Stephen King - Secret window, secret garden

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Secret Window, Secret Garden

Two PAST MIDNIGHT:

A note on 'Secret Window, Secret Garden'

I'm one of those people who believe that life is a series of cycles - wheels within wheels, some meshing with others, some

spinning alone, but all of them performing some finite, repeating function. I like that abstract image of life as something

like an efficient factory machine, probably because actual life, up close and personal, seems so messy and strange. It's nice

to be able to pull away every once in awhile and say, 'There's a pattern there after all! I'm not sure what it means, but by

God, I see it!'

All of these wheels seem to finish their cycles at roughly the same time, and when they do - about every twenty years

would be my guess - we go through a time when we end things. Psychologists have even lifted a parliamentary term to

describe this phenomenon - they call it cloture.

I'm forty-two now, and as I look back over the last four years of my life I can see all sorts of cloture. It's as apparent in my

work as anywhere else. In It, I took an outrageous amount of space to finish talking about children and the wide perceptions

which light their interior lives. Next year I intend to publish the last Castle Rock novel, Needful Things (the last story in this

volume, 'The Sun Dog,' forms a prologue to that novel). And this story is, I think, the last story about writers and writing

and the strange no man's land which exists between what's real and what's make-believe. I believe a good many of my long-

time readers, who have borne my fascination with this subject patiently, will be glad to hear that.

A few years ago I published a novel called Misery which tried, at least in part, to illustrate the powerful hold fiction can

achieve over the reader. Last year I published a book called The Dark Half where I tried to explore the converse: the

powerful hold fiction can achieve over the writer. While that book was between drafts, I started to think that there might be

a way to tell both stories at the same time by approaching some of the plot elements of The Dark Half from a totally

different angle. Writing, it seems to me, is a secret act - as secret as dreaming - and that was one aspect of this strange and

dangerous craft I had never thought about much.

I knew that writers have from time to time revised old works - John Fowles did it with The Magus, and I have done it

myself with The Stand - but revision was not what I had in mind. What I wanted to do was to take familiar elements and put

them together in an entirely new way. This I had tried to do at least once before, restructuring and updating the basic

elements of Bram Stoker's Dracula to create 'Salem's Lot, and I was fairly comfortable with the idea.

One day in the late fall of 1987, while these things were tumbling around in my head, I stopped in the laundry room of our

house to drop a dirty shirt into the washing machine. Our laundry room is a small, narrow alcove on the second floor. I

disposed of the shirt and then stepped over to one of the room's two windows. It was casual curiosity, no more. We've been

living in the same house for eleven or twelve years now, but I had never taken a good hard look out this particular window

before. The reason is perfectly simple; set at floor level, mostly hidden behind the drier, half blocked by baskets of

mending, it's a hard window to look out of.

I squeezed in, nevertheless, and looked out. That window looks down on a little brick-paved alcove between the house and

the attached sunporch. It's an area I see just about every day ... but the angle was new. My wife had set half a dozen pots

out there, so the plants could take a little of the early-November sun, I suppose, and the result was a charming little garden

which only I could see. The phrase which occurred to me was, of course, the title of this story. It seemed to me as good a

metaphor as any for what writers - especially writers of fantasy - do with their days and nights. Sitting down at the

typewriter or picking up a pencil is a physical act; the spiritual analogue is looking out of an almost forgotten window... a

window which offers a common view from an entirely different angle ... an angle which renders the common extraordinary.

The writer's job is to gaze through that window and report on what he sees.

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Secret Window, Secret Garden

But sometimes windows break. I think that, more than anything else, is the concern of this story: what happens to the wide-

eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?

'You stole my story,' the man on the doorstep said. 'You stole my story and something's got to be done about it. Right is

right and fair is fair and something has to be done.'

Morton Rainey, who had just gotten up from a nap and who was still feeling only halfway into the real world, didn't have

the slightest idea what to say. This was never the case when he was at work, sick or well, wide awake or half asleep; he was

a writer, and hardly ever at a loss when it became necessary to fill a character's mouth with a snappy comeback. Rainey

opened his mouth, found no snappy comeback there (not even a limp one, in fact), and so closed it again.

He thought: This man doesn't look exactly real. He looks like a character out of a novel by William Faulkner.

This was of no help in resolving the situation, but it was undeniably true. The man who had rung Rainey's doorbell out here

in the western Maine version of nowhere looked about forty-five. He was very thin. His face was calm, almost serene, but

carved with deep lines. They moved horizontally across his high brow in regular waves, cut vertically downward from the

ends of his thin lips to his jawline, and radiated outward in tiny sprays from the corners of his eyes. The eyes were bright,

unfaded blue. Rainey couldn't tell what color his hair was; he wore a large black hat with a round crown planted squarely

on his head. The underside of the brim touched the tops of his ears. It looked like the sort of hat Quakers wore. He had no

sideburns, either, and for all Morton Rainey knew, he might be as bald as Telly Savalas under that round-crowned felt hat.

He was wearing a blue work-shirt. It was buttoned neatly all the way to the loose, razor-reddened flesh of his neck,

although he wore no tie. The bottom of the shirt disappeared into a pair of blue-jeans that looked a little too big for the man

who was wearing them. They ended in cuffs which lay neatly on a pair of faded yellow work-shoes which looked made for

walking in a furrow of played-out earth about three and a half feet behind a mule's ass.

'Well?' he asked when Rainey continued to say nothing.

'I don't know you,' Rainey said finally. It was the first thing he'd said since he'd gotten up off the couch and come to answer

the door, and it sounded sublimely stupid in his own cars.

'I know that,' said the man. 'That doesn't matter. I know you, Mr Rainey. That's what matters.' And then he reiterated: 'You

stole my story.'

He held out his hand, and for the first time Rainey saw that he had something in it. It was a sheaf of paper. But not just any

old sheaf of paper; it was a manuscript. After you've been in the business awhile, he thought, you always recognized the

look of a manuscript. Especially an unsolicited one.

And. belatedly, he thought: Good thing for you it wasn't a gun, Mort old kid. You would have been in hell before you knew

you were dead.

And even more belatedly, he realized that he was probably dealing with one of the Crazy Folks. It was long overdue, of

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course; although his last three books had been best-sellers, this was his first visit from one of that fabled tribe. He felt a

mixture of fear and chagrin, and his thoughts narrowed to a single point: how to get rid of the guy as fast as possible, and

with as little unpleasantness as possible.

'I don't read manuscripts - ' he began.

'You read this one already,' the man with the hard-working sharecropper's face said evenly. 'You stole it.' He spoke as if

stating a simple fact. like a man noting that the sun was out and it was a pleasant fall day.

All of Mort's thoughts were belated this afternoon, it seemed; he now realized for the first time how alone he was out here.

He had come to the house in Tashmore Glen in early October, after two miserable months in New York; his divorce had

become final just last week.

It was a big house, but it was a summer place, and Tashmore Glen was a summer town. There were maybe twenty cottages

on this particular road running along the north bay of Tashmore Lake, and in July or August there would be people staying

in most or all of them . . . but this wasn't July or August. It was late October. The sound of a gunshot, he realized, would

probably drift away unheard. If it was heard, the hearers would simply assume someone was shooting at quail or pheasant -

it was the season.

'I can assure you - '

'I know you can.' the man in the black hat said with that same unearthly patience. 'I know that.'

Behind him, Mort could see the car the man had come in. It was an old station wagon which looked as if it had seen a great

many miles, very few of them on good roads. He could see that the plate on it wasn't from the State of Maine, but couldn't

tell what state it was from; he'd known for some time now that he needed to go to the optometrist and have his glasses

changed, had even planned early last summer to do that little chore, but then Henry Young had called him one day in April,

asking who the fellow was he'd seen Amy with at the mall - some relative, maybe? - and the suspicions which had

culminated in the eerily quick and quiet no-fault divorce had begun, the shitstorm which had taken up all his time and

energy these last few months. During that time he had been doing well if he remembered to change his underwear, let alone

handle more esoteric things like optometrist appointments.

'If you want to talk to someone about some grievance you feel you have,' Mort began uncertainly, hating the pompous,

talking-boilerplate sound of his own voice but not knowing how else to reply, 'you could talk to my ag -'

'This is between you and me,' the man on the doorstep said patiently. Bump, Mort's tomcat, had been curled up on the low

cabinet built into the side of the house - you had to store your garbage in a closed compartment or the racoons came in the

night and pulled it all over hell - and now he jumped down and twined his way sinuously between the stranger's legs. The

stranger's bright-blue eyes never left Rainey's face. 'We don't need any outsiders, Mr Rainey. It is strictly between you and

me.'

'I don't like being accused of plagiarism, if that's what you're doing,' Mort said. At the same time, part of his mind was

cautioning him that you had to be very careful when dealing with people of the Crazy Folks tribe. Humor them? Yes. But

this man didn't seem to have a gun, and Mort outweighed him by at least fifty pounds. I've also got five or ten years on him,

by the look, he thought. He had read that a bonafide Crazy Guy could muster abnormal strength, but he was damned if he

was simply going to stand here and let this man he had never seen before go on saying that he, Morton Rainey, had stolen

his story. Not without some kind of rebuttal.

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Secret Window, Secret Garden

'I don't blame you for not liking it,' the man in the black hat said. He spoke in the same patient and serene way. He spoke,

Mort thought, like a therapist whose work is teaching small children who are retarded in some mild way. 'But you did it.

You stole my story.'

'You'll have to leave,' Mort said. He was fully awake now, and he no longer felt so bewildered, at such a disadvantage. 'I

have nothing to say to you.'

'Yes, I'll go,' the man said. 'We'll talk more later.' He held out the sheaf of manuscript, and Mort actually found himself

reaching for it. He put his hand back down to his side just before his uninvited and unwanted guest could slip the

manuscript into it, like a process server finally slipping a subpoena to a man who has been ducking it for months.

'I'm not taking that,' Mort said, and part of him was marvelling at what a really accommodating beast a man was: when

someone held something out to you, your first instinct was to take it. No matter if it was a check for a thousand dollars or a

stick of dynamite with a lit and fizzing fuse, your first instinct was to take it.

'Won't do you any good to play games with me, Mr Rainey,' the man said mildly. 'This has got to be settled.'

'So far as I'm concerned, it is,' Mort said, and closed the door on that lined, used, and somehow timeless face.

He had only felt a moment or two of fear, and those had come when he first realized, in a disoriented and sleep-befogged

way, what this man was saying. Then it had been swallowed by anger - anger at being bothered during his nap, and more

anger at the realization that he was being bothered by a representative of the Crazy Folks.

Once the door was closed, the fear returned. He pressed his lips together and waited for the man to start pounding on it.

And when that didn't come, he became convinced that the man was just standing out there, still as a stone and as patient as

same, waiting for him to reopen the door ... as he would have to do, sooner or later.

Then he heard a low thump, followed by a series of light steps crossing the board porch. Mort walked into the master

bedroom, which looked out on the driveway. There were two big windows in here, one giving on the driveway and the

shoulder of hill behind it, the other providing a view of the slope which fell away to the blue and agreeable expanse of

Tashmore Lake. Both windows were reflectorized, which meant he could look out but anyone trying to look in would see

only his own distorted image, unless he put his nose to the glass and cupped his eyes against the glare.

He saw the man in the work-shirt and cuffed blue-jeans walking back to his old station wagon. From this angle, he could

make out the license plate's state of issue - Mississippi. As the man opened the driver's-side door, Mort thought: Oh shit.

The gun's in the car. He didn't have it on him because he believed he could reason with me ... whatever his idea of

'reasoning' is. But now he's going to get it and come back. It's probably in the glove compartment or under the seat

But the man got in behind the wheel, pausing only long enough to take off his black hat and toss it down beside him. As he

slammed the door and started the engine, Mort thought, There's something different about him now. But it wasn't until his

unwanted afternoon visitor had backed up the driveway and out of sight behind the thick screen of bushes Mort kept

forgetting to trim that he realized what it was.

When the man got into his car, he had no longer been holding the manuscript.

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It was on the back porch. There was a rock on it to keep the individual pages from blowing all over the little dooryard in the

light breeze. The small thump he'd heard had been the man putting the rock on the manuscript.

Mort stood in the doorway, hands in the pockets of his khaki pants, looking at it. He knew that craziness wasn't catching

(except maybe in cases of prolonged exposure, he supposed), but he still didn't want to touch the goddam thing. He

supposed he would have to, though. He didn't know just how long he would be here - a day, a week, a month, and a year all

looked equally possible at this point - but he couldn't just let the fucking thing sit there. Greg Carstairs, his caretaker, would

be down early this afternoon to give him an estimate on how much it would cost to reshingle the house, for one thing, and

Greg would wonder what it was. Worse, he would probably assume it was Mort's, and that would entail more explanations

than the damned thing was worth.

He stood there until the sound of his visitor's engine had merged into the low, slow hum of the afternoon, and then he went

out on the porch, walking carefully in his bare feet (the porch had needed painting for at least a year now, and the dry wood

was prickly with potential splinters), and tossed the rock into the juniper-choked gully to the left of the porch. He picked up

the little sheaf of pages and looked down at it. The top one was a title page. It read:

SECRET WINDOW, SECRET GARDEN

By John Shooter

Mort felt a moment's relief in spite of himself. He had never heard of John Shooter, and he had never read or written a short

story called 'Secret Window, Secret Garden' in his life.

He tossed the manuscript in the kitchen wastebasket on his way by, went back to the couch in the living room, lay down

again, and was asleep in five minutes.

He dreamed of Amy. He slept a great lot and he dreamed of Amy a great lot these days, and waking up to the sound of his

own hoarse shouts no longer surprised him much. He supposed it would pass.

The next morning he was sitting in front of his word processor in the small nook off the living room which had always

served as his study when they were down here. The word processor was on, but Mort was looking out the window at the

lake. Two motor-boats were out there, cutting broad white wakes in the blue water. He had thought they were fishermen at

first, but they never slowed down - just cut back and forth across each other's bows in big loops. Kids, he decided. Just kids

playing games.

They weren't doing anything very interesting, but then, neither was he. He hadn't written anything worth a damn since he

had left Amy. He sat in front of the word processor every day from nine to eleven, just as he had every day for the last three

years (and for about a thousand years before that he had spent those two hours sitting in front of an old Royal office model),

but for all the good he was doing with it, he might as well have traded it in on a motor-boat and gone out grab-assing with

the kids on the lake.

Today, he had written the following lines of deathless prose during his two-hour stint:

Four days after George had confirmed to his own satisfaction that his wife was cheating on him, he confronted her. 'I have

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to talk to you, Abby,' he said.

It was no good.

It was too close to real life to be good.

He had never been so hot when it came to real life. Maybe that was part of the problem.

He turned off the word processor, realizing just a second after he'd flicked the switch that he'd forgotten to save the

document. Well, that was all right. Maybe it had even been the critic in his subconscious, telling him the document wasn't

worth saving.

Mrs Gavin had apparently finished upstairs; the drone of the Electrolux had finally ceased. She came in every Tuesday to

clean, and she had been shocked into a silence very unlike her when Mort had told her two Tuesdays ago that he and Amy

were quits. He suspected that she had liked Amy a good deal more than she had liked him. But she was still coming, and

Mort supposed that was something.

He got up and went out into the living room just as Mrs Gavin came down the main staircase. She was holding the vacuum-

cleaner hose and dragging the small tubular machine after her. It came down in a series of thumps, looking like a small

mechanical dog. If I tried to pull the vacuum downstairs that way, it'd smack into one of my ankles and then roll all the way

to the bottom, Mort thought. How does she get it to do that, I wonder?

'Hi there, Mrs G.,' he said, and crossed the living room toward the kitchen door. He wanted a Coke. Writing shit always

made him thirsty.

'Hello, Mr Rainey.' He had tried to get her to call him Mort, but she wouldn't. She wouldn't even call him Morton. Mrs

Gavin was a woman of her principles, but her principles had never kept her from calling his wife Amy.

Maybe I should tell her I caught Amy in bed with another man at one of Derry's finer motels, Mort thought as he pushed

through the swing door. She might go back to calling her Mrs Rainey again, at the very least.

This was an ugly and mean-spirited thought, the kind of thinking he suspected was at the root of his writing problems, but

he didn't seem to be able to help it. Perhaps it would also pass ... like the dreams. For some reason this idea made him think

of a bumper sticker he'd seen once on the back of a very old VW beetle. CONSTIPATED - CANNOT PASS, the sticker

had read.

As the kitchen door swung back, Mrs Gavin called: 'I found one of your stories in the trash, Mr Rainey. I thought you might

want it, so I put it on the counter.'

'Okay,' he said, having no idea what she might be talking about. He was not in the habit of tossing bad manuscripts or frags

in the kitchen trash. When he produced a stinker - and lately he had produced more than his share - it went either directly to

data heaven or into the circular file to the right of his word-processing station.

The man with the lined face and round black Quaker hat never even entered his mind.

He opened the refrigerator door, moved two small Tupperware dishes filled with nameless leftovers, discovered a bottle of

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Pepsi, and opened it as he nudged the fridge door closed with his hip. As he went to toss the cap in the trash, he saw the

manuscript - its title page was spotted with something that looked like orange juice, but otherwise it was all right - sitting

on the counter by the Silex. Then he remembered. John Shooter, right. Charter member of the Crazy Folks, Mississippi

Branch.

He took a drink of Pepsi, then picked up the manuscript. He put the title page on the bottom and saw this at the head of the

first page.

John Shooter

General Delivery

Dellacourt, Mississippi

30 pages

Approximately 7500 words

Selling 1st serial rights, North America

SECRET WINDOW, SECRET GARDEN

By John Shooter

The manuscript had been typed on a good grade of bond paper, but the machine must have been a sad case - an old office

model, from the look, and not very well maintained. Most of the letters were as crooked as an old man's teeth.

He read the first sentence, then the second, then the third, for a few moments clear thought ceased.

Todd Downey thought that a woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had was not much of a

woman. He therefore decided to kill her. He would do it in the deep corner formed when the house and the barn came

together at an extreme angle - he would do it where his wife kept her garden.

'Oh shit,' Mort said, and put the manuscript back down. His arm struck the Pepsi bottle. It overturned, foaming and fizzing

across the counter and running down the cabinet facings. 'Oh SHIT!' he yelled.

Mrs Gavin came in a hurry, surveyed the situation, and said: 'Oh, that's nothing. I thought from the sound that maybe you'd

cut your own throat. Move a little, can't you, Mr Rainey?'

He moved, and the first thing she did was to pick the sheaf of manuscript up off the counter and thrust it back into his

hands. It was still okay; the soda had run the other way. He had once been a man with a fairly good sense of humor - he had

always thought so, anyway - but as he looked down at the little pile of paper in his hands, the best he could manage was a

sour sense of irony. It's like the cat in the nursery rhyme, he thought. The one that kept coming back.

'If you're trying to wreck that,' Mrs Gavin said, nodding at the manuscript as she got a dishrag from under the sink, 'you're

on the right track.'

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'It's not mine,' he said, but it was funny, wasn't it? Yesterday, when he had almost reached out and taken the script from the

man who had brought it to him, he'd thought about what an accommodating beast a man was. Apparently that urge to

accommodate stretched in all directions, because the first thing he'd felt when he read those three sentences was guilt ... and

wasn't that just what Shooter (if that was really his name) had wanted him to feel? Of course it was. You stole my story,

he'd said, and weren't thieves supposed to feel guilty?

'Pardon me, Mr Rainey,' Mrs Gavin said, holding up the dishrag.

He stepped aside so she could get at the spill. 'It's not mine,' he repeated - insisted, really.

'Oh,' she said, wiping up the spill on the counter and then stepping to the sink to wring out the cloth. 'I thought it was.'

'It says John Shooter,' he said, putting the title page back on top and turning it toward her. 'See?'

Mrs Gavin favored the title page with the shortest glance politeness would allow and then began wiping the cabinet faces.

'Thought it was one of those whatchacallums,' she said. 'Pseudonames. Or nyms. Whatever the word is names.'

'I don't use one,' he said. 'I never have.'

This time she favored him with a brief glance - country shrewd and slightly amused - before getting down on her knees to

wipe up the puddle of Pepsi on the floor. 'Don't s'pose you'd tell me if you did,' she said.

'I'm sorry about the spill,' he said, edging toward the door.

'My job,' she said shortly. She didn't look up again. Mort took the hint and left.

He stood in the living room for a moment, looking at the abandoned vacuum cleaner in the middle of the rug. In his head he

heard the man with the lined face saying patiently, This is between you and me. We don't need any outsiders, Mr Rainey. It

is strictly between you and me.

Mort thought of that face, recalled it carefully to a mind which was trained to recall faces and actions, and thought: It wasn't

just a momentary aberration, or a bizarre way to meet an author he may or may not consider famous. He will be back.

He suddenly headed back into his study, rolling the manuscript into a tube as he went.

Three of the four study walls were lined with bookshelves, and one of them had been set aside for the various editions,

domestic and foreign, of his works. He had published six books in all: five novels and a collection of short stories. The

book of short stories and his first two novels had been well received by his immediate family and a few friends. His third

novel, The Organ-Grinder's Boy, had been an instant best-seller. The early works had been reissued after he became a

success, and had done quite well, but they had never been as popular as his later books.

The short-story collection was called Everybody Drops the Dime, and most of the tales had originally been published in the

men's magazines, sandwiched around pictures of women wearing lots of eye make-up and not much else. One of the

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stories, however, had been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. It was called 'Sowing Season,' and it was to this

story he now turned.

A woman who would steal your love when your love was all you had wasn't much of a woman - that, at least, was Tommy

Havelock's opinion. He decided to kill her. He even knew the place he would do it, the exact place: the little patch of

garden she kept in the extreme angle formed where the house and the barn came together.

Mort sat down and worked his way slowly through the two stories, reading back and forth. By the time he was halfway

through, he understood he really didn't need to go any further. They varied in diction in some places; in many others even

that was the same, word for word. Diction aside, they were exactly the same. In both of them, a man killed his wife. In both

of them, the wife was a cold, loveless bitch who cared only for her garden and her canning. In both of them, the killer

buried his spousal victim in her garden and then tended it, growing a really spectacular crop. In Morton Rainey's version,

the crop was beans. In Shooter's, it was corn. In both versions, the killer eventually went crazy and was discovered by the

police eating vast amounts of the vegetable in question and swearing he would be rid of her, that in the end he would finally

be rid of her.

Mort had never considered himself much of a horror-story writer - and there was nothing supernatural about 'Sowing

Season' - but it had been a creepy little piece of work all the same. Amy had finished it with a little shiver and said, 'I

suppose it's good, but that man's mind ... God, Mort, what a can of worms.'

That had summed up his own feelings pretty well. The landscape of 'Sowing Season' wasn't one he would care to travel

through often, and it was no 'Tell-Tale Heart,' but he thought he had done a fair job of painting Tom Havelock's homicidal

breakdown. The editor at EQ had agreed, and so had the readers - the story had generated favorable mail. The editor had

asked for more, but Mort had never come up with another story even remotely like 'Sowing Season.'

'I know I can do it,' Tod Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. 'I'm sure that in time

all of her will be gone.'

That was how Shooter's ended.

'I am confident I can take care of this business,' Tom Havelock told them, and helped himself to another portion of beans

from the brimming, steaming bowl. 'I'm sure that, in time, her death will be a mystery even to me.'

That was how Mort Rainey's ended.

Mort closed his copy of Everybody Drops the Dime and replaced it thoughtfully on his shelf of first editions.

He sat down and began to rummage slowly and thoroughly through the drawers of his desk. It was a big one, so big the

furniture men had had to bring it into the room in sections, and it had a lot of drawers. The desk was solely his domain;

neither Amy nor Mrs G. had ever set a hand to it, and the drawers were full of ten years' worth of accumulated rick-rack. It

had been four years since Mort had given up smoking, and if there were any cigarettes left in the house, this was where they

would be. If he found some, he would smoke. just about now, he was crazy for a smoke. If he didn't find any, that was all

right, too; going through his junk was soothing. Old letters which he'd put aside to answer and never had, what had once

seemed so important now looking antique, even arcane; postcards he'd bought but never mailed; chunks of manuscript in

varying stages of completion; half a bag of very elderly Doritos; envelopes; paper-clips; cancelled checks. He could sense

layers here which were almost geological - layers of summer life frozen in place. And it was soothing. He finished one

drawer and went on to the next, thinking all the while about John Shooter and how John Shooter's story - his story,

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Secret Window, Secret Garden

goddammit! - had made him feel.

The most obvious thing, of course, was that it had made him feel like he needed a cigarette. This wasn't the first time he'd

felt that way in the last four years; there had been times when just seeing someone puffing away behind the wheel of a car

next to his at a stoplight could set off a raging momentary lust for tobacco. But the key word there, of course, was

'momentary.' Those feelings passed in a hurry, like fierce rainsqualls - five minutes after a blinding silver curtain of rain has

dropped out of the sky, the sun is shining again. He'd never felt the need to turn in to the next convenience store on his way

for a deck of smokes ... or go rummaging through his glove compartment for a stray or two as he was now rummaging

through his desk.

He felt guilty, and that was absurd. Infuriating. He had not stolen John Shooter's story, and he knew he hadn't - if there had

been stealing (and there must have been; for the two stories to be that close without prior knowledge on the part of one of

the two players was impossible for Mort to believe), then it had been Shooter who had stolen from him.

Of course.

It was as plain as the nose on his face ... or the round black hat on John Shooter's head.

Yet he still felt upset, unsettled, guilty ... he felt at a loss in a way for which there was perhaps no word. And why? Well ...

because...

At that moment Mort lifted up a Xerox of The Organ-Grinder's Boy manuscript, and there, beneath it, was a package of L

& M cigarettes. Did they make L & M's anymore? He didn't know. The pack was old, crumpled, but definitely not flat. He

took it out and looked at it. He reflected that he must have bought this particular pack in 1985, according to the informal

science of stratification one might call - for want of a better word - Deskology.

He peered inside the pack. He saw three little coffin nails, all in a row.

Time-travellers from another age, Mort thought. He stuck one of the cigarettes in his mouth, then went out into the kitchen

to get a match from the box by the stove. Time-travellers from another age, riding up through the years, patient cylindrical

voyagers, their mission to wait, to persevere, to bide until the proper moment to start me on the road to lung cancer again

finally arrives. And it seems the time has finally come.

'It'll probably taste like shit,' he said aloud to the empty house (Mrs Gavin had long since gone home), and set fire to the tip

of the cigarette. It didn't taste like shit, though. It tasted pretty good. He wandered back toward his study, puffing away and

feeling pleasantly lightheaded. Ah, the dreadful patient persistence of addiction, he thought. What had Hemingway said?

Not this August, nor this September - this year you have to do what you like. But the time comes around again. It always

does. Sooner or later you stick something back in your big dumb old mouth again. A drink, a smoke, maybe the barrel of a

shotgun. Not this August, nor this September ...

... unfortunately, this was October.

At an earlier point in his prospecting, he had found an old bottle half full of Planter's Peanuts. He doubted if the nuts would

be fit to eat, but the lid of the bottle made a fine ashtray. He sat behind his desk, looked out at the lake (like Mrs G., the

boats which had been out there earlier were gone), relished his old, vile habit, and found he could think about John Shooter

and John Shooter's story with a little more equanimity.

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SecretWindow,SecretGardenTwoPASTMIDNIGHT:Anoteon'SecretWindow,SecretGarden'I'moneofthosepeoplewhobelievethatlifeisaseriesofcycles-wh\eelswithinwheels,somemeshingwithothers,somespinningalone,butallofthemperformingsomefinite,repeatingfuncti\on.Ilikethatabstractimageoflifeassomethinglikeanefficientfact...

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Stephen King - Secret window, secret garden

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