night, maybe a sleeping bad thing, even one hibernating way down in dead and rotting flesh, could come back to life. What if it shot Paul's arms out of the ground? What if it made his dirty dead hands grab me? What if his grinning face came rising up to my own, with dirt running from the corners of his eyes like tears?
I don't want to cry, ten is too old to cry (especially if you've been through the things I have), but I'm starting to blubber, I can't help it. Then I see one sweetheart tree standing a little bit apart from all the others, with its branches spread out in what looks like a low cloud.
And to me, Lisey, that tree looked…kind. I didn't know why then, but I think that now, all these years later, I do. Writing this has brought it back. The night-lights, those scary cold balloons drifting just above the ground, wouldn't go under it. And as I got closer to it, I realized that this one tree, at least, smelled as sweet—or almost as sweet —at night as it did in the daytime. That's the tree you're sitting under now, little Lisey, if you're reading this last story. And I'm very tired. I don't think I can do the rest of it the justice it deserves, although I know I must try. It's my last chance to talk to you, after all.
Let us say that there's a little boy who sits in the shelter of that tree for—well, who knows, really? Not all that long night, but until the moon (which always seems to be full here, have you noticed?) is down and he has dozed in and out of half a dozen strange and sometimes lovely dreams, at least one of which will later become the basis of a novel. Long enough for him to name that wonderful shelter the Story Tree.
And long enough for him to know that something awful—something far worse than the paltry evil which has seized his father—has turned its casual gaze toward him…and marked him for later notice (perhaps)…and then turned its obscene and unknowable mind once more away. That was the first time I sensed the fellow who has lurked behind so much of my life, Lisey, the thing that has been the darkness to your light, and who also feels—as I know you always have—that everything is the same. That is a wonderful concept, but it has its dark side. I wonder if you know? I wonder if you ever will?
17
'I know,' Lisey said. 'I do now. God help me, I do.'
She looked at the pages again. Six left. Only six, and that was good. Afternoons in Boo'ya Moon were long, but she thought that this one had finally begun to fade. It was really time to be getting back. Back to her house. Her sisters. Her life.
She had begun to understand how it was to be done.
18
There comes a time when I hear the laughers beginning to draw closer to the edge of the Fairy Forest, and I think their amusement has taken on a sardonic, perhaps stealthy undertone. I peer around the trunk of my sheltering tree and think I see dark shapes slipping from the darker mass of the trees at the edge of the woods. This may only be my overactive imagination, but I don't think so. I think my imagination, febrile as it is, has been exhausted by the many shocks of the long day and longer night, and that I have been reduced to seeing exactly what is there. As if to confirm this, there comes a slobbering chuckle from the high grass not twenty yards from where I am crouching. Once more I don't think about what I'm doing; I simply close my eyes and feel the chill of my bedroom fold itself around me once more. A moment later I'm sneezing from the disturbed dust under my bed. I rear up, face contorted in a nearly gruesome effort to sneeze as quietly as possible, and I thump my forehead on the broken box-spring. If the pick had still been sticking through I might have gashed myself badly or even put out one of my eyes, but it's gone.
I drag myself out from under my bed on my elbows and my knees, conscious that a sickly five o'clock light is soaking in through the window. It's sleeting harder than ever, by the sound, but I hardly notice. I swivel my head from my floorlevel position, peering stupidly around at the shambles that used to be my bedroom. The closet door has been pulled off the top hinge and leans drunkenly into the room from the lower one. My clothes have been scattered and many of them—most of them, it looks like—have been torn apart, as if the thing inside of Daddy has taken out on them what it couldn't take out on the boy who should have been inside them. Far worse, it has torn my few treasured paperback books—sports biographies and science fiction novels, mostly—to shreds. Their flimsy covers lie in pieces everywhere. My bureau has been
overturned, the drawers slung to the corners of the room. The hole where the pickaxe went through my bed looks as big as a moon crater, and I think: That's where my belly would have been, if I'd been lying there. And there's a faint sour smell. It reminds me of how Boo'ya Moon smelled at night, but it's more familiar. I try to put a name on it and can't. All I can think of is bad fruit, and although that's not quite right, it turns out to be very close.
I don't want to leave the room, but I know I can't stay there because eventually he'll be back. I find a pair of jeans that aren't ripped and put them on. My sneakers are gone, I don't know where, but maybe my boots will still be in the mudroom. And my coat. I'll put them on and run out into the sleet. Down the driveway, following Mr. Halsey's half-frozen slushy car tracks, to the road. Then down the road to Mulie's Store. I'll run for my life, into some future I can't even imagine. Unless, that is, he catches me first and kills me.
I have to climb over the bureau, which is blocking the door, to get into the hall. Once I'm out there I see the thing has knocked down all the pictures and knocked holes in the walls, and I know I'm looking at more of its anger at not being able to get at me.
Out here the sour fruit smell is strong enough to recognize. There was a Christmas party at U.S. Gyppum last year. Daddy went because he said it would 'look funny' if he didn't. The man who drew his name gave him a jug of homemade blackberry wine for a present. Now, Andrew Landon has got a lot of problems (and he'd probably be the first to admit it, if caught in an honest moment), but alcohol isn't one of them. He poured himself a jelly-glass of that wine before dinner one night—between Christmas and New Year's, this was, with Paul chained in the cellar— took one sip, grimaced, started to pour it down the sink, then saw me looking and held it out.
You want to try this, Scott? he asked. See what all the shouting's about? Hey, if you like it, you can have the whole sweetmother gallon.
I'm as curious about booze as any kid, I guess, but that smell was too fruity-rancid. Maybe the stuff makes you happy like I've seen on TV, but I could never lick that gone-dead fruit smell. I shook my head.
You're a wise child, Scooter ole Scoot, he said, and poured the stuff in the jelly-glass down the sink. But he must have saved the rest of the jug (or just forgot about it) because that's what I smell now, sure as God made little fishes, and strong. By the time I get to the foot of the stairs it's a stench, and now I hear something besides the steady rattle of the sleet on the boards and the tinny tick-tock of it on the windows: George Jones. It's Daddy's radio, tuned to WWVA like always, playing very soft. And I also hear snoring. The relief is so great that tears go spilling down my cheeks. The thing I've been most afraid of is that he's laid up, waiting for me to show myself. Now, listening to those long, ragged snores, I know that he's not.
Nevertheless, I'm careful. I detour through the dining room so I can come into the living room from behind the sofa. The dining room is also a shambles. Nana's breakfront has been overturned, and it looks to me like he made a pretty good effort to turn it into kindling. All the dishes are broken. So's the blue pitcher, and the money inside it has been torn to pieces. Green shreds have been flung every whichever. Some even hang from the central light fixture like New Year's Eve confetti. Apparently the thing inside Daddy has no more use for money than it does for books.
In spite of those snores, in spite of being on the couch's blind side, I peer into the living room like a soldier peering over the lip of a foxhole after an artillery barrage. It's a needless precaution. His head's hanging off one end of the couch and his hair, which he hasn't taken the scissors to since before Paul went bad, is so long it's almost touching the rug. I could have marched through there crashing a pair of cymbals and he wouldn't have stirred. Daddy isn't just asleep in the jumbled wreckage of that room; he is un-smuckingconscious.
A little further in and I see there's a cut running up one cheek, and his closed eyes have a purplish, exhausted look. His lips have slid back from his teeth, making him look like an old dog that fell asleep trying to snarl. He covers the couch with an old Navajo blanket to keep off grease and spilled food, and he's wrapped part of it over him. He must have been tired of busting things up by the time he got in here, because he's poked out the eye of the television and smashed the glass over his dead wife's studio portrait and called it good. The radio's in its usual
