Dreamcatcher

He pondered this as he pushed the second load of memory-boxes into the office. Of course the Derry boxes would be stacked near the Duddits boxes; memory was both the act and the art of association. The question remained whether or not his Derry memories mattered. How was he supposed to know that when he didn’t know what Mr Gray wanted?

But he did know.

Mr Gray wanna go south.

Derry was south.

Jonesy sprinted back into the memory storehouse, pushing the dolly ahead of him. He’d take as many of the boxes marked DERRY as he could, and hope they were the right ones. He would also hope that he sensed Mr Gray’s return in time. Because if he was caught out here, he would be swatted like a fly.

4

Janas watched, horrified, as his left hand reached out and opened the driver’s-side door of his truck, letting in the cold, the snow, and the relentless wind. “Don’t hurt me anymore, mister, please don’t, you can have a ride if you want a ride, just don’t hurt me anymore, my head-”

Something suddenly rushed through Andy Janas’s mind. It was like a whirlwind with eyes. He felt it prying into his current orders, his expected arrival time at Blue Base… and what he knew of Derry, which was nothing. His orders had taken him through Bangor, he’d never been to Derry in his life.

He felt the whirlwind pull back and had one moment of delirious relief-I don’t have what it needs, it’s going to let me go-and then understood that the thing in his mind had no intention of letting him go. It needed the truck, for one thing. It needed to shut his mouth, for another.

Janas put up a brief but bitterly energetic struggle. It was this unexpected resistance that allowed Jonesy time to remove at least one stack of the boxes marked DERRY. Then Mr Gray once more resumed his place at Janas’s motor controls.

Janas saw his hand shoot out and up to the driver’s-side visor. His hand gripped the ballpoint pen and yanked it free, snapping the rubber band which held it.

No! Janas shouted, but it was too late. He caught a shiny zipping glitter as his hand, which was gripping the ballpoint like a dagger, plunged the pen into his staring eye. There was a popping sound and he jittered back and forth behind the wheel like a badly managed puppet, his fist digging the pen in deeper and deeper, up to the halfway mark, then to the three-quarter mark, his split eyeball now running down the side of his face like a freakish tear. The tip struck something that felt like thin gristle, bound up for a moment, then passed through into the meat of his brain.

You bastard, he thought, what are you, you bas-

There was a final brilliant flash of light inside his head and then everything went dark. Janas slumped forward over the wheel. The pickup’s horn began to blow.

5

Mr Gray hadn’t gotten much from Janas-mostly that unexpected struggle for control at the end-but one thing which came through clearly was that Janas wasn’t on his own. The transport column of which he had been a part had strung out because of the storm, but they were all headed to the same place, which Janas had identified in his mind as both Blue Base and Gosselin’s. There was a man there that Janas had been afraid of, the man in charge, but Mr Gray could not have cared less about Creepy Kurtz/the boss/Crazy Abe. Nor did he have to care, since he had no intention of going anywhere near Gosselin’s store. This place was different and this species, although only semi-sentient, composed mostly of emotions, was different, too. They fought. Mr Gray had no idea why, but they did.

Best to finish it quickly. And to that end, he had discovered an excellent delivery system.

Using Jonesy’s hands, Mr Gray pulled Janas from behind the wheel and carried him to the guardrails. He threw the body over the side, not bothering to watch as it tumbled down the slope to the frozen streambed. He went back to the truck, looked fixedly at the two plastic-wrapped bundles in the back, and nodded. The animal corpses were good for nothing. The other, though… that would be useful. It was rich with what he needed.

He looked up suddenly, Jonesy’s eyes widening in the blowing snow. The owner of this body was out of its hiding place. Vulnerable. Good, because that consciousness was starting to annoy

him, a constant muttering (sometimes rising to a panicky squeal) on the lower level of his thought-process. Mr Gray paused a moment longer, trying to make his mind blank, not wanting Jonesy to have the slightest warning… and then he pounced.He didn’t know what he had expected, but not this. Not this dazzling white light.

6

Jonesy was nearly caught out. Would have been caught out if not for the fluorescents with which he had lit his mental storeroom. This place might not actually exist, but it was real enough to him, and that made it real enough to Mr Gray when Mr Gray arrived.

Jonesy, who was pushing the dolly filled with boxes marked DERRY, saw Mr Gray appear like magic at the head of a corridor of high-stacked cartons. It was the rudimentary humanoid that had been standing behind him at Hole in the Wall, the thing he had visited in the hospital. The dull black eyes were finally alive, hungry. It had crept up, caught him outside his office refuge, and it meant to have him.

But then its bulge of a head recoiled, and before its three-fingered hand shielded its eyes (it had no lids, not even any lashes), Jonesy saw an expression on its gray sketch of a face that had to be bewilderment. Maybe even pain. It had been out there, in the snowy dark, disposing of the driver’s body. It had come in here unprepared for the discount-mart glare. He saw something else, too: The invader had borrowed its expression of surprise from the host. For a moment, Mr Gray was a horrible caricature of Jonesy himself.

Its surprise gave Jonesy just enough time. Pushing the dolly ahead of him almost without realizing it and feeling like the imprisoned princess in some fucked-up fairy-tale, he ran into the office. He sensed rather than saw Mr Gray reaching out for him with his three-fingered hands (the gray skin was raw-looking, like very old uncooked meat), and slammed the office door just ahead of their clutch. He bumped the dolly with his bad hip as he spun around-he accepted that he was inside his own head, but all of this was nevertheless completely real-and just managed to run the bolt before Mr Gray could turn the knob and force his way in. Jonesy engaged the thumb-lock in the center of the doorknob for good measure. Had the thumb-lock been there before, or had he added it? He couldn’t remember.

Jonesy stepped back, sweating, and this time ran his butt into the handle of the dolly. In front of him, the doorknob turned back and forth, back and forth. Mr Gray was out there, in charge of the rest of his mind-and his body, as well-but he couldn’t get in here. Couldn’t force the door, didn’t have the heft to break it down, didn’t have the wit to pick the lock.

Why? How could that be?

“Duddits,” he whispered. “No bounce, no play.”

The doorknob rattled. “Let me in!” Mr Gray snarled, and to Jonesy he didn’t sound like an emissary from another galaxy but like anyone who has been denied what he wants and is pissed off about it. Was that because he was interpreting Mr Gray’s behavior in terms which he, Jonesy, understood? Humanizing the alien? Translating him?

“Let…me…IN!'Jonesy responded without thinking: “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.” And thought: To which you say, “Then I’ll huff… and I’ll PUFF…and I’ll BLO W your house in!”

But Mr Gray only rattled the knob harder than ever. He was not used to being balked in this manner (or in any manner, Jonesy guessed) and was very pissed. Janas’s momentary resistance had startled him, but this was resistance on a whole other level.

“Where are you?” Mr Gray called angrily. “How can you be in there? Come out!” Jonesy didn’t reply, only stood among the tumbled boxes, listening. He was almost positive Mr Gray couldn’t get in, but it would be just as well not to provoke him.And after a little more knob-rattling, he sensed Mr Gray leaving him. Jonesy went to the window, stepping over the tumbled boxes marked DUDDITS and DERRY to get there, and stared out into the snowy night.

7

Mr Gray climbed Jonesy’s body back behind the wheel of the truck, slammed the door, and pushed the accelerator. The truck bolted forward, then lost purchase. All four wheels spun, and the truck skidded into the guardrails with a jarring bang.

“Fuck!” Mr Gray cried, accessing Jonesy’s profanity almost without being aware of it. “Jesus-Christ-bananas! Kiss my bender! Doodlyfuck! Bite my bag!”

Then he stopped and accessed Jonesy’s driving skills again. Jonesy had some information on driving in weather like this, but nowhere near as much as Janas had possessed. Janas was gone, however, his files erased. What Jonesy knew would have to do. The important thing was to get beyond what Janas had thought of as the “q-zone”. Beyond the q-zone he would be safe. Janas had been clear about that.

Jonesy’s foot pressed down on the gas pedal again, much more gently this time. The truck started to move. Jonesy’s hands steered the Chevrolet back into the fading path left by the plow. Under the dash, the radio crackled to life. “Tubby One, this is Tubby Four. I got a rig off the road and turned over on the median. Do you copy?”

Mr Gray consulted the files. What Jonesy knew about military communication was skimpy, mostly gleaned from books and something called the movies, but it might do. He took the mike, felt for the button Jonesy seemed to think would be on the side, found it, pushed it. “I copy,” he said. Would Tubby Four be able to tell that Tubby One was no longer Andy Janas? Based on Jonesy’s files, Mr Gray doubted it.

“A bunch of us are going to get him up, see if we can get him back on the road. He’s got the goddam food, you copy?” Mr Gray pushed the button. “Got the goddam food, copy.”

A longer pause, long enough for him to wonder if he’d said something wrong, stepped in some kind of a trap, and then the radio said: “We’ll have to wait for the next bunch of plows, I guess. You might as well keep rolling, over?” Tubby Four sounded disgusted. Jonesy’s files suggested that might be because Janas, with his superior driving skills, had gotten too far ahead to help. All this was good. He would’ve kept moving in any case, but it was good to have Tubby Four’s official sanction, if that’s what it was.

He checked Jonesy’s files (which he now saw as Jonesy saw them-boxes in a vast room) and said, “Copy. Tubby One, over and out.” And, as an afterthought: “Have a nice night.”

The white stuff was horrible. Treacherous. Nonetheless, Mr Gray risked driving a little faster. As long as he was in the area controlled by Creepy Kurtz’s armed force, he might be vulnerable. Once out of the net, however, he would be able to complete his business very quickly.