Dreamcatcher Page 19

  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.

  9

  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 chittered 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 tail 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. Yo
u 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 right, 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 corners 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 of 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 wind-up 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! Latebreaking! 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 Aroos-took 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.