The Body

19

I came awake in the middle of the night, disoriented, wondering why it was so chilly in my bedroom and who had left the windows open. Denny, maybe. I had been dreaming of Denny, something about body-surfing at Harrison State Park. But it had been four years ago that we had done that.

This wasn’t my room; this was someplace else. Somebody was holding me in a mighty bearhug, somebody else was pressed against my back, and a shadowy third was crouched beside me, head cocked in a listening attitude.

“What the fuck?” I asked in honest puzzlement.

A long-drawn-out groan in answer. It sounded like Vern.

That brought things into focus, and I remembered where I was… but what was everybody doing awake in the middle of the night? Or had I only been asleep for seconds? No, that couldn’t be, because a thin sliver of moon was floating dead center in an inky sky.

“Don’t let it get me!” Vern gibbered. “I swear I’ll be a good boy, I won’t do nothin bad, I’ll put the ring up before I take a piss, I’ll… I’ll…” With some astonishment I realized that I was listening to a prayer—or at least the Vern Tessio equivalent of a prayer.

I sat bolt upright, scared. “Chris?”

“Shut up, Vern,” Chris said. He was the one crouching and listening. “It’s nothing.”

“Oh, yes it is,” Teddy said ominously. “It’s something.”

“What is?” I asked. I was still sleepy and disoriented, unstrung from my place in space and time. It scared me that I had come in late on whatever had developed—too late to defend myself properly, maybe.

Then, as if to answer my question, a long and hollow scream rose languidly from the woods—it was the sort of scream you might expect from a woman dying in extreme agony and extreme fear.

“Oh-dear-to-Jesus!” Vern whimpered, his voice high and filled with tears. He re-applied the bearhug that had awakened me, making it hard for me to breathe and adding to my own terror. I threw him loose with an effort but he scrambled right back beside me like a puppy which can’t think of anyplace else to go.

“It’s that Brower kid,” Teddy whispered hoarsely. “His ghost’s out walkin in the woods.”

“Oh God!” Vern screamed, apparently not crazy about that idea at all. “I promise I won’t hawk no more dirty books out of Dahlie’s Market! I promise I won’t give my carrots to the dog no more! I… I… I…” He floundered there, wanting to bribe God with everything but unable to think of anything really good in the extremity of his fear. “I won’t smoke no more unfiltered cigarettes! I won’t say no bad swears! I won’t put my Bazooka in the offerin plate! I won’t—”

“Shut up, Vern,” Chris said, and beneath his usual authoritative toughness I could hear the hollow boom of awe. I wondered if his arms and back and belly were as stiff with gooseflesh as my own were, and if the hair on the nape of his neck was trying to stand up in hackles, as mine was.

Vern’s voice dropped to a whisper as he continued to expand the reforms he planned to institute if God would only let him live through this night.

“It’s a bird, isn’t it?” I asked Chris.

“No. At least, I don’t think so. I think it’s a wildcat. My dad says they scream bloody murder when they’re getting ready to mate. Sounds like a woman, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said. My voice hitched in the middle of the word and two ice-cubes broke off in the gap.

“But no woman could scream that loud,” Chris said… and then added helplessly: “Could she, Gordie?”

“It’s his ghost,” Teddy whispered again. His eyeglasses reflected the moonlight in weak, somehow dreamy smears. “I’m gonna go look for it.”

I don’t think he was serious, but we took no chances. When he started to get up, Chris and I hauled him back down. Perhaps we were too rough with him, but our muscles had been turned to cables with fear.

“Let me up, fuckheads!” Teddy hissed, struggling. “If I say I wanna go look for it, then I’m gonna go look for it! I wanna see it! I wanna see the ghost! I wanna see if—”

The wild, sobbing cry rose into the night again, cutting the air like a knife with a crystal blade, freezing us with our hands on Teddy—if he’d been a flag, we would have looked like that picture of the Marines claiming Iwo Jima. The scream climbed with a crazy ease through octave after octave, finally reaching a glassy, freezing edge. It hung there for a moment and then whirled back down again, disappearing into an impossible bass register that buzzed like a monstrous honeybee. This was followed by a burst of what sounded like mad laughter… and then there was silence again.

“Jesus H Baldheaded Christ,” Teddy whispered, and he talked no more of going into the woods to see what was making that screaming noise. All four of us huddled up together and I thought of running. I doubt if I was the only one. If we had been tenting in Vern’s field—where our folks thought we were—we probably would have run. But Castle Rock was too far, and the thought of trying to run across that trestle in the dark made my blood freeze. Running deeper into Harlow and closer to the corpse of Ray Brower was equally unthinkable. We were stuck. If there was a ha’ant out there in the woods—what my dad called a Goosalum—and it wanted us, it would probably get us.

Chris proposed we keep a guard and everyone was agreeable to that. We flipped for watches and Vern got the first one. I got the last. Vern sat up cross-legged by the husk of the campfire while the rest of us lay down again. We huddled together like sheep.

I was positive that sleep would be impossible, but I did sleep—a light, uneasy sleep that skimmed through unconsciousness like a sub with its periscope up. My half-sleeping dreams were populated with wild cries that might have been real or might have only been products of my imagination. I saw—or thought I saw—something white and shapeless steal through the trees like a grotesquely ambulatory bedsheet.

At last I slipped into something I knew was a dream. Chris and I were swimming at White’s Beach, a gravel-pit in Brunswick that had been turned into a miniature lake when the gravel-diggers struck water. It was where Teddy had seen the kid hit his head and almost drown.

In my dream we were out over our heads, stroking lazily along, with a hot July sun blazing down. From behind us, on the float, came cries and shouts and yells of laughter as kids climbed and dived or climbed and were pushed. I could hear the empty kerosene drums that held the float up clanging and booming together—a sound not unlike that of churchbells, which are so solemn and emptily profound. On the sand-and-gravel beach, oiled bodies lay face down on blankets, little kids with buckets squatted on the verge of the water or sat happily flipping muck into their hair with plastic shovels, and teenagers clustered in grinning groups, watching the young girls promenade endlessly back and forth in pairs and trios, never alone, the secret places of their bodies wrapped in Jantzen tank suits. People walked up the hot sand on the balls of their feet, wincing, to the snackbar. They came back with chips, Devil Dogs, Red Ball Popsicles.

Mrs. Cote drifted past us on an inflatable rubber raft. She was lying on her back, dressed in her typical September-to-June school uniform: a gray two-piece suit with a thick sweater instead of a blouse under the jacket, a flower pinned over one almost nonexistent breast, thick support hose the color of Canada Mints on her legs. Her black old lady’s high-heeled shoes were trailing in the water, making small V’s. Her hair was blue-rinsed, like my mother’s, and done up in those tight, medicinal-smelling clockspring curls. Her glasses flashed brutally in the sun.

“Watch your steps, boys,” she said. “Watch your steps or I’ll hit you hard enough to strike you blind. I can do that; I have been given that power by the school board. Now, Mr. Chambers, ‘Mending Wall,’ if you please. By rote.”

“I tried to give the money back,” Chris said. “Old lady Simons said okay, but she took it! Do you hear me? She took it! Now what are you going to do about it? Are you going to whack her blind?”

“ ‘Mending Wall,’ Mr. Chambers, if you please. By rote.”

Chris threw me a despairing glance, as if to say Didn’t I tell you it would be this way?, and then began to tread water. He began: “ ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that sends the frozen-ground-swell under it—’ ” And then his head went under, his reciting mouth filling with water.

He popped back up, crying: “Help me, Gordie! Help me!”

Then he was dragged under again. Looking into the clear water I could see two bloated, naked corpses holding his ankles. One was Vern and the other was Teddy, and their open eyes were as blank and pupilless as the eyes of Greek statues. Their small pre-pubescent penises floated limply up from their distended bellies like albino strands of kelp. Chris’s head broke water again. He held one hand up limply to me and voiced a screaming, womanish cry that rose and rose, ululating in the hot sunny summer air. I looked wildly toward the beach but nobody had heard. The lifeguard, his bronzed, athletic body lolling attractively on the seat at the top of his whitewashed cruciform wooden tower, just went on smiling down at a girl in a red bathing suit. Chris’s scream turned into a bubbling water-choked gurgle as the corpses pulled him under again. And as they dragged him down to black water I could see his rippling, distorted eyes turned up to me in a pleading agony; I could see his white starfish hands held helplessly up to the sun-burnished roof of the water. But instead of diving down and trying to save him, I stroked madly for the shore, or at least to a place where the water would not be over my head. Before I could get there—before I could even get close—I felt a soft, rotted, implacable hand wrap itself around my calf and begin to pull. A scream built up in my chest… but before I could utter it, the dream washed away into a grainy facsimile of reality. It was Teddy with his hand on my leg. He was shaking me awake. It was my watch.

Still half in the dream, almost talking in my sleep, I asked him thickly: “You alive, Teddy?”

“No. I’m dead and you’re a black nigger,” he said crossly. It dispelled the last of the dream. I sat up by the campfire and Teddy lay down.