Dreamcatcher

  As soon as he does, the kid's face clouds over, not with fear this time, or with the petulance of one balked of getting his way, but in pure sorrow. Tears fill those amazingly green eyes of his and spill down the clean tracks on his dirty cheeks. He takes Beaver's hand and puts Beaver's arm back over his shoulders. "Ooo or! Ooo or!" he says.

  Beaver looks at them, panicked. "That's all my mother ever sang me," he says. "I always went right to fuckin sleep."

  Henry and Jonesy exchange a look and burst out laughing. Not a good idea, it'll probably scare the kid and he'll start that terrible bawling again, but neither of them can help it. And the kid doesn't cry. He smiles at Henry and Jonesy instead, a sunny smile that displays a mouthful of white crammed-together teeth, and then looks back at Beaver. He continues to hold Beaver's arm firmly around his shoulders.

  "Ooo or!" he commands.

  "Aw, fuck, sing it again," Pete says. "The part you know."

  Beaver ends up singing it three more times before the kid will let him stop, will let the boys work him into his pants and his torn shirt, the one with Richie Grenadeau's number on it. Henry has never forgotten that haunting fragment and will sometimes recall it at the oddest times: after losing his virginity at a UNH fraternity party with "Smoke on the Water" pounding through the speakers downstairs; after opening his paper to the obituary page and seeing Barry Newman's rather charming smile above his multiple chins; feeding his father, who had come down with Alzheimer's at the ferociously unfair age of fifty-three, his father insisting that Henry was someone named Sam. "A real man pays off his debts, Sammy," his father had said, and when he accepted the next bite of cereal, milk ran down his chin. At these times what he thinks of as Beaver's Lullaby will come back to him, and he will feel transiently comforted. No bounce, no play.

  Finally they've got the kid all dressed except for one red sneaker. He's trying to put it on himself, but he's got it pointing backward. He is one fucked-up young American, and Henry is at a loss to know how the three big boys could have bullied up on him. Even aside from the crying, which was like no crying Henry had ever heard before, why would you want to be so mean?

  "Let me fix that, man," Beaver says.

  "Fit wha?" the kid asks, so comically perplexed that Henry, Jonesy, and Pete all burst out laughing again. Henry knows you're not supposed to laugh at retards, but he can't help it. The kid just has a naturally funny face, like a cartoon character.

  Beaver only smiles. "Your sneaker, man."

  "Fit neek?"

  "Yeah, you can't put it on that way, fuckin imposseeblo, senor." Beaver takes the sneaker from him and the kid watches with close interest as the Beav slips his foot into it, draws the laces firmly against the tongue, and then ties the ends in a bow. When he's done, the kid looks at the bow for a moment longer, then at Beaver. Then he puts his arms around Beaver's neck and plants a big loud smack on Beaver's cheek.

  "If you guys tell anybody he did that--" Beaver begins, but he's smiling, clearly pleased.

  "Yeah, yeah, you'll never chum with us again, ya fuckin wank," Jonesy says, grinning. He has held onto the lunchbox and now squats in front of the kid, holding it out. "This yours, guy?"

  The kid grins with the delight of someone encountering an old friend and snatches it. "Ooby-Ooby-Doo, where-are-oo?" he sings. "We gah-sum urk oo-do-now!"

  "That's right," Jonesy agrees. "Got some work to do now. Gotta get you the fuck home is what we got to do. Douglas Cavell, that's your name, right?"

  The boy is holding his lunchbox to his chest in both of his dirty hands. Now he gives it a loud smack, just like the one he put on Beaver's cheek. "I Duddits!" he cries.

  "Good," Henry says. He takes one of the boy's hands, Jonesy takes the other, and they help him to his feet. Maple Lane is only three blocks away and they can be there in ten minutes, always assuming that Richie and his friends aren't hanging around and hoping to ambush them. "Let's get you home, Duddits. Bet your Mom's worried about you."

  But first Henry sends Pete to the corner of the building to look up the driveway. When Pete comes back and reports the coast clear, Henry lets them go that far. Once they are on the sidewalk, where people can see them, they'll be safe. Until then, he will take no chances. He sends Pete out a second time, tells him to scout all the way to the street, then whistle if everything is cool.

  "Dey gone," Duddits says.

  "Maybe," Henry says, "but I'll feel better if Pete takes a look."

  Duddits stands serenely among them, looking at the pictures on his lunchbox, while Pete goes out to look around. Henry feels okay about sending him. He hasn't exaggerated Pete's speed; if Richie and his friends try to jump him, Pete will turn on the jets and leave them in the dust.

  "You like this show, man?" Beaver says, taking the lunchbox. He speaks quietly. Henry watches with some interest, curious to see if the retarded boy will cry for his lunchbox. He doesn't.

  "Ey Ooby-Doos!" the retarded kid says. His hair is golden, curly. Henry still can't tell what age he is.

  "I know they're Scooby-Doos," the Beav says patiently, "but they never change their clothes. Pete's right about that. I mean, fuck me Freddy, right?"

  "Ite!" He holds out his hands for the lunchbox and Beaver gives it back. The retarded boy hugs it, then smiles at them. It is a beautiful smile, Henry thinks, smiling himself. It makes him think of how you are cold when you have been swimming in the ocean for awhile, but when you come out, you wrap a towel around your bony shoulders and goosepimply back and you're warm again.

  Jonesy is also smiling. "Duddits," he says, "which one is the dog?"

  The retarded boy looks at him, still smiling, but puzzled now, too.

  "The dog," Henry says. "Which one's the dog?"

  Now the boy looks at Henry, his puzzlement deepening.

  "Which one's Scooby, Duddits?" Beaver asks, and Duddits's face clears. He points.

  "Ooby! Ooby-Ooby-Doo! Eee a dog!"

  They all burst out laughing, Duddits is laughing too, and then Pete whistles. They start moving and have gone about a quarter of the way up the driveway when Jonesy says, "Wait! Wait!"

  He runs to one of the dirty office windows and peers in, cupping his hands to the sides of his face to cut the glare, and Henry suddenly remembers why they came. Tina Jean What's-Her-Face's pussy. All that seems about a thousand years ago.

  After about ten seconds, Jonesy calls, "Henry! Beav! Come here! Leave the kid there!"

  Beaver runs to Jonesy's side. Henry turns to the retarded boy and says, "Stand right there, Duddits. Right there with your lunchbox, okay?"

  Duddits looks up at him, green eyes shining, lunchbox held to his chest. After a moment he nods, and Henry runs to join his friends at the window. They have to squeeze together, and Beaver grumbles that someone is steppin on his fuckin feet, but they manage. After a minute or so, puzzled by their failure to show up on the sidewalk, Pete joins them, poking his face in between Henry's and Jonesy's shoulders. Here are four boys at a dirty office window, three with their hands cupped to the sides of their faces to cut the glare, and a fifth boy standing behind them in the weedy driveway, holding his lunchbox against his narrow chest and looking up at the white sky, where the sun is trying to break through. Beyond the dirty glass (where they will leave clean crescents to mark the places where their foreheads rested) is an empty room. Scattered across the dusty floor are a number of deflated white tadpoles that Henry recognizes as jizzbags. On one wall, the one directly across from the window, is a bulletin board. Tacked to it is a map of northern New England and a Polaroid photograph of a woman holding her skirt up. You can't see her pussy, though, just some white panties. And she's no high-school girl. She's old. She must be at least thirty.

  "Holy God," Pete says at last, giving Jonesy a disgusted look. "We came all the way down here for that?"

  For a moment Jonesy looks defensive, then grins and jerks his thumb back over his shoulder. "No," he says. "We came for him."

  6

  Henry was pulled
from recall by an amazing and totally unexpected realization: he was terrified, had been terrified for some time. Some new thing had been hovering just below the threshold of his consciousness, held down by the vivid memory of meeting Duddits. Now it had burst forward with a frightened yell, insisting on recognition.

  He skidded to a stop in the middle of the road, flailing his arms to keep from falling down in the snow again, and then simply stood there panting, eyes wide. What now? He was only two and a half miles from Hole in the Wall, almost there, so what the Christ now?

  There's a cloud, he thought. Some kind of cloud, that's what. I can't tell what it is but I can feel it--I never felt anything so clearly in my life. My adult life, anyway. I have to get off the road. I have to get away from it. Get away from the movie. There's a movie in the cloud. The kind Jonesy likes. A scary one.

  "That's stupid," he muttered, knowing it wasn't.

  He could hear the approaching wasp-whine of an engine. It was coming from the direction of Hole in the Wall and coming fast, a snowmobile engine, almost certainly the Arctic Cat stored at camp . . . but it was also the redblack cloud with the movie going on inside it, some terrible black energy rushing toward him.

  For a moment Henry was frozen with a hundred childish horrors, things under beds and things in coffins, squirming bugs beneath overturned rocks and the furry jelly that was the remains of a long-dead baked rat the time Dad had moved the stove out from the wall to check the plug. And horrors that weren't childish at all: his father, lost in his own bedroom and bawling with fear; Barry Newman, running from Henry's office with that vast look of terror on his face, terror because he had been asked to look at something he wouldn't, perhaps couldn't, acknowledge; sitting awake at four in the morning with a glass of Scotch, all the world a dead socket, his own mind a dead socket and oh baby it was a thousand years till dawn and all lullabys had been cancelled. Those things were in the redblack cloud rushing down on him like that pale horse in the Bible, those things and more. Every bad thing he had ever suspected was now coming toward him, not on a pale horse but on an old snowmobile with a rusty cowling. Not death but worse than death. It was Mr. Gray.

  Get off the road! his mind screamed. Get off the road now! Hide!

  For a moment he couldn't move--his feet seemed to grow heavy. The gash on his thigh, the one the turnsignal had made, burned like a brand. Now he understood how a deer caught in the headlights felt, or a chipmunk hopping stupidly back and forth in front of an oncoming lawnmower. The cloud had robbed him of his ability to help himself. He was frozen in its rushing path.

  What got him going, oddly enough, was all those thoughts of suicide. Had he agonized his way to that decision on five hundred sleepless nights only to be robbed of his option by a kind of buck-fever? No, by God, no, it wouldn't be. Suffering was bad enough; allowing his own terrified body to mock that suffering by locking up and just standing here while a demon ran him down . . . no, he would not allow that to happen.

  And so he moved, but it was like moving in a nightmare, fighting his way through air which seemed to have grown as thick as taffy. His legs rose and fell with the slowness of an underwater ballet. Had he been running down this road? Actually running? The idea now seemed impossible, no matter how strong the memory.

  Still, he kept moving while the whine of the approaching engine grew closer, deepening to a stut-tery roar. And at last he was able to get into the trees on the south side of the road. He managed perhaps fifteen feet, far enough so there was no snow cover, only a dust of white on the aromatic orange-brown needles. There Henry fell on his knees, sobbing with terror and putting his gloved hands to his mouth to stifle the sound, because what if it heard? It was Mr. Gray, the cloud was Mr. Gray, and what if it heard?

  He crawled behind the moss-girdled trunk of a spruce tree, clutched it, then peered around it through the tumbled screen of his sweaty hair. He saw a spark of light in the dark afternoon. It jittered, wavered, and rounded. It became a headlight.

  Henry began to moan helplessly as the blackness neared. It seemed to hover over his mind like an eclipse, obliterating thought, replacing it with terrible images: milk on his father's chin, panic in Barry Newman's eyes, scrawny bodies and staring eyes behind barbed wire, flayed women and hanged men. For a moment his understanding of the world seemed to turn inside out like a pocket and he realized that everything was infected . . . or could be. Everything. His reasons for contemplating suicide were paltry in the face of this oncoming thing.

  He pressed his mouth against the tree to keep from screaming, felt his lips tattoo a kiss into the springy moss all the way down to where it was moist and tasted of bark. In that moment the Arctic Cat flashed past and Henry recognized the figure which straddled it, the person who was generating the redblack cloud which now filled Henry's head like a dry fever.

  He bit into the moss, screamed against the tree, inhaled fragments of moss without being aware of it, and screamed again. Then he simply knelt there, holding onto the tree and shuddering, as the sound of the Arctic Cat began to diminish into the west. He was still there when it had died away to a troublesome whine again; still there when it faded away entirely.

  Pete's back there somewhere, he thought. It'll come to Pete, and to the woman.

  Henry stumbled back to the road, unaware that his nose had begun bleeding again, unaware that he was crying. He began moving toward Hole in the Wall once more, although now the best pace he could manage was a shambling limp. But maybe that was all right, because it was all over back at camp.

  Whatever the horrible thing was that he had been sensing, it had happened. One of his friends was dead, one was dying, and one, God help him, had become a movie star.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JONESY AND THE BEAV

  1

  Beaver said it again. No Beaver-isms now; just that bare Anglo-Saxon syllable you came to when you were up against the wall and had no other way to express the horror you saw. "Ah, fuck, man--fuck."

  However much pain McCarthy had been in, he had taken time to snap on both of the switches just inside the bathroom door, lighting the fluorescent bars on either side of the medicine chest mirror and the overhead fluorescent ring. These threw a bright, even glare that gave the bathroom the feel of a crime-scene photograph . . . and yet there was a kind of stealthy surrealism, too, because the light wasn't quite steady; there was just enough flicker for you to know the power was coming from a genny and not through a line maintained by Derry and Bangor Hydroelectric.

  The tile on the floor was baby blue. There were only spots and splatters of blood on it near the door, but as they approached the toilet next to the tub, the splotches ran together and became a red snake. Scarlet capillaries had spread off from this. The tiles were tattooed with the footprints of their boots, which neither Jonesy nor Beaver had taken off. On the blue vinyl shower curtain were four blurred fingerprints, and Jonesy thought: He must have reached out and grabbed at the curtain to keep from falling when he turned to sit.

  Yes, but that wasn't the awful part. The awful part was what Jonesy saw in his mind's eye: McCarthy scuttling across the baby blue tiles with one hand behind him, clutching himself, trying to hold something in.

  "Ah, fuck!" Beaver said again. Almost sobbing. "I don't want to see this, Jonesy--man, I can't see this."

  "We've got to." He heard himself speaking as if from a great distance. "We can do this, Beav. If we could face up to Richie Grenadeau and his friends that time, we can face up to this."

  "I dunno, man, I dunno . . ."

  Jonesy didn't know, either--not really--but he reached out and took Beaver's hand. Beav's fingers closed over his with panicky tightness and together they went a step deeper into the bathroom. Jonesy tried to avoid the blood, but it was hard; there was blood everywhere. And not all of it was blood.

  "Jonesy," Beaver said in a dry near-whisper. "Do you see that crud on the shower curtain?"

  "Yeah." Growing in the blurred fingerprints were little clumps of reddish gol
den mold, like mildew. There was more of it on the floor, not in the fat blood-snake, but in the narrow angles of the grout.

  "What is it?"

  "I don't know," Jonesy said. "Same shit he had on his face, I guess. Shut up a minute." Then: "Mr. McCarthy? . . . Rick?"

  McCarthy, sitting there on the toilet, made no response. He had for some reason put his orange cap back on--the bill stuck off at a crooked, slightly drunken angle. He was otherwise naked. His chin was down on his breastbone, in a parody of deep thought (or maybe it wasn't a parody, who knew?). His eyes were mostly closed. His hands were clasped primly together over his pubic thatch. Blood ran down the side of the toilet in a big sloppy paintstroke, but there was no blood on McCarthy himself, at least not as far as Jonesy could see.

  One thing he could see: the skin of McCarthy's stomach hung in two slack dewlaps. The look of it reminded Jonesy of something, and after a moment or two it came to him. It was how Carla's stomach had looked after she had delivered each of their four children. Above McCarthy's hip, where there was a little love-handle (and some give to the flesh), the skin was only red. Across the belly, however, it had split open in tiny weals. If McCarthy had been pregnant, it must have been with some sort of parasite, a tapeworm or a hookworm or something like that. Only there was stuff growing in his spilled blood, and what had he said as he lay there in Jonesy's bed with the blankets pulled up to his chin? Behold, I stand at the door and knock. This was one knock Jonesy wished he had never answered. In fact, he wished he had shot him. Yes. He saw more clearly now. He was hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the completely horrified mind, and in that state wished he had put a bullet in McCarthy before he saw the orange cap and the orange flagman's vest. It couldn't have hurt and it might have helped.

  "Stand at the door and knock on my ass," Jonesy muttered.

  "Jonesy? Is he still alive?"

  "I don't know."

  Jonesy took another step forward and felt Beaver's fingers slide out of his; the Beav had apparently come as close to McCarthy as he was able.

  "Rick?" Jonesy asked in a hushed voice. A don't-wake-the-baby voice. A viewing-the-corpse voice. "Rick, are you--"