Dreamcatcher

Chapter One McCARTHY

Jonesy almost shot the guy when he came out of the woods. How close? Another pound on the Garand’s trigger, maybe just a half. Later, hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the horrified mind, he wished he had shot before he saw the orange cap and the orange flagman’s vest. Killing Richard McCarthy couldn’t have hurt, and it might have helped. Killing McCarthy might have saved them all.

Pete and Henry had gone to Gosselin’s Market, the closest store, to stock up on bread, canned goods, and beer, the real essential. They had plenty for another two days, but the radio said there might be snow coming. Henry had already gotten his deer, a good-sized doe, and Jonesy had an idea Pete cared a lot more about making sure of the beer supply than he did about getting his own deer-for Pete Moore, hunting was a hobby, beer a religion. The Beaver was out there someplace, but Jonesy hadn’t heard the crack of a rifle any closer than five miles, so he guessed that the Beav, like him, was still waiting,

There was a stand in an old maple about seventy yards from the camp and that was where Jonesy was, sipping coffee and reading a Robert Parker mystery novel, when he heard something coming and put the book and the Thermos aside. In other years he might have spilled the coffee in his excitement, but not this time. This time he even took a few seconds to screw on the Thermos’s bright red stopper.

The four of them had been coming up here to hunt in the first week of November for twenty-six years, if you counted in the times Beav’s Dad had taken them, and Jonesy had never bothered with the tree-stand until now. None of them had; it was too confining. This year Jonesy had staked it out. The others thought they knew why, but they only knew half of it.

In mid-March of 2001, Jonesy had been struck by a car while crossing a street in Cambridge, not far from John Jay College, where he taught. He had fractured his skull, broken two ribs, and suffered a shattered hip, which had been replaced with some exotic combination of Teflon and metal. The man who’d struck him was a retired BU history professor who was-according to his lawyer, anyway-in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, more to be pitied than punished. So often, Jonesy thought, there was no one to blame when the dust cleared. And even if there was, what good did it do? You still had to live with what was left, and console yourself with the fact that, as people told him every day (until they forgot the whole thing, that was), it could have been worse.

And it could have been. His head was hard, and the crack in it healed. He had no memory of the hour or so leading up to his accident near Harvard Square, but the rest of his mental equipment was fine. His ribs healed in a month. The hip was the worst, but he was off the crutches by October, and now his limp only became appreciable toward the end of the day.

Pete, Henry, and the Beav thought it was the hip and only the hip that had caused him to opt for the tree-stand instead of the damp, cold woods, and the hip was certainly a factor just not the only one. What he had kept from them was that he now had little interest in shooting deer. It would have dismayed them. Hell, it dismayed Jonesy himself. But there it was, something new in his existence that he hadn’t even suspected until they had actually gotten up here on November eleventh and he had uncased the Garand. He wasn’t revolted by the idea of hunting, not at all-he just had no real urge to do it. Death had brushed by him on a sunny day in March, and Jonesy had no desire to call it back, even if he were dealing rather than receiving.

What surprised him was that he still liked being at camp-in some ways, better than ever. Talking at night-books, politics, the shit they’d gotten up to as kids, their plans for the future. They were in their thirties, still young enough to have plans, plenty of them, and the old bond was still strong.

And the days were good, too-the hours in the tree-stand, when he was alone. He took a sleeping bag and slid into it up to his hips when he got cold, and a book, and a Walkman. After the first day, he stopped listening to the Walkman, discovering that he liked the music of the woods better-the silk of the wind in the pines, the rust of the crows. He would read a little, drink coffee, read a little more, sometimes work his way out of the sleeping bag (it was as red as a stoplight) and piss off the edge of the platform. He was a man with a big family and a large circle of colleagues. A gregarious man who enjoyed all the various relationships the family and the colleagues entailed (and the students, of course, the endless stream of students) and balanced them well. It was only out here, up here, that he realized the attractions of silence were still real, still strong. It was like meeting an old friend after a long absence.

“You sure you want to be up there, man?” Henry had asked him yesterday morning. “I mean, you’re welcome to come out with me. We won’t overuse that leg of yours, I promise. “'Leave him alone,” Pete said. “He likes it up there. Don’t you, Jones-boy?”

“Sort of,” he said, unwilling to say much more-how much he actually did like it, for instance. Some things you didn’t feel safe telling even your closest friends. And sometimes your closest friends knew, anyway.

“Tell you something,” the Beav said. He picked up a pencil and began to gnaw lightly at it-his oldest, dearest trick, going all the way back to first grade. “I like coming back and seeing you there-like a lookout in the crow’s nest in one of those fuckin Hornblower books. Keepin an eye out, you know.”

“Sail, ho,” Jonesy had said, and they all laughed, but Jonesy knew what the Beav meant. He felt it. Keeping an eye out. Just thinking his thoughts and keeping an eye out for ships or sharks or who knew what. His hip hurt coming back down, the pack with his shit in it was heavy on his back, and he felt slow and clumsy on the wooden rungs nailed to the trunk of the maple, but that was okay. Good, in fact. Things changed, but only a fool believed they only changed for the worse.

That was what he thought then.

When he heard the whicker of moving brush and the soft snap of a twig-sounds he never questioned were those of an approaching deer-Jonesy thought of something his father said: You can’t make yourself be lucky. Lindsay Jones was one of life’s losers and had said few things worth committing to memory, but that was one, and here was the proof of it again: days after deciding he had finished with deer hunting, here came one, and a big one by the sound a buck, almost surely, maybe one as big as a man.

That it was a man never so much as crossed Jonesy’s mind. This was an unincorporated township fifty miles north of Rangely, and the nearest hunters were two hours” walk away. The nearest paved road, the one which eventually took you to Gosselin’s Market (BEER BAIT OUT OF STATE LICS LOTTERY TIX), was at least sixteen miles away.

Well, he thought, it isn’t as if I took a vow, or anything.

No, he hadn’t taken a vow. Next November he might be up here with a Nikon instead of a Garand, but it wasn’t next year yet, and the rifle was at hand. He had no intention of looking a gift deer in the mouth.

Jonesy screwed the red stopper into the Thermos of coffee and put it aside. Then he pushed the sleeping bag off his lower body like a big quilted sock (wincing at the stiffness in his hip as he did it) and grabbed his gun. There was no need to chamber a round, producing that loud, deer-frightening click; old habits died hard, and the gun was ready to fire as soon as he thumbed off the safety. This he did when he was solidly on his feet. The old wild excitement was gone, but there was a residue-his pulse was up and he welcomed the rise. In the wake of his accident, he welcomed all such reactions-it was as if there were two of him now, the one before he had been knocked flat in the street and the warier, older fellow who had awakened in Mass General… if you could call that slow, drugged awareness being awake. Sometimes he still heard a voice-whose he didn’t know, but not his-calling out Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy, I want Marcy. He thought of it as death’s voice-death had passed him in the street and had then come to the hospital to finish the job, death masquerading as a man (or perhaps it had been a woman, it was hard to tell) in pain, someone who said Marcy but meant Jonesy.

The idea passed-all of the funny ideas he’d had in the hospital eventually passed-but it left a residue. Caution was the residue. He had no memory of Henry calling and telling him to watch himself for the next little while (and Henry hadn’t reminded him), but since then Jonesy had watched himself. He was careful. Because maybe death was out there, and maybe sometimes it called your name.

But the past was the past. He had survived his brush with death, and nothing was dying here this morning but a deer (a buck, he hoped) who had strolled in the wrong direction.

The sound of the rustling brush and snapping twigs was conu'ng toward him from the southwest, which meant he wouldn’t have to shoot around the trunk of the maple-good-and put him upwind. Even better. Most of the maple’s leaves had fallen, and he had a good, if not perfect, sightline through the interlacing branches. Jonesy raised the Garand, settled the buttplate into the hollow of his shoulder, and prepared to shoot himself a conversation-piece.

What saved McCarthy-at least temporarily-was Jonesy’s disenchantment with hunting. What almost got McCarthy killed was a phenomenon George Kilroy, a friend of his father’s, had called “eye-fever”. Eye-fever, Kilroy claimed, was a form of buck fever, and was probably the second most common cause of hunting accidents. “First is drink,” said George Kilroy… and like Jonesy’s father, Kilroy knew a bit on that subject, as well. “First is always drink.”

Kilroy said that victims of eye-fever were uniformly astounded to discover they had shot a fencepost, or a passing car, or the broad side of a barn, or their own hunting partner (in many cases the partner was a spouse, a sib, or a child). “But I saw it,” they would protest, and most of them according to Kilroy, could pass a lie-detector test on the subject. They had seen the deer or the bear or the wolf, or just the grouse flip-flapping through the high autumn grass. They had seen it.

What happened, according to Kilroy, was that these hunters were afflicted by an anxiety to make the shot, to get it over with, one way or the other. This anxiety became so strong that the brain persuaded the eye that it saw what was not yet visible, in order to end the tension. This was eye-fever. And although Jonesy was aware of no particular anxiety-his fingers had been perfectly steady as he screwed the red stopper back into the throat of the Thermos-he admitted later to himself that yes, he might have fallen prey to the malady.

For one moment he saw the buck clearly at the end of the tunnel made by the interlocking branches-as clearly as he had seen any of the previous sixteen deer (six bucks, ten does) he had brought down over the years at Hole in the Wall. He saw its brown head, one eye so dark it was almost the black of jeweler’s velvet, even part of its rack.

Shoot now! part of him cried-it was the Jonesy from the other side of the accident, the whole Jonesy. That one had spoken more frequently in the last month or so, as he began to approach some mythical state which people who had never been hit by a car blithely referred to as “total recovery”, but he had never spoken as loudly as he did now. This was a command, almost a shout.

And his finger did tighten on the trigger. It never put on that last pound of pressure (or perhaps it only would have taken another half, a paltry eight ounces), but it did tighten. The voice that stopped him was that second Jonesy, the one who had awakened in Mass General, doped and disoriented and in pain, not sure of anything anymore except that someone wanted something to stop, someone couldn’t stand it-not without a shot, anyway-that someone wanted Marcy.

No, not yet-wait, watch, this new cautious Jonesy said, and that was the voice he listened to. He froze in place, most of his weight thrown forward on his good left leg, rifle raised, barrel angled down that interlacing tunnel of light at a cool thirty-five degrees.

The first flakes of snow came skating down out of the white sky just then, and as they did, Jonesy saw a bright vertical line of orange below the deer’s head-it was as if the snow had somehow conjured it up. For a moment perception simply gave up and what he was seeing over the barrel of his gun became only an unconnected jumble, like paints swirled all together on an artist’s palette. There was no deer and no man, not even any woods, just a puzzling and untidy jumble of black, brown, and orange.

Then there was more orange, and in a shape that made sense: it was a hat, the kind with flaps you could fold down to cover your ears. The out-of-staters bought them at L.L. Bean’s for forty-four dollars, each with a little tag inside that said PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA BY UNION LABOR. Or you could pick one up at Gosselin’s for seven bucks. The tag in a Gosselin’s cap just said MADE IN BANGLADESH.

The hat brought everything into horrible oh-God focus: the brown he had mistaken for a buck’s head was the front of a man’s wool jacket, the black jeweler’s velvet of the buck’s eye was a button, and the antlers were only more branches-branches belonging to the very tree in which he was standing. The man was unwise (Jonesy could not quite bring himself to use the word crazy) to be wearing a brown coat in the woods, but Jonesy was still at a loss to understand how he himself could have made a mistake of such potentially horrifying consequence. Because the man was also wearing an orange cap, wasn’t he? And a bright orange flagman’s vest as well, over the admittedly unwise brown coat. The man was-was a pound of finger-pressure from death. Maybe less.

It came home to him in a visceral way then, knocking him clean out of his own body. For a terrible, brilliant moment he never forgot, he was neither Jonesy Number One, the confident pre-accident Jonesy, or Jonesy Number Two, the more tentative survivor who spent so much of his time in a tiresome state of physical discomfort and mental confusion. For that moment he was some other Jonesy, an invisible presence looking at a gunman standing on a platform in a tree. The gunman’s hair was short and already graying, his face lined around the mouth, beard-speckled on the cheeks, and haggard. The gunman was on the verge of using his weapon. Snow had begun to dance around his head and light on his untucked brown flannel shirt, and he was on the verge of shooting a man in an orange cap and vest of the very sort he would have been wearing himself if he had elected to go into the woods with the Beaver instead of up into this tree.

He fell back into himself with a thud, exactly as one fell back into one’s seat after taking a car over a bad bump at a high speed. To his horror, he realized he was still tracking the man below with the Garand, as if some stubborn alligator deep in his brain refused to let go of the idea that the man in the brown coat was prey. Worse, he couldn’t seem to make his finger relax on the rifle’s trigger. There was even an awful second or two when he thought he was actually still squeezing, inexorably eating up those last few ounces between him and the greatest mistake of his life. He later came to accept that that at least had been an illusion, something akin to the feeling you get of rolling backward in your stopped car when you glimpse a slowly moving car beside you, out of the corner of your eye.

No, he was just frozen, but that was bad enough, that was hell. Jonesy, you think too much, Pete liked to say when he caught Jonesy staring out into the middle distance, no longer tracking the conversation, and what he probably meant was Jonesy, you imagine too much, and that was very likely true. Certainly he was imagining too much now as he stood up here in the middle of the tree and the season’s first snow, hair leaping up in tufts, finger locked on the Garand’s trigger-not tightening still, as he had for a moment feared, but not loosening, either, the man almost below him now, the Garand’s gunsight on the top of the orange cap, the man’s life on an invisible wire between the Garand’s muzzle and that cap, the man maybe thinking about trading his car or cheating on his wife or buying his oldest daughter a pony (Jonesy later had reason to know McCarthy had been thinking about none of those things, but of course not then, not in the tree with his forefinger a frozen curl around the trigger of his rifle) and not knowing what Jonesy had not known as he stood on the curb in Cambridge with his briefcase in one hand and a copy of the Boston Phoenix under his arm, namely that death was in the neighborhood, or perhaps even Death, a hurrying figure like something escaped from an early Ingmar Bergman film, something carrying a concealed implement in the coarse folds of its robe. Scissors, perhaps. Or a scalpel.

And the worst of it was that the man would not die, or at least not at once. He would fall down and lie there screaming, as Jonesy had lain screaming in the street. He couldn’t remember screaming, but of course he had; he had been told this and had no reason to disbelieve it. Screamed his fucking head off, most likely. And what if the man in the brown coat and orange accessories started screaming for Marcy? Surely he would not-not really-but Jonesy’s mind might report screams of Marcy. If there was eye-fever-if he could look at a man’s brown coat and see it as a deer’s head-then there was likely the auditory equivalent, as well. To hear a man screaming and know you were the reason-dear God, no. And still his finger would not loosen.

What broke his paralysis was both simple and unexpected: about ten paces from the base of Jonesy’s tree, the man in the brown coat fell down. Jonesy heard the pained, surprised sound he made-mrof! was what it sounded like-and his finger released the trigger without his even thinking about it.

The man was down on his hands and knees, his brown-gloved fingers (brown gloves, another mistake, this guy almost could have gone out with a sign reading SHOOT ME taped to his back, Jonesy thought) spread on the ground, which had already begun to whiten. As the man got up again, he began to speak aloud in a fretful, wondering voice. Jonesy didn’t realize at first that he was also weeping.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” the man said as he worked his way back to a standing position. He swayed on his feet as if drunk. Jonesy knew that men in the woods, men away from their families for a week or a weekend, got up to all sorts of small wickedness-drinking at ten in the morning was one of the most common. But Jonesy didn’t think this guy was drunk. No reason; just a vibe.

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.” And then, as he began to walk again: “Snow. Now it’s snow. Please God, oh God, now it’s snow, oh dear.”

His first couple of steps were lurching and unsure. Jonesy had about decided that his vibe was incorrect, the guy was loaded, and then the fellow’s gait smoothed out and he began to walk a little more evenly. He was scratching at his right cheek.

He passed directly beneath the stand, for a moment he wasn’t a man at all but only a round circle of orange cap with brown shoulders to either side of it. His voice drifted up, liquid and full of tears, mostly Oh dear with the occasional Oh God or Now it’s snow thrown in for salt.

Jonesy stood where he was, watching as the guy first disappeared directly beneath the stand, then came out on the other side. He pivoted without being aware of it to keep the plodding man in view-nor was he aware that he had lowered his rifle to his side, even pausing long enough to put the safety back on.

Jonesy didn’t call out, and he supposed he knew why: simple guilt. He was afraid that the man down there would take one look at him and see the truth in Jonesy’s eyes-even through his tears and the thickening snow, the man would see that Jonesy had been up there with his gun pointed, that Jonesy had almost shot him.

Twenty paces beyond the tree, the man stopped and only stood there, his gloved right hand raised to his brow, shielding his eyes from the snow. Jonesy realized he had seen Hole in the Wall. Had probably realized he was on an actual path, too. Oh dear and Oh God stopped, and the guy began to run toward the sound of the generator, rocking from side to side like a man on the deck of a ship. Jonesy could hear the stranger’s short, sharp gasps for breath as he pounded toward the roomy cabin with the lazy curl of smoke rising from the chimney and fading almost at once into the snow.

Jonesy began to work his way down the rungs nailed to the trunk of the maple with his gun slung over his shoulder (the thought that the man might present some sort of danger did not occur to him, not then; he simply didn’t want to leave the Garand, which was a fine gun, out in the snow). His hip had stiffened, and by the time he got to the foot of the tree, the man he’d almost shot had made it nearly all the way to the cabin door… which was unlocked, of course. No one locked up, not way out here.

About ten feet from the granite slab that served as Hole in the Wall’s front stoop, the man in the brown coat and orange hat fell down again. His hat tumbled off, revealing a sweaty clump of thinning brown hair. He stayed on one knee for a moment, head lowered. Jonesy could hear his harsh, fast breathing.

The man picked up his cap, and just as he set it back on his head, Jonesy hailed him.

The man staggered to his feet and turned tipsily. Jonesy’s first impression was that the man’s face was very long-that he was almost what people meant when they called someone “horsefaced”. Then, as Jonesy got closer, hitching a little but not really limping (and that was good, because the ground underfoot was getting slippery fast), he realized the guy’s face wasn’t particularly long at all-he was just very scared and very very pale. The red patch on his cheek where he had been scratching stood out brightly. The relief that came over him when he saw Jonesy hurrying toward him was large and immediate. Jonesy almost laughed at himself, standing up there on the platform in the tree and worrying about the guy reading his eyes. This man wasn’t into reading faces, and he clearly had no interest in where Jonesy had come from or what he might have been doing. This man looked like he wanted to throw his arms around Jonesy’s neck and cover him with big gooey kisses.

“Thank God!” the man cried. He held out one hand toward Jonesy and shuffled toward him through the thin icing of new snow. “Oh gee, thank God, I’m lost, I’ve been lost in the woods since yesterday, I thought I was going to die out here. I… I…”

His feet slipped and Jonesy grabbed his upper arms. He was a big man, taller than Jonesy, who stood six-two, and broader, as well. Nevertheless, Jonesy’s first impression was of insubstantialness, as if the man’s fear had somehow scooped him out and left him light as a milkweed pod.

“Easy, fella,” Jonesy said. “Easy, you’re all right now, you’re okay. Let’s just get you inside and get you warm, how would that be?”

As if the word warm had been his cue, the man’s teeth began to chatter. “S-S-Sure.” He tried to smile, without much success. Jonesy was again struck by his extreme pallor. It was cold out here this morning, upper twenties at best, but the guy’s cheeks were all ashes and lead. The only color in his face, other than the red patch, was the brown crescents under his eyes.

Jonesy got an arm around the man’s shoulders, suddenly swept by an absurd and sappy tenderness for this stranger, an emotion so strong it was like his first junior high school crush-Mary Jo Martineau in a sleeveless white blouse and straight knee-length denim skirt. He was now absolutely sure the man hadn’t been drinking-it was fear (and maybe exhaustion) rather than booze that had made him unsteady on his feet. Yet there was a smell on his breath-something like bananas. It reminded Jonesy of the ether he’d sprayed into the carburetor of his first car, a Vietnam-era Ford, to get it to crank over on cold mornings.

“Get you inside, right?”

“Yeah. C-Cold. Thank God you came along. Is this-”

“My place? No, a friend’s.” Jonesy opened the varnished oak door and helped the man over the threshold. The stranger gasped at the feel of the warm air, and a flush began to rise in his cheeks. Jonesy was relieved to see there was some blood in him, after all.

Hole in the Wall was pretty grand by deep woods standards. You came in on the single big downstairs room-kitchen, dining room, and living room, all in one-but there were two bedrooms behind it and another upstairs, under the single eave. The big room was filled with the scent of pine and its mellow, varnished glow. There was a Navajo rug on the floor and a Micmac hanging on one wall which depicted brave little stick-hunters surrounding an enormous bear. A plain oak table, long enough to accommodate eight places, defined the dining area. There was a woodstove in the kitchen and a fireplace in the living area; when both were going, the place made you feel stupid with the heat even if it was twenty below outside. The west wall was all window, giving a view of the long, steep slope which fell off to the west. There had been a fire there in the seventies, and the dead trees stood black and twisted in the thickening snow. Jonesy, Pete, Henry and the Beav called this slope The Gulch, because that’s what the Beav’s Dad and his friends had called it.

“Oh God, thank God, and thank you, too,” the man in the orange hat said to Jonesy, and when Jonesy grinned-that was a lot of thank-yous-the man laughed shrilly as if to say yes, he knew it, it was a funny thing to say but he couldn’t help it. He began to take deep breaths, for a few moments looking like one of those exercise gurus you saw on high-number cable. On every exhale, he talked.

“God, I really thought I was done-for last night… it was so cold… and the damp air, I remember that… remember thinking Oh boy, oh dear, what if there’s snow coming after all… I got coughing and couldn’t stop… something came and I thought I have to stop coughing, if that’s a bear or something I’ll… you know… provoke it or something only I couldn’t and after awhile it just… you know, went away on its own-”

“You saw a bear in the night”,” Jonesy was both fascinated and appalled. He had heard there were bears up here-Old Man Gosselin and his pickle-barrel buddies at the store loved to tell bear stories, particularly to the out-of-staters-but the idea that this man, lost and on his own, had been menaced by one in the night, was keenly horrible. It was like hearing a sailor talk about a sea monster.

“I don’t know that it was,” the man said, and suddenly shot Jonesy a sidewards look of cunning that Jonesy didn’t like and couldn’t read. “I can’t say for sure, by then there was no more lightning.”

“Lightning, too? Man!” If not for the guy’s obviously genuine distress, Jonesy would have wondered if he wasn’t getting his leg pulled. In truth, he wondered it a little, anyway.

“Dry lightning, I guess,” the man said. Jonesy could almost see him shrugging it off. He scratched at the red place on his cheek, which might have been a touch of frostbite. “See it in winter, it means there’s a storm on the way.”

“And you saw this? Last night?”

“I guess so.” The man gave him another quick, sideways glance, but this time Jonesy saw no slyness in it, and guessed he had seen none before. He saw only exhaustion. “It’s all mixed up in my mind… my stomach’s been hurting ever since I got lost it always hurts when I’m ascairt, ever since I was a little kid…”

And he was like a little kid, Jonesy thought, looking everywhere at once with perfect unselfconsciousness. Jonesy led the guy toward the couch in front of the fireplace and the guy let himself be led. Ascairt. He even said ascairt instead of afraid, like a kid. A little kid.

“Give me your coat,” Jonesy said, and as the guy first unbuttoned the buttons and then reached for the zipper under them, Jonesy thought again of how he had thought he was looking at a deer, at a buck for Chrissakes-he had mistaken one of those buttons for an eye and had damned near put a bullet through it.

The guy got the zipper halfway down and then it stuck, one side of the little gold mouth choking on the cloth. He looked at it-gawked at it, really-as if he had never seen such a thing before. And when Jonesy reached for the zipper, the man dropped his hands to his sides and simply let Jonesy reach, as a first-grader would stand and let the teacher put matters right when he got his galoshes on the wrong feet or his jacket on inside out.

Jonesy got the little gold mouth started again and pulled it the rest of the way down. Outside the window-wall, The Gulch was disappearing, although you could still see the black scrawled shapes of the trees. Almost thirty years they had come up here together for the hunting, almost thirty years without a single miss, and in none of that time had there been snow heavier than the occasional squall. It looked like all that was about to change, although how could you tell? These days the guys on radio and TV made four inches of fresh powder sound like the next Ice Age.

For a moment the guy only stood there with his jacket hanging open and snow melting around his boots on the polished wooden floor, looking up at the rafters with his mouth open, and yes, he was like a great big six-year-old-or like Duddits. You almost expected to see mittens dangling from the cuffs of his jacket on clips. He shrugged out of his coat in that perfectly recognizable child’s way, simply slumping his shoulders once it was unzipped and letting it fall. If Jonesy hadn’t been there to catch it, it would have gone on the floor and gotten right to work sopping up the puddles of melting snow.

“What’s that?” he asked.

For a moment Jonesy had no idea what the guy was talking about, and then he traced the stranger’s gaze to the bit of weaving which hung from the center rafter. It was colorful-red and green, with shoots of canary yellow, as well-and it looked like a spiderweb.

“It’s a dreamcatcher,” Jonesy said. “An Indian charm. Supposed to keep the nightmares away, I guess.”

“Is it yours?”

Jonesy didn’t know if he meant the whole place (perhaps the guy hadn’t been listening before) or just the dreamcatcher, but in either case the answer was the same. “No, my friend’s. We come up hunting every year. “'How many of you?” The man was shivering, holding his arms crisscrossed over his chest and cupping his elbows in his palms as he watched Jonesy hang his coat on the tree by the door. “Four. Beaver-this is his camp-is out hunting now. I don’t know if the snow’ll bring him back in or not. Probably it will. Pete and Henry went to the store.”

“Gosselin’s? That one?”

“Uh-huh. Come on over here and sit down on the couch.” Jonesy led him to the couch, a ridiculously long sectional. Such things had gone out of style decades ago, but it didn’t smell too bad and nothing had infested it. Style and taste didn’t matter much at Hole in the Wall.

“Stay put now,” he said, and left the man sitting there, shivering and shaking with his hands clasped between his knees. His jeans had the sausagey look they get when there are longjohns underneath, and still he shook and shivered. But the heat had brought on an absolute flood of color; instead of looking like a corpse, the stranger now looked like a diphtheria victim.

Pete and Henry were doubling in the bigger of the two downstairs bedrooms. Jonesy ducked in, opened the cedar chest to the left of the door, and pulled out one of the two down comforters folded up inside. As he recrossed the living room to where the man sat shivering on the couch, Jonesy realized he hadn’t asked the most elementary question of all, the one even six-year-olds who couldn’t get their own zippers down asked.

As he spread the comforter over the stranger on the outsized camp couch, he said: “What’s your name?” And realized he almost knew. McCoy? McCann? The man Jonesy had almost shot looked up at him, at once pulling the comforter up around his neck. The brown patches under his eyes were filling in purple. “mcCarthy,” he said. “Richard McCarthy.” His hand, surprisingly plump and white without its glove, crept out from beneath the coverlet like a shy animal. “You are?''Gary Jones,” he said, and took the hand with the one which had almost pulled the trigger. “Folks mostly call me Jonesy. “'Thanks, Jonesy.” McCarthy looked at him earnestly. “I think you saved my life.” “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Jonesy said. He looked at that red patch again. Frostbite, just a small patch. Frostbite, had to be.

Chapter Two THE BEAV

“You know I can’t call anyone, don’t you?” Jonesy said. “The phone lines don’t come anywhere near here. There’s a genny for the electric, but that’s all.”

McCarthy, only his head showing above the comforter, nodded. “I was hearing the generator, but you know how it is when you’re lost-noises are funny. Sometimes the sound seems to be coming from your left or your right, then you’d swear it’s behind you and you better turn back.”

Jonesy nodded, although he did not, in fact, know how it was. Unless you counted the week or so immediately after his accident, time he had spent wandering in a fog of drugs and pain, he had never been lost.

“I’m trying to think what’d be the best thing,” Jonesy said. “I guess when Pete and Henry get back, we better take you out. How many in your party?”

It seemed McCarthy had to think. That, added to the unsteady way he had been walking, solidified Jonesy’s impression that the man was in shock. He wondered that one night lost in the woods would do that; he wondered if it would do it to him.

“Four,” McCarthy said, after that minute to think. “Just like you guys. We were hunting in pairs. I was with a friend of mine, Steve Otis. He’s a lawyer like me, down in Skowhegan. We’re all from Skowhegan, you know, and this week for us… it’s a big deal.” Jonesy nodded, smiling. “Yeah. Same here.”

“Anyway, I guess I just wandered off.” He shook his head. “I don’t know, I was hearing Steve over on my right, sometimes seeing his vest through the trees, and then I… I just don’t know. I got thinking about stuff, I guess-one thing the woods are great for is thinking about stuff-and then I was on my own. I guess I tried to backtrack but then it got dark…” He shook his head yet again, “It’s all mixed up in my mind, but yeah-there were four of us, I guess that’s one thing I’m sure of Me and Steve and Nat Roper and Nat’s sister, Becky.”

“They must be worried sick.” McCarthy looked first startled, then apprehensive. This was clearly a new idea for him. “Yeah, they must be. Of course they are. Oh dear, Oh gee. “Jonesy had to restrain a smile at this. When he got going, McCarthy sounded a little like a character in that movie, Fargo.

“So we better take you out. If, that is-”

“I don’t want to be a bother-”

“We’ll take you out. If we can. I mean, this weather came in fast.”

“It sure did,” McCarthy said bitterly. “You’d think they could do better with all their darn satellites and doppler radar and gosh knows what else. So much for fair and seasonably cold, huh?”

Jonesy looked at the man under the comforter, just the flushed face and the thatch of thinning brown hair showing, with some perplexity. The forecasts he had heard-he, Pete, Henry, and the Beav-had been full of the prospect of snow for the last two days. Some of the prognosticators hedged their bets, saying the snow could change over to rain, but the fellow on the Castle Rock radio station that morning (WCAS was the only radio they could get up here, and even that was thin and jumbled with static) had been talking about a fast-moving Alberta Clipper, six or eight inches, and maybe a nor'easter to follow, if the temperatures stayed down and the low didn’t go out to sea. Jonesy didn’t know where McCarthy had gotten his weather forecasts, but it sure hadn’t been WCAS. The guy was just mixed up, that was most likely it, and had every right to be.

“You know, I could put on some soup. How would that be, Mr McCarthy?’mcCarthy smiled gratefully. “I think that would be pretty fine," he said. “My stomach hurt last night and something fierce this morning, but I feel better now.” “Stress,” Jonesy said. “I would have been puking my guts. Probably filling my pants, as well.”

“I didn’t throw up,” McCarthy said. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t. But…” Another shake of the head, it was like a nervous tic with him. “I don’t know. The way things are jumbled, it’s like a nightmare I had.”

“The nightmare’s over,” Jonesy said. He felt a little foolish saying such a thing-a little auntie-ish-but it was clear the guy needed reassurance.

“Good,” McCarthy said. “Thank you. And I would like some soup.”

“There’s tomato, chicken, and I think maybe a can of Chunky Sirloin. What do you fancy?”

“Chicken,” McCarthy said. “My mother always said chicken soup was the thing when you’re not feeling your best.”

He grinned as he said it, and Jonesy tried to keep the shock off his face. McCarthy’s teeth were white and even, really too even to be anything but capped, even the man’s age, which had to be forty-five or thereabouts. But at least four of them were missing-the canines on top (what Jonesy’s father had called “the vampire teeth”) and two right in front on the bottom-Jonesy didn’t know what those were called. He knew one thing, though: McCarthy wasn’t aware they were gone. No one who knew about such gaps in the line of his teeth could expose them so unselfconsciously, even under circumstances like these. Or so Jonesy believed. He felt a sick little chill rush through his gut, a telephone call from nowhere. He turned toward the kitchen before McCarthy could see his face change and wonder what was wrong. Maybe ask what was wrong.

“One order chicken soup coming right up. How about a grilled cheese to go with it?”

“If it’s no trouble. And call me Richard, will you? Or Rick, that’s even better. When people save my life, I like to get on a first-name basis with them as soon as possible.”

“Rick it is, for sure,” Better get those teeth fixed before you step in front of another Jury, Rick.

The feeling that something was wrong here was very strong. It was that click, just as almost guessing McCarthy’s name had been. He was a long way from wishing he’d shot the man when he had the chance, but he was already starting to wish McCarthy had stayed the hell away from his tree and out of his life.

He had the soup on the stove and was making the cheese sandwiches when the first gust of wind arrived-a big whoop that made the cabin creak and raised the snow in a furious sheet. For a moment even the black scrawled shapes of the trees in The Gulch were erased, and there was nothing outside the big window but white: it was as if someone had set up a drive-in movie screen out there. For the first time, Jonesy felt a thread of unease not just about Pete and Henry, presumably on their way back from Gosselin’s in Henry’s Scout, but for the Beaver. You would have said that if anybody knew these woods it would have been the Beav, but nobody knew anything in a whiteout-all bets were off, that was another of his ne'er-do-well father’s sayings, probably not as good as you can’t make yourself be lucky, but not bad. The sound of the genny might help Beav find his way, but as McCarthy had pointed out, sounds had a way of deceiving you. Especially if the wind started kicking up, as it had now apparently decided to do.

His mom had taught him the dozen basic things he knew about cooking, and one of them had to do with the art of making grilled cheese sandwiches. Lay in a little mouseturds first, she said-mouseturds being Janet Jones for mustard-and then butter the goddam bread, not the skillet. Butter the skillet and all’s you got’s fried bread with some cheese in it. He had never understood how the difference between where you put the butter, on the bread or in the skillet, could change the ultimate results, but he always did it his mother’s way, even though it was a pain in the ass buttering the tops of the sandwiches while the bottoms cooked. No more would he have left his rubber boots on once he was in the house… because, his mother had always said, “they draw your feet.” He had no idea just what that meant, but even now, as a man going on forty, he took his boots off as soon as he was in the door, so they wouldn’t draw his feet.

“I think I might have one of these babies myself,” Jonesy said, and laid the sandwiches in the skillet, butter side down. The soup had begun to simmer, and it smelled fine-like comfort.

“Good idea. I certainly hope your friends are all right.”

“Yeah,” Jonesy said. He gave the soup a stir. “Where’s your place?”

“Well, we used to hunt in Mars Hill, at a place Nat and Becky’s uncle owned, but some god-bless’d idiot burned it down two summers ago. Drinking and then getting careless with the old smokes, that’s what the Fire Marshal said, anyway.” Jonesy nodded. “Not an uncommon story.”

“The insurance paid the value of the place, but we had nowhere to hunt. I thought probably that’d be the end of it, and then Steve found this nice place over in Kineo. I think it’s probably an unincorporated township, just another part of the Jefferson Tract, but Kineo’s what they call it, the few people who live there. Do you know where I mean?”

“I know it,” Jonesy said, speaking through lips that felt oddly numb. He was getting another of those telephone calls from nowhere. Hole in the Wall was about twenty miles east of Gosselin’s. Kineo was maybe thirty miles to the west of the market. That was fifty miles in all. Was he supposed to believe that the man sitting on the couch with just his head sticking out of the down comforter had wandered fifty miles since becoming lost the previous afternoon? It was absurd. It was impossible.

“Smells good,” McCarthy said.

And it did, but Jonesy no longer felt hungry.

He was just bringing the chow over to the couch when he heard feet stamping on the stone outside the door. A moment later the door opened and Beaver came in. Snow swirled around his legs in a dancing mist.

“Jesus-Christ-bananas,” the Beav said. Pete had once made a list of Beav-isms, and Jesus-Christ-bananas was high on it, along with such standbys as doodlyfuck and Kiss my bender. They were exclamations both Zen and profane. “I thought I was gonna end up spendin the night out there, then I saw the light.” Beav raised his hands roofward, fingers spread. “Seen de light, lawd, yessir, praise Je-” His glasses started to unfog then, and he saw the stranger on the couch. He lowered his hands, slowly, then smiled. That was one of the reasons Jonesy had loved him ever since grade-school, although the Beav could be tiresome and wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, by any means: his first reaction to the unplanned and unexpected wasn’t a frown but a smile.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Joe Clarendon. Who’re you?”

“Rick McCarthy,” he said, and got to his feet. The comforter tumbled off him and Jonesy saw he had a pretty good potbelly pooching out the front of his sweater. Well, he thought, nothing strange, about that, at least, it’s the middle-aged man’s disease, and it’s going to kill us in our millions during the next twenty years or so.

McCarthy stuck out his hand, started to step forward, and almost tripped over the fallen comforter. If Jonesy hadn’t reached out and grabbed his shoulder, steadying him, McCarthy probably would have fallen forward, very likely cleaning out the coffee-table on which the food was now set. Again Jonesy was struck by the man’s queer ungainliness-it made him think of himself a little that past spring, as he had learned to walk all over again. He got a closer look at the patch on the guy’s cheek, and sort of wished he hadn’t. It wasn’t frostbite at all. It looked like a skin-tumor of some kind, or perhaps a portwine stain with stubble growing out of it.

“Who, whoa, shake it but don’t break it,” Beaver said, springing forward. He grabbed McCarthy’s hand and pumped it until Jonesy thought McCarthy would end up swan-diving into the coffee-table after all. He was glad when the Beav-all five-feet-six of him, with snow still melting into all that long black hippie hair-stepped back. The Beav was still smiling, more broadly than ever. With the shoulder-length hair and the thick glasses, he looked like either a math genius or a serial killer. In fact, he was a carpenter.

“Rick here’s had a time of it,” Jonesy said. “Got lost yesterday and spent last night in the woods.”

Beaver’s smile stayed on but became concerned. Jonesy had an idea what was coming next and willed Beaver not to say it he had gotten the impression that McCarthy was a fairly religious man who might not care much for profanity-but of course asking Beaver to clean up his mouth was like asking the wind not to blow.

“Bitch-in-a-buzzsaw!” he cried now. “That’s fuckin terrible! Sit down! Eat! You too, Jonesy.”

“Nah,” Jonesy said, “you go on and eat that. You’re the one who just came in out of the snow.”

“You sure?”

“I am. I’ll just scramble myself some eggs. Rick can catch you up on his story.” Maybe it’ll make more sense to you than it does to me, he thought.

“Okay.” Beaver took off his Jacket (red) and his vest (orange, of course). He started to toss them on the woodpile, then thought better of it. “Wait, wait, got something you might want.” He stuck his hand deep into one of the pockets of his down jacket, rummaged, and came out with a paperback book, considerably bent but seemingly none the worse for wear otherwise. Little devils with pitchforks danced across the cover-Small Vices, by Robert Parker. It was the book Jonesy had been reading in the stand.

The Beav held it out to him, smiling. “I left your sleeping-bag, but I figured you wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight unless you knew who the fuck done it.”

“You shouldn’t have gone up there,” Jonesy said, but he was touched in a way only Beaver could touch him. The Beav had come back through the blowing snow and hadn’t been able to make out if Jonesy was up in the tree-stand or not, not for sure. He could have called, but for the Beav, calling wasn’t enough, only seeing was believing.

“Not a problem, Beaver said, and sat down next to McCarthy, who was looking at him as a person might look at a new and rather exotic kind of small animal. “Well, thanks,” Jonesy said. “You get around that sandwich. I’m going to do eggs.” He started away, then stopped. “What about Pete and Henry? You think they’ll make it back okay?'he Beav opened his mouth, but before he could answer the wind gasped around the cabin again, making the walls creak and rising to a grim whistle in the eaves. “Aw, this is just a cap of snow,” Beaver said when the gust died away.

“They’ll make it back. Getting out again if there comes a real norther, that might be a different story.” He began to gobble the grilled cheese sandwich. Jonesy went over to the kitchen to scramble some eggs and heat up another can of soup. He felt better about McCarthy now that Beaver was here. The truth was he always felt better when the Beav was around. Crazy but true.

By the time he got the eggs scrambled and the soup hot, McCarthy was chatting away to Beaver as if the two of them had been friends for the last ten years. If McCarthy was offended by the Beav’s litany of mostly comic profanity, that was outweighed by Beav’s considerable charm. “There’s no explaining it,” Henry had once told Jonesy. “He’s a tribble, that’s all-you can’t help liking him. It’s why his bed is never empty-it sure isn’t his looks women respond to.”

Jonesy brought his eggs and soup into the living area, working not to limp-it was amazing how much more his his hip hurt in bad weather, he had always thought that was an old wives” tale but apparently it was not-and sat in one of the chairs at the end of the couch. McCarthy had been doing more talking than eating, it seemed. He’d barely touched his soup, and had eaten only half of his grilled cheese.

“How you boys doin?” Jonesy asked. He shook pepper onto his eggs and fell to with a will-his appetite had made a complete comeback, it seemed.

“We’re two happy whoremasters,” Beaver said, but although he sounded as chipper as ever, Jonesy thought he looked worried, perhaps even alarmed. “Rick’s been telling me about his adventures. It’s as good as a story in one of those men’s magazines they had in the barber shop when I was a kid.” He turned back to McCarthy, still smiling-that was the Beav, always smiling-and flicked a hand through the heavy fall of his black hair. “Old Man Castonguay was the barber on our side of Derry when I was a kid, and he scared me so fuckin bad with those clippers of his that I been stayin away from em ever since.”

McCarthy gave a weak little smile but made no reply. He picked up the other half of his cheese sandwich, looked at it, then put it back down again. The red mark on his cheek glowed like a brand. Beaver, meanwhile, rushed on, as if he was afraid of what McCarthy might say if given half a chance. Outside it was snowing harder than ever, blowing, too, and Jonesy thought of Henry and Pete out there, probably on the Deep Cut Road by now, in Henry’s old Scout.

“Not only did Rick here just about get eaten up by something in the middle of the night-a bear, he thinks it was-he lost his rifle, too. A brand new Remington.30-.30, fuckin A, you won’t never see that again, not a chance in a hundred thousand.”

“I know,” McCarthy said. The color was fading out of his cheeks again, that leaden look coming back in. “I don’t even remember when I put it down, or-” There was a sudden low rasping noise, like a locust. Jonesy felt the hair on the back of his neck stiffen, thinking it was something caught in the fireplace chimney. Then he realized it was

McCarthy. Jonesy had heard some loud farts in his time, some long ones, too, but nothing like this. It seemed to go on forever, although it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. Then the smell hit.

McCarthy had picked up his spoon; now he dropped it back into his barely touched soup and raised his right hand to his blemished cheek in an almost girlish gesture of embarrassment. “Oh gosh, I’m sorry,” he said.

“Not a bit, more room out than there is in,” Beaver said, but that was just instinct running his mouth, instinct and the habits of a lifetime-Jonesy could see he was as shocked by that smell as Jonesy was himself It wasn’t the sulfurous rotten-egg odor that made you laugh and roll your eyes and wave your hand in front of your face, yelling Ah, Jesus, who cut the cheese? Nor one of those methane swamp-gas farts, either. It was the smell Jonesy had detected on McCarthy’s breath, only stronger-a mixture of ether and overripe bananas, like the starter-fluid you shot into your carburetor on a subzero morning.

“Oh dear, that’s awful,” McCarthy said. “I am so darned sorry.”

“It’s all right, really” Jonesy said, but his stomach had curled up into a ball, like something protecting itself from assault. He wouldn’t be finishing his own early lunch; no way in hell could he finish it. He wasn’t prissy about farts as a rule, but this one really reeked.

The Beav got up from the couch and opened a window, letting in a swirl of snow and a draft of blessedly fresh air. “Don’t you worry about it, partner… but that is pretty ripe. What the hell you been eatin? Woodchuck turds?”

“Bushes and moss and other stuff, I don’t know just what,” McCarthy said. “I was just so hungry, you know, I had to eat something, but I don’t know much about that sort of thing, never read any of those books by Euell Gibbons… and of course it was dark.” He said this last almost as if struck by an inspiration, and Jonesy looked up at Beaver, catching his eye to see if the Beav knew what Jonesy did-McCarthy was lying. McCarthy didn’t know what he’d eaten in the Woods, or if he had eaten anything at all. He just wanted to explain that ghastly unexpected frog’s croak. And the stench which had followed it.

The wind gusted again, a big, gaspy whoop that sent a fresh skein of snow in through the open window, but at least it was turning the air over, and thank God for that.

McCarthy leaned forward so suddenly he might have been propelled by a spring, and when he hung his head forward between his knees, Jonesy had a good idea of what was coming next; so long Navajo rug, it’s been good to know ya. The Beav clearly thought the same; he pulled back his legs, which had been splayed out before him, to keep them from being splattered.

But instead of vomit, what came out of McCarthy was a long, low buzz-the sound of a factory machine which has been put under severe strain. McCarthy’s eyes bulged from his face like glass marbles, and his cheeks were so taut that little crescents of shadow appeared under the comers of his eyes. It went on and on, a rumbling, rasping noise, and when it finally ceased, the genny out back seemed far too loud.

“I’ve heard some rm'ghty belches, but that’s the all-time blue ribbon winner,” Beav said. He spoke with quiet and sincere respect.

McCarthy leaned back against the couch, eyes closing, mouth downturned in what Jonesy took for embarrassment, pain, or both. And once again he could smell that aroma of bananas and ether, a fermenting active smell, like something which has just started to go over.

“Oh God, I am so sorry,” McCarthy said without opening his eyes. “I’ve been doing that all day, ever since light. And my stomach hurts again.” Jonesy and the Beav shared a silent, concerned look.

“You know what I think?” Beaver asked. “I think you need to lie down and take you a little sleep. You were probably awake all night, listening to that pesky bear and God knows what else. You’re tired out and stressed out and fuck-a-duck knows what else out. You just need some shuteye, a few hours and you’ll be right as the goddam rain.”

McCarthy looked at Beaver with such wretched gratitude that Jonesy felt a little ashamed to be seeing it. Although McCarthy’s complexion was still leaden, he had begun to break a sweat-great big beads that formed on his brow and temples, and then ran down his cheeks like clear oil. This in spite of the cold air now circulating in the room.

“You know,” he said, “I bet you’re right. I’m tired, that’s all it is. My stomach hurts, but that part’s just stress. And I was eating all sorts of things, bushes and just… gosh, oh dear, I don’t know… all sorts of things.” He scratched his cheek. “Is this darn thing on my face bad? Is it bleeding?”

“No,” Jonesy said. “Just red.”

“It’s a reaction,” McCarthy said dolefully. “I get the same thing from peanuts. I’ll lie down. That’s the ticket, all right.”

He got to his feet, then tottered. Beaver and Jonesy both reached for him, but McCarthy steadied on his feet before either of them could take hold. Jonesy could have sworn that what he had taken for a middle-aged potbelly was almost gone. Was it possible? Could the man have passed that much gas? He didn’t know. All he knew for sure was that it had been a mighty fart and an even mightier belch, the sort of thing you could yarn on for twenty years or more, starting off We used to go up to Beaver Clarendon’s camp the first week of hunting season every year, and one November-it was “01, the year of the big fall storm-this fella wandered into camp… Yes, it would make a good story, people would laugh about the big fart and the big burp, people always laughed at stories about farts and burps. He wouldn’t tell the part about how he had come within eight ounces of press on a Garand’s trigger of taking McCarthy’s life, though. No, he wouldn’t want to tell that part. Would he?

Pete and Henry were doubling, and so Beaver led McCarthy to the other downstairs bedroom, the one Jonesy had been using. The Beav shot him a little apologetic look, and Jonesy shrugged. It was the logical place, after all. Jonesy could double in with Beav tonight-Christ knew they’d done it enough as kids-and in truth, he wasn’t sure McCarthy could have managed the stairs, anyway. He liked the man’s sweaty, leaden look less and less.

Jonesy was the sort of man who made his bed and then buried it-books, papers, clothes, bags, assorted toiletries. He swept all this off as quick as he could, then turned back the coverlet. “You need to take a squirt, partner?” the Beav asked.

McCarthy shook his head. He seemed almost hypnotized by the clean blue sheet Jonesy had uncovered. Jonesy was once again struck by how glassy the man’s eyes were. Like the eyes of a stuffed trophy head. Suddenly and unbidden, he saw his living room back in Brookline, that upscale municipality next door to Boston. Braided rugs, early American furniture… and McCarthy’s head mounted over the fireplace. Bagged that one up in Maine, he would tell his guests at cocktail parties. Big bastard, dressed out at one-seventy.

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the Beav was looking at him with something like alarm. “Twinge in the hip,” he said. “Sorry. Mr McCarthy-Rick-you’ll want to take off your sweater and pants. Boots too, of course.

McCarthy looked around at him like a man roused from a dream. “Sure,” he said. “You bet.”

“Need help?” Beaver asked.

“No, gosh no.” McCarthy looked alarmed or amused or both. “I’m not that far gone.”

“Then I’ll leave Jonesy to supervise.”

Beaver slipped out and McCarthy began to undress, starting by pulling his sweater off over his head. Beneath it he wore a red-and-black hunter’s shirt, and beneath that a thermal undershirt. And yes, there was less gut poking out the front of that shirt, Jonesy was sure of it.

Well… almost sure. Only an hour ago, he reminded himself, he had been sure McCarthy’s coat was the head of a deer.

McCarthy sat down in the chair beside the window to take off his shoes, and when he did there was another fart-not as long as the first one, but just as loud and hoarse. Neither of them commented on it, or the resulting smell, which was strong enough in the little room to make Jonesy’s eyes feel like watering.

McCarthy kicked his boots off-they made clunking sounds on the wooden floor-then stood up and unbuckled his belt. As he pushed his blue jeans down, revealing the lower half of his thermal underwear, the Beav came back in with a ceramic pot from upstairs. He put it down by the head of the bed. “Just in case you have to, you know, urk. Or if you get one of those collect calls you just have to take right away.”

McCarthy looked at him with a dullness Jonesy found alarming-a stranger in what had been his bedroom, somehow ghostly in his baggy long underwear. An ill stranger. The question was just how ill.

“In case you can’t make the bathroom,” the Beav explained. “Which, by the way, is close by. Just bang a left outside the bedroom door, but remember it’s the second door as you go along the wall, okay? If you forget and go in the first one, you’ll be taking a shit in the linen closet.”

Jonesy was surprised into a laugh and didn’t care for the sound of it in the slightest-high and slightly hysterical.

“I feel better now,” McCarthy said, but Jonesy detected absolutely zero sincerity in the man’s voice. And the guy just stood there in his underwear, like an android whose memory circuits have been about three-quarters erased. Before, he had shown some life, if not exactly vivacity; now that was gone, like the color in his cheeks.

“Go on, Rick,” Beaver said quietly. “Lie down and catch some winks. Work on getting your strength back.”

“Yes, okay.” He sat down on the freshly opened bed and looked out the window. His eyes were wide and blank. Jonesy thought the smell in the room was dissipating, but perhaps he was just getting used to it, the way you got used to the smell of the monkeyhouse at the zoo if you stayed in there long enough. “Gosh, look at it snow.”

“Yeah,” Jonesy said. “How’s your stomach now?”

“Better.” McCarthy’s eyes moved to Jonesy’s face. They were the solemn eyes of a frightened child. “I’m sorry about passing gas that way-I never did anything like that before, not even in the Army when it seemed like we ate beans every day-but I feel better.”

“Sure you don’t need to take a leak before you turn in?” Jonesy had four children, and this question came almost automatically. “No. I went in the woods just before you found me. Thank you for taking me in. Thank you both.” “Ah, hell,” Beaver said, and shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “Anybody woulda.” “maybe,” McCarthy said. “And maybe not. In the Bible it says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” Outside, the wind gusted more fiercely yet, making Hole in the Wall shake. Jonesy waited for McCarthy to finish-it sounded as if he had more to say-but the man just swung his feet into bed and pulled the covers up.

From somewhere deep in Jonesy’s bed there came another of those long, rasping farts, and Jonesy decided that was enough for him. It was one thing to let in a wayfaring stranger when he came to your door just ahead of a storm; it was another to stand around while he laid a series of gas-bombs.

The Beaver followed him out and closed the door gently behind him.

When Jonesy started to talk, the Beav shook his head, raised his finger to his lips, and led Jonesy across the big room to the kitchen, which was as far as they could get from McCarthy without going into the shed out back.

“Man, that guy’s in a world of hurt,” Beaver said, and in the harsh glow of the kitchen’s fluorescent strips, Jonesy could see just how worried his old friend was. The Beav rummaged into the wide front pocket of his overalls, found a toothpick, and began to nibble on it. In three minutes-the length of time it took a dedicated smoker to finish a cigarette-he would reduce it to a palmful of flax-fine splinters. Jonesy didn’t know how the Beav’s teeth stood up to it (or his stomach), but he had been doing it his whole life.

“I hope you’re wrong, but…” Jonesy shook his head. “Did you ever smell anything like those farts?”

“Nope,” Beaver said. “But there’s a lot more going on with that guy than just a bad stomach.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he thinks it’s November eleventh, for one thing.”

Jonesy had no idea what the Beav was talking about. November eleventh was the day their own hunting party had arrived, bundled into Henry’s Scout, as always.

“Beav, it’s Wednesday. It’s the fourteenth.”

Beaver nodded, smiling a little in spite of himself. The toothpick, which had already picked up an appreciable warp, rolled from one side of his mouth to the other. “I know that. You know that. Rick, he don’t know that. Rick thinks it’s the Lord’s Day.”

“Beav, what exactly did he say to you?” Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been much-it just didn’t take that long to scramble a couple of eggs and heat a can of soup. That started a train of thought, and as Beaver talked, Jonesy ran water to do up the few dishes. He didn’t mind camping out, but he was damned if he was going to live in squalor, as so many men seemed willing to do when they left their homes and went into the woods.

“What he said was they came up on Saturday so they could hunt a little, then spend Sunday working on the roof, which had a couple of leaks in it. He goes, “At least I didn’t have to break the commandment about working on the Sabbath. When you’re lost in the woods, the only thing you have to work on is not going crazy."”

“Huh,” Jonesy said.

“I guess I couldn’t swear in a court of law that he thinks this is the eleventh, but it’s either that or go back a week further, to the fourth, because he sure does think it’s Sunday. And I just can’t believe he’s been out there ten days.”

Jonesy couldn’t, either. But three? Yes. That he could believe. “It would explain something he told me,” Jonesy said. “He-”

The floor creaked and they both jumped a little, looking toward the closed bedroom door on the other side of the big room, but there was nothing to see. And the floors and walls were always creaking out here, even when the wind wasn’t blowing up high. They looked at each other, a little shamefaced.

“Yeah, I’m jumpy,” Beaver said, perhaps reading Jonesy’s face, perhaps picking the thought out of Jonesy’s mind. “Man, you have to admit it’s a little creepy, him turning up right out of the woods like that.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“That fart sounded like he had something crammed up his butt that was dying of smoke inhalation.”

The Beav looked a little surprised at that, as he always did when he said something funny. They began laughing simultaneously, holding onto each other and doing it through open mouths, expelling the sounds as a series of harsh sighs, trying to keep it down, not wanting the poor guy to hear them if he was still awake, hear and know they were laughing at him. Jonesy had a particularly hard time keeping it quiet because the release was so necessary-it had a hysterical seventy to it and he doubled over, gasping and snorting, water running out of his eyes.

At last Beaver grabbed him and yanked him out the door. There they stood coatless in the deepening snow, finally able to laugh out loud with the booming wind to cover the sounds they made.

When they went back in again, Jonesy’s hands were so numb he barely felt the hot water when he plunged his hands into it, but he was laughed out and that was good. He wondered again about Pete and Henry-how they were doing and if they’d make it back okay.

“You said it explained some stuff,” the Beav said. He had started another toothpick. “What stuff?”

“He didn’t know snow was coming,” Jonesy said. He spoke slowly, trying to recall McCarthy’s exact words. “’so much for fair and seasonably cold," I think that’s what he said. But that would make sense if the last forecast he heard was for the eleventh or twelfth. Because until late yesterday, it was fair, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, and seasonably fuckin cold,” Beaver agreed. He pulled a dishtowel with a pattern of faded ladybugs on it from the drawer by the sink and began to dry the dishes. He looked across at the closed bedroom door as he worked. “What else’d he say?”

“That their camp was in Kineo.”

“Kineo? That’s forty, fifty miles west of here. He-” Beaver took the toothpick out of his mouth, examined the bite-marks on it, and put the other end in his mouth. “Oh, I see.”

“Yeah. He couldn’t have done all that in a single night, but if he was out there for three days-”

“-and four nights, if he got lost on Saturday afternoon that makes four nights-”

“Yeah, and four nights. So, supposing he kept pretty much headed dead east that whole time…” Jonesy calculated fifteen miles a day. “I’d say it’s possible.”

“But how come he didn’t freeze?” Beaver had lowered his voice to a near-whisper, probably without being aware of it. “He’s got a nice heavy coat and he’s wearin longies, but nights have been in the twenties everywhere north of the county line since Halloween. So you tell me how he spends four nights out there and doesn’t freeze. Doesn’t even look like he’s got any frostbite, just that mess on his cheek.”

“I don’t know. And there’s something else,” Jonesy said. “How come he doesn’t have the start of a beard?”

“Huh?” Beaver’s mouth opened. The toothpick hung from his lower lip. Then, very slowly, he nodded. “Yeah. All he’s got is stubble.”

“I’d say less than a day’s growth.”

“I guess he was shavin, huh?”

“Right,” Jonesy said, picturing McCarthy lost in the woods, scared and cold and hungry (not that he looked like he’d missed many meals, that was another thing), but still kneeling by a stream every morning, breaking the ice with a booted foot so he could get to the water beneath, then taking his trusty Gillette from… where? His coat pocket?

“And then this morning he lost his razor, which is why he’s got the stubble,” the Beav said. He was smiling again, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of humor in it.

“Yeah. Same time he lost his gun. Did you see his teeth?”

Beaver made a what-now grimace.

“Four gone. Two on top, two on the bottom. He looks like the What-me-worry kid that’s always on the front of Mad magazine.”

“Not a big deal, buddy. I’ve got a couple of AWOL choppers myself.” Beaver hooked back one comer of his mouth, baring his left gum in a one-sided grin Jonesy could have done without. “Eee? Ight ack ere.”

Jonesy shook his head. It wasn’t the same. “The guy’s a lawyer, Beav-he’s out in public all the time, his looks are part of his living. And these babies are right out in front. He didn’t know they were gone. I’d swear to it.”

“You don’t suppose he got exposed to radiation or something, do you?” Beaver asked uneasily. “Your teeth fall out when you get fuckin radiation poisonin, I saw that in a movie one time. One of the ones you’re always watching, those monster shows. You don’t suppose it’s that, do you? Maybe he got that red mark the same time.”

“Yeah, he got a dose when the Mars Hill Nuclear Power Plant blew up,” Jonesy said, and Beaver’s puzzled expression made him immediately sorry for the crack. “Beav, when you get radiation poisoning, I think your hair falls out, too.”

The Beaver’s face cleared. “Yeah, that’s right. The guy in the movie ended up as bald as Telly what’s-his-fuck, used to play that cop on TV.” He paused. “Then the guy died. The one in the movie, I mean, not Telly, although now that I think of it-”

“This guy’s got plenty of hair,” Jonesy interrupted. Let Beaver get off on a tangent and they would likely never get back to the point. He noticed that, out of the stranger’s presence, neither of them called him Rick, or even McCarthy. Just “the guy,” as if they subconsciously wanted to turn him into something less important than a man-something generic, as if that would make it matter less if… well, if.

“Yeah,” Beaver said. “He does, doesn’t he? Plenty of hair. “'He must have amnesia.” “Maybe, but he remembers who he is, who he was with, shit like that. Man, that was some trumpet-blast he blew, wasn’t it? And the stink! Like ether!''Yeah,” Jonesy said. “I kept thinking of starter fluid. Diabetics get a smell when they’re tipping over. I read that in a mystery novel, I think.” “Is it like starter fluid?”

“I can’t remember.” They stood there looking at each other, listening to the wind. It crossed Jonesy’s mind to tell Beaver about the lightning the guy claimed to have seen, but why bother? Enough was enough. “I thought he was going to blow his cookies when he leaned forward like that,” the Beav said.

“Didn’t you?”

Jonesy nodded.

“And he don’t look well, not at all well.”

“No.”

Beaver sighed, tossed his toothpick in the trash, and looked out the window, where the snow was coming down harder and heavier than ever. He flicked his fingers through his hair. “Man, I wish Henry and Pete were here. Henry especially.”

“Beav, Henry’s a psychiatrist.”

“I know, but he’s the closest thing to a doctor we got-and I think that fellow needs doctoring.”

Henry actually was a physician-had to be, in order to get his certificate of shrinkology-but he’d never practiced anything except psychiatry, as far as Jonesy knew. Still, he understood what Beaver meant.

“Do you still think they’ll make it back, Beav?”

Beaver sighed. “Half an hour ago I would have said for sure, but it’s really comin heavy. I think so.” He looked at Jonesy somberly; there was not much of the usually happy-go-lucky Beaver Clarendon in that look. “I hope so,” he said.

Chapter Three HENRY’S SCOUT

Now, as he followed the Scout’s headlights through the thickening snow, burrowing as if through a tunnel along the Deep Cut Road toward Hole in the Wall, Henry was down to thinking about ways to do it.

There was the Hemingway Solution, of course-way back at Harvard, as an undergraduate, he had written a paper calling it that, so he might have been thinking about it-in a personal way, not just as another step toward fulfilling some twinky course requirement, that was-even then. The Hemingway Solution was a shotgun, and Henry had one of those now… not that he would do it here, with the others. The four of them had had a lot of fine times at Hole in the Wall, and it would be unfair to do it there. It would pollute the place for Pete and Jonesy-for Beaver too, maybe Beaver most of all, and that wouldn’t be right. But it would be soon, he could feel it coming on, something like a sneeze. Funny to compare the ending of your life to a sneeze, but that was probably what it came to. Just kerchoo, and then hello darkness, my old friend.

When implementing the Hemingway Solution, you took off your shoe and your sock. Butt of the gun went on the floor. Barrel went into your mouth. Great toe went around the trigger. Memo to myself, Henry thought as the Scout fishtailed a little in the fresh snow and he corrected-the ruts helped, that was really all this road was, a couple of ruts dug by the skidders that used it in the summertime. If you do it that way, take a laxative and don’t do it until after that final dump, no need to make any extra mess for the people who find you.

“Maybe you better slow down a little,” Pete said. He had a beer between his legs and it was half gone, but one wouldn’t be enough to mellow Pete out. Three or four more, though, and Henry could go barrel-assing down this road at sixty and Pete would just sit there in the passenger seat, singing along with one of those horrible fucking Pink Floyd discs. And he could go sixty, probably, without putting so much as another ding in the front bumper. Being in the ruts of the Deep Cut, even when they were filled with snow, was like being on rails. If it kept snowing that might change, but for now, all was well.

“Don’t worry, Pete-everything’s five-by-five.”

“You want a beer?”

“Not while I’m driving.”

“Not even out here in West Overshoe?”

“Later.”

Pete subsided, leaving Henry to follow the bore of the headlights, to thread his way along this white lane between the trees. Leaving him with his thoughts, which was where he wanted to be. It was like returning to a bloody place inside your mouth, exploring it again and again with the tip of your tongue, but it was where he wanted to be.

There were pills. There was the old Baggie-over-the-head-in-the-bathtub-trick. There was drowning. There was jumping from a high place. The handgun in the ear was too unsure-too much chance of waking up paralyzed-and so was slitting the wrists, that was for people who were only practicing, but the Japanese had a way of doing it that interested Henry very much. Tie a rope around your neck. Tie the other end to a large rock. Put the rock on the seat of a chair, then sit down with your back braced so you can’t fall backward but have to keep sitting. Tip the chair over and the rock rolls off. Subject may live for three to five minutes in a deepening dream of asphyxiation. Gray fades to black; hello darkness, my old friend. He had read about that method in one of Jonesy’s beloved Kinsey Milhone detective novels, of all places. Detective novels and horror movies: those were the things that floated Jonesy’s boat.

On the whole, Henry leaned toward the Hemingway Solution.

Pete finished his first beer and popped the top on his second, looking considerably more content. “What’d you make of it?” Pete asked.

Henry felt called to from that other universe, the one where the living actually wanted to live. As always these days, that made him feel impatient. But it was important that none of them suspect, and he had an idea Jonesy already did, a little. Beaver might, too. They were the ones who could sometimes see inside. Pete didn’t have a clue, but he might say the wrong thing to one of the others, about how preoccupied ole Henry had gotten, like there was something on his mind, something heavy, and Henry didn’t want that. This was going to be the last trip to Hole in the Wall for the four of them, the old Kansas Street gang, the Crimson Pirates of the third and fourth grades, and he wanted it to be a good one. He wanted them to be shocked when they heard, even Jonesy, who saw into him the most often and always had. He wanted them to say they’d had no idea. Better that than the three of them sitting around with their heads hung, not able to make eye contact with one another except in fleeting glances, thinking that they should have known, they had seen the signs and should have done something. So he came back to that other universe, simulating interest smoothly and convincingly. Who could do that better than a headshrinker?

“What did I make of what?”

Pete rolled his eyes. “At Gosselin’s, dimbulb! All that stuff Old Man Gosselin was talking about.”

“Peter, they don’t call him Old Man Gosselin for nothing. He’s eighty if he’s a day, and if there’s one thing old women and old men are not short on, it’s hysteria.” The Scout-no spring chicken itself, fourteen years old and far into its second trip around the odometer popped out of the ruts and immediately skidded, four-wheel drive or not. Henry steered into the skid, almost laughing when Pete dropped his beer onto the floor and yelled, “Whoa-fuck, watch out!”

Henry let off on the gas until he felt the Scout start to straighten out, then zapped the go-pedal again, deliberately too fast and too hard. The Scout went into another skid, this time widdershins to the first, and Pete yelled again. Henry let up once more and the Scout thumped back into the ruts and once again ran smoothly, as if on rails. One positive to deciding to end your life, it seemed, was no longer sweating the small stuff. The lights cut through the white and shifting day, full of a billion dancing snowflakes, not one of them the same, if you believed the conventional wisdom.

Pete picked up his beer (only a little had spilled), and patted his chest. “Aren’t you going a little fast?”

“Not even close,” Henry said, and then, as if the skid had never occurred (it had) or interrupted his train of thought (it hadn’t), he went on, “Group hysteria is most common in the very old and the very young. It’s a well-documented phenomenon in both my field and that of the sociology heathens who live next door.”

Henry glanced down and saw he was doing thirty-five, which was, in fact, a little fast for these conditions. He slowed down. “Better?”

Pete nodded. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re a great driver, but man, it’s snowing. Also, we got the supplies.” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the two bags and two boxes in the back seat. “In addition to hot dogs, we got the last three boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Beaver can’t live without that stuff, you know.”

“I know,” Henry said. “I like it, too. Remember those stories about devil-worship in Washington State, the ones that made the press in the mid-nineties? They were traced back to several old people living with their children-grandchildren, in one case-in two small towns south of Seattle. The mass reports of sexual abuse in daycare centers apparently began with teenage girls working as part-time aides crying wolf at the same time in Delaware and California. Possibly coincidence, or possibly the time was simply ripe for such stories to gain credence and these girls caught a wave out of the air.”

How smoothly the words rolled out of his mouth, almost as if they mattered. Henry talked, the man beside him listened with dumb admiration, and no one (certainly not Pete) could have surmised that he was thinking of the shotgun, the rope, the exhaust pipe, the pills. His head was full of tape-loops, that was all. And his tongue was the cassette player.

“In Salem,” Henry went on, “the old men and the young girls combined their hysteria, and voila, you have the Salem Witch Trials.” “I saw that movie with Jonesy,” Pete said. “Vincent Price was in it. Scared the shit out of me.”

“I’m sure,” Henry said, and laughed. For one wild moment he’d thought Pete was talking about The Crucible. “And when are hysterical ideas most likely to gain credence? Once the crops are in and the bad weather closes down, of course-then there’s time for telling stories and making mischief In Wenatchee, Washington, it’s devil-worship and child sacrifices in the woods. In Salem it was witches. And in the Jefferson Tract, home of the one and only Gosselin’s Market, it’s strange lights in the sky, missing hunters, and troop maneuvers. Not to mention weird red stuff growing on the trees.”

“I don’t know about the helicopters and the soldiers, but enough people have seen those lights so they’re having a special town meeting. Old Man Gosselin told me so while you were getting the canned stuff. Also, those folks over Kineo way are really missing. That ain’t hysteria.”

“Four quick points,” Henry said. “First, you can’t have a town meeting in the Jefferson Tract because there’s no town-even Kineo’s just an unincorporated township with a name. Second, the meeting will be held around Old Man Gosselin’s Franklin stove and half those attending will be shot on peppermint schnapps or coffee brandy.”

Pete snickered.

“Third, what else have they got to do? And fourth-this concerns the hunters-they probably either got tired of it and went home, or they all got drunk and decided to get rich at the rez casino up in Carrabassett.”

“You think, huh?” Pete looked crestfallen, and Henry felt a great wave of affection for him. He reached over and patted Pete’s knee.

“Never fear,” he said. “The world is full of strange things.” If the world had really been full of strange things, Henry doubted he would have been so eager to leave it, but if there was one thing a psychiatrist knew how to do (other than write prescriptions for Prozac and Paxil and Amblen, that was), it was tell lies.

“Four hunters all disappearing at the same time seems pretty strange to me, all right.”

“Not a bit,” Henry said, and laughed. “One would be odd. Two would be strange. Four? They went off together, depend on it.”

“How far are we from Hole in the Wall, Henry?” Which, when translated, meant Do I have time for another beer?

Henry had zeroed the Scout’s tripmeter at Gosselin’s, an old habit that went back to his days working for the State of Massachusetts, where the deal had been twelve cents a mile and all the psychotic geriatrics you could write up. The mileage between the store and the Hole was easy enough to remember: 22.2. The odometer currently read 12.7, which meant-

“Look out!” Pete shouted, and Henry snapped his gaze hack to the windshield.

The Scout had just topped the steep rise of a tree-covered ridge. The snow here was thicker than ever, but Henry was running with the high beams on and clearly saw the person sitting in the road about a hundred feet ahead-a person wearing a duffel coat, an orange vest that blew backward like Superman’s cape in the strengthening wind, and one of those Russian fur hats. Orange ribbons had been attached to the hat and they also blew back in the wind, reminding Henry of the streamers you sometimes saw strung over used-car lots. The guy was sitting in the middle of the road like an Indian that wants to smoke-um peace pipe, and he did not move when the headlights struck him. For one moment Henry saw the sitting figure’s eyes, wide open but still, so still and bright and blank, and he thought: That’s how my eyes would look if I didn’t guard them so closely.

There was no time to stop, not with the snow. Henry twisted the wheel to the right and felt the thump as the Scout came out of the ruts again. He caught another glimpse of the white, still face and had time to think, Why, goddam! It’s a woman.

Once out of the ruts the Scout began to skid again at once. This time Henry turned against it, deliberately snowplowing the wheels to deepen the skid, knowing without even thinking about it (there was no time to think) that it was the road-sitter’s only chance. And he didn’t rate it much of one, at that.

Pete screamed, and from thy corner of his eye, Henry saw him raise his hands in front of his face, palms out in a warding-off gesture. The Scout tried to go broadside and now Henry spun the wheel back, trying to control the skid just enough so that the rear end wouldn’t smash the road-sitter’s face backward into her skull. The wheel spun with greasy, giddy ease under his gloved hands. For perhaps three seconds the Scout shot down the snow-covered Deep Cut Road at a forty-five-degree angle, a thing belonging partly to Henry Devlin and partly to the storm. Snow flew up and around it in a fine spray; the headlights painted the snow-slumped pines on the left side of the road in a pair of moving spots. Three seconds, not long, but just long enough. He saw the figure pass by as if she were moving instead of them, except she never moved, not even when the rusty edge of the Scout’s bumper flirted past her with perhaps no more than an inch of snowy air between it and her face.

Missed you! Henry exulted. Missed you, you bitch! Then the last thin thread of control broke and the Scout broached broadside. There was a “udden'ng vibration as the wheels found the ruts again, only crosswise this time. It was still trying to turn all the way around, swapping ends-Frontsies-backsies! they used to cry when in line back in grammar school-and then it hit a buried rock or perhaps a small fallen tree with a terrific thud and rolled over, first on the passenger side, the windows over there disintegrating into glittering crumbs, then over onto the roof One side of Henry’s seatbelt broke, spilling him onto the roof on his left shoulder. His balls thumped against the steering column, producing instant leaden pain. The turnsignal stalk broke off against his thigh and he felt blood begin to run at once, soaking his jeans. The claret, as the old boxing radio announcers used to call it, as in Look out, folks, the claret has begun to flow. Pete was yelling or screaming or both.

For several seconds the overturned Scout’s engine continued to run, then gravity did its work and the motor died, Now it was just an overturned hulk in the road, wheels still spinning, lights shining at the snow-loaded trees on the left side of the road. One of them went out, but the other continued to shine.

Henry had talked with Jonesy a lot about his accident (listened, really; therapy was creative listening), and he knew that Jonesy had no memory of the actual collision. As far as Henry could tell, he himself never lost consciousness following the Scout’s flip, and the chain of recollection remained intact. He remembered fumbling for the seatbelt clasp, wanting to be all the way free of the fucking thing, while Pete bellowed that his leg was broken, his cocksucking leg was broken. He remembered the steady whick-thump, whick-thump of the windshield wipers and the glow of the dashlights, which were now up instead of down. He found the seatbelt clasp, lost it, found it again, and pushed it. The seatbelt’s lap-strap released him and he thumped awkwardly against the roof, shattering the domelight’s plastic cover.

He flailed with his hand, found the doorhandle, couldn’t move it.

“My leg! Oh man, my fucking leg!”

“Shut up about it,” Henry said. “Your leg’s okay.” As if he knew. He found the doorhandle again, yanked, and there was nothing. Then he realized why-he was upside down and yanking the wrong way. He reversed his grip and the domelight’s uncovered bulb glared hotly in his eye as the door clicked open. He shoved the door with the back of his hand, sure there would be no real result; the frame was probably bent and he’d be lucky to get six inches.

But the door grated and suddenly he could feel snow swirling coldly around his face and neck. He pushed harder on the door, getting his shoulder into it, and it wasn’t until his legs came free of the steering column that he realized they had been hung up. He did half a somersault and was suddenly regarding his own denim-covered crotch at close range, as if he had decided to try and kiss his throbbing balls, make them all well. His diaphragm folded in on itself and it was hard to breathe.

“Henry, help me! I’m caught! I’m fuckin caught!”

“Just a minute.” His voice sounded squeezed and high, hardly his own voice at all. Now he could see the upper left leg of his jeans darkening with blood. The wind in the pines sounded like God’s own Electrolux.

He grabbed the doorpost, grateful he’d left his gloves on while he was driving, and gave a tremendous yank-he had to get out, had to unfold his diaphragm so he could breathe.

For a moment nothing happened, and then Henry popped out like a cork out of a bottle. He lay where he was for a moment, panting and looking up into a sifting, falling net of snow. There was nothing odd about the sky then; he would have sworn to it in court on a stack of Bibles. Just the low gray bellies of the clouds and the psychedelic downrush of the snow.

Pete was calling his name again and again, with increasing panic.

Henry rolled over, got to his knees, and when that went all right he lurched to his feet. He only stood for a moment, swaying in the wind and waiting to see if his bleeding left leg would buckle and spill him into the snow again. It didn’t, and he limped around the back of the overturned Scout to see what he could do about Pete. He spared one glance at the woman who had caused all this fuckarow. She sat as she had, cross-legged in the middle of the road, her thighs and the front of her parka frosted with snow. Her vest snapped and billowed. So did the ribbons attached to her cap. She had not turned to look at them but stared back in the direction of Gosselin’s Market just as she had when they came over the rise and saw her. One swooping, curving tire-track in the snow came within a foot of her cocked left leg, and he had no idea, absolutely none at all, how he could have missed her.

“Henry! Henry, help me!”

He hurried on, slipping in the new snow as he rounded the passenger side. Pete’s door was stuck, but when Henry got on his knees and yanked with both hands, it came open about halfway. He reached in, grabbed Pete’s shoulder, and yanked. Nothing.

“Unbuckle your belt, Pete.”

Pete fumbled but couldn’t seem to find it even though it was right in front of him. Working carefully, with not the slightest feeling of impatience (he supposed he might be in shock), Henry unclipped the belt and Pete thumped to the roof, his head bending sideways. He screamed in mingled surprise and pain and then came floundering and yanking his way out of the half-open door. Henry grabbed him under his arms and pulled backward. They both went over in the snow and Henry was afflicted with deja vu so strong and so sudden it was like swooning. Hadn’t they played just this way as kids? Of course they had. The day they’d taught Duddits how to make snow angels, for one. Someone began to laugh, startling him badly. Then he realized it was him.

Pete sat up, wild-eyed and glowering, the back of him covered with snow. “The fuck are you laughing about? That asshole almost got us killed! I’m gonna strangle the son of a bitch!”

“Not her son but the bitch herself,” Henry said. He was laughing harder than ever and thought it quite likely that Pete didn’t understand what he was saying-especially with the wind thrown in-but he didn’t care. Seldom had he felt so delicious.

Pete flailed to his feet much as Henry had done himself, and Henry was just about to say something wise, something about how Pete was moving pretty well for a guy with a broken leg, when Pete went back down with a cry of pain. Henry went to him and felt Pete’s leg, thrust out in front of him. It seemed intact, but who could tell through two layers of clothing?

“It ain’t broke after all,” Pete said, but he was panting with pain. “Fucker’s locked up is all, just like when I was playin football. Where is she? You sure it’s a woman?”

“Yes.”

Pete got up and hobbled around the front of the car holding his knee. The remaining headlight still shone bravely into the snow. “She better be crippled or blind, that’s all I can say,” he told Henry. “If she’s not, I’m gonna kick her ass all the way back to Gosselin’s.” Henry began to laugh again. It was the mental picture of Pete hopping… then kicking. Like some fucked-up Rockette. “Peter, don’t you really hurt her!” he shouted, suspecting any severity he might have managed was negated by the fact that he was speaking between gusts of maniacal laughter.

“I won’t unless she puts some sass on me,” Pete said. The words, carried back to Henry on the wind, had an offended-old-lady quality to them that made him laugh harder than ever. He scooted down his jeans and long underwear and stood there in his jockeys to see how badly the turnsignal stalk had wounded him.

It was a shallow gash about three inches long on the inside of his thigh. It had bled copiously-was still oozing-but Henry didn’t think it was deep.

“What in the hell did you think you were doing?” Pete scolded from the other side of the overturned Scout, whose wipers were still whick-thumping back and forth. And although Pete’s tirade was laced with profanity (much of it decidedly Beaverish), his friend still sounded to Henry like an offended old lady schoolteacher, and this got him laughing again as he hauled up his britches.

“Why you sittin out here in the middle of the motherfuckin road in the middle of a motherfuckin snowstorm? You drunk? High on drugs? What kind of dumb doodlyfuck are you? Hey, talk to me! You almost got me n my buddy killed, the least you can do is… oww, FUCK-ME-FREDDY!”

Henry came around the wreck just in time to see Pete fall over beside Ms Buddha. His leg must have locked up again. She never looked at him. The orange ribbons on her hat blew out behind her.

Her face was raised into the storm, wide eyes not blinking as the snowflakes whirled into them to melt on their warm living lenses, and Henry felt, in spite of everything, his professional curiosity aroused. Just what had they found here?

“Oww, fuck me sideways, shit-a-goddam, don’t that fuckin HURT!”

“Are you all right?” Henry asked, and that started him laughing again. What a foolish question.

“Do I sound all right, shrink-boy?” Pete asked waspishly, but when Henry bent toward him, he raised one hand and waved him away. “Nah, I got it, it’s lettin go, check Princess Dipshit. She just sits there.”

Henry dropped to his knees in front of the woman, wincing at the pain-his legs, yes, but his shoulder also hurt where he had banged it on the roof and his neck was stiffening rapidly-but still chuckling.

This was no dewy damsel in distress. She was forty at least, and heavyset. Although her parka was thick and she was wearing God knew how many layers beneath it, it swelled noticeably in front, indicating the sort of prodigious jugs for which breast-reduction surgery had been made. The hair whipping out from beneath and around the flaps of her cap was cut in no particular style. Like them, she was wearing jeans, but one of her thighs would have made two of Henry’s. The first word to occur to him was countrywoman-the kind of woman you saw hanging out her wash in the toy-littered yard beside her doublewide trailer while Garth or Shania blared from a radio stuck in an open window… or maybe buying a few groceries at Gosselin’s. The orange gear suggested that she might have been hunting, but if so, where was her rifle? Already covered in snow? Her wide eyes were dark blue and utterly blank. Henry looked for her tracks and saw none. The wind had erased them, no doubt, but it was still eerie; she might have dropped from the sky.

Henry pulled his glove off and snapped his fingers in front of those staring eyes. They blinked. It wasn’t much, but more than he had expected, given the fact that a multi-ton vehicle had just missed her by inches and never a twitch from her.

“Hey!” he shouted in her face. “Hey, come back! Come back!” He snapped his fingers again and could hardly feel them-when had it turned so cold? We’re in a goddam situation here, he thought.

The woman burped. The sound was startlingly loud even with the wind in the trees, and before it was snatched away by the moving air, he got a whiff of something both bitter and pungent it smelled like medicinal alcohol. The woman shifted and grimaced, then broke wind-a long, purring fart that sounded like ripping cloth. Maybe, Henry thought, it’s how the locals say hello. The idea got him laughing again.

“Holy shit,” Pete said, almost in his ear. “Sounds like she nipped out the seat of her pants with that one. What you been drinkin, lady, Prestone?” And then, to Henry: “She’s been drinkin somethin, by Christ, and if it ain’t antifreeze, I’m a monkey.”

Henry could smell it, too.

The woman’s eyes suddenly shifted, met Henry’s own. He was shocked by the pain he saw in them. “Where’s Rick?” she asked. “I have to find Rick-he’s the only one left.” She grimaced, and when her lips peeled back, Henry saw that half her teeth were gone. Those remaining looked like stakes in a dilapidated fence. She belched again, and the smell was strong enough to make his eyes water.

“Aw, holy Christ!” Pete nearly screamed. “What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know,” Henry said. The only things he knew for sure were that the woman’s eyes had gone blank again and that they were in a goddam situation here. Had he been alone, he might have considered sitting down next to the woman and putting his arm around her-a much more interesting and unique answer to the final problem than the Hemingway Solution. But there was Pete to think about-Pete hadn’t even been through his first alcohol rehab yet, although that was undoubtedly in the cards.

And besides, he was curious.

Pete was sitting in the snow, working at his knee again with his hands, looking at Henry, waiting for him to do something, which was fair enough, since so often he had been the idea man of their quartet. They hadn’t had a leader, but Henry had been the closest thing to it. Even back in junior high school that had been true. The woman, meanwhile, was looking at no one, just staring off into the snow again.

Settle, Henry thought. Just take a deep breath and settle.

He took the breath, held it, and let it out. Better. A little better. All right, what was up with this lady? Never mind where she’d come from, what she was doing here, or why she smelled like diluted antifreeze when she burped. What was up with her right now?

Shock, obviously. Shock so deep it was like a form of catatonia-witness how she had not so much as stirred when the Scout went skidding by her at shaving distance. And yet she hadn’t retreated so far inside that only a hypo of something excitable could reach her; she had responded to the snap of his fingers, and she had spoken. Had inquired about someone named Rick.

“Henry-”

“Quiet a minute.”

He took off his gloves again, held his hands in front of her face, and clapped them smartly. He thought the sound very small compared to the steady whoosh of the wind in the trees, but she blinked again.

“On your feet!”

Henry took her gloved hands and was encouraged when they closed reflexively around his. He leaned forward, getting into her face, smelling that ethery odor. No one who smelled like that could be very well.

“On your feet, get up! With me! On three! One, two, three!”

He stood, holding her hands. She rose, her knees popping, and burped again. She broke wind again as well. Her hat went askew, dipping over one eye. When she made no move to straighten it, Henry said. “Fix her hat.”

“Hub?” Pete had also gotten up, although he didn’t look very steady.

“I don’t want to let go of her. Fix her hat, get it out of her eye.”

Gingerly, Pete reached out and straightened her hat. The woman bent slightly, grimaced, farted.

“Thank you very much,” Pete said sourly. “You’ve been a wonderful audience, good night.”

Henry could feel her sagging and tightened his grip.

“Walk!” he shouted, getting into her face again. “Walk with me!

On three! One, two, three!”

He began walking backwards, toward the front of the Scout. She was looking at him now and he held her gaze. Without glancing at Pete-he didn’t want to risk losing her-he said, “Take my belt. Lead me.”

“Where?”

“Around the other side of the Scout.”

“I’m not sure I can-”

“You have to, Pete, now do it.”

For a moment there was nothing, and then he felt Pete’s hand slip under his coat, fumble, and catch hold of his belt. They shuffled across the narrow string of road in an awkward conga-line, through the staring yellow spotlight of the Scout’s remaining headlamp. On the far side of the overturned vehicle they were at least partly sheltered from the wind, and that was good.

The woman abruptly pulled her hands out of Henry’s and leaned forward, mouth opening. Henry stepped back, not wanting to be splattered when she let go… but instead of vomiting she belched, the loudest one yet. Then, while still bent over, she broke wind again. The sound was like nothing Henry had ever heard before, and he would have sworn he’d heard everything on the wards in western Massachusetts. She kept her feet, though, breathing through her nose in big horselike snuffles of air.

“Henry,” Pete said. His voice was hoarse with terror, awe, or both. “My God, look.”

He was staring up at the sky, jaw loose and mouth gaping. Henry followed his gaze and could hardly believe what he was seeing. Bright circles of light, nine or ten of them, cruised slowly across the low-hanging clouds. Henry had to squint to look at them. He thought briefly of spotlights stabbing the night sky at Hollywood film premieres, but of course there were no such lights out here in the woods, and if there had been he would have seen the beams themselves, rising in the snowy air. Whatever was projecting those lights was above or in the clouds, not below them. They ran back and forth, seemingly at random, and Henry felt a sudden atavistic terror invade him… except it actually seemed to rise up from inside, somewhere deep inside. All at once his spinal cord felt like a column of ice.

“What is it?” Pete asked, nearly whining. “Christ, Henry, what is it?”

“I don’t-”

The woman looked up, saw the dancing lights, and began to shriek. They were amazingly loud, those shrieks, and so full of terror they made Henry feel like shrieking himself “They’re back!” she screamed. “They’re back! They’re back!'Then she covered her eyes and put her head against the front tire of the overturned Scout. She quit screaming and only moaned, like something caught in a trap with no hope of getting free.

For some unknown length of time (probably no more than five minutes, although it felt longer) they watched those brilliant lights run across the sky-circling, skidding, hanging lefts and rights, appearing to leapfrog each other. At some point Henry became aware there were only five instead of nearly a dozen, and then there were only three. Beside him the woman with her face against the tire fatted again, and Henry realized they were standing out here in the middle of nowhere, gawping at some sort of storm-related celestial phenomenon which, while interesting, would contribute absolutely nothing toward getting them into a place that was dry and warm. He could remember the final reading on the tripmeter with perfect clarity: 12.7. They were nearly ten miles from Hole in the Wall, a good hike under the best of circumstances, and here they were in a storm only two steps below a blizzard. Plus, he thought, I’m the only one who can walk.

“Pete.” “It’s somethin, isn’t it?” Pete breathed. “They’re fucking UFOS, just like on The X-Files. What d'you suppose-''Pete.” He took Pete’s chin in his hand and turned his face away from the sky, to his own.

Overhead, the last two lights were paling.

“It’s some sort of electrical phenomenon, that’s all.”

“You think?” Pete looked absurdly disappointed.

“Yeah-something related to the storm. But even if it’s the first wave of the Butterfly Aliens from Planet Alnitak, it isn’t going to make any difference to us if we turn into Popsicles out here. Now I need you to help me. I need you to do that trick of yours. Can you?”

“I don’t know,” Pete said, venturing one final look at the sky. There was only one light now, and so dim you wouldn’t have known it was there if you hadn’t been looking for it. “Ma’am? Ma’am, they’re almost gone. Mellow out, okay?”

She made no reply, only stood with her face pressed against the tire. The streamers on her hat flapped and flew. Pete sighed and turned to Henry.

“What do you want?”

“You know the loggers” shelters along this road?” There were eight or nine of them, Henry thought, nothing but four posts each, with pieces of rusty corrugated tin on top for roofs. The pulpers stored cut logs or pieces of equipment beneath them until spring.

“Sure,” Pete said.

“Where’s the closest one? Can you tell me?”

Pete closed his eyes, raised one finger, and began moving it back and forth. At the same time he made a little ticking sound with the tip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. This had been a part of Pete ever since high school. It didn’t go back as far as Beaver’s gnawed pencils and chewed toothpicks, or Jonesy’s love of horror movies and murder stories, but it went back a long way. And it was usually reliable. Henry waited, hoping it would be reliable now.

The woman, her ears perhaps catching that small regular ticking sound beneath the boom of the wind, raised her head and looked around. There was a large dark smear across her forehead from the tire.

At last Pete opened his eyes. “Right up there,” he said, pointing in the direction of Hole in the Wall. “Go around that curve and then there’s a hill. Go down the other side of the hill and there’s a straight stretch. At the end of the straight there’s one of those shelters. It’s on the left. Part of the roof’s fallen in. A man named Stevenson had a nosebleed there once.”

“Yeah?”

“Aw, man, I don’t know.” And Pete looked away, as if embarrassed.

Henry vaguely remembered the shelter… and the fact that the roof had partially fallen in was good, or could be; if it had fallen the right way, it would have turned the wall-less shelter into a lean-to.

“How far?”

“Half a mile. Maybe three-quarters.”

“And you’re sure.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you walk that far on your knee?”

“I think so-but will she?”

“She better,” Henry said. He put his hands on the woman’s shoulders, turned her wide-eyed face to his, and moved in until they were almost nose to nose. The smell of her breath was awful-antifreeze with something oily and organic beneath it-but he stayed close, and made no move to draw back.

“We need to walk!” he told her, not quite shouting but speaking loudly and in a tone of command. “Walk with me now, on three! One, two, three!”

He took her hand and led her back around the Scout and into the road. There was one moment of resistance and then she followed with perfect docility, not seeming to feel the push of the wind when it struck them. They walked for about five minutes, Henry holding the woman’s gloved right hand in his left one, and then Pete lurched.

“Wait,” he said. “Bastardly knee’s tryin to lock up on me again.

While he bent and massaged it, Henry looked up at the sky. There were no lights up there now. “Are you all right? Can you make it?”

“I’ll make it,” Pete said. “Come on, let’s go.”

They made it around the curve all right and halfway up the hill all right and then Pete dropped, groaning and cursing and clutching his knee. He saw the way Henry was looking at him and made a peculiar sound, something caught between a laugh and a snarl. “Don’t you worry about me,” he said. “Petie-bird’s gonna make it.”

“You sure?”

“Ayuh.” And to Henry’s alarm (although there was amusement, too, that dark amusement which never seemed to leave him now), Pete balled his gloved hands into fists and began pounding on his knee.

“Pete-”

“Let go, you hump, let go!” Pete cried, ignoring him completely. And during this the woman stood slump-shouldered with the wind now at her back and the orange hat-ribbons blowing out in front of her, as silent as a piece of equipment that has been turned off.

“Pete?” “I’m all right now,” Pete said. He looked up at Henry with exhausted eyes… but they, too, were not without amusement. “Is this a total fuckarow or not?”

“It is. “'I don’t think I could walk all the way back to Derry, but I’ll get to that shelter.” He held out a hand. “Help me up, chief”

Henry took his old friend’s hand and pulled. Pete came up stiff-legged, like a man rising from a formal bow, stood still for a moment, then said: “Let’s go. I’m lookin forward to gettin out of this wind.” He paused, then added: “We should have brought a few beers.”

They got to the top of the hill and the wind was better on the other side. By the time they got to the straight stretch at the bottom, Henry had begun allowing himself to hope that this part of it, at least, was going to go all right. Then, halfway along the straight with a shape up ahead that just about had to be the loggers” shelter, the woman collapsed-first to her knees, then onto her front. She lay like that for a moment, head turned, only the breath rising from her open mouth to indicate she was still alive (and how much simpler this would be if she wasn’t, Henry thought). Then she rolled over on her side and let out another long bray of a belch.

“Oh you troublesome cunt,” Pete said, sounding not angry but only tired. He looked at Henry. “What now?'Henry knelt by her, told her in his loudest voice to get up, snapped his fingers, clapped his

hands, and counted to three several times. Nothing worked.

“Stay here with her. Maybe I can find something up there to drag her on.”

“Good luck.”

“You have a better idea?”

Pete sat down in the snow with a grimace, his bad leg stretched out in front of him. “Nosir,” he said, “I do not. I’m fresh out of ideas.”

It took Henry five minutes to walk up to the shelter. His own leg was stiffening where the turnsignal lever had gouged it, but he thought he was all right. If he could get Pete and the woman to shelter, and if the Arctic Cat back at Hole in the Wall would start, he thought this might still turn out okay. And damn, it was interesting, there was that. Those lights in the sky…

The shelter’s corrugated top had fallen perfectly: the front, facing the road, was open, but the back was almost entirely closed off And poking out of the thin scrim of snow that had drifted inside was a swatch of dirty gray tarpaulin with a coating of sawdust and ancient splinters clinging to it.

“Bingo,” Henry said, and grabbed it. At first it stuck to the ground, but when he put his back to it, the tarp came loose with a hoarse ripping sound that made him think of the woman farting.Dragging it behind him, he plodded back toward where Pete, his leg still pointed out stiffly before him, sat in the snow next to the prone woman.

It was far easier than Henry had dared hope. In fact, once they got her on the tarpaulin, it was a breeze. She was a hefty woman, but she slid on the snow like grease. Henry was glad it wasn’t five degrees warmer; sticky snow might have changed things considerably. And, of course, it helped being on a straight stretch.

The snow was now ankle deep and falling more thickly than ever, but the flakes had gotten bigger. It’s stopping, they’d tell each other in tones of disappointment when they saw flakes like that as kids.

“Hey Henry?” Pete sounded out of breath, but that was okay; the shelter was just up ahead. In the meantime Pete walked in a kind of stiff-legged strut to keep his knee from coming out of whack again.

“What?”

“I been thinkin about Duddits a lot just lately-how strange is that?”

“No, bounce,” Henry said at once, without even thinking about it.

“That’s right.” Pete gave a somehow nervous laugh. “No bounce, no play. You do think it’s strange, don’t you?”

“If it is,” Henry said, “we’re both strange.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been thinking of Duddits myself, and for quite awhile. Since at least March. Jonesy and I were going to go see him-”

“You were?”

“Yeah. Then Jonesy had that accident-”

“Crazy old cocksucker that hit him never should have been driving,” Pete said with a dark frown. “Jonesy’s lucky to be alive.”

“You got that right,” Henry said. “His heart stopped in the ambulance. The EMTs had to give him the juice.”

Pete halted, wide-eyed. “No shit? It was that bad? That close?”

It occurred to Henry that he had just been indiscreet. “Yes, but you ought to keep your mouth shut about it. Carla told me, but I don’t think Jonesy knows. I never…” He waved his arm vaguely, and Pete nodded with perfect understanding. I never sensed that he did was what Henry meant.

“I’ll keep it under my hat,” Pete said.

“I think it’s best you do.”

“And you never got to see Duds.”

Henry shook his head. “In all the excitement about Jonesy, I forgot. Then it was summer, and you know how things come up…”

Pete nodded.

“But you know what? I was thinking of him just a little while ago. Back in Gosselin’s.”

“Was it the kid in the Beavis and Butt-head shirt?” Pete asked. His words came out in little puffs of white vapor.

Henry nodded. “The kid” could have been twelve or twenty-five, when it came to Down’s syndrome you just couldn’t tell. He had been red-haired, wandering along the middle aisle of the dark little market next to a man who just about had to be his father-same green-and-black-checked hunting jacket, more importantly the same carroty red hair, the man’s now thin enough to show the scalp underneath, and he had given them a look, the kind that says Don’t you say nothing about my kid unless you want trouble, and of course neither of them had said anything, they had come the twenty or so miles from Hole in the Wall for beer and bread and hot dogs, not trouble, and besides, they had once known Duddits, still knew Duddits in a way-sent him Christmas presents and birthday cards, anyway, Duddits who had once been, in his own peculiar fashion, one of them. What Henry could not very well confide to Pete was that he’d been thinking of Duds at odd moments ever since realizing, some sixteen months ago, that he meant to take his own life and that everything he did had become either a holding action against that event or a preparation for it. Sometimes he even dreamed of Duddits, and of the Beav saying Let me fix that, man and Duddits saying Fit wha?

“Nothing wrong with thinking about Duddits, Pete,” he said as he hauled the makeshift sled with the woman on it into the shelter. He was out of breath himself. “Duddits was how we defined ourselves. He was our finest hour.”

“You think so?”

“Yup.” Henry plopped down to get his breath before going on. to the next thing. He looked at his watch. Almost noon. By now Jonesy and Beaver would be past the point of thinking the snow had just slowed them down; would be almost sure something had gone wrong. Perhaps one of them would fire up the snowmobile (if it works, he reminded himself again, if the damn thing works). Come out looking for them. That would simplify things a bit.

He looked at the woman lying on the tarp. Her hair had fallen over one eye, hiding it; the other looked at Henry-and through him-with chilly indifference.

Henry believed that all children were presented with self-defining moments in early adolescence, and that children in groups were apt to respond more decisively than children alone. Often they behaved badly, answering distress with cruelty. Henry and his friends had behaved well, for whatever reason. It meant no more than anything else in the end, but it did not hurt to remember, especially when your soul was dark, that once you had confounded the odds and behaved decently.

He told Pete what he was going to do and what Pete was going to do, then got to his feet to start doing it-he wanted them all safe behind the doors of Hole in the Wall before the light left the day. A clean, well-lighted place.

“Okay,” Pete said, but he sounded nervous. “Just hope she doesn’t die on me. And that those lights don’t come back.” He craned to look out at the sky, where now there were only dark, low-hanging clouds. “What were they, do you think? Some kind of lightning?”

“Hey, you’re the space expert.” Henry got up. “Start picking up the little sticks-you don’t even have to get up to do that.”

“Kindling, right?”

“Right,” Henry said, then stepped over the woman on the tarp and walked to the edge of the woods, where there was plenty of bigger stuff lying around in the snow. Roughly nine miles, that was the walk ahead of him. But first they were going to light a fire. A nice big one.

Chapter Four MCCARTHY GOES TO THE JOHN

Jonesy and Beaver sat in the kitchen, playing cribbage, which they simply called the game. That was what Lamar, Beaver’s father, had always called it, as though it were the only game. For Lamar Clarendon, whose life revolved around his central Maine construction company, it probably was the only game, the one most at home in logging camps, railroad sheds, and, of course, construction trailers. A board with a hundred and twenty holes, four pegs, and an old greasy deck of cards; if you had those things, you were in business. The game was mostly played when you were waiting to do something else-for the rain to let up, for a freight order to arrive, or for your friends to get back from the store so you could figure out what to do with the strange fellow now lying behind a closed bedroom door.

Except, Jonesy thought, we’re really waiting for Henry. Pete’s just with him. Henry’s the one who’ll know what to do, Beaver was right. Henry’s the one.

But Henry and Pete were late back. It was too early to say something had happened to them, it could just be the snow slowing them down, but Jonesy was starting to wonder if that was all, and guessed the Beav was, too. Neither of them had said anything about it as yet-it was still on the morning side of noon and things might still turn out okay-but the idea was there, floating unspoken between them.

Jonesy would concentrate on the board and the cards for awhile, and then he’d look at the closed bedroom door behind which McCarthy lay, probably sleeping, but oh boy his color had looked bad. Two or three times he saw Beav’s eyes flicking over there, too.

Jonesy shuffled the old Bikes, dealt, gave himself a couple of cards, then set aside the crib when Beaver slid a couple across to him. Beaver cut and then the preliminaries were done; it was time to peg. You can peg and still lose the game, Lamar told them, that Chesterfield always sticking out from the comer of his mouth, his Clarendon Construction cap always pulled down over his left eye like a man who knows a secret he will only tell if the price is right, Lamar Clarendon a no-play workadaddy dead of a heart attack at forty-eight, but if you peg you won’t never get skunked.

No play, Jonesy thought now. No bounce, no play. And then, on the heels of that, the wavering damned voice that day in the hospital: Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy? And oh man, why was the world so hard? Why were there so many spokes hungry for your fingers, so many gears eager to grab for your guts?

“Jonesy?”

“Huh?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, why?”

“You shivered.”

“Did I?” Sure he did, he knew he did.

“Yeah.”

“Drafty, maybe. You smell anything?”

“You mean… like him?”

“I wasn’t talking about Meg Ryan’s armpits. Yeah, him.”

“No,” Beaver said. “A couple of times I thought… but it was just imagination. Because those farts, you know-”-smelled so bad. “'Yeah. They did. The burps, too. I thought he was gonna blow chunks, man. For sure.” Jonesy nodded. I’m scared, he thought. Sitting here shit scared in a snowstorm. I want Henry, goddammit. How about that.

“Jonesy?”

“What? Are we ever gonna play this hand or not?”

“Sure, but… do you think Henry and Pete are okay?”

“How the hell do I know?”

“You don’t… have a feeling? Maybe see-”

“I don’t see anything but your face.”

Beav sighed. “But do you think they’re okay?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.” Yet his eyes stole first to the clock half past eleven, now-and then to the closed bedroom door with McCarthy behind it. In the middle of the room, the dreamcatcher danced and slowly turned in some breath of air. “Just going slow. They’ll be right along. Come on, let’s play.”

“All right. Eight.”

“Fifteen for two.”

“Fuck.” Beaver put a toothpick in his mouth. “Twenty-five.”

“Thirty.”

“Go.”

“One for two.”

“Doodlyfuck!” Beaver gave an exasperated little laugh as Jonesy turned the corner onto Third Street. “You peg my ass off every time you deal.” “I peg your ass when you deal, too,” Jonesy said. “The truth hurts. Come on, play.” “Nine.” “Sixteen.”

“And one for last card,” the Beav said, as if he had won a moral victory. He stood up. “I’m

gonna go out, take a leak.” “Why? We’ve got a perfectly good john, in case you didn’t know it.” “I know it. I just want to see if I can write my name in the snow.” Jonesy laughed. “Are you ever gonna grow up?''Not if I can help it. And keep it down. Don’t wake the guy up.

Jonesy swept the cards together and began to shuffle them as Beaver walked to the back door. He found himself thinking about a version of the game they had played when they were kids. They called it the Duddits Game, and they usually played in the Cavell rec room. It was the same as regular cribbage, except they let Duddits peg. I got ten, Henry would say, peg me ten, Duddits. And Duddits, grinning that loopy grin of his that never failed to make Jonesy feel happy, might peg four or six or ten or two fucking dozen. The rule when you played the Duddits Game was that you never complained, never said Duddits, that’s too many or Duddits, that’s not enough. And man, they’d laugh. Mr and Mrs Cavell, they’d laugh, too, if they happened to be in the room, and Jonesy remembered once, they must have been fifteen, sixteen, and Duddits of course was whatever he was, Duddits Cavell’s age was never going to change, that was what was so beautiful and scary about him, and this one time Alfie Cavell had started crying, saying Boys, if you only knew what this means, to me and to the missus, if you only knew what it means to Douglas-

“Jonesy.” Beaver’s voice, oddly flat. Cold air came in through the open kitchen door, raising a rash of gooseflesh on Jonesy’s arms.

“Close the door, Beav, was you born in a barn?”

“Come over here. You need to look at this.”

Jonesy got up and went to the door. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. The backyard was filled with enough animals to stock a petting zoo. Deer, mostly, a couple of dozen assorted does and bucks. But moving with them were raccoons, waddling woodchucks, and a contingent of squirrels that seemed to move effortlessly along the top of the snow. From around the side of the shed where the Arctic Cat and assorted tools and engine parts were stored, came three large canines Jonesy at first mistook for wolves. Then he saw the old discolored length of clothesline hanging around the neck of one of them and realized they were dogs, probably gone feral. They were all moving east, up the slope from The Gulch. Jonesy saw a pair of good-sized wildcats moving between two little groups of deer and actually rubbed his eyes, as if to clear them of a mirage. The cats were still there. So were the deer, the woodchucks, the coons and squirrels. They moved steadily, barely giving the men in the doorway a glance, but without the panic of creatures running before a fire. Nor was there any smell of fire. The animals were simply moving cast, vacating the area.

“Holy Christ, Beav,” Jonesy said in a low, awed voice. Beaver had been looking up. Now he gave the animals a quick, cursory glance and lifted his gaze to the sky again. “Yeah. Now look up there.”

Jonesy looked up and saw a dozen glaring lights-some red, some blue-white-dancing around up there. They lit the clouds, and he suddenly understood that they were what McCarthy had seen when he was lost. They ran back and forth, dodging each other or sometimes briefly merging, making a glow so bright he couldn’t look at it without squinting. “What are they?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Beaver said, not looking away. On his pale face, the stubble stood out with almost eerie clarity. “But the animals don’t like it. That’s what they’re trying to get away from.”

They watched for ten, perhaps fifteen minutes, and Jonesy became aware of a low humming, like the sound of an electrical transformer. Jonesy asked Beaver if he heard it, and the Beav simply nodded, not taking his eyes off the dancing lights in the sky, which to Jonesy looked to be the size of manhole covers. He had an idea that it was the sound the animals wanted to escape, not the lights, but said nothing. Speech all at once seemed hard; he felt a debilitating fear grip him, something feverish and constant, like a low-grade flu.

At last the lights began to dim, and although Jonesy hadn’t seen any of them wink out, there seemed to be fewer of them. Fewer animals, too, and that nagging hum was fading.

Beaver started, like a man awakening from a deep sleep. “Camera,” he said. “I want to get some pictures before they’re gone.” “I don’t think you’ll be able to-”

“I got to try!” Beaver almost shouted. Then, in a lower tone of voice: “I got to try. At least I can get some of the deers and such before they…” He was turning away, heading back across the kitchen, probably trying to remember what heap of dirty clothes he’d left his old battered camera under, when he stopped suddenly. In a flat and decidedly unbeaverish voice, he said, “Oh, Jonesy. I think we got a problem.”

Jonesy took a final look at the remaining lights, still fading (smaller, too), then turned around. Beaver was standing beside the sink, looking across the counter and the big central room.

“What? What now?” That nagging, shrewish voice with the little tremor in it… was that really his?

Beaver pointed. The door to the bathroom where they’d put Rick McCarthy-Jonesy’s room-stood open. The door to the bathroom, which they had left open so McCarthy could not possibly miss his way if nature called, was now closed.

Beaver turned his somber, beard-speckled face to Jonesy’s. “Do you smell it?”

Jonesy did, in spite of the cold fresh air coming in through the door. Ether or ethyl alcohol, yes, there was still that, but now it was mixed with other stuff. Feces for sure. Something that could have been blood. And something else, something like mine-gas trapped a million years and finally let free. Not the kind of fart-smells kids giggled over on camping trips, in other words. This was something richer and far more awful. You could only compare it to farts because there was nothing else even close. At bottom, Jonesy thought, it was the smell of something contaminated and dying badly.

“And look there.” Beaver pointed at the hardwood floor. There was blood on it, a trail of bright droplets running from the open door to the closed one. As if McCarthy had dashed with a nosebleed.Only Jonesy didn’t think it was his nose that had been bleeding.

Of all the things in his life he hadn’t wanted to do-calling his brother Mike to tell him Ma had died of a heart attack, telling Carla she had to do something about the booze and all the prescriptions or he was going to leave her, telling Big Lou, his cabin counselor at Camp Agawam, that he had wet his bed-crossing the big central room at Hole in the Wall to that closed bathroom door was the hardest. It was like walking in a nightmare where you seem to cover ground at the same dreamy, underwater pace no matter how fast you move your legs.

In bad dreams you never got to where you’re going, but they made it to the other side of the room and so Jonesy supposed it wasn’t a dream after all. They stood looking down at the splatters of blood. They weren’t very big, the largest the size of a dime.

“He must have lost another tooth,” Jonesy said, still whispering. “That’s probably it.”

The Beav looked at him, one eyebrow raised. Then he went to the bedroom door and looked in. After a moment he turned to Jonesy and curled his finger in a beckoning gesture. Jonesy went to where Beaver stood in a kind of sidle, not wanting to lose sight of the closed bathroom door.

In the bedroom the covers had been thrown all the way back onto the floor, as if McCarthy had risen suddenly, urgently. The shape of his head was still in the middle of the pillow and the

shape of his body still lay printed on the sheet. Also printed on the sheet, about halfway down, was a large bloody blotch. Soaking into the blue sheet, it looked purple.

“Funny place to lose a tooth from,” Beaver whispered. He bit down on the toothpick in his mouth and the ragged front half of it fell on the doorsill. “Maybe he was hoping for a quarter from the Ass Fairy.”

Jonesy didn’t respond. He pointed to the left of the doorway, instead. There, in a tangle, were the bottoms of McCarthy’s longjohns and the jockey briefs he’d been wearing beneath them. Both were matted with blood. The jockeys had caught the worst of it; if not for the waistband and the cotton high up on the front, you might have thought they were a racy, jaunty red, the kind of shorts a devotee of the Penthouse Forum might put on if he was expecting to get laid when the date was over.

“Go look in the chamber pot,” Beaver whispered.

“Why don’t we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how he is?”

“Because I want to know what to fucking expect,” Beaver replied in a vehement whisper. He patted his chest, then spit out the ragged remains of his latest toothpick. “Man, my ticker’s goin nuts.”

Jonesy’s own heart was racing, and he could feel sweat running down his face. Nevertheless he stepped into the room. The cold fresh air coming in the back door had cleaned out the main room pretty well, but the stench in here was foul-shit and mine-gas and ether. Jonesy felt the little bit of food he’d eaten take an uneasy lurch in his stomach and willed it to stay where it was. He approached the chamber pot and at first couldn’t make himself look in. Half a dozen horror-movie images of what he might see danced in his head. Organs floating in blood soup. Teeth. A severed head.

“Go on!” Beaver whispered.

Jonesy squeezed his eyes shut, bent his head, held his breath, then opened his eyes again. There was nothing but clean china gleaming in the glow thrown by the overhead light. The chamber pot was empty. He released his breath in a sigh through his clenched teeth, then walked back to the Beav, avoiding the splashes of blood on the floor.

Nothing,” he said. “Now come on, let’s stop screwing around.” They walked past the closed door of the linen closet and regarded the closed pine-paneled door to the john. Beaver looked at Jonesy. Jonesy shook his head. “It’s your turn,” he whispered. “I looked in the thunderjug.”

“You found him,” Beaver whispered back. His jaw was set stubbornly. “You do it.”

Now Jonesy was hearing something else-hearing it without hearing it, exactly, partly because this sound was more familiar, mostly because he was so fiercely fixed on McCarthy, the man he had almost shot. A whup-whup-whup sound, faint but growing louder. Coming this way.

“Well fuck this,” Jonesy said, and although he only spoke in a normal tone of voice, it was loud enough to make them both jump a little. He rapped a knuckle on the door. “Mr McCarthy! Pick! Are you all right in there?”

He won’t answer, Jonesy thought. He won’t answer because he’s dead. Dead and sitting on the throne, just like Elvis.

But McCarthy wasn’t dead. He groaned, then said: “I’m a little sick, fellows. I need to move my bowels. If I can move my bowels, I’ll be-” There was another groan, then another fart. This one was low, almost liquid. The sound made Jonesy grimace. “-I’ll be all right,” McCarthy finished. To Jonesy, the man didn’t sound on the same continent with all right. He sounded out of breath and in pain. As if to underline this, McCarthy groaned again, louder. There was another of those liquid ripping sounds, and then McCarthy cried out.

“McCarthy!” Beaver tried the doorknob but it wouldn’t turn. McCarthy, their little gift from the woods, had locked it from the inside. “Rick!” The Beav rattled the knob. “Open up, man!” Beaver was trying to sound lighthearted, as if the whole thing was a big joke, a camp prank, which only made him sound more scared.

“I’m okay,” McCarthy said. He was panting now. “I just… fellows, I just need to make a little room.” There came the sound of more flatulence. It was ridiculous to think of what they were hearing as “passing gas” or “breaking wind”-those were airy phrases, light as meringue. The sounds coming from behind the closed door were brutal and meaty, like ripping flesh.

“McCarthy!” Jonesy said. He knocked. “Let us in!” But did he want to go in? He did not. He wished McCarthy had stayed lost or been found by someone else. Worse, the amygdala in the base of his brain, that unapologetic reptile, wished he had shot McCarthy to begin with. “Keep it simple, stupid,” as they said in Carla’s N.A. program. “McCarthy!”

“Go away!” McCarthy called with weak vehemence. “Can’t you go away and let a fellow let a fellow… make a little number two? Gosh!”

Whup-whup-whup: louder and closer now.

“Rick!” Now it was the Beav. Holding onto the light tone with a kind of desperation, like a climber in trouble holding onto his rope. “Where you bleedin from, buddy?”

“Bleeding?” McCarthy sounded honestly puzzled. “I’m not bleeding.”

Jonesy and Beaver exchanged a scared glance.

WHUP-WHUP-WHUP!

The sound had finally gotten Jonesy’s full attention, and what he felt was enormous relief “That’s a helicopter,” he said. “Bet they’re looking for him.”

“You think so?” Beaver wore the expression of a man hearing something too good to be true.

“Yeah.” Jonesy supposed the people in the chopper could be chasing the footlights in the sky or trying to figure out what the animals were up to, but he didn’t want to think about those things, didn’t care about those things. What he cared about was getting Rick McCarthy off the hopper, off his hands, and into a hospital in Machias or Derry. “Go on out there and flag them down.”

“What if-” WHUP! WHUP! WHUP! And from behind the door there came more of those wrenching, liquid sounds, followed by another cry from McCarthy. “Get out there!” Jonesy shouted. “Flag those fuckers down! I don’t care if you have to drop trou and dance the hootchie-koo, just get them to land!''Okay-” Beaver had started to turn away. Now he jerked and screamed.

A number of things Jonesy had been quite successfully not thinking about suddenly leaped out of the closet and came running into the light, capering and leering. When he wheeled around however, all he saw was a doe standing in the kitchen with its head extended over the counter, examining them with its mild brown eyes. Jonesy took a deep, gasping breath and slumped back against the wall.

“Eat snot and rot,” Beaver breathed. Then he advanced on the doe, clapping his hands. “Bug out, Mabel! Don’t you know what time of year this is? Go on! Put an egg in your shoe and beat it! Make like an amoeba and split!”

The deer stayed where she was for a moment, eyes widening in an expression of alarm that was almost human. Then she whirled around, her head skimming the line of pots and ladles and tongs hanging over the stove. They clanged together and some fell from their hooks, adding to the clangor. Then she was out the door, little white tail flipping.

Beaver followed, pausing long enough to look at the cluster of droppings on the linoleum with a jaundiced eye.

The mixed migration of animals had pretty well dried up to stragglers. The doe Beav had scared out of their kitchen leaped over a limping fox that had apparently lost one paw to a trap and then disappeared into the woods. Then, from above the low-hanging clouds just beyond the snowmobile shed, a lumbering helicopter the size of a city bus appeared. It was brown, with the letters ANG printed on the side in white.

Ang? Beaver thought. What the hell is Ang? Then he realized: Air National Guard, probably out of Bangor.

It dipped, nose-heavy. Beaver stepped into the back yard, waving his arms over his head. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, little help here! Little help, guys!”

The helicopter descended until it was no more than seventy-five feet off the ground, close enough to raise the fresh snow in a cyclone. Then it moved toward him, carrying the snow cyclone with it.

“Hey! We got a hurt guy here! Hurt guy!” jumping up and down now like one of those numbass bootscooters on The Nashville Network, feeling like a jerk but doing it anyway. The chopper drifted toward him, low but not coming any lower, not showing any sign of actually landing, and a horrid idea filled him. Beav didn’t know if it was something he was getting from the guys in the chopper or just paranoia. All he could be sure of was that he suddenly felt like something pinned to the center ring of a target in a shooting gallery: hit the Beaver and win a clock-radio.

The chopper’s side door slid back. A man holding a bullhorn and wearing the bulkiest parka Beaver had ever seen came tilting out toward him. The parka and the bullhorn didn’t bother the Beav. What bothered him was the oxygen mask the guy was wearing over his mouth and nose. He’d never heard of fliers needing to wear oxygen masks at an attitude of seventy-five feet. Not, that was, if the air they were breathing was okay.

The man in the parka spoke into the bullhorn the words conning out loud and clear over the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter’s rotors but sounding strange anyway, partly because of the amplification but mostly, Beaver thought, because of the mask. It was like being addressed by some strange robot god.

“HOW MANY ARE YOU?” the god-voice called down. “SHOW ME ON YOUR FINGERS.”

Beaver, confused and frightened, at first thought only of himself and Jonesy; Henry and Pete weren’t back from the store, after all. He raised two fingers like a guy giving the peace sign.

“STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” the man leaning out of the helicopter boomed in his robot god’s voice. “THIS AREA IS UNDER TEMPORARY QUARANTINE! SAY AGAIN, THIS AREA IS UNDER TEMPORARY QUARANTINE! YOU MUST NOT LEAVE!”

The snowfall was thinning, but now the wind kicked up and blew a sheet of the snow which had been sucked up by the copter’s rotors into Beaver’s face. He slitted his eyes against it and waved his arms. He sucked in freezing snow, spat out his toothpick to keep from yanking that down his throat, too (it was how he would die, his mother constantly predicted, by pulling a toothpick down his throat and choking on it), and then screamed: “What do you mean, quarantine? We got a sick guy down here, you got to come and get him!”

Knowing they couldn’t hear him under the big whup-whup-whup of the rotor blades, he didn’t have any fucking bullhorn to boost his voice, but yelling anyway. And as the words sick guy passed through his lips, he realized he’d given the guy in the chopper the wrong number of fingers-they were three, not two. He started to raise that number of fingers, then thought of Henry and Pete. They weren’t here yet but unless something had happened to them, they would be-so how many were they? Two was the wrong answer, but was three the right one? Or was it five? As he usually did in such situations, Beaver went into mental dog-lock. When it happened in school, there’d been Henry sitting beside him or Jonesy behind him to give him the answers. Out here there was no one to help, only that big whup-whup-whup smacking into his ears and all that swirling snow going down his throat and into his lungs, making him cough.

“STAY WHERE YOU ARE! THIS SITUATION WILL BE RESOLVED IN TWENTYFOUR TO FORTY-EIGHT HOURS! IF YOU NEED FOOD, CROSS YOUR ARMS OVER, YOUR HEAD!”

“There are more of us!” Beaver screamed at the man leaning out of the helicopter. He screamed so loudly red dots danced in front of his eyes. “We got a hurt guy here! We… have got… A HURT GUY!” The idiot in the helicopter tossed his bullhorn back into the cabin behind him, then made a thumb-and-forefinger circle down at Beaver, as if to say, Okay! Gotcha! Beaver felt like dancing in frustration. Instead, he raised one open hand above his head-a finger each for him and his friends, plus the thumb for McCarthy. The man in the helicopter took this in, then grinned. For one truly wonderful moment, Beaver thought he had gotten through to the mask-wearing fuckwad. Then the fuckwad returned what he thought was Beaver’s wave, said something to the pilot behind him, and the ANG helicopter began to rise. Beaver Clarendon was still standing there, frosted with swirling snow and screaming. There’s five of us and we need help! There’s five of us and we need somefucking HELP!”

The copter vanished back into the clouds.

Jonesy heard some of this-certainly he heard the amplified voice from the Thunderbolt helicopter-but registered very little, He was too concerned with McCarthy, who had given a number of small and breathless screams, then fallen silent. The stench coming under the door continued to thicken.

“McCarthy!” he yelled as Beaver came back in. “Open this door or we break it down!” “Get away from me!” McCarthy screamed back in a thin, distracted voice. “I have to shit, that’s all, I HAVE TO SHIT! If I can shit I’ll be all right!”

Such straight talk, coming from a man who seemed to consider oh gosh and oh dear strong language, frightened Jonesy even more than the bloody sheet and underwear. He turned to Beaver, barely noticing that the Beav was powdered with snow and looking like Frosty. “Come on, help me break it down. We’ve got to try and help him.”

Beaver looked scared and worried. Snow was melting on his cheeks. “I dunno. The guy in the helicopter said something about quarantine-what if he’s infected or something? What if that red thing on his face-”

In spite of his own ungenerous feelings about McCarthy, Jonesy felt like striking his old friend. This previous March he himself had lain bleeding in a street in Cambridge. Suppose people had refused to touch him because he might have AIDS? Refused to help him? Just left him there to bleed because there were no rubber gloves handy?

“Beav, we were right down in his face-if he’s got something really infectious, we’ve probably caught it already. Now what do you say?”

For a moment what Beaver said was nothing. Then Jonesy felt that click in his head. For just a moment he saw the Beaver he’d grown up with, a kid in an old beat-up motorcycle jacket who had cried Hey, you guys, quit it! Just fucking QUIT it! and knew it was going to be all right.

Beaver stepped forward. “Hey, Rick, how about opening up?

We just want to help.”

Nothing from behind the door. Not a cry, not a breath, not so much as the sound of shifting cloth. The only sounds were the steady rumble of the gennie and the fading whup of the helicopter.

“Okay,” Beaver said, then crossed himself “Let’s break the fucker down.”

They stepped back together and turned their shoulders toward the door, half-consciously miming cops in half a hundred movies.

“On three,” Jonesy said.

“Your leg up to this, man?”

In fact, Jonesy’s leg and hip hurt badly, although he hadn’t precisely realized this until Beaver brought it up. “I’m fine,” he said.

“Yeah, and my ass is king of the world.”

“On three. Ready?” And when Beaver nodded: “One… two… three.”

They rushed forward together and hit the door together, almost four hundred pounds behind two dropped shoulders. It gave way with an absurd ease that spilled them, stumbling and grabbing at each other, into the bathroom. Their feet skidded in the blood on the tiles.

“Ah, fuck,” Beaver said. His right hand crept to his mouth, which was for once without a toothpick, and covered it. Above his hand, his eyes were wide and wet. “Ah, fuck, man-fuck.”

Jonesy found he could say nothing at all.

Chapter Five DUDDITS, PART ONE

“Lady”, Pete said.

The woman in the duffel coat said nothing. Lay on the sawdusty piece of tarp and said nothing. Pete could see one eye, staring at him, or through him, or at the jellyroll center of the fucking universe, who knew. Creepy. The fire crackled between them, really starting to take hold and throw some heat now. Henry had been gone about fifteen minutes. It would be three hours before he made it back, Pete calculated, three hours at the very least, and that was a long time to spend under this lady’s creepy jackalope eye.

“Lady,” he said again. “You hear me?”

Nothing. But once she had yawned, and he’d seen that half her goddam teeth were gone. What the fuck was up with that? And did he really want to know? The answer, Pete had discovered, was yes and no. He was curious-he supposed a man couldn’t help being curious-but at the same time he didn’t want to know. Not who she was, not who Rick was or what had happened to him, and not who “they” were. They’re back! the woman had screamed when she saw the lights in the sky, They’re back!

“Lady,” he said for the third time.

Nothing.

She’d said that Pick was the only one left, and then she’d said They’re back, presumably meaning the lights in the sky, and since then there had been nothing but those unpleasant burps and farts… the one yawn, exposing all those missing teeth… and the eye. The creepy jackalope eye. Henry had only been gone fifteen minutes he’d left at five past twelve and it was now twelve-twenty by Pete’s watch-and it felt like an hour and a half This was going to be one long fucking day, and if he was going to get through it without cracking up (he kept thinking of some story they’d had to read in the eighth grade, he couldn’t remember who wrote it, only that the guy in the story had killed this old man because he couldn’t stand the old man’s eye, and at the time Pete hadn’t understood that but now he did, yessir), he needed something.

“Lady, do you hear me?” Nada. Just the creepy jackalope eye. “I have to go back to the car because I kind of forgot something. But you’ll be all right. Won’t you?”

No answer-and then she let loose with another of those long buzz-saw farts, her face wrinkling up as she let go, as if it hurt her… and probably it did, something that sounded like that just about had to hurt. And even though Pete had been careful to get upwind, some of the smell came to him-hot and rank but somehow not human. Nor did it smell like cow-farts. He had worked for Lionel Sylvester as a kid, he’d milked more than his share of cows, and sometimes they blew gas at you while you were on the stool, sure-a heavy green smell, a marshy smell. This wasn’t like that, not a bit. This was like… well, like when you were a kid and got your first chemistry set, and after awhile you got tired of the faggy little experiments in the booklet and just went hogwild and mixed all that shit together, just to see if it would explode. And, he realized, that was part of what was troubling him, part of what was making him nervous. Except that was stupid. People didn’t just explode, did they? Still, he had to get him a little help here. Because she was giving him the Willies, bigtime.

He got two of the pieces of wood Henry had scrounged, added them to the fire, debated, and added a third. Sparks rose, whirling, and winked out against the sloping piece of corrugated tin. “I’ll be back before that all burns down, but if you want to add on another, be my guest. Okay?”

Nothing. He suddenly felt like shaking her, but he had a mile and a half to walk, up to the Scout and back here again, and he had to save his strength. Besides, she’d probably fart again. Or burp right in his face.

“Okay,” he said. “Silence gives consent, that’s what Mrs White always used to say back in the fourth grade.”

He got to his feet, bracing his knee as he did so, grimacing and slipping, almost falling, but finally getting up because he needed that beer, goddammit, needed it, and there was no one to get it except for him, Probably he was an alcoholic. In fact, there was no probably about it, and he supposed eventually he’d have to do something about it, but for now he was on his own, wasn’t he? Yes, because this bitch was gone, nothing left of her but some nasty gas and that creepy jackalope eye. If she needed to put some more wood on the fire she’d just have to do it, but she wouldn’t need to, he’d be back long before then. It was only a mile and a half. Surely his leg would hold him that long.

“I’ll be back,” he said. He leaned over and massaged his knee. Stiff, but not too bad. Really not too bad. He’d just put the beer in a bag-maybe a box of Hi Ho crackers for the bitch while he was at it-and be right back. “You sure you’re okay?”

Nothing. Just the eye.

“Silence gives consent,” he repeated, and began walking back up the Deep Cut Road, following the wide drag-mark of the tarpaulin and their almost-filled-in tracks. He walked in little hitches, pausing to rest every ten or twelve steps… and to massage his knee. He stopped once to look back at the fire. It already looked small and insubstantial in the gray early afternoon light. “This is fuckin crazy,” he said once, but he kept on going.

He got to the end of the straight stretch all right, and halfway up the hill all right. He was just starting to walk a little faster, to trust the knee a little when-ha-ha, asshole, fooled ya-it locked again, turning to something that felt like pig-iron, and he went down, yelling squeezed curses through his clenched teeth.

It was as he sat there cursing in the snow that he realized something very odd was going on out here. A large buck went walking past him on the left, with no more than a quick glance at the human from which it would have fled in great, springy bounds on any other day. Running along almost under its feet was a red squirrel.

Pete sat there in the lessening snow-huge flakes falling in a shifting wave that looked like lace-with his leg stuck out in front of him and his mouth open. There were more deer coming along the road, other animals, too, walking and hopping like refugees fleeing some disaster. There were even more of them in the woods, a wave moving east.

“Where you guys going?” he asked a snowshoe rabbit that went lolloping past him with its ears laid along its back. “Big coverall game at the rez? Casting call for a new Disney cartoon? Got a-”

He broke off, the spit in his mouth drying up to something that felt like an electric mist. A black bear, fat with its pre-hibernation stuffing, was ambling through the screen of thin second-growth trees to his left. It went with its head down and its rump switching from side to side, and although it never spared Pete so much as a look, Pete’s illusions about his place here in the big north woods were for the first time entirely stripped away. He was nothing but a heap of tasty white meat that happened to still be breathing. Without his rifle, he was more defenseless than the squirrel he’d seen scurrying around the buck’s feet-if noticed by a bear, the squirrel could at least run up the nearest tree, all the way to the thin top branches where no bear could possibly follow. The fact that this bear never so much as looked at him didn’t make Pete feel much better. Where there was one, there would be more, and the next one might not be so preoccupied.

Once he was sure the bear was gone, Pete struggled to his feet again, his heart hammering. He had left that foolish farting woman back there alone, but really, how much protection would he have been able to provide if a bear decided to attack? The thing was, he had to get his rifle. Henry’s too, if he could carry it. For the next five minutes-until he got to the top of the hill-Pete thought about firepower first and beer second. By the time he began his cautious descent on the other side, however, he was back to beer. Put it in a bag and hang the bag over his shoulder. And no stopping to drink one on the way back. He’d have one when he was sitting in front of the campfire again. It would be a reward beer, and there was nothing better than a reward beer.

You’re an alcoholic. You know that, don’t you? Fucking alcoholic.

Yes, and what did that mean? That you couldn’t fuck up.

Couldn’t get caught leaving a semi-comatose woman alone in the woods, let’s say, while you went off in search of the suds. And once he got back to the shelter, he had to remember to toss his empties deep into the woods. Although Henry might know anyway. The way they always seemed to know stuff about each other when they were together. And mental link or no mental link, you had to get up pretty goddam early in the morning to put one over on Henry Devlin.

Yet Pete thought Henry would probably let him alone about the beer. Unless, that was, Pete decided the time had come to talk about it. To maybe ask Henry for help. Which Pete might do, in time. Certainly he didn’t like the way he felt about himself right now; leaving that woman alone back there said something about Peter Moore that wasn’t so nice. But Henry… there was something wrong with Henry, too, this November. Pete didn’t know if Beaver felt it, but he was pretty sure Jonesy did. Henry was kind of tucked up. He was maybe even-

From behind him there came a wet grunt. Pete screamed and whirled around. His knee locked up again, locked up savagely, but in his fright he barely noticed. It was the bear, the bear had circled back behind him, that bear or another one-

It wasn’t a bear. It was a moose, and it walked past Pete with no more than a glance as he fell into the road again, cursing low in his throat and holding his leg, looking up into the lightly falling snow and cursing himself for a fool. An alcoholic fool.

He had a frightening few moments when it seemed that this time the knee wasn’t going to let go-he’d torn something in it and here he would lie in the exodus of animals until Henry finally returned on the snowmobile, and Henry would say What the fuck are you doing here? Why did you leave her alone? As if I didn’t know.

But at last he was able to get up again. The best he could do was a gimpy sidesaddle hobble, but it was better than lying in the snow a couple of yards from a fresh pile of steaming moose shit. He could now see the overturned Scout, its wheels and undercarriage covered with fresh snow. He told himself that if his latest fall had happened on the other side of the hill, he would have gone back to the woman and the fire, but that now, with the Scout actually in sight, it was better to go on. That the guns were his main objective, the bottles of Bud just an extra added attraction. And almost believed it. As far as getting back… well, he would make it somehow. He’d gotten this far, hadn’t he?

Fifty yards or so from the Scout, he heard a rapidly approaching whup-whup-whup-the unmistakable sound of a helicopter. He looked skyward eagerly, preparing himself to stand upright long enough to wave-God, if anyone needed a little help from the sky, it was him-but the helicopter never quite broke through the low ceiling. For a moment he saw a dark shape running through the dreck almost directly above him, the bleary flash of its lights, as well-and then the sound of the copter was moving off to the east, in the direction the animals were running. He was dismayed to feel a nasty sense of relief lurking just below his disappointment: if the helicopter had landed, he never would’ve gotten to the beer, and he had come all this way, all this damn way.

Five minutes later he was down on his knees and climbing carefully into the overturned Scout. He quickly learned that his bad knee wouldn’t support him for long (it was swelled against his jeans now like a big painful loaf of bread), and more or less swam into the snow-coated interior. He didn’t like it; all the smells seemed too strong, all the dimensions too close. It was almost like crawling into a grave, one that smelled of Henry’s cologne.

The groceries were sprayed all over the back, but Pete barely gave the bread and cans and mustard and the package of red hot dogs (red dogs were about all Old Man Gosselin carried for meat) a glance. It was the beer he was interested in, and it looked like only one bottle had broken when the Scout turned turtle. Drunk’s luck. The smell was strong-of course the one he’d been drinking from had spilled as well-but beer was a smell he liked. Henry’s cologne, on the other hand… phew, Jesus. In a way it was as bad as the smell of the crazy lady’s gas. And he didn’t know why the smell of cologne should make him think of coffins and graves and funeral flowers, but it did.

“Why would you want to wear cologne in the woods anyway, old sport?” he asked, the words coming out in little puffs of white vapor. And the answer of course was that Henry hadn’t been-the smell wasn’t really here at all, just the smell of beer. For the first time in a long time Pete found himself thinking about the pretty real estate lady who had lost her keys outside the Bridgton Pharmacy, and how he had known she wasn’t going to meet him for dinner, didn’t want to be within ten miles of him. Was smelling nonexistent cologne like that? He didn’t know, only that he didn’t like the way the smell seemed all mixed up in his mind with the idea of death.

Forget it, numbnuts. You’re spooking yourself, that’s all. There’s a big difference between really seeing the line and just spooking yourself. Forget about it and get what you came for.

“Good fuckin idea,” Pete said.

The store-bags were plastic, not paper, the kind with handles; Old Man Gosselin had marched at least that far into the future. Pete snagged one, and as he did, felt a rip of pain on the pad of his right hand. Only one goddam broken bottle and so naturally he’d cut himself on it, and pretty deep, from the feel. Maybe this was his punishment for leaving the woman alone back there. If so, he’d take it like a man and count himself let off easy.

He gathered up eight bottles, started to work his way back out of the Scout, then thought again. Had he staggered all the way back here for a lousy eight beers? “I think not,” he muttered, and then got the other seven, taking time to scrounge them all in spite of how creepy the Scout was making him feel. At last he backed out, fighting the panicky idea that something small, but with big teeth, would soon spring at him, taking a great big chomp out of his balls. Pete’s Punishment, Part Two.

He didn’t exactly freak, but he wiggled back out faster than he’d wiggled in, and his knee locked up again just as he got entirely clear. He rolled over on his back, whimpering, looking up into the snow-the last of it, now coming down in great big flakes as lacy as a woman’s best underwear-and massaging the knee, telling it to come on, now, honey, come on now, sweetie, let go, you fucking bitch. And just as he was starting to think that this time it wouldn’t, it did. He hissed through his teeth, sat up, and looked at the bag “THANKS FOR SHOPPING AT OUR PLACE! printed on the side in red.

“Where else would I shop, you old bastard?” he asked. He decided to allow himself one beer after all before starting back to the woman. Hell, it would lighten the load.

Pete fished one out, twisted the cap, and poured the top half down his throat in four big gulps. It was cold and the snow he was sitting in was even colder, but he still felt better. That was the magic of beer. The magic of scotch, vodka, and gin as well, but when it came to alcohol, he was with Tom T. Hall: he liked beer.

Looking at the bag, he thought again of the carrot-top back in the store-the mystified grin, the Chinese eyes that had originally earned such people the term mongoloids, as in mongoloid idiot. That led him to Duddits again, Douglas Cavell if you wanted to be formal about it. Why Duds had been on his mind so much lately Pete couldn’t say, but he had, and Pete made himself a promise: when this was over, he was going to stop in Derry and see old Duddits. He’d make the others go with him, and somehow he didn’t think he’d have to try very hard to convince them. Duddits was probably the reason they were still friends after so many years. Hell, most kids never so much as thought of their college or high-school buddies again, let alone those they’d chummed with in junior high… what was now known as middle school, although Pete had no doubt it was the same sad jungle of insecurities, confusion, smelly armpits, crazy fads, and half-baked ideas. They hadn’t known Duddits from school, of course, because Duddits didn’t go to Derry junior High. Duds went to The Mary M. Snowe School for the Exceptional, which was known to the neighborhood kids as The Retard Academy or sometimes just The Dumb School. In the ordinary course of events their paths never would have crossed, but there was this vacant lot out on Kansas Street, and the abandoned brick building that went with it. Facing the street you could still read TRACKER BROTHERS SHIPPING TRUCKING AND STORAGE in fading white paint on the old red brick. And on the other side, in the big alcove where the trucks had once backed up to unload… something else was painted there.

Now, sitting in the snow but no longer feeling it melting to cold slush under his ass, drinking his second beer without even being aware he had opened it (the first empty he had cast into the woods where he could still see animals moving east), Pete remembered the day they had met Duds. He remembered Beaver’s stupid jacket that the Beav had loved so much, and Beaver’s voice, thin but somehow powerful, announcing the end of something and the beginning of something else, announcing in some ungraspable but perfectly real and knowable way that the course of their lives had changed one Tuesday afternoon when all they had been planning was some two-on-two in Jonesy’s driveway and then maybe a game of Parcheesi in front of the TV; now, sitting here in the woods beside the overturned Scout, still smelling the cologne Henry hadn’t been wearing, drinking his life’s happy poison with a hand wearing a bloodstained glove, the car salesman remembered the boy who had not quite given up his dreams of being an astronaut in spite of his increasing problems with math (Jonesy had helped him, and then Henry had helped him and then, in tenth grade, he’d been beyond help), and he remembered the other boys as well, mostly the Beav, who had turned the world upside down with a high yell in his just-beginning-to-change voice: Hey you guys, quit it! Just fucking QUIT it!

“Beaver,” Pete said, and toasted the dark afternoon as he sat with his back propped against the overturned Scout’s hood. “You were beautiful, man.” But hadn’t they all been?

Hadn’t they all been beautiful?

Because he is in the eighth grade and his last class of the day is music, on the ground floor, Pete is always out before his three best friends, who always finish the day on the second floor, Jonesy and Henry in American Fiction, which is a reading class for smart kids, and Beaver next door in Math for Living, which is actually Math for Stupid Boys and Girls. Pete is fighting hard not to have to take that one next year, but he thinks it’s a fight he will ultimately lose. He can add, subtract, multiply, and divide; he can do fractions, too, although it takes him too much time. But now there is something new, now there is the x. Pete does not understand the x, and fears it.

He stands outside the gate by the chainlink fence as the rest of the eighth-graders and the babyass seventh-graders stream by, stands there kicking his boots and pretending to smoke, one hand cupped to his mouth and the other concealed beneath it-the concealed hand the one with the hypothetical hidden butt.

And now here come the ninth-graders from the second floor, and walking among them like royalty-like uncrowned kings, almost, although Pete would never say such a corny thing out loud-are his friends, Jonesy and Beaver and Henry. And if there is a king of kings it is Henry, whom all the girls love even if he does wear glasses. Pete is lucky to have such friends, and he knows it-is probably the luckiest eighth-grader in Derry, x or no x. The fact that having friends in the ninth grade keeps him from getting beaten up by any of the eighth-grade badasses is the very least of it.

“Hey, Pete!” Henry says as the three of them come sauntering out through the gate. As always, Henry seems surprised to see him there, but absolutely delighted. “What you up to, my man?”

“Nothin much,” Pete replies as always. “What’s up with you?”

“SSDD,” Henry says, whipping off his glasses and giving them a polish. If they had been a club, SSDD likely would have been their motto; eventually they will even teach Duddits to say it-it came out Say shih, iffa deh in Duddits-ese, and is one of the few things Duddits says that his parents can’t understand. This of course will delight Pete and his friends.Now, however, with Duddits still half an hour in their future, Pete just echoes Henry: “Yeah, man, SSDD.”

Same shit, different day. Except in their hearts, the boys only believe the first half, because in their hearts they believe it’s the same day, day after day. It’s Derry, it’s 1978, and it win always be 1978. They say there will be a future, that they will live to see the twenty-first century-Henry will be a lawyer, Jonesy win be a writer, Beaver will be a long-haul truck-driver, Pete will be an astronaut with a NASA patch on his shoulder-but this is just what they say, as they chant the Apostle’s Creed in church with no real idea of what’s coming out of their mouths; what they’re really interested in is Maureen Chessman’s skirt, which was short to begin with and has ridden a pretty good way up her thighs as she shifted around. They believe in their hearts that one day Maureen’s skirt will ride up high enough for them to see the color of her panties, and they similarly believe that Derry is forever and so are they. It will always be junior high school and quarter of three, they will always be walking up Kansas Street together to play basketball in Jonesy’s driveway (Pete also has a hoop in his driveway but they like Jonesy’s better because his father has posted it low enough so you can dunk), talking about the same old things: classes and teachers and which kid got into a fuckin pisser with which kid, or which kid is going to get into a fuckin pisser with which kid, whether or not so-and-so could take so-and-so if they got into a fuckin pisser (except they never will because so-and-so and so-and-so are tight), who did something gross lately (their favorite so far this year has to do with a seventh-grader named Norm Parmeleau, now known as Macaroni Parmeleau, a nickname that will pursue him for years, even into the new century of which these boys speak but do not in their hearts actually believe; to win a fifty-cent bet, Norm Parmeleau had one day in the cafeteria firmly plugged both nostrils with macaroni and cheese, then hawked it back like snot and swallowed it; Macaroni Parmeleau who, like so many junior-high-school kids, has mistaken notoriety for celebrity), who is going out with whom (if a girl and a guy are observed going home together after school, they are presumed to be probably going out; if they are observed ban in onto hands or suckin face it is a certainty), who is going to win the Super Bowl (fuckin Patriots, fuckin Boston Patriots, only they never do, having to root for the Patriots is a fuckin pisser). All these topics are the same and yet endlessly fascinating as they walk from the same school (I believe in God the father almighty) on the same street (maker of heaven and earth) under the same white everlasting October sky (world without end) with the same friends (amen). Same shit, same day, that is the truth in their hearts, and they’re down with K.C. and the Sunshine Band on this one, even though they will all tell you RIR-DS (rock is rolling, disco sucks): that’s the way they like it. Change will come upon them sudden and unannounced, as it always does with children of this age; if change needed permission from Junior-high-school students, it would cease to exist.

Today they also have hunting to talk about, because next month Mr Clarendon is for the first time going to take them up to Hole in the Wall. They’ll be gone for three days, two of them schooldays (there is no problem getting permission for this trip from the school, and absolutely no need to lie about the trip’s purpose; southern Maine may have gotten citified, but up here in God’s country, hunting is still considered part of a young person’s education, especially if the young person is a boy). The idea of creeping through the woods with loaded rifles while their friends are back at dear old DJHS, just droning away, strikes them as incredibly, delightfully boss, and they walk past The Retard Academy on the other side of the street without even seeing it. The retards get out at the same time as the kids at Derry junior High, but most of them go home with their mothers on the special retard bus, which is blue instead of yellow and is reputed to have a bumper sticker on it that says SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH OR I’ll KILL YOU. As Henry, Beaver, Jonesy, and Pete walk past Mary M. Snowe on the other side, a few high-functioning retards who are allowed to go home by themselves are still walking along, goggling around themselves with those weird expressions of perpetual wonder. Pete and his friends see them without seeing them, as always. They are just part of the world’s wallpaper.

Henry, Jonesy, and Pete are listening closely to the Beav, who’s telling them that when they get to Hole in the Wall they have to get down in The Gulch, because that’s where the big ones always go, there’s bushes down there that they like. “Me and my Dad have seen about a billion deer in there,” he says. The zippers on his old motorcycle jacket jingle agreeably.

They argue about who’s going to get the biggest deer and where is the best place to shoot one so you can bring it down with one shot and it won’t suffer. (“Except my father says that animals don’t suffer the way people do when they get hurt,” Jonesy tells them. “He says God made them different that way so it would be okay for us to hunt them.”) They laugh and squabble and argue over who is the most likely to blow lunch when it comes time to gut their kills, and The Retard Academy falls farther and farther behind. Ahead of them, on their side of the street, looms the square red brick building where Tracker Brothers used to do business.

“If anyone hurls, it won’t be me,” Beaver boasts. “I seen deerguts a thousand times and they don’t bother me at all. I remember once-” “Hey you guys,” Jonesy breaks in, suddenly excited. “You want to see Tina Jean Schlossinger’s pussy?”

“Who’s Tina Jean Sloppinger?” Pete asks, but he is already intrigued. Seeing any pussy seems like a great idea to him; he is always looking at his Dad’s Penthouse and Playboy magazines, which his Dad keeps out in his workshop, behind the big Craftsman toolbox. Pussy is very interesting. It doesn’t give him a boner and make him feel sexy the way bare tits do, but he guesses that’s because he’s still a kid.

And pussy is interesting.

“Schlossinger,” Jonesy says, laughing. “Schlossinger, Petesky. The Schlossingers live two blocks over from me, and-” He stops suddenly, struck by an important question which must be answered immediately. He turns to Henry. “Are the Schlossingers Jews or Republicans?”

Now it’s Henry laughing at Jonesy, but without any malice. “Technically, I think it’s possible to be both at the same time… or neither one.” Henry pronounces the word nyther instead of neether, which impresses Pete. It sounds smart as a motherfucker, and he reminds himself to say it that way from now on-nyther, nyther, nyther, he tells himself… but knows somehow that he win forget, that he is one of those people condemned to say neether all his life.

“Never mind religion and politics,” Henry says, still laughing. “If you’ve got a picture of Tina Jean Schlossinger showing her pussy, I want to see it.”

The Beav, meanwhile, has become visibly excited-cheeks flushed, eyes bright, and he goes to stick a fresh toothpick in his mouth before the old one is even half finished. The zippers on his jacket, the one Beaver’s older brother wore during his four or five years of Fonzie-worship, jingle faster.

“Is she blonde?” the Beav asks. “Blonde, and in high school? Super good-looking? Got-” He holds his hands out in front of his chest, and when Jonesy nods, grinning, Beaver turns to Pete and blurts: “This year’s Homecoming Queen up at the high school, ringmeat! Her picture was in the fuckin paper! Up on that float with Richie Grenadeau?”

“Yes, but the fucking Tigers lost the Homecoming game and Grenadeau ended up with a broken nose,” Henry says. “First Derry High team ever to play a Class-A team from southern Maine and those fools-”

“Fuck the Tigers,” Pete breaks in. He has more interest in high school football than he does in the dreaded x, but not much. Anyway, he’s got the girl placed now, remembers the newspaper photo of her standing on the flower-decked bed of a pulp truck next to the Tiger quarterback, both of them wearing tinfoil crowns, smiling, and waving to the crowd. The girl’s hair fell around her face in big blowy Farrah Fawcett waves, and her gown was strapless, showing the tops of her breasts.

For the first time in his life, Pete feels real lust-it is a meaty feeling, red and heavy, that stiffens his prick, dries up the spit in his mouth, and makes it hard for him to think. Pussy is interesting; the idea of seeing local pussy, Homecoming Queen pussy… that is a lot more than exciting. That is, as the Derry News’s film critic sometimes says about movies she especially likes, “a must-see.”

“Where?” he asks Jonesy breathlessly. He is imagining seeing this girl, this Tina Jean Schlossinger, waiting on the corner for the school bus, just standing there giggling with her girlfriends, not having the slightest idea that the boy walking past has seen what is under her skirt or her jeans, that he knows if the hair on her pussy is the same color as the hair on her head. Pete is on fire. “Where is it?”

“There,” Jonesy says, and points at the red brick box that is Tracker Brothers old freight and storage depot. There is ivy crawling up the sides, but this has been a cold fall and most of the leaves have already died and turned black. Some of the windows are broken and the rest are bleary. Looking at the place gives Pete a little chin. Partly because the big kids, the high-school kids and even some that are beyond high school, play baseball in the vacant lot behind the building, and big kids like to beat up little kids, who knows why, it relieved the monotony or something. But this isn’t the big deal, because baseball is over for the year and the big kids have probably moved on to Strawford Park, where they will play two-hand touch football until the snow flies. (Once the snow flies, they will beat each others” brains in playing hockey with old friction-taped sticks.) No, the big deal is that kids sometimes disappear in Derry, Derry is funny that way, and when they do disappear, they are often last seen in out-of-the-way places like the deserted Tracker Brothers depot. No one talks about this unpleasant fact, but everyone knows about it.

Yet a pussy… not some fictional Penthouse pussy but the actual muff of an actual girl from town… that would be something to see, all right. That would be a fuckin pisser.

“Tracker Brothers?” Henry says with frank disbelief They have stopped now, are standing together in a little clump not far from the building while the last of the retards go moaning and goggling by on the other side of the street. “I think the world of you, Jonesy, don’t get me wrong-the fucking world-but why would there be a picture of Tina Jean’s pussy in there?''I don’t know,” Jonesy said, “but Davey Trask saw it and said it was her.” “I dunno about goin in there, man,” Beaver says. “I mean, I’d love to see Tina Jean Slophanger’s pussy-”

“Schlossinger-”

“-but that place has been empty at least since we were in the fifth grade-”

“Beav-”

“-and I bet it’s full of rats.”

“Beav-”

But Beav intends to have his entire say. “Rats get rabies,” he says. “They get rabies up the old wazoo.”

“We don’t have to go in,” Jonesy says, and all three look at him with renewed interest. This is, as the fellow said when he saw the black-haired Swede, a Norse of a different color.

Jonesy sees he has their full attention, nods, goes on. “Davey says all you have to do is go around on the driveway side and look in the third or fourth window. It used to be Phil and Tony Tracker’s office. There’s still a bulletin board on the wall. And Davey said the only two things on the bulletin board are a map of New England showing all the truck routes, and a picture of Tina jean Schlossinger showing all of her pussy.”

They look at him with breathless interest, and Pete asks the question which has occurred to all of them. “Is she bollocky?”

“No,” Jonesy admits. “Davey says you can’t even see her tits, but she’s holding her skirt up and she isn’t wearing pants and you can see it, just as clear as day.”

Pete is disappointed that this year’s Tiger Homecoming Queen isn’t bollocky bare-ass, but the thing about how she’s holding her skirt up inflames them all, feeding some primal, semi-secret notion of how sex really works. A girl could hold her skirt up, after all; any girl could.

Not even Henry asks any more questions. The only question comes from the Beav, who asks if Jonesy is sure they won’t have to go inside in order to see. And they are already moving in the direction of the driveway running down the far side of the building toward the vacant lot, powerful as a spring tide in their nearly mindless motion.

Pete finished the second beer and heaved the bottle deep into the woods. Feeling better now, he got cautiously to his feet and dusted the snow from his ass. And was his knee a little bit looser? He thought maybe it was. Looked awful, of course-looked like he had a little model of the Minnesota goddam Metrodome under there-but felt a bit better. Still, he walked carefully, swinging his plastic sack of beer in short arcs beside him. Now that the small but powerful voice insisting that he had to have a beer, just goddam had to, had been silenced, he thought of the woman with new solicitude, hoping she hadn’t noticed he was gone. He would walk slowly, he would stop to massage his knee every five minutes or so (and maybe talk to it, encourage it, a crazy idea, but he was out here on his own and it couldn’t hurt), and he would get back to the woman. Then he would have another beer. He did not look back at the overturned Scout, did not see that he had written DUDDITS in the snow, over and over again, as he sat thinking of that day back in 1978.

Only Henry had asked why the Schlossinger girl’s picture would be there in the empty office of an empty freight depot, and Pete thought now that Henry had only asked because he had to fulfill his role as Group Skeptic. Certainly he’d only asked once; as for the rest of them, they had simply believed, and why not? At thirteen, Pete had still spent half his life believing in Santa Claus. And besides-

Pete stopped near the top of the big hill, not because he was out of breath or because his leg was cramping up, but because he could suddenly feel a low humming sound in his head, sort of like an electrical transformer, only with a kind of cycling quality to it, a low thud-thud-thud. And no, it wasn’t “suddenly” as in “suddenly started up'; he had an idea the sound had been there for awhile and he was just becoming aware of it. And he had started to think some funny stuff. All that about Henry’s cologne, for instance… and Marcy. Someone named Marcy. He didn’t think he knew anyone named Marcy but the name was suddenly in his head, as in Marcy I need you or Marcy I want you or maybe Zounds, Marcy, bring the gasogene.

He stood where he was, licking his dry lips, the bag of beer hanging straight down from his hand now, its pendulum motion stilled. He looked up in the sky, suddenly sure the lights would be there… and they were there, only just two of them now, and very faint.

“Tell Marcy to make them give me a shot,” Pete said, enunciating each word carefully in the stillness, and knew they were exactly the right words. Right why or right how he couldn’t say, but yes, those were the words in his head. Was it the click, or had the lights caused those thoughts? Pete couldn’t say for sure.

“Maybe nyther,” he said.

Pete realized the last of the snow had stopped. The world around him was only three colors: the deep gray of the sky, the deep green of the firs, and the perfect unblemished white of the new snow. And hushed.

Pete cocked his head first to one side and then to the other, listening. Yes, hushed. Nothing. No sound in the world and the humming noise had stopped as completely as the snow. When he looked up, he saw that the pale, mothlike glow of the lights was also gone.

“Marcy?” he said, as if calling someone. It occurred to him that Marcy might be the name of the woman who had caused them to wreck, but he dismissed the idea. That woman’s name was Becky, he knew it as surely as he had known the name of the real estate woman that time. Marcy was just a word now, and nothing about it called to him. Probably he’d just had a brain-cramp. Wouldn’t be the first time.

He finished climbing the hill and started down the other side, his thoughts returning to that day in the fall of 1978, the day they had met Duddits.

He was almost back to the place where the road leveled when his knee abruptly let go, not locking up this time but seeming to explode like a pine knot in a hot fire.

Pete pitched forward into the snow. He didn’t hear the Bud bottles break inside the bag-all but two of them. He was screaming too loudly.

Chapter Six DUDDITS, PART TWO

Henry started off in the direction of the camp at a quick walk, but as the snow subsided to isolated flurries and the wind began to die, he upped the walk to a steady, clocklike jog. He had been jogging for years, and the pace felt natural enough. He might have to pull up for awhile, walk or even rest, but he doubted it. He had run road-races longer than nine miles, although not for a couple of years and never with four inches of snow underfoot. Still, what was there to worry about? Falling down and busting a hip? Maybe having a heart attack? At thirty-seven a heart attack seemed unlikely, but even if he had been a prime candidate for one, worrying about it would have been ludicrous, wouldn’t it? Considering what he was planning? So what was there to worry about?

Jonesy and Beaver, that was what. On the face of it that seemed as ludicrous as worrying about suffering a catastrophic cardiac outage here in the middle of nowhere-the trouble was behind him, with Pete and that strange, semi-comatose woman, not up ahead at Hole in the Wall… except there was trouble at Hole in the Wall, bad trouble. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did and he accepted the knowing. Even before he started encountering the animals, all hurrying by and none giving him more than the most cursory glance, he knew that.

Once or twice he glanced up into the sky, looking for more foo-lights, but there were none to be seen and after that he just looked straight ahead, sometimes having to zig or zag to keep out of the way of the animals. They weren’t quite stampeding, but their eyes had an odd, spooky look that Henry had never seen before.

Once he had to skip handily to keep from being upended by a pair of hurrying foxes.

Eight more miles, he told himself. It became a jogging mantra, different from the ones that usually went through his head when he was running (nursery rhymes were the most common), but not that different-same idea, really. Eight more miles, eight more miles to Banbury Cross. No Banbury Cross, though, just Mr Clarendon’s old camp-Beaver’s camp, now-and no cock horse to get him there. What was a cock horse, anyway? Who knew? And what in Christ’s name was happening out here-the lights, the slow-motion stampede (dear God, what was that in the woods off to his left, was that a fucking bear?), the woman in the road, just sitting there with most of her teeth and most of her brains missing? And those farts, dear God. The only thing he’d ever smelled even remotely like it was the breath of a patient he’d had once, a schizophrenic with intestinal cancer. Always that smell, an internist friend had told Henry when Henry tried to describe it. They can brush their teeth a dozen times a day, use Lavoiis every hour on the hour, and that smell still comes through. It’s the smell of the body eating itself, because that’s all cancer is when you take the diagnostic masks off: autocannibalism.

Seven more miles, seven more miles, and all the animals are running, all the animals are headed for Disneyland. And when they get there they’ll form a conga line and sing “It’s a Small World After All.”

The steady, muted thud of his booted feet. The feel of his glasses bouncing up and down on the bridge of his nose. His breath coming out in balloons of cold vapor. But he felt warm now, felt good, those endorphins kicking in. Whatever was wrong with him, it was no shortage of those; he was suicidal but by no means dysthytmic.

That at least some of his problem-the physical and emotional emptiness that was like a near-whiteout in a blizzard-was physical, hormonal, he had no doubt. That the problem could be addressed if not entirely corrected by pills he himself had prescribed by the bushel… he had no doubt of that, either, But like Pete, who undoubtedly knew there was a rehab and years of AA meetings in his most plausible future, Henry did not want to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a he, something that would lessen him.

He wondered if Pete had gone back for the beer, and knew the answer was probably yes. Henry would have suggested bringing it along if he’d thought of it, making such a risky return trip (risky for the woman as well as Pete himself) unnecessary, but he’d been pretty freaked out-and the beer hadn’t even crossed his mind. He bet it had crossed Pete’s, though. Could Pete make it roundtrip on that sprung knee? It was

possible, but Henry would not have bet on it. They’re back! the woman had screamed, looking up at the sky. They’re back! They’re back! Henry put his head down and jogged a little faster.

Six more miles, six more to Banbury Cross. Was it down to six yet, or was he being optimistic? Giving those old endorphins a little too much free rein? Well, so what if he was? Optimism couldn’t hurt at this point. The snow had almost stopped falling and the tide of animals had slackened, and that was also good-What wasn’t so good was the thoughts in his head, some of which seemed less and less like his own. Becky, for instance, who was Becky? The name had begun to resonate in his head, had become another part of the mantra. He supposed it was the woman he’d just avoided killing. Whose little girl are you? Becky, why I’m Becky, I’m pretty Becky Shue.

Except she hadn’t been pretty, not pretty at all. One heavyset smelly mama was what she’d been, and now she was in Pete Moore’s less than reliable care.

Six. Six. Six more miles to Banbury Cross.

Jogging steadily-as steadily as was possible, given the footing-and hearing strange voices in his head. Except only one of them was really strange, and that one wasn’t a voice at all but a kind of hum with a rhythmic beat

(whose little girl, whose little girl, pretty Becky Shue)

caught in it. The rest were voices he knew, or voices his friends knew. One was a voice Jonesy had told him about, a voice he’d heard after his accident and associated with all his pain: Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy.

He heard Beaver’s voice: Go look in the chamber pot.

Jonesy, answering: Why don’t we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how he is?

A stranger’s voice saying that if he could just do a number two he’d be okay…

… only he was no stranger, he was Rick, pretty Becky’s friend Rick. Rick what? McCarthy? McKinley? McKeen? Henry wasn’t sure, but he leaned toward McCarthy, like Kevin McCarthy in that old horror movie about the pods from space that made themselves look like people. One of Jonesy’s raves. Get a few drinks in him and mention that movie and Jonesy would respond

with the key line at once: “They’re here! They’re here!”

The woman, looking up at the sky and screaming They’re back, they’re back.

Dear Christ, there’d been nothing like this since they were kids and this was worse, like picking up a power-line filled with voices instead of electricity.

All those patients over the years, complaining of voices in their heads. And Henry, the big psychiatrist (Young Mr God, one state hospital patient called him back in the early days), had nodded as if he knew what they were talking about. Had in fact believed he did know what they were talking about. But maybe only now did he really know.

Voices. Listening to them so hard he missed the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter passing overhead, a dark rushing shark-shape barely obscured by the bottoms of the clouds. Then the voices began to fade as radio signals from faraway places do when daylight comes and the atmosphere once more begins to thicken. At last there was only the voice of his own thoughts, insisting that something terrible had happened or was about to happen at Hole in the Wall; that something equally terrible was about to happen or had happened back there at the Scout or the loggers” shelter.

Five more miles. Five more miles.

In an effort to turn his mind away from his friend behind and his friends ahead, or what might be happening all around him, he let his mind go to where he knew Pete’s mind had already gone: to 1978, and Tracker Brothers, and to Duddits. How Duddits Cavell could have anything to do with this fuckarow Henry didn’t understand, but they had all been thinking about him, and Henry didn’t even need that old mental connection to know it. Pete had mentioned Duds while they were dragging the woman to the loggers” shelter on that piece of tarp, Beaver had been talking about Duddits Just the other day when Henry and the Beav had been in the woods together-the day Henry had tagged his deer, that had been, The Beav reminiscing about how the four of them had taken Duddits Christmas shopping in Bangor one year. just after Jonesy had gotten his license that was; Jonesy would have driven anyone anywhere that winter. The Beav laughing about how Duddits had worried Santa Claus wasn’t real, and all four of them-big high-school galoots by then, thinking they had the world by the tail-working to reconvince Duddits that Santa was a true thing, the real deal. Which of course they’d done. And Jonesy had called Henry from Brookline Just last month, drunk (drunkenness was much rarer for Jonesy, especially since his accident, than it was for Pete, and it was the only maudlin call Henry had ever gotten from the man), saying that he’d never done anything in his life that was as good, as plain and simple baldass fine, as what they had done for poor old Duddits Cavell back in 1978. That was our finest hour, Jonesy had said on the phone, and with a nasty jolt, Henry realized he had told Pete exactly the same thing. Duddits, man. Fucking Duds.

Five more miles… or maybe four. Five more miles… or maybe four.

They had been going to see a picture of a girl’s pussy, the picture supposedly tacked up on the bulletin board of some deserted office. Henry couldn’t remember the girl’s name, not after all these years, only that she’d been that prick Grenadeau’s girlfriend and the 1978 Homecoming Queen at Derry High. Those things had made the prospect of seeing her pussy especially interesting. And then, just as they got to the driveway, they had seen a discarded red-and-white Derry Tigers shirt. And a little way down the driveway there had been something else.

I hate that fuckin show, they never change their clothes, Pete had said, and Henry opened his mouth to reply, only before he could…

“The kiddo screamed,” Henry said. He slipped in the snow, tottered for a moment, then ran on again, remembering that October day under that white sky. He ran on remembering Duddits. How Duddits had screamed and changed all their lives. For the better, they had always assumed, but now Henry wondered.

Right now he wondered very much.

When they get to the driveway-not much of a driveway, weeds are growing even in the gravelly wheelruts now-Beaver is in the lead. Beaver is, indeed, almost foaming at the jaws. Henry guesses that Pete is nearly as wrought-up, but Pete is holding it in better, even though he’s a year younger. Beaver is… what’s the word? Agog. Henry almost laughs at the aptness of it, and then the Beav stops so suddenly Pete almost runs into him.

“Hey!” Beaver says. “Fuck me Freddy! Some kid’s shirt!”

It is indeed. Red and white, and not old and dirty, as if it had been there a thousand years. In fact, it looks almost new.

“Shirt, schmirt, who gives a shit?” Jonesy wants to know.

“Let’s just-”

“Hold your horses,” the Beav says. “This is a good shirt.” Except when he picks it up, they see that it isn’t. New, yes a brand-new Derry Tigers shirt, with 19 on the back. Pete doesn’t give a shit for football, but the rest of them recognize it as Richie Grenadeau’s number. Good, no-not anymore. It’s ripped deeply at the back collar, as if the person wearing it had tried to run away, then been grabbed and hauled back.

“Guess I was wrong,” the Beav says sadly, and drops it again. “Come on.”

But before they get very far, they come across something else-this time it’s yellow instead of red, that bright yellow plastic only a kid could love. Henry trots ahead of the others and picks it up. It’s a lunchbox with Scooby-Doo and his friends on it, all of them running from what appears to be a haunted house. Like the shirt it looks new, not anything that’s been lying out here for any length of time, and all at once Henry is starting to have a bad feeling about this, starting to wish they hadn’t detoured into this deserted driveway by this deserted building at all… or at least had saved it for another day. Which, even at fourteen, he realizes is stupid. When it comes to pussy, he thinks, you either go or you don 9 t, there’s no such thing as saving it for another day.

“I hate that fuckin show, Pete says, looking over Henry’s shoulder at the lunchbox. “They never change their clothes, did you ever notice that? Wear the same fuckin thing, show in and show out.”

Jonesy takes the Scooby-Doo lunchbox from Henry and turns it to look at something he’s seen pasted on the end. The wild look has gone out of Jonesy’s eyes, he’s frowning slightly, and Henry has an idea Jonesy is also wishing they’d just gone on and played some two-on-two.

The sticker on the side reads: I BELONG TO DOUGLAS CAVELL, 19 MAPLE LANE, DERRY, MAINE. IF THE BOY I BELONG TO IS LOST, CALL 949-1864. THANKS!

Henry opens his mouth to say the lunchbox and the shirt must belong to a kid who goes to The Retard Academy-he’s sure of it just looking at the sticker, which is almost like the tag their fucking dog wears-but before he can, there is a scream from the far side of the building, over where the big kids play baseball in the summer. It’s full of hurt, that scream, but what starts Henry running before he can even think about it is the surprise in it, the awful surprise of someone who has been hurt or scared (or both) for the very first time.

The others follow him. They run up the weedy right rut of the driveway, the one closest to the building, in single file: Henry, Jonesy, the Beav, and Pete.

There is hearty male laughter. “Go on and eat it,” someone says. “Eat it and you can go. Duncan might even give you your pants back.”

“Yeah, if you-” Another boy, probably Duncan, begins and then he stops, staring at Henry and his friends.

“Hey you guys, quit it!” Beaver shouts. “Just fucking quit it!” Duncan’s friends-there are two of them, both wearing Derry High School jackets-realize they are no longer unobserved at their afternoon’s entertainment, and turn. Kneeling on the gravel amid them, dressed only in underpants and one sneaker, his face smeared with blood and dirt and snot and tears, is a child of an age Henry cannot determine. He’s not a little kid, not with that powdering of hair on his chest, but he has the look of a little kid just the same. His eyes have a Chinese tilt and are bright green, swimming with tears.

On the red brick wall behind this little group, printed in large white letters which are fading but still legible, is this message: NO BOUNCE, NO PLAY. Which probably means keep the games and the balls away from the building and out in the vacant lot where the deep ruts of the basepaths and the ragged hill of the pitcher’s mound can still be seen, but who can say for sure? NO BOUNCE, NO PLAY. In the years to come they will say this often; it will become one of the private catch-phrases of their youth and has no exact meaning. Who knows? perhaps comes closest. Or What can you do? It is always best spoken with a shrug, a smile, and hands tipped up to the sky.

“Who the fuck’re you?” one of the big boys asks the Beav. On his left hand he’s wearing what looks like a batting glove or maybe a golf glove… something athletic, anyway. In it is the dried dog-turd he has been trying to make the mostly naked boy eat.

“What are you doing?” Jonesy asks, horrified. “You tryin to make him eat that? The fuck’s wrong with you?”

The kid holding the dog-turd has a wide swatch of white tape across the bridge of his nose, and Henry utters a bark of recognition that is half surprise and half laughter. It’s too perfect, isn’t it? They’re here to look at the pussy of the Homecoming Queen and here, by God, is the Homecoming King, whose football season has apparently been ended by nothing worse than a broken nose, and who is currently passing his time doing stuff like this while the rest of the team practices for this week’s game.

Richie Grenadeau hasn’t noticed Henry’s look of recognition; he’s staring at Jonesy. Because he has been startled and because Jonesy’s tone of disgust is so completely unfeigned, Richie at first takes a step backward. Then he realizes that the kid who has dared to speak to him in such reproving tones is at least three years younger and a hundred pounds lighter than he is. The sagging hand straightens again.

“I’m gonna make him eat this piece of shit,” he says. “Then he can go. You go now, snotball, unless you want half''Yeah, fuck off,” the third boy says. Richie Grenadeau is big but this boy is even bigger, a six-foot-five hulk whose face flames with acne. “While you got th-” “I know who you are,” Henry says.Richie’s eyes switch to Henry. He looks suddenly wary… but he also looks pissed off. “Fuck off, sonny. I mean it.”

“You’re Richie Grenadeau. Your picture was in the paper.

What do you think people will say if we tell em what we caught you doing?”

“You’re not gonna tell anyone anything, because you’ll be fuckin dead,” the one named Duncan says. He has dirty-blond hair falling around his face and down to his shoulders. “Get outta here. Beat feet.”

Henry pays no attention to him. He stares at Richie Grenadeau. He is aware of no fear, although there’s no doubt these three boys could stomp them flat; he is burning with an outrage he has never felt before, never even suspected. The kid kneeling on the ground is undoubtedly retarded, but not so retarded he doesn’t understand these three big boys intended to hurt him, tore off his shirt, and then-

Henry has never in his life been closer to getting good and beaten up, or been less concerned with it. He takes a step forward, fists clenching. The kid on the ground sobs, head now lowered, and the sound is a constant tone in Henry’s head, feeding his fury.

“I’ll tell,” he says, and although it is a little kid’s threat, he doesn’t sound like a little kid to himself. Nor to Richie, apparently; Richie takes a step backward and the gloved hand with the dried turd in it sags again. For the first time he looks alarmed. “Three against one, a little retarded kid, fuck yeah, man, I’ll tell. I’ll tell and I know who you are!”

Duncan and the big boy-the only one not wearing a high-school jacket-step up on either side of Richie. The boy in the underpants is behind them now, but Henry can still hear the pulsing drone of his sobs, it’s in his head, beating in his head and driving him fucking crazy.

“All right, okay, that’s it,” the biggest boy says. He grins, showing several holes where teeth once lived. “You’re gonna die now.”

“Pete, you run when they come,” Henry says, never taking his eyes from Richie Grenadeau. “Run home and tell your mother.” And, to Richie: “You’ll never catch him, either. He runs like the fucking wind.”

Pete’s voice sounds thin but not scared. “You got it, Henry.” “And the worse you beat us up, the worse it’s gonna be for you, Jonesy says. Henry has already seen this, but for Jonesy it is a revelation; he’s almost laughing. “Even if you really did kill us, what good would it do you? Because Pete does run fast, and he’ll tell.”

“I run fast, too,” Richie says coldly. “I’ll catch him.”

Henry turns first to Jonesy and then to the Beav. Both of them are standing firm. Beaver, in fact, is doing a little more than that. He bends swiftly, picks up a couple of stones-they are the size of eggs, only with jagged edges-and begins to chunk them together. Beav’s narrowed eyes shift back and forth between Richie Grenadeau and the biggest boy, the galoot. The toothpick in his mouth jitters aggressively up and down.

“When they come, go for Grenadeau,” Henry says. “The other two can’t even get close to Pete.” He switches his gaze to Pete, who is pale but unafraid-his eyes are shining and he is almost dancing on the balls of his feet, eager to be off “Tell your ma. Tell her where we are, to send the cops. And don’t forget this bully motherfucker’s name, whatever you do.” He shoots a district attorney’s accusing finger at Grenadeau, who once more looks uncertain. No, more than uncertain. He looks afraid.

“Richie Grenadeau,” Pete says, and now he does begin to dance. “I won’t forget.”

“Come on, you dickweed,” Beaver says. One thing about the Beav, he knows a really excellent rank when he hears it. “I’m gonna break your nose again. What kind of chickenshit quits off the football team cause of a broken nose, anyhow?”

Grenadeau doesn’t reply-no longer knows which of them to reply to, maybe-and something rather wonderful is happening: the other boy in the high-school jacket, Duncan, has also started to look uncertain. A flush is spreading on his cheeks and across his forehead. He wets his lips and looks uncertainly at Richie. Only the galoot still looks ready to fight, and Henry almost hopes they will fight, Henry and Jonesy and the Beav will give them a hell of a scrap if they do, hell of a scrap, because of that crying, that fucking awful crying, the way it gets in your head, the beat-beat-beat of that awful crying.

“Hey Rich, maybe we ought to-” Duncan begins.

“Kill em,” the galoot rumbles. “Fuck em the fuck up.”

This one takes a step forward and for a moment it almost goes down. Henry knows that if the galoot had been allowed to take even one more step he would have been out of Richie Grenadeau’s control, like a mean old pitbull that breaks its leash and just goes flying at its prey, a meat arrow.

But Richie doesn’t let him get that next step, the one which will turn into a clumsy charge. He grabs the galoot’s forearm, which is thicker than Henry’s bicep and bristling with reddish-gold hair. “No, Scotty,” he says, “wait a minute.”

“Yeah, wait,” Duncan says, sounding almost panicky. He shoots Henry a look which Henry finds, even at the age of fourteen, grotesque. It is a reproachful look. As if Henry and his friends were the ones doing something wrong.

“What do you want?” Richie asks Henry. “You want us to get out of here, that it?”

Henry nods.

“If we go, what are you gonna do? Who are you going to tell?”

Henry discovers an amazing thing: he is as close to coming unglued as Scotty, the galoot. Part of him wants to actually provoke a fight, to scream EVERYBODY! FUCKING EVERYBODY! Knowing that his friends would back him up, would never say a word even if they got trashed and sent to the hospital.

But the kid. That poor little crying retarded kid. Once the big boys finished with Henry, Beaver, and Jonesy (with Pete as well, if they could catch him), they would finish with the retarded kid, too, and it would likely go a lot further than making him eat a piece of dried dog-turd.

“No one,” he says. “We won’t tell anyone.”

“Fuckin liar,” Scotty says. “He’s a fuckin liar, Richie, lookit him.”

Scotty starts forward again, but Richie tightens his grip on the big galoot’s forearm.

“If no one gets hurt,” Jonesy says in a blessedly reasonable tone of voice, “no one’s got a story to tell”

“Grenadeau glances at him, then back at Henry. “Swear to God?”

“Swear to God,” Henry agrees.

“All of you swear to God?” Grenadeau asks.

Jonesy, Beav, and Pete all dutifully swear to God.

Grenadeau thinks about it for a moment that seems very long, and then he nods. “Okay, fuck this. We’re going.”

“If they come, run around the building the other way,” Henry says to Pete, speaking very rapidly because the big boys are already in motion. But Grenadeau still has his hand clamped firmly on Scotty’s forearm, and Henry thinks this is a good sign.

“I wouldn’t waste my time,” Richie Grenadeau says in a lofty tone of voice that makes Henry feel like laughing… but with an effort he manages to keep a straight face. Laughing at this point would be a bad idea. Things are almost fixed up. There’s a part of him that hates that, but the rest of him nearly trembles with relief.

“What’s up with you, anyway?” Richie Grenadeau asks him. “What’s the big deal?”

Henry wants to ask his own question-wants to ask Richie Grenadeau how he could do it, and it’s no rhetorical question, either. That crying! My God! But he keeps silent, knowing anything he says might just provoke the asshole, get him going all over again.

There is a kind of dance going on here; it looks almost like the ones you learn in first and second grade. As Richie, Duncan, and Scott walk toward the driveway (sauntering, attempting to show they are going of their own free will and haven’t been frightened off by a bunch of homo junior-high kids), Henry and his friends first move to face them and then step backward in a line toward the weeping kid kneeling there in his underpants, blocking him from them.

At the corner of the building Richie pauses and gives them a final look. “Gonna see you fellas again,” he says. “One by one or all together. “'Yeah,” Duncan agrees.

“You’re gonna be lookin at the world through a oxygen tent!” Scott adds, and Henry comes perilously close to laughing again. He prays that none of his friends will say anything-let done be done-and none of them do. It’s almost a miracle.

One final menacing look from Richie and they are gone around the comer. Henry, Jonesy, Beaver, and Pete are left alone with the kid, who is rocking back and forth on his dirty knees, his dirty bloody tearstreaked uncomprehending face cocked to the white sky like the face of a broken clock, all of them wondering what to do next. Talk to him? Tell him it’s okay, that the bad boys are gone and the danger has passed? He will never understand. And oh that crying is so freaky. How could those kids, mean and stupid as they were, go on in the face of that crying? Henry will understand later-sort of-but at that moment it’s a complete mystery to him.

“I’m gonna try something,” Beaver says abruptly.

“Yeah, sure, anything,” Jonesy says. His voice is shaky.

The Beav starts forward, then looks at his friends. It is an odd look, part shame, part defiance, and-yes, Henry would swear it-part hope.

“If you tell anybody I did this,” he says, “I’ll never chum with you guys again.”

“Never mind that crap,” Pete says, and he also sounds shaky. “If you can shut him up, do it!”

Beaver stands for a moment where Richie was standing while he tried to get the kid to eat the dog-turd, then drops to his knees. Henry sees the kid’s underwear shorts are in fact Underoos, and that they feature the Scooby-Doo characters, plus Shaggy’s Mystery Machine, just like the kid’s lunchbox.

Then Beaver takes the wailing, nearly naked boy into his arms and begins to sing.

Four more miles to Banbury Cross… or maybe only three. Four more miles to Banbury Cross… or maybe only-

Henry’s feet skidded again, and this time he had no chance to get his balance back. He had been in a deep daze of memory, and before he could come out of it, he was flying through the air.

He landed heavily on his back, hitting hard enough to lose his wind in a loud and painful gasp-“Uh!” Snow rose in a dreamy sugarpuff, and he hit the back of his head hard enough to see stars.

He lay where he was for a moment, giving anything broken ample opportunity to announce itself When nothing did, he reached around and prodded the small of his back. Pain, but no agony. When they were ten and eleven and spent what seemed like whole winters sledding in Strawford Park, he had taken worse hits than this and gotten up laughing. Once, with the idiotic Pete Moore piloting his Flexible Flyer and Henry riding behind him, they had gone head-on into the big pine at the foot of the hill, the one all the kids called the Death Tree, and survived with nothing more than a few bruises and a couple of loose teeth each. The trouble was, he hadn’t been ten or eleven for a lot of years.

“Get up, ya baby, you’re okay,” he said, and carefully came to a sitting position. Twinges from his back, but nothing worse. just shaken up. Nothing hurt but your fuckin pride, as they used to say. Still, he’d maybe sit here another minute or two. He was making great time and he deserved a rest. Besides, those memories had shaken him. Richie Grenadeau, fucking Richie Grenadeau, who had, it turned out, flunked off the football team-it hadn’t been the broken nose at all. Gonna see you fellas again, he had told them, and Henry guessed he had meant it, but the threatened confrontation had never happened, no, never happened. Something else had happened instead.

And all that was a long time ago. Right now Banbury Cross awaited-Hole in the Wall, at least-and he had no cock horse to ride there, only that poor man’s steed, shank’s mare. Henry got to his feet, began to brush snow from his ass, and then someone screamed inside his head.

“Ow, ow, ow!” he cried. It was like something played through a Walkman you could turn up to concert-hall levels, like a shotgun blast that had gone off directly behind his eyes. He staggered backward, flailing for balance, and had he not run into the stiffly jutting branches of a pine growing at the left side of the road, he surely would have fallen down again.

He disengaged himself from the tree’s clutch, ears still ringing-hell, his entire head was ringing-and stepped forward, hardly believing he was still alive. He raised one of his hands to his nose, and the palm of his hand came away wet with blood. There was something loose in his mouth, too. He held his hand under it, spat out a tooth, looked at it wonderingly, then tossed it aside, ignoring his first impulse, which had been to put it in his coat pocket. No one, as far as he knew, did surgical implants of teeth, and he strongly doubted that the Tooth Fairy came this far out in the boonies.

He couldn’t say for sure whose scream that had been, but he had an idea Pete Moore had maybe just run into a big load of bad trouble.Henry listened for other voices, other thoughts, and heard none. Excellent. Although he had to admit that, even without voices, this had certainly turned into the hunting trip of a lifetime.

“Go, big boy, on you huskies,” he said, and started running toward Hole in the Wall again. His sense that something had gone wrong there was stronger than ever, and it was all he could do to hold himself to a fast jog.

Go look in the chamber pot.

Why don’t we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how he is?

Had he actually heard those voices? Yes, they were gone now, but he had heard them, just as he had heard that terrible agonal scream. Pete? Or had it been the woman? Pretty Becky Shue?

“Pete,” he said, the word coming out in a puff of vapor. “It was Pete.” Not entirely sure, even now, but pretty sure.

At first he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to find his rhythm again, but then, while he was still worrying about it, it came back-the synchronicity of his hurrying breath and thudding feet, beautiful in its simplicity.

Three more miles to Banbury Cross, he thought. Going home. Just like we took Duddits home that day.

(if you tell anybody I did this I’ll never chum with you guys again)

Henry returned to that October afternoon as to a deep dream. He dropped down the well of memory so far and so fast that at first he didn’t sense the cloud rushing toward him, the cloud that was not words or thoughts or screams but only its redblack self, a thing with places to go and things to do.

Beaver steps forward, hesitates for a moment, then drops to his knees. The retard doesn’t see him; he is still wailing, eyes squeezed shut and narrow chest heaving. Both the Underoos and Beaver’s zipper-studded old motorcycle jacket are comical, but none of the other boys are laughing. Henry only wants the retard to stop crying. That crying is killing him.

Beaver shuffles forward a little bit on his knees, then takes the weeping boy into his arms.

“Baby’s boat’s a silver dream, sailing near and far…”

Henry has never heard Beaver sing before, except maybe along with the radio-the Clarendons are most certainly not churchgoers-and he is astounded by the clear tenor sweetness of his friend’s voice. In another year or so the Beav’s voice will change completely and become unremarkable, but now, in the weedy vacant lot behind the empty building, it pierces them all, astounds them. The retarded boy reacts as well, stops crying and looks at Beaver with wonder.

“It sails from here in Baby’s room and to the nearest star; Sail, Baby, sail, sail on home to me, sail the seas and sail the stars, sail on home to me…”

The last note drifts on the air and for a moment nothing in the world breathes for beauty. Henry feels like crying. The retarded boy looks at Beaver, who has been rocking him back and forth in rhythm with the song. On his teary face is an expression of blissful astonishment. He has forgotten his split lip and bruised cheek, his missing clothes, his lost lunchbox. To Beaver he says ooo or, open syllables that could mean almost anything, but Henry understands them perfectly and sees Beaver does, too.

“I can’t do more,” the Beav says. He realizes his arm is still around the kid’s shirtless shoulders and takes it away.

As soon as he does, the kid’s face clouds over, not with fear this time, or with the petulance of one balked of getting his way, but in pure sorrow. Tears fill those amazingly green eyes of his and spill down the clean tracks on his dirty cheeks. He takes Beaver’s hand and puts Beaver’s arm back over his shoulders. “Ooo or! Ooo or!” he says. Beaver looks at them, panicked. “That’s all my mother ever sang me, he says. “I always went right to fuckin sleep.”

Henry and Jonesy exchange a look and burst out laughing. Not a good idea, it’ll probably scare the kid and he’ll start that terrible bawling again, but neither of them can help it. And the kid doesn’t cry. He smiles at Henry and Jonesy instead, a sunny smile that displays a mouthful of white crammed-together teeth, and then looks back at Beaver. He continues to hold Beaver’s arm firmly around his shoulders.

“Ooo or!” he commands.

“Aw, fuck, sing it again,” Pete says. “The part you know.” Beaver ends up singing it three more times before the kid will let him stop, will let the boys work him into his pants and his tom shirt, the one with Richie Grenadeau’s number on it. Henry has never forgotten that haunting fragment and will sometimes recall it at the oddest times: after losing his virginity at a UNH fraternity party with “Smoke on the Water” pounding through the speakers downstairs; after opening his paper to the obituary page and seeing Barry Newman’s rather charming smile above his multiple chins; feeding his father, who had come down with Alzheimer’s at the ferociously unfair age of fifty-three, his father insisting that Henry was someone named Sam. “A real man pays off his debts, Sammy,” his father had said, and when he accepted the next bite of cereal, milk ran down his chin. At these times what he thinks of as Beaver’s Lullaby will come back to him, and he will feel transiently comforted. No bounce, no play.

Finally they’ve got the kid all dressed except for one red sneaker. He’s trying to put it on himself, but he’s got it pointing backward. He is one fucked-up young American, and Henry is at a loss to know how the three big boys could have bullied up on him. Even aside from the crying, which was like no crying Henry had ever heard before, why would you want to be so mean?

“Let me fix that, man,” Beaver says.

“Fit wha?” the kid asks, so comically perplexed that Henry, Jonesy, and Pete all burst out laughing again. Henry knows you’re not supposed to laugh at retards, but he can’t help it. The kid just has a naturally funny face, like a cartoon character.

Beaver only smiles. “Your sneaker, man.”

“Fit neek?”

“Yeah, you can’t put it on that way, fuckin imposseeblo, senor.” Beaver takes the sneaker from him and the kid watches with close interest as the Beav slips his foot into it, draws the laces firmly against the tongue, and then ties the ends in a bow. When he’s done, the kid looks at the bow for a moment longer, then at Beaver. Then he puts his arms around Beaver’s neck and plants a big loud smack on Beaver’s cheek.

“If you guys tell anybody he did that-” Beaver begins, but he’s smiling, clearly pleased. “Yeah, yeah, you’ll never chum with us again, ya fuckin wank,” Jonesy says, grinning. He has held onto the lunchbox and now squats in front of the kid, holding it out. “This yours, guy?'The kid grins with the delight of someone encountering an old friend and snatches it. “Ooby-Ooby-Doo, where-are-oo?” he sings. “We gah-sum urk oo-do-now!” “That’s right,” Jonesy agrees. “Got some work to do now. Gotta get you the fuck home is what we got to do. Douglas Cavell, that’s your name, right?'The boy is holding his lunchbox to his chest in both of his dirty hands. Now he gives it a loud smack, just like the one he put on Beaver’s check. “I Duddits!” he cries.

“Good,” Henry says. He takes one of the boy’s hands, Jonesy takes the other, and they help him to his feet. Maple Lane is only three blocks away and they can be there in ten minutes, always assuming that Richie and his friends aren’t hanging around and hoping to ambush them. “Let’s get you home, Duddits. Bet your Mom’s worried about you.”

But first Henry sends Pete to the corner of the building to look up the driveway. When Pete comes back and reports the coast clear, Henry lets them go that far. Once they are on the sidewalk, where people can see them, they’ll be safe. Until then, he will take no chances. He sends Pete out a second time, tells him to scout all the way to the street, then whistle if everything is cool.

“Dey gone,” Duddits says.

“Maybe,” Henry says, “but I’ll feel better if Pete takes a look.” Duddits stands serenely among them, looking at the pictures on his lunchbox, while Pete goes out to look around. Henry feels okay about sending him. He hasn’t exaggerated Pete’s speed; if Richie and his friends try to jump him, Pete will turn on the jets and leave them in the dust.

“You like this show, man?” Beaver says, taking the lunchbox. He speaks quietly. Henry watches with some interest, curious to see if the retarded boy will cry for his lunchbox. He doesn’t.

“Ey Ooby-Doos!” the retarded kid says. His hair is golden, curly. Henry still can’t tell what age he is.

“I know they’re Scooby-Doos,” the Beav says patiently, “but they never change their clothes. Pete’s right about that. I mean, fuck me Freddy, right?”

“Ite!” He holds out his hands for the lunchbox and Beaver gives it back. The retarded boy hugs it, then smiles at them. It is a beautiful smile, Henry thinks, smiling himself. It makes him think of how you are cold when you have been swimming in the ocean for awhile, but when you come out, you wrap a towel around your bony shoulders and goosepimply back and you’re warm again.

Jonesy is also smiling. “Duddits,” he says, “which one is the dog?”

The retarded boy looks at him, still smiling, but puzzled now, too.

“The dog,” Henry says. “Which one’s the dog?”

Now the boy looks at Henry, his puzzlement deepening.

“Which one’s Scooby, Duddits?” Beaver asks, and Duddits’s face clears. He points.

“Ooby! Ooby-Ooby-Doo! Eee a dog!”

They all burst out laughing, Duddits is laughing too, and then Pete whistles. They start moving and have gone about a quarter of the way up the driveway when Jonesy says, “Wait! Wait!”

He runs to one of the dirty office windows and peers in, cupping his hands to the sides of his face to cut the glare, and Henry suddenly remembers why they came. Tina Jean What’s-Her-Face’s pussy. All that seems about a thousand years ago.

After about ten seconds, Jonesy calls, “Henry! Beav! Come here! Leave the kid there!”

Beaver runs to Jonesy’s side. Henry turns to the retarded boy and says, “Stand right there, Duddits. Right there with your lunchbox, okay?”

Duddits looks up at him, green eyes shining, lunchbox held to his chest. After a moment he nods, and Henry runs to join his friends at the window. They have to squeeze together, and Beaver grumbles that someone is steppin on his fuckin feet, but they manage. After a minute or so, puzzled by their failure to show up on the sidewalk, Pete joins them, poking his face in between Henry’s and Jonesy’s shoulders. Here are four boys at a dirty office window, three with their hands cupped to the sides of their faces to cut the glare, and a fifth boy standing behind them in the weedy driveway, holding his lunchbox against his narrow chest and looking up at the white sky, where the sun is trying to break through. Beyond the dirty glass (where they will leave clean crescents to mark the places where their foreheads rested) is an empty room. Scattered across the dusty floor are a number of deflated white tadpoles that Henry recognizes as jizzbags. On one wall, the one directly across from the window, is a bulletin board. Tacked to it is a map of northern New England and a Polaroid photograph of a woman holding her skirt up. You can’t see her pussy, though, just some white panties. And she’s no high-school girl. She’s old. She must be at least thirty.

“Holy God,” Pete says at last, giving Jonesy a disgusted look. “We came all the way down here for that?”

For a moment Jonesy looks defensive, then grins and jerks his thumb back over his shoulder. “No,” he says. “We came for him.”

Henry was pulled from recall by an amazing and totally unexpected realization: he was terrified, had been terrified for some time. Some new thing had been hovering just below the threshold of his consciousness, held down by the vivid memory of meeting Duddits. Now it had burst forward with a frightened yell, insisting on recognition.

He skidded to a stop in the middle of the road, flailing his arms to keep from falling down in the snow again, and then simply stood there panting, eyes wide. What now? He was only two and a half miles from Hole in the Wall, almost there, so what the Christ now?

There’s a cloud, he thought. Some kind of cloud, that’s what. I can’t tell what it is but I can’t tell it-I never felt anything so clearly in my life. My adult life, anyway. I have to get off the road. I have to get away from it. Get away from the movie. There’s a movie in the cloud. The kind Jonesy likes. A scary one.

“That’s stupid,” he muttered, knowing it wasn’t.

He could hear the approaching wasp-whine of an engine. It was coming from the direction of Hole in the Wall and coming fast, a snowmobile engine, almost certainly the Arctic Cat stored at camp… but it was also the redblack cloud with the movie going on inside it, some terrible black energy rushing toward him.

For a moment Henry was frozen with a hundred childish horrors, things under beds and things in coffins, squirming bugs beneath overturned rocks and the furry jelly that was the remains of a long-dead baked rat the time Dad had moved the stove out from the wall to check the plug. And horrors that weren’t childish at all: his father, lost in his own bedroom and bawling with fear; Barry Newman, running from Henry’s office with that vast look of terror on his face, terror because he had been asked to look at something he wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, acknowledge; sitting awake at four in the morning with a glass of Scotch, all the world a dead socket, his own mind a dead socket and oh baby it was a thousand years till dawn and all lullabys had been cancelled. Those things were in the redblack cloud rushing down on him like that pale horse in the Bible, those things and more. Every bad thing he had ever suspected was now coming toward him, not on a pale horse but on an old snowmobile with a rusty cowling. Not death but worse than death. It was Mr Gray.

Get off the road! his mind screamed. Get off the road now! Hide!

For a moment he couldn’t move-his feet seemed to grow heavy. The gash on his thigh, the one the turnsignal had made, burned like a brand. Now he understood how a deer caught in the headlights felt, or a chipmunk hopping stupidly back and forth in front of an oncoming lawnmower. The cloud had robbed him of his ability to help himself He was frozen in its rushing path.

What got him going, oddly enough, was all those thoughts of suicide. Had he agonized his way to that decision on five hundred sleepless nights only to be robbed of his option by a kind of buck-fever? No, by God, no, it wouldn’t be, Suffering was bad enough; allowing his own terrified body to mock that suffering by locking up and just standing here while a demon ran him down… no, he would not allow that to happen.

And so he moved, but it was like moving in a nightmare, fighting his way through air which seemed to have grown as thick as taffy. His legs rose and fell with the slowness of an underwater ballet. Had he been running down this road? Actually running? The idea now seemed impossible, no matter how strong the memory.

Still, he kept moving while the whine of the approaching engine grew closer, deepening to a stuttery roar. And at last he was able to get into the trees on the south side of the road. He managed perhaps fifteen feet, far enough so there was no snow cover, only a dust of white on the aromatic orange-brown needles. There Henry fell on his knees, sobbing with terror and putting his gloved hands to his mouth to stifle the sound, because what if it heard? It was Mr Gray, the cloud was Mr Gray, and what if it heard?

He crawled behind the moss-girdled trunk of a spruce tree, clutched it, then peered around it through the tumbled screen of his sweaty hair. He saw a spark of light in the dark afternoon. It jittered, wavered, and rounded. It became a headlight.

Henry began to moan helplessly as the blackness neared. It seemed to hover over his mind like an eclipse, obliterating thought, replacing it with terrible images: milk on his father’s chin, panic in Barry Newman’s eyes, scrawny bodies and staring eyes behind barbed wire, flayed women and hanged men. For a moment his understanding of the world seemed to turn inside out like a pocket and he realized that everything was infected… or could be. Everything. His reasons for contemplating suicide were paltry in the face of this oncoming thing.

He pressed his mouth against the tree to keep from screaming, felt his lips tattoo a kiss into the springy moss all the way down to where it was moist and tasted of bark. In that moment the Arctic Cat flashed past and Henry recognized the figure which straddled it, the person who was generating the redblack cloud which now filled Henry’s head like a dry fever.

He bit into the moss, screamed against the tree, inhaled fragments of moss without being aware of it, and screamed again. Then he simply knelt there, holding onto the tree and shuddering, as the sound of the Arctic Cat began to diminish into the west. He was still there when it had died away to a troublesome whine again; still there when it faded away entirely.

Pete’s back there somewhere, he thought. It’ll come to Pete, and to the woman.

Henry stumbled back to the road, unaware that his nose had begun bleeding again, unaware that he was crying. He began moving toward Hole in the Wall once more, although now the best pace he could manage was a shambling limp. But maybe that was all right, because it was all over back at camp.

Whatever the horrible thing was that he had been sensing, it had happened. One of his friends was dead, one was dying, and one, God help him, had become a movie star.

Chapter Seven JONESY AND THE BEAV

Beaver said it again. No Beaver-isms now; just that bare Anglo-Saxon syllable you came to when you were up against the wall and had no other way to express the horror you saw. “Ah, fuck, man-fuck.”

However much pain McCarthy had been in, he had taken time to snap on both of the switches just inside the bathroom door, lighting the fluorescent bars on either side of the medicine chest mirror and the overhead fluorescent ring. These threw a bright, even glare that gave the bathroom the feel of a crime-scene photograph… and yet there was a kind of stealthy surrealism, too, because the light wasn’t quite steady; there was just enough flicker for you to know the power was coming from a genny and not through a line maintained by Derry and Bangor Hydroelectric.

The tile on the floor was baby blue. There were only spots and splatters of blood on it near the door, but as they approached the toilet next to the tub, the splotches ran together and became a red snake. Scarlet capillaries had spread off from this. The tiles were tattooed with the footprints of their boots, which neither Jonesy nor Beaver had taken off. On the blue vinyl shower curtain were four blurred fingerprints, and Jonesy thought: He must have reached out and grabbed at the curtain to keep from falling when he turned to sit.

Yes, but that wasn’t the awful part. The awful part was what Jonesy saw in his mind’s eye: McCarthy scuttling across the baby-blue tiles with one hand behind him, clutching himself, trying to hold something in.

“Ah, fuck!” Beaver said again. Almost sobbing. “I don’t want to see this, Jonesy-man, I can’t see this.”

“We’ve got to.” He heard himself speaking as if from a great distance. “We can do this, Beav. If we could face up to Richie Grenadeau and his friends that time, we can face up to this.”

“I dunno, man, I dunno…”

Jonesy didn’t know, either-not really-but he reached out and took Beaver’s hand. Beav’s fingers closed over his with panicky tightness and together they went a step deeper into the bathroom. Jonesy tried to avoid the blood, but it was hard; there was blood everywhere. And not all of it was blood.

“Jonesy,” Beaver said in a dry near-whisper. “Do you see that crud on the shower curtain?”

“Yeah.” Growing in the blurred fingerprints were little clumps of reddish-golden mold, like mildew. There was more of it on the floor, not in the fat blood-snake, but in the narrow angles of the grout.

“What is it?” “I don’t know,” Jonesy said. “Same shit he had on his face, I guess. Shut up a minute.” Then: “Mr McCarthy?… Rick?”

McCarthy, sitting there on the toilet, made no response. He had for some reason put his orange cap back on-the bill stuck off at a crooked, slightly drunken angle. He was otherwise naked. His chin was down on his breastbone, in a parody of deep thought (or maybe it wasn’t a parody, who knew?). His eyes were mostly closed. His hands were clasped pritrdy together over his pubic thatch. Blood ran down the side of the toilet in a big sloppy paintstroke, but there was no blood on McCarthy himself, at least not as far as Jonesy could see.

One thing he could see: the skin of McCarthy’s stomach hung in two slack dewlaps. The look of it reminded Jonesy of something, and after a moment or two it came to him. It was how Carla’s stomach had looked after she had delivered each of their four children. Above McCarthy’s hip, where there was a little lovehandle (and some give to the flesh), the skin was only red. Across the belly, however, it had split open in tiny weals. If McCarthy had been pregnant, it must have been with some sort of parasite, a tapeworm or a hookworm or something like that. Only there was stuff growing in his spilled blood, and what had he said as he lay there in Jonesy’s bed with the blankets pulled up to his chin? Behold, I stand at the door and knock. This was one knock Jonesy wished he had never answered. In fact, he wished he had shot him. Yes. He saw more clearly now. He was hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the completely horrified mind, and in that state wished he had put a bullet in McCarthy before he saw the orange cap and the orange flagman’s vest. It couldn’t have hurt and it might have helped.

“Stand at the door and knock on my ass,” Jonesy muttered.

“Jonesy? Is he still alive?”

“I don’t know.”

Jonesy took another step forward and felt Beaver’s fingers slide out of his; the Beav had apparently come as close to McCarthy as he was able.

“Rick?” Jonesy asked in a hushed voice. A don’t-wake-the-baby voice. A viewing-the-corpse voice. “Rick, are you-”

There was a loud, dank fart from beneath the man on the toilet, and the room immediately filled with an eyewatering aroma of excrement and airplane glue. Jonesy thought it a wonder that the shower curtain didn’t melt.

From the bowl there came a splash. Not the plop of a turd dropping-at least Jonesy didn’t think so. It sounded more like a fish jumping in a pond.

“Christ almighty, the stink of it! “Beaver cried. He had the heel of his hand over his mouth and nose and his words were muffled. “But if he can fart, he must be alive. Huh, Jonesy? He must still be-”

“Hush,” Jonesy said in a quiet voice. He was astonished at its steadiness. “Just hush, okay?” And the Beav hushed.

Jonesy leaned in close. He could see everything: the small stipple of blood in McCarthy’s right eyebrow, the red growth on his cheek, the blood on the blue plastic curtain, the joke sign-LAMAR’s THINKIN PLACE-that had hung in here when the toilet was still of the chemical variety and the shower had to be pumped up before it could be used. He saw the little gelid gleam from between McCarthy’s eyelids and the cracks in his lips, which looked purple and liverish in this light. He could smell the noxious aroma of the passed gas and could almost see that, too, rising in filthy dark yellow streamers, like mustard gas.

“McCarthy? Rick? Can you hear me?”

He snapped his fingers in front of those nearly closed eyes. Nothing. He licked a spot on the back of his wrist and held it first in front of McCarthy’s nostrils, then in front of his lips. Nothing.

“He’s dead, Beav,” he said, drawing back.

“Bullshit he is,” Beaver replied. His voice was ragged, absurdly offended, as if McCarthy had violated all the rules of hospitality. “He just dropped a clinker, man, I heard it. “'I don’t think that was-”

Beav stepped past him, bumping Jonesy’s bad hip against the sin k hard enough to hurt. “That’s enough, fella!” Beaver cried. He grabbed McCarthy’s round freckled unmuscled shoulder and shook it. “Snap out of it! Snap-”

McCarthy listed slowly tubward and Jonesy had a moment when he thought Beaver had been right after all, the guy was still alive, alive and trying to get up. Then McCarthy fell off the throne and into the tub, pushing the shower curtain ahead of him in a filmy blue billow. The orange hat fell off. There was a bony crack as his skull hit the porcelain and then Jonesy and Beaver were screaming and clutching each other, the sound of their horror deafening in the little tile-lined room. McCarthy’s ass was a lopsided full moon with a giant bloody crater in its center, the site of some terrible impact, it seemed. Jonesy saw it for only a second before McCarthy collapsed facedown into the tub and the curtain floated back into place, hiding him, but in that second it seemed to Jonesy that the hole was a foot across. Could that be? A foot? Surely not.

In the toilet bowl, something splashed again, hard enough to spatter droplets of bloody water up onto the ring, which was also blue. Beaver started to lean forward to look in, and Jonesy slammed the lid down on the ring without even thinking about it. “No,” he said.

“No?”

“No.”

Beaver tried to get a toothpick out of the front pocket of his overalls, came up with half a dozen, and dropped them on the floor. They rolled across the bloody blue tiles like jackstraws. The Beav looked at them, then looked up at Jonesy. There were tears standing in his eyes. “Like Duddits, man,” he said.

“What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“Don’t you remember? He was almost naked, too. Fuckers snatched off his shirt and his pants, didn’t leave him nothing but his underpants. But we saved him.” Beaver nodded vigorously, as if Jonesy-or some deep and doubtful part of himself-had scoffed at this idea.

Jonesy scoffed at nothing, although McCarthy didn’t remind him in the slightest of Duddits. He kept seeing McCarthy going over sideways into the tub, his orange hat falling off, the fatty deposits on his chest (the tits of easy living, Henry called them whenever he saw a pair underneath some guy’s polo shirt) wobbling. And then his ass turning up to the light-that harsh fluorescent light that kept no secrets but blabbed everything in a droning monotone. That perfect white man’s ass, hairless, just starting to turn flabby and settle down on the backs of the thighs; he had seen a thousand like it in the various locker rooms where he had dressed and showered, was developing one himself (or had been until the guy had run him over, changing the physical configuration of his backside perhaps forever), only he had never seen one like McCarthy’s was now, one that looked like something inside had fired a flare or a shotgun shell in order to-to what?

There was another hollow splash from the toilet. The Ed bumped up. It was as good an answer as any. In order to get out, of course.

In order to get out.

“Sit on that,” Jonesy told Beaver.

“Huh?”

“Sit on it!” Jonesy almost shouted it this time and Beaver sat down on the closed Ed in a hurry, looking startled. In the no-secrets, flat-toned light of the fluorescents, Beaver’s skin looked as white as freshly turned clay and every fleck of black stubble was a mole. His lips were purple. Above his head was the old joke sign: LAMAR’s THINKIN PLACE. Beav’s blue eyes were wide and terrified.

“I’m sittin, Jonesy-see?''Yeah. I’m sorry, Beav. But you just sit there, all right? Whatever he had inside him, it’s trapped. Got nowhere to go but the septic tank. I’ll be back-''Where you goin? Cause I don’t want you to leave me sittin in the shithouse next to a dead man, Jonesy. If we both run-”

“We’re not running,” Jonesy said grimly. “This is our place, and we’re not running.” Which sounded noble but left out at least one aspect of the situation: he was mostly just afraid the thing that was now in the toilet might be able to run faster than they could. Or squiggle faster. Or something. Clips from a hundred horror films-Parasite, Alien, They Came from Within-ran through his mind at super-speed. Carla wouldn’t go to the movies with him when one of those was playing, and she made him go downstairs and use the TV in his study when he brought them home on tape. But one of those movies-something he’d seen in one of them-just might save their lives. Jonesy glanced at the reddish-gold mildewy stuff growing on McCarthy’s bloody handprint. Save their lives from the thing in the toilet, anyway. The mildewy stuff… who in God’s name knew?

The thing in the bowl leaped again, thudding the underside of the lid, but Beaver had no trouble holding the lid down. That was good. Maybe whatever it was would drown in there, although Jonesy didn’t see how they could count on that; it had been living inside McCarthy, hadn’t it? It had been living inside old Mr Behold-I-stand-at-the-door-and-knock for quite some time, maybe the whole four days he’d been lost in the woods. It had slowed the growth of McCarthy’s beard, it seemed, and caused a few of his teeth to fall out; it had also caused McCarthy to pass gas that probably couldn’t have gone ignored even in the politest of polite society-farts like poison gas, to be perfectly blunt about it-but the thing itself had apparently been fine… lively… growing…

Jonesy had a sudden vivid image of a wriggling white tapeworm emerging from a pile of raw meat. His gorge rose with a liquid chugging sound.

“Jonesy?” Beaver started to get up. He looked more alarmed than ever.

“Beaver, sit back down!”

Beaver did, just in time. The thing in the toilet leaped and hit the underside of the lid with a hard, hollow rap. Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

“Remember that Lethal Weapon movie where Mel Gibson’s partner didn’t dare to get off the crapper?” Beaver said. He smiled, but his voice was dry and his eyes were terrified. “This is like that, isn’t it?”

“No,” Jonesy said, “because nothing’s going to blow up. Besides, I’m not Mel Gibson and you’re too fucking white to be Danny Glover. Listen, Beav. I’m going out to the shed-”

“Huh-uh, no way, don’t leave me here all by myself-”

“Shut up and listen. There’s friction tape out there, isn’t there?”

“Yeah, hangin on a nail, at least I think-”

“Hanging on a nail, that’s right. Near the paint-cans, I think. A big fat roll of it. I’m going to get that, then come back and tape the Ed down. Then-”

It leaped again, furiously, as if it could hear and understand. Well, how do we know it can’t? Jonesy thought. When it hit the bottom of the lid with a hard, vicious thud, the Beav winced.

“Then we’re getting out of here,” Jonesy finished.

“On the Cat?”

Jonesy nodded, although he had in fact forgotten all about the snowmobile. “Yeah, on the Cat. And we’ll hook up with Henry and Pete-'The Beav was shaking his head. “Quarantine, that’s what the guy in the helicopter said. That must be why they haven’t come back yet, don’t you think? They musta got held out by the-”

Thud!

Beaver winced. So did Jonesy.

“-by the quarantine.”

“That could be,” Jonesy said. “But listen, Beav-I’d rather be quarantined with Pete and Henry than here with… than here, wouldn’t you?”

“Let’s just flush it down,” Beaver said. “How about that?” Jonesy shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Because I saw the hole it made getting out,” Jonesy said, “and so did you. I don’t know what it is, but we’re not going to get rid of it just by pushing a handle. It’s too big.”

“Fuck.” Beaver slammed the heel of his hand against his forehead.

Jonesy nodded.

“All right, Jonesy. Go get the tape.”

In the doorway, Jonesy paused and looked back. “And Beaver…?”

The Beav raised his eyebrows.

“Sit tight, buddy-”

Beaver started to giggle. So did Jonesy. They looked at each other, Jonesy in the doorway and the Beav sitting on the closed toilet seat, snorting laughter. Then Jonesy burned across the big central room (still giggling-sit tight, the more he thought about it the funnier it seemed) toward the kitchen door. He felt hot and feverish, both horrified and hilarious. Sit tight. Jesus-Christ-Bananas.

Beav could hear Jonesy giggling all the way across the room, still giggling when he went out the door. In spite of everything, Beav was glad to hear that sound. It had already been a bad year for Jonesy, getting run over the way he had-for awhile there at first they’d all thought he was going to step out, and that was awful, poor old Jonesy wasn’t yet thirty-eight. Bad year for Pete, who’d been drinking too much, a bad year for Henry, who sometimes got a spooky absence about him that Beav didn’t understand and didn’t like… and now he guessed you could say it had been a bad year for Beaver Clarendon, as well. Of course this was only one day in three hundred and sixty-five, but you just didn’t get up in the morning thinking that by afternoon there’d be a dead guy laying naked in the tub and you’d be sitting on a closed toilet seat in order to keep something you hadn’t even seen from-

“Nope,” Beaver said. “Not going there, okay? Just not going there.”

And he didn’t have to. Jonesy would be back with the friction tape in a minute or two, three minutes tops. The question was where did he want to go until Jonesy returned? Where could he go and feel good?

Duddits, that was where. Thinking about Duddits always made him feel good. And Roberta, thinking about her was good, too. Undoubtedly.

Beav smiled, remembering the little woman in the yellow dress who’d been standing at the end of her walk on Maple Lane that day. The smile widened as he remembered how she’d caught sight of them. She had called her boy that same thing. She had called him.

“Duddits!” she cries, a little graying wren of a woman in a flowered print dress, then runs up the sidewalk toward them.

Duddits has been walking contentedly with his new friends, chattering away six licks to the minute, holding his Scooby-Doo lunchbox in his left hand and Jonesy’s hand in his right, swinging it cheerfully back and forth. His gabble seems to consist almost entirely of open vowel-sounds. The thing which amazes Beaver the most about it is how much of it he understands.

Now, catching sight of the graying birdie-woman, Duddits lets go of Jonesy’s hand and runs toward her, both of them running, and it reminds Beaver of some musical about a bunch of singers, the Von Cripps or Von Crapps or something like that. “Ah-mee, Ah-mee!” Duddits shouts exuberantly-Mommy! Mommy!

“Where have you been? Where have you been, you bad boy, you bad old Duddits!”

They come together and Duddits is so much bigger-two or three inches taller, too-that Beaver winces, expecting the birdie-woman to be flattened the way Coyote is always getting flattened in the Roadrunner cartoons. Instead, she picks him up and swings him around, his sneakered feet flying out behind him, his mouth stretched halfway up to his ears in an expression of joyful ecstasy.

“I was just about to go in and call the police, you bad old late thing, you bad old late D-”

She sees Beaver and his friends and sets her son down on his feet. Her smile of relief is gone; she is solemn as she steps toward them over some little girl’s hopscotch grid-crude as it is, Beav thinks, even that will always be beyond Duddits. The tears on her checks gleam in the glow of the sun that has finally broken through.

“Uh-oh,” Pete says. “We’re gonna catch it.”

“Be cool,” Henry says, speaking low and fast. “Let her rant and then I’ll explain.”

But they have misjudged Roberta Cavell-have judged her by the standard of so many adults who seem to view boys their age as guilty until proven innocent. Roberta Cavell isn’t that way, and neither is her husband, Alfie. The Cavells are different. Duddits has made them different.

“Boys,” she says again. “Was he wandering? Was he lost? I’ve been so afraid to let him walk, but he wants so much to be a real boy…” She gives Beaver’s fingers a strong squeeze with one hand and Pete’s with the other. Then she drops them, takes Jonesy’s and Henry’s hands, and gives them the same treatment. “Ma’am…” Henry begins.

Mrs Cavell looks at Henry with fixed concentration, as if she is trying to read his mind. “Not just lost,” she says. “Not just wandering.” “Ma’am Henry tries again, and then gives up any thought of dissembling. It is Duddits’s green gaze looking up at him from her face, only intelligent and aware, keen and questioning. “No, ma’am.” Henry sighs. “Not just wandering.”

“Because usually he comes right home. He says he can’t get lost because he sees the line. How many were there?”

“Oh, a few,” Jonesy says, then shoots a swift look at Henry. Beside them, Duddits has found a last few gone-to-seed dandelions on the neighbors” lawn and is down on his belly, blowing the fluff off them and watching it float away on the breeze. “A few boys were teasing him, ma’am.”

“Big boys,” Pete says.

Again her eyes search them, from Jonesy to Pete, from Pete to Beaver, and then back to Henry again. “Come up to the house with us,” she says. “I want to hear all about it. Duddits has a big glass of ZaRex every afternoon-it’s his special drink-but I’ll bet you guys would rather have iced tea. Wouldn’t you?”

The three of them look at Henry, who considers and then nods. “Yes, ma’am, iced tea would be great.”

So she leads them back to the house where they’ll spend so much of their time in the following years-the house at 19 Maple Lane-only it is really Duddits who leads the way, prancing, skipping, sometimes lifting his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox over his head, but always, Beaver notices, keeping at almost exactly the same place on the sidewalk, about a foot from the grass margin between the walk and the street. Years later, after the thing with the Rinkenhauer girl, he will consider what Mrs Cavell said. They all will. He sees the line.

“Jonesy?” Beaver called.

No answer. Christ, it seemed like Jonesy had been gone a long

time. Probably hadn’t been, but there was no way Beaver could tell; he’d forgotten to put on his watch that morning. Stupid, but then, he’d always been stupid, he ought to be used to it by now. Next to Jonesy and Henry, both he and Pete had been stupid. Not that Jonesy or Henry had ever treated them that way-that was one of the great things about them.

“Jonesy?”

Still nothing. Probably he was having trouble finding the tape, that was all.

There was a vile little voice far back in Beaver’s head telling him that the tape had nothing to do with it, that Jonesy had just gone Powder River, leaving him here to sit on the toilet like Danny Glover in that movie, but he wouldn’t listen to that voice because Jonesy would never do anything like that. They were friends to the end, always had been.

That’s right, the vile voice agreed. You were friends. And this is the end.

“Jonesy? You there, man?”

Still nothing. Maybe the tape had fallen off the nail it had been hung on.

Nothing from beneath him, either. And hey, it really wasn’t possible that McCarthy had shit some kind of monster into the john, was it? That he’d given birth to-Gasp!-The Beast in the Bowl? It sounded like a horror-movie spoof on Saturday Night Live. And even if that had happened, The Beast in the Bowl had probably drowned by now, drowned or gone deep. A line from a story suddenly occurred to him, one they’d read to Duddits-taking turns, and it was good there were four of them because when Duddits liked something he never got tired of it.

“Eee doool!” Duddits would shout, running to one of them with the book held high over his head, the way he’d carried his lunchbox home that first day. “Eee doool, eee doool!” Which in this case meant Read Pool! Read Pool! The book was McElligot’s Pool, by Dr. Seuss, the first memorable couplet of which went, “Young man,” (argued the farmer) “You’re sort of a fool!

You’ll never catch fish in McElligot’s Pool!” But there had been fish, at least in the imagination of the little boy in the story. Plenty of fish. Big fish.

No splashes from beneath him, though. No bumps on the underside of the lid, either. Not for awhile now. He could maybe risk one quick look, just raise the lid a little and slam it back down if anything-

But sit tight, buddy was the last thing Jonesy had said to him, and that was what he’d better do.

Jonesy’s most likely a mile down the road by now, the vile voice estimated. A mile down the road and still picking up speed.

“No, he ain’t,” Beaver said. “Not Jonesy.”

He shifted a little bit on the closed seat, waiting for the thing to jump, but it didn’t. It might be sixty yards away by now and swimming with the turds in the septic tank. Jonesy had said it was too big to go down, but since neither of them had actually seen it, there was no way to tell for sure, was there? But in either case, Monsieur Beaver Clarendon was going to sit right here. Because he’d said he would. Because time always seemed slower when you were worried or scared. And because he trusted Jonesy. Jonesy and Henry had never hurt him or made fun, not of him and not of Pete. And none of them had ever hurt Duddits or made fun of him, either.

Beav snorted laughter. Duddits with his Scooby-Doo lunchbox. Duddits on his belly, blowing the fluff off dandelions. Duddits running around in his back yard, happy as a bird in a tree, yeah, and people who called kids like him special didn’t know the half of it. He had been special, all right, their present from a fucked-up world that usually didn’t give you jack-shit. Duddits had been their own special thing, and they had loved him.

They sit in the sunny kitchen nook-the clouds have gone away as if by magic-drinking iced tea and watching Duddits, who drank his ZaRex (awful-looking orange stuff) in three or four huge splattering gulps and then ran out back to play.

Henry does most of the talking, telling Mrs Cavell that the boys were just “kinda pushing him around.” He says that they got a little bit rough and ripped his shirt, which scared Duddits and made him cry. There is no mention of how Richie Grenadeau and his friends took off his pants, no mention of the nasty after-school snack they wanted Duddits to eat, and when Mrs Cavell asks them if they know who these big boys were, Henry hesitates briefly and then says no, just some big boys from the high school, he didn’t know any of them, hot by name. She looks at Beaver, Jonesy, and Pete; they all shake their heads. It may be wrong-dangerous to Duddits in the long run, as well-but they can’t step that far outside the rules which govern their lives. Already Beaver cannot understand where they found the sack to intervene in the first place, and later the others will say the same. They marvel at their courage; they also marvel that they aren’t in the fuckin hospital.

She looks at them sadly for a moment, and Beaver realizes she knows a lot of what they aren’t telling, probably enough to keep her awake that night. Then she smiles. Right at Beaver she smiles, and it makes him tingle all the way down to his toes. “What a lot of zippers you have on your jacket!” she says.

Beaver smiles. “Yes, ma’am. It’s my Fonzie jacket. It was my brother’s first. These guys make fun of it, but I like it just the same.”

“Happy Days,” she says. “We like it, too. Duddits likes it. Perhaps you’d like to come over some night and watch it with us. With him.” Her smile grows wistful, as if she knows nothing like that will ever happen.

“Yeah, that’d be okay,” Beav says.

“Actually it would,” Pete agrees.

They sit for a little without talking, just watching him play in the back yard. There’s a swing-set with two swings. Duddits runs behind them, pushing them, making the swings go by themselves. Sometimes he stops, crosses his arms over his chest, turns the clockless dial of his face up to the sky, and laughs.

“Seems all right now,” Jonesy says, and drinks the last of his tea. “Guess he’s forgotten all about it.”

Mrs Cavell has started to get up. Now she sits back down, giving him an almost startled look. “Oh no, not at all,” she says. “He remembers. Not like you and I, perhaps, but he remembers things. He’ll probably have nightmares tonight, and when we go into his room-his father and me-he won’t be able to explain. That’s the worst for him; he can’t tell what it is he sees and thinks and feels. He doesn’t have the vocabulary.”

She sighs. “In any case, those boys won’t forget about him. What if they’re laying for him now? What if they’re laying for you?” “We can take care of ourselves,” Jonesy says, but although his voice is stout enough, his eyes are uneasy,

“Maybe,” she says. “But what about Duddits? I can walk him to school-I used to, and I suppose I’ll have to again, for awhile at least, anyway-but he loves to walk home on his own so much.”

“It makes him feel like a big boy,” Pete says. She reaches across the table and touches Pete’s hand, making him blush. “That’s right, it makes him feel like a big boy. “'You know,” Henry says, “we could walk him. We all go together to the junior high, and it would be easy enough to come down here from Kansas Street. “-Roberta Cavell only sits there without saying anything, a little birdie-woman in a print dress, looking at Henry attentively, like someone waiting for the punchline of a joke. “Would that be okay, Missus Cavell?” Beaver asks her. “Because we could do it, easy. Or maybe you don’t want us to.”

Something complicated happens to Mrs CaveE’s face-there are all those little twitches, mostly under the skin. One eye almost winks, and then the other one does wink. She takes a handkerchief from her pocket and blows her nose. Beaver thinks, She’s trying not to laugh at us. When he tells Henry that as they are walking home, Jonesy and Pete already dropped off, Henry will look at him with utter astonishment. Cry is what she was tryin not to do, he will say… and then, affectionately, after a pause: Dope.

“You would do that?” she asks, and when Henry nods for all of them, she changes the question slightly. “Why would you do that?” Henry looks around as if to say Someone else take this one, willya?

Pete says, “We like him, ma’am.”

Jonesy is nodding. “I like the way he carries his lunchbox over his head-”

“Yeah, that’s bitchin,” Pete says. Henry kicks him under the table. Pete replays what he just said-you can see him doing it and begins blushing furiously.

Mrs Cavell appears not to notice. She’s looking at Henry with fixed intensity. “He has to go by quarter of eight,” she says. “We’re always near here by then,” Henry replies. “Aren’t we, you guys?” And although seven forty-five is in fact a little early for them, they all nod and say yeah right sure yeah. “You would do that?” she asks again, and this time Beaver has no trouble reading her tone; she is incredyouwhatsis, the word that means you can’t fuckin believe it.

“Sure,” Henry says. “Unless you think Duddits wouldn’t… you know…”

“Wouldn’t want us to,” Jonesy finishes.

“Are you crazy?” she asks. Beaver thinks she is speaking to herself, trying to convince herself that these boys are really in her kitchen, that all of this is in fact happening. “Walking to school with the big boys? Boys who go to what Duddits calls “real school"? He’d think he was in heaven.”

“Okay,” Henry says. “We’ll come by quarter of eight, walk him to school. And we’ll walk home with him, too. “'He gets out at-”

“Aw, we know what time The Retard Academy gets out,” Beaver says cheerfully, and realizes a second before he sees the others” stricken faces that he’s said something a lot worse than bitchin. He claps his hands over his mouth. Above them, his eyes are huge. Jonesy kicks his shin so hard under the table that Beav almost tumbles over backward.

“Don’t mind him, ma’am,” Henry says. He is talking rapidly, which he only does when he’s embarrassed. “He just-”

“I don’t mind,” she says. “I know what people call it. Sometimes Alfie and I call it that ourselves.” This topic, incredibly, hardly seems to interest her. “Why?” she says again.

And although it’s Henry she’s looking at, it’s Beaver who answers, in spite of his blazing cheeks. “Because he’s cool,” he says. The others nod.

They will walk Duddits to school and back for the next five years or so, unless he is sick or they are at Hole in the Wall; by the end of it Duddits is no longer going to Mary M. Snowe, aka The Retard Academy, but to Derry Vocational, where he learns to bake cookies (baitin tooties, in Duddits-ese), replace car batteries, make change, and fie his own tie (the knot is always perfect, although it sometimes appears about halfway down his shirt). By then the Josie Rinkenhauer thing has come and gone, a little nine days” wonder forgotten by everyone except Josie’s parents, who will never forget. In those years when they walk with him to and from his school, Duddits will sprout up until he’s the tallest of all of them, a gangly teenager with a strangely beautiful child’s face. By then they will have taught him how to play Parcheesi and a simplified version of Monopoly; by then they will have invented the Duddits Game and played it incessantly, sometimes laughing so hard that Alfie Cavell (he was the tall one of the pair, but he also had a birdie look about him) would come to the head of the stairs in the kitchen, the ones that led to the rec room, and yell down at them, wanting to know what was going on, what was so funny, and maybe they would try to explain that Duddits had pegged Henry fourteen on a two hand or that Duddits had pegged Pete fifteen backward, but Alfie never seemed to get it; he’d stand there at the head of the stairs with a section of the newspaper in his hand, smiling perplexedly, and at last he’d always say the same thing, Keep it down to a dull roar, boys, and close the door, leaving them to their own devices… and of all those devices the Duddits Game was the best, totally bitchin, as Pete would have said. There were times when Beaver thought he might actually laugh until he exploded, and Duddits sitting there all the time on the rug beside the big old Parkmunn cribbage board, feet folded under him and grinning like Buddha. What a fuckaree! All of that ahead of them but now just this kitchen, and the surprising sun, and Duddits outside, pushing the swings. Duddits who had done them such a favor by coming into their lives. Duddits who is-they know it from the first-not like anyone else they know.

“I don’t see how they could have done it,” Pete says suddenly. “The way he was crying. I don’t see how they could have gone on teasing him.”

Roberta Cavell looks at him sadly. “Older boys don’t hear him the same way,” she says. “I hope you never understand.”

“Jonesy!” Beaver shouted. “Hey, Jonesy!”

This time there’s a response, faint but unmistakable. The snowmobile shed was a kind of ground-level attic, and one of the things out there was an old-fashioned bulb horn, the kind a bicycle deliveryman back in the twenties or thirties might have had mounted on the handlebars of his bike. Now Beaver heard it: Ooogah! How-oogah! A noise that surely would have made Duddits laugh until he cried-a sucker for big, juicy noises, that had been ole Duds.

The filmy blue shower curtain rustled and the Beav’s arms broke out in lush bundles of gooseflesh. For a moment he almost leaped up, thinking that it was McCarthy, then realized he’d brushed the curtain with his own elbow-it was close quarters in here, close quarters, no doubt-and settled back. Still nothing from beneath him, though; that thing, whatever it was, was either dead or gone. For certain.

Well… almost for certain.

The Beav reached behind him, fingered the flush lever for a moment, then let his hand fall away. Sit tight, Jonesy had said, and Beaver would, but why the fuck didn’t Jonesy come back? If he couldn’t find the tape, why didn’t he just come back without it? It had to have been at least ten minutes now, didn’t it? And felt like a fucking hour. Meantime, here he sat on the john with a dead man in the tub beside him, one who looked as if his ass had been blown open by dynamite, man, talk about having to take a shit-

“Beep the horn again, at least,” Beaver muttered. “Honk that jeezly thing, let me know you’re still there.” But Jonesy didn’t.

Jonesy couldn’t find the tape.

He’d looked everywhere and couldn’t find it anywhere. He knew it had to be here, but it wasn’t hanging from any of the nails and it wasn’t on the tool-littered worktable. It wasn’t behind the paint-cans, or on the hook beneath the old painting masks that hung there by their yellowing elastics. He looked under the table, looked in the boxes stacked against the far wall, then in the compartment under the Arctic Cat’s passenger seat. There was a spare headlight in there, still in its carton, and half a pack of ancient Lucky Strikes, but no goddam tape. He could feel the minutes ticking away. Once he was pretty sure he heard the Beav calling for him, but he didn’t want to go back without the tape and so he blew the old horn that was lying on the floor, pumping its cracked black rubber horn and making an oogah-oogah sound that Duddits no doubt would have loved.

The more he looked for the tape and didn’t find it, the more imperative it seemed. There was a hall of twine, but how would you tie down a toilet seat with twine, for Christ’s sake? And there was Scotch tape in one of the kitchen drawers, he was almost sure of it, but the thing in the toilet had sounded pretty strong, like a good-sized fish or something. Scotch tape just wasn’t good enough.

Jonesy stood beside the Arctic Cat, looking around with wide eyes, running his hands through his hair (he hadn’t put his gloves back on and he’d been out here long enough to nunib his fingers), breathing out big white puffs of vapor.

“Where the fuck?” he asked aloud, and slammed his fist down on the table. A stack of little boxes filled with nails and screws fell over when he did, and there was the friction tape behind them, a big fat roll of it. He must have looked right past it a dozen times.

He grabbed it, stuffed it in his coat pocket-he had remembered to put that on, at least, although he hadn’t bothered to zip it up-and turned to go. And that was when Beaver began to screaming. His calls had been barely there, but Jonesy had no trouble at all hearing the screams. They were big, lusty, filled with pain.

Jonesy sprinted for the door.

Beaver’s Mom had always said the toothpicks would kill him, but she had never imagined anything like this.

Sitting there on the closed toilet seat, Beaver felt in the bib pocket of his overalls for a pick to chew on, but there weren’t any-they were scattered all over the floor. Two or three had landed clear of the blood, but he’d have to rise up off the toilet seat a little to get them-rise up and lean forward.

Beaver debated. Sit tight, Jonesy had said, but surely the thing in the toilet was gone; dive, dive, dive, as they said in the submarine war movies. Even if it wasn’t, he’d only be lifting his ass for a second or two. If the thing jumped, Beaver could bring his weight right back down again, maybe break its scaly little neck for it (always assuming it had one).

He looked longingly at the toothpicks, Three or four were close enough so he could just reach down and pick them up, but he wasn’t going to put bloody toothpicks in his mouth, especially considering where the blood had come from. There was something else, too. That funny furry stuff was growing on the blood, growing in the gutters of grout between the tiles, as well-he could see it more clearly than ever. It was on some of the toothpicks, too… but not on those which had fallen clear of the blood. Those were clean and white, and if he had ever in his life needed the comfort of something in his mouth, a little piece of wood to gnaw on, it was now.

“Fuck it,” the Beav murmured, and leaned forward, reaching out. His stretching fingers came up just short of the nearest clean pick. He flexed the muscles of his thighs and his butt came up off the seat. His fingers closed on the toothpick-ah, got it-and something hit the closed lid of the toilet seat at just that moment, hit it with terrifying force, driving it up into his unprotected balls and knocking him forward. Beaver grabbed at the shower curtain in a last-ditch effort to maintain his balance, but it pulled free of the bar in a metallic clitter-clack of rings. His boots slipped in the blood and he went sprawling forward onto the floor like a man blown out of an ejection seat. Behind him he heard the toilet seat fly up hard enough to crack the porcelain tank.

Something wet and heavy landed on Beaver’s back. Something that felt like a tail or a worm or a muscular segmented tentacle curled between his legs and seized his already aching balls in a contracting python’s grip. Beaver screamed, chin lifting from the bloody tiles (a red crisscross pattern tattooed faintly on his chin), eyes bulging. The thing lay wet and cold and heavy from the nape of his neck to the small of his back, like a rolled-up breathing rug, and now it began to utter a feverish high-pitched chattering noise, the sound of a rabid monkey.

Beaver screamed again, wriggled toward the door on his belly, then lurched up onto all fours, trying to shake the thing off. The muscular rope between his legs squeezed again, and there was a low popping sound from somewhere in the liquid haze of pain that was now his groin.

Oh Christ, the Beav thought. Mighty Christ bananas, I think that was one of my balls.

Squealing, sweating, tongue dancing in and out of his mouth like a demented party-favor, Beaver did the only thing he could think of: rolled over onto his back, trying to crush the whatever-it-was between his spine and the tiles. It chittered in his ear, almost deafening him, and began to wriggle frantically. Beaver seized the tail curled between his legs, smooth and hairless on top, thorny-as if plated with hooks made of clotted hair-underneath. And wet. Water? Blood? Both?

“Ahhh! A hhh! Oh God let go! Fuckin thing, let go! Jesus! My fuckin sack! Jeesus!”

Before he could get either hand beneath the tail, a mouthful of needles sank into the side of his neck. He reared up, bellowing, and then the thing was gone. Beaver tried to get to his feet. He had to push with his hands because there was no strength in his legs, and his hands kept slipping. In addition to McCarthy’s blood, the bathroom floor was now covered with murky water from the cracked toilet tank and the tiled surface was a skating rink.

As he finally got up, he saw something clinging to the doorway about halfway up. It looked like some kind of freak weasel-no legs but with a thick reddish-gold tail. There was no real head, only a kind of slippery-looking node from which two feverish black eyes stared.

The lower half of the node split open, revealing a nest of teeth. The thing struck at Beaver like a snake, the node lashing forward, the hairless tail curled around the doorjamb. Beaver screamed and raised a hand in front of his face. Three of the four fingers on it-all but the pinky-disappeared. There was no pain, either that or the pain from his ruptured testicle swallowed it whole. He tried to step away, but the backs of his knees struck the bowl of the battered toilet. There was nowhere to go.

That thing was in him? Beaver thought; there was time for that much. It was in him?

Then it uncoiled its tall or its tentacle or whatever it was and leaped at him, the top half of its rudimentary head full of its stupidly furious black eyes, the lower half a packet of bone needles. Far away, in some other universe where there still might be sane life, Jonesy was calling his name, but Jonesy was late, Jonesy was way late.

The thing that had been in McCarthy landed on the Beav’s chest with a smack. It smelled like McCarthy’s wind-a heavy reek of oil and ether and methane gas. The muscular whip that was its lower body wrapped around Beaver’s waist. Its head darted forward and its teeth closed on Beaver’s nose.

Screaming, beating at it with his fists, Beaver fell backward onto the toilet. The ring and the lid had flown up against the tank when the thing came out. The lid had stayed up, but the ring had fallen back into place. Now the Beav landed on it, broke it, and dropped ass-first into the toilet with the weasel-thing clutching him around the waist and chewing his face.

“Beaver! Beav, what-”

Beaver felt the thing stiffen against him-it literally stiffened, like a dick getting hard. The grip of the tentacle around his waist tightened, then loosened. Its black-eyed idiotic face whipped around toward the sound of Jonesy’s voice, and Beav saw his old friend through a haze of blood, and with dimming eyes: Jonesy standing slack-jawed in the doorway, a roll of friction tape (won’t need that now, Beaver thought, nah) in one dangling hand. Jonesy standing there utterly defenseless in his shocked horror. This thing’s next meal.

“Jonesy, get outta here!” Beaver shouted. His voice was wet, strained through a mouthful of blood. He sensed the thing getting ready to leap and wrapped his arms around its pulsing body as if it were his lover. “Get out! Shut the door! B-” Burn it, he wanted to say. Lock it in, lock both of us in, burn it, burn it alive, I’m going to sit here ass-deep in this fucking toilet with my arms wrapped around it, and if I can die smelling it roast, I can die happy. But the thing was struggling too hard and fucking Jonesy was just standing there with that roll of friction tape in his hand and his jaw dropped, and goddam if he didn’t look like Duddits, dumb as a stone boat and never going to improve. Then the thing turned back to Beaver, its earless noseless node of a head drawn back, and before that head darted forward and the world detonated for the last time, Beaver had a final, partial thought: Those toothpicks, damn, Mamma always said-

Then the exploding red and blooming black and somewhere far off the sound of his own screams, the final ones.

Jonesy saw Beaver sitting in the toilet with something that looked like a giant red-gold worm clinging to him. He called out and the thing turned toward him, no real head, just the black eyes of a shark and a mouthful of teeth. Something in the teeth, something that couldn’t be the mangled remains of Beaver Clarendon’s nose but probably was.

Run away! he screamed at himself, and then: Save him! Save Beaver!

Both imperatives had equal power, and the result kept him frozen in the doorway, feeling as if he weighed a thousand pounds. The thing in Beaver’s arms was making a noise, a crazed chattering sound that got into his head and made him think of something, something from a long time ago, he didn’t know just what.

Then Beaver was screaming at him from his awkward sprawl in the toilet, telling him to get out, to shut the door, and the thing turned back to the sound of his voice as if recalled to temporarily forgotten business, and it was Beaver’s eyes it went for this time, his fucking eyes, Beaver writhing and screaming and trying to hold on as the thing chattered and chattered and bit, its tail or whatever it was flexing and tightening around Beaver’s waist, pulling Beaver’s shirt out of his overalls and then slithering inside against his bare skin, Beaver’s feet jerking on the tiles, the heels of his boots spraying bloody water in thin sheets, his shadow flailing on the wall, and that mossy stuff was everywhere now, it grew so fucking fast-

Jonesy saw Beaver thrash backward in a final throe; saw the thing let go its grip and leap clear just as the Beav rolled off the toilet, his upper half falling into the tub on top of McCarthy, old Mr Behold-I-Stand-at-the-Door-and-Knock. The thing hit the floor and slithered around-Christ, it was quick-and started toward him. Jonesy took a step backward and swept the bathroom door shut just before the thing hit it, making a thump almost exactly like the one it had made when it hit the underside of the toilet seat. It hit hard enough to shiver the door against the jamb. Light flickered in shutters from beneath the door as it moved restlessly on the tiles, and then it slammed into the door again. Jonesy’s first thought was to run and get a chair, put it under the doorknob, but how dumb was that, as his kids said, how fucking brainless, the door opened in, not out. The real question was whether the thing understood the function of the doorknob, and if it could reach it.

As if it had read his mind-and who could say that was impossible?-there was a slithering sound on the other side of the door and he felt the doorknob trying to turn, Whatever the thing was, it was incredibly strong. Jonesy had been holding the knob with his right hand; now he added his left, as well. There was a bad moment when the pressure on the knob continued to mount, when he felt sure the thing in there would be able to turn the knob in spite of his doubled grip, and Jonesy almost panicked, almost turned and ran.

What stopped him was his memory of how quick it was. It’d run me down before I could get halfway across the room, he thought, wondering in the back of his mind why the room had to be so goddam big in the first place. It’d run me down, go up my leg, and then right up my-

Jonesy redoubled his grip on the doorknob, cords standing out on his forearms and on the sides of his neck, lips skinned back to show his teeth. His hip hurt, too. His goddam hip, if he did try to run his hip would slow him down even more thanks to the retired professor, fucking elderly asshole shouldn’t have been driving in the first place, thanks a lot, prof, thanks a fucking pantload, and if he couldn’t hold the door shut and he couldn’t run, what then?

What had happened to Beaver, of course. It had had the Beav’s nose stuck in its teeth like a shish kebab.

Moaning, Jonesy held the knob. For a moment the pressure increased even more, and then it stopped. From behind the thin wood of the door, the thing yammered angrily. Jonesy could smell the ethery aroma of starter fluid.

How was it holding on in there? It had no limbs, not that Jonesy had been able to see, just that reddish tail-thing, so how-

He heard the minute crackle-crunch-splinter of wood on the other side of the door, directly in front of his own head by the sound, and knew. It was clinging by its teeth. The idea filled Jonesy with unreasoning horror. That thing had been inside McCarthy, he had absolutely no doubt of it. Inside McCarthy and growing like a giant tapeworm in a horror movie. Like a cancer, one with teeth. And when it had grown enough, when it was ready to go to bigger and better things, you might say, it had simply chewed its way out.

“No, man, no,” Jonesy said in a watery, almost weeping voice.

The knob of the bathroom door began trying to turn the other way. Jonesy could see it in there, on its side of the bathroom door, battened to the wood like a leech with its teeth, its tall or single tentacle wrapped around the doorknob like a loop ending in a hangman’s noose, pulling-

“No, no, no,” Jonesy panted, hanging onto the knob with all of his strength. It was on the verge of slipping away from him. There was sweat on his face and on his Palms, too, he could feel it.

In front of his bulging, frightened eyes, a constellation of bumps appeared in the wood. Those were where its teeth were planted and working deeper all the time. Soon the points would burst through (if he didn’t lose his grip on the doorknob first, that was) and he’d actually have to look at the fangs that had torn his friend’s nose off his face.

That brought it home to him: Beaver was dead. His old friend.

“You killed him!” Jonesy cried at the thing on the other side of the door. His voice quivered with sorrow and terror. “You killed the Beav!”

His cheeks were hot, the tears which now began to course down them even hotter. Beaver in his black leather jacket (What a lot of zippers! Duddits’s Mom had said on the day they met her), Beaver next door to shitfaced at the Senior Prom and dancing like a Cossack, arms folded across his chest and his feet kicking, Beaver at Jonesy and Carla’s wedding reception, hugging Jonesy and whispering fiercely in his ear, “You got to be happy, man. You got to be happy for all of us.” And that had been the first he knew that Beaver wasn’t-Henry and Peter, of course, about them there had never been a question, but the Beav? And now Beaver was dead, Beaver was lying half in and half out of the tub, lying noseless on top of Mr Richard Fucking I-Stand-at-the-Door-and-Knock McCarthy.

“You killed him, you fuck!” he shouted at the bulges in the door-there had been six of them and now there were nine, hell, a dozen.

As if surprised by his rage, the widdershins pressure on the doorknob eased again. Jonesy looked around wildly for anything that might help him, saw nothing, then looked down. The roll of friction tape was there. He might be able to bend and snatch it up, but then what? He would need both hands to pull lengths of tape off it, both hands and his teeth to rip them, and even supposing the thing gave him time, what was the good of it, when he could barely hold the doorknob still against its pressure?

And now the knob began to turn again. Jonesy held it on his side, but he was getting tired now, the adrenaline in his muscles starting to decay and turn to lead, his palms more slippery than ever, and that smell the ethery smell, was clearer now and somehow purer, untainted by the wastes and gases of McCarthy’s body, and how could it be so strong on this side of the door? How could it unless-

In the half-second or so before the rod connecting the doorknobs on the inside and outside of the bathroom door snapped, Jonesy became aware that it was darker now. just a little. As if someone had crept up behind him, was standing between him and the light, him and the back door-The rod snapped. The knob in Jonesy’s hand pulled free and the bathroom door immediately swung in a little, pulled by the weight of the eelish thing clinging to it. Jonesy shrieked and dropped the knob. It hit the roll of tape and bounced askew.

He turned to run and there stood a gray man.

He-it-was a stranger, but in a way no stranger at all. Jonesy had seen representations of him on a hundred “Weird mysteries” TV shows, on the front pages of a thousand tabloid newspapers (the kind that shouted their serio-comic horrors at you as you stood prisoner in the supermarket checkout lanes), in movies like ET and Close Encounters and Fire in the Sky; Mr Gray who was an X-Files staple.

All the images had gotten the eyes night, at least, those huge black eyes that were just like the eyes of the thing that had chewed its way out of McCarthy’s ass, and the mouth was close-a vestigial slit, no more than that-but its gray skin hung in loose folds and swags, like the skin of an elephant dying of old age. From the wrinkles there ran listless yellow-white streams of some pussy substance; the same stuff ran like tears from the comers of its expressionless eyes. Clots and smears of it puddled across the floor of the big room, across the Navajo rug beneath the dreamcatcher, back toward the kitchen door through which it had entered. How long had Mr Gray been there? Had he been outside, watching Jonesy run from the snowmobile shed to the back door with the useless roll of friction tape in his hand?

He didn’t know. He only knew that Mr Gray was dying, and Jonesy had to get past him because the thing in the bathroom had just dropped onto the floor with a heavy thud. It would be coming for him.

Marcy, Mr Gray said.

He spoke with perfect clarity, although the vestige of a mouth never moved. Jonesy heard the word in the middle of his head, in the same precise place where he had always heard Duddits’s crying.

“What do you want?” The thing in the bathroom slithered across his feet, but Jonesy barely noticed it. Barely noticed it curl between the bare, toeless feet of the gray man.

Please stop, Mr Gray said inside Jonesy’s head. It was the click. More; it was the line. Sometimes you saw the line; sometimes you heard it, as he had heard the run of Defuniak’s guilty thoughts that time. I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy?

Death looking for me that day, Jonesy thought. Missed me in the street, missed me in the hospital-if only by a room or two-been looking ever since. Finally found me.

And then the thing’s head exploded, tore wide open, releasing a red-orange cloud of ether-smelling particles. Jonesy breathed them in.

Chapter Eight ROBERTA

With her hair now all gray, a widow at fifty-eight (but still a birdie-woman who favored flowered print dresses, those things hadn’t changed), Duddits’s mother sat in front of the television in the ground-floor apartment in West Derry Acres which she and her son now shared. She had sold the house on Maple Lane after Alfie died. She could have afforded to keep it-Alfie had left plenty of money, the life insurance had paid out plenty more, and there was her share of the imported auto-parts company he’d started in 1975 on top of that-but it was too big and there were too many memories above and below the living room where she and Duddits spent most of their time. Above was the bedroom where she and Alfie had slept and talked, made plans and made love. Below was the rec room where Duddits and his friends had spent so many afternoons and evenings. In Roberta’s view they had been friends sent from heaven, angels with kind hearts and dirty mouths who had actually expected her to believe that when Duddits started saying fut, he was trying to say Fudd, which, they explained earnestly, was the name of Pete’s new puppy-Elmer Fudd, just Fudd for short. And of course she had pretended to believe this.

Too many memories, too many ghosts of happier times. And then, of course, Duddits had gotten sick. Two years now he’d been sick, and none of his old friends knew because they didn’t come around anymore and she hadn’t had the heart to pick up the phone and call Beaver, who would have called the others.

Now she sat in front of the TV, where the local-news folks had finally given up just breaking into her afternoon stories and had gone on the air full-time. Roberta listened, afraid of what might be happening up north but fascinated, too. The scariest part was that no one seemed to know exactly what was happening or just what the story was or how big it was. There were missing hunters, maybe as many as a dozen, in a remote area of Maine a hundred and fifty miles north of Derry. That part was clear enough. Roberta wasn’t positive, but she was quite sure that the reporters were talking about Jefferson Tract, where the boys used to go hunting, coming back with bloody stories that both fascinated Duddits and frightened him.

Were those hunters just cut off by an Alberta Clipper storm that had passed through, dropping six or eight inches of snow on the area? Maybe. No one could say for sure, but one party of four that had been hunting in the Kineo area really did seem to be missing. Their pictures were flashed on the screen, their names recited solemnly: Otis, Roper, McCarthy, Shue. The last was a woman.

Missing hunters weren’t big enough to warrant interrupting the afternoon soaps, but there was other stuff, too. People had glimpsed strange, varicolored lights in the sky. Two hunters from Millinocket who had been in the Kineo area two days previous claimed to have seen a cigar-shaped object hovering over a powerline-cut in the woods. There had been no rotors on the craft, they said, and no visible means of propulsion. It simply hung there about twenty feet above the powerlines, emitting a deep hum that buzzed in your bones. And in your teeth, it seemed. Both of the hunters claimed to have lost teeth, although when they opened their mouths to display the gaps, Roberta had thought the rest of their teeth looked ready to fall out, as well. The hunters had been in an old Chevy pickup, and when they tried to drive closer for a better look, their engine had died. One of the men had a battery-powered watch that had run backward for about three hours following the event and had then quit for good (the other’s watch, the old-fashioned windup kind, had been fine). According to the reporter, a number of other hunters and area residents had been seeing unidentified flying objects-some cigar-shaped, some of the more traditional saucer shape-for the last week or so. The military slang for such an outbreak of sightings, the reporter said, was a “flap”.

Missing hunters, UFOS. Juicy, and certainly good enough to lead with on Live at Six (“Local! Late-breaking! Your Town and Our State!”), but now there was more. There was worse. Still only rumors, to be sure, and Roberta prayed they would prove to be untrue, but creepy enough to have kept her here for almost two hours now, drinking too much coffee and growing more and more nervous.

The scariest rumors clustered around reports that something had crash-landed in the woods, not far from where the men had reported the cigar-shaped craft hovering over the powerlines. Almost as disquieting were reports that a fairly large area of Aroostook County, perhaps two hundred square miles mostly owned by the paper companies or the government, had been quarantined.

A tall, pale man with deep-set eyes spoke briefly to reporters at the Air National Guard base in Bangor (he stood in front of a sign which proclaimed HOME OF THE MANIACS) and said that none of the rumors were true, but that “a number of conflicting reports” were being checked. The super beneath him read Simply ABRAHAM KURTZ. Roberta couldn’t tell what his rank was, or indeed if he was really a military man at all. He was dressed in a simple green coverall with nothing on it but a zipper. If he was cold-you would have thought so, wearing nothing but that coverall-he didn’t show it. There was something in his eyes, which were very large and fringed with white lashes, that Roberta didn’t much like. They looked to her like liar’s eyes.

“Can you at least confirm that the downed aircraft is neither foreign nor… nor extraterrestrial in origin?” a reporter asked. He sounded young.

“ET phone home,” Kurtz said, and laughed. There was laughter from most of the other reporters as well, and no one except Roberta, watching the clip here in her West Derry Acres apartment, seemed to realize that was not an answer at all.

“Can you confirm that there is no quarantine in the area of the Jefferson Tract?” another reporter asked.

“I can neither confirm nor deny that at this time,” Kurtz said. “We’re taking this matter quite seriously. Your government dollars are working very hard today, ladies and gentlemen.” He then walked away toward a helicopter with slowly turning rotors and ANG, printed on the side in big white letters.

That clip had been videotaped at 9:45 A.M… according to the news anchor. The next clip-shaky footage from a hand-held video camera-had been taken from a Cessna chartered by Channel 9 News to overfly the Jefferson Tract. The air had obviously been bumpy and there was a lot of snow, but not enough to obscure the two helicopters which had appeared and flanked the Cessna on either side like big brown dragonflies. There was a radio transmission, so blurry that Roberta needed to read the transcript printed in yellow at the bottom of the TV screen: “This area is interdicted. You are ordered to turn back to your point of flight origination. Repeat, this area is interdicted. Turn back.”

Did interdicted mean the same as quarantined? Roberta Cavell thought it probably did, although she also thought fellows like that man Kurtz might quibble. The letters on the flanking helicopters were clearly visible: ANG. One of them might have been the very one that took

Abraham Kurtz north.

Cessna pilot: “Under whose orders is this operation being carried out?”

Radio: “Turn back, Cessna, or you will be forced to turn back.” The Cessna had turned back. It had been low on fuel anyway, the news anchor reported, as if that explained everything. Since then they had just been rehashing the same stuff and calling it updates. The major networks supposedly had correspondents en route.

She was getting up to turn the TV off-watching had begun to make her nervous-when Duddits screamed. Roberta’s heart stopped in her chest, then jackrabbited into doubletime. She whirled around, bumping the table by the La-Z-Boy which had been Alfie’s and was now hers, overturning her coffee cup. It soaked the TV Guide, drowning the cast of The Sopranos in a puddle of brown.

The scream was followed by high, hysterical sobbing, the sobs of a child. But that was the thing about Duddits-he was in his thirties now, but he would die a child, and long before he turned forty.

For a moment all she could do was stand still. At last she got moving, wishing that Alfie were here… or even better, one of the boys. Not that any of them were boys now, of course; only Duddits was still a boy; Down’s syndrome had turned him into Peter Pan, and soon he would die in Never-Never Land.

“I’m coming, Duddie!” she called, and so she was, but she felt old to herself as she went hurrying down the hall to the back bedroom, her heart banging leakily against her ribs, arthritis pinging her hips. No Never Land for her.

“Coming, Mummy’s coming!”

Sobbing and sobbing, as if his heart had broken. He had cried out the first time he realized his gums were bleeding after he brushed his teeth, but he had never screamed and it had been years since he’d cried like this, the kind of wild sobbing that got into your head and tore at your brains. Thump and hum, thump and hum, thump and hum.

“Duddie, what is it?”

She burst into his room and looked at him, wide-eyed, so convinced he must be hemorrhaging that at first she actually saw blood. But there was only Duddits, rocking back and forth in his crank-up hospital bed, cheeks wet with tears. His eyes were that same old brilliant green, but the rest of his color was gone. His hair was gone, too, his lovely blond hair that had reminded her of the young Art Garfunkel. The faint winterlight coming in through the window gleamed on his skull, gleamed on the bottles ranked on the bedside table (pills for infection, pills for pain, but no pills that would stop what was happening to him, or even slow it down), gleamed on the IV pole standing in front of the table.

But there was nothing wrong that she could see. Nothing that would account for the almost grotesque expression of pain on his face.

She sat down beside him, captured the restlessly whipping head and held it to her bosom. Even now, in his agitation, his skin was cool; his exhausted, dying blood could bring no heat to his face. She remembered reading Dracula long ago, back in high school, the pleasurable terror that had been quite a bit less pleasurable once she was in bed, the lights out, her room filled with shadows. She remembered being very glad there were no real vampires, except now she knew different. There was at least one, and it was far more terrifying than any Transylvanian count; its name wasn’t Dracula but leukemia, and there was no stake you could put through its heart.

“Duddits, Duddie, honey, what is it?”

And he screamed it out as he lay against her breast, making her forget all about what might or might not be happening up in the Jefferson Tract, freezing her scalp to her skull and making her skin crawl and horripilate. “Eeyer-eh! Eeeyer-eh! Oh Amma, Eeeyer-eh!” There was no need to ask him to say it again or to say it more clearly; she had been listening to him her whole life, and she knew well enough:

Beaver’s dead! Beaver’s dead! Oh, Mamma, Beaver’s dead!

Chapter Nine PETE AND BECKY

Pete lay screaming in the snow-covered rut where he had landed until he could scream no more and then just lay there for awhile, trying to cope with the pain, to find some way to compromise with it. He couldn’t. This was no-compromise pain, blitzkrieg agony. He’d had no idea the world had such pain-had he known, surely he would have stayed with the woman. With Marcy, although Marcy wasn’t her name. He almost knew her name, but what did it matter? He was the one who was in trouble here, the pain coming up from his knee in baked spasms, hot and terrible.

He lay shivering in the road with the plastic bag beside him.

THANKS FOR SHOPPING AT OUR PLACE! on the side. Pete reached for it, wanting to see if there was a bottle or two in there that wasn’t broken, and when his leg shifted, a bolt of agony flew up from the knee. It made the others feel like twinges. Pete screamed again, and passed out.

He didn’t know how long he’d been out when he came to-the light suggested it hadn’t been long, but his feet were numb and his hands were going as well, in spite of the gloves.

Pete lay partially turned on his side, the beer-bag lying beside him in a puddle of freezing amber slush. The pain in his knee had receded a little-probably that was numbing up, too-and he found he could think again. That was good, because this was a fuckin pisser he’d gotten himself into here. He had to get back to the lean-to and the fire, and he had to do it on his own. If he simply lay here waiting for Henry and the snowmobile, he was apt to be a Petesicle when Henry arrived-a Petesicle with a bag of busted beer-bottles beside him, thank you for shopping at our place, you fucking alcoholic, thanks a lot. And there was the woman to think of She might die, too, and all because Pete Moore had to have his brewskis.

He looked at the bag with distaste. Couldn’t throw it into the woods; couldn’t risk waking his knee up again. So he covered it with snow, like a dog covering its own scat, and then he began to crawl.

The knee wasn’t that numb after all, it seemed. Pete crawled on his elbows and pushed with his good foot, teeth clenched, hair hanging in his eyes. No animals now; the stampede had stopped and there was only him-the gaspy sound of his breathing and the stifled moans of pain each time his knee bumped. He could feel sweat running down his arms and back, but his feet remained numb and so did his hands.

He might have given up, but halfway along the straight stretch he caught sight of the fire he and Henry had made. It had burned down considerably, but it was there. Pete began to crawl toward it, and each time he bumped his leg and the bolts of agony came, he tried to project them into the orange spark of the fire. He wanted to get there. It hurt like pluperfect hell to move, but oh how he wanted to get there. He didn’t want to die freezing to death in the snow.

“I’ll make it, Becky,” he muttered. “I’ll make it, Becky.” He spoke her name half a dozen times before he heard himself using it.

As he approached the fire he paused to glance at his watch and frowned. It said eleven-forty or thereabouts, and that was nuts-he remembered checking it before starting back to the Scout, and it had said twenty past twelve then. A slightly longer look revealed the source of the confusion. His watch was running backward, the second hand moving counterclockwise in irregular, spasmodic jerks. He looked at this without much surprise. His ability to appreciate anything so fine as mere peculiarity had passed. Even his leg was no longer his chief concern. He was very cold, and big shudders began to course his body as he elbowed his way and pushed with his rapidly tiring good leg, covering the last fifty yards to the dying fire.

The woman was no longer on the tarp. She now lay on the far side of the fire, as if she had crawled toward the remaining wood and then collapsed.

“Hi, honey, I’m home,” he panted. “Had a little trouble with my knee, but now I’m back. Goddam knee’s your fault anyway, Becky, so don’t complain, all right? Becky, is that your name?”

Maybe, but she made no response. Just lay there staring. He could still see only one of her eyes, although whether it was the same one or the other he didn’t know. Didn’t seem so creepy now, but maybe that was because he had other things to worry about. Like the fire. It was guttering, but there was a good bed of coals and he thought he was in time. Get some wood on that sweetheart, really build her up, then lie here with his gal Becky (but upwind, please God-those hangers were bad). Wait for Henry to show up. Wouldn’t be the first time Henry had pulled his nuts out of the fire.

Pete crawled toward the woman and the little stockpile of wood beyond her, and as he got close-close enough to start picking up that ethery chemical smell again-he understood why her gaze no longer bothered him. That creepy jackalope look had gone out of it. Everything had. She’d crawled halfway around the fire and died. The crusting of snow around her waist and hips had gone a dark red.

Pete stopped for a moment, up on his aching arms and peering at her, but his interest in her, dead or alive, was not much more than the passing interest he’d felt in his back-turning watch. What he wanted to do was get some wood on the fire and get warm. He would consider the problem of the woman later. Next month, maybe, when he was sitting in his own living room with a cast on his knee and a cup of hot coffee in his hand.

He finally made it to the wood. Only four pieces were left, but they were big pieces. Henry might be back before they burned down, and Henry would pick up some more before going on to get help. Good old Henry. Still wearing his dorky horn-rims, even in this age of soft contacts and laser surgery, but you could count on him.

Pete’s mind tried to return to the Scout, crawling into the Scout and smelling the cologne Henry had not, in fact, been wearing, and he wouldn’t let it. Let’s not go there, as the kids said. As if memory was a destination. No more ghost-cologne, no more memories of Duddits. No more no bounce, no more no play. He had enough on his plate already.

He threw the wood onto the fire one branch at a time, sidearming the pieces awkwardly, wincing at the pain in his knee but enjoying the way the sparks rose in a cloud, whirling beneath the lean-to’s canted tin ceiling like crazy fireflies before winking out.

Henry would be back soon. That was the thing to hold onto. Just watch the fire blaze up and hold that thought.

No, he won’t. Because things have gone wrong back at Hole in the Wall. Something to do with-

“Rick,” he said, watching the flames taste the new wood. Soon they would feed and grow tall.

He stripped off his gloves, using his teeth, and held his hands up to the warmth of the fire. The cut on the pad of his right hand, where the busted bottle had gotten him, was long and deep. Was going to leave a scar, but so what? What was a scar or two between friends? And they were friends, weren’t they? Yeah. The old Kansas Street Gang, the Crimson Pirates with their plastic swords and battery-powered Star Wars ray-guns. Once they had done something heroic-twice, if you counted the Rinkenhauer girl. They had even gotten their pictures in the paper that time, and so what if he had a few scars? And so what if they had once maybe-just maybe-killed a guy? Because if ever there was a guy who deserved killing-

But he wasn’t going to go there, either. No way, baby. He saw the line, though. Like it or not, he saw the line, more clearly than he’d seen it in years. Primarily he saw Beaver… and heard him, too. Right in the center of his head.

Jonesy? You there, man?

“Don’t get up, Beav,” Pete said, watching the flames crackle and climb. The fire was hot now, beating warmth against his face, making him feel sleepy. “You stay right where you are. Just… you know, just sit tight.”

What, exactly, was all this about? What’s all this jobba-nobba? as the Beav himself had sometimes said when they were kids, a phrase that meant nothing but still cracked them up. Pete sensed he could know if he wanted to, the line was that bright. He got a glimpse of blue tiles, a filmy blue shower curtain, a bright orange cap-Rick’s cap, McCarthy’s cap, old Mr I-Stand-at-the-Door’s cap-and sensed he could have all the rest if he wanted it. He didn’t know if this was the future, the past, or what was happening right this minute, but he could have it if he wanted it, if he-

“I don’t,” he said, and pushed the whole thing away.

There were a few sticks and twigs left on the ground. Pete fed them to the fire, then looked at the woman. Her open eye had no menace in it now. It was dusty, the way a deer’s eyes got dusty after you shot it. All that blood around her… he supposed she’d hemorrhaged. Something inside had gone bust. Hell of a tough break. He supposed maybe she’d known it was coming and had sat down in the road because she wanted to be sure of being seen if someone came along. Someone had, but look how it had turned out. Poor bitch. Poor unlucky bitch.

Pete shifted to the left, slowly, until he could snag the tarp, then began to move forward again. It had been her makeshift sled; now it could be her makeshift shroud. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Becky or whatever your name is, I’m really sorry. But I couldn’t have helped you by staying, you know; I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking car salesman. You were-”

–fucked from the start was how he’d meant to finish, but the words dried up in his throat as he saw the back of her. That part hadn’t been visible until he got close, because she had died facing the fire. The seat of her jeans was blown out, as if she’d finally finished farting fumes and had gotten down to the dynamite. Tom rags of denim fluttered in the breeze. Also fluttering were fragments of the garments she had been wearing beneath, at least two pairs of longjohns-one heavy white cotton, the other pink silk. And something was growing on both the legs of the jeans and the back of her parka. It looked like mildew or some kind of fungus. Red-gold, or maybe that was just reflected firelight.

Something had come out of her. Something-

Yes. Something. And it’s watching me right now.

Pete looked into the woods. Nothing. The flood of animals had dried up. He was alone.

Except I’m not.

No, he wasn’t. Something was out there, something that didn’t do well in the cold, something that preferred warm, wet places. Except-

Except it got too big. And it ran out of food.

“Are you out there?”

Pete thought that calling out like that would make him feel foolish, but it didn’t. What it made him feel was more frightened than ever.

His eye fastened on a sketchy track of that mildewy stuff. It stretched away from Becky-yeah, she was a Becky, all right, as Becky as Becky could be-and around the comer of the lean-to. A moment later Pete heard a scaly scraping sound as something slithered on the tin roof He craned up, following the sound with his eyes.

“Go away,” he whispered. “Go away and leave me alone. I… I’m fucked up.”

There was another brief slither as the thing moved farther up the tin. Yes, he was fucked up. Unfortunately, he was also food. The thing up there slithered again. Pete didn’t think it would wait long, maybe couldn’t wait long, not up there; it would be like a gecko in a refrigerator. What it was going to do was drop on him. And now he realized a terrible thing: he had gotten so fixated on the beer that he had forgotten the fucking guns.

His first impulse was to crawl deeper into the lean-to, but that might be a mistake, like running into a blind alley. He grabbed the jutting end of one of the fresh branches he’d just put on the fire instead. He didn’t take it out, not yet, just made a loose fist around it. The other end was burning briskly. “Come on,” he said to the tin roof “You like it hot? I’ve got something hot for you. Come on and get it. Yum-fuckin-yum.”

Nothing. Not from the roof, anyway. There was a soft flump of snow falling from one of the pines behind him as the lower branches shed their burden. Pete’s hand tightened on his makeshift torch, half-lifting it from the fire. Then he let it settle back in a little swirl of sparks. “Come on, motherfucker. I’m hot, I’m tasty, and I’m waiting.” Nothing. But it was up there. It couldn’t wait long, he was sure of it. Soon it would come.

Time passed. Pete wasn’t sure how much; his watch had given up entirely. Sometimes his thoughts seemed to intensify, as they sometimes had when he and the others were hanging with Duddits (although as they grew older and Duddits stayed the same, there had been less of that-it was as though their changing brains and bodies had lost the knack of picking up Duddits’s strange signals). This was like that, but not exactly like that. Something new, maybe. Maybe even something to do with the lights in the sky. He was aware that Beaver was dead and that something terrible might have happened to Jonesy, but he didn’t know what.

Whatever had happened, Pete thought Henry knew about it, too, although not clearly; Henry was deep inside his own head and he thought Banbury Cross, Banbury Cross, ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross.

The stick burned down further, closer to his hand, and Pete wondered what he’d do if it burned down too far to be of use, if the thing up there could outwait him after all. And then a new thought came to him, bright as day and red with panic. It filled his head and he began to cry it aloud, masking the sound of the thing on the roof as it slithered quickly down the slope of the tin.

“Please don’t hurt us! Ne nous blessez pas!”

But they would, they would, because… what?

Because they are not helpless little ETs, boys, waiting around for someone to give them a New England Tel phone card so they can phone home, they are a disease. They are cancer, praise Jesus, and boys, we’re one big hot radioactive shot of chemotherapy. Do you hear me, boys?

Pete didn’t know if they did, the boys to whom the voice spoke, but he did. They were coming, the boys were coming, the Crimson Pirates were coming and not all the begging in the world would stop them. And still they begged, and Pete begged with them.

“Please don’t hurt us! Please! S'il vous plait! Ne nous blessez pas! Ne nous faites pas mal nous sommes sans defense! “Weeping now. “Please! For the love of God, we’re helpless!”

In his mind he saw the hand, the dog-turd, the weeping nearly naked boy. And all the time the thing on the roof was slithering, dying but not helpless, stupid but not entirely stupid, getting behind Pete while he screamed, while he lay on his side by the dead woman, listening as some apocalyptic slaughter began.

Cancer, said the man with the white eyelashes.

“Please!” he screamed. “Please, we’re helpless!”

But, lie or the truth, it was too late.

The snowmobile had passed Henry’s hiding place without slowing, and the sound of it was now receding to the west. It was safe to come out, but Henry didn’t come out. Couldn’t come out. The intelligence which had replaced Jonesy hadn’t sensed him, either because it was distracted or because Jonesy had somehow-might somehow still be

But no. The idea that there could be any of Jonesy left inside that terrible cloud was so much dreamwork.

And now that the thing was gone-receding, at least there were the voices. They filled Henry’s head, making him feel half-mad with their babble, as Duddits’s crying had always made him feel half-mad, at least until puberty had ended most of that crap. One of the voices belonged to a man who said something about a fungus

(dies easily unless it gets on a living host)

and then something about a New England Tel phone card and… chemotherapy? Yes, a big hot radioactive shot. It was the voice, Henry thought, of a lunatic. He had treated enough of them to judge, God knew.

The other voices were the ones which made him question his own sanity. He didn’t know all of them, but he knew some: Walter Cronkite, Bugs Bunny, Jack Webb, Jimmy Carter, a woman he thought was Margaret Thatcher. Sometimes the voices spoke in English, sometimes in French.

“II n'y a pas d'infection ici,” Henry said, and then began to weep, He was astounded and exhilarated to find there were still tears in his heart, from which he thought all tears and all laughter-true laughter-had fled. Tears of horror, tears of pity, tears that opened the stony ground of self-regarding obsession and burst the rock inside. “There is no infection here, please, oh God stop it, don’t, don’t, nous sommes sans defense, NOUS SOMMES SANS-”

Then the human thunder began in the west and Henry put his hands to his head, thinking that the screams and the pain in there would tear it apart. The bastards were-

The bastards were slaughtering them.

Pete sat by the fire, unmindful of the bellows of pain from his separated knee, unaware that he was now holding the branch from the fire up beside his temple. The screams inside his head could not quite drown out the sound of the machine-guns in the west, big machine-guns,.50s. Now the cries-please don’t hurt us, we are defenseless, there is no infection-began to fade into panic; it wasn’t working, nothing could work, the deal was done.

Movement caught Pete’s eye and he turned just as the thing that had been on the roof struck at him. He caught a blurred glimpse of a slender, weaselly body that seemed powered by a muscular tail rather than legs, and then its teeth sank into his ankle. He shrieked and yanked his good leg toward him so hard he almost clocked himself in the chin with his own knee. The thing came with it, clinging like a leech. Were these the things that were begging for mercy? Fuck them, if they were. Fuck them!

He reached for it with his right hand, the one he’d cut on the Bud bottle, without even thinking about it; the torch he continued to hold up at the side of his head with his uninjured left. He seized something that felt like cool, fur-covered jelly. The thing let go of his ankle at once, and Pete caught just a glimpse of expressionless black eyes-shark’s eyes, eagle eyes-before it sank the needle-nest of its teeth into his clutching hand, tearing it wide open along the perforation of the previous cut.

The agony was like the end of the world. The thing’s head if it had one-was buried in the hand, ripping and tearing, digging deeper. Blood flew in splattery fans as Pete tried to shake it off, stippling the snow and the sawdusty tarp and the dead woman’s parka. Droplets flew into the fire and hissed like fat in a hot skillet. Now the thing was making a ferocious chattering sound. Its tail, as thick as a moray eel’s body, wrapped around Pete’s thrashing arm, endeavoring to keep it still.

Pete made no conscious decision to use the torch, because he’d forgotten he had it; his only thought was to tear the terrible biting thing off his right hand with his left. At first, when it caught fire and flared up, as hot and bright as a roll of newspaper, he didn’t understand what was happening. Then he screamed, partly in fresh pain and partly in triumph. He bolted to his feet-for the time being, at least, his bulging knee did not hurt at all-and swung his burdened right arm at one of the lean-to’s support posts in a great sweeping roundhouse. There was a crunch and the chattering sound was replaced by muffled squealing. For one endless moment the knot of teeth planted in his hand burrowed in deeper than ever. Then they loosened and the burning creature fell free and landed on the frozen ground. Pete stamped on it, felt it writhe under his heel, and was filled with one moment of pure and savage triumph before his outraged knee gave way entirely and his leg bent inside out, the tendons torn loose.

He fell heavily on his side, face to face with Becky’s lethal hitchhiker, unaware that the lean-to was beginning to shift, the pole he’d struck with his arm bowing slowly outward. For a moment the weasel-thing’s rudiment of a face was three inches from Pete’s own. Its burning body flapped against his jacket. Its black eyes boiled. It had nothing so sophisticated as a mouth, but when the bulge in the top of its body unhinged, revealing its teeth, Pete screamed at it “No! No! No!”-and batted it into the fire, where it writhed and made its frantic, monkeylike chattering.

His left foot swung in a short arc as he shoved the thing farther into the fire. The tip of his boot struck the tilting pole, which had just decided to hold the lean-to up a little longer. This was one outrage too many and the pole snapped, dropping half of the tin roof. A second or two later, the other pole snapped as well. The rest of the roof fell into the fire, sending out a whirling squirt of sparks.

For a moment that was all. Then the fallen sheet of rusty tin began to heave itself up and down, as if it were breathing. A moment later, Pete crawled out from under. His eyes were glazed. His skin was pasty with shock. The left cuff of his jacket was on fire. He stared at this for a moment with his legs still under the fallen roof from the knees down, then raised his arm in front of his face, drew in a deep breath, and blew out the flames rising from his jacket like a giant birthday candle.

Approaching from the east was the buzz of a snowmobile engine. Jonesy… or whatever was left of him. The cloud. Pete didn’t think it would show him any mercy. This was no day for mercy in the Jefferson Tract. He should hide. But the voice advising him of that was distant, unimportant. One thing was good: he had an idea he had finally quit drinking.

He raised his savaged right hand in front of his face. One finger was gone, presumably down the thing’s gullet. Two others lay in a swoon of severed tendons. He saw that reddish-gold stuff already growing along the deepest slashes-the ones the monster had inflicted and the one he’d done himself, crawling back into the Scout after the beer. He could feel a kind of fizzy sensation as whatever that stuff was fed on his flesh and blood.

Pete suddenly felt that he couldn’t die soon enough.

The sound of the machine-guns in the west had stopped, but it wasn’t over, not by a long shot. And as if the thought had summoned it, a huge explosion hammered the day, blotting out the wasp-whine of the oncoming snowmobile and everything else. Everything but the busy fizz in his hand, that was. In his hand, the crud was dining on him the way the cancer that had killed his father had dined on the old man’s stomach and lungs.

Pete ran his tongue over his teeth, felt gaps where some of them had fallen out.

He closed his eyes and waited.