by Stephen King
Johnny had come out of that in a cold sweat, his flesh marbled into goosebumps, the scarf wrapped tightly between his hands, his breath coming in short, strangled gasps. He had thrown the scarf on the floor where it lay like a twisted white snake. He would not touch it again. His father had put it in a return envelope and sent it back.
But now, mercifully, the mail was beginning to taper off. The crazies had discovered some fresher object for their public and private obsessions. Newsmen no longer called for interviews, partly because the phone number had been changed and unlisted, partly because the story was old hat.
Roger Dussault had written a long and angry piece for his paper, of which he was the feature editor. He proclaimed the whole thing a cruel and tasteless hoax. Johnny had undoubtedly boned up on incidents from the pasts of several reporters who were likely to attend the press conference, just in case. Yes, he admitted, his sister Anne’s nickname had been Terry. She had died fairly young, and amphetamines might have been a contributing cause. But all of that was accessible information to anyone who wanted to dig it up. He made it all seem quite logical. The article did not explain how Johnny, who had not been out of the hospital, could have come by this “accessible information,” but that was a point most readers seemed to have overlooked. Johnny could not have cared less. The incident was closed, and he had no intention of creating new ones. What good could it possibly do to write the lady who had sent the scarf and tell her that her brother had drowned, screaming, in quicksand because he had gone the wrong way while looking for a place to take a piss? Would it ease her mind or help her live her life any better?
Today’s mail was a mere six letters. A power bill. A card from Herb’s cousin out in Oklahoma. A lady who had sent Johnny a crucifix with MADE IN TAIWAN stamped on Christ’s feet in tiny gold letters. There was a brief note from Sam Weizak. And a small envelope with a return address that made him blink and sit up straighter. S. Hazlett,12 Pond Street, Bangor.
Sarah. He tore it open.
He had received a sympathy card from her two days after the funeral services for his mother. Written on the back of it in her cool, backslanting hand had been: “Johnny—I’m so sorry that this has happened. I heard on the radio that your mom had passed away—in some ways that seemed the most unfair thing of all, that your private grief should have been made a thing of public knowledge. You may not remember, but we talked a little about your mom the night of your accident. I asked you what she’d do if you brought home a lapsed Catholic and you said she would smile and welcome me in and slip me a few tracts. I could see your love for her in the way you smiled. I know from your father that she had changed, but much of the change was because she loved you so much and just couldn’t accept what had happened. And in the end I guess her faith was rewarded. Please accept my warm sympathy, and if there’s anything I can do, now or later on, please count on your friend—Sarah.”
That was one note he had answered, thanking her for both the card and the thought. He had written it carefully, afraid that he might betray himself and say the wrong thing. She was a married woman now, that was beyond his control or ability to change. But he did remember their conversation about his mother—and so many other things about that night. Her note had summoned up the whole evening, and he answered in a bittersweet mood that was more bitter than sweet. He still loved Sarah Bracknell, and he had to remind himself constantly that she was gone, replaced by another woman who was five years older and the mother of a small boy.
Now he pulled a single sheet of stationery out of the envelope and scanned it quickly. She and her boy were headed down to Kennebunk to spend a week with Sarah’s freshman and sophomore roommate, a girl named Stephanie Constantine now, Stephanie Carsleigh then. She said that Johnny might remember her, but Johnny didn’t. Anyway, Walt was stuck in Washington for three weeks on combined firm and Republican party business, and Sarah thought she might take one afternoon and come by Pownal to see Johnny and Herb, if it was no trouble.
“You can reach me at Steph’s number, 814-6219, any time between Oct. 17th and the 23rd. Of course, if it would make you feel uncomfortable in any way, just call me and say so, either up here or down there in K’bunk. I’ll understand. Much love to both of you—Sarah.”
Holding the letter in one hand, Johnny looked across the yard and into the woods, which had gone russet and gold, seemingly just in the last week. The leaves would be falling soon, and then it would be time for winter.
Much love to both of you—Sarah.He ran his thumb across the words thoughtfully. It would be better not to call, nor to write, not to do anything, he thought. She would get the message. Like the woman who mailed the scarf—what possible good could it do? Why kick a sleeping dog? Sarah might be able to use that phrase, much love, blithely, but he could not. He wasn’t over the hurt of the past. For him, time had been crudely folded, stapled, and mutilated. In the progression of his own interior time, she had been his girl only six months ago. He could accept the coma and the loss of time in an intellectual way, but his emotions stubbornly resisted. Answering her condolence note had been difficult, but with a note it was always possible to crumple the thing up and start again if it began to go in directions it shouldn’t go, if it began to overstep the bounds of friendship, which was all they were now allowed to share. If he saw her, he might do or say something stupid. Better not to call. Better just to let it sink.
But he would call, he thought. Call and invite her over.
Troubled, he slipped the note back into the envelope.
The sun caught on bright chrome, twinkled there, and tossed an arrow of light back into his eyes. A Ford sedan was crunching its way down the driveway. Johnny squinted and tried to make out if it was a familiar car. Company out here was rare. There had been lots of mail, but people had only stopped by on three or four occasions. Pownal was small on the map, hard to find. If the car did belong to some seeker after knowledge, Johnny would send him or her away quickly, as kindly as possible, but firmly. That had been Weizak’s parting advice. Good advice, Johnny thought.
“Don’t let anyone rope you into the role of consulting swami, John. Give no encouragement and they will forget. It may seem heartless to you at first—most of them are misguided people with too many problems and only the best of intentions—but it is a question of your life, your privacy. So be firm.” And so he had been.
The Ford pulled into the turnaround between the shed and the woodpile, and as it swung around, Johnny saw the small Hertz sticker in the corner of the windshield. A very tall man in a very new blue jeans and a red plaid hunting shirt that looked as if it had just come out of an L.L. Bean box got out of the car and glanced around. He had the air of a man who is not used to the country, a man who knows there are no more wolves or cougars in New England, but who wants to make sure all the same. A city man. He glanced up at the porch, saw Johnny, and raised one hand in greeting.
“Good afternoon,” he said. He had a flat city accent as well—Brooklyn, Johnny thought—and he sounded as if he were talking through a Saltine box.
“Hi,” Johnny said. “Lost?”
“Boy, I hope not,” the stranger said, coming over to the foot of the steps. “You’re either John Smith or his twin brother.”
Johnny grinned. “I don’t have a brother, so I guess you found your way to the right door. Can I do something for you?”
“Well, maybe we can do something for each other.” The stranger mounted the porch steps and offered his hand. Johnny shook it. “My name is Richard Dees. Inside View magazine.”
His hair was cut in a fashionable ear-length style, and it was mostly gray. Dyed gray, Johnny thought with some amusement. What could you say about a man who sounded as if he were talking through a Saltine box and dyed his hair gray?
“Maybe you’ve seen the magazine.”
“Oh, I’ve seen it. They sell it at the checkout counters in the supermarket. I’m not interested in being interviewed. Sorry you had to make a trip out here for nothing.” They
sold it in the supermarket, all right. The headlines did everything but leap off the pulp-stock pages and try to mug you. CHILD KILLED BY CREATURES FROM SPACE, DISTRAUGHT MOTHER CRIES. THE FOODS THAT ARE POISONING YOUR CHILDREN. 12 PSYCHICS PREDICT CALIFORNIA EARTHQUAKE BY 1978.
“Well now, an interview wasn’t exactly what we were thinking of,” Dees said. “May I sit down?”
“Really, I ...”
“Mr. Smith, I’ve flown all the way up from New York, and from Boston I came on a little plane that had me wondering what would happen to my wife if I died intestate.”
“Portland-Bangor Airways?” Johnny asked, grinning.
“That’s what it was,” Dees agreed.
“All right,” Johnny said. “I’m impressed with your valor and your dedication to your job. I’ll listen, but only for fifteen minutes or so. I’m supposed to sleep every afternoon.” This was a small lie in a good cause.
“Fifteen minutes should be more than enough.” Dees leaned forward. “I’m just making an educated guess, Mr. Smith, but I’d estimate that you must owe somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars. That roll somewhere within putting distance of the pin, does it?”
Johnny’s smile thinned. “What I owe or don’t owe,” he said, “is my business.”
“All right, of course, sure. I didn’t mean to offend, Mr. Smith. Inside View would like to offer you a job. A rather lucrative job.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“If you’ll just give me a chance to lay this out for you ...”
Johnny said, “I’m not a practicing psychic. I’m not a Jeane Dixon or an Edgar Cayce or an Alex Tannous. That’s over with. The last thing I want to do is rake it up again.”
“Can I have just a few moments?”
“Mr. Dees, you don’t seem to understand what I’m ...”
“Just a few moments?” Dees smiled winningly.
“How did you find out where I was, anyway?”
“We have a stringer on a mid-Maine paper called the Kennebec Journal. He said that although you’d dropped out of the public view, you were probably staying with your father.”
“Well, I owe him a real debt of thanks, don’t I?”
“Sure,” Dees said easily. “I’m betting you’ll think so when you hear the whole deal. May I?”
“All right,” Johnny said. “But just because you flew up here on Panic Airlines, I’m not going to change my mind.”
“Well, however you see it. It’s a free country, isn’t it? Sure it is. Inside View specializes in a psychic view of things, Mr. Smith, as you probably know. Our readers, to be perfectly frank, are out of their gourds for this stuff. We have a weekly circulation of three million. Three million readers every week, Mr. Smith, how’s that for a long shot straight down the fairway? How do we do it? We stick with the upbeat, the spiritual ...”
“Twin Babies Eaten By Killer Bear,” Johnny murmured.
Dees shrugged. “Sure, well, it’s a tough old world, isn’t it? People have to be informed about these things. It’s their right to know. But for every downbeat article we’ve got three others telling our readers how to lose weight painlessly, how to find sexual happiness and compatibility, how to get closer to God...”
“Do you believe in God, Mr. Dees?”
“Actually, I don’t,” Dees said, and smiled his winning smile. “But we live in a democracy, greatest country on earth, right? Everyone is the captain of his own soul. No, the point is, our readers believe in God. They believe in angels and miracles ...”
“And exorcisms and devils and Black Masses ...”
“Right, right, right. You catch. It’s a spiritual audience. They believe all this psychic bushwah. We have a total of ten psychics under contract, including Kathleen Nolan, the most famous seer in America. We’d like to put you under contract, Mr. Smith.”
“Would you?”
“Indeed we would. What would it mean for you? Your picture and a short column would appear roughly twelve times a year, when we run one of our All-Psychic issues. Inside View’s Ten Famous Psychics Preview the Second Ford Administration, that sort of thing. We always do a New Year’s issue, and one each Fourth of July on the course of America over the next year—that’s always a very informative issue, lots of chip shots on foreign policy and economic policy in that one—plus assorted other goodies.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Johnny said. He was speaking very slowly, as if to a child. “I’ve had a couple of precognitive bursts—I suppose you could say I ‘saw the future’—but I don’t have any control over it. I could no more come up with a prediction for the second Ford administration—if there ever is one—than I could milk a bull.”
Dees looked horrified. “Who said you could? Staff writers do all those columns.”
“Staff ... ?” Johnny gaped at Dees, finally shocked.
“Of course,” Dees said impatiently. “Look. One of our most popular guys over the last couple of years has been Frank Ross, the guy who specializes in natural disasters. Hell of a nice guy, but Jesus Christ, he quit school in the ninth grade. He did two hitches in the Army and was swamping out Greyhound buses at the Port Authority terminal in New York when we found him. You think we’d let him write his own column? He’d misspell cat.”
“But the predictions ...”
“A free hand, nothing but a free hand. But you’d be surprised how often these guys and gals get stuck for a real whopper.”
“Whopper,” Johnny repeated, bemused. He was a little surprised to find himself getting angry. His mother had bought Inside View for as long as he could remember, all the way back to the days when they had featured pictures of bloody car wrecks, decapitations, and bootlegged execution photos. She had sworn by every word. Presumably the greater part of Inside View’s other 2,999,999 readers did as well. And here sat this fellow with his dyed gray hair and his forty-dollar shoes and his shirt with the store-creases still in it, talking about whoppers.
“But it all works out,” Dees was saying. “If you ever get stuck, all you have to do is call us collect and we all take it into the pro-shop together and come up with something. We have the right to anthologize your columns in our yearly book, Inside Views of Things to Come. You’re perfectly free to sign any contract you can get with a book publisher, however. All we get is first refusal on the magazine rights, and we hardly ever refuse, I can tell you. And we pay very handsomely. That’s over and above whatever figure we contract for. Gravy on your mashed potatoes, you might say.” Dees chuckled.
“And what might that figure be?” Johnny asked slowly. He was gripping the arms of his rocker. A vein in his right temple pulsed rhythmically.
“Thirty thousand dollars per year for two years,” Dees said. “And if you prove popular, that figure would become negotiable. Now, all our psychics have some area of expertise. I understand that you’re good with objects.” Dees’s eyes became half-lidded, dreamy. “I see a regular feature. Twice monthly, maybe—we don’t want to run a good thing into the ground. ‘John Smith invites Inside View-ers to send in personal belongings for psychic examination ...’ Something like that. We’d make it clear, of course, that they should send in inexpensive stuff because nothing could be returned. But you’d be surprised. Some people are crazy as bedbugs, God love em. You’d be surprised at some of the stuff that would come in. Diamonds, gold coins, wedding rings ... and we could attach a rider to the contract specifying that all objects mailed in would become your personal property.”
Now Johnny began to see tones of dull red before his eyes. “People would send things in and I’d just keep them. That’s what you’re saying.”
“Sure, I don’t see any problem with that. It’s just a question of keeping the ground rules clear up front. A little extra gravy for those mashed potatoes.”
“Suppose,” Johnny said, carefully keeping his voice even and modulated, “suppose I got ... stuck for a whopper, as you put it ... and I just called in and said President Ford was going to be as
sassinated on September 31, 1976? Not because I felt he was, but because I was stuck?”
“Well, September only has thirty days, you know,” Dees said. “But otherwise, I think it’s a hole in one. You’re going to be a natural, Johnny. You think big. That’s good. You’d be surprised how many of these people think small. Afraid to put their mouths where their money is, I suppose. One of our guys—Tim Clark out in Idaho—wrote in two weeks ago and said he’d had a flash that Earl Butz was going to be forced to resign next year. Well pardon my French, but who gives a fuck? Who’s Earl Butz to the American housewife? But you have good waves, Johnny. You were made for this stuff.”
“Good waves,” Johnny muttered.
Dees was looking at him curiously. “You feel all right, Johnny? You look a little white.”
Johnny was thinking of the lady who had sent the scarf. Probably she read Inside View, too. “Let me see if I can summarize this,” he said. “You’d pay me thirty thousand dollars a year for my name ...”
“And your picture, don’t forget.”
“And my picture, for a few ghost-written columns. Also a feature where I tell people what they want to know about objects they send in. As an extra added attraction, I get to keep the stuff ...”
“If the lawyers can work it out ...”
“... as my personal property. That the deal?”
“That’s the bare bones of the deal, Johnny. The way these things feed each other, it’s just amazing. You’ll be a household word in six months, and after that, the sky is the limit. The Carson show. Personal appearances. Lecture tours. Your book, of course, pick your house, they’re practically throwing money at psychics along Publisher’s Row. Kathy Nolan started with a contract like the one we’re offering you, and she makes over two hundred thou a year now. Also, she founded her own church and the IRS can’t touch dime-one of her money. She doesn’t miss a trick, does our Kathy.” Dees leaned forward, grinning. “I tell you, Johnny, the sky is the limit.”
