Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [187]
Good! he wanted to cry out at her. Good! Because you only had to see it! I had to wear It!
'You knew my love,' he said unsteadily. 'I never hid her from you. You knew from the start.'
'But I never knew,' she said, 'how deep her embrace could be.'
'Well, cheer up,' Mort said. 'She seems to have left me now.'
Amy was weeping. 'Mort, Mort - I only want you to live and be happy. Can't you see that? Can't you do that?'
What he had seen was one of her bare shoulders touching one of Ted Milner's bare shoulders. He had seen their eyes, wide and frightened, and Ted's hair stuck up in an Alfalfa corkscrew. He thought of telling her this - of trying, anyway -and let it go. It was enough. They had hurt each other enough. Another time, perhaps, they could go at it again. He wished she hadn't said that thing about the nervous breakdown, though. He had not had a nervous breakdown.
'Amy, I think I ought to go.'
'Yes - both of us. Ted's out showing a house, but he'll be back soon. I have to put some dinner together.'
'I'm sorry about the argument.'
'Will you call if you need me? I'm still worried.'
'Yes,' he said, and said goodbye, and hung up. He stood there by the telephone for a moment, thinking he would surely burst into tears. But it passed. That was perhaps the real horror.
It passed.
39
The steadily falling rain made him feel listless and stupid. He made a little fire in the woodstove, drew a chair over, and tried to read the current issue of Harper's, but he kept nodding off and then jerking awake again as his chin dropped, squeezing his windpipe and producing a snore. I should have bought some cigarettes today, he thought. A few smokes would have kept me awake. But he hadn't bought any smokes, and he wasn't really sure they would have kept him awake, anyway. He wasn't just tired; he was suffering from shock.
At last he walked over to the couch, adjusted the pillows, and lay back. Next to his cheek, cold rain spicklespackled against the dark glass.
Only once, he thought. I only did it once. And then he fell deeply asleep.
40
In his dream, he was in the world's biggest classroom.
The walls stretched up for miles. Each desk was a mesa, the gray tiles the endless plain which swept among them. The clock on the wall was a huge cold sun. The door to the hallway was shut, but Morton Rainey could read the words on the pebbled glass:
HOME TEAM WRITING ROOM
PROF. DELLACOURT
They spelled it wrong, Mort thought, too many L's.
But another voice told him this was not so.
Mort was standing on the giant blackboard's wide chalk gutter, stretching up. He had a piece of chalk the size of a baseball bat in his hand. He wanted to drop his arm, which ached ferociously, but he could not. Not until he had written the same sentence on the blackboard five hundred times: I will not copy from John Kintner. He must have written it four hundred times already, he thought, but four hundred wasn't enough. Stealing a man's work when a man's work was really all he had was unforgivable. So he would have to write and write and write, and never mind the voice in his mind trying to tell him that this was a dream, that his right arm ached for other reasons.
The chalk squeaked monstrously. The dust, acrid and somehow familiar - so familiar - sifted down into his face. At last he could go on no longer. His arm dropped to his side like a bag filled with lead shot. He turned on the chalk gutter, and saw that only one of the desks in the huge classroom was occupied. The occupant