There was an unmarked door at the end. It was unlocked and he came out onto the gallery above the rear of the meeting hall, which was spread out below him in a crazy quilt of shadows. He closed the door behind him and shivered a little at the soft stir of echoes in the empty hall. His footfalls also echoed back as he walked to the right along the rear gallery, then turned left. Now he was walking along the right-hand side of the hall, about twenty-five feet above the floor. He stopped at a point above the woodstove and directly across from the podium where Stillson would be standing in about five-and-a-half hours.
He sat down cros-legged and rested for a while. Tried to get in control of the headache with some deep breathing. The woodstove wasn’t operating and he felt the cold settling steadily against him – and then into him. Previews of the winding shroud.
When he had begun to feel a little better, he thumbed the catches on the attache case. The double dick echoed back as his footfalls had done, and this time it was the sound of cocking pistols.
Western justice, he thought, for no reason at all. That was what the prosecutor had said when the jury found Claudine Longet guilty of shooting her lover. She’s found out what western justice means.
Johnny looked down into the case and rubbed his eyes. His vision doubled briefly and then things came together again. He was getting an impression from the very wood he was sitting on. A very old impression; if it had been a photograph, it would have been sepia-toned. Men standing here and smoking cigars, talking and laughing and waiting for town meeting to begin. Had it been 1920? 1902? There was something ghostly about it that made him feel uneasy. One of them had been talking about the price of whiskey and cleaning his nose with a silver toothpick and
(and two years before he had poisoned his wife)
Johnny shivered. Whatever the impression was, it didn’t matter. It was an impression of a man who was long dead now.
The rifle gleamed up at him.
When men do it in wartime, they give them medals, he thought.
He began to assemble the rifle. Each click I echoed back, just once, solemnly, the sound of a cocking pistol.
He loaded the Remington with five bullets.
He placed it across his knees.
And waited
3.
Dawn came slowly. Johnny dozed a little, but he was too cold now to do more than doze.
Thin, sketchy dreams haunted what sleep he did get.
He came fully awake at a little past seven. The door below was thrown open with a crash, and he had to bite his tongue to keep from crying out, Who’s there?
It was the custodian. Johnny put his eye to one of the diamond shapes cut into the balustrade and saw a burly man who was bundled up in a thick Navy pea coat. He was coming up the center aisle with an armload of firewood. He was humming ‘Red River Valley’. He dropped the armload of wood into the woodbox with a crash and then disappeared below Johnny. A second later he heard the thin screcing noise of the stove’s firebox door being swung open.
Johnny suddenly thought of the plume of vapor be was producing every time he exhaled.
Suppose the custodian looked up? Would he be able to see that?
He tried to slow the rate of his breathing, but that made his head ache worse and his vision doubled alarmingly.
Now there was the crackle of paper being crumpled, then the scratch of a match. A faint whiff of sulphur in the cold air. The custodian went on humming ‘Red River Valley’, and then broke into loud and tuneless song: ‘From this valley they say you are going… we will miss your bright eyes and sweet smiiiiile…’
Now a different crackling sound. Fire.
‘That’s got it, you sucker,’ the custodian said from directly below Johnny, and then there was the sound of the firebox door being slammed shut again. Johnny pressed both hands over his mouth like a bandage, suddenly afflicted with suicidal amusement. He saw himself rising up from the floor of the gallery, as thin and white as any self-respecting ghost. He saw himself spreading his arms like wings and his fingers like talons and calling down in hollow tones: ‘That’s got you, you sucker.’