Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  "No, Mort! Please! Please, Mort--"

  He flung himself at her, raising the screwdriver over his head and then bringing it down. Amy shrieked and rolled to the left. Pain burned a line across her hip as the screwdriver blade tore her dress and grooved her flesh. Then she was scrambling to her knees, hearing and feeling the dress shred out a long unwinding strip as she did it.

  "No, ma'am," Shooter panted. His hand closed upon her ankle. "No, ma'am." She looked over her shoulder and through the tangles of her hair and saw he was using his other hand to work the screwdriver out of the floor. The round-crowned black hat sat askew on his head.

  He yanked the screwdriver free and drove it into her right calf.

  The pain was horrid. The pain was the whole world. She screamed and kicked backward, connecting with his nose, breaking it. Shooter grunted and fell on his side, clutching at his face, and Amy got to her feet. She could hear a woman howling. It sounded like a dog howling at the moon. She supposed it wasn't a dog. She supposed it was her.

  Shooter was getting to his feet. His lower face was a mask of blood. The mask split open, showing Mort Rainey's crooked front teeth. She could remember licking across those teeth with her tongue.

  "Feisty one, ain't you?" he said, grinning. "That's all right, ma'am. You go right on."

  He lunged for her.

  Amy staggered backward. The screwdriver fell out of her calf and rolled across the floor. Shooter glanced at it, then lunged at her again, almost playfully. Amy grabbed one of the living-room chairs and dumped it in front of him. For a moment they only stared at each other over it ... and then he snatched for the front of her dress. Amy recoiled.

  "I'm about done fussin with you," he panted.

  Amy turned and bolted for the door.

  He was after her at once, flailing at her back, his fingertips skating and skidding down the nape of her neck, trying to close on the top of the dress, catching it, then just missing the hold which would have coiled her back to him for good.

  Amy bolted past the kitchen counter and toward the back door. Her right loafer squelched and smooched on her foot. It was full of blood. Shooter was after her, puffing and blowing bubbles of blood from his nostrils, clutching at her.

  She struck the screen door with her hands, then tripped and fell full-length on the porch, the breath whooshing out of her. She fell exactly where Shooter had left his manuscript. She rolled over and saw him coming. He only had his bare hands now, but they looked like they would be more than enough. His eyes were stern and unflinching and horribly kind beneath the brim of the black hat.

  "I am so sorry, missus," he said.

  "Rainey!" a voice cried. "Stop!"

  She tried to look around and could not. She had strained something in her neck. Shooter never even tried. He simply came on toward her.

  "Rainey! Stop!"

  "There is no Rainey h--" Shooter began, and then a gunshot rapped briskly across the fall air. Shooter stopped where he was, and looked curiously, almost casually, down at his chest. There was a small hole there. No blood issued from it--at least, not at first--but the hole was there. He put his hand to it, then brought it away. His index finger was marked by a small dot of blood. It looked like a bit of punctuation--the period which ends a sentence. He looked at this thoughtfully. Then he dropped his hands and looked at Amy.

  "Babe?" he asked, and then fell full-length beside her on the porch boards.

  She rolled over, managed to get up on her elbows, and crawled to where he lay, beginning to sob.

  "Mort?" she cried. "Mort? Please, Mort, try to say something!"

  But he was not going to say anything, and after a moment she let this realization fill her up. She would reject the simple fact of his death again and again over the next few weeks and months, and would then weaken, and the realization would fill her up again. He was dead. He was dead. He had gone crazy down here and he was dead.

  He, and whoever had been inside him at the end.

  She put her head down on his chest and wept, and when someone came up behind her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, Amy did not look around.

  EPILOGUE

  Ted and Amy Milner came to see the man who had shot and killed Amy's first husband, the well-known writer Morton Rainey, about three months after the events at Tashmore Lake.

  They had seen the man at one other time during the three-month period, at the inquest, but that had been a formal situation, and Amy had not wanted to speak to him personally. Not there. She was grateful that he had saved her life ... but Mort had been her husband, and she had loved him for many years, and in her deepest heart she felt that Fred Evans's finger hadn't been the only one which pulled the trigger.

  She would have come in time anyway, she suspected, in order to clarify it as much as possible in her mind. Her time might have been a year, or two, possibly even three. But things had happened in the meanwhile which made her move more quickly. She had hoped Ted would let her come to New York alone, but he was emphatic. Not after the last time he had let her go someplace alone. That time she had almost gotten killed.

  Amy pointed out with some asperity that it would have been hard for Ted to "let her go," since she had never told him she was going in the first place, but Ted only shrugged. So they went to New York together, rode up to the fifty-third floor of a large skyscraper together, and were together shown to the small cubicle in the offices of the Consolidated Assurance Company which Fred Evans called home during the working day ... unless he was in the field, of course.

  She sat as far into the corner as she could get, and although the offices were quite warm, she kept her shawl wrapped around her.

  Evans's manner was slow and kind--he seemed to her almost like the country doctor who had nursed her through her childhood illnesses--and she liked him. But that's something he'll never know, she thought. I might be able to summon up the strength to tell him, and he would nod, but his nod wouldn't indicate belief. He only knows that to me he will always be the man who shot Mort, and he had to watch me cry on Mort's chest until the ambulance came, and one of the paramedics had to give me a shot before I would let him go. And what he won't know is that I like him just the same.

  He buzzed a woman from one of the outer offices and had her bring in three big, steaming mugs of tea. It was January outside now, the wind high, the temperature low. She thought with some brief longing of how it would be in Tashmore, with the lake finally frozen and that killer wind blowing long, ghostly snakes of powdered snow across the ice. Then her mind made some obscure but nasty association, and she saw Mort hitting the floor, saw the package of Pall Malls skidding across the wood like a shuffleboard weight. She shivered, her brief sense of longing totally dispelled.

  "Are you okay, Mrs. Milner?" Evans asked.

  She nodded.

  Frowning ponderously and playing with his pipe, Ted said, "My wife wants to hear everything you know about what happened, Mr. Evans. I tried to discourage her at first, but I've come to think that it might be a good thing. She's had bad dreams ever since--"

  "Of course," Evans said, not exactly ignoring Ted, but speaking directly to Amy. "I suppose you will for a long time. I've had a few of my own, actually. I never shot a man before." He paused, then added, "I missed Vietnam by a year or so."

  Amy offered him a smile. It was wan, but it was a smile.

  "She heard it all at the inquest," Ted went on, "but she wanted to hear it again, from you, and with the legalese omitted."

  "I understand," Evans said. He pointed at the pipe. "You can light that, if you want to."

  Ted looked at it, then dropped it into the pocket of his coat quickly, as if he were slightly ashamed of it. "I'm trying to give it up, actually."

  Evans looked at Amy. "What purpose do you think this will serve?" he asked her in the same kind, rather sweet voice. "Or maybe a better question would be what purpose do you need it to serve?"

  "I don't know." Her voice was low and composed. "But we were in Tashmore thr
ee weeks ago, Ted and I, to clean the place out--we've put it up for sale--and something happened. Two things, actually." She looked at her husband and offered the wan smile again. "Ted knows something happened, because that's when I got in touch with you and made this appointment. But he doesn't know what, and I'm afraid he's put out with me. Perhaps he's right to be."

  Ted Milner did not deny that he was put out with Amy. His hand stole into his coat pocket, started to remove the pipe, and then let it drop back again.

  "But these two things--they bear on what happened at your lake home in October?"

  "I don't know. Mr. Evans ... what did happen? How much do you know?"

  "Well," he said, leaning back in his chair and sipping from his mug, "if you came expecting all the answers, you're going to be sorely disappointed. I can tell you about the fire, but as for why your husband did what he did ... you can probably fill in more of those blanks than I can. What puzzled us most about the fire was where it started--not in the main house but in Mr. Rainey's office, which is an addition. That made the act seem directed against him, but he wasn't even there.

  "Then we found a large chunk of bottle in the wreckage of the office. It had contained wine--champagne, to be exact--but there wasn't any doubt that the last thing it had contained was gasoline. Part of the label was intact, and we sent a Fax copy to New York. It was identified as Moet et Chandon, nineteen-eighty-something. That wasn't proof indisputable that the bottle used for the Molotov cocktail came from your own wine room, Mrs. Milner, but it was very persuasive, since you listed better than a dozen bottles of Moet et Chandon, some from 1983 and some from 1984.

  "This led us toward a supposition which seemed clear but not very sensible: that you or your ex-husband might have burned down your own house. Mrs. Milner here said she went off and left the house unlocked--"

  "I lost a lot of sleep over that," Amy said. "I often forgot to lock up when I was only going out for a little while. I grew up in a little town north of Bangor and country habits die hard. Mort used to ..." Her lips trembled and she stopped speaking for a moment, pressing them together so tightly they turned white. When she had herself under control again, she finished her thought in a low voice. "He used to scold me about it."

  Ted took her hand.

  "It didn't matter, of course," Evans said. "If you had locked the house, Mr. Rainey still could have gained access, because he still had his keys. Correct?"

  "Yes," Ted said.

  "It might have sped up the detection end a little if you'd locked the door, but it's impossible to say for sure. Monday-morning quarterbacking is a vice we try to steer clear of in my business, anyway. There's a theory that it causes ulcers, and that's one I subscribe to. The point is this: given Mrs. Rainey's--excuse me, Mrs. Milner's--testimony that the house was left unlocked, we at first believed the arsonist could have been literally anyone. But once we started playing around with the assumption that the bottle used had come from the cellar wine room, it narrowed things down."

  "Because that room was locked," Ted said.

  Evans nodded. "Do you remember me asking who held keys to that room, Mrs. Milner?"

  "Call me Amy, won't you?"

  He nodded. "Do you remember, Amy?"

  "Yes. We started locking the little wine closet three or four years ago, after some bottles of red table wine disappeared. Mort thought it was the housekeeper. I didn't like to believe it, because I liked her, but I knew he could be right, and probably was. We started locking it then so nobody else would be tempted."

  Evans looked at Ted Milner.

  "Amy had a key to the wine room, and she believed Mr. Rainey still had his. So that limited the possibilities. Of course, if it had been Amy, you would have had to have been in collusion with her, Mr. Milner, since you were each other's alibis for that evening. Mr. Rainey didn't have an alibi, but he was at a considerable distance. And the main thing was this: we could see no motive for the crime. His work had left both Amy and himself financially comfortable. Nevertheless, we dusted for fingerprints and came up with two good ones. This was the day after we had our meeting in Derry. Both prints belonged to Mr. Rainey. It still wasn't proof--"

  "It wasn't?" Ted asked, looking startled.

  Evans shook his head. "Lab tests were able to confirm that the prints were made before what remained of the bottle was charred in the fire, but not how long before. The heat had cooked the oils in them, you see. And if our assumption that the bottle came from the wine room was correct, why, someone had to physically pick it up out of the bag or carton it came in and store it in its cradle. That someone would have been either Mr. or Mrs. Rainey, and he could have argued that that was where the prints came from."

  "He was in no shape to argue anything," Amy said softly. "Not at the end."

  "I guess that's true, but we didn't know that. All we knew is that when people carry bottles, they generally pick them up by the neck or the upper barrel. These two prints were near the bottom, and the angle was very odd."

  "As if he had been carrying it sideways or even upside down," Ted broke in. "Isn't that what you said at the hearing ?"

  "Yes--and people who know anything about wine don't do it. With most wines, it disturbs the sediment. And with champagne--"

  "It shakes it up," Ted said.

  Evans nodded. "If you shake a bottle of champagne really hard, it will burst from the pressure."

  "But there was no champagne in it, anyway," Amy said quietly.

  "No. Still, it was not proof. I canvassed the area gas stations to see if anyone who looked like Mr. Rainey had bought a small amount of gas that night, but had no luck. I wasn't too surprised; he could have bought the gasoline in Tashmore or at half a hundred service stations between the two places.

  "Then I went to see Patricia Champion, our one witness. I took a picture of a 1986 Buick--the make and model we assumed Mr. Rainey would have been driving. She said it might have been the car, but she still couldn't be sure. So I was up against it. I went back out to the house to look around, and you came, Amy. It was early morning. I wanted to ask you some questions, but you were clearly upset. I did ask you why you were there, and you said a peculiar thing. You said you were going down to Tashmore Lake to see your husband, but you came by first to look in the garden."

  "On the phone he kept talking about what he called my secret window ... the one that looked down on the garden. He said he'd left something there. But there wasn't anything. Not that I could see, anyway."

  "I had a feeling about the man when we met," Evans said slowly. "A feeling that he wasn't ... quite on track. It wasn't that he was lying about some things, although I was pretty sure he was. It was something else. A kind of distance."

  "Yes--I felt it in him more and more. That distance."

  "You looked almost sick with worry. I decided I could do worse than follow you down to the other house, Amy, especially when you told me not to tell Mr. Milner here where you'd gone if he came looking for you. I didn't believe that idea was original with you. I thought I might just find something out. And I also thought He trailed off, looking bemused.

  "You thought something might happen to me," she said. "Thank you, Mr. Evans. He would have killed me, you know. If you hadn't followed me, he would have killed me."

  "I parked at the head of the driveway and walked down. I heard a terrific rumpus from inside the house and I started to run. That was when you more or less fell out through the screen door, and he came out after you."

  Evans looked at them both earnestly.

  "I asked him to stop," he said. "I asked him twice."

  Amy reached out, squeezed his hand gently for a moment, then let it go.

  "And that's it," Evans said. "I know a little more, mostly from the newspapers and two chats I had with Mr. Milner--"

  "Call me Ted."

  "Ted, then." Evans did not seem to take to Ted's first name as easily as he had to Amy's. "I know that Mr. Rainey had what was probably a schizophrenic episode in which he was two p
eople, and that neither one of them had any idea they were actually existing in the same body. I know that one of them was named John Shooter. I know from Herbert Creekmore's deposition that Mr. Rainey imagined this Shooter was hounding him over a story called 'Sowing Season,' and that Mr. Creekmore had a copy of the magazine in which that story appeared sent up so Mr. Rainey could prove that he had published first. The magazine arrived shortly before you did, Amy--it was found in the house. The Federal Express envelope it came in was on the seat of your ex-husband's Buick."

  "But he cut the story out, didn't he?" Ted asked.

  "Not just the story--the contents page as well. He was careful to remove every trace of himself. He carried a Swiss-army knife, and that was probably what he used. The missing pages were in the Buick's glove compartment."

  "In the end, the existence of that story became a mystery even to him," Amy said softly.

  Evans looked at her, eyebrows raised. "Beg pardon?"

  She shook her head. "Nothing."

  "I think I've told you everything I can," Evans said. "Anything else would be pure speculation. I'm an insurance investigator, after all, not a psychiatrist."

  "He was two men," Amy said. "He was himself ... and he became a character he created. Ted believes that the last name, Shooter, was something Mort picked up and stored in his head when he found out Ted came from a little town called Shooter's Knob, Tennessee. I'm sure he's right. Mort was always picking out character names just that way ... like anagrams, almost.

  "I don't know the rest of it--I can only guess. I do know that when a film studio dropped its option on his novel The Delacourt Family, Mort almost had a nervous breakdown. They made it clear--and so did Herb Creekmore--that they were concerned about an accidental similarity, and they understood he never could have seen the screenplay, which was called The Home Team. There was no question of plagiarism ... except in Mort's head. His reaction was exaggerated, abnormal. It was like stirring a stick around in what looks like a dead campfire and uncovering a live coal."