Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  She asked him if he would be staying in Derry overnight. "Uh-uh. I'll be going back as soon as we finish with the insurance adjustors. If something else pops, they can get in touch with me ... or you can."

  He smiled at her. She smiled back and touched his hand briefly. Ted didn't like it. He frowned out the window and fingered his pipe.

  21

  They were on time for their meeting with the representatives of the insurance company, which undoubtedly relieved Ted Milner's mind. Mort was not particularly crazy about having Ted in attendance; it had never been Ted's house, after all, not even after the divorce. Still, it seemed to ease Amy's mind to have him there, and so Mort left it alone.

  Don Strick, the Consolidated Assurance Company agent with whom they had done business, conducted the meeting at his office, where they went after another brief tour of "the site." At the office they met a man named Fred Evans, a Consolidated field investigator specializing in arson. The reason Evans hadn't been with Wickersham and Bradley that morning or at "the site" when Strick met them there at noon became obvious very quickly: he had spent most of the previous night poking through the ruins with a ten-cell flashlight and a Polaroid camera. He had gone back to his motel room, he said, to catch a few winks before meeting the Raineys.

  Mort liked Evans very much. He seemed to really care about the loss he and Amy had suffered, while everyone else, including Mr. Teddy Makes Three, seemed to have only mouthed the traditional words of sympathy before going on to whatever they considered the business at hand (and in Ted Milner's case, Mort thought, the business at hand was getting him out of Derry and back to Tashmore Lake as soon as possible). Fred Evans did not refer to 92 Kansas Street as "the site." He referred to it as "the house."

  His questions, while essentially the same as those asked by Wickersham and Bradley, were gentler, more detailed, and more probing. Although he'd had four hours' sleep at most, his eyes were bright, his speech quick and clear. After speaking with him for twenty minutes, Mort decided that he would deal with a company other than Consolidated Assurance if he ever decided to burn down a house for the insurance money. Or wait until this man retired.

  When he had finished his questions, Evans smiled at them. "You've been very helpful, and I want to thank you again, both for your thoughtful answers and for your kind treatment of me. In a lot of cases, people's feathers get ruffled the second they hear the words 'insurance investigator.' They're already upset, understandably so, and quite often they take the presence of an investigator on the scene as an accusation that they torched their own property."

  "Given the circumstances, I don't think we could have asked for better treatment," Amy said, and Ted Milner nodded so violently that his head might have been on a string--one controlled by a puppeteer with a bad case of nerves.

  "This next part is hard," Evans said. He nodded to Strick, who opened a desk drawer and produced a clipboard with a computer printout on it. "When an investigator ascertains that a fire was as serious as this one clearly was, we have to show the clients a list of claimed insurable property. You look it over, then sign an affidavit swearing that the items listed still belong to you, and that they were still in the house when the fire occurred. You should put a check mark beside any item or items you've sold since your last insurance overhaul with Mr. Strick here, and any insured property which was not in the house at the time of the fire." Evans put a fist to his lips and cleared his throat before going on. "I'm told that there has been a separation of residence recently, so that last bit may be particularly important."

  "We're divorced," Mort said bluntly. "I'm living in our place on Tashmore Lake. We only used it during the summers, but it's got a furnace and is livable during the cold months. Unfortunately, I hadn't got around to moving the bulk of my things out of the house up here. I'd been putting it off."

  Don Strick nodded sympathetically. Ted crossed his legs, fiddled with his pipe, and generally gave the impression of a man who is trying not to look as deeply bored as he is.

  "Do the best you can with the list," Evans said. He took the clipboard from Strick and handed it across the desk to Amy. "This can be a bit unpleasant--it's a little like a treasure hunt in reverse."

  Ted had put his pipe down and was craning at the list, his boredom gone, at least for the time being; his eyes were as avid as those of any bystander gleeping the aftermath of a bad accident. Amy saw him looking and obligingly tipped the form his way. Mort, who was sitting on the other side of her, tipped it back the other way.

  "Do you mind?" he asked Ted. He was angry, really angry, and they all heard it in his voice.

  "Mort--" Amy said.

  "I'm not going to make a big deal of this," Mort said to her, "but this was our stuff, Amy. Ours."

  "I hardly think--" Ted began indignantly.

  "No, he's perfectly right, Mr. Milner," Fred Evans said with a mildness Mort felt might have been deceptive. "The law says you have no right to be looking at the listed items at all. We wink at something like that if nobody minds ... but I think Mr. Rainey does."

  "You're damned tooting Mr. Rainey does," Mort said. His hands were tightly clenched in his lap; he could feel his fingernails biting smile-shapes into the soft meat of his palms.

  Amy switched her look of unhappy appeal from Mort to Ted. Mort expected Ted to huff and puff and try to blow somebody's house down, but Ted did not. Mort supposed it was a measure of his own hostile feeling toward the man that he'd made such an assumption; he didn't know Ted very well (although he did know he looked a bit like Alfalfa when you woke him up suddenly in a no-tell motel), but he knew Amy. If Ted had been a blowhard, she would have left him already.

  Smiling a little, speaking to her and ignoring Mort and the others completely, Ted said: "Would it help matters if I took a walk around the block?"

  Mort tried to restrain himself and couldn't quite do it. "Why not make it two?" he asked Ted with bogus amiability.

  Amy shot him a narrow, dark stare, then looked back at Ted. "Would you? This might be a little easier ..."

  "Sure," he said. He kissed her high on her cheekbone, and Mort had another dolorous revelation: the man cared for her. He might not always care for her, but right now he did. Mort realized he had come halfway to thinking Amy was just a toy that had captivated Ted for a little while, a toy of which he would tire soon enough. But that didn't jibe with what he knew of Amy, either. She had better instincts about people than that ... and more respect for herself.

  Ted got up and left. Amy looked at Mort reproachfully. "Are you satisfied?"

  "I suppose," he said. "Look, Amy--I probably didn't handle that as well as I could have, but my motives are honorable enough. We shared a lot over the years. I guess this is the last thing, and I think it belongs between the two of us. Okay?"

  Strick looked uncomfortable. Fred Evans did not; he looked from Mort to Amy and then back to Mort again with the bright interest of a man watching a really good tennis match.

  "Okay," Amy said in a low voice. He touched her hand lightly, and she gave him a smile. It was strained, but better than no smile at all, he reckoned.

  He pulled his chair closer to hers and they bent over the list, heads close together, like kids studying for a test. It didn't take Mort long to understand why Evans had warned them. He thought he had grasped the size of the loss. He had been wrong.

  Looking at the columns of cold computer type, Mort thought he could not have been more dismayed if someone had taken everything in the house at 92 Kansas Street and strewn it along the block for the whole world to stare at. He couldn't believe all the things he had forgotten, all the things that were gone.

  Seven major appliances. Four TVs, one with a videotape editing hook-up. The Spode china, and the authentic Early American furniture which Amy had bought a piece at a time. The value of the antique armoire which had stood in their bedroom was listed at $14,000. They had not been serious art-collectors, but they had been appreciators, and they had lost twelve pieces of original art
. Their value was listed at $22,000, but Mort didn't care about the dollar value; he was thinking about the N. C. Wyeth line-drawing of two boys putting to sea in a small boat. It was raining in the picture; the boys were wearing slickers and galoshes and big grins. Mort had loved that picture, and now it was gone. The Waterford glassware. The sports equipment stored in the garage--skis, ten-speed bikes, and the Old Town canoe. Amy's three furs were listed. He saw her make tiny check marks beside the beaver and the mink--still in storage, apparently--but she passed the short fox jacket without checking it off. It had been hanging in the closet, warm and stylish outerwear for fall, when the fire happened. He remembered giving her that coat for her birthday six or seven years ago. Gone now. His Celestron telescope. Gone. The big puzzle quilt Amy's mother had given them when they were married. Amy's mother was dead and the quilt was now so much ash in the wind.

  The worst, at least for Mort, was halfway down the second column, and again it wasn't the dollar value that hurt. 124 BOTS. WINE, the item read. VALUE $4,900. Wine was something they had both liked. They weren't rabid about it, but they had built the little wine room in the cellar together, stocked it together, and had drunk the occasional bottle together.

  "Even the wine," he said to Evans. "Even that."

  Evans gave him an odd look that Mort couldn't interpret, then nodded. "The wine room itself didn't burn, because you had very little fuel oil in the cellar tank and there was no explosion. But it got very hot inside, and most of the bottles burst. The few that didn't ... Well, I don't know much about wine, but I doubt if it would be good to drink. Perhaps I'm wrong."

  "You're not," Amy said. A single tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it absently away.

  Evans offered her his handkerchief. She shook her head and bent over the list with Mort again.

  Ten minutes later it was finished. They signed on the correct lines and Strick witnessed their signatures. Ted Milner showed up only instants later, as if he had been watching the whole thing on some private viewscreen.

  "Is there anything else?" Mort asked Evans.

  "Not now. There may be. Is your number down in Tashmore unlisted, Mr. Rainey?"

  "Yes." He wrote it down for Evans. "Please get in touch if I can help."

  "I will." He rose, hand outstretched. "This is always a nasty business. I'm sorry you two had to go through it."

  They shook hands all around and left Strick and Evans to write reports. It was well past one, and Ted asked Mort if he'd like to have some lunch with him and Amy. Mort shook his head.

  "I want to get back. Do some work and see if I can't forget all this for awhile." And he felt as if maybe he really could write. That was not surprising. In tough times--up until the divorce, anyway, which seemed to be an exception to the general rule--he had always found it easy to write. Necessary, even. It was good to have those make-believe worlds to fall back on when the real one had hurt you.

  He half-expected Amy to ask him to change his mind, but she didn't. "Drive safe," she said, and planted a chaste kiss on the corner of his mouth. "Thanks for coming, and for being so ... so reasonable about everything."

  "Can I do anything for you, Amy?"

  She shook her head, smiling a little, and took Ted's hand. If he had been looking for a message, this one was much too clear to miss.

  They walked slowly toward Mort's Buick.

  "You keepin well enough down there?" Ted asked. "Anything you need?"

  For the third time he was struck by the man's Southern accent--just one more coincidence.

  "Can't think of anything," he said, opening the Buick's door and fishing the car keys out of his pocket. "Where do you come from originally, Ted? You or Amy must have told me sometime, but I'll be damned if I can remember. Was it Mississippi?"

  Ted laughed heartily. "A long way from there, Mort. I grew up in Tennessee. A little town called Shooter's Knob, Tennessee."

  22

  Mort drove back to Tashmore Lake with his hands clamped to the steering wheel, his spine as straight as a ruler, and his eyes fixed firmly on the road. He played the radio loud and concentrated ferociously on the music each time he sensed telltale signs of mental activity behind the center of his forehead. Before he had made forty miles, he felt a pressing sensation in his bladder. He welcomed this development and did not even consider stopping at a wayside comfort-station. The need to take a whizz was another excellent distraction.

  He arrived at the house around four-thirty and parked the Buick in its accustomed place around the side of the house. Eric Clapton was throttled in the middle of a full-tilt-boogie guitar solo when Mort shut off the motor, and quiet crashed down like a load of stones encased in foam rubber. There wasn't a single boat on the lake, not a single bug in the grass.

  Pissing and thinking have a lot in common, he thought, climbing out of the car and unzipping his fly. You can put them both off... but not forever.

  Mort Rainey stood there urinating and thought about secret windows and secret gardens; he thought about those who might own the latter and those who might look through the former. He thought about the fact that the magazine he needed to prove a certain fellow was either a lunatic or a con man had just happened to burn up on the very evening he had tried to get his hands on it. He thought about the fact that his ex-wife's lover, a man he cordially detested, had come from a town called Shooter's Knob and that Shooter happened to be the pseudonym of the aforementioned loony-or-con-man who had come into Mort Rainey's life at the exact time when the aforementioned Mort Rainey was beginning to grasp his divorce not just as an academic concept but as a simple fact of his life forever after. He even thought about the fact that "John Shooter" claimed to have discovered Mort Rainey's act of plagiarism at about the same time Mort Rainey had separated from his wife.

  Question: Were all of these things coincidences?

  Answer: It was technically possible.

  Question: Did he believe all these things were coincidences?

  Answer: No.

  Question: Did he believe he was going mad, then?

  "The answer is no," Mort said. "He does not. At least not yet." He zipped up his fly and went back around the corner to the door.

  23

  He found his housekey, started to put it in the lock, and then pulled it out again. His hand went to the doorknob instead, and as his fingers closed over it, he felt a clear certainty that it would rotate easily. Shooter had been here ... had been, or was still. And he wouldn't have needed to force entry, either. Nope. Not this sucker. Mort kept a spare key to the Tashmore Lake house in an old soap-dish on a high shelf in the toolshed, which was where Shooter had gone to get a screwdriver in a hurry when the time had come to nail poor old Bump to the garbage cabinet. He was in the house now, looking around ... or maybe hiding. He was--

  The knob refused to move; Mort's fingers simply slid around it. The door was still locked.

  "Okay," Mort said. "Okay, no big deal." He even laughed a little as he socked the key home and turned it. Just because the door was locked didn't mean Shooter wasn't in the house. In fact, it made it more likely that he was in the house, when you really stopped to think about it. He could have used the spare key, put it back, then locked the door from the inside to lull his enemy's suspicions. All you had to do to lock it, after all, was to press the button set into the knob. He's trying to psych me out, Mort thought as he stepped in.

  The house was full of dusty late-afternoon sunlight and silence. But it did not feel like unoccupied silence.

  "You're trying to psych me out, aren't you?" he called. He expected to sound crazy to himself: a lonely, paranoid man addressing the intruder who only exists, after all, in his own imagination. But he didn't sound crazy to himself. He sounded, instead, like a man who has tumbled to at least half the trick. Only getting half a scam wasn't so great, maybe, but half was better than nothing.

  He walked into the living room with its cathedral ceiling, its window-wall facing the lake, and, of course, The World-Famous Mort R
ainey Sofa, also known as The Couch of the Comatose Writer. An economical little smile tugged at his cheeks. His balls felt high and tight against the fork of his groin.

  "Half a scam's better than none, right, Mr. Shooter?" he called.

  The words died into dusty silence. He could smell old tobacco smoke in that dust. His eye happened on the battered package of cigarettes he had excavated from the drawer of his desk. It occurred to him that the house had a smell-almost a stink--that was horribly negative: it was an un-woman smell. Then he thought: No. That's a mistake. That's not it. What you smell is Shooter. You smell the man, and you smell his cigarettes. Not yours, his.

  He turned slowly around, his head cocked back. A second-floor bedroom looked down on the living room halfway up the cream-colored wall; the opening was lined with dark-brown wooden slats. The slats were supposed to keep the unwary from falling out and splattering themselves all over the living-room floor, but they were also supposed to be decorative. Right then they didn't look particularly decorative to Mort; they looked like the bars of a jail cell. All he could see of what he and Amy had called the guest bedroom was the ceiling and one of the bed's four posts.