He stared down at the bench, frowning, gripping it tightly in his hands. It -…
(A summer bench)
How many hundreds of different people had sat here at one time or another, listening to
‘God Bless America’, to ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ (‘Be hind to your web-footed friends…
for a duck may be somebody’s moooother…’), to the Castle Rock Cougars’ fight song?
Green summer leaves, smoky haze of fall like a memory of cornhusks and men with rakes in mellow dusk. The thud of the big snare drum. Mellow gold trumpets and trombones. School band uniforms …
(for a duck … may be… somebody’s mother…)
Good summer people sitting here, listening. applauding, holding programs that had been designed and printed in the Castle Rock High School graphic arts shop.
But this morning a killer had been sitting here. Johnny could feel him.
Dark tree branches etched against a gray snow-sky like runes. He(I) am sitting here, smoking, waiting, feeling good, feeling like he(I) could jump right over the roof of the world and land lightly on two feet. Humming a song. Something by the Rolling Stones.
Can’t get that, but very dearly everything is… is what?
All right. Everything is all right) everything is gray and waiting for snow, and Em…
‘Slick,’ Johnny muttered. ‘I’m slick, I’m so slick.’
Bannerman leaned forward, unable to catch the words over the howling wind. ‘What?’
‘Slick,’ Johnny repeated. He looked up at Bannerman and the Sheriff involuntarily took a step backward. Johnny’s eyes were cool and somehow inhuman. His dark hair blew wildly around his white face, and overhead the winter wind screamed through the black sky. His hands seemed welded to the bench.
‘I’m so fucking slick,’ he said clearly. A triumphant smile had formed on his lips. His eyes stared through Bannerman. Bannerman believed. No one could be acting this, or putting it on. And the most terrible part of it was… he was ‘reminded of someone. The ……. the tone of voice … Johnny Smith was gone; he seemed to have been replaced by a human blank. And lurking behind the planes of his ordinary features, almost near enough to touch. was another face. The face of the killer.
The face of someone he knew.
‘Never catch me because I’m too slick for you.’ A little laugh escaped him, confident, lightly taunting. ‘I put it on every time, and if they scratch… or bite… they don’t get a bit of me… because I’m so SLICK !’ His voice rose to a triumphant, crazy shriek that competed with the wind, and Bannerman fell back another step, his flesh crawling helplessly, his balls tight and cringing against his guts.
Let it stop, he thought. Let it stop now. Please.
Johnny bent his head over the bench. Melting snow dripped between his bare fingers.
(Snow. Silent snow, secret snow -)
(She put a clothespin on it so I’d know how it felt. How it felt when you got a disease. A disease from one of those nasty-fuckers, they’re all nasty. fuckers, and they have to be stopped, yes, stopped, stop them, stop, the stop, the STOP – OH MY GOD THE STOP
SIGN -!)
He was little again. Going to school through the silent, secret snow. And there was a man looming out of the shifting whiteness, a terrible man, a terrible black grinning man with eyes as shiny as quarters, and there was a red STOP sign clutched in one gloved hand…
him! … him! . . him!
(OH MY GOD DON’T … DON’T LET HIM GET ME … MOMMA … DON’T LET HIM
GET MEEEEE…)
Johnny screamed and fell away from the bench, his hands suddenly pressed to his cheeks.
Bannerman crouched beside him, badly frightened. Behind the rope the reporters stirred and murmured.
‘Johnny! Snap out of it! Listen, Johnny…’
‘Slick,’ Johnny muttered. He looked up at Bannerman with hurt, frightened eyes. In his mind he still saw that black shape with the shiny-quarter eyes looming out of the snow.
His crotch throbbed dully from the pain of the clothespin the killer’s mother had made him wear. He hadn’t been the killer then, oh no, not an animal, not a pusbag or a shitbag or whatever Bannerman had called him, he’d only been a scared little boy with a clothespin on his…his…