Then it was over. So was my urinary infection. Both the heat and the miserable throbbing pain were gone from my crotch, and the fever was likewise gone from my head. I could still feel the sweat it had drawn out of my skin, and I could smell it, but it was gone, all right.

'What's going on?' Delacroix called shrilly. His voice still came from far away, but when John Coffey bent forward, breaking eye-contact with me, the little Cajun's voice suddenly came clear. It was as if someone had pulled wads of cotton or a pair of shooters' plugs out of my ears. 'What's he doing to you?'

I didn't answer. Coffey was bent forward over his own lap with his face working and his throat bulging. His eyes were bulging, too. He looked like a man with a chicken bone caught in his throat.

'John!' I said. I clapped him on the back; it was all I could think of to do. 'John, what's wrong?'

He hitched under my hand, then made an unpleasant gagging, retching sound. His mouth opened the way horses sometimes open their mouths to allow the bit—reluctantly, with the lips peeling back from the teeth in a kind of desperate sneer. Then his teeth parted, too, and he exhaled a cloud of tiny black insects that looked like gnats or noseeums. They swirled furiously between his knees, turned white, and disappeared.

Suddenly all the strength went out of my middsection. It was as if the muscles there had turned to water. I slumped back against the stone side of Coffey's cell. I remember thinking the name of the Savior—Christ, Christ, Christ, over and over, like that—and I remember thinking that the fever had driven me delirious. That was all.

Then I became aware that Delacroix was bawling for help; he was telling the world that John Coffey was killing me, and telling it at the top of his lungs. Coffey was bending over me, all right, but only to make sure I was okay.

'Shut up, Del,' I said, and got on my feet. I waited for the pain to rip into my guts, but it didn't happen. I was better. Really. There was a moment of dizziness, but that passed even before I was able to reach out and grab the bars of Coffey's cell door for balance. 'I'm totally okey-doke.'

'You get on outta here,' Delacroix said, sounding like a nervy old woman telling a kid to climb down out of that-ere apple tree. 'You ain't suppose to be in there wit no one else on the block.'

I looked at John Coffey, who sat on the bunk with his huge hands on the tree stumps of his knees. John Coffey looked back at me. He had to tilt his head up a little, but not much.

'What did you do, big boy?' I asked in a low voice. 'What did you do to me?'

'Helped,' he said. 'I helped it, didn't I?'

'Yeah, I guess, but how? How did you help it?'

He shook his head—right, left, back to dead center. He didn't know how he'd helped it (how he'd cured it) and his placid face suggested that he didn't give a rat's ass—any more than I'd give a rat's ass about the mechanics of running when I was leading in the last fifty yards of a Fourth of July Two-Miler. I thought about asking him how he'd known I was sick in the first place, except that would undoubtedly have gotten the same headshake. There's a phrase I read somewhere and never forgot, something about "an enigma wrapped in a mystery." That's what John Coffey was, and I suppose the only reason he could sleep at night was because he didn't care. Percy called him the ijit, which was cruel but not too far off the mark. Our big boy knew his name, and knew it wasn't spelled like the drink, and that was just about all he cared to know.

As if to emphasize this for me, he shook his head m that deliberate way one more time, then lay down on his bunk with his hands clasped under his left cheek like a pillow and his face to the wall. His legs dangled off the end of the bunk from the shins on down, but that never seemed to bother him. The back of his shirt had pulled up, and I could see the scars that crisscrossed his skin.

I left the cell, turned the locks, then faced Delacroix, who was standing across the way with his hands wrapped around the bars of his cell, looking at me anxiously. Perhaps even fearfully. Mr. Jingles perched on his shoulder with his fine whiskers quivering like filaments. 'What dat darkie-man do to you?' Delacroix asked. 'Waddit gris-gris? He th'ow some gris-gris on you?' Spoken in that Cajun accent of his, gris-gris rhymed with pee-pee.

'I don't know what you're talking about, Del.'

'Devil you don't! Lookit you! All change! Even walk different, boss!'

I probably was walking different, at that. There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of peace so remarkable it was almost ecstasy—anyone who's suffered bad pain and then recovered will know what I'm talking about.

'Everything's all right, Del,' I insisted. 'John Coffey had a nightmare, that's all.'

'He a gris-gris man!' Delacroix said vehemently. There was a nestle of sweat-beads on his upper lip. He hadn't seen much, just enough to scare him half to death. 'He a hoodoo man!'

'What makes you say that?'

Delacroix reached up and took the mouse in one hand. He cupped it in his palm and lifted it to his face. From his pocket, Delacroix took out a pink fragment—one of those peppermint candies. He held it out, but at first the mouse ignored it, stretching out its neck toward the man instead, sniffing at his breath the way a person might sniff at a bouquet of flowers. Its little oildrop eyes slitted most of the way closed in an expression that looked like ecstasy. Delacroix kissed its nose, and the mouse allowed its nose to be kissed. Then it took the offered piece of candy and began to munch it. Delacroix looked at it a moment longer, then looked at me. All at once I got it.

'The mouse told you,' I said. 'Am I right?'

'Oui.'

'Like he whispered his name to you.'

'Oui, in my ear he whisper it.'

'Lie down, Del,' I said. 'Have you a little rest. All that whispering back and forth must wear you out.'

He said something else—accused me of not believing him, I suppose. His voice seemed to be coming from a long way off again. And when I went back up to the duty desk, I hardly seemed to be walking at all—it was more like I was floating, or maybe not even moving, the cells just rolling past me on either side, movie props on hidden wheels.

I started to sit like normal, but halfway into it my knees unlocked and I dropped onto the blue cushion Harry had brought from home the year before and plopped onto the seat of the chair. If the chair hadn't been there, I reckon I would have plopped straight to the floor without passing Go or collecting two hundred dollars.

I sat there, feeling the nothing in my groin where a forest fire had been blazing not ten minutes before. I helped it, didn't I? John Coffey had said, and that was true, as far as my body went. My peace of mind was a different story, though. That he hadn't helped at all.

My eyes fell on the stack of forms under the tin ashtray we kept on the corner of the desk. BLOCK REPORT was printed at the top, and about halfway down was a blank space headed Report All Unusual Occurrences. I would use that space in tonight's report, telling the story of William Wharton's colorful and action-packed arrival. But suppose I also told what had happened to me in John Coffey's cell? I saw myself picking up the pencil—the one whose tip Brutal was always licking—and writing a single word in big capital letters: MIRACLE.

That should have been funny, but instead of smiling, all at once I felt sure that I was going to cry I put my hands to my face, palms against my mouth to stifle the sobs—I didn't want to scare Del again just when he was starting to get settled down—but no sobs came. No tears, either. After a few moments I lowered my hands back to the desk and folded them. I didn't know what I was feeling, and the only clear thought in my head was a wish that no one should come back onto the block until I was a little more in control of myself. I was afraid of what they might see in my face.