stillson's fellows moved in quickly. There was a yell of dismay and the woman's hand disappeared quickly. But it was all on the other side of the marching band.

The din from the crowd was enormous, and he thought again of the rock concerts he had been to. This was what it would be like if Paul McCartney or Elvis Presley decided to shake hands with the crowd.

They were screaming his name, chanting it: “GREG… GREG… GREG…”

The young guy who had billeted his family next to Johnny was holding his son up over his head so the kid could see. A young man with a large, puckered burn scar on one side of his face was waving a sign that read:

LIVE FREE OR DIE, HERE'S GREG IN YER EYE!

An achingly beautiful girl of maybe eighteen was waving a chunk of watermelon, and pink juice was running down her tanned arm. It was all mass confusion. Excitement was humming through the crowd like a series of high-voltage electrical cables.

And suddenly there was Greg Stillson, darting back through the band, back to Johnny's side of the crowd. He didn't pause, but still found time to give the tuba player a hearty clap on the back.

Later, Johnny mulled it over and tried to tell himself that there really hadn't been any chance or time to melt back into the crowd; he tried to tell himself that the crowd had practically heaved him into Stilison's arms. He tried to tell himself that Stillson had done everything but abduct his hand. None of it was true. There was time, because a fat woman in absurd, yellow damdiggers threw her arms around Stillson's neck and gave him a hearty kiss. which Stillson returned with a laugh and a “You bet I'll remember you, hon. “The fat woman screamed laughter.

Johnny felt the familiar compact coldness come over him, the trance feeling. The sensation that nothing mattered except to know. He even smiled a little, but it wasn't his smile. He put his hand out, and Stilison seized it in both of his and began to pump it up and down.

“Hey, man, hope you're gonna support us in…”

Then Stillson broke off. The way Eileen Magown had. The way Dr. James (just like the soul singer) Brown had. The way Roger Dussault had. His eyes went wide, and then they filled with-fright? No. It was terror in Still-son's eyes.

The moment was endless. Objective time was replaced by something else, a perfect cameo of time as they stared into each other's eyes. For Johnny it was like being in that dull chrome corridor again, only this time Stilison was with him and they were sharing… sharing

(everything)

For Johnny it had never been this strong, never. Everything came at him at once, crammed together and screaming like some terrible black freight train highballing through a narrow tunnel, a speeding engine with a single glaring headlamp mounted up front, and the headlamp was knowing everything, and its light impaled Johnny Smith like a bug on a pin. There was nowhere to run and perfect knowledge ran him down, plastered him as flat as a sheet of paper while that night-running train raced over him.

He felt like screaming, but had no taste for it, no voice for it.

The one image he never escaped

(as the blue filter began to creep in)

was Greg Stillson taking the oath of office. It was being administered by an old man with the humble, frightened eyes of a fieldmouse trapped by a terribly proficient, battlescarred

(tiger)

barnyard tomcat. One of Stillson's hands clapped over a Bible, one upraised. It was years in the future because Stillson had lost most of his hair. The old man was speaking, Stillson was following. Stillson was saying

(the blue filter is deepening, covering things, blotting them out bit by bit, merciful blue filter, Stillson's face is behind the blue… and the yellow -. -the yellow like tiger-stripes)

he would do it “So help him God. “His face was solemn, grim, even, but a great hot joy clapped in his chest and roared in his brain. Because the man with the scared fieldmouse eyes was the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and

(oh dear God the filter the filter the blue filter the yellow stripes)

now all of it began to disappear slowly behind that blue filter-except it wasn't a filter; it was something real. It was

(in the future in the dead zone)

something in the future. His? Stillson's? Johnny didn't know.

There was the sense of flying-flying through the blue-above scenes of utter desolation that could not quite be seen. And cutting through this came the disembodied voice of Greg Stillson, the voice of a cut-rate God or a comic-opera engine of the dead: “I'M GONNA GO THROUGH THEM LIKE BUCKWHEAT THROUGH A GOOSE! GONNA GO THROUGH THEM LIKE SHIT THROUGH A CANEBRAKE!”

“The tiger,” Johnny muttered thickly. “The tiger's behind the blue. Behind the yellow.”

Then all of it, pictures, images, and words, broke up in the swelling, soft roar of oblivion. He seemed to smell some sweet, coppery scent, like burning high-tension wires. For a moment that inner eye seemed to open even wider, searching; the blue and yellow that had obscured everything seemed about to solidify into… into something, and from somewhere inside, distant and full of terror, he heard a woman shriek: “Give him to me, you bastard!”

Then it was gone.

How long did we stand together like that? he would ask himself later. His guess was maybe five seconds. Then Stillson was pulling his hand away, ripping it away, staring at Johnny with his mouth open, the color draining away from beneath the deep tan of the summertime campaigner. Johnny could see the fillings in the man's back teeth.

His expression was one of revolted horror.

Good! Johnny wanted to scream. Good! Shake yourself to pieces! Total yourself! Destruct! Implode! Disintegrate! Do the world a favor!

Two of the motorcycle guys we're rushing forward and now the sawedoff pool cues were out and Johnny felt a stupid kind of terror because they were going to hit him, hit him over the head with their cues, they were going to make believe Johnny Smith's head was the eight ball and they were going to blast it right into the side pocket, right back into the blackness of coma and he would never come out of it this time, he would never be able to tell anyone what he had seen or change anything.

That sense of destruction-God! It had been everything!

He tried to backpedal. People scattered, pressed back, yelled with fear (or perhaps with excitement). Stillson was turning toward his bodyguards, already regaining his composure, shaking his head, restraining them.

Johnny never saw what happened next. He swayed on his feet, head lowered, blinking slowly like a drunk at the bitter end of a week-long binge. Then the soft, swelling roar of oblivion overwhelmed him and Johnny let it; he gladly let it. He blacked out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“No,” the Trimbull chief of police said in answer to Johnny's question, “you're not charged with anything. You're not under detention. And you don't have to answer any questions. We'd just be very grateful if you would.”

“Very grateful,” the man in the conservative business suit echoed. His name was Edgar Lancte. He was with the Boston office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He thought that Johnny Smith looked like a very sick man. There was a puffed bruise above his left eyebrow that was rapidly turning purple. When he blacked out, Johnny had come down very hard-either on the shoe of a marching-bandsman or on the squared-off toe of a motorcycle boot. Lancte mentally favored the latter possibility. And possibly the motorcycle boot had been in motion at the instant of contact.

Smith was too pale, and his hands trembled badly as he drank the paper cup of water that Chief Bass had given him. One eyelid was ticking nervously. He looked like the classic would-be assassin, although the most deadly thing in his personal effects had been a nailclipper. Still, Lancte would keep that impression in mind, because he was what he was.

“What can I tell you?” Johnny asked. He had awakened on a cot in an unlocked cell. He'd had a blinding headache. It was draining away now, leaving him feeling strangely hollow inside. He felt a little as if his legitimate innards had been scooped out and replaced with Reddi Wip. There was a high, constant sound in his ears-not precisely a ringing; more like a high, steady hum. It was nine P. M. The Stillson entourage had long since swept out of town. All the hot dogs had been eaten.

“You can tell us exactly what happened back there,” Bass said.

“It was hot. I guess I got overexcited and fainted.”

“You an invalid or something?” Lancte asked casually.

Johnny looked at him steadily. “Don't play games with me, Mr. Lancte. If you know who I am, then say so.”

“I know,” Lancte said. “Maybe you are psychic.”

“Nothing psychic about guessing an FBI agent might be up to a few games,” Johnny said.

“You're a Maine boy, Johnny. Born and bred. What's a Maine boy doing down in New Hampshire?”

“Tutoring.”

“The Chatsworth boy?”

“For the second time: if you know, why ask? Unless you suspect me of something.”

Lancte lit a Vantage Green. “Rich family.”

“Yes. They are.”

“You a Stillson fan, are you, Johnny?” Bass asked. Johnny didn't like fellows who used his first name on first acquaintance, and both of these fellows were doing it” It made him nervous.

“Are you?” he asked,

Bass made an obscene blowing sound. “About five years ago we had a day-long folk-rock concert in Trimbull. Out on Hake Jamieson's land. Town council had their doubts, but they went ahead because the kids have got to have something. We thought we were going to have maybe two hundred local kids in Hake's east pasture listening to music. Instead we got sixteen hundred, all of em smoking pot and drinking hard stuff straight out from the neck of the bottle. They made a hell of a mess and the council got mad and said there'd never be another one and they turned around all hurt arid wet-eyed and said, “Whassa matter? No one got hurt, did they?” It was supposed to be okay to make a helluva mess because no one got hurt. I feel the same way about this guy Stilison. I remember once…

“You don't have any sort of grudge against Stillson, do you, Johnny?” Lancte asked. “Nothing personal between you and him?” He smiled a fatherly, you-can-get-it-off-your-chest-if-you-want-to smile.

“I didn't even know who he was until six weeks ago.”

“Yes, well, but that really doesn't answer my question, does it?”

Johnny sat silent for a little while. “He disturbs me,” he said finally.

“That doesn't really answer my question, either.”

“Yes, I think it does.”

“You're not being as helpful as we'd like,” Lancte said regretfully.

Johnny glanced over at Bass. “Does anybody who faints in your town at a public gathering get the FBI treatment, Chief Bass?”

Bass looked uncomfortable. “Well… no. Course not.”

“You were shaking hands with Stillson when you keeled over,” Lancte said. “You looked sick. Stillson himself looked scared green. You're a very lucky young man, Johnny. Lucky his goodbuddies there didn't turn your head into a votive urn. They thought you'd pulled a piece on him.”

Johnny was looking at Lancte with dawning surprise. He looked at Bass, then back to the FBI man. “You were there,” he said. “Bass didn't call you up on the phone. You were there. At the rally.”

Lancte crushed out his cigarette. “Yes. I was.”

“Why is the FBI interested in Stillson?” Johnny nearly barked the question.

“Let's talk about you, Johnny. What's your…

“No, let's talk about Stillson. Let's talk about his good-buddies, as you call them. Is it legal for them to carry” around sawed-off pool cues?”

“It is,” Bass said. Lancte threw him a warning look, but Bass either didn't see it or ignored it. “Cues, baseball bats, golf clubs. No law against any of them.”

“I heard someone say those guys used to be iron riders. Bike gang members.”

“Some of them used to be with a New Jersey club, some used to be with a New York club, that's…”

“Chief Bass,” Lancte interrupted, “I hardly think this is the time…

“I can't see the harm of telling him,” Bass said. “They're bums, rotten apples, hairbags. Some of them ganged together in the Hamptons back four or five years ago, when they had the bad riots. A few of them were affiliated with a bike club called the Devil's Dozen that disbanded in 1972. Stillson's ramrod is a guy named Sonny Elliman. He used to be the president of the Devil's Dozen. He's been busted half a dozen times but never convicted of anything.”

“You're wrong about that, Chief,” Lancte said, lighting a fresh cigarette. “He was cited in Washington State in 1973 for making an illegal left turn against traffic. He signed the waiver and paid a twenty-five dollar fine.”

Johnny got up and went slowly across the room to the water cooler, where he drew himself a fresh cup of water. Lancte watched him go with interest.

“So you just fainted, right?” Lancte said.

“No,” Johnny said, not turning around. “I was going to shoot him with a bazooka. Then, at the critical moment, all my bionic circuits blew.”

Lancte sighed.

Bass said, “You're free to go any time.”

“Thank you.

“But I'll tell you just the same way Mr. Lancte here would tell you. In the future, I'd stay away from Stillson rallies, if I were you. If you want to keep a whole skin, that is. Things have a way of happening to people Greg Stillson doesn't like…

“Is that so?” Johnny asked. He drank his water.

“Those are matters outside your bailiwick, Chief Bass,” Lancte said. His eyes were like hazy steel and he was looking at Bass very hard.

“All right,” Bass said mildly.

“I don't see any harm in telling you that there have been other rally incidents,” Lancte said. “In Ridgeway a young pregnant woman was beaten so badly she miscarried. This was just after the Stillson rally there that CBS filmed. She said she couldn't ID her assailant, but we feel it may have been one of Stillson's bikies. A month ago a kid, he was fourteen, got himself a fractured skull. He had a little plastic squirtgun. He couldn't ID his assailant, either. But the squirtgun makes us believe it may have been a security overreaction.”

How nicely put, Johnny thought.

“You couldn't find anyone who saw it happen?”

“Nobody who would talk. “Lancte smiled humorlessly and tapped the ash off his cigarette. “He's the people's choice.”

Johnny thought of the young guy holding his son up so that the boy could see Greg Stillson. Who the hell cares? They're just for show, anyway.

“So he's got his own pet FBI agent.”

Lancte shrugged and smiled disarmingly. “Well, what can I say? Except, FYI, it's no tit assignment, Johnny. Sometimes I get scared. The guy generates one hell of a lot of magnetism. If he pointed me out from the podium and told the crowd at one of those rallies who I was, I think they'd run me up the nearest lamppost.

Johnny thought of the crowd that afternoon, and of the pretty girl hysterically waving her chunk of watermelon. “I think you might be right,” he said.

“So if there's something you know that might help me… “Lancte leaned forward. The disarming smile had become slightly predatory. “Maybe you even had a psychic flash about him. Maybe that's what messed you up.”

“Maybe I did,” Johnny said, unsmiling.

“Well?”

For one wild moment Johnny considered telling them everything. Then he rejected it. “I saw him on TV. I had nothing in particular to do today, so I thought I'd come over here and check him out in person. I bet I wasn't the only out-of-towner who did that.”

“You sure wasn't,” Bass said vehemently.

“And that's all?” Lancte asked.

“That's all,” Johnny said, and then hesitated. “Except I think he's going to win his election.”

“We're sure he is,” Lancte said. “Unless we can get something on him. In the meantime, I'm in complete agreement with Chief Bass. Stay away from Stillson rallies.”

“Don't worry. “Johnny crumpled up his paper cup and threw it away. “It's been nice talking to you two gentle men, but I've got a long drive back to Durham.”

“Going back to Maine soon, Johnny?” Lancte asked casually.

“Don't know. “He looked from Lancte, slim and impeccable, tapping out a fresh cigarette on the blank face of his digital watch, to Bass, a big, tired man with a basset hound's face. “Do either of you think he'll run for higher office? If he gets this seat in the House of Representatives?”

“Jesus wept,” Bass muttered, and rolled his eyes.

“These guys come and go,” Lancte said. His eyes, so brown they were nearly black, had never stopped studying Johnny. “They're like one of those rare radioactive elements that are so unstable that they don't last long. Guys like Stillson have no permanent political base, just a temporary coalition that holds together for a little while and then falls apart. Did you see that crowd today? College kids and mill hands yelling for the same guy? That's not politics, that's something on the order of hula hoops or coonskin caps or Beatle wigs. He'll get his term in the House and he'll free4unch until 1978 and that'll be it. Count on it.”

But Johnny wondered.

The next day, the left side of Johnny's forehead had become very colorful. Dark purple-almost black-above the eyebrow shaded to red and then to a morbidly gay yellow at the temple and hairline. His eyelid had puffed slightly, giving him a leering sort of expression, like the second banana in a burlesque review.

He did twenty laps in the pool and then sprawled in one of the deck chairs, panting. He felt terrible. He had gotten less than four hours” sleep the night before, and all of what he had gotten had been dream-haunted.

“Hi, Johnny… how you doing, man?”

He turned around. It was Ngo, smiling gently. He was dressed in his work clothes and wearing gardening gloves. Behind him was a child's red wagon filled with small pine trees, their roots wrapped in burlap. Recalling what Ngo called the pines, he said: “I see you're planting more weeds.”

Ngo wrinkled his nose. “Sorry, yes. Mr. Chatsworth is loving them. I tell him, but they are junk trees. Every-where there are these trees in New England. His face goes like this… “Now Ngo's whole face wrinkled and he looked like a caricature. of some late show monster…… and he says to me, “Just plant them. "”

Johnny laughed. That was Roger Chatsworth, all right.

He liked things done his way. “How did you enjoy the rally?”

Ngo smiled gently. “Very instructive,” he said. There was no way to read his eyes. He might not have noticed the sunrise on the side of Johnny's face. “Yes, very instructive, we are all enjoying ourselves.”

“Good.”

“And you?”

“Not so much,” Johnny said, and touched the bruise lightly with his fingertips. It was very tender.

“Yes, too bad, you should put a beefsteak on it,” Ngo said, still smiling gently.

What did you think about him, Ngo? What did your class think? Your Polish friend? Or Ruth Chen and her sister?”

“Going back we did not talk about it, at our instructors” request. Think about what you have seen, they say. Next Tuesday we will write in class, I think. Yes, I am thinking very much that we will. A class composition.”

“What will you say in your composition?”

Ngo looked at the blue summer sky. He and the sky smiled at each other. He was a small man with the first threads of gray in his hair. Johnny knew almost nothing about him; didn't know if he had been married, had fathered children, if he had fled before the Vietcong, if he had been from Saigon or from one of the rural provinces. He had no idea what Ngo's political leanings were.

“We talked of the game of the Laughing Tiger,” Ngo said. “Do you remember?”

“Yes,” Johnny said.

“I will tell you of a real tiger. When I was a boy there was a tiger who went bad near my village. He was being le manger d'homme, eater of men, you understand, except he was not that, he was an eater of boys and girls and old women because this was during the war and there were no men to eat. Not the war you know of, but the Second World War. He had gotten the taste for human meat, this tiger. Who was there to kill such an awful creature in a humble village where the youngest man is being sixty and with only one arm, and the oldest boy is myself, only seven years of age? And one day this tiger was found in a pit that had been baited with the body of a dead woman. It is a terrible thing to bait a trap with a human being made in the image of God, I will say in my composition, but it is more terrible to do nothing while a bad tiger carries away small children. And I will say in my composition that this bad tiger was still alive when we found it. It was having a stake pushed through its body but it was still alive. We beat it to death with hoes and sticks. Old men and women and children, some children so excited and frightened they are wetting themselves in their pants. The tiger fell in the pit and we beat it to death with our hoes because the men of the village had gone to fight the Japanese. I am thinking that this Stillson is like that bad tiger with its taste for human meat. I think a trap should be made for him, and I think he should be falling into it. And if he still lives, I think he should be beaten to death.”

He smiled gently at Johnny in the clear summer sunshine.

“Do you really believe that?” Johnny asked.

“Oh, yes,” Ngo said. He spoke lightly, as if it were a matter of no consequence. “What my teacher will say when I am handing in such a composition, I don't know. “He shrugged his shoulders. “Probably he will say, “Ngo, you are not ready for the American Way.” But I will say the truth of what I feel. What did you think, Johnny?” His eyes moved to the bruise, then moved away.

“I think he's dangerous,” Johnny said. “I… I know lie's dangerous.”

“Do you?” Ngo remarked. “Yes, I believe you do know it. Your fellow New Hampshires, they see him as an engaging clown. They set him the way many of this world are seeing this black man, Idi Amin Dada. But you do not.

“No,” Johnny said. “But to suggest he should be killed…

“Politically killed,” Ngo said, smiling. “I am only suggesting he should be politically killed.”

“And if he can't be politically killed?”

Ngo smiled at Johnny. He unfolded his index finger, cocked his thumb, and then snapped it down. “Bam,” he said softly. “Bam, bam, ham.”

“No,” Johnny said, surprised at the hoarseness in his own voice. “That's never an answer. Never”

“No? I thought it was an answer you Americans used quite often. “Ngo picked up the handle of the red wagon. “I must be planting these weeds, Johnny. So long, man.

Johnny watched him go, a small man in suntans and moccasins, pulling a wagonload of baby pines. He disappeared around the corner of the house.

No. Killing only sows more dragon's teeth. I believe that. I believe it with all my heart.

On the first Tuesday in November, which happened to be the second day in the month, Johnny Smith sat slumped in the easy chair of his combined kitchen-living room and watched the election returns. Chancellor and Brinkley were featuring a large electronic map that showed the results of the presidential race in a color-code as each state came in. Now, at nearly midnight, the race between Ford and Carter looked very cl6se. But Carter would win; Johnny had no doubt of it.

Greg Stillson had also won.

His victory had been extensively covered on the local newsbreaks, but the national reporters had also taken some note of it, comparing his victory to that of James Longley, Maine's independent governor, two years before.

Chancellor said, “Late polls showing that the Republican candidate and incumbent Harrison Fisher was closing the gap were apparently in error; NBC predicts that Stilison, who campaigned in a construction worker's hard hat and on a platform that included the proposal that all pollution be sent into outer space, ended up with forty-six percent of the vote, to Fisher's thirty-one percent. In a district where the Democrats have always been poor relations, David Bowes could only poll twenty-three per-cent of the vote.”

“And so,” Brinkley said, “it's hot dog time down in New Hampshire… for the next two years, at least. “He and Chancellor grinned. A commercial came on. Johnny didn't grin. He was thinking of tigers.

The time between the Trimbull rally and election night had been busy for Johnny. His work with Chuck had continued, and Chuck continued to improve at a slow but steady pace. He had taken two summer courses, passed them both, and retained his sports eligibility. Now, with the football season just ending, it looked very much as if he would be named to the Gannett newspaper chain's All New England team. The careful, almost ritualistic visits from the college scouts had already begun, but they would have to wait another year; the decision had already been made between Chuck and his father that he would spend a year at Stovington Prep, a good private school in Vermont. Johnny thought Stovington would probably be delirious at the news. The Vermont school regularly fielded great soccer teams and dismal football teams. They would probably give him a full scholarship and a gold key to the girl's dorm in the bargain. Johnny felt that it had been the right decision. After it had been reached and the pressure on Chuck to take the SATs right away had eased off, his progress had taken another big jump.

In late September. Johnny had gone up to Pownal for the weekend and after an entire Friday night of watching his father fidget and laugh uproariously at jokes on TV that weren't particularly funny, he had asked Herb what the trouble was.

“No trouble,” Herb said, smiling nervously and rubbing his hands together like an accountant who has discovered that the company he just invested his life savings with is bankrupt. “No trouble at all, what makes you think that, son?”

“Well, what's on your mind, then?”

Herb stopped smiling, but he kept rubbing his hands together. “I don't really know how to tell you, Johnny. I mean…

“Is it Charlene?”

“Well, yes. It is.”

“You popped the question.”

Herb looked at Johnny humbly. “How do you feel about coming into a stepmother at the age of twenty-nine, John?”

Johnny grinned. “I feel fine about it. Congratulations, Dad.”

Herb” smiled, relieved. “Well, thanks. I was a little scared to tell you, I don't mind admitting it. I know what you said when we talked about it before, but people sometimes feel one way when something's maybe and another way when it's gonna be. I loved your mom, Johnny. And I guess I always will.”

“I know that, dad.”

“But I'm alone and Charlene's alone and… well, I guess we can put each other to good use.”

Johnny went over to his father and kissed him. “All the best. I know you'll have it.”

“You're a good son, Johnny. “Herb took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and swiped at his eyes with it. “We thought we'd lost you. I did, anyway. Vera never lost hope. She always believed. Johnny, I…”

“Don't, Daddy. It's over.

“I have to,” he said. “It's been in my gut like a stone for a year and a half now. I prayed for you to die, Johnny. My own son, and I prayed for God to take you. “He wiped his tears again and put his handkerchief away. “Turned out God knew a smidge more than I did. Johnny… would you stand up with me? At my wedding?”

Johnny felt something inside that was almost but not quite like sorrow. “That would be my pleasure,” he said.

“Thanks. I'm glad I've… that I've said everything that's on my mind. I feel better than I have in a long, long time.”

“Have you set a date?”

“As a matter of fact, we have. How does January 2 sound to you?”

“Sounds good,” Johnny said. “You can count on me.”

“We're going to put both places on the market, I guess,” Herb” said. “We've got our eye on a farm in Biddeford. Nice place. Twenty acres. Half of it woodlot. A new start.”

“Yes. A new start, that's good.”

“You wouldn't have any objections to us selling the home place?” Herb asked anxiously.

“A little tug,” Johnny said. “That's all.”

“Yeah, that's what I feel. A little tug. “He smiled. “Somewhere around the heart, that's where mine is. What about you?”

“About the same,” Johnny said.

“How's it going down there for you?”

“Good.”

“Your boy's getting along?”

“Amazin well,” Johnny said, using one of his father's pet expressions and grinning.

“How long do you think you'll be there?”

“Working with Chuck? I guess I'll stick with it through the school year, if they want me. Working one-on one has been a new kind of experience. I like it. And this has been a really good job. Atypically good, I'd say.”

“What are you going to do after?”

Johnny shook his head. “I don't know yet. But I know one thing.”

“What's that?”

“I'm going out for a bottle of champagne. We're going to get bombed.”

His father had stood up on that September evening and clapped him on the back. “Make it two,” he said.

He still got the occasional letter from Sarah Hazlett. She and Walt were expecting their second child in April. Johnny wrote back his congratulations and his good wishes for Walt's canvass. And he thought sometimes about his afternoon with Sarah, the long, slow afternoon.

It wasn't a memory he allowed himself to take out too often; he was afraid that constant exposure to the sunlight of recollection might cause it to wash out and fade, like the reddish-tinted proofs they used to give you of your graduation portraits.

He had gone out a few times this fall, once with the older and newly divorced sister of the girl Chuck was seeing, but nothing had developed from any of those dates.

Most of his spare time that fall he had spent in the company of Gregory Ammas Stillson.

He had become a Stillsonphile. He kept three looseleaf notebooks in his bureau under his socks and underwear and T-shirts. They were filled with notes, speculations, and Xerox copies of news items.

Doing this had made him uneasy. At night, as he wrote around the pasted-up clippings with a fine-line Pilot pen, he sometimes felt like Arthur Bremmer or the Moore woman who had tried to shoot Jerry Ford. He knew that if Edgar Lancte, Fearless Minion of the Effa Bee Eye, could see him doing this, his phone, living room, and bathroom would be tapped in a jiffy. There would be an Acme Furniture van parked across the street, only instead of being full of furniture it would be loaded with cameras and mikes and God knew what else.

He kept telling himself that he wasn't Bremmer, that Stilison wasn't an obsession, but that got harder to believe after the long afternoons at the UNH library, searching through old newspapers and magazines and feeding dimes into the photocopier. It got harder to believe on the nights he burned the midnight oil, writing out his thoughts and trying to make valid connections. It grew well-nigh impossible to believe on those graveyard-ditch three A. M. “s when he woke up sweating from the recurring nightmare.

The nightmare was nearly always the same, a naked replay of his handshake with Stillson at the Trimbull rally. The sudden blackness. The feeling of being in a tunnel filled with the glare of the onrushing headlight, a head-light bolted to some black engine of doom. The old man with the humble, frightened eyes administering an unthinkable oath of office. The nuances of feeling, coming and going like tight puffs of smoke. And a series of brief images, strung together in a flapping row like the plastic pennants over a used-car dealer's lot. His mind whispered to him that these images were all related, that they told a picture-story of a titanic approaching doom, perhaps even the Armageddon of which Vera Smith had been so endlessly confident.

But what were the images? What were they exactly? They were hazy, impossible to see except in vague outline, because there was always that puzzling blue filter between, the blue filter that was sometimes cut by those yellow markings like tiger stripes.

The only clear image in these dream-replays came near the end: the screams of the dying, the smell of the dead. And a single tiger padding through miles of twisted metal, fused glass, and scorched earth. This tiger was always laughing, and it seemed to be carrying something in its mouth-something blue and yellow and dripping blood.

There had been times in the fall when he thought that dream would send him mad. Ridiculous dream; the possibility it seemed to point to was impossible, after all. Best to drive it totally out of his mind.

But because he couldn't, he researched Gregory Still-son and tried to tell himself it was only a harmless hobby and not a dangerous obsession.

Stillson had been born in Tulsa. His father had been an oil-field roughneck who drifted from job to job, working more often than some of his colleagues because of his tremendous size. His mother might once have been pretty, although there was only a hint of that in the two pictures that Johnny had been able to unearth. If she had been, the times and the man she had been married to had dimmed her prettiness quickly. The pictures showed little more than another dustbowl face, a southeast United States depression woman who was wearing a faded print dress and holding a baby-Greg-in her scrawny arms, and squinting into the sun.

His father had been a domineering man who didn't think much of his son. As a child, Greg had been pallid and sickly. There was no evidence that his father had abused the boy either mentally or physically, but there was the suggestion that at the very least, Greg Stillson had lived in a disapproving shadow for the first nine years of his life. The one picture Johnny had of the father and son t6gether was a happy one, however; it showed them together in the oil fields, the father's arm slung around the son's neck in a careless gesture of comradeship. But it gave Johnny a little chill all the same. Harry” Stilison was dressed in working clothes, twill pants and a double-breasted khaki shirt, and his hard hat was cocked jauntily back on his head.

Greg had begun school in Tulsa, then had been switched to Oklahoma City when he was ten. The previous summer his father had been killed in an oil-derrick flameout. Mary Lou Stillson had gone to Okie City with her boy because it was where her mother lived, and where the war work was. It was 1942, and good times had come around again.

Greg's grades had been good until high school, and then he began to get into a series of scrapes. Truancy, fighting, hustling snooker downtown, maybe hustling stolen goods uptown, although that had never been proved. In 1949, when he had been a high-school junior, he had pulled a two-day suspension for putting a cherry'-bomb fire-cracker in a locker-room toilet.

In all of these confrontations with authority, Mary Lou Stillson took her son's part. The good times-at least for the likes of the Stillsons-had ended with the war work in 1945, and Mrs. Stillson seemed to think of it as a case of her and her boy against the rest of the world. Her mother had died, leaving her the small frame house and nothing else. She hustled drinks in a roughneck bar for a while, then waited table in an all-light beanery. And when her boy got in trouble, she went to bat for him, never checking (apparently) to see if his hands were dirty or clean.

The pale sickly boy that his father had nicknamed Runt was gone by 1949. As Greg Stillson's adolescence progressed, his father's physical legacy came out. The boy shot up six inches and put on seventy pounds between thirteen and seventeen. He did not play organized school sports but somehow managed to acquire a Charles Atlas bodybuilding gym and then a set of weights. The Runt became a bad guy to mess with.

Johnny guessed he must have come close to dropping out of school on dozens of occasions. He had probably avoided a bust out of sheer dumb luck. If only he had taken at least one serious bust, Johnny thought often. It would have ended all these stupid worries, because a convicted felon can't aspire to high public office.

Stillson had graduated-near the bottom of his class, it was true-in June. 1951. Grades notwithstanding, there was nothing wrong with his brains. His eye was on the main chance. He had a glib tongue and a winning manner. He worked briefly that summer as a gas jockey. Then, in August of that year, Greg Stillson had gotten Jesus at a tent-revival in Wildwood Green. He quit his job at the 76 station and went into business as a rainmaker “through the power of Jesus Christ our Lord”.

Coincidentally or otherwise, that had been one of the driest summers in Oklahoma since the days of the dust bowl. The crops were already a dead loss, and the livestock would soon follow if the shallowing wells went dry. Greg had been invited to a meeting of the local ranchers association. Johnny had found a great many stories about what had followed; it was one of the high points of Stillson's career. None of these Stories completely jibed, and Johnny could understand why. It had all the attributes of an American myth, not much different from some of the stories about Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan. That something had happened was undeniable. But the strict truth of it was already beyond reach.

One thing seemed sure. That meeting of the ranchers” association must have been one of the strangest ever held. The ranchers had invited over two dozen rainmakers from various parts of the southeast and southwest. About half of them were Negroes. Two were Indians-a half-breed Pawnee and a full-blooded Apache. There was a peyote-chewing Mexican. Greg was one of about nine white fellows, and the only home-town boy.

The ranchers heard the proposals of the rainmakers and dowsers one by one. They gradually and naturally divided themselves into two groups: those who would take half of their fee up front (nonrefundable) and those who wanted their entire fee up front (nonrefundable).

When Greg Stillson's turn came, he stood up, hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans, and was supposed to have said: “I guess you fellows know I got in the way of being able to make it rain after I gave my heart to Jesus. Before that I was deep in sin and the ways of sin. Now one of the main ways of sin is the way we've seen tonight, and you spell that kind of sinning mostly with dollar signs.”

The ranchers were interested. Even at nineteen Stillson had been something of a comic spellbinder. And he had made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Because he was a born-again Christian and because he knew that the love of money was the root of all evil, he would make it rain and afterward they could pay him whatever they thought the job had been worth.

He was hired by acclamation, and two days later he was down on his knees in the back of a flatbed farm truck, cruising slowly along the highways and byways of central Oklahoma, dressed in a black coat and a preacher's low-crowned hat, praying for rain through a pair of loudspeakers hooked up to a Delco tractor battery. People turned out by the thousands to get a look at him.

The end of the story was predictable but satisfying. The skies grew cloudy during the afternoon of Greg's second day on the job, and the next morning the rains came. The rains came for three days and two nights, flash floods killed four people. whole houses with chickens perched on the roof peaks were washed down the Greenwood River, the wells were filled, the livestock was saved, and The Oklahoma Ranchers” and Cattlemen's Association decided it probably would have happened anyway. They passed the hat for Greg at their next meeting and the young rainmaker was given the princely sum of seventeen dollars.

Greg was not put out of countenance. He used the seventeen dollars to place an ad in the Oklahoma City Herald. The ad pointed out that about the same sort of thing had happened to a certain rat-catcher in the town of Hamlin. Being a Christian, the ad went on, Greg Stillson was not in the way of taking children, and he surely knew he had no legal recourse against a group as large and powerful as the Oklahoma Ranchers” and Cattlemen's Association. But fair was fair, wasn't it? He had his elderly mother to support, and she was in failing health. The ad suggested that he had prayed his ass off for a bunch of rich, ungrateful snobs, the same sort of men that had tractored poor folks like the Joads off their land in the thirties. The ad suggested that he had saved tens of thousands of dollars” worth of livestock and had got seventeen dollars in return. Because he was a good Christian, this sort of ingratitude didn't bother him, but maybe it ought to give the good citizens of the county some pause. Right-thinking people could send contributions to Box 471. care of the Herald.

Johnny wondered how much Greg Stillson had actually received as a result of that ad. Reports varied. But that fall, Greg had been tooling around town in a brand-new Mercury. Three years” worth of back taxes were paid on the small house left to them by Mary Loil's mother. Mary Lou herself (who was not particularly sickly and no older than forty-five), blossomed out in a new raccoon coat. Stillson had apparently discovered one of the great hidden muscles of principle which move the earth: if those who receive will not pay. those who have not often will, for no good reason at all. It may be the same principle that assures the politicians there will always be enough young men to feed the war machine.

The ranchers discovered they had stuck their collection hand into a hornets” nest. When members came in town, crowds often gathered and jeered at them. They were denounced from pulpits all across the county. They found it suddenly difficult to sell the beef the rain had saved without shipping it a considerable distance.

In November of that memorable year, two young men with brass knucks on their hands and nickel-plated. 32's. in their pockets had turned up on Greg Stillson's doorstep, apparently hired by the Ranchers” and Cattlemen's Association to suggest-as strenuously as necessary-that Greg would find the climate more congenial elsewhere Both of them ended up in the hospital. One of them had a concussion. The other had lost four of his teeth was suffering a rupture. Both had been found on corner of Greg Stillson's block, sans pants. Their brass knucks bad been inserted in an anatomical location most commonly associated with sitting down, and in case of one of these two young men, minor surgery was necessary to remove the foreign objects.

The Association cried off. At a meeting in early December, an appropriation of $700 was made from its fund, and a check in that amount was forwarded to Stillson.

He got what he wanted.

In 1953 he and his mother moved to Nebraska. The rainmaking business had gone bad, and there were some who said the pool-hall hustling had also gone bad. Whatever the reason for moving, they turned up in Omaha where Greg opened a house-painting business that bust two years later. He did better as a salesman for TruthWay Bible Company of America. He crisscrossed the cornbelt, taking dinner with hundreds of hard working, God-fearing farm families, telling the story his conversion and selling Bibles, plaques, luminous Jesuses, hymn books, records; tracts, and a rabidly right-wing paperback called America the TruthWay:

Communist-Jewish Conspiracy Against Our United States

In 1957 the aging Mercury was replaced with a brand-new Ford ranch wagon.

In 1958 Mary Lou Stillson died of cancer, and late that year Greg Stillson got out of the born-again Bible business and drifted east. He spent a year in New York City before moving upstate to Albany. His year in New York been devoted to an effort at cracking the acting business. It was one of the few jobs (along with house painting) that he hadn't been able to turn a buck at. But probably not from lack of talent, Johnny thought cynically.

Albany he had gone to work for Prudential, and he stayed in the capital city until 1965. As an insurance salesman he was an aimless sort of success. There was no offer to join the company at the executive level, no outbursts of Christian fervor. During that five-year period, the brash and brassy Greg Stillson of yore seemed to have gone into hibernation. In all of his checkered career, the woman in his life had been his mother. He had never married, had not even dated regularly as far as Johnny had been able to find out.

In 1965, Prudential had offered him a position in Ridgeway, New Hampshire, and Greg had taken it. At about the same time, his period of hibernation seemed to end. The go-go Sixties were gathering steam. It was the era of the short skirt and do your own thing. Greg became active in Ridgeway community affairs. He joined the chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club. He got state-wide coverage in 1967, during a controversy over the parking meters downtown. For six years, various factions had been wrangling over them. Greg suggested that if the meters be taken out and that collection boxes be put up in their stead. Let people pay what they want. some people had said that was the craziest idea they had ever heard. Well, Greg responded, you might just be surprised. Yes sir. He was persuasive. The town finally adopted the proposal on a provisional basis, and the ensuing flood of nickels and dimes had surprised everyone but Greg. He had discovered the principle years ago.

In 1969 he made New Hampshire news again when he suggested, in a long and carefully worked-out letter to the Ridgeway newspaper, that drug offenders be put to work on town public works projects such as parks and bike paths, even weeding the grass on the traffic islands. That's the craziest idea I ever heard, many said. Well, Greg responded, try her out and if she don't work, chuck her. The town tried it out. One pothead reorganized the en-tire town library from the outmoded Dewey decimal system to the more modern Library of Congress cataloguing system, at no charge to the town. A number of hippies busted at an hallucinogenic house party relandscaped the town park into an area showplace, complete with duckpond and a playground scientifically designed to maximize effective playtime and minimize danger. As Greg pointed out, most of these drug-users got interested in all those chemicals in college, but that was no reason why they shouldn't utilize all the other things they had learned in college.

At the same time Greg was revolutionizing his adopted home town's parking regulations and its handling of drug offenders, he was writing letters to the Manchester Union-Leader, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times, espousing hawkish positions on the war in Vietnam, mandatory felony sentences for heroin addicts, and a return to the death penalty, especially for heroin pushers. In his campaign for the House of Representatives, he had claimed on several occasions to have been against the war from 1970 on, but the man's own published statements made that a flat lie.

In 1970, Greg Stillson had opened his own insurance and realty company. He was a great success. In 1973 he and three other businessmen had financed and built a shopping mall on the outskirts of Capital City, the county seat of the district he now represented. That was the year of the Arabian oil boycott, also the year Greg started driving a Lincoln Continental. It was also the year he ran for mayor of Ridgeway.

The mayor enjoyed a two-year term, and two years before, in 1971, he had been asked by both the Republicans and Democrats of the largish (population 8,500) New England town to run. He had declined both of them with smiling thanks. In “78 he ran as an independent, taking on a fairly popular Republican who was vulnerable because of his fervent support of President Nixon, and a Democratic figurehead. He donned his construction helmet for the first time. His campaign slogan was Let's Build A Better Ridgeway! He won in a landslide. A year later, in New Hampshire's sister state of Maine, the voters turned away from both the Democrat, George Mitchell, and the Republican, James Erwin, and elected an insurance man from Lewiston named James Longley their governor.

The lesson had not been lost on Gregory Ammas Stillson.

Around the Xerox clippings were Johnny's notes and the questions he regularly asked himself. He had been over his chain of reasoning so often that now, as Chancellor and Brinkley continued to chronicle the election results, he could have spouted the whole thing word for word.

First, Greg Stillson shouldn't have been able to get elected. His campaign promises were, by and large, jokes. His background was all wrong. His education was all wrong. It stopped at the twelfth-grade level, and, until 1965, he had been little more than a drifter. In a country where the voters have decided that the lawyers should make the laws, Stillson's only brushes with that force had been from the wrong side. He wasn't married. And his personal history was decidedly freaky.

Second, the press had left him almost completely-and very puzzlingly-alone. In an election year when Wilbur Mills had admitted to a mistress, when Wayne Hays had been dislodged from his barnacle-encrusted House seat because of his, when even those in the houses of the mighty had not been immune from the rough-and-ready frisking of the press, the reporters should have had a field day with Stillson. His colorful, controversial personality seemed to stir only amused admiration from the national press, and he seemed to make no one except maybe Johnny Smith-nervous. His bodyguards had been Harley-Davidson beach-hoppers only a few years ago, and people had a way of getting hurt at Stillson rallies, but no investigative reporter had done an indepth study of that. At a campaign rally in Capital City-at that same mall Stillson had had a hand in developing-an eight. yearold girl had suffered a broken arm and a dislocated neck; her mother swore hysterically that one of those “motorcycle maniacs” had pushed her from the stage when the girl tried to climb up on the podium and get the Great Man's signature for her autograph book. Yet there had only been a squib in the paper-Girl Hurt at Stillson Rally-quickly forgotten.

Stillson had made a financial disclosure that Johnny thought too good to be true. In 1975 Stillson had paid $11,000 in Federal taxes on an income of $36,000-no state income tax at all, of course; New Hampshire didn't have one. He claimed all of his income came from his insurance and real estate agency, plus a small pittance that was his salary as mayor. There was no mention of the lucrative Capital City mall. No explanation of the fact that Stillson lived in a house with an assessed value of $86,000, a house he owned free and clear. In a season when the president of the United States was being dunned over what amounted to greens fees, Stillson's weird financial disclosure statement raised zero eye brows.

Then there was his record as mayor. His performance on the job was a lot better than his campaign performances would have led anyone to expect. He was a shrewd and canny man with a rough but accurate grasp of human, corporate, and political psychology. He had wound up his term in 1975 with a fiscal surplus for the first time in ten years, much to the delight of the taxpayers. He pointed with justifiable pride to his parking program and what he called his Hippie Work-Study Program. Ridgeway had also been one of the first towns in the whole country to organize a Bicentennial Committee. A company that made filing cabinets had located in Ridgeway, and in recessionary times, the unemployment rate locally was an enviable 3. 2 percent. All very admirable.

It was some of the other things that had happened while Stillson was mayor that made Johnny feel scared.

Funds for the town library had been cut from $11,500 to $8,000, and then, in the last year of Stilison's term, to $6,500. At the same time, the municipal police appropriation had risen by forty percent. Three new police cruisers had been added to the town motor pool, and a collection of riot equipment Two new officers had also been added, and the town council had agreed, at Stillson's urging, to institute a 50/50 policy on purchasing officers” personal sidearms. As a result, several of the cops in this sleepy New England town had gone out and bought. 357 Magnums, the gun immortalized by Dirty Harry Callahan. Also during Stillson's term as mayor, the teen rec center had been closed, a supposedly voluntary but police-enforced ten o'clock curfew for people under sixteen had been instituted, and welfare had been cut by thirty-five percent.

Yes, there were lots of things about Greg Stillson that scared Johnny.

The domineering father and laxly approving mother. The political rallies that felt more like rock concerts. The man's way with a crowd, his bodyguards -Ever since Sinclair Lewis people had been crying woe and doom and beware of the fascist state in America, and it just didn't happen. Well, there had been Huey Long down there in Louisiana, but Huey Long had -

Had been assassinated.

Johnny closed his eyes and saw Ngo cocking his finger. Bam, bam, bam. Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night. What fearful hand or eye -But you don't sow dragon's teeth. Not unless you want to get right down there with Frank Dodd in his hooded vinyl raincoat. With the Oswalds and the Sirhans and the Bremmers. Crazies of the world, unite. Keep your paranoid notebooks up-to-date and thumb them over at midnight and when things start to reach a head inside you, send away the coupon for the mail-order gun. Johnny Smith, meet Squeaky Fromme, Nice to meet you, Johnny, everything you've got in that notebook makes perfect sense to me. Want you to meet my spiritual master. Johnny, meet Charlie. Charlie, this is Johnny. When you finish with Stillson, we're going to get off together and off the rest of the pigs so we can save the redwoods.

His head was swirling. The inevitable headache was coming on. It always led to this. Greg Stilison always led him to this. It was time to go to sleep and please God, no dreams.

Still: The Question.

He had written it in one of the notebooks and kept coming back to it. He had written it in neat letters and then had drawn a triple circle around it, as if to keep it in. The Question was this: If you could jump into a time machine and go back to 1932, would you kill Hitler?

Johnny looked at his watch. Quarter of one. It was November 3 now, and the Bicentennial election was a part of history. Ohio was still undecided, but Carter was leading. No contest, baby. The hurly burly's done, the election's lost and won. Jerry Ford could hang up his jock, at least until 1980.

Johnny went to the window and looked out. The big house was dark, but there was a light burning in Ngo's apartment over the garage. Ngo, who would shortly be an American citizen, was still watching the great American quadrennial ritual: Old Bums Exit There, New Bums Enter Here. Maybe Gordon Strachan hadn't given the Watergate Committee such a bad answer at that Johnny went to bed. After a long time he slept.

And dreamed of the laughing tiger.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Herb Smith took Charlene MacKenzie as his second wife on the afternoon of January 2, 1977, just as planned. The ceremony took place in the Congregational Church at Southwest Bend. The bride's father, an eighty-year-old gentleman who was almost blind, gave her away. Johnny stood up with his dad and produced the ring flawlessly at the proper moment. It was a lovely occasion.

Sarah Hazlett attended with her husband and their son, who was leaving his babyhood behind now. Sarah was pregnant and radiant, a picture of happiness and fulfilment. Looking at her, Johnny was surprised by a stab of bitter jealousy like an unexpected attack of gas. After a few moments it went away, and Johnny went over and spoke to them at the reception following the wedding.

It was the first time he had met Sarah's husband. He was a tall, good-looking man with a pencil-line moustache and prematurely graying hair. His canvass for the Maine state senate had been successful, and he held forth on what the national elections had really meant, and the difficulties of working with an independent governor, while Denny pulled at the leg of his trousers and demanded more drink, Daddy, more drink, more-drink!

Sarah said little, but Johnny felt her brilliant eyes on him-an uncomfortable sensation, but somehow not unpleasant. A little sad, maybe.

The liquor at the reception flowed freely, and Johnny went two drinks beyond his usual two drink stopping point-the shock of seeing Sarah again, maybe, this time with her family, or maybe only the realization, written on Charlene's radiant face, that Vera Smith really was gone, and for all time. So when he approached Hector MacKenzie, father of the bride, some fifteen minutes after the Hazletts had left, he had a pleasant buzz on.

The old man was sitting in the corner by the demolished remains of the wedding cake, his arthritis-gnarled hands folded over his cane. He was wearing dark glasses. One bow had been mended with black electrician's tape. Beside him there stood two empty bottles of beer and another that was half-full. He peered closely at Johnny.

“Herb's boy, ain't you?”

“Yes, sir.

A longer scrutiny. Then Hector MacKenzie said, “Boy, you don't look well.”

“Too many late nights, I guess.”

“Look like you need a tonic. Something to build you up.”

“You were in World War I, weren't you?” Johnny asked. A number of medals, including a Croix de Guerre, were pinned to the old man's blue serge suit coat.

“Indeed I was,” MacKenzie said, brightening. “Served under Black Jack Pershing. AEF, 1917 and 18. We went through the mud and the crud. The wind blew and the shit flew. Belleau Wood, my boy. Belleau Wood. It's just a name in the history books now. But I was there. I saw men die there. The wind blew and the shit flew and up from the trenches came the whole damn crew.

“And Charlene said that your boy… her brother.,.”

“Buddy. Yep. Would have been your stepuncle, boy. Did we love that boy? I guess we did, His name was Joe, but everyone called him Buddy almost from the day he was born. Charlie's mother started to die the day the telegram came.”

“Killed in the war, wasn't he?”

“Yes, he was,” the old man said slowly. “St. Lo, 1944. Not that far from Belleau Wood, not the way we measure things over here, anyway. They ended Buddy's life with a bullet. The Nazis.”

“I'm working on an essay,” Johnny said, feeling a certain drunken cunning at having brought the conversation around to his real object at last, “I'm hoping to sell it to the Atlantic or maybe Harper's.,.”

“Writer, are you?” The dark glasses glinted up at Johnny with renewed interest.

“Well, I'm trying,” Johnny said. Already he was beginning to regret his glibness. Yes, I'm a writer, I write in my notebooks, after the dark of night has fallen. “Anyway, the essay's going to be about Hitler,”

“Hitler? What about Hitler?”

“Well… suppose… just suppose you could hop into a time machine and go back to the year 1932. In Germany. And suppose you came across Hitler. Would you kill him or let him live?”

The old man's blank black glasses tilted slowly up to Johnny's face, And now Johnny didn't feel drunk or glib or clever at all. Everything seemed to depend on what this old man had to say.

“Is it a joke, boy?”

“No. No joke.”

One of Hector MacKenzie's hands left the head of his cane. It went to the pocket of his suit pants and fumbled there for what seemed an eternity. At last it came out again. It was holding a bone-handled pocket knife that had been rubbed as smooth and mellow as old ivory over the course of years. The other hand came into play, folding the knife's one blade out with all the incredible delicacy of arthritis. It glimmered with bland wickedness under the light of the Congregational parish hall: a knife that had traveled to France in 1917 with a boy, a boy who had been part of a boy-army ready and willing to stop the dirty hun from bayoneting babies and raping nuns, ready to show the Frenchies a thing or two in the bargain; and the boys had been machine-gunned, the boys had gotten dysentery and the killer flu, the boys had inhaled mustard gas and phosgene gas, the boys had come out of Belleau Wood looking like haunted scarecrows who had seen the face of Lord Satan himself. And it had all turned out to be for nothing; it turned out that it all had to be done over again, Somewhere music was playing. People were laughing. People were dancing. A flashbar popped warm light. Somewhere far away. Johnny stared at the naked blade, transfixed, hypnotized by the play of the light over its honed edge.

“See this?” MacKenzie asked softly.

“Yes,” Johnny breathed.

“I'd seat this in his black, lying, murderer's heart,” MacKenzie said. “I'd put her in as far as she'd go… and then I'd twist her. “He twisted the knife slowly in his hand, first clock, then counterclock. He smiled, showing baby-smooth gums and one leaning yellow tooth.

“But first,” he said, “I'd coat the blade with rat poison.”

“Kill Hitler?” Roger Chatsworth said, his breath coming out in little puffs. The two of them were snowshoeing in the woods behind the Durham house. The woods were very silent. It was early March, but this day was as smoothly and coldly silent as deep January.

“Yes, that's right.”

“Interesting question,” Roger said. “Pointless, but interesting. No. I wouldn't. I think I'd join the party instead. Try to change things from within. It might have been possible to purge him or frame him, always granting the foreknowledge of what was going to happen.”

Johnny thought of the sawedoff pool cues. He thought of the brilliant green eyes of Sonny Elliman.

“It might also be possible to get yourself killed!” he said. “Those guys were doing more than singing beer-hall songs back in 1933.”

“Yes, that's true enough. “He cocked an eyebrow at Johnny. “What would you do?”

“I really don't know,” Johnny said.

Roger dismissed the subject. “How did your dad and his wife enjoy their honeymoon?”

Johnny grinned. They had gone to Miami Beach, hotel-workers” strike and all. “Charlene said she felt right at home, making her own bed. My dad says he feels like a freak, sporting a sunburn in March. But I think they both enjoyed it.”

“And they've sold the houses?”

“Yes, both on the same day. Got almost what they wanted, too. Now if it wasn't for the goddam medical bills still hanging over my head, it'd be plain sailing.”

“Johnny…

“Hmmm?”

“Nothing. Let's go back. I've got some Chivas Regal, if you've got a taste.”

“I believe I do,” Johnny said.

They were reading Jude the Obscure now, and Johnny had been surprised at how quickly and naturally Chuck had taken to it (after some moaning and groaning over the first forty pages or so). He confessed he had been reading ahead at night on his own, and he intended to try something else by Hardy when he finished. For the first time in his life he was reading for pleasure. And like a boy who has just been initiated into the pleasures of sex by an older woman, he was wallowing in it.

Now the book lay open but facedown in his lap. They were by the pool again, but it was still drained and both he and Johnny were wearing light jackets. Overhead, mild white clouds scudded across the sky, trying desultorily to coalesce enough to make rain. The feel of the air was mysterious and sweet; spring was somewhere near. It was April 16.

“Is this one of those trick questions?” Chuck asked.

“Nope.”

“Well, would they catch me?”

“Pardon?” That was a question none of the others had asked.

“If I killed him. Would they catch me? Hang me from a lamppost? Make me do the funky chicken six inches off the ground?”

“Well; I don't know,” Johnny said slowly. “Yes, I suppose they would catch you.”

“I don't get to escape in my time machine to a gloriously changed world, huh? Back to good old 1977?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Well, it wouldn't matter. I'd kill him anyway.”

“Just like that?”

“Sure. “Chuck smiled a little. “I'd rig myself up with one of those hollow teeth filled with quick-acting poison or a razor blade in my shirt collar or something like that. So if I did get caught they couldn't do anything too gross to me. But I'd do it. If I didn't, I'd be afraid all those millions of people he ended up killing would haunt me to my grave.”

“To your grave,” Johnny said a little sickly.

“Are you okay, Johnny?”

Johnny made himself return Chuck's smile. “Fine. I guess my heart just missed a beat or something.”

Chuck went on with Jude under the milky cloudy sky.

May.

The smell of cut grass was back for yet another return engagement-also those long-running favorites, honey. suckle, dust, and roses. In New England spring really only comes for one priceless week and then the deejays drag out the Beach Boys golden oldies, the buzz of the cruising Honda is heard throughout the land, and summer comes down with a hot thud.

On one of the last evenings of that priceless spring week, Johnny sat in the guest house, looking out into the night. The spring dark was soft and deep. Chuck was off at the senior prom with his current girl friend, a more intellectual type than the last half-dozen. She reads, Chuck had confided to Johnny, one man of the world to another.

Ngo was gone. He had gotten his citizenship papers in late March, had applied for a job as head groundskeeper at a North Carolina resort hotel in April had gone down for an interview three weeks ago, and had been hired on the spot. Before he left, he had come to see Johnny.

“You worry too much about tigers that are not there, I think,” he said. “The tiger has stripes that will fade into the background so he will not be seen. This makes the worried man see tigers everywhere.”

“There's a tiger,” Johnny had answered.

“Yes,” Ngo agreed. “Somewhere. In the meantime, you grow thin.”

Johnny got up, went to the fridge, and poured himself a Pepsi. He went outside with it to the little deck. He sat down and sipped his drink and thought how lucky everyone was that time travel was a complete impossibility. The moon came up, an orange eye above the pines, and beat a bloody path across the swimming pool. The first frogs croaked and thumped. After a little while Johnny went inside and poured a hefty dollop of Ron Rico into his Pepsi. He went back outside and sat down again, drinking and watching as the moon rose higher in the sky, changing slowly from orange to mystic, silent silver.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

On June the 23rd, 1977, Chuck graduated from high school. Johnny, dressed in his best suit, sat in the hot auditorium with Roger and Shelley Chatsworth and watched as he graduated forty-third in his class. Shelley cried.

Afterward, there was a lawn party at the Chatsworth home. The day was hot and humid. Thunderheads with purple bellies had formed in the west; they dragged slowly back and forth across the horizon, but seemed to come no closer. Chuck, flushed with three screwdrivers, came over with his girl friend, Patty Strachan, to show Johnny his graduation present from his parents-a new Pulsar watch.

“I told them I wanted that R2D2 robot, but this was the best they could do,” Chuck said, and Johnny laughed.

They talked a while longer and then Chuck said with almost rough abruptness: “I want to thank you, Johnny. If it hadn't been for you, I wouldn't be graduating today at all.”

“No, that isn't true,” Johnny said. He was a little alarmed to see that Chuck was on the verge of tears. “Class always tells, man.

“That's what I keep telling him,” Chuck's girl said. Behind her glasses, a cool and elegant beauty was waiting to come out.

“Maybe,” Chuck said. “Maybe it does. But I think I know which side my diploma is buttered on. Thanks a hell of a lot. “He put his arms around Johnny and gave him a hug.

It came suddenly-a hard, bright bolt of image that made Johnny straighten up and dap his hand against the side of his head as if Chuck had struck him instead of hugging him. The image sank into his mind like a picture done by electroplate.

“No,” he said. “No way. You two stay right away from there.”

Chuck drew back uneasily. He had felt something. Something cold and dark and incomprehensible. Suddenly he didn't want to touch Johnny; at that moment he never wanted to touch Johnny again. It was as if he had found out what it would be like to lie in his own coffin and watch the lid nailed down.

“Johnny,” he said, and then faltered. “What's what's

Roger had been on his way over with drinks, and now he paused, puzzled. Johnny was looking over Chuck's shoulder, at the distant thunderheads. His eyes were vague and hazy.

He said: “You want to stay away from that place. There are no lightning rods.”

“Johnny… “Chuck looked at his father, frightened. “It's like he's having some kind of… fit, or something.”

“Lightning,” Johnny proclaimed in a carrying voice. People turned their heads to look at him. He spread his hands. “Flash fire. The insulation in the walls. The doors… jammed. Burning people smell like hot pork.”

“What's he talking about?” Chuck's girl cried, and conversation trickled to a halt. Now everyone was looking at Johnny, as they balanced plates of food and glasses.

Roger stepped over. “John! Johnny I What's wrong? Wake up!” He snapped his fingers in front of Johnny's vague eyes. Thunder muttered in the west, the voice of giants over gin rummy. perhaps. “What's wrong?”

Johnny's voice was clear and moderately loud, carrying to each of the fifty-some people who were there-businessmen and their wives, professors and their wives, Durham's upper middle class. “Keep your son home tonight or he's going to burn to death with the rest of them. There is going to be a fire, a terrible fire. Keep him away from Cathy's. It's going to be struck by lightning and it will burn flat before the first fire engine can arrive. The insulation will burn. They will find charred bodies six and seven deep in the exits and there will be no way to identify them except by their dental work. It… it…,

Patty Strachan screamed then, her hand going to her mouth, her plastic glass tumbling to the lawn, the ice cubes spilling out onto the grass and gleaming there like diamonds of improbable size. She stood swaying for a moment and then she fainted. going down in a pastel billow of party dress, and her mother ran forward, crying at Johnny as she passed: “What's wrong with you? What in God's name is wrong with you?”

Chuck stared at Johnny. His face was paper-white.

Johnny's eyes began to clear. He looked around at the staring knots of people. “I'm sorry,” he muttered.

Patty's mother was on her knees, holding her daughter's head in her arms and patting her cheeks lightly. The girl began to stir and moan.

“Johnny?” Chuck whispered, and then, without waiting for an answer, went to his girl.

It was very still on the Chatsworth back lawn. Everyone was looking at him. They were looking at him because it had happened again. They were looking at him the way the nurses had. And the reporters. They were crows strung out on a telephone line. They were holding their drinks and their plates of potato salad and looking at him as if he were a bug, a freak. They were looking at him as if he had suddenly opened his pants and exposed himself to them.

He wanted to run, he wanted to hide. He wanted to puke.

“Johnny,” Roger said, putting an arm around him. “Come on in the house. You need to get off your feet for…

Thunder rumbled, far off.

“What's Cathy's?” Johnny said harshly, resisting the pressure of Roger's arm over his shoulders. “It isn't someone's house, because there were exit signs. What is it? Where is it?”

“Can't you get him out of here?” Patty's mother nearly screamed. “He's upsetting her all over again!”

“Come on, Johnny.”

“But…”

“Come on.”

He allowed himself to be led away toward the guest house. The sound of their shoes on the gravel drive was very loud. There seemed to be no other sound. They got as far as the pool, and then the whispering began behind them.

“Where's Cathy's?” Johnny asked again.

“How come you don't know?” Roger asked. “You seemed to know everything else. You scared poor Patty Strachan into a faint.”

“I can't see it. It's in the dead zone. What is it?”

“Let's get you upstairs first.”

“I'm not sick!”

“Under strain, then,” Roger said. He spoke softly and soothingly, the way people speak to the hopelessly mad. The sound of his voice made Johnny afraid. And the headache started to come. He willed it back savagely. They went up the stairs to the guest house.

“Feel any better?” Roger asked.

“What's Cathy's?”

“It's a very fancy steakhouse and lounge in Somersworth. Graduation parties at Cathy's are something of a tradition. God knows why. Sure you don't want these aspirin?”

“No. Don't let him go, Roger. It's going to be hit by lightning. It's going to burn flat.”

“Johnny,” Roger Chatsworth said, slowly and very kindly, “you can't know a thing like that.”

Johnny drank ice water a small sip at a time and set the glass back down with a hand that shook slightly. “You said you checked into my background. I thought…”

“Yes, I did. But you're drawing a mistaken conclusion. I knew you were supposed to be a psychic or something, but I didn't want a psychic. I wanted a tutor. You've done a fine job as a tutor. My personal belief is that there isn't any difference between good psychics and bad ones, because I don't believe in any of that business. It's as simple as that. I don't believe it.”

“That makes me a liar, then.”

“Not at all,” Roger said in that same kind, low voice. “I have a foreman at the mill in Sussex who won't light three on a match, but that doesn't make him a bad foreman. I have friends who are devoutly religious, and although I don't go to church myself, they're still my friends. Your belief that you can see into the future or sight things at a distance never entered into my judgment of whether or not to hire…… that isn't quite true. It never entered into it once I'd decided that it wouldn't interfere with your ability to do a good job with Chuck. It hasn't. But I no more believe that Cathy's is going to burn down tonight than I believe the moon is green cheese.”

“I'm not a liar, just crazy,” Johnny said. In a dull sort of way, it was interesting. Roger Dussault and many of the people who wrote Johnny letters had accused him of trickery, but Chatsworth was the first to accuse him of having a Jeanne d'Arc complex.

“Not that, either,” Roger said. “You're a young man who was involved in a terrible accident and who has fought his way back against terrible odds at what has probably been a terrible price. That isn't a thing I'd ever flap my jaw about freely, Johnny, but if any of those people out there on the lawn-including Patty's mother-want to jump to a lot of stupid conclusions they'll be invited to shut their mouths about things they don't understand.”

“Cathy's,” Johnny said suddenly. “How did I know the name, then? And how did I know it wasn't someone's house?”

“From Chuck. He's talked about the party a lot this week.”

“Not to me.”

Roger shrugged. “Maybe he said something to Shelley or me while you were in earshot. Your subconscious happened to pick it up and file it away…

“That's right,” Johnny said bitterly. “Anything we don't understand, anything that doesn't fit into our scheme of the way things are, we'll just file it under S for subconscious, right? The twentieth-century god. How many times have you done that when something ran counter to your pragmatic view of the world, Roger?”

Roger's eyes might have flickered a little-or it might have been imagination.

“You associated lightning with the thunderstorm that's coming,” he said. “Don't you see that? It's perfectly sim. -.

“Listen,” Johnny said. “I'm telling you this as simply as I can. That place is going to be struck by lightning. It's going to burn down. Keep Chuck home.”

Ah, God, the headache was coming for him. Coming like a tiger. He put his hand to his forehead and rubbed it unsteadily.

“Johnny, you've been pushing much too hard.”

“Keep him home,” Johnny repeated.

“It's his decision, and I wouldn't presume to make it for him. He's free, white, and eighteen.”

There was a tap at the door. “Johnny?”

“Come in,” Johnny said, and Chuck himself came in. He looked worried.

“How are you?” Chuck asked.

“I'm all right,” Johnny said. “I've got a headache, that's all. Chuck… please stay away from that place tonight. I'm asking you as a friend. Whether you think like your dad or not. Please.”

“No problem, man,” Chuck said cheerfully, and whumped down on the sofa. He hooked a hassock over with one foot. “Couldn't drag Patty within a mile of that place with a twenty-foot towin chain. You put a scare into her.”

“I'm sorry,” Johnny said. He felt sick and chilly with relief. “I'm sorry but I'm glad.”

“You had some kind of a flash, didn't you?” Chuck looked at Johnny, then at his father, and then slowly back to Johnny. “I felt it. It was bad.”

“Sometimes people do. I understand it's sort of nasty.”

“Well, I wouldn't want it to happen again,” Chuck said. “But hey… that place isn't really going to burn down, is it?”

“Yes,” Johnny said. “You want to just keep away.”

“But… “He looked at his father, troubled. “The senior class reserved the whole damn place. The school encourages that, you know. It's safer than twenty or thirty different parties and a lot of people drinking on the back roads: There's apt to be… “Chuck fell silent for a moment and then began to look frightened. “There's apt to be two hundred couples there,” he said. “Dad…”

“I don't think he believes any of this,” Johnny said.

Roger stood up and smiled. “Well, let's take a ride over to Somersworth and talk to the manager of the place,” he said. “It was a dull lawn party, anyway. And if you two still feel the same coming back, we can have everyone over here tonight.”

He glanced at Johnny.

“Only condition being that you have to stay sober and help chaperon, fellow.”

“I'll be glad to,” Johnny said. “But why, if you don't believe it?”

“For your peace of mind,” Roger said, “and for Chuck's And so that, when nothing happens tonight, I can say I told you so and then just laaaugh my ass off.”

“Well, whatever, thanks. “He was trembling worse than ever now that the relief had come, but his headache had retreated to a dull throb.

“One thing up front, though,” Roger said. “I don't think we stand a snowball's chance in hell of getting the owner to cancel on your unsubstantiated word, Johnny. This is probably one of his big business nights each year.”

Chuck said, “Well, we could work something out…”

“Like what?”

“Well, we could tell him a…… spin some kind of yarn…

“Lie, you mean? No, I won't do that. Don't ask me, Chuck.”

Chuck nodded. “All right.”

“We better get going,” Roger said briskly. “It's quarter of five. We'll take the Mercedes over to Somersworth.”

Bruce Carrick, the owner-manager, was tending bar when the three of them came in at five-forty. Johnny's heart sank a little when he read the sign posted outside the lounge doors: PRIVATE PARTY THIS EVENING ONLY 7 PM TO CLOSING SEE YOU TOMORROW.

Carrick was not exactly being run into the ground. He was serving a few workmen who were drinking beer and watching the early news, and three couples who were having cocktails. He listened to Johnny's story with a face that grew ever more incredulous. When he had finished, Carrick said: “You say Smith's your name?”

“Yes, that's right.”

“Mr. Smith, come on over to this window with me.”

He led Johnny to the lobby window, by the cloakroom door.

“Look out there, Mr. Smith, and tell me what you see.

Johnny looked out, knowing what he would see. Route 9 ran west, now drying from a light afternoon sprinkle. Above, the sky was perfectly clear. The thunderheads had passed.

“Not much. At least, not now. But…

“But nothing. “Bruce Carrick said. “You know what I think? You want to know frankly? I think you're a nut. Why you picked me for this royal screwing I don't know or care. But if you got a second, sonny, I'll tell you the facts of life. The senior class has paid me six hundred and fifty bucks for this bash. They've hired a pretty good rock “n roll band, Oak, from up in Maine. The food's out there in the freezer, all ready to go into the microwave. The salads are on ice. Drinks are extra, and most of these kids are over eighteen and can drink all they want… and tonight they will, who can blame them, you only graduate from a high school once. I'll take in two thousand dollars in the lounge tonight, no sweat. I got two extra barmen coming in. I got six waitresses and a hostess. If I should cancel this thing now, I lose the whole night. plus I got to pay back the six-fifty I already took for the meal. I don't even get my regular dinner crowd because that sign's been there all week. Do you get the picture?”

“Are there lightning rods on this place?” Johnny asked.

Carrick threw his hands up. “I tell this guy the facts of life and he wants to discuss lightning rods! Yeah, I got lightning rods! A guy came in here, before I added on, must be five years ago now. He gave me a song-and-dance about improving my insurance rates. So I bought the goddam lightning rods! Are you happy? Jesus Christ!” He looked at Roger and Chuck. “What are you two guys doing? Why are you letting this asshole run around loose? Get out, why don't you? I got a business to run.

“Johnny… “Chuck began.

“Never mind,” Roger said. “Let's go. Thank you for your time, Mr. Carrick, and for your polite and sympathetic attention.”

“Thanks for nothing,” Carrick said. “Bunch of nuts!” He strode back toward the lounge.

The three of them went out. Chuck looked doubtfully at the flawless sky. Johnny started toward the car, looking only at his feet, feeling stupid and defeated. His headache thudded sickly against his temples. Roger was standing with his hands in his back pockets, looking up at the long, low roof of the building.

“What are you looking at, Dad?” Chuck asked.

“There are no lightning rods up there,” Roger Chatsworth said thoughtfully. “No lightning rods at all.”

The three of them sat in the living room of the big house, Chuck by the telephone. He looked doubtfully at his father. “Most of them won't want to change their plans this late,” he said.

“They've got plans to go out, that's all,” Roger said. “They can just as easily come here.”

Chuck shrugged and began dialing.

They ended up with about half the couples who had been planning to go to Cathy's that graduation evening, and Johnny was never really sure why they came. Some probably came simply because it sounded like a more interesting party and because the drinks were on the house. But word traveled fast, and the parents of a good many of the kids here had been at the lawn party that afternoon-as a result, Johnny spent much of the evening feeling like an exhibit in a glass case. Roger sat in the corner on a stool, drinking a vodka martini. His face was a studied mask.

Around quarter of eight he walked across the big bar/ playroom combination that took up three-quarters of the basement level, bent close to Johnny and bellowed over the roar of Elton John, “You want to go upstairs and play some cribbage?”

Johnny nodded gratefully.

Shelley was in the kitchen, writing letters. She looked up when they came in, and smiled. “I thought you two masochists were going to stay down there all night. It's not really necessary, you know.”

“I'm sorry about all of this,” Johnny said. “I know how crazy it must seem.”

“It does seem crazy,” Shelley said. “No reason not to be candid about that. But having them here is really rather nice. I don't mind.”

Thunder rumbled outside. Johnny looked around. Shelley saw it and smiled a little. Roger had left to hunt for the cribbage board in the dining room welsh dresser.

“It's just passing over, you know,” she said. “A little thunder and a sprinkle of rain.”

“Yes,” Johnny said.

She signed her letter in a comfortable sprawl, folded it, sealed it, addressed it, stamped it. “You really experienced something, didn't you, Johnny?”

“Yes.”

“A momentary faintness,” she said. “Possibly caused by a dietary deficiency. You're much too thin, Johnny. It might have been a hallucination, mightn't it?”

“No, I don't think so.”

Outside, thunder growled again, but distantly. “I'm just as glad to have him home. I don't believe in astrology and palmistry and clairvoyance and all of that, but… I'm just as glad to have him home. He's our only chick… a pretty damned big chick now, I suspect you re thinking, but it's easy to remember him riding the little kids” merry-go-round in the town park in his short pants. Too easy, perhaps. And it's nice to be able to share the the last rite of his boyhood with him.”

“It's nice that you feel that way,” Johnny said. Suddenly he was frightened to find himself close to tears. In the last six or eight months it seemed to him that his emotional control had slipped several notches.

“You've been good for Chuck. I don't mean just teaching him to read. In a lot of ways.”

“I like Chuck.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I know you do.”

Roger came back with the cribbage board and a transistor radio tuned to WMTQ, a classical station that broadcast from the top of Mount Washington.

“A little antidote for Elton John, Aerosmith, Foghat, et al,” he said. “How does a dollar a game sound, Johnny?”

“It sounds fine.”

Roger sat down, rubbing his hands. “Oh, you're goin home poor,” he said.

They played cribbage and the evening passed. Between each game one of them would go downstairs and make sure no one had decided to dance on the pool table or go out back for a little party of their own. “No one is going to impregnate anyone else at this party if I can help it,” Roger said.

Shelley had gone into the living room to read. Once an hour the music on the radio would stop and the news would come on and Johnny's attention would falter a little. But there was nothing about Cathy's in Somersworth-not at eight, nine, or ten.

After the ten o'clock news, Roger said: “Getting ready to hedge your prediction a little, Johnny?”

“No.”

The weather forecast was for scattered thundershowers, clearing after midnight.

The steady bass signature of K. C. and the Sunshine Band came up through the floor.

“Party's getting loud,” Johnny remarked.

“The hell with that,” Roger said, grinning. “The party's getting drunk. Spider Parmeleau is passed out in the corner and somebody's using him for a beer coaster. Oh, they'll have big heads in the morning, you want to believe it. I remember at my own graduation party…”

“Here is a bulletin from the WMTQ newsroom,” the radio said.

Johnny, who had been shuffling, sprayed cards all over the floor.

“Relax, it's probably just something about that kidnapping down in Florida.”

“I don't think so,” Johnny said.

The broadcaster said: “It appears at this moment that the worst fire in New Hampshire history has claimed more than seventy-five young lives in the border town of Somersworth, New Hampshire. The fire occurred at a restaurant-lounge called Cathy's. A graduation party was in progress when the fire broke out. Somersworth fire chief Milton Hovey told reporters they have no suspicions of arson; they believe that the fire was almost certainly caused by a bolt of lightning.”

Roger Chatsworth's face was draining of all color. He sat bolt upright in his kitchen chair, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere above Johnny's head. His hands lay loosely on the table. From below them came the babble of conversation and laughter, intermingled now with the sound of Bruce Springsteen.

Shelley came into the room. She looked from her husband to Johnny and then back again. “What is it? What's wrong?”

“Shut up,” Roger said.

“… is still blazing, and Hovey said that a final tally of the dead will probably not be known until early morning. It is known that over thirty people, mostly members of the Durham High School senior class, have been taken to hospitals in surrounding areas to be treated for burns. Forty people, also mostly graduating students, escaped from small bathroom windows at the rear of the lounge, but others were apparently trapped in fatal pile-ups at the…

“Was it Cathy's?” Shelley Chatsworth screamed. “Was it that place?”

“Yes,” Roger said. He seemed eerily calm. “Yes, it was.”

Downstairs there had been a momentary silence. It was followed by a running thud of footsteps coming up the stairs. The kitchen door burst open and Chuck came in, looking for his mother.

“Mom? What is it? What's wrong?”

“It appears that we may owe you for our son's life,” Roger said in that same eerily calm voice. Johnny had never seen a face that white. Roger looked like a ghastly living waxwork.

“It burned?” Chuck's voice was incredulous. Behind him, others were crowding up the stairs now, whispering in low, affrighted voices. “Are you saying it burned down?”

No one answered. And then, suddenly, from somewhere behind him, Patty Strachan began to talk in a high, hysterical voice. “It's his fault, that guy there! He made it happen! He set it on fire by his mind, just like in that book Carrie. You murderer! Killer! You…

Roger turned toward her. “SHUT UP!” He roared.

Patty collapsed into wild sobs.

“Burned?” Chuck repeated. He seemed to be asking himself now, inquiring if that could possibly be the right word.

“Roger?” Shelley whispered. “Rog? Honey?”

There was a growing mutter on the stairs, and in the playroom below, like a stir of leaves. The stereo clicked off. The voices murmured.

Was Mike there? Shannon went, didn't she? Are you sure? Yes, I was all ready to leave when Chuck called me. My mother was there when that guy freaked out and she said she felt like a goose was walking on her grave, she asked me to come here instead. Was Casey there? Was Ray there? Was Maureen Ontello there? Oh my God, was she? Was…

Roger stood up slowly and turned around. “I suggest,” he said, “that we find the soberest people here to drive and that we all go down to the hospital. They'll need blood donors.”

Johnny sat like a stone. He found himself wondering if he would ever move again. Outside, thunder rumbled.

And followed on its heels like an inner clap, he heard his dying mother's voice:

Do your duty, John.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

August 12, 1977

Dear Johnny,

Finding you wasn't much of a trick-I sometimes think if you have enough free cash, you can find anyone in this country, and the cash I got. Maybe I'm risking your resentment stating it as baldly as that, but Chuck and Shelley and I owe you too much to tell you less than the truth. Money buys a lot, but it can't buy off the lightning. They found twelve boys still in the men's room opening off the restaurant, the one where the window had been nailed shut. The fire didn't reach there but the smoke did, and all twelve of them were suffocated. I haven't been able to get that out of my mind, because Chuck could have been one of those boys. So I had you “tracked down”, as you put it in your letter. And for the same reason, I can't leave you alone as you requested. At least not until the enclosed check comes back canceled with your endorsement on the back.

You'll notice that it's a considerably smaller check than the one you returned about a month ago. I got in touch with the EMMC Accounts Department and paid your outstanding hospital bills with the balance of it. You're free and clear that way, Johnny. That I could do, and I did it-with great pleasure, I might add.

You protest you can't take the money. I say you can and you will You will, Johnny. I traced you to Ft. Lauderdale, and if you leave there I will trace you to the next place you go, even if you decide on Nepal. Call me a louse who won't let go if you want to; I see myself more as “the Hound of Heaven”. I don't want to hound you, Johnny. I remember you telling me that day not to sacrifice my son. I almost did. And what about the others? Eighty-one dead, thirty more terribly maimed and burned. I think of Chuck saying maybe we could work out some kind of a story, spin a yarn or something, and me saying with all the righteousness of the totally stupid, “I won't do that, Chuck. Don't ask me.” Well, I could have done something. That's what haunts me. I could have given that butcher Carrick ~3,ooo to pay off his help and shut down for the night. It would have come to about ~37 a life. So believe me when I say I don't want to hound you; I'm really too busy hounding myself to want to spare the time. I think I'll be doing it for quite a few years to come. I'm paying up for refusing to believe anything I couldn't touch with one of my five senses. And please don't believe that paying the bills and tendering this check is just a sop to my conscience. Money can't buy off the lightning, and it can't buy an end to bad dreams, either. The money is for Chuck, although he knows nothing about it.

Take the check and I'll leave you in peace. That's the deal. Send it on to UNICEF, if you want, or give it to a home for orphan bloodhounds, or blow it all on the ponies. I don't care. Just take it.

I'm sorry you felt you had to leave in such a hurry, but I believe I understand. We all hope to see you soon. Chuck leaves for Stovington Prep on September 4.

Johnny, take the check. Please.

All regards,

Roger Chatsworth

September 1 1977

Dear Johnny,

Will you believe that I'm not going to let this go? Please. Take the check.

Regards,

Roger

Dear Johnny,

September 10, 1977

Charlie and l were both so glad to know where you are, and it was a relief to get a letter from you that sounded so natural and like yourself. But there was one thing that bothered me very much, son. I called up Sam Weizak and read him that part of your letter about the increasing frequency of your headaches. He advises you to see a doctor, Johnny, without delay. He is afraid that a clot may have formed around the old scar tissue. So that worries me, and it worries Sam, too. You've never looked really healthy since you came out of the coma, Johnny, and when I last saw you in early June, I thought you looked very tired. Sam didn't say, but I know what he'd really like you to do is to catch a plane out of Phoenix and come on home and let him be the one to look at you. You certainly can't plead poverty now!

Roger Chatsworth has called here twice, and I tell him what I can. I think he's telling the truth when he says it isn't conscience-money or a reward for saving his son's life. I believe your mother would have said that the man is doing penance the only way he knows how. Anyway, you've taken it, and I hope you don't mean it when you say you only did it to “get him off your back”. I believe you have too much grit in you to do anything for a reason like that.

Now this is very hard for me to say, but l will do the best I can. Please come home, Johnny. The publicity has died down again I can hear you saying, “Oh bullshit, it will never die down again, not after this” and I suppose you are right in a way, but you are also wrong. Over the phone Mr. Chatsworth said, “If you talk to him, try to make him understand that no psychic except Nostradamus has ever been much more than a nine-days” wonder. “I worry about you a lot, son. I worry about you blaming yourself for the dead instead of blessing your. self for the living, the ones you saved, the ones that were at the Chatsworths” house that night. I worry and I miss you, too. “I miss you like the dickens,” as your grand-mother used to say. So please come home as soon as you can.

Dad

P. S. I'm sending the clippings about the fire and about your part in it. Charlie collected them up. As you will see, you were correct in guessing that “everyone who was at that lawn party will spill their guts to the papers”. I suppose these clippings may just upset you more, and if they do, just toss them away. But Charlie's idea was that you may look at them and say, “That wasn't as bad as I thought, I can face that. “I hope it turns out that way.

Dad

September 29, 1977

Dear Johnny,

I got your address from my dad. How is the great American desert. Seen any redskins (ha-ha)? Well here I am at Stovington Prep. This place isn't so tough. I am taking sixteen hours of credit. Advanced chemistry is my favorite although it's really something of a tit after the course at DHS. I always had the feeling that our teacher there, old Fearless Farnham, would really have been more happy making doomsday weapons and blowing up the world. In English we are reading three things by J. D. Salinger this first four weeks, Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters. I like him a lot. Our teacher told us he still lives over in N. H. but has given up writing. That blows my mind. Why would someone just give up when they are going great guns? Oh well. The football team here really sucks but I'm learning to like soccer. The coach says soccer is football for smart people and football is football for ass-holes. I can't figure out yet if he's right or just jealous.

I'm wondering if it would be oh to give out your address to some people who were at our party graduation night. They want to write and say thanks. One of them is Patty Strachan's mother, you will remember her, the one that made such a pisshead of herself when her “precious daughter” fainted at the lawn party that afternoon. She now figures that you're an ok person. I'm not going with Patty anymore, by the way. I'm not much on long-distance courtships at my “tender age” (ha-ha), and Patty is going to Vassar, as you might have expected. I've met a foxy little chick here.

Well, write when you can, my man. My dad made it sound like you were really “bummed out” for what reason I do not know since it seems to me that you did everything you could to make things turn out right. He's wrong, isn't he, Johnny? You're really not that bummed out, are you? Please write and tell me you are oh, I worry about you. That's a laugh, isn't it, the original Alfred E. Neuman worried about you, but I am.

When you write, tell me why Holden Caulfield always has to have the blues so much when he isn't even black.

Chuck

P. S. The foxy chick's name is Stephanie Wyman, and have already turned her on to Something Wicked This Way Comes. She also likes a punk-rock group called The Ramones, you should hear them, they are hilarious.

C

October 17, 1977

Dear Johnny,

Okay, that's better, you sound ok. Laughed my ass off about your job with the Phoenix Public Works Dept. I have no sympathy at all for your sunburn after four outings as a Stovington Tiger. Coach is right, l guess, football is football for assholes, at least at this place. Our record is 1-3 and in the game we won I scored three touchdowns, hyperventilated my stupid self and blacked out. Scared Steff into a tizzy (ha-ha).

f waited to write so I could answer your question about how the Home Folks feel about Greg Stillson now that he is “on the job”. J was home this last weekend, and I'll tell you all I can. Asked my dad first and he said, “Is Johnny still interested in that guy?” I said, “He's showing his fundamental bad taste by wanting your opinion. “Then he goes to my mother, “See, prep school is turning him into a smartass. I thought it would.”

Well, to make a long story short-most people are pretty surprised by how well Stillson's doing. My dad said this: “If people of a congressman's home district had to give a report card on how well the guy was doing after four months, Stillson would get mostly Bs, plus an A for his work on Carter's energy bill and his own home heating-oil ceiling bill. Also an A for effort. “Dad told me to tell you that maybe he was wrong about Stillson being the village fool.

Other comments from people I talked to when I was home: they like it around here that he doesn't dress up in a business suit. Mrs. Jarvis who runs the Quik-Pik (sorry about the spelling, man, but that's what they call it) says she thinks Stillson is not afraid of “the big interests”. Henry Burke, who runs The Bucket-that el scuzzo tavern downtown-says he thinks Stilison has done “a double-damn good lob”. Most other comments are similar. They contrast what Stillson has done with what Carter hasn't done, most of them are really disappointed in him and are kicking themselves for having voted for him. I asked some of them if they weren't worried that those iron horsemen were still hanging around and that fellow Sonny Elliman was serving as one of Stillson's aides. None of them seemed too upset. The guy who runs the Record Rock put it to be this way: “If Tom Hayden can go straight and Eldridge Cleave can get Jesus, why can't some bikies join the establishment? Forgive and forget.”

So there you are. I would write more, but football practice is coming up. This weekend we are scheduled to be trounced by the Barre Wildcats. I just hope I survive the season. Keep well, my man.

Chuck

From the New York Times, March 4, 1978:

Special to the Times-Edgar Lancte, 37, a ten-year veteran of the FBI, was apparently murdered last night in an Oklahoma City parking garage. Police say that a dynamite bomb wired to the ignition of his car exploded when Mr. Lancte turned the key. The gang-land-style execution was similar in style to the murder of Arizona investigative reporter Don Bolles two years ago, but FBI chief William Webster would not speculate on any possible connection. Mr. Webster would also neither confirm nor deny that Mr. Lancte had been investigating shady land deals and possible links to local politicians.

There appears to be some mystery surrounding exactly what Mr. Lancte's current assignment was, and one source in the Justice Department claims that Mr. Lancte was not investigating possible land fraud at all but a national security matter.

Mr. Lancte joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1968 and…

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The notebooks in Johnny's bureau drawer grew from four to five, and by the fall of 1978 to seven. In the fall of 1978, between the deaths of two popes in rapid succession, Greg Stillson had become national news.

He was reelected to the House of Representatives in a landslide, and with the country tending toward Proposition 13 conservativism, he had formed the America Now party. Most startling, several members of the House had reneged on their original party standing and had “joined up”, as Greg liked to put it. Most of them held very similar beliefs, which Johnny had defined as superficially liberal on domestic issues and moderate to very conservative on issues of foreign policy. There was not a one of them who had voted on the Carter side of the Panama Canal treaties. And when you peeled back the liberal veneer on domestic positions, they turned out to be pretty conservative, too. The America Now party wanted bad trouble for big-time dopers, they wanted the cities to have to sink or swim on their own ('There is no need for a struggling dairy farmer to have to subsidize New York City's methadone programs with his taxes,” Greg proclaimed), they wanted a crackdown on welfare benefits to whores, pimps, bums, and people with a felony bust on their records, they wanted sweeping tax reforms to be paid for by sweeping social services cutbacks. All of it was an old song, but Greg's America Now party had set it to a pleasing new tune.

Seven congressmen swung over before the off-year elections, and two senators. Six of the Congressmen were reelected, and both of the senators. Of the nine, eight had been Republicans whose base had been whittled away to a pinhead. Their switch of party and subsequent reelections, one wag had quipped, was a better trick than the one that had followed “Lazarus, come forth!”

Some were already saying that Greg Stillson might be a power to be reckoned with, and not that many years down the road, either. He had not been able to send all the world's pollution out to Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, but he had succeeded in running at least two of the rascals out-one of them a congressman who had been feathering his nest as the silent partner in a parking-lot kickback scheme, and one of them a presidential aide with a penchant for gay bars. His oil-ceiling bill had shown vision and boldness, and his careful guidance of its passage from committee to final vote had shown a down-home country-boy shrewdness. Nineteen-hundred eighty would be too early for Greg, and 1984 might be too tempting to resist, but if he managed to stay cool until 1988, if he continued to build his base and the winds of change did not shift radically enough to blow his fledgling party away, why, anything might happen. The Republicans had fallen to squabbling splinters, and assuming that Mondale or Jerry Brown or even Howard Baker might follow Carter as president, who was to follow then? Even 1992 might not be too late for him. He was a relatively young man. Yes, 1992 sounded about right…

There were several political cartoons in Johnny's notebooks. All of them showed Stillson's infectious slantwise grin, and in all of them he was wearing his construction helmet. One by Oliphant showed Greg rolling a barrel of oil marked PRICE CEILINGS straight down the middle aisle of the House, the helmet cocked back on his head. Up front was Jimmy Carter, scratching his head and looking puzzled; he was not looking Greg's way at all and the implication seemed to be that he was going to get run down. The caption read: OUTTA MY WAY, JIMMY!

The helmet. The helmet somehow bothered Johnny more than anything else. The Republicans had their elephant, the democrats their donkey, and Greg Stillson had his construction helmet. In Johnny's dreams it sometimes seemed that Stillson was wearing a motorcycle helmet. And sometimes it was a coal-scuttle helmet.

In a separate notebook he kept the clippings his father had sent him concerning the fire at Cathy's. He had gone over them again and again, although for reasons that Sam, Roger, or even his father could not have suspected.

PSYCHIC PREDICTS FIRE. “MY DAUGHTER WOULD HAVE DIED TOO,” TEARFUL, THANKFUL MOM PROCLAIMS (the tearful, thankful mom in question had been Patty Strachan's). Psychic Who Cracked Castle Rock Murders Predicts Flash Fire. ROADHOUSE DEATH-TOLL REACHES 90. FATHER SAYS JOHNNY SMITH HAS LEFT NEW ENGLAND, REFUSES TO SAY WHERE. Pictures of him. Pictures of his father. Pictures of that long-ago wreck on Route 6 in Cleaves Mills, back in the days when Sarah Bracknell had been his girl. Now Sarah was a woman, the mother of two, and in his last letter Herb had said Sarah was showing a few gray hairs. It seemed impossible to believe that he himself was thirty-one. Impossible, but true.

Around all these clippings were his own jottings, his painful efforts to get it straight in his mind once and for all. None of them understood the true importance of the fire, its implication on the much larger matter of what to do about Greg Stillson.

He had written: “I have to do something about Stillson. I have to. I was right about Cathy's, and I'm going to be right about this. There is absolutely no question in my mind. He is going to become president and he is going to start a war-or cause one through simple mismanagement of the office, which amounts to the same thing.

“The question is: How drastic are the measures that need to be taken?

“Take Cathy's as a test-tube case. It almost could have been sent to me as a sign, God I'm starting to sound like my mother, but there it is. Okay, I knew there was going to be a fire and that people were going to die. Was that sufficient to save them? Answer: it was not sufficient to save all of them, because people only truly believe after the fact. The ones who came to the Chatsworth house instead of going to Cathy's were saved, but it's important to remember that R. C. didn't have the party because he believed my prediction. He was very upfront about that. He had the party because he thought it would help me have peace of mind. He was… humoring me. He believed after. Patty Strachan's mother believed after. After-after-after. By then it was too late for the dead and the burned.

“So, Question-Could I have changed the outcome?

“Yes. I could have driven a car right through the front of the place. Or, I could have burned it down myself that afternoon.

“Question 3: What would the results of either action have been to me?

“Imprisonment, probably. If I took the car option and then lightning struck it later that night, I suppose I could have argued… no, it doesn't wash. Common experience may recognize some sort of psychic ability in the human mind, but the law sure as hell doesn't. I think now, if I had it to do over again, I would do one of those things and never mind the consequences to me. Is it p0sssible that I didn't completely believe my own prediction?

“The matter of Stillson is horribly similar in all respects, except, thank God, that I have a lot more lead time.

“So, back to square one. I don't want Greg Stillson to become President. How can I change that outcome?

“1. Go back to New Hampshire and “line up”, as he puts it. Try to throw a few monkey wrenches into the America Now party. Try to sabotage him. There's dirt enough under the rug. Maybe I could sweep some of it out.

“2. Hire someone else to get the dirt on him. There's enough of Roger's money left over to hire someone good. On the other hand, I got the feeling that Lancte was pretty good. And Lancte's dead.

“3. Wound or cripple him. The way Arthur Bremmer crippled Wallace, the way whoever-it-was crippled Larry Flynt.

“4. Kill him. Assassinate him.

“Now, some of the drawbacks. The first option isn't sure enough. I could end up doing nothing more constructive than getting myself trounced, the way Hunter Thompson did when he was researching his first book, that one on the Hell's Angels. Even worse, this fellow Elliman may be familiar with what I look like, as a result of what happened at the Trimbull rally. Isn't it more or less S. O. P. to keep a file on people who may be dangerous to your guys? I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Stillson had one guy on his payroll whose only job was to keep updated files on weird people and kooks. Which definitely includes me.

“Then there's the second option. Suppose all the dirt has already come out? If Stillson has already formed his higher political aspirations-and all his actions seem to point that way-he may already have cleaned up his act. And another thing: dirt under the rug is only as dirty as the press wants to make it, and the press likes Stillson. He cultivates them. In a novel I suppose I would turn private detective myself and “get the goods on him”, but the sad fact is that I wouldn't know where to begin. You could argue that my ability to “read” people, to find things out that have been lost (to quote Sam) would give me a boost. If I could find out something about Lancte, that would turn the trick. But isn't it likely that Stillson delegates all that to Sonny Elliman? And I cannot even be sure, despite my suspicions, that Edgar Lancte was still on Stillson's trail when he was murdered. It is possible that I might hang Sonny Elliman and still not finish Stillson.

“Overall, the second alternative is lust not sure enough. The stakes are enormous, so much so that I don't even dare let myself think about “the big picture” very often. It brings on a very bitch-kitty of a headache every time.

“I have even considered, in my wilder moments, trying to hook him on drugs the way the character Gene Hack-man played in The French Connection II was, or driving him batty with LSD slipped into his Dr Pepper or whatever it is he drinks. But all of that is cop-show make-believe. Gordon Liddy shit. The problems are so great that this “option” doesn't even bear much talking about, Maybe I could kidnap him. After all, the guy is only a U. S. representative. I wouldn't know where to get heroin or morphine, but I could get plenty of LSD from Larry McNaughton right here in the good old Phoenix Public Works Department. He has pills for every purpose. But suppose (if we're willing to suppose the foreging) that he just enjoyed his trip(s)?

“Shooting and crippling him? Maybe I could and maybe I couldn't. I guess under the right circumstances, I could-like the rally in Trimbull. Suppose I did. After what happened in Laurel, George Wallace was never really a potent political force again. On the other hand, FDR campaigned from his wheelchair and even turned it into an asset.

“That leaves assassination, the Big Casino. This is the one unarguable alternative. You can't run for president if you're a corpse.

“If I could pull the trigger.

“And if I could, what would the results be to me?

“As Bob Dylan says, “Honey, do you have to ask me that?"”

There were a great many other notes and jottings, but the only other really important one was written out and neatly boxed: “Suppose outright murder does turnout to be the only alternative? And suppose it turned out that I could pull the trigger? Murder is still wrong. Murder is wrong. Murder is wrong. There may yet be an answer. Thank God there's years of time.”

But for Johnny, there wasn't.

In early December of 1978, shortly after another congressman, Leo Ryan of California, had been shot to death on a jungle airstrip in the South American country of Guayana, Johnny Smith discovered he had almost run out of time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

At 2:30 P. M. On December 26, 1978, Bud Prescott waited on a tall and rather haggard-looking young man with graying hair and badly bloodshot eyes. Bud was one of three clerks working in the 4th Street Phoenix Sporting Goods Store on the day after Christmas, and most of the business was exchanges-but this fellow was a paying customer.

He said he wanted to buy a good rifle, light-weight, bolt-action. Bud showed him several. The day after Christmas was a slow one on the gun-counter; when men got guns for Christmas, very few of them wanted to exchange them for something else.

This fellow looked them all over carefully and finally settled on a Remington 700,. 243 caliber, a very nice gun with a light kick and a flat trajectory. He signed the gun-book John Smith and Bud thought, If I never saw me an alias before in my life, there's one there. “John Smith” paid cash-took the twenties right out of a wallet that was bulging with them. Took the rifle right over the counter. Bud, thinking to poke him a little, told him he could have his initials burned into the stock, no extra charge. “John Smith” merely shook his head.

When “Smith” left the store, Bud noticed that he was limping noticeably. Would never be any problem identifying that guy again, he thought, not with that limp and those scars running up and down his neck.

At 10: 30 AM. on December 27, a thin man who walked with a limp came into Phoenix Office Supply, Inc., and approached Dean Clay, a salesman there. Clay said later that he noticed what his mother had always called a “fire-spot” in one of the man's eyes. The customer said he wanted to buy a large attache case, and eventually picked out a handsome cowhide item, top of the line, priced at $149. 95. And the man with the limp qualified for the cash discount by paying with new twenties. The whole transaction, from looking to paying; took no more than ten minutes. The fellow walked out of the store, and turned right toward the downtown area, and Dean Clay never saw him again until he saw his picture in the Phoenix Sun.

Late that same afternoon a tall man with graying hair approached Bonita Alvarez's window in the Phoenix Amtrak terminal and inquired about traveling from Phoenix to New York by train. Bonita showed him the connections. He followed them with his finger and then carefully jotted them all down. He asked Bonnie Alvarez if she could ticket him to depart on January 3. Bonnie danced her fingers over her computer console and said that she could.

“Then why don't you… “the tall man began, and then faltered. He put one hand up to his head.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Fireworks,” the tall man said. She told the police later on that she was quite sure that was what he said. Fire-works.

“Sir? Are you all right?”

“Headache,” he said. “Excuse me. “He tried to smile, but the effort did not improve his drawn, young-old face much.

“Would you like some aspirin? I have some.”

“No, thanks. It'll pass.”

She wrote the tickets and told him he would arrive at New York's Grand Central Station on January 6, at midafternoon.

“How much is that?”

She told him and added: “Will that be cash or charge,. Mr. Smith?”

“Cash,” he said, and pulled it right out of his wallet -a whole handful of twenties and tens.

She counted it, gave him his change, his receipt, his tickets. “Your train leaves at 10: 30 A. M., Mr. Smith,” she said. “Please be here and ready to entrain at 10: 10.

“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”

Bonnie gave him the big professional smile, but Mr. Smith was already turning away. His face was very pale, and to Bonnie he looked like a man who was in a great deal of pain.

She was very sure that he had said fireworks.

Elton Curry was a conductor on Amtrak's Phoenix-Salt Lake run. The tall man appeared promptly at 10:00 A. M. on January 2, and Elton helped him up the steps and into the car because he was limping quite badly. He was carrying a rather old tartan traveling bag with scuffmarks and fraying edges in one hand. In the other he carried a brand-new cowhide attache case. He carried the attache case as if it were quite heavy.

“Can I help you with that, sir?” Elton asked, meaning the attache case, but it was the traveling bag that the passenger handed him, along with his ticket.

“No, I'll take that when we're underway, sir.”

“All right. Thank you.”

A very polite sort of fellow, Elton Curry told the FBI agents who questioned him later. And he tipped well.

January 6, 1979, was a gray, overcast day in New York -snow threatened but did not fall. George Clements” taxi was parked in front of the Biltmore Hotel, across from Grand Central.

The door opened and a fellow with graying hair got in, moving carefully and a little painfully. He placed a traveling bag and an attache case beside him on the seat, dosed the door, then put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes for a moment, as if he was very, very tired.

“Where we goin, my friend?” George asked.

His fare looked at a slip of paper. “Port Authority Terminal,” he said.

George got going. “You look a little white around the gills, my friend. My brother-in-law looked like that when he was havin his gallstone attacks. You got stones?

“No.”

“My brother-in-law, he says gallstones hurt worse than anything. Except maybe kidney stones. You know what I told him? I told him he was full of shit. Andy, I says, you're a great guy, I love ya, but you're full of shit. You ever had cancer, Andy? I says. I asks him that, you know, did he ever have cancer. I mean, everybody knows cancer's the worst. “George took a long look in his rear-view mirror. “I'm asking y6u sincerely, my friend… are you okay? Because, I'm telling you the truth, you look like death warmed over.”

The passenger answered, “I'm fine. I was… thinking of another taxi ride. Several years ago.

“Oh, right,” George said sagely, exactly as if he knew what the man was talking about. Well, New York was full of kooks, there was no denying that. And after this brief pause for reflection, he went on talking about his brother-in-law.

“Mommy, is that man sick?”

“Shhh.”

“Yeah, but is he?”

“Danny, be quiet.”

She smiled at the man on the other side of the Greyhound's aisle, an apologetic, kids-will-say-anything-won't-they smile, but the man appeared not to have heard. The poor guy did look sick. Danny was only four, but he was right about that. The man was looking listlessly out at the snow that had begun to fall shortly after they crossed the Connecticut state line. He was much too pale, much too thin, and there was a hideous Frankenstein scar running up out of his coat collar to just under his jaw. It was as if someone had tried taking his head clean off at sometime in the not-too-distant past-tried and almost succeeded.

The Greyhound was on its way to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and they would arrive at 9 30 tonight if the snow didn't slow things down too much. Julie Brown and her son were going to see Julie's mother-in-law, and as usual the old bitch would spoil Danny rotten-and Danny didn't have far to go.

“I wanna go see him.”

“No, Danny.”

“I wanna see if he's sick.”

“No!”

“Yeah, but what if he's dine, ma?” Danny's eyes positively glowed at this entrancing possibility. “He might be dine right now!”

“Danny, shut up.”

“Hey, mister!” Danny cried. “You dine, or anything?”

“Danny, you shut your mouth! “Julie hissed, her cheeks burning with embarrassment.

Danny began to cry then, not real crying but that snotty, I-can't-get-my-own-way whining that always made her want to grab him and pinch his arms until he really had something to cry about. At times like this, riding the bus into evening through another cruddy snowstorm with her son whining beside her, she wished her own mother had sterilized her several years before she had reached the age of consent.

That was when the man across the aisle turned his head and smiled at her-a tired, painful smile, but rather sweet for all that. She saw that his eyes were terribly bloodshot, as if he had been crying. She tried to smile back, but it felt false and uneasy on her lips. That red left eye-and the scar running up his neck-made that half of his face look sinister and unpleasant.

She hoped that the man across the aisle wasn't going all the way to Portsmouth, but as it turned out, he was.

She caught sight of him in the terminal as Danny's gram swept the boy, giggling happily, into her arms. She saw him limping toward the terminal doors, a scuffed traveling bag in one hand, a new attache case in the other. And for just a moment, she felt a terrible chill cross her back. It was really worse than a limp-it was very nearly a head-long lurch. But there was something implacable about it, she told the New Hampshire state police later. It was as if he knew exactly where he was going and nothing was going to stop him from getting there.

Then he passed out into the darkness and she lost sight of him.

Timmesdale, New Hampshire, is a small town west of Durham, just inside the third congressional district. It is kept alive by the smallest of the Chatsworth Mills, which hulks like a soot-stained brick ogre on the edge of Timmesdale Stream. Its one modest claim to fame (according to the local Chamber of Commerce) is that it was the first town in New Hampshire to have electric streetlights.

One evening in early January, a young man with prematurely graying hair and a limp walked into the Timmesdale Pub, the town's only beer joint. Dick O'Donnell, the owner, was tending the bar. The place was almost empty because it was the middle of the week and another norther was brewing. Two or three inches had piled up out there already, and more was on the way.

The man with the limp stamped off his shoes, came to the bar, and ordered a Pabst. O'Donnell served him. The fellow had two more, making them last, watching the TV over the bar. The color was going bad, had been for a couple of months now, and The Fonz looked like an aging Rumanian ghoul. O'Donnell couldn't remember having seen this guy around.

“Like another?” O'Donnell asked, coming back to the bar after serving the two old bags in the corner.

“One more won't hurt,” the fellow said. He pointed to a spot above the TV. “You met him, I guess.”

It was a framed blowup of a political cartoon. It showed Greg Stilison, his construction helmet cocked back on his head, throwing a fellow in a business suit down the Capitol steps. The fellow in the business suit was Louis Quinn, the congressman who had been caught taking kickbacks in the parking-lot scam some fourteen months ago. The cartoon was titled GIVING EM THE BUM'S RUSH, and across the corner it had been signed in a scrawling hand: For Dick O'Donnell, who keeps the best damn saloon in the third district! Keep drawing them, Dick-Greg Stillson.

“Betcha butt I did,” O'Donnell said. “He gave a speech in here the last time he canvassed for the House. Had signs out all over town, come on into the Pub at two o'clock Saturday afternoon and have one on Greg. That was the best damn day's business I've ever done. People was only supposed to have one on him, but he ended up grabbing the whole tab. Can't do much better than that, can you?”

“Sounds like you think he's one hell of a guy.

“Yeah, I do,” O'Donnell said. “I'd be tempted to put my bare knuckles on anyone who said the other way.”

“Well, I won't try you. “The fellow put down three quarters. “Have one on me.

“Well, okay. Don't mind if I do. Thanks, mister…?”

“Johnny Smith is my name.

“Why, pleased to meet you, Johnny. Dicky O'Donnell, that's me. “He drew himself a beer from the tap. “Yeah, Greg's done this part of New Hampshire a lotta good. And there's a lotta people afraid to come right out and say it, but I'm not. I'll say it right out loud. Some day Greg Stillson's apt to be president”

“You think so?”

“I do,” O'Donnell said, coming back to the bar. “New Hampshire's not big enough to hold Greg. He's one hell of a politician, and coming from me, that's something. I thought the whole crew was nothin but a bunch of crooks and lollygags. I still do, but Greg's an exception to the rule. He's a square shooter. If you told me five years ago I'd be sayin somethin like that, I woulda laughed in your face. You'd be more likely to find me readin poitry than seein any good in a politician, I woulda said. But, goddammit, he's a man.”

Johnny said, “Most of these guys want to be your buddy while they're running for office, but when they get in its fuck you, Jack, I got mine until the next election. I come from Maine myself, and the one time I wrote Ed Muskie, you know what I got? A form letter!”

“Ah, that's a Polack for you,” O'Donnell said. “What do you expect from a Polack? Listen, Greg comes back to the district every damn weekend! Now does that sound like fuck you, Jack, I got mine, to you?”

“Every weekend, huh?” Johnny sipped his beer. “Where? Trimbull? Ridgeway? The big towns?”

“He's got a system,” O'Donnell said in the reverent tones of a man who has never been able to work one out for himself. “Fifteen towns, from the big places like Capital City right down to the little burgs like Timmesdale and Coorter's Notch. He hits one a week until he's gone through the whole list and then he starts at the top again. You know how big Coorter's Notch is? They got eight hundred souls up there. So what do you think about a guy who takes a weekend off from Washington and comes down to Coorter's Notch to freeze his balls off in a cold meetin hall? Does that sound like fuck you, Jack, I got mine, to you?”

“No, it doesn't,” Johnny said truthfully. “What does he do? Just shake hands?”

“No, he's got a hall in every town. Reserves it for all day Saturday. He gets in there about ten in the morning, and people can come by and talk to him. Tell him their idears, you know. If they got questions, he answers them. If he can't answer them, he goes back to Washington and finds the answer!” He looked at Johnny triumphantly.

“When was he here in Timmesdale last?”

“Couple of months ago,” O'Donnell said. He went to the cash register and rummaged through a pile of papers beside it. He came up with a dog-eared clipping and laid it on the bar beside Johnny.

“Here's the list. You just take a look at that and see what you think.”

The clipping was from the Ridgeway paper. It was fairly old now. The story was headlined STILLS ON ANNOUNCES “FEEDBACK CENTERS”. The first paragraph looked as though it might have been lifted straight from the Stillson press kit. Below it was the list of towns where Greg would be spending his weekends, and the proposed date's. He was not due in Timmesdale again until mid-March.

“I think it looks pretty good,” Johnny said.

“Yeah, I think so. Lotta people think so.”

“By this dipping, he must have been ill Goorter's Notch just last weekend.”

“That's right,” O'Donnell said, and laughed. “Good old Coorter's Notch. Want another beer, Johnny?”

“Only if you'll join me,” Johnny said, and laid a couple of bucks on the bar.

“Well, I don't care if I do.”

One of the two bar-bags had put some money in the juke and Tammy Wynette, sounding old and tired and not happy to be here, began singing, “Stand By Your Man.”

“Hey Dick!” the other cawed. “You ever hear of service in this place?”

“Shut your head! “he hollered back.

“Fuck-YOU,” she called, and cackled.

“Goddammit, Clarice, I told you about saying the eff-word in my bar! I told you…:

“Oh get off it and let's have some beer.”

“I hate those two old cunts,” O'Donnell muttered to Johnny. “Couple of old alky diesel-dykes, that's what they are. They been here a million years, and I wouldn't be surprised if they both lived to spit on my grave. It's a hell of a world sometimes.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Pardon me, I'll be right back. I got a girl, but she only comes in Fridays and Saturdays in the winter.”

O'Donnell drew two schooners of beer and brought them over to the table. He said something to them and Clarice replied “Fuck-YOU!” and cackled again. The beerjoint was filled with the ghosts of dead hamburgers. Tammy Wynette sang through the popcorn-crackle of an old record. The radiators thudded dull heat into the room and outside snow spatted dryly against the glass. Johnny rubbed his temples. He had been in this bar before, in a hundred other small towns. His head ached. When he had shaken O'Donnell's hand he knew that the barkeep had a big old mongrel dog that he had trained to sic on command. His one great dream was that some night a burglar would break into his house and he would legally be able to sic that big old dog onto him, and there would be one less goddam hippie pervo junkie in the world.

Oh, his head ached.

O'Donnell came back, wiping his hands on his apron. Tammy Wynette finished up and was replaced with Red Sovine, who had a CB call for the Teddy Bear.

“Thanks again for the suds,” O'Donnell said, drawing two.

“My pleasure,” Johnny said, still studying the dipping. “Coorter's Notch last week, Jackson this coming weekend. I never heard of that one. Must be a pretty small town, huh?”

“Just a burg,” O'Donnell agreed. “They used to have a ski resort, but it went broke. Lotta unemployment up that way. They do some wood-pulping and a little shirttail farming. But he goes up there, by the Jesus. Talks to em. Listens to their bitches. Where you from up in Maine, Johnny?”

“Lewiston,” Johnny lied. The dipping said that Greg Stillson would meet with interested persons at the town hall.

“Guess you came down for the skiing, huh?”

“No, I hurt my leg a while back. I don't ski anymore.

Just passing through. Thanks for letting me look at this. “Johnny handed the clipping back. “It's quite interesting.”

O'Donnell put it carefully back with his other papers. He had an empty bar, a dog back home that would sic on command, and Greg Stillson. Greg had been in his bar.

Johnny found himself abruptly wishing himself dead. If this talent was a gift from God, then God was a dangerous lunatic who ought to be stopped. If God wanted Greg Stilison dead, why hadn't he sent him down the birth canal with the umbilical cord wrapped around his throat? Or strangled him on a piece of meat? Or electrocuted him while he was changing the radio station? Drowned him in the ole swimming hole? Why did God have to have Johnny Smith to do his dirty work? It wasn't his responsibility to save the world, that was for the psychos and only psychos would presume to try it. He suddenly decided he would let Greg Stillson live and spit in God's eye.

“You okay, Johnny?” O'Donnell asked.

“Huh? Yeah, sure.”

“You looked sorta funny for just a second there.”

Chuck Chatsworth saying: if I didn't, I'd be afraid all those people he killed would haunt me to my grave.

“Out woolgathering, I guess,” Johnny said. “I want you to know it's been a pleasure drinking with you.”

“Well, the same goes back to you,” O'Donnell said, looking pleased. “I wish more people passing through felt that way. They go through here headed for the ski resorts, you know. The big places. That's where they take their money. If I thought they'd stop in, I'd fix this place up like they'd like. Posters, you know, of Switzerland and Colorado. A fireplace. Load the juke up with rock “n” roll records instead of that shitkicking music I'd… you know, I'd like that. “He shrugged. “I'm not a bad guy, hell.”

“Of course not,” Johnny said, getting off the stool and thinking about the dog trained to sic, and the hoped-for hippie junkie burglar.

“Well, tell your friends I'm here,” O'Donnell said

“For sure,” Johnny said.

“Hey Dick!” one of the bar-bags hollered. “Ever hear of service-with-a-smile in this place?”

“Why don't you get stuffed?” O'Donnell yelled at her, flushing.

“Fuck-YO U!” Clarice called back, and cackled. Johnny slipped quietly out into the gathering storm,

He was staying at the Holiday Inn in Portsmouth. When he got back that evening, he told the desk clerk to have his bill ready for checkout in the morning.

In his room, he sat down at the impersonal Holiday Inn writing desk, took out all the stationery, and grasped the Holiday Inn pen. His head was throbbing, but there were letters to be written. His momentary rebellion-if that was what it had been-had passed. His unfinished business with Greg Stillson remained.

I've gone crazy, he thought. That's really it. I've gone entirely off my chump. He could see the headlines now.

PSYCHO SHOOTS N. H. REP. MADMAN ASSASSINATES STILLS ON. HAIL OF BULLETS CUTS DOWN U. S. REPRESENTATIVE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE.

And Inside View, of course, would have a field day.

SELF-PROCLAIMED “SEER” KILLS STILLSON, 12 NOTED PSYCHIATRISTS TELL WHY SMITH DID

IT. With a sidebar by that fellow Dees, maybe, telling how Johnny had threatened to get his shotgun and “shoot me a trespasser”.

Crazy.

The hospital debt was paid, but this would leave a new bill of particulars behind, and his father would have to pay for it. He and his new wife would spend a lot of days in the limelight of his reflected notoriety. They would get the hate mail. Everyone he had known would be interviewed-the Chatsworths, Sam, Sheriff George Bannerman. Sarah? Well, maybe they wouldn't get as far as Sarah. After all, it wasn't as though he were planning to shoot the president. At least, not yet. There's a lotta people afraid to come right out and say it, but I'm not. I'll say it right out loud. Some day Greg Stillson's apt to be president.

Johnny rubbed his temples. The headache came in low, slow waves, and none of this was getting his letters written. He drew the first sheet of stationery toward him, picked up the pen, and wrote Dear Dad. Outside, snow struck the window with that dry, sandy sound that means serious business. Finally the pen began to move across the paper, slowly at first, then gaining speed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Johnny came up wooden steps that had been shoveled clear of snow and salted down. He went through a set of double doors and into a foyer plastered with specimen ballots and notices of a special town meeting to be held here in Jackson on the third of February. There was also a notice of Greg Stillson's impending visit and a picture of The Man Who himself, hard hat cocked back on his head, grinning that hard slantwise “We're wise to em, ain't we, pard?” grin. Set a little to the right of the green door leading into the meeting hall itself was a sign that Johnny hadn't expected, and he pondered it in silence for several seconds, his breath pluming white from his lips. DRIVER EXAMINATIONS TODAY, this sign read. It was set on a wooden easel. HAVE PAPERS READY.

He opened the door, went into the stuporous glow of heat thrown by a big woodstove, and there sat a cop at a desk. The cop was wearing a ski parka, unzipped. There were papers scattered across his desk, and there was also a gadget for examining visual acuity.

The cop looked up at Johnny, and he felt a sinking sensation in his gut”

“Can I help you, sir?”

Johnny fingered the camera slung around his neck. “Well, I wondered if it would be all right to look around a little bit,” he said. “I'm on assignment from Yankee magazine. We're doing a spread on town hall architecture in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Taking a lot of pictures, you know.”

“Go right to it,” the cop said. “My wife reads Yankee all the time. Puts me to sleep.”

Johnny smiled. “New England architecture has a tendency toward… well, starkness.”

“Starkness,” the cop repeated doubtfully, and then let it go. “Next, please.”

A young man approached the desk the cop was sitting behind. He handed an examination sheet to the cop, who took it and said, “Look into the viewer, please, and identify the traffic signs and signals which I will show you.

The young man peered into the viewing machine. The cop put an answer-key over the young man's exam sheet. Johnny moved down the center aisle of the Jackson town hall and clicked a picture of the rostrum at the front.

“Stop sign,” the young man said from behind him. “The next one's a yield sign… and the next one is a traffic information sign… no right turn, no left turn, like that…”

He hadn't expected a cop in the town hall; he hadn't even bothered to buy film for the camera he was using as a prop. But now it was too late to back out anyway. This was Friday, and Stillson would be here tomorrow if things went the way they were supposed to go. He would be answering questions and listening to suggestions from the good people of Jackson. There would be a fair-sized entourage with him. A couple of aides, a couple of advisors-and several others, young men in sober suits and sports jackets who had been” wearing jeans and riding motorcycles not so long ago. Greg Stillson was still a firm believer in guards for the body. At the Trimbull rally they had been carrying sawedoff pool cues. Did they carry guns now? Would it be so difficult for a U. S. representative to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon? Johnny didn't think so. He could count on one good chance only; he would have to make the most of it. So it was important to look the place over, to try and decide if he could take Stillson in here or if it would be better to wait in the parking lot with the window rolled down and the rifle on his lap.

So he had come and here he was, casing the joint while a state cop gave driver-permit exams not thirty feet away.

There was a bulletin board on his left, and Johnny snapped his unloaded camera at it-why in God's name hadn't he taken another two minutes and bought himself a roll of film? The board was covered with chatty small-town intelligence concerning baked-bean suppers, an upcoming high school play, dog-licensing information, and, of course, more on Greg. A file card said that Jackson's first selectman was looking for someone who could take shorthand, and Johnny studied this as though it were of great interest to him while his mind moved into high gear.

Of course if Jackson looked impossible-or even chancy-he could wait until next week, where Stillson would be doing the whole thing all over again in the town of Upson. Or the week after, in Trimbull. Or the week after that. Or never.

It should be this week. It ought to be tomorrow.

He snapped the big woodstove in the corner, and then glanced upward. There was a balcony up there. No-not precisely a balcony, more like a gallery with a waist-high railing and wide, white-painted slats with small, decorative diamonds and curlicues cut into the wood. It would be very possible for a man to crouch behind that railing and look through one of those doodads. At the right moment, he could just stand up and -'What kind of camera is that?”

Johnny looked around, sure it was the cop. The cop would ask to see his filmless camera-and then he would want to see some ID-and then it would be all over.

But it wasn't the cop. It was the young man who had been taking his driver's permit test. He was about twenty. two, with long hair and pleasant, frank eyes. He was wearing a suede coat and faded jeans.

“A Nikon,” Johnny said.

“Good camera, man. I'm a real camera nut. How long have you been working for Yankee?”

“Well, I'm a free lance,” Johnny said. “I do stuff for them, sometimes for Country Journal, sometimes for Downeast, you know.”

“Nothing national, like People or Life?”

“No. At least, not yet. “What f-stop do you use in here?” What in hell is an f-stop.”

Johnny shrugged. “I play it mostly by ear.”

“By eye, you mean,” the young man said, smiling. “That's right, by eye. “Get lost, kid, please get lost. “I'm interested in f,ree4andng myself,” the young man said, and grinned. “My big dream is to take a picture some day like the flag-raising at Iwo Jima.”

“I heard that was staged,” Johnny said.

“Well, maybe. Maybe. But it's, a classic. Or how about the first picture of a UFO coming in for a landing? I'd sure like that. Anyway, I've got a portfolio of stuff I've taken around here. Who's your contact at Yankee?”

Johnny was sweating now. “Actually, they contacted me on this one,” he said. “It was a…”

“Mr. Clawson, you can come over now,” the cop said, sounding impatient. “I'd like to go over these answers with you.”

“Whoops, his master's voice,” Clawson said. See you later, man. “He hurried off and Johnny let out his breath in a silent, whispering sigh. It was time to get out, and quickly.

He snapped another two or three “pictures” just so it wouldn't look like a complete rout, but he was barely aware of what he was looking at through the viewfinder. Then he left.

The young man in the suede jacket-Clawson-had forgotten all about him, He had apparently flunked the written part of his exam. He was arguing strenuously with the cop, who was only shaking his head.

Johnny paused for a moment in the town hall's entryway. To his left was a cloakroom. To his right was a closed door. He tried it and found it unlocked. A narrow flight of stairs led upward into dimness. The actual offices would be up there, of course. And the gallery.

He was staying at the Jackson House, a pleasant little hotel on the main drag. It had been carefully renovated and the renovations had probably cost a lot of money, but the place would pay for itself, the owners must have reckoned, because of the new Jackson Mountain ski resort. Only the resort had gone bust and now the pleasant little hotel was barely hanging on. The night clerk was dozing over a cup of coffee when Johnny went out at four o'clock on Saturday morning, the attache case in his left hand.

He had slept little last night, slipping into a short, light doze after midnight. He had dreamed. It was 1970 again. It was carnival time. He and Sarah stood in front of the Wheel of Fortune and again he had that feeling of crazy, enormous power. In his nostrils he could smell burning rubber.

“Come on,” a voice said softly behind him, “I love to watch this guy take a beatin. “He turned and it was Frank Dodd, dressed in his black vinyl raincoat, his throat slit from ear to ear in a wide red grin, his eyes sparkling with dead vivaciousness. He turned back to the booth, scared-but now the pitchman was Greg Stillson, grinning knowingly at him, his yellow hard hat tipped cockily back on his skull. “Hey-hey-hey,” Stillson chanted, his voice deep and resonant and ominous, “Lay em down where you want em down, fella. What do you say? Want to shoot the moon?”

Yes, he wanted to shoot the moon. But as Stillson set the Wheel in motion he saw that the entire outer circle had turned green. Every number was double-zero. Every number was a house number.

He had jerked awake and spent the rest of the night looking out the frost-rimmed window into darkness. The headache he'd had ever since arriving in Jackson the day before was gone, leaving him feeling weak but composed. He sat with his hands in his lap. He didn't think about Greg Stillson; he thought about the past. He thought about his mother putting a Band-Aid on a scraped knee; he thought about the time the dog had torn off the back of Grandma Nellie's absurd sundress and how he had laughed and how Vera had swatted him one and cut his forehead with the stone in her engagement ring; he thought about his father showing him how to bait a fishing hook and saying, It doesn't hurt the worms, Johnny at least, I don't think it does. He thought about his father giving him a pocketknife for Christmas when he was seven and saying very seriously, I'm trusting you) Johnny. All those memories had come back in a flood.

Now he stepped off into the deep cold of the morning, his shoes squeaking on the path shoveled through the snow. His breath plumed out in front of him. The moon was down but the stars were sprawled across the black sky in idiot's profusion, God's jewel box, Vera always called it. You're looking into God's jewel box, Johnny.

He walked down Main Street, and he stopped in front of the tiny Jackson post office and fumbled the letters out of his coat pocket. Letters to his father, to Sarah, to Sam Weizak, to Bannerman. He set the attache case down between his feet, opened the mailbox that stood in front of the neat little brick building, and after one brief moment of hesitation, dropped them in. He could hear them drop down inside, surely the first letters mailed in Jackson this new day, and the sound gave him a queer sense of finality, The letters were mailed, there was no stopping now.

He picked up the case again and walked on. The only sound was the squeak of his shoes on the snow. The big thermometer over the door of the Granite State Savings Bank stood at 3 degrees, and the air had that feeling of total silent inertia that belongs exclusively to cold New Hampshire mornings. Nothing moved. The roadway was empty. The windshields of the parked cars were blinded with cataracts of frost. Dark windows, drawn shades. To Johnny it all seemed somehow dreadful and at the same time holy. He fought the feeling. This was no holy business he was on.

He crossed Jasper Street and there was the town hall, standing white and austerely elegant behind its plowed banks of twinkling snow.

What are you going to do if the front door's locked? Smart guy?

Well, he would find a way to cross that bridge if he had to. Johnny looked around, but there was no one to see him. If this had been the president coming for one of his famous town meetings, everything would have been different, of course. The place would have been blocked off since the night before, and men would be stationed inside already. But this was only a U. S. representative, one of over four hundred, no big deal. No big deal yet.

Johnny went up the steps and tried the door. The knob turned easily and he stepped into the cold entryway and pulled the door shut behind him. Now the headache was coming back, pulsing along with the steady thick beat of his heart. He set his case down and massaged his temples with his gloved fingers.

There was a sudden low scream. The coat-closet door was opening, very slowly, and then something white was falling out of the shadows toward him.

Johnny barely held back a cry. For one moment he thought it was a body, falling out of the closet like some-thing from a spook movie. But it was only a heavy cardboard sign that read PLEASE HAVE PAPERS IN ORDER BEFORE APPEARING FOR EXAMINATION.

He set it back in place and then turned to the doorway giving upon the stairs.

This door was now locked.

He leaned down to get a better look at it in the dim white glow of the streetlight that filtered in the one window. It was a spring lock, and he thought he might be able to open it with a coat hanger. He found one in the coat closet and hooked the neck of it into the crack between the door and the jamb. He worked it down to the lock and began to fumble around. His head was thudding fiercely now. At last he heard the bolt snap back as the wire caught it. He pulled the door open. He picked up his attache case and went through, still holding the coat hanger. He pulled the door closed behind him and heard it lock again. He went up the narrow stairs, which creaked and groaned under his weight.

At the top of the stairs there was a short hallway with several doors on either side. He walked down the hall, past TOWN MANAGER and TOWN SELECTMEN, past TAX ASSESSOR and MEN'S and O'SEER OF THE POOR and LADIES”.

There was an unmarked door at the end. It was unlocked and he came out onto the gallery above the rear of the meeting hall, which was spread out below him in a crazy quilt of shadows. He closed the door behind him and shivered a little at the soft stir of echoes in the empty hall. His footfalls also echoed back as he walked to the right along the rear gallery, then turned left. Now he was walking along the right-hand side of the hall, about twenty-five feet above the floor. He stopped at a point above the woodstove and directly across from the podium where Stillson would be standing in about five-and-a-half hours.

He sat down cros-legged and rested for a while. Tried to get in control of the headache with some deep breathing. The woodstove wasn't operating and he felt the cold settling steadily against him-and then into him. Previews of the winding shroud.

When he had begun to feel a little better, he thumbed the catches on the attache case. The double dick echoed back as his footfalls had done, and this time it was the sound of cocking pistols.

Western justice, he thought, for no reason at all. That was what the prosecutor had said when the jury found Claudine Longet guilty of shooting her lover. She's found out what western justice means.

Johnny looked down into the case and rubbed his eyes. His vision doubled briefly and then things came together again. He was getting an impression from the very wood he was sitting on. A very old impression; if it had been a photograph, it would have been sepia-toned. Men standing here and smoking cigars, talking and laughing and waiting for town meeting to begin. Had it been 1920? 1902? There was something ghostly about it that made him feel uneasy. One of them had been talking about the price of whiskey and cleaning his nose with a silver toothpick and

(and two years before he had poisoned his wife)

Johnny shivered. Whatever the impression was, it didn't matter. It was an impression of a man who was long dead now.

The rifle gleamed up at him.

When men do it in wartime, they give them medals, he thought.

He began to assemble the rifle. Each click I echoed back, just once, solemnly, the sound of a cocking pistol.

He loaded the Remington with five bullets.

He placed it across his knees.

And waited

Dawn came slowly. Johnny dozed a little, but he was too cold now to do more than doze. Thin, sketchy dreams haunted what sleep he did get.

He came fully awake at a little past seven. The door below was thrown open with a crash, and he had to bite his tongue to keep from crying out, Who's there?

It was the custodian. Johnny put his eye to one of the diamond shapes cut into the balustrade and saw a burly man who was bundled up in a thick Navy pea coat. He was coming up the center aisle with an armload of firewood. He was humming “Red River Valley”. He dropped the armload of wood into the woodbox with a crash and then disappeared below Johnny. A second later he heard the thin screcing noise of the stove's firebox door being swung open.

Johnny suddenly thought of the plume of vapor be was producing every time he exhaled. Suppose the custodian looked up? Would he be able to see that?

He tried to slow the rate of his breathing, but that made his head ache worse and his vision doubled alarmingly.

Now there was the crackle of paper being crumpled, then the scratch of a match. A faint whiff of sulphur in the cold air. The custodian went on humming “Red River Valley”, and then broke into loud and tuneless song: “From this valley they say you are going… we will miss your bright eyes and sweet smiiiiile…”

Now a different crackling sound. Fire.

“That's got it, you sucker,” the custodian said from directly below Johnny, and then there was the sound of the firebox door being slammed shut again. Johnny pressed both hands over his mouth like a bandage, suddenly afflicted with suicidal amusement. He saw himself rising up from the floor of the gallery, as thin and white as any self-respecting ghost. He saw himself spreading his arms like wings and his fingers like talons and calling down in hollow tones: “That's got you, you sucker.”

He held the laughter behind his hands. His head throbbed like a tomato full of hot, expanding blood. His vision jittered and blurred crazily. Suddenly he wanted very badly to move away from the impression of the man who had been cleaning his nose with the silver toothpick, but he didn't dare make a sound. Dear Jesus, what if he had to sneeze?

Suddenly, with no warning, a terrible wavering shriek filled the hall, drilling into Johnny's ears like thin silver nails, climbing, making his head vibrate. He opened his mouth to scream. -It cut off.

“Oh, you whore,” the custodian said conversationally.

Johnny looked through the diamond and saw the custodian standing behind the podium and fiddling with a microphone. The mike cord snaked down to a small portable amp. The custodian went down the few steps from the podium to the floor and pulled the amplifier farther from the mike, then fooled with the dials on top of it. He went back to the mike and turned it on again. There was another feedback whine, this one lower and then tapering away entirely. Johnny pressed his hands tight against his forehead and rubbed them back and forth.

The custodian tapped on the mike with his thumb, and the sound filled the big empty room. It sounded like a fist knocking on a coffin lid. Then his voice, still tuneless, but now amplified to the point of monstrosity, a giant's voice bludgeoning into Johnny's head: “FROM THIS VAL-LEEE THEY SAY YOU ARE GOING…”

Stop it, Johnny wanted to scream. Oh, please stop it, I'm going crazy, can't you stop it?

The singing ended with a loud, amplified snap! and the custodian said in his own voice, “That's got you, whore.”

He walked out of Johnny's line of sight again. There was a sound of tearing paper and the low popping sounds of twine being snapped. Then the custodian reappeared, whistling and holding a large stack of booklets. He began to place them at close intervals along the benches.

When he had finished that chore, the custodian buttoned his coat and left the hall. The door slammed hollowly shut behind him. Johnny looked at his watch. It was 7: 45. The town hall was warming up a little. He sat and waited. The headache was still very bad, but oddly enough. it was easier to bear than it had ever been before. All he had to do was tell himself that he wouldn't have to bear it for long.

The doors slammed open again promptly at nine o'clock, startling him out of a catnap. His hands clamped tightly over the rifle and then relaxed. He put his eye to the diamond-shaped peephole. Four men this time. One of them was the custodian, the collar of his pea coat turned up against his neck. The other three were wearing topcoats with suits underneath. Johnny felt his heartbeat quicken. One of them was Sonny Elliman. His hair was cut short now and handsomely styled, but the brilliant green eyes had not changed.

“Everything set?” he asked.

“Check for yourself,” the custodian said.

“Don't be offended, Dad,” one of the others replied. They were moving to the front of the hall. One of them clicked the amplifier on and then clicked it off again, satisfied.

“People round these parts act like he was the bloody emperor,” the custodian grumbled.

“He is, be is,” the third man said-Johnny thought he also recognized this fellow from the Trimbull rally. “Haven't you got wise to that yet, Pop?”

“Have you been upstairs?” Elliman asked the custodian, and Johnny went cold.

“Stairway door's locked,” the custodian answered. “Same as always. I gave her a shake.”

Johnny silently gave thanks for the spring lock on the door.

“Ought to check it out,” Elliman said.

The custodian uttered an exasperated laugh. “I don't know about you guys,” he said. “Who are you expecting? The Phantom of the Opera?”

“Come on Sonny,” the fellow Johnny thought he recognized said. “There's nobody up there, We just got time for a coffee if we shag ass down to that resrunt on the corner.”

“That's not coffee,” Sonny said. “Fucking mud is all that is. Just run upstairs first and make sure no one's there, Moochie. We go by the book.”

Johnny licked his lips and clutched the gun. He looked up and down the narrow gallery. To his right it ended in a blank wall. To his left it went back to the suite of offices, and either way it made no difference. If he moved, they would hear him. This empty, the town hall served as a natural amplifier. He was stuck.

There were footfalls down below. Then the sound of the door between the hall and the entryway being opened and closed. Johnny waited, frozen and helpless. Just below him the custodian and the other two were talking, but he heard nothing they said. His head had turned on his neck like some slow engine and he stared down the length of the gallery, waiting for the fellow Sonny Elliman had called Moochie to appear at the end of it. His bored expression would suddenly turn to shock and incredulity, his mouth would open: Hey Sonny, there's a guy up here!

Now he could hear the muffled sound of Moochie climbing the stairs. He tried to think of something, anything. Nothing came. They were going to discover him, it was less than a minute away now, and he didn't have any idea of how to stop it from happening. No matter what he did, his one chance was on the verge of being blown.

Doors began to open and close, the sound of each drawing closer and less muffled. A drop of sweat spilled from Johnny's forehead and darkened the leg of his jeans. He could remember each door he had come past on his way here. Moochie had checked TOWN MANAGER and TOWN SELECTMEN and TAX ASSESSOR. Now he was opening the door of MEN'S, now he was glancing through the office that belonged to the O'SEER OF THE POOR, now the LADIES” room. The next door would be the one leading to the galleries.

It opened.

There was the sound of two footfalls as Moochie approached the railing of the short gallery that ran along the back of the hall. “Okay, Sonny? You satisfied?”

“Everything look good?”

“Looks like a fucking dump,” Moochie responded, and there was a burst of laughter from below.

“Well, come on down and let's go for coffee,” the third man said. And incredibly, that was it. The door slammed to. The footsteps retreated back down the hall, and then down the steps to the first floor.

Johnny went limp and for a moment everything swam away from him into shades of gray. The slam of the entryway door as they went out for their coffee brought him partially out of it.

Below, the custodian presented his judgment: “Bunch of whores. “Then he left, too, and for the next twenty minutes or so, there was only Johnny.

Around 9: O A. M., the people of Jackson began to file into their town hall. The first to appear was a trio of old ladies dressed in formal black, chattering together like magpies. Johnny watched them pick seats close to the stove-almost entirely out of the field of his vision-and pick up the booklets that had been left on the seats. The booklets appeared to be filled with glossy pictures of Greg Stillson.

“I just love that man,” one of the three said. “I've gotten his autograph three times and I'll get it again today, I'll be bound.”

That was all the talk there was about Greg Stillson. The ladies went on to discuss the impending Old Home Sunday at the Methodist Church.

Johnny, almost directly over the stove, went from very cold to very hot. He had taken advantage of the slack tide between the departure of Stillson's security people and the arrival of the first townfolk, using it to shed both his jacket and his outer shirt. He kept wiping sweat from his face with a handkerchief, and the linen was streaked with blood as well as sweat. His bad eye was kicking up again, and his vision was constantly blurred and reddish.

The door below opened, there was the hearty tromp-tromp-tromp of men stamping snow from their pacs, and then four men in checked woolen jackets came down the aisle and sat in the front row. One of them launched immediately into a Frenchman joke.

A young woman of about twenty-three arrived with her son, who looked about four. The boy was wearing a blue snowmobile suit with bright yellow markings, and he wanted to know if he could talk into the microphone.

“No, dear,” the woman said, and they went down behind the men. The boy immediately began to kick his feet against the bench in front of him, and one of the men glanced back over his shoulder,

“Sean, stop that,” she said.

Quarter of ten now. The door was opening and closing with a steady regularity. Men and women of all types and occupations and ages were filling up the hall. There was a drifting hum of conversation, and it was edged with an indefinable sense of anticipation. They weren't here to quiz their duly-elected representative; they were waiting for a bona-fide star turn in their small community. Johnny knew that most “meet-your-candidate” and “meet-your-representative” sessions were attended by a handful of die-hards in the nearly empty meeting halls. During the election of 1976 a debate between Maine's Bill Cohen and his challenger, Leighton Cooney, had attracted all of twenty-six people, press aside. The skull-sessions were so much window-dressing, a self-testimonial to wave when election time came around again. Most could have been held in a middling-sized closet. But by 10 A. M., every seat in the town hall was taken, and there were twenty or thirty standees at the back. Every time the door opened, Johnny's hands tensed down on the rifle. And he was still not positive he could do it, no matter what the stakes.

Five past, ten past. Johnny began to think Stillson had been held up, or was perhaps not coming at all. And the feeling which moved stealthily through him was one of relief.

Then the door opened again and a hearty voice called:

“Hey! How ya doin, Jackson, N. H.?”

A startled, pleased murmur. Someone called ecstatic-ally, “Greg! How are you?”

“Well, I'm feeling perky,” Stillson came right back, “How the heck are you?”

A spatter of applause quickly swelled to a roar of approval.

“Hey, all right!” Greg shouted over it. He moved quickly down the aisle, shaking hands, toward the podium.

Johnny watched him through his loophole. Stillson was wearing a heavy rawhide coat with a sheepskin collar, and today the hard hat had been replaced with a woolen ski cap with a bright red tassel. He paused at the head of the aisle and waved at the three or four press in attendance. Flashbulbs popped and the applause got its second wind, shaking the rafters.

And Johnny Smith suddenly knew it was now or never. The feelings he had had about Greg Stillson at the Trimbull rally suddenly swept over him again with a certain and terrible clarity. Inside his aching, tortured head he seemed to hear a dull wooden sound, two things coming together with a terrible force at one single moment. It was, perhaps, the sound of destiny. It would be too easy to delay, to let Stillson talk and talk. Too easy to let him get away, to Sit up here with bis head in his hands, waiting as the crowd thinned out, waiting as the custodian returned to dismantle the sound system and sweep up the litter, all the time kidding himself that there would be next week in another town.

The time was now, indisputably now, and every human being on earth suddenly had a stake in what happened in this backwater meetinghouse.

That thudding sound in his head, like poles of destiny coming together.

Stillson was mounting the steps to the podium. The area behind him was clear. The three men in their open topcoats were lounging against the far wall.

Johnny stood up.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion.

There were cramps in his legs from sitting so long. His knees popped like dud firecrackers. Time seemed frozen, the applause went on and on even though heads were turning, necks were craning; someone screamed through the applause and still it went on; someone had screamed because there was a man in the gallery and the man was holding a rifle and this was something they had all seen on TV, it was a situation with classic elements that they all recognized. In its own way, it was as American as The Wonderful World of Disney. The politician and the man in a high place with the gun.

Greg Stillson turned toward him, his thick neck craning, wrinkling into creases. The red puff on the top of his ski cap bobbed.

Johnny put the rifle to his shoulder. It seemed to float up there and he felt the thud as it socketed home next to the joint there. He thought of shooting partridge with his dad as a boy. They had gone deer-hunting but the only time Johnny had ever seen one he had not been able to pull the trigger; the buck fever had gotten him. It was a secret, as shameful as masturbation, and he had never told anyone.

There was another scream. One of the old ladies was clutching her mouth and Johnny saw there was artificial fruit scattered along the wide brim of her black hat, Faces turned up to him, big white zeros. Open mouths, small black zeros. The little boy in the snowmobile suit was pointing. His mother was trying to shield him. Still-son was in the gunsight suddenly and Johnny remembered to flick off the rifle's safety. Across the way the men in the topcoats were reaching inside their jackets and Sonny Elliman, his green eyes blazing, was hollering:

Down! Greg, get DOWN!”

But Stillson stared up into the gallery and for the second time their eyes locked together in a perfect sort of understanding, and Stillson only ducked at the same instant Johnny fired. The rifle's roar was loud, filling the place, and the slug took away nearly one whole corner of the podium, peeling it back to the bare, bright wood. Splinters flew. One of them struck the microphone, and there was another monstrous whine of feedback that suddenly ended in a guttural, low-key buzzing.

Johnny pumped another cartridge into the chamber and fired again. This time the slug punched a hole through the dusty carpeting of the dais.

The crowd had started to move, panicky as cattle. They all drove into the center aisle. The people who had been standing at the rear escaped easily, but then a bottleneck of cursing, screaming men and women formed in the double doorway.

There were popping noises from the other side of the hall, and suddenly part of the gallery railing splintered up in front of Johnny's eyes. Something screamed past his ear a second later. Then an invisible finger gave the collar of his shirt a flick. All three of them across the way were holding handguns, and because Johnny was up in the gallery, their field of fire was crystal clear-but Johnny doubted if they would have bothered overmuch about innocent bystanders anyway.

One of the trio of old women grabbed Moochie's arm. She was sobbing, trying to ask something. He flung her away and steadied his gun in both hands. There was a stink of gunpowder in the hall now. It had been about twenty seconds since Johnny had stood up.

“Down! Down, Greg!”

Stillson was still standing at the edge of the dais, crouching slightly, looking up. Johnny brought the rifle down, and for an instant Stilison was dead-bang in front sight. Then a pistol-slug grooved his neck, knocking him backward, and his own shot went wild into the air. The window across the way dissolved in a tinkling rain of glass. Thin screams drifted up from below. Blood poured down and across his shoulder and chest.

Oh, you're doing a great job of killing him, he thought hysterically, and pushed back to the railing again. He levered another cartridge into the breech and threw it to his shoulder again. Now Stilison was on the move. He darted down the steps to floor4evel and then glanced up at Johnny again.

Another bullet whizzed by his temple. I'm bleeding like a stuck pig, he thought. Come on. Come on and get this over.

The bottleneck at the entryway broke, and now people began to pour out. A puff of smoke rose from the barrel of one of the pistols across the way, there was a bang, and the invisible finger that had flicked his collar a few seconds ago now drew a line of fire across the side of Johnny's head. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered except taking Stillson. He brought the rifle down again.

Make this one count -Stillson moved with good speed for such a big man.

The dark-haired young woman Johnny had noticed earlier was about halfway up the center aisle, holding her crying son in her arms, still trying to shield him with her body. And what Stillson did then so dumbfounded Johnny that he almost dropped the rifle altogether. He snatched the boy from his mother's arms, whirled toward the gallery, holding the boy's body in front of him. It was no longer Greg Stillson in the front sight, but a small squirming figure in

(the filter blue filter yellow stripes tiger stripes)

a dark blue snowmobile suit with bright yellow piping. Johnny's mouth dropped open. It was Stillson, all right. The tiger. But he was behind the filter now.

What does it mean? Johnny screamed, but no sound passed his lips.

The mother screamed shrilly then; but Johnny had heard it all somewhere before. “Tommy! Give him to me!

TOMMY! GIVE HIM TO ME, YOU BASTARD!”

Johnny's head was swelling blackly, expanding like a bladder. Everything was starting to fade. The only brightness left was centered around the notched gunsight, the gunsight now laid directly over the chest of that blue snowmobile suit.

Do it, oh for Christ's sake you have to do it he'll get away -And now-perhaps it was only his blurring eyesight that made it seem so-the blue snowmobile suit began to spread, its color washing out to the light robin's egg color of the vision, the dark yellow stretching, striping, until everything began to be lost in it.

(behind the filter. yes, he's behind the filter, but what does it mean? does it mean it's safe or just that he's beyond my reach? what does it)

Warm fire flashed somewhere below and was gone. Some dim part of Johnny's mind registered it as a flashbulb.

Stilison shoved the woman away and backed toward the door, eyes squeezed into calculating pirate's slits. He held the squirming boy firmly by the neck and the crotch.

Can't. Oh dear God forgive me, I can't.

Two more bullets struck him then, one high in the chest, driving him back against the wall and bouncing him off it, the second into the left side of his midsection, spinning him around into the gallery railing. He was dimly aware that he had lost the rifle. It struck the gallery floor and discharged point-blank into the wall. Then his upper thighs crashed into the ballustrade and he was falling. The town hall turned over twice before his eyes and then there was a splintering crash as he struck two of the benches, breaking his back and both legs.

He opened his mouth to scream, but what came out was a great gush of blood. He lay in the splintered remains of the benches he had struck and thought: It's over. I punked out. Blew it.

Hands were on him, not gentle. They were turning him over. Elliman, Moochie, and the other guy were there. Elliman was the one who had turned him over.

Stillson came, shoving Moochie aside.

“Never mind this guy,” he said harshly. “Find the son of a bitch that took that picture. Smash his camera.

Moochie and the other guy left. Somewhere close by the woman with the dark hair was crying out:

behind a kid, hiding behind a kid and I'll tell every-body…”

“Shut her up, Sonny,” Stillson said.

“Sure,” Sonny said, and left Stillson's side.

Stillson got down on his knees above Johnny. “Do we know each other, fella? No sense lying. You've had the course.”

Johnny whispered, “We knew each other.”

“It was that Trimbull rally, wasn't it?”

Johnny nodded.

Stillson got up abruptly, and with the last bit of his strength Johnny reached out and grasped his ankle. It was only for a second; Stillson pulled free easily. But it was long enough.

Everything had changed.

People were drawing near him now, but he saw only feet and legs, no faces. It didn't matter. Everything had changed.

He began to cry a little. Touching Stillson this time had been like touching a blank. Dead battery. Fallen tree. Empty house. Bare bookshelves. Wine bottles ready for candles.

Fading. Going away. The feet and legs around him were becoming misty and indistinct. He heard their voices, the excited gabble of speculation, but not the words. Only the sound of the words, and even that was fading, blurring into a high, sweet humming sound.

He looked over his shoulder and there was the corridor he had emerged from so long ago. He had come out of that corridor and into this bright placental place. Only then his mother had been alive and his father had been there, calling him by name, until he broke through to them. Now it was only time to go back. Now it was right to go back.

I did it. Somehow I did it. I don't understand how, but I have.

He let himself drift toward that corridor with the dark chrome walls, not knowing if there might be something at the far end of it or not, content to let time show him that. The sweet hum of the voices faded. The misty brightness faded. But he was still he-Johnny Smith-intact.

Get into the corridor, he thought. All right.

He thought that if he could get into that corridor, he would be able to walk.