Dreamcatcher (35 page)

Inside Hole in the Wall, the fungus (or mildew, or whatever it was) had gone forward appreciably even during the short time Henry had been in the shed. The Navajo rug was now covered side to side, with not even the slightest pattern showing through. There were patches on the couch, the counter between the kitchen and the dining area, and on the seats of two of the three stools which stood on the living-room side of the counter. A crooked capillary of red-gold fuzz ran up one leg of the dining-room table, as if following the line of a spill, and Henry was reminded of how ants will congregate on even the thinnest track of spilled sugar. Perhaps the most distressing thing of all was the red-gold fuzz of cobweb hanging high over the Navajo rug. Henry looked at it fixedly for several seconds before realizing what it really was: Lamar Clarendon's dreamcatcher. Henry didn't think he would ever know exactly what had happened here, but of one thing he was sure: the dreamcatcher had snared a real nightmare this time.

You aren't really going any farther in here, are you? Now that you've seen how fast it grows? Jonesy
looked
all right when he went by, but he
wasn't
all right, and you know it. You felt it. So . . . you aren't really going on, are you?

“I think so,” Henry said. The doubled thickness of masks bobbed on his face when he spoke. “If it gets hold of me . . . why, I'll just have to kill myself.”

Laughing like Stubb in
Moby-Dick,
Henry moved farther into the cabin.

4

With one exception, the fungus grew in thin mats and clumps. The exception was in front of the bathroom door, where there was an actual hill of fungus, all of it matted together and growing upward in the doorway, bearding both jambs to a height of at least four feet. This hill-like clump of growth seemed to be lying over some grayish, spongy growth medium. On the side facing the living room, the gray stuff split in two, making a V-shape that reminded Henry unpleasantly of splayed legs. As if someone had died in the doorway and the fungus had overgrown the corpse. Henry recalled an offprint from med school, some article quickly scanned in the search for something else. It had contained photographs, one of them a gruesome medical examiner's shot he had never quite forgotten. It showed a murder victim dumped in the woods, the nude body discovered after approximately four days. There had been toadstools growing from the nape of the neck, the creases at the backs of the knees, and from the cleft of the buttocks.

Four days, all right. But this place had been clean this morning, only . . .

Henry glanced at his watch and saw that it had
stopped at twenty till twelve. It was now Eastern Standard No Time At All.

He turned and peeked behind the door, suddenly convinced that something was lurking there.

Nah. Nothing but Jonesy's Garand, leaning against the wall.

Henry started to turn away, then turned back again. The Garand looked clear of the goo, and Henry picked it up. Loaded, safety on, one in the chamber. Good. Henry slung it over his shoulder and turned back toward the unpleasant red lump growing outside the bathroom door. The smell of ether, mingled with something sulfurous and even more unpleasant, was strong in here. He walked slowly across the room toward the bathroom, forcing himself forward a step at a time, afraid (and increasingly certain) that the red hump with the leglike extrusions was all that remained of his friend Beaver. In a moment he would see the straggly remains of the Beav's long black hair or his Doc Martens, which Beaver called his “lesbian solidarity statement.” The Beav had gotten the idea that Doc Martens were a secret sign by which lesbians recognized each other, and no one could talk him out of this. He was likewise convinced that people named Rothschild and Goldfarb ran the world, possibly from a bedrock-deep bunker in Colorado. Beaver, whose preferred expression of surprise was fuck me Freddy.

But there was absolutely no way of telling if the lump in the doorway had once been the Beav, or indeed if it had once been anyone at all. There was only that suggestive shape. Something glinted in the spongy
mass of growth and Henry leaned a little closer, wondering even as he did it if microscopic bits of the fungus were already growing on the wet, unprotected surfaces of his eyes. The thing he spotted turned out to be the bathroom doorknob. Off to one side, sporting its own fuzz of growth, was a roll of friction tape. He remembered the mess scattered across the surface of the worktable out back, the yanked-open drawers. Had this been what Jonesy had been out there looking for? A goddam roll of tape? Something in his head—maybe the click, maybe not—said it was. But why? In God's name, why?

In the last five months or so, as the suicidal thoughts came more frequently and visited for longer and longer periods of time, chatting in their pidgin language, Henry's curiosity had pretty much deserted him. Now it was raging, as if it had awakened hungry. He had nothing to feed it. Had Jonesy wanted to tape the door shut? Yeah? Against what? Surely he and the Beav must have known it wouldn't work against the fungus, which would just send its fingers creeping under the door.

Henry looked into the bathroom and made a low grunting sound. Whatever obscene craziness had gone on, it had started and ended in there—he had no doubt of it. The room was a red cave, the blue tiles almost completely hidden under drifts of the stuff. It had grown up the base of the sink and the toilet, as well. The seat's lid was back against the tank, and although he couldn't be positive—there was too much overgrowth to be positive—he thought that
the ring itself had been broken inward. The shower curtain was now a solid red-gold instead of filmy blue; most of it had been torn off the rings (which had grown their own vegetable beards) and lay in the tub.

Jutting from the edge of the tub, also overgrown with fungus, was a boot-clad foot. The boot was a Doc Marten, Henry was sure of it. He had found Beaver after all, it seemed. Memories of the day they had rescued Duddits suddenly filled him, so bright and clear it might have been yesterday. Beaver wearing his goofy old leather jacket, Beaver taking Duddits's lunchbox and saying
You like this show? But they never change their clothes!
And then saying—

“Fuck me Freddy,” Henry told the overgrown cabin. “That's what he said, what he
always
said.” Tears running from his eyes and down his cheeks. If it was just wetness the fungus wanted—and judging by the jungle growing out of the toilet-bowl, it liked wetness just fine—it could land on him and have a feast.

Henry didn't much care. He had Jonesy's rifle. The fungus could start on him, but he could make sure that he was long gone before it ever got to the dessert course. If it came to that.

It probably would.

5

He was sure he'd seen a few rug-remnants heaped up in one corner of the shed. Henry debated going out and getting them. He could lay them down on the bathroom
floor, walk over them, and get a better look into the tub. But to what purpose? He knew that was Beaver, and he had no real desire to see his old friend, author of such witticisms as
Kiss my bender,
being overgrown by red fungus as the pallid corpse in that long-ago medical offprint had been growing its own colony of toadstools. If it might have answered some of his questions about what had happened, yes, perhaps. But Henry didn't think that likely.

Mostly what he wanted was to get out of here. The fungus was creepy, but there was something else. An even creepier sensation that he was not alone.

Henry backed away from the bathroom door. There was a paperback on the dining table, a pattern of dancing devils with pitchforks on its cover. One of Jonesy's, no doubt, already growing its own little colony of crud.

He became aware of a whickering noise from the west, one that quickly rose to a thunder. Helicopters, and not just one, this time. A lot. Big ones. They sounded as if they were coming in at rooftop level, and Henry ducked without even being aware of it. Images from a dozen Vietnam War movies filled his head and he was momentarily sure that they would open up with their machine-guns, spraying the house. Or maybe they'd hose it down with napalm.

They passed over without doing either, but came close enough to rattle the cups and dishes on the kitchen shelves. Henry straightened up as the thunder began to fade, becoming first a chatter and then a harmless drone. Perhaps they had gone off to join the
animal slaughter at the east end of Jefferson Tract. Let them. He was going to get the fuck out of here and—

And what? Exactly what?

While he was thinking this question over, there was a sound from one of the two downstairs bedrooms. A rustling sound. This was followed by a moment of silence, just long enough for Henry to decide it was his imagination pulling a little more overtime. Then there came a series of low clicks and chitters, almost the sound of a mechanical toy—a tin monkey or parrot, maybe—on the verge of running down. Gooseflesh broke out all over Henry's body. The spit dried up in his mouth. The hairs on the back of his neck began to straighten in bunches.

Get out of here, run!

Before he could listen to that voice and let it get a hold on him, he crossed to the bedroom door in big steps, unshouldering the Garand as he went. The adrenaline dumped into his blood, and the world stood forth brightly. Selective perception, that unacknowledged gift to the safe and cozy, fell away and he saw every detail: the trail of blood which ran from bedroom to bathroom, a discarded slipper, that weird red mold growing on the wall in the shape of a handprint. Then he went through the door.

It was on the bed, whatever it was; to Henry it looked like a weasel or a woodchuck with its legs amputated and a long, bloody tail strung out behind it like an afterbirth. Only no animal he'd ever seen—with the possible exception of the moray eel at the Boston Seaquarium—had such disproportionately large black
eyes. And another similarity: when it yawned open the rudimentary line that was its mouth, it revealed a nest of shocking fangs, as long and thin as hatpins.

Behind it, pulsing on the blood-soaked sheet, were a hundred or more orange-and-brown eggs. They were the size of large marbles and coated with a murky, snotlike slime. Within each Henry could see a moving, hairlike shadow.

The weasel-thing rose up like a snake emerging from a snake-charmer's basket and chittered at him. It lurched on the bed—Jonesy's bed—but seemed unable to move much. Its glossy black eyes glared. Its tail (except Henry thought it might actually be some sort of gripping tentacle) lashed back and forth, then laid itself over as many of the eggs as it could reach, as if protecting them.

Henry realized he was saying the same word,
no,
over and over in a monotonous drone, like a helpless neurotic who has been loaded up on Thorazine. He shouldered the rifle, aimed, and tracked the thing's repulsive wedge of a head as it twitched and dodged.
It knows what this is, it knows at least that much,
Henry thought coldly, and then he squeezed the trigger.

It was close range and the creature wasn't up to much in the way of evasion; either laying its eggs had exhausted it or it wasn't doing well in the cold—with the main door open, Hole in the Wall had gotten quite cold indeed. The report was very loud in the closed room, and the thing's upraised head disintegrated in a liquid splatter that blew back against the wall in strings and clots. Its blood was the same red-gold as the fungus.
The decapitated body tumbled off the bed and onto a litter of clothes Henry didn't recognize: a brown coat, an orange flagman's vest, a pair of jeans with cuffs (none of them had ever worn cuffed jeans; in junior high school, those who did had been branded shitkickers). Several of the eggs tumbled off with the body. Most landed on either the clothes or the litter of Jonesy's books and remained whole, but a couple hit the floor and broke open. Cloudy stuff like spoiled eggwhite oozed out, about a tablespoonful from each egg. Within it were those hairs, writhing and twisting and seeming to glare at Henry with black eyes the size of pinheads. Looking at them made him feel like screaming.

He turned and walked jerkily out of the room on legs with no more feeling in them than the legs of a table. He felt like a puppet being manipulated by someone who means well but has just begun to learn his craft. He had no real idea where he was going until he reached the kitchen and bent over the cabinet under the sink.

“I am the eggman, I am the eggman, I am the walrus! Goo-goo-joob!”

He didn't sing this but declaimed it in a loud, hortatory voice he hadn't realized was in his repertoire. It was the voice of a ham actor from the nineteenth century. That idea called up an image—God knew why—of Edwin Booth dressed as d'Artagnan, plumed hat and all, quoting from the lyrics of John Lennon, and Henry uttered two loud laugh-syllables—
Ha! Ha!

I'm going insane,
he thought . . . but it was okay. Better d'Artagnan reciting “I Am the Walrus” than the
image of that thing's blood splattering onto the wall, or the mold-covered Doc Marten sticking out of the bathtub, or, worst of all, those eggs splitting open and releasing a load of twitching hairs with eyes. All those eyes looking at him.

He moved aside the dish detergent and the floor-bucket, and there it was, the yellow can of Sparx barbecue lighter fluid. The inept puppeteer who had taken him over advanced Henry's arm in a series of jerks, then clamped his right hand on the Sparx can. He carried it back across the living room, pausing long enough to take the box of wooden matches from the mantel.

“I am he and you are me and we are all together!” he declaimed, and stepped briskly back into Jonesy's bedroom before the terrified person inside his head could seize the controls, turn him, and make him run away. That person wanted to make him run until he fell down unconscious. Or dead.

The eggs on the bed were also splitting open. Two dozen or more of those hairs were crawling around on the blood-soaked sheet or squirming on Jonesy's pillow. One raised its nub of a head and chittered at Henry, a sound almost too thin and high-pitched to be heard.