Until today.
It had been Jonesy's body on the Arctic Cat, but the thing now inside his old friend was full of alien images and alien purpose. Jonesy might also still be inside--Henry rather thought he was--but if so, he was now too deep, too small and powerless, to be of any use. Soon Jonesy would be gone completely, and that would likely be a mercy.
Henry had been afraid the thing now running Jonesy would sense him, but it went by without slowing. Toward Pete. And then what? Then where? Henry didn't want to think, didn't want to care.
At last he started back to camp again, not because there was anything left at Hole in the Wall but because there was no place else to go. As he reached the gate with its one-word sign--CLARENDON--he spat another tooth into his gloved hand, looked at it, then tossed it away. The snow was over, but the sky was still dark and he thought the wind was picking up again. Had the radio said something about a storm with a one-two punch? He couldn't remember, wasn't sure it mattered.
Somewhere to the west of him, a huge explosion hammered the day. Henry looked dully in that direction, but could see nothing. Something had either crashed or exploded, and at least some of the nagging voices in his head had stopped. He had no idea if those things were related or not, no idea if he should care. He stepped through the open gate, walking on the packed snow marked with the tread of the departing Arctic Cat, and approached Hole in the Wall.
The generator brayed steadily, and above the granite slab that served as their welcome mat, the door stood open. Henry paused outside for a moment, examining the slab. At first he thought there was blood on it, but blood, either fresh or dried, did not have that unique red-gold sheen. No, he was looking at some sort of organic growth. Moss or maybe fungus. And something else . . .
Henry tipped his head back, flared his nostrils, and sniffed gently--he had a memory, both clear and absurd, of being in Maurice's a month ago with his ex-wife, smelling the wine the sommelier had just poured, seeing Rhonda there across the table and thinking, We sniff the wine, dogs sniff each other's assholes, and it all comes to about the same. Then, in a flash, the memory of the milk running down his father's chin had come. He had smiled at Rhonda, she had smiled back, and he had thought what a relief the end would be, and if it were done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.
What he smelled now wasn't wine but a marshy, sulfurous odor. For a moment he couldn't place it, then it came: the woman who had wrecked them. The smell of her wrong innards was here, too.
Henry stepped onto the granite slab, aware that he had come to this place for the last time, feeling the weight of all the years--the laughs, the talks, the beers, the occasional lid of pot, a food-fight in '96 (or maybe it had been '97), the gunshots, that bitter mixed smell of powder and blood that meant deer season, the smell of death and friendship and childhood's brilliance.
As he stood there, he sniffed again. Much stronger, and now more chemical than organic, perhaps because there was so much of it. He looked inside. There was more of that fuzzy, mildewy stuff on the floor, but you could see the hardwood. On the Navajo rug, however, it had already grown so thick that it was hard to make out the pattern. No doubt whatever it was did better in the heat, but still, the rate of growth was scary.
Henry started to step in, then thought better of it. He backed two or three paces away from the doorway instead and only stood there in the snow, very aware of his bleeding nose and the holes in his gums where there had been teeth when he woke up this morning. If that mossy stuff was producing some sort of airborne virus, like Ebola or Hanta, he was probably cooked already, and anything he did would amount to no more than locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. But there was no sense taking unnecessary risks, was there?
He turned and walked around Hole in the Wall to the Gulch side, still walking in the packed tread of the departed Arctic Cat to keep from sinking into the new snow.
2
The door to the shed was open, too. And Henry could see Jonesy, yes, clear as day, Jonesy pausing in the doorway before going in to get the snowmobile, Jonesy holding to the side of the doorway with a casual hand, Jonesy listening to . . . to the what?
To the nothing. No crows cawing, no jays scolding, no woodpeckers pecking, no squirrels scuttering. There was only the wind and an occasional padded plop as a clot of snow slid off a pine or spruce and hit the new snow beneath. The local wildlife was gone, had moved on like goofy animals in a Gary Larson cartoon.
He stood where he was for a moment, calling up his memory of the shed's interior. Pete would have done better--Pete would have stood here with his eyes closed and his forefinger ticking back and forth, then told you where everything was, right down to the smallest jar of screws--but in this case Henry thought he could do without Pete's special skill. He'd been out here just yesterday, looking for something to help him open a kitchen cabinet door that was swelled shut. He had seen then what he wanted now.
Henry inhaled and exhaled rapidly several times, hyperventilating his lungs clean, then pressed his gloved hand tight over his mouth and nose and stepped in. He stood still for a moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim. He didn't want to be surprised by anything if he could help it.
When he could see well again, Henry stepped across the empty place where the snowmobile had been. There was nothing on the floor now but an overlaid pattern of oil stains, but there were more patches of that reddish-gold crud growing on the green tarp which had covered the Cat and was now cast aside in the corner.
The worktable was a mess--a jar of nails and one of screws overturned so that what had been kept carefully separate was now mixed together, an old pipe-holder that had belonged to Lamar Clarendon knocked to the floor and broken, all the drawers built into the table's thickness yanked open and left that way. One of them, Beaver or Jonesy, had gone through this place like a whirlwind, looking for something.
It was Jonesy.
Yeah. Henry might never know what it was, but it had been Jonesy, he knew that, and it had clearly been almighty important to him or to both of them. Henry wondered if Jonesy had found it. He would probably never know that, either. Meanwhile, what he wanted was clearly visible in the far corner of the room, hung on a nail above a pile of paint-cans and sprayguns.
Still holding his hand over his mouth and nose, breath held, Henry crossed the interior of the shed. There were at least four of the little nose-and-mouth painters' masks hanging from elastics which had lost most of their snap. He took them all and turned in time to see something move behind the door. He kept himself from gasping, but his heartbeat jumped, and all at once the double lungful of air that had gotten him this far seemed too hot and heavy. Nothing there, either, it had just been his imagination. Then he saw that yeah, there was something. Light came in through the open door; a little more came in through the single dirty window over the table, and Henry had literally jumped at his own shadow.
He left the shed in four big steps, the painters' masks swinging from his right hand. He held onto his lungful of decayed air until he'd made four more steps along the packed track of the snowmobile, then let it out in an explosive rush. He bent over, hands planted on his thighs above his knees, small black dots flocking before his eyes and then dissolving.
From the east came a distant crackle of gunfire. Not rifles; it was too loud and fast for that. Those were automatic weapons. In Henry's mind there came a vision as clear as the memory of milk running down his father's chin or Barry Newman fleeing his office with rockets on his heels. He saw the deer and the coons and the chucks and the feral dogs and the rabbits being cut down in their dozens and their hundreds as they tried to escape what was now pretty clearly a plague zone; he could see the snow turning red with their innocent (but possibly contaminated) blood. This vision hurt him in a way he had not expected, piercing through to a place that wasn't dead but only dozing. It was the place that had resonated so strongly to Duddits's weeping, setting up a harmonic tone that made you feel as if your head were going to ex
plode.
Henry straightened up, saw fresh blood on the palm of his left glove, and cried "Ah, shit!" at the sky in a voice that was both furious and amused. He had covered his mouth and nose, he had gotten the masks and was planning on wearing at least two when he went inside Hole in the Wall, but he had completely forgotten the gash in his thigh, the one he'd gotten when the Scout rolled over. If there had been a contaminant out there in the shed, something given off by the fungus, the chances were excellent that it was in him now. Not that the precautions he had taken were any such of a much. Henry imagined a sign, big red letters reading BIOHAZARD AREA! PLEASE HOLD BREATH AND COVER ANY SCRATCHES YOU MAY HAVE WITH YOUR HAND!
He grunted laughter and started back toward the cabin. Well, good God, Maude, it wasn't as if he had planned to live forever, anyway.
Off to the east, the gunfire crackled on and on.
3
Once again standing outside Hole in the Wall's open door, Henry felt in his back pocket for a handkerchief without much hope of finding one . . . and didn't. Two of the unadvertised attractions of spending time in the woods were urinating where you wanted and just leaning over and giving a honk when your nose felt in need of a blow. There was something primally satisfying about letting the piss and the snot fly . . . to men, at least. When you thought about it, it was sort of a blue-eyed wonder that women could love the best of them, let alone the rest of them.
He took off his coat, the shirt under it, and the thermal undershirt beneath that. The final layer was a faded Boston Red Sox tee-shirt with GARCIAPARRA 5 on the back. Henry took this off, spun it into a bandage, and wrapped it around the blood-caked tear in the left leg of his jeans, thinking again that he was locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. Still, you filled in the blanks, didn't you? Yes, you filled in the blanks and you printed neatly and legibly. These were the concepts upon which life ran. Even when life was running out, it seemed.
He put the rest of his outerwear back on over his goosepimply top half, then donned two of the teardrop-shaped painters' masks. He considered fixing two of the others over his ears, imagined those narrow bands of elastic crisscrossing the back of his head like the straps of a shoulder holster, and burst out laughing. What else? Use the last mask to cover one eye?
"If it gets me, it gets me," he said, at the same time reminding himself that it wouldn't hurt to be careful; a little dose of careful never hurt a man, old Lamar used to say.
Inside Hole in the Wall, the fungus (or mildew, or whatever it was) had gone forward appreciably even during the short time Henry had been in the shed. The Navajo rug was now covered side to side, with not even the slightest pattern showing through. There were patches on the couch, the counter between the kitchen and the dining area, and on the seats of two of the three stools which stood on the living-room side of the counter. A crooked capillary of red-gold fuzz ran up one leg of the dining-room table, as if following the line of a spill, and Henry was reminded of how ants will congregate on even the thinnest track of spilled sugar. Perhaps the most distressing thing of all was the red-gold fuzz of cobweb hanging high over the Navajo rug. Henry looked at it fixedly for several seconds before realizing what it really was: Lamar Clarendon's dreamcatcher. Henry didn't think he would ever know exactly what had happened here, but of one thing he was sure: the dreamcatcher had snared a real nightmare this time.
You aren't really going any farther in here, are you? Now that you've seen how fast it grows? Jonesy looked all right when he went by, but he wasn't all right, and you know it. You felt it. So . . . you aren't really going on, are you?
"I think so," Henry said. The doubled thickness of masks bobbed on his face when he spoke. "If it gets hold of me . . . why, I'll just have to kill myself."
Laughing like Stubb in Moby-Dick, Henry moved farther into the cabin.
4
With one exception, the fungus grew in thin mats and clumps. The exception was in front of the bathroom door, where there was an actual hill of fungus, all of it matted together and growing upward in the doorway, bearding both jambs to a height of at least four feet. This hill-like clump of growth seemed to be lying over some grayish, spongy growth medium. On the side facing the living room, the gray stuff split in two, making a V-shape that reminded Henry unpleasantly of splayed legs. As if someone had died in the doorway and the fungus had overgrown the corpse. Henry recalled an offprint from med school, some article quickly scanned in the search for something else. It had contained photographs, one of them a gruesome medical examiner's shot he had never quite forgotten. It showed a murder victim dumped in the woods, the nude body discovered after approximately four days. There had been toadstools growing from the nape of the neck, the creases at the backs of the knees, and from the cleft of the buttocks.
Four days, all right. But this place had been clean this morning, only . . .
Henry glanced at his watch and saw that it had stopped at twenty till twelve. It was now Eastern Standard No Time At All.
He turned and peeked behind the door, suddenly convinced that something was lurking there.
Nah. Nothing but Jonesy's Garand, leaning against the wall.
Henry started to turn away, then turned back again. The Garand looked clear of the goo, and Henry picked it up. Loaded, safety on, one in the chamber. Good. Henry slung it over his shoulder and turned back toward the unpleasant red lump growing outside the bathroom door. The smell of ether, mingled with something sulfurous and even more unpleasant, was strong in here. He walked slowly across the room toward the bathroom, forcing himself forward a step at a time, afraid (and increasingly certain) that the red hump with the leglike extrusions was all that remained of his friend Beaver. In a moment he would see the straggly remains of the Beav's long black hair or his Doc Martens, which Beaver called his "lesbian solidarity statement." The Beav had gotten the idea that Doc Martens were a secret sign by which lesbians recognized each other, and no one could talk him out of this. He was likewise convinced that people named Rothschild and Goldfarb ran the world, possibly from a bedrock-deep bunker in Colorado. Beaver, whose preferred expression of surprise was fuck me Freddy.
But there was absolutely no way of telling if the lump in the doorway had once been the Beav, or indeed if it had once been anyone at all. There was only that suggestive shape. Something glinted in the spongy mass of growth and Henry leaned a little closer, wondering even as he did it if microscopic bits of the fungus were already growing on the wet, unprotected surfaces of his eyes. The thing he spotted turned out to be the bathroom doorknob. Off to one side, sporting its own fuzz of growth, was a roll of friction tape. He remembered the mess scattered across the surface of the worktable out back, the yanked-open drawers. Had this been what Jonesy had been out there looking for? A goddam roll of tape? Something in his head--maybe the click, maybe not--said it was. But why? In God's name, why?
In the last five months or so, as the suicidal thoughts came more frequently and visited for longer and longer periods of time, chatting in their pidgin language, Henry's curiosity had pretty much deserted him. Now it was raging, as if it had awakened hungry. He had nothing to feed it. Had Jonesy wanted to tape the door shut? Yeah? Against what? Surely he and the Beav must have known it wouldn't work against the fungus, which would just send its fingers creeping under the door.
Henry looked into the bathroom and made a low grunting sound. Whatever obscene craziness had gone on, it had started and ended in there--he had no doubt of it. The room was a red cave, the blue tiles almost completely hidden under drifts of the stuff. It had grown up the base of the sink and the toilet, as well. The seat's lid was back against the tank, and although he couldn't be positive--there was too much overgrowth to be positive--he thought that the ring itself had been broken inward. The shower curtain was now a solid red-gold instead of filmy blue; most of it had been torn off the rings (which had grown their own vegetable beards) and lay in the tub.
Jutting from the edge of the tub, also overgrown with fungus, w
as a boot-clad foot. The boot was a Doc Marten, Henry was sure of it. He had found Beaver after all, it seemed. Memories of the day they had rescued Duddits suddenly filled him, so bright and clear it might have been yesterday. Beaver wearing his goofy old leather jacket, Beaver taking Duddits's lunchbox and saying You like this show? But they never change their clothes! And then saying--
"Fuck me Freddy," Henry told the overgrown cabin. "That's what he said, what he always said." Tears running from his eyes and down his cheeks. If it was just wetness the fungus wanted--and judging by the jungle growing out of the toilet-bowl, it liked wetness just fine--it could land on him and have a feast.
Henry didn't much care. He had Jonesy's rifle. The fungus could start on him, but he could make sure that he was long gone before it ever got to the dessert course. If it came to that.
It probably would.
5
He was sure he'd seen a few rug-remnants heaped up in one corner of the shed. Henry debated going out and getting them. He could lay them down on the bathroom floor, walk over them, and get a better look into the tub. But to what purpose? He knew that was Beaver, and he had no real desire to see his old friend, author of such witticisms as Kiss my bender, being overgrown by red fungus as the pallid corpse in that long-ago medical offprint had been growing its own colony of toadstools. If it might have answered some of his questions about what had happened, yes, perhaps. But Henry didn't think that likely.
Mostly what he wanted was to get out of here. The fungus was creepy, but there was something else. An even creepier sensation that he was not alone.
Henry backed away from the bathroom door. There was a paperback on the dining table, a pattern of dancing devils with pitchforks on its cover. One of Jonesy's, no doubt, already growing its own little colony of crud.