by Stephen King
“No, I’m sorry,” Johnny said. “I’d have to know what it was about. And how come Sam never called me?”
Bannerman sighed. “I guess you’re a man who doesn’t read the papers,” he said.
But that wasn’t true. He had read the papers compulsively since he had regained consciousness, trying to pick up on the things he had missed. And he had seen Bannerman’s name just recently. Sure. Because Bannerman was on a pretty hot seat. He was the man in charge of—
Johnny held the phone away from his ear and looked at it with sudden understanding. He looked at it the way a man might look at a snake he has just realized is poisonous.
“Mr. Smith?” It squawked tinnily. “Hello? Mr. Smith?”
“I’m here,” Johnny said, putting the phone back to his ear. He was conscious of a dull anger at Sam Weizak, Sam who had told him to keep his head down only this summer, and then had turned around and given this local-yokel sheriff an earful—behind Johnny’s back.
“It’s that strangling business, isn’t it?”
Bannerman hesitated a long time. Then he said, “Could we talk, Mr. Smith?”
“No. Absolutely not.” The dull anger had ignited into sudden fury. Fury and something else. He was scared.
“Mr. Smith, it’s important. Today ...”
“No. I want to be left alone. Besides, don’t you read the goddam Inside View? I’m a fake anyway.”
“Dr. Weizak said ...”
“He had no business saying anything!” Johnny shouted. He was shaking all over. “Good-bye!” He slammed the phone into its cradle and got out of the phone nook quickly, as if that would prevent it from ringing again. He could feel a headache beginning in his temples. Dull drill-bits. Maybe I should call his mother out there in California, he thought. Tell her where her little sonny-buns is. Tell her to get in touch. Tit for tat.
Instead he hunted in the address book in the phone-table drawer, found Sam’s office number in Bangor, and called it. As soon as it rang once on the other end he hung up, scared again. Why had Sam done that to him? Goddammit, why?
He found himself looking at the Christmas tree.
Same old decorations. They had dragged them down from the attic again and taken them out of their tissue-paper cradles again and hung them up again, just two evenings ago. It was a funny thing about Christmas decorations. There weren’t many things that remained intact year after year as a person grew up. Not many lines of continuity, not many physical objects that could easily serve both the states of childhood and adulthood. Your kid clothes were handed down or packed off to the Salvation Army; your Donald Duck watch sprung its mainspring; your Red Ryder cowboy boots wore out. The wallet you made in your first camp handicrafts class got replaced by a Lord Buxton, and you traded your red wagon and your bike for more adult toys—a car, a tennis racket, maybe one of those new TV hockey games. There were only a few things you could hang onto. A few books, maybe, or a lucky coin, or a stamp collection that had been preserved and improved upon.
Add to that the Christmas tree ornaments in your parents’ house.
The same chipped angels year after year, and the same tinsel star on top; the tough surviving platoon of what had once been an entire battalion of glass balls (and we never forget the honored dead, he thought—this one died as a result of a baby’s clutching hand, this one slipped as dad was putting it on and crashed to the floor, the red one with the Star of Bethlehem painted on it was simply and mysteriously broken one year when we took them down from the attic, and I cried); the tree stand itself. But sometimes, Johnny thought, absently massaging his temples, it seemed it would be better, more merciful, if you lost touch with even these last vestiges of childhood. You could never discover the books that had first turned you on in quite the same way. The lucky coin had not protected you from any of the ordinary whips and scorns and scrapes of an ordinary life. And when you looked at the ornaments you remembered that there had once been a mother in the place to direct the tree-trimming operation, always ready and willing to piss you off by saying “a little higher” or “a little lower” or “I think you’ve got too much tinsel on that left side, dear.” You looked at the ornaments and remembered that just the two of you had been around to put them up this year, just the two of you because your mother went crazy and then she died, but the fragile Christmas tree ornaments were still here, still hanging around to decorate another tree taken from the small back woodlot and didn’t they say more people committed suicide around Christmas than at any other time of the year? By God, it was no wonder.
What a power God has given you, Johnny.
Sure, that’s right, God’s a real prince. He knocked me through the windshield of a cab and I broke my legs and spent five years or so in a coma and three people died. The girl I loved got married. She had the son who should have been mine by a lawyer who’s breaking his ass to get to Washington so he can help run the big electric train set. If I’m on my feet for more than a couple of hours at a time it feels like somebody took a long splinter and rammed it straight up my leg to my balls. God’s a real sport. He’s such a sport that he fixed up a funny comic-opera world where a bunch of glass Christmas tree globes could outlive you. Neat world, and a really first-class God in charge of it. He must have been on our side during Vietnam, because that’s the way he’s been running things ever since time began.
He has a job for you, Johnny.
Bailing some half-assed country cop out of a jam so he can get reelected next year?
Don’t run from him, Johnny. Don’t hide away in a cave.
He rubbed his temples. Outside, the wind was rising. He hoped dad would be careful coming home from work.
Johnny got up and pulled on a heavy sweatshirt. He went out into the shed, watching his breath frost the air ahead of him. To the left was a large pile of wood he had split in the autumn just past, all of it cut into neat stove lengths. Next to it was a box of kindling, and beside that was a stack of old newspapers. He squatted down and began to thumb through them. His hands went numb quickly but he kept going and eventually he came to the one he was looking for. The Sunday paper from three weeks ago.
He took it into the house, slapped it down on the kitchen table, and began to root through it. He found the article he was looking for in the features section and sat down to reread it.
The article was accompanied by several photos, one of them showing an old woman locking a door, another showing a police car cruising a nearly deserted street, two others showing a couple of businesses that were nearly deserted. The headline read: THE HUNT FOR THE CASTLE ROCK STRANGLER GOES ON ... AND ON.
Five years ago, according to the story, a young woman named Alma Frechette who worked at a local restaurant had been raped and strangled on her way home from work. A joint investigation of the crime had been conducted by the state attorney general’s office and the Castle County sheriffs department. The result had been a total zero. A year later an elderly woman, also raped and strangled, had been discovered in her tiny third-floor apartment on Carbine Street in Castle Rock. A month later the killer had struck again; this time the victim had been a bright young junior high school girl.
There had been a more intensive investigation. The investigative facilities of the FBI had been utilized, all to no result. The following November Sheriff Carl M. Kelso, who had been the county’s chief law officer since approximately the days of the Civil War, had been voted out and George Bannerman had been voted in, largely on an aggressive campaign to catch the “Castle Rock Strangler.”
Two years passed. The strangler had not been apprehended, but no further murders occurred, either. Then, last January, the body of seventeen-year-old Carol Dunbarger had been found by two small boys. The Dunbarger girl had been reported as a missing person by her parents. She had been in and out of trouble at Castle Rock High School where she had a record of chronic tardiness and truancy, she had been busted twice for shoplifting, and had run away once before, getting as far as Boston. Both Bannerman and the state police assumed
she had been thumbing a ride—and the killer had picked her up. A midwinter thaw had uncovered her body near Strimmer’s Brook, where two small boys had found it. The state medical examiner said she had been dead about two months.
Then, this November 2, there had been yet another murder. The victim was a well-liked Castle Rock grammar school teacher named Etta Ringgold. She was a lifetime member of the local Methodist church, holder of an M.B.S. in elementary education, and prominent in local charities. She had been fond of the works of Robert Browning, and her body had been found stuffed into a culvert that ran beneath an unpaved secondary road. The uproar over the murder of Miss Ringgold had rumbled over all of northern New England. Comparisons to Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, were made—comparisons that did nothing to pour oil on the troubled waters. William Loeb’s Union-Leader in not-so-distant Manchester, New Hampshire, had published a helpful editorial titled THE DO-NOTHING COPS IN OUR SISTER STATE.
This Sunday supplement article, now nearly four weeks old and smelling pungently of shed and woodbox, quoted two local psychiatrists who had been perfectly happy to blue-sky the situation as long as their names weren’t printed. One of them mentioned a particular sexual aberration—the urge to commit some violent act at the moment of orgasm. Nice, Johnny thought, grimacing. He strangled them to death as he came. His headache was getting worse all the time.
The other shrink pointed out the fact that all five murders had been committed in late fall or early winter. And while the manic-depressive personality didn’t conform to any one set pattern, it was fairly common for such a person to have mood-swings closely paralleling the change of the seasons. He might have a “low” lasting from mid-April until about the end of August and then begin to climb, “peaking” at around the time of the murders.
During the manic or “up” state, the person in question was apt to be highly sexed, active, daring, and optimistic. “He would be likely to believe the police unable to catch him,” the unnamed psychiatrist had finished. The article concluded by saying that, so far, the person in question had been right.
Johnny put the paper down, glanced at the clock, and saw his father should be home almost anytime, unless the snow was holding him up. He took the old newspaper over to the wood stove and poked it into the firebox.
Not my business. Goddam Sam Weizak anyway.
Don’t hide away in a cave, Johnny.
He wasn’t hiding away in a cave, that wasn’t it at all. It just so happened that he’d had a fairly tough break. Losing a big chunk of your life, that qualified you for tough-break status, didn’t it?
And all the self-pity you can guzzle?
“Fuck you,” he muttered to himself. He went to the window and looked out. Nothing to see but snow falling in heavy, wind-driven lines. He hoped dad was being careful, but he also hoped his father would show up soon and put an end to this useless rat-run of introspection. He went over to the telephone again and stood there, undecided.
Self-pity or not, he had lost a goodish chunk of his life. His prime, if you wanted to put it that way. He had worked hard to get back. Didn’t he deserve some ordinary privacy? Didn’t he have a right to what he had just been thinking of a few minutes ago—an ordinary life?
There is no such thing, my man.
Maybe not, but there sure was such a thing as an abnormal life. That thing at Cole’s Farm. Feeling people’s clothes and suddenly knowing their little dreads, small secrets, petty triumphs—that was abnormal. It was a talent, it was a curse.
Suppose he did meet this sheriff? There was no guarantee he could tell him a thing. And suppose he could? Just suppose he could hand him his killer on a silver platter? It would be the hospital press conference all over again, a three-ring circus raised to the grisly nth power.
A little song began to run maddeningly through his aching head, little more than a jingle, really. A Sunday-school song from his early childhood: This little light of mine ... I’m gonna let it shine ... this little light of mine ... I’m gonna let it shine ... let it shine, shine, shine, let it shine ...
He picked up the phone and dialed Weizak’s office number. Safe enough now, after five. Weizak would have gone home, and big-deal neurologists don’t list their home phones. The phone rang six or seven times and Johnny was going to put it down when it was answered and Sam himself said, “Hi? Hello?”
“Sam?”
“John Smith?” The pleasure in Sam’s voice was unmistakable—but was there also an undercurrent of unease in it?
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“How do you like this snow?” Weizak said, maybe a little too heartily. “Is it snowing where you are?”
“It’s snowing.”
“Just started here about an hour ago. They say ... John? Is it the sheriff? Is that why you sound so cold?”
“Well, he called me,” Johnny said, “and I’ve been sort of wondering what happened. Why you gave him my name. Why you didn’t call me and say you had ... and why you didn’t call me first and ask if you could.”
Weizak sighed. “Johnny, I could maybe give you a lie, but that would be no good. I didn’t ask you first because I was afraid you would say no. And I didn’t tell you I’d done it afterward because the sheriff laughed at me. When someone laughs at one of my suggestions, I assume, nuh, that the suggestion is not going to be taken.”
Johnny rubbed at one aching temple with his free hand and closed his eyes. “But why, Sam? You know how I feel about that. You were the one who told me to keep my head down and let it blow over. You told me that yourself.”
“It was the piece in the paper,” Sam said. “I said to myself, Johnny lives down that way. And I said to myself, five dead women. Five.” His voice was slow, halting, and embarrassed. It made Johnny feel much worse to hear Sam sounding like this. He wished he hadn’t called.
“Two of them teen-age girls. A young mother. A teacher of young children who loved Browning. All of it so corny, nuh? So corny I suppose they would never make a movie or a TV show out of it. But nonetheless true. It was the teacher I thought about most. Stuffed into a culvert like a bag of garbage ...”
“You had no damn right to bring me into your guilt fantasies,” Johnny said thickly.
“No, perhaps not.”
“No perhaps about it!”
“Johnny, are you all right? You sound ...”
“I’m fine!” Johnny shouted.
“You don’t sound fine.”
“I’ve got a shitter of a headache, is that so surprising? I wish to Christ you’d left this alone. When I told you about your mother you didn’t call her. Because you said ...”
“I said some things are better lost than found. But that is not always true, Johnny. This man, whoever he is, has a terribly disturbed personality. He may kill himself. I am sure that when he stopped for two years the police thought he had. But a manic-depressive sometimes has long level periods—it is called a ‘plateau of normality’—and then goes back to the same mood-swings. He may have killed himself after murdering that teacher last month. But if he hasn’t, what then? He may kill another one. Or two. Or four. Or ...”
“Stop it.”
Sam said, “Why did Sheriff Bannerman call you? What made him change his mind?”
“I don’t know. I suppose the voters are after him.”
“I’m sorry I called him, Johnny, and that this has upset you so. But even more I am sorry that I did not call you and tell you what I had done. I was wrong. God knows you have a right to live your life quietly.”
Hearing his own thoughts echoed did not make him feel better. Instead he felt more miserable and guilty than ever.
“All right,” he said. “That’s okay, Sam.”
“I’ll not say anything to anyone again. I suppose that is like putting a new lock on the barn door after a horse theft, but it’s all I can say. I was indiscreet. In a doctor, that’s bad.”
“All right,” Johnny said again. He felt helpless, and the slow embarrassment with which Sam spoke m
ade it worse.
“I’ll see you soon?”
“I’ll be up in Cleaves next month to start teaching. I’ll drop by.”
“Good. Again, my sincere apologies, John.”
Stop saying that!
They said their good-byes and Johnny hung up, wishing he hadn’t called at all. Maybe he hadn’t wanted Sam to agree so readily that what he had done was wrong. Maybe what he had really wanted Sam to say was, Sure I called him. I wanted you to get off your ass and do something.
He wandered across to the window and looked out into the blowing darkness. Stuffed into a culvert like a bag of garbage.
God, how his head ached.
5
Herb got home half an hour later, took one look at Johnny’s white face and said, “Headache?”
“Yeah.”
“Bad?”
“Not too bad.”
“We want to watch the national news,” Herb said. “Glad I got home in time. Bunch of people from NBC were over in Castle Rock this afternoon, filming. That lady reporter you think is so pretty was there. Cassie Mackin.”
He blinked at the way Johnny turned on him. For a moment it seemed that Johnny’s face was all eyes, staring out at him and full of a nearly inhuman pain.
“Castle Rock? Another murder?”
“Yeah. They found a little girl on the town common this morning. Saddest damn thing you ever heard of. I guess she had a pass to go across the common to the library for some project she was working on. She got to the library but she never got back ... Johnny, you look terrible, boy.”
“How old was she?”
“Just nine,” Herb said. “A man who’d do a thing like that should be strung up by the balls. That’s my view on it.”
“Nine,” Johnny said, and sat down heavily. “Stone the crows.”
“Johnny, you sure you feel okay? You’re white as paper.”
“Fine. Turn on the news.”
Shortly, John Chancellor was in front of them, bearing his nightly satchel of political aspirations (Fred Harris’s campaign was not catching much fire), government edicts (the cities of America would just have to learn common budgetary sense, according to President Ford), international incidents (a nationwide strike in France), the Dow Jones (up), and a “heart-warming” piece about a boy with cerebral palsy who was raising a 4-H cow.