Dreamcatcher

9

The office which he had furnished so beautifully-furnished out of his mind and his memories-was now falling apart.

Jonesy limped restlessly back and forth, looking around the room, lips pressed so tightly together they were white, forehead beaded with sweat even though it had gotten damned cold in here,

This was The Fall of the Office of Jonesy instead of the House of Usher. The furnace was howling and clanking beneath him, making the floor shake. White stuff-frost crystals, maybe-puffed in through the vent and left a powdery triangular shape on the wall. Where it touched it went to work on the wood paneling, simultaneously rotting it and warping it. The pictures fell one by one, tumbling to the floor like suicides. The Eames chair-the one he’d always wanted, the very one-split in two as if it had been hacked by an invisible axe. The mahogany panels on the walls began to split and peel free like dead skin. The drawers juddered out of their places in the desk and clattered one by one to the floor. The shutters Mr Gray had installed to block his view of the outside world were vibrating and shaking, producing a steady metallic squalling that set Jonesy’s teeth on edge.

Crying out to Mr Gray, demanding to know what was going on, would be useless… and besides, Jonesy had all the information he needed. He had slowed Mr Gray down, but Mr Gray had first risen to the challenge and then above it. Viva Mr Gray, who had either reached his goal or almost reached it. As the paneling fell off the walls, he could see the dirty Sheetrock beneath: the walls of the Tracker Brothers office as four boys had seen it in 1978, lined up with their foreheads to the glass, their new chum standing behind them as bidden, waiting for them to be done with whatever it was they were doing, waiting for them to take him home. Now another wood panel tore loose, coming off the wall with a sound like tearing paper, and beneath it was a bulletin board with a single photo, a Polaroid, tacked to it. Not a beauty queen, not Tina Jean Schlossinger, but just some woman with her skirt hiked to the bottom of her panties, pretty stupid. The nice rug on the floor suddenly shrivelled like skin, revealing dirty Tracker Brothers tile beneath, and those white tadpoles, scumbags left by couples who came in here to screw beneath the disinterested gaze of the Polaroid woman who was no one, really, just an artifact of a hollow past.

He paced, lurching on his bad hip, which hadn’t hurt this badly since just after the accident, and he understood all of this, oh yes indeed, you had better believe it. His hip was full of splinters and ground glass; his shoulders and neck ached with a fierce tiredness. Mr Gray was beating his body to death as he made his final charge and there was nothing Jonesy could do about it.

The dreamcatcher was still okay. Swaying back and forth in great looping arcs, but still okay. Jonesy fixed his eyes on it. He had thought himself ready to die, but he didn’t want to go like this, not in this stinking office. Outside of it, they had once done something good, something almost noble. To die in here, beneath the dusty, indifferent gaze of the woman pinned to the bulletin board… that didn’t seem fair. Never mind the rest of the world; he, Gary Jones of Brookline, Massachusetts, once of Derry, Maine, lately of the Jefferson Tract, deserved better.

“Please, I deserve better than this!” he cried to the swaying cobweb shape in the air, and on the disintegrating desk behind him, the telephone rang.

Jonesy wheeled around, groaning at the fiery, complicated pain in his hip. The phone on which he’d called Henry earlier had been his office phone, the blue Trimline. The one on the cracked surface of the desk now was black and clunky, with a dial instead of buttons and a sticker on it reading MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU. It was the phone he’d had in his childhood room, the one his parents had given him for his birthday. 949-7784, the number to which he had charged the call to Duddits all those years ago.

He sprang for it, ignoring his hip, praying the line wouldn’t disintegrate and disconnect before he could answer. “Hello? Hello!” Swaying back and forth on the shaking, vibrating floor. The whole office now going up and down like a ship on a heavy sea.Of all the voices he might have expected, Roberta’s was the last. “Yes, Doctor, hold on for your call.” There was a click so loud it hurt his head, then silence. Jonesy groaned and was about to put

the phone down when there was another click.

“Jonesy?” It was Henry. Faint, but undoubtedly Henry.

“Where are you?” Jonesy shouted. “Christ, Henry, the place is falling apart! I’m falling apart!”

“I’m in Gosselin’s,” Henry said, “only I’m not. Wherever you are, you’re not. We’re in the hospital where they took you after you got hit…” A crackle on the line, a buzz, and then Henry came back, sounding closer and stronger. Sounding like a lifeline in all this disintegration. not there, either!”

“What?”

“We’re in the dreamcatcher, Jonesy! We’re in the dreamcatcher and we always were! Ever since ’78! Duddits is the dreamcatcher, but he’s dying! He’s holding on, but I don’t know how long… “Another click followed by another buzz, bitter and electric.

“Henry! Henry!”

“… come out!” Faint again now. Henry sounded desperate. “You have to come out, Jonesy! Meet me! Run along the dreamcatcher and meet me! There’s still time! We can take this son of a bitch! Do you hear me? We can-”

There was another click and the phone went dead. The body of his childhood phone cracked, split open, and vomited out a senseless tangle of wires. All of them were red-orange; all of them were contaminated with the byrus.

Jonesy dropped the phone and looked up at the swaying dreamcatcher, that ephemeral cobweb. He remembered a line they’d been fond of as kids, pulled out of some comedian’s routine: Wherever you are, there you are. That had been right up there with Same shit, different day, had perhaps even taken over first place as they grew older and began to consider themselves sophisticated. Wherever you are, there you are. Only according to Henry’s call just now, that wasn’t true. Wherever they thought they were, they weren’t.

They were in the dreamcatcher.

He noted that the one swaying in the air above the ruins of his desk had four central spokes radiating out from the center. Many connecting threads were held together by those spokes, but what held the spokes together was the center-the core where they merged.

Run along the dreamcatcher and meet me! There’s still time!

Jonesy turned and sprinted for the door.

10

Mr Gray was also at a door-the one into the shaft house. It was locked. Considering what had happened with the Russian woman, this didn’t surprise him much. Locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen was Jonesy’s phrase for it. If he’d had one of the kim, this would have been easy. As it was, he wasn’t too perturbed. One of the interesting side effects of having emotions, he had discovered, was that they caused you to think ahead, plan ahead, so that you wouldn’t trigger an all-out emotional attack if things went wrong.

It might be one reason these creatures had survived as long as they had.

Jonesy’s suggestion that he give in to all this-go native had been his phrase for it, one that struck Mr Gray as both mysterious and exotic-wouldn’t quite leave his mind, but Mr Gray pushed it aside. He would accomplish his mission here, satisfy the imperative. After that, who knew? Bacon sandwiches, perhaps. And what Jonesy’s mind identified as a “cocktail”. This was a cool and refreshing drink, slightly intoxicating-

A gust of wind rolled off the Reservoir, slapping wet snow into his face, momentarily blinding him. It was like the snap of a. wet towel, returning him to the here and now, where he had a job to finish.

He sidled to the left on the rectangular granite stoop, slipped, then dropped to his knees, ignoring the howl from Jonesy’s hip. He hadn’t come all this way- black light-years and white miles-either to fall back down the steps and break his neck or to tumble into the Quabbin and die of hypothermia in that chilly water.

The stoop had been placed atop a mound of crushed stone. Leaning over the left side of the stoop, he brushed snow away and began feeling for a loose chunk. There were windows flanking the locked door, narrow but not too narrow.

Sound was tamped down and flattened by the heavy fall of wet snow, but he could hear the sound of an approaching motor. There had been another, as well, but that one had already stopped, probably at the end of East Street. They were coming, but they were too late. It was a mile along the path, which was densely overgrown and slippery underfoot. By the time they got here the dog would be down the shaft, drowning and delivering the byrum into the aqueduct at the same time.

He found a loose rock and pulled it free, working carefully so as not to dislodge the pulsing body of the dog around his shoulders. He backed away from the edge on his knees, then tried to get to his feet. At first he couldn’t. The ball of Jonesy’s hip had swelled tight again. He finally lurched upright, although the pain was incredible, seeming to go all the way up to his teeth and his temples.

He stood for a moment, holding Jonesy’s bad right leg a little off the ground like a horse with a stone in its hoof, bracing himself against the locked shaft- house door. When the pain had abated somewhat, he used the rock to beat the glass out of the window to the left of the door. He cut Jonesy’s hand in several places, once deeply, and several cracked panes in the upper half of the window hung over the lower half like a cut-rate guillotine, but he paid no attention to these things. Nor did he sense that Jonesy had finally left his bolt-hole,

Mr Gray squirmed in through the window, landed on the cold concrete floor, and looked around.

He was in a rectangular room about thirty feet long. At the far end, a window which no doubt would have given a spectacular view of the Reservoir on a clear day showed only white, as if a sheet had been tacked over it. To one side of it was what looked like a gigantic steel pail, its sides speckled with red-not byrus, but an oxide Jonesy identified as “rust”. Mr Gray didn’t know for sure but guessed that men could be lowered down the shaft in the bucket, should some emergency require it.

The iron cover, four feet across, was in place, seated dead center in the middle of the floor. He could see the square notch on one side of it and looked around. A few tools leaned against the wall. One of them, in a scatter of glass from the broken window, was a crowbar. Quite possibly the same one the Russian woman had used as she prepared for her suicide.

Way I heard it, Mr Gray thought, the folks in Boston’ll be drinking that last byrum in their morning coffee right around Valentine’s Day.

He seized the crowbar, limped painfully to the center of the room with his breath puffing cold and white before him, then seated the spatulate end of the tool in the slot of the cover. The fit was perfect.

11

Henry racks the telephone, takes in a deep breath, holds it… and then runs for the door which is marked both OFFICE and PRIVATE.

“Hey!” old Reenie Gosselin squawks from her place at the cash-register. “Come back here, kid! You can’t go in there!”

Henry doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow, but as he goes through the door he realizes that yeah, he is a kid, at least a foot shy of his final height, and although he’s wearing specs, they’re nowhere near as heavy as they will be later on. He’s a kid, but under all that flopping hair (which will have thinned a bit by the time he hits his