His greatness was on the way. It might still be years ahead – he was young, sure, nothing wrong with being young as long as you understood you couldn’t have everything all at once. As long as you believed it would come eventually. He did believe that.
And God and Sonny Jesus help anyone that got in his way.
Greg Stillson cocked a sunburned elbow out the window and began to whistle along with the radio. He stepped on the go-pedal, walked that old Mercury up to seventy, and rolled down the straight Iowa farm road to-ward whatever future there might be.
PART ONE
The Wheel of Fortune
CHAPTER ONE
The two things Sarah remembered about that night later were his run of luck at the Wheel of Fortune and the mask. But as time passed, years of it, it was the mask she thought about – when she could bring herself to think about that horrible night at all.
He lived in an apartment house in Cleaves Mills. Sarah got there at quarter to eight, parking around the corner, and buzzing up to be let in. They were taking her car tonight because Johnny’s was laid up at Tibbets’ Garage in Hampden with a frozen wheel bearing or something like that. Something expensive, Johnny had told her over the phone, and then he had laughed a typical Johnny Smith laugh. Sarah would have been in tears if it had been her car – her pocketbook.
Sarah went through the foyer to the stairs, past the bulletin board that hung there. It was dotted with file cards advertising motorbikes, stereo components, typing services, and appeals from people who needed rides to Kansas or California, people who were driving to Florida and needed riders to share the driving and help pay for the gas. But tonight the board was dominated by a large placard showing a clenched fist against an angry red
back-ground suggesting fire. The one word on the poster was STRIKE ! It was late October of 1970.
Johnny had the front apartment on the second floor -the penthouse, he called it – where you could stand in your tux like Ramon Navarro, a big slug of Ripple wine in a balloon glass, and look down upon the vast, beating heart of Cleaves Mills; its hurrying after-show crowds, its bustling taxis, its neon signs. There are almost seven thousand stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.
Actually Cleaves Mills was mostly a main street with a stop and go light at the intersection (it turned into a blinker after 6 P.M.), about two dozen stores, and a small moccasin factory. Like most of the towns surrounding Orono, where the University of Maine was, its real industry was supplying the things students consumed -beer, wine, gas, rock ‘n’ roll music, fast food, dope, gro~ ceries, housing, movies. The movie house was The Shade. It showed art films and ’40’S nostalgia flicks when school was in. In the summertime it reverted to Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns.
Johnny and Sarah were both out of school a year, and both were teaching at cleaves Mills High, one of the few high schools in the area that had not consolidated into a three-or four-town district. University faculty and ad-ministration as well as university students used Cleaves as their bedroom, and the town had an enviable tax base. It also had a fine high school with a brand-new media wing. The townies might bitch about the university crowd with their smart talk and their Commie marches to end the war and their meddling in town politics, but they had never said no to the tax dollars that were paid annually on the gracious faculty homes and the apartment buildings in the area some students called Fudgey Acres and others called Sleaze Alley.
Sarah rapped on his door and Johnny’s voice, oddly muffled, called, ‘It’s open, Sarah!’
Frowning a little, she pushed the door open. Johnny’s apartment was in total darkness except for the fitful yellow glow of the blinker half a block up the street. The furniture was so many humped black shadows.
‘Johnny…?’
Wondering if a fuse had blown or something, she took a tentative step forward – and then the face appeared before her, floating in the darkness, a horrible face out of a nightmare.