“Oh,” Herb said. “Yeah, I see what you mean. “He lit his pipe. “You've never really been comfortable with it, have you?”

“No,” Johnny said. “We never talk much about it, either, which is something of a relief. It seems like the only thing other people do want to talk about. “And it wasn't just that they wanted to talk; that wouldn't have bothered him so much. But when he was in Slocum's Store for a sixpack or a loaf of bread, the girl would try to take his money without touching his hand, and the frightened, skittish look in her eyes was unmistakable. His father's friends would give him a little wave instead of a handshake. In October Herb had hired a local high school girl to come in once a week to do some dusting and vacuum the floors. After three weeks she had quit for no stated reason at all probably someone at her high school had told her who she was cleaning for. It seemed that for everyone who was anxious to be touched, to be informed, to be in contact with Johnny's peculiar talent, there was another who regarded him as a kind of leper. At times like these, Johnny would think of the nurses staring at him the day he had told Eileen Magown that her house was on fire, staring at him like magpies on a telephone wire. He would think of the way the TV reporter had drawn back from him after the press conference's unexpected conclusion, agreeing with everything he said but not wanting to be touched. Unhealthy either way.

“No, we don't talk about it,” Herb agreed. “It makes me think of your mother, I suppose. She was so sure you'd been given the… the whatever-it-is for some reason. Sometimes I wonder if she wasn't right.”

Johnny shrugged. “All I want is a normal life. I want to bury the whole damn thing. And if this little squib helps me do it, so much the better.”

“But you still can do it, can't you?” Herb asked. He was looking closely at his son.

Johnny thought about a night not quite a week ago. They had gone out to dinner, a rare happening on their strapped budget. They had gone to Cole's Farm in Gray, probably the best restaurant in the area, a place that was always packed. The night had been cold, the dining room cheery and warm. Johnny had taken his father's coat and his own into the cloakroom, and as he thumbed through the racked coats, looking for empty hangers, a whole series of clear impressions had cascaded through his mind. It was like that sometimes, and on another occasion he could have handled every coat for twenty minutes and gotten nothing at all. Here was a lady's coat with a fur collar. She was having an affair with one of her husband's poker buddies, was scared sick about it, but didn't know how to close it off. A man's denim jacket, sheepskin-lined. This guy was also worried-about his brother, who had been badly hurt on a construction project the week before. A small boy's parka-his grandmother in Durham had given him a Snoopy transistor radio just today and he was mad because his father hadn't let him bring it into the dining room with him. And another one, a plain, black topcoat, that had turned him cold with terror and robbed him of his appetite. The man who owned this coat was going mad. So far he had kept up appearances-not even his wife suspected-but his vision of the world was being slowly darkened by a series of increasingly paranoid fantasies. Touching that

Coat had been like touching a writhing coil of snakes.

“Yes, I can still do it,” Johnny said briefly. “I wish to hell I couldn't.”

“You really mean that?”

Johnny thought of the plain, black topcoat. He had only picked at his meal, looking this way and that, trying to single the man out of the crowd, unable to do so.

“Yes,” he said. “I mean it.”

“Best forgotten then,” Herb said, and clapped his son on the shoulder.

And for the next month or so it seemed that it would be forgotten. Johnny drove north to attend a meeting at the high school for midyear teachers and to take a load of his personal things up to his new apartment, which he found small but liveable.

He went in his father's car, and as he was getting ready to leave Herb asked him, “You're not nervous? About driving?”

Johnny shook his head. Thoughts of the accident itself troubled him very little now. If something was going to happen to him, it would. And deep down he felt confident that lightning would not strike in the same place again-when he died, he didn't believe it would be in a car accident.

In fact, the long trip was quiet and soothing, the meeting a little bit like Old Home Week. All of his old colleagues who were still teaching at CMHS dropped by to wish him the best. But he couldn't help noticing how few of them actually shook hands with him, and he seemed to sense a certain reserve, a wariness in their eyes. Drivmg home, he convinced himself it was probably imagination. And if not, well-even that had its amusing side. If they had read their Inside View, they would know he was a hoax and nothing to worry about.

The meeting over, there was nothing to do but go back to Pownal and wait for the Christmas holidays to come and go. The packages containing personal objects stopped coming, almost as if a switch had been thrown-the power of the press, Johnny told his father. They were replaced by a brief spate of angry-and mostly anonymous-letters and cards from people who seemed to feel personally cheated.

“You ort to burn in H! E! L! L! for your slimey skeems to bilk this American Republic,” a typical one read. It had been written on a crumpled sheet of Ramada Inn stationery and was postmarked York, Pennsylvania. “You are nothing but a Con Artist and a dirty rotten cheet. I bless God for that paper that saw thru you. You Ort to be ashamed of yourself Sir. The Bible says an ordinery sinner will be cast into the Lake of F!I!R!E! and be consomed but a F!A!L!S!E P!R!O!F!I!T! shall burn forever and EVER! That's you a False Profit who sold your Immortal Soul for a few cheep bucks. So thats the end of my letter and I hope for your sake I never catch you ut on the Streets of your Home Town. Signed, A FRIEND (of God not you Sir)!”

Over two dozen letters in this approximate vein came in during the course of about twenty days following the appearance of the inside View story. Several enterprising souls expressed an interest in joining in with Johnny as partners. “I used to be a magician's assistant,” one of these latter missives bragged, “and I could trick an old whore out of her g-string. If you're planning a mentalist gig, you need me in!”

Then the letters dried up, as had the earlier influx of boxes and packages. On a day in late November when he had checked the mailbox and found it empty for the third afternoon in a row, Johnny walked back to the house remembering that Andy Warhol had predicted that a day would come when everyone in America would be famous for fifteen minutes. Apparently his fifteen minutes had come and gone, and no one was any more pleased about it than he was.

But as things turned out, it wasn't over yet.

“Smith?” The telephone voice asked. “John Smith?”

“Yes. “It wasn't a voice he knew, or a wrong number. That made it something of a puzzle since his father had had the phone unlisted about three months ago. This was December 17, and their tree stood in the corner of the living room, its base firmly wedged into the old tree stand Herb had made when Johnny was just a kid. Outside it was snowing.

“My name is Bannerman. Sheriff George Bannerman, from Castle Rock. “He cleared his throat. “I've got a well, I suppose you'd say I've got a proposal for you.

“How did you get this number?”

Bannerman cleared his throat again. “Well, I could have gotten it from the phone company, I suppose, it being police business. But actually I got it from a friend of yours. Doctor by the name of Weizak.”