Dreamcatcher (27 page)

Too many memories, too many ghosts of happier times. And then, of course, Duddits had gotten sick. Two years now he'd been sick, and none of his old friends knew because they didn't come around anymore and she hadn't had the heart to pick up the phone and call Beaver, who would have called the others.

Now she sat in front of the TV, where the local-news folks had finally given up just breaking into her afternoon stories and had gone on the air full-time. Roberta listened, afraid of what might be happening up north but fascinated, too. The scariest part was that no one seemed to
know
exactly what was happening or just what the story was or how big it was. There were missing hunters, maybe as many as a dozen, in a remote area of Maine a hundred and fifty miles north of Derry. That part was clear enough. Roberta wasn't positive, but she was quite sure that the reporters were talking about Jefferson Tract, where the boys used to go hunting, coming back with bloody stories that both fascinated Duddits and frightened him.

Were those hunters just cut off by an Alberta Clipper storm that had passed through, dropping six or eight inches of snow on the area? Maybe. No one could say for sure, but one party of four that had been hunting in the Kineo area really did seem to be missing.
Their pictures were flashed on the screen, their names recited solemnly: Otis, Roper, McCarthy, Shue. The last was a woman.

Missing hunters weren't big enough to warrant interrupting the afternoon soaps, but there was other stuff, too. People had glimpsed strange, varicolored lights in the sky. Two hunters from Millinocket who had been in the Kineo area two days previous claimed to have seen a cigar-shaped object hovering over a powerline-cut in the woods. There had been no rotors on the craft, they said, and no visible means of propulsion. It simply hung there about twenty feet above the powerlines, emitting a deep hum that buzzed in your bones. And in your teeth, it seemed. Both of the hunters claimed to have lost teeth, although when they opened their mouths to display the gaps, Roberta had thought the rest of their teeth looked ready to fall out, as well. The hunters had been in an old Chevy pickup, and when they tried to drive closer for a better look, their engine had died. One of the men had a battery-powered watch that had run backward for about three hours following the event and had then quit for good (the other's watch, the old-fashioned wind-up kind, had been fine). According to the reporter, a number of other hunters and area residents had been seeing unidentified flying objects—some cigar-shaped, some of the more traditional saucer shape—for the last week or so. The military slang for such an outbreak of sightings, the reporter said, was a “flap.”

Missing hunters, UFOs. Juicy, and certainly good enough to lead with on
Live at Six
(“Local! Latebreaking!
Your Town and Our State!”), but now there was more. There was
worse.
Still only rumors, to be sure, and Roberta prayed they would prove to be untrue, but creepy enough to have kept her here for almost two hours now, drinking too much coffee and growing more and more nervous.

The scariest rumors clustered around reports that something had crash-landed in the woods, not far from where the men had reported the cigar-shaped craft hovering over the powerlines. Almost as disquieting were reports that a fairly large area of Aroos-took County, perhaps two hundred square miles mostly owned by the paper companies or the government, had been quarantined.

A tall, pale man with deep-set eyes spoke briefly to reporters at the Air National Guard base in Bangor (he stood in front of a sign which proclaimed
HOME OF THE MANIACS
) and said that none of the rumors were true, but that “a number of conflicting reports” were being checked. The super beneath him read simply
ABRAHAM KURTZ
. Roberta couldn't tell what his rank was, or indeed if he was really a military man at all. He was dressed in a simple green coverall with nothing on it but a zipper. If he was cold—you would have thought so, wearing nothing but that coverall—he didn't show it. There was something in his eyes, which were very large and fringed with white lashes, that Roberta didn't much like. They looked to her like liar's eyes.

“Can you at least confirm that the downed aircraft is neither foreign nor . . . nor extraterrestrial in origin?” a reporter asked. He sounded young.

“ET phone home,” Kurtz said, and laughed. There was laughter from most of the other reporters as well, and no one except Roberta, watching the clip here in her West Derry Acres apartment, seemed to realize that was not an answer at all.

“Can you confirm that there is no quarantine in the area of the Jefferson Tract?” another reporter asked.

“I can neither confirm nor deny that at this time,” Kurtz said. “We're taking this matter quite seriously. Your government dollars are working very hard today, ladies and gentlemen.” He then walked away toward a helicopter with slowly turning rotors and
ANG
printed on the side in big white letters.

That clip had been videotaped at 9:45
A.M
., according to the news anchor. The next clip—shaky footage from a hand-held video camera—had been taken from a Cessna chartered by Channel 9 News to overfly the Jefferson Tract. The air had obviously been bumpy and there was a lot of snow, but not enough to obscure the two helicopters which had appeared and flanked the Cessna on either side like big brown dragonflies. There was a radio transmission, so blurry that Roberta needed to read the transcript printed in yellow at the bottom of the TV screen:
“This area is interdicted. You are ordered to turn back to your point of flight origination. Repeat, this area is interdicted. Turn back.”

Did interdicted mean the same as quarantined? Roberta Cavell thought it probably did, although she also thought fellows like that man Kurtz might quibble. The letters on the flanking helicopters were clearly
visible:
ANG
. One of them might have been the very one that took Abraham Kurtz north.

Cessna pilot:
“Under whose orders is this operation being carried out?”

Radio:
“Turn back, Cessna, or you will be forced to turn back.”

The Cessna had turned back. It had been low on fuel anyway, the news anchor reported, as if that explained everything. Since then they had just been rehashing the same stuff and calling it updates. The major networks supposedly had correspondents en route.

She was getting up to turn the TV off—watching had begun to make her nervous—when Duddits screamed. Roberta's heart stopped in her chest, then jackrabbited into doubletime. She whirled around, bumping the table by the La-Z-Boy which had been Alfie's and was now hers, overturning her coffee cup. It soaked the
TV Guide,
drowning the cast of
The Sopranos
in a puddle of brown.

The scream was followed by high, hysterical sobbing, the sobs of a child. But that was the thing about Duddits—he was in his thirties now, but he would die a child, and long before he turned forty.

For a moment all she could do was stand still. At last she got moving, wishing that Alfie were here . . . or even better, one of the boys. Not that any of them were boys now, of course; only Duddits was still a boy; Down's syndrome had turned him into Peter Pan, and soon he would die in Never-Never Land.

“I'm coming, Duddie!” she called, and so she was,
but she felt old to herself as she went hurrying down the hall to the back bedroom, her heart banging leakily against her ribs, arthritis pinging her hips. No Never Land for her.

“Coming, Mummy's coming!”

Sobbing and sobbing, as if his heart had broken. He had cried out the first time he realized his gums were bleeding after he brushed his teeth, but he had never screamed and it had been years since he'd cried like this, the kind of wild sobbing that got into your head and tore at your brains. Thump and hum, thump and hum, thump and hum.

“Duddie, what is it?”

She burst into his room and looked at him, wide-eyed, so convinced he must be hemorrhaging that at first she actually
saw
blood. But there was only Duddits, rocking back and forth in his crank-up hospital bed, cheeks wet with tears. His eyes were that same old brilliant green, but the rest of his color was gone. His hair was gone, too, his lovely blond hair that had reminded her of the young Art Garfunkel. The faint winterlight coming in through the window gleamed on his skull, gleamed on the bottles ranked on the bedside table (pills for infection, pills for pain, but no pills that would stop what was happening to him, or even slow it down), gleamed on the IV pole standing in front of the table.

But there was nothing wrong that she could see. Nothing that would account for the almost grotesque expression of pain on his face.

She sat down beside him, captured the restlessly
whipping head and held it to her bosom. Even now, in his agitation, his skin was cool; his exhausted, dying blood could bring no heat to his face. She remembered reading
Dracula
long ago, back in high school, the pleasurable terror that had been quite a bit less pleasurable once she was in bed, the lights out, her room filled with shadows. She remembered being very glad there were no real vampires, except now she knew different. There was at least one, and it was far more terrifying than any Transylvanian count; its name wasn't Dracula but leukemia, and there was no stake you could put through its heart.

“Duddits, Duddie, honey, what is it?”

And he screamed it out as he lay against her breast, making her forget all about what might or might not be happening up in the Jefferson Tract, freezing her scalp to her skull and making her skin crawl and horripilate.
“Eeyer-eh! Eeeyer-eh! Oh Amma, Eeeyer-eh!”
There was no need to ask him to say it again or to say it more clearly; she had been listening to him her whole life, and she knew well enough:

Beaver's dead! Beaver's dead! Oh, Mamma, Beaver's dead!

1

Pete lay screaming in the snow-covered rut where he had landed until he could scream no more and then just lay there for awhile, trying to cope with the pain, to find some way to compromise with it. He couldn't. This was no-compromise pain, blitzkrieg agony. He'd had no idea the world had such pain—had he known, surely he would have stayed with the woman. With Marcy, although Marcy wasn't her name. He almost
knew
her name, but what did it matter? He was the one who was in trouble here, the pain coming up from his knee in baked spasms, hot and terrible.

He lay shivering in the road with the plastic bag beside him.
THANKS FOR SHOPPING AT OUR PLACE!
on the side. Pete reached for it, wanting to see if there was a bottle or two in there that wasn't broken, and when his leg shifted, a bolt of agony flew up from the
knee. It made the others feel like twinges. Pete screamed again, and passed out.

2

He didn't know how long he'd been out when he came to—the light suggested it hadn't been long, but his feet were numb and his hands were going as well, in spite of the gloves.

Pete lay partially turned on his side, the beer-bag lying beside him in a puddle of freezing amber slush. The pain in his knee had receded a little—probably that was numbing up, too—and he found he could think again. That was good, because this was a fuckin pisser he'd gotten himself into here. He had to get back to the lean-to and the fire, and he had to do it on his own. If he simply lay here waiting for Henry and the snowmobile, he was apt to be a Petesicle when Henry arrived—a Petesicle with a bag of busted beer-bottles beside him, thank you for shopping at our place, you fucking alcoholic, thanks a lot. And there was the woman to think of. She might die, too, and all because Pete Moore had to have his brewskis.

He looked at the bag with distaste. Couldn't throw it into the woods; couldn't risk waking his knee up again. So he covered it with snow, like a dog covering its own scat, and then he began to crawl.

The knee wasn't that numb after all, it seemed. Pete crawled on his elbows and pushed with his good foot, teeth clenched, hair hanging in his eyes. No animals now; the stampede had stopped and there was
only him—the gaspy sound of his breathing and the stifled moans of pain each time his knee bumped. He could feel sweat running down his arms and back, but his feet remained numb and so did his hands.

He might have given up, but halfway along the straight stretch he caught sight of the fire he and Henry had made. It had burned down considerably, but it was there. Pete began to crawl toward it, and each time he bumped his leg and the bolts of agony came, he tried to project them into the orange spark of the fire. He wanted to get there. It hurt like plu-perfect hell to move, but oh how he wanted to get there. He didn't want to die freezing to death in the snow.

“I'll make it, Becky,” he muttered. “I'll make it, Becky.” He spoke her name half a dozen times before he heard himself using it.

As he approached the fire he paused to glance at his watch and frowned. It said eleven-forty or thereabouts, and that was nuts—he remembered checking it before starting back to the Scout, and it had said twenty past twelve then. A slightly longer look revealed the source of the confusion. His watch was running backward, the second hand moving counterclockwise in irregular, spasmodic jerks. He looked at this without much surprise. His ability to appreciate anything so fine as mere peculiarity had passed. Even his leg was no longer his chief concern. He was very cold, and big shudders began to course his body as he elbowed his way and pushed with his rapidly tiring good leg, covering the last fifty yards to the dying fire.

The woman was no longer on the tarp. She now lay on the far side of the fire, as if she had crawled toward the remaining wood and then collapsed.

“Hi, honey, I'm home,” he panted. “Had a little trouble with my knee, but now I'm back. Goddam knee's your fault anyway, Becky, so don't complain, all right? Becky, is that your name?”