Now he was.
Dropping his hands away from the lock and putting his lips to the door, he said "Eat shit and die" in his clearest voice. He felt Mr. Gray recoil. He even felt the pain when Mr. Gray thumped back against the window, and why not? They were his nerves, after all. Not to mention his head. Few things in his life gave him so much pleasure as Mr. Gray's outraged surprise, and he vaguely realized what Mr. Gray already knew: the alien presence in his head was more human now.
If you could come back as a physical entity, would you still be Mr. Gray? Jonesy wondered. He didn't think so. Mr. Pink, maybe, but not Mr. Gray.
He didn't know if the guy would try his Monsieur Mesmer routine again, but Jonesy decided to take no chances. He turned and went to the office window, tripping over one of the boxes and stepping over the rest. Christ, but his hip hurt. It was crazy to feel such pain when you were imprisoned in your own head (which, Henry had once assured him, had no nerves anyway, at least not once you got into the old gray matter), but the pain was there, all right. He had read that amputees sometimes felt horrible agonies and unscratchable itches in limbs that no longer existed; probably this was the same deal.
The window had returned to a tiresome view of the weedy, double-rutted driveway which had run alongside the Tracker Brothers depot back in 1978. The sky was white and overcast; apparently when his window looked into the past, time was frozen at midafternoon. The only thing the view had to recommend it was that, as he stood here taking it in, Jonesy was as far from Mr. Gray as he could possibly get.
He guessed that he could change the view, if he really wanted to; could look out and see what Mr. Gray was currently seeing with the eyes of Gary Jones. He had no urge to do that, however. There was nothing to look at but the snowstorm, nothing to feel but Mr. Gray's stolen rage.
Think of something else, he told himself.
What?
I don't know--anything. Why not--
On the desk the telephone rang, and that was odd on an Alice in Wonderland scale, because a few minutes ago there had been no telephone in this room, and no desk for it to sit on. The litter of old used rubbers had disappeared. The floor was still dirty, but the dust on the tiles was gone. Apparently there was some sort of janitor inside his head, a neatnik who had decided Jonesy was going to be here for awhile and so the place ought to be at least tolerably clean. He found the concept awesome, the implications depressing.
On the desk, the phone shrilled again. Jonesy picked up the receiver and said, "Hello?"
Beaver's voice sent a sick and horrible chill down his back. A telephone call from a dead man--it was the stuff of the movies he liked. Had liked, anyway.
"His head was off, Jonesy. It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud."
There was a click, then dead silence. Jonesy hung up the phone and walked back to the window. The driveway was gone. Derry was gone. He was looking at Hole in the Wall under a pale clear early-morning sky. The roof was black instead of green, which meant this was Hole in the Wall as it had been before 1982, when the four of them, then strapping high-school boys (well, Henry had never been what you'd call strapping), had helped Beav's Dad put up the green shingles the camp still wore.
Only Jonesy needed no such landmark to know what time it was. No more than he needed someone to tell him the green shingles were no more, Hole in the Wall was no more, Henry had burned it to the ground. In a moment the door would open and Beaver would run out. It was 1978, the year all this had really started, and in a moment Beaver would run out, wearing only his boxer shorts and his many-zippered motorcycle jacket, the orange bandannas fluttering. It was 1978, they were young . . . and they had changed. No more same shit, different day. This was the day when they began to realize just how much they had changed.
Jonesy stared out the window, fascinated.
The door opened.
Beaver Clarendon, age fourteen, ran out.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HENRY AND OWEN
1
Henry watched Underhill trudge toward him in the glare of the security lights. Underhill's head was bent against the snow and the intensifying wind. Henry opened his mouth to call out, but before he could, he was overwhelmed, nearly flattened, by a sense of Jonesy. And then a memory came, blotting out Underhill and this brightly lit, snowy world completely. All at once it was 1978 again, not October but November and there was blood, blood on cattails, broken glass in marshy water, and then the bang of the door.
2
Henry awakes from a terrible confused dream--blood, broken glass, the rich smells of gasoline and burning rubber--to the sound of a banging door and a blast of cold air. He sits up and sees Pete sitting up beside him, Pete's hairless chest covered with goosebumps. Henry and Pete are on the floor in their sleeping-bags because they lost the four-way toss. Beav and Jonesy got the bed (later there will be a third bedroom at Hole in the Wall, but now there are only two and Lamar has one all to himself, by the divine right of adulthood), only now Jonesy is alone in the bed, also sitting up, also looking confused and frightened.
Scooby-ooby-Doo, where are you, Henry thinks for no appreciable reason as he gropes for his glasses on the windowsill. In his nose he can still smell gas and burning tires. We got some work to do now--
"Crashed," Jonesy says thickly, and throws back the covers. His chest is bare, but like Henry and Pete, he wore his socks and longjohn bottoms to bed.
"Yeah, went in the water," Pete says, his face suggesting he doesn't have the slightest idea what he's talking about. "Henry, you got his shoe--"
"Moccasin--" Henry says, but he hasn't any idea what he's talking about either. Nor wants to.
"Beav," Jonesy says, and gets out of bed in a clumsy lunge. One of his stocking-clad feet comes down on Pete's hand.
"Ow!" Pete cries. "Ya stepped on me, ya fuckin gomer, watch where you're--"
"Shut up, shut up," Henry says, grabbing Pete's shoulder and giving it a shake. "Don't wake up Mr. Clarendon!"
Which would be easy, because the door of the boys' bedroom is open. So is the door on the far side of the big central room, the one to the outside. No wonder they're cold, there's a hell of a draft. Now that Henry has his eyes back on (that is how he thinks of it), he can see the dreamcatcher out there dancing in the cold November breeze coming in through the open door.
"Where's Duddits?" Jonesy asks in a dazed, I'm-still-dreaming voice. "Did he go out with Beaver?"
"He's back in Derry, foolish," Henry says, getting up and pulling on his thermal undershirt. And he doesn't feel that Jonesy is foolish, not really; he also has a sense that Duddits was just here with them.
It was the dream, he thinks. Duddits was in the dream. He was sitting on the bank. He was crying. He was sorry. He didn't mean to. If anyone meant to, it was us.
And there is still crying. He can hear it, coming in through the front door, carried on the breeze. It's not Duddits, though; it's the Beav.
They leave the room in a line, pulling on scraps of clothes as they go, not bothering with their shoes, which would take too long.
One good thing--judging from the tin city of beer-cans on the kitchen table (plus a suburb of same on the coffee-table), it'll take more than a couple of open doors and some whispering kids to wake up Beaver's Dad.
The big granite doorstep is freezing under Henry's stocking feet, cold in the deep thoughtless way death must be cold, but he barely notices.
He sees the Beaver right away. He's at the foot of the maple tree with the deer-stand in it, on his knees as if praying. His legs and feet are bare, Henry sees. He's wearing his motorcycle jacket, and tied up and down its arms, fluttering like pirate's finery, are the orange bandannas his father made his son wear when Beaver insisted on wearing such a damned foolish unhunterly thing in the woods. The outfit looks pretty funny, but there's nothing funny about that agonized face tilted up toward the maple's nearly bare branches. The Beav's cheeks are streaming with tears.
Henry breaks into a run. Pe
te and Jonesy follow suit, their breath puffing white in the chill morning air. The needle-strewn ground under Henry's feet is almost as hard and cold as the granite doorstep.
He drops to his knees beside Beaver, scared and somehow awed by those tears. Because the Beav isn't just misting up, like the hero of a movie who may be allowed to shed a manly drop or two when his dog or his girlfriend dies; Beav is running like Niagara Falls. From his nose hang two ropes of clear glistening snot. You never saw stuff like that in the movies.
"Gross," Pete says.
Henry looks at him impatiently, but then he sees Pete isn't looking at Beaver but past him, at a steaming puddle of vomit. In it are kernels of last night's corn (Lamar Clarendon believes passionately in the virtues of canned food when it comes to camp cooking) and strings of last night's fried chicken. Henry's stomach takes a big unhappy lurch. And just as it starts to settle, Jonesy yarks. The sound is like a big liquid belch. The puke is brown.
"Gross!" Pete almost screams it this time.
Beaver doesn't seem to even notice. "Henry!" he says. His eyes, submerged beneath twin lenses of tears, are huge and spooky. They seem to peer past Henry's face and into the supposedly private rooms behind his forehead.
"Beav, it's okay. You had a bad dream."
"Sure, a bad dream." Jonesy's voice is thick, his throat still plated with puke. He tries to clear it with a thick ratching noise that is somehow worse than what just came out of him, then bends over and spits. His hands are planted on the legs of his longhandles, and his bare back is covered with bumps.
Beav takes no notice of Jonesy, nor of Pete as Pete kneels down on his other side and puts a clumsy, tentative arm around Beav's shoulders. Beav continues to look only at Henry.
"His head was off," Beaver whispers.
Jonesy also drops to his knees, and now all three of them are surrounding the Beav, Henry and Pete to either side, Jonesy in front. There is vomit on Jonesy's chin. He reaches to wipe it away, but Beaver takes his hand before he can. The boys kneel beneath the maple, and suddenly they are all one. It is brief, this sense of union, but as vivid as their dream. It is the dream, but now they are all awake, the sensation is rational, and they cannot disbelieve.
Now it is Jonesy the Beav is looking at with his spooky swimming eyes. Clutching Jonesy's hand.
"It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud."
"Yeah," Jonesy whispers in an awed and shaky voice. "Oh Jeez, it was."
"Said he'd see us again, remember?" Pete asks. "One at a time or all together. He said that."
Henry hears these things from a great distance, because he's back in the dream. Back at the scene of the accident. At the bottom of a trash-littered embankment where there is a soggy piece of marsh, created by a blocked drainage culvert. He knows the place, it's on Route 7, the old Derry-Newport Road. Lying overturned in the muck and the murk is a burning car. The air stinks of gas and burning tires. Duddits is crying. Duddits is sitting halfway down the trashy slope and holding his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox against his chest and crying his eyes out.
A hand protrudes from one of the windows of the overturned car. It's slim, the nails painted candy-apple red. The car's other two occupants have been thrown clear, one of them almost thirty damn feet. This one's facedown, but Henry still recognizes him by the masses of soaked blond hair. It's Duncan, the one who said you're not gonna tell anyone anything, because you'll be fuckin dead. Only Duncan's the one who wound up dead.
Something floats against Henry's shin. "Don't pick that up!" Pete says urgently, but Henry does. It's a brown suede moccasin. He has just time to register this, and then Beaver and Jonesy shriek in terrible childish harmony. They are standing together, ankle-deep in the muck, both of them wearing their hunting clothes: Jonesy in his new bright orange parka, bought special from Sears for this trip (and Mrs. Jones still tearfully, unpersuadably convinced that her son will be killed in the woods by a hunter's bullet, cut down in his prime), Beaver in his tattered motorcycle jacket (What a lot of zippers! Duddie's Mom had said admiringly, thus winning Beaver's love and admiration forever) with the orange bandannas tied up and down the arms. They aren't looking at the third body, the one lying just outside the driver's door, but Henry does, just for a moment (still holding the moccasin, like a small water-logged canoe, in his hands), because something is terribly, fundamentally wrong with it, so wrong that for a moment he cannot tell what it might be. Then he realizes that there's nothing above the collar of the corpse's high-school jacket. Beaver and Jonesy are screaming because they have seen what should have been above it. They have seen Richie Grenadeau's head lying faceup, glaring at the sky from a blood-spattered stand of cattails. Henry knows it's Richie at once. Even though the swatch of tape no longer rides the bridge of his nose, there is no mistaking the guy who was trying to feed Duddits a piece of shit that day behind Tracker's.
Duds is up there on the bank, crying and crying, that crying that gets into your head like a sinus headache, and if it goes on it will drive Henry mad. He drops the moc and slogs around the back of the burning car to where Beaver and Jonesy stand with their arms around each other.
"Beaver! Beav!" Henry shouts, but until he reaches out and gives Beaver a hard shake, Beaver just continues to stare at the severed head, as if hypnotized.
Finally, though, Beaver looks at him. "His head's off," he says, as if this were not evident. "Henry, his head's--"
"Never mind his head, take care of Duddits! Make him stop that goddam crying!"
"Yeah," Pete says. He looks at Richie's head, that final dead glare, then looks away, mouth twitching. "It's drivin me fuckin bugshit."
"Like chalk on a chalkboard," Jonesy mutters. Above his new orange parka, his skin is the color of old cheese. "Make him stop, Beav."
"H-H-H--"
"Don't be a dweeb, sing him the fuckin song!" Henry shouts. He can feel mucky water oozing up between his toes. "The lullaby, the goddam lullaby!"
For a moment the Beav looks as though he still doesn't understand, but then his eyes clear a little and he says "Oh!" He goes slogging toward the embankment where Duddits sits, clutching his bright yellow lunchbox and howling as he did on the day they met him. Henry sees something that he barely has time to notice: there is blood caked around Duddits's nostrils, and there's a bandage on his left shoulder. Something is poking out of it, something that looks like white plastic.
"Duddits," the Beav says, climbing the embankment. "Duddie, honey, don't. Don't cry no more, don't look at it no more, it's not for you to look at, it's so fuckin gross . . ."
At first Duddits takes no notice, just goes on howling. Henry thinks, He cried himself into a nosebleed and that's the blood part, but what's that white thing sticking out of his shoulder?
Jonesy has actually raised his hands to cover his ears. Pete has got one of his on top of his head, as if to keep it from blowing off. Then Beaver takes Duddits in his arms, just as he did a few weeks earlier, and begins to sing in that high clear voice that you'd never think could come out of a scrub like the Beav.
"Baby's boat's a silver dream, sailing near and far . . ."
And oh miracle of blessed miracles, Duddits begins to quiet.
Speaking from the corner of his mouth, Pete says: "Where are we, Henry? Where the fuck are we?"
"In a dream," Henry says, and all at once the four of them are back under the maple tree at Hole in the Wall, kneeling together in their underwear and shivering in the cold.
"What?" Jonesy says. He pulls free to wipe at his mouth, and when the contact among them breaks, reality comes all the way back. "What did you say, Henry?"
Henry feels the withdrawal of their minds, actually feels it, and he thinks, We weren't meant to be like this, none of us. Sometimes being alone is better.
Yes, alone. Alone with your thoughts.
"I had a bad dream," Beaver says. He seems to be explaining this to himself rather than to the rest of them. Slowly, as if he were still dreaming, he unzips one of h
is jacket pockets, rummages around inside, and comes out with a Tootsie Pop. Instead of unwrapping it, Beaver puts the stick end in his mouth and begins to roll it back and forth, nipping and gnawing lightly. "I dreamed that--"
"Never mind," Henry says, and pushes his glasses up on his nose. "We all know what you dreamed." We ought to, we were there trembles on his lips, but he keeps it inside. He's only fourteen, but wise enough to know that what is said cannot be unsaid. When it's laid, it's played they say when they're playing rummy or Crazy Eights and someone makes a goofy-ass discard. If he says it, they'll have to deal with it. If he doesn't, then maybe . . . just maybe it'll go away.
"I don't think it was your dream, anyhow," Pete says. "I think it was Duddits's dream and we all--"
"I don't give a shit what you think," Jonesy says, his voice so harsh that it startles them all. "It was a dream, and I'm going to forget it. We're all going to forget it, aren't we, Henry?"
Henry nods at once.
"Let's go back in," Pete says. He looks vastly relieved. "My feet're free--"
"One thing, though," Henry says, and they all look at him nervously. Because when they need a leader, Henry is it. And if you don't like the way I do it, he thinks resentfully, someone else can do it. Because this is no tit job, believe me.
"What?" Beaver asks, meaning What now?
"When we go into Gosselin's later on, someone's got to call Duds. In case he's upset."
No one replies to this, all of them awed to silence by the idea of calling their new retardo friend on the phone. It occurs to Henry that Duddits has likely never received a phone call in his life; this will be his first.
"You know, that's probably right," Pete agrees . . . and then slaps his hand over his mouth like someone who has said something incriminating.
Beaver, naked except for his dopey boxers and his even dopier jacket, is now shivering violently. The Tootsie Pop jitters at the end of its gnawed stick.
"Someday you'll choke on one of those things," Henry tells him.
"Yeah, that's what my Mom says. Can we go in? I'm freezing."
They start back toward Hole in the Wall, where their friendship will end twenty-three years from this very day.