again. 'I was lost in the dark,' he whispers. 'You found me.'
'Scott, no—'
He nods. Yes.
'You saw me whole. Everything…' He uses his free hand to make a weak circling gesture: Everything the same. He is smiling a little now as he looks at her.
'Hang on, Scott! Just hang on!'
He nods as if she finally gets it. 'Hang on…wait for the wind to change.'
'No, Scott, the ice!' It's all she can think of to say. 'Wait for the ice!'
He says baby. He calls her babyluv. And then the only sound is the steady hiss of oxygen from the mask around his neck. Lisey puts her hands to her face
8
and took them away dry. She was both surprised and not surprised. Certainly she was relieved; it seemed that she might finally be finished with her grieving. She guessed she still had a lot of work to do up here in Scott's office—she and Amanda had barely made a dent—but she thought she'd made some unexpected progress in cleaning up her own shit over these last two or three days. She touched her wounded breast and felt almost no pain at all. This is taking self-healing to a new level, she thought, and smiled.
In the other room Amanda cried indignantly to the TV, 'Oh, you dumbass! Leave that bitch alone, can't you see she's no good?' Lisey cocked an ear in that direction and deduced that Jacy was about to wheedle Sonny into marrying her. The movie was almost over.
She must have fast-forwarded through some of it, Lisey thought, but when she looked at the dark pressing against the skylight above her, she knew that wasn't so. She'd been sitting at Dumbo's Big Jumbo and reliving the past for over an hour and a half. Doing a little work on herself, as the New Agers liked to say. And what conclusions had she drawn? That her husband was dead, that was all. Dead and gone on. He wasn't waiting for her along the path in Boo'ya Moon, or sitting on one of those stone benches as she had once found him; he wasn't wrapped in one of those creepy shroud-things, either. Scott had left Boo'ya Moon behind. Like Huck, he'd lit out for the Territories.
And what had caused his final illness? His death certificate claimed pneumonia, and she had no problem with that. They could have put Nibbled to death by ducks on it and he'd have been just as dead—but she couldn't help wondering. Had his death been on a flower that he had picked up and smelled, or a bug that had slipped its sipper under his skin as the sun went down red in its house of thunder? Did he get it on a quick visit to Boo'ya Moon a week or a month before his final reading in Kentucky, or had it been waiting for decades, ticking like a clock? It might have been in a single grain of dirt that got under one fingernail while he was digging his brother's grave. Just a single bad bug that lay asleep as the years passed, finally waking up at his computer one day when a reluctant word finally came to him and he snapped his fingers in satisfaction. Maybe—terrible thought, but who knew?—she had even brought it back herself from one of her own visits, a lethal mite in a tiny dot of pollen he had kissed from the tip of her nose.
Oh shit, now she was crying.
She had seen a packet of unopened Kleenex in the top lefthand drawer of the desk. She took it out, opened it, removed a couple, and began to blot her eyes with them. In the other room, she heard Timothy Bottoms shout, 'He was sweepin, you sonsabitches!' and knew that time had taken another of those ungainly crow-hops forward. There was only one more scene in the movie. Sonny goes back to the coach's wife. His middleaged lover. Then the credits roll.
On the desk, the telephone gave a brief ting. Lisey knew what it meant as surely as she had known what Scott meant when he made that weak twirling gesture at the end of his life, the one that meant everything the same.
The phone was dead, the lines either cut or torn out. Dooley was here. The Black Prince of the Incunks had come for her.
XV. Lisey and The Long Boy
(Pafko at the Wall)
1
'Amanda, come here!'
'In a minute, Lisey, the movie's almost—'
'Amanda, right now!'
She picked up the telephone, confirmed the nothing inside it, put it back down. She knew everything. It seemed to have been there all along, like the sweet taste in her mouth. The lights would be next, and if Amanda didn't come before he doused them—
But there she was, standing between the entertainment alcove and the long main room, looking suddenly afraid and old. On the VHS tape the coach's wife would soon be throwing the coffee pot at the wall, angry because her hands were too unsteady to pour. Lisey wasn't surprised to see her own hands were trembling. She picked up the .22. Amanda saw her do it and looked more frightened than ever. Like a lady who would have preferred to be in Philadelphia, all things considered. Or catatonic. Too late, Manda, Lisey thought.
'Lisey, is he here?'
'Yes.'
In the distance thunder rumbled, seeming to agree.
'Lisey, how do you kn—'
'Because he's cut the phone.'
'The cell—'
'Still in the car. The lights will go next.' She reached the end of the big redwood desk—Dumbo's Big Jumbo indeed, she thought, you could almost put a jet fighter down on the smucking thing—and now it was a straight shot to where her sister was standing, maybe eight steps across the rug with the maroon smears of her own blood on it.
When she reached Amanda the lights were still on, and Lisey had a moment's doubt. Wasn't it possible, after all, that a tree-branch knocked loose by the afternoon storms had finally fallen, taking down a telephone line?
Sure, but that's not what's happening.
She tried to give Amanda the gun. Amanda didn't want to take it. It thumped to the carpet and Lisey tensed for the explosion, which would be followed by either Amanda's scream of pain or her own as one of them took a bullet in the ankle. The gun didn't go off, just stared into the distance with its single idiot eye. As Lisey bent down to get it, she heard a thud from below, as if someone had walked into something down there and knocked it over. A cardboard box filled with mostly blank pages, say—one of a stack.
When Lisey looked up at her sister again, Amanda's hands were pressed, left over right, on the scant shelf of her bosom. Her face had gone pale; her eyes were dark pools of dismay. 'I can't hold that gun,' she whispered. 'My hands…see?' She turned them palms out, displaying the cuts.
'Take the smucking thing,' Lisey said. 'You won't have to shoot him.'
This time Amanda closed her fingers reluctantly around the Pathfinder's rubber grip. 'Do you promise?'
'No,' Lisey said. 'But almost.'
She peered toward the stairs leading down to the barn. It was darker at that end of the study, far more ominous,
