If he’ll see Ace, maybe he’ll see me, Alan thought, and raised his fist to knock. Before he could bring it down, the pager clipped to his belt went off. Alan pushed the button that turned the hateful gadget off and stood indecisively in front of the shop door a moment longer… but there was really no question about what he had to do now. If you were a lawyer or a business executive, maybe you could afford to ignore your pages for awhile, but when you were a County Sheriff-and one who was elected rather than appointed there wasn’t much question about priorities.

Alan crossed the sidewalk, then paused and spun around quickly.

He felt a little like the player who is “it” in a game of Red Light, the one whose job it is to catch the other players in motion so he can send them all the way back to the beginning. The feeling that he was being watched had returned, and it was very strong.

He was positive he would see the surprised twitch of the drawn shade on Mr. Gaunt’s side of the door.

But there was nothing. The shop just went on dozing in the unnaturally hot October sunlight, and if he hadn’t seen Ace coming out with his own eyes, Alan would have sworn the place was empty, watched feeling or no watched feeling.

He crossed to his cruiser, leaned in to grab the mike, and radioed in.

“Henry Payton called,” Sheila told him. “He’s already got preliminary reports on Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck from Henry Ryan-by?”

“I copy. BY.”

“Henry said if you want him to give you the high spots, he’ll be in from right now until about noon. By.”

“Okay. I’m just up Main Street. I’ll be right in. By.”

“Uh, Alan?”

“Yeah?”

“Henry also asked if we’re going to get a fax machine before the turn of the century, so he can just send copies of this stuff instead of calling all the time and reading it to you. By.”

“Tell him to write a letter to the Head Selectman,” Alan said grumpily. “I’m not the one who writes the budget and he knows it.”

“Well, I’m just telling you what he said. No need to get all huffy about it. By.”

Alan thought Sheila sounded rather huffy herself, however.

“Over and out,” he said.

He got into Unit 1 and racked the mike. He glanced at the bank in time to see the big digital read-out over the door announce the time as ten-fifty and the temperature as eighty-two degrees. Jesus, we don’t need this, he thought. Everyone in town’s got a goddam case of prickly heat.

Alan drove slowly back to the Municipal Building, lost in thought.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something going on in Castle Rock, something which was on the verge of slipping out of control. It was crazy, of course, crazy as hell, but he just couldn’t shake it.

The town’s schools were closed for the holiday, but Brian Rusk wouldn’t have gone even if they had been open.

Brian was sick. it wasn’t any kind of physical illness, not measles or chicken pox or even the Hershey Squirts, the most humiliating and debilitating of them all. Nor was it a mental disease, exactly-his mind was involved, all right, but it felt almost as if that involvement were a side-effect. The part of him which had taken sick was deeper inside him than his mind; some essential part of his make-up which was available to no doctor’s needle or microscope had gone gray and ill.

He had always been a sunshiny sort of boy, but that sun was gone now, buried behind heavy banks of cloud which were still building.

The clouds had begun to gather on the afternoon he had thrown the mud at Wilma jerzyck’s sheets, they had thickened when Mr.

Gaunt had come to him in a dream, dressed in a Dodger uniform, and told him he wasn’t done paying for his Sandy Koufax card yet… but the overcast had not become total until he had come down to breakfast this morning.

His father, dressed in the gray fatigues he wore to work at the Dick Perry Siding and Door Company in South Paris, was seated at the kitchen table with the Portland Press-Herald open in front of him.

“Goddam Patriots,” he said from behind his newspaper barricade.

“When the hell are they gonna get a quarterback that can throw the goddam ball?”

“Don’t swear in front of the boys,” Cora said from the stove, but she didn’t speak with her usual exasperated forcefulness-she sounded distant and preoccupied.

Brian slipped into his chair and poured milk on his corn flakes.

“Hey Bri!” Sean said cheerfully. “You wanna go downtown today?

Play some video games?”

“Maybe,” Brian said. “I guess-” Then he saw the headline on the front page of the paper and stopped talking.

DEAD IN CASTLE ROCK “It was a duel,” State Police Source Claims There were photographs of two women, side by side. Brian recognized both of them. One was Nettle Cobb, who lived around the corner on Ford Street. His mom said she was a nut, but she had always seemed okay to Brian. He had stopped a couple of times to pet her dog when she was walking him, and she seemed pretty much like anyone else.

The other woman was Wilma jerzyck.

He poked at his cereal but didn’t actually eat any of it. After his father left for work, Brian dumped the soggy corn flakes into the garbage pail and then crept upstairs to his room. He expected his mother to come cawing after him, asking how come he was throwing away good food while children were starving in Africa (she seemed to believe the thought of starving kids could improve your appetite), but she didn’t; she seemed lost in a world of her own this morning.

Sean was right there, however, bugging him just like always.

“So what do you say, Bri? You want to go downtown? Do you?”

He was almost dancing from one foot to the other in his excitement.

“We could play some video games, maybe check out that new store with all the neat stuff in the window-”

“You stay out of there!” Brian shouted, and his little brother recoiled, a look of shock and dismay spreading over his face.

“Hey,” Brian said, “I’m sorry. But you don’t want to go in there, Sean-o. That place sucks.”

Sean’s lower lip was trembling. “Kevin Pelkey says-”

“Who are you going to believe? That wet end or your own brother? It’s no good, Sean. It’s…” He wet his lips and then said what he understood as the bottom of the truth: “It’s bad.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Sean asked. His voice was fierce and teary.

“You’ve been acting like a dope all weekend! Mom, too!”

“I don’t feel so good, that’s all.”

"Well-”

Sean considered.

Then he brightened.

"Maybe some

video games would make you feel better. We can play Air Raid, Bri!

They got Air Raid! The one where you sit right inside, and it tilts back and forth! It’s awesome!”

Brian considered it briefly. No. He couldn’t imagine going down to the video arcade, not today, maybe not ever again. All the other kids would be there-today you’d have to wait in line to get at the good games like Air Raid-but he was different from them now, and he might always be different.

After all, he had a 1956 Sandy Koufax card.

Still, he wanted to do something nice for Sean, for anyone-something that would make up a little for the monstrous thing he had done to Wilma jerzyck. So he told Sean he might want to play some video games that afternoon, but to take some quarters in the meantime.

Brian shook them out of his big plastic Coke bottle bank.

“Jeepers!” Sean said, his eyes round. “There’s eight… nine… ten quarters here! You really must be sick!”