Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [135]
Mort crushed out his cigarette and decided to take a nap. Then he decided that was a bad idea. It would be better, healthier both mentally and physically, to eat some lunch ' read for half an hour or so, and then go for a nice long walk down by the lake. He was sleeping too much, and sleeping too much was a sign of depression. Halfway to the kitchen, he deviated to the long sectional couch by the window-wall in the living room. The hell with it, he thought, putting a pillow under his neck and another one behind his head. I Am depressed.
His last thought before drifting off was a repeat: He's not done with me yet. Oh no, not this guy. He's a repeater.
5
He dreamed he was lost in a vast cornfield. He blundered from one row to the next, and the sun glinted off the watches he was wearing - half a dozen on each forearm, and each watch set to a different time.
Please help me! he cried. Someone please help me! I'm lost and afraid!
Ahead of him, the corn on both sides of the row shook and rustled. Amy stepped out from one side. John Shooter stepped out from the other. Both of them held knives.
I am confident I can take care of this business, Shooter said as they advanced on him with their knives raised. I'm sure that, in time, your death will be a mystery even to us.
Mort turned to run, but a hand - Amy's, he was sure - seized him by the belt and pulled him back. And when the knives, glittering in the hot sun of this huge secret garden
6
It was the telephone which woke him an hour and a quarter later. He struggled out of a terrible dream - someone had been chasing him, that was all he could clearly remember - to a sitting position on the couch. He was horribly hot; every inch of his skin seemed to be running with sweat. The sun had crept around to this side of the house while he was sleeping and had shone in on him through the window-wall for God knew how long.
Mort walked slowly toward the telephone table in the front hall, plodding like a man in a diver's suit walking in the bed of a river against the current, his head thumping slowly, his mouth tasting like old dead gopher-shit. For every step he took forward, the entrance to the hall seemed to retreat a step, and it occurred to Mort, not for the first time, that hell was probably like the way you felt after sleeping too long and too hard on a hot afternoon. The worst of it wasn't physical. The worst was that dismaying, disorienting sense of being outside yourself, somehow - just an observer looking through dual TV cameras with blurry lenses.
He picked up the phone thinking it would be Shooter.
Yeah, it'll be him, all right - the one person in the whole wide world I shouldn't be talking to with my guard down and one half of my mind feeling unbuttoned from the other half. Sure tell be him - who else? 'Hello?'
It wasn't Shooter, but as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line reply to his greeting, he discovered there was at least one other person to whom he had no business talking while in a physically vulnerable state.
'Hello, Mort,' Amy said. 'Are you all right?'
7
Some time later that afternoon, Mort donned the extra-large red flannel shirt he used as a jacket in the early fall and took the walk he should have taken earlier. Bump the cat followed him long enough to ascertain that Mort was serious, then returned to the house.
He walked slowly and deliberately through an exquisite afternoon which seemed to be all blue sky, red leaves, and golden air. He walked with his hands stuffed into his pockets, trying to let the lake's quiet work through his skin and calm him down, as it had always done before - he supposed that was the reason he had come here instead of staying in New York, as Amy had