1.

'You don't understand,' Greg Stillson said in a voice of utter, reasonable patience to the kid sitting in the lounge at the back of the Ridgeway police station. The kid, shirt-less, was tilted back in a padded folding chair and drinking a bottle of Pepsi. He was smiling indulgently at Greg Stillson, not understanding that twice was all Greg Still-son ever repeated himself, understanding that there was one prime asshole in the room, but not yet understanding who it was.

That realization would have to be brought home to him.

Forcibly, if necessary.

Outside, the late August morning was bright and warm. Birds sang in the trees. And Greg felt his destiny was closer than ever. That was why he would be careful with this prime asshole. That was no long-haired bike-freak with a bad case of bowlegs and B.O.; this kid was a college boy, his hair was moderately long but squeaky clean, and he was George Harvey's nephew. Not that George cared for him much (George had fought his way across Germany in 1945, and he had two words for these long-haired freaks, and those two words were not Happy Birthday), but he was blood. And George was a man to be reckoned with on the town council. See what you can do with him, George had told Greg when Greg informed him that Chief Wiggins had arrested his sister's kid. But his eyes said, Don't hurt him. He's blood.

The kid was looking at Greg with lazy contempt. 'I understand,' he said. 'Your Deputy Dawg took my shirt and I want it back. And you better understand something. If I don't get it back, I'm going to have the American Civil Liberties Union down on your red neck.'

Greg got up, went to the steel-gray file cabinet opposite the soda machine, pulled out his keyring, selected a key, and opened the cabinet. From atop a pile of accident and traffic forms, he took a red T-shirt. He spread it open so the legend on it was clear: BABY LET'S FUCK.

'You were wearing this,' Greg said in that same mild voice. 'On the street.'

The kid rocked on the back legs of his chair and swigged some more Pepsi. The little indulgent smile playing around his mouth - almost a sneer - did not change. 'That's right,' he said. 'And I want it back. It's my property.

Greg's head began to ache. This smartass didn't realize how easy it would be. The room was soundproofed, and there had been times when that soundproofing had muffled screams. No - he didn't realize. He didn't understand.

But keep your hand on it. Don't go overboard. Don't upset the applecart.

Easy to think. Usually easy to do. But sometimes, his temper - his temper got out of hand.

Greg reached into his pocket and pulled out his Bic lighter.

'So you just go tell your gestapo' chief and my fascist uncle that the First Amendment ...' He paused, eyes widening a little. 'What are you ... ? Hey! Hey!'

Taking no notice and at least outwardly calm, Greg struck a light. The Bic's gas flame vroomed upward, and Greg lit the kid's T-shirt on fire. It burned quite well, actually.

The front legs of the kid's chair came down with a bang and he leaped toward Greg with his bottle of Pepsi still in his hand. The self-satisfied little smirk was gone, replaced with a look of wide-eyed shock and surprise - and the anger of a spoiled brat who has had everything his own way for too long.

No one ever called him runt, Greg Stillson thought, and his headache worsened. Oh, he was going to have to be careful.

'Gimme that!' the kid shouted. Greg was holding the shirt out, pinched together in two fingers at the neck, ready to drop it when it got too hot. 'Gimme that, you asshole! That's mine! That's...'

Greg planted his hand in the middle of the kid's bare chest and shoved him as hard as he could - which was hard indeed. The kid went flying across the room, the anger dissolving into total shock, and - at last - what Greg needed to see: fear.

He dropped the shirt on the tile floor, picked up the kid's Pepsi, and poured what was left in the bottle onto the smouldering T-shirt. It hissed balefully.

The kid was getting up slowly, his back pressed against the wall. Greg caught his eyes with his own. The kid's eyes were br6wn and very, very wide.

'We're going to reach an understanding,' Greg said, and the words seemed distant to him, behind the sick thud in his head. 'We're going to have a little seminar right here in this back room about just who's the asshole. you got my meaning? We're gonna reach some conclusions. Isn't that what you college boys like to do? Reach conclusions?'

The kid drew breath in hitches. He wet his lips, seemed about to speak, and then he yelled: 'Help!'

'Yeah, you need help, all right,' Greg said. 'I'm going to give you some, too.'

'You're crazy,' George Harvey's nephew said, and then yelled again, louder: 'HELP!'

'I may be,' Greg said. 'Sure. But what we got to find out, Sonny, is who the prime asshole is. See what I mean?'

He looked down at the Pepsi bottle in his hand, and suddenly he swung it savagely against the corner of the steel cabinet. It shattered, and when the kid saw the scatter of glass on the floor and the jagged neck in Greg's hand pointing toward him, he screamed. The crotch of his jeans, faded almost white, suddenly darkened. His face went the color of old parchment. And as Greg walked toward him, gritting glass under the workboots he wore summer and winter, he cringed against the wall.

'When I go out on the street, I wear a white shirt,' Greg said. He was grinning, showing white teeth. 'Sometimes a tie. When you go out on the street, you wear some rag with a filthy saying on it. So who's the asshole, kiddo?'

George Harvey's nephew whined something. His bulging eyes never left the spears of glass jutting from the bottle neck in Greg's hand.

'I'm standing here high and dry,' Greg said, coming a little closer, 'and you got piss running down both legs into your shoes. So who's the asshole?'

He began to jab the bottle neck lightly toward the kid's bare and sweaty midriff, and George Harvey's nephew began to cry. This was the sort of kid that was tearing the country in two, Greg thought. The thick wine of fury buzzed and coursed in his head. Stinking yellow-belly crybaby assholes like this.

Ah, but don't hurt him - don't kick over the apple cart -'I sound like a human being,' Greg said, 'and you sound like a pig in a grease-pit, boy. So who's the ass-hole?'

He jabbed with the bottle again: one of the jagged glass points dimpled the kid's skin just below the right nipple and brought a tiny bead of blood. The kid howled.

'I'm talking to you,' Greg said. 'You better answer up, same as you'd answer up one of your professors. Who's the asshole?'

The kid sniveled but made no coherent sound.

'You answer up if you want to pass this exam,' Greg said. 'I'll let your guts loose all over this floor, boy.' And in that instant, he meant it. He couldn't look directly at this welling drop of blood; it would send him crazy if he did, George Harvey's nephew or not. 'Who's the asshole?'

'Me,' the kid said, and began to sob like a small child afraid of the bogeyman, the Allamagoosalum that waits behind the closet door in the dead hours of the night.

Greg smiled. The headache thumped and flared. 'Well, that's pretty good, you know. That's a start. But it's not quite good enough. I want you to say, "I'm an asshole."'

'I'm an asshole,' the kid said, still sobbing. Snot flowed from his nose and hung there in a runner. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

'Now I want you to say, "I'm a prime asshole."'

'I... I'm a prime asshole.'

'Now you just say one more thing and maybe we can be done here. You say, "Thank you for burning up that dirty shirt, Mayor Stilison."

The kid was eager now. The kid saw his way clear. 'Thanks for burning up that dirty shirt.'

In a flash, Greg ran one of the jagged points from left to right across the kid's soft belly, bringing a line of blood. He barely broke the skin, but the kid howled as if all the devils of hell were behind him.

'You forgot to say "Mayor Stillson",' Greg said, and just like that it broke. The headache gave one more massive beat right between his eyes and was gone. He looked down stupidly at the bottle neck in his hand and could barely remember how it had gotten there. Stupid damn thing. He had almost thrown everything away over one numbnuts kid.

'Mayor Stillson!' The kid was screaming. His terror was perfect and complete. 'Mayor Stillson! Mayor Still-son Mayor Still...'

'That's good,' Greg said.

'.... son Mayor Stillson! Mayor Stillson! Mayor...'

Greg whacked him hard across the face, and the kid rapped his head on the wall. He fell silent, his eyes wide and blank.

Greg stepped very close to him. He reached out. He closed one hand around each of the kid's ears. He pulled the kid's face forward until their noses were touching. Their eyes were less than half an inch apart.

'Now, your uncle is a power in this town,' he said softly, holding the kid's ears like handles. The kid's eyes were huge and brown and swimming. 'I'm a power too -coming to be one - but I ain't no George Harvey. He was born here, raised here, everything. And if you was to tell your uncle what went on in here, he might take a notion to finish me in Ridgeway.'

The kid's lips were twitching in a nearly soundless blubber. Greg shook the boy's head slowly back and forth by the ears, banging their noses together.

'He might not... he was pretty damn mad about that shirt. But he might. Blood ties are strong ties. So you think about this, son. If you was to tell your uncle what went on here and your uncle squeezed me out, I guess I would come along and kill you. Do you believe that?'

'Yeah,' the kid whispered. His cheeks were wet, gleaming.

"Yes sir, Mayor Stillson."'

'Yessir, Mayor Stilison.'

Greg let go of his ears. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I'd kill you, but first I'd tell anybody that'd listen about how you pissed yourself and stood there crying with snot running out of your nose.'

He turned and walked away quickly, as if the kid smelled bad, and went to the cabinet again. He got a box of Band-Aids from one of the shelves and tossed them across to the kid, who flinched back and fumbled them. He hastened to pick them up off the floor, as if Stillson might attack him again for missing.

Greg pointed. 'Bathroom over there. You clean yourself up. I'm gonna leave you a Ridgeway PAL sweatshirt. I want it mailed back, clean, no bloodstains. You understand?'

'Yes,' the kid whispered.

'SIR!' Stillson screamed at him. 'SIR! SIR! SIR! Can't you remember that?'

'Sir,' the kid moaned. 'Yessir, yessir.'

'They don't teach you kids respect for nothing,' Greg said. 'Not for nothing.'

The headache was trying to come back. He took several deep breaths and quelled it - but his stomach felt miserably upset. 'Okay, that's the end. I just want to offer you one good piece of advice. Don't you make the mistake of getting back to your damn college this fall or whenever and start thinking this was some way it wasn't. Don't you try to kid yourself about Greg Stillson. Best forgotten, kid. By you, me, and George. Working this around in your mind until you think you could have another swing at it would be the worst mistake of your life. Maybe the last.'

With that Greg left, taking one last contemptuous look at the kid standing there, his chest and belly caked with a few minor smears of dried blood, his eyes wide, his lips trembling. He looked like an overgrown ten-year-old who has struck out in the Little League playoffs.

Greg made a mental bet with himself that he would never see or hear from this particular kid again, and it was a bet he won. Later that week, George Harvey stopped by the barbershop where Greg was getting a shave and thanked him for 'talking some sense' into his nephew. 'You're good with these kids, Greg,' he said. 'I dunno... they seem to respect you.'

Greg told him not to mention it.

2.

While Greg Stillson was burning a shirt with an obscene saying on it in New Hampshire, Walt and Sarah Hazlett were having a late breakfast in Bangor, Maine. Walt had the paper.

He put his coffee cup down with a clink and said, 'Your old boyfriend made the paper, Sarah.'

Sarah was feeding Denny. She was in her bathrobe, her hair something of a mess, her eyes still only about a quarter open. Eighty percent of her mind was still asleep. There had been a party last night. The guest of honor had been Harrison Fisher, who had been New Hampshire's third district congressman since dinosaurs walked the earth, and a sure candidate for reelection next year.

It had been politic for her and Walt to go. Politic. That was a word that Walt used a lot lately. He had had lots more to drink than she had, and this morning he was dressed and apparently chipper while she felt buried in a pile of sludge. It wasn't fair.

'Blue!' Denny remarked, and spat back a mouthful of mixed fruit.

'That's not nice,' Sarah said to Denny. To Walt: 'Are you talking about Johnny Smith?'

'The one and only.'

She got up and came around to Walt's side of the table. 'He's all right, isn't he?'

'Feeling good and kicking up dickens by the sound of this,' Walt said dryly.

She had a hazy idea that it might be related to what had happened to her when she went to see Johnny, but the size of the headline shocked her: REAWAKENED COMA PATIENT DEMONSTRATES PSYCHIC ABILITY AT DRAMATIC NEWS CONFERENCE.

The story was under David Bright's by-line. The accompanying photo showed Johnny, still looking thin and, in the unsparing glare of the flash, pitifully confused, standing over the sprawled body of a man the caption identified as Roger Dussault, a reporter for the Lewiston paper. Reporter Faints after Revelation, the caption read.

Sarah sank down into the chair next to Walt and began to read the article. This did not please Denny, who began to pound on the tray of his highchair for his morning egg.

'I believe you're being summoned,' Walt said.

'Would you feed him, honey? He eats better for you anyway.' Story Continued Page 9, Col. 3. She folded the paper open to page nine.

'Flattery will get you everywhere,' Walt said agreeably. He slipped off his sports coat and put on her apron. 'Here it comes, guy,' he said, and began feeding Denny his egg.

When she had finished the story, Sarah went back and read it again. Her eyes were drawn again and again to the picture, to Johnny's confused, horror-struck face. The people loosely grouped around the prone Dussault were looking at Johnny with an expression close to fear. She could understand that. She remembered kissing him, and the strange, preoccupied look that had slipped over his face. And when he told her where to find the lost wedding ring, she had been afraid.

But Sarah, what you were afraid of wasn't quite the same thing, was it?

'Just a little more, big boy,' Walt was saying, as if from a thousand miles away. Sarah looked up at them, sitting together in a bar of mote-dusted sunlight, her apron flapping between Walt's knees, and she was suddenly afraid again. She saw the ring sinking to the bottom of the toilet bowl, turning over and over. She heard the small clink as it struck the porcelain. She thought of Halloween masks, of the kid saying, l love to see this guy take a beatin. She thought of promises made and never kept, and her eyes went to his thin newsprint face, looking out at her with such haggard, wretched surprise.

'.... gimmick, anyway,' Walt said, hanging up her apron. He had gotten Denny to eat the egg, every bit of it, and now their son and heir was sucking contentedly away at a juice-bottle.

'Huh?' Sarah looked up as he came over to her.

'I said that for a man who must have almost half a million dollars' worth of hospital bills outstanding, it's a helluva good gimmick.'

'What are you talking about? What do you mean, gimmick?'

'Sure,' he said, apparently missing her anger. 'He could make seven, maybe ten thousand dollars doing a book about the accident and the coma. But if he came out of the coma psychic - the sky's the limit.'

'That's one hell of an allegation!' Sarah said, and her voice was thin with fury.

He turned to her, his expression first one of surprise and then of understanding. The understanding look made her angrier than ever. If she had a nickel for every time Walt Hazlett had thought he understood her, they could fly first-class to Jamaica.

'Look, I'm sorry I brought it up,' he said.

'Johnny would no more lie than the Pope would ... would... you know.'

He bellowed laughter, and in that moment she nearly picked up his own coffee cup and threw it at him. Instead, she locked her hands together tightly under the table and squeezed them. Denny goggled at his father and then burst into his own peal of laughter.

'Honey,' Walt said. 'I have nothing against him, I have nothing against what he's doing. In fact, I respect him for it. If that fat old mossback Fisher can go from a broke lawyer to a millionaire during fifteen years in the House of Representatives, then this guy should have a perfect right to pick up as much as he can playing psychic...'

'Johnny doesn't lie,' she repeated tonelessly.

'It's a gimmick for the blue-rinse brigade who read the weekly tabloids and belong to the Universe Book Club,' he said cheerily. 'Although I will admit that a little second sight would come in handy during jury selection in this damn Timmons trial.'

'Johnny Smith doesn't lie,' she repeated, and heard him saying: It slipped off your finger. You were putting his shaving stuff into one of those side pockets and it just slipped off ... you go up in the attic and look, Sarah. You'll see. But she couldn't tell Walt that. Walt didn't know she had been to see Johnny.

Nothing wrong in going to see him, her mind offered uneasily.

No, but how would he react to the news that she had thrown her original wedding ring into the toilet and flushed it away? He might not understand the sudden twitch of fear that had made her do it - the same fear she saw mirrored on those other newsprint faces, and, to some degree, on Johnny's own. No, Walt might not under-stand that at all. After all, throwing your wedding ring into the toilet and then pushing the flush did suggest a certain vulgar symbolism.

'All right,' Walt was saying, 'he doesn't lie. But I just don't believe

Sarah said softly, 'Look at the people behind him, Walt. Look at their faces. They believe.'

Walt gave them a cursory glance. 'Sure, the way a kid believes in a magician as long as the trick is ongoing.'

'You think this fellow Dussault was a, what-do-you-call-it, a shill? According to the article, he and Johnny had

never met before.'

'That's the only way the illusion will work, Sarah,' Walt said patiently. 'It doesn't do a magician any good to pull a bunny out of a rabbit hutch, only out of a hat. Either Johnny Smith knew something or he made a terribly good guess based on this guy Dussault's behavior at the time. But I repeat, I respect him for it. He got a lot of mileage out of it. If it turns him a buck, more power to him.'

In that moment she hated him, loathed him, this good man she had married. There was really nothing so terrible on the reverse side of his goodness, his steadiness, his mild good humor - just the belief, apparently grounded in the bedrock of his soul, that everybody was looking out for number one, each with his or her own little racket. This morning he could call Harrison Fisher a fat old mossback; last night he had been bellowing with laughter at Fisher's stories about Greg Stillson, the funny mayor of some-town-or-other and who might just be crazy enough to run as an independent in the House race next year.

No, in the world of Walt Hazlett, no one had psychic powers and there were no heroes and the doctrine of we-have-to-change-the-system from-within was all-powerful. He was a good man, a steady man, he loved her and Denny, but suddenly her soul cried out for Johnny and the five years together of which they had been robbed. Or the lifetime together. A child with darker hair.

'You better get going, babe,' she said quietly. 'They'll have your guy Timmons in stocks and bonds, or whatever they are.'

'Sure.' He smiled at her, the summation done, session adjourned. 'Still friends?'

'Still friends.' But he knew where the ring was. He knew.

Walt kissed her, his right hand resting lightly on the back of her neck. He always had the same thing for breakfast, he always kissed her the same way, some day they were going to Washington, and no one was psychic.

Five minutes later he was gone, backing their little red Pinto out onto Pond Street, giving his usual brief toot on the horn, and putting away. She was left alone with Denny, who was in the process of strangling himself while he tried to wriggle under his highchair tray.

'You're going at that all wrong, Sluggo,' Sarah said, crossing the kitchen and unlatching the tray.

'Blue!' Denny said, disgusted with the whole thing.

Speedy Tomato, their tomcat, sauntered into the kitchen at his usual slow, hipshot juvenile delinquent's stride, and Denny grabbed him, making little chuckling noises. Speedy laid his ears back and looked resigned.

Sarah smiled a little and cleared the table. Inertia. A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and she was at rest. Never mind Walt's darker side; she had her own. She had no intention of doing more than sending Johnny a card at Christmas. It was better, safer, that way - because a body in motion tends to keep moving. Her life here was good. She had survived Dan, she had survived Johnny, who had been so unfairly taken from her (but so much in this world was unfair), she had come through her own personal rapids to this smooth water, and here she would stay. This sunshiny kitchen was not a bad place. Best to forget county fairs, Wheels of Fortune, and Johnny Smith's face.

As she ran water into the sink to do the dishes she turned on the radio and caught the beginning of the news. The first item made her freeze with a just-washed plate in one hand, her eyes looking out over their small backyard in startled contemplation. Johnny's mother had had a stroke while watching a TV report on her son's press conference. She had died this morning, not an hour ago.

Sarah dried her hands, snapped off the radio, and pried Speedy Tomato out of Denny's hands. She carried her boy into the living room and popped him into his play-pen. Denny protested this indignity with loud, lusty howls of which she took no notice. She went to the telephone and called the EMMC. A switchboard operator who sounded tired of repeating the same piece of intelligence over and over again told her that John Smith had discharged himself the night before, slightly before mid-night.

She hung up the phone and sat down in a chair. Denny continued to cry from his playpen. Water ran into the kitchen sink. After a while she got up, went into the kitchen, and turned it off.

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