Dreamcatcher

But he might be able to get to his files.

Was there any reason to risk it? Any advantage? There might be, if he knew what Mr Gray wanted. Beyond a ride, that was. And speaking of that, a ride where?

The answer was unexpected because it came in Duddits’s voice: Ow. Ih-her Ay onna oh ow.

Mr Gray wanna go south.

Jonesy stepped back from his dirty window on the world. There wasn’t much to be seen out there just now, anyway; snow and dark and shadowy trees. This morning’s snow had been the appetizer; here was the main course.

Mr Gray wanna go south.

How far? And why? What was the big picture?

On these subjects Duddits was silent.

Jonesy turned and was surprised to see that the route-map and the picture of the girl were no longer on the bulletin board. Where they had been were four color snapshots of four boys. Each had the same background, Derryjunior High, and the same caption beneath: SCHOOL DAYS, 1978. Jonesy himself on the far left, face split in a trusting ear-to-ear grin that now broke his heart. Beav next to him, the Beav’s grin revealing the missing tooth in front, victim of a skating fall, which had been replaced by a false one a year or so later… before high school, anyway. Pete, with his broad, olive-tinted face and his shamefully short hair, mandated by his father, who said he hadn’t fought in Korea so his kid could look like a hippie. And Henry on the end, Henry in his thick glasses that made Jonesy think of Danny Dunn, Boy Detective, star of the mysteries Jonesy had read as a kid.

Beaver, Pete, Henry. How he had loved them, and how unfairly sudden the severing of their long friendship had been. No, it wasn’t a bit fair-

All at once the picture of Beaver Clarendon came alive, scaring the hell out of Jonesy. Beav’s eyes widened and he spoke in a low voice. “His head was off, remember? It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud. What a fuckarow! I mean, Jesus-Christ-bananas.”

Oh my God, Jonesy thought, as it came back to him-the one thing about that first hunting trip to Hole in the Wall that he had forgotten… or suppressed. Had all of them suppressed it? Maybe so. Probably so. Because over the years since, they had talked about everything in their childhoods, all those shared memories… except that one.

His head was qff… his eyes were full of mud. Something had happened to them then, something that had to do with what was happening to him now. If only I knew what it was, Jonesy thought. If I only knew.

2

Andy Janas had lost the other three trucks in his little squadron had gotten ahead of them because they weren’t used to driving in shit like this and he was. He had grown up in northern Minnesota, and you better believe he was used to it. He was by himself in one of Chevrolet’s finer Army vehicles, a modified four-wheel-drive pickup, and he had the four-wheel drive engaged tonight. His father hadn’t raised any fools.

Still, the turnpike was mostly clear; a couple of Army plows had gone by an hour or so ago (he would be catching up to them soon, he guessed, and when he did he would cut speed and fall in behind them like a good boy), and no more than two or three inches had piled up on the concrete since then. The real problem was the wind, which lifted the fluff and turned the road into a ghost. You had the reflectors to guide you, though. Keeping the reflectors in sight was the trick those other gomers didn’t understand… or maybe with the convoy trucks and the Humvees, the headlights were set too high to pick the reflectors up properly. And when the wind really gusted, even the reflectors disappeared; the goddam world went totally white and you had to take your foot off the go-pedal until the air stilled again and just try to stay on course in the meantime. He would be all right, and if anything happened, he was in radio contact and more plows would be coming up behind, keeping the southbound barrel of the turnpike open all the way from Presque Isle to Millinocket.

In the back of his truck were two triple-wrapped packages. In one were the bodies of two deer which had been killed by the Ripley. In the other-this Janas found moderately to seriously gruesome was the body of a grayboy turning slowly to a kind of reddish-orange soup. Both were bound for the docs at Blue Base, which had been set up at a place called…

Janas looked up at the driver’s visor. There, held in place by a rubber band, was a piece of notepaper and a ballpoint pen. Scrawled on the paper was GOSSELIN’s STO, TAKE EX 16, TURN L.

He’d be there in an hour. Maybe less. The docs would undoubtedly tell him they had all the animal samples they needed and the deer-carcasses would be burned, but they might want the grayboy, if the little fella hadn’t turned entirely to mush. The cold might retard that process a little bit, but whether it did or didn’t was really none of Andy Janas’s nevermind. His concern was to get there, turn over his samples, and then await debriefing from whoever was in charge of asking questions about the q-zone’s northern-and most quiet perimeter. While he was awaiting, he would grab some hot coffee and a great big plate of scrambled eggs. If the right someone was around, he might even be able to promote something to spike his coffee with. That would be good. Get a little buzz going, then just hunker down and

pull over

Janas frowned, shook his head, scratched his ear as if something-a flea, perhaps-had bitten him there. The goddam wind gusted hard enough to shake the truck. The turnpike disappeared and so did the reflectors. He was encased in total white again and he had no doubt that this scared the everloving bejabbers out of the other guys, but not him, he was Mr Minnesota-Twins-Taking-Care-of-Business, just puff the old foot off the gas (and never rm'nd the brake, when you were driving in a snowstorm the brake was the best way he knew to turn a good n’de bad), just coast and wait for

pull over

“Huh?” He looked at the radio, but there was nothing there, just static and dim background chatter.

pull over

“Ow!” Janas cried, and grabbed at his head, which suddenly hurt like a motherfucker. The olive-green pickup swerved, skidded, then came back under control as his hands automatically steered into the skid. His foot was still off the gas and the Chevy’s speedometer needle unwound rapidly.

The plows had made a narrow path down the center of the two southbound lanes. Now Janas steered into the thicker snow to the right of this path, the truck’s wheels spurning up a haze of snow which the wind quickly whipped away. The guardrail reflectors were very bright, glaring in the dark like cat’s eyes.

Janas screamed with pain. From a great distance he heard himself shouting, “Okay, okay, I am! just stop it! Quit yanking me!” Through watering eyes he saw a dark form rear up on the far side of the guardrails not fifty feet ahead. As the headlights struck the shape fully, he saw it was a man wearing a parka.

Andy Janas’s hands no longer felt like his own. They felt like gloves with someone else’s hands inside them. This was an odd and entirely unpleasant sensation. They turned the steering wheel farther to the left entirely without his help, and the pickup truck coasted to a stop in front of the man in the parka.

3

This was his chance, with Mr Gray’s attention entirely diverted. Jonesy sensed that if he thought about it he would lose his courage, so he didn’t think. He simply acted, knocking back the bolt on the office door with the heel of his hand and yanking the door open.

He had never been inside Tracker Brothers as a kid (and it had been gone since the big storm of “85), but he was pretty sure that it had never looked like what he saw now. Outside the dingy office was a room so vast Jonesy couldn’t see the end of it. Overhead were endless acres of fluorescent bars. Beneath them, stacked in enormous columns, were millions of cardboard boxes.

No, Jonesy thought. Not millions. Trillions.

Yes, probably trillions was closer. Thousands of narrow aisles ran between them. He was standing at one edge of eternity’s own warehouse, and the idea of finding anything in it was ludicrous. If he ventured away from the door into his office hideout, he would become lost in no time. Mr Gray wouldn’t need to bother with him; Jonesy would wander until he died, lost in a mind-boggling wasteland of stored boxes.

That’s not true. I could no more get lost in there than I could in my own bedroom. Nor will I have to hunt for what I want. 7his is my place. Welcome to your own head, big boy.

The concept was so huge that it made him feel weak… only he couldn’t afford to be weak right now, or to hesitate. Mr Gray, everyone’s favorite invader from the Great Beyond, wouldn’t be occupied with the truck driver for long, If Jonesy meant to move some of these files to safety, he had to do it right now. The question was, which ones?

Duddits, his mind whispered. This has something to do with Duddits. You know it does. He’s been o your mind a lot lately. The other guys were thinking of him, too. Duddits is what held you and Henry and Pete and Beaver together-you’ve always known that, but now you know something else, as well. Don’t you?

Yes. He knew that his accident in March had been caused by thinking he’d seen Duddits once again being teased by Richie Grenadeau and his friends. Only “teased” was a ludicrously inapt word for what had been going on behind Tracker Brothers that day, wasn’t it? Tortured was the word. And when he’d seen that torture being reenacted, he had plunged into the street without looking, and-

His head was off, Beaver suddenly said from the storeroom’s overhead speakers, his voice so loud and sudden it made Jonesy cringe. It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud, A d sooner or later every murderer pays the price. What a fuckarow!

Richie’s head. Richie Grenadeau’s head. And Jonesy had no time for this. He was a trespasser in his own head now, and he’d do well to move quickly.

When he had first looked out at this enormous storeroom, all the boxes had been plain and unmarked. Now he saw that those at the head of the row closest to him were labeled in black grease-pencil: DUDDITS. Was that surprising? Fortuitous? Not at all. They were his memories, after all, stored flat and neatly folded in each of the trillions of boxes, and when it came to memory, the healthy mind was able to access them pretty much at will.

Need something to move them with, Jonesy thought, and when he looked around he was not exactly amazed to see a bright red hand-dolly. This was a magic place, a make-it-up-as-you-go-along place, and the most marvelous thing about it, Jonesy supposed, was that everybody had one.

Moving quickly, he stacked some of the boxes marked DUDDITS on the dolly and ran them into the Tracker Brothers office at a trot. He dumped them by tipping the dolly forward, spilling them across the floor. Untidy, but he could worry about the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval later.

He ran back out, feeling for Mr Gray, but Mr Gray was still with the truck-driver… Janas, his name was. There was the cloud, but the cloud didn’t sense him. It was as dumb as… well, as dumb as fungus.

Jonesy got the rest of the DUDDITS boxes, and saw that the next stack had also acquired scribbled grease-pencil labels. These latter said DERRY, and there were too many to take. The question was whether or not he needed to take any of them.