The moon. Yes, that. A bloody orange hophead moon, so suddenly different from the northern lights and the killing cold she had just left behind her. It had been sexy summer-crazy, that moon, darkly delicious, lighting the stone cleft of valley near the pool better than she might have wished. She could see it now almost as well as then because she had cut through the purple curtain, had ripped it most righteously, but memory was only memory and Lisey had an idea hers had taken her almost as far as it could. A little more, maybe--another picture or two from her own personal booksnake--but not much, and then she would actually have to go back there, to Boo'ya Moon.
The question was, could she?
Then another question occurred to her: What if he's one of the shrouded ones now?
For an instant, an image struggled to come clear in Lisey's mind. She saw scores of silent figures that might have been corpses wrapped in old-fashioned winding sheets. Only they were sitting up. And she thought they were breathing.
A shudder rolled through her. It hurt her lacerated breast in spite of the Vicodin she had on board, but there was no way to stop that shudder until it had run its course. When it had, she found herself able to face practical considerations again. The foremost was whether she could get over to that other world on her own . . . because she had to go, shrouded ones or not.
Scott had been able to do it on his own, and had been able to take his brother Paul. As an adult he had been able to take Lisey from The Antlers. The crucial question was what had happened seventeen years later, on that cold January night in 1996.
"He wasn't entirely gone," she murmured. "He squeezed my hand." Yes, and the thought had crossed her mind that somewhere he might have been squeezing with every ounce of his force and being, but did that mean he had taken her?
"I yelled at him, too." Lisey actually smiled. "Told him if he wanted to come home he had to take me to where he was . . . and I always thought he did . . ."
Bullshit, little Lisey, you never thought about it at all. Did you? Not until today, when you almost literally got your tit in the wringer and had to. So if you're thinking about it, really think about it. Did he pull you to him that night? Did he?
She was on the verge of concluding it was one of those questions, like the chicken-or-egg thing, to which there was no satisfactory answer, when she remembered his saying Lisey, you're a champ at this!
Say she had done it by herself in 1996. Even so, Scott had been alive, and that squeeze of his hand, feeble as it had been, was enough to tell her he was there on the other side, making a conduit for her--
"It's still there," she said. She was gripping the handle of the shovel again. "That way through is still there, it must be, because he prepared for all of this. Left me a smucking bool hunt to get me ready. Then, yesterday morning, in bed with Amanda . . . that was you, Scott, I know it was. You said I had a blood-bool coming . . . and a prize . . . a drink, you said . . . and you called me babyluv. So where are you now? Where are you when I need you to get me over?"
No answer but the ticking of the clock on the wall.
Close your eyes. He'd said that, too. Visualize. See as well as you can. It will help. Lisey, you're a champ at this.
"I better be," she told the empty, sunny, Scottless bedroom. "Oh honey, I just better be."
If Scott Landon had had a fatal flaw, it might have been thinking too much, but that had never been her problem. If she had stopped to consider the situation on that hot day in Nashville, Scott almost certainly would have died. Instead she had simply acted, and saved his life with the shovel she now held.
I trite to come here with Daddy's shovel from the shed, but it wouldn't go.
Would the silver spade from Nashville go?
Lisey thought yes. And that was good. She wanted to keep it with her. "Friends to the end," she whispered, and closed her eyes.
She was summoning her memories of Boo'ya Moon, now vivid indeed, when a disturbing question broke her deepening concentration: another troublesome thought to divert her.
What time is it there, little Lisey? Oh, not the hour, I don't mean that, but is it daytime or nighttime? Scott always knew--he said he did, anyway--but you're not Scott.
No, but she remembered one of his favorite rock 'n roll tunes: "Night Time Is the Right Time." In Boo'ya Moon, nighttime was the wrong time, when smells turned rotten and food could poison you. Nighttime was when the laughers came out--things that ran on all fours but sometimes stood up like people and looked around. And there were other things, worse things.
Things like Scott's long boy.
It's very close, honey. That's what he told her as he lay under the hot Nashville sun on the day when she had been sure he was dying. I hear it taking its meal. She had tried to tell him she didn't know what he was talking about; he had pinched her and told her not to insult his intelligence. Or her own.
Because I'd been there. Because I'd heard the laughers and believed him when he said there were worse things waiting. And there were. I saw the thing he was talking about. I saw it in 1996, when I went to Boo'ya Moon to bring him home. Just its side, but that was enough.
"It was endless," Lisey muttered, and was horrified to realize she really believed this to be the truth. It had been night in 1996. Night when she had gone to Scott's other world from the cold guest room. She had gone down the path, into the woods, into the Fairy Forest, and--
A motor exploded into life nearby. Lisey's eyes flew open and she nearly screamed. Then she relaxed again, little by little. It was only Herb Galloway, or maybe the Luttrell kid Herb sometimes hired, cutting the grass next door. This was entirely different from the bitterly cold night in January of '96 when she'd discovered Scott in the guest room, there and still breathing but gone in every other way that mattered.
She thought: Even if I could do it, I can't do it like this--it's too noisy.
She thought: The world is too much with us.
She thought: Who wrote that? And, as happened so frequently, that thought came trailing its painful little red caboose: Scott would know.
Yes, Scott would know. She thought of him in all the motel rooms, bent over a portable typewriter (SCOTT AND LISEY, THE EARLY YEARS!) and then later, with his face lit by the glow of his laptop. Sometimes with a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray beside him, sometimes with a drink, always with the curl of hair falling forgotten across his forehead. She thought of him lying on top of her in this bed, of chasing her full-tilt through that awful house in Bremen (SCOTT AND LISEY IN GERMANY!), both of them naked and laughing, horny but not really happy, while trucks and cars rumbled around and around the traffic-circle up the street. She thought of his arms around her, all the times his arms had been around her, and the smell of him, and the sandpaper rasp his cheek made against hers, and she thought she would sell her soul, yes, her immortal smucking soul, for no more than the sound of him down the hall slamming the door and then yelling Hey, Lisey, I'm home--everything the same?
Hush and close your eyes.
That was her voice, but it was almost his, a very good imitation, so Lisey closed her eyes and felt the first warm tears, almost comforting, slip out through the screen of lashes. There was a lot they didn't tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart. It's a secret, Lisey thought, and it should be, because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and it's so sad--
She didn't want to think about that sadness, nor did she want to think about her hurt breast, where the pain had begun to creep back. She turned her thoughts to Boo'ya Moon again, instead. She recalled how utterly amazing and wonderful it had been to go from the bitter subzero Maine night to that tropical place in the wink of a maiden's eye. The somehow sad texture of the air, and the silky aromas of fran
gipani and bougainvillea. She remembered the tremendous light of the setting sun and the rising moon and how, far off, that bell was ringing. That same bell.
Lisey realized that the sound of the riding mower in the Galloways' yard now seemed oddly distant. So was the blat of a passing motorcycle. Something was happening, she was almost sure of it. A spring was winding, a well was filling, a wheel was turning. Maybe the world was not too much with her, after all.
But what if you get over there and it's night? Assuming that what you feel isn't just a combination of narcotics and wishful thinking, what if you get over there and it's night, when the bad things come out? Things like Scott's long boy?
Then I'll come back here.
If you have time, you mean.
Yes, that's what I mean, if there's t--
Suddenly, shockingly, the light shining through the lids of her closed eyes changed from red to a dim purple that was almost black. It was as if a shade had been pulled. But a shade wouldn't account for the glorious mixture of smells that suddenly filled her nose: the mixed perfume of all those flowers. Nor could it account for the grass she now felt pricking her calves and naked back.
She'd made it. Gotten over. Come through.
"No," Lisey said with her eyes still shut--but it was feeble, little more than a token protest.
You know better, Lisey, Scott's voice whispered. And time is short. SOWISA, babyluv.
And because she knew that voice was absolutely right--time was indeed short--Lisey opened her eyes and sat up in her talented husband's childhood refuge.
Lisey sat up in Boo'ya Moon.
6
It was neither night nor day, and now that she was here, she wasn't surprised. She had come just before twilight on her previous two trips; was it any wonder it was just before twilight again?
The sun, brilliant orange, stood above the horizon at the end of the seemingly endless field of lupin. Looking the other way, Lisey could see the first rising arc of the moon--one far bigger than the biggest harvest moon she had ever seen in her life.
That's not our moon, is it? How can it be?
A breeze ruffled the sweaty ends of her hair, and somewhere not too far distant, that bell tinkled. A sound she remembered, a bell she remembered.
You better hurry up, don't you think?
Yes indeed. It was safe at the pool, or so Scott had said, but the way there led through the Fairy Forest, and that was not. The distance was short, but she'd do well to hurry.
She half-ran up the slope to the trees, looking for Paul's marker. At first she didn't see it, then spotted it leaning far over to one side. She didn't have time to straighten the cross . . . but took the time, anyway, because Scott would have taken the time. She set the silver spade aside for a moment (it had indeed come with her, as had the yellow knitted square) so she could use both hands. There must be weather here, because the single painstakingly printed word--PAUL--had faded to little more than a ghost.
I think I straightened it last time, too, she thought. In '96. And thought I'd like to look for the hypodermic needle, only there was no time.
Nor was there now. This was her third real trip to Boo'ya Moon. The first hadn't been so bad because she'd been with Scott and they'd gone no farther than the broken signpost reading before returning to the bedroom at The Antlers. The second time, however, in 1996, she'd had to take the path into the Fairy Forest on her own. She couldn't recall what bravery she must have summoned, not knowing how far it was to the pool or what she'd find when she got there. Not that this trip didn't have its own unique set of difficulties. She was topless, her badly gored left breast was starting to throb again, and God only knew what sort of things the smell of her blood might attract. Well, it was too late to worry about that now.
And if something does come at me, she thought, picking up the spade by its short wooden handle, one of those laughers, for instance, I'll just bop it one with Little Lisey's Trusty Maniac Swatter, Copyright 1988, Patent Pending, All Rights Reserved.
Somewhere up ahead, that bell tinkled again. Barefoot, bare-breasted, blood-smeared, wearing nothing but a pair of old denim shorts and carrying a spade with a silver scoop in her right hand, Lisey set off toward the sound along the rapidly darkening path. The pool was up ahead, surely no more than half a mile distant. There it was safe even after dark, and she would take off the few clothes she still wore, and wash herself clean.
7
It grew dim very quickly once she was under the canopy of trees. Lisey felt the urge to hurry more strongly than ever, but when the wind stirred the bell again--it was very close, now, and she knew it was hung from a branch by a bit of stout cord--she stopped, struck by a complex overlay of recall. She knew the bell was hung on a piece of cord because she had seen it on her last trip here, ten years ago. But Scott had swiped it long before that, even before they were married. She knew because she had heard it in 1979. Even then it had sounded familiar, in an unpleasant way. Unpleasant because she had hated the sound of that bell long before it had come over here to Boo'ya Moon.
"And I told him," she murmured, switching the spade to her other hand and brushing back her hair. The yellow square of delight lay over her left shoulder. Around her the sweetheart trees rustled like whispering voices. "He didn't say much, but I guess he took it to heart."
She set off again. The path dipped, then rose to the top of a hill where the trees were a little thinner and strong red light shone through them. Not quite sunset yet, then. Good. And here the bell hung, nodding from side to side just enough to produce the faintest chime. It had, once upon a time, sat beside the cash register of Pat's Pizza & Cafe in Cleaves Mills. Not the kind of bell you hit with your palm, the discreet hotel-desk species that went ding! once and then shut up, but a kind of miniature silver school bell with a handle that went ding-a-ling for as long as you wanted to keep on shaking it. And Chuckie G., the cook who was on duty most nights during the year or so Lisey had waitressed at Pat's, had loved that bell. Sometimes, she remembered telling Scott, she heard its annoying silver ding-a-ling in her dreams, along with Chuckie G. bawling, leather-lunged: Order's up, Lisey! Come on, let's hustle! Hungry people! Yes, in bed she had told Scott how much she had hated Chuckie G.'s annoying little bell, in the spring of 1979 it must have been, because not long after that the annoying little bell had disappeared. She'd never associated Scott with its disappearance, not even when she'd heard it the first time she'd been here--too many other things going on then, too much weird input--and he had never said a word about it. Then, in 1996, while searching for him, she had heard Chuckie G.'s long-lost bell again, and that time she had
(let's hustle hungry people order's up)
known it for what it was. And the whole thing had made perfect crackpot sense. Scott Landon had been the man, after all, who thought the Auburn Novelty Shop was the hardy-har capital of the universe. Why wouldn't he have thought it a fine joke to swipe the bell that so annoyed his girlfriend and bring it to Boo'ya Moon? To hang it rah-cheer beside the path for the wind to ring?
There was blood on it last time, the deep voice of memory whispered. Blood in 1996.
Yes, and it had frightened her, but she had pushed on, anyway . . . and the blood was gone now. The weather that had faded Paul's name from the marker's crosspiece had also washed the bell clean. And the stout length of cord upon which Scott had hung it twenty-seven years before (always assuming time was the same over here) had almost worn away--soon the bell would tumble to the path. Then the joke would be over.
And now intuition spoke to her as powerfully as it ever had in her life, not in words but in a picture. She saw herself laying the silver spade at the foot of the Bell Tree, and she did so without pause or question. Nor did she ask herself why; it looked too perfect lying there at the foot of the old, gnarled tree. Silver bell above, silver spade below. As to why it should be perfect . . . she might as well ask herself why Boo'ya Moon existed in the first place. She'd thought the spade had been made for her protection th
is time. Apparently not. She gave it one more look (it was all the time she could afford) and then moved on.
8
The path led her down into another fold of forest. Here the strong red light of evening had faded to dimming orange and the first of the laughers woke somewhere ahead of her in the darker reaches of the woods, its horribly human voice climbing that glass mad-ladder and making her arms break out in gooseflesh.
Hurry, babyluv.
"Yes, all right."
Now a second laugher joined the first, and although she felt more gooseflesh ripple up her bare back, she thought she was all right. Just up ahead the path curved around a vast gray rock she remembered very well. Beyond it lay a deep rock-hollow--oh yes, deep and puffickly huhyooge--and the pool. At the pool she would be safe. It was scary at the pool, but it was also safe. It--
Lisey became suddenly, queerly positive that something was stalking her, just waiting for the last of the light to drain away before making its move.
Its lunge.
Heart pounding so hard it hurt her mutilated breast, she dodged around the great gray bulk of that protruding stone. And the pool was there, lying below like a dream made real. As she looked down at that ghostly shining mirror, the last memories clicked into place, and remembering was like coming home.
9
She comes around the gray rock and forgets all about the dried smear of blood on the bell, which has so troubled her. She forgets the screaming, windy cold and brilliant northern lights she has left behind. For a moment she even forgets Scott, whom she's come here to find and bring back . . . always assuming he wants to come. She looks down at the ghostly shining mirror of the pool and forgets everything else. Because it's beautiful. And even though she's never been here before in her life, it's like coming home. Even when one of those things starts to laugh she isn't afraid, because this is safe ground. She doesn't need anyone to tell her that; she knows it in her bones, just as she knows Scott has been talking about this place in his lectures and writing about it in his books for years.