Stephen King - Thinner

Old Orchard had been vulgar, but it had also had a certain peeling innocence that seemed missing in Bar Harbor.

Here so many things were the exact reverse of Old Orchard that Billy felt a little as if he had stepped through the looking glass – there were few old women and apparently no fat women; hardly any women wearing bathing suits. The Bar Harbor uniform seemed to be tennis dress and white sneakers or faded jeans, rugby shirts, and boatniks. Billy saw few old cars and even fewer American cars. Most were Saabs, Volvos, Datsuns, BMW's, Hondas. All of them had bumper stickers saying things like SPLIT WOOD, NOT ATOMS and U.S. OUT OF EL SALVADOR and LEGALIZE THE WEED. The bike people were here too – they wove in and out of the slowly moving downtown throngs on expensive tenspeeds, wearing polarized sunglasses and sun visors, flashing their orthodontically perfect smiles and listening to Sony Walkmen. Below town, in the harbor itself, a forest of masts grew – not the thick, dull-colored masts of working boats, but the slim white ones of sailboats that would be drydocked after Labor Day.

The people hanging out in Bar Harbor were young, brainy, fashionably liberal, and rich. They also partied all night long, apparently. Billy had phoned ahead to make a reservation at the Frenchman's Bay Motel and had lain awake until the small hours of the morning listening to conflicting rock music pouring from six or eight different bars. The tally of wrecked cars and traffic violations mostly DWI's – in the local paper was impressive and a little disheartening.

Billy watched a Frisbee fly over the crowds in their preppy clothes and thought: You want to know why this place and these people depress you? I'll tell you. They are studying to live in places like Fairview, that's why. They'll finish school, get married to women who will conclude their first affairs and rounds of analysis at roughly the same time, and settle down on the Lantern Drives of America. There they will wear red pants when they play golf, and each and every New Year's Eve will be the occasion of much tit-grabbing.

'Yeah, that's depressing, all right,' he muttered, and a couple passing by looked at him strangely.

They're still here.

Yes. They were still here. The thought was so natural, so positive, that it was neither surprising nor particularly exciting. He had been a week behind them – they could be up in the Maritimes by now or halfway down the coast again; their previous pattern suggested they would be gone by now, and certainly Bar Harbor, where even the souvenir shops looked like expensive East Side auction rooms, was a little too tony to put up with a raggle-taggle band of Gypsies for long. All very true. Except they were still here, and he knew it.

'Old man, I smell you,' he whispered.

Of course you smell him. You are supposed to.

That thought caused a moment's unease. Then he got up, tossed the remainder of his cone into a trash barrel, and walked back to the ice-cream vendor. The vendor did not seem particularly pleased to see Billy returning.

'I wonder if you could help me,' Billy said.

'No, man, I really don't think so,' the vendor said, and Billy saw the revulsion in his eyes.

'You might be surprised.' Billy felt a sense of deep calm and predestination – not deja vu but real predestination. The ice-cream vendor wanted to turn away, but Billy held him with his own eyes – he found he was capable of that now, as if he himself had become some sort of supernatural creature. He took out the packet of photographs – it was now rumpled and sweat-stained. He dealt out the familiar tarot hand of images, lining them up along the counter of the man's booth.

The vendor looked at them, and Billy felt no surprise at the recognition in the man's eyes, no pleasure – only that faint fear, like pain waiting to happen when the local anesthetic wears off. There was a clear salt tang in the air, and gulls were crying over the harbor.

'This guy,' the ice-cream vendor said, staring fascinated at the photograph of Taduz Lemke. 'This guy – what a spook!'

'Are they still around?'

'Yeah,' the ice-cream vendor said. 'Yeah, I think they are. The cops kicked 'em out of town the second day, but they were able to rent a field from a farmer in Tecknor that's one town inland from here. I've seen them around. The cops have gotten to the point where they're writing 'em up for broken taillights and stuff like that. You'd think they'd take the hint.'

'Thank you.' He began to collect his pictures again.

'You want another ice cream?'

'No, thank you.' The fear was stronger now – but the anger was there too, a buzzing, pulsing tone under everything else.

'Then would you mind just sort of rambling on, mister? You're not particularly good for business.'

'No,' Billy said. 'I suppose I'm not.'

He headed back toward his car. The tiredness had left him.

That night at a quarter past nine, Billy parked his rental car on the soft shoulder of Route 37-A, which leaves Bar Harbor to the northwest. He was on top of a hill, and a sea breeze blew around him, ruffling his hair and making his loose clothes flap on his body. From behind him, carried on that breeze, came the sound of tonight's rock-'n-roll party starting to crank up in Bar Harbor.

Below him, to the right, he could see a large campfire surrounded by cars and trucks and vans. Closer in were the people – every now and then one of them strolled in front of the fire, a black cardboard cutout. He could hear conversation, occasional laughter.

He had caught up.

The old man is down there waiting for you, Billy – he knows you're here.

Yes. Yes, of course. The old man could have pulled his little band right off the edge of the world – at least, as far as Billy Halleck would have been able to tell – if he had wanted. But that hadn't been his pleasure. Instead he had taken Billy over the jumps from Old Orchard to here. That had been what he wanted.

The fear again, drifting like smoke through his hollow places ~ there were so many hollow places in him now, it seemed. But the rage was still there too.

It's what I wanted too – and I may just surprise him. The fear I'm sure he expects. The anger – that may be a surprise.

Billy looked back at the car for a moment, then shook his head. He started down the grassy side of the hill toward the fire.

He paused in back of the camper with the unicorn and the maiden on the side, a narrow shadow among other shadows, but more constant than those thrown by the shifting flames. He stood there listening to their quiet conversation, the occasional burst of laughter, the pop of an exploding knot in the fire.

I can't go out there, his mind insisted with utter certainty. There was fear in this certainty, but also intertwined in it were inarticulate feelings of shame and propriety – he no more wanted to break into the concentric circles of their campfire and their talk and their privacy than he had wanted to have his pants fall down in Hilmer Boynton's courtroom. He, after all, was the offender. He was …

Then Linda's face rose up in his mind; he heard her asking him to come home, and beginning to cry as she did.

He was the offender, yes, but he was not the only one.

The rage began to come up in him again. He clamped down on it, tried to compress it, to turn it into something a little more useful – simple sternness would be enough, he thought. Then he walked between the camper and the station wagon parked next to it, his Gucci loafers whispering in the dry timothy grass, and into their midst.

There really were concentric circles: first the rough circle of vehicles, and inside that, a circle of men and women sitting around the fire, which burned in a dug hollow surrounded by a circle of stones. Nearby, a cut branch about six feet tall had been stuck into the earth. A yellow sheet of paper. – a campfire permit, Billy supposed – was impaled on its tip.