Dreamcatcher (81 page)

21

When Deke came to, it was later—just how much later he couldn't tell, because the Budweiser digital clock over the beer cooler was flashing 88:88. Three of his teeth lay on the floor, knocked out when he fell down, he assumed. The blood around his nose and on his chin had dried to a spongy cake. He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn't support him. He crawled to the door instead, with his hair hanging in his face, praying.

His prayer was answered. The little red shitbox car was gone. Where it had been were four bacon packages, all empty, the mayonnaise jar, three-quarters empty, and half a loaf of Holsum white bread. Several crows—there were some almighty big ones around the Reservoir—had found the bread and were pecking slices out of the torn wrapper. At a distance—almost back to Route 32—two or three more were at work on
a congealed mess of bacon and matted chunks of bread.
Monsieur
's gourmet lunch had not agreed with him, it seemed.

God,
Deke thought.
I hope you puked so hard you tore your plumbing loose, you
—

But then his own guts took a fantastical, skipping leap and he clapped his hand over his mouth. He had a hideously clear image of the man's teeth closing on the raw, fatty meat hanging out between the pieces of bread, gray flesh veined with brown like the severed tongue of a dead horse. Deke began to make muffled yurking sounds behind his hand.

A car turned in—just what he needed, a customer while he was on the verge of tossing his cookies. Not really a car at all, on second glance, nor a truck, either. Not even an SUV. It was one of those godawful Humvees, painted in smeary camouflage blobs of black and green. Two people in front and—Deke was almost sure of it—another in back.

He reached out, flipped the
OPEN
sign hanging in the door over to
CLOSED
, then backed away. He had gotten to his feet, had managed at least that much, but now he felt perilously close to collapsing again.
They saw me in here, just as sure as shit,
he thought.
They'll come in and ask where the other one went, because they're after him. They want him, they want the bacon sandwich man. And I'll tell. They'll make me tell. And then I'll
—

His hand rose in front of his eyes. The first two fingers, coated with dried blood up to the second knuckles, were poked out and hooked. They were trembling. To Deke, they almost looked like they
were waving.
Hello, eyes, how you doing? Enjoy looking while you can, because we'll be coming for you soon.

The person in the back of the Humvee leaned forward, seemed to say something to the driver, and the vehicle leaped backward, one rear wheel splashing through the puddle of vomit left by the store's last customer. It wheeled around on the road, paused for just a moment, then set off in the direction of Ware and the Quabbin.

When they disappeared over the first hill, Deke McCaskell began to weep. As he walked back toward the counter (staggering and weaving but still on his feet), his gaze fell on the teeth lying on the floor. Three teeth. His. A small price to pay. Oh yes, teeny dues. Then he stopped, gazing at the three dollar bills which still lay on the counter. They had grown a coating of pale red-orange fuzz.

22

“Oht ear! Eeep owen!”

Owen, that's me,
Owen thought wearily, but he understood Duddits well enough (it wasn't that hard, once your ear had become attuned):
Not here! Keep going!

Owen reversed the Humvee to Route 32 as Duddits sat back—collapsed back—and began to cough again.

“Look,” Henry said, and pointed. “See that?”

Owen saw. A bunch of wrappers soaking into the ground under the force of the pelting downpour. And
a jar of mayonnaise. He threw the Hummer back into drive and headed north. The rain hitting the windshield had a particularly fat quality that he recognized: soon it would turn back to sleet, and then—very likely—to snow. Close to exhausted now, and queerly sad in the wake of the telepathy's withdrawing wave, Owen found that his chief regret was having to die on such a dirty day.

“How far ahead is he now?” Owen asked, not daring to ask the real question, the only one that mattered:
Are we already too late?
He assumed that Henry would tell him, were that the case.

“He's there,” Henry said absently. He had turned around in the seat and was wiping Duddits's face with a damp cloth. Duddits looked at him gratefully and tried to smile. His ashy cheeks were sweaty now, and the black patches under his eyes had spread, turning them into raccoon's eyes.

“If he's
there,
why did we have to come
here
?” Owen asked. He had the Hummer up to seventy,
very
dangerous on this slick stretch of two-lane blacktop, but now there was no choice.

“I didn't want to risk Duddits losing the line,” Henry said. “If that happens . . .”

Duddits uttered a vast groan, wrapped his arms around his midsection, and doubled over them. Henry, still kneeling on the seat, stroked the slender column of his neck.

“Take it easy, Duds,” Henry said. “You're all right.”

But he wasn't. Owen knew it and so did Henry.
Feverish, crampy in spite of a second Prednisone pill and two more Percocets, now spraying blood every time he coughed, Duddits Cavell was several country miles from all right. The consolation prize was that the Jonesy-Gray combination was also a very long way from all right.

It was the bacon. All they'd hoped to do was to make Mr. Gray stop for awhile; none of them had guessed how prodigious his gluttony would turn out to be. The effect on Jonesy's digestion had been fairly predictable. Mr. Gray had vomited once in the parking lot of the little store, and had had to pull over twice more on the road to Ware, leaning out the window and offloading several pounds of raw bacon with almost convulsive force.

Diarrhea came next. He had stopped at the Mobil on Route 9, southeast of Ware, and had barely made it into the men's room. The sign outside the station read
CHEAP GAS CLEAN TOILETS
, but the
CLEAN TOILETS
part was certainly out of date by the time Mr. Gray left. He didn't kill anyone at the Mobil, which Henry counted as a plus.

Before turning onto the Quabbin access road, Mr. Gray had needed to stop twice more and dash into the sopping woods, where he tried to evacuate Jonesy's groaning bowels. By then the rain had changed over to huge flakes of wet snow. Jonesy's body had weakened considerably, and Henry was hoping for a faint. So far it hadn't happened.

Mr. Gray was furious with Jonesy, railing at him continuously by the time he slipped back behind the
wheel of the car after his second trip into the woods. This was all Jonesy's fault, Jonesy had trapped him. He chose to ignore his own hunger and the compulsive greed with which he had eaten, pausing between bites only to lick the grease from his fingers. Henry had seen such selective arrangements of the facts—emphasizing some, ignoring others completely—many times before, in his patients. In some ways, Mr. Gray was Barry Newman all over again.

How human he's becoming,
he thought.
How curiously human.

“When you say he's there,” Owen asked, “just how
there
do you mean?”

“I don't know. He's closed down again, at least pretty much. Duddits, do you hear Jonesy?”

Duddits looked at Henry wearily, then shook his head. “Isser Ay ookar cards,” he said—
Mr. Gray took our cards
—but that was like a literal translation of a slang phrase. Duddits hadn't the vocabulary to express what had actually happened, but Henry could read it in his mind. Mr. Gray was unable to enter Jonesy's office stronghold and take the playing-cards, but he had somehow turned them all blank.

“Duddits, how are you making out?” Owen said, looking into the rearview mirror.

“I o-ay,” Duddits said, and immediately began to shiver. On his lap was his yellow lunchbox and the brown bag with his medicines in it . . . his medicines and that odd little string thing. Surrounding him was the voluminous blue duffel coat, yet inside it, he still shivered.

He's going fast,
Owen thought, as Henry began to swab his old friend's face again.

The Humvee skidded on a slick patch, danced on the edge of disaster—a crash at seventy miles an hour would probably kill them all, and even if it didn't, it would put paid to any final thin chance they might have of stopping Mr. Gray—and then came back under control again.

Owen found his eyes drifting back to the paper bag, his mind going again to that string-thing.
Beaver sent to me. For my Christmas last week.

Trying to communicate now by telepathy was, Owen thought, like putting a message into a bottle and then tossing the bottle into the ocean. But he did it anyway, sending out a thought in what he hoped was Duddits's direction:
What do you call it, son?

Suddenly and unexpectedly, he saw a large space, combination living room, dining room, and kitchen. The mellow pine boards glowed with varnish. There was a Navajo rug on the floor and a tapestry on one wall—tiny Indian hunters surrounding a gray figure, the archetypal alien of a thousand supermarket tabloids. There was a fireplace, a stone chimney, an oak dining table. But what riveted Owen's attention (it had to; it was at the center of the picture Duddits had sent him, and glowed with its own special light) was the string creation which hung from the center rafter. It was the Cadillac version of the one in Duddits's medicine bag, woven in bright colors instead of drab white string, but otherwise the same. Owen's eyes filled with tears. It was the most beautiful room in the world. He felt that
way because Duddits felt that way. And Duddits felt that way because it was where his friends went, and he loved them.

“Dreamcatcher,” said the dying man in the back seat, and he pronounced the word perfectly.

Owen nodded. Dreamcatcher, yes.

It's you,
he sent, supposing that Henry was overhearing but not caring one way or the other. This message was for Duddits, strictly for Duddits.
You're the dreamcatcher, aren't you? Their dreamcatcher. You always were.

In the mirror, Duddits smiled.

23

They passed a sign which read
QUABBIN RESERVOIR
8
MILES NO FISHING NO SERVICES PICNIC AREA OPEN HIKING TRAILS OPEN PASS AT OWN RISK
. There was more, but at eighty miles an hour, Henry had no time to read it.

“Any chance he'll park and walk in?” Owen asked.

“Don't even hope for it,” Henry said. “He'll drive as far as he can. Maybe he'll get stuck. That's what you want to hope for. There's a good chance it might happen. And he's weak. He won't be able to move fast.”

“What about you, Henry? Will you be able to move fast?”

Considering how stiff he was and how badly his legs ached, that was a fair question. “If there's a chance,” he said, “I'll go as hard as I can. In any case,
there's Duddits. I don't think he's going to be capable of a very strenuous hike.”

Any hike at all,
he didn't add.

“Kurtz and Freddy and Perlmutter, Henry. How far back are they?”

Henry considered this. He could feel Perlmutter clearly enough . . . and he could touch the ravening cannibal inside him, as well. It was like Mr. Gray, only the weasel was living in a world made of bacon. The bacon was Archibald Perlmutter, once a captain in the United States Army. Henry didn't like to go there. Too much pain. Too much hunger.

“Fifteen miles,” he said. “Maybe only twelve. But it doesn't matter, Owen. We're going to beat them. The only question is whether or not we're going to catch Mr. Gray. We'll need some luck. Or some help.”

“And if we catch him, Henry. Are we still going to be heroes?”

Henry gave him a tired smile. “I guess we'll have to try.”

1

Mr. Gray drove the Subaru nearly three miles up East Street—muddy, rutted, and now covered with three inches of fresh snow—before crashing into a fault caused by a plugged culvert. The Subaru had fought its way gamely through several mires north of the Goodnough Dike, and had bottomed out in one place hard enough to tear off the muffler and most of the exhaust pipe, but this latest break in the road was too much. The car went forward nose-first into the crack and lodged on the pipe, unmuffled engine blatting stridently. Jonesy's body was thrown forward and the seatbelt locked. His diaphragm clenched and he vomited helplessly onto the dashboard: nothing solid now, only bilious strings of saliva. For a moment the color ran out of the world and the rackety roar of the engine faded. He fought viciously for consciousness, afraid that if he passed out for even a moment,
Jonesy might somehow be able to take control again.

The dog whined. Its eyes were still closed but its rear legs twitched spasmodically and its ears flicked. Its belly was distended, the skin rippling. Its moment was near.

A little at a time, color and reality began to return. Mr. Gray took several deep breaths, coaxing this sick and unhappy body back to something resembling calm. How far was there still to go? He didn't think it could be far now, but if the little car was really stuck, he would have to walk . . . and the dog couldn't. The dog must remain asleep, and it was already perilously close to waking again.

He caressed the sleep-centers of its rudimentary brain. He wiped at his slimy mouth as he did it. Part of his mind was aware of Jonesy, still in there, blind to the outside world but awaiting any chance to leap forward and sabotage his mission; and, incredibly, another part of his mind craved more food—craved bacon, the very stuff which had poisoned it.

Sleep, little friend.
Speaking to the dog; speaking also to the byrum. And both listened. Lad ceased whining. His paws stopped twitching. The ripples running across the dog's belly slowed . . . slowed . . . stopped. This calm wouldn't last long, but for now all was well. As well as it could be.