"Cooked!" he yelled back.
"I will make it so, sire. Would you be a love and get the baby? That hot dog's rapidly turning into a dirt-dog. Take it away from him and give him to his Dad."
Henry went down the steps, fished Noel out from under the table, and carried him back toward the porch.
"Ennie!" Noel cried brightly. He was now eighteen months old.
Henry stopped, feeling a chill spread up his back. It was as if he had been hailed by a ghost.
"Eee foo, Ennie! Eee foo!" Noel bopped Henry briskly on the nose with his dirt-dog to underline the thrust of his thesis.
"I'll wait for my burger, thanks," he said, and resumed walking.
"No eee my foo?"
"Ennie eee his own foo, honeybunch. But maybe I ought to have that nasty thing. You can have another one as soon as they're ready." He tweezed the dirt-dog out of Noel's little hand, then plumped him down in Jonesy's lap and resumed his seat. By the time Jonesy had finished swabbing mustard and ketchup out of his son's belly-button, the kid was almost asleep.
"What did you mean, 'Sure we knew'?" Jonesy asked.
"Ah, Jonesy, come on. Maybe we left him, or tried, but do you think Duddits ever left us? After all that happened, do you really believe that?"
Very slowly, Jonesy shook his head.
"Some of it was growing up--growing apart--but some of it was the Richie Grenadeau thing. That worked on us the way the business of the Rapeloews' serving platter worked on Owen Underhill."
Jonesy didn't need to ask what this meant; in Wyoming, they'd had all the time they needed to catch up on each other's story.
"There's an old poem about a man trying to outrun God," Henry said. " 'The Hound of Heaven,' it's called. Duddits wasn't God--God forbid--but he was our hound. We ran as fast and as far as we could, but--"
"We could never run off the dreamcatcher, could we?" Jonesy said. "None of us could do that. And then they came. The byrum. Stupid spores in spaceships built by some other race. Is that what they were? All they were?"
"I don't think we'll ever know. Only one question got answered last fall. For centuries we've looked up at the stars and asked ourselves if we're alone in the universe. Well, now we know we're not. Big whoop, huh? Gerritsen . . . do you remember Gerritsen?"
Jonesy nodded. Of course he remembered Terry Gerritsen. Navy psychologist, in charge of the Wyoming debriefing team, always joking about how typical it was that Uncle Sammy would post him to a place where the nearest water was Lars Kilborn's cow-wallow. Gerritsen and Henry had become close--if not quite friends, only because the situation didn't quite allow it. Jonesy and Henry had been well-treated in Wyoming, but they hadn't been guests. Still, Henry Devlin and Terry Gerritsen were professional colleagues, and such things made a difference.
"Gerritsen started by assuming two questions had been answered: that we're not alone in the universe and that we're not the only intelligent beings in the universe. I labored hard to convince him that the second postulate was based on faulty logic, a house built on sand. I don't think I entirely succeeded in getting through, but I may have planted a seed of doubt, at least. Whatever else the byrum may be, they're not shipbuilders, and the race that built the ships may be gone. May in fact be byrum themselves by now."
"Mr. Gray wasn't stupid."
"Not once he got inside your head, that much I agree with. Mr. Gray was you, Jonesy. He stole your emotions, your memories, your taste for bacon--"
"I don't eat it anymore."
"I'm not surprised. He also stole your basic personality. That included the subconscious kinks. Whatever there is in you that liked the Mario Bava horror movies and the Sergio Leone westerns, whatever it is that got off on the fear and the violence . . . man, Mr. Gray loved that shit. And why wouldn't he? Those things are primitive survival tools. As the last of his kind in a hostile environment, he grabbed every damned tool he could lay his hands on."
"Bullshit." Jonesy's dislike of this idea was plain on his face.
"It's not. At Hole in the Wall, you saw what you expected to see, which was an X-Files-slash-Close Encounters of the Third Kind alien. You inhaled the byrus . . . I have no doubt there was at least that much physical contact . . . but you were completely immune to it. As, we now know, at least fifty percent of the human race seems to be. What you caught was an intention . . . a kind of blind imperative. Fuck, there's no word for it, because there's no word for them. But I think it got in because you believed it was there."
"You are telling me," Jonesy said, looking at Henry over the top of his sleeping son's head, "that I almost destroyed the human race because I had a hysterical pregnancy?"
"Oh, no," Henry said. "If that had been all, it would have passed off. Would have amounted to no more than a . . . a fugue. But in you, the idea of Mr. Gray stuck like a fly in a spiderweb."
"It stuck in the dreamcatcher."
"Yes."
They fell quiet. Soon Carla would call them and they would eat hot dogs and hamburgers, potato salad and watermelon, beneath the blue shield of the infinitely permeable sky.
"And will you say it was all coincidence?" Jonesy asked. "That they just happened to come down in the Jefferson Tract and I just happened to be there? And not just me, either. You and Peter and Beav. Plus Duddits, just a couple of hundred miles to the south, don't forget that. Because it was Duddits who held us together."
"Duddits was always a sword with two edges," Henry said. "Josie Rinkenhauer on one--Duddits the finder, Duddits the savior. Richie Grenadeau on the other--Duddits the killer. Only Duddits needed us to help him kill. I'm sure of that. We were the ones with the deeper subconscious layer. We supplied the hate and the fear--the fear that Richie really would get us, the way he promised he would. We always had more of the dark stuff than Duds. His idea of being mean was counting your crib backward, and that was more in the spirit of fun than anything else. Still . . . do you remember the time Pete pulled Duddits's hat over his eyes and Duds walked into the wall?"
Jonesy did, vaguely. Out at the mall, that had been. When they had been young and the mall had been the place to go. Same shit, different day.
"For quite awhile after that, Pete lost whenever we played the Duddits game. Duddits always counted him backward, and none of us tipped to it. We probably thought it was just coincidence, but in light of everything I know now, I tend to doubt that."
"You think even Duddits knew payback's a bitch?"
"He learned it from us, Jonesy."
"Duddits gave Mr. Gray his foothold. His mind-hold."
"Yeah, but he also gave you a stronghold--a place where you could hide from Mr. Gray. Don't forget that."
No, Jonesy thought, he would never forget that.
"All of it on our end started with Duddits," Henry said. "We've been odd, Jonesy, ever since we knew him. You know it's true. The things with Richie Grenadeau were only the big things, the ones that stood out. If you look back over your life, you'll see other things. I'm sure of it."
"Defuniak," Jonesy murmured.
"Who's that?"
"The kid I caught cheating just before my accident. I caught him even though I wasn't there on the day the test was given."
"You see? But in the end, it was Duddits who broke the little gray son of a bitch. I'll tell you something else: I think Duddits saved my life at the end of East Street. I think it's entirely possible that when Kurtz's sidekick looked into the back of the Humvee at us--the first time, I'm talking about--he had a little Duddits in his head saying 'Don't worry, old hoss, go on about your business, they dead.' "
But Jonesy had not left his earlier thought. "And are we supposed to believe that the byrum connecting with us--us, of all the people in the world--was just random coincidence? Because that's what Gerritsen believed. He never said it in so many words, but his take on it was clear enough."
"Why not? There are scientists, brilliant men like Stephen Jay Gould, who believe that our own species exists thanks to an even longer and more improbable ch
ain of coincidences."
"Is that what you believe?"
Henry lifted his hands. He hardly knew how to reply without invoking God, who had crept back into his life over these last few months. By the back door, as it were, and in the dead of many sleepless nights. But did one have to invoke that old deus ex machina to make sense of this?
"What I believe is that Duddits is us, Jonesy. L'enfant c'est moi . . . toi . . . tout le monde. Race, species, genus; game, set, and match. We are, in our sum, Duddits, and all our noblest aspirations come down to no more than keeping track of the yellow lunchbox and learning to put our shoes on the right way--fit wha, fit neek. Our wickedest motions, in a cosmic sense, come down to no more than counting someone's crib, pegging it backward, then playing dumb about it."
Jonesy was regarding him with fascination. "That's either inspiring or horrible. I can't tell which."
"And it doesn't matter."
Jonesy thought about this, then asked: "If we're Duddits, who sings to us? Who sings the lullaby, helps us go to sleep when we're sad and scared?"
"Oh, God still does that," Henry said, and could have kicked himself. There it was, out in spite of all his intentions.
"And did God keep that last weasel out of Shaft 12? Because if that thing had gotten in the water, Henry--"
Technically, the weasel that had incubated inside of Perlmutter had actually been the last, but it was a fine point, a hair that needed no splitting.
"It would have caused trouble, I don't dispute that; for a couple of years, whether or not to tear down Fenway Park would have been the least of Boston's concerns. But destroy us? I don't think so. We were a new thing to them. Mr. Gray knew it; those tapes of you under hypnosis--"
"Don't talk about those." Jonesy had listened to two of them, and believed doing so had been the biggest mistake he'd made during his time in Wyoming. Listening to himself speak as Mr. Gray--under deep hypnosis to become Mr. Gray--had been like listening to a malevolent ghost. There were times when he thought he might be the only man on earth who truly understood what it was to be raped. Some things were better forgotten.
"Sorry."
Jonesy waved his hand to show it was okay--not a problem--but he had paled considerably.
"All I'm saying is that, to a greater or lesser degree, we are a species living in the dreamcatcher. I hate the way that sounds, phony transcendentalism, rings on the ear like pure tin, but we don't have the right words for this part of it, either. We may have to invent some eventually, but in the meantime, dreamcatcher will have to do."
Henry turned in his seat. Jonesy did the same, shifting Noel a little bit on his lap. A dreamcatcher hung over the door to the cabin. Henry had brought it as a house present, and Jonesy had put it up at once, like a Catholic peasant nailing a crucifix to the door of his cottage during a time of vampires.
"Maybe they were just drawn to you," Henry said. "To us. The way flowers turn to follow the sun, or the way iron filings line up when they feel the pull of a magnet. We can't tell for sure, because the byrum is so different from us."
"Will they be back?"
"Oh yes," Henry said. "Them or others."
He looked up at the blue sky of this late-summer day. Somewhere in the distance, toward the Quabbin Reservoir, an eagle screamed. "I think you can take that to the bank. But not today."
"Guys!" Carla shouted. "Lunch is ready!"
Henry took Noel from Jonesy. For a moment their hands touched, their eyes touched, and their minds touched--for a moment they saw the line. Henry smiled. Jonesy smiled back. Then they walked down the steps and across the lawn side by side, Jonesy limping, Henry with the sleeping child in his arms, and for that moment the only darkness was their shadows trailing behind them on the grass.
Lovell, Maine
May 29, 2000
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I was never so grateful to be writing as during my time of work (November 16, 1999-May 29, 2000) on Dreamcatcher. I was in a lot of physical discomfort during those six and a half months, and the book took me away. The reader will see that pieces of that physical discomfort followed me into the story, but what I remember most is the sublime release we find in vivid dreams.
A good many people helped me. One was my wife, Tabitha, who simply refused to call this novel by its original title, which was Cancer. She considered it both ugly and an invitation to bad luck and trouble. Eventually I came around to her way of thinking, and she no longer refers to it as "that book" or "the one about the shit-weasels."
I'm also indebted to Bill Pula, who took me four-wheeling at the Quabbin Reservoir, and to his cohorts, Peter Baldracci, Terry Campbell, and Joe McGinn. Another group of people, who would perhaps prefer not to be named, took me out behind the Air National Guard base in a Humvee, and foolishly let me drive, assuring me I couldn't get the beast stuck. I didn't, but it was close. I came back mudsplattered and happy. They would also want me to tell you that Hummers are better in mud than in snow; I have fictionalized their capabilities in that regard to suit the course of my fiction.
Thanks are also in order to Susan Moldow and Nan Graham at Scribner, to Chuck Verrill, who edited the book, and to Arthur Greene, who agented it. And I mustn't forget Ralph Vicinanza, my foreign rights agent, who found at least six ways to say "There is no infection here" in French.
One final note. This book was written with the world's finest word processor, a Waterman cartridge fountain pen. To write the first draft of such a long book by hand put me in touch with the language as I haven't been for years. I even wrote one night (during a power outage) by candlelight. One rarely finds such opportunities in the twenty-first century, and they are to be savored.
And to those of you who have come so far, thank you for reading my story.
Stephen King
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June 2014
DET.-RET.
13
The waiter returns to ask if there will be anything else. Hodges starts to say no, then orders another cup of coffee. He just wants to sit here awhile, savoring double happiness: it wasn't Mr. Mercedes and it was Donnie Davis, the sanctimonious cocksucker who killed his wife and then had his lawyer set up a reward fund for information leading to her whereabouts. Because, oh Jesus, he loved her so much and all he wanted was for her to come home so they could start over.
He also wants to think about Olivia Trelawney, and Olivia Trelawney's stolen Mercedes. That it was stolen no one doubts. But in spite of all her protests to the contrary, no one doubts that she enabled the thief.
Hodges remembers a case that Isabelle Jaynes, then freshly arrived from San Diego, told them about after they brought her up to speed on Mrs. Trelawney's inadvertent part in the City Center Massacre. In Isabelle's story it was a gun. She said she and her partner had been called to a home where a nine-year-old boy had shot and killed his four-year-old sister. They had been playing with an automatic pistol their father had left on his bureau.
"The father wasn't charged, but he'll carry that for the rest of his life," she said. "This will turn out to be the same kind of thing, wait and see."
That was a month before the Trelawney woman swallowed the pills, maybe less, and nobody on the Mercedes Killer case had given much of a shit. To them--and him--Mrs. T. had just been a self-pitying rich lady who refused to accept her part in what had happened.
The Mercedes SL was downtown when it was stolen, but Mrs. Trelawney, a widow who lost her wealthy husband to a heart attack, lived in Sugar Heights, a suburb as rich as its name where lots of gated drives led up to fourteen-and twenty-room McMansions. Hodges grew up in Atlanta, and whenever he drives through Sugar Heights he thinks of a ritzy Atlanta neighborhood called Buckhead.
Mrs. T.'s elderly mother, Elizabeth Wharton, lived in an apartment--a very nice one, with rooms as big as a political candidate's promises--in an upscale condo
cluster on Lake Avenue. The crib had space enough for a live-in housekeeper, and a private nurse came three days a week. Mrs. Wharton had advanced scoliosis, and it was her Oxycontin that her daughter had filched from the apartment's medicine cabinet when she decided to step out.
Suicide proves guilt. He remembers Lieutenant Morrissey saying that, but Hodges himself has always had his doubts, and lately those doubts have been stronger than ever. What he knows now is that guilt isn't the only reason people commit suicide.
Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.
14
Two motor patrol cops found the Mercedes an hour after the killings. It was behind one of the warehouses that cluttered the lakeshore.
The huge paved yard was filled with rusty container boxes that stood around like Easter Island monoliths. The gray Mercedes was parked carelessly askew between two of them. By the time Hodges and Huntley arrived, five police cars were parked in the yard, two drawn up nose-to-nose behind the car's back bumper, as if the cops expected the big gray sedan to start up by itself, like that old Plymouth in the horror movie, and make a run for it. The fog had thickened into a light rain. The patrol car roofracks lit the droplets in conflicting pulses of blue light.
Hodges and Huntley approached the cluster of motor patrolmen. Pete Huntley spoke with the two who had discovered the car while Hodges did a walk-around. The front end of the SL500 was only slightly crumpled--that famous German engineering--but the hood and the windshield were spattered with gore. A shirtsleeve, now stiffening with blood, was snagged in the grille. This would later be traced to August Odenkirk, one of the victims. There was something else, too. Something that gleamed even in that morning's pale light. Hodges dropped to one knee for a closer look. He was still in that position when Huntley joined him.
"What the hell is that?" Pete asked.
"I think a wedding ring," Hodges said.
So it proved. The plain gold band belonged to Francine Reis, thirty-nine, of Squirrel Ridge Road, and was eventually returned to her family. She had to be buried with it on the third finger of her right hand, because the first three fingers of the left had been torn off. The ME guessed this was because she raised it in an instinctive warding-off gesture as the Mercedes came down on her. Two of those fingers were found at the scene of the crime shortly before noon on April tenth. The index finger was never found. Hodges thought that a seagull--one of the big boys that patrolled the lakeshore--might have seized it and carried it away. He preferred that idea to the grisly alternative: that an unhurt City Center survivor had taken it as a souvenir.