Dreamcatcher

Bangor Hydroelectric.

The tile on the floor was baby blue. There were only spots and splatters of blood on it near the door, but as they approached the toilet next to the tub, the splotches ran together and became a red snake. Scarlet capillaries had spread off from this. The tiles were tattooed with the footprints of their boots, which neither Jonesy nor Beaver had taken off. On the blue vinyl shower curtain were four blurred fingerprints, and Jonesy thought: He must have reached out and grabbed at the curtain to keep from falling when he turned to sit.

Yes, but that wasn’t the awful part. The awful part was what Jonesy saw in his mind’s eye: McCarthy scuttling across the baby-blue tiles with one hand behind him, clutching himself, trying to hold something in.

“Ah, fuck!” Beaver said again. Almost sobbing. “I don’t want to see this, Jonesy-man, I can’t see this.”

“We’ve got to.” He heard himself speaking as if from a great distance. “We can do this, Beav. If we could face up to Richie Grenadeau and his friends that time, we can face up to this.”

“I dunno, man, I dunno…”

Jonesy didn’t know, either-not really-but he reached out and took Beaver’s hand. Beav’s fingers closed over his with panicky tightness and together they went a step deeper into the bathroom. Jonesy tried to avoid the blood, but it was hard; there was blood everywhere. And not all of it was blood.

“Jonesy,” Beaver said in a dry near-whisper. “Do you see that crud on the shower curtain?”

“Yeah.” Growing in the blurred fingerprints were little clumps of reddish-golden mold, like mildew. There was more of it on the floor, not in the fat blood- snake, but in the narrow angles of the grout.

“What is it?” “I don’t know,” Jonesy said. “Same shit he had on his face, I guess. Shut up a minute.” Then: “Mr McCarthy?… Rick?”

McCarthy, sitting there on the toilet, made no response. He had for some reason put his orange cap back on-the bill stuck off at a crooked, slightly drunken angle. He was otherwise naked. His chin was down on his breastbone, in a parody of deep thought (or maybe it wasn’t a parody, who knew?). His eyes were mostly closed. His hands were clasped pritrdy together over his pubic thatch. Blood ran down the side of the toilet in a big sloppy paintstroke, but there was no blood on McCarthy himself, at least not as far as Jonesy could see.

One thing he could see: the skin of McCarthy’s stomach hung in two slack dewlaps. The look of it reminded Jonesy of something, and after a moment or two it came to him. It was how Carla’s stomach had looked after she had delivered each of their four children. Above McCarthy’s hip, where there was a little lovehandle (and some give to the flesh), the skin was only red. Across the belly, however, it had split open in tiny weals. If McCarthy had been pregnant, it must have been with some sort of parasite, a tapeworm or a hookworm or something like that. Only there was stuff growing in his spilled blood, and what had he said as he lay there in Jonesy’s bed with the blankets pulled up to his chin? Behold, I stand at the door and knock. This was one knock Jonesy wished he had never answered. In fact, he wished he had shot him. Yes. He saw more clearly now. He was hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the completely horrified mind, and in that state wished he had put a bullet in McCarthy before he saw the orange cap and the orange flagman’s vest. It couldn’t have hurt and it might have helped.

“Stand at the door and knock on my ass,” Jonesy muttered.

“Jonesy? Is he still alive?”

“I don’t know.”

Jonesy took another step forward and felt Beaver’s fingers slide out of his; the Beav had apparently come as close to McCarthy as he was able.

“Rick?” Jonesy asked in a hushed voice. A don’t-wake-the-baby voice. A viewing-the-corpse voice. “Rick, are you-”

There was a loud, dank fart from beneath the man on the toilet, and the room immediately filled with an eyewatering aroma of excrement and airplane glue. Jonesy thought it a wonder that the shower curtain didn’t melt.

From the bowl there came a splash. Not the plop of a turd dropping-at least Jonesy didn’t think so. It sounded more like a fish jumping in a pond.

“Christ almighty, the stink of it! “Beaver cried. He had the heel of his hand over his mouth and nose and his words were muffled. “But if he can fart, he must be alive. Huh, Jonesy? He must still be-”

“Hush,” Jonesy said in a quiet voice. He was astonished at its steadiness. “Just hush, okay?” And the Beav hushed.

Jonesy leaned in close. He could see everything: the small stipple of blood in McCarthy’s right eyebrow, the red growth on his cheek, the blood on the blue plastic curtain, the joke sign-LAMAR’s THINKIN PLACE-that had hung in here when the toilet was still of the chemical variety and the shower had to be pumped up before it could be used. He saw the little gelid gleam from between McCarthy’s eyelids and the cracks in his lips, which looked purple and liverish in this light. He could smell the noxious aroma of the passed gas and could almost see that, too, rising in filthy dark yellow streamers, like mustard gas.

“McCarthy? Rick? Can you hear me?”

He snapped his fingers in front of those nearly closed eyes. Nothing. He licked a spot on the back of his wrist and held it first in front of McCarthy’s nostrils, then in front of his lips. Nothing.

“He’s dead, Beav,” he said, drawing back.

“Bullshit he is,” Beaver replied. His voice was ragged, absurdly offended, as if McCarthy had violated all the rules of hospitality. “He just dropped a clinker, man, I heard it. “'I don’t think that was-”

Beav stepped past him, bumping Jonesy’s bad hip against the sin k hard enough to hurt. “That’s enough, fella!” Beaver cried. He grabbed McCarthy’s round freckled unmuscled shoulder and shook it. “Snap out of it! Snap-”

McCarthy listed slowly tubward and Jonesy had a moment when he thought Beaver had been right after all, the guy was still alive, alive and trying to get up. Then McCarthy fell off the throne and into the tub, pushing the shower curtain ahead of him in a filmy blue billow. The orange hat fell off. There was a bony crack as his skull hit the porcelain and then Jonesy and Beaver were screaming and clutching each other, the sound of their horror deafening in the little tile-lined room. McCarthy’s ass was a lopsided full moon with a giant bloody crater in its center, the site of some terrible impact, it seemed. Jonesy saw it for only a second before McCarthy collapsed facedown into the tub and the curtain floated back into place, hiding him, but in that second it seemed to Jonesy that the hole was a foot across. Could that be? A foot? Surely not.

In the toilet bowl, something splashed again, hard enough to spatter droplets of bloody water up onto the ring, which was also blue. Beaver started to lean forward to look in, and Jonesy slammed the lid down on the ring without even thinking about it. “No,” he said.

“No?”

“No.”

Beaver tried to get a toothpick out of the front pocket of his overalls, came up with half a dozen, and dropped them on the floor. They rolled across the bloody blue tiles like jackstraws. The Beav looked at them, then looked up at Jonesy. There were tears standing in his eyes. “Like Duddits, man,” he said.

“What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“Don’t you remember? He was almost naked, too. Fuckers snatched off his shirt and his pants, didn’t leave him nothing but his underpants. But we saved him.” Beaver nodded vigorously, as if Jonesy-or some deep and doubtful part of himself-had scoffed at this idea.

Jonesy scoffed at nothing, although McCarthy didn’t remind him in the slightest of Duddits. He kept seeing McCarthy going over sideways into the tub, his orange hat falling off, the fatty deposits on his chest (the tits of easy living, Henry called them whenever he saw a pair underneath some guy’s polo shirt) wobbling. And then his ass turning up to the light-that harsh fluorescent light that kept no secrets but blabbed everything in a droning monotone. That perfect white man’s ass, hairless, just starting to turn flabby and settle down on the backs of the thighs; he had seen a thousand like it in the various locker rooms where he had dressed and showered, was developing one himself (or had been until the guy had run him over, changing the physical configuration of his backside perhaps forever), only he had never seen one like McCarthy’s was now, one that looked like something inside had fired a flare or a shotgun shell in order to-to what?

There was another hollow splash from the toilet. The Ed bumped up. It was as good an answer as any. In order to get out, of course.

In order to get out.

“Sit on that,” Jonesy told Beaver.

“Huh?”

“Sit on it!” Jonesy almost shouted it this time and Beaver sat down on the closed Ed in a hurry, looking startled. In the no-secrets, flat-toned light of the fluorescents, Beaver’s skin looked as white as freshly turned clay and every fleck of black stubble was a mole. His lips were purple. Above his head was the old joke sign: LAMAR’s THINKIN PLACE. Beav’s blue eyes were wide and terrified.

“I’m sittin, Jonesy-see?''Yeah. I’m sorry, Beav. But you just sit there, all right? Whatever he had inside him, it’s trapped. Got nowhere to go but the septic tank. I’ll be back-''Where you goin? Cause I don’t want you to leave me sittin in the shithouse next to a dead man, Jonesy. If we both run-”

“We’re not running,” Jonesy said grimly. “This is our place, and we’re not running.” Which sounded noble but left out at least one aspect of the situation: he was mostly just afraid the thing that was now in the toilet might be able to run faster than they could. Or squiggle faster. Or something. Clips from a hundred horror films- Parasite, Alien, They Came from Within-ran through his mind at super-speed. Carla wouldn’t go to the movies with him when one of those was playing, and she made him go downstairs and use the TV in his study when he brought them home on tape. But one of those movies-something he’d seen in one of them-just might save their lives. Jonesy glanced at the reddish-gold mildewy stuff growing on McCarthy’s bloody handprint. Save their lives from the thing in the toilet, anyway. The mildewy stuff… who in God’s name knew?

The thing in the bowl leaped again, thudding the underside of the lid, but Beaver had no trouble holding the lid down. That was good. Maybe whatever it was would drown in there, although Jonesy didn’t see how they could count on that; it had been living inside McCarthy, hadn’t it? It had been living inside old Mr Behold-I-stand-at-the-door-and-knock for quite some time, maybe the whole four days he’d been lost in the woods. It had slowed the growth of McCarthy’s beard, it seemed, and caused a few of his teeth to fall out; it had also caused McCarthy to pass gas that probably couldn’t have gone ignored even in the politest of polite society-farts like poison gas, to be perfectly blunt about it-but the thing itself had apparently been fine… lively… growing…

Jonesy had a sudden vivid image of a wriggling white tapeworm emerging from a pile of raw meat. His gorge rose with a liquid chugging sound.

“Jonesy?” Beaver started to get up. He looked more alarmed than ever.

“Beaver, sit back down!”

Beaver did, just in time. The thing in the toilet leaped and hit the underside of the lid with a hard, hollow rap. Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

“Remember that Lethal Weapon movie where Mel Gibson’s partner didn’t dare to get off the crapper?” Beaver said. He smiled, but his voice was dry and his eyes were terrified. “This is like that, isn’t it?”