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Then I crumpled it, opened the box of kitchen matches that sat beside the stove to light the
burners and the oven, and scratched one. The fan promptly whiffed it out and I thought again how
hard it was to change some things. I turned the fan off, lit another match, and touched it to the ball of
notepaper. When it was blazing, I dropped it into the sink, waited for it to go out, then washed the
ashes down the drain.
After that, Mr. George Amberson went to bed.
But he did not sleep for a long time.
5
When the last plane of the night skimmed over the rooftop at twelve-thirty, I was still awake and
thinking of my list. Telling the police was out. It might work with Oswald, who would declare his
undying love for Fidel Castro in both Dallas and New Orleans, but Dunning was a different matter.
He was a well-liked and well-respected member of the community. Who was I? The new guy in a
town that didn’t like outsiders. That afternoon, after coming out of the drugstore, I had once again
seen No Suspenders and his crew outside the Sleepy Silver Dollar. I was wearing my workingman
clothes, but they had given me that same flat-eyed who the fuck’re you look.
Even if I’d been living in Derry for eight years instead of eight days, just what would I say to the
police, anyway? That I’d had a vision of Frank Dunning killing his family on Halloween night? That
would certainly go over well.
I liked the idea of placing an anonymous call to the butcher himself a little better, but it was a
scary option. Once I called Frank Dunning—either at work or at Edna Price’s, where he would no
doubt be summoned to the communal phone in the parlor—I would have changed events. Such a call
might stop him from killing his family, but I thought it just as likely it would have the opposite
effect, tipping him over the precarious edge of sanity he must be walking behind the affable George
Clooney smile. Instead of preventing the murders, I might only succeed in making them happen
sooner. As it was, I knew where and when. If I warned him, all bets were off.
Frame him for something? It might work in a spy novel, but I wasn’t a CIA agent; I was a goddam
English teacher.
Incapacitate butcher was next on the list. Okay, but how? Smack him with the Sunliner, maybe as he
walked from Charity Avenue to Kossuth Street with a hammer in his hand and murder on his mind?
Unless I had amazing luck, I’d be caught and jailed. There was this, too. Incapacitated people usually
get better. He might try again once he did. As I lay there in the dark, I found that scenario all too
plausible. Because the past didn’t like to be changed. It was obdurate.
The only sure way was to follow him, wait until he was alone, and then kill him. Keep it simple,
stupid.
But there were problems with this, too. The biggest was that I didn’t know if I could go through
with it. I thought I could in hot blood—to protect myself or another—but in cold blood? Even if I
knew that my potential victim was going to kill his own wife and children if he weren’t stopped?
And . . . what if I did it and then got caught before I could escape to the future where I was Jake
Epping instead of George Amberson? I’d be tried, found guilty, sent to Shawshank State Prison. And
that was where I’d be on the day John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas.
Even that wasn’t the absolute bottom of the matter. I got up, paced through the kitchen to my
phone booth of a bathroom, went to the toilet, then sat on the seat with my forehead propped on the
heels of my palms. I had assumed Harry’s essay was the truth. Al had, too. It probably was, because
Harry was two or three degrees on the dim side of normal, and people like that are less liable to try