smucking tendons…once your life in the real world started to feel like a loose tooth in a sick socket—
She'd be walking downstairs, or getting into the car, or turning on the shower, or reading a book, or opening a crossword magazine, and there would be a feeling absurdly like an oncoming sneeze or
(mein gott, babyluv, mein gott, leedle Leezy—!)
an approaching orgasm and she would think, Oh smuck, I'm not coming, I'm going, I'm going over. The world would seem to waver and there would be that sense of a whole other world waiting to be born, one where the sweetness curdled and turned to poison after dark. A world that was just a sidestep away, no more than the flick of a hand or the turn of a hip. For a moment she would feel Castle View drop away on every side and she would be Lisey on a tightrope, Lisey walking a knife-edge. Then she'd be back again, a solid (if middle-aged and a little too thin) woman in a solid world, walking down a flight of stairs, slamming a car door, adjusting the hot water, turning the page of a book, or solving eight across: Old-style gift, four-letter word, starts with B, ends with N.
9
Two days after the dismantled booksnake went north, on what the Portland branch of the National Weather Service would record as the hottest day of the year in Maine and New Hampshire, Lisey went up to the empty study with a boombox and a compact disc titled Hank Williams' Greatest Hits. There would be no problem playing the CD, just as there had been no problem running the fans on the day the Minions of Partridge had been up here; all Dooley had done, it turned out, was open the electrical box downstairs and flip off the three breakers that controlled the study's power.
Lisey had no idea how hot it actually was in the study, but knew it had to be a triple-digit number. She could feel her blouse begin sticking to her body and her face dampening as soon as she was at the top of the stairs. Somewhere she had read that women don't sweat, they glow, and what a crock of shit that was. If she stayed up here long, she'd probably pass out with heatstroke, but she didn't intend to stay up here for long. There was a country song she sometimes heard on the radio called 'Ain't Livin' Long Like This.' She didn't know who had written that song or sang it (not Ole Hank), but she could relate to it. She couldn't spend the rest of her life afraid of her own reflection—or what she might see peeking out from behind it—and she couldn't live it afraid that she might at any moment lose her hold on reality and find herself in Boo'ya Moon.
This shite had to end.
She plugged in the boombox, then sat cross-legged on the floor before it and put in the disc. Sweat ran into her eye, stinging, and she knuckled it away. Scott had played a lot of music up here, really blasting it out. When you had a twelvethousand-dollar stereo system and soundproofing in the alcove where most of the speakers were, you could really let it rip. The first time he played 'Rockaway Beach' for her, she'd thought the very roof over their heads might lift off. What she was about to play would sound tinny and small by comparison, but she thought it would be enough.
Old-style gift, four letters, begins with B, ends with N.
Amanda, sitting on one of those benches, looking out at Southwind Harbor, sitting above the child-murdering woman in the caftan, Amanda saying 'It was something about a story. Your story, Lisey's story. And the afghan. Only he called it the african. Did he say it was a boop? A beep? A boon?' No, Manda, not a boon, although that is a four-letter word, now rather old-fashioned, beginning with B and ending with N, that means gift. But the word Scott used—
That word had been bool, of course. The sweat ran down Lisey's face like tears. She let it. 'As in Bool, The End. And at the end you get a prize. Sometimes a candybar. Sometimes an RC from Mulie's. Sometimes a kiss. And sometimes…sometimes a story. Right, honey?'
Talking to him felt all right. Because he was still here. Even with the computers gone, and the furniture, and the fancy Swedish stereo system, and the file-cabinets full of manuscripts, and the stacks of galleys (his own and those sent to him by friends and admirers), and the booksnake…even with those things gone, she still felt Scott. Of course she did. Because he hadn't finished having his say. He had one more story to tell.
Lisey's story.
She thought she knew which one, because there was only one he had never finished.
She touched one of the dried bloodstains on the carpet and thought about the arguments against insanity, the ones that fell through with a soft shirring sound. She thought how it had been under the yum-yum tree: like being in another world, one of their own. She thought about the Bad-Gunky Folks, the Bloody Bool Folks. She thought about how, when Jim Dooley had seen the long boy, he had stopped screaming and his hands had fallen to his sides. Because the strength had run out of his arms. That was what looking at the bad-gunky did, when the bad-gunky was looking back at you.
'Scott,' she said. 'Honey, I'm listening.'
There was no reply…except Lisey replied to herself. The name of the town was Anarene. Sam the Lion owned the pool-hall. Owned the picture show. And the restaurant, where every tune on the juke seemed to be a Hank Williams tune.
Somewhere something in the empty study seemed to sigh in agreement. Possibly it was just her imagination. In any case, it was time. Lisey still didn't know exactly what she was looking for, but she thought she'd know it when she saw it— surely she'd know it when she saw it, if Scott had left it for her—and it was time to go looking. Because she wasn't living long like this. She couldn't.
She pushed PLAY and Hank Williams's tired, jolly voice began to sing.
'Goodbye Joe, me gotta go,
Me-oh-my-oh,
Me gotta go pole the pirogue
Down the bayou…'
SOWISA, babyluv, she thought, and closed her eyes. For a moment the music was still there but hollow and oh so distant, like music coming down a long corridor, or from the throat of a deep cave. Then sunshine bloomed red on the inside of her eyelids and the temperature dropped twenty or even twenty-five degrees all at a go. A cool breeze, delicious with the smell of flowers, caressed her sweaty skin and blew her sticky hair back from her temples.
Lisey opened her eyes in Boo'ya Moon.
10
She was still sitting cross-legged, but now she was on the edge of the path leading down the purple hill in one direction and under the sweetheart trees in the other. She'd been here before; it was to this exact spot that her husband had brought her before he was her husband, saying there was something he wanted to show her.
Lisey got to her feet, pushing her sweat-dampened hair away from her face, relishing the breeze. The sweetness of the mixed aromas it carried—yes, of course—but even more, the coolness of it. She guessed it was mid- afternoon, the temperature a perfect seventy-five degrees. She could hear birds singing, perfectly ordinary ones by the sound—chickadees and robins for sure, probably finches and maybe a lark for good measure—but no awful laughing things in the woods. It was too early for them, she supposed. No sense of the long boy, either, and that was the best news of all.
She faced the trees and turned on her heels in a slow halfcircle. She wasn't looking for the cross, because Dooley had gotten that stuck in his arm and then thrown it aside. It was the tree she was looking for, the one that stood just a little forward of the two others on the left side of the path—
'No, that's wrong,' she murmured. 'They were on either side of the path. Like soldiers guarding the way into the woods.'
Just like that she saw them. And a third standing a little in front of the one on the left. The third was the biggest, its trunk covered with moss so dense it looked like
