The next morning he was sitting in front of his word processor in the small nook off the living room which had always served as his study when they were down here. The word processor was on, but Mort was looking out the window at the lake. Two motor-boats were out there, cutting broad white wakes in the blue water. He had thought they were fishermen at first, but they never slowed down - just cut back and forth across each other's bows in big loops. Kids, he decided. Just kids playing games.

They weren't doing anything very interesting, but then, neither was he. He hadn't written anything worth a damn since he had left Amy. He sat in front of the word processor every day from nine to eleven, just as he had every day for the last three years (and for about a thousand years before that he had spent those two hours sitting in front of an old Royal office model), but for all the good he was doing with it, he might as well have traded it in on a motor-boat and gone out grab-assing with the kids on the lake.

Today, he had written the following lines of deathless prose during his two-hour stint:

Four days after George had confirmed to his own satisfaction that his wife was cheating on him, he confronted her. 'I have to talk to you, Abby,' he said.

It was no good.

It was too close to real life to be good.

He had never been so hot when it came to real life. Maybe that was part of the problem.

He turned off the word processor, realizing just a second after he'd flicked the switch that he'd forgotten to save the document. Well, that was all right. Maybe it had even been the critic in his subconscious, telling him the document wasn't worth saving.

Mrs Gavin had apparently finished upstairs; the drone of the Electrolux had finally ceased. She came in every Tuesday to clean, and she had been shocked into a silence very unlike her when Mort had told her two Tuesdays ago that he and Amy were quits. He suspected that she had liked Amy a good deal more than she had liked him. But she was still coming, and Mort supposed that was something.

He got up and went out into the living room just as Mrs Gavin came down the main staircase. She was holding the vacuum-cleaner hose and dragging the small tubular machine after her. It came down in a series of thumps, looking like a small mechanical dog. If I tried to pull the vacuum downstairs that way, it'd smack into one of my ankles and then roll all the way to the bottom, Mort thought. How does she get it to do that, I wonder?

'Hi there, Mrs G.,' he said, and crossed the living room toward the kitchen door. He wanted a Coke. Writing shit always made him thirsty.

'Hello, Mr Rainey.' He had tried to get her to call him Mort, but she wouldn't. She wouldn't even call him Morton. Mrs Gavin was a woman of her principles, but her principles had never kept her from calling his wife Amy.

Maybe I should tell her I caught Amy in bed with another man at one of Derry's finer motels, Mort thought as he pushed through the swing door. She might go back to calling her Mrs Rainey again, at the very least.

This was an ugly and mean-spirited thought, the kind of thinking he suspected was at the root of his writing problems, but he didn't seem to be able to help it. Perhaps it would also pass ... like the dreams. For some reason this idea made him think of a bumper sticker he'd seen once on the back of a very old VW beetle. CONSTIPATED - CANNOT PASS, the sticker had read.

As the kitchen door swung back, Mrs Gavin called: 'I found one of your stories in the trash, Mr Rainey. I thought you might want it, so I put it on the counter.'

'Okay,' he said, having no idea what she might be talking about. He was not in the habit of tossing bad manuscripts or frags in the kitchen trash. When he produced a stinker - and lately he had produced more than his share - it went either directly to data heaven or into the circular file to the right of his word-processing station.

The man with the lined face and round black Quaker hat never even entered his mind.

He opened the refrigerator door, moved two small Tupperware dishes filled with nameless leftovers, discovered a bottle of Pepsi, and opened it as he nudged the fridge door closed with his hip. As he went to toss the cap in the trash, he saw the manuscript - its title page was spotted with something that looked like orange juice, but otherwise it was all right - sitting on the counter by the Silex. Then he remembered. John Shooter, right. Charter member of the Crazy Folks, Mississippi Branch.

He took a drink of Pepsi, then picked up the manuscript. He put the title page on the bottom and saw this at the head of the first page.

John Shooter

General Delivery

Dellacourt, Mississippi

30 pages

Approximately 7500 words

Selling 1st serial rights, North America

SECRET WINDOW, SECRET GARDEN

By John Shooter

The manuscript had been typed on a good grade of bond paper, but the machine must have been a sad case - an old office model, from the look, and not very well maintained. Most of the letters were as crooked as an old man's teeth.

He read the first sentence, then the second, then the third, for a few moments clear thought ceased.

Todd Downey thought that a woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had was not much of a woman. He therefore decided to kill her. He would do it in the deep corner formed when the house and the barn came together at an extreme angle - he would do it where his wife kept her garden.

'Oh shit,' Mort said, and put the manuscript back down. His arm struck the Pepsi bottle. It overturned, foaming and fizzing across the counter and running down the cabinet facings. 'Oh SHIT!' he yelled.

Mrs Gavin came in a hurry, surveyed the situation, and said: 'Oh, that's nothing. I thought from the sound that maybe you'd cut your own throat. Move a little, can't you, Mr Rainey?'

He moved, and the first thing she did was to pick the sheaf of manuscript up off the counter and thrust it back into his hands. It was still okay; the soda had run the other way. He had once been a man with a fairly good sense of humor - he had always thought so, anyway - but as he looked down at the little pile of paper in his hands, the best he could manage was a sour sense of irony. It's like the cat in the nursery rhyme, he thought. The one that kept coming back.

'If you're trying to wreck that,' Mrs Gavin said, nodding at the manuscript as she got a dishrag from under the sink, 'you're on the right track.'

'It's not mine,' he said, but it was funny, wasn't it? Yesterday, when he had almost reached out and taken the script from the man who had brought it to him, he'd thought about what an accommodating beast a man was. Apparently that urge to accommodate stretched in all directions, because the first thing he'd felt when he read those three sentences was guilt ... and wasn't that just what Shooter (if that was really his name) had wanted him to feel? Of course it was. You stole my story, he'd said, and weren't thieves supposed to feel guilty?

'Pardon me, Mr Rainey,' Mrs Gavin said, holding up the dishrag.

He stepped aside so she could get at the spill. 'It's not mine,' he repeated - insisted, really.

'Oh,' she said, wiping up the spill on the counter and then stepping to the sink to wring out the cloth. 'I thought it was.'

'It says John Shooter,' he said, putting the title page back on top and turning it toward her. 'See?'

Mrs Gavin favored the title page with the shortest glance politeness would allow and then began wiping the cabinet faces. 'Thought it was one of those whatchacallums,' she said. 'Pseudonames. Or nyms. Whatever the word is names.'

'I don't use one,' he said. 'I never have.'

This time she favored him with a brief glance - country shrewd and slightly amused - before getting down on her knees to wipe up the puddle of Pepsi on the floor. 'Don't s'pose you'd tell me if you did,' she said.

'I'm sorry about the spill,' he said, edging toward the door.

'My job,' she said shortly. She didn't look up again. Mort took the hint and left.

He stood in the living room for a moment, looking at the abandoned vacuum cleaner in the middle of the rug. In his head he heard the man with the lined face saying patiently, This is between you and me. We don't need any outsiders, Mr Rainey. It is strictly between you and me.

Mort thought of that face, recalled it carefully to a mind which was trained to recall faces and actions, and thought: It wasn't just a momentary aberration, or a bizarre way to meet an author he may or may not consider famous. He will be back.

He suddenly headed back into his study, rolling the manuscript into a tube as he went.