Dreamcatcher

  4

  For one thing, the interior of the truck had changed. Instead of the olive-drab plainness of Andy Janas's government-issue pickup (clipboard of papers and forms on the passenger side, squawking radio beneath the dash), he was now in a luxy Dodge Ram with a club cab, gray velour seats, and roughly as many controls as a Lear jet. On the glove compartment was a sticker reading I MY BORDER COLLIE. The border collie in question was still present and accounted for, asleep in the passenger-side footwell with its tail curled neatly around it. It was a male named Lad. Jonesy sensed that he could access the name and the fate of Lad's master, but why would he want to? Somewhere north of their present position, Janas's army truck was now off the road, and the driver of this one would be lying nearby. Jonesy had no idea why the dog had been spared.

  Then Lad lifted his tail and farted, and Jonesy did.

  5

  He discovered that by looking out the Tracker Brothers' office window and concentrating, he could look out through his own eyes. The snow was coming down more heavily than ever, but like the Army truck, the Dodge was equipped with four-wheel drive, and it poked along steadily enough. Going the other way, north toward Jefferson Tract, was a chain of headlights set high off the road: Army convoy trucks. Then, on this side, a reflectorized sign--white letters, green background--loomed out of the flying snow. DERRY NEXT 5 EXITS.

  The city plows had been out, and although there was hardly any traffic (there wouldn't have been much at this hour even on a clear night), the turnpike was in passable shape. Mr. Gray increased the Ram's speed to forty miles an hour. They passed three exits Jonesy knew well from his childhood (KANSAS STREET, AIRPORT, UPMILE HILL/STRAWFORD PARK) then slowed.

  Suddenly Jonesy thought he understood.

  He looked at the boxes he'd dragged in here, most marked DUDDITS, a few marked DERRY. The latter ones he'd taken as an afterthought. Mr. Gray thought he still had the memories he needed--the information he needed--but if Jonesy was right about where they were going (and it made perfect sense), Mr. Gray was in for a surprise. Jonesy didn't know whether to be glad or afraid, and found he was both.

  Here was a green sign reading EXIT 25--WITCHAM STREET. His hand flicked on the Ram's turnsignal.

  At the top of the ramp, he turned left onto Witcham, then left again, half a mile later, onto Carter Street. Carter went up at a steep angle, heading back toward Upmile Hill and Kansas Street on the other side of what had once been a high wooded ridge and the site of a thriving Micmac Indian village. The street hadn't been plowed in several hours, but the four-wheel drive was up to the task. The Ram threaded its way among the snow-covered humps on either side--cars that had been street-parked in defiance of municipal snow-emergency regulations.

  Halfway up Mr. Gray turned again, this time onto an even narrower track called Carter Lookout. The Ram skidded, its rear end fishtailing. Lad looked up briefly, whined, then put his nose back down on the floormat as the tires took hold, biting into the snow and pulling the Ram the rest of the way up.

  Jonesy stood at his window on the world, fascinated, waiting for Mr. Gray to discover . . . well, to discover.

  At first Mr. Gray wasn't dismayed when the Ram's high beams showed nothing at the crest but more swirling snow. He was confident he'd see it in a few seconds, of course he would . . . just a few more seconds and he'd see the big white tower which stood here overlooking the drop to Kansas Street, the tower with the windows marching around it in a rising spiral. In just a few more seconds . . .

  Except now there were no more seconds. The Ram had chewed its way to the top of what had once been called Standpipe Hill. Here Carter Lookout--and three or four other similar little lanes--ended in a large open circle. They had come to the highest, most open spot in Derry. The wind howled like a banshee, a steady fifty miles an hour with gusts up to seventy and even eighty. In the Ram's high beams, the snow flew horizontally, a storm of daggers.

  Mr. Gray sat motionless. Jonesy's hands slid off the wheel and clumped to either side of Jonesy's body like birds shot out of the sky. At last he muttered, "Where is it?"

  His left hand rose, fumbled at the doorhandle, and at last pulled it up. He swung a leg out, then fell to Jonesy's knees in a snowdrift as the howling wind snatched the door out of his hand. He got up again and floundered around to the front of the truck, his jacket rippling around him and the legs of his jeans snapping like sails in a gale. The wind-chill was well below zero (in the Tracker Brothers' office, the temperature went from cool to cold in the space of a few seconds), but the redblack cloud which now inhabited most of Jonesy's brain and drove Jonesy's body could not have cared less.

  "Where is it?" Mr. Gray screamed into the howling mouth of the storm. "Where's the fucking STAND-PIPE?"

  There was no need for Jonesy to shout; storm or no storm, Mr. Gray would hear even a whisper.

  "Ha-ha, Mr. Gray," he said. "Hardy-fucking-har. Looks like the joke's on you. The Standpipe's been gone since 1985."

  6

  Jonesy thought that if Mr. Gray had remained still, he would have done a full-fledged pre-schooler's tantrum, perhaps right down to the rolling around in the snow and the kicking of the feet; in spite of his best efforts not to, Mr. Gray was bingeing on Jonesy's emotional chemistry set, as helpless to stop now that he had started as an alcoholic with a key to McDougal's Bar.

  Instead of throwing a fit or having a snit, he thrust Jonesy's body across the bald top of the hill and toward the squat stone pedestal that stood where he had expected to find the storage facility for the city's drinking water: seven hundred thousand gallons of it. He fell in the snow, floundered back up, limped forward on Jonesy's bad hip, fell again and got up again, all the time spitting Beaver's litany of childish curses into the gale: doodlyfuck, kiss my bender, munch my meat, bite my bag, shit in your fuckin hat and wear it backward, Bruce. Coming from Beaver (or Henry, or Pete), these had always been amusing. Here, on this deserted hill, screamed into the teeth of the storm by this lunging, falling monster that looked like a human being, they were awful.

  He, it, whatever Mr. Gray was, at last reached the pedestal, which stood out clearly enough in the glow cast by the Ram's headlights. It had been built to a child's height, about five feet, and of the plain rock which had shaped so many New England stone walls. On top were two figures cast in bronze, a boy and a girl with their hands linked and their heads lowered, as if in prayer or in grief.

  The pedestal was drifted to most of its height in snow, but the top of the plaque screwed to the front was visible. Mr. Gray fell to Jonesy's knees, scraped snow away, and read this:

  TO THOSE LOST IN THE STORM

  MAY 31, 1985

  AND TO THE CHILDREN

  ALL THE CHILDREN

  LOVE FROM BILL, BEN, BEV, EDDIE, RICHIE,

  STAN, MIKE

  THE LOSERS' CLUB

  Spray-painted across it in jagged red letters, also perfectly visible in the truck's headlights, was this further message:

  7

  Mr. Gray knelt looking at this for nearly five minutes, ignoring the creeping numbness in Jonesy's extremities. (And why would he take care? Jonesy was just your basic rental job, drive it as hard as you want and butt out your cigarettes on the floormat.) He was trying to make sense of it. Storm? Children? Losers? Who or what was Pennywise? Most of all, where was the Standpipe, which Jonesy's memories had insisted was here?

  At last he got up, limped back to the truck, got in, and turned up the heater. In the blast of hot air, Jonesy's body began to shake. Soon enough, Mr. Gray was back at the locked door of the office, demanding an explanation.

  "Why do you sound so angry?" Jonesy asked mildly, but he was smiling. Could Mr. Gray sense that? "Did you expect me to help you? Come on, pal--I don't know the specifics, but I have a pretty good idea what the overall plan is: twenty years from now and the whole planet is one big redheaded ball, right? No more hole in the ozone layer, but no more people, either."

  "Don't you smartass me! Don't you dare!"
>
  Jonesy fought back the temptation to taunt Mr. Gray into another tantrum. He didn't believe his unwelcome guest would be capable of huffing down the door between them no matter how angry he became, but what sense was there in putting that idea to the test? And besides, Jonesy was emotionally exhausted, his nerves jumping and his mouth full of a burnt-copper taste.

  "How can it not be here?"

  Mr. Gray brought one hand down on the center of the steering wheel. The horn honked. Lad the border collie raised his head and looked at the man behind the wheel with large, nervous eyes. "You can't lie to me! I have your memories!"

  "Well . . . I did get a few. Remember?"

  "Which ones? Tell me."

  "Why should I?" Jonesy asked. "What'll you do for me?"

  Mr. Gray fell silent. Jonesy felt him accessing various files. Then, suddenly, smells began to waft into the room from under the door and through the heating and cooling vent. They were his favorite aromas: popcorn, coffee, his mother's fish chowder. His stomach immediately began to roar.

  "Of course I can't promise you your mother's chowder," Mr. Gray said. "But I'll feed you. And you're hungry, aren't you?"

  "With you driving my body and pigging out on my emotions, it'd be a wonder if I wasn't," Jonesy replied.

  "There's a place south of here--Dysart's. According to you, it's open twenty-four hours a day, which is a way of saying all the time. Or are you lying about that, too?"

  "I never lied," Jonesy replied. "As you said, I can't. You've got the controls, you've got the memory banks, you've got everything but what's in here."

  "Where is there? How can there be a there?"

  "I don't know," Jonesy said truthfully. "How do I know you'll feed me?"

  "Because I have to," Mr. Gray said from his side of the door, and Jonesy realized Mr. Gray was also being truthful. If you didn't pour gas into the machine from time to time, the machine stopped running. "But if you satisfy my curiosity, I'll feed you the things you like. If you don't . . ."

  The smells from under the door changed, became the greenly assaultive odor of broccoli and brussels sprouts.

  "All right," Jonesy said. "I'll tell you what I can, and you feed me pancakes and bacon at Dysart's. Breakfast twenty-four hours a day, you know. Deal?"

  "Deal. Open the door and we'll shake on it."

  Jonesy was surprised into a smile--it was Mr. Gray's first attempt at humor, and really not such a bad one. He glanced into the rearview mirror and saw an identical smile on the mouth which was no longer his. That was a little creepy.

  "Maybe we'll skip the handshake part," he said.

  "Tell me."

  "Yes, but a word of warning--break a promise to me, and you'll never get to make another one."

  "I'll keep it in mind."

  The truck sat at the top of Standpipe Hill, rocking slightly on its springs, its headlamps blazing out cylinders of snow-filled light, and Jonesy told Mr. Gray what he knew. It was, he thought, the perfect place for a scary story.

  8

  The years of 1984 and '85 were bad ones in Derry. In the summer of 1984, three local teenagers had thrown a gay man into the Canal, killing him. In the ten months which followed, half a dozen children had been murdered, apparently by a psychotic who sometimes masqueraded as a clown.

  "Who is this John Wayne Gacey?" Mr. Gray asked. "Was he the one who killed the children?"

  "No, just someone from the midwest who had a similar modus operandi," Jonesy said. "You don't understand many of the cross-connections my mind makes, do you? Bet there aren't many poets out where you come from."

  Mr. Gray made no reply to this. Jonesy doubted if he knew what a poet was. Or cared.

  "In any case," Jonesy said, "the last bad thing to happen was a kind of freak hurricane. It hit on May thirty-first, 1985. Over sixty people died. The Standpipe blew over. It rolled down that hill and into Kansas Street." He pointed to the right of the truck, where the land sloped sharply away into the dark.

  "Almost three quarters of a million gallons of water ran down Upmile Hill, then into downtown, which more or less collapsed. I was in college by then. The storm happened during my Finals Week. My Dad called and told me about it, but of course I knew--it was national news."

  Jonesy paused, thinking, looking around the office which was no longer bare and dirty but nicely furnished (his subconscious had added both a couch that he had at home and an Eames chair he'd seen in the Museum of Modern Art catalogue, lovely but out of his financial reach) and really quite pleasant . . . certainly nicer than the blizzardy world his body's usurper was currently having to deal with.

  "Henry was in school, too. Harvard. Pete was bumming around the West Coast, doing his hippie thing. Beaver was trying a junior college downstate. Majoring in hashish and video games, is what he said later." Only Duddits had been here in Derry when the big storm blew through . . . but Jonesy discovered he didn't want to speak Duddits's name.

  Mr. Gray said nothing, but Jonesy got a clear sense of his impatience. Mr. Gray cared only about the Standpipe. And how Jonesy had fooled him.

  "Listen, Mr. Gray--if there was any fooling going on, you did it to yourself. I got a few of the DERRY boxes, that's all, and brought them in here while you were busy killing that poor soldier."

  "The poor soldiers came in ships from the sky and massacred all of my kind that they could find."

  "Spare me. You guys didn't come here to welcome us into the Galactic Book Circle."

  "Would things have been any different if we had?"

  "You can also spare me the hypotheticals," Jonesy said. "After what you did to Pete and the Army guy, I could care less about having an intellectual discussion with you."

  "We do what we have to do."

  "That might be, but if you expect me to help you, you're mad."

  The dog was looking at Jonesy with even more unease, apparently not used to masters who held animated conversations with themselves.

  "The Standpipe fell over in 1985--sixteen years ago--but you stole this memory?"

  "Basically, yeah, although I don't think you'd have much luck with that in a court of law, since the memories were mine to begin with."

  "What else have you stolen?"

  "That's for me to know and you to think about."

  There was a hard and ill-tempered thump at the door. Jonesy was once more reminded of the story about The Three Little Pigs. Huff and puff, Mr. Gray; enjoy the dubious pleasures of rage.

  But Mr. Gray had apparently left the door.

  "Mr. Gray?" Jonesy called. "Hey, don't go 'way mad, okay?"

  Jonesy guessed that Mr. Gray might be off on another information search. The Standpipe was gone but Derry was still here; ergo, the town's water had to be coming from somewhere. Did Jonesy know the location of that somewhere?

  Jonesy didn't. He had a vague memory of drinking a lot of bottled water after coming back from college for the summer, but that was all. Eventually water had started coming out of their taps again, but what was that to a twenty-one-year-old whose biggest concern had been getting into Mary Shratt's pants? The water came, you drank it. You didn't worry about where it came from as long as it didn't give you the heaves or the squitters.

  A sense of frustration from Mr. Gray? Or was that just his imagination? Jonesy most sincerely hoped not.

  This had been a good one . . . what the four of them, in the days of their misspent youth, would undoubtedly have called "a fuckin pisser."

  9

  Roberta Cavell woke up from some unpleasant dream and looked to her right, half-expecting to see only darkness. But the comforting blue numbers were still glowing from the clock by her bed, so the power hadn't gone out. That was pretty amazing, considering the way the wind was howling.

  1:04 A.M., the blue numbers said. Roberta turned on the bedside lamp--might as well use it while she could--and drank some water from her glass. Was it the wind that had awakened her? The bad dream? It had been bad, all right, something about aliens with deathrays and ev
eryone running, but she didn't think that was it, either.

  Then the wind dropped, and she heard what had waked her: Duddits's voice from downstairs. Duddits . . . singing? Was that possible? She didn't see how, considering the terrible afternoon and evening the two of them had put in.

  "Eeeyer-eh!" for most of the hours between two and five--Beaver's dead! Duddits seemingly inconsolable, finally bringing on a nosebleed. She feared these. When Duddits started bleeding, it was sometimes impossible to get him stopped without taking him to the hospital. This time she had been able to stop it by pushing cotton-wads into his nostrils and then pinching his nose high up, between the eyes. She had called Dr. Briscoe to ask if she could give Duddits one of his yellow Valium tablets, but Dr. Briscoe was off in Nassau, if you please. Some other doctor was on call, some whitecoat johnny who had never seen Duddits in his life, and Roberta didn't even bother to call him. She just gave Duddits the Valium, painted his poor dry lips and the inside of his mouth with one of the lemon-flavored glycerine swabs that he liked--the inside of his mouth was always developing cankers and ulcers. Even when the chemo was over, these persisted. And the chemo was over. None of the doctors--not Briscoe, not any of them--would admit it, and so the plastic catheter stayed in, but it was over. Roberta would not let them put her boy through that hell again.

  Once he'd taken his pill, she got in bed with him, held him (being careful of his left side, where the indwelling catheter hid under a bandage), and sang to him. Not Beaver's lullaby, though. Not today.

  At last he had begun to quiet, and when she thought he was asleep, she had gently pulled the cotton-wads from his nostrils. The second one stuck a little, and Duddits's eyes had opened--that beautiful flash of green. His eyes were his true gift, she sometimes thought, and not that other business . . . seeing the line and all that went with it.

  "Umma?"

  "Yes, Duddie."

  "Eeeyer in hen?"

  She felt such sorrow at that, and at the thought of Beaver's absurd leather jacket, which he had loved so much and finally worn to tatters. If it had been someone else, anyone else but one of his four childhood friends, she would have doubted Duddie's premonition. But if Duddits said Beaver was dead, then Beaver almost certainly was.