Dreamcatcher (67 page)

They walk across Strawford Park, following a line
only Duddits and Pete can see while a man only Henry can see follows along behind them. At the north end of the park is a rickety board fence with a sign on it:
D.B.&A. R.R. PROPERTY
KEEP OUT!
Kids have been ignoring this sign for years, and it's been years since the Derry, Bangor, and Aroostook actually ran freights along the spur through The Barrens, anyway. But they see the train-tracks when they push through a break in the fence; they are down at the bottom of the slope, gleaming rustily in the sun.

The slope is steep, a-riot with poison sumac and poison ivy, and halfway down they find Josie Rinkenhauer's big plastic purse. It is old now and sadly battered—mended in several places with friction tape—but Henry would know that purse anywhere.

Duddits pounces on it happily, yanks it open, peers inside. “ArbyEN!” he announces, and pulls them out. Pete, meanwhile, has foraged on, bent over at the waist, grim as Sherlock Holmes on the trail of Professor Moriarty. And it is Pete Moore who actually finds her, looking wildly around at the others from a filthy concrete drainpipe that pokes out of the slope and tangled foliage:
“She's in here!”
Pete screams deliriously. Except for two flaring patches of color on his cheeks, his face is as pale as paper.
“Guys, I think she's in here!”

There is an ancient and incredibly complex system of drains and sewers beneath Derry, a town which exists in what was once swampland shunned even by the Micmac Indians who lived all around it. Most of the sewer-system was built in the thirties, with New Deal money, and most of it will collapse in 1985, during
the big storm that will flood the town and destroy the Derry Standpipe. Now the pipes still exist. This one slopes downward as it bores into the hill. Josie Rinkenhauer ventured in, fell, then slid on fifty years' worth of dead leaves. She went down like a kid on a slide and lies at the bottom. She has exhausted herself in her efforts to climb back up the greasy, crumbling incline; she has eaten the two or three cookies she had in the pocket of her pants and for the last series of endless hours—twelve, perhaps fourteen—has only lain in the reeking darkness, listening to the faint hum of the outside world she cannot reach and waiting to die.

Now at the sound of Pete's voice, she raises her head and calls with all of her remaining strength:
“Help mee! I can't get out! Pleeease, help meee!”

It never occurs to them that they should go for an adult—perhaps for Officer Nell, who patrols this neighborhood. They are crazy to get her out; she has become their responsibility. They won't let Duddits in, they maintain at least that much sanity, but the rest of them create a chain into the dark without so much as thirty seconds' discussion: Pete first, then the Beav, then Henry, then Jonesy, the heaviest, as their anchor.

In this fashion they crawl into the sewage-smelling dark (there's the stench of something else, too, something old and nasty beyond belief), and before he's gotten ten feet Henry finds one of Josie's sneakers in the muck. He puts it in a back pocket of his jeans without even thinking about it.

A few seconds later, Pete calls back over his shoulder: “Whoa, stop.”

The girl's weeping and pleas for help are very loud now, and Pete can actually see her sitting at the bottom of the leaf-lined slope. She's peering up at them, her face a smudged white circle in the gloom.

They stretch their chain farther, being as careful as they can despite their excitement. Jonesy has got his feet braced against a huge chunk of fallen concrete. Josie reaches up . . . gropes . . . cannot quite touch Pete's outstretched hand. At last, when it seems they must admit defeat, she scrambles a little way up. Pete grabs her scratched and filthy wrist.

“Yeah!”
he screams triumphantly.
“Gotcha!”

They pull her carefully back up the pipe toward where Duddits is waiting, holding up her purse in one hand and the two dolls in the other, shouting in to Josie not to worry, not to worry because he's got BarbieKen. There's sunlight, fresh air, and as they help her out of the pipe—

15

There was no telephone in the Humvee—two different radios but no telephone. Nevertheless, a phone rang loudly, shattering the vivid memory Henry had spun between them and scaring the hell out of both of them.

Owen jerked like a man coming out of a deep sleep and the Humvee lost its tenuous hold on the road, first skidding and then going into a slow and ponderous spin, like a dinosaur dancing.

“Holy fuck—”

He tried to turn into the skid. The wheel only spun, turning with sick ease, like the wheel of a sloop that has lost its rudder. The Humvee went backward down the single treacherous lane that was left on the southbound side of I-95, and at last fetched up askew in the snowbank on the median side, headlights opening a cone of snowy light back in the direction they had come.

Brring! Brring! Brring!
Out of thin air.

It's in my head,
Owen thought.
I'm projecting it, but I think it's actually in my head, more goddam telep—

There was a pistol on the seat between them, a Glock. Henry picked it up, and when he did, the ringing stopped. He put the muzzle against his ear with his entire fist wrapped around the gunbutt.

Of course,
Owen thought.
Makes perfect sense. He got a call on the Glock, that's all. Happens all the time.

“Hello,” Henry said. Owen couldn't hear the reply, but his companion's tired face lit in a grin. “Jonesy! I
knew
it was you!”

Who else would it be?
Owen wondered.
Oprah Winfrey?

“Where—”

Listening.

“Did he want Duddits, Jonesy? Is that why . . .” Listening again. Then: “The
Standpipe?
Why . . . Jonesy?
Jonesy?
”

Henry held the pistol against the side of his head a moment longer, then looked at it without seeming to realize what it was. He laid it on the seat again. The smile had gone.

“He hung up. I think the other one was coming back. Mr. Gray, he calls him.”

“He's alive, your buddy, but you don't look happy about it.” It was Henry's
thoughts
that weren't happy about it, but there was no longer any need to say this. Happy at first, the way you were always happy when someone you liked gave you a little ringy-dingy on the old Glock, but not happy now. Why?

“He—
they
—are south of Derry. They stopped to eat at a truck stop called Dysart's . . . only Jonesy called it Dry Farts, like when we were kids. I don't think he even knew it. He sounded scared.”

“For himself? For us?”

Henry gave Owen a bleak look. “He says he's afraid Mr. Gray means to kill a State Trooper and take his cruiser. I think that was mostly it.
Fuck.
” Henry struck his leg with his fist.

“But he's alive.”

“Yeah,” Henry said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “He's immune. Duddits . . . you understand about Duddits now?”

No. I doubt if you do, either, Henry . . . but maybe I understand enough.

Henry lapsed into thoughtspeak—it was easier.
Duddits changed us
—being
with Duddits changed us. When Jonesy got hit by that car in Cambridge, it changed him again. The brainwaves of people who undergo near-death experiences often change, I saw a
Lancet
article on that just last year. For Jonesy it must mean this Mr. Gray can use him without infecting him or wearing him out. And it's also enabled him to keep from being subsumed, at least so far.

“Subsumed?”

Co-opted. Gobbled up.
Then aloud: “Can you get us out of this snowbank?”

I think so.

“That's what I was afraid of,” Henry said glumly.

Owen turned to him, face greenish in the glow of the dashboard instruments. “What the fuck is
wrong
with you?”

Christ, don't you understand? How many ways do I have to tell you this?
“He's still
in
there!
Jonesy!
”

For the third or fourth time since his and Henry's run had started, Owen was forced to leap over the gap between what his head knew and what his heart knew. “Oh. I see.” He paused. “He's alive. Thinking and alive. Making
phone calls,
even.” He paused again. “Christ.”

Owen tried the Hummer in low forward and got about six inches before all four wheels began to spin. He geared reverse and drove them backward into the snowbank—
crunch.
But the Hummer's rear end came up a little on the packed snow, and that was what Owen wanted. When he went back to low, they'd come out of the snowbank like a cork out of a bottle. But he paused a moment with the brake pressed under the sole of his boot. The Hummer had a rough, powerful idle that shook the whole frame. Outside, the wind snarled and howled, sending snow-devils skating down the deserted turnpike.

“You know we have to do it, don't you?” Owen said. “Always assuming we're able to catch him in the first place. Because whatever the specifics might be,
the general plan is almost certainly general contamination. And the math—”

“I can do the math,” Henry said. “Six billion people on Spaceship Earth, versus one Jonesy.”

“Yep, those are the numbers.”

“Numbers can lie,” Henry said, but he spoke bleakly. Once the numbers got big enough, they didn't,
couldn't
lie. Six billion was a very big number.

Owen let off the brake and laid on the accelerator. The Humvee rolled forward—a couple of feet, this time—started to spin, then caught hold and came roaring out of the snowbank like a dinosaur. Owen turned it south.

Tell me what happened after you pulled the kid out of the drainpipe.

Before Henry could do so, one of the radios under the dash crackled. The voice that followed came through loud and clear—its owner might have been sitting there in the Hummer with them.

“Owen? You there, buck?”

Kurtz.

16

It took them almost an hour to get the first sixteen miles south of Blue Base (the
former
Blue Base), but Kurtz wasn't worried. God would take care of them, he was quite sure of that.

Freddy Johnson was driving them (the happy quartet was packed into another snow-equipped Humvee). Perlmutter was in the passenger seat, handcuffed to
the doorhandle. Cambry was likewise cuffed in back. Kurtz sat behind Freddy, Cambry behind Pearly. Kurtz wondered if his two press-ganged laddie-bucks were conspiring in telepathic fashion. Much good it would do them, if they were. Kurtz and Freddy both had their windows rolled down, although it rendered the Humvee colder than old Dad's outhouse in January; the heater was on high but simply couldn't keep up. The open windows were a necessity, however. Without them, the atmosphere of the Hummer would quickly become uninhabitable, as sulfurous as a poisoned coalmine. Only the smell on top wasn't sulfur but ether. Most of it seemed to be coming from Perlmutter. The man kept shifting in his seat, sometimes groaning softly under his breath. Cambry was hot with Ripley and growing like a wheat field after a spring rain, and he had that smell—Kurtz was getting it even with his mask on. But Pearly was the chief offender, shifting in his seat, trying to fart noiselessly (the one-cheek sneak, they had called such a maneuver back in the dim days of Kurtz's childhood), trying to pretend that suffocating smell wasn't coming from him. Gene Cambry was growing Ripley; Kurtz had an idea that Pearly, God love him, was growing something else.

To the best of his ability, Kurtz concealed these thoughts behind a mantra of his own:
Davis and Roberts, Davis and Roberts, Davis and Roberts.

“Would you please stop that?” Cambry asked from Kurtz's right. “You're driving me crazy.”

“Me too,” Perlmutter said. He shifted in his seat
and a low
pffft
sound escaped him. The sound of a deflating rubber toy, perhaps.

“Oh, man, Pearly!” Freddy cried. He unrolled his window further, letting in a swirl of snow and cold air. The Humvee skated and Kurtz braced himself, but then it steadied again. “Would you
please
quit with the fuckin anal perfume?”

“I beg your pardon,” Perlmutter said stiffly. “If you're insinuating that I broke wind, then I have to tell you—”

“I'm not insinuatin
anything,
” Freddy said. “I'm telling you to quit stinkin the place up or—”

Since there was no satisfactory way in which Freddy could complete this threat—for the time being they needed two telepaths, a primary and a backup—Kurtz broke in smoothly. “The story of Edward Davis and Franklin Roberts is an instructive one, because it shows there's really nothing new under the sun. This was in Kansas, back when Kansas really
was
Kansas . . .”

Kurtz, a pretty decent storyteller, took them back to Kansas during the Korean conflict. Ed Davis and Franklin Roberts had owned similar smallhold farms not far from Emporia, and not far from the farm owned by Kurtz's family (which had not quite been named Kurtz). Davis, never bolted together tightly in the first place, grew increasingly certain that his neighbor, the offensive Roberts, was out to steal his farm. Roberts was spreading tales about him in town, Ed Davis claimed. Roberts was poisoning his crops, Roberts was putting pressure on the Bank of Emporia to foreclose the Davis farm.

What Ed Davis had done, Kurtz said, was to catch him a rabid raccoon and put it in the henhouse—
his own
henhouse. The coon had slaughtered those chickens right and left, and when he was plumb wore out with killing, praise God, Farmer Davis had blown Mr. Coon's black-and-gray-striped head off.