Dreamcatcher (57 page)

“Don't you smartass me! Don't you dare!”

Jonesy fought back the temptation to taunt Mr. Gray into another tantrum. He didn't believe his unwelcome guest would be capable of huffing down the door between them no matter how angry he became, but what sense was there in putting that idea to the test? And besides, Jonesy was emotionally exhausted, his nerves jumping and his mouth full of a burnt-copper taste.

“How can it not be here?”

Mr. Gray brought one hand down on the center of the steering wheel. The horn honked. Lad the border collie raised his head and looked at the man behind the wheel with large, nervous eyes. “You can't lie to me! I have your memories!”

“Well . . . I
did
get a few. Remember?”

“Which ones? Tell me.”

“Why should I?” Jonesy asked. “What'll you do for me?”

Mr. Gray fell silent. Jonesy felt him accessing various files. Then, suddenly, smells began to waft into the room from under the door and through the heating and cooling vent. They were his favorite aromas: popcorn, coffee, his mother's fish chowder. His stomach immediately began to roar.

“Of course I can't promise you your mother's chowder,” Mr. Gray said. “But I'll feed you. And you're hungry, aren't you?”

“With you driving my body and pigging out on my emotions, it'd be a wonder if I wasn't,” Jonesy replied.

“There's a place south of here—Dysart's. According to you, it's open twenty-four hours a day, which is a way of saying all the time. Or are you lying about that, too?”

“I never lied,” Jonesy replied. “As you said, I can't. You've got the controls, you've got the memory banks, you've got everything but what's in here.”

“Where
is
there? How can there
be
a there?”

“I don't know,” Jonesy said truthfully. “How do I know you'll feed me?”

“Because I
have
to,” Mr. Gray said from his side of the door, and Jonesy realized Mr. Gray was also being truthful. If you didn't pour gas into the machine from time to time, the machine stopped running. “But if you satisfy my curiosity, I'll feed you the things you like. If you don't . . .”

The smells from under the door changed, became the greenly assaultive odor of broccoli and brussels sprouts.

“All right,” Jonesy said. “I'll tell you what I can, and you feed me pancakes and bacon at Dysart's. Breakfast twenty-four hours a day, you know. Deal?”

“Deal. Open the door and we'll shake on it.”

Jonesy was surprised into a smile—it was Mr. Gray's first attempt at humor, and really not such a bad one. He glanced into the rearview mirror and saw an identical smile on the mouth which was no longer his.
That
was a little creepy.

“Maybe we'll skip the handshake part,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“Yes, but a word of warning—break a promise to me, and you'll never get to make another one.”

“I'll keep it in mind.”

The truck sat at the top of Standpipe Hill, rocking slightly on its springs, its headlamps blazing out cylinders of snow-filled light, and Jonesy told Mr. Gray what he knew. It was, he thought, the perfect place for a scary story.

8

The years of 1984 and '85 were bad ones in Derry. In the summer of 1984, three local teenagers had thrown a gay man into the Canal, killing him. In the ten months which followed, half a dozen children had been murdered, apparently by a psychotic who sometimes masqueraded as a clown.

“Who is this John Wayne Gacey?” Mr. Gray asked. “Was he the one who killed the children?”

“No, just someone from the midwest who had a similar
modus operandi,
” Jonesy said. “You don't understand many of the cross-connections my mind makes, do you? Bet there aren't many poets out where you come from.”

Mr. Gray made no reply to this. Jonesy doubted if he knew what a poet was. Or cared.

“In any case,” Jonesy said, “the last bad thing to happen was a kind of freak hurricane. It hit on May thirty-first, 1985. Over sixty people died. The Standpipe blew over. It rolled down that hill and into Kansas Street.” He pointed to the right of the truck, where the land sloped sharply away into the dark.

“Almost three quarters of a million gallons of water ran down Upmile Hill, then into downtown, which more or less collapsed. I was in college by then. The storm happened during my Finals Week. My Dad called and told me about it, but of course I knew—it was national news.”

Jonesy paused, thinking, looking around the office which was no longer bare and dirty but nicely furnished (his subconscious had added both a couch that he had at home and an Eames chair he'd seen in the Museum of Modern Art catalogue, lovely but out of his financial reach) and really quite pleasant . . . certainly nicer than the blizzardy world his body's usurper was currently having to deal with.

“Henry was in school, too. Harvard. Pete was bumming around the West Coast, doing his hippie
thing. Beaver was trying a junior college downstate. Majoring in hashish and video games, is what he said later.” Only Duddits had been here in Derry when the big storm blew through . . . but Jonesy discovered he didn't want to speak Duddits's name.

Mr. Gray said nothing, but Jonesy got a clear sense of his impatience. Mr. Gray cared only about the Standpipe. And how Jonesy had fooled him.

“Listen, Mr. Gray—if there was any fooling going on, you did it to yourself. I got a few of the
DERRY
boxes, that's all, and brought them in here while you were busy killing that poor soldier.”

“The poor soldiers came in ships from the sky and massacred all of my kind that they could find.”

“Spare me. You guys didn't come here to welcome us into the Galactic Book Circle.”

“Would things have been any different if we had?”

“You can also spare me the hypotheticals,” Jonesy said. “After what you did to Pete and the Army guy, I could care less about having an intellectual discussion with you.”

“We do what we have to do.”

“That might be, but if you expect me to help you, you're mad.”

The dog was looking at Jonesy with even more unease, apparently not used to masters who held animated conversations with themselves.

“The Standpipe fell over in 1985—sixteen years ago—but you stole this memory?”

“Basically, yeah, although I don't think you'd have
much luck with that in a court of law, since the memories were mine to begin with.”

“What else have you stolen?”

“That's for me to know and you to think about.”

There was a hard and ill-tempered thump at the door. Jonesy was once more reminded of the story about The Three Little Pigs. Huff and puff, Mr. Gray; enjoy the dubious pleasures of rage.

But Mr. Gray had apparently left the door.

“Mr. Gray?” Jonesy called. “Hey, don't go 'way mad, okay?”

Jonesy guessed that Mr. Gray might be off on another information search. The Standpipe was gone but Derry was still here; ergo, the town's water had to be coming from
somewhere.
Did Jonesy know the location of that somewhere?

Jonesy didn't. He had a vague memory of drinking a lot of bottled water after coming back from college for the summer, but that was all. Eventually water had started coming out of their taps again, but what was that to a twenty-one-year-old whose biggest concern had been getting into Mary Shratt's pants? The water came, you drank it. You didn't worry about where it came from as long as it didn't give you the heaves or the squitters.

A sense of frustration from Mr. Gray? Or was that just his imagination? Jonesy most sincerely hoped not.

This had been a good one . . . what the four of them, in the days of their misspent youth, would undoubtedly have called “a fuckin pisser.”

9

Roberta Cavell woke up from some unpleasant dream and looked to her right, half-expecting to see only darkness. But the comforting blue numbers were still glowing from the clock by her bed, so the power hadn't gone out. That was pretty amazing, considering the way the wind was howling.

1:04
A.M
., the blue numbers said. Roberta turned on the bedside lamp—might as well use it while she could—and drank some water from her glass. Was it the wind that had awakened her? The bad dream? It had been bad, all right, something about aliens with deathrays and everyone running, but she didn't think that was it, either.

Then the wind dropped, and she heard what had waked her: Duddits's voice from downstairs. Duddits . . .
singing?
Was that possible? She didn't see how, considering the terrible afternoon and evening the two of them had put in.

“Eeeyer-eh!”
for most of the hours between two and five—
Beaver's dead!
Duddits seemingly inconsolable, finally bringing on a nosebleed. She feared these. When Duddits started bleeding, it was sometimes impossible to get him stopped without taking him to the hospital. This time she
had
been able to stop it by pushing cotton-wads into his nostrils and then pinching his nose high up, between the eyes. She had called Dr. Briscoe to ask if she could give Duddits one of his yellow Valium tablets, but Dr. Briscoe was off in Nassau,
if you please. Some other doctor was on call, some whitecoat johnny who had never seen Duddits in his life, and Roberta didn't even bother to call him. She just gave Duddits the Valium, painted his poor dry lips and the inside of his mouth with one of the lemon-flavored glycerine swabs that he liked—the inside of his mouth was always developing cankers and ulcers. Even when the chemo was over, these persisted. And the chemo
was
over. None of the doctors—not Briscoe, not any of them—would admit it, and so the plastic catheter stayed in, but it was over. Roberta would not let them put her boy through that hell again.

Once he'd taken his pill, she got in bed with him, held him (being careful of his left side, where the indwelling catheter hid under a bandage), and sang to him. Not Beaver's lullaby, though. Not today.

At last he had begun to quiet, and when she thought he was asleep, she had gently pulled the cotton-wads from his nostrils. The second one stuck a little, and Duddits's eyes had opened—that beautiful flash of green. His eyes were his true gift, she sometimes thought, and not that other business . . . seeing the line and all that went with it.

“Umma?”

“Yes, Duddie.”

“Eeeyer in hen?”

She felt such sorrow at that, and at the thought of Beaver's absurd leather jacket, which he had loved so much and finally worn to tatters. If it had been someone else,
anyone
else but one of his four childhood
friends, she would have doubted Duddie's premonition. But if Duddits said Beaver was dead, then Beaver almost certainly was.

“Yes, honey, I'm sure he's in heaven. Now go to sleep.”

For another long moment those green eyes had looked into hers, and she had thought he would start crying again—indeed, one tear, large and perfect,
did
roll down his stubbly cheek. It was so hard for him to shave now, sometimes even the Norelco started little cuts that dribbled for hours. Then his eyes had closed again and she had tiptoed out.

After dark, while she was making him oatmeal (all but the blandest foods were now apt to set off vomiting, another sign that the end was nearing), the whole nightmare started again. Terrified already by the increasingly strange news coming out of the Jefferson Tract, she had raced back to his room with her heart hammering. Duddits was sitting upright again, whipping his head from side to side in a child's gesture of negation. The nosebleed had re-started, and at each jerk of his head, scarlet drops flew. They spattered his pillowcase, his signed photograph of Austin Powers (
“Groovy, baby!”
was written across the bottom), and the bottles on the table: mouthwash, Compazine, Percocet, the multi-vitamins that seemed to do absolutely no good, the tall jar of lemon swabs.

This time it was Pete he claimed was dead, sweet (and not terribly bright) Peter Moore. Dear God, could it be true? Any of it? All of it?

The second bout of hysterical grief hadn't gone on as
long, probably because Duddits was already exhausted from the first. She had gotten the nosebleed stanched again—lucky her—and had changed his bed, first helping him to his chair by the window. There he'd sat, looking out into the renewing storm, occasionally sobbing, sometimes heaving great, watery sighs that hurt her inside. Just
looking
at him hurt her: how thin he was, how pale he was, how
bald
he was. She gave him his Red Sox hat, signed across the visor by the great Pedro Martinez (
you get so many nice things when you're dying,
she sometimes mused), thinking his head would be cold there, so close to the glass, but for once Duddits wouldn't put it on. He only held it on his lap and looked out into the dark, his eyes big and unhappy.

At last she had gotten him back into bed, where once again her son's green eyes looked up at her with all their terrible dying brilliance.

“Eeet in hen, ooo?”

“I'm sure he is.” She hadn't wanted to cry, desperately hadn't wanted to—it might set him off again—but she could feel the tears brimming. Her head was pregnant with them, and the inside of her nose tasted of the sea each time she pulled in breath.

“In hen wif Eeeyer?”

“Yes, honey.”

“I eee Eeeyer n Eeet in hen?”

“Yes, you will. Of course you will. But not for a long while.”

His eyes had closed. Roberta had sat beside him on the bed, looking down at her hands, feeling sadder than sad, more alone than lonely.

Now she hurried downstairs and yes, it was singing, all right. Because she spoke such fluent Duddits (and why not? it had been her second language for over thirty years), she translated the rolling syllables without even thinking much about them:
Scooby-Dooby-Doo, where are you? We got some work to do now. I've been telling you, Scooby-Doo, we need a helping hand, now.