BOOL! THE END!
Nothing else.
Lisey looked at it for nearly a minute, although God knew she had things to do and places to go. Her skin was prickling again, but this time the feeling was almost pleasant…and hell, there was really no almost about it, was there? A small, bemused smile was playing around her mouth. Ever since she'd begun the work of cleaning out his study—ever since she'd lost it and trashed what Scott had been pleased to call his 'memory nook,' if you wanted to be exact—she had felt his presence…but never as close as this. Never as actual. She reached into the box and thumbed through a deep thickness of the pages stacked there, pretty sure of what she would find. And did. All the pages were blank. She riffled a bunch of the ones crammed in sideways, and they were, too. In Scott's childhood lexicon, a boom had been a short trip and a bool…well, that was a little more complicated, but in this context it almost certainly meant a joke or harmless prank. This giant bogus novel was Scott Landon's idea of a knee- slapper.
Were the other two boxes in the stack also bools? And the ones in the bins and cubbies across the way? Was the joke that elaborate? And if so, whom was it supposed to be on? Her? Incunks like Woodbody? That made a certain amount of sense, Scott liked to poke fun at the folks he'd called 'textcrazies,' but that idea pointed toward a rather terrible possibility: that he might have intuited his own
(Died Young)
coming collapse
(Before His Time)
and said nothing to her. And it led to a question: would she have believed him if he'd told her? Her first impulse was to say no—to say, if only to herself, I was the practical one, the one who checked his luggage to see if he had enough underwear and called ahead to make sure the flights were running on time. But she remembered the way the blood on his lips had turned his smile into a clown's grin; she remembered how he had once explained to her— with what had seemed like perfect lucidity—that it was unsafe to eat any kind of fresh fruit after sunset, and that food of all kinds should be avoided between midnight and six. According to Scott, 'nightfood' was often poisonous, and when he said it, it sounded logical. Because—
(hush)
'I would have believed him, leave it at that,' she whispered, and put her head down, and closed her eyes against tears that did not come. Eyes that had wept at 'Zack McCool''s set speech were now dry as stones. Silly smucking eyes!
The manuscripts in the crammed drawers of his desks and the main filing cabinet upstairs were most certainly not bools; this Lisey knew. Some were copies of published short stories, some were alternate versions of those stories. In the desk Scott had called Dumbo's Big Jumbo she had marked at least three unfinished novels and what appeared to be a finished novella—and wouldn't Woodbody just drool. There were also half a dozen finished short stories Scott had apparently never cared enough to send out for publication, most of them years old from the look of the typefaces. She wasn't qualified to say what was trash and what was treasure, although she was sure it would all be of interest to Landon scholars. This, however…this bool, to use Scott's word…
She was gripping the handle of the silver spade, and hard. It was a real thing in what suddenly felt like a very cobwebby world. She opened her eyes again and said, 'Scott, was this just a goof, or are you still messing with me?'
No answer. Of course. And she had a couple of sisters that needed seeing to. Surely Scott would have understood her shoving all this on the back burner for the time being.
In any case, she decided to take the spade along.
She liked the way it felt in her hand.
6
Lisey plugged in the phone and then left in a hurry, before the damned thing could start ringing again. Outside the sun was setting and a strong westerly wind had gotten up, explaining the draft that had whooshed past her when she had opened the door to take the first of her two upsetting telephone calls: no ghosts there, babyluv. This day seemed at least a month long, but that wind, lovely and somehow finegrained, like the one in her dream the night before, soothed and refreshed her. She crossed from the barn to the kitchen without fearing 'Zack McCool' was lurking somewhere nearby. She knew how calls from cell phones sounded way out here: crackly and barely there. According to Scott, it was the power-lines (which he liked to call 'UFO refueling stations'). Her buddy 'Zack' had been coming in clear as a bell. That particular Deep Space Cowboy had been on a landline, and she doubted like hell if her next-door neighbor had loaned him their phone so he could threaten her.
She got her car-keys and slipped them into the side pocket of her jeans (unaware that she was still carrying Amanda's Little Notebook of Compulsions in the back pocket—although she would become aware, in the fullness of time); she also got the bulkier ring with all the keys to the Landon kingdom domestic on it, each still labeled in Scott Landon's neat hand. She locked the house, then trudged back to lock the barn's sliding doors together and the door to Scott's study at the top of the outside stairs. Once that was done, she went to her car with the spade on her shoulder and her shadow trailing out long beside her on the dooryard dirt in the last of that day's fading red Junelight.
IV. Lisey and The Blood-Bool
(All the Bad-Gunky)
1
Driving to Amanda's along the recently widened and repaved Route 17 was a matter of fifteen minutes, even slowing for the blinker where 17 crossed the Deep Cut Road to Harlow. Lisey spent more of it than she wanted to thinking about bools in general and one bool in particular: the first. That one had been no joke.
'But the little idiot from Lisbon Falls went ahead and married him anyway,' she said, laughing, then took her foot off the gas. Here was Patel's Market on the left—Texaco self-serve pumps on clean black asphalt under blinding white lights—and she felt an amazingly strong urge to pull in and grab a pack of cigarettes. Good old Salem Lights. And while she was there, she could get some of those Nissen doughnuts Manda liked, the squash ones, and maybe some HoHos for herself.
'You numbah one crazy baby,' she said, smiling, and stepped smartly down on the gas again. Patel's receded. She was running with her dims on now, although there was still plenty of twilight. She glanced in her rearview mirror, saw the silly silver shovel lying on the back seat, and said it again, this time laughing: 'You numbah one crazy baby, ah so!'
And what if she was? Ah so what?
2
Lisey parked behind Darla's Prius and was only halfway to the door of Amanda's trim little Cape Cod when Darla came out, not quite running and struggling not to cry.
'Thank God you're here,' she said, and when Lisey saw the blood on Darla's hands she thought of bools again, thought of her husband-to-be coming out of the dark and holding out his hand to her, only it hadn't really looked like a hand anymore.
'Darla, what—'
'She did it again! That crazy bitch went and cut herself again! All I did was go to use the bathroom…I left her drinking tea in the kitchen…'Are you okay, Manda,' I said…and…'
'Hold on,' Lisey told her, forcing herself to at least sound calm. She'd always been the calm one, or the one who put on that face; the one who said things like Hold on and Maybe it's not that bad. Wasn't that supposed to be the oldest child's job? Well, maybe not if the oldest child turned out to be a smucking mental case.
'Oh, she's not gonna die, but what a mess,' Darla said, beginning to cry after all. Sure, now that I'm here you let go, Lisey thought. Never occurs to any of you that little Lisey might have a few problems of her own, does it?
