Four Past Midnight - 3 - Secret Window, Secret Garden

by Stephen King

  She had spoken with Fred Evans herself since her last call, she said, and she was convinced he either knew something or suspected something about the fire he didn't want to tell them. Mort tried to soothe her, and thought he succeeded to some degree, but he was worried himself. If Shooter hadn't started the fire -and Mort felt inclined to believe the man had been telling the truth about that -then it must have been raw coincidence ... right?

  He didn't know if it was right or not.

  'Mort, I've been so worried about you,' she said suddenly.

  That snapped him back from his thoughts. 'Me? I'm okay.'

  'Are you sure? When I saw you yesterday, I thought you looked ... strained.' She paused. 'In fact, I thought you looked like you did before you had the ... you know.'

  'Amy, I did not have a nervous breakdown.'

  'Well, no,' she said quickly. 'But you know what I mean. When the movie people were being so awful about The Delacourt Family.'

  That had been one of the bitterest experiences of Mort's life. Paramount had optioned the book for $75,000 on a pick-up price Of $750,000 - damned big money. And they had been on the verge of exercising their option when someone had turned up an old script in the files, something called The HomeTeam, which was enough like The Delacourt Family to open up potential legal problems. It was the only time in his career - before this nightmare, anyway -when he had been exposed to the possibility of a plagiarism charge. The execs had ended up letting the option lapse at the eleventh hour. Mort still did not know if they had been really worried about plagiarism or had simply had second thoughts about his novel's film potential. If they really had been worried, he didn't know how such a bunch of pansies could make any movies. Herb Creekmore had obtained a copy of the Home Team screenplay, and Mort had seen only the most casual similarity. Amy agreed.

  The fuss happened just as he was reaching a dead end on a novel he had wanted desperately to write. There had been a short PR tour for the paperback version of The Delacourt Family at the same time. All of that at once had put him under a great deal of strain.

  But he had not had a nervous breakdown.

  'I'm okay,' he insisted again, speaking gently. He had discovered an amazing and rather touching thing about Amy some years before: if you spoke to her gently enough, she was apt to believe you about almost anything. He had often thought that, if it had been a species-wide trait, like showing your teeth to indicate rage or amusement, wars would have ceased millennia ago.

  'Are you sure, Mort?'

  'Yes. Call me if you hear any more from our insurance friend.'

  'I will.'

  He paused. 'Are you at Ted's?'

  'Yes.'

  'How do you feel about him, these days?'

  She hesitated, then said simply: 'I love him.'

  'Oh.'

  'I didn't go with other men,' she said suddenly. 'I've always wanted to tell you that. I didn't go with other men. But Ted ... he looked past your name and saw me, Mort. He saw me.'

  'You mean I didn't.'

  'You did when you were here,' she said. Her voice sounded small and forlorn. 'But you were gone so much.'

  His eyes widened and he was instantly ready to do battle. Righteous battle. 'What? I haven't been on tour since The Delacourt Family! And that was a short one!'

  'I don't want to argue with you, Mort,' she said softly. 'That part should be over. All I'm trying to say is that, even when you were here, you were gone a lot. You had your own lover, you know. Your work was your lover.' Her voice was steady, but he sensed tears buried deep inside it. 'How I hated that bitch, Mort. She was prettier than me, smarter than me, more fun than me. How could I compete?'

  'Blame it all on me, why not?' he asked her, dismayed to find himself on the edge of tears. 'What did you want me to do? Become a goddam plumber? We would have been poor and I would have been unemployed. There was nothing else I could fucking do, don't you understand that? There was nothing else I could do!' He had hoped the tears were over, at least for awhile, but here they were. Who had rubbed this horrible magic lamp again? Had it been him or her this time?

  'I'm not blaming you. There's blame for me, too. You never would have found us ... the way you did ... if I hadn't been weak and cowardly. It wasn't Ted; Ted wanted us to go to you and tell you together. He kept asking. And I kept putting him off. I told him I wasn't sure. I told myself I still loved you, that things could go back to the way they were ... but things never do, I guess. I'll -' She caught her breath, and Mort realized she was crying, too. 'I'll never forget the look on your face when you opened the door of that motel room. I'll carry that to my grave.'

  Good! he wanted to cry out at her. Good! Because you only had to see it! I had to wear It!

  'You knew my love,' he said unsteadily. 'I never hid her from you. You knew from the start.'

  'But I never knew,' she said, 'how deep her embrace could be.'

  'Well, cheer up,' Mort said. 'She seems to have left me now.'

  Amy was weeping. 'Mort, Mort - I only want you to live and be happy. Can't you see that? Can't you do that?'

  What he had seen was one of her bare shoulders touching one of Ted Milner's bare shoulders. He had seen their eyes, wide and frightened, and Ted's hair stuck up in an Alfalfa corkscrew. He thought of telling her this - of trying, anyway -and let it go. It was enough. They had hurt each other enough. Another time, perhaps, they could go at it again. He wished she hadn't said that thing about the nervous breakdown, though. He had not had a nervous breakdown.

  'Amy, I think I ought to go.'

  'Yes - both of us. Ted's out showing a house, but he'll be back soon. I have to put some dinner together.'

  'I'm sorry about the argument.'

  'Will you call if you need me? I'm still worried.'

  'Yes,' he said, and said goodbye, and hung up. He stood there by the telephone for a moment, thinking he would surely burst into tears. But it passed. That was perhaps the real horror.

  It passed.

  39

  The steadily falling rain made him feel listless and stupid. He made a little fire in the woodstove, drew a chair over, and tried to read the current issue of Harper's, but he kept nodding off and then jerking awake again as his chin dropped, squeezing his windpipe and producing a snore. I should have bought some cigarettes today, he thought. A few smokes would have kept me awake. But he hadn't bought any smokes, and he wasn't really sure they would have kept him awake, anyway. He wasn't just tired; he was suffering from shock.

  At last he walked over to the couch, adjusted the pillows, and lay back. Next to his cheek, cold rain spickle-spackled against the dark glass.

  Only once, he thought. I only did it once. And then he fell deeply asleep.

  40

  In his dream, he was in the world's biggest classroom.

  The walls stretched up for miles. Each desk was a mesa, the gray tiles the endless plain which swept among them. The clock on the wall was a huge cold sun. The door to the hallway was shut, but Morton Rainey could read the words on the pebbled glass:

  HOME TEAM WRITING ROOM

  PROF. DELLACOURT

  They spelled it wrong, Mort thought, too many L's.

  But another voice told him this was not so.

  Mort was standing on the giant blackboard's wide chalk gutter, stretching up. He had a piece of chalk the size of a baseball bat in his hand. He wanted to drop his arm, which ached ferociously, but he could not. Not until he had written the same sentence on the blackboard five hundred times: I will not copy from John Kintner. He must have written it four hundred times already, he thought, but four hundred wasn't enough. Stealing a man's work when a man's work was really all he had was unforgivable. So he would have to write and write and write, and never mind the voice in his mind trying to tell him that this was a dream, that his right arm ached for other reasons.

  The chalk squeaked monstrously. The dust, acrid and somehow familiar - so familiar - sifted down into his face. At last he could go on no longer. His arm d
ropped to his side like a bag filled with lead shot. He turned on the chalk gutter, and saw that only one of the desks in the huge classroom was occupied. The occupant was a young man with a country kind of face; a face you expected to see in the north forty behind the ass end of a mule. His pale-brown hair stuck up in spikes from his head. His country-cousin hands, seemingly all knuckles, were folded on the desk before him. He was looking at Mort with pale, absorbed eyes.

  I know you, Mort said in the dream.

  That's right, pilgrim, John Kintner said in his bald, drawling Southern accent. You just put me together wrong. Now keep on writing. It's not five hundred. It's five thousand.

  Mort started to turn, but his foot slipped on the edge of the gutter, and suddenly he was spilling outward, screaming into the dry, chalky air, and John Kintner was laughing, and he

  41

  - woke up on the floor with his head almost underneath the rogue coffee table, clutching at the carpet and crying out in high-pitched, whinnying shrieks.

  He was at Tashmore Lake. Not in some weird, cyclopean classroom but at the lake ... and dawn was coming up misty in the east.

  I'm all right. It was just a dream and I'm all right.

  But he wasn't. Because it hadn't just been a dream. John Kintner had been real. How in God's name could he have forgotten John Kintner?

  Mort had gone to college at Bates, and had majored in creative writing. Later, when he spoke to classes of aspiring writers (a chore he ducked whenever possible), he told them that such a major was probably the worst mistake a man or woman could make, if he or she wanted to write fiction for a living.

  'Get a job with the post office,' he'd say. 'It worked for Faulkner.' And they would laugh. They liked to listen to him, and he supposed he was fairly good at keeping them entertained. That seemed very important, since he doubted that he or anyone else could teach them how to write creatively. Still, he was always glad to get out at the end of the class or seminar or workshop. The kids made him nervous. He supposed John Kintner was the reason why.

  Had Kintner been from Mississippi? Mort couldn't remember, but he didn't think so. But he had been from some enclave of the Deep South all the same - Alabama, Louisiana, maybe the toolies of north Florida. He didn't know for sure. Bates College had been a long time ago, and he hadn't thought of John Kintner, who had suddenly dropped out one day for reasons known only to himself, in years.

  That's not true. You thought about him last night.

  Dreamed about him, you mean, Mort corrected himself quickly, but that hellish little voice inside would not let it go.

  No, earlier than that. You thought about him while you were talking to Shooter on the telephone.

  He didn't want to think about this. He wouldn't think about this. John Kintner was in the past; John Kintner had nothing to do with what was happening now. He got up and walked unsteadily toward the kitchen in the milky, early light to make strong coffee. Lots and lots of strong coffee. Except the hellish little voice wouldn't let him be. Mort looked at Amy's set of kitchen knives hanging from their magnetized steel runners and thought that if he could cut that little voice out, he would try the operation immediately.

  You were thinking that you rocked the man - that you finally rocked him. You were thinking that the story had become the central issue again, the story and the accusation of plagiarism. Shooter treating you like a goddam college kid was the issue. Like a goddam college kid. Like a

  'Shut up,' Mort said hoarsely. 'Just shut the fuck up.'

  The voice did, but he found himself unable to stop thinking about John Kintner anyway.

  As he measured coffee with a shaking hand, he thought of his constant, strident protestations that he hadn't plagiarized Shooter's story, that he had never plagiarized anything.

  But he had, of course.

  Once.

  Just once.

  'But that was so long ago,' he whispered. 'And it doesn't have anything to do with this.'

  It might be true, but that did not stop his thoughts.

  42

  He had been a junior, and it was spring semester. The creative-writing class of which he was a part was focussing on the short story that semester. The teacher was a fellow named Richard Perkins, Jr, who had written two novels which had gotten very good reviews and sold very few copies. Mort had tried one, and thought the good reviews and bad sales had the same root cause: the books were incomprehensible. But the man hadn't been a bad teacher - he had kept them entertained, at least.

  There had been about a dozen students in the class. One of them was John Kintner. Kintner was only a freshman, but he had gotten special permission to take the class. And had deserved it, Mort supposed. Southern-fried cracker or not, that sucker had been good.

  The course required each of them to write either six short stories or three longer ones. Each week, Perkins dittoed off the ones he thought would make for the liveliest discussion and handed them out at the end of the class. The students were supposed, to come the following week prepared to discuss and criticize. It was the usual way to run such a class. And one week Perkins had given them a story from John Kintner. It had been called ... What had it been called?

  Mort had turned on the water to fill the coffeemaker, but now he only stood, looking absently out at the fog beyond the window-wall and listening to the running water.

  You know damned well what It was called. 'Secret Window, Secret Garden.'

  'But it wasn't!' he yelled petulantly to the empty house. He thought furiously, determined to shut the hellish little voice up once and for all ... and suddenly it came to him.

  '"Crowfoot Mile!" he shrieked. 'The name of the story was "Crowfoot Mile," and it doesn't have anything to do with anything!'

  Except that was not quite true, either, and he didn't really need the little, voice hunkered down someplace in the middle of his aching head to point out the fact.

  Kintner had turned in three or maybe four stories before disappearing to wherever he had disappeared to (if asked to guess, Mort would have guessed Vietnam - it was where most of them had disappeared to at the end of the sixties -the young men, anyhow). 'Crowfoot Mile' hadn't been the best of Kintner's stories ... but it had been good. Kintner was clearly the best writer in Richard Perkins, Jr's class. Perkins treated the boy almost as an equal, and in Mort Rainey's not-so-humble estimation, Perkins had been right to do so, because he thought Kintner had been quite a bit better than Richard Perkins, Jr. As far as that went, Mort believed he had been better.

  But had he been better than Kintner?

  'Huh-uh,' he said under his breath as he turned on the coffeemaker. 'I was second.'

  Yes. He had been second, and he had hated that. He knew that most students taking writing courses were just marking time, pursuing a whim before giving up childish things and settling into a study of whatever it was that would be their real life's work. The creative writing most of them would do in later life would consist of contributing items to the Community Calendar pages of their local newspapers or writing advertising copy for Bright Blue Breeze dish detergent. Mort had come into Perkins's class confidently expecting to be the best, because it had never been any other way with him. For that reason, John Kintner had come as an unpleasant shock.

  He remembered trying to talk to the boy once ... but Kintner, who contributed in class only when asked, had proved to be almost inarticulate. When he spoke out loud, he mumbled and stumbled like a poor-white sharecropper's boy whose education had stopped at the fourth-grade level. His writing was the only voice he had, apparently.

  And you stole it.

  'Shut up,' he muttered. 'Just shut up.'

  You were second best and you hated it. You were glad when he was gone, because then you could be first again. Just like you always had been.

  Yes. True. And a year later, when he was preparing to graduate, he had been cleaning out the back closet of the sleazy Lewiston apartment he had shared with two other students, and had come upon a pile of offprints from Perkin
s's writing course. Only one of Kintner's stories had been in the stack. It happened to be 'Crowfoot Mile.'

  He remembered sitting on the seedy, beer-smelling rug of his bedroom, reading the story, and the old jealousy had come over him again.

  He threw the other offprints away, but he had taken that one with him ... for reasons he wasn't sure he wanted to examine closely.

  As a sophomore, Mort had submitted a story to a literary magazine called Aspen Quarterly. It came back with a note which said the readers had found it quite good 'although the ending seemed rather jejune.' The note, which Mort found both patronizing and tremendously exciting, invited him to submit other material.

  Over the next two years, he had submitted four more stories. None were accepted, but a personal note accompanied each of the rejection slips. Mort went through an unpublished writer's agony of optimism alternating with deep pessimism. He had days when he was sure it was only a matter of time before he cracked Aspen Quarterly. And he had days when he was positive that the entire editorial staff - pencil-necked geeks to a man - was only playing with him, teasing him the way a man might tease a hungry dog by holding a piece of meat up over its head and then jerking the scrap out of reach when it leaps. He sometimes imagined one of them holding up one of his manuscripts, fresh out of its manila envelope, and shouting: 'Here's another one from that putz in Maine! Who wants to write the letter this time?' And all of them cracking up, perhaps even rolling around on the floor underneath their posters of Joan Baez and Moby Grape at the Fillmore.

  Most days, Mort had not indulged in this sort of sad paranoia. He understood that he was good, and that it was only a matter of time. And that summer, working as a waiter in a Rockland restaurant, he thought of the story by John Kintner. He thought it was probably still in his trunk, kicking around at the bottom. He had a sudden idea. He would change the title and submit 'Crowfoot Mile' to Aspen Quarterly under his own name! He remembered thinking it would be a fine joke on them, although, looking back now, he could not imagine what the joke would have been.