Dreamcatcher (19 page)

“—but that place has been empty at least since we were in the fifth grade—”

“Beav—”

“—and I bet it's full of rats.”

“Beav—”

But Beav intends to have his entire say. “Rats get rabies,” he says. “They get rabies up the old wazoo.”

“We don't have to go in,” Jonesy says, and all three look at him with renewed interest. This is, as the fellow
said when he saw the black-haired Swede, a Norse of a different color.

Jonesy sees he has their full attention, nods, goes on. “Davey says all you have to do is go around on the driveway side and look in the third or fourth window. It used to be Phil and Tony Tracker's office. There's still a bulletin board on the wall. And Davey said the only two things on the bulletin board are a map of New England showing all the truck routes, and a picture of Tina Jean Schlossinger showing all of her pussy.”

They look at him with breathless interest, and Pete asks the question which has occurred to all of them. “Is she bollocky?”

“No,” Jonesy admits. “Davey says you can't even see her tits, but she's holding her skirt up and she isn't wearing pants and you can see
it,
just as clear as day.”

Pete is disappointed that this year's Tiger Homecoming Queen isn't bollocky bare-ass, but the thing about how she's holding her skirt up inflames them all, feeding some primal, semi-secret notion of how sex really works. A girl
could
hold her skirt up, after all; any girl could.

Not even Henry asks any more questions. The only question comes from the Beav, who asks if Jonesy is
sure
they won't have to go inside in order to see. And they are already moving in the direction of the driveway running down the far side of the building toward the vacant lot, powerful as a spring tide in their nearly mindless motion.

5

Pete finished the second beer and heaved the bottle deep into the woods. Feeling better now, he got cautiously to his feet and dusted the snow from his ass. And was his knee a little bit looser? He thought maybe it was. Looked awful, of course—looked like he had a little model of the Minnesota goddam Metrodome under there—but felt a bit better. Still, he walked carefully, swinging his plastic sack of beer in short arcs beside him. Now that the small but powerful voice insisting that he
had
to have a beer, just goddam
had
to, had been silenced, he thought of the woman with new solicitude, hoping she hadn't noticed he was gone. He would walk slowly, he would stop to massage his knee every five minutes or so (and maybe talk to it, encourage it, a crazy idea, but he was out here on his own and it couldn't hurt), and he would get back to the woman. Then he would have another beer. He did not look back at the overturned Scout, did not see that he had written
DUDDITS
in the snow, over and over again, as he sat thinking of that day back in 1978.

Only Henry had asked why the Schlossinger girl's picture would be there in the empty office of an empty freight depot, and Pete thought now that Henry had only asked because he had to fulfill his role as Group Skeptic. Certainly he'd only asked once; as for the rest of them, they had simply
believed,
and why not? At thirteen, Pete had still spent half his life believing in Santa Claus. And besides—

Pete stopped near the top of the big hill, not because he was out of breath or because his leg was cramping up, but because he could suddenly feel a low humming sound in his head, sort of like an electrical transformer, only with a kind of cycling quality to it, a low
thud-thud-thud.
And no, it wasn't “suddenly” as in “suddenly started up”; he had an idea the sound had been there for awhile and he was just becoming aware of it. And he had started to think some funny stuff. All that about Henry's cologne, for instance . . . and Marcy. Someone named Marcy. He didn't think he knew anyone named Marcy but the name was suddenly in his head, as in
Marcy I need you
or
Marcy I want you
or maybe
Zounds, Marcy, bring the gasogene.

He stood where he was, licking his dry lips, the bag of beer hanging straight down from his hand now, its pendulum motion stilled. He looked up in the sky, suddenly sure the lights would be there . . . and they
were
there, only just two of them now, and very faint.

“Tell Marcy to make them give me a shot,” Pete said, enunciating each word carefully in the stillness, and knew they were exactly the right words. Right
why
or right
how
he couldn't say, but yes, those were the words in his head. Was it the click, or had the lights caused those thoughts? Pete couldn't say for sure.

“Maybe nyther,” he said.

Pete realized the last of the snow had stopped. The world around him was only three colors: the deep gray of the sky, the deep green of the firs, and the perfect unblemished white of the new snow. And hushed.

Pete cocked his head first to one side and then to the other, listening. Yes, hushed. Nothing. No sound in the world and the humming noise had stopped as completely as the snow. When he looked up, he saw that the pale, mothlike glow of the lights was also gone.

“Marcy?” he said, as if calling someone. It occurred to him that Marcy might be the name of the woman who had caused them to wreck, but he dismissed the idea. That woman's name was Becky, he knew it as surely as he had known the name of the real estate woman that time. Marcy was just a word now, and nothing about it called to him. Probably he'd just had a brain-cramp. Wouldn't be the first time.

He finished climbing the hill and started down the other side, his thoughts returning to that day in the fall of 1978, the day they had met Duddits.

He was almost back to the place where the road leveled when his knee abruptly let go, not locking up this time but seeming to explode like a pine knot in a hot fire.

Pete pitched forward into the snow. He didn't hear the Bud bottles break inside the bag—all but two of them. He was screaming too loudly.

1

Henry started off in the direction of the camp at a quick walk, but as the snow subsided to isolated flurries and the wind began to die, he upped the walk to a steady, clocklike jog. He had been jogging for years, and the pace felt natural enough. He might have to pull up for awhile, walk or even rest, but he doubted it. He had run road-races longer than nine miles, although not for a couple of years and never with four inches of snow underfoot. Still, what was there to worry about? Falling down and busting a hip? Maybe having a heart attack? At thirty-seven a heart attack seemed unlikely, but even if he had been a prime candidate for one, worrying about it would have been ludicrous, wouldn't it? Considering what he was planning? So what was there to worry about?

Jonesy and Beaver, that was what. On the face of it that seemed as ludicrous as worrying about suffering a catastrophic cardiac outage here in the middle of nowhere—the trouble was behind him, with Pete and that strange, semi-comatose woman, not up ahead at Hole in the Wall . . . except there
was
trouble at Hole in the Wall, bad trouble. He didn't know how he knew that, but he did and he accepted the knowing. Even before he started encountering the animals, all hurrying by and none giving him more than the most cursory glance, he knew that.

Once or twice he glanced up into the sky, looking for more foo-lights, but there were none to be seen and after that he just looked straight ahead, sometimes having to zig or zag to keep out of the way of the animals. They weren't quite stampeding, but their eyes had an odd, spooky look that Henry had never seen before. Once he had to skip handily to keep from being upended by a pair of hurrying foxes.

Eight more miles,
he told himself. It became a jogging mantra, different from the ones that usually went through his head when he was running (nursery rhymes were the most common), but not
that
different—same idea, really.
Eight more miles, eight more miles to Banbury Cross.
No Banbury Cross, though, just Mr. Clarendon's old camp—Beaver's camp, now—and no cock horse to get him there. What
was
a cock horse, anyway? Who knew? And what in Christ's name was happening out here—the lights, the slow-motion stampede (dear God, what was that in the woods off to his left, was that a fucking
bear
?), the woman in the
road, just sitting there with most of her teeth and most of her brains missing? And those
farts,
dear God. The only thing he'd ever smelled even remotely like it was the breath of a patient he'd had once, a schizophrenic with intestinal cancer.
Always that smell,
an internist friend had told Henry when Henry tried to describe it.
They can brush their teeth a dozen times a day, use Lavoris every hour on the hour, and that smell still comes through. It's the smell of the body eating itself, because that's all cancer is when you take the diagnostic masks off: auto-cannibalism.

Seven more miles, seven more miles, and all the animals are running, all the animals are headed for Disneyland. And when they get there they'll form a conga line and sing “It's a Small World After All.”

The steady, muted thud of his booted feet. The feel of his glasses bouncing up and down on the bridge of his nose. His breath coming out in balloons of cold vapor. But he felt warm now, felt good, those endorphins kicking in. Whatever was wrong with him, it was no shortage of those; he was suicidal but by no means dysthymic.

That at least some of his problem—the physical and emotional emptiness that was like a near-white-out in a blizzard—
was
physical, hormonal, he had no doubt. That the problem could be addressed if not entirely corrected by pills he himself had prescribed by the bushel . . . he had no doubt of that, either. But like Pete, who undoubtedly knew there was a rehab and years of AA meetings in his most plausible future, Henry did not
want
to be fixed, was somehow
convinced that the fix would be a lie, something that would lessen him.

He wondered if Pete had gone back for the beer, and knew the answer was probably yes. Henry would have suggested bringing it along if he'd thought of it, making such a risky return trip (risky for the woman as well as Pete himself) unnecessary, but he'd been pretty freaked out—and the beer hadn't even crossed his mind.

He bet it had crossed Pete's, though. Could Pete make it roundtrip on that sprung knee? It was possible, but Henry would not have bet on it.

They're back!
the woman had screamed, looking up at the sky.
They're back! They're back!

Henry put his head down and jogged a little faster.

2

Six more miles, six more to Banbury Cross.
Was it down to six yet, or was he being optimistic? Giving those old endorphins a little too much free rein? Well, so what if he was? Optimism couldn't hurt at this point. The snow had almost stopped falling and the tide of animals had slackened, and that was also good. What wasn't so good was the thoughts in his head, some of which seemed less and less like his own. Becky, for instance, who was Becky? The name had begun to resonate in his head, had become another part of the mantra. He supposed it was the woman he'd just avoided killing.
Whose little girl are you? Becky, why I'm Becky, I'm pretty Becky Shue.

Except she hadn't been pretty, not pretty at all. One heavyset smelly mama was what she'd been, and now she was in Pete Moore's less than reliable care.

Six. Six. Six more miles to Banbury Cross.

Jogging steadily—as steadily as was possible, given the footing—and hearing strange voices in his head. Except only one of them was really strange, and that one wasn't a voice at all but a kind of hum with a rhythmic beat

(whose little girl, whose little girl, pretty Becky Shue)

caught in it. The rest were voices he knew, or voices his friends knew. One was a voice Jonesy had told him about, a voice he'd heard after his accident and associated with all his pain:
Please stop, I can't stand it, give me a shot, where's Marcy.

He heard Beaver's voice:
Go look in the chamber pot.

Jonesy, answering:
Why don't we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how he is?

A stranger's voice saying that if he could just do a number two he'd be okay . . .

. . . only he was no stranger, he was Rick, pretty Becky's friend Rick. Rick what? McCarthy? McKinley? McKeen? Henry wasn't sure, but he leaned toward McCarthy, like Kevin McCarthy in that old horror movie about the pods from space that made themselves look like people. One of Jonesy's faves. Get a few drinks in him and mention that movie and Jonesy would respond with the key line at once:
“They're here! They're here!”

The woman, looking up at the sky and screaming
They're back, they're back.

Dear Christ, there'd been nothing like this since they were kids and this was
worse,
like picking up a power-line filled with voices instead of electricity.

All those patients over the years, complaining of voices in their heads. And Henry, the big psychiatrist (Young Mr. God, one state hospital patient called him back in the early days), had nodded as if he knew what they were talking about. Had in fact believed he
did
know what they were talking about. But maybe only now did he really know.

Voices. Listening to them so hard he missed the
whup-whup-whup
of the helicopter passing overhead, a dark rushing shark-shape barely obscured by the bottoms of the clouds. Then the voices began to fade as radio signals from faraway places do when daylight comes and the atmosphere once more begins to thicken. At last there was only the voice of his own thoughts, insisting that something terrible had happened or was about to happen at Hole in the Wall; that something equally terrible was about to happen or had happened back there at the Scout or the loggers' shelter.