Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [147]
WELCOME TO THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS
it said. The writing on the blackboard was easier to read.
SOWING SEASON
A Short Story by Morton Rainey
it said.
Suddenly something whizzed over Mort's shoulder, just missing his head. The orange. As Mort cringed back, the orange struck the blackboard, burst open with a rotten squashing sound, and splattered gore across what had been written there.
He turned back to Shooter. Stop that! he cried in a shaky, scolding voice.
Shooter dipped into his bag again. What's the matter? Shooter asked in his calm, stern voice. Don't you recognize blood oranges when you see them? What kind of writer are you?
He threw another one. It splattered crimson across Mort's name and began to drip slowly down the wall.
No more! Mort screamed, but Shooter dipped slowly, implacably, into the bag again. His long, callused fingers sank into the skin of the orange he brought out; blood began to sweat its way onto the orange's skin in pinprick droplets.
No more! No more! Please! No more! I'll admit it, I'll admit anything. everything, if you just stop! Anything, if you'll just stop! If you'll
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stop, if you'll just stop -
He was falling.
Mort grabbed at the edge of the couch just in time to save himself a short and probably painful trip to the living-room floor. He rolled toward the back of the couch and simply lay there for a moment, clutching the cushions, shivering, and trying to grasp at the ragged tails of the dream.
Something about a classroom, and blood oranges, and the school of hard knocks. Even this was going, and the rest was already gone. It had been real, whatever it was. Much too real.
At last he opened his eyes, but there was precious little to see; he had slept until long past sundown. He was horribly stiff, especially at the base of his neck, and he suspected he had been asleep at least four hours, maybe five. He felt his way cautiously to the living-room light-switch, managing to avoid the octagonal glass-topped coffee table for a change (he had an idea the coffee table was semi-sentient, and given to shifting its position slightly after dark, the better to hack away at his shins), and then went into the front hall to try Amy again. On the way, he checked his watch. It was quarter past ten. He had slept over five hours ... nor was this the first time. And he wouldn't even pay for it by tossing and turning all night, judging by past experience, he would be asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow in the bedroom.
He picked up the phone, was momentarily puzzled by the dead silence in his ear. then remembered he had yanked the damn thing's fang. He pulled the wire through his fingers until he got to the jack, turned around to plug it in ... and paused. From here he could look out the small window to the left of the door. This gave him an angle of vision on the back porch, where the mysterious and unpleasant Mr Shooter had left his manuscript under a rock yesterday. He could also see the garbage cabinet, and there was something on it - two somethings, actually. A white something and a dark something. The dark something looked nasty; for one frightening second, Mort thought a giant spider was crouched there.
He dropped the phone cord and turned on the porch light in a hurry. Then there was a space of time - he didn't know just how long and didn't care to know -when he was incapable of further movement.
The white thing was a sheet of paper - a perfectly ordinary 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of typing paper. Although the garbage cabinet was a good fifteen feet away from where Mort was standing, the few words on it were printed in large strokes and he could read them easily. He thought Shooter must have used either a pencil with an extremely soft lead or a piece of artist's charcoal.