“That's right, and this is police business. You stay be-hind this rope here or you'll spend the night in my holding cell.”

With the beam of his flashlight he traced the course of the rope for them and then held it up so Johnny could pass beneath. They walked down the slope toward the snow-mounded shapes of the benches. Behind them the reporters gathered at the rope, pooling their few lights so that Johnny and George Bannerman walked in a dull sort of spotlight,

“Flying blind,” Bannerman said.

“Well, there's nothing to see, anyway,” Johnny said. “Is there?”

“No, not now. I told Frank he could take that rope down anytime. Now I'm glad he didn't get around to it. You want to go over to the bandstand?”

“Not yet. Show me where the cigarette butts were. “They went on a little farther and then Bannerman stopped. “Here,” he said, and shone his light on a bench that was little more than a vague hump poking out of a drift.

Johnny took off his gloves and put them in his coat pockets. Then he knelt and began to brush the snow away from the seat of the bench. Again Bannerman was struck by the haggard pallor of the man's face. On his knees before the bench he looked like a religious penitent, a man in desperate prayer.

Johnny's hands went cold, then mostly numb. Melted now ran off his fingers. He got down to the splintered, weatherbeaten surface of the bench. He seemed to see it very clearly, almost with magnifying power. It had once been green, but now much of the paint had flaked and eroded away. Two rusted steel bolts held the seat to the backrest.

He seized the bench in both hands, and sudden weirdness flooded him he had felt nothing so intense before and would feel something so intense only once ever again.

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…

“Help me get up,” he muttered.

Bannerman helped him to his feet. “The bandstand now,” Johnny said.

“No, I think we ought to go back, Johnny.”

Johnny pushed past him blindly and began to flounder toward the bandstand, a big circular shadow up ahead. It bulked and loomed in the darkness, the death place. Bannerman ran and caught up to him.

“Johnny, who is it? Do you know who…?”

“You never found any scraps of tissue under their finger. nails because he was wearing a raincoat,” Johnny said, He panted the words out. “A raincoat with a hood. A slick vinyl raincoat. You go back over the reports. You go back over the reports and you'll see. It was raining or snowing every time. They clawed at him, all right. They fought him. Sure they did. But their fingers just slipped and slid over it.”

“Who, Johnny? Who?”

“I don't know. But I'm going to find out.”

He stumbled over the lowest of the six steps leading up to the bandstand, fumbled for his balance, and would have lost it if Bannerman had not gripped his arm. Then they were up on the stage. The snow was thin here, a bare dusting, kept off by the conical roof. Bannerman trained his flashlight beam on the floor and Johnny dropped to his hands and knees and began to crawl slowly across it. His hands were bright red. Bannerman thought they must be like chunks of raw meat by now.

Johnny stopped suddenly and stiffened like a dog on point. “Here,” he muttered. “He did it right here.”

Images and textures and sensations flooded in. The copper taste of excitement, the possibility of being seen adding to it. The girl was squirming, trying to scream. He had covered her mouth with one gloved hand. Awful excitement. Never catch me, I'm the Invisible Man, is it dirty enough for you now, momma?

Johnny began to moan, shaking his head back and forth.

Sound of clothes ripping. Warmth. Something flowing. Blood? Semen? Urine?

He began to shudder all over. His hair hung in his face. His face. His smiling, open face caught inside the circular border of the raincoat's hood as his (my) hands close around the neck at the moment of orgasm and squeeze… and squeeze… and squeeze.