Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

I made the shuttle handily, telling invisible beads as it took off in a pouring rainstorm (sitting next to an, overweight businessman who read the Wall Street Journal through the entire flight and ate Turns one after another, deliberately and reflectively, as if enjoying them) and made A.M. Washington with at least ten minutes to spare. The television lights intensified the mild hangover I'd gotten up with, and I was grateful for what had been a fairly laid-back lunch with the Post reporter, whose questions had been interesting and relatively unthreatening. Then this spitball about feeding off people's fears comes out of nowhere. The reporter, a young, lanky guy, was looking at me over his sandwich, eyes bright.

4

It's 1960, and a lonely Ohio youth has left the movie theater where he has just seen Psycho for the fifth time. This young man goes home and stabs his grandmother to death. The pathologist would later count over forty separate stab wounds.

Why? the police asked.

Voices, the young man replies. Voices told me to do it .

5

"Look," I said, putting my own sandwich down. "You take any bigcity psychiatrist. He's got a marvelous home in the suburbs, a hundred thousand dollars' worth of house at the very least.

He drives a MercedesBenz, either tobacco-brown or silver-gray. His wife has got a Country Squire wagon. His kids go to private schools during the academic year and to good summer camps in New England or in the northwest every summer. Sonny has got Harvard if he can make the grades-money is certainly no problem-and his daughter can go to some reet and compleet girls' school where the sorority motto is `We don't conjugate, we decline.' And how is he making the money that produces all of these wonders? He is listening to women weep over their frigidity, he is listening to men with suicidal impulses, he is dealing with paranoia both high and low, he's maybe striking on the occasional true schizophrenic. He's dealing with people who most of all are scared shitless that their lives have somehow gotten out of control and that things are falling apart . . . and if that isn't earning a living by feeding off people's fears, I don't know what is.” I picked up my sandwich again and bit into it, convinced that if I hadn't hit the spitter he had thrown me, I'd at least managed to foul it back and stay alive at the plate. When I looked up from my Reuben, the little half-smile on the reporter's face was gone.

"I," he said softly, "happen to be in analysis.”

6

January of 1980. The woman and her mother are having a worried conference over the woman's three-month-old baby.