Dreamcatcher

Lad let out a series of yipping whines. Mr Gray looked at him and saw that things had now reached the critical juncture. Although he was still asleep, Lad’s abdomen was now so grotesquely swelled that one of his legs stuck stiffly up in the air. The skin of his lower belly had stretched to the point of splitting, and the veins there pulsed with clocklike rapidity. A trickle of bright blood spilled out from beneath his tall.

Mr Gray looked balefully at the crowbar jutting from the slot in the iron cover. In Jonesy’s imagination, the Russian woman had been a slim beauty with dark hair and dark tragic eyes. In reality, Mr Gray thought, she must have been broad-shouldered and muscular. How else could she have-

There was a blast of gunfire, alarmingly close. Mr Gray gasped and looked around. Thanks to Jonesy, the human corrosion of doubt was also part of his makeup now, and for the first time he realized that he might be balked-yes, even here, so close to his goal that he could hear it, the sound of rushing water starting on its sixty-mile underground journey. And all that stood between the byrum and this whole world was a circular iron plate weighing a hundred and twenty pounds.

Screaming a thin and desperate litany of Beaver-curses, Mr Gray rushed forward, Jonesy’s failing body jerking back and forth on the defective pivot-point of its right hip. One of them was coming, the one called Owen, and Mr Gray dared not believe he could make this Owen turn his weapon on himself Given time, given the element of surprise, maybe. Now he had neither. And this man who was coming had been trained to kill; it was his career.

Mr Gray leaped into the air. There was a snap, quite audible, as Jonesy’s overstressed hip broke free of the swollen socket which had held it. Mr Gray landed on the crowbar with Jonesy’s full weight. The edge lifted again, and this time the cover slid almost a foot across the concrete. The black crescent through which the Russian woman had slipped appeared again. Not much of a crescent, really no more than a delicate capital C drawn with a calligrapher’s pen but enough for the dog.

Jonesy’s leg would no longer support Jonesy’s weight (and where was Jonesy, anyway? Still not a murmur from his troublesome host), but that was all right. Crawling would do now. Mr Gray worked his way in such fashion across the cold cement floor to where the sleeping border collie lay, seized Lad by his collar, and began to drag him back to Shaft 12.

15

The Hall of Memories-that vast repository of boxes-is also on the verge of shaking itself apart. The floor shudders as if in the grip of an endless slow earthquake. Overhead, the fluorescents flicker on and off, giving the place a stuttery, hallucinatory look. In places tall stacks of cartons have fallen over, blocking some of the corridors.

Jonesy runs as best he can, He moves from corridor to corridor, threading his way through this maze purely on instinct. He tells himself repeatedly to ignore the goddam hip, he is nothing but mind now, anyway, but he might as well be an amputee trying to convince his missing limb to stop throbbing.

He runs past boxes marked AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN WAR and DEPARTMENTAL POLITICS and CHILDREN’s STORIES and CONTENTS OF UPSTAIRS CLOSET. He hurdles a pile of tumbled boxes marked CARLA, Comes down on his bad leg, and screams at the pain.

He clutches more boxes (these marked GETTYSBURG) in order to keep from falling, and at last sees the far side of the storage room. Thank God; it seems to him that he has run miles.

The door is marked ICU and QUIET PLEASE and NO VISITORS W/O PASS. And that is right; this is where they took him; this is where he had awakened and heard crafty old Mr Death pretending to call for Marcy.

Jonesy bangs through the door and into another world, one he recognizes: the blue-over-white ICU corridor where he took his first painful, tentative steps four days after his surgery. He stumbles a dozen feet down the tiled corridor, sees the splotches of byrus growing on the walls, hears the Muzak, which is decidedly un-hospital-like; although it’s turned low, it appears to be the Rolling Stones singing “Sympathy for the Devil”.

He has no more than identified this song when his hip suddenly goes nuclear. Jonesy utters a surprised scream and falls to the black-and-red ICU tiles, clutching at himself This is how it was Just after he was hit: an explosion of red agony. He rolls over and over, looking up at the glowing light-panels, at the circular speakers from which the music (“Anastasia screamed in vain”) is coming, music from another world, when the pain is this bad everything is in another world, pain makes a shadow of substance and a mockery even of love, that is something he learned in March and must learn again now. He rolls and he rolls, hands clutching at his swollen hip, eyes bulging, mouth pulled back in a vast rictus, and he knows what has happened, all right: Mr Gray. That son of a bitch Mr Gray has re-broken his hip.

Then, from far away in that other world, he hears a voice he knows, a kid’s voice.

Jonesy!

Echoing, distorted… but not that far away. Not this corridor, but one of the adjacent ones. Whose voice? One of his own kids? John, maybe? No-

Jonesy, you have to hurry! He’s coming to kill you! Owen is coming to kill you!

He doesn’t know who Owen is, but he knows who that voice belongs to: Henry Devlin. But not as it is now, or as it was when he last saw Henry, going off to Gosselin’s Market with Pete; this is the voice of the Henry he grew up with, the one who told Richie Grenadeau that they’d tell on him if he didn’t stop, that Richie and his friends would never catch Pete because Pete ran like the fucking wind.

I can’t! he calls back, still rolling on the floor. He is aware that something has changed, is still changing, but not what, I can’t, he broke my hip again, the son of a bitch broke-

And then he realizes what is happening to him: the pain is running backward. It’s like watching a videotape as it rewinds-the milk flows up from the glass to the carton, the flower which should be blooming through the miracle of time-lapse photography closes up, instead.

The reason is obvious when he looks down at himself and sees the bright orange jacket he’s wearing. It’s the one his mother bought him in Sears for his first hunting trip to Hole in the Wall, the trip when Henry got his deer and they all killed Richie Grenadeau and his friends-killed them with a dream, maybe not meaning to but doing it just the same.

He has become a child again, a kid of fourteen, and there is no pain. Why would there be? His hip will not be broken for another twenty-three years. And then it all comes together with a crash in his mind: there was never any Mr Gray, not really; Mr Gray lives in the dreamcatcher and nowhere else. He is no more real than the pain in his hip. I was immune, he thinks, getting up. I never got so much as a speck of the byrus. What’s in my head isn’t quite a memory, not that, but a true ghost in the machine. He’s me. Dear God, Mr Gray is me.

Jonesy scrambles to his feet and begins to run, almost losing his feet as he swerves around a corner. He stays up, though; he is agile and quick as only a fourteen-year-old can be, and there is no pain, no pain.

The next corridor is one he knows. There is a parked gurney with a bedpan on it. Walking past it, moving delicately on tiny feet, is the deer he saw that day in Cambridge just before he was struck. There is a collar around its velvety neck and swinging from it like an oversized amulet is his Magic 8-Ball. Jonesy sprints past the deer, which looks at him with mild, surprised eyes.

Jonesy!

Close now. Very close.

Jonesy, hurry!

Jonesy redoubles his speed, feet flying, young lungs breathing easily, there is no byrus because he is immune, there is no Mr Gray, not in him, at least, Mr Gray is in the hospital and always was, Mr Gray is the phantom limb you still feel, the one you could swear is still there, Mr Gray is the ghost in the machine, the ghost on life support, and the life support is him.

He turns another comer. Here are three doors which are standing open. Beyond them, by the fourth door, the only one that is closed, Henry is standing. Henry is fourteen, as Jonesy is; Henry is wearing an orange coat, as Jonesy is. His glasses have slid down on his nose just as they always did, and he is beckoning urgently.

Hurry up! Hurry up, Jonesy! Duddits can’t hold on much longer! If he dies before we kill Mr Gray-

Jonesy joins Henry at the door. He wants to throw his arms around him, embrace him, but there’s no time.

This is all my fault, he tells Henry, and his voice is higher in pitch than it has been in years.

Not true, Henry says. He’s looking at Jonesy with the old impatience that awed Jonesy and Pete and Beaver as children Henry always seemed farther ahead, always on the verge of sprinting into the future and leaving the rest of them behind. They always seemed to be holding him back.

But-

You might as well say that Duddits murdered Richie Grenadeau and that we were his accomplices. He was what he was, Jonesy, and he made us what we are…but not on purpose. It was all he could do to tie his shoes on purpose, don’t you know that?

And Jonesy thinks: Fit wha? Fit neek?

Henry…is Duddits-

He’s holding on for us, Jonesy, I told you. Holding us together.

In the dreamcatcher.

That’s tight. So are we going to stand out here arguing in the hall while the world goes down the chute, or are we going to-

We’re going to kill the son of a bitch, Jonesy says, and reaches for the doorknob. Above it is a sign reading THERE IS NO INFECTION HERE, IL N'Y A PAS D'INFECTION ICI, and suddenly he sees both of that sign’s bitter edges. It’s like one of those Escher optical illusions. Look at it from one angle and it’s true. Look at it from another and it’s the most monstrous lie in the universe.

Dreamcatcher, Jonesy thinks, and turns the knob.

The room beyond the door is a byrus madhouse, a nightmare jungle overgrown with creepers and vines and lianas twisted together in blood-colored plaits. The air reeks of sulfur and chilly ethyl alcohol, the smell of starter fluid sprayed into a balky carb on a subzero January morning. At least they don’t have the shit-weasel to worry about, not in here; that’s on another strand of the dreamcatcher, in another place and time. The byrum is Lad’s problem now; he’s a border collie with a very dim future.

The television is on, and although the screen is overgrown with byrus, a ghostly black-and-white image comes straining through. A man is dragging the corpse of a dog across a concrete floor. Dusty and strewn with dead autumn leaves, it’s like a tomb in one of the fifties horror flicks Jonesy still likes to watch on his VCR. But this isn’t a tomb; it is filled with the hollow sound of rushing water.

In the center of the floor there is a rusty circular cover with MWRA stamped on it: Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. Even through the reddish serum on the TV screen, these letters stand out. Of course they do. To Mr Gray-who died as a physical being all the way back at Hole in the Wall-they mean everything.

They mean, quite literally, the world.

The shaft-lid has been partly pushed aside, revealing a crescent shape of absolute darkness. The man dragging the dog is himself, Jonesy realizes, and the dog isn’t quite dead. It is leaving a trail of frothy pink blood behind on the concrete, and its back legs are twitching. Almost paddling.

Never mind the movie, Henry almost snarls, and Jonesy turns his attention to the figure in the bed, the gray thing with the byrus- speckled sheet pulled up to its chest, which is a plain gray expanse of poreless, hairless, nippleless flesh. Although he can’t see now because of the sheet, Jonesy knows there is no navel, either,