As the horses entered the backstretch, Broken Field began to press My Lass for the lead. My Lass broke stride and Broken Field flew by her. At the same time, Absolutely began to move up on the outside-Keeton saw it before the disembodied voice of the announcer sent the news blaring across the track, and he barely felt Frazier elbowing him, barely heard him screaming, “That’s your horse, Bustert That’s your horse and she’s got a chance!”

As the horses thundered down the final straightaway toward the place where Keeton and Frazier were standing, the entire crowd began to bellow. Keeton had felt the electricity whip through him again, not a spark this time but a storm. He began to bellow with them; the next day he would be so hoarse he could barely speak above a whisper.

“Absolutely!” he screamed. “Come on Absolutely, come on you bitch andr UN."’ “Trot,” Frazier said, laughing so hard tears ran down his cheeks.

“Come on you bitch and trot. That’s what you mean, Buster.”

Keeton paid no attention. He was in another world. He was sending brain-waves out to Absolutely, sending her telepathic strength through the air.

“Now it’s Broken Field and How Do?, How Do? and Broken Field", the godlike voice of the announcer chanted, “and Absolutely is gaining fast as they come to the last eighth of a mile@’ The horses approached, raising a cloud of dust. Absolutely trotted with her neck arched and her head thrust forward, legs rising and falling like pistons; she passed How Do? and Broken Field, who was flagging badly, right where Keeton and Frazier were standing. She was still widening her lead when she crossed the finish line.

When the numbers went up on the tote-board, Keeton had to ask Frazier what they meant. Frazier had looked at his ticket, then at the board. He whistled soundlessly.

“Did I make my money back?” Keeton asked anxiously.

“Buster, you did a little better than that. Absolutely was a thirtyto-one shot.”

Before he left the track that night, Keeton had made just over three hundred dollars. That was how his obsession was born.

He took his overcoat from the tree in the corner of his office, drew it on, started to leave, then stopped, holding the doorknob in his hand. He looked back across the room. There was a mirror on the wall opposite the window. Keeton looked at it for a long, speculative moment, then walked across to it. He had heard about how They used mirrors-he hadn’t been born yesterday.

He put his face against it, ignoring the reflection of his pallid skin and bloodshot eyes. He cupped a hand to either cheek, cutting off the glare, narrowing his eyes, looking for a camera on the other side.

Looking for Them.

He saw nothing.

After a long moment he stepped away, swabbed indifferently at the smeared glass with the sleeve of his overcoat, and left the office. Nothing yet, anyway. That didn’t mean They wouldn’t come in tonight, pull out his mirror, and replace it with one-way glass.

Spying was just another tool of the trade for the Persecutors. He would have to check the mirror every day now.

“But I can,” he said to the empty upstairs hallway. “I can do that. Believe me.”

Eddie Warburton was mopping the lobby floor and didn’t look up as Keeton stepped out onto the street.

His car was parked around back, but he didn’t feel like driving.

He felt too confused to drive; he would probably put the Caddy through someone’s store window if he tried. Nor was he aware, in I the depths of his confused mind, that he was walking away from his house rather than toward it. It was seven-fifteen on Saturday morning, and he was the only person out in Castle Rock’s small business district.

His mind went briefly back to that first night at Lewiston Raceway. He couldn’t do anything wrong, it seemed. Steve Frazier had lost thirty dollars and said he was leaving after the ninth race.

Keeton said he thought he would stay awhile longer. He barely looked at Frazier, and barely noticed when Frazier was gone. He did remember thinking it was nice not to have someone at his elbow saying Buster This and Buster That all the time. He hated the nickname, and of course Steve knew it-that was why he used it.

The next week he had come back again, alone this time, and had lost sixty dollars’ worth of previous winnings. He hardly cared.

Although he thought often of those huge stacks of banded currency, it wasn’t the money, not really; the money was just the symbol you took away with you, something that said you had been there, that you had been, however briefly, part of the big show. What he really cared about was the tremendous, walloping excitement that went through the crowd when the starter’s bell rang, the gates opened with their heavy, crunching thud, and the announcer yelled, “Theyyy’rrre OFF!” What he cared about was the roar of the crowd as the pack rounded the third turn and went hell-for-election down the backstretch, the hysterical camp-meeting exhortations from the stands as they rounded the fourth turn and poured on the coal down the homestretch. It was alive, oh, it was so alive. It was so alive that-that it was dangerous.

Keeton decided he’d better stay away. He had the course of his life neatly planned. He intended to become Castle Rock’s Head Selectman when Steve Frazier finally pulled the pin, and after six or seven years of that, he intended to stand for the State House of Representatives. After that, who knew? National office was not out of reach for a man who was ambitious, capable… and sane.

That was the real trouble with the track. He hadn’t recognized it at first, but he had recognized it soon enough. The track was a place where people paid their money, took a ticket… and gave up their sanity for a little while. Keeton had seen too much insanity in his own family to feel comfortable with the attraction Lewiston Raceway held for him. It was a pit with greasy sides, a snare with hidden teeth, a loaded gun with the safety removed. When he went, he was unable to leave until the last race of the evening had been run. He knew. He had tried. Once he had made it almost all the way to the exit turnstiles before something in the back of his brain, something powerful, enigmatic, and reptilian, had arisen, taken control, and turned his feet around. Keeton was terrified of fully waking that reptile. Better to let it sleep.

For three years he had done just that. Then, in 1984, Steve Frazier had retired, and Keeton had been elected Head Selectman.

That was when his real troubles began.

He had gone to the track to celebrate his victory, and since he was celebrating, he decided to go whole hog. He bypassed the two- and five-dollar windows, and went straight to the ten-dollar window. He had lost a hundred and sixty dollars that night, more than he felt comfortable losing (he told his wife the next day that it had been forty), but not more than he could afford to lose. Absolutely not.

He returned a week later, meaning to win back what he had lost so he could quit evens. And he had almost made it. Almost-that was the key word. The way he had almost made it to the exit turnstiles. The week after, he had lost two hundred and ten dollars.

That left a hole in the checking account Myrtle would notice, and so he had borrowed a little bit from the town’s petty-cash fund to cover the worst of the shortfall. A hundred dollars. Peanuts, really.

Past that point, it all began to blur together. The pit had greased sides, all right, and once you started sliding you were doomed.

You could expend your energy clawing at the sides and succeed in slowing your fall… but that, of course, only drew out the agony.

If there had been a point of no return, it had been the summer of 1989. The pacers ran nightly during the summer, and Keeton was in attendance constantly through the second half of July and all of August. Myrtle had thought for awhile that he was using the racetrack as an excuse, that he was actually seeing another woman, and that was a laugh-it really was. Keeton couldn’t have got a hardon if Diana herself had driven down from the moon in her chariot with her toga open and a FUCK ME DANFORTH Sign hung around her neck. The thought of how deep he’d dipped into the town treasury had caused his poor dick to shrivel to the size of a pencil eraser.