'Mort?' she asked. Her voice was weak and uncertain.
He made no reply, only stared at her. His eyes were grim and glittering. She had never seen Mort's eyes look this way, not even on the horrible afternoon at the motel. It was almost as if this was not Mort at all, but some stranger who looked like Mort.
She recognized the hat, though.
'Where did you find that old thing? The attic?' Her heartbeat was in her voice, making it stagger.
He must have found it in the attic. The smell of mothballs on it was strong, even from where she was standing. Mort had gotten the hat years ago, at a gift shop in Pennsylvania. They had been travelling through Amish country. She had kept a little garden at the Derry house, in the angle where the house and the study addition met. It was her garden, but Mort often went out to weed it when he was stuck for an idea. He usually wore the hat when he did this. He called it his thinking cap. She remembered him looking at himself in a mirror once when he was wearing it and joking that he ought to have a bookjacket photo taken in it. 'When I put this on,' he'd said, 'I look like a
man who belongs out in the north forty, walking plow-furrows behind a mule's ass.'
Then the hat had disappeared. It must have migrated down here and been stored. But...
'It's my hat,' he said at last in a rusty, bemused voice. 'Wasn't ever anybody else's.'
'Mort? What's wrong? What's
'You got you a wrong number, woman. Ain't no Mort here. Mort's dead.' The gimlet eyes never wavered. 'He did a lot of squirming around, but in the end he couldn't lie to himself anymore, let alone to me. I never put a hand on him, Mrs Rainey. I swear. He took the coward's way out.'
'Why are you talking that way?' Amy asked.
'This is just the way I talk,' he said with mild surprise. 'Everybody down in Miss'ippi talks this way.'
'Mort, stop!'
'Don't you understand what I said?' he asked. 'You ain't deaf, are you? He's dead. He killed himself.'
'Stop it, Mort,' she said, beginning to cry. 'You're scaring me, and I don't like it.'
'Don't matter,' he said. He took his hands out from behind his back. In one of them he held the scissors from the top drawer of the desk. He raised them. The sun had come out, and it sent a starfish glitter along the blades as he snicked them open and then closed. 'You won't be scared long.' He began walking toward her.
49
For a moment she stood where she was. Mort would not kill her; if there had been killing in Mort, then surely he would have done some that day at the motel.
Then she saw the look in his eyes and understood that Mort knew that, too.
But this wasn't him.
She screamed and wheeled around and lunged for the door.
Shooter came after her, bringing the scissors down in a silver arc. He would have buried them up to the handles between her shoulderblades if his feet had not slid on the papers scattered about the hardwood floor. He fell full-length with a cry of mingled perplexity and anger. The blades stabbed down through page nine of 'Secret Window, Secret Garden' and the tips broke off. His mouth struck the floor and sprayed blood. The package of Pall Malls - the brand John Kintner had silently smoked during the breaks halfway through the writing class he and Mort Rainey had shared - shot out of his pocket and slid along the slick wood like the weight in a barroom shuffleboard game. He got up on his knees, his mouth snarling and smiling through the blood which ran over his lips and teeth.
'Won't do you no help, Mrs Rainey!' he cried, getting to his feet. He looked at the scissors, snicked them open to study the blunted tips a little better, and then tossed them impatiently aside. 'I got a place in the garden for you! I got it all picked out. You mind me, now!'
He ran out the door after her.
50
Halfway across the living room, Amy took her own spill. One of her feet came down on the discarded issue of EQMM and she fell sprawling on her side, hurting her hip and right breast. She cried out.
Behind her, Shooter ran across to the table and snatched up the screwdriver he had used on the cat.
'Stay right there, and be still,' he said as she turned over on her back and stared at him with wide eyes which looked almost drugged. 'If you move around, I'm only goin to hurt you before it's over. I don't want to hurt you, missus, but I will if I have to. I've got to have something, you see. I have come all this way, and I've got to have something for my trouble.'
As he approached, Amy propped herself up on her elbows and shoved herself backward with her feet. Her hair hung in her face. Her skin was coated with sweat; she could smell it pouring out of her, hot and stinking. The face above her was the solemn, judgmental face of insanity.
'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 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.