Dreamcatcher

in their image. It was the way things had always been, and the way they were meant to be.

But now…

Something’s happening to me, Mr Gray thought, aware even as the thought came that it was essentially a “Jonesy” thought. I’m starting to be human.

The fact that the idea was not without its attractions filled Mr Gray with horror.

8

Jonesy came out of a doze where the only sound was the soothing, lulling rhythm of Mr Gray’s voice, and saw that his hands were resting on the locks of the office door, ready to turn the lower and draw the bolt on the upper. The son of a bitch was trying to hypnotize him, and doing a pretty good job of it.

“We always win,” said the voice on the other side of the door. It was soothing, which was nice after such a stressful day, but it was also vilely complacent. The usurper who would not rest until he had it all… who took getting it all as a given. “Open the door, Jonesy, open it now.”

For a moment he almost did it, He was awake again, but he almost did it anyway. Then he remembered two sounds: the tenebrous creak of Pete’s skull as the red stuff tightened on it, and the wet squittering Janas’s eye had made when the tip of the pen pierced it.

Jonesy realized he hadn’t been awake at all, not really. But now he was.

Now he was.

Dropping his hands away from the lock and putting his lips to the door, he said “Eat shit and die” in his clearest voice. He felt Mr Gray recoil. He even felt the pain when Mr Gray thumped back against the window, and why not? They were his nerves, after all. Not to mention his head. Few things in his life gave him so much pleasure as Mr Gray’s outraged surprise, and he vaguely realized what Mr Gray already knew: the alien presence in his head was more human now.

If you could come back as a physical entity, would you still be Mr Gray? Jonesy wondered. He didn’t think so. Mr Pink, maybe, but not Mr Gray.

He didn’t know if the guy would try his Monsieur Mesmer routine again, but Jonesy decided to take no chances. He turned and went to the office window, tripping over one of the boxes and stepping over the rest. Christ, but his hip hurt. It was crazy to feel such pain when you were imprisoned in your own head (which, Henry had once assured him, had no nerves anyway, at least not once you got into the old gray matter), but the pain was there, all right. He had read that amputees sometimes felt horrible agonies and unscratchable itches in limbs that no longer existed; probably this was the same deal.

The window had returned to a tiresome view of the weedy, double-rutted driveway which had run alongside the Tracker Brothers depot back in 1978. The sky was white and overcast; apparently when his window looked into the past, time was frozen at midafternoon. The only thing the view had to recommend it was that, as he stood here taking it in, Jonesy was as far from Mr Gray as he could possibly get.

He guessed that he could change the view, if he really wanted to; could look out and see what Mr Gray was currently seeing with the eyes of Gary Jones. He had no urge to do that, however. There was nothing to look at but the snowstorm, nothing to feel but Mr Gray’s stolen rage.

Think of something else, he told himself.

What?

I don’t know-anything. Why not-

On the desk the telephone rang, and that was odd on an Alice in Wonderland scale, because a few minutes ago there had been no telephone in this room, and no desk for it to sit on. The litter of old used rubbers had disappeared. The floor was still dirty, but the dust on the tiles was gone. Apparently there was some sort of Janitor inside his head, a neatnik who had decided Jonesy was going to be here for awhile and so the place ought to be at least tolerably clean. He found the concept awesome, the implications depressing.

On the desk, the phone shrilled again. Jonesy picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?”

Beaver’s voice sent a sick and horrible chill down his back. A telephone call from a dead man-it was the stuff of the movies he liked. Had liked, anyway. “His head was off, Jonesy. It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud. “There was a click, then dead silence. Jonesy hung up the phone and walked back to the window. The driveway was gone. Derry was gone. He was looking at Hole in the Wall under a pale clear early-morning sky. The roof was black instead of green, which meant this was Hole in the Wall as it had been before 1982, when the four of them, then strapping high-school boys (well, Henry had never been what you’d call strapping), had helped Beav’s Dad put up the green shingles the camp still wore.

Only Jonesy needed no such landmark to know what time it was. No more than he needed someone to tell him the green shingles were no more, Hole in the Wall was no more, Henry had burned it to the ground. In a moment the door would open and Beaver would run out. It was 1978, the year all this had really started, and in a moment Beaver would run out, wearing only his boxer shorts and his many-zippered motorcycle jacket, the orange bandannas fluttering. It was 1978, they were young… and they had changed. No more same shit, different day. This was the day when they began to realize just how much they had changed.

Jonesy stared out the window, fascinated.

The door opened.

Beaver Clarendon, age fourteen, ran out.

Chapter Fifteen HENRY AND OWEN

1

Henry watched Underhill trudge toward him in the glare of the security lights. Underhill’s head was bent against the snow and the intensifying wind. Henry opened his mouth to call out, but before he could, he was overwhelmed, nearly flattened, by a sense of Jonesy. And then a memory came, blotting out Underhill and this brightly lit, snowy world completely. All at once it was 1978 again, not October but November and there was blood, blood on cattails, broken glass in marshy water, and then the bang of the door.

2

Henry awakes from a terrible confused dream-blood, broken glass, the rich smells of gasoline and burning rubber-to the sound of a banging door and a blast of cold air. He sits up and sees Pete sitting up beside him, Pete’s hairless chest covered with goosebumps. Henry and Pete are on the floor in their sleeping-bags because they lost the four-way toss. Beav and Jonesy got the bed Oater there will be a third bedroom at Hole in the Wall, but now there are only two and Lamar has one all to himself, by the divine right of adulthood), only now Jonesy is alone in the bed, also sitting up, also looking confused and frightened.

Scooby-ooby-Doo, where are you, Henry thinks for no appreciable reason as he gropes for his glasses on the windowsill. In his nose he can still smell gas and burning tires. We got some work to do now-

“Crashed,” Jonesy says thickly, and throws back the covers. His chest is bare, but like Henry and Pete, he wore his socks and longjohn bottoms to bed. “Yeah, went in the water,” Pete says, his face suggesting he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about. “Henry, you got his shoe-” “moccasin-'Henry says, but he hasn’t any idea what he’s talking about either. Nor wants to. “Beav,” Jonesy says, and gets out of bed in a clumsy lunge. One of his stocking-clad feet comes down on Pete’s hand. “Ow!” Pete cries. “Ya stepped on me, ya fuckin gomer, watch where you’re-” “shut up, shut up,” Henry says, grabbing Pete’s shoulder and giving it a shake. “Don’t wake up Mr Clarendon!”

Which would be easy, because the door of the boys” bedroom is open. So is the door on the far side of the big central room, the one to the outside. No wonder they’re cold, there’s a hell of a draft. Now that Henry has his eyes back on (that is how he thinks of it), he can see the dreamcatcher out there dancing in the cold November breeze coming in through the open door.

“Where’s Duddits?” Jonesy asks in a dazed, I’m-still-dreaming voice. “Did he go out with Beaver?”

“He’s back in Derry, foolish,” Henry says, getting up and pulling on his thermal undershirt. And he doesn’t feel that Jonesy is foolish, not really; he also has a sense that Duddits was just here with them.

It was the dream, he thinks. Duddits was in the dream. He was sitting on the bank. He was crying. He was so. He didn’t mean to. If anyone meant to, it was us.

And there is still crying. He can hear it, coming in through the front door, carried on the breeze. It’s not Duddits, though; it’s the Beav. They leave the room in a line, pulling on scraps of clothes as they go, not bothering with their shoes, which would take too long.

One good thing-judging from the tin city of beer-cans on the kitchen table (plus a suburb of same on the coffee-table), it’ll take more than a couple of open doors and some whispering kids to wake up Beaver’s Dad.

The big granite doorstep is freezing under Henry’s stocking feet, cold in the deep thoughtless way death must be cold, but he barely notices.

He sees the Beaver right away. He’s at the foot of the maple tree with the deer-stand in it, on his knees as if praying. His legs and feet are bare, Henry sees. He’s wearing his motorcycle jacket, and tied up and down its arms, fluttering like pirate’s finery, are the orange bandannas his father made his son wear when Beaver insisted on wearing such a damned foolish unhunterly thing in the woods. The outfit looks pretty funny, but there’s nothing funny about that agonized face tilted up toward the maple’s nearly bare branches. The Beav’s cheeks are streaming with tears.

Henry breaks into a run. Pete and Jonesy follow suit, their breath puffing white in the chill morning air. The needle-strewn ground under Henry’s feet is almost as hard and cold as the granite doorstep.

He drops to his knees beside Beaver, scared and somehow awed by those tears. Because the Beav isn’t just misting up, like the hero of a movie who may be allowed to shed a manly drop or two when his dog or his girlfriend dies; Beav is running like Niagara Falls. From his nose hang two ropes of clear glistening snot. You never saw stuff like that in the movies.