Dreamcatcher (56 page)

It was the dreamcatcher.

The dreamcatcher from Hole in the Wall.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. “I'm
decorating
the place.”

Of course he was, why not? Didn't even prisoners on Death Row decorate their cells? And if he could add a desk and a dreamcatcher and a Trimline phone in his sleep, then maybe—

Jonesy closed his eyes and concentrated. He tried to call up an image of his study in Brookline. For a moment this gave him trouble, because a question intruded: if his memories were out there, how could he still have them in here? The answer, he realized, was probably simple. His memories were still in his head, where they had always been. The cartons in the storeroom were what Henry might call an externalization, his way of visualizing all the stuff to which Mr. Gray had access.

Never mind. Pay attention to what needs doing. The study in Brookline. See the study in Brookline.

“What are you doing?” Mr. Gray demanded. The smarmy self-confidence had left his voice. “What the doodlyfuck are you doing?”

Jonesy smiled a little at that—he couldn't help it—but he held onto his image. Not just the study, but one wall of the study . . . there by the door leading into the little half-bath . . . yes, there it was. The Honeywell thermostat. And what was he supposed to say? Was there a magic word, something like alakazam?

Yeah.

With his eyes still closed and a trace of a smile still on his sweat-streaming face, Jonesy whispered: “Duddits.”

He opened his eyes and looked at the dusty, nondescript wall.

The thermostat was there.

3

“Stop it!” Mr. Gray shouted, and even as Jonesy crossed the room he was amazed by the familiarity of that voice; it was like listening to one of his own infrequent tantrums (the wild disorder of the kids' rooms was a likely flashpoint) on a tape recorder. “You just stop it!
This has got to stop!
”

“Kiss my bender, beautiful,” Jonesy replied, and grinned. How many times had his kids wished they could say something like that to him, when he started quacking? Then a nasty thought occurred to him. He'd probably never see the inside of his Brookline duplex again, but if he did, it would be through eyes which now belonged to Mr. Gray. The cheek the kids kissed (“Eeu, scratchy, Daddy!” Misha would say) would now be Mr. Gray's cheek. The lips Carla kissed would likewise be Mr. Gray's. And in bed, when she gripped him and guided him into her—

Jonesy shivered, then reached for the thermostat . . . which, he saw, was set to 120. The only one in the world that went so high, no doubt. He backed it half a turn to the left, not knowing what to expect, and was delighted to feel an immediate waft of cool air on his
cheeks and brow. He turned his face gratefully up to catch the breeze more fully, and saw a heating/cooling grate set high in one wall. One more fresh touch.

“How are you doing that?” Mr. Gray shouted through the door. “Why doesn't your body incorporate the byrus? How can you be there at all?”

Jonesy burst out laughing. There was simply no way to hold it in.

“Stop that,” Mr. Gray said, and now his voice was chilly. This was the voice Jonesy had used when he had given Carla his ultimatum: rehab or divorce, hon, you choose. “I can do more than just turn up the heat, you know. I can burn you out. Or make you blind yourself.”

Jonesy remembered the pen going into Andy Janas's eye—that terrible thick popping sound—and winced. Yet he recognized a bluff when he heard one.
You're the last and I'm your delivery-system,
Jonesy thought.
You won't beat the machinery up too much. Not until your mission's accomplished, anyhow.

He walked slowly back to the door, reminding himself to be wary . . . because, as Gollum had said of Bilbo Baggins, it was tricksy, precious, aye, very tricksy.

“Mr. Gray?” he asked softly.

No answer.

“Mr. Gray, what do you look like now? What do you look like when you're yourself? A little less gray and a little more pink? A couple more fingers on your hands? Little bit of hair on your head? Starting to get some toesies and some testes?”

No answer.

“Starting to look like me, Mr. Gray? To
think
like me? You don't like that, right? Or do you?”

Still no answer, and Jonesy realized Mr. Gray was gone. He turned and hurried across to the window, aware of even more changes: a Currier and Ives woodcut on one wall, a Van Gogh print on another—
Marigolds,
a Christmas gift from Henry—and on this desk the Magic 8-Ball he kept on his desk at home. Jonesy barely noticed these things. He wanted to see what Mr. Gray was up to, what had engaged his attention now.

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.”