Or in her hair.
7
The path tilted and grew steeper for a few moments; the shadows grew deeper. She thought she might finally be gaining a little bit on Dooley. She didn't dare cast a glance back to see, and she prayed that Amanda wouldn't try following them. It might be safe on Sweetheart Hill, and it might be safe at the pool, but it wasn't a bit safe in these woods. Jim Dooley was far from the worst of it, either. Now she heard the faint and dreamy ring of Chuckie G.'s bell, swiped by Scott in another lifetime and hung from a tree at the top of the next rise.
Lisey saw brighter light ahead, not reddish-orange now but just a dying pink afterglow. It stole through a thinning of the trees. The path was a bit brighter, too. She could see its gentle upslope. Beyond that next rise, she remembered, it sank again, winding through even thicker forest until it reached the big rock and the pool beyond.
Can't make it, she thought. The breath tearing in and out of her throat was hot and there was the beginning of a stitch in her side. He'll catch me before I'm halfway up that hill.
It was Scott's voice that responded, laughing on top, surprisingly angry beneath. You didn't come all this way for that. Go on, babyluv--SOWISA.
SOWISA, yes. Strapping it on had never seemed more appropriate than right now. Lisey tore up the hill, hair plastered to her skull in sweaty strings, arms pumping. She breathed in huge snatches, exhaled in harsh bursts. She wished for the sweet taste in her mouth, but she'd given her last sip of the pool to the crazy smuck behind her and now what her mouth tasted of was copper and exhaustion. She could hear him closing in again, not yelling now, saving all his breath for the chase. The cramp in her side deepened. A high, sweet singing started up first in her right ear, then in both of them. The laughers cackled closer now, as if they wanted to be in at the kill. She could smell the change in the trees, how the aroma that had been sweet had grown sharp, like the smell of the ancient henna she and Darla had found in Granny D's bathroom after she died, a poison smell, and--
That's not the trees.
All the laughers had fallen silent. Now there was only the sound of Dooley ripping breath from the air as he pounded along behind her, trying to close those last few feet of distance. And what she thought of was Scott's arms sweeping around her, Scott pulling her against his body, Scott whispering Shhhh, Lisey. For your life and mine, now you must be still.
She thought: It's not lying across the path, like it was when he tried to get to the pool in '04. This time it's in its run beside the path. Like it was when I came to him during the winter of the big wind from Yellowknife.
But just as she glimpsed the bell, still hanging from that rotting length of cord, the last light of the day shining on its curve, Jim Dooley put on a final burst of speed and Lisey actually did feel his fingers slipping across the back of her shirt, hunting for purchase there, anything, a bra-strap would do. She managed to hold back the scream that rose in her throat, but it was a near thing. She bolted onward, finding a little more speed of her own, speed that probably would have done her no good if Dooley hadn't tripped again, going down with a cry--"You BITCH!"--that Lisey thought he would live to regret.
But perhaps not for long.
8
That shy tinkle came again, from what had once been
(Order's up, Lisey! Come on, let's hustle!)
the Bell Tree and was now the Bell-and-Spade Tree. And there it was, Scott's silver spade. When she had placed it here--following a powerful intuition she now understood--the laughers had been gibbering hysterically. Now the Fairy Forest was silent except for the sounds of her own tortured respiration and Dooley's gasping spew of curses. The long boy had been sleeping--dozing, at least--and Dooley's yelling had awakened it.
Maybe this was how it was supposed to go, but that did not make it easy. It was horrible to feel the awakening whisper of not-quite-alien thoughts from her undermind. They were like restless hands feeling for loose boards or testing the closed cover of a well. She found herself considering too many terrible things that had at one time or another undermined her heart: a pair of bloody teeth she'd once found on the floor of a movie-theater bathroom, two little kids crying in each other's arms outside a convenience store, the smell of her husband as he lay on his deathbed, looking at her with his burning eyes, Granny D lying dying in the chickenyard with her foot going jerk-jerk-jerk.
Terrible thoughts. Terrible images, the kind that come back to haunt you in the middle of the night when the moon is down and the medicine's gone and the hour is none.
All the bad-gunky, in other words. Just beyond those few trees.
And now--
In the always perfect, never-ending moment of now
9
Gasping, whining, her heart nothing but bloodthunder in her ears, Lisey bends to lay hold of the silver spade. Her hands, which knew their business eighteen years ago, know it as well now, even while her head fills with images of loss, pain, and heartsick despair. Dooley's coming. She hears him. He's quit cursing but she hears the approach of his respiration. It's going to be close, closer than with Blondie, even though this madman doesn't have a gun, because if Dooley manages to grab hold of her before she's able to turn--
But he doesn't. Not quite. Lisey pivots like a hitter going after a fat pitch, swinging the silver spade just as hard as she can. The bowl catches a last bloom of pink light, a fading corsage, and its speeding upper edge ticks the hanging bell on its way by. The bell says a final word--TING!--and goes flying into the gloom, trailing its bit of rotting cord after it. Lisey sees the spade carry on forward and upward, and once more she thinks Holy smuck! I really put a charge into this one! Then the flat of the blade connects with Jim Dooley's onrushing face, making not a crunch--the sound she remembers from Nashville--but a kind of muffled gonging. Dooley shrieks in surprise and agony. He is driven sideways, off the path and into the trees, flailing with his arms, trying to keep his balance. She has a moment to see that his nose is laid radically over to one side, just as Cole's was; time to see that his mouth is gushing blood from the bottom and both corners. Then there's movement from her right, not far from where Dooley is thrashing about and trying to haul himself upward. It is vast movement. For a moment the dark and fearsomely sad thoughts which inhabit her mind grow even sadder and darker; Lisey thinks they will either kill her or drive her insane. Then they shift in a slightly different direction, and as they do, the thing over there just beyond the trees also shifts. There's the complicated sound of breaking foliage, the snapping and tearing of trees and underbrush. Then, and suddenly, it's there. Scott's long boy. And she understands that once you have seen the long boy, past and future become only dreams. Once you have seen the long boy, there is only, oh dear Jesus, there is only a single moment of now drawn out like an agonizing note that never ends.
10
Almost before Lisey was aware of what was happening and surely before she was ready--although the idea of ever being ready for such a thing was a joke--suddenly it was there. The piebald thing. The living embodiment of what Scott had been talking about when he talked about the bad-gunky.
What she saw was an enormous plated side like cracked snakeskin. It came bulging through the trees, bending some and snapping others, seeming to pass right through a couple of the biggest. That was impossible, of course, but the impression never faded. There was no smell but there was an unpleasant sound, a chuffing, somehow gutty sound, and then its patchwork head appeared, taller than the trees and blotting out the sky. Lisey saw an eye, dead yet aware, black as wellwater and as wide as a sinkhole, peering through the foliage. She saw an opening in the meat of its vast questing blunt head and intuited that the things it took in through that vast straw of flesh did not precisely die but lived and screamed . . . lived and screamed . . . lived and screamed.
She herself could not scream. She was incapable of any noise at all. She took two steps backward, steps that felt weirdly calm to her. The spade, its silver bowl once more dripping with the blood of an insane
man, fell from her fingers and landed on the path. She thought, It sees me . . . and my life will never truly be mine again. It won't let it be mine.
For a moment it reared, a shapeless, endless thing with patches of hair growing in random clumps from its damp and heaving slicks of flesh, its great and dully avid eye upon her. The dying pink of the day and the waxing silver glow of moonlight lit the rest of what still lay snakelike in the shrubbery.
Then its eye turned from Lisey to the screaming, thrashing creature that was trying to back out of the little copse of trees that had entangled him, Jim Dooley with blood gushing from his broken mouth, broken nose, and one swollen eye; Jim Dooley with blood even in his hair. Dooley saw what was looking at him and screamed no more. Lisey saw him trying to cover his good eye, saw his hands fall to his sides, knew he had lost his strength, and felt a moment of pity for him in spite of everything, an instant of empathy that was gruesome in its strength and nearly unendurable in its human harmony. In that moment she might have taken it all back if it had meant only her own dying, but she thought of Amanda and tried to harden her horrified mind and heart.
The huge thing tangled in the trees poked forward almost delicately and gathered Dooley in. The flesh around the hole in its blunt snout seemed to wrinkle briefly, almost to pucker, and Lisey remembered Scott lying on the hot pavement that day in Nashville. As the low snorts and the crunching sounds began and Dooley started to voice his final, seemingly endless cries, she remembered Scott whispering, I hear it taking its meal. She remembered how he had pursed his lips in a tight O, and she recalled with perfect clarity how blood had burst from them when he made that indescribably nasty chuffing sound: fine ruby droplets which seemed to hang in the sweltering air.
She ran then, though she would have sworn she no longer knew how. She bolted back along the path toward the hill of lupin, away from the place near the Bell-and-Spade Tree where the long boy was eating Jim Dooley alive. She knew it was doing her and Amanda a favor, but she knew it was a lefthanded favor at best, because if she survived this night, she would now be free of the long boy no more than Scott had been, no, not a single day since his childhood. Now it had marked her as well, made her a part of its never-ending moment, its terrible world-spanning regard. From now on she would have to be careful, especially if she happened to wake up in the middle of the night . . . and Lisey had an idea that her nights of sound sleep were over. In the small hours she would have to steer her gaze away from mirrors, and window-glass, and especially from the curved surfaces of waterglasses, God knew why. She would have to protect herself as well as she could.
If she survived this night.
It's very close, honey, Scott had whispered as he lay shivering on the hot pavement. Very close.
Behind her, Dooley screamed as if he would never stop. Lisey thought it would drive her mad. Or that it already had.
11
Just before she emerged from the trees, Dooley's shrieking finally did cease. She didn't see Amanda. This filled Lisey with new terror. Suppose her sister had run away to who knew which point of the compass? Or suppose she was still somewhere close at hand, but curled up in a fetal position, catatonic again and concealed by the shadows?
"Amanda? Amanda?"
There was an endless moment during which she heard nothing. It was followed--God, at last!--by a rustling in the high grass to Lisey's left, and Amanda stood up. Her face, pale to begin with and painted paler by the light of the rising moon, now looked like that of a wraith. Or a harpy. She came stumbling forward, arms out, and Lisey gathered her in. Amanda was shivering. The hands at the nape of Lisey's neck were locked in a chilly knot.
"Oh Lisey, I thought he'd never stop!"
"Me either."
"And so high . . . I couldn't tell . . . they were so high . . . I hoped it was him, but I thought, 'What if it's Little? What if it's Lisey?'" Amanda began to sob against the side of Lisey's neck.
"I'm all right, Amanda. I'm here and I'm all right."
Amanda pulled her face away from Lisey's neck so she could look down into her younger sister's face. "Is he dead?"
"Yes." She would not share her intuition that Dooley might have achieved a kind of hellish immortality within the thing that had eaten him. "Dead."
"Then I want to go back! Can we go back?"
"Yes."
"I don't know if I can make a picture of Scott's study in my mind . . . I'm so upset . . ." Amanda looked around fearfully. "This isn't like Southwind at all."
"No," Lisey agreed, gathering Amanda back into her arms. "And I know you're afraid. You just do the best you can."
Lisey was actually not worried about getting back to Scott's study, back to Castle View, back to the world. She thought the problem now might be staying there. She remembered a doctor telling her once she'd have to be especially careful of her ankle after giving it a savage sprain while ice-skating. Because once you stretch those tendons, he'd said, it's ever so much easier to do it next time.
That much easier next time, right. And it had seen her. That eye, as big as a spring sinkhole, both dead and alive, had been on her.
"Lisey, you're so brave," Amanda said in a small voice. She took one final look at the sloping hill of lupin, gilded and strange in the growing light of the moon, then pressed her face against the side of Lisey's neck again.
"Keep talking like that and I'll have you back in Greenlawn tomorrow. Close your eyes."
"They are."
Lisey closed her own. For a moment she saw that blunt head that wasn't a head at all but only a maw, a straw, a funnel into blackness filled with endless swirling bad-gunky. In it she still heard Jim Dooley screaming, but the sound was now thin, and mixed with other screams. With what felt like tremendous effort, she swept the images and sounds away, replacing them with a picture of the red maple desk and the sound of Ole Hank--who else?--singing "Jambalaya." There was time to think of how at first she and Scott hadn't been able to come back when they so badly needed to with the long boy so close, time to think of
(it's the african Lisey I feel it like an anchor)
what he had said, time to wonder why that should make her think again of Amanda looking with such longing at the good ship Hollyhocks (a goodbye look if there ever was one), and then time was up. Once more she felt the air turn, and the moonlight was gone. She knew even with her eyes closed. There was the sense of taking a short, jolting fall. Then they were in the study and the study was dark because Dooley had killed the electricity, but still Hank Williams was singing--My Yvonne, sweetest one, me-oh-my-oh--because even with the power cut, Ole Hank meant to have his say.
12
"Lisey? Lisey!"
"Manda, you're crushing me, get off--"
"Lisey, are we back?"
Two women in the dark. Lying tangled together on the carpet.
"Kinfolk come to see Yvonne by the dozens . . ." Drifting out of the alcove.
"Yes, would you get the smuck off me, I can't breathe!"
"Sorry . . . Lisey, you're on my arm . . ."
"Son-of-a-gun, we'll have big fun . . . on the bayou!"
Lisey managed to roll to her right. Amanda pulled her arm free, and a moment later the weight of her body came off Lisey's midsection. Lisey gasped in a deep--and deeply satisfying--breath. As she let it out, Hank Williams quit singing in mid-phrase.
"Lisey, why is it so dark in here?"
"Because Dooley cut the power, remember?"
"He cut the lights," Amanda said reasonably. "If he'd cut the power, the TV wouldn't have been playing."
Lisey could have asked Amanda why the TV had suddenly stopped playing, but didn't bother. Other matters needed discussing. They had other fish to fry, as the saying was. "Let's go in the house."
"I'm a hundred percent down with that," Amanda said. Her fingers touched Lisey's elbow, groped down her forearm, and seized her hand. The sisters stood up together. Amanda added, in a confiding tone: "No offense, Lisey, but if I ever come here again it'll be too soon." r />
Lisey understood how Amanda felt, but her own feelings had changed. Scott's study had daunted her, no argument there. It had kept her at arm's length for two long years. But she thought the major chore which had needed doing in here was now done. She and Amanda had cleansed Scott's ghost away, kindly and--time would tell, but she was almost positive--completely.
"Come on," she said. "Let's go in the house. I'll make hot chocolate."
"And maybe a little brandy to start with?" Amanda asked hopefully. "Or don't crazy ladies get brandy?"
"Crazy ladies don't. You do."
Holding hands, they groped toward the stairs. Lisey stopped only once, when she stepped on something. She bent over and picked up a round of glass easily an inch thick. She realized it was one of the lenses from Dooley's night-vision goggles and dropped it with a grimace of disgust.
"What?" Amanda asked.
"Nothing. I'm able to see a little. How about you?"
"A little. But don't let go of my hand."
"I won't, honey."
They descended the stairs to the barn together. It took longer to do it that way, but it felt a lot safer.
13
Lisey set out her smallest juice glasses and poured them each a shot of brandy from a bottle she found at the very back of the dining room drinks cabinet. She held her glass up and clinked it against Amanda's. They were standing at the kitchen counter. Every light in the room was on, even the gooseneck lamp in the corner where Lisey scribbled checks at a child's schooldesk.
"Over the teeth," Lisey said.
"Over the gums," Amanda said.
"Look out guts, here it comes," they said together, and drank.
Amanda bent and blew out a gust of breath. When she straightened up, there were roses in her formerly pale cheeks, a line of red forming on her brow, and a tiny saddle of scarlet on the bridge of her nose. Tears stood in her eyes.